The assassination of John F. Kennedy profoundly changed the nature of America, James Piereson argues in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:  How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2007), for on November 22, 1963, “the cultural consensus of the 1950s began to give way to the oppositional and experimental culture that we associate with the 1960s” (p. vii).  Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, was a committed communist who openly hated America and loved Fidel Castro.  One would think his act would “have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines.  Yet something very close to the opposite happened.  In the aftermath of the assassination, left-wing ideas and revolutionary leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them—enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States that at any other time in our history.  By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of radical and revolutionary causes, even going so far as to grow beards and don army jackets in emulation of Castro.  . . . .  It is one of the ironies of recent history that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president’s coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that drove Oswald to assassinate him” (p. x).  The New Left—as was evident in the Port Huron Statement, issued by the Students for a Democratic Society, and spokesmen such as Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers—espoused the same views as Lee Harvey Oswald and moved rapidly and successfully to gain control of the Democratic Party.  

To explain this anomaly, Piereson first explores the liberalism that had developed in this country during the 20^th century.  Rooted in pre-WWI Progressivism, re-oriented in a pragmatic direction by the New Deal, the liberalism of John F. Kennedy championed a big government designed to alleviate poverty and establish social justice.  It was, moreover, staunchly anti-communist.  Alongside this political and economic liberalism, however, there emerged, by 1960, a “social radicalism that . . . found adherents among the intellectual and academic classes, and in many instances among the idle rich” (p. 23).   These radicals were committed to social revolution—above all sexual liberation—and “moved into politics in order to transform education, the family, religion, relations between the sexes, and attitudes toward life generally” (p. 24).  

Kennedy, however, was a liberal, not a radical.  While in the Senate he actually had enjoyed generally good relations with Joseph McCarthy—indeed, his little brother Bobby served on McCarthy’s staff.  His great hero in politics was Winston Churchill.  But his support of the civil rights movement had elicited the enmity of “right-wing” extremists, so when he was killed “the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist—an anticommunist, perhaps, or a white supremacist, but in any case ‘a right-wing nut’” (p. 58).  When it became clear that a communist had killed him, Jacqueline Kennedy lamented that he hadn’t died for the cause of civil rights.  “’It had to be some silly little communist,’ she said.  “It even robs his death of any meaning’” (p. 59).  If, in fact, he was a martyr, it was for his role in the Cold War, but she and the Kennedy clan were determined to make him, like Lincoln (whose funeral provided the pattern for JFK’s), a martyr for social justice.  Still more, she began to craft the illusion of “Camelot” (something her husband never mentioned) to glorify him (a 20^th century King Arthur!) and the New Frontiersmen surrounding him in Washington.  

Given the fact that Lincoln was invoked by Mrs. Kennedy had her circle, Piereson wonders at the comparison and devotes a chapter to Abraham Lincoln, finding that “the effort to link the two men was based on the assumption that they had died in the same cause—an assumption that was far from being the case” (p. 61).  Lincoln represented deeply-held moral and religious convictions concerning the immorality of slavery and the idea of a nation providentially called into being as a beacon of liberty.  He was thus a “martyr” in the classic sense.  Kennedy could have qualified as a martyr if his death had been attributed to his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, demonstrating that “communism was the large cause behind the assassination and, further, that Kennedy was martyr to the ideals at stake in the Cold War” (p. 86).  

But that was not the Liberal script!  To blame communism, or Castro, for the event would involve demonizing what Liberals lionized—the collectivism of the Left.  So almost immediately JFK’s death was blamed on the American people, perversely racist and militaristic, rather than a fanatical individual, a committed communist.  Pundits, politicians and preachers joined in a great chorus of accusation.  Chief Justice Earl Warren blamed “the hatred and bitterness” infused into “the bloodstream of American life” by “bigots” (p. 92).  An editorial in the New York Times declaimed:  ‘”none of us can escape a share in the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence that has now found expression in the death by gunfire of our martyred president’” (p. 91).  Oswald and communism literally disappeared from the narrative.  Disdaining the evidence, Kennedy was made a martyr for civil rights—the victim of a vicious, violent, militaristic, right-wing “society.”  

In this they were joined by the Soviet press, which insisted “that ‘rightists’ were responsible for the assassination and that plots were being hatched to blame the crime on a communist” (p. 96).  Reactionaries, racists, Ku Klux Klanists, Birchists!  Anyone but an avowed communist must be blamed!  Kennedy court historians quickly supported this account.  “Arthur Schlesinger, in his thousand-page history of the Kennedy administration, could not bring himself to mention Oswald at all in connection with the assassination but allocated several paragraphs to a description of Dallas’s hate-filled atmosphere” (p. 98).  Sadly enough, Piereson laments, “The public did not hear in that dark time the explanation that President Kennedy had been killed for his advocacy of liberty in the face of communist tyranny in Cuba and elsewhere, or that he was a casualty of ‘the long twilight struggle’ to defend and promote freedom in the world” (p. 104).  Amazingly, “In a bizarre paradox, Kennedy’s arch-enemy, Fidel Castro, was turned into a hero in the late 1960s by many of those young people who had mourned Kennedy’s death in 1963” (p. 107).  

Thus many “conspiracy” explanations were floated to exonerate Oswald and his communist convictions!  These received considerable currency among leaders of the New Left who resolutely doubted the official report of the Warren Commission.  Books and articles, TV programs and films, discredited the official account.  Some devious plot—orchestrated by the CIA, perhaps—led to Kennedy’s death.  Skillful propaganda, such as Oliver Stone’s egregious film, JFK, swayed public opinion so that “by the mid-1970s, according to a Gallup Poll taken in 1976, some 80 percent of American were convinced that Kennedy was a victim of a conspiracy, a figure that was not wavered much since that time” (p. 126).  

To clarify the truth, Piereson devotes an illuminating chapter to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin.  He was a high school dropout who latched on to some Marxist notions that fueled a deep hostility toward America.  He joined the Marines, tried to emigrate to Russia, and generally seemed to be the prototypical “loser” in whatever he attempted.  But he did develop some political convictions, and his “ruminations on politics sound more than a little like the theories outlined in the Port Huron Statement, the New Left manifesto written in 1962 that denounced U.S. preoccupations with communism . . . and exalted an alternative system based on a concept of participatory socialism” (p. 149).  When Kennedy was shot, both the FBI and CIA were confident that he had acted on his own, motivated by his very public communist convictions.  But powerful politicians, including the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, demanded that they mute their public statements lest they provoke Soviet hostility.  

Consequently, “Kennedy’s anticommunism, for example, was turned on its head by the radicals of the 1960s and by the liberals who eventually took command of the reform movement” (p. 204).  Replacing Kennedy’s type of liberalism was what Piereson calls “Punitive Liberalism,” designed to assail America for her failures and demand radical social transformation.  American history became a litany of oppression and abuse—women, blacks, Indians, et al. had all suffered at the hands of a deeply flawed, if not evil, nation.  Thus we have today’s liberalism, primarily committed to speaking up for the “oppressed” and rectifying proliferating “injustices” in America.  

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Looking at Liberalism from a different perspective, Jonah Goldberg has written Liberal Fascism:  The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2007).  Goldberg’s title, and treatment, are almost deliberately incendiary, designed to anger American liberals, who have routinely insisted that “fascism” is a conservative trait!  Here they ape “Stalin [who] stumbled on a brilliant tactic of simply labeling all inconvenient ideas and movements fascist” (p. 10).  So for clarity, Goldberg provides this definition of fascism:  “Fascism is a religion of the state.  It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people.  It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.  It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by fore or through regulation and social pressure.  Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives.  Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.  I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism” (p. 23).  Consequently, he points out remarkable correlations and draws intriguing conclusions that make his treatise quite thought-provoking.  Historically, the argument he endeavors to prove is this:  “Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today’s liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism” (p. 2).  

Before the Holocaust, “when it never occurred to anyone that fascism had anything to do with anti-Semitism” (p. 26), many American liberals, including members of FDR’s “brain trust” such as Rexford Guy Tugwell, openly admired fascist efficiency.  To New Dealers (pragmatists to a man) success validated the truth and goodness of ideas.  Thus Tugwell praised Italian Fascism as “’the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.  It makes me envious’” (p. 13).  What Tugwell—and earlier Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson—craved is what Goldberg calls “the totalitarian temptation—that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian cream of ‘creating a better world’” (p. 15).  That longing still marks the liberal rhetoric of “hope” (Barak Obama) and the “politics of meaning” (Hillary Clinton).  The desire to create a better world, to make sure that everyone’s cared for, to require everyone to live right, informed “the Nazi antismoking and public health drives [that] foreshadowed today’s crusades against junk food, trans fats, and the like.  A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’” (p. 19).  

To rightly explain Fascism, Goldberg gives careful attention to Benito Mussolini.  “He was one of Europe’s leading radical socialists in arguably the most radical socialist party outside of Russia.  Under his stewardship, Avanti! became close to gospel for a whole generation of socialist intellectuals, including Antonio Gramsci” (p. 36).  He was clearly indebted to the syndicalism of Georges Sorel, and “without syndicalism fascism was impossible” (p. 36).  Interestingly enough, “Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the ‘will to believe’” (p. 37).  Still more:  Sorel replicated much of Rousseau and Robespierre and the radical ideas of the French Revolution, which “was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions” (p. 38).  

One of the most prestigious and prolific contemporary biblical scholars, N.T. Wright, builds upon and nicely summarizes his earlier, magisterial work. The Resurrection of the Son of God, to set forth his position in Surprised by Hope:  Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church  (New York:  HarperOne, c. 2008).  He asks us to ponder two questions:  “What are we waiting for?  And what are we going to do about it in the meantime?” (p. xi).  This leads us to hope for eternal life (Paradise and Heaven) hereafter and commit ourselves to working within the Kingdom of God here and now.  Importantly, “the robust Jewish and Christian doctrine of the resurrection, as part of God’s new creation, gives more value, not less, to the present world and to our present bodies” (p. 26).  

Wright repeatedly stresses the centrality of Christ’s Resurrection to the early Christians.  Without that event, there simply would have been no Christians!  “Take away the resurrection, and you lose the entire New Testament and most of the second-century fathers as well” (p. 43).  “The only way we can explain the phenomena we have been examining is by proposing a two-pronged hypothesis:  first, Jesus’s tomb really was empty; second, the disciples really did encounter him in ways that convinced them that he was not simply a ghost or hallucination” (p. 58).  They believed in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and, consequently, looked forward to their own bodies’ resurrection.  The body will be transformed through, not annihilated by, death.  It will be a different kind of body.  But like our risen Lord’s, it will still be a body!

We deal here not with science, but history and its concern for singular events, not repeatedly observable experiments.  “Historical argument alone,” Wright admits, “cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.  The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity” (p. 64).  Still more and most importantly:  Christ’s resurrection “is not an odd event within the world as it is but is the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.  It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world.  The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude:  Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation” (p. 67).  

Wright evaluates the Christian’s hope vis-à-vis the secular optimism regarding “the myth of progress,” showing how much more realistically Christians face their world.  Marx and Darwin—and all the champions of endless development—look less and less credible as the 21^st century dawns.  Christians who know their Faith put little faith in “progress.”  They hope for the “new creation” embodied in the resurrected Jesus.  Colossians 1:15-20 and I Corinthians 15 are crucial texts Wright embraces and builds upon to demonstrate what the world really needs.  

Several pages are devoted to Jesus’ Ascension.  Rarely have I heard preached, or taught, much about this post-resurrection event.  Yet, Wright says, “some kind of belief in Jesus’s ascension has recently been shown to be not just a strange added extra to Christian belief, as has sometimes been thought, but a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong” (p. 109).  The Ascension opens to us this truth:  “Basically heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter.  They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.  And the point about heaven is twofold.  First, heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth:  the ascension therefore means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on the earth to find him.  Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given.  ‘All Authority is given to me,’ said Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel, ‘in heaven and on earth’” (p. 111).  Still more, he continues:  “The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery.  It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable:  that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time” (p. 115).  Heaven and Earth mysteriously but actually intertwine.  Heaven is not far away but near at hand.  Jesus, at the right hand of the Father, is not remote from us but immediately and always present.  Our departed loved ones are not in a distant land but right next door.  To try and imagine all this, Wright refers us to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.  

Moving from the Ascension to the Second Coming, Wright resists some of the millennialism popular in evangelical circles while firmly reminding us that Christians do await the day when God’s purposes in history are attained and the Son can fully reign over a new creation.  For us, this will mean a “new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life” (p. 147).  There is a remarkable consensus in the N.T. on this subject.  “The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about” (p. 149).  Wright notes that the Greek word translated “mansions,” monai, was “regularly used” to indicate a place where one briefly paused on a longer journey.  Similarly, the word “Paradise,” spoken to the thief on the cross, meant “not a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day” (p. 150).  As did Randy Alcorn in Heaven, Wright stresses that our ultimate Heaven is a new creation, a new earth, where we will enjoy a transformed bodily life.  When Early Christians spoke of resurrection, “It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death.  It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death.  It was, in other words, life after life after death” (p. 151).  

“This is where one of the great Easter hymns [attributed to Thomas a Kempis] gets it exactly right:

O how glorious and resplendent

Fragile body, shalt thou be,

When endued with so much beauty

Full of health, and strong, and free!

Full of vigour, full of pleasure,

That shall last eternally” (p. 154).  

Some of the earliest and best Christian thinkers—Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen—stressed bodily resurrection.  They pondered the nature of matter and spirit, wondering what, exactly, “spiritual bodies” would be like.  Early Christians discerned  that the matter in our bodies (what we label molecules and cells) continually changes while we ourselves remain the same.  There is a real physicality about us, but what we are is the inner essence, the form our bodies take.  “(C.S. Lewis, summarizing this argument, offers an illustration:  I am in that respect, he says, like a curve in a waterfall.)  This argument is repeated by Thomas a millennium after Origen and nearly a millennium before Lewis.  It’s a good argument” (p. 157).  As developed by Hugh of St. Victor, this position holds that the resurrected body “’will be immune from death and sorrow; it will be at the height of its powers, free from disease and deformity, and around thirty years old, the age at which Christ began his ministry.  It will surpass anything we can imagine, even from the accounts of Christ’s appearances on earth after his own resurrection’” (p. 158).  

Like so many of us, Wright pays “homage” to C.S. Lewis, who helps us imagine “what the risen body might be like.”  Thus in The Great Divorce Lewis “manages to get us to envisage bodies that are more solid, more real, more substantial than our present ones.  That is the task that 2 Corinthians in particular invites us to.  These will be bodies of which the phrase ‘the weight of glory,’ taken from that letter (4:17), will be seen, felt, and known to be appropriate” (p. 159).   When I first grasped the fact that  “solid” walls are mostly empty space I was able to imagine that Jesus walked through walls because his resurrected body was more dense than the walls and thus quite capable of penetrating what seems to our senses hardened stone.  We will not be disembodied “immortal souls” throughout eternity.  Rather, inasmuch as our bodies are both now and then formed by our souls they will be the same (transformed) bodies we now know.  

We will have bodies in Heaven because God’s original design was for us to rule on Earth.  This world—time and space and matter—are good.  They are flawed by sin.  But they are good.  Thus, in God’s good time, a new world (the old world restored) will come into being.  As Lewis said, in Miracles, “’the old field of space, time, matter and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop.  We may be tired of that old field:  God is not’” (p. 163).  

Wright discusses purgatory (he discounts it) and paradise (where Christians who have died rest for a time) and hell.  We need not believe in purgatory to maintain concern for our departed loved ones.  “I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should . . . that they should be refreshed and filled with God’s joy and peace.  Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?” (p. 172).  While rather reticent regarding Hell, Wright insists the justice of God must be carried out.  “God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end” (p. 179).  And people who refuse God’s gracious offer of salvation will suffer forever without it.  “I wish it were otherwise,” he confesses, “but one cannot forever whistle ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ in the darkness of” the past century’s atrocities (p. 180).  

In the second part of this book, dealing with the mission of the Church, Wright develops a major part of his thesis:  God intends to establish His Kingdom, and we’re privileged to help out while anticipating eternal life therein.  Salvation is not an exclusively individual blessing.  Nor is it something reserved for the “sweet by-and-by.  The resurrected Jesus is truly Lord of heaven and earth.  As Paul proclaimed in Athens, in Jesus “God has unveiled himself and his plan for the whole world by appointing a man to be judge of the whole world and has certified this by raising him from the dead.  This is what the resurrection does:  it opens the new world, in which, under the saving and judging lordship of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, everything else is to be seen in a new light” (p. 244).  So what are we to do, this side of the grave?  In a memorable passage, Wright says:  “I don’t know how my planting a tree today will relate to the wonderful trees that there will be in God’s recreated world, though I do remember Martin Luther’s words about the proper reaction to knowing the kingdom was coming the next day being to go out and plant a tree” (p. 209).  

Beyond planting trees, however, much that Wright says about establishing the Kingdom in our day reflects the social gospel mindset one expects of current Anglican clergymen.  He’s especially concerned that wealthy Western nations forgive debts of poorer nations.  But however one evaluates his personal convictions regarding politics, his main thesis stands:  we who await the new creation should, it seems obvious, cooperate in preserving and cultivating and developing this one.

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N.T. Wright focuses on “the communion of saints” in a brief treatise, For All the Saints?  Remembering the Christian Departed (New York:  Morehouse Publishing, c. 2003), wherein he discusses the saints and their enduring estate.  Parts of the book deals with controversies within the Church of England and are thus rather irrelevant to us who are not part of that communion.  But the central points (also made in Surprised by Hope) are quite persuasive and helpful.  For a quick (75 pp) read that sums up Wright’s theology, this book is useful.  He is particularly alarmed by the creeping notion of purgatory in Anglican circles.  This is not so much the Roman Catholic notion (which he also stoutly rejects), but rather the current and notably universalistic view that everyone will somehow be saved through some sort of purgatorial process.  (Note, for example, the ease with which the British public assumed Princess Diana passed from earth to heaven).  

He declares, with biblical evidence, that saints are God’s people and are all saved through the atoning work of Christ.  All saints, following death, enter Paradise, where they await the final resurrection and the triumphant establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. He believes the departed saints “are at rest; they are conscious; . . . but they are not yet enjoying the final bliss which is to come in the New Jerusalem.  This is in line with the classic Eastern Orthodox doctrine which, though it speaks of the saints, and invokes them in all sorts of ways, does not see them as having finally experienced the completeness of redemption.  Until all God’s people are safely home, none of them is yet fulfilled.  That is why the Orthodox pray for the saints as well as with them, that they—with us when we join them—may come to the fulfillment of God’s complete purposes” (p. 24).  

So it is perfectly normal and good to feel bonded with our departed loved ones.  We rightly pray for them, but not that they move quickly through Purgatory!  “True prayer,” says Wright, “is an outflowing of love; if I love someone, I will want to pray for them, not necessarily because they are in difficulties, not necessarily because there is a particular need of which I’m aware, but simply because holding them up in God’s presence is the most natural and appropriate thing to do, and because I believe that God chooses to work through our prayers for other people’s benefit, whatever sort of benefit that may be.  Now love doesn’t stop at death—or, if it does, it’s a pretty poor sort of love!  In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of that nothingness.  But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved I prayer before God” (pp. 73-74).  He goes on to note that Professor Sir Norman Anderson, a distinguished evangelical Anglican thinker, lost all three of his children, early in their adult lives.  And, on a very personal level, Wright relates, he came “to realize that it was perfectly in order to continue to hold those beloved children before God I prayer, not to get them out of purgatory, nor because he was unsure about their final salvation, but because he wanted to talk to God about them, to share as it were his love for them with the God who had given them and had inexplicably allowed them to be taken away again” (p. 74).  

Wright never retreats from the New Testament claim that Jesus arose from the dead with a transformed, resurrected body.  The tomb was truly empty.  The vacuous liberalism that portrayed the Resurrection as a “spiritual” experience of some sort has no credibility.  He further believes that there must be a Hell of some sort—and folks who actually go there forever.  While restrained in describing it, while hopeful in regards the numbers who will go there, Wright cannot take seriously Jesus’ words without allowing the reality of Hell.  

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Folks interested in the scholarly foundation for N.T. Wright’s more popular works should consult  The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, c. 2003), the third volume of his  magnum opus (“Christian Origins and the Question of God”) which has established him among the most highly acclaimed (and orthodox) of contemporary biblical scholars.  Indeed, he builds a strong case for rejecting many of these scholars’ (Bultmann, Schillebeeckx, Crossan, et al.) positions!  For example, as a somber historian he seriously questions the existence of the mysterious “Q” document routinely cited by New Testament scholars.    Furthermore, as he carefully studies the resurrection narratives in the Gospels  he finds them remarkably different, testifying to the reality of the central event but providing unique details treasured by the writer.  Importantly, he declares:  “The idea that faith must never have anything to do with history, so popular in certain circles for many years, is long overdue a decent burial” (p. 716).

He endeavors, in this treatise, “to investigate the claim of the earliest Christians, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead.  In order to be sure we are aiming at that target, it is important to locate their claim where it belongs, within the worldview and language of second-Temple Judaism.  In addition, since the (still recognizably Jewish) claim was quickly advanced within the wider non-Jewish world of the first, century, it is important also to map out where the claim belonged within that larger universe of discourse” (p. 28).  Consequently, he devotes considerable (nearly 200 pp!) attention to primary sources revealing the ancient world’s views on death.  Remarkably few pagans were strict materialists who denied any life after death.  Overwhelming, like Plato, they firmly believed in the immortality of the soul—but not of any resurrected body.  A few first century Jews, notably elite Sadducees, denied any resurrection, but most of them, represented by the Pharisees, devoutly believed in a final resurrection of the nation of Israel. 

Into that world came Christians proclaiming what had never been proposed—that Jesus had in fact arisen from the grave.  And with that assurance they looked forward to the resurrection of the bodies of all who believed in Him.  Faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus was the absolute source of their faith—not an addition to a primitive spiritual ecstasy spawned by His message.  This is evident, Wright shows, in Paul’s letters, which he explores in depth (200 pp.), providing sufficient exegetical information to prove his point.  The same can be shown in the Gospels and other New Testament books, as well as a wealth of material in second century Church documents.  

What is clear, in Wright’s historical documentation, is this:  “The early Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah; and they believed this because of his resurrection” (p. 554).  And so does Wright!  After presenting all the evidence, he explains why, as a disciplined historian, he finds the early Christian claims persuasive.  “The language of ‘resurrection’ and the specific modifications within Jewish resurrection belief which we have seen in early Christianity, could only have occurred, I suggest, if the early Christians believed they had clear evidence, against all their own and everyone else’s expectations, both of continuity between the Jesus who died and the Jesus who was now alive of a transformation in his mode of embodiment” (p. 696).  Following a brief explanation of historical logic, he says:  “We are left with the conclusion that the combination of empty tomb and appearances of the living Jesus forms a set of circumstances which is itself both necessary and sufficient for the rise of early Christian belief” (p. 696).  Still more: good historians follow “inference to the best explanation, which is one variety of ‘abduction’” (p. 716).  Historians, like detectives, deal with singular bits of evidence and try to construct the best conclusion possible.  To Wright, the conclusion is inescapable:  Jesus is Lord.  And He is risen! 

# # # 

  One of the world’s most distinguished historians, Michael Burleigh, has written a two volume study detailing the struggle between religion and politics during the past two centuries.  In short, he argues, political movements (particularly the revolutionary call for “change”) have frequently taken on notably religious characteristics while religious communities have often abandoned their traditions so as to promulgate a sociopolitical gospel.  Volume one is entitled Earthly Powers:  The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York:  Harper Perennial, c. 2005).   Beginning with the French Jacobins, continuing through various 19^th century utopian socialisms, culminating in 20^th century totalitarianisms, we witness political religions wrecking havoc in the world.  

Burleigh cites a prescient statement of Frederick Voigt, a “Burkean neo-Tory” in a “remarkable [1938] book called Unto Caesar.”  Therein “he compared totalitarianisms with religions:  ‘We have referred to Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions.  They are not opposites, but are fundamentally akin, in a religious as well as a secular sense.  Both are messianic and socialistic.  Both reject the Christian knowledge that all are under sin and both see in good and evil principles of class or race.  Both are despotic in their methods and their mentality.  Both have enthroned the modern Caesar, collective man, the implacable enemy of the individual soul.  Both  would render unto this Caesar the things which are God’s.  Both would make man master of his own destiny, establish the Kingdom of Heaven in this world.  Neither will hear of any Kingdom that is not of this world’” (p. 9).  

It all began with the Enlightenment, wherein (as Carl Becker noted long ago in his little classic The Heavenly City of the 18^th Century Philosophers) thinkers such as Rousseau who sought to establish a perfect world.  As Alexis de Tocqueville explained, these intellectuals ignored the social wisdom of the ages and “’built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason’” (p. 44).  They imagined a world more to their liking—a world that ought to be—and sought to establish it by whatever means necessary.  Since the Catholic Church in France represented all that the intellectuals despised, it became the target of intense persecution during the Revolution.  Within five years, “only 150 of France’s 40,000 pre-Revolution parishes were openly celebrating mass” (p. 66).  Vandalized churches, the suppression of monastic orders and widespread killing of priests and the laymen who defended them, characterized the Jacobin “terror.”  

In 1793 a large-scale revolt (the Vendee uprising) occurred in western France.  Most of the anti-revolutionary “rebels” were farmers, artisans, middle class merchants outraged by the excesses of the Revolution.  The Jacobins in Paris dispatched the army, and 250,000 “fanatics” were slaughtered.  In an area near Nantes, “up to a third of the population perished, a statistic roughly equivalent to the horrors of twentieth-century Cambodia” (p. 101).  “This was the first occasion in history,” Burleigh says, “when an ‘anticlerical’ and self-styled ‘non-religious’ state embarked on a programme of mass murder that anticipated many twentieth-century horrors” (p. 97).  

Though Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy in 1815 reestablished significant elements of the Church in France, the Revolution of 1789 had unleashed turbulent currents that troubled and reshaped Europe throughout the following century.  Particularly powerful was its stimulus for Nationalism.  In Burleigh’s judgment, “Nationalism was the most pervasive and potent Church to emerge during the nineteenth century, although for most people belonging to their nation was entirely compatible with Christian, Jewish or other devotions” (p. 199).  The revolutions of 1848, the unification movements in Italy and Germany, all reveal a deep attachment to Nation, a virtual deification of the State.  One’s loyalty shifted from the Church to secular regimes.  Still more:  while encouraging some forms of sentimental piety, the Romantic movement generally incubated a deeper passion for one’s fatherland.  

Coupled with Nationalism was another equally secular outgrowth of the French Revolution—Socialism.  Discarding the Christian portrait of a Golden Age in the past from which we are fallen, secularists in the 19^th century envisioned a perfect world just ahead of us, to be inaugurated by scientific and technological breakthroughs.  Man, by nature, was considered good, not sinful.  All that was needed, to eliminate ignorance and poverty, was scientific education and social transformation.  “Saint-Simon was the ur-guru of all future technocratic solutions to social problems and one of the early lights of European central socialist planning through which so much misery was inflicted on so many.  Beyond that, he was the ancestor of those who seek global governance, world parliaments and world peace, the contemporary manifestation of the utopian legacy” (p. 224).  

Saint-Simon opened a Pandora’s box of utopian socialist fantasies, including those of Auguste Comte (the “Father of Sociology”), Charles Fourier and Robert Owen (both of whom inspired some American settlements such as Brook Farm and New Harmony, Indiana).  There was usually a “religious” aspect to such endeavors, but, as Burleigh notes:  “Sectarian millennial doctrines were effectively transformed into an ideology of social progress whose Advent would come not with the millennium described in Daniel or Revelation, but as a consequence of general subscription to the communitarian way of life” (p. 24).  Interestingly enough, he thinks that Chartism, a reform movement that significantly changed England in the 1830s, “was little more than a secularized form of Methodism” (p. 242).  

In Karl Marx’s “scientific socialism” there appeared an atheistic version of communism intent on reviving the radical “Babouvism,” named for Gracchus Babeuf, who sought to establish, reacting against Napoleon and the Directory in 1798, the “equality of goods, to be achieved by distributing the property of the rich, would guarantee paradise on earth” (p. 243).  Equality everywhere!  Though Marx himself was irreligious, many 19^th century communists blended a religious fervor with their heaven-on-earth aspirations.  To Burleigh, Marxism itself is studded with religious trimmings:  “Marxism combined the assurance that everything was operating according to the dispositions of secularised versions of higher powers with Gnostic sectarian belief that the messianic elect that had grasped these laws was morally entitled to destroy existing society (which was entirely without virtue) in order to achieve earthly paradise.  Like medieval millenarians or early modern Protestant zealots, Communists took it upon themselves to realise heaven on earth through transforming violence:  that exercise in regrettable but necessary killing which would murder eighty or a hundred million people in the twentieth century” (p. 251).  

Yet another movement, overtly politicizing religion, was “Christian Socialism.”  Many 19^th century Christians, abandoning the doctrines of the Faith, sought to transform their religion into a social ethic.  In England especially, hand-in-hand with Victorian moralism, Christian Socialism attracted a corps of converts.  “Salvationism gave way to meliorism” (p. 253).  Rather than saving souls, these Christians worked to rectify society.  “Equality, justice and plenty were not endlessly deferred to an afterlife, but were attainable in this life through faith in Jesus Christ” (p. 262).  Rather quickly, of course, the “Christian” aspects faded and a secular Socialism (evident in various Fabians and the resultant Labor Party) emerged.

There were, admittedly, significant critiques of all this.  Pope Pius IX and John Henry Newman sought to counteract liberalizing trends within the Catholic Church.  The Pope called Vatican Council I, the first General Council in 300 years.  He and the Council sought to build a fortress, resisting the “satanic conspiracy of anticlericals, freemasons and liberals” that he detested.  In Germany, Catholics were battered by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf but clung to the ancient faith and “mounted an impressive counter-campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance” (p. 332).  Nevertheless, by the century’s end, effective conservative resistance to the revolutionary message of the French Revolution had markedly faded.

Burleigh concludes this volume with a chapter titled “Apocalypse 1914.”  In the “great war” the mixture of politics and religion stood clearly revealed.  In Germany, for example, “the immanentist and Hegelian strain in German liberal Protestant theology, in which whatever one felt powerfully enough was indicative of the developing presence of God, meant that He was manifest in the intense emotions of August 1914, directing the movements of German armies at war.  As a wartime German cleric put it:  ‘God is what the god-inspired people do’” (p. 442).  Nationalism easily usurped the catholicity of the ancient Christian creeds.  Politics became a religion; religion embraced politics.  

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

Burleigh’s second volume, Sacred Causes:  The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2007), brings his narrative into the present.  Impoverishment and disillusionment, as well as massive political changes, resulted from WWI.  The Russian and German and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed.  Italy’s liberal regime was displaced by Mussolini in the 1920s and Germany’s Weimar Republic barely survived the decade before falling to Hitler.  Totalitarians—all sharing a thoroughly socialistic worldview—triumphed in much of Europe.  Their totalitarianism, according to Langmead Casserly, was “’founded not only on the will to power of autocratic statesmen, but also on the will to security, and the impulse to adore and propitiate, of the mass of citizens    . . .  The pseudo-divinity of the modern state is perhaps not so much a divinity which it has arrogantly usurped as a divinity thrust upon it by the masses of insecure and frustrated people, insistently demanding some powerful and venerable object of faith and trust’” (p. 15).  

In a lucid chapter entitled “The Totalitarian Political Religions” Burleigh analyzes Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.  While granting their many differences, he finds remarkable their  remarkable.  Before any of them appeared, a clairvoyant thinker, Semyon Frank (born into a Russian-Jewish family but converting to Orthodox Christianity in 1912), assessed “the nihilistic moralism of the Russian intelligentsia.  Of the socialists’ infatuation with the idea, he presciently declared:  ‘Sacrificing himself for the sake of this idea, he does not hesitate to sacrifice other people for it.  Among his contemporaries he sees either merely the victims of the world’s evil he dreams of eradicating or the perpetrators of that evil . . .   This feeling of hatred for the enemies of the people forms the concrete and active psychological foundation of his life.  Thus the great love of mankind of the future gives birth to a great hatred for people; the passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction’” (p. 39).  

Legions of Western Europeans were enchanted by the 1917 triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.  One of them was Bertrand Russell, who joined a delegation of the Labor Party that visited the promised land in 1920.  Witnessing what actually happened, he discerned (within 24 hours) the impact of Lenin:  “’I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people’” (p. 39).  Groping about for an explanation of what he saw, Russell concluded:  “The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously.  Bolshevism has supplied the new religion.  It promises glorious things” (p. 39).

Substitute Fascism or National Socialism for Bolshevism and you have a valid explanation for much that transpired during the third and fourth decades of the 20^th century.  Italy’s Il Duce, for example, had been “a rising star of the revolutionary left-wing of the Italian Socialist Party” before the war (p. 55) whose “concern with culture and values led Mussolini to a quasi-religious conception of politics, in which a dedicated elite would help regenerate mankind from the social and spiritual ills that were commonly held to debilitate it” (p. 55).  Hitler too incorporated religious resonances in his rhetoric.  “His God was not the Christian God” (p. 101), and he was ferociously anticlerical.  But “the fundamental structure of the Nazi creed was soteriological, a redemptive story of suffering and deliverance, a sentimental journey from misery to glory, from division to mystic unity based on the blood bond that linked souls” (p. 105).  

Having demonstrated the religious aspects of political movements, Burleigh then turns to “the churches in the age of dictators.”  Almost everywhere Christians suffered.  Details differ as one moves from revolutionary Mexico to Republican Spain to Portugal and Austria, Italy and Germany, but these were difficult years for churches.  The popes were especially hard pressed to deal with political upheavals in so many different “Catholic” countries.  In 1931, evaluating dangers posed by Fascism in Italy, Pope Pius XI cautiously warned, in Quadragesimo anno,  that “there are some who fear that the State is substituting itself in the place of private initiative, instead of limiting itself to necessary and adequate assistance” (p. 166).  

His successor, Pius XII, facing the more overtly anti-Christian Nazis in Germany, decried the Nationalism which “’is perhaps the most dangerous heresy of our times’” (p. 169).  Under his guidance, Catholic bishops in Austria and Germany “were more condemnatory of Nazism than may be popularly realised” (p. 170).   Rooted in the Natural Law, Catholics were more likely to oppose Hitler’s program than Protestants, who were “generally more prone to worrying about seeming out of step with scientising modernism” than preserving the ancient faith (p. 180).  Individual Protestants such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer certainly distinguised themselves by opposing the Nazis, but virtually all Christians in Germany failed to do so. Hitler effectively suppressed church publications, drove into exile eminent intellectuals, spread lies about traditional church leaders, and subtly co-opted many nominally “Christian” Germans.  

In Burleigh’s judgment, Pius XII (contrary to being “Hitler’s Pope,” as some calumnists contend) fought Hitler as effectively as anyone.  According to an American consul, Pius XII “’opposed unilaterally every compromise with National Socialism.  He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person.  He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, in spite of appearances, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand” (p. 187).  Even Albert Einstein, no champion of Christianity, said that “’Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth.  I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.  I am forced to confess, that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly’” (p. 213).  

WWII, Burleigh says, was (like WWI) an “apocalypse.”  World-wide havoc destroyed millions of people but left a globe in tatters.  It was, to be sure, a war.  But, as T.S. Eliot said noted, it was actually  “’an enormous catastrophe which includes a war’” (p. 215).  Christians—and their churches—suffered wherever the Nazis ruled, and one of the great contributions of this book is to make known what they endured while the war was waged.  In Poland, the most devastated of all nations, three million Christians, as well as three million Jews, perished.  One-fifth of the Catholic clergy disappeared.  In Holland the churches ineffectually protested the deportation of Jews, but at least they spoke up—and many suffered for so doing.  With Catholics in all European countries, Pope Pius XII walked a thin wire, trying to be both prophet and diplomat, denouncing evil while doing what possible to protect believers wherever they lived.  

Wherever possible, he protected Jews as well—in Rome one third of the Jews “were hidden in buildings owned by the Catholic Church” (p. 278). Jews in the American army “which liberated Rome were unequivocal in their praise for Pius for his role in protecting Jews,” declaring that without his assistance thousands would have perished.  “In recognition of Pius’ efforts, Rome’s chief rabbi Israel Zolli took the baptismal name Eugenio when he formally converted to Christianity in February 1945” (p. 280).   While we might second-guess Pius XII—as we might well do with FDR—in his response to the Nazis, no one who examines the evidence can blame him for the Holocaust.  Thousands of Christians could certainly have responded more courageously, but the blame for Hitler’s wrongdoing rests with Hitler and his minions.  Indeed, “In 1945 the Allied occupying powers and the broad German public had a greater regard for the conduct of the Churches under National Socialism than would be the case by the 1960s, the beginning of decades of therapeutic inquisition that has since become tawdry” (p. 301).  

WWII was followed, immediately, by the “Cold War,” wherein Stalin replaced Hitler as the great threat to the West.  “Within a remarkable short time totalitarian rule had been reimposed on half a continent using a combination of force and fraud” (p. 344).  A new corps of politicians, notably Konrad Adenauer in West Germany, sincerely sought to rebuild their countries with a commitment to their Christian traditions and resist the creep of Communism.  For decades, of course, Russian Orthodox Christians had suffered under Bolshevism.  Now, as the “Iron Curtain” fell over Eastern Europe, Christians in the West began to heed their anguish and join in doing what possible to stop the spread of an overtly atheistic socialism.  Anti-communism became, particularly in some American circles, almost an item in the Creed!  

There was, for a decade following WWII, a rather remarkable religious revival in England and America.  But things changed in the 1960s.  Young radicals, marching in the streets, called for “change.”  Indeed, Burleigh notes, “Change came to be fetishised for change’s sake” (p. 350).  Whatever had been should be no more!  Sexual standards, including opposition to contraception and abortion, carefully defended for generations, were jettisoned in the “sexual revolution.”  Criticizing, rather than supporting, one’s country was abruptly labeled “patriotic.”  Spokesmen for Christianity, such as Joseph Fletcher, with his “Situation Ethics,” joined the “movement,” as did various champions of “liberation theology,” and by 1970 a profoundly different cultural world was settling into place.  “Ill-digested economics and sociology flooded into the minds of theologians for whom the Gospels were not sexy enough unless flavoured with a heavy shake of Marxism” (p. 371). 

Ironically, while trendy theologians in the West flirted with Marxism, those suffering its iron hand hungered for the ancient certainties of the Christian Faith.  “As the future Solidarity leader Lech Walesa would comment:  ‘The invocation of a moral order was the most revolutionary response that could be made to the increasingly dogmatic socialism practiced in Poland, and people we caught up in this wave of moral reawakening’” (p. 419).   So too, said Russian dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn!  When Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979, his countrymen chanted “’We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, in schools, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God’” (p. 430).  And when President Ronald Reagan courageously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was cheered by the millions who knew the truth whereof he spoke.  

So ends Burleigh’s story.  The carnage wrought by messianic political movements, running from the Jacobins to Castro, should prompt us to eschew any and all political saviors and solutions.  And the implosion of the churches should warn us to ever worship God and pray for the forgiveness of our sins rather than mobilize believers to rectify the world’s social and economic woes.  

# # #

“The best of a bad job is all the most of us make of it—except of course the saints,” said T.S. Eliot.  That admission, on the flyleaf of Ralph McInerny’s autobiography, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You:  My Life and Pastimes (Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame, c. 2006), sets the tone for his memoirs.  Nearing the end of his earthly days, he finds himself “praying for mercy and the grace of a happy death” (p. 2).  One of America’s most distinguished philosophers (delivering the Gifford Lectures a decade ago), McInerny has taught philosophy for 50 years at the University of Notre Dame.  In his spare time, he churned out dozens of novels (mainly mysteries) to provide an ample income for himself and his rapidly growing family.  He also inspired and helped guide various publishing ventures designed to promulgate the Catholic faith.  He is, in short, a multitalented intellectual whose influence endures in many sectors.  

Rather than tell his life story chronologically, McInerny takes a thematic approach.  So we begin with the “biosphere,” the world wherein he began to be.  Born in 1929 in Minneapolis to devout Irish Catholic parents who were impoverished by the Great Depression, he nevertheless remembers his “childhood as a veritable idyll of happiness” (p. 7).  Whether exploring the mysteries of nature pulsating within the lakes and woods adjacent to his home, or the resources of the library, or the glories of worship in the parish church, McInerny relished all aspects of life.  

After the eighth grade (in 1942), following his religious inclinations, he decided to enter Nazareth Hall, a preparatory seminary in St. Paul.  Here he studied under “some of the best teachers I ever had” (p. 16) a staunchly classical curriculum which proved invaluable throughout the rest of his life—“Latin from the very beginning, Greek starting in Third Year, English, history, math, science of a sort, and French or German” (p. 15).  Here too he “first began to regard myself as a writer” (p. 15) and ultimately edited the school newspaper.  From Nazareth Hall McInerny moved on to nearby St. Paul Seminary, studying a philosophy and theology, still aspiring to the priesthood.  “It was here that, at a fateful moment, I was introduced to philosophy” (p. 24).  A bright young teacher-priest assigned some works of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, rather than secondary textbooks, and a new world opened for McInerny.   Reading the masters, plumbing the depths of the primary sources, forever altered the young scholar.  “I could not get enough of Aquinas” (p. 24).  A growing love for philosophy—as well as the potential joys of the conjugal life—led him to leave the seminary with a bachelor’s degree and the knowledge that he was not called to the priesthood.  

The woman he married, Connie, was his faithful wife for 50 years, and to her this book is dedicated.  In a chapter entitled “Paterfamilias,” McInerny properly praises her for the multiple and absolutely essential ways she blessed him and her world.  “Marriage,” he found, “is the school in which most of us learn our own defects as well as the joys and griefs of life” (p. 31).  “Connie was to have seven children in the course of some ten and a half years.  We just had them.  That is the point of being married” (p. 31).  Children too taught him many life lessons.  And they have proved to be, for McInerny, a great blessing.

Throughout his life McInerny wrote and wanted to be a writer.  He wrote poems, essays, short stories, and novels simply because he liked to write.  Re-reading his early efforts, he laments:  “It is penitential for me to even page through those early efforts” (p. 58).  Now and then he would send a story to a magazine.  “It would come back, in Thurber’s phrase, like a serve in tennis” (p. 58).  Finally financial pressures (Notre Dame professors in those days were poorly paid) prompted him to “get serious” (p. 58) about writing for the commercial market in 1964.  He determined to write daily for a year and set to work at a workbench in his basement, “day after day” (p. 62), typing away.  “My resolution,” he declares, “had made me a disciplined writer, which is the only kind I can admire” (p. 62).  His early stories were routinely rejected, but he slowly learned “that one writes for a reader” rather than for himself (p. 59).  To remind himself of this he “typed a slogan and pinned it over my typewriter.  Nobody Owes You A Reading” (p. 59).  Some kindly editors began to advise him.  Then he got a good agent.  Slowly his stories began to be published.  Indeed he wrote so much that he began publishing under several pseudonyms.  Then came some books, such as Jolly Rogerson, which were well reviewed and sold well.  Most importantly, he wrote The Priest, which sold a million copies and established him as a successful novelist.  In time he hit upon a popular format and published the Father Dowling mysteries (24 of them), which provided the basis for a successful TV series.  

While writing all these popular books, of course, McInerny continued to do the work required of a Notre Dame professor.  Having been introduced to Aristotle and Aquinas in seminary, he remained forever grateful to these two for their philosophical realism, a position he supported throughout his career.  He briefly explains his rejection of rival philosophical positions, especially those following in the “modern” lineage of Descartes.  Such positions, almost always articulated by a very particular and oft-solipsistic individual, are increasingly espoused by many of his Notre Dame colleagues, but McInerny finds them fatally flawed by “a deep incoherence, and not just from some other and alien point of view, but on the terms they themselves accept.  By contrast, the way I do philosophy is not just a way of doing philosophy, it is philosophy.  And it isn’t my way, it’s ours” (p. 92).  And his way, he argues, is the way of Aquinas, who has become increasingly the magnetic hook upon which he hangs his philosophical hat.  “The rationale of Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris [calling for a return to Aquinas] has proved its soundness to me over the years.  There is no other way, really.  Gustate et videte.  Water only slakes when drunk, and the choice we make at the outset of philosophizing is a fateful one” (p. 164).  

Consider the decidedly anti-Thomistic currents of modern morality.  Relativism reigns most everywhere, primarily in an emotivist garb.  “That is,” McInerny notes, “to judgments of good and bad are to be taken as expressions of the speaker’s feelings or subjective condition.  This being the case, moral judgments could only be taken to have public value at the price of tyranny.  That is, to promote a moral position is to seek to make others act in accord with your feelings about the matter.  Here is the root of the privatization of morality along with religion” (p. 154).  Emotivism oozes from newspapers and TV and country music as well as from allegedly high-level philosophical journals.  Historians, of course, equate this with the position of Protagoras, the ancient sophist who “maintained that what is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me” (p. 155).  Refuting Protagoras, “Plato argued that this claim is incoherent.  It refutes itself.  Its refutation comes not from an alien viewpoint, but from its own internal assumptions” (p. 155).  The assumptions stand revealed as fallacious once one thinks logically and acknowledges the pre-logical truths basic to that discipline.  Yet, sad to say, however incoherent it may be, emotivism enjoys such certain absolute currency as to define our weltgeist.  

McInerny loves Notre Dame, warts and all.  But he’s distressed by directions lately taken, making the university increasingly less Catholic.  “How ironic, he says, “that Catholic philosophy since the Council has taken on the coloration of modernity and all but abandoned its traditional roots.  Our departments of philosophy now have a majority of members for whom what I have been saying would be as unintelligible as doubtless it would be at Meatball Tech.  It is a melancholy thought that now, when the salutary impact of traditional philosophy is most urgently needed, we who are its presumed representatives have abandoned ship and are crowding the rails of the Titanic.” (p. 105).  

Towards the end of the book, he repeats his warning:  “Permit me to be repetitive.  I have spent my academic career in what I regard as the premier institution of Catholic higher education in this country, Notre Dame.  I have seen close up, and have participated in, decisions that have had the unlooked-for effect of sending us down the path of secularization” (pp. 152-153).  In its determination to be an “excellent” university, in its almost juvenile desire to rival secular institutions like Stanford, Notre Dame has sold its soul to the devil.  As a professor for half-a-century in a Catholic institution, McInerny acknowledges that he is now “involved in a long twilight struggle within the walls.  Positions dubiously compatible with the faith are maintained and taught all around us.  A young colleague of mine announced in a departmental meeting that, since he regarded Catholicism as false, he had a moral obligation to disabuse his students of their faith.  That is where we have come” (p. 157).  With certain qualifications, much the same could be said of most “Christian” colleges and universities during the past five decades—as James Burtchaell (for a time a Notre Dame professor) makes clear in his definitive study, The Dying of the Light:  The Disengagement of Colleges & Universities from their Christian Churches.    

McInerny also loves his Church, though he laments much that has transpired in the wake of Vatican II.  Even as the official council was ending “a sort of para-council began, in which members of the media sought to exercise influence on the fathers of the council” (p. 122).  And when the fathers could not be influenced, different interpretations of their positions could be espoused in accord with the famous spirit of Vatican II.  “At soirees sponsored by Time magazine, strategy and tactics wee exuberantly discussed.  And major pressure was to be put on changing the Church’s attitude toward sexual morality” (p. 122).  When Pope Paul VI failed to endorse contraception in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, it “came as a bombshell to those who had convinced themselves that the ban on contraception was a dead letter.  The reaction was unique in the history of the Catholic Church.  Moral theologians took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, rejecting the decision of the pope and advising the faithful that they were not bound by it.  The rebellion of the theologians had begun.  It was to characterize and disrupt the life of the Church for decades, and is only now beginning to subside” (p. 124).  

Such theologians regarded themselves as a “second magisterium,” endowed with the authority to defy popes and bishops!  Importantly, McInerny insists:  the rebellion within the Church, like the rebellion of the ‘60s, is all about sex!  By any means necessary, the ‘60s Generation intends to establish a libertine sexual ethos, both within and outside the Catholic Church.  “Have I become a Cassandra, in despair of the Church the modern world?” McInerny asks.  “Not at all.  With William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize address, I am confident that man will prevail, and as for the Church, the gates of hell will not prevail against her.  But one would have to be a mindless Pollyanna not to admit that we live in strange and antinomian times” (p. 133).  And he sees small, hopeful signs of changing times.  New priests, new seminaries, new magazines all promise a new day for the Church.  No doubt he cheers Benedict XVI!  

Part of the Church’s renewal in America newness results from McInerny’s own efforts as an editor and publisher of very traditional, Catholic materials.  To counter the liberalism of those promoting a “false spirit of Vatican II,” he and Michael Novak launched a highly successful magazine, Crisis.  That the magazine elicited furious denunciations from those of the left validated its mission!  He also established a publishing house, Crisis Books, that made available orthodox works.  He joined with Father Fessio, who established Ignatius Press, to published a journal, Catholic Dossier.  He also helped established the Maritain Center at Notre and oversee the translation and publication of Maritain’s works.  Another study center, the Medieval Institute, exists at the university, thanks to McInerny’s efforts, where seminars and speakers and special events continue to espouse the Catholicism that birthed the university.

That a remarkable man could compress a life story into 167 pages is in itself remarkable!  He ever remembers that “Nobody Owes You A Reading.”  Better a book that’s too brief than one that’s mind-numbingly long!  Reading McInerny is simply a feast for the mind and soul.  His friend Michael Novak says it well:  “This is a charming, bittersweet, witty, evocative, even romantic reminiscence of a wonderful life . . . .  Be prepared to weep a little, and laugh a little—it ought to be a movie.  McInerny’s masterpiece!” 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Roger Scruton, an English philosopher recently re-located to the United States, provides us his memoirs in Gentle Regrets:  Thoughts from a Life (New York:  Continuum, c. 2005).  Though he taught for many years at an English university, Birkbeck College in London, and more recently at Boston University in America, Scruton is best labeled a “public intellectual” who has written many books on various topics.  Like McInerny, he tells his story thematically rather than chronologically.  And the reverberating theme reveals the struggles of a thoughtful conservative trying to survive in a culture that celebrates anything but conservative views.  

He begins his Gentle Regrets by telling us how he “discovered books” in 1957, at the age of 13, when he picked up Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  “I did not put the book down until I had finished it.  And for months afterwards I strode through our suburb side by side with Christian, my inner eye fixed on the Celestial City” (p. 2).  That vision slowly faded, but the role of books in shaping a man’s life was firmly fixed.  He discovered that great writers, such as Bunyan and Shakespeare, provide great philosophy—“philosophy not argued but shown” (p. 9).  

His reading rooted him in classical culture (thanks in part to the Royal Grammar School curriculum) and largely alienated him from his counter-cultural contemporaries.  A bona fide member of the ‘60s generation, he “was a rebel—but a meta-rebel, so to speak, in rebellion against rebellion” (p. 19).  He rejected the regnant nihilism of his peers.  He further abandoned the socialism that virtually identifies the counter-culture, “only to discover that a socialist conscience was the one thing required for success in the only spheres where I could aspire to it” (p. 19).  Consequently, when Scruton became a conservative at a rather young age he could hardly have anticipated the venom of the left nor realize the price he’d pay for this decision.  “It became a matter of honour among English-speaking intellectuals to disassociate themselves from me, to write, if possible, damning and contemptuous reviews of my books, and to block my chances of promotion” (p. 55).   Though many Englishmen vote Conservative in national elections, most “intellectuals regarded the term ‘conservative’ as a term of abuse” (p. 33).  Indeed, they generally embraced the fashionable rhetorical fantasies of Michael Foucault, whose Les mots et les choses (very much the bible for the radicals who rioted in Paris in 1968, literally just outside Scruton’s hotel window) “seemed to justify every form of transgression” (p. 35).  

In his opinion, Foucault’s “book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric.  Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that ‘truth’ requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class that profits from its propagation.  The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula.  Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it.  Where there is power there is oppression.  And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy” (p. 35).  Sadly enough, this is the message now dominating Europe’s universities.  

To illustrate this, Scruton notes that Eric Habsbawm was awarded, at the request of Prime Minister Tony Blair, “the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of the Companion of Honour” (p. 36).  Habsbawm, a long-term member of England’s Communist Party until it finally dissolved amidst revelations provided by Solzhenitsyn and The Black Book of Communism, recently lamented the demise of Stalinism!  He is nevertheless “the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools” (p. 36).  Consider too “the extraordinary fact that  Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honour to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate, and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister” (p. 36).  

Conjoined with his growing conservatism, Scruton slowly turned from atheism to the church, discovering therein a wisdom and peace the world does not afford.  In a fascinating chapter entitled “Stealing from Churches,” he remembers entering a small French chapel with a Parisian woman (a philosopher teacher) who enjoyed visiting country churches.  After wandering through the church, she deftly pocketed silver-bound crystal bottles used by the priest when distributing the Eucharist.  In that theft, she represents, to Scruton, the legions of secularists (like ancient Vandals) who have been on a spiritual rampage, literally taking and tossing away the incomparable riches of the West.  

Those spiritual riches were evident in some of the persons Scruton encountered in his “years as a voyeur of holiness” that led him “into contact with true believers, and taught me that faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the world to God” (p. 63).  One was a rather eccentric priest in London, Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who resolutely resisted the alleged “reforms” of Vatican II.  He showed Scruton that a highly traditional religion “is quite unlike the fashionable social doctrines of our day, all of which are founded, in the end, on anger or resentment” (p. 67).  Love, Christian love, is quite different from social justice.  Memorably, Gilbey said:  “’We are not asked to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall.  The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place.  His duty is to leave this world a better man’” (p. 68).  

In a very different place, Poland, where he lectured on philosophy, Scruton met a 26 year old woman, Barbara, who lived in Gdansk.  Her life had been anything but pleasant, yet she is “the other holy person in my life” (p. 71).  She listened intently to his lectures, but he was the one who learned from their conversations and profited from her prayers for his salvation.  In particular, she incarnated “the truth that sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between, and that nothing matters more than the customs, ceremonies and rites with which we lift the body above its material need and reshape it as a soul” (p. 75).  Certainly one should resist (as did Solidarity) some of the Communists’ policies in Poland, but “the real fight was within you, to overcome the spirit of selfish calculation.  The important thing, she said, was not to improve the world, but to improve yourself” (p. 79).  The most saintly people Scruton said almost exactly the same thing!  And it’s the perennial truth of the Faith.  

Thus influenced, Scruton has been “regaining my religion.”  He began attending an Anglican church, “no longer as a thief but as a penitent” (p. 233) and (as an accomplished musician) volunteered to play the organ.  He is not yet what one would consider an orthodox believer.  But he has rediscovered what he sensed, decades ago while reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—the power of permanent, indeed eternal things.  “Religion enables us to bear our losses, not primarily because it promises to offset them with some compensating gain, but because it sees them from a transcendental perspective” (p. 228).  

In chapters I’ve not touched on Scruton discusses opera, architecture, pets and children.  And he does so with a gentle touch, a probing mind, giving us a book quite worth perusing.  

  During my wife Roberta’s final days I re-read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (San Francisco:  HarperSanFrancisco, c. 1961, 1996), knowing that I would soon (barring a dramatic miracle) endure what he described.  Just recently I again read the book and wrote rather extensive personal reflections in a journal I’ve been keeping, indicating how his words help me cope with my inner pain, now seven months after her death.  Lewis wrote, following the death of his wife, Joy, to help diffuse the sorrow he felt.  His words more accurately describe what I’ve felt than anything I’ve read or can say.   So in this issue of my “Reedings” I’ll try to explain why the book (and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son, which I also discuss) is so valuable to me.  Inasmuch as it is a collection of thoughts rather than a structured presentation, I’ll select and comment on passages that particularly spoke to me.  Importantly, these words, for both Lewis and me, reflect a period of intense pain, not a final theological perspective.  

In his “Introduction” to the book, Lewis’s step-son, Douglas Gresham, notes:  “This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane.  It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm the fortress” (p. xxvi).  Neither Lewis nor I can gloss over the intense agony one feels when he loses the love of his life.  Pious rhetoric fails in such moments.  Jesus’ words on the Cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”—resonate more truthfully than “God is good, all the time”!  

 “Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wondered.  “This is one of the most disquieting symptoms” (p. 5).   Certainly God speaks to me through the Scripture, especially in the Psalms of lament, so He has been with me.  Certainly He has spoken to me through books I’ve read—Peter Kreeft, Sheldon Vanauken, Lewis et al.  And I’ve found the austerely intellectual arguments of Aquinas much more useful than the glib assurances of Guideposts magazine!  He’s comforted me through music—Dean and Marcia Nelson gave me an Isaacs’ CD that I love.  But if I’d hoped God would emotionally embrace and comfort me, such has not been the case.  I’ve not experienced what some claim—a kind of sweet euphoria that sweeps away all sorrow.   “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly.  Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively.  But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (p. 25).  However “triumphantly” others process grief, for me (and apparently Lewis too) it’s much more the “dark night of the soul” described by St. John of the Cross.  

“What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had” (p. 30).  This for me too is most difficult.  My wife and I didn’t really pray for a “miracle” last summer—just a successful stem cell transplant that the doctor considered rather routine!  Yet during the four years she battled the disease how sincerely she prayed, thanking God for the “healing” taking place in her body as she took the prescribed medications.  We prayed.  Others prayed.  But neither transplants nor medications did more than temporarily drive into remission the multiple myeloma.  I understand that God has no obligation to heal us!  We both were surrendered to God’s will, whatever it might be (dying included).  But it’s truly hard to pray or hope for much in the shadows of her passing.    

“Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’  In one sense that is most certain.  She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable” (p. 24).   There is always a mysterious hidden ness to personality.  Even while near me, Roberta was alluringly incomprehensible.  Death simply magnifies that otherness.  Yes, I knew her—and still feel I know her.  Yet without her nearby she is (as Lewis says) “incomprehensible and unimaginable.”  To be real, without the body, is something to believe, but not to fathom.  But, as Lewis reasons, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was.  I mistook clouds of atoms for a person” (p. 28).  Reductionistic materialism fails to support the reality of human consciousness.  Mind must not be confused with molecular motion.  In the words of a great neuroscientist, John Eccles, a Nobel Prize winner:  “We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world” (p. 29).  Persons transcend things.  Roberta was and is a person who was embodied for 67 years.  

An unexpected consequence of his suffering, Lewis notes, is “the laziness of grief” (p. 5).  Perhaps this is because:  “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable” (p. 28).  “And grief still feels like fear.  Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense.  Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.  It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.  It doesn’t seem worth starting anything.  I can’t settle down.  I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much.  Up till now I always had too little time.  Now there is nothing but time.  Almost pure time, empty successiveness” (p. 33).  “The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away, but what will follow?” he wonders.  “Just this apathy, this dead flatness?            . . . .  Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?” (p. 36).  

Nor did I anticipate how listless one becomes in the wake of death.  There’s a strange ennui, a disinterest in doing anything beyond necessary daily tasks.  Like him, “I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired” (p. 60).  After a lifetime of insatiable reading, I find myself picking up and laying down books in a few minutes.  It’s actually a physical sensation, this lack of energy.  And I, who routinely retired at 10:00 p.m., now stay up late and sleep late—reversing a lifelong pattern!  I watch lots of videos and TV, finding it impossible to read much at night.  In some ways I resolutely face reality, never pretending I’m just fine without her.  I think I’m honest about the utter solitariness of my situation.  And yet, there’s still much I do to evade the aching reality of her absence.  

Lewis often wonders at the mysterious one-flesh nature of Christian marriage.  Male and female are, by nature, somewhat at odds.  “Marriage heals this.  Jointly the two become fully human.  ‘In the image of God created he them.’  Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.  And then one or other dies” (p. 49).    There is a literal truth to this conjugal union that one realizes when the bond is broken and part of you departs.  I need Roberta with me to be what I’m designed to be!  But the union can never be total.  “There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’  You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain” (p. 13).  However close we were, only she knew the anguish of her disease.  Only she suffered the interminable treatments.  Only she knew the inescapable depression of unanswered prayers and failed procedures.  She never complained, never seemed angry, rarely wept in my presence.  “I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.  The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine.  We were setting out on different roads” (p. 13).  Different roads:  hers to Glory; mine to Gethsemane.  

“If, as I can’t help suspecting,” Lewis says, “the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.  It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.  It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.  We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here.  Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves through the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love” (p. 50).  How helpful this is!  To imagine that separation is but another step in the dance of love—a process divesting one of self-absorption while focusing (primarily through grief) upon the lover—is worth pondering.  

Lewis also wondered about the sanctifying aspects Joy’s suffering, when “month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel while she wore it” (p. 42).  “The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness” (43).  He then compares God to a loving surgeon who insists on operating, at considerable pain to us, in order to ultimately heal.  Nothing is more helpful (if hard to accept) than this:  God wills our good—holiness; certain processes, sickness and death included—contribute to this good.  Roberta’s suffering (and my current emotional trauma) are both part of becoming what God ultimately wills for us.  Clinging to the hope rooted in this belief makes some of our sorrow palatable.  

Implicit in the well-intended but usually unwelcome “how are you doing?” inquiries is the assumption that you must soon “get over” the loss of your loved one.  As Lewis notes, “the words are ambiguous.  To say a patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg cut off is quite another.  After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies.  If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop.  Presently he’ll get his strength back and be able to stump about on his wooden leg.  He has ‘got over it.’  But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man.  There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it” (p. 52).  Lewis then notes the various things one continues to do—and continuously senses the loss of the limb.  But some things are forever gone.  “All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off.  Duties too.  At present I am learning to get about on a wooden leg.  But I shall never be a biped again” (p. 53).  What powerful analogies Lewis employs!  Many of us describe the loss of a spouse as an amputation.  But only Lewis has the skill to flesh out the comparison so as to enable one to see this.  In truth a major part of me is gone!  I’m crippled by Roberta’s death.  What I was for 44 years I’ll never be again.  Inasmuch as I’m alive I assume a natural kind of healing is taking place.  But it’s not a healing to my prior condition.  It’s only a healing that will enable me to limp about.  “I shall never be biped again.”  How lamentably true.  

“Still there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under an obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness” (p. 53).  Neither Lewis nor I could have anticipated this peculiar disposition.  And both he (then) and I (now) suspect our deceased spouses disapprove!  So why harbor such a feeling?  “Partly, no doubt, vanity.  We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in that huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job” (p. 53).  

But, he perceptively continues, what really drives us to cling to our sorrow is mistaking symptom for reality.   What we really cherish is the reality of a union that persists despite death.  We want to  preserve our marriage, forever.  “If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase.  We don’t want to escape them at the price of desertion or divorce.  . . . .   We were one flesh.  Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete.  We will be still married, still in love.  Therefore we still will ache.  But we are not—if we understand ourselves—seeking the aches for their own sake.  The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved.  And the more joy there can be in the marriage between the dead and the living, the better” (p. 543).  Lewis then notes that Joy is closer to him as he remembers good times rather than when he grieves at her loss.  

In time, Lewis sensed how rightly remembering his wife pointed him to God.  He had no “good” pictures of his wife, but at times he thought of her as a sword, because of her sharp mind.  At other times he compared her to a lush, nurturing garden.  “Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith.  To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful” (p. 63).   Fortunately I have many good pictures of Roberta, many taken on the trips she took while exploring the world.  They are, in a sense, icons for me.  And when I think of her as a homemaker, or as a craftsman, I see her busily engaged making beautiful wreaths and clothes.  She was so gracious and loving.  Remembering her I think of the Lord who made and redeemed her.  And yet:  “All reality is iconoclastic.  The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her.  And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness.  That is, in her foursquare and independent reality.  And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead” (p. 66).  While I loved all the things Roberta did for me, I most deeply loved her.  What I miss most is not the things she did (though I’m certainly handicapped without her cooking and housekeeping skills) but simply her presence.  It’s her being I love.  

Lewis interrogated himself, wondering if he loved Joy more than God, craved to see her more than Him in the hereafter.  I too ponder this.  My thoughts about heaven these days center largely on her.  I know that without Christ all we hope for is vain.  But in my heart I mainly long to be with her.  Both Lewis and I know we must properly prefer God above all in order to attain our final end.  So we ask:  “Lord, are these your real terms?  Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?  Consider, Lord, how it looks to us” (p. 68).  He then notes, as I often did while Roberta battled cancer, that “Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged to never see her again.  I’d have had to.  Any decent person would” (p. 69).  To never see Roberta in order to obtain life for her would have been difficult but doable, I think.  It would have been bearable because despite the absence there would still have been the assurance of her being alive and flourishing.  Having said all this, however, if the Gospel is true and she’s alive and well, as never before, then I must be content with the knowledge that her being is ever sustained by the “One in whom we live and move and have our being.”  

Describing one of his sudden awakenings to his late wife’s persisting presence, Lewis said:  “It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down.  It was incredibly unemotional.  Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own, not ‘soul’ as we tend to think of soul.  . . . .  Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers.  . . . .  Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention.  No sense of joy or sorrow.  No love even in our ordinary sense.  No un-love.  I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like.  Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy.  An intimacy that had not passed through the senses at all” (p. 73).  

Like Lewis, I’ve had a few powerful moments wherein I acutely sensed Roberta’s presence.  For instance, in the early hours of March 15, I suddenly said “Hi, honey,” simply acknowledging her very real being there at that moment.    I wasn’t dreaming.  Admittedly, when one lies awake in the night there’s a certain semi-consciousness to it all.  But I knew, in a powerful way, that she was there.  (One of the mysterious developments since her death is my referring to her as “Honey,” a word I never once used while she lived!  I just began, almost immediately following her death, to refer to her thusly!)  Lewis aptly describes what I sensed—no emotion at all, just a clear recognition of what is.  For me it was less an awareness of her “mind” than her “being.”  She was mysteriously present (here, or there, but somewhere!) and I spoke to her.  My mood, like Lewis’s, was “cheerful” inasmuch as I just felt good to know she was there.  This all happened in a brief moment—one of those precious moments of assurance that I too easily forget when I lapse into my gloomy times.  

“Wherever it came from, “Lewis continued, “it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind.  The dead could be like this; sheer intellects” (p. 74).  He found he didn’t need emotional comfort.  “The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it” (p. 74).  Rather than being the nebulous, ethereal spirits portrayed in New Age (deeply Gnostic) materials, the departed are:  “Above all, solid.  Utterly reliable.  Firm.  There is no nonsense about the dead” (p. 75).  Indeed!  How good it is to imagine (as I endeavor to do) our departed loved ones as the substantial figures portrayed in Lewis’s incomparable The Great Divorce.  As is evident from this review, C.S. Lewis’s words have blessed me as I have observed an almost identical grief to that described in A Grief Observed.  

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

Similar, in many ways, to A Grief Observed is Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, c. 1987).  Wolterstorff is one of several world-class philosophers matriculated by Calvin College half-a-century ago, ultimately teaching at Yale University.  This brief meditation was written following the death of his 25 year-old son, Eric, who fell while climbing a mountain in Germany.  “If he was worth loving,” the father writes, “he is worth grieving over.  Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved.  That worth abides” (p. 5).  

Not to be avoided or repressed, grief is a healthy reaction to the loss of a precious person.  No love, no grief; much love, much grief.  “So I own my grief.  I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it.  I do not try to dis-own it” (p. 5).  Though it may be difficult to own it “redemptively,” it must, inasmuch as one is honest, be owned.  As we remember we lament, for it’s “a part of life.”  Indeed:  “Every lament is a love-song” (p. 6).  Wolterstorff stresses the centrality of remembering in the Jewish and Christian traditions.  Consequently, we must strive to rightly remember our loved ones!  To those who counsel forgetting and getting on with life, we must resolutely reply:  remembering is a way of loving, and remembering one who has died means mourning.  

“Nothing fills the void of his absence.  He’s not replaceable” (p. 32).  Though Wolterstorff had four other children, it was as if he lost his only son because there was only one Eric.  “There’s a hole in the world now” (ibid).  The loss of a being’s presence creates a void.  The loss of a person creates an absolute void.  “But please:  don’t say it’s not really so bad.  Because it is.  Death is awful, demonic” (p. 34).  It’s in fact impossible to exaggerate its evil.  It carries with it the loss of all that’s good.  Yet it must be stated that grief is episodic rather than constant.  The dark moments easily overwhelm the rest of one’s day.  It’s easy to overstate—and thus indulge in self-pity—the devastation one feels.  But it’s still devastating.  

After wrestling with dark doubts, C.S. Lewis realized that “It was allowed to one [Jesus Christ], we are told, and find I can now believe again, that he has done vicariously whatever can be so done” (Grief Observed, p. 44).  Out of his despair, Lewis finally found comfort in Christ.  While Roberta was dying I found solace solely in remembering that the Son of God had also suffered and died—the absolutely best Person was not exempt from sin’s penalty.  Thank God for Gethsemane and Calvary, for only Christ’s  suffering comforts us who suffer.  As Lewis said, “Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive god.’  Sometimes it is hard to say so much.  But if our faith is true, he didn’t.  He crucified Him” (p. 28).  If God Himself suffered and died, I could not insist Roberta not!   

Like Lewis (and Job of old), Nicholas Wolterstorff finally found his way to a certain equilibrium.  It was not in a philosophical position, though he is one of the world’s finest philosophers.  He found that only in the Cross, where one sees the Son of God suffer and die, is there real consolation.  Our tears and sobs are legitimate and good.  “Blessed are they who mourn.”  And when (in God’s good time) the tears no longer blind us we can at last look up and see Jesus, there is a promised blessedness in mourning.  

To understand what motivates Islamic Jihadists one should read first-hand accounts such as Brigitte Gabriel’s Because They Hate:  A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, c. 2006), that give specificity to events in the Middle East.  Born in Lebanon, when it was still a peaceful, prosperous, predominantly Christian country, she witnessed the chaos and destruction that followed the Islamic invasion of her homeland 40 years ago.  Now living in the United States, she writes this book to warn Americans “that what happened to me and my country of birth could, terrifyingly, happen here in America” (p. 2).  We Americans simply must know this:  “The main objective in the radical Islamists’ strategy to dominate the world is the destruction of the United States.  They know that if America, the keystone, falls, then the arch of Western civilization will collapse” (p. 169).  

The only child of elderly, prosperous parents in southern Lebanon, Gabriel enjoyed, for a decade, an idyllic childhood, blessed with parties, religious holidays, good schools, and friendly neighbors.  Things changed rapidly, however, as the nation’s “open door” immigration policies allowed thousands of Palestinians to enter the country.  Following the successful establishment of the nation of Israel, growing numbers of Palestinians lived in PLO refugee camps in Jordan, from which they launched terrorist raids against Israel.  Weary of their presence, Jordan’s King Hussein expelled the Palestinians in 1970.  Subsequently, “Lebanon was the only one of twenty-two Arab countries that was willing to open its borders to a third wave of Palestinian refugees” (p. 18).  

These refugees quickly sought to seize control of their host country.  Gabriel’s home and village, located not far from the Israeli border, were reduced to rubble as Muslims routinely shelled it.  “To a ten year old, all this—the civil war and the attack against us—was bewildering.  Just as people asked ‘Why do they hate us?’ after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’  He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say.  ‘The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians.  They want us dead because they hate us’” (p. 33).  To Americans mystified by the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11, and by the Muslims’ rejoicing thereafter, she says:  “There is a three-word answer that is both simple and complex:  because they hate.  They hate our way of life.  They hate our freedom.  They hate our democracy.  They hate the practice of every religion but their own.  They don’t just disagree.  They hate” (p. 145).  

In 1982 Israeli troops occupied southern Lebanon and brought blessed peace to Gabriel’s region—a military action bringing what Europe experienced when the Nazis were defeated in 1945.  Protected by Israeli soldiers, she and her neighbors moved about freely and rebuilt their lives.    When her mother became seriously ill, Jewish military medical personnel took her to a hospital in Israel, where she received first-class treatment.  In that hospital a lifetime of anti-Jewish prejudice drained away from Gabriel.  The Israelis were even treating Islamic terrorists!  “I realized at that moment,” she says, “that I had been sold a fabricated lie by my government and culture about the Jews and Israel that was far from reality.  I knew for a fact, as someone raised in the Arab world, that if I had been a Jew in an Arab hospital, I would have been lynched and then thrown to the ground, and joyous shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ would have echoed through the hospital and the surrounding streets” (p. 79).  

In that Jewish hospital, Gabriel volunteered to serve as a translator.  This led in time to a job with a Jerusalem television station, where she worked for six years.  There the contrast between Judaism and Islam was striking.  On the Jewish side, “you see order, structure, cleanliness, and beautiful flowers planted everywhere” (p. 103).  A block away, in the Muslim section, dirt and disorder prevail.  The “clash of civilizations” shines forth every day in Jerusalem.  And at work, helping prepare daily newscasts, the clash seemed overwhelmingly clear, and she “began to realize that the Arab Muslim world, because of its religion and culture, is a natural threat to civilized people of the world, particularly Western Civilization” (p. 105).  Working as a journalist, Gabriel saw the astoundingly favorable treatment Western media gave homicidal thugs like Yasser Arafat.  Ever portraying the PLO in positive ways—and Israelis as villains—American journalists greatly helped the jihadists.  “Unable to defeat Western military superiority, our enemy depends on negative themes throughout the media to create disunity, opening schisms on the home front in our communities, on our campuses, and in our government” (p. 111).  Noting that “General Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, was asked why America was defeated in Vietnam.  He said:  ‘America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win’” (p. 112).  In our “fight against Islamo-fascism” these words should give us pause.  

Living in Jerusalem, she watched foreign TV “journalists” who “blew in, blew around, and blew out.  They came with their preconceived ideas, toed the network editorial policy line, and perpetuated,” albeit unconsciously, the “subtle Arab and PLO propaganda, which had reached them wherever they came from.”  They loved to photograph “wailing Palestinians” and “kids throwing stones against border patrol soldiers firing tear gas and rubber bullets.  Because I could speak the language and read the Arabic press and knew the nuances behind events, I sensed that reporters were being manipulated” (p. 119).  Thus it was with a both amazement and anger Gabriel “watched the West fall further under the spell of anti-West, anti-Israeli propaganda, just as it did during its coverage of Lebanon, which portrayed the Palestinians and Islamo-fascists as the victims instead of the aggressors” (p. 119).  

Gabriel is alarmed by this because she has carefully observed developments in the Middle East—and America’s response to them—since 1975.  When, in the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, President Jimmy Carter “alternately groveled and bungled, Ayatollah Khomeini exultingly proclaimed, ‘America cannot do a damn thing!’  This became a slogan and a battle cry throughout the Middle East” (p. 125).  Though markedly different from Carter in many ways, President Ronald Reagan behaved similarly in Lebanon.  When Hezbollah, subsidized and controlled by Iran, “blew up the marines in Lebanon in 1983, America turned tail and ran, leaving the Christians to be slaughtered in town after town.  It sent a strong, loud, and clear message to the Muslim radicals of the world, including Osama bin Laden:  America is no longer the power it used to be” (p. 125).  That being so, Sudanese Muslims, in 1983, launched a genocidal “jihad to impose Islam on black African Christians and animists in the southern part of the country” (p. 125).  Some two million innocent people were killed within a decade.  

She further provides brief accounts of other Islamic aggressions since 1979.  It’s a world-wide phenomenon with enormous implications.  And it’s taking place within the United States as well.  Radical Muslims, funded by Saudi Arabian petrodollars, are working hard to Islamize this country, though they present a benign face to the public.  “Masquerading as a civil rights organization,” for example, CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) “has had a hidden agenda to Islamize America from the start” (p. 138).  Gabriel documents and laments the degree to which Saudi money and compliant professors have established influential footholds for radical Islam on many university campuses.  To deal with this threat, at home and abroad, reading this book, with its many suggestions concerning what to do, is most helpful.  

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An equally readable book, addressing the same issue and coming to basically the same conclusion, though from a markedly different perspective, is Nonie Darwish’s Now They Call Me Infidel:  Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2006).  Darwish was born into an elite Egyptian family, and her father was a highly placed officer in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s army, considered “one of the most brilliant analytical minds found in the Egyptian military” by an Israeli historian (p. 255).  Unfortunately, he was assassinated by Israeli agents while stationed in Gaza in 1956.  In death, however, he became a celebrated “shahid,” a martyr for Islam, a national hero.  Subsequently, the family settled in Cairo, where Darwish received an excellent education in a Catholic girls’ school and then the American University in Cairo.  She enjoyed the unique economic and social privileges of her class.  But she was also fully immersed in the culture of Islam.  From the radio, as well as the mosques, came “calls to war and songs praising President Nasser.  Arab leaders were treated as gods and they acted as gods” (p. 33).  The call for jihad was ubiquitous.  “No Arab could avoid the culture of jihad.  Jihad is not some esoteric concept.  In the Arab world, the meaning of jihad is clear:  It is a religious holy war against infidels, an armed struggle against anyone who is not a Muslim” (p. 33).

Yet she found herself inwardly torn by some of the incongruities of her world, especially when dealing with “marriage and family dynamics.”  She managed to avoid the arranged marriages expected of  Muslim women.  And she observed that “at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism lies the most precious and important object, the woman.  She is the source of pride or shame to the Muslim man who rules and is ruled by the most despotic, tyrannical, and humiliating forms of governments on earth” (p. 66).  Muslim men’s “honor is totally dependent on their female blood relatives” (p. 66).  Personal honor and integrity are not particularly important.  It’s their women that establish their “honor”!  

Darwish also struggled with the reality of polygamy and its power in Islamic culture.  Married women ever fear that their husbands will take a second wife—often secret liaisons divulged only at the man’s death, when his estate must be divided among all his wives.  Muslim women, consequently, distrust both their husbands and any single women who might attract them.  Then there is the “temporary marriage,” also known as “pleasure marriage,” empowering men to have one-night stands, “usually in exchange for money (calling it a dowry), and still feel that it is acceptable in the eyes of God” (p. 68).  Men may easily divorce their wives, whereas women must beg (often unsuccessfully) for a dissolution of a dysfunctional union.  Consequently, Darwish found “very few happy marriages around me” (p. 79).  As a single woman Darwish worked for several years at the English desk of the Middle East News Agency.  This gave her a unique perspective on the world and also occasionally allowed her to travel abroad.  She became aware of a world quite different from that described by the Egyptian media.  She also made friends with Copts—Christian Egyptians who had suffered for centuries.  In fact she fell in love with and married a Coptic man, with whom she immigrated to the United States in 1978.  

Landing in Los Angeles, she acknowledges that she “loved America even before seeing it” (p. 113).  She found Americans friendly and helpful, courteous, hard-working, generous and honest—virtues  largely absent in Egypt.  She worked for a Jewish businessman and found that most everything she had heard about Jews in Egypt was wrong.  “I asked myself, Why the hate?  What purpose does it serve?  What are Arabs afraid of?”  Indeed, she concluded:  “The Arab-Israel conflict is not a crisis over land, but a crisis of hate, lack of compassion, ingratitude, and insecurity” (p. 126).  American women differed from the women she’d grown up around.  They were supportive of each other, complimenting and helping in various ways.  “Moving to America,” she says, in a memorable passage, “was like being catapulted to another time in history.  America for me was not just a place for making money, having a job, a house, and car, it was a place for becoming a human being” (p. 130).  

Part of that process was religious.  Though she remained a Muslim she hungered for an authentically personal relationship with God.  “The truth is that most Muslims are a part of ‘political Islam’ rather than a religion and a personal relationship with God” (p. 136).  Islam, for her (and most Muslims) is a matter of birth and politics.  Mosques are mainly for men, whom women are expected to obey.  To her dismay, she found “that rabid anti-American feeling is rampant in the majority of U.S. mosques, where Muslims are encouraged to stand out as mujahadeen in America” (p. 140).  Using America’s democratic processes, these Muslims seek to ultimately control the nation.  Knowing the history of Islam, Darwish says:  “The current onslaught against our society is nothing new.  Conquering the world for Islam has been going on since the seventh century using pretty much the same tactics” (p. 144).  

In time, Darwish had to reject her family’s religion.  One Sunday morning she was watching a Christian preacher on TV, who was expounding the love chapter in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  She heard about “the love of God I was desperate for but was unable to find in my culture of origin” (p. 160).   Her daughter came in and announced that the TV preacher pastored the church that sponsored the Christian school she attended.   So Darwish determined to visit the church the following Sunday.  She did and heard “a message of compassion, love, acceptance, tolerance, and prayer for all of humanity” (p. 159).  This message was differed radically from the hate-filled diatribes, urging Muslims to “destroy the infidels,” propounded by most Muslim preachers.  At that moment, sitting for the first time in that Christian church, this Muslim woman “was faced with a challenge, nothing less than the choice between love and hate” (p. 159).  She made a decision, and it made a difference.  Evaluating this, she writes:  “Many immigrants come to this great nation in search of material gain, which is fine; however, the biggest prize I gained was my religious freedom and learning to love.  For me it was nothing short of cataclysmic.  I had turned from a culture of hatred to one of love” (p. 161).  Though still apparently a Muslim, her God is not a jihadist!

Her new perspective provides readers a lens with which to evaluate developments in the Middle East.  When she made a brief trip to Egypt (arriving home in L.A. the night before the  terrorist attacks on  September 11, 2002, she saw again the deadening hand of Islam upon her land.  She heard again the lies about the Jews.  She sensed the irrational anti-Americanism promoted by the media, including the only U.S. media outlet available to Egyptians, CNN!  “To my surprise,” she says, CNN contributed to Arab hatred and suspicion of America by regularly criticizing America and President Bush” (p. 175).  She noted the pernicious impact of money from Saudi Arabia, funding radical jihadists.  And she sorrowed at the injurious impact of Islam upon the nation’s women, including many in her own family.

Mystified at the silence of allegedly “moderate” Muslims who failed to denounce the jihadists, Darwish began writing and speaking, trying to inform America about the threat of radical Islam.  “In the Arab world,” she insists, “there is only one meaning for jihad, and that is:  a religious holy war against infidels” (p. 201).  That’s what we now face everywhere.  Portraying Islam as a peaceful religion “can only bring disaster between the two worlds” (p. 202).  She especially critiques America’s universities, where the Muslims are afforded unusual support and easily propagandize naïve students.  “The war of words and propaganda,” she warns, “could be as vital as the actual military war” (p. 211).  The message she declares is clear.  “After 9/11, my fellow Americans should never be in the dark again.  They must understand the brutality and persistence of their enemy” (p. 212).  Radical Muslims intend to conquer the world “and to usher in a Caliphate—that is, a supreme totalitarian Islamic government” (p. 212).  They will do anything possible to accomplish this goal.  “they are willing to bring about an Armageddon to conquer the world to Islam.  We are already in world War III and many people in the West are still in denial” (p. 212).  

She hopes that reading Now They Call Me Infidel will shake some of us out of such denial!  

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An immigrant from India, Dinesh D’Souza, gives us his analysis of the Middle East crisis in The Enemy At Home:  The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2007).  Unlike Brigette Gabriel, who lived amongst Muslims, D’Souza takes a more genial view of Islam, trying to see things as Muslims see them, arguing that radical Muslims are a small minority within an overwhelmingly moderate (though deeply religious) culture.  Too many of these moderates, however, share the anti-American animus of the radicals.  But what they actually hate, D’Souza insists, is the America represented by the cultural left in this country.  Furthermore, he argues, the cultural left hates not America herself but the conservative America personified by George Bush.  

Muslims hate us not (as President Clinton once averred) because of the Christian Crusades, which were hardly noticed until recently by Muslim historians, who now find them useful for propaganda.  Nor is it because of oil and multinational corporations.  In fact, most Muslims welcome foreign investment and technological developments.  Moderate Muslims are, however, deeply offended by the America personified by this country’s cultural left—especially in Hollywood, the universities, and the media.  As the left promotes its world-wide agenda, devout Muslims feel their religion is under attack.  D’Souza sees authentic hate for America not so much in Muslims but in cultural leftists who hate conservative America.   

Consequently, the “cultural left is unwilling to fight a serious and sustained battle against Islamic radicalism and fundamentalism because it is fighting a more threatening political battle against American conservatism and American fundamentalism” (p. 10).  Defeat of the American military in Iraq is preferable to victory in any arena for George Bush.  Amazingly, “the left seeks America’s most devastating foreign policy defeat, surpassing even America’s loss in the Vietnam War” (p. 192) because it hates George Bush and James Dobson!  The cultural left hates anything that threatens their antinomian, nihilistic, individual, libertine autonomy.  Thus they defend virtually all forms of vulgarity, immodesty, indecency, pornography, same-sex marriage, abortion, etc.  Their position is visibly evident at noisy demonstrations where “banners and placards say ‘Save Roe v. Wade’ on one side and ‘Impeach Bush’on the other” (p. 191).  

For example, Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, the chairman of the Black Studies Department, finds great value in the “so-called obscenity” rap lyrics of 2 Live Crew, comparing them to Shakespeare!  Martha Nussbaum, an influential liberal philosopher, celebrates promiscuous theatrical productions, commending to her readers the example of “the Athenian thinker Crates and his lover, Hipparchia, who ‘copulated in public and went off together to dinner parties.’  For Nussbaum this couple demonstrates ‘the life of the cosmopolitan’ at its best’” (p. 124).   That Al Gore can praise, and the Academy Awards showcase, a lesbian such as Ellen DeGeneres simply documents the moral rot at the heart of this nation.  Such liberals—represented by Michael Moore, Al Franken, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jane Fonda, et al.—have done everything possible to oppose President Bush’s war on terror.  They are more committed to the “war against the war” that “is being waged by the left with mainstream liberal encouragement” (p. 234).  These are the people Osama bin Laden regularly cites in his videotaped statements.  “To see how bizarre this is, imagine if Hitler had issued regular missives during World War II in which he praised a group of Americans and cited from their writings” (p. 214).  Jihadists like bin Laden, following the lead of Vietnamese Communists, have effectively developed a “media strategy” to discredit America, and they have been enormously assisted by American leftists.  

These leftists must be intellectually defeated here at home, D’Souza believes, before the war on terror can be won around the world.  

# # # 

For anyone interested in historical data—both documents and excerpts from respected historians—demonstrating the validity of the books I’ve reviewed, perusing  725 pages of The Legacy of Jihad:  Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, edited by Andrew G. Bostom (New York:  Prometheus Books, c. 2005) will prove persuasive.  “Bostom has provided an invaluable service,” writes a noted scholar, Bat Ye’or, “an invaluable service to both scholars and lay audiences with the comprehensive analysis of jihad.”  His “exhaustive research,” she continues, “is of paramount importance for an understanding of both the history and the contemporary resurgence of jihad, in all its manifestations, including the current cultural jihad subverting Western universities.”  

As you would expect, I’ve thought much of Heaven since my wife’s death last August.  Giving me guidance are books that provide scriptural, philosophical, and testimonial perspectives—solid sources for Christian belief.  Randy Alcorn’s Heaven (Carol Stream, IL:  Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., c. 2004) certainly provides what Rick Warren considers “the best book on Heaven I’ve ever read.”  (I thank my friend Ron Bynum for recommending this book shortly after my wife died).  Alcorn prefaces his biblical discussion with a brief reference to history and anthropology, where ample “evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is” (p. xvii).  He cites St. Cyprian, who said that death “‘sets us free from the snares of the world, and restores us to paradise and the kingdom.  Anyone who has been in foreign lands longs to return to his own native land . . . .  We regard Paradise as our native land’” (p. xviii).  Alcorn then dedicates his book to all who are “burdened discouraged, depressed, or even traumatized” (p. xx).  Only Heaven can salve our deepest sorrows.

“‘It becomes us,’ wrote the great American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, ‘to spend this life only as a journey toward heaven . . . to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life.  Why should we labor for or set our hearts on anything else, but that which is our proper end and true happiness?’” (p. 5).  Scripture devotes much attention to this ultimate end, though today’s teachers and preachers say little about it.   “What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ:  a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth.  Our desires correspond precisely to God’s plans” (p. 7).  

Our lack of interest in Heaven betrays an atrophied imagination.  In his fictional works C.S. Lewis activates this essential human faculty.  Using the imagination, Alistair McGrath says, affirms “‘the critical role of the God-given human capacity to construct and enter into mental pictures of divine reality, which are mediated through Scripture and the subsequent tradition of reflection and development’” (p. 15).  Still more, Lewis said:  “‘While reason is the natural organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning’” (p. 22).  Alcorn then develops “a theology of heaven,” differentiating between the “present” and “eternal” heavens.  At death the redeemed go immediately to a “present” or “intermediate” Heaven.  At the end of time and the resurrection of the body and the final judgment, they will enter the “eternal” Heaven—or the New Earth that will be established for them.  Though not yet enjoying their resurrected bodies, residents of the present Heaven occupy a unique space and enjoy a mysteriously embodied existence—as was evident when Moses and Elijah appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration.  

Adam was first made a physical being, then given a spirit.  So, Alcorn reasons, “God may grant us some physical form that will allow us to function as human beings while in that unnatural state ‘between bodies,’ awaiting our resurrection” (p. 57).  Since the Resurrected Jesus has a body, “If Christ’s body in the present Heaven has physical proportion, it stands to reason that others in Heaven might have physical forms as well, even if only temporary ones” (p. 59).  “It might be better, then, if we think of the location of the present Heaven as not in another universe but simply as a part of ours that we are unable to see, due to our spiritual blindness.  If that’s true, when we die we don’t go to a different universe but to a place within our universe that we’re currently unable to see” (p. 184).  To envision this possibility, note how contemporary physicists who routinely talk about a dozen or so invisible “dimensions” to the universe!

Sifting through the Scriptures, Alcorn finds no less than 21 details concerning the saints in the present Heaven.  They are the same persons, conscious of their new place, remember their earthly life, know what’s happening on earth, pray for us, wear robes, have a sense of time, and feel bound to believers on earth.  “There is not a wall of separation within the bride of Christ.  We are one family with those who’ve gone to Heaven ahead of us” (p. 67).  While he’s firmly Protestant, this position squares precisely with the Catholic tradition regarding the “communion of saints,” defined clearly by The Catechism of the Catholic Church:  “So it is that the union of the wayfarers with the brethren who sleep in the place of Christ is in no way interrupted, but on the contrary, according to the constant faith of the Church, this union is reinforced by an exchange of spiritual goods” (#955).  

At the end of time, Alcorn insists we will be restored to the Earth God initially envisioned.  The New Earth will be the original Eden Adam lost.  Though scarred by sin, this earth is at least a shadow of the New Earth.  So to think about the eternal heaven it helps to look about us and rejoice in the mountains and streams, the music and sunsets, that daily ennoble our lives.  “It is no coincidence that the first two chapters of the Bible (Genesis 1-2) begin with the creation of the heavens and the earth and the last two chapters (Revelation 21-22) begin with the recreation of the heavens and the earth” (p. 132).  

After setting forth his “theology” of heaven, Alcorn turns to answering common questions regarding it.  We will live (sin excepted) much like we live now.  We will eat and drink, read and study and discuss new truths, work creatively, enjoy fellowship with friends and family.  Married ties will be strengthened and the joys of the man-wife relationship intensified.  Animals will be there, occupying their niche in God’s design.  For all these positions Alcorn has texts.  And frequently he cites respected authorities, ranging from Augustine to Wesley to C.S. Lewis, to support his views.  The book is helpful and persuasive—simply the place to begin thinking biblically about the hereafter.  

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Equally valuable to me is a philosophical treatise by Boston College’s Professor Peter Kreeft, titled Heaven:  The Heart’s Deepest Longing  (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1980).  “This book,” he says, “is the thought-experiment of looking with the eye of the heart and exploring what we see of the deep desire hidden there, the desire for heaven” (p. 39).  He begins by noting that the “question of hope is at least as ultimate as the other two great questions [what can I know?  what ought I do?].  For it means “‘what is the point and purpose of life?  Why was I born?  Why am I living?’” (p. 12).  All of us wonder, at times at least, “Is that all there is?” (p. 46).  Historically, as is evident in everything from Indian burial mounds to Egyptian pyramids, man has above all hoped for heaven, however variously envisioned.  

What all men long for, Aristotle persuasively argued, is happiness.  And this happiness, added Pascal, “is neither outside nor inside us:  it is in God, both outside and inside us” (p. 32).  Pascal further said that the heart has its reasons that reason never knows, and when we honestly look within (listening to our hearts), Kreeft says, there is  “a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled, impregnated by your divine lover.  Heaven is God’s body; earth is ours” (p. 35).  Though our minds may open up mathematical means to decipher the universe, our hearts give us different but equally valid and valuable truths regarding ourselves.  

Love also has its ways of knowing, a clairvoyant “X-ray vision” (p. 37), seeing the essence of things.    “Only one who loves you really knows you, and the deeper the love, the deeper the knowledge.  The non-lover may know everything about you, but only the lover knows you” (p. 37).  So thinking about heaven is an exercise of the heart and of love.  Inasmuch as we love God we come to know Him.  Inasmuch as we lovingly long for happiness and heaven we come to know them.  As Malcolm Muggeridge said, in Jesus Rediscovered:   “‘I had a sense, of something enormously vivid, that I was a stranger in a strange land; a visitor, not a native . . . a displaced person.”  Consequently, he concluded:   “The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth.  As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland’” (p. 63).   

Such musings are prodded by the genuinely strange dimensions of earthly realities such as time.  At times it seems we never have enough time.  At other times we wonder if the clock will ever change.  We think much about the future and the past, wondering how things will be and how things were.  In a moment we can encompass the centuries in our minds.  To Kreeft, our “nostalgia for Eden is not just for another time but for another kind of time” (p. 70).   Underlying all our musings on time, we truly “long for the infinitely old and the infinitely new because we long for eternity” (p. 80).  “Time and death make life precious, but they do not make it eternal.  But that is what we long for (‘thou hast put eternity into Man’s heart’), even if we do not know what it is” (p. 73).  Facing death we long to live on, forever and ever.  

Clues to eternal, heavenly bliss may be found, Kreeft suggests, in our authentically personal relationships.  Consider, for example, how much a person reveals through his face.  There is a “numinous, most magical” quality to the face, for here mind controls matter.  “A human face is more than a part of the body, an object; it is a part of the soul, a subject, an I.  It is the place where soul still transfigures body as its Creator designed it to” (p. 99).  Furthermore, romantic love, like a face, reveals a deep inner reality.  “It is like a sacrament in that way:  a special sign of a general truth, a local reminder of a universal reality” (pp.101).  That’s because:  “As the face is the epiphany of the person, the person is the epiphany of the universe, the universe’s face as seen by the ‘haunt detector’ called romantic love” (p. 101-102).  Readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy remember that “God appeared to Dante as a Beatrice-shaped glory.  Yet Beatrice was not obliterated by the divine light.  Dante did not merely pass through Beatrice to God; he found God in Beatrice.  He did not love Beatrice less because he loved God more” (p. 102).  “Romantic love is a powerful image of the love of God because, unlike lust, it does not desire a possessable and consumable thing (like a body).  It wants not to possess but to be possessed, not by the beloved but by love itself, the reality in which both lovers stand” (p. 107).   

Our world, Kreeft says, is not really distant from heaven.  Rather, “heaven includes earth as the soul includes the body.  My soul includes my body because it is my me, my personhood, and part of this is what I call ‘my’ body” (p. 115).  Earth’s an accurate image, a shadow of Heaven, which is “more real, more substantial than earth,” has “more dimensions than earth, not fewer,” and is “clearer, more detailed and specific than earth, not vaguer” (pp. 116-117).  The Eternal Word indwells both Heaven and Earth.  He is “Christ the Haunter, the incarnate divine Mind, the Logos.  . . . .  The divine Idea perfectly and completely expressed before the world was created, the divine Word that was the instrument creating the universe, the divine design reflected in all created order, finally focuses at this single point:  a human individual who says ‘I am’, claming to be the divine I AM ‘before Abraham was’.  All signs lead to him because all signs come from him” (p. 118).  Rightly seeing His world we see his Face!  The God Whose Face was visible in Christ is the great “I AM who says, ‘I am with you always’, and that I AM is the absolute, the unchangeable, the utterly reliable.  Our I is flighty, relative, and unreliable.  But our I can plug into the I Am and then it and its joy become as eternally solid as the joy of I AM.  Faith is that plug. (p. 160) 

What we hope for in Heaven is a continuous state of joy, an extension of those moments of joy we experience while on Earth.  Such joy is a truly ecstatic—rooted outside of us, not inside us—reality.  “Just as love is not in us but we are ‘in love’ (‘it’s bigger than both of us’), joy is not in us but we are in it:  ‘Enter into the joy of thy Lord’” (p. 145).  “Heaven is ek-stasis; hell is in-stasis.  Heaven in coinherence; hell is incoherence.  Heaven is aspiration; hell is greed.  Heaven is love; hell is lust” (p. 150).  Joy comes to those who fully, and finally, submit their wills to God’s will.  “In His will,” said Dante, “is our peace,” and “’Thy will be done,’” echoes Kreeft, “is the infallible road to total joy” (p. 158).

Submission to God’s will here-and-now gives us a foretaste of Heaven, for “Earth is not outside heaven; it is heaven’s workshop, heaven’s womb” (p. 172).  Seen from this perspective, we are not “pie-in-the-sky” daydreamers fantasizing a better world.  Indeed, “Heaven is not escapist because we are already there, just as the fetus in the womb is already in the world because the womb is in the world and subject to its laws, such as the laws of gravity and genetics” (p. 174).  Still more:  “Heaven is not a thing or even a place; it is a Person; that’s why it (he) is present.  Heaven is where God is—God defines heaven, not heaven, God—and God is present in every place” (p. 175).  All who will may enter, for we are justified by faith—and our “faith is in God’s present (gift) of his Present (now) presence (here)” (p. 181).  For “This is the Gospel, the scandalously good news:  that we are guaranteed heaven by sheer gift” (p. 183).  

In a profound appendix, Kreeft cogently develops a philosophical case for C.S. Lewis’s “argument from desire,” which he finds to be one of the most persuasive arguments for the existence for God ever advanced.  Without question “it is far more moving, arresting, and apologetically effective than any other argument for God or for heaven” (p. 201).  He sums it up thusly:  1) “The major premise of the argument is that every natural or innate desire in us bespeaks a corresponding real object that can satisfy the desire.”  2) “The minor premise is that there exists in us a desire which nothing in  time, nothing on earth, no creature, can satisfy.”  And 3) “The conclusion is that there exists something outside of time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy this desire” (p. 202).  

To his knowledge, Kreeft says, agreeing with Lewis, “No case has ever been found of an innate desire for a nonexistent object” (p. 203).  By nature we desire more than nature affords.  We desire a supernatural reality called heaven.  Even better, C.S. Lewis asserted (in The Problem of Pain):  “Your soul has a curious shape because it is . . . a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. . . .  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand” (p. 67).  

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

Two “testimonial” books, testifying to the reality of “life-after-death,” deserve perusing.  Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven:  A True Story of Death & Life  (Grand Rapids, MI:  Fleming H. Revell, c. 2004) tells the story of a Baptist pastor who had a terrible automobile accident in 1989, was declared dead at the scene, lay immobile for 90 minutes, and then revived to spend many months recovering from his injuries.  During those 90 minutes he entered heaven, where he met many people he knew who had preceded him.  While there, he says, “My heart filled with the deepest joy I’ve ever experienced” (p. 31).  Marvelous music, praising Christ the King, thrilled him and still resounds in his memory.  Colors were more vivid, people were more wonderful—all was in fact perfect.  “I was home; I was where I belonged,” he says.   “I wanted to be there more than I had ever wanted to be anywhere on earth” (p. 33).  

A more fascinating story, for me, was written three decades ago by George G. Ritchie, M.D., entitled Return from Tomorrow (Waco, TX:  Chosen Books, c. 1978).  His medical training, as well as his philosophical bent, make the book both a fascinating narrative and a meaningful reflection.  In 1943, aged 20, Ritchie was in Texas, preparing for service in WWII.  While there he was stricken by the flu, which turned into double pneumonia.  Despite the doctors’ efforts, he apparently died; they pronounced him dead and covered his face with a sheet.  From his perspective, however, he simply became immaterial.  He walked down the hospital corridors, but no one saw him.  Then he flew overland, heading toward his home in Richmond, Virginia.  He saw the countryside passing underneath.  Then he alighted in a strange town (Vicksburg, MS) and wandered about a bit, noticing specific details of it.  As in the hospital, he saw things as if he were physically present, but no one could see him—and he could easily move through solid things.

At that point he decided he needed to get back to Texas and recover his embodied state.  He returned to the hospital and “began one of the strangest searches that can ever have taken place:  the search for myself.  From one ward to another of that enormous complex I rushed, pausing in each small room, stooping over the occupant of the bed, hurrying on” (p. 42).  In time he found the room where his body lay—though the face was covered he knew it because of a distinctive ring on his left hand.  He realized that others thought he was “dead” but he really wasn’t!  While trying to get back into his body, the room suddenly turned bright—“it was like a million welders’ lamps all blazing at once” (p. 48).  The light was not an “it” but a “He,” a Man who was clearly “the Son of God” (p. 49).  This was not the Jesus he’d heard about (with considerable disinterest) in Sunday school!  He was powerful.  And He “loved me” (p. 49).  In that moment he envisioned all the details of his 20  years on earth.  And the question from the Light was:  “What did you do with your life?” (p. 52).  He realized that he’d lived, almost exclusively, for himself.  Though he had professed a faith in Jesus as a child, he hadn’t really sought to serve Him.  He realized that a life rightly lived was a life consumed by love.  

Thereafter Ritchie was taken on a journey that exposed him to various places inhabited by those who had died.  He saw self-absorbed people, self-promoting and verbally vicious and vindictive people who had made their own hell—much like the folks in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.   “With a feeling of sick familiarity I recognized here my own thinking” (p. 65).  With Jesus beside him, he realized that Jesus had not “abandoned them, but they who had fled from the Light that showed up their darkness” (p. 66).  Above all they had failed to see Him.  Then he was taken to another kind of place where people peacefully studiously in an extensive library, engaged in a great project of some sort.  They were “supremely self-forgetful” and thus utterly at peace.  They were not yet in heaven, but “They grew and they have kept on growing” (p. 71).  Finally, though at quite a distance, he was granted a glimpse of heaven itself.  “At this time I had not yet read the book of Revelation.  I could only gape in awe at this faraway spectacle, wondering how bright each building, each inhabitant, must be to be seen over so many light-years of distance.  Could these radiant being, I wondered, amazed, be those who had indeed kept Jesus the focus of their lives?” (p. 72).  

After this incredible journey, Ritchie returned to his body in the hospital, reviving nine minutes after being declared dead.  Alive again, he began to live fully.   He suddenly began to notice and care for others.  There were “no casual events for me since that night in Texas, . . . no ‘unimportant’ encounters with people.  Every minute of every day since that time, I’d been aware of the presence of a larger world” (p. 85).  Equally important, though he naturally feared the physical pain of dying, “as for death itself, I not only felt no fear of it, I found myself wishing it would happen” (p. 105).  

In time he went to medical school and, after practicing medicine for 13 years, further studied to become a psychiatrist.  Through it all, a lesson he learned while treating a Christ-like soldier in Europe remained paramount:  “in losing myself, I had discovered Christ.  It was strange, I thought:  I’d had to die in Texas, too, to see Him.  I wondered if we always had to die, some stubborn part of us, before we could see more of Him” (p. 112).  In retrospect, he reflects upon his “return from tomorrow,” saying:  “Whatever I saw was only—from the doorway, so to speak.  But it was enough to convince me totally of two things from that moment on.  One, that our consciousness does not cease with physical death—that it becomes in fact keener and more aware than ever.  And secondly, that how we spend our time on earth, the kind of relationships we build, is vastly, infinitely more important than we can know” (pp. 15-16).  

Following my wife Roberta’s death, the most meaningful book I’ve read is Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy (New York:  Bantam Books, c. 1977).    I’d read and appreciated it when it was first published three decades ago, but reading it with the weight of sorrow pressing down upon me made its message particularly powerful.  The guiding premise—a phrase from C.S. Lewis, who called the death of Vanauken’s wife a “severe mercy”—is most especially pertinent, for though God is “merciful” He does not always please nor necessarily deal gently with us.  The book also contains a number of Lewis’s letters, and therein lies part of its values for us Lewis fans.  What is striking about his letters is, 1) that Lewis would take the time to write them, given the rather minimal personal contact he’d had with Vanauken, and, 2)  depth of their thought.  That a man could, one assumes without much forethought or revision, simply dash off letters filled with such powerful insights is simply amazing!  

Compressing the book’s contents into a paragraph of memories evoked when he returned to his boyhood home, Vanauken “remembered his childhood, [but] what was really filling his mind was Davy, Davy so loved, so dear, and now a sixmonth dead.  It was she—she alone—that had brought him back to Glenmerle in the night, the girl he had loved here, the girl he had married and continued to love for a decade and a half until that winter dawn when she had blindly touched his face a last time and died with her hand in his.  Since then grief, the immensity of loss, had filled his life.  And yet, amidst the tears and the pain, there was a curious hint of consolation in one thought:  the thought that nothing now could mar the years of their love.  As he had written to his friend, C. S. Lewis in England, the manuscript of their love had gone safe to the printer” (p. 11).  Still more:    “Sitting there on the rough wood of the bridge, he remembered his absolute knowing—something beyond faith or belief—in the moments after her death, in that suddenly empty room, that she still was.  She had not ceased with that last light breath.  She and he would meet again:  ‘And with God be the rest!’” (p. 11).   

Fleshing out the book’s theme, Vanauken tells the romantic story of two young adults meeting, courting, and ultimately marrying.  In the process they constructed a “Shining Barrier” and tried to live exclusively for each other—an absolute bond secured by “the co-inherence of lovers” (p. 31), an important phrase taken from Charles Williams.  “Pagans that we were, we were not reminded of Christ’s ‘one flesh’ for marriage; if we had been, we might have felt a faint alliance with Him” (p. 32).  Following some time in Hawaii where he was stationed during WWII, and several months sailing about in the “Grey Goose” (so named because grey geese mate for life), so that they could follow their desire to be both totally united and unencumbered by other ties, they crossed the Atlantic and Sheldon entered Oxford University to pursue a graduate degree in literature.

At Oxford things dramatically changed, for here they experienced an “encounter with light” in large part because of the influence of C.S. Lewis.  Truth-seeking young scholars, they decided to look seriously at Christianity, simply because of its historical importance.  A friend recommended they read Lewis, and they fortuitously began with his space fictions trilogy—Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; and That Hideous Strength.   Vanauken is grateful that they began with the fiction rather than the apologetical works of Lewis, for “the trilogy showed me that the Christian God might, after all, be quite big enough for the whole galaxy” (p. 81).  In addition to Lewis, however, they read G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and T.S. Eliot, whose “description of the state of being a Christian lingered in our minds:  ‘A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)’” (p. 81).  Lewis, however, proved most influential, appealing to both their imaginative and logical faculties.  Though the Vanaukens only met him a few times, Lewis’s written works (and subsequent letters) proved decisive in their journey of faith.  

Davy first assented to the claims of the Christ.  She had, even before considering the Faith, been convicted of her sins, which “had come out and paraded before her, ghastly in appearance and mocking in demeanour” (p. 63).   Sheldon in time followed, though for years his “conversion” would be somewhat less transforming than hers.  He did, however, ask C.S. Lewis if (given his awakened religious interests) he should consider a clerical vocation.  Lewis wisely urged him to envision a tent-making apostolate and Vanauken continued to pursue his literary interests.  When it came time to return to the United States, Vanauken briefly met with Lewis, and as they parted the cheerfully grinning Oxford tutor said, “‘At all events we’ll certainly meet again, here—or there” (p. 123).  Crossing the street, Lewis turned to wave a final farewell.  “Then he raised his voice in a great roar that easily overcame the noise of the cars and busses.  Heads turned and at least one car swerved.  ‘Besides,’ he bellowed with a great grin, ‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’” (p. 123).  

Sheldon was offered a teaching position at a small college in Virginia, Lynchburg College, and the Vanaukens returned to familiar fields and began a somewhat idyllic existence.  He enjoyed teaching, and she pursued her own interests, especially volunteering for projects and teaching Sunday school in the local Episcopal church.  She became increasingly devout as well, diligently studying Scripture, praying, and helping host weekly meetings of students in their home.  They were, occasionally, alerted to certain currents within their denomination that were rapidly watering down traditional doctrines, and they “resolved to stand firm for the Faith once-given, and we began to be glad for the unswerving faith of Rome.  The place of last resort” (p. 126). (Many years later, he explains in Under the Mercy—a less successful sequel to A Severe Mercy—his entrance into the Roman Catholic Church.)  

Concurrently, Davy (earlier in her life quite the radical feminist, insisting on equality in every realm) became more “wifely.”  Amazingly, “She was accepting St. Paul on women and wives” (p. 137).  She remained ever patient and forgiving, despite some of his failings.  “And I knew without her saying that she had, somehow, come to a new understanding that God in His ample love embraced our love with, it may be, a sort of tenderness, and we must tread the Way to Him hand in hand.  We understood without words that we must hold the co-inherence of lovers and be Companions of the Co-inherence of the Incarnate Lord:  She in me and I in her; Christ in us and we in Him” (p. 149).  I have thought much about these words, applying them to my bond with Roberta, and I like them very much:  Companions of the Co-inherence of the Incarnate Lord:  She in me and I in her; Christ in us and we in Him.  

Then came her illness.  What seemed, initially, something of little consequence turned terminal.  When the doctor informed Vanauken there was no hope for her recovery, he suffered the “worst day” of his life.  They were both still young.  She’d seemed so vibrant, so healthy.  She lingered for several months in the hospital and suffered no pain.  But she was dying.  And he knew—in words that best describe something of what I too knew and prayed for in the days before Roberta passed away:   “If she died, I might—since, under God, I must not act to follow her—I might live for years.  Those years and all of beauty thy might contain I put into the ball.  And then I offered-up all of it to the King:  take all I have ever dreamed, all I may ever long for including the death I shall certainly long for:  I offer it up, oh Christ, for her, for her best good, death or life.  This was my offering-up.  I asked God to take all, all that was or would ever be, in holy exchange, not for her spared life which would be my good but not perhaps hers, but for her good, whatever it might be.  Later I would pray that she might recover but only if it were for her good.  That offering-up was perhaps the most purely holy and purely loving act of my life” (pp. 158-159).  

Immediately following that moment of prayerful surrender, he saw a rainbow on the horizon.  He refused to presumptiously assume that God put the rainbow in place especially for him, but he thankfully affirmed that “God would know from the beginning of what we call time that I should be making my prayer and seeing the rainbow” (p. 159).  And it was a great consolation in a time of sorrow.  Thus he could stand by Davy’s bedside and say:  “I love you . . . whatever it is to be, for ever” (p. 160).  Love—only love—forms the core of the good life.  For as Vanauken discovered:  “love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom” (p. 165).  In it all,  “Davy strove to do God’s will.  More important, she strove to make her own will conform to God’s will:  to will what He willed.  Her prayer—and mind, too, often—was the prayer from one of Charles Williams’s novels:  “Do—or do not.”  She wanted, humanly, to live; and she, humanly, feared death:  yet she was surrendered to God” (p. 165).  Soon after she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma four years ago, Roberta sent an e-mail to a circle of friends expressing precisely the same commitment.

In those dire days, strangely enough, they were sublimely happy, “even under the sentence of death!” (p. 166).  They were happy, largely, because, as Vanauken wrote:  “If there’s anything I’m sure of, it is that heaven is a coming home” (p. 167).  At the very end, he took Davy’s wedding ring, which had been removed since her finger has shrunk.  “Then I put it upon Davy’s third finger, saying in a low voice:  ‘With this ring I thee wed . . . for all eternity.’  I do not know whether she heard; but I think she did, for her fingers tightened the least bit” (pp. 175-176).  Though I didn’t say the same words, I shared Vanauken’s sentiment and commitment.  A few days before Roberta died a nurse asked me if I wanted her wedding ring removed, since her hands were swelling.  Without even thinking I said no!  For 44 years that ring represented our undying vows, and I was not about to abridge the commitment made long ago.  And there has always been—as many of the poems I wrote her reveal—an eternal dimension to the love that I felt and still feel for her.  Responding to this sense of eternal love, C.S. Lewis wrote to Vanauken, crafting sentences that certainly apply to me today:  “’Like you I can’t imagine real Eros coming twice.  I still feel married to Joy’” (p. 231).

When Davy died, Vanauken says:  “As I stood there in that suddenly empty room, I was suddenly swept with a tide of absolute knowing that Davy still was.  I do not mean that I thought her body might still live; I knew it didn’t.  But past faith and belief, I knew quite overwhelmingly that she herself—her soul—still was” (p. 177).   A similar assurance came to me the day after Roberta died.  I awakened from a sound sleep, exactly 24 hours after she breathed her last breath, her hand in mine, with a sweet conviction that she was, in fact, still with me.  Call it what you may, explain it however you wish, the truth is I felt strongly impressed by the persistence of her being.  What it all means only God knows.  But I know how helpful such periods of conviction are to us who mourn the death of a beloved spouse.  

Thereafter Vanauken went through a year of mourning—“grief unalloyed”—described in an invaluable chapter titled “The Way of Grief.”  To him (and for me knowing this is a great comfort) “grief is a form of love—the longing for the dear face, the warm hand.  It is the remembered reality of the beloved that calls it forth.  For an instant she is there, and the void denied” (p. 182).  He mourned deeply, and “for over a year, there was no day I did not weep, and I did not find that tears cut me off from her” (p. 182).  Mysteriously, “we were, in some way, together.  . . . .  But in a not-at-all mystical sense she lived, she was vivid and alive, in me.  Our love continued.  The final severance was not yet” (182).  When he shared these impressions with C.S. Lewis, this reply came:  “’It is remarkable (I have experienced it), that sense that the dead person is.  And also, I have felt, is active:  can sometimes do more for you now than before—as if God gave them, as a kind of birthday present on arrival, some great blessing to the beloved they have left behind’” (184).

To Vanauaken—as to me during the past five months—the loss of his wife, “after the intense sharing and closeness of  the years, the loss and grief was, quite simply, the most immense thing I had ever known”(187).  Commenting on his sorrow, C.S. Lewis gave this sage advice:  “There is great good in bearing sorrow patiently:  I don’t know that there is any virtue in sorrow just as such.  It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can” (p. 189-190).  To us who might want to wallow in our misery, Lewis’s injunction is clear:  be up and about and live as cheerfully as possible!

To deal with Davy’s death, Vanauken devoted himself to writing a (never published) history of their life together—facilitated by the extensive journals they both kept.  It was a powerful time of introspection as well as remembering.  Significantly:  “It came to me quite early on in this study of times past that she—that Davy—did, in fact, know what I was doing and approved.  And even more strongly I received, or seemed to receive, an intimation that she, whatever she was and in whatever state, was missing me, too.  I have no evidence for the truth of this beyond my own growing conviction that it was so” (p. 193).  The process of writing enabled him to discern her uniqueness.  And he just knew that “the unique person abides.  Always” (p. 196).  

In addition to writing, he took lots of walks in the country—a practice I too follow (as I’ve always done—though running was generally my preferred approach!) and find it—particularly in the Rocky Mountains I love—most comforting.  Like Vanauken, I find “there were no tears, ever, in the country:  there were too many intimations of heaven,” for he was reminded that even in the few years they shared together there “had been love and joy and beauty” (p. 197).  “And it seemed to me that we were bound each to each, she in me and I in her, through all eternity, both of us Companions of the Co-inherence.  Although the tears would be with me for many a day to come, I was content” (197).

Such contentment comes only when we rest assured of life everlasting.  The only thing that sustains me in these days in the expectation of the eternal life Jesus promised—an eternity with Him and her.  Indeed, inasmuch as she is with Jesus and Jesus is with me she is with me too, as one of my friends, Barbara Hornbeck, assured me in a note she wrote.  That we have a natural hunger for life eternal is one of the most demonstrable facts in the history of man.  “Thus, Lewis says, ‘if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.’  This, I think, is what C. S. Lewis’s life and writings are about; and mine, too” (p. 209).  

At times (playing games, working intently on challenging and rewarding tasks, listening to music) we seem to slip into a timeless state, an ecstasy, that foretells something of the reality of eternity.  Such a moment, Vanauken says, “suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures.  It suggests that we were created for eternity”  (p. 204).  So too he and Davy hungered for a love that lasts forever.  And with her passing, he came to believe that:  “Although I must live long years in time beyond Davy, somehow I felt certain that we should go on to the Eternal Majesty together, nor would she be conscious of delay” (p. 206).  

His thoughts regarding eternal life—and an eternity of loving his wife—were fueled by correspondence with C.S. Lewis, who judged their marriage most admirable.  “Davy and I, in Lewis’s words, ‘admirably realised’ the Christian ideal of man and wife as One Flesh’” (p. 214).   In one of his letters, Lewis said:  “About the nature of the relation between spouses in eternity I base my idea on S. Paul’s dictum that “he that is joined with a harlot is one flesh.”  If the lowest, most corrupt form of sexual union has some mystical “oneness” involved in it (and by the way what an argument against “casual practice!”) a fortiori the married & lawful form must have it par excellence.  That is, I think the union between the risen spouses will be as close as that between the soul and its own risen body” (p. 207).  Ultimately, Vanauken accepted Davy’s death as a “severe mercy,” something that was certainly not per se good but somehow meaningful within the context of God’s good will for all His creatures.   He explains:  “Our love—under the aweful shadow—was deep and clear.  If God saved our love—and, indeed, transformed it into its real and eternal self—in the only way possible, her death, it was for me, despite grief and aloneness, worth it”  (p. 221).  

A Severe Mercy closes with an “Epilogue” entitled “The Second Death.”  Two years after his wife’s death he returned to Oxford, mainly to revisit the places that had meant so much to him.  And he hoped to chat a bit with his mentor, C.S. Lewis.  While there he had a remarkable, memorable dream.  Davy appeared, vividly to him.  He describes the dialogue he remembered:

 “Can you tell me one thing, dearling?  Are you–well with me sometimes?  I’ve sometimes thought you might be.”

“Yes, I am,” she said.  “I know all your doings.”

“Thank God!”  I said.  Then I said, very casually.  “And my letters to you—have you, um, read them?  Over my shoulder, maybe?”

She knew—we always knew—that it was important to me.  Her arms around me tightened, and she said in a low voice, “Yes, dearling.  I’ve read them all.”

And then our eyes met in that look of perfect understanding—that look of   knowing—that I had missed more than any other thing.  After that, we just sat there on the edge of the bed, holding each other, cheek to cheek.  There was more said, and there was laughter.  And I was pervaded with bliss” (p. 224).  

Reflecting upon the dream, Vanauken said:  “It must, I decided, on some level contain truth.  It was a sort of  “All shall be most well.”  It left me with a serene, peaceful happiness that lasted a long time” (p. 225).  Many of you know me, and I am one of the least likely of men to “dream dreams and see visions.”  Indeed, though I know we all dream I have hardly ever remembered any dreams at all.  So far as I know, I never dreamed about Roberta before her death.  But in the nearly five months I’ve lived without her I’ve had a few dreams.  Though they lack the detail and dialogue Vanauken’s dream contained, they did much the same for me.  Whatever one makes of dreams, the few I’ve had have given me a sense of serenity and peace—an assurance that “all shall be well!”  Such phenomena, Vanauken suggests (perhaps following an insight proffered by Lewis in a conversation), may very well indicate “that if the dead do stay with us for a time, it might be allowed partly so that we may hold on to something of their reality” (p. 228).

# # #

One of the joys attendant to aging as a professor is to note the successes and accomplishments of one’s former students.  Thus, though it would be both unwise and prideful to claim any credit for their work, I am pleased to review books recently published by several graduates of MidAmerica Nazarene University who took classes with me—and with whom I have maintained contact over the years.

Dean Flemming, who currently teaches New Testament at European Nazarene College in Germany, has devoted his missionary career to teaching.  In the process he earned a Ph.D. from Aberdeen University.  The fruit of his doctoral studies and classroom experiences has been  published, titled:  Contextualization in the New Testament:  Patterns for Theology and Mission (Downers Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2005).   The book was cited by Christianity Today as one of the 22 most significant titles of the year, and The International Bulletin of Missionary Research labeled it one of “Fifteen Outstanding Books of 2005 for Mission Studies.”  

The thesis for the book began when Flemming discovered that the deep concerns of his Asian and Pacific students were quite different from those of the graduate schools he had attended.  He quickly learned to actually listen to his students and take seriously their questions, such as the New Testament’s message regarding suffering, spiritual powers, honoring ancestors, etc.  He discovered what most missionaries soon learn:  the Gospel must be contextualized.  He further realized that “the activity of expressing and embodying the gospel in context-sensitive ways has characterized the Christian mission from the very beginning” (p. 15).  Thus his task, in this treatise, is twofold:  “first, to study the New Testament writings in order to discover how they demonstrate the task of doing context-sensitive theology; and second, to reflect on what these patterns and precedents teach us about how the gospel might become embodied within our diverse cultures and life settings today” (pp. 15-16).  We have a text, which is normative and transcultural for Christians.  And it must be rightly embedded in various cultures, which requires a very intentional activity called contextualization.  The model for this is Jesus, whose incarnation “serves as a key paradigm for a contextualized mission and theology” (p. 20).  Jesus both enfleshed and explained (using a variety of culturally appropriate means) the gospel.  

As one might anticipate, Flemming devotes considerable attention (one-sixth of the treatise) to the book of Acts.  “The language and content of Acts suggest that Luke’s primary target audience would have been Greek-speaking Gentiles, especially those familiar enough with the Septuagint to appreciate Luke’s frequent allusions to the Scriptures and their fulfillment” (p. 28).  Luke wrote both to encourage believers and to help establish the Church in a pagan world.  From the beginning, as is evident by the role Hellenists played in the Jerusalem church, the good news of Jesus Christ was proclaimed to both Jews and Gentiles.  Important incidents, such as Stephen’s speech and Philip’s evangelistic witness to the Ethiopian, indicate the stance of Christians in the first decade of their existence as a people.  

Still more, the significance of the story of Cornelius (a Roman centurian) and the Apostle Peter “can hardly be overstated” (p. 36).  The God-fearing centurian represents “a natural ‘bridge group’ for the progress of the gospel into the Gentile arena” (p. 36).  When Peter finally grasped the meaning of both his vision and his encounter with Cornelius he declared:  “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 1):34-35).  This good news is good for all people.  And it must not be hamstrung with non-essential Jewish traditions.  As an outgrowth of this, the Council of Jerusalem clearly declared the universal dimensions of the Christian message.  “Sharply put,” Flemming says, the Jerusalem Council concluded that “God’s present activity among the Gentiles becomes the hermeneutical key for understanding the biblical text” (p. 46).   Interestingly enough, the apostle James cited the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the OTin this pivotal council.  

Paul’s missionary journeys and preaching dominate Luke’s history in the last half of Acts, wherein “Luke portrays Paul of Tarsus as a missionary of extraordinary flexibility and cultural sensitivity” (p. 56).  He employed the techniques of classical rhetoric—typically moving from ethos to logos to pathos—that “stressed the importance of tailoring an oral speech to the specific audience and occasion” (p. 58).  (Helpfully, Flemming provides the reader a three-page chart summing up such items as geographical location, audience, rhetorical style evangelistic appeal, etc. in each of Paul’s sermons).

Flemming especially notes Paul’s preaching in Lystra and Athens, “the only speeches in Acts directed to pagan Gentiles.  Consequently, these two sermons are critical to understanding how the word of salvation bridged cultural barriers within the early Christian mission” (p. 66).  The message delivered in Athens, a philosophically-rooted challenge to polytheism and call to repentance, recorded “in Acts 17, is perhaps the outstanding example of intercultural evangelistic witness in the New Testament” (p. 72).  Importantly—and highly relevant for us today—in “Athens Paul refuses to syncretize his message or to compromise its truth claims . . . .  Paul engages Athenian culture with the goal of its transformation.  There are non-negotiables to Paul’s message that confront the prevailing assumptions of his audience:  the sovereign lordship of the Creator and Ruler of the nations (which means there are no other gods), the universal need for repentance (which presupposes sin and guilt), and the reality of a future judgment (which implies moral accountability).  Above all, Paul announces the supreme revelation of God in Christ, validated by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead (which flies in the face of Greek notions of death and immortality)” (pp. 82-83).  

Though Paul’s letters certainly contain doctrinal and ethical injunctions, Flemming  is concerned to show how, addressed to churches historically located in Acts, they “are unrivaled in offering examples of doing contextual theology for diverse Christian communities” (p. 89).  One should not be surprised to discover Paul using markedly different words and developing different perspectives in his various epistles.  (To read the works of C.S. Lewis illustrates how one man can write in unusually different ways!)  Rightly read, they display “a delightful creativity in the use of theological language and imagery that allows him to express the meaning of the gospel with both flexibility and precision” (p. 111).  

Paul endeavored to engage the Greco-Roman world as a thinker fully embedded in it.  A Roman citizen who was born a Jew and schooled as a Greek, he functioned as a “world citizen” in his missionary work.  He easily affirmed certain aspects of classical culture—especially its understanding of creation and conscience and its positive pronouncements regarding virtue, military service, and athletic competition.  Yet he also denounced certain sinful aspects to that world and called for cultural transformation, under the Lordship of Christ Jesus.  

Turning from Paul’s epistles to the four Gospels, Flemming finds similar missiological themes designed to implant the story of Jesus—the fundamental Christian message—in various cultures.  Matthew mainly addressed Jewish believers, Mark targeted both Jews and Gentiles, Luke mainly focused on Gentiles, and John wrote to encourage and theologically mentor early Christian communities; all of them, however, make clear the universal implications of the gospel.  

On the basis of his study, Flemming then concludes with a brief chapter arguing that the New Testament provides guidelines for “contextualizing the gospel today.”  Four things truly matter.  “First, the biblical witness to what God has done in Jesus Christ is fundamental” (p. 303).  Who He Is and what he said must never be compromised.  Secondly, the Spirit must be heeded as He guides believers in the way of truth.  Thirdly, all disciples must evaluate their beliefs and traditions in light of the broader (historical and geographic) Christian community.  And finally, the gospel is rightly contextualized when it bears good fruit in the lives of people who come in faith to Christ.  

This is a fine, scholarly work.  While certainly accessible to general readers, pastors and professors will most benefit from it.  

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David and Lisa Frisbie are co-executive directors of The Center for Marriage and Family Studies, and (growing out of their extensive experience speaking, listening, conducting conferences) have recently published two books:  Happily Remarried (Eugene, OR:  Harvest House Publishers, c. 2005) and Moving Forward After Divorce (Eugene, OR:  Harvest House Publishers, c. 2006).   Both books are filled with dialogues and personal stories, obviously drawn from the Frisbies’ interviews and discussions with folks who have weathered the storms of divorce.  Concerned with helping folks who have, for whatever reason, divorced, they choose not to explore the biblical and theological questions posed by divorce and remarriage, 

In Happily Remarried, we discover “Four ‘First Principles’ for Building a Strong Second Marriage.”  First, “Form a Spiritual Connection Centered on Serving God.”  The Frisbies strongly urge the men and women they counsel to regularly pray and worship together, inviting God to take His rightful place at the center of their lives.  Thus equipped, they can engage in service projects—soup kitchens, mission trips, etc.  Secondly, newly married couples must “Regard Your Remarriage as Permanent and Irreversible.”  The mental reservations and half-hearted commitments and escape clauses that often undermined first marriages must not be allowed to destroy the second.  Thirdly, one must “Forgive Everyone, Including Yourself.”  However deep the hurts, however righteous the anger, one must learn to forgive in order to successfully remarry.  “The antidote to anger is forgiveness:  the process of releasing our anger and frustration, thus restoring the inner health of our soul and spirit” (p. 59).  No new relationship can be healthy until earlier animosities have been defused.  Finally, “Use Conflict to Get Better Acquainted.”  Newly remarried people, and especially those bringing children into the mix, must learn to cope with conflict.  It’s both normal and inevitable.  The key is to profit from it.  You can get better acquainted when you argue and learn to see things from another person’s perspective.  As long as you learn when, and where, and how to argue, you can benefit from the conflicts that surface as you adjust to your new spouse.

Having set forth foundational principles, the authors move to “Strategies for Building your Remarriage Relationship.”  They offer suggestions regarding the wedding ceremony, honeymoon, choice of residence, finances, disciplining children, dealing with former spouses, successfully laminating the particles of what had been two significantly different families.  David and Lisa Frisbie confidently set forth their suggestions, for in their travels they “continue to meet courageous, hope-filled people who have survived divorce” (p. 203).  The challenges are clear, but with God’s help happy second marriages are possible.  

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Though published subsequently to Happily Remarried, the second book by David and Lisa Frisbie, Moving Forward After Divorce is logically the first of their treatises, since it deals with the immediate issues confronting divorced persons.  They try to balance the inevitable grief and anger one feels with the possibility of healing and hope.  As was true of their first book, they choose to focus on the practical steps available to formerly married men and women and declare:  “The ideas here beckon our gaze away from the debris at our feet and out toward the far horizon” (p. 10).  

Out of the death of one’s dreams regarding a first (or prior marriage) one must envision “new beginnings” rooted in the reality of God’s love and others’ support.  By resolutely facing forward, relying upon strength offered by loved ones, it is possible to move forward.  Most importantly, one must find his or her real identity in God rather than in one’s spouse.  Then one can look for, and act upon, opportunities that come, doing different things and doing things differently, becoming a different person in the process.  

A major part of this process, of course, is discovering how to deal with children.  Discipline becomes especially difficult, and two extremes must be avoided:  overcontrol and permissiveness.  One must also resist the temptation to become a “friend” rather than a parent.  Complicating the task is “the delicate dance of co-parenting,” maintaining one’s own rules in his or her household without condemning different rules followed in one’s former spouse’s.  Working constructively together, rather than using children as weapons to salve festering sores, makes things better for the kids.  Difficult though it may be to envision, one may actually gain influence while losing access to one’s children.  Even adolescents may be effectively parented, if one learns lessons from the Frisbies’ informants.  

Finally, there is the issue of remarriage.  For some people, “flying solo” is the best solution.  Some are deeply committed to their marriage vows, considering them indissoluable, and rightly maintain their moral convictions by refusing to consider a second marriage.  Doing so may also facilitate better bonds with one’s children, who are easily confused and upset by the injection of “step” moms or dads into their already shattered world.  But others, the Frisbies say, rightly choose to remarry.  When they weigh the odds and make mature decisions, rich and rewarding second marriages do in fact result.  

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In The Power of Serving Others:  You Can Start where You Are (San Francisco:  Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., c. 2006), Gary Morsch and Dean Nelson challenge readers to be world-changers.  Indeed, “This book is about changing our world.  It’s not about a revolution, but it is revolutionary” (p. ix).  Morsch is a medical doctor who established Heart to Heart International—probably the most fiscally efficient relief organization in the world.  Nelson is a journalist who teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University who has been published in the New York Times and Boston Globe as well as various religious periodicals.  

The authors want to illustrate the power of serving others, so this book is largely a collection of Morsch’s heart-worming stories, made winsome by Nelson’s engaging literary style.  They take us from natural disasters, ranging from New Orleans to Indonesia, to war-devastated regions in Kosovo and Iraq.  In the midst of chaos and sorrow, good things still happen.  Repeatedly we discover the book’s core message:

1.  Everyone has something to give.

2.  Most people are willing to give when they see the need and have the 

        opportunity.

1. Everyone can do something for someone right now” (p. 2). 

Most of us are, by nature, altruistic rather than self-centered, they say.  We just need to find ways to reach out and help others.  

This was evident in New Orleans, when hundreds of volunteers responded to the devastation of the hurricane.  They “were on the scene days before government agencies were deployed” (p. 14).  Often those paid to respond to crises simply fail to do so as well as unpaid volunteers!  “Individuals, neighborhoods, and churches responded as if they were made for these kinds of situations, which is exactly my point! (p. 15).  Following the powerful tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2004, students at Point Loma Nazarene University raised $40,000 to help Heart to Heart, which transformed (through contacts Morsch has with pharmaceutical firms and FedEx) the offering into “more than $1 million in aid” (p. 48).  

In the course of highlighting relief for major disasters, Morsch and Nelson also remind us of Mother Teresa’s powerful admonition:  “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”  Small acts of love, daily done, make the world a livable place.  

# # # 

Whether or not the world is meaningful is a meaningful question.  Giving one answer, an eminent physicist, Stephen Weinberg, verbalized the nihilism pervading modernity by declaring that the universe “seems pointless.”  He personally does science not to discover any deep purpose or meaning to things but simply because it is a momentarily interesting way to spend one’s time.  On the contrary, argue Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, in A Meaningful World:  How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (Downers Grove:  IVP Academic, c. 2006), “the universe is meaning-full” (p 15) because God’s made it.  

Wiker and Witt begin by exploring Shakespeare’s “Hamlet and the search for meaning,” noting the absurdity of arguing (as does the Darwinist Richard Dawkins) that a group of monkeys, aimlessly typing for a million years, could produce the play.  In fact, “Hamlet” reveals the sheer genius of the man Shakespeare—evident in the depth, clarity, symmetry, and elegance of his works.  Furthermore, “the living world is more like Shakespeare’s Globe Theater than a tidy and tightly bound circle of the watch” (p. 52).  To take a reductionist approach to Shakespeare’s dramas—tabulating the sequence of particular letters, or looking for repetitive phrases, or explaining everything (as did Freud) in terms of sexual desires—would effectively prevent one from actually understanding their message.  Such endeavors, however, “are akin to the Darwinists’ overly tidy treatment of vision or the cell.  In each case the critic analyzes the work narrowly, ignoring the larger context, be it ecological, aesthetic or otherwise” (p. 56). 

Add to Shakespeare the mathematical genius of Euclid!   The authors guide us through the proof for the Pythagorean theorem and discern therein “the inherent, necessary and universal order of geometrical things themselves, an order that preexists our attempts to uncover it and that inflames the geometer’s desire to know it” (p. 96).  What we know, when we think geometrically, are immaterial figures—forms in our minds, not material objects.  “The struggle to understand the demonstration about right triangles is the struggle to grasp something that is immaterial” (p. 97).  Still more:  the logic and beauty of mathematics is equally evident in the periodic table so basic to chemistry.  It demonstrates an “underlying order” that is “far more elegant and harmonious than even the most conspiracy-minded chemist could imagine.  They suspected a beautiful melody.  They discovered a symphony” (p. 135).  Indeed, “The periodic table of elements, in all its exquisite order, fits the qualities that we traditionally associate with the works of genius to the highest degree” (p. 171).    

And the periodic table is quite elementary when compared with the complexity of the living cell.  To Darwin, of course, it was a “black box,” a little blob of matter, unknowable because of the limited powers of 19^th century microscopes.  “We now know that even the simplest functional cell is almost unfathomably complex, containing at least 250 genes and their corresponding proteins, each one extraordinarily difficult to produce randomly and none of which can function apart from the intricate structure of the cell” (p. 201).  Like the sentences of Shakespeare, the amino acids and proteins in cells could hardly have been accidentally assembled, for they “are defined from the top down” (p. 212).  In a recent (2001) biological treatise, The Way of the Cell, published by Oxford University Press, Franklin Harold notes that even a simple “’bacterial cell consists of more than three hundred million molecules . . . and requires some 2,000 genes for its specification’” (p. 223).  Furthermore:  “’There is nothing random about this assemblage, which reproduces itself with constant composition and from generation after generation.  A cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life, in another deeper sense:  like the legs and leaves of higher organisms, its molecular constituents have functions.  . . . molecules are parts of an integrated system, and in that capacity can be said to serve the activities of the cell as a whole.  As with any hierarchical system, each constituent is at once an entity in itself and a part of the larger design; . . .  Organization, John von Neumann once said, has purpose; order does not.  Living things clearly have at least one purpose, to perpetuate their own kind.  Therefore, organization is the word that sums up the essence of biological order’” (p. 223; italics added by authors).  Consequently, you cannot understand a cell in terms of DNA, for “DNA is not the ultimate cause of biological formation; rather DNA is the informational material used by growing organism (just as words are the material for Shakespearean Drama” (pp. 226-227).  

This book is most intriguing.  Getting the reader to ponder Shakespeare and Euclid, Boyle and Behe as witnesses to intelligent design is quite an achievement!  Among the impressive list of those praising this book is James Sire, who says:  “I have been reticent to affirm the value of the cosmological argument from design, but no longer.  Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt have convinced me that from literature to mathematics, physics to biology, the very phenomena of the world breathe intelligence.  A Meaningful World is a masterful argument, a tour de force, framed with brilliance and wit.  Here is a convincing case for a universe charged not only with meaning, but with the glory of God.”  

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

Francis S. Collins led the government team of geneticists that successfully pursued the Human Genome Project.  When the project was completed, President Bill Clinton commended his work, declaring: “‘Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.’  But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual.  ‘Today,’ he said, ‘we are learning the language in which God created life.  We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift’” (p. 2).  Though the President may have overstated the case, his words receive validation in Collins’ The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York:  Free Press, c. 2006), wherein he effectively gives witness to his faith in Christ and explains how his scientific work enhances his religious belief.  He argues “that belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science” (p. 3).   

Reared in an irreligious home, Collins had little interest in theological issues until he completed his graduate work and began working as a medical doctor.  He took a loosely agnostic position—a kind of ‘willful blindness’ he now suspects—that freed him to live pretty much on his own terms.  But at the age of 26, by the bedside of a devout Christian woman who gave witness to her strong faith and bluntly asked him what he believed, he began to seriously consider ultimate things.  He realized that nothing could be more important than discerning whether or not God exists.  So he decided to investigate the question.  A Methodist minister, in response to his inquiries, gave him a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.  “In the next few days, as I turned its pages, struggling to absorb the breadth and depth of the intellectual arguments laid down by this legendary Oxford scholar, I realized that all of my own constructs against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy” (p. 21).  He was most deeply impressed by Lewis’s Moral Law argument for God’s existence, and repeatedly praises Lewis throughout this book.

More than intellectual conviction, however, Collins longed to know this God in whom he believed.  That apparently involved living righteously—something he found himself unable to do.  Then he began to be truly honest with himself and admitted that he was a “sinner” in need of grace.  He also began to seriously consider the God-man Jesus Christ and “read the actual account of His life for the first time in the four gospels, the eyewitness nature of the narratives and the enormity of Christ’s claims and their consequences gradually began to sink in.  Here was a man who not only claimed to know God, He claimed to be God.  No other figure I could find in any other faith made such an outrageous claim.  He also claimed to be able to forgive sins, which seemed both exciting and utterly shocking” (p. 221).  Accepting the atoning work of Christ on the cross led to an equally important corollary:  “Faithfulness to God required a kind of death of self-will, in order to be reborn as a new creation” (p. 222).  So, a year after coming to the conclusion that God exists Collins came to Christ.  While hiking in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, “the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance.  As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over.  The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ” (p. 225).  

Years later, in 1989, serving as a volunteer in an African hospital, Collins was profoundly moved by some kind words from a young man suffering tuberculosis.  “Nothing I had learned from science could explain that experience.  Nothing about the evolutionary explanations for human behavior could account for why it seemed so right for this privileged white man to be standing at the bedside of this young African farmer, each of them receiving something exceptional.  This was what C.S. Lewis calls agape.  It is the love that seeks no recompense.  It is an affront to materialism and naturalism.  And it is the sweetest joy that one can experience” (p. 217).  Importantly, in this moment Collins “also saw more clearly than ever before the author of that goodness and truth, the real True North, God himself, revealing His holy nature by the way in which He has written this desire to seek goodness in all of our hearts” (p. 218).  

Thus it is as a deeply committed Christian that Collins has worked on the very cutting edge of science and also pondered “the great questions of human existence.”  Regarding the origins of the universe, he finds the Big Bang theory and the Christian belief in creatio ex nihilo remarkably congruent.  Indeed, as “Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, ‘The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole’” (p. 76).  Regarding life on earth, Collins espouses what he calls “theistic evolution,” crediting God for overseeing an evolutionary process that proceeds by natural selection.  (Parenthetically, he highly commends the work of my PLNU colleague, Darrel Falk, who sets forth a similar position in Coming to Peace with Science).  Collins acknowledges, however, the great mystery of the actual origin of life, since “at the present time we simply do not know.  No current hypothesis comes close to explaining how in the space of a mere 150 million years, the prebiotic environment that existed on planet Earth gave rise to life” (p. 90).  

In his own realm of expertise, genetics, Collins shows how his study of the human genome enabled him to engage in “deciphering God’s instruction book.”  “For me, as a believer,” he writes, “the uncovering of the human genome sequence held additional significance.  This book was written in the DNA language by which God spoke life into being.  I felt an overwhelming sense of awe in surveying this most significant of all biological texts” (p. 123-124).  This leads him to set forth his belief in “BioLogos,” a “belief that God is the source of all life and that life expresses the will of God” (p. 203).  It is, however, “not intended as a scientific theory.  Its truth can be tested only by the spiritual logic of the heart, the mind, and the soul” (p. 204).  In other words:  knowledge comes from testable science whereas belief is an inner, subjective inclination.  

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

Some time ago, while reading Against the Idols of the Age (an edited collection of Australian philosopher David Stove’s writings, reviewed in my “Reedings” #155), my interest was piqued in Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales:  Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 1995).  Stove’s “object is to show that Darwinism is not true:  not true, at any rate, of our species” (p. xiv), and he does so with rigorous logic and factual clarity unclouded by any personal objection to either philosophical materialism (which he seems to favor) or Darwin’s hypothesis of “evolution through natural selection.”  Ironically, he says, “Darwin’s explanation of evolution, even though it is . . . still the best one available, is not true” (p. 46).  

He begins by noting “Darwinism’s Dilemma,” which is this:  “If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive:  a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners.  But is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species” (p. 3).  Stove then details “where Darwin first went wrong about man,” showing how Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (the key to his thesis regarding natural selection) seriously misled him.  Since, as Stove demonstrates, “it is rational to conclude that the Malthus-Darwin principle is false, it is rational to conclude that the Darwinian theory of evolution is false” (p. 96).  The very notion that every species procreates until available resources are exhausted simply has no factual basis.  It may be true of pine trees and salmon, but it is hardly true of mammals and (especially) man.  “Go to the extreme case,” Stove says, “and consider the most privileged classes of people that history can show:  the people for whom the probability of death from starvation or in battle was lowest, and to whom the best medical attention of the time was available.  Such classes have never been prolific of offspring in anything like the degree to which they were privileged.  They have never even managed to maintain their numbers by reproduction” (p. 64).  

In truth, Darwinians continually contradict themselves—though blithely unaware of their illogic.  Consequently, Stove says, “All Darwinians have a remarkable asymmetry of mind where their own species is concerned.  On the one had there is the human life which both by experience and by reading history and  literature, they know a great deal about; but all of this they put to one side, as having nothing to do with theory.  They have to put it aside, because of course this human life contains not a single instance of the famous Darwinian struggle, and in fact consists entirely of disconfirmations of that theory.  But on the other hand, Darwinians draw endless confirmations of their theory from the lives of extinct or hypothetical or imaginary or impossible human beings concerning whom they know exactly as much as they rest of us do:  namely nothing” (p. 83).  

Stove also scrutinizes the claims of “sociobiology”—a currently fashionable version of Darwinism (popularized by Richard Dawkins) that explains virtually everything in terms of “selfish genes.”  It is, ironically, Stove says, “a religion:  one which has genes as its gods” (p. 248).  “According to the Christian religion, human beings and all other created things exist for the greater glory of God; according to sociobiology, human beings and all other living things exist for the benefit of their genes” (p. 249).  Both positions, to Stove, are irrational beliefs, not scientific demonstrations.  One may prefer one or the other beliefs—or neither—but he should acknowledge the difference between science and religion!  To Christians, God is immortal, invisible, holy and wise, whereas genes are the “immortals” in sociobiology, thus making it a current and fashionable version of polytheism.  Certainly genes, “like viruses, have a strong tendency to self-replication.  But to describe genes as ‘selfish’ on that account, or on any account, would be just as nonsensical as describing viruses as ‘selfish.’  Genes can no more be selfish that they can be (say) supercilious or stupid” (p. 175).  Think for a moment about the latent contradiction in this position.  “Two bacteria of the same parentage have 100 percent of their genes in common, and therefore must, according to sociobiology, exercise 100 percent altruism towards each other.  So how are they going to be able to compete with one another for ‘the means of subsistence?’” (p. 208).  It’s clear, of course, that they could not.  But simple facts and logic apparently do not deter Dawkins et al. from defending their theory!  

Moving from the lowest level of life, bacteria, to the highest, human beings, it is obvious that if selfish genes dictate everything they should shape our behavior.  Thus a leading sociobiologist, William “Hamilton wrote that ‘we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person but that everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or off-spring], or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins’” (p. 227).  In response, an astonished Stove declares:  “Was an expectation more obviously false than this one ever held (let alone published) by any human being?” (p. 227).  Yet prestigious evolutionists routinely make such claims.  And, indeed, “Altruism ought to be non-existent, or short-lived whenever it does occur, if the Darwinian theory of evolution is true” (p. 201).  In fact, altruism abounds, but the fitness theorists “publish hundreds of articles every year, in which kind altruism is both denied and casually explained in terms of shared genes.  These two things may be logically inconsistent with one another.  But what of that?  It’s a ‘successful research program,’ isn’t it?” (p,. 246).    

Rather than a “successful research program,” Darwinism is a naturalistic philosophy, remarkably akin to that of the German pessimist Schopenhauer, who died in 1860 and probably never  heard of Darwin.  He is “the true philosopher of Darwinism.  He was so before Darwinism existed, and he is so still” (p. 296).   “Schopenhauer’s central theme is the universality and, among organisms in general, the overridingness, of the sexual reproductive impulse.  He calls this impulse ‘the will to live,’ or ‘the Life Force.’  This impulse or will or force is purposive—nothing more so, or more effectually so—but not conscious” (p. 294).  This will reduces all beings, whether bacteria or bananas or baboons or humans, to puppets instinctively obeying an inner impulse to preserve the species through reproduction.  Denying, as Darwinians must, the freedom of man’s will, he lamented that a person “can absolutely never do anything other than precisely what he does at that particular moment.”  There is, Stove says, in Schopenhauer’s  1819 masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, “the grinding and constant pressure, in every species, of population on the supply of food” with “the hair trigger readiness of population to increase, in particular, if the food supply gives it the smallest chance to do so.  The struggle for life among conspecifics, which results from this unsleeping and untiring attempt to increase, is universal, constant and pitiless.  Not even the Hardest Men among Darwinians have ever portrayed the struggle for life more uncompromisingly than Schopenhauer does” (p. 294).  Schopenhauer, who deeply influenced Friedrich Nietzsche (and C.S. Lewis in his atheist years), found life utterly meaningless, an irrational struggle to survive for no particular reason.  To him, life is “a striving without aim or end.”  

However “successful” it has been in scientific circles, Stove says there is a distinct “irrelevance of Darwinism to human life” (p. 307).  Man’s historical concern for, and commitment, to such things a truth, goodness, and beauty, cannot be explained in accord with the Darwinian template.  As an intellectual exercise, one could simply go through the dictionary listing words that refer to meaningful things that cannot be explained by Darwinism.  Indeed, the most valuable human attributes are “injurious” from a survival of the fittest evolutionary perspective.  So Stove concludes “that on the subject of our species, Darwinism is a mere festering mass of errors:  and of errors in the plain honest sense of that word too, namely, falsities taken for truths.”  If you’re interested in flowers and fish, Darwinism will prove quite helpful.  “But the case is altogether different, indeed reversed, when our own species is in question.  If it is human life that you would most like to know about and to understand, then a very good library can be begun by leaving out Darwinism, from 1859 to the present hour” (p. 325).