Dennis Prager is one of the more thoughtful “talk-show hosts” on radio, sustaining an audience for several decades.  A conservative Jew, he consistently tries to look at the “big picture” when addressing current issues and brings to his subjects a thoughtful religious perspective.  He has also written several fine books, the most recent of which is Still the Best Hope:  Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York:  Broadside Books, c. 2012).  The words in book’s title were crafted  by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when he addressed Congress and declared that America to be “the last best hope on earth.”  To Prager those words still ring true, so he wrote the to defend and promote the uniquely American trinity of values, conveniently inscribed on every coin minted in this nation:  “Liberty”—the personal freedom which flourishes alongside limited government and free enterprise; “In God We Trust”—which indicates that our natural rights and moral responsibilities are God-given; and “E Pluribus Unum”—which declares Americans to be a diverse people united by principles rather than blood or ethnicity.  

Prager wrote this book with a sense of urgency, believing we stand at a crossroads offering us three incompatible religious and/or ideological options, devoting roughly one-third of the book to each:  1) Leftism; 2) Islamism; 3) Americanism.  He explains:  “The American value of ‘Liberty’ is at odds with a Sharia-based society and with the Leftist commitment to material equality; ‘E Pluribus Unum’ is at odds with the Leftist commitment to multiculturalism; and ‘In God We Trust’ conflicts with both the Leftist commitment to secularism and the Islamic ideal of a Sharia-based state” (p. 10).  Though he certainly has read widely and thought deeply, Prager relies more on illustrations than scholarly studies, broad generalizations rather than meticulous documentation.  This is not to discount his presentation but simply to make it clear he writes for the general public, not the academy.   

Leftism, emerging in the French Revolution and thenceforth fueling scores of revolutionary movements around the world, is very much a religious movement, though of a secular sort.  Energized by  Karl Marx, it seeks to destroy Western Christian Culture and replace it with a scientifically-based, egalitarian society.  Its religious nature was evident in Hillary Clinton’s touting “the politics of meaning”—granting primacy to this-worldly concerns, continually seeking to establish a heaven-on-earth through political orchestration.  It dominates organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization of Women and the National Council of Churches.  It rules the media (e.g. the New York Times and NBC) and most all liberal arts colleges and universities (e.g. Harvard, Columbia, UCLA and Occidental).  Prager thinks “Western universities have become Left-wing seminaries” (p. 97).  To soften and promote their ideological posture, Leftists usually call themselves “progressives” or “liberals” or “feminists” or “environmentalists”—much like denominations within a religion—but they share some core convictions.  They seek to make America a thoroughly secular place, resembling the “social democracies” in Europe which have sought to shed their national distinctions by joining the European Union, and they want to transform America to make it more egalitarian via universal health care, a command economy, minimum wages, cradle-to-grave welfare programs, affirmative action, race-based college admission policies, etc.  

Importantly, Leftists oppose traditional religions and seek to suppress, if not eliminate, their presence—their free expression—in the public square.    Philosophically committed to materialism, they necessarily believe:   “Man has supplanted the biblical God.  ‘God is man,” said Marx.  And man is God,’ said Engels” (p. 38).   Though some of them may “believe” in a deity of some sort, they reject “the personal, morally judging, transcendent God of the Bible” (p. 40).  What they really reject is special Revelation, with its clear-cut distinctions between good and evil.  To Prager, who regularly teaches classes on the Hebrew Bible, “the dividing line is belief in divine scripture.  Those who believe that God is the ultimate author of their scripture (the Old and New Testaments for Christians, the Torah for Jews) are rarely Leftist.  On the other hand, those Christians and Jews who believe that the Bible is entirely man-made are far more likely to adopt Leftist values” (p. 40).  

The Left believes, above all, in improving the world, making it a better place, creating a utopia of some sort.  It thinks we should not seek to understand things as they are but to devise ways to change them, to even transform such basic things as human nature.  As Robert F. Kennedy said:  “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, ‘Why?’  I dream of things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’”  Or we’re urged to sing along with the Beatles’ John Lennon and Imagine a perfectly peaceful world cleansed of private property and freed from greed—a world where there’s “no heaven or hell” and “everyone lives for today” (p. 69).  Thinking so makes it so!  As “a famous dissident joke stated:  ‘In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past that is always changing’” (p. 209).  Good intentions, not effective actions, qualify one for membership in the “inner ring” of the self-anointed saviors.  “Because the Left relies heavily on feelings and intentions,” Prager says, “wisdom and preexisting moral value systems do not count for much” (p. 77).  Consequently, there is an adulation and courting of young people and their tastes (e.g. clothes, slang and music).  

Yet despite all their allegedly “good intentions”—despite all the propaganda circulating through the schools and media—“the Left’s moral record is among the worst of any organized group or idea in history” (p. 168).  Almost everything it’s “touched has made it worse—morals, religion, art, education from elementary school to university, and the economic condition of the welfare sates it created” (p. 168).  Most appalling is the number of innocents murdered by Stalin, Mao, Castro et al.—100 million, according to The Black Book of Communism.  Softer versions of socialism, now evident throughout Europe and touted by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have established ultimately unsustainable welfare programs such as Britain’s National Health Service that slowly slide into faceless bureaucracies failing the very people they claim to serve.   Though claiming to represent and care for ordinary people, “If the Left had its way, the citizens of the state would be told how to live in almost every way:  what to drive and when; what lightbulbs to use; what temperature to keep their homes; what men would be permitted to say to women; what school textbooks must include; when God could be mentioned, and when not; how much of their earning people may keep; what art would be funded and what art would not; what food children could be fed; how enthusiastically to cheer girls’ sports teams; and much more.  The list of Left-wing controls over our lives is ever expanding” (p. 208).  

Turning to Islam, which along with Leftism is devoted to the destruction of Western Civilization, Prager admits he treads through a minefield wherein charges of “Islamophobia” are routinely ignited against anyone daring to find fault with any aspect of the faith.  Yet we must fully understand—and dare to critique—an ideology mixing  religion and politics which has for 1400 years threatened Western Civilization.  One must of course try to distinguish between Islam and Islamism—the former a faith calling individuals to certain obligations, the latter a political movement promoting world domination.  There are certainly decent Muslims with whom one may establish concord, but there are also legions of fanatical Islamists supporting terrorism.  In fact, we must realize that Islam has historically allowed little personal freedom (whether religious, intellectual, or economic) and approves the militant establishment and expansion of its Caliphate.  Thus, according to perhaps the greatest Muslim thinker, Ibn Khaldun, Islam “demands jihad, holy war” and “Muslims are therefore enjoined to wage jihad in order to make converts to Islam” (p. 251).  

Islamic jihadists now seek to destroy Israel and America—primarily because they prevent “the expansion of Islamist rule” (p. 288).  Though such aspirations now seem to lack the necessary economic and military strength needed to accomplish them, they must be understood in order to respond to the many acts of terrorism and aggression we now face.  Prager responds to a variety of pro-Islamic arguments (e.g. the Koran contains inspiring verses; most Muslims are peace-loving; Muslim Spain enjoyed a “golden age” of religious tolerance; Muslims don’t impose Islam on conquered peoples), showing that partial truths do not validate an ideology whose negative aspects mandate its rejection.   

Having evaluated America’s rivals, Prager turns to defending her and her “unique values,” the first of which is liberty (“the essence of the American idea”).  Millions of immigrants, from 1607 onwards, have risked everything seeking various kinds of freedom (religious, political, economic) in this land.  For example:  “More black Africans have immigrated to the United States voluntarily—looking for freedom and opportunity—than came to the United States involuntarily as slaves” (p. 313).   Prizing liberty, many generations of Americans favored limited government because personal “liberty exists in inverse proportion to the size of the state.  The bigger the government/state, the less liberty the individual has.  The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen” (p. 316).  As a God-given right, liberty stands rooted in the very Being of God as revealed in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, and He is absolutely essential as the sustaining Source of all values.   As John Adams insisted:  “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate the government of any other.”  Explaining how these values earlier helped shape America, Prager provides scores of important illustrations regarding such things as individual responsibility, distinctions between good and evil, the sanctity of property, marriage and life.    

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When I began my teaching career in the mid-60s, I routinely taught a history course, Western Civilization, which was most everywhere basic to college curricula.  Two decades later, relocating to a college which had replaced “Western Civilization” with “World Civilizations,” I unsuccessfully argued for a return to the much more focused and manageable course on the West.  As Rodney Stark notes, in How the West Won:  The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, Delaware:  ISI Books, c. 2014):  “Forty years ago the most important and popular freshman course at the best American colleges and universities was “Western Civilization.”  It not only covered the general history of the West but also included historical surveys of art, music, literature, philosophy, and science.  But this course has long since disappeared from most college catalogues on grounds that Western civilization is but one of the many civilizations and it is ethnocentric and arrogant for us to study ours” (#42).  Thus we witnessed Stanford abandon its “widely admired ‘Western Civilization’ course just months after the Reverend Jesse Jackson came on campus and led members of the Black Student Union in chants of ‘Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go.’  More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned ‘Western Civilization’ courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course” (#49).  

In light of this, Stark offers his book as a sturdy (indeed, contrarian!) defense of the currently-maligned West.  Doing so, he challenges many of the voguish views of the academy, arguing that the fall of the Roman Empire was in fact beneficial, that the “Dark Ages” never happened, that the Crusades are defensible, that global warming in earlier eras was a blessing, that the “Scientific Revolution” clearly began in the Medieval period rather than the 17th century, that the Protestant Reformers replaced a repressive Catholic system with equally repressive Protestant systems, and that Europe’s colonies impoverished rather than enriched their sponsors.  Still more:  he argues that non-Western societies such as the Chinese and Islamic, Mayan and Indic, failed to become “modern” because of intrinsic factors making such a transition impossible.  To Stark, the West’s distinctiveness resides in its ideas, and contrary to many historians (operating within a generally materialistic—whether Darwinian or Marxist—philosophical perspective) he thinks economic developments do not fully explain why cultures and civilizations rise and fall.  

Glancing at the world of Classical Beginnings (500 BC-AD 500), he finds:  “At the dawn of history most people [whether in China or India or Mesopotamia or Egypt] lived lives of misery and exploitation in tyrannical empires that covered huge areas” (#151).   Subject to arbitrary and frequently despotic rulers, forced to work within a command economy, deprived of secure title to property, the masses of mankind loved poorly.  Consequently, “in 1900 Chinese peasants were using essentially the same tools and techniques that had been using for more than three thousand years.  The same was true in Egypt” (#228).  But then, “In the midst of all this misery and repression a ‘miracle’ of progress and freedom took place in Greece among people who lived not in an empire but in hundreds of small, independent city-states.  It was here that the formation of Western civilization began” (#158).  

Despite the persistence of slavery, the Greeks tasted and celebrated (in both games and politics) the luxury of freedom.  Thriving as individuals, they flourished in such areas as:  warfare; democracy; economics; literary; the arts; technology; speculative philosophy and formal logic.  Importantly (as Herodotus noted in explaining the differences between Egypt and Greece), “the ancient Greeks took the single most significant step toward the rise of Western science when they proposed that the universe is orderly and governed by underlying principles that the human mind could discern through observation and reason” (#473).  This was possible because—as Anaxagoras and Plato saw—there is a Mind (Nous) underlying the physical cosmos—a monotheistic perspective that undergirds the West’s triumphs. 

Anticipating and complementing developments in Greece, Jewish theologians also proclaimed a “rational God” who was eternal, immutable, conscious and revealed to us through both creation and scripture.  Due to Alexander’s conquests and the subsequent Roman occupation of their land, many Jews were quite cosmopolitan—two centuries before Christ Jerusalem was actually known as “Antioch-at-Jerusalem.”  Early Christians such as Justin Martyr drew upon the best Greek thinkers (“Christians before Christ”) as they developed their theology.  Both Christian and Greek philosophers (preeminently Plato) revered “the divine gift of reason” which “has sown the seeds of truth in all men as beings created in God’s image’” (#698).  Thus, to Augustine:  “‘Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals.  Heaven forbid that we should believe in such as way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even belief if we did not possess rationals souls’” (#751).  Confidence in the rationality of the Creator—as well as His providential care for creation—enabled later Christian thinkers to do significant the scientific and historical studies basic to Western Civilization.  

By contrast:  “Islam holds that the universe is inherently irrational—that there is no cause and effect—because everything happens as the direct result of Allah’s will at that particular time.  Anything is possible.  Attempts at science, then, are not only foolish but also blasphemous, in that they imply limits to Allah’s power and authority.  Therefore Muslim scholars study law (what does Allah require?), not science” (#825), and Islam, for 1400 years, has demonstrably failed to develop anything comparable to the science and technology, literature and philosophy of the West.  Similarly, in China, the Confucian reverence for the past encouraged an opposition to change clearly illustrated by the great Chinese admiral Zheng He, who led large fleets (involving several hundred ships) across the Indian Ocean to the coast of East Africa between 1405 and 1433 A.D.   His expeditions, which could easily have led to the a Chinese of the globe, came to naught when the emperor dismantled his ships and forbade further construction of oceangoing vessels.  Even the blueprints for Zheng’s ships were destroyed!

Following the fall of Rome (“the most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization”), the West emerged from the crucible of Greek and Christian culture.  In the “Not-So-Dark” Middle Ages, its genius emerged and flourished.  Political decentralization encouraged creativity and competition, progress and prosperity.  An “agricultural revolution” enabled Medieval Europeans to eat better and live longer—as did the favorable climate during the “Medieval Warming” era (800-1250 A.D.).  “As food became abundant, the population of Europe soared from about 25 million in 950 to about 75 million in 1250” (#2737).  Harnessing wind and water with sophisticated machinery (often shaped in blast furnaces) enabled them to irrigate land and grind grain and navigate seas.  Germans and Scandinavians, Hungarians and Slavs were successfully converted and began contributing to the creative Christian Culture responsible for impressive monuments—Gothic cathedrals; universities at Oxford and Paris; scientific inquires and advances under the guidance of brilliant thinkers such as Nicole Oresme and Jean Buridan; and magisterial scholarly works such as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.  

Within that Medieval incubus there emerged, Stark stresses, the “freedom and capitalism” essential for the modern world.  Slavery slowly disappeared throughout Christendom.  It “ended in medieval Europe only because the Church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then banned the enslavement of Christians” (#2349).  Only in the Christian world was slavery eliminated!  Persons were increasingly free (despite the persistence of serfdom) to work voluntarily and creatively—and to increasingly to take part in the political life of their communities.  Capitalism emerged throughout Europe during the late Middle Ages, long before the Protestant Reformation.  Private property, commercial activities flourishing through free markets, and capital investments rendering income all brought about an incredible economic transformation.  Above all else:  “If there is a single factor responsible for the rise of the West, it is freedom.  Freedom to hope.  Freedom to act.  Freedom to invest.  Freedom to enjoy the flirts of one’s dreams as well as one’s labor” (#2663).  This freedom flourished in Medieval Europe and shaped the future of the West.  

Dramatically evident in 1492, the West quickly expanded to control much of the globe in successive centuries.  Technological developments, markedly evident in superior military equipment and trades goods, enabled relatively small groups of Europeans to conquer or colonize the Americas.  They  also proved decisive in numerous conflicts with Muslims, insuring their retreat from Europe.  “In 1800 Europeans controlled 35 percent of the land surface of the globe.  By 1878 this figure had risen to 67 percent.  Then in the next two decades, Europeans seized control of nearly all of Africa, so that in 1914, on the eve of World War I, Europeans dominated 84 percent of the world’s land area” (#6604).  Intellectually, the “Enlightenment” proved equally decisive.  Though it did indeed prompt various heterodox notions, the Enlightenment must be understood, in accord with Alfred North Whitehead, as rooted in many of the scientific and theological insights of Medieval thinkers—most especially the rationality of God and His world.  “For, as Albert Einstein once remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible:  ‘A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way . . .  That is the “miracle” which is constantly being reinforced as our knowledge expands.’  And that is the ‘miracle that testifies to a creation guided by intention and rationality” (#5963).   

Due to this “miracle,” we Moderns enjoy unprecedented prosperity.  The standard of living has dramatically increased during the past two centuries.  Enjoying “political freedom, secure property rights, high wages, cheap energy, and a highly educated population,” the West now features an unprecedented quality-of-life.  Back-breaking manual labor has been largely replaced by machines.  Ordinary people enjoy “consumer” goods available only to the super-wealthy in earlier centuries.  Hardly the catastrophe denounced by romantics (from William Wordsworth to Al Gore), technology has greatly improved the lot of ordinary folks.  And this is, quite simply, how the West won! 

To understand both Time magazine’s award of its 2015 “person of the year” award to Angelica Merkel for welcoming nearly a million Syrian immigrants to Germany and the pro-Islamic rhetoric and policies of the Obama administration, they must be seen as nearly verbatim implementations of European pronouncements streaming for 40 years from international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union.  That Barack Obama launched his 2008 presidential campaign with a speech in Berlin, Germany, indicates the degree to which he consistently seeks to align himself with European nations and their Islamic overtures.  For example, the EU’s ban on words which might offend Muslims—e.g. jihad; fundamentalists; Islamic terrorism—is  scrupulously followed by the American president.  So Obama administration spokesmen, following terrorist attacks, consistently refer to violent extremists, ever insisting they have no necessary ties to Islam—which is, of course, a necessarily “peaceful” religion.  Indeed, as Attorney-General Loretta Lynch immediately declared, following the slaughter in Riverside, California, we must, above all else, avoid Islamophobia whenever “extremists” indulge in terrorist acts!

Should one want to get inside such thinking he should heed Bat Ye’or’s Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (Madison, N.J.:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, c. 2011), an expansion and update of her earlier Eurabia:  The Euro-Arab Axis.  Doing so enables one to see that what’s now happening in America has been developing, in what was once the heart of Western Civilization as Muslims implement their “Koranic duty to Islamize the planet,” since the whole earth is Allah’s and his people, the Muslims, are to enforce his rule.  Importantly:  “Muslims can never be guilty of occupation or oppression because Allah granted them the whole world; jihad returns to them what belongs to them as true believers” (#317).  So while “Westerners define terrorism as murderous attacks that blindly target civilian populations or individuals, committed by criminal gangs that act outside of recognized formations and do not respect the laws of war,” Muslims “judge terrorism by its motives, not its methods.  Any enterprise aimed at extending Islamic territory is considered ‘resistance.’  Palestinian jihidists, who popularized all modern terrorist methods, are always called ‘resistants’ in official OIC documents” (#930).  

Bat Ye’or is an Egypt-born Jewess who has devoted her life to historical research, publishing important treatises illustrating the plight of Jews and Christians under Islam in The Dhimmi:  Jews and Christians under Islam and The Decline of Eastern Christianity  under Islam:  From Jihad to Dhimmitude.   In an enlightening foreword to The Dhimmi, the great French philosopher Jacques Ellul noted that there exists in the secularized West a “current of favorable predispositions to Islam,” notably evident in the many euphemistic discussions of jihad.  But by setting forth the historical facts, Bat Ye’or dares contradict such prevailing assumptions.  “Historians,” she says, “professionally or economically connected to the Arab-Muslim world,” have misled the public with treatises  “which were either tendentious or combined facts with apologetics and fantasy.  After World War II, the predominance of a left-wing intelligentsia and the emergence of Arab regimes which were ‘socialist’ or allied to Moscow consolidated an Arabophile revolutionary internationalism” that remains strong is much of the contemporary world.   

Jihad, in fact, necessarily characterizes Islam, Ellul says, for it is a sacred duty for the faithful—“Islam’s normal path to expansion.”  Almost never the inner “spiritual” combat imagined by some pro-Islamic writers seeking to make the religion palatable to non-Muslims, actual jihad  advocates “a real military war of conquest” followed by an iron-handed policy of “dhimmitude”—the brutal reduction of conquered peoples to Islamic law.  Indeed the word Islam means submission—not peace!  Muslims divide the world into two—and only two—realms:  the “domain of Islam” and “the domain of war.”  At times there will be tactical concessions and “peaceful” interludes.  But ultimately, all devout Muslims are committed to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible.  Ellul stresses this “because there is so much talk nowadays of the tolerance and fundamental pacifism of Islam that it is necessary to recall its nature, which is fundamentally warlike!”  Writing presciently in 1991 Ellul declared:  “Hostage-taking, terrorism . . . the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam.”  

Turning to Bat Ye’or Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate, we find a careful study of the multitudinous documents generated by various congresses operating under the auspices of the UN and EU as well as assorted Muslim-controlled organizations such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which work to establish an “EU Mediterranean policy.”  Illustrating the dictum of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s revolution—“If Islam is not political, it is nothing”—the OIC fuses religion and politics.  “Close to the Muslim Brotherhood, it shares its strategic and cultural vision, that of a universal religious community, the Ummah based upon the Koran, the Sunna and the canonical orthodoxy of shari’a” (#1429).  It’s supported by 65 countries and represents some 1.3 billion Muslims.   The OIC vows “‘to support the restoration of the complete sovereignty and territorial integrity of a member-state under foreign occupation.’  Such a principle could be applied to every jihad waged by Muslims in various countries to expand the reach of Islam and to install shari’a there, whether in Europe, Africa or Asia” (#4156).  

The ideas set forth by these organizations rather quickly set the tone and substance of policies that have shaped much of the modern world; providing “the progressive Islamization of the West; they establish the major elements of a new global system of totalitarian social and political domination impervious to Western democratic institutions” (#215).  “Europe is a perfect ally, serving the expansionist ambitions of the Ummah, the universal Muslim community” (#902).  In the past Jihadist warriors conquered vast swaths of land and subjected the residents who survived to the dhimmitude that slowly destroyed them.  Today’s “jihad ideology of world conquest, propelled by billions of petrodollars and facilitated by the complacency of European governments and the rivalry between Western powers, is flourishing in every corner of the world.  The driving force of this process is the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which has been dedicated since its creation in 1969 to the elimination of the State of Israel and the eventual implementation of shari’a over the West” (#257).  

Accordingly, Muslim supporters (many of them former Nazis, such as Paul Kickoff, the former SS officer who became the head of Interpol, and Kurt Waldheim, who served as the UN Secretary General) especially stressed a “multilateralism” and “multiculturalism” paradoxically combined with an anti-Israel agenda which included the strident anti-Americanism routinely expressed in UN resolutions.  Multiculturalism, devoted to the notion that all cultures are equally admirable, served as a rationale recognizing the reality of “Muslim immigrants’ refusal to integrate into Western societies” (#1752) while simultaneously insisting that European nations provide employment, housing, medical care, education, etc.  It also mandated that Europeans promote Islamic culture among immigrants and celebrate the utterly spurious “immense contribution of Islamic culture and civilization to Europe’s development and to include it in school and university syllabuses” (#1954).  

The strong support of the European Community for Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (leading to, of all things, a Nobel Peace Prize for the murderous Arafat) sharply illustrates the legitimization of modern jihadism.  One of the most powerful organizations, The Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC), was formed “in 1974 in response to Palestinian terrorism and the oil boycott . . . injected Eurabia into the very heart of Europe.  In effect, to its initial anti-Israeli and anti-American program the association added a new element relating to the internal politics of the EEC:  the promotion in European countries of an extensive Muslim Immigration on which would be conferred the same social, political, and national rights as the indigenous populations” (#550).  Yet the rights and privileges (e.g. freedom of religious expression, equality under law) Muslims demand for themselves in Europe are precisely those denied non-Muslims in Muslim nations!  As Montalembert noted long ago:  “When I am weaker, I ask you for liberty because it is your principle; but when I am strong, I take it away from you because it is not my principle.”  

Bat Ye’or repeatedly discusses the nation of Israel, pointing out how the very survival of this tiny nation is at risk.  She illustrates the deep hostility toward Jews ever-evident in Islamic history, and she shows how this hostility continues in conferences hosted by Arab countries whose publications represent “a monument to hatred and anti-jewish incitement that goes well beyond Nazi literature, with sentences such as, ‘Jews are the enemies of Allah, the enemies of faith and of the worship of Allah’” (#2860).  Israel has no right to exist, and all the land must be returned to Palestinians (this explains why an independent Palestinian “state” alongside Israel is unacceptable to Muslims).  Pro-Palestinian edicts —fully evident in World Council of Churches publications and United Nations resolutions and elite universities’ “divestment from Israel” posturing—are pervasive. 

What’s taking place, Bat Ye’or insists, is the steady break-up of the nation states that once constituted Europe.  Without their consent, the historic peoples of France and Germany, Italy and Spain, have lost their identity as the European Union has taken control of the continent and acceded to almost every Islamic demand, especially regarding immigration.  Dependent on Middle East oil and hoping to profit from immigrant labor, the EU has provided ways for Muslims to settle in Europe without forfeiting their Islamic culture.  Second and third generations insist on the teaching of Arabic and pro-Islamic materials in the schools.  Leaders from Muslim communities must be included in the political system and where possible sharia law must be established to settle intra-Muslim issues.  Slowly, through demographic growth, Muslims hope to gain power in various places.   The Caliphate now effectively dominates a number of European cities.  And across the Atlantic, with “President Obama, America is engaging more radically along such a path,” engaging in “outreach” and education, easing “the bureaucratic process in obtaining US visas and avoid embarrassing delays” entering the country (#3527).  

Europe’s “globalist and pacifist trends are obvious in the American Democratic administration under President Barack Obama,” which strongly supports UN policies and embraced a booklet titled Changing Course:  A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World.  “For a European familiar with EU surrender policy, President Obama’s policy had no surprises.  Western guilt, apologies, flatteries, tributes, anti-Zionism/antisemitism, open-doors immigration, were all part of the dhimmitude paraphernalia” (#4521).  Thus in his 2009 Ramadan address, the president praised “‘Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings’” (#4534).  Such statements, Bat Ye’or sadly concludes, reflect a civilization in the process of collapse, a people willing to submit to Islam.  Europe lost its bet that money and appeasement would pacify Muslims.  And the United States, she fears, is tilting in the same direction.  

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In Londonistan:  How Britain Created a Terror State Within (London:  Gibson Square, c. 2007), Melanie Phillips detailed how she thought “Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamization,” blithely ignoring the “pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation” daily changing the very nature the nation (#68). For many years Phillips was an acclaimed reporter and columnist—“a darling of the left”—for the Guardian, probably the leading leftist newspaper in England, “the paper of choice for intellectuals, the voice of progressive conscience, and the dream destination for many, if not most, aspiring journalists.”  Her disillusionment with the Left began when she honestly followed the evidence while researching and writing articles on a wide variety of subjects—immigration, education, environmentalism, marriage and family, feminism, multiculturalism, health care, Israel and foreign affairs.  

Though only nominally Jewish, Phillips found (to her surprise) that her colleagues on the Guardian branded her as a Jew who could not deal dispassionately with Israel.  Indeed, anything but a pro-Palestinian stance was anathematized by Britain’s leftists, who routinely equate Israelis with Nazis!  “The more I read,” she wrote in her autobiography, Guardian Angel, “the more horrified I became by the scale of the intellectual and moral corruption that was becoming embedded in public discourse about the Middle East—the systematic rewriting of history, denial of law and justice and the corresponding demonization and delegitimisation of Israel.”  Indicative of this process is the widespread sale and use of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a vicious anti-semitic work popular among the Nazis) and Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the Muslim world.  Pondering this phenomenon, she concluded—wisely, I think—that “Israel represents not a regional dispute but a metaphysical struggle between good and evil.  That is why the cause of Palestine is key to the Islamists’ demands” (#2661).  

Half-a-century ago many European intellectuals embraced Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist who urged his readers to abandon violent revolution while launching a “long march” through various societal institutions—schools, churches, judicial systems, media outlets, law enforcement and charitable organizations.  “This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn -sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by the values of those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism” (#2768).  What needed, above all, to be replaced was the Mosaic code, the Judeo-Christian morality fundamental to Western Civilization.  In many ways, the struggle now taking place is between the adherents of two books—the Bible and the Koran!  Inasmuch as they simply cannot be reconciled there is little hope for reconciliation between their believers.  

Hostility towards Israel was accompanied by lock-step support for the Palestinians and Islamic residents in England.  For decades the British have welcomed immigrants of all sorts, asking no questions and offering them “a galaxy of welfare benefits, free education and free health care regardless of their behavior, beliefs or circumstances” (#912).   Multitudes of Muslims thus arrived determined to preserve their traditions while enjoying England’s standard of living.  While recurrently aroused by terrorist attacks such as the subway bombings in 2005, neither politicians nor public (eased along by a very proper English tolerance and political correctness) pay serious heed to the cultural currents transforming significant sections of their country.  Trying to win over the hearts and minds of immigrant Muslims, naively convinced that “moderates” will support the nation that welcomed them, few Englishmen grasp Islamic extremism.  By “defining ‘extremism’ narrowly as supporting violence against Britain, it makes the catastrophic mistake of treating the aim of Islamizing Britain as an eccentric but unthreatening position and not one to be taken at all seriously” (#84).  The so-called “moderates” in Islam, Phillips thinks, are hardly moderate at all.  Yes, they condemn terrorist attacks, but they simultaneously deny such attacks have any roots in “real” Islam, “denying what was a patently obvious truth that these attacks were carried out by adherents of Islam in the name of Islam” (#2011).  

The Islamizing process is markedly evident throughout English society.  In the schools, teachers are pressured to present Islam in an positive manner, becoming agents of propaganda and indoctrination rather than truthful understanding.  Unable to distinguish between truth and lies, the ordinary Brit easily swallows pro-Muslim pronouncements that lack historical credibility and set forth misleading “mythology, distortion and libels” (#2453).  Underwriting this process, oil-rich Saudi sheiks have poured enormous sums into educational institutions—establishing “chairs” in universities, building elementary school facilities, publishing various pro-Islamic materials.  “Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of the nation delivering instead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be.  In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain’s indigenous one.  Concern not to offend minority sensibilities has reached the risible point where piggy banks have been banished from British banks in case Muslims might be offended” (#470).  “This moral inversion has been internalized so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by ‘Islamophobes’ and a hostile West.  Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the reaffirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia, as even use of the term ‘Islamic terrorism’ is regarded as  ‘Islamophobic’” (#492).  Importantly, Phillips says, the multicultural assault on distinctively English ways results from “a repudiation of Christianity, the founding faith of the nation and the fundamental source of its values, including its sturdy individualism and profound love of liberty” (#1748).  

Police are discouraged from enforcing English law in Muslim communities lest they be charged with Islamophobia, and a growing number of policemen (hired to pacify the strident doctrines of ethnic diversity) are simply jihadists committed to the ultimate triumph of their faith.   Judges, more committed to “human rights” and “transnational progressivism” than England’s common law traditions, seek to impose  multicultural values.  The Association of Muslim Lawyers now calls for the “formal recognition of a Muslim man’s right under Sharia law to have up to four wives” (#2366).  Step-by-step, “Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions.  In February 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury caused a furor when he declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.  But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with blind eyes turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy, indeed welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men” (#158).  

In England today mosques attract more attendees than Christian churches which, have largely replaced “the fundamental doctrines of Christianity” with the “worship of social liberalism.  The Church stopped trying to save people’s souls and started trying instead to change society.  . . .   Miracles were replaced by Marx” (#3197).  Facing an ideology (Islam) determined to destroy Christianity, the Church in England capitulated in hopes of surviving as an emasculated but comfortable institution.  So London now serves as a center for Islamic study, featuring scores of research and educational institutions with newspapers and publishing houses distributing radical Islamic materials throughout the world.  Christian pastors and evangelists face prosecution if they make comments critical of Islam since “Islamophobic” speech is banned in England. Though he recently seems to have altered some of his views, Prince Charles once suggested he be known as a “defender of faith” rather than the ‘Defender of the Faith!”  He seemed to have concluded his nation is no longer Christian and is now truly multi- religious.  Amazingly enough, “the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from Judeo-Christian Christian heritage” (#512)—it’s on its knees, not before the LORD but before Islamic intimidation, and the Church of England’s prostration rather painfully illustrates the plight of England today, says Phillips.  

Heading toward the White House Barack Obama pledged to “fundamentally transform” America.  And he clearly has!  Yet in many ways he has simply consummated a process launched 50 years ago by the ‘60s Generation.    And one of the most significant transformations—the sexual revolution—has most deeply affected us all.  Signaling what was to come, one of the leaders of the ‘60s generation, Michael Lehrner, celebrated his 1971 marriage to a teenage girl with a wedding cake inscribed with these words:  “Smash monogamy!”  Those words were also embraced by the Weatherman faction of the SDS, led by Obama’s friend Bill Ayers.  (Interestingly enough, Hillary Clinton in the 1990s dubbed the self-ordained Lehrner her “personal rabbi”—though she obviously has resolved to preserve at least one more-or-less monogamous union.)   

To address this transformation R. Albert (Al) Mohler, Jr., the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of America’s most distinguished evangelical thinkers, has published an important treatise:  We Cannot be Silent:  Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, & the Very Meaning of Right & Wrong (Nashville:  Nelson Books, c. 2015).  Acknowledging the impact of the “vast moral revolution” which has swept “away a sexual morality and a definition of marriage that has existed for thousands of years,” he both analyzes the upheaval and offers Christians a way to deal with it, noting that Flannery O’Connor “rightly warned us years ago that we must ‘push as hard as the age that pushes against you.’  This book is an attempt to do just that” (p. 1).     

Though it was oft-unperceived and lacked the violent explosiveness of the French or Russian revolutions, the cultural revolution launched in the 1960s has profoundly reshaped our world.  To Roger Scruton, an astute contemporary philosopher:   “The left-wing enthusiasm that swept through institutions of learning in the 1960s was one of the most efficacious intellectual revolutions in recent history, and commanded a support among those affected by it that has seldom been matched by any revolution the world of politics” (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands:  Thinkers of the New Left).  Consequently, says Mohler:  “We are facing nothing less than a comprehensive redefinition of life, love, liberty, and the very meaning of right and wrong” (p. 1).  

While the Supreme Court’s recent (2015) redefinition of marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges) has vividly illustrated the sexual revolution, Mohler insists “it didn’t start with same-sex marriage.”  Indeed:  “Any consideration of the eclipse of marriage in the last century must take account of four massive developments:  birth control and contraception, divorce, advanced reproductive technologies, and cohabitation.  All four of these together are required to facilitate the sexual revolution as we know it today.  The redefinition of marriage couldn’t have happened without these four developments” (p. 17).  Though Evangelicals have generally avoided the implications of at the first three of these four, Mohler devotes separate chapters to each to demonstrate the validity of his thesis.  

At the dawn of the 20th century eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger began promoting birth control as a means to purify the race—“More from the fit, less from the unfit.”  Though contraception had hitherto been condemned by all major branches of Christianity, accommodating modernity was in the air and the Church of England led the way by endorsing birth control (within marriage) in 1930.  Most all Protestants quickly followed suit.  Indeed, by 1960 few evangelicals even considered it a moral issue.  Nor did they pay much attention to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut that granted married Americans the right to purchase contraceptives.  Issuing that decision Justice William O. Douglas admitted that nothing in the Constitution justified the decision, but he insisted, there must be somehow somewhere therein a “right to privacy, including the right to access to birth control, in what he defined as ‘penumbras’ that were ‘formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance” (p. 20).  The Court’s rationale in Griswold would soon be wielded first to justify abortion in Roe v. Wade and then same-sex marriage in Obergefall v. Hodges.  “Erotic liberty” was declared a constitutional right!  

Along with contraception, divorce had been “inconceivable for most Christians throughout the history of the Christian church” (p. 22).  But during the 1960s no-fault divorce—first signed into law by then governor Ronald Reagan in California in 1969—soon made it easier to terminate a marriage than to dissolve a business partnership.  The disastrous results—broken families and fatherless children—were clearly unintended but ultimately momentous.  But most churches failed to either anticipate or deal wisely with it.  “No-fault divorce is a rejection of the scriptural understanding of covenant that stands at the very heart of the Christian gospel.  Nevertheless Christian churches generally surrendered” to the culture “and abdicated their moral and biblical responsibility to uphold marriage in its covenantal essence” (p. 24).  Indeed, by failing to strongly resist no-fault divorce evangelicals lost “credibility to speak to the larger issue of sexuality and marriage” (p. 25).  In yet another realm—reproductive technologies—few evangelicals have showed either understanding of or sensitivity to the ethics involved.  So just as the Pill allowed sex without babies so too in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and other technologies allowed women (independently of men) to have babies without sex.  

Only when dealing with the fourth of  Mohler’s factors—cohabitation—have evangelicals seemed alert to the sinful nature of the sexual revolution.  But on this score they now occupy an increasingly small segment of the culture.  What was once condemned as “living in sin” or “shacking up” has become widely accepted in America.   Most women under 30 who now bear children do so while still unmarried.  Thereby they virtually insure their children’s failure in many important areas, and they represent what Tom Smith says “‘is a massive change in one generation, a change that is so great that the majority of parents of young children today were raised in a different type of family than they live in today’” (p. 3).  

Having scanned the historical components of the sexual revolution, Mohler turns to the recently rapid successes of the homosexual movement, culminating in the redefining of marriage itself.  Though in 2004 eleven states passed defense of traditional marriage initiatives, less than a decade later “not one effort to define marriage as the exclusive union of a man and a woman succeeded” (p. 34).  Younger people in particular approve same-sex relationships and activities.  A monumental moral revolution, fueled by the entertainment industry, is in process.  Its success was carefully crafted and implemented by cunning activists who especially worked within academic disciplines and liberal churches to validate their cause.  Remarkably:  “‘Homophobia’ is now the new mental illness and moral deficiency, while homosexuality is accepted as the new normal” (p. 41).  Liberal churchmen now declare it not sinful but an optional lifestyle, and many evangelicals (e.g. Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo) who are all too frequently biblically compromised and anxious to be compassionate, have joined the chorus supporting the new morality which is now established in the legalization of same-sex marriage.  

Consequently, Christians committed to a deeply-biblical and traditional ethic must now awaken and begin patiently responding to the revolution.  So, Mohler reminds us:  “In the Christian understanding, same-sex marriage is actually impossible so we cannot recognize same-sex couples as legitimately married” (p. 54).  Christians must remember that no government can create or define marriage—that’s already been done by God and revealed in both Nature and Scripture.  “Evangelical Christians, in particular, should recognize natural law as a priceless testimony to the comprehensive grace God, a testimony that displays his glory and pattern for human flourishing” (p. 63).  

Turning to the latest expansion of sexual rights, the “transgender revolution” promoted by Oprah Winfrey et al., Mohler notes that “an entire civilization” has been turned “upside down” by severing “gender” from “sex.”  Decades ago the politically correct establishment decreed that though there are only two biological sexes there may well be a variety of self-selected genders.  So some schools now ban gendered nouns (boys and girls) and pronouns (he and she).  This is because they assert, as Katy Steinmetz explains:  “‘There is no concrete correlation between a person’s gender identity and sexual interests; a heterosexual woman, for instance, might start living as a man and still be attracted to men.  One oft-cited explanation is that sexual orientation determines who we want to go to bed with and gender identity determines what you want to go to bed as.’” (p. 68).  Reality is whatever we want it to be!  And we now face an “omnigender” collage that includes “Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer”!  Just whatever!

Amidst all this confusion, defenders of traditional marriage face a daunting challenge!  Fortunately, the Bible provides a solid basis for beginning to rebuild families that nurture healthy children within the context of a divinely-blessed, lifelong, monogamous covenant.  There is, in fact, only one way to live rightly together as men and women!  Whatever transpires in the surrounding culture, God’s people have been given clear commandments regarding sexual relations.  And we must also struggle to preserve the legal “right to be Christian” in an increasingly anti-Christian country wherein “Erotic liberty has been elevated as a right more fundamental than religious liberty” (p. 124).   It’s important to listen carefully when President Obama and his administrative enforcers shift from the language of the Constitution—the “free exercise” of religion—to the freedom to “worship,” which can easily be confined within the walls of a “house of worship.”  Certainly we must always to speak the truth in love and seek to reach all men and women with the grace of the Gospel.  But to “bear witness to Christ and the gospel in contemporary culture,” as Robert George says, means “to make oneself a ‘sign of contradiction’ to those powerful forces who equate ‘progress’ and ‘social justice’ with sexual license. 

                                        * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The sexual revolution, now culminating in the legalization of same-sex marriage and celebration of transgender declarations, triumphed within a culture devoid of a Natural Law ethos.  Though slowly giving way to an evolutionary worldview, wherein there are no established essences to things, the Natural Law (rooted in Aristotle and Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas and America’s Founding Fathers) still provides a rationale for and defense of heterosexual marriage that forever makes sense.  Conjoined with an earlier treatise he co-authored with Robert George and Sherif Girgis—What Is Marriage?  Man and Woman:  A Defense (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2012)—Ryan T. Anderson’s Truth Overruled:  The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom (Washington, D.C.:  Regency Publishing, c. 2015) merits serious study and distribution.  “With its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court of the United States,”  Anderson asserts, “has brought the sexual revolution to its apex—a redefinition of our civilizations’ primordial institution, cutting its link to procreation and declaring sex differences meaningless” (#80).  Five unelected, elitist judges have rashly claimed the power to trash the most important association known to man!    They not only “decided a case incorrectly—it has damaged the common good and harmed our republic” (#1009).  

Consequently, folks who dare declare their support for traditional, heterosexual marriage are now pilloried as bigots (akin to racists) committed to immoral forms of sexual discrimination.  Christians espousing heterosexual monogamy and everyone who dares condemn  sodomy are now instructed “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”  Facing the fact that the ground has shifted around us, Christians must, Anderson says, clearly think through how to respond, taking to heart the patience and perspicuity of the pro-life movement.  We must, first, identify and reject the judicial activism so evident in both Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges.   Poor jurisprudence can, and must be, refuted on the highest of intellectual levels.  Then we must take steps to preserve our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms “to speak and live according to the truth” (#209).  

To do so, Princeton Professor Robert George says:  “‘We must, above all, tell the truth:  Obergefell v. Hodges is an illegitimate decision.  What Stanford Law School Dean John Ely said of Roe v. Wade applies with equal force to Obergefell:  “It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”  What Justice Byron White said of Roe is also true of Obergefell:  “it is an act of ‘raw judicial power.’”  The lawlessness of these decisions is evident in the fact that they lack any foundation or warranting the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution.  The justices responsible for these rulings, whatever their good intentions,are substituting their own views of morality and sound public policy for those of the people and their elected representatives.  They have set them selves up as super legislators possessing a kind of plenary power to impose their judgments on the nation.  What could be more unconstitutional—more anti-constitutional—than that?’” (#1031).  Importantly, Professor George’s strong critique of the Court can be found, in equally emphatic language, in the four justices’ (John Roberts; Antonio Scalia; Samuel Alito; Clarence Thomas) opinions who dissented from Obergefall.  

The author’s “goal is to equip everyone, not just the experts, to defend what most of us never imagined we’d have to defend:  our rights of conscience, our religious liberty, and the basic building block of civilization—the human family, founded on the marital union of a man and a woman” (#237).  “Whatever the law or culture may say, we must commit now to witness to the truth about marriage:  that men and women are equal and equally necessary in the lives of children; that men and women, though different, are complementary; that it takes a man and a woman to bring a child into the world.  It is not bigotry but compassion and common sense to insist on laws and public policies that maximize the likelihood that children will grow up with a mom and a dad” (#267). 

To declare this truth we must first insist that words mean something.  Marriage can only describe a conjugal union, the fleshly union of a male and female human being.  To accept the Supreme Court’s verdict is to grant its faulty “assumption that marriage is a genderless institution” (#288), nothing more than an agreement between persons to enjoy some sort of emotionally rewarding relationship.   The Court’s position was, of course, largely set in place by the sexual revolutionaries who promoted cohabitation, no-fault divorce, single parenting, and the hook-up culture dramatically evident on university campuses.  

Still more, as a conjugal union marriage is designed for and ordered to procreation, a fact vociferously denied by sexual revolutionaries.  In the marital act two become one flesh.  It’s not an etherial, spiritual bond between “loving” persons but an intensely physical act, uniting a man and woman in a thoroughly “comprehensive” manner.  Note, Anderson says, this “parallel:  The muscles, heart, lungs, stomach and intestines of an individual human body cooperate with each other toward a single biological end—the continued life of that body.  In the same way, a man and a woman, when they unite in the marital act, cooperate toward a single biological end—procreation” (#407).  Bringing children into the world entails forging intact families suitable for their rearing.  “Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father” (#470).  

To redefine marriage in accord with the sexual revolution charts a dire course for our future, says Anderson:  “The needs and rights of children will be subordinated to the desires of adults.  The marital norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence will be weakened.  Unborn children will be put at even more risk than they already are.  And religious liberty—Americans’ ‘first freedom’—will be threatened” (#692).  We already see the harms done by single parenting, whereby children suffer on almost every score—increased poverty, abuse, delinquency, substance addictions, dysfunctional relationships.  So too a “study undertaken by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas demonstrated the negative impacts among children being raised in the context of a same-sex home” (#1509).  

And there’s more to come as proponents of erotic rights envision moving beyond same-sex marriage to “legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners” (#765).  The California legislature recently passed a bill allowing a child to have three legal parents.  Though the governor vetoed it, such legislation will quickly cascade from similar chambers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision.  Yet other theorists propose temporary marriage licenses—leasing a spouse, much as you lease a house, for as long as he or she suits you.  Once marriage has been reduced to a “lifestyle option” valued primarily for its benefits to autonomous adults, little remains to that most essential “little platoon,” the family.   And precisely that, for the sexual revolutionaries, has been the purpose all along.  As  Michael Lehrner and the Weathermen said, “smash monogamy.”  It all fits nicely into the agenda of Marx and Engels, who placed the abolition of families high on their list in order to create a pure, socialist society.  

Turning to the question of what we can now do, Anderson leads us back to the carefully-wrought, timelessly true theological position of the Christian Church.  The creation account in Genesis provides a wonderful prescription whereby a man and a woman form a divinely-ordained covenant best illustrated in “God’s own covenant-making love in Jesus Christ” (#1670).  This new covenant of grace reaffirms the old covenant, with its rules regarding sex and marriage.  “Sex, gender, marriage, and family all come together in the first chapters of Scripture in order to make clear that every aspect of our sexual lives is to submit to the creative purpose of God and be channeled into the exclusive arena of human sexual behavior—marriage—defined clearly and exclusively as the lifelong, monogamous union of a man and a woman” (#1739).  

Today, of course, there are revisionist thinkers within the religious world who explain away the clear words of Scripture and insist the modern world requires a new morality better attuned to its desires.  In their view, convictions rooted an antiquity have no more value that pre-scientific notions regarding astronomy or immunology.  To such thinkers—and the many churches embracing their views—orthodox believers “must speak a word of compassionate truth.  And that compassionate truth is this:  homosexual acts are expressly and unconditionally forbidden by God through his Word, and such acts are an abomination to the Lord by his own declaration” (#1778).  Strong words!  But compassion need not walk  weakly, extending approval to everyone in every situation!   Without a mental toughness, we will fail to resist the sledge hammer blows now bludgeoning traditional marriage.

Similarly, we dare not stand aside (under the auspices of kindness and tolerance) while this nation’s religious liberties are attacked.  Revolutionaries of all sorts, sexual revolutionaries included, know they must establish their ideologies in a people’s legal structures.  No one thinking clearly about America’s recent history can avoid concluding that Christians who dare deviate from the erotic revolution’s dictates will be punished.  Given the decades-long shift to administrative law courts (invisible to many of us), people are increasingly fined for failing to measure up to the precepts of sexual “equality” or mouthing “hate speech.”  So florists and bakers and photographers refusing to participate in gay weddings have been found guilty and harshly fined for their conscience-bound commitment to traditional marriage.   “Erotic liberty” outweighs religious liberty and threatens to entirely subvert it.  

Rightly read, Truth Overruled and We Cannot Not Be Silent should prompt us to share their truths  and support their proposals if we care for our families, churches, and a good society.  

While teaching Ethics in the 1970s I often used, as a supplementary text, Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in a Hungry World.  Written by a Mennonite theologian committed to alleviating hunger and poverty around the world, it challenged readers to thoughtfully address pressing world problems by citing biblical texts and explaining economic structures—generally informed, I now realize, by Marxist critiques (the rich exploit the poor) and Keynesian (deficit spending) prescriptions.  Back then I thought Sider surely knew more than I and properly assessed the issues he addressed.  Two decades later, however, Sider announced that though his biblical perspectives were defensible his economic positions had been skewed by his misunderstanding of free market economics.  Unfortunately, in accord with Sider too many theologians and preachers make economic pronouncements quite untethered to economic wisdom.  

Thus it’s good to consider a book I wish I’d had in the ‘70s written by a fine theologian (Wayne Gruden, PhD, University of Cambridge, now teaching at Phoenix Seminary) and a skilled economist (Barry Asmos, PhD, now serving as a senior economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis) titled The Poverty of Nations:  A Sustainable Solution (Wheaton:  Crossway Books, c. 2013).   Blending their expertise, they seek “to provide a sustainable solution to poverty in the poor nations of the world, a solution based on both economic history and the teachings of the Bible” (p. 25).  They provide a richly-documented and amply-illustrated treatise, engaging and understandable for anyone concerned with rightly alleviating poverty in our world.  

In an endorsement that sums up the book’s message, Brian Westbury, former Chief Economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, says:  “I became an economist because I fell in love with the idea that a nation’s choices could determine whether citizens faced wealth or poverty.  Thirty years of research has led me to believe that wealth comers from a choice to support freedom and limited government.  I became a Christian because I fell in love with Jesus Christ.  The Bible says we were created in God’s image and that while we should love our neighbor, we are also meant to be creators ourselves.  I never thought these were mutually exclusive beliefs.  In fact, I believe biblical truth and free markets go hand in hand.  I have searched far and wide for a book that melds these two worldviews.  Asmos and Grudem have done it!  A top-flight economist and a renowned theologian have put together a bullet-proof antidote to poverty.  It’s a tour de force.  The church and the state will find in this book a recipe for true, loving, and lasting justice.”  High praise indeed!  

Asmos and Gruden first focus on the right “goal” to pursue:  increasing a nation’s GDP, which means producing valuable goods and services.   Though popular programs for redistributing existing goods—through taxation or apparently benevolent “aid” programs, or “debt-relief” subsidies for poor countries, or “fair trade” crusades allegedly helping poor coffee farmers, or printing more money—may momentarily appear to reduce poverty, ultimately such endeavors do little to improve economic conditions.  Nor is depending on donations God’s ideal for human flourishing.  “God’s purpose from the beginning has been for human beings to work and create their own goods and services, not simply to receive donations” (p. 72).  Certainly there is an important place for charitable assistance and governmental “safety nets,” but real economic development requires wealth-creation through the creativity of a people adding to their own community’s goods and services.  In short:  “Producing more goods and services does not happen by depending on donations from other countries; by redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor; by depleting natural resources; or by blaming factors and entities outside the nation, whether colonialism, banks that have lent money, the world economic system, rich nations, or large corporations.”  Only one objective should prevail, the “primary economic goal” of “continually producing more goods and services, and thus increasing its GDP” (p. 106).  

To justify their case, Asmos and Gruden carefully analyze and reject eight historical “economic systems that did not lead to prosperity”—hunting and gathering; subsistence farming; slavery; tribal ownership; feudalism; mercantilism; socialism and communism; the welfare state and its illusory equality.    Though certain advantages may be associated with each of these systems, they were all basically stagnant and generally enriched only a small percentage of the population.  Surveying the past, it seems clear that only the “free market” system facilitates wide-spread economic prosperity.  Rightly defined:  “A free-market system is one in which economic production and consumption are determined by the free choices of individuals rather than by governments, and this process is founded in private ownership of the means of production” (p. 131).  

The authors carefully distinguish between the free-market system they support and the “crony” or “state” or “oligarchic” forms of capitalism they reject.  In particular,  to function rightly, free-markets  require the “rule of law” that extends to political and business elites as well as ordinary folks.  Poor countries almost always have poor (i.e. corrupt or incompetent) leaders!   Property must be protected, contracts and deeds must be upheld, and harmful products must be banned.  A free-market cannot work amidst anarchy, so a good if limited government is essential.  And the free-market also needs a stable currency and low taxes to encourage the development of goods and services.  Various aspects of free market economics—specialization, trade, competition, prices, profits and losses, entrepreneurship—are explained and defended. “The genius of a free-market system is that it does not try to compel people to work.  It rather leaves people free to choose to work, and it rewards that work by letting people keep the fruits of their labor” (p. 133).  

Neither one person nor any bureaucracy guides the free-market economy—the collective wisdom of countless individuals making choices enables it to work well.  This meshes well with the Bible’s celebration of “human freedom and voluntary choices” (p. 188).  Freedom is truly essential for human flourishing of any sort.  Thus Asmos and Gruden carefully detail “twenty-one specific freedoms” (e.g. to own property, buy and sell, travel and relocate, trade, start businesses, to work at any job, etc.) that should be protected in any good society.  Sustained by a free people the free-market works!  “With no central director or planner, it still enables vast amounts of wealth to be created, and the benefits to be widely distributed, in every nation where it is allowed to function.  No other system encourages everyone to compete and cooperate, and gives people such economic freedom to choose and produce, and thus enhances prosperity.  Slowly but surely, countries around the world are seeing the win-win nature of a free-market system” (p. 184).  

There is, furthermore, a moral as well as economic component to the free-market.  Obviously  wrongdoing occurs within free-market economies!  No Christian should be alarmed at the reality of sin pervading all areas of human behavior!  But the opportunities for massive corruption are more strikingly evident in socialistic, state-controlled  economies prevalent throughout the developing world.  By encouraging individual freedom and responsibility, free markets recognize the intrinsic dignity of persons created in the image of God who create the goods and services basic for human flourishing.  Such taking care of oneself, acting in one’s self-interest, can be distinguished from covetousness.  As Brian Griffiths says:  “‘From a Christian point of view therefore self-interest is a characteristic of man created in the image of God, possessed of a will and a mind, able to make decisions and accountable for them.  It is not a consequence of the Fall.  Selfishness is the consequence of the Fall and it is the distortion of self-interest when the chief end of our lives is not the service of God but the fulfillment of our own ego’” (p. 208).  

To Rick Warren, who has energetically supported programs around the world while pastoring the Saddleback Community Church, this book merits serious attention from evangelicals.  He’s traveled extensively and “witnessed firsthand that almost every government and NGO (non-profit) poverty program is actually harmful to the poor, hurting them in the long run rather than helping them.  The typical poverty program creates dependency, robs people of dignity, stifles initiative, and can foster a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ sense of entitlement.”  Thus, Warren continues:  “The biblical way to help people rise out of poverty is through wealth creation, not wealth redistribution.  For lasting results, we must offer the poor a hand up, not merely a handout.”  To enable us to do so, The Poverty of Nations “should be required reading in every Christian college and seminary,by every relief and mission organization, and by every local church pastor.”  At Saddleback, Warren says, “this book will become a standard text that we will use to train every mission team we have in 196 countries.”

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For several decades years Henry Hazlitt was one of the most eminent “public intellectuals” in America—writing economic-oriented columns for the New York Times and contributing to other periodicals, publishing books and engaging in discussions with the nation’s leading thinkers.  In the opinion of H.L. Mencken, he was “one of the few economists in human history who could really write.”  At a dinner honoring him, Ludwig von Mises declared:  “In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can life as free men, you are our leader.  You have indefatigably  fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilizations has created over a long period of centuries. . . .  You are the economic conscience of our country.”  

In his most acclaimed and influential treatise, Economics in One Lesson (New York:  Three Rivers Press, c. 1946; re-issued in 1961 and updated in 1978) Hazlitt relied on basic common sense to encourage common folks to grasp economic principles and thereby to become better citizens.  With Adam Smith he believed that what is “prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”  Thus the simple difference between good and bad economists is this:  “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond.  The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences.  That bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups” (p. 16).  Good economists, as the architects of the Iroquois Confederacy recognized centuries ago, should propose and implement policies with an eye on “the seventh generation,” not the current crowd.  

Above all, Hazlitt sought to refute some prevailing “economic fallacies” that “have almost become a new orthodoxy” (p. 9).  The fallacies he analyzed were primarily those espoused by John Maynard Keynes and his disciples shaping the New Deal.  Brilliant thinkers such as Keynes are often “bad” inasmuch as they dismiss concerns for the long-term impact of their policies.  They think only of themselves and their immediate problems.  But if we care for others “the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence.  The art of economics consists in looking not merely at they immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group for for all groups” (p. 17).   Unfortunately, folks follow Keynes since he is “regarded as brilliant economist, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “‘In the long run we are all dead’” (p. 16).

To illustrate his thesis, Hazlitt explains the “broken-window fallacy.  If a baker’s window is broken, he must pay a repairman to fix it.  The repairman thus has more money to spend and that money trickles through the village enriching a variety of people.  What’s not recognized, however, is the baker’s lost savings—money he could have used to buy a new suit or expand his business.  To imagine the vandal’s destructive act could stimulate economic development and add to the community’s welfare is an illusion.  “Yet the broken-window fallacy,under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics” (p. 25).  Wartime spending, for example, certainly seems to stimulate the economy, providing employment and bolstering selected industries, but it does enormous harm in the process.   

So too government spending saps a people’s economic strength.  Though continually “presented as a panacea for all our economic ills” by politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama, in the long run all such expenditures must be paid for by someone, someway, some day.  Just as a broken window stimulates certain activity and enriches certain workers, so too does government spending.  “The government spenders forget that they are taking the money from A in order to pay it to B.  Or rather, they know this very well; but while they dilate upon all the benefits of the process to B, and all the wonderful things he will have which he would not have had if the money had not been transferred to him, they forget the effects of the transaction on A.  Be is seen; A is forgotten” (p. 37).  

The “Forgotten Man” was more fully described by William Graham Sumner in 1883:  “‘As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering.  A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X . . . .  What I want to do is to look up C . . . .  I call him the Forgotten Man . . . .  He is the man who never is thought of.  He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid on him’” (p. 195).  To which Hazlitt adds:  “It is C, the Forgotten Man,who is always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity” (p. 195).  

But since people rarely want to pay more taxes politicians generally resort to printing and spending more money.  Their grandstanding easily garners votes in the next election and often appears to help a nation, but the invisible wheels of inflation will surely (if slowly) destroy her, for “inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation” (p. 31), ultimately harming most those least able to afford it.  Most surely it is “the opium of the people” (p. 174).  Yet throughout human history:  “Each generation and country follows the same mirage.  Each grasps for the same Dead Sea fruit that turns to dust and ashes in its mouth.  for it is the nature of inflation to give birth to a thousand illusions” (p. 171).  

In a series of short chapters, Hazlitt explains and condemns a variety of government policies and programs—government loans (whether for houses or schooling); subsidies (for both farmers and businesses); “full employment” (attained only under totalitarian regimes) ; regulations (whether for industries or favored species); protective tariffs (always favoring special producers rather than consumers); foreign aid (whether military or economic); “parity” prices (beloved by farmers); government price-fixing (whether during WWII or under Richard Nixon); rent control (favoring an elite, enriched class of renters) ; excessive union wage-rates (the constant goal of both the AFL-CIO and NEA); minimum wage laws (inevitably costing jobs and harming production); unemployment benefits (skyrocketing under Barack Obama); “just” prices and wages (arbitrarily set by bureaucrats rather than established by the market); etc.  

In the book’s final edition Hazlitt addressed “the lesson after thirty years.”  In short:  little has changed since 1946.  Economists and politicians continue to pursue deficit spending policies that inflate the currency and cannot but harm the nation in the long run.  Thus within a century the American dollar has shrunk to a nickel!   

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As he watched Roosevelt’s New Deal bear fruit in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (whereby a tenfold growth in government activities took place), Henry Hazlitt protested the mushrooming power and size of the federal government and its necessarily dictatorial “Planned Economy,” setting forth his objections in Man vs. the Welfare State (New Rachelle, N.Y.:  Arlington House, c. 1969).  He noted that FDR’s generation of politicians had promised not only to “bring perpetual full employment, prosperity, and ‘economic growth,’ but solve the age-old problem of poverty overnight.  And the end results not merely that accomplishment has fallen far short of promises, but that the attempt to fulfill the promises has brought an enormous increase in government spending, an enormous increase in the burden of taxes, chronic, deficits, chronic inflation, ‘Social Security’ has brought an ominous increase in social insecurity” (#92).

Basically Hazlitt tries to help the reader understand the short-sightedness of welfare state economics.  There simply cannot be “salvation through government spending” because the deficit spending involved is no better than “creating money out of thin air.”  It wrongly equates income (or money) with goods and services, which are the only true measure of a nation’s wealth.  Nor can we evade the ominous consequences of indebtedness by arguing (as did Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith and kindred “liberal” economists) that “we owe it to ourselves.”   Unfortunately, as David Hume observed two centuries earlier, such rationalizations regarding “contracting debt will almost infallibly be abused in every government.”  And rather than repay the debt governments inflate (and thus debase) the currency—effectively repudiating it!  Putting “it bluntly, the government’s creditors have been swindled” (#254).   

Swindlers of all sorts succeed by subtly misleading their victims, and “the welfare state can arise and persist only be cultivating and living on a set of economic delusions in the minds of the voters” (#527).  Among these delusions are the worth of minimum wage laws, price controls, consumer protection regulations, relief programs, Social Security, guaranteed annual income, guaranteed jobs, the negative income tax, and various “soak the rich” endeavors.  The swindlers assert, through the mouths of prominent politicians, that “social justice” demands those who can pay for the welfare state be forced to do so.  Listening to such rhetoric, almost all voters assume the “rich” are people much richer than they—only later to they awaken to the fact that they themselves are the “rich” who must pay the bills!  Admitting they will rob Peter to pay Paul, they imagine they are only depriving the “rich” Peter of his property.  

President Lyndon Johnson once said:  “‘We are going to try to take all of the money that we think is unnecessarily being spent and take it from the “haves” and give it to the “have nots” that need it so much’” (#3022).  The main mechanism for doing this is the progressive income tax, established by American Progressives in the 16th Amendment a century ago.  Those promoting it fully understood its baleful economic prospects, but they wanted to use it for social transformation.  “In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels frankly proposed ‘a heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ as an instrument by which ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,’ and to a make ‘despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’” (#1537).  

In fact, “the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else, and most all welfare state policies illustrate  “the shrewd observation of the French economist, Bastiat, more than a century ago:  “‘The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live a the expense of everybody else’” (#1028).  Doing so inevitably leads to disasters such as was evident half-a-century ago in Uruguay, which embraced “democratic socialism” a century ago or in Venezuela today.   The cost of living balloons and the GNP declines.  Ultimately, the welfare state cannot but destroy the economy!  

 During the 42 years I taught in Nazarene universities I was privileged to work alongside some truly gifted scholars who lived out their calling as Christian professors.  Dr. Rick Kennedy, a professor of history at Point Loma Nazarene University who received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was certainly one of these—combining commitments to teaching and research, conscientiously upholding the orthodox Christian tradition, working winsomely with students, and actively worshiping in San Diego’s First Presbyterian Church.   In addition, he has for years worked diligently within The Conference of Faith and History and now serves as that organization’s secretary.  In a laudatory review of Kennedy’s latest work, Thomas Kidd, a prominent professor of history at Baylor University, commends him as “a formidable academic historian” who has written “many serious books and articles on American intellectual history.”  

Kennedy  has recently added to his list of publications a fine biography, one of an excellent series of religious biographies edited by Mark Noll, entitled The First American Evangelical:  A Short Life of Cotton Mather (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 2015).  “In this book,” Kennedy says, placing Mather (the son of Increase Mather, an equally significant Massachusetts clergyman) in his historical milieu, “I will focus on Cotton and his self-conscious desire to tug against the slide of genteel Protestantism” (#152).  And as the title indicates, he wants to identify Cotton Mather as the “first evangelical”—a position usually assigned to leaders of the First Great Awakening such as Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian, and George Whitefield, the wondrously winsome itinerant English evangelist.  Two decades before the Great Awakening broke out in the 1730s, many of its elements emerged under Mather’s ministry in Boston:  “Thousands of people and a large number of churches rallied to the way Cotton Mather articulated and modeled what he called an ‘all day long faith’ and described as a way of walking ‘to the very top of Christianity’” (#162).  

Along with many Puritans, Mather refused to be labeled a “Calvinist” and selected the term “Eleutherian” (a Greek word for freedom), to denote his singular commitment to the New Testament message, for as St Paul declared to the Galatians:  “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free!”  In the 1690s, he led a small band of “Eleutherians” who where committed to the “evangelical interest,” a more intense form of discipleship and piety than was then evident in Boston.  He became “a standard-bearer for a my-utmost-for-his-highest type of Christianity, which moderates saw as too extreme” #1733).  Thus to  Kennedy:  “Herein lies the birth of the evangelical tradition in America:  A coalition of ministers and laypeople rallied to Cotton Mather’s call to a zealous, freedom-loving, Bible focused Protestantism that was open to spiritual activities and communications” #1748).  

Born in Boston in 1663, Cotton was the “oldest child of Increase Mather and Maria Cotton.  Both of his grandfathers, Richard Mather and John Cotton, were revered founders of the colony, powerful ministers, and model Puritans” (#338).  But young Mather witnessed “the last decades of Puritan Boston” while preparing (through the Boston Latin School and Harvard College) to join his father in pastoring Boston’s prestigious North Church, “probably the largest and richest Protestant congregation in America” (#1090).  He soon demonstrated prowess as a preacher as well as effectiveness in pastoral visitation, working with small prayer groups, launching jail ministries, promoting missions to the Indians, and fervently praying both publically and by himself in his study.  “‘My life is almost a continual conversation with heaven,’ Cotton wrote in 1713” (#770).  Still more, he sought to follow “‘the advice of the ancients:  If you wish to be always with God, always pray, always read’” (#480).  

He devoutly pursued a scholarly life, acquiring a vast library (believing “his study was a kind of holy ground”) and writing prolifically on a variety of subjects.  Above all he loved and lived in the Bible, continually seeking to understand and expound it.  Attuned to intellectual currents in Europe, he “was the first important scholar in America to realize that a battle for the Bible was brewing among Protestant scholars” (#2268).  Many were taking a highly critical approach (manifest in the rationalism personified by Spinoza) that disregarded the Supernatural.  To effectively defend the traditional, orthodox commitment to the Bible’s trustworthiness—indeed its infallibility—he embraced and articulated the philosophical “reasonableness” (rooted in Aristotle’s Topics) akin to the “courtroom jurisprudence” that Professor Kennedy has effectively emphasized throughout his publications.  

For Cotton Mather, such reasonableness mines a multitude of sources, so the testimonies of the Christian tradition, preserved in its classic texts, merit respectful attention.  He considered himself an historian—the study of which is “‘one of the most needful and useful accomplishments for a man that would serve God’” (#2101)—and Kennedy argues he was “the greatest American historian of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (#1532).  “In the pulpit he upheld the Bible as divine testimony.  In a book he titled Reasonable Religion, he declared that Christians are not reasonable ‘if we don’t receive that book which we call the Bible or, the Scripture, as a Divine Testimony’” (#612).  Similarly, credible witnesses to miracles (whether in the Bible or in history) should not be dismissed merely because they  testify to supernatural events.  In that spirit he wrote “a religious and political history of New England called Magnalia Christi Americana, the “Great American Deeds of Christ,” a work that made him “an internationally known historian” when it was published in 1702 (#1542).  Indeed, he had become “the most famous American in the British Empire” (#1758).  

Sadly enough, few Americans today could identify Cotton Mather.  If they’ve heard of him, they likely remember a minor incident—his peripheral role in the notorious Salem witch trials.  When he heard reports of girls engaged in witchcraft, he urged they be brought into “the kind of healing program that had worked for” some disturbed girls he’d worked with in Boston.  Secular officials intervened, however, and the trials were held.  One of the judges, “Samuel Sewall later declared to his church that he was willing to ‘take the blame and shame’ of the trials upon himself.  In his history of New England, Cotton agreed that the executions proceeded from mistaken principles” (#1367).  Though he is frequently “associated with the witch trials,” he never attended them; “nor did he have any authority within the situation” (#1367).  The extent of his influence was urging leniency in dealing with the accused.  

As Thomas Kidd indicates, this biography of Cotton Mather is a “gleefully revisionist” treatise.  Professor Kennedy seeks to show his subject in a positive light, quite different from the dour portraits drawn by more muckraking writers.  Committed to his understanding of  “reasonableness,” Kennedy is as open to Mather’s reports of God’s providential and miraculous workings in New England as Mather was open to the same realities in both Scripture and history.  The book’s thesis, identifying Mather as the “first American Evangelical,” will certainly engender scholarly debates, but it seems reasonable to me to find the same spiritual hungers and convictions cultivated by Cotton Mather in New England in 1715 surfacing with more clarity and power in the First Great Awakening in the 1730s.  

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Professor Rick Kennedy has long pondered the proper way to research and reason, to think and write and teach history—especially as it comes to bear on the Christian Tradition.  Early on in his career he published an excellent article entitled “Miracles in the Dock:  A Critique of the Historical Profession’s Special Treatment of Alleged Spiritual Events” in fides et historia, XXVI:2 (Summer 1994), wherein he mounted a vigorous attack on David Hume’s flawed rejection of miracles and called historians to recover an earlier, better way of doing history.  Kennedy then expanded that argument in a scholarly monograph titled A History of Reasonableness:  Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (Rochester:  University of Rochester Press, c. 2004).  

He began his treatise with a story John Locke told in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  A 17^th century King of Siam (modern Thailand) refused to believe a Dutch ambassador’s description of ice!  Having never seen frozen water he could not imagine such could exist.  He refused to believe a report because his personal experience negated it.  John Locke himself, trying to find reasons to believe others’ experiences as well as his own, suggested that tentatively accepting the testimonies of credible witnesses make sense.  So the King of Siam should have at least taken the ambassador at his word and subsequently sought to see if other reports confirmed his assertion.  For Kennedy this story “gets at the deep traditional issues of testimony and authority in the art of reasoning” and gives us a segue into a  discussion of their historical development. 

To rightly reason on the basis of testimony and authority is no minor matter!  Unless we can do so much that holds us together grows tenuous.  “For leaders to act, for juries to decide, and for history to teach, people have needed to trust testimony and authority” (p. 4).  From Aristotle on, as Kennedy shows by examining an impressive number of important textbooks used during the course of 20 centuries, thinkers and teachers concerned with education took seriously the role of testimony and authority.  And inasmuch as Aristotle set forth many important definitions and distinctions in his Topics, we may take him (joining St Thomas Aquinas) as “The Philosopher” since he stands at the heart of the “classical tradition” so central to Western Civilization.  

There is a marked difference between what we “know from within ourselves and what we learn from others” (p. 13).  Gifted children quickly become proficient in mathematics, seeing clearly what simply must be true.  An adolescent can become a world-class mathematician or chess master, but few would want him to be the nation’s president!  That’s because the things we learn from others, such as history and wisdom, must develop throughout a life rightly lived and are learned through dialectic (dialogical reasoning) and rhetoric (writing and speaking effectively) rather than logic and geometry.  “Aristotle ingeniously created an intellectual device that served this and other purposes.  He called it topics” and it became basic to “the liberal arts curriculum for two thousand years” (p. 13).  

Much that we learn, Aristotle insisted, comes from others by way of testimony and authority.  It is a form of “social” knowledge and is essential for “social” creatures such as ourselves.  Throughout the past, a multitude of thoughtful human beings have discovered truths regarding God, man, and the cosmos that we can quickly appropriate by believing them, accepting their authority.  He set forth the “pattern followed by most of the textbook writers discussed in this book, a pattern of writing about testimony from the perspective of honest people giving and receiving the best information available to them” (p. 16).  Such knowledge, of course, is not nearly as self-evident and certain as Euclid’s axioms or sense experiences, and we must take care to be neither overly gullible nor dogmatically skeptical.  But without such knowledge and capacity to reason well we would live seriously circumscribed and intellectual impoverished lives.  

Influential educators, especially Cicero and Quintilian in ancient Rome, simplified, synthesized and prescribed the principles set forth in Aristotle’s Topics.  Then Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus, preserved this tradition of carefully evaluating and trusting testimony and authority; their works were used in schools throughout the Middle Ages.  During the Reformation, Luther’s close associate Philipp Melanchthon “reached deeply into the works of Aristotle, Augustine, and the best Medieval theologians in order to strengthen not only the role of dialectic as the foundation to all aspects of the liberal arts curriculum but also as the foundation of a Christian reasonableness in general” (p. 117).  

Things began to change, however, when 17^th century thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes charted new directions more suitable to the budding scientific approach to truth that was concisely summed up in the newly-established Royal Society’s motto, “Nullius in verba” (On no one’s word).  Bacon specifically sought to surpass Aristotle’s “common sense” philosophy, and Descartes endeavored to confine all knowledge to mathematical strictures.  Thus Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (along with Newton a co-founder of calculus) could imagine settling “all disputes” through “computation” (p. 197).  In the hands of David Hume, this approach easily led to the denial of most all testimony—especially when applied to miracles.  Important textbooks, notably The Port-Royal Logic, certainly tried to maintain a balance between truths discerned mathematically and truths delivered through historical witnesses.  And gifted disciples of Aristotle, such as Richard Henry Whatley and John Henry Newman, eloquently upheld his views and emphasized “the reasonableness of Christianity.”  But during the past four centuries the measured rejection of Aristotle’s Topics is quite evident.  

Consequently, C.S. Lewis’s lament in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (“Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”) describes the plight of modern education.  Philosophers following Immanuel Kant reduced knowledge to what can be subjectively discerned.  The autonomous self stands alone, determining what is true, or good, or beautiful.  In America, John Dewey insisted one learns singularly through personal experience, through “doing.”  Reflecting the influence of such thinkers, today’s teachers  promote “Critical Thinking,” encouraging even the youngest scholars to stand defiantly alone and decide for themselves what is true or good or beautiful for them.  Rarely are they taught to trust authorities or historical testimonies or “common sense” traditions.  

In the book’s final paragraphs Professor Kennedy reflects on his own intellectual pilgrimage.  Growing up in California in the 1960s, he embraced the bumper sticker philosophy:  “Question Authority.”  Throughout his many years in school, culminating in his doctoral studies, he was urged to become an independent, “critical” thinker.   Historians, he learned, were to be ever-vigilant, doubting rather than trusting sources, subjecting everything to one’s personal judgment.  Fortunately, he worked with a number of “good teachers who modeled what they did not preach” (p. 310).  So he began to appreciate the wisdom of pre-modern thinkers such as Aristotle and Augustine.  And he has come to believe, along with John Locke, that the King of Siam should have believed the Dutch ambassador’s words regarding the existence of ice in northern climes.  And he thinks, as did Locke:  “We should do well to commiserate our mutual Ignorance, and endeavour to remove it by all the gentle and fair ways of Information” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, xvi.4).  

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In Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin:  An Academic Excursion (Eugene, Oregon:  WIPF & STOCK, c. 2008), Rick Kennedy invites readers to join him in thinking about the discipline of history while climbing (with his two young sons and a good friend) one of the peaks in California’s Evolution Group in the Sierra Nevadas.  The book is by design a very personal account:  “Back in the 1970s, I learned to love university life.  I eventually became a professor of history.  I started out a Bible-trusting Christian and have not lost my faith.  This book is about the reasonableness of biblical Christianity in universities.  By reasonableness, I mean the warranted credibility, if not the persuasiveness, of Christian claims about ancient history” (p. 1).  He thus follows Aristotle, trusting various sources, not the questioning Socrates, and provides, in easily-read form, the basic argument set forth in his History of Reasonableness. 

While climbing Mt. Darwin, Kennedy also ponders the “natural history” set forth by Charles Darwin which is, at times, posed as a rival to biblical faith since he “then inferred that since the creation of new species did not need God, then it is best to assume that God was not involved” (p. 1).  While he thinks “Darwin’s theory works within the boundaries of credibility that are standard to Natural history,” he doesn’t “think it is true to the extent that it should influence the core of Christian history” (p. 26).  There’s simply a sharp difference between studying pre-historical rocks and human history preserved in documents.  

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Twenty years ago, a decade into his professorial career, Rick Kennedy published a fine treatise entitled Faith at State:  A Handbook for Christians at Secular Universities (Downer’s Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 1995).  Though designed for students at state institutions, the book can be read by students and professors wherever they study and teach.  Still more:  it reveals Kennedy’s deep commitment to the importance and worth  of higher education.  Universities, Kennedy insisted, need Christians on campus, for the academy influences our culture and the Christian voice needs to be heard therein.  He cited the oft-quoted statement of Charles Malik to emphasize this point:  “‘At the heart of all the problems facing Western civilization . . . lies the state of mind and the spirit of universities’” (p. 13).  The university at its best may be portrayed as the “Academical Village” Thomas Jefferson envisioned for the University of Virginia.  Kennedy likes the “village” image because universities provide relaxed environments enabling folks to find “time to chat, gossip or take a walk” (p 19).  They are—or should be—comfortable, nurturing communities.  They provide the facilities where learning takes place.  And Christian students should seize advantage of every opportunity to learn!

     To help students attain their goals, Kennedy introduces them to the essentials of university life.  “There are lots of good faculty members at every school,” he says.  “The job of the student is to seek out the good ones and avoid the bad ones” (p. 35).  There are peers with whom one can discuss and thereby learn.  There are nearby Christian churches and on-campus organizations which can assist students (Kennedy himself was encouraged by both the Navigators and the Church of the Nazarene in San Luis Obispo, California).  There are great books—the Bible and the writings of wonderful Christian thinkers from St Augustine to John Henry Newman will help Christian students integrate their faith with what they are learning.

     Above all, Kennedy calls Christian students to help recall universities to their original mission:  the search for truth.  Most universities still have (sadly ignored) mission statements of a deeply religious character.  Christians on campus can urge professors and students to remember and live out that mission.  They can also discover the excitement and joy of thinking!  Reason itself, Kennedy says, brings its own rewards.  Readable, thoughtful, buoyantly celebrating the love of learning, Faith at State is a book one should give students who are embarking on their academic voyage.  

# # #

For more than a century, the Roman Catholic Church was led by a succession of saintly, scholarly pontiffs whose encyclicals provided insight and guidance for both Catholics and concerned Christians everywhere.  So the recent encyclical of the Pope Francis, Laudato Si’:  On Care for Our Common Home (Rome:  Libreria Editrice Vaticana, c. 2015) merits respectful scrutiny.  Unfortunately, when compared with the works of his immediate predecessors (Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II), the current Pope’s work provides little more than unremarkable ethical precepts all too effortlessly  conjoined with easily disputed alarmist assertions regarding the state of the world.  Still more:  Laudato Si’ is seriously impaled on the horns of the dilemma—alternating between biocentric and anthropocentric concerns, between the naturalistic assumptions of modern environmentalism and the theistic perspectives of classic Christianity.    

The book’s title comes from the oft-celebrated song of St Francis of Assisi:  “Laudato Si’, mi’ Signore—Praise be to you, my Lord.”  It’s a joyous thanksgiving hymn that easily resonates within the heart of all believers in the God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth.  With St Francis we rejoice in the beauty of “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.”  Joining the Pope, most of us believe St Francis can serve as the “patron saint” of ecologists and stand as “the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically (Kindle #80).  

Now our “Sister, Mother Earth,” says Pope Francis, cries out in protest at the wounds we’ve inflicted upon her, looking “more and more like an immense pile of filth” (#161) resulting from the “throwaway culture” and “rampant individualism” effected by the technological revolution (which he repeatedly and stridently critiques).  He’s deeply alarmed:  “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.  We may well be leaving to coming generations of debris, desolation and filth” (#1205).  So we must act decisively to reduce pollution.  He believes that a “solid scientific consensus” requires us to assent to the hazards of “carbon dioxide pollution” and the reality of man-caused global warming.  Equally alarming:  thousands of species have been eliminated, the Pope says, threatening the “biodiversity” that should flourish on our “green planet.”  Equally alarming, amidst all this ecological devastation, human beings and society are suffering as growing economic inequalities reduce the quality of life for millions.  

Reading the various items of concern listed by Francis (whose citations often refer to papers produced by various bishops’ conferences rather than bona fide scientific treatises), the shallowness of his diagnosis becomes evident—it routinely appears in Sierra Club newsletters and New York Times editorials.  Consequently there is, for example, no hint of any awareness of how significantly the industrial revolution has increased life expectancy and reduced the actual poverty endured by the world’s peoples!  Nor is there any indication Pope Francis appreciates how significantly the energy derived from fossil fuels has improved the daily lives of earth’s residents!  That devastating famines have largely disappeared as a result of the Green Revolution (hybrid plants and fertilizers increasing the earth’s fertility due to the genius of Norman Borlaug) goes unnoticed.  So in one section he champions the radical reduction of carbon dioxide (requiring the radical curtailment of energy production) while in a later section he urges us to feed the poor (something that can take place only through promoting the Green Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels to provide the energy needed to do so!).  In sum:  inasmuch as prudence—the first of the cardinal virtues—requires an accurate, truthful understanding of what is, much of this encyclical is imprudent.  

When we turn to the “gospel of creation,” however, Pope Francis treads on firmer ground, since he relies on the wisdom of his more-gifted predecessors (Benedict XVI and John Paul II) as well as Scripture and the theological richness of Church tradition.  To recognize that God made a good world and entrusted us with the task of husbanding it is neither novel nor unimportant—it is the basic environmental conviction of all devout theists.  Usurping God’s rightful place in the cosmos by pretending humans can be “lords and masters” of creation clearly violates the divine order.  As God’s creatures, we ought to live harmoniously with (sharing communion with) all creatures great and small.  This is the Pope’s praiseworthy “integral ecology,” though it is rendered problematic when fleshed out in dubious Green clichés, i.e. “everything is interconnected,” and requires us to embrace the sacredness of  “sustainability,” “intergenerational solidarity,” and “simplicity of life.”      

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The scientific depth and environmental expertise Pope Francis patently lacks is ably evident in Alan Carlin’s Environmentalism Gone Mad:  How a Sierra Club Activist and Senior EPA Analyst Discovered a Radical Green Energy Fantasy (Mount Vernon, WA:  Stairway Press, c. 2015).  Though the title suggests a colorful manifesto written for a popular audience, this is actually a fact-filled, rigorously documented, rather demanding treatise written to address readers already cognizant of the issues addressed.  Carlin earned a degree in physics from the California Technological University and a PhD in developmental economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then spent four decades in the Environmental Protection Agency.  So he fully understands his subject.  Indeed, some of the book’s most interesting sections tell his life story and provide insights into his convictions and engagements.  

His commitment to conservation was early evident in his Sierra Club endeavors in Los Angeles (where he headed the largest club in the nation and did battle with David Brower and radicals within the national organization 40 years ago) as well as his many years providing scientific analyses for the EPA.  Unfortunately, during the Obama administration Brower-style radicals gained power within the EPA, imposing global warming dogmas in much the same fashion as the USSR promoted “Lysenko’s biological theories” (#5660).  This led Carlin to resign his position in 2010 to do further research and analysis.  Ultimately he wrote this book “to explain why I changed from my lifelong support of the environmental movement to extreme skepticism concerning their current primary objective of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide” (Kindle #113).  “In the years since I initially embraced what is now called the  US environmental movement it has changed considerably in several ways.  The most obvious change is that it has gone from being primarily concerned about wilderness and other wild lands preservation to primarily restricting fossil fuel energy production and energy use” (# 5677).  This results from the fact “that environmental policy has been hijacked by radicals intent on imposing their ideology by government fiat on the rest of us” and they “are being supported by many Western European countries and the Obama Administration” (#151).  

These radicals disdain the “cost benefit analysis” Carlin values and seem to care little for the high prices ordinary people (especially in developing nations) will necessarily pay as their carbon-reducing policies are implemented.  “I had spent my career trying to promote economic development, environmental protection, good science and economics, and rational analysis of multidisciplinary problems which I regarded as mutually supportive in the larger sense,” he says, but his position now elicits scorn rather than respect.  Disinterested in scholarly research, the radicals began to use the power of the EPA to promote their own agendas (often in defiance of Congress’s clear intent in various environmental laws), repeatedly attaining their goals by selectively pushing cases through a sympathetic judicial system.  

Carlin follows the scientific method and grew disillusioned with its abandonment by alarmist environmentalists and politicians.  To him “there is a correct answer to a scientific question, although it may take some time and considerable effort to discover what it is.  And it is never ‘settled’ or based on ‘consensus’” (#132).  He wonders “if [John] Kerry, [Al] Gore, or [President] Obama have ever taken a course in science or understand what the scientific method is.  The more pessimistic possibility is that they know but think that most of the rest of the population do not and will not figure it out” #2727).  Himself committed to studying empirical data (insisting, for example, on the use of satellite as well as ground-based data for earth’s temperatures), which lend little credence to the alarmist projections of “climate change” based on computer models, he has settled into the “skeptic” camp regarding the issue.  “By late 2008,” Carlin says, to him “it was quite evident that GWD [Global Warming Doctrine] was simply that, a doctrine, in a desperate search for scientific credibility since it could not satisfy the scientific method” (#1707).  

Importantly, he insists:  “Inspection of satellite temperature data available since 1979 strongly suggests that global temperatures are not primarily influenced by gradually increasing CO₂ levels but rather are associated with periodic major ocean oscillations, particularly the 3-5 year El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the 60 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) found in the largest ocean, the Pacific” (#4494).  In addition to oceanic oscillations, Carlin believes solar or solar magnetic activity, more than anything else, ultimately dictates climate change—as it has been doing so for millions of years.  “By combining the variations  in the number of sunspots, one of the longer-running databases based on actual human observations, with ocean oscillations as explanatory variables, Dan Pangburn has managed to reproduce global temperatures with amazing accuracy since 1850 and with less certainty (due to less accurate temperature records) since 1700” (#5334).  

What seems likely to come in the future (in the light of work done by Pangburn and other meticulous researchers) is global cooling due to “diminishing sunspots” and related oceanic  cycles, following “the pattern of temperatures over the last 3,000 years.  All these convince me that the major climate risk we face is much colder temperatures in the next few centuries and millennia in northern latitudes” (# 5392).  That another ice age might be coming should give us pause!  The minor warming that has occurred in recent decades has in fact made life better for us—as it did in the Roman and Medieval warming periods.  But another ice age would devastate vast regions of the Northern Hemisphere!  Maintaining the planet’s warmth (including increased use of fossil fuels) ought to be our mission!  

This is one of those books I recommend people know about rather than attempt to read!  Carlin’s personal experiences and perspectives make it persuasive.  He obviously knows what he discusses and takes care to demonstrate the bases for his beliefs.  The scientific material, set forth in abundant detail, is properly documented, up-to-date and trustworthy.  The arguments set forth are cogent and convincing.  Anyone seriously concerned about “climate change” and public policy will greatly benefit from an exposure to this treatise.  But, unfortunately, this book is almost numbingly repetitive and unorganized, desperately needing an expert’s editorial hand to reduce its length and sharpen its focus.  

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Reared on the High Plains, I’ve always loved the West’s wide-open spaces.  One of the earliest songs I remember hearing on the radio in Dodge City, Kansas (no doubt sung by Gene Autry and the “Sons of the Pioneers”), was “Home, Home on the Range.” And after all these years I still share that early longing for “a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play, where never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”  So I recently read with interest Dan Dagget’s Beyond the Rangeland Conflict:  Toward a West that Works (Flagstaff, AZ:  The Grand Canyon Trust, c. 1995).  

As a journalist strongly committed to environmentalism, Dagget served “as conservation chair of the Northern Arizona Sierra Club group and as a writer for a number of environmental journals, including the Earth First! Journal.”  The Sierra Club once ranked him as one of the 100 top grass-roots activist in the nation.  He glibly chanted the mantra “nature knows best,” insisting she be allowed to follow her inner wisdom.  He also viewed ranchers—particularly those grazing cattle on public lands—as harmful intruders who should be removed in order to allow Mother Earth to heal herself from the wounds of civilization.  He “repeated—too many times to count—the statistics that make up the indictment against western ranchers:  that domestic grazers are responsible for destroying up to 90 percent of some western states’ riparian areas that are, in turn, vital to up to 80 percent of the region’s indigenous species; that livestock are the reason 59 percent of our public rangelands are in poor condition; that the belches of livestock contribute to global warming; their excrement fouls our campgrounds and pollutes our streams, and bits of their bodies clog our arteries” ( p. 7).   

In time, however, a powerful truth overwhelmed him:  the lands wisely used by good ranchers flourished better than those left alone!   As he surveyed the West, talked with the people who live on the land, and studied the issue, he concluded that “much of the western range is in worse shape than even some of the most alarming assessments would have us believe,” with “denuded and eroding” mountains and deserts, dying streams and endangered wildlife (p. 1).  But, contrary to environmentalist rhetoric and federal policy, these problems flowed from the widely-held notion that ecosystems left alone thrive but suffer under the hand of man.  In truth, grazing animals generally improve the health of the land and enable it to promote the biodiversity real environmentalists (including many ranchers) desire.  Thus:  “The main objective of this book is to chronicle the success stories of these ranchers, and, as much as possible, the management teams with whom they work to increase biodiversity, revive riparian areas and watersheds, and restore the vitality of grasslands and savannas.”  Dagget hopes “to encourage more environmentalists to work with ranchers and find their reward on the land, rather than in the hearing room or the courtroom” (p. 11).  

To prove his case, Dagget shows, through personal vignettes and stories as well as gorgeous pictures (often showing, side-by-side flourishing grazed land compared with degraded left-alone preserves), how ranchers in various areas are rightly caring for the land.  He visits ranches in New Mexico, Arizona,  Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, arguing that similar approaches throughout the arid West could restore vast regions to the health they enjoyed centuries ago (when Indians set fires to control the grasslands and wild animals did what cattle can now do). 

“The ranchers and conservationists who populate these pages,” says Wendell Berry in his promotional blurb, “have quit fighting over the contested landscapes and have begun restoring them.  It would be hard to overestimate the importance of their stories.  I read this book eagerly, recognizing it as something I have been waiting for, and it gave me hope.” 

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A decade after publishing Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Dan Dagget wrote a sequel titled  Gardeners of Eden:  Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature (Santa Barbara, CA:  The Thatcher Charitable Trust, c. 2005).  He continues to take issue with those radical environmentalists who portray human beings as parasites or cancers on the land because he now thinks we play a crucial role in maintaining its health.  He’s “fascinated with the idea of ‘life making the conditions for life available to life,’ especially where it involves humans.  One could say the purpose of this book is to establish that humans actually can be a part of this sort of relationship with nature and to make us better able to recognize the instances in which we are” (p. 79).  Historical studies show that man played an essential role that is being reduced by both technological developments (leaving less people in rural America) and environmental ideologies (prizing “wilderness” spaces devoid of human habitation).  This book proposes ways to reintroduce “humans into the environment in the same way that we might reintroduce an endangered subspecies of caribou or flycatcher or cactus” (p. 6).  

Following the pattern established in Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Dagget records his journeys throughout the West’s ranching country, interviewing the people (the Gardeners of Eden) and photographing the lands that are flourishing under their restorative care.  The evidence shows—in dramatic, pictorial ways—how well the land fares when managed by conscientious ranchers.  We now know that for many centuries millions of buffalo, deer, and antelope grazed the land, pulverizing and manuring the soil as they followed their migration patterns.  We also know that millennia before 1492 American Indians routinely burned swaths of the land every other year, thereby controlling growth and enriching the soil.  (Were such fires used today, the catastrophic fires periodically devastating vast sections of the West would be minimized!)  

As Charles Mann says:  “‘Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison,’” using fire to control “‘underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game’” (p. 27).  Today’s ranchers are learning to duplicate these aboriginal wise-use methods, often helping native grasses and vegetation replace invasive species (e.g. sagebrush, salt cedar, thistles, junipers) that often flourish under the “Leave-It-Alone” approach and generally degrade the land.  Yet despite their success—and despite the efforts of Dagget and others to share their strategies—few policy-makers and bureaucrats note the fact that carefully-grazed land is far more healthy than wilderness left to its own devices.  

Instead, various governmental agencies are spending billions of dollars, allegedly protecting the land by “leaving it alone” while it degrades at an alarming rate.  Imprisoned by the Green ideology that “nature knows best,” federal policy-architects have “brought us to the absurdity that the actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to determining if it is healthy or not” (p. 18).  It is now clear to Dagget that “the Leave-It-Alone assumption is woven into our very concepts of nature (especially evident in urbanites), of what nature is and how we are related to it.  It is nothing more than our culture’s story of the creation of nature—the story of the Garden of Eden—adopted as policy.  The Garden of Eden story is the establishment, within our culture, of the assumption that humans are separate from nature, that we are not a part of it, and that we are not animals but something different.  Lots of people who consider themselves to be irreligious or even antireligious subscribe to this piece of religious dogma” (p. 22).  

What’s needed, Dagget says in his final chapter, is a “new environmentalism” attainable by “becoming native again.”  The Leave-It-Alone policies imposed by the preservationists now leading environmentalist groups and federal agencies have clearly failed both the land and its residents.  As the evidence now demonstrates, we need a new approach that truly restores the land and increases its productivity.  For example, ranchers in North Dakota practicing “holistic grazing” now “experience an average return on their money of 16 percent.  Practitioners of other approaches, mostly seasonal grazing, report a 2 percent gain” (p. 142).  By becoming native again and recovering the wise-use policies that made the West what it was centuries ago, this wonderful region could regain its vibrancy.  

Dagget’s books embrace both a sound environmental ethic and a high regard for human enterprise.  Would that his wise words and images could shape the convictions and policies of our nation. 

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 For many decades Thomas C. Oden has been one of the most prolific and significant Wesleyan theologians.  In A Change of Heart:  A Personal and Theological Memoir (Downers Grove, IL:  Inter/Varsity Press, c. 2014) he sets forth a fascinating and illuminating reflection on his life and scholarly career.  Reading his story provides not only insight into Oden—it illuminates much about recent American history as well as amplifies timeless truths regarding the Christian Faith.  In brief, he confesses:  “My life story has had two phases: going away from home as far as I could go, not knowing what I might find in an odyssey of preparation, and then at last inhabiting anew my own original home of classic Christian wisdom.  The uniting theme of the two parts of my life can only be providence” (p. 140).  

Born in 1931 and reared in Altus, Oklahoma (situated in the southwest corner of the state), Oden absorbed and still celebrates many aspects of the high plains frontier culture that nourished him.  Though most Altus residents were what we would now consider “poor,” they had a “can do” spirit and believed anyone could “make something” of himself through hard work, delayed gratification and exemplary ethics.  Joining the Cub Scouts as a boy, Oden embraced their Motto:  “Do your best,” and “memorized the Scout law, which says ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.’  These ideals have never been erased from my consciousness” (p. 20).  

Oden’s father was a lawyer concerned to rightly educate his sons, and his book-filled office early inspired young Tom to live immersed in books.  His mother was a gifted musician, and music became a major part in his life.  In fact, “It was through music that I first learned to reason” (p. 22).  Devout members of the Altus Methodist church, his parents not only attended services but began each day with devotional readings from the “Upper Room” and said grace before meals.  His grandmother was an especially devout woman and significantly shaped Tom’s childhood spirituality.  Though at times he considered becoming a lawyer (as did his elder brother), he didn’t know exactly what career to follow, but he did believe God had a good plan for him to follow.  

During WWII, Oden’s father was appointed to a federal position in Oklahoma City, so the family moved and Tom adjusted to an urban environment, including a junior high school (Taft) where he learned, to his lasting satisfaction, Latin.  Religiously, both in Oklahoma City and Altus, he “became maximally involved in the youth activities of the Epworth League for Methodist young people, where I received ever-expanding doses of social justice aspirations” (p. 31).  Following the war, Oden finished high school in Altus (and also learned to appreciate the “tough, resilient, working people” with whom he worked during the summers.)  

Entering the University of Oklahoma in 1949, Oden qualified for a unique “Letters” program that enabled students to choose their course of studies in literature, history, and philosophy.  He read many of the “greats”—Shakespeare, Plato, et al.—but found himself most drawn to the Marxism and was “a Marxist utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories” (p. 42).  He also met Edrita Pokorny, an unusually gifted actress, with whom he fell in love and soon married.  (His love for, and 46 year partnership with, this remarkable woman, makes for some of the more memorable sections in A Change of Heart).   He also decided, while at OU, to enter the Methodist ministry and became active in denominational activities, including summer camps more devoted to social justice than personal redemption.  “I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment” (p. 50).   Still more:  “I found Saul Alinsky’s teaching of socialist pragmatism and political opportunism extremely useful as I made plans to co-opt religious structures as instruments for the fundamental transformation of society” (p. 53).  

From the University of Oklahoma, the Odens moved to Dallas, Texas, where Tom entered Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology (mentored by the legendary Wesley scholar Albert Outler) and served as youth minister for a nearby Congregational church.  He read voraciously and plunged energetically into ecumenical endeavors (especially promoting the World Council of Churches).  Determined to pursue a PhD subsequent to his seminary training, he was accepted by Yale University, where he profited from working with H. Richard Niebuhr, James Gustafson, Hans Frei, and George Lindbeck (all distinguished luminaries in the Protestant world).  He also embraced, without much thought, the “demythologizing” approach to Scripture personified by Rudolph Bultmann.  Finishing his PhD course work, he returned to SMU’s Perkins School of Theology, where he taught for two years while completing his dissertation (writing on the ethics of Bultmann and Barth and earning for himself a reputation as a “situation ethicist,” fully committed to a “what’s happening now” existential agenda).    

  Now a fully-certified academic, Oden joined the faculty at Phillips Graduate Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma.  Here he remained for a decade, churning out various books and championing everything from Rogerian psychology (with its novel emphasis on “unconditional love”) to existential ethics to socialist economics to radical feminism.    Traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation and Resurrection, he either ignored or “professed” with inner reservations evacuating them of substance.  His “ideological history” parallels (in its indebtedness to Saul Alinsky) that of another Methodist, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who “was reading my essays and working out of the same sources and moving in the same circles as I had been” (p. 86).  

Thanks to a generous Danforth grant, Oden and his family spent the 1965-66 year abroad, living in Heidelberg, Germany, and traveling about to visit noted theologians (including Bultmann and Barth).  He also observed the last session of Vatican II and toured Israel, where the “Bible I had learned as a child, distinguished from the Bible I had learned in historical-critical studies, was coming alive for me in a palpable way” (p. 110).  During this year many things began to change for Oden.  Reading the theological works of Wolfart Pannenberg, he discovered significant flaws in both Bultmann and Barth.  He became disillusioned with Freudian psychoanalysis (long a mainstay in his understanding of and prescriptions for pastoral psychology).  While marching behind Margaret Mead in a WCC-orchestrated march in Geneva, he suddenly realized he was in the wrong place, with the wrong crowd.  

Back in America, sitting on a Houston bench during an Earth Day march in 1969, he fully felt “a revulsion against the self-preoccupation, narcissism and anarchy” that had characterized his adult years.  Sitting on that bench, he turned to the collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer that he had in his pocket.  “I read out loud:  ‘Almighty Father, who has given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.’  My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what had I been missing in all my frenzied subculture of experimental living” (p. 126).  

His “change of heart” synchronized with his 1970 move to Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey, historically the most distinguished and still perhaps the premier Methodist graduate school.  Thereby established as a tenured professor of theology, he had to learn theology!  In large part he realized this in his first month there as a result of discussions with one of his Drew colleagues, Will Herberg, a “brilliant, diminutive, forceful, bearded Russian Jew” who both accelerated Oden’s growing disillusionment with Marxism and prodded him to seriously study authentic Christian thought.  Herberg abruptly told him that he “was densely ignorant of Christianity.”  Indeed:  “Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, ‘You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.’  In his usual gruff voice and brusque speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition” (p. 136).  Suitably chastised—and admirably open to Herberg’s wisdom—Oden turned his life around by turning to the classic sources of the Christian tradition.  “Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away:  the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism” (p. 138).  

Thenceforth he devoted himself to following the rule of St Ireaneus of Lyons:  invent no new doctrines!  He realized that by endeavoring to do so during the first half of his life (promoting “vast plans for social change”) he had inadvertently but tragically “harmed many innocents, especially the unborn.  The sexually permissive lifestyle, which I had not joined but failed to critique, led to a generation of fatherless children.  The political policies I had promoted were intended to increase justice by political means but ended by diminishing personal responsibility and freedom” (p. 145).  Guilt-ridden, especially for teaching a situational “social ethics to young pastors” and providing them “a rationale for their blessing convenience abortions” while ignoring the intrinsic evil of the act, he turned to God for solace.  What God said in response was simply:  “no excuse.  I had been wrong, wrong, wrong” (p. 157).  

Oden’s “change of heart” quickly led to a change in his publications.  He worked to bring theological studies back to the classic, “consensual” position of the Church’s first five centuries.  Doing so brought him into contact with conservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus (the Lutheran thinker who eventually established and edited the influential periodical First Things and became a Catholic) and Carl F.H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today who became his “mentor in evangelical theology.”  Though his liberal colleagues were dismayed by his conservative contacts, he “found the evangelicals to be more welcoming and inclusive than the liberals, largely because “Evangelical and Catholic inclusiveness” were more solidly rooted in “transcultural classic Christianity” (p. 175).  

Despite his best efforts, Oden had little influence in Methodist circles or even in his own institution.  Drew Theological Seminary continued its leftward drift during the ‘80s with each new professor.  He became “a lonely voice” for the orthodox Christian tradition “amid a chorus of indignant advocates” (p. 184) of whatever was newest and most “cutting edge” in academia.  Especially belligerent at Drew were the radical feminists who vindictively targeted him (despite his lengthy record of supporting women’s rights) for opprobrium.  To refer to Jesus as the “Son of God” was, in the feminists’ agenda, a sign of an evil patriarchy that mandated denunciation.  As feminists gained control of the seminary, they promoted a radical agenda composed of “gender language, abortion rights, reproductive rights and sexual ethics” (p. 186).  Effectively isolated from his colleagues, Oden focused his attention on mentoring those graduate students who sought him out and publishing works that clarified and defended the ancient confessions.

Thus, in addition to writing his own three volume systematic theology, he embarked on an ambitious effort to make available ancient theological sources in multivolume collections, including Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Ancient Christian Texts, and Ancient Christian Documents.  He also traveled widely, lecturing in Russia and Cuba as well as throughout the United States.  Along with his travels, he cultivated an amazing circle of eminent friends, ranging from Catholics such as Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI who encouraged him to pursue his scholarly interests) to Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, wealthy Evangelicals who greatly assisted with the expenses of publishing the ancient patristic texts.  

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In his final days as a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, Thomas Oden published Requiem:  A Lament in Three Movements (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, c. 1995) to register his “affectionate anguish” with both seminary education and the state of mainline Protestant denominations in the United States.  Having discovered and sought to make available the great resources of the classic Christian tradition, he styled himself a “young fogey” so committed to the truth of the past that he is considered “old-fashioned” by the legions of “modernists” now controlling mainline institutions.  “As a former sixties radical,” he confessed, “I am now out of the closet as an orthodox evangelical (yes, you read me right—orthodox evangelical) teaching in the PC Wordperfect (politically correct) theological school, in a resourceful faculty that has tried to live out the inclusiveness ethic as earnestly as any I know” (p. 15).  Though deeply sorrowful in many ways, this Requiem “is essentially a lament for a friend, not a diatribe against an enemy” (p. 19).  And yet he must utter words of caution:  “Christian worshipers can no longer afford to neglect what is happening to the young people they guilelessly send off to seminary, entrusting that they will be taught all that is requisite for Christian ministry” (p. 22).  

Explaining “the feast I left” (in a prelude to the first of his lament’s three movements) Oden focuses on an incident in his seminary’s chapel devoted to worshipping the goddess “Sophia.”  Presiding at the service was one of the coauthors of Wisdom’s Feast who had described Sophia as “a strong, proud, creative goddess within the biblical tradition,” a “divine saving figure” immanent “in all things, waiting to be discovered.”  Sitting in the chapel of a United Methodist seminary, listening to a feminist homily and hymn devoted to Sophia, he “felt just a little (for the first time in my life) like the apologists of the second century must have felt when confronted with the challenge of attesting the Lordship of Christ amid a pagan pantheon of Greco-Roman deities” (p. 29).  Pondering his predicament as the chapel service moved toward the sacrament of the Lord’s Table, he prayed for a wisdom quite different from Sophia; as the female homilist “offered the invitation to come to the Lord’s Table, not in the Lord’s name, but in the name of the goddess who was speaking through Jesus,” he “quietly, inconspicuously, left the service” (p. 32).  Though this kind of service is, Oden insists, quite limited to radical hyperfeminist circles, it does in fact represent powerful currents within contemporary Christianity.  But since he had read Wisdom’s Feast, he knew what the homilist was doing and he could not endorse it since she had clearly written that “‘in this [Eucharistic] service, Sophia actively replaces Jesus’” (p. 146). 

The fact that a goddess, Sophia, could be worshipped in a Methodist seminary points to the tarnished state of theological education in America.  To Oden, the culprit in the story is Secularization, an “interloper” who has stolen the doctrinal, liturgical and devotional riches of the church.  Mainline seminaries have aided and abetted this secularizing process, wedding themselves to a “modernity” (what Oden calls “mod rot”) that is already passing away.  They have provided a safe place for trendy, tenured radicals who worked closely with ecclesiastical bureaucracies to promote “change” in the church.  Self-consciously “liberated” and socially engaged, they generally considered themselves “doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, multiculturally tolerant, morally broad-minded, ethically situationist, and, above all, sexually lenient, permissive, uninhibited” (p. 34).  Consequently:  “It seems worth noting that the liberated seminary at its zenith has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history:  Heresy simply does not exist” (p. 46).  Political Incorrectness must promptly be punished—witness the fate of Larry Summers, forced to resign as President of Harvard for untoward remarks regarding women in science.  Heresy must be tolerated andeven celebrated for its “cutting-edge” elements—witness the failure of the Episcopal Church to discipline bishops (such as John Spong) promulgating the most radical denials of orthodoxy.   

Yet for all the bad news Oden presented two decades ago, he had hope for seminary education, for there was an “emerging resistance movement” committed to rediscovering and promoting classic orthodoxy.  Despite his personal struggles with powerful “ultrafeminists” who must be heroically resisted despite their opprobrium (calling folks like Oden medieval, misogynist, puritanical), there are many women in ministry committed to preserving the ancient truths of the faith.  Despite the Marxist ideology underlying much of “liberation theology,” there are advocates of social justice still securely committed to orthodoxy.  Young Evangelicals may very well maintain (if they rightly struggle) their deep convictions while taking advantage of the enormous scholarly resources (libraries, endowments, etc.) of mainline denominations.  

In addition to the seminaries, Secularization afflicts the ecumenical organizations which once promised to unite Christians and make more effective their witness.  In his younger years, Oden invested much time and energy in ecumenical endeavors, but in time he became disillusioned with them.  In particular, they were dominated by elite planners, bureaucrats determined to save the world through political processes!  As “political idealists,” they “care far less about the classical Christianity of the grassroots church than about their ideals and programs and blueprints for reforming the denominational networks” (p. 92).    Quite apart from organizations such as the WCC, a real ecumenical movement (orchestrated by the Holy Spirit rather than bureaucrats) has brought conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox together, affirming their belief in ancient creeds and uniting to oppose the “culture of death” most evident in abortion-on-demand.

Such believers illustrate the emergence and worth of what Oden terms “Postmodern Paleo-orthodox Spirituality.”  It is a spirituality deeply rooted in the Ancient Christianity best expounded by Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley.  “Christian orthodoxy in its ancient (paleo) ecumenical sense is summarily defined sacramentally by the baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), liturgically the by the Eucharistic event, and doctrinally by the baptismal confession with its precisely remembered rule of faith as recalled in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and their subsequent consensual interpretations” (p. 130).  Despite having been shunted aside by liberals and modernists during the past 200 years, it retains an abiding strength clearly evident for 20 centuries.   Modernity, Oden believes, is collapsing, though dinosaurs proclaiming its wonders still stalk the halls of academic and culturally powerful institutions.  But Paleo-orthodoxy will survive and prosper simply because it is eternally true and will provide its adherents with eternal life, now and forever.  Routinely declared dead and gone, this classic Christianity revives and flourishes again and again, for:  “Life lived in Christ does not waste time resenting the inexorable fact that each culture like each person dies.  Sanctifying grace offers beleaguered cultural pilgrims the power and means of trusting fundamentally in the One who proffers this ever-changing, forever-dying historical process” (p. 130).  

Young Evangelicals in particular seem committed to exploring and expounding this ancient tradition. Thus Oden, having begun his life within a family still rooted in orthodoxy, has returned to the basic tenets of its creeds.  With T.S. Eliot he has clearly discovered the timeless truth that “In my beginning is my end.”  Consequently:  “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost /  And found and lost again and again:  and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious” (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets).  

Though not deeply immersed in WWII histories, I’ve always been interested in that era and recurrently read things that interested me, for I know how the two great wars (WWI and WWII) significantly shaped the 20^th century.  In Germany’s Underground:  The Anti-Nazi Resistance (New York:  Da Capo Press, c. 2000; 1^st ed. c. 1947) Allen W. Dulles focuses on the oft-unknown and unheralded but heroic effort by conscientious Germans to stop (or at least minimize) the devastation unleashed by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi devotees.  At mid-century the Dulles family was among the most distinguished and influential in America—his brother John Foster became President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State; another brother, Avery, was a significant Catholic theologian and Cardinal; Allen himself, following the war, became the head of America’s Secret Service agency.  During WWII Allen was stationed to Switzerland to make contact with and coordinate activities with anti-Nazi Germans.  He subsequently published this illuminating account.

Dulles begins by describing “the evolution of a police state” whereby Adolph Hitler shrewdly took control of Germany.  He was certainly no “mountebank” or “fool.”  In fact “he was one of the smartest tyrants who ever hypnotized a people” (p. 17), successfully persuading millions of Germans that he would triumphantly lead the nation to the “national and moral rebirth” they craved.  Effectively manipulated by propaganda and deceit, many of them awakened much too late to the brutal dictatorship (carefully following the Bolshevik model) that Hitler had established.  They then discovered, as Count Helmuth von Moltke lamented, that efforts to oppose the Nazis were incredibly difficult; indeed, what could be done “‘when you cannot use the telephone, when you are unable to post letters, when you cannot tell the names of your closest friends to your other friends for fear that one of them might be caught and might divulge the names under pressure?’” (p. 20).     

Nevertheless, once the war commenced, conspirators such as Moltke launched plots to overthrow Hitler.  Eminent military leaders included:  Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Chief of Staff of the German army until the summer of 1938; General (later Field Marshal) Erwin von Witzleben; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel (the celebrated “desert fox” widely lauded by Hitler in the early years of the war); and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (heading the Abwehr—the military intelligence agency), represented the honorable esprit de corps of their martial tradition.  “Immer true und redlickheit—always loyal and honest,” they vowed!  Notable politicians, including Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, formerly the mayor of Leipzig, and Johannes Popitz, the Prussian Finance Minister, were equally involved in underground activities.  Professional men (numerous lawyers), diplomats, labor leaders, and churchmen (such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer) played vital roles.  Probably the best known of the conspirators, Mayor Goerdeler, was “the proverbial German official—conscientious but romantic, intellectual but devoted to the state and every concept of law and order.  He was a devout Protestant and a public servant par excellence.  It took a Hitler to make such a man a revolutionary” (p. 30).  

Without doubt the military officers posed the most serious threat to Der Fuehrer.   During the war there were several daring efforts, beginning in 1939, to assassinate him, but he seemed to live a charmed life.  The most significant underground conspiracy, known as “the Kreisau Circle,” was led by Count Helmuth von Moltke” and brought together a significant number of anti-Nazis inspired by Christian convictions.  Dulles sketches biographical portraits of several of these men, highlighting their character and courage, and reminds us of the “other Germany” Hitler despised and trampled.  Of the dozens involved in various plots, virtually none survived, but their heroic efforts deserve memorializing.  Their final effort took place in 1944 when Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Staffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase under a table near Hitler while he was holding a meeting.  Inadvertently one of the attending officers moved the briefcase away from Hitler simply because it was in his way.  The bomb exploded and four officers were killed.  Hitler was seriously injured and never fully recovered—but he walked away from the scene.  The Gestapo quickly identified Stauffenberg as the culprit and his fellow conspirators were rounded up and executed.   

Since Dulles had personal contact with some of the important anti-Nazi Germans, this treatise gives us valuable insight into some of the significant efforts made to save their country.  That they failed does not tarnish their image—rather it reminds us that even under brutal tyrannies there is often a courageous few who risk their all to combat them.  

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Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was one of the most prominent Germans involved in conspiracies to overthrow Adolf Hitler.  In significant ways he surreptitiously helped the Allies—and had his maneuvers to get England to join Germany in an alliance against Russia succeeded, the world might have been vastly different.  Ian Colvins told his story in Master Spy:  The Incredible Story of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Who, While Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence, Was a Secret Ally of the British (London:  McGraw-Hill Book Company, c. 1952; republished by Uncommon Valor Press, c. 2014).  Though written 60 years ago, Master Spy has the advantage of being written while many of the best sources were still alive.  “Colvin’s ‘contacts with German generals’ and his relentless, if undercover, investigation of the attitudes of the German General Staff toward Hitler ultimately led him to an encouraging conclusion:  admirals and generals high in the Nazi hierarchy were searching desperately for ways of ridding themselves of Der Fuehrer and reaching an accord with Great Britain and France.  First among them was Admiral Canaris, Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence” (Kindle, #28).  

Canaris “had reached the height of his professional ambition when he took over the appointment of Chief of Intelligence” (#177).  He served with distinction in U-boats during WWI and commanded a battleship between the wars, but he had always been interested in military intelligence and moved into that arena during the 1930s.  His love of adventure and intrigue, his intellectual shrewdness, and his quiet, confident demeanor appealed to Hitler, who treated military officers deferentially before committing them to aggressive actions against Austria and Czechoslovakia in the windup to actual war in 1939.  When the dictator began taking some powers away from the General Staff, assuming for himself the post of War Minister, Canaris began to soften his allegiance his commander-in-chief.   

So by the time hostilities began in 1939 Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence had already begun working to undermine his endeavors.  Canaris had wide-ranging contacts with conspirators such as Count Helmuth von Moltke and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and effectively cultivated diplomatic contacts abroad, especially in England and Switzerland.  Before the invasion of Poland, some of the anti-Nazi conspirators proposed arresting Hitler and establishing a military rule—something Winston Churchill noted in The Gathering Storm.  Unfortunately, Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister and thought he could work with Hitler.  Since the German officers thought they needed England’s support if a coup d’etat could be staged, this early plot (one that could have saved the world incredible anguish) dissipated.  

When Hitler notified his military that he would invade Poland, Canaris told his staff “that the defeat of Germany would be terrible, but that a victory of Hitler would be more terrible still!  He considered that nothing should be omitted that would shorten the war” (#1455) and thenceforth committed himself maintaining his position while working surreptitiously to foil Hitler’s agenda.  Through his agents abroad he was able to supply the Allies with important information regarding political and military developments within Germany.  He sought (unsuccessfully) to persuade the British to help the Norwegians resist the Nazi invaders, persuaded that an all-out battle there might transform public opinion in Germany and bring the war to an end.  He secretly admired Winston Churchill (reading his speeches to his wife at home) and rejoiced in the “English bulldog’s” resolve to resist the Nazis.  He used misinformation and diplomatic contacts (including frequent personal visits) to keep Generalissimo Franco from opening Spain to Hitler, who wanted to establish bases in that country.   In Spain Canaris “achieved something lasting.  He had saved this mysterious land from prolonged torture” and obviously helped the Allies thereby (#2344).  He subtly subverted Hitler’s order that Churchill be assassinated when he attended a conference in Casablanca conference.  Whenever and wherever he could—as Colvins shows through many fascinating details—he schemed to thwart the Nazi agenda.  

Hitler at times noted Canaris’ apparent “pessimism” but never doubted his loyalty as the German  armies were conquering most of Europe.  But as the Third Reich began collapsing—and as conspiracies against Hitler proliferated—Admiral Canaris began to be suspected of treason,  Arrests of leading conspirators such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer led to information that led to more arrests.  “Canaris men” in foreign posts had, it seemed, all too often failed to deliver the information needed by the Nazis.  In February, 1944, he was removed from his position as Chief of Military Intelligence—nine years after being appointed to that post.  While technically still free, he knew his days were numbered, though he had covered his tracks with consummate skill.  “‘Canaris was unprotected,’ said Willy Jenke.  ‘He was afraid for his life, and yet he would not budge.  We urged him to flee to Spain with his wife and family.  General Franco would have seen to his safety.  The Military Intelligence could have put an aircraft at his disposal; but he would not go.’”  Asked to explain, Canaris said:  “‘I will never flee.  I want to share the fate of the German people” (#3468).  

When the Kreisel Circle’s plot to kill Hitler dramatically failed in 1944, Canaris was one of the scores of eminent Germans rounded up, implicated in anti-Nazi efforts, and sent to Flossenburg (joining General Oster and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others).  Given a summary trial, he was executed a mere 20 days before Hitler himself would kill himself.  But shortly before dying, Canaris tapped out a message to a fellow prisoner, declaring:  “‘I die for my Fatherland.  I have a clear conscience.  I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler leading Germany to destruction’” (#3727).  

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In Victims of Yalta:  The Secret Betrayal of the Allies, 1944-1947 (New York:  Pegasus Books, c. 2012, first published in 1977) Nikolai Tolstoy (a distant relative of the famous novelist) compiled and analyzed evidence—much of it first-hand oral testimonies taken from survivors—regarding one of the truly tragic results of WWII.   He documents the fact that  “well over two million Russians were handed over to Stalin in the years 1944-7 by the Western Allies, and that the fate accorded to almost all of them was terrible, has been known to an increasingly large public for a number of years” (p. 19).  How and why it was done—and why the story was so studiously withheld from the public in the West—provides the structure for this book.  Amazingly, though many German “war criminals” were brought to justice following WWII, no Russians were held accountable for “the herding of millions of ordinary Russians into cattle-trucks to certain death, torture or unbearable privation” (p. 24).  

During the course of WWII, millions of Russian civilians were, at least briefly, forced to live under Nazi rule.  Nearly three million of them were sent to work camps.  (When Allied troops “liberated” Russian slave laborers who were working on German farms, many of them would beg to be left in their servitude rather than sent “home.”  Incredibly, “life as slave-laborers in Nazi Germany had been better than life in Russia” (p. 315)).   Nearly six million Russian soldiers were captured by the Germans; 1,150,000 survived the war.  Nearly a million Russians voluntarily joined the Germans, determined to help overthrow Stalin’s brutal tyranny.  As the Red Army swept across Eastern Europe, of course, many of these Russians were “repatriated”—which generally meant being sent to the Soviet Gulag!  As the war ended some of the Russians in German camps were handed over to Allied forces, who then returned them to their “motherland.”  To Stalin, all these Russians were in some way “traitors” and he demanded their return to the Soviet Union.  

When it became apparent the Allies would triumph in battle, politicians and diplomats began to discuss how to deal with the POWs and refugees dislodged by the conflict.  Some English officials, in particular, were distressed at the prospect of returning Russians to the Soviet Union, though they also had to consider how negotiate the return of Allied POWS now under Russian control.  Leading the negotiations in 1944, Sir Anthony Eden visited Moscow and discussed the issue with Stalin, whose “wit, humour, and gentle wisdom” rekindled Eden’s “admiration” for the tyrant.  The two men “laughed, drank and gossiped around the festive table until the early hours of the morning” (p. 74) and it was agreed to quickly “repatriate” the Russians held in England.  Similarly, at Yalta, Stalin imposed his will on the confreres, ultimately resulting in the “repatriation” of virtually all his subjects.  George Kennan, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, witnessed this process with concern, knowing that the NKVD was in charge of handling the returning Russians; he had “‘no illusions as to the fate that awaited these people on arrival in the Soviet Union.  I was full of horror and mortification over what the Western governments were doing’” (p. 87).  

Nevertheless, following through commitments made to Stalin, the repatriation process proceeded rapidly.  The fate of the Cossacks who had joined the German army was especially “remarkable,” Tolstoy says.  During the prior century, they had been loyal supporters of the Tsar and had stoutly opposed the Bolsheviks.  The German soldiers who occupied their territories treated them rather benevolently, and many of the men actively assisted Hitler’s Wehrmacht.  Following the Russian triumph at Stalingrad, these Cossacks (often accompanied by entire families) retreated along with the German forces and were ultimately assigned a region in northern Italy.  As Allied troops moved into this area, the Cossacks (numbering in the thousands) peacefully surrendered to Britain’s Brigader Geoffrey Musson of the 36^th Infantry Brigade, having “no quarrel with the Western Allies;” they were interested only in sustaining “their struggle against Bolshevism” (p. 158). 

British soldiers were most impressed by the Cossacks, with their fur caps, knee-high riding boots, and skilled horsemanship.  Led by some famous White Russian officers (many of them émigrés who had lived in the West since the Bolshevik victory in the civil war), they were well-organized, orderly, and fully willing to cooperate with their captors.  They believed (since Winston Churchill and other Western leaders had earlier supported the White Russians in their struggle against the Bolsheviks) that they would escape Stalin’s dragnet.  Under no circumstances did they want to go back to their “homeland” in the USSR.  Some even volunteered to join Allied troops in the Far East battling the Japanese!  English officers on the ground promised the Cossacks they would be protected.  They’d not yet learned of the promises made by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta!  Shortly ly thereafter Brigader Musson faced the Cossack’s leader, Ataman Domanov, and informed him “‘that I have received strict orders to hand over the whole of the Cossack Division to the Soviet authorities.  I regret to have to tell you this, but the order is categorical.  Good day’” (p. 175).  

To the Cossacks, “it was the lying that was perhaps the most repulsive aspect of the whole grim business unfolding” (p. 178).  Their leaders, still operating in accord with the noblesse oblige of their culture, had taken the British officers at their word—and now that word had been broken!  They’d surrendered and been betrayed.  Rounded up, by force when necessary, and packed into trucks, they were delivered to the Soviets in Judenberg, Austria.  Local residents were shocked to see the British orchestrating this process, and the soldiers involved understood they were sending the Cossacks to certain death.  Many of them were almost immediately executed—distant gunfire was heard in Judenberg.  The rest of them were packed into trains sent to slave labor camps in Siberia.    Virtually none of them survived.  

Though British army officers certainly deserve some blame for following orders—first to deceive and then to force the Cossacks to return to Russia—Tolstoy tries to put their behavior in context.  They did, in fact, look the other way when some of the people fled to the woods and in time settled in the West.  Some of the wives of Cossack leaders were helped to escape.  But in general they followed orders to deport the Russians.  To a degree, they did so “because they genuinely believed the Cossack’s fears to be illusory.  For three years British wartime propaganda had represented the USSR [in the words of Dr. John Pinching] ‘as a kind of utopian socialist state.  One rather believed this . . . [and] this echoed the Stephen Spender, Bernard Shaw kind of intellectual Left with which I was associated in Oxford, and which I swallowed hook, like and sinker . . .  Really, I think I was brainwashed by the Psychological Warfare Branch into thinking that Russia was a socialist state, and that they would behave compassionately towards these people whom we were deputed to send back’” (p. 218).  The big lie that sustained the USSR prompted all too many Westerners to help Stalin liquidate millions of his subjects.  

The Cossacks simply represent one of many groups of “Russians” forced to return to the USSR.  At Yalta, Stalin demanded “that all SOVIET nationals found in territories occupied by ALLIES should be returned to the USSR” (p. 254).  For whatever reason, and for however long they’d lived outside the borders of the Soviet Union, they were be “repatriated”!  At Potsdam, Stalin intensified his demands and Churchill promised to cooperate, though he seems to have been personally unaware of many details known to Stalin.  He would soon be replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Atlee, who was far more pliable in Stalin’s hands.  The Soviet dictator was especially determined to round up those White Russians (mostly Ukrainian) who had fled to the West to escape Bolshevik rule.  

Allied soldiers—Americans like Eisenhower and Patten more frequently than British—found the repatriation process abhorrent and occasionally worked  clandestinely to help Russians escape—quietly ignoring the edicts by leaders such as  Secretary of State Stettinius, who declared that “it was United States policy to return all Soviet citizens ‘irrespective of whether they wish to be so released’” (p. 337).  American GIs would register some Russians (especially old émigrés) as non-Soviet citizens—Ukrainians were often registered as Poles—and provide false papers enabling them to flee to freedom.  They simply looked the other way when many “refugees” escaped the camps.  “The plain fact was that almost no soldier, British or American, approved of forcible repatriation.”  At Nuremberg German soldiers were being tried for precisely those “war crimes” Stalin insisted his “allies” commit!  “That soldiers should not maltreat prisoners or war, nor harm women and children, had been a maxim of warriors since the Middle Ages” (p. 348), and many military men were truer to their tradition than their superior’s commands.  

Unfortunately, these soldiers could have only minimal impact upon the forced repatriation (and rapid demise) of millions of Russians.  That only tiny Liechtenstein valiantly refused to cooperate in any way with Stalin is a worthy testament to that nation’s character.  Unfortunately, she did so alone!  

 Though we can never reach a consensus determining who was the “world’s smartest man,” a significant number of scholars would vote for St. Thomas Aquinas.  The “Angelic Doctor’s” genius lay not in his originality or creativity—both attributes he would have disdained—but in his unique ability to synthesize and persuasively explain the perennial truths of philosophy and theology, to effectively conjoin faith and reason.  Commending him to the Church as her finest theologian a century ago, Pope Leo XIII said:  “Because he had the utmost reverence for the Doctors of antiquity, he seems to have inherited in a way the intellect of all.”  Still more, wrote Jacques Maritain:  “St. Thomas cast his net upon the universe and carried off all things transformed into the life of the mind, towards the beatific vision.”  To make  accessible important aspects of Aquinas’ work, Kevin Vost recently published The One Minute Aquinas:  The Doctor’s Quick Answers to Fundamental Questions (Manhester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, c. 2014).  Designed to address “the questions that matter most,” he explores some of Aquinas’ positions (primarily found in his Summa Theologica), treating the nature of human nature (as evident in man’s hunger for happiness), the nature of God, and the person of Christ.  

          We naturally desire happiness.  Exactly how to fully attain and enjoy it, however, perennially puzzles and eludes us!  Many (indeed most) of the things we pursue—wealth, pleasure, status—wrongly promise to make us happy, and even the best and brightest of mortals generally die a bit discontent.  To Aquinas this makes sense because we most deeply long for a joy impossible to attain on earth.  At best we can only partially discover (through God’s grace and a virtuous life) what we will fully attain only in heaven (the beautific vision).  Composed of body and soul, we are special creatures, unlike the rest of creation; so to attain our end (happiness) we must rightly order both our material and spiritual lives.  Preeminently spiritual beings, created to share God’s eternal life, we must rightly respond to His initiatives and commands.  

To do so requires that we comply with our divine design to live as free moral agents, to act responsibly, to do the things conducive to true happiness.  “As the intellect seeks to know the true, the will seeks to obtain the good” (#678 Kindle).  Thus we must be free, for as Thomas said, “‘Man has free will:  otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain’” (#686).  We choose to do right or wrong, to resist or surrender to sinful temptations, to demand instant gratifications or consider long-term goods—and in making such decisions we develop the habits that shape our character.  Good habits—whether playing the piano, building muscles or interpreting Scripture—come through sustained repetition.  “Good habits direct us toward good acts, and another word for a good habit is a virtue.  . . . .  As Aristotle wrote, ‘Virtue is that which makes its possessor good, and his work good likewise’” (#892).  Thus we need to practice the cardinal virtues (prudence; fortitude; temperance; justice—all nicely discussed by Voss in short sections) in order to live well.  Helping us do so is the Law.  To Aquinas, “‘The light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law’” (#1229).  This law is given specificity in Scripture and informs human laws insofar as they are truly good.  

Yet we need more than the Law to guide us to eternal goodness.  Thus the Grace of God grants those infused virtues (faith, hope, and love) that finally satisfy our hunger for happiness, enabling us to participate in the very life of God Himself.  Responding by faith to His invitation, we find the forgiveness of sins and are born again.  By faith we acknowledge the truth fully revealed to us in Christ and learn of Him as the Holy Spirit works within us, giving us understanding and strength to trust and follow God.  Hope grants us the assurance that our future good, our eternal happiness, has been provided by Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross and Resurrection from the grave.  “Josef Pieper said hope captures ‘the very foundation of being in the world for the Christian:  the concept of the status viatoris.’  A viator is ‘one on the way,’ and is translated as ‘wayfarer’ in the Summa Theologica” (#1588).   The best of the infused virtues, of course, is charity—“the friendship of man for God” that “resides not in our passions, but in the will, and the will desires, seeks, and loves the good.  Love in the sense of charity seeks the highest good—the attainment of union with God” (#1655).  Amazingly, God has entered into our world and encourages us to establish a lasting friendship with Him.  Just as loving our neighbors means doing good for them, as well as wishing them well, so too loving God means doing what pleases him, not simply feeling certain things about Him.  

To please God we must first know Who He Is!  To this subject Aquinas devoted himself wholeheartedly.  While yet a six-year old child he is reputed to have asked “Who is God?” and for the next 42 years he constantly sought to answer his question.  By nature we have a vague awareness of a Supreme Being of some sort, though this innate awareness easily slides into denial or forgetfulness.  We can, however, by careful thinking come to certainty regarding His existence.  Thus Aquinas set forth, at the beginning of the Summa, five famous ways to “prove” or “argue for” God’s existence.  Beyond this simple fact, we need Him to reveal Himself (primarily in Scripture) regarding his attributes, though we can reason cogently when deciding various things regarding the Great I Am who is Three-in-One.  

Until quite recently, natural scientists and philosophers took the universe to be eternal.  By taking the Bible as his foundation, however, Aquinas declared it to be created.  Matter began to be as God spoke it into being.  Citing Dionysius, who said all things were divinely caused, Thomas said:  “God’s ability to create belongs to his being or essence, which is common to the three Persons of the Trinity.  God causes things by his intellect and will, as when a craftsman works through an idea or ‘word’ in his mind to craft something that he loves.  So too did God the Father make creatures through the Word, who is his Son, and through his Love, which is the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity, then, created creation” (#3054).  He created simply because He is Good and sought to share His goodness with His creatures.  So, as Augustine said, “the trace of the Trinity appears in creatures” and guides the studious mind toward the Creator.  

The Second Person of the Trinity, Christ Jesus, most fully revealed God to us, and Aquinas labored to fully grasp His nature and work.  With the memorable simplicity characteristic of him, he said of our Lord:  “Being born, He became our friend.  At supper, He became our food.  Dying, He was our ransom’s price.  And, reigning, is our eternal good” (#3432).    “God became incarnate as the most fitting way to restore our corrupted sinful human nature so that many good things would follow, including the building up of our faith, since we could hear God Himself speak; our hope, since Christ’s presence shows us God’s love for us; our charity, so that we would desire to love God in return for his presence among us; and our well-doing, since God himself served as our example; and indeed, ‘the full participation of the Divinity, which is the bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed on us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says . . . God was made man that man might be made God’” (#3467).  

Summing up his commendation of Aquinas, Vost cites the 14^th century Pope John XXII, who  declared, in Doctoris Angelici:  “He enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors together; a man can derive more profit from his books in one year than from a lifetime spent pondering the philosophy of others” (#4321).  Anyone desiring to do so will find in Kevin Vost a most helpful tutor.

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For many years Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, has published a stream of books designed to explain and defend the Christian Faith.  One of his most recent and best works is titled Practical Theology:  Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas—358 Ways Your Mind Can Help You Become a Saint (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2014).  Kreeft believes (as did C.S. Lewis) that the best devotional materials are written by the Church’s most serious and incisive theologians (who appeal to the mind) rather than entertaining communicators (who try to touch the emotions).  Thus an article from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica will be more valuable than the latest “spiritual” entry in Oprah Winfrey’s book club!   Though resembling Kevin Vost’s One Minute Aquinas in intent, Kreeft’s work differs in its organization and approach—citing the saint more extensively and giving greater depth to his presentation.  

Consequently, Kreeft explains:  “In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his ‘existential bite’.  Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other.  I wrote this book to help bring the sun out from its eclipse.”  So, he continues:  “Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain ‘the one thing needful’, the summum bonum or ‘greatest good’, the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality.  Three of its names are ‘being a saint’, ‘beatitude’ (supreme happiness) and ‘union with God’.  That was my principle for choosing which passages to use:  do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e., sanctity, happiness, union with God?” (#330).  

This book seeks to bring us into contact with Aquinas himself.  Kreeft provides some explanation and commentary, but it’s all designed to help us rightly understand St. Thomas.  The 358 selections follow the order of the Summa, but it’s easy to peruse the table of contents and go immediately to subjects that look interesting.  Thus I’ll just lift out a few of the entries to illustrate the worth of Kreeft’s compendium.  Given that life is a journey—and journeys must end somewhere—it’s important to realize that “Our end is to know God—not just to know about Him but to know Him.  ‘This is eternal life:  to know Thee, the one true God’ (Jn 17:3) (#397).  To know Him requires theology—studying God—the “queen of the sciences” to Medieval thinkers such as Aquinas.  

Theology means thinking about God, and Aquinas insists there is a very human as well as divine dimension to this process.  We have minds uniquely capable of reasoning.  Thus we can discern God’s presence in all things.  “God is in all things,” Aquinas insisted; “not indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works.  For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately, and touch it by its power; hence . . . the thing moved and the mover must be joined together.  Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire.  Now God causes this effect (being, existence) in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being, as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.  Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being.  But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things  . . .   Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” (#737).  

The great Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson condensed Aquinas’ explication to a “great syllogism:  (1) Being is innermost in each thing.  (2) God is very being, by His own essence.  (3) Therefore God is in all things, and innermostly” (#782).  This highly important point leads Kreeft to rejoice, for if God is truly present in all things—and if sanctity comes through “practicing the presence of God—we may begin to experience a bit of heavenly joy, see a bit of the beatific vision when we will finally “see Him as He is.”  By delighting in the manifest presence of the Creator in His creation, we may experience some of the transcendent joy of beauty here and now.  If God is everywhere and we manage to clearly see creation’s splendor, “the whole world will light up like a stained glass window when the rising sun (the rising Son!) suddenly shines on it, all the colors bursting into life with one and the same light” (#756).  By carefully attending to all that is—the snowflakes on a pine bough, the ripples on a stream, the colors of a sunset—we learn to “love God in everything because you can find God in every thing” (#1093).  

By nature we humans seek answers to various “why” questions.  The greatest of “whys” focuses on the definitive, the final reason for things—what physicists today label a “grand theory of everything” that explains it all.  To Kreeft, our compulsion to know shows that God has planted, deep in our being, a “desire to know the ultimate explanation for everything, which is in the mind that designed everything, the Author of the story we are all in.  For we desire to know all that can be known about all that is.  (We also desire to attain and enjoy all the good that is and all the beauty that is, but we first have to know it in order to appreciate and enjoy it.) (#816).  Both Aristotle and Aquinas and C.S. Lewis took it for granted that “nature makes nothing in vain.”  So, Kreeft says, “All natural desires correspond to real beings that can satisfy them:  hunger, thirst, eros, tiredness, loneliness, boredom, ugliness, injustice, and pain point to food, drink, sex, rest, friends, interest, beauty, justice and pleasure” (#822).  Surely this desire we have to know the Ultimate Source of all validates its Reality!   What we know about God is much like knowing and artist through his works.  “God is an artist, not a scientist; he designed and created the world, which is first of all the product of his art and then becomes the object of our science.  Therefore all human science—in all senses of ‘science’, ancient (broad) and modern (narrow)—is really an appreciation of the divine art” (#989).  

Though many modern thinkers insist that “chance and necessity” explain all that happens, we often hear folks say (often in the face of some misfortune) that “everything has a reason.” In truth, according to Aquinas, everything does, indeed, have a purpose—and that gives real meaning to life.  In an ordered universe, where everything changes in accord with various causes, there are evident ends towards which things move.  Calves become cattle, not mountain goats.  Heated water dissolves into oxygen and hydrogen, not nitrogen and helium.  “Therefore our human lives, which include conscious purposes, fit into this purpose-filled universe” (#2034).  The world is intelligently designed and we can understand it.  Things move purposively.  We too, if we fit in to this designed order, move to our proper end if we accept God’s will.  “Being sane and being saintly are ultimately the same thing:  conforming our thoughts and our lives to the nature of reality, which is ultimately God, His nature and His designs” (#2040).  Thus “‘Life’s greatest secret is incredibly simple.  It is just repeating two magic syllables each day to God:  the same syllables you said in your wedding vow:  ‘I do’” (#2108).

By saying “I do” to God I commit to a loving relationship to be finally consummated in heaven, where we expect to experience the ultimate joy of the Beatific Vision.  Aquinas said:  “‘Our Lord said (Jn 17:3):  This is eternal life:  that they may know Thee, the only true God.  Now eternal life is the last end. . . .  Therefore man’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, which is an act of the intellect’” (#2404).  Still more:  “‘It is written (1 Jn 3:2):  When He shall appear we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.  Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the divine essence’” (#2417).  Thankfully, we taste a bit of the joy and happiness we crave while still on earth.  But ultimately we can only be truly happy in Heaven.  If we look for a heaven-on-earth we’ll be forever depressed.  But if we think of this world as a training ground for what’s to come we can enjoy some of our trials in view of what’s awaiting us.  

Making our way to heaven involves making ethical decisions, and Aquinas gives us a nicely-nuanced understanding of how we should live well.  He explains, for example, why an act is good only if its intent, its means to the end, and its ends are good.  Unlike the Kantians, who focus only on intent (do your duty without concern for the consequences) and easily become legalists, or Utilitarians, who consider only the consequences (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) and easily become insensitive to motivations and individual differences, or the Relativists (who respond empathetically to each situation and easily dispense with self-evident norms), Thomas insisted we consider all relevant factors when making decisions.  His synoptic vision, insisting we patiently consider all that makes decisions wise and good, truly distinguishes him as a moral thinker.  

Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, we make decisions that help make us who we are.   Even small choices, in their composite, really matter.  Inasmuch as we choose to do good, properly in accord with reason, we become better persons.  There are no “neutral” acts to Thomas!  Fortunately, many of our choices to do what’s reasonable are quite simple—eating, resting, speaking to colleagues, waiting in line, dressing appropriately, speaking politely.  As long as we have the right end (the divinely appointed end) in view, fixing breakfast for children or driving to school or smiling at a sales clerk qualify as ethical acts.  This is true, Kreeft says, “Especially if you offered up all your prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of each day this morning.  God counts that.  You may forget the covenant you made with Him this morning, but He doesn’t” (#2873).  We certainly fail at times, and sin is undeniably evident in our world.  But “St. Thomas is a great optimist.  There is far, far more good than evil in life, just as there is far, far more joy than suffering.  The glass isn’t half full, it’s 95% full” (#2880).  Thus to him, “Ethics is about good and evil.  Everything human, if it’s not evil, is good.  Ethics is therefore not like an umbrella and boots; it’s like food.  It’s not about a checklist, a postscript; it’s about everything” (#2887).  

Doing what’s reasonable aligns us with the Natural Law embedded within our being.  Thus to “‘scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God’” (#2898).  Inasmuch as the Natural Law stands rooted in God’s Eternal Law, “‘the natural law of reason is a participation in the eternal law of God’.  That means more than ‘an image of’ or ‘an effect of’.  It means real sharing, real presence.  That is why to disobey reason is to disobey God.  Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls.  We call that prophet conscience.  (St. Thomas used two terms  for it:  ‘synderesis’ was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and ‘conscience was the application of it.  We use ‘conscience for both.)” (#2898).  

So our conscience is sacred!  Following our true nature, reasoning rightly, means we reject the “if it feels good do it” mantra.  “Feelings come and feelings go,” said Luther, “and feelings are deceiving.”  Making ethical decisions can never be a matter of following our feelings!  “Do you want to meet God,” Kreeft wonders?  “Do you want to touch Him?  Do you want to hear Him speaking to you?  Do you want to know His will for you?  Do you want to have a ‘religious experience’?  You do this every time your conscience speaks.  Seeking mystical experiences instead is a diversion and an excuse for neglecting this hourly, humdrum meeting with the divine will than confronts us, usually in an uncomfortable way.  That’s why we look for something else.  Do you want to be a mystic?  Conscience is mystical enough.  Do you want to meet Absolute Authority?  Listen to your conscience.  Do you want God to come closer to you?  No you don’t; He is already too close for comfort in your conscience.”  In sum:  Ordinary conscience is sacred because it is the very voice of God speaking in your moral reason” (#2952).  

Years ago Malcolm Muggeridge penned a book titled The Third Testament, providing biographical portraits of persons who, in their own distinctive and persuasive ways, came to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ.  Though lacking the authority of Scripture, the lives of the saints and martyrs of the Christian Church have ever provided an on-going affirmation of the abiding Truth revealed in the Gospel.  Several recent autobiographical works testify to the perennial power of the Holy Spirit working within the hearts of folks open to Him and also show how apologetics played a pivotal role in their conversions.  (Parenthetically, the numerous references to C.S. Lewis illustrate the enduring value of his writings.)

In Counting to God:  A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief (Attitude Media, c. 2014), Douglas Ell sets forth the reasons he came to (and continues to) believe in the existence of God.  Primarily it was to answer “the great question” regarding the cosmos.  This “great question” endures as perhaps the most ancient and abiding questions ever posed.   “Accident or design—that is the question.  What do you think?” (Kindle #52).  With an abiding interest in science—taking a double major in math and physics at MIT as an undergraduate, then adding a graduate degree in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland—Ell carefully considered (while busily practicing law for three decades) the evidence available.    He slowly came to believe that mounting scientific evidence fits easily into faith in the God revealed in Scripture.  Consequently he wants “to go right to the core of the new scientific evidence of design in the universe, and thus the existence of God.  To me, it is the most exciting issue of our age” (#86). 

In a chapter devoted to his “personal journey” Ell explains why science and mathematics have been so important to him and now form a solid part of his faith’s foundation.  As a child he found numbers magical, intriguing, something of a key to Reality.  So too he found all aspects of the universe simply fascinating.  Unfortunately,  he could not fit God into his understanding of what seemed so real and important to him.  What he garnered from his childhood Sunday school classes (with their stories of Noah et al.) seemed impossible to accept, so he “began to doubt God and the Bible” (#266).  Science appeared better grounded and  more cogent to him than Bible stories.   

Years later, prodded by his wife, he joined her in attending church services, where he was surprised above all by the inner peace enjoyed by many of the parishioners.  Since his legal work required considerable time on airplanes he began seriously reading in an effort to reconcile science (but not the Scientism which restricts all reality to the natural realm) and religion (but not the Fideism which denigrates the importance of reason).  “We believers,” he declares in ending his treatise, “need to wake up and see the world the way it is.  The most magnificent battle of our generation, and for our children and our children’s children, is not Islam versus Christianity; it is Scientism versus Belief” (#3451).  

Unfortunately, today’s Scientistic elites, ensconced in “most colleges and universities, newspapers, magazines, and television and movie producers—want you to believe that our universe is meaningless and pointless, a grand system where everything somehow arose by accident and with no purpose or design but somehow, miraculously, gives the appearance of design” (#763).  Countering this are the advocates of Intelligent Design.  Their pedigree includes some of the most lustrous scientists of all time—Copernicus, Kelvin, Newton et al.  Carefully following the scientific method—demanding evidence with which to craft reasonable hypotheses—Intelligent Design thinkers then and now argue that the sheer magnitude of “apparent” design virtually proves it’s real and points logically to a Designer.  This is particularly evident when one considers the mathematical probabilities involved in bringing our world into being.  

The natural world (our wondrous universe) clearly reveals the Creator.  It is, to the author, in its own way a Gospel—good news to inquiring thinkers.  At least seven “wonders” deserve our attention and celebration:  1) the universe began, abruptly, 14 billion years ago; 2) this universe is “fine tuned” for life as we know it; 3) life itself is an incredible miracle; 4) living things reveal an amazingly intricate technology, enabling them to function according to meticulous plans; 5) the origin of new species remains a mystery unexplained by Darwinians; 6) planet earth is uniquely suited for life; and 7) quantum physics enables us to transcend earlier ways of thinking about time and space and causality.  Providing the book’s structure, “Each of these wonders is scientific support for the hypothesis of God” (#165).   Discussing these points, Ell provides (in readable form for laymen) insight into the current state of knowledge regarding the cosmos.  These seven wonders provide data for the “logic of belief” that connects the dots and provides the worldview Ell embraces.  

For open-minded readers, for folks interested in finding God:  “You have a choice.  You can accept the dogma of Scientism as fact and believe the universe is an accident, without meaning and without purpose, and live your life that way.  Or you can use the gift of reason to consider new evidence, evidence that just might lead you to believe in the designed universe of absolute wonder and evidence that just might let you live your life with meaning, with purpose, and with a sense of a greater reality, in awe of life’s mysteries and designs.  Choose well; it’s your life” (#443).  

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Though less well-known than his late brother Christopher (one of the more belligerent “new atheists” who wrote God is Not Great), Peter Hitchens has also enjoyed a highly successful journalistic career.  In The Rage Against God:  how atheism led me to faith (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2010) he charts his journey from youthful rebellion (a “carnival of adolescent petulance, ingratitude, cruelty, and insensitivity”) against everything associated with Christianity to a mature faith.  In many ways he represents his generation, and one learns much more from this treatise than one man’s story, for things were dramatically changing in England and he would live out much associated with the transformative ‘60s.   As a child, he “lived at the very end of an era that is now as distant and gone as the Lost City of Atlantis.  There were modern things about it, but in general it was a very old civilization” (p. 59).  

Born in 1951 and reared in a non-church-going family, he was exposed to the state-sponsored Anglican “religion” in school.  W hat he encountered was hardly the real thing—instead it was a “strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it” that could be rather easily tossed aside by questioning youngsters.  So at the age of 15 he melodramatically burned his Bible on a field near his Cambridge boarding school.  He fervently believed “it was the enemy’s book, the keystone of the arch I wished to bring down (p. 18).  In its place he embraced the evolutionary Naturalism and ideological Socialism favored by the educated elite of the day.  Thereby unshackled from any authority, he set out to “do his own thing” without fear of the consequences (at least of the eternal sort).  Above all he resisted any sort of  Authority—he would map his own course and set his own rules.  So his prodigal sins multiplied and metastasized, ultimately leaving him with a deep sense of shame and guilt.  

Hitchens’ atheism easily sanctioned his “moral positions,” which were “fierce opposites of what I had always been taught.  I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable.  I renounced patriotism, too—so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusions of this decision.  I began by embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority over the conventional warmongers” (p. 52).   But in time he would be stationed for two years as a journalist in Moscow, where the absurdity of his adolescent Leftism was made manifest.  The “Soviet Paradise” in reality was an abysmal prison, for the “Communist state had made a serious effort to replace and supplant such forces as conscience and self-control.  It had taken onto itself the responsibilities of God and of believers in God.  But its commandments were very different from those of God” (p. 85).  Inevitably:  “Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood” (p. 153).  

Other assignments around the globe led Hitchens to conclude that “civilization” is a rare and precious thing.  Back home, observing and “writing about the inner workings of Britain’s socialist Labour movement and the increasingly unhinged strikes it kept calling, combined to destroy what remained of my teenage socialism, though I was slow to admit it to myself” (p. 99).  The secularism he had embraced was “a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining Christian restraints on power and the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations” (p. 161).  What he had known as a child in England, he finally decided, was far better than what he found in totalitarian and non-Christian lands.  He could not but conclude that something about Christianity made the world a better place.  And he sensed, deep in his heart, that the loss of Christianity in England could not but dissolve civilization.  As his “secular faiths” failed him he began to open his mind to the truth evident in artistic works on display in chapels and cathedrals.  Then he married his wife—and the words of the Church of England’s traditional “marriage service awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed.  I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being.  It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done” (p. 105).  

So as a prodigal so he returned to the Church.  But the Church found was not the Church he’d known as a schoolboy!  Innovations abounded; neither the majestic words of Authorized (King James) Version Bible nor Cranmer’s Prayer Book suited the trendy reformers.  Within a few decades, “400 years of almost unbroken tradition had been wiped out” (p. 108).  “The new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services were not just ugly, but contained a different message, which was not strong enough or hard enough to satisfy my need to atone” (p. 111).  The secularism he’d found finally inadequate was making powerful inroads into the established Church, threatening to inwardly raze it.  Thus he finds and takes comfort in islands of sanity within the Church of England—small chapels still using the old Book of Common Prayer and fellow believers determined to uphold traditional orthodoxy.  

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David Skeel is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who sets forth, in True Paradox:  How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2014), some beguiling reasons for faith in Christ.  Unlike some, who seek to dumb-down the intellectual content of traditional theology in order to appeal to the masses who have little interest in such things, he rejoices in the many ways a more “complex” Christianity fits the manifestly “complex” world we live in!  Clearly there is an evident simplicity to Christian belief.  “The feature that makes Christianity different from any other religion or system of thought is Christian’s belief that Jesus, the God who became man, suffered, died and was raised from the dead to reconcile humans with God” (p. 12).  That said, however, applying its truth to our world leads to considerable complexity!  

We must inevitably try to make sense of the world within God’s Son revealed Himself, and “the capacity to provide explanations for some of the complexities of life as we actually experience it is a key test of any religion or system of thought that claims to offer a comprehensive account of our place in the universe” (p. 18).  To Skeel, the place to begin this endeavor is with human consciousness, that subjective self-awareness of one’s being that “is the single most complex and mysterious feature of our existence” (p. 33).  He defines our “ability to devise and assess theories about the nature of reality our idea-making capacity” (p. 38).  Whereas materialists can make no sense of this trait—either denying its existence or considering it a strange effusion of matter-in-motion—Christians understand it as an aspect of being created in the image of a supremely self-aware and creative God who calls us to join Him, eternally.  Additionally, Christians understand and uphold a timeless, universal moral standard, whereas unbelievers easily slide into various forms of relativism, making ethical ideals mere local products of history and culture.  The dignity of the person, the equality of the sexes, the importance of just legal codes, the importance of the traditional family are all tenaciously held by traditional, orthodox Christians.  

“Beauty and the Arts” provide a second “paradox” eliciting Skeel’s attention, for:     “Our sense of beauty is thus connected with our idea-making capacity” (p. 65).  He finds Wordsworth’s declaration definitive:  “I have felt /  A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air.”  Materialists vainly endeavor to provide explanations for this unique human attribute.  How do we explain our delight in sunsets or symphonies that apparently diverts us from the “struggle for existence” Darwinists declare explains everything?  To Christians, man’s interest in created beauty points him to an ultimate Beauty, an ultimate Creator who delights in it.  Thus, though an atheist himself, “Leonard Bernstein once said that when he listened to the music of, he thought for a moment that there must be a God” (p. 77).   “‘It was when I was happiest that I longed most,’ the central character in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces says as she reflects on her encounters with beauty.  ‘And because it was beautiful, it set me longing, always longing.  Somewhere else, there must be more of it’” (p. 87).  

On a personal level, Skeel notes he was reared without any religious perspective.  While in college, however, he read texts in some of his literature classes which contained biblical references.  So he decided to read the Bible and was simply “blown away,” for he “hadn’t expected the profusion of genres or the power and elegance of the overarching narrative that we repeatedly go astray yet God loves us and longs to take us back.”  Though other things certainly contributed to his spiritual journey, “the sheer beauty of the Bible is what first drew me in, and it’s still what I go back to when I’m asked over a beer late at night why I believe that Christianity is true” (p. 86).  

Addressing the problem of evil—so often the main plank in atheists’ arguments against God’s existence—Skeel finds the Christian perspective paradoxically satisfying.  To understand that God made a good world that is now marred by freely chosen human sinfulness, and that He entered into our world and suffered on the Cross to save us from sin, provides a key to dealing with pain and suffering.  It’s not an easy answer—but it is, for many of us, a satisfying one.  “The fact that the Son of God suffered an ignominious death means that God fully understands suffering.  Although the Bible doesn’t explain why suffering exists, it teaches that the Son of God—the second of God’s three persons—has experienced suffering firsthand.  Pain and suffering are still ugly, but Jesus having suffered put the ordeal of suffering in a different light” (p. 105).  Importantly, he refuses to say “that God causes suffering, as many Christians do,” preferring to believe “that God allows and eventually transforms suffering.”  This is more than a “semantic” distinction.  “I don’t think it is, and [Bill] Stuntz [one of the author’s close friends, an eminent criminal justice scholar who died of cancer] certainly didn’t.  He called ‘the principle of taking the sourest lemons and making the sweetest lemonade . . . the most beautiful I’ve ever encountered’” (p. 104).  

As a lawyer Skeel takes seriously “The Justice Paradox.”  “Nearly every system of thought gives rise to a theory of justice.  If the proof is in the pudding, a nation’s or civilization’s legal system is the pudding.  The legal system and its effects show us the real-world implications of the system of thought that underlies it” (p. 110).  Surveying world history, it becomes evident how rarely dictated legal codes (from Hammurabi to Napoleon) establish good societies.  A glance at the utopian aspirations of various Marxists, from Russia to China to Cuba, reveals how glowing promises descend into barbarian brutality.  Even the American Republic has failed to fully realize the aspirations of the Founders!  Christians need not be surprised at this.  “The dream of a perfectly just social order is, Christians believe, a dangerous lie that we tell ourselves” (p. 121).  As an old country song declares:  “Ain’t no livin’ in a perfect world.”  

Christians understand justice to be rooted in the understanding and conviction that every person is made in the image of God.  So every person must be treated well.  But materialists, believing man to be nothing more than a higher animal, have no reason to respect “human rights.”  Thus the cruelties of Hitler and Stalin and Mao flowed easily from their deep commitment to evolutionary materialism.  Revering every person, Christians realize how easily socio-political regimes violate human dignity, generally arguing that individuals must be sacrificed for the common good.  So Christians need to understand the inability of the law to fully and finally establish a good society.  Committed to promoting “the flourishing of others,” believers need to embrace “a vision of justice I call ‘law with a light touch’” (p. 129).  Consequently, Social Gospel advocates, whether Walter Rauschenbush promoting Prohibition a century ago or Jim Wallis championing Pacifism today, gravely err.  Determined “to usher in the kingdom of God through law, they are denying Christianity’s teachings, not promoting them” (p. 134).  We need less perfectionistic laws and more reconciliation between a holy God and sinful man!  

“Life and Afterlife” is the final paradox Skeel considers.  Christians, throughout the centuries, have boldly declared their faith in life everlasting.  Beyond the grave there’s Heaven to gain.  Materialists, naturally, disbelieve in anything beyond the physical world.  They have no hope for anything better than physical satisfactions.  Yet they struggle to explain man’s strange awareness of something beyond our time-space world.  C.S. Lewis repeatedly stressed (following an insight of Aristotle) that natural desires unfailingly point to realities which fulfill them.  Thus our hunger indicates there is something real called food.  “All of the longings we have considered in this book may be a foreshadowing of heaven.  Lewis himself experienced those longings with unusual intensity—he referred to the sensation as joy.  ‘If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it,’ Lewis wrote, ‘that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing’” (p. 145).  

History records few things more clearly than man’s hope for some kind of afterlife.  Exactly what’s entailed therein certainly varies (as multitudinous artistic works reveal) but surely it’s a continuation of some sort of the life we now enjoy.  Christians believe we will not be disembodied spirits but resurrected bodies blessed to inhabit a “new” heaven and earth.  Inspired music—classical works such as Bach Brandenburg concertos and the “spirituals” composed by slaves in the antebellum South—offers hints of what lies ahead.  Skeel also finds the scholarly work of N.T. Wright most helpful.  “Wright argues that heaven and earth are neither ‘poles apart, needing to be separated forever,’ nor are they ‘simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism.’  He concludes, ‘No, they are radically different, but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female’” (p. 155).