Anyone seriously concerned about the souls of our youth should seriously ponder Vigen Guroian’s recent essay, “Dorm Brothel:  The new debauchery, and the colleges that let it happen,” in Christianity Today (February 2005), 45-51.  A professor of theology at Loyola College in Baltimore, Guroian confirms what Tom Wolfe describes in his widely discussed novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, a searing portrait of the corruption of a young woman who attends an elite university such as Stanford or Yale.  Wolfe believes that colleges and universities have replaced churches as sources of moral authority and abandoned students to the anarchical nihilism described in his novel.   In her favorable review of I Am Charlotte Simmons, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, of Harvard Law School, laments that its descriptive passages of “binge drinking, foul language, academic dishonesty, and predatory sex” portray “a parent’s worst nightmare” (First Things, February 2005, p. 41).  Sending your children to war in Iraq may very well less threaten their character than sending them to Harvard or MIT!

The collapse of standards on university campuses was anticipated by William F. Buckley’s 1952 treatise, in God and Man at Yale:  The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” written within months of his 1950 graduation from his alma mater.   A 50th anniversary paperback edition has recently appeared (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002) and provides one with a helpful beginning point with which to chart the course of higher education since WWII.  Buckley wrote book to reflect his concern for “God, for country, and for Yale . . . in that order.”  Though an allegedly “Christian” university, Yale was clearly slipping away from even a passing commitment to God and His reality.  Arriving in 1946, after serving two years in the Army, Buckley (a very traditional Roman Catholic)  believed “that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward the good life” (p. lxiii).  Though Yale officially claimed, in those days, to be solidly Christian and freely took money from donors who believed it, Buckley’s assumption that the university would encourage such faith dissipated almost immediately. Undermining the university president’s  pious pronouncements was a critical agnosticism that typified the faculty and infected many students.

For example, the most popular “religion” class was “entitled the Historical and Literary Aspects of the Old Testament” (p. 5).  Taught by the warmly winsome college chaplain, it was popular mainly because good grades were readily available for minimal effort.  A Philosophy of Religion class was taught by a professor who claimed to be a “nondogmatic” Christian who was, in fact, equally “open” to all religious positions, endorsing the “pluralism” that now characterizes many religion departments.  Another professor, a former Congregational minister described himself as “80 percent atheist and 20 percent agnostic” (p. 8).  Yale’s philosophy department featured Paul Weiss, an agnostic, who delighted to “debunk” the Christian religion, along with various professors who immersed their students in the works of Bertrand Russell, David Hume, and assorted skeptics.  By assiduously sorting through one’s options, students could find a defender of orthodox Christianity, but the university’s instructors generally promoted the relativistic, instrumental views of John Dewey

Similarly, most professors advocated varieties of socialism, condemning in the process the traditional American way of life.  They were especially critical of America’s individualism and free enterprise capitalism.  Commencement speeches, presidential proclamations, and catalogue declarations notwithstanding, Yale’s professors consistently espoused versions of collectivism.  Only a stalwart few openly sympathized with Karl Marx, but Marx himself had urged two routes to utopia:  1) violent revolution or, 2) “a slow increase of state power, through extended social services, taxation, and regulation, to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society” (p. 42).  The second, more gradual approach obviously appealed to many Yale’s professors who claimed to support the American way but consistently celebrated the demise of “rugged individualism” and endorsed the equalization of income, the  “just” redistribution of wealth, steeply progressive death and income taxes, and the apparently infinite expansion of the welfare state.

Having distanced itself from God and country, Buckley argued, Yale had lost its raison d’etre.  To a large extent, he thought, this was because professors recklessly indulged themselves, rationalizing “academic freedom” as a license to promote personal ideologies rather than carrying out the mission of the university.  On some issues, of course, Yale was intensely dogmatic, says Buckley.  A racist would be quickly fired from the faculty.  Yet an atheist promoting his agenda in this “Christian” institution would almost certainly gain promotion and tenure!  Sadly, Buckley says, Yale’s professors failed to take seriously their calling, which is to guard the treasures of civilization and rightly shape students.  They had the power to affect “the destiny of the world” (p. 172).  But they were promoting an anti-Christian and pro-collectivist agenda that would destroy it.

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Michael L Budde and my colleague, John Wright, have edited Conflicting Allegiances:  The Church-Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society (Grand Rapids:  BrazosPress, c. 2004).  Inevitably, the essays are uneven in quality, but the general thesis of the book, summed up in Professor Wright’s Introduction:  “How Many Masters?  From the Church-Related to an Ecclesially Based University,” deserves careful consideration.  Christian institutions–by definition it would seem–should promote orthodox theology and encourage virtuous character.  They should, in short, be Christian!  But all too many of them–as Buckley’s portrait of Yale illustrated–claim to be what they’re not and largely leave students to their own devices.  Consequently, Wright insists, they will be shaped by the surrounding non-Christian culture rather than the Church.  To correct this, he argues the Christian university should reconfigure itself as an “ecclesially based” institution that openly and fervently seeks to “initiate and socialize” both professors and students “into the polity and practices of the church” (p. 26).  Rather than prepare folks to work in the world, they should be ready to die for their faith!

Fundamental to Wright’s project is the radical overhaul–if not displacement–of the “liberal arts Christian college.”  For two centuries churches have conducted a great experiment:  inviting students to blend “faith and learning” in their colleges.  The faith was understood to be the faith of the Fathers, the traditional doctrinal and ecclesial positions of the community of faith.  The “learning,” however, was to be that of the broader world.  Thus the curricula and textbooks of “Christian colleges” almost always mirrored that of the secular world.  In time, Wright argues, the “Christian” aspect of the college could not but fade away.  Consequently, only a more militantly committed community–the “ecclesially-based university–can maintain its integrity.

Sharing Wright’s position, William T. Cavanaugh, in “Sailing Under True Colors:  Academic Freedom and the Ecclesially Based University,” argues that the liberal version of freedom enshrined in secular universities–a commitment to unlimited professorial autonomy–slowly erodes what must be central to a Christian institution:  the authority of Scripture and Tradition.  To Cavanaugh, “academic freedom” should be corporately understood, and any given university should be free to espouse its peculiar ideals.  But within a given university, consensus and commitment to the mission should preempt personal professorial preferences.  So a Christian college should freely and openly indoctrinate rather than offer options to students.

Wes Avram, having served as Chaplain at Bates College (once an American Baptist but now unaffiliated “Christian” liberal arts college), writes perceptively about his role in “With Friends Like These:  Pathetic Chaplaincy and the Ethos of the Ecclesial College.”   In the 1990s, Bates’ vaguely Christian identity was, sadly enough, probably best evident in its buildings–ornate tombstones bearing witness to an earlier epoch.  At Bates College in the ’90s, egalitarian and politically correct rhetoric had replaced theological pronouncements, and the college’s Baptist founders were unfailingly praised as social reformers rather than clergymen.  Spiritual concerns–sin, salvation, holiness and hope–had been shifted to health and counseling offices, and humanitarian service projects had replaced worship and personal discipleship.  Any form of evangelism was now frowned upon as fervently as inclusive, inter-faith services were praised.  Virtually nothing but “fundamentalism” could be safely denounced.  Working within this environment without embracing its ethos was, to say the least, challenging for Avram.  But his essay both illustrates the dead-end of the secularizing process and provides helpful hints as to how one functions and works within such a secularized “Christian” college.

John Milbank, as one would expect from an eminent advocate of “radical orthodoxy,” urges readers to recover a more ancient and worthy perspective in “The Last of the Last:  Theology in the Church.”  Rather than follow the “critical” pathways of academicians, he wants to get back to the pre-modern world where the Church was stronger and theology better.  He especially insists that “Scripture, tradition, and reason were not seen as separate sources prior to 1300” and should not be today (p. 240).  In particular, he urges us to recover the richness of Thomas Aquinas, rooting ourselves in a worldview prior to the devastating incursions of nominalism (ironically rooted in an essentially Islamic perspective) and restore a solidly Christian theology.

While the essays I’ve mentioned prove valuable, other essays in the volume illustrate some of the problems of postmodernism.  Amy Laura Hall’s disquisition on Edith Wharton, making a “case for women’s studies” that encourages students to be “strategically rude,” is a highly improbable (if predictably postmodern) interpretation of Wharton.  M. Therese Lysaught, in “Love Your Enemies,” labors to establish an improbable link between “the contemporary practice of the life sciences and the infrastructure of violence of the liberal democratic state.”  To her, the recent Human Genome Project is the “Manhattan Project for biology” (p. 113) and is yet another bastard son of  America’s evil war machine.

Lysought’s animosity towards America, unfortunately, taints many of the essays in this volume.  That Michael L. Budde, one of the editors, favorably cites Noam Chomsky (one of the most irresponsible and hateful writers in America) indicates something of the ideological bias of the collection.  Generally speaking, the essays attack America’s “liberal democratic society” as an almost demonic entity that must rejected if not destroyed.  But the real problem with maintaining Christian colleges, in my judgment, is not “liberal democracy.”  Christian institutions struggled to retain their identity long before liberalism or democracy flourished in the modern era.  It’s “the world, the flesh and the devil,” as St. John so perceptively said long ago, it’s deadly sins–lust, pride, envy, sloth, intemperance–that seduce and destroy far more than fall prey to pernicious political structures.

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Jim Nelson Black, former executive director of the Wilberforce Forum, has conducted extensive interviews with students and professors, as well as extensively researched the Freefall of the American University:  How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation (Nashville:  WND Books, c. 2004).  For our children’s sake, he argues, higher education in this nation must be overhauled, for the radicals of the ’60s now control the universities, making them centers of leftist activism, aiming “to transform the United States into a socialist utopia” (p. 4) rather than loci of higher learning.

Disciples of Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse–Bill and Hillary Clintons’ admitted “main academic influence” (p. 221) in their student days–have “marched through American institutions” and established their Marxist ideology.  Today’s professors, says USC’s Dallas Willard, more routinely cite Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who are fully devoted to the “Marxist idea . . . that rhetoric is everything, and everything is political” (p. 256).  They fulfill Norman Thomas’s prediction:  “‘The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened'” (p. 247).  This was clarified by Professor Richard Rorty, one of the luminaries of the current academy, who declared:  “The power base of the Left in America is now in the universities,” and it especially thrives in ethnic studies programs, “Women’s Studies programs, and Gay and Lesbian Studies program” (p. 11).  Social Justice Centers almost always provide avenues for decrying racism, sexism, ageism, global capitalism, etc.  Displacing the despised Western Christian Culture of traditional curricula, the Left celebrates its adversary stance toward both Christianity and America.  Destroying traditional sexual standards–so evident in Thom Wolfe’s novel–is but part of a larger assault on all social norms.

Academic standards have softened.  “College seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge than high-schoolers a half century ago” (p. 29).   They don’t study Shakespeare, because courses on “the bard” are rarely offered and never required, even of literature majors.  They are generally required to take courses in non-Eurocentric studies, but almost never in American history.  To the degree they learn about this country, they hear about the abuses of slavery and patriarchy, of American imperialism and Puritanical prudery.  But they know little about the nation’s presidents or generals or founding documents.  Thus they’re primed to believe the fantasies of Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, taking as “historical” the rants of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.  Consequently, Black says, “There is perhaps no more troubling aspect of the radicalization of the university campus than the revisionism that passes for history today” (p. 163).  Even at Harvard, says Professor Harvey Mansfield, too few students think critically, discerning the difference between coherent argumentation and emotional venting.

Moral standards are in “freefall,” according to Black.  Promiscuous and virtually anonymous sex–”Hooking up” in today’s parlance–almost defines campus life.  Homosexual activity has especially gained approval, with “coming out” festivals and campus organizations vigorously promoting the gay lifestyle.  Professors in English departments now deal with subjects like “lesbianism sadomasochism” and “the queer child” rather than Melville and Dickens.  “Transgendered scholars” now grace elite academic departments.  Pornography is “seriously” studied and various kinds of experimentation encouraged.  Consequently, STDs proliferate.  According to Meg Meeker, 20 percent of our teens have incurable herpes.  “Every third girl has the human papilloma virus (HPV).  HPV causes 99.7 percent of cervical cancer cases that kills over five thousand women each year.  One out of ten has chlamydia'” (p. 203).

Black’s data, sadly enough, confirms the Tom’s Wolfe’s poignant portrait of the destruction of young people’s souls by the very institutions that should protect and nourish them.

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In Going Broke by Degree:  Why College Cost Too Much (Washington, D.C.:  The AEI Press, c. 2004), Richard Vedder, for many years a professor of economics at Ohio University, drafts a sobering portrait of the serious financial failings of today’s colleges and universities.  Though the book contains ample data and sophistical quantitative analysis, the thesis is clear:  in the non-competitive environment of higher education, student fees and tax monies can be endlessly increased in order to provide an increasingly comfortable life for increasingly unproductive professors.

Though costs have soared, there’s no evidence that students are better educated than they were 50 years ago.  Student grade point averages have soared while their Graduate Record Exam scores have declined.  Students are taught by graduate students–or adjunct instructors–many of whom barely know more than their charges.  Monies once devoted to instruction have been diverted to administrative tasks–jumping  from 20 percent to 50 percent in 70 years.  Professors’ salaries have boomed while their teaching loads have decreased.  Smaller classes have been mandated, but though they make the professor’s life easier there’s no evidence that they improve student learning.  Enormous investments are made in “research,” but very little of it has value beyond the expansion of professors’ curriculum vita.

To bring sobriety and financial health to the nation’s colleges, Vedder proposes some radical changes, making them competitive and accountable to the broader public.  Privatizing public institutions, requiring the kind of  strategies and ethics that prevail in the private sector, making educational institutions truly educational rather than “student service” centers, would bring some sanity to higher education.

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As a student at UCLA, Ben Shapiro openly challenged his leftist professors.  He kept a record of his experiences and then expanded his reaction through research and wrote Brainwashed:  How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth (Nashville:  WND, c. 2004).   He endured professors who praised Mao Tse-Tung and Islamic radicals.  He discovered that the “Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the US, is riddled with university faculty” (p. 35).  Thus Eric Foner, a celebrated Columbia University historian and fervent Marxist, responded to 9/11 with the declaration:  “‘I’m not sure which is more frightening:  the horror that engulfed New york City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House'” (p. 111).

Many of today’s professors, Shapiro says, are only minimally interested in scholarship, for they want to change the world.  Environmentalism, especially, has become a fervent faith for many professors.  To save the earth is a sacred mission.  So they attack SUVs, capitalism, free trade, and even the green revolution that has largely eliminated starvation in China and India.  One environmentalist, David Ehrenfeld, even argues that “the smallpox virus should not be destroyed since it kills only human beings” (p. 83).  And that, says another professor, CUNY’s Paul Taylor, would be “‘Good Riddance'” (p. 83).

This is obviously the book of a bright and very young writer.  Strong on anecdotes and alarming quotations, short on balance and analysis!  But it does reflect the reaction of one perceptive student.

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Something of a companion to Shapiro’s is Mike S. Adams’ Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel:  Confessions of a Conservative College Professor (Augusta, GA:  Harbor House, c. 2004).  He particularly addresses the problems of Political Correctness–the straight jacket of thought imposed on both teachers and students alike on many university campuses.  He awakened to the problem not long after he was hired to teach criminal justice at UNC-Wilmington in 1993.  At that time he was an atheist solidly committed to the Democratic Party.  In 1996, however, he traveled to Quito, Ecuador, where he interviewed a Catholic prisoner on death row who seemed to have a better perspective on life than he did.  Three years later he interviewed a “mentally retarded inmate on Texas’ death row” who quoted John 3:16.  Those encounters led Adams to buy a Bible and, before finishing it, embrace the Christian faith.  He also became a Republican.  By that time, since he openly aired his views, he had become a controversial professor, routinely attacked by colleagues for his controversial views.  Written as a series of letters, the book gives insight into Adams and his battles, illustrating the general conclusions of the more comprehensive studies earlier discussed.

# # #

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” Aldous Huxley wisely noted, and the facts differentiating the sexes must no longer be ignored, says Stephen Rhoads in Taking Sex Differences Seriously (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, 2004).  Rhoads, a professor at the University of Virginia, takes sex differences seriously because he takes research seriously and finds overwhelming evidence “that sex differences are large, deeply rooted and consequential” (p. 4).   From preferred forms of humor to risk-taking, from physical strength to social needs, from competitive athletics to social support groups, the two sexes radically differ.  Yet for nearly half-a-century, as a pronounced part of the “sexual revolution,” influential activists have sought to minimize, if not erase the differences between the sexes, talking learnedly about “genders” as “culturally determined” or mere matters of personal choice.

This is perhaps most clearly evident in athletics, which are far more important to boys than girls.  “One study of fourth and sixth graders showed that during free play, boys are competing with other boys 50 percent of the time whereas girls compete against each other only 1 percent of the time” (p. 168).   In the nation’s high schools and colleges, “girls outnumber boys in almost every extracurricular activity” except sports (p. 186).  Sports help society, for they are one of the few activities that help harness boys’ innately aggressive tendencies.  Boys socialize mainly through athletics, and they need “sports more than girls do because boys have more difficulty than girls in making friends” (p. 183).

But since 1972 the heavy hand of the federal government has sought to level the playing field for both sexes.  Consequently, over 20,000 “spots for male athletes disappeared” in university programs, and more than 350 men’s teams were jettisoned to make way for female athletes.  Thousands of men would like to voluntarily participate in varsity athletics, whereas women must often be enticed (through scholarships) to join a team.  Women are markedly less interested in competitive athletics, and fans decidedly prefer to watch men’s teams.  At the University of Virginia, where Rhoads teaches, “97 percent of total ticket revenues come from sales for men’s games, and 3 percent from sales for women’s games” (p. 164).

Nevertheless, “gender equality” in athletics (though not, one must note, in music or drama departments, much less in scholarships for women’s studies programs!) has been part of the “sexual revolution” for 40 years.  Rhoads attributes the success of the sexual revolution to three things:  1) the birth control pill, that made sex primarily “recreational” rather than “procreative;” 2) the counterculture of the ’60s, with its mantras of “if it feels good, do it” and “make love, not war”; and 3) the successful feminist movement.  Whatever its intent, however, Sally Cline says it is better labeled “the Genital Appropriation Era” and what it “‘actually permitted was more access to women’s bodies by more men; what it actually achieved was not a great deal of liberation for women but a great deal of legitimacy for male promiscuity; what it actually passed on to women was the male fragmentation of emotion from body'” (p. 97).

Though a majority of women still hope to find a husband in college, “hooking up” has replaced dating on campus, and even dating rarely leads to marriage.  Though widely practiced, however, “hooking up” inevitably harms women.  It’s not an equal opportunity activity!  “The most sexually active women were just as likely as other women to think about love, commitment and marriage with the men they slept with.  Sexually active men thought less about love, commitment and marriage as they had more casual sex.  The men’s feelings about casual sex were often very positive.  The women’s were more often negative” (p. 106).  The men who enjoy  promiscuous sex, however, generally disdain promiscuous women as possible wives!  “Of single men age 25 to 33, 74 percent agree that if they meet someone they want a long-term relationship with, they try to postpone sex” (p. 122).  All too many unmarried women, still cohabitating their 30s, find themselves “‘acting like a wife’ while their partners are ‘acting like a boyfriend'” (p. 119).  It’s hardly surprising, then, that “since the sexual revolution began, women have been thinking worse of men” (p. 118).  Indeed, there’s lots of “rage” toward them.  Men, for many women, are “jerks.”

The sexual revolution also ignited the egalitarian dogma of culturally constructed “genders,” equally capable of rearing children.  Ignoring sexual differences, as do those who promote “androgynous parenting,” involves little more than believing one’s fantasies.  Staunch feminists, such as Joyce Carol Oates and Kate Millet, determined to abolish patriarchy, have insisted that “gender” is a human construct and “gender differences” are quite superficial.  Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg declared:  “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be” (p. 17).  Men pretend that women are better mothers, she says, simply because they want to escape the demanding work of child care.  More radically, Susan Okin, reflecting the typical academic feminist’s longing for a “just future,” envisions a world wherein “one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”  Male and female distinctions would disappear, and both men and women would do domestic chores equally well.

Such views, though advanced by “researchers” in the ’70s, can no longer be honestly maintained.  Women and men really are different.  Women, for example, actually enjoy being with babies and toddlers more than men.  “Cross-nationally, girls show more interest in babies and are preferred as babysitters.  Neither Israeli kibbutzim nor U.S. communes have had any success in abolishing such sex roles, although many have made doing so their highest priority” (p. 26).  And babies–by a margin of “fourteen to one”–prefer being with their mothers rather than their fathers (p. 11).  “Young children, moreover, are quick to self-segregate by sex” (p. 25).  Like water flowing through the Grand Canyon, the sexes simply conform to the “patriarchal” stereotypes disdained by feminists.  In truth, says Alice Eagly, women really “‘do ‘tend to manifest behaviors that can be described as socially sensitive, friendly, and concerned with others’ welfare” (p. 18).  They “find special pleasure in small groups of women–a preference that gives them practice at establishing intimate friendships” (p. 204).

Men, conversely, “tend to manifest behaviors that can be described as dominant, controlling and independent'” (p. 18).  Men everywhere “want to ‘drive the car, pick the topic, run the war'” (p. 151).  Boys forever fight and refuse to listen to girls (p. 154).  So too (once grown-up) men “hate to be dominated.  Men attempt to climb workplace hierarchies in part because of their strong desire for a job with no close supervision” (p. 151).  In the judgment of Anne Campbell, “Deep inside, men are always on their own against the world'” (p. 184).  That’s the way it is–and perhaps the way it should be!  Men also desire physically attractive women, for “researchers found that feminine beauty affects a man’s brain at a very primal level–similar to what a hungry man gets from a meal or an addict gets from a fix” (p. 59).  Like it or not, women are forever in a beauty contest, competing for men’s attention.  Women, by contrast, find men’s physical stature and financial accomplishments more alluring.  They want to “look up to” their husbands, both physically (wanting someone six inches taller) and intellectually.   Universally, women value a mate’s financial resources more highly than do men.  Men often prefer women who earn less than they do, but women almost never do.  Strangely enough, “highly paid professional women have an even stronger preference for high-earning men than do women working in less well-paid jobs” (p. 63).

Fathers are important not only as breadwinners, however; they are necessary for a child’s well being, especially serving as disciplinarians and “guides to the outside world” (p. 80).  Fatherless children suffer.  They have significantly more developmental problems and die more frequently.  “Swedish boys in single-parent families are four times as likely to develop a narcotics-related disease, and girls are three times as likely” (p. 80).  The pain of losing a father through divorce is powerfully expressed by Jonetta Rose Barras, in Whatever Happened to Daddy’s Little Girl?:  “‘A abandoned by the first man in her life forever entertains powerful feelings of being unworthy or incapable of receiving any man’s love.  Even when she receives love from another, she is constantly and intensely fearful of losing it.  This is the anxiety, the pain, of losing one’s father'” (p. 94).

Mothers, of course, are as important as fathers, and women instinctively “dream of motherhood” (p. 190).  Germaine Greer published an influential manifesto, The Female Eunuch, in 1970 that mocked motherhood.  “Now, thirty years later, she says she is ‘desperate for a baby. . . .  She mourns her unborn babies . . . and [has] pregnancy dreams, waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen'” (p. 205).  Today’s young women, frequently ingesting feminists’ formulae for the “good life,” choose to make careers primary, but they routinely lament their barrenness when they reach their 40s.  Lugging a leather briefcase to a lush office proves to be a poor substitute for a baby at one’s breast.  Giving birth to a baby profoundly changes most women, who discover a mysterious and joyous bond between themselves and their young.  Naomi Wolf, once pregnant, recorded that “the hormones of pregnancy” so changed her that she had to “question my entire belief system about ‘the social construction of gender'” (p. 205).

Greer and Wolf, however, no longer represent feminism.  Rather than acknowledge the research that challenges their prejudices, most feminists reject it.  They angrily denounce it, without citing evidence, as biased and anti-woman.  Gloria Allred labels such research “harmful and dangerous” (p. 19).  Feminists, deeply imbedded in publishing houses, promote school textbooks that celebrate atypical women, actually giving “more attention to Maria Mitchell, a nineteenth-century astronomer who discovered a comet, than to Albert Einstein” (p. 40).  Scholars (many of them women) who dare question feminist claims face disrespectful audiences and personal attacks, and they have difficulty finding publishers for their research.

What seems clear, Rhoads says, is that there are “two kinds of females, one kind of male” (p. 29).  Men, universally, see themselves as protectors and providers.  Women seem to divide (perhaps in accord with their testosterone levels) into semi-masculine and fully feminine groups.  Strong feminists, Rhoads suggests, embody the competitive, aggressive traits of men.  Many of them–Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir–never married.   “A disproportionate number of female business executives were athletes in school” (p. 173).  Thus the only segment of women in America with a majority identifying themselves as “feminists” is a tiny cadre “making more than $100,000 a year” (p. 35).  These powerful women, when pregnant, often “‘see the body as an imperfect tool that the more perfect self should control.  They tend to experience pregnancy and birth as unpleasant because they are so out of control.'”  They cannot understand home-birthers, who “see themselves as ‘actively growing the baby'” in their wombs.  Rather, “‘see the baby as a separate entity,’ a ‘foreign body growing inside my body'” (p. 36).   So naturally they cannot understand the clear majority of women who want to be home with their kids, who appreciate traditional husbands who protect and provide.

Yet, Rhoads concludes, these traditional men and women are the ones who find life most satisfying.  Women really do find joy in rearing children and homemaking.  Men really thrive when they can succeed in work and thereby support a family.  Taking sex differences seriously explains why this is so.  Everyone concerned with marriage and family, with the health of young people, should take seriously Rhoads’ research.  As the distinguished Rutgers University professor of anthropology Lionel Tiger says:  “The Empress of Androgyny has no clothes.  Steven Rhoads provides a responsible, clear, exhaustive and convincing description of human sex differences and what they mean for social policy and personal life.  While members of the academy rush to consume ‘natural’ foods and protect ‘nature,’ they simultaneously ignore and even avoid ‘human nature,’ especially in the sexual sphere where political intensity is greatest.  Rhoads offers a generous-minded but hard-headed corrective to ideological fatuities and concernocrat assertions that have polluted the intellectual air.  And his scholarship is as punctilious as his writing is efficient” (book jacket).

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Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America:  The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes (New York:  Sentinel, c. 2004), adds a journalist’s perspective to Rhoad’s more scholarly treatise.  Though she is a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, and provides both footnotes and bibliography to document her case, she writes for a general audience and addresses “one of the fundamental changes of our time:  the ongoing, massive, and historically unprecedented experiment in family-child separation in which the United States and most other advanced societies are now engaged” (p. xiii).  As the book’s subtitle indicates, she argues, courting controversy, that we simply must fill homes with adults who rightly nurture children.

In a chapter devoted to day care, markedly similar to a chapter in Rhoads’ treatise, Eberstadt notes that it is necessary because 70% of the mothers with children under age six were working.  However necessary for moms who lack other options, day care harms kids.  Child care advocates, especially those who promote universal, governmentally-funded child care, are sadly misguided.  “In sum,” she insists, “the real trouble with day care is twofold:  One, it increases the likelihood that kids will be unhappy, and two, the chronic rationalization of that unhappiness renders adults less sensitive to children’s needs and demands in any form” (p. 19).  Rather than “overparenting” or excessive maternalism–portrayed by “separatonists” as harmful to children–kids need parents who are continually present, constantly involved in their activities.

When they’re not, they face the “furious child problem.”  Shooters in our schools most clearly illustrate it.  But less lethal forms of savagery–”feral behavior,” Eberstadt calls it–have markedly increased and generally develop in “stressed, single parent homes,” where children spend little time with the only adults capable of inculcating academic and social skills.  Careful studies, taking into account “differences in family income and in parental education, marital status, and total hours worked, the more hours parents are away from home after school and in the evening, the more likely their children are to test in the bottom quartile on achievement tests [emphasis added]” (p. 37).

The same goes for physical and mental fitness.  “Fit parents, fat kids” describes the U.S.  While “boomers” embrace vegetarianism and haunt health clubs, their kids (at home alone) veg-out on chips and soda while playing video games.  Between 1960 and 2000, “the percentage of overweight children and teenagers tripled” (p. 41).  Too little breast-feeding, too much TV, too little exercise, too few family meals, too much fast-food grazing.  In sum:  “Today’s child fat problem is largely the result of adults not being there to supervise what kids eat” (p. 54).  Mental disorders and suicides have soared.  Depression, autism, learning disabilities, ADD all point to troubled children.  Yet Eberstadt wonders whether much of this may simply be “a legitimate emotional response to the disappearance from children’s lives of protecting related adults?” (p. 78).

Rather than stay home with their kids, parents increasingly rely on psychiatric drugs to keep them pacified.  In one decade (1987-1996) the number of kids taking such drugs tripled.  Prozac eases girls’ depression; Ritalin curbs boys’ exuberance.   Psychologists dispense prescriptions rather than probe the hidden hurts in kids’ hearts.   Parents and teachers who ban even pictures of guns from school routinely endorse mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin.  A significant number of school shooters, such as Kip Kinkel in Oregon and Eric Harris in Colorado, were taking prescribed drugs.  Ritalin has been widely prescribed and now thrives on an underground black market as kids with prescriptions turn dealers with their surplus pills.  Angry musicians, including Kurt Cobain and Eminem, loudly lamented being placed on Ritalin as children.  Eberstadt fears that “children and teenagers are increasingly treated with performance-enhancing drugs not only to help them compete, but also to relieve the stresses that their long, out-of-home, institutionalized days add to the adults around them, the teachers, parents, and other authorities” (p. 102).

She believes this, in part, because of “the primal scream of teenage music,” perhaps the most disturbing chapter in the book.  Older folks (like myself) who can’t stand the music and simply hope it goes away should carefully heed Eberstadt’s analysis of it.   Digging beneath the profanity and violence of rap music, Eberstadt argues that “if yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment” (p. 106).  The lyrics of Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain, Eminem et al. rail against “the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers” (p. 106).  Tupar Shakur, a violent rapper gunned down in his 20s in Las Vegas, was “a boy who ‘had to play catch by myself,’ who prays:  ‘Please send me a pops before puberty’” (p. 114).   Eminem’s songs emphasize “the crypto-traditional notion that children need parents and that not having them has made all hell break loose” (p. 117).  In a song written for a movie he made, Eminem “studies his little sister as she colors one picture after another of an imagined nuclear family, failing to understand that ‘momma’s got a new man.’  ‘Wish I could be the daddy that neither of us had,’ he comments” (p. 117).  Though their parents don’t want to admit it, kids buying Eminem’s albums by the millions generally crave the Ozzie and Harriet homes of the ’50s.

For one thing, kids in the ’50s were free from the “ravages of ‘responsible’ teenage sex” that now devastates our young people.  STDs run rampant, thanks to absent parents and the “safe sex’ mantra of “sex educators.”  Five of the ten most frequently reported diseases in modern America are STDs.  Parents and teachers who are paranoid about smoking tobacco tolerate and even encourage far more lethal experimentation with sex.  But “if tobacco were doing to teenage girls’ lungs what intercourse and oral sex are now doing to their ovaries and other female organs, there would be no more adult talk of ‘safe sex’ than there is talk of ‘safe cigarettes.’  The difference is that one can always stop smoking, whereas some of the STDs are for keeps” (p. 140).  Kids are now “sexually active,” it’s clear.  And empty homes, with both parents working from dawn to dark, provide perfect places for teenage trysts–91% taking place there after school.

Sex abuse also escalates when parents aren’t around.  Men rarely abuse their biological children.  A British psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple, declares:  “‘He who says single parenthood and easy divorce says child sexual abuse'” (p. 137).  Another scholar, David Blankenhorn, notes that 86 percent of child abusers “were known to the family, but were someone other than the child’s father” (p. 137).  “In the statistics on teenage STDs lurks one of the saddest stories in this book,” says Eberstadt.  “Here is a clear-cut example that laissez-faire parenting has caused real harm to millions of teenagers, most seriously the girls whose bodies now carry viruses latent with short- and long-term problems–everything from infertility to increased risks of various cancers.  Many of them do not even know what they have, and neither do their happy-talk parents who continue on in their unenlightened happy-talk way–responsibly buying their responsible adolescents birth control, all the while clinging to ideological reassurances about ‘responsible’ teenage sex” (p. 138).

In conclusion, Eberstadt  says we need less day care and “more parent-child separation but, rather, the adoption of a higher standard that acknowledges what has too long gone unacknowledged:  the benefits of increasing the number of intact adult-supervised homes” (p. 172). 

DAVID HOROWITZ on the LEFT

               Few thinkers understand the American Left as well as David Horowitz.  Reared in New York as a  “baby diaper” Communist, deeply committed to Marxism, in the ’60s he edited the most widely-read counter-cultural periodical, Ramparts Magazine, helping to inspire and orchestrate the anti-war movement of that era.  Making an about-face in the ’70’s, he has become a trenchant critic of today’s Left.  He fully understands the its ideology and knows personally many of its most prominent spokesmen.  Horowitz’s latest book, Unholy Alliance:  Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2004) provides readers a valuable analysis of the latest fluorescence of radicalism and its influence on the liberal mainstream of this nation. 

            The debris from the World Trade Towers had barely settled before Leftists began to blame America for both the murderous attacks and the manifold woes of the world.  Rather than condemn the murderous Moslem terrorists, intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Barbara Kingsolver decried the “root causes” responsible for terror.  Activists   staged “peace vigils” and teach-ins” to protest America’s villainy as her troops attacked the Taliban tyrants in Afghanistan.  Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, an unabashed Marxist who was elected president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in the 1990s, declared:  “I’m not sure which is more frightening:  the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House'” (p. 15).  President Bush’s “Manichean vision” was “deeply rooted in our Puritan past and evangelical present,” Foner declared, making it the moral equivalent of the fanaticism of Osama bin Laden. 

            When the war against terror shifted to Iraq, the Left mounted a furious attack on President Bush.  Anti-war demonstrations, organized by International ANSWER (an openly Bolshevik-style group noted for its support for North Korea), featured speakers who called America a “rogue” or “terrorist” state and likened George Bush to Adolf Hitler.  “No Blood for Oil,” the protestors screamed.  A handful of Democratic Congressmen, such as John Conyers and Charles Rangel, supported these radical protests, and professors in hundreds of universities paraded to various podia to revive and revise the anti-Vietnam War rants of the ’60s.  Along with the war, the protestors reviled capitalism–specifically the “globalization” of detested companies such as Halliburton–and demanded the implementation of their utopian visions of “social justice.”  Consequently, militant Leftists in America have sided with Islamists abroad as part of their endeavor to radically change their own country.  The Marxist critique of America suffused the radical Islamicism of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and (subsequently) his protégé, Osama bin Laden.  When Iranian students took American embassy hostages in Teheran in 1979, they referred to the U.S. as the “Great Satan.”  Enjoying the support of Iran’s Communist Party, Khomeini adopted a Leninist approach to transforming Iran, establishing revolutionary tribunals, purging dissidents, making friends with the U.S.S.R.  The only free, democratic states in the Middle East, Lebanon and Israel (the “Little Satan”) were targeted for destruction.  Christian Lebanon–a jewel of freedom and prosperity in that region–was soon destroyed by Syria and the PLO. 

When the U.S. attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, aging anti-Vietnam War protesters, heeding the call of Ramsey Clark and others, found new life, flying the Palestinian Liberation Organization flag much as they did with the Vietnam flag decades ago.  Horowitz notes that youthful protesters, trashing cities such as Seattle, when they host meetings of the World Trade Organization, are manipulated by hard-core communists in groups like International ANSWER.  Allied organizations, including the Coalition for Peace and Justice, blessed by the National Council of Churches, have brought a religious fervor to the anti-war movement.  Horowitz adeptly traces its nihilistic views to their ideological source:  Karl Marx, who said, “Everything that exists deserves to perish” (p. 50).  Undaunted hate for what is, unmitigated hope for what is not but is to come, marks socialism.  Thus part of the socialist agenda includes an Anti-Americanism intent on replacing the American system with something akin to Cuba.  Leftists at the beginning of the 21st century illustrate an affinity with their 20th century predecessors, when, Whittaker Chambers said, “men banded together by the millions in movements like Fascism and Communism,” determined to undermine their own nations.  Consequently, “treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas” (p. 48).

            Many intellectuals on the Left take Noam Chomsky (a Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist) as the North Star for the movement.  “No individual has done more to shape the anti-American passions of a generation,” says Horowitz.  Professors cite him, thousands of university students flock to his lectures, and he enjoys an enormous international reputation.  Anti-American Europeans take particular delight in citing his analyses.  Chomsky claims to be an anarchist and certainly advocates a nihilistic agenda:  destroy the United States, whose history is laced with little more than atrocities and genocide, and something better (precisely what, he never says) will replace it.  America is the “Great Satan” to Chomsky, and his venom inspires both critics and enemies of this country.  Less than two weeks after American forces invaded Afghanistan, for example, Chomsky told a friendly crowd that that the U.S. was the “greatest terrorist state” on the planet.  He also predicted that American troops would orchestrate a genocide, annihilating millions of civilians in that country.

            Aligned with Chomsky is Howard Zinn, whose “signature book, A People’s History of the United States is a raggedly conceived Marxist caricature that begins with Columbus and ends with George Bush.  It has sold over a million copies, greatly exceeding that of any comparable history text” (p. 102).  Praised by professors such as Eric Foner, Zinn has been feted by academics and touted by movie directors and music celebrities.  His historical treatise is required reading in hundreds of classrooms.  The New York Times Book Review endorsed it “as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.”  Zinn sees American history as a long record of injustice wherein the powerful have exploited the weak.  Indians, slaves, labor unionists, socialists, et al. have endured brutality throughout this nation’s history.  Following the lead of Chomsky and Zinn, “Entire fields–’Whiteness Studies,’ ‘Cultural Studies,’ ‘Women’s Studies,’ ‘African American Studies,’ and ‘American Studies,’ to mention some–are now principally devoted to this radical assault on American history and society and to the ‘deconstruction’ of the American idea'” (p. 106). 

            Veteran “movement” activists, such as Leslie Cagan, who brings 40 years of radicalism to her position as “national coordinator” for the Coalition united for Peace and Justice, celebrate the virtues of Communism.  She lived 10 years in Cuba, years that “made it seem like I died and went to heaven” (p. 173).   She and others in the current anti-war movement have embraced the cause of radical Islamists, ever supporting terrorists who are brought to trial, and rallying to the ACLU’s defense of Professor Sami al-Arian, who used his position at the University of South Florida to finance and promote terrorist groups such as Islamic Jihad.  One of the professor’s organizations, the Islamic Committee for Palestine, raised money to subsidize Palestinian “martyrs” by urging donations of  “‘$500 to kill a Jew'” (p. 190).  When the FBI arrested al-Arian, he instantly attained a “victim” status and was staunchly defended USF’s faculty union and the American Association of University Professors!

            Hysterical opposition to the Patriot Act is another Leftist trademark.  Bernardine Dohrn, who three decades ago helped lead the Weather Underground (responsible for bombings and various terrorist acts), is now a law professor at Northwestern University and enjoys the esteem of her colleagues in the American Bar Association.  In a 2003 article published in Monthly Review, a Marxist periodical, she urged resistance to the both American imperialism abroad and counter-terrorism at home.  She somberly warned against immanent McCarthy-type measures everywhere threatening our liberties–specifically evident in John Ashcroft’s moves against Islamic charities (clear channels, Horowitz says, for moving funds from the U.S. to Middle East terrorists). 

            Professor Dohrn’s views have been endorsed by prominent spokesmen in the Democratic Party.   House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Al Gore became stridently anti-Bush and anti-war as the war against Iraq developed.  Senator Ted Kennedy claimed that Bush and a cabal of conspirators concocted the plan for war in Texas in order to gain political advantages.  “This whole thing,” said Kennedy, “was a fraud” (p. 236).  Former President Jimmy Carter (revealing an affinity for the Left that would be manifestly evident when he sat in a special box with Michael Moore at the 2004 Democratic Convention) proclaimed positions that garnered for himself the Nobel Peace Prize.  Carter was praised by the Nobel Committee for “promoting social and economic justice” and condemning “the line the current U.S. Administration has take on Iraq” (p. 216).  Carter claimed that the Iraq war reversed 200 years of American foreign policy, which had “been predicated on basic religious principles, respect for international law, and alliances that resulted in wise decisions and mutual restraint” (p. 221).  All these principles, he said had been trampled under foot by George W. Bush. 

            In truth, Horowitz suggests, the anti-war movement has little to do with the specific situation in the Middle East.  It’s simply the latest edition of a century-long struggle between the socialist Left, committed to replacing the American system with a socialist utopia, and the patriotic (if oft-naïve) citizens who support their country’s economic and foreign policy traditions.

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            To understand Horowitz, reading a recent compilation of articles edited by Jamie Glazov, Left Illusions:  An Intellectual Odyssey (Dallas:  Spence Publishing Company, 2003) supplements his earlier autobiography, Radical Son.  The collection is taken from books and articles, often written for on-line publications such as salon.com and FrontPageMagazine.com.  The book features into ten sections, tying together essays on topics such as race, the new left, Antonio Gramsci (the Italian Communist who has deeply influenced American Leftists), the post-communist left, and the war on terror.  Introducing Horowitz, Glazov quotes Camille Paglia’s appraisal of him as an “original and courageous” thinker” whose “spiritual and political odyssey [will prove] paradigmatic for our time” (p. xii). 

That odyssey is documented by Glazov in a short essay, describing Horowitz’s role in shaping the ’60s generation, followed by his turn to conservatism.  He slowly realized, in the ’70s, that “social engineers could not reshape human nature,” one of the core Marxist dogmas, and that the Left’s rhetoric and aspirations were, sadly enough, sheer illusions.  He lost the faith that binds together the revolutionary left.   Reflecting on it, Horowitz believes Sigmund Freud rightly understood (in Civilization and Its Discontents) the problem.  Socialists dream of a beautiful world wherein love and justice reign.  Consequently, Horiwitz laments, socialism is “an adult fairy tale.  Socialism was a wish for the comforting fantasies of childhood to come true.  I had an additional thought:  the revolutionary was a creator, just like God.  Socialism was not only a childish wish, but a wish for childhood itself:  security, warmth, the feeling of being at the center of the world” (p. 100). 

            In a chapter entitled “The Road to Nowhere,” Horowitz develops the arguments of a Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, an eminent former Marxist, who said:  “‘The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective:  it has revealed itself as the farcial aspect of human bondage'” (p. 126).  Kolakowsky clearly saw the deeply religious roots of Marxist ideology, an endeavor to end man’s estrangement and bring into being a “new man.”  Frankfurt School Marxists, such as Herbert Marcuse, derided the “commodity fetishism” of the capitalist system that resulted in a truncated “one dimensional” man.  But we now know the pervasive ills that have resulted wherever the Marxist recipe has been followed.  For example, in 1989, Soviet citizens ate half the meat Russians enjoyed in 1913 under the Czars.  When you’re not eating anything, “commodity fetishism” looks more like blessed abundance!  Tiny Taiwan and Switzerland each exported more manufactured goods than the Soviet Union, whose “factories” were models of inefficiency.  South African Blacks under apartheid “owned more cars per capita than did citizens of the socialist state” (p. 133).  The socialist hopes were all illusions. 

Since he apostatized, Horowitz has suffered endless, venomous attacks from his former colleagues.  This results, in part, from Horowitz’s thorough understanding of the cause he once championed.  He recognizes how constantly the Left indulges in “Telling It Like It Wasn’t.”  In an essay by this title he focuses on a PBS documentary, “1968:  The Year that Shaped a Generation,” which was virtually dictated by former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society such as Tom Hayden, who now defend their ’60s radicalism as a species of liberal reformism.  But  Hayden misrepresents himself, Horowitz says, for:  “By 1968, Hayden was already calling the black Panthers ‘America’s Vietcong’ and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic convention in Chicago that August” (p. 76).  That riot, as scripted by Hayden and the SDS, shattered the calm of the city.  Consequently Hubert Humphrey lost the presidential election.  That, in turn, “paved the way for a takeover of its apparatus by forces of the political left–a trauma from which the party has yet to recover” (p. 77).

            By 1974, new-style Democrats–Ron Dellums, Pat Schroeder, David Bonior, Bella Abzug–asserted themselves.  Having helped shape the anti-war movement, Horowitz knows that the slogan “Bring the Troops Home” was merely a cover for the real goal:  facilitating the victory of North Vietnam.  “Let me make this perfectly clear:  Those of us who inspired and then led the anti-war movement did not want merely to stop the killing, as so many veterans of the domestic battles now claim.  We wanted the communists to win” (p. 111).  Mounting evidence indicates that the war was not lost on the battlefields, where America could have prevailed and saved millions from Communism.  America lost the war because it lost the will to persevere.  Democrats thwarted Nixon’s efforts to establish a negotiated peace in Southeast Asia.  They cut off funds for South Vietnam and Cambodia and “precipitated the bloodbath that followed” (p. 78).  “The mass slaughter in Cambodia and South Vietnam from 1976 to 1978 was the real achievement of the New Left and could not have been accomplished without Hayden’s sabotage of the Humphrey presidential campaign and the anti-communist Democrats” (p. 78). 

            I’ve touched upon only a few of the themes Horowitz addresses in this book.  He has always been fiercely partisan, but, he says:  “I make no apologies for my present position.  My values have not changed, but my sense of what supports them and makes them possible has.  It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am” (back cover). 

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            Horowitz and his long-term colleague Peter Collier have edited The Anti-Chomsky Reader (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2004) in an effort to expose the duplicity and destructiveness of one of the most influential members of the radical Left in America.  A MIT professor of linguistics, Chomsky early established his reputation as an academic.  Then, during the Vietnam War, he took center stage by writing impassioned indictments of America’s foreign policies.  “According to the Chicago Tribune, Chomsky is ‘the most cited living author’ and ranks just below Plato and Sigmund Freud among the most cited authors of all time” (p. vii).  In some circles he’s revered as one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers, and he certainly has attracted multiplied thousands of devotees.  The “documentaries” of Michael Moore, the recent political machinations of billionaire George Soros, and web sites such as MoveOn.org. all reflect Chomsky’s views.  Horowitz and Collier contend, however, that Chomsky’s influence actually results from providing “an authentic voice to the hatred of America that has been an enduring fact of our national scene since the mid-1960s” (p. viii).  More perniciously, two linguists who have studied his academic work (Robert Levine of Ohio State University and Paul Postal of New York University) accuse him of “a deep disregard of, and contempt for, the truth; a monumental disdain for standards of inquiry; a relentless strain of self-promotion; notable descents into incoherence; and a penchant for verbally abusing those who disagree with him” (p. ix). 

            In the lead article of the collection, Stephen J. Morris, a Johns Hopkins University professor, accuses Chomsky of “Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia.”  Slighting scholarly literature, ignorant of the complex history of the region, Chomsky wrote about Vietnam on the basis of left-wing journalistic accounts and his own one-week visit to the country in 1970.  Applauding America’s withdrawal in 1974, he defended Communist rule in Vietnam in The Political Economy of Human Rights.  The book was, Morris says, “an attempt to reconstruct the anti-Western ideology of the New Left; it also is the most extensive rewriting of a period of contemporary history ever produced in a nontotalitarian society” (pp. 8-9).  More than ignoring the millions slaughtered as the Communists extended their control from Vietnam to Cambodia, Chomsky actually defended Pol Pot’s vicious regime by attempting to deny the genocide that transpired under its rule. 

            Thomas Nichols examines related issues in “Chomsky and the Cold War” and demonstrates the anti-American bias in his works, wherein he routinely delights to assert the moral equivalency of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.  During ’80s, he wrote with “almost pathological hostility” regarding President Reagan, dismissing him as an ignorant figurehead of a flawed Administration.  When Czechoslovakia’s courageous Vaclav Havel (an informed and articulate critic of socialism) spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1990, Chomsky called it an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon'” (p. 60).  Anti-Communist cold warriors were always wrong!

            In “Chomsky’s War Against Israel,” Paul Bogdanor documents the professor’s contempt for documentary evidence, making him an “intellectual crook” according to Arthur M. Schlesinger (p. 98).  Chomsky defended Yassar Arafat and the PLO and overlooked the genocidal rhetoric and terrorist attacks of Muslims.  Conversely, he routinely denounces Israel.  He ignored “the Saudi reaction to the capture of Adolf Eichhman, ‘who had the honor of killing five million Jews,’ or the Jordanian announcement that by perpetrating the Holocaust, Eichmann had conferred a real blessing on humanity,’ and that the best response to his trial would be ‘the liquidation of the remaining six million’ to avenge his memory” (p. 91).   Even more disturbing, in “Chomsky and Holocaust Denial,” Werner Cohn (a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who has published a book-length study on the topic) charts links between Chomsky and a small coterie of European writers, including Israel Shahak, “the world’s most conspicuous Jewish anti-Semite” (p. 119) and Robert Faurisson, a neo-Nazi French writer. 

            These essays document what Horowitz labels Chomsky’s “Anti-American Obsession.” His life-long commitment to socialism has led him to support Marxist movements around the world, ignoring their failures while praising their objectives.  Even when forced to criticize certain glaring socialist catastrophes and brutalities, he laments them as forgivable failures to develop the socialist utopia of Chomsky’s dreams.  And that commitment explains the incessant Anti-Americanism which is perhaps the most distinguishing dimension of his writings.  

                Though Australia stands, in many ways, on the periphery of Western Civilization, some of her scholars deserve careful reading.  In part this is because as “outsiders” they often bring a refreshing perspective to their respective disciplines.  Indeed, Michael J. Denton’s Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis (c. 1984) helped launch the challenging “Intelligent Deign” movement in biology.  More recently Denton has published a sequel, titled Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York:  The Free Press, c. 1998).  He aims, he says, cogently outlining his thesis:  “first, to present the scientific evidence for believing that the cosmos is uniquely fit for life as it exists on earth and for organisms of design and biology very similar to our own species, Homo sapiens, and second, to argue that this ‘unique fitness’ of the laws of nature for life is entirely consistent with the older teleological religious concept of the cosmos as a specially designed whole, with life and mankind as its primary goal and purpose” (p, xi).  The cosmos appears as if were precisely designed to enable intelligent beings to flourish on a very special place, planet earth.  The more we learn about our world, the more it reveals a “deeper order” that orchestrates all that is. 

            Though teleology–the Aristotelian notion that there is purpose and design to the world–has been discarded by many modern thinkers, Denton insists it makes sense.  Indeed, as Fred Hoyle (no friend of theism) acknowledged, “‘a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature'” (p. 12).  This is evident in elementary matters, as Denton makes clear in a lengthy, fascinating discussion of the marvelous properties of water.  “What is so very remarkable about the various physical properties of water . . . is not that each is so fit in itself, but the astonishing way in which, in many instances, several independent properties are adapted to serve cooperatively the same biological end” (p. 40).  Without water there would be no life–and its unique composition serves to facilitate life.  Joining water, light is likewise essential for life on earth.  The sun’s radiation, screened by intricately coordinated atmospheric gases, stimulates and sustains living creatures.  That the right amount of the right kind of light reaches earth is a “staggering” coincidence.  That water is transparent to this light is equally amazing.  Indeed, we should “be awed and staggered” by such “coincidences,” defying mathematical probabilities, that are absolutely necessary for the world to be as it is. 

Denton then peruses the presence of radioactive substances, the movement of tectonic plates, the marvelous rightness of the atmosphere and atmospheric pressure, the role of carbon and iron in the processes of life, the positive influence of planets such as Jupiter on the earth, the unique properties of oxygen and carbon dioxide in sustaining life, the mysterious power of photosynthesis, the incredible information contained in DNA, the sophisticated functioning of proteins within the cell, the life-sustaining efficiency of hemoglobin in the blood, the marvel of the cell’s membrane, and the brain’s computing power.  “The emerging picture is obviously consistent with the teleological view of nature.  That each constituent utilized by the cell for a particular biological role, each cog in the watch, turns out to be the only and at the same time the ideal candidate for its role is particularly suggestive of design.  . . . .  The prefabrication of parts to a unique end is the very hallmark of design.  Moreover, there is simply no way that such prefabrication could be the result of natural selection” (p. 233).  So too for man.  Denton finds the cosmos perfectly designed for our flourishing.  He notes our unique capacity to see and speak, our hand’s marvelous dexterity, our fire-making and using capacities, our suitability for our place in the cosmos, and our propensity for mathematics and abstract thought.  All things considered, the “chain of coincidences underlying our existence . . . is simply too long and the appearance of contrivance too striking” (p. 261) to be attributed to naturalistic chance.  

                Having devoted the first part of the book to “life,” he turns to the question of “evolution.”  That life should appear on planet earth is, quite simply, miraculous.  Denton emphasizes that few living creatures existed before the Cambrian Explosion–a 5 million year sliver of time, 600 million years ago–which witnessed the “great and  never-to-be-repeated burst of creative growth” responsible for all the main branches of the tree of life.  Thenceforth occurred an apparently “inevitable unfolding of a preordained pattern, written into the laws of nature from the beginning’ (p. 282).  Indeed, given the “immensely complex” composition of living organisms, “it is hard to understand how undirected evolution via a series of independent changes could ever produce a radical redisgn in any sort of system as complex as a living organism.  “In effect,” Denton says, “modern biology has revealed us a watch, a watch with a trillion cogs!–a watch which wonderfully fulfills William Paley’s prophetic claim in this famous section from his Natural Theology;  or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Aoppearances of Nature, published in 1800, that ‘every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more and that in a degree which exceeds all computation'” (p. 350).  Soon, he hopes, science will increasingly side with natural theology and defend of the “anthropocentric faith” Isaac Newton envisioned two centuries ago.

                Denton’s two treatises provide persuasive building blocks for the Intelligent Design movement.  Though personally agnostic, he remains open to and respectful of religious perspectives.  And he certainly thinks nature’s design reveals its underlying intelligence.

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The late philosopher David Stove had an amazing ability to cogently refute shoddy logic, especially in the philosophy of science.  Largely unknown outside Australia, a Stove sampler has been edited by Roger Kimbell and titled:  Against the Idols of the Age (New Brunswick, NJ:  Transaction Publishers, c. 1999).  In the book’s prefeace, Kimball commends Stove as a healthy antidote to the intellectual cowardice and pernicious illogic that pervades far too many fashionable theories.   

                In the book’s first section, “The Cult of Irrationalism in Science,” he deals with “Cole Porter and Karl Popper:  The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science.”  The mood of jazz–”anything goes,” as Cole Porter  crooned–provides “the key to Popper’s philosophy of science” (p. 5).  In the philosophy of science, Popper spawned thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn (of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions fame) who amplified and made respectable Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values.”  Rather than discovering truth, they alleged, science merely advances theories and probabilities, all of which decay like fallen leaves.  The best example of such Jazz Age nihilism is P.K. Feyerabend, a University of California professor who called himself “a ‘Dadaist’ and his philosophy ‘epistemological anarchism.’  He maintains that science knows, and should know no rules of method, no logic” (p. 14).  Thus witchcraft and astrology and even the sorcery of Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan fictions, as well as Newton and Pasteur, have “scientific” standing. 

                Confronting such blatant irrationalism, Stove simply asks if Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, et al. make sense.  He examines their words.  They assert, for example, that “unfalsifiable” and “irrefutable” statements are the same.  This is, however, patently untrue.  An “unfalsifiable” statement means “consistent with every observation statement,” whereas an “irrefutable statement” means “known for certain” (p. 21).  “They are no more related in meaning than, say, ‘weighty’ in ‘weighty thinker,’ and ‘overweight.’  Someone who identified weighty thinkers with overweight thinkers, and took himself to have gained a new insight into the nature of thinkers, would be guilty of a stupid enough pun.  Someone who identifies irrefutable propositions with unfalsifiable ones, and takes himself to have gained a new insight into the nature of scientific propositions is guilty of no better” (p. 210).     

                In “Idols Contemporary and Perennial,” Stove deals with some social and political issues.  He attacks  Harvard University Professor Robert Nozick in “‘Always apologize, always explain’:  Robert Nozick’s War Wounds.”  Following WWII the only nation able to resist Communism’s march toward world domination was the United States, so Nozick illustrates how during the Vietnam War “America’s capactity for such resistance remained intact, [but] her willingness did not.  For that war was lost, not through defeat of American armies in the field, nor yet through treachery among them, but through a massive sedition at home” (p. 93).  Consequently, Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations reveals “the gruesome and disabling wounds which were inflicted on American life, and on American intellectual life in particular, by the defeat in Vietnam” (p. 94).  Yet Nozick, strangely, wore such wounds as badges of honor.  He celebrated the defeat of America as a “moral” advance. The U.S. learned, he claimed, the signal virtue of “non-coerciveness.”  Just be nice to everyone and tolerate everything!  Impose nothing, especially anything as controversial as universal truth, on anyone. 

                Philosophizing in a non-coercive manner, Nozick foregoes rigorous proofs and indulges in pleasing “explanations,” an exercise that “is as insubstantial intellectually as it is over-charged emotionally:  in fact it is like nothing so much as a paper kite driven by a fifty horsepower motor” (p. 99).  Nozick’s views, Stove shows, are rooted in the notions of Kant, who declared that our experience “‘constitutes’ nature.  If this is not madness, and more specifically the self-importance of the human species run mad, it will do so until the real thing comes along” (p. 103).  While declaring his intent to address tough questions in Philosophical Explanations, Nozick instead indulges in verbal gymnastics that enable him–and philosophers like him–to “sound nicer:  that is, ‘gentler, softer, more considerate of others, respecters of their rights, and so forth'” (p. 107). 

                To Stove, such spinelessness cannot be considered philosophy.  Philosophers should seek and demand truth, a fundamentally “coercive” notion, “since what is true is independent of what anyone wants or believes” (p. 111).  Still more:  “No ideal could be more destructive of human life than the ideal of non-coerciveness” (p. 111).  Were not parents coercive their offspring would never survive.  Were not teachers coercive students would never learn.   Nozick’s endeavor, ultimately, reduces to an “autism” akin to America’s withdrawal from Vietnam.  “Autism is your only non-stop guaranteed-non-coercive fun.  At least, it is, if ‘fun’ is the right word” (p. 112).  Whatever it is, Stove says, it ought not be taken seriously!

                Finally, in the third section of the book, Stove tackles “Darwinian Fairytales.”  Whatever one may think of the empirical evidence, however one may respect the “authorities” endorsing it, Darwinism’s illogic, he says, deserves pillaring.  According to Darwin, constant competition ruthlessly weeds out the unfit and facilitates the evolution of species.  However, Stove insists, “the facts of human life” manifestly disprove this thesis, leaving us with “Darwinism’s Dilemma.”  For we do, in fact, cultivate religious values, help each other, nurture each other, build hospitals to care for the sick, and even give our lives for others.  Some Darwinians say the “Cave Man” (but not us moderns) lived according to the survival of the fittest code; others say the ruthless “Hard Man” still reigns, directing our species’ development; and still others, taking the “Soft Man” approach, cheerfully contradict themselves, declaring Darwin was right about natural selection while defending the need for welfare programs, foreign aid, etc.  What Stove insists is that the species we know best–our own–amply illustrates the very antithesis of Darwin’s fundamental thesis.

                Darwin erred, egregiously, by embracing the demographic theory of Thomas Malthus as the key to understanding evolution, whereas many “organic populations” never “obey this principle” (p. 240).  Microorganisms, parasites, and insects may seem to illustrate the idea that a species proliferates geometrically until food supplies are exhausted.  But more advanced creatures defy Malthus’ view.  Both domestic pets and “huge African wild” animals frequently “fail to increase in numbers, or even decline, in the presence of abundant food” (p. 241).  More importantly, the very species Malthus studied–man–easily demonstrates the “grotesque falsity” of his thesis.  Darwin’s modern defenders similarly fail Stove’s logic tests.  In “Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins,” he ridicules Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins’ portrait of  “selfish genes” guiding biological evolution in strictly deterministic fashion, much like the predestinarian God of Calvinist theology.  To call genes selfish, Stove insists, counters common sense.  To say a gene is “selfish” is akin to saying a virus is “studious, or shy.  You could just as intelligibly describe an electron as being slatternly, a triangle as being scholarly, or a number as being sex mad” (p. 255).  Yet Dawkins attained international eminence by propounding such nonsense. 

                Neo-Darwinists like Dawkins struggle (as did Darwin himself) to explain many things, especially the “altruism” that pervades creation, since it ought not exist in a dog-eat-dog Darwinian world.    Some, like E. O. Wilson, promote “sociobiology” to suggest that altruism is nothing but selfishness dictating preferential treatment for next-of-kin.  One would expect, then, Stove insists, that in bacteria, which reproduce by fission and “have 100 percent of their genes in common,” altruism would prevail. In fact, there is utterly “no kin altruism” evident (p. 295).  Few animals even recognize their first cousins, much less treat them favorably.  But human beings adopt orphans, send money to unknown starving people, and illustrate the utter folly of such “shared genes” musings.

                With sarcasm and relentless logic, Stove makes his case.  He admits that Darwinism may be the most persuasive theory afloat, but it simply cannot be true.   He’s no theist.  Indeed he’s rigorously skeptical about most everything.  But he’s a truth seeker and truth teller, and one profits from the clarity of his critiques.

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                In The Killing of History:  How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 1996), Keith Windschuttle documented the demise of traditional history in many realms.  For  2400 years, beginning with Thucydides, historians have sought to discern and narrate what actually happened in the past.  Mistakes might be made, interpretations might vary, but they sincerely believed there is “truth” to tell.  That ancient endeavor has lately been discounted by thinkers swayed by Neitzsche’s equation of  history and myth.  Nietzsche “wanted to replace the whole of Weswtern philosophy with a position that held there are no facts, only interpretations, and no objective truths, only the perspectives of various individuals and groups” (p. 24).  His disciples, such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, insisted that all “history” is merely a momentary perspective, historically shaped, and valuable insofar as it empowers whoever constructs it.  Consequently, today’s young people are “taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture–equality, freedom, democracy, human rights–as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful” (p. 5).  “Cultural studies,” focused on popular culture (especially movies and TV), have replaced the disciplined investigation of documents and discovery of facts.  Massaging texts and words, rather than portraying persons and locating events, enamor historians. And everyone’s free to creatively construct his own past.   

This approach to writing history is assailed in Windschuttle’s chapter entitled “Semiotics and the Conquest of America.”  A torrent of books re-evaluating Columbus’s landfall appeared in 1992.  In David Stannard’s American Holocaust, for example, we’re told that “‘The road to Auschwitz led straight through the heart of the Americas'” (p. 39).  Tzvetan Todorov, in The Conquest of America, declared there’s no difference between Christians ingesting the sacramental bread and wine and Aztecs cutting out the hearts of their sacrificial victims.  Hernando Cortes and the conquistadores are routinely demonized.  But Indians, who routinely offered human sacrifices to their gods and indulged in cannibalism, are always treated sympathetically.  They lived according to their cultures’ code.  To historians like Stannard and Todorov, cultural relativism is an article of faith until one deals with Cortes or Christians, who are wrong all the time in all places! 

In fact, Cortes conquered Mexico because the Aztecs’ Indian foes assisted him.  And his much-lamented  Spanish brutalities were, primarily, the result of following their Indians allies’ approach to war, for the Tlascalans  insisted:  “‘In fighting the Mexicans . . . we should kill all we could, leaving no one alive:  neither the young, lest they should bear arms again, nor the old, lest they give counsel'” (p. 58).  The religion and culture of the Aztecs, Windschuttle inists, “made it necessary for Cortes to destroy Tenochtitlan and kill most of its inhabitants.  The Mexica had no concept of surrender and the transfer of power to the victor.  During the final stages of the siege, Cortes made several attempts to negotiate with the remaining Mexican lords but was rebuffed.   They refused any terms save a swift death.  Even with all their warriors either dead or unarmed and the people starving, they responded to further mass killings from cannon and handgun not by surrendering but by pressing on to destruction.  Exasperated, Cortes decided to raze the city, and unleashed his native allies who massacred the remnants of the defenseless men, women and children” (p. 54). 

Turning to the history of Hawaii and Australia, Windschuttle shows how postmodern historians are re-imaging and rewriting the past with little concern for empirical data.  Underlying this approach is Michel Foucault, the anti-humanist, anti-history historian whose theories largely shape “the directions history is now taking” (p. 131).  He’s especially noted for his rejection of the “humanism of the modern era” (p. 134).  To Faucault, there is no “autonomous” human person, no subjective self.  Indeed, neither consciousness nor free will nor external reality are real.  Our words and the way we interpret them are all there is. 

Foucault’s radical relativism, of course, subverts itself.  He claimed that all cultural groups have their own “truths,” none of which is objective or universal.  Histories are mere “fictions.”  Yet he assumed, of course, that his thesis–all cultures normalize only small “truths”–is True for all cultures at all times everywhere!   Toward the end of his life, he began back-peddling, suggesting that perhaps one must be a “subject” of some sort, capable of real moral acts.  “He defines the basic practice of ethics as self-mastery that is derived from ‘the thoughtful practice of freedom.’  Unfortunately, neither he nor his supporters like to admit that he has thereby jettisoned key passages of his earlier work.  But rather than admit he was mistaken or wrong, they dealt out  equivocations such as ‘shifts of emphasis’, ‘discontinuities’ and a similar range of euphemisms” (pp. 148-149). 

With the collapse of the USSR one would have expected a related retreat of Marxism.  Such has not, however, occurred.  Tactics have simply shifted.  Rather than hoping to overthrow capitalistic regimes through revolution, Marxists now work to reform and ultimately transform them through “creeping socialism.”  Adopting the approach of Antonio Gramsci, this led to “leftist participation in the upper reaches of government, education, the law and the media, as well as lobby groups concerned with environmental, feminist, homosexual, ethnic and welfare issues” (p. 185).  Infiltrating the historical profession, they have replaced the empirically-based narrative  with a “grand theorist” method that explains the past in terms of class struggle and historical dialectic.

Windshuttle finally examines efforts to kill history by reducing it to a social science or re-casting it as imaginative literature–as did Hayden White, who declared, in his influential Metahistory:  “‘The aged Kant was right, in short:  we are free to conceive “history” as we please, just as we are free to make of it what we will'” (p. 258).  And that, precisely, is our problem!  Kant’s heirs are killing history!

 

 

 

                Everyone interested in the “cardinal doctrine” of The Church of the Nazarene must read Mark R. Quanstrom’s A Century of Holiness Theology:  The Doctrine of Entire Sanctification in the Church of the Nazarene, 1905 to 2004 (Kansas City:  Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 2004).  Written as a Ph.D. dissertation, it meticulously documents the denomination’s story without special pleading for the author’s personal position, which is not particularly evident.  Written by an active pastor (22 years in Belleville, IL), it presents the evidence in a readable manner that also bears witness to the author’s concern for and commitment to his church’s distinctive doctrine. 

                Quanstrom begins his study by linking the Church of the Nazarene’s emergence with the “American Ideal” at the beginning of the 20th century.  It was an optimistic era when progressive–and often utopian–aspirations filled the air.  Progressive politicians like Woodrow Wilson envisioned and worked for a perfect world.  Utopian novels, especially Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, touted a world-to-come without scarcity or injustice, wherein social and technological developments guaranteed comfort for all.    Christian socialists and advocates of the “Social Gospel” like Washing Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, called for the immediate establishment of the Kingdom of God, free of war and economic inequities.  The first generation of Nazarenes, while rejecting the theological liberalism of Social Gospel devotees, entertained many of the same utopian aspirations.  They thought the world could be transformed, in socio-political as well as personal ways, through the proclamation of Christian holiness.

                Then came World War I.  Sobriety set in.  Utopian visions dissipated amidst the mustard gas of trench warfare.  So, as early as 1919, some doctrinal retrenchments began in Nazarene circles.  It was decided that entire sanctification should be promoted as a personal transformation, a deliverance from the power of sin, rather than a means whereby the Kingdom of God would come into being.  Following decades witnessed significant reductions in the claims made for the work of entire sanctification, even within an individual’s heart.  Consequently, within a century of the church’s founding, “entire sanctification would not be taught so much as an instantaneous change in the heart of the believer appropriated by consecration and faith, but rather more as an unremarkable event in the progress of growth, if taught at all.  The ‘eradication of the sinful nature’ would be terminology that many Nazarenes would eschew, even though the words would remain in the Articles of Faith” (p. 23).  Consequently, the “early Nazarenes’ hopes for the propagation and preservation of the doctrine as they understood it have not been realized” (p. 24).

                Filling in this story, Quanstrom first explores the Church of the Nazarene’s 19th century doctrinal roots.  The holiness theology of Pheobe Palmer (who emphasized consecration and faith), holiness camp meetings, and eminent Methodist preachers (such as John Allen Wood and Daniel Steele), established the position on “Christian perfection” the church adopted.  A.M. Hills, one of the most influential early Nazarene theologians, summed it up in Holiness and Power, a book which was part of the Ministerial Course of Study from 1911-1964.  Hills especially emphasized the “instantaneous” nature of the “second work of grace” whereby a believer was entirely sanctified.  Seekers were urged to “believe and receive” the experience, to accept by faith the effectual working of God in their heart if they only surrendered their all to Him. 

Alongside Hills’ book, Possibilities of Grace, a treatise by a Methodist writer, Asbury Lowery, was included in the course of study in 1911, where it remained until 1956.  “Lowrey,” Quanstrom says, “was as optimistic as any in the holiness movement concerning what would happen if the church received this blessing.  He believed that holiness was the reason for every great reformation in the history of the church” (p. 45).  Following the lead of Phoebe Palmer, Lowrey urged believers to consecrate themselves completely to God, the “place their all upon the altar,” and take God at His Word by believing that the “altar sanctifies the gift.”  Truly sanctified, they need not even consider themselves actually in need of confessing “forgive us our trespasses” when reciting the Lord’s Prayer. 

                As the young denomination took form, following World War I, clarifying (for example) the difference between Pentecostals and Nazarenes, a “fundamentalist leavening” began.  Whereas mainline denominations, such as the Presbyterians and Methodists, had divided into modernist and fundamentalist factions, the General Superintendents declared, at the 1928 General Assembly, that “there will be no discussion of modernism or fundamentalism.  We are all fundamentalists, we believe the Bible, we all believe in Christ, that He is truly the Son of God” (56).  They declared that the scripture is “infallible,” for “the Bible is the Word of God.  We believe it from Genesis to Revelation.”  Still more:  “The church must stand first, last and all the time for the whole Bible, the inspired, infallible, revealed Word of God” (p. 56).  Subsequently, delegates to the General Assembly expanded the denomination’s article of belief to read:  “We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures by which we understand the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to salvation; so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith” (p. 57, italics Quanstrom’s).     

                During the 1930s, H. Orton Wiley, the architect of the above statement regarding scripture, began work on an official theology for the church, pursuant to a request by J. B. Chapman.  A.M. Hills, at times a colleague of Wiley’s at Pasadena College and clearly an “elder statesman” of the movement, was disappointed that he wasn’t assigned the task.  But he published, with an independent publisher, his Fundamental Christian Theology, which was added to the Ministerial Course of Study and widely utilized during that decade.  Hills espoused post-millennialism, confident that Christ will return when His disciples have perfected His commission.  He also espoused a lofty view of human freedom, rather typical of the pre-WWI progressives, that was ratified by the 1928 General Assembly’s declared confidence in man’s “godlike ability of freedom” (p. 72).  So his explanation of entire sanctification was naturally optimistic.  If we simply will to will God’s will we will be holy. 

                H. Orton Wiley’s magisterial, three-volume Systematic Theology appeared during the early ’40s and was instantly recognized as the official theology of the Church of the Nazarene.   Thorough scholarship rooted his work in the classical, orthodox mainstream of the Christian Faith, but he primarily engaged 19th century theologians such as Miley who had worked within the Wesleyan tradition.  Though Wiley never openly differed with A.M. Hills, he subtlety and firmly shifted the focus of salvation from man’s “free will” to God’s “free grace,” giving preeminence to God alone in all aspects of salvation.  Emphasizing “prevenient grace,” he embraced both the Protestant notion of moral depravity without denying the reality of free will, thereby distancing himself from the rather radical “moral freedom” espoused by Hills.   

                Wiley fully endorsed the article on entire sanctification as set forth (in 1928) in the Articles of Faith for the Church of the Nazarene:  “We believe that entire sanctification is that act of God, subsequent to regeneration, by which believers are made free from original sin, or depravity, and brought into a state of entire devotement to God, and the holy obedience of love made perfect.  It is wrought by the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and comprehends in one experience the cleansing of the heart from sin and the abiding, indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, empowering the believer for life and service.  Entire sanctification is provided by the blood of Jesus, is wrought instantaneously by faith, preceded by entire consecration; and to this work and state of grace the Holy Spirit bears witness.  This experience is also known by various terms representing its different phases, such as ‘Christian Perfection,’ ‘Perfect Love,’ ‘Heart Purity,’ ‘The Baptism with the Holy Spirit,’ ‘The Fullness of the Blessing,’ and ‘Christian holiness.'”

                Wiley especially emphasized the instantaneous nature of the second work of grace.  He stressed the aorist tense of New Testament words describing God’s sanctifying work in the heart, embracing fundamentalism’s commitment to the words of Scripture, and he tried to make sure that Nazarenes would tenaciously proclaim it.  Methodist theologians in the 19th century had failed to defend this position and gradually emphasized “‘growth and development, rather than upon the crises which marked the different stages in personal experience'” (p. 81).  But the great promise to believers, is “‘that God has promised a cleansing from all sin through the blood of Jesus.  He lays hold of the promises of God, and in a moment, the Holy Spirit purifies his heart by faith.  In that instant he lives the full life of love.  In him love is made perfect . . .  The law of God is written upon his heart'” (p. 84). 

                Definitively defended by Wiley, the doctrine of entire sanctification was promoted by Nazarene preachers and teachers in the post-WWII era, albeit with less triumphant optimism than earlier.  Tending to share the somber realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, Americans in general rather discounted the perfectibility of man.   Revealing this were some of the books added to the ministerial course of study, such as A Right Conception of Sin, by Richard Taylor; The Terminology of Holiness, by J.B. Chapman; Conflicting Concepts of Holiness, by W.T. Purkiser.  “These were works,” says Quanstrom, “which were clinically precise in their definition concerning exactly what it was that was eradicated by the grace of entire sanctification and they were not making the claims that earlier holiness works had” (98).  The doctrine was still clearly declared, though its scope had narrowed.  Rejecting Lowrey’s perfectionism, Purkiser, for example, insisted that sanctified believers certainly should pray that God “forgives us our trespasses,” noting that we pray for others as well as ourselves and (even if cleansed from sin) remain aware of our past sins.

                Concerned that Nazarene preachers have a seminary supporting the church’s doctrines, Nazarene Theological Seminary opened in 1945.  The first professor of theology was Stephen S. White, who upheld  the doctrine of entire sanctification, stressing that it is a distinctively second, instantaneous work of grace, freeing the believer from inbred sin as a result of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  He especially emphasized (and was supported therein by NTS’s first president and future general superintendent, Hugh Benner) the importance of sin’s “eradication.”  But others, such as Richard Taylor, qualified such claims, distinguishing between sin and infirmity, exempting from cleansing various flaws of personality and temperament. 

Asbury Lowrey’s Possibilities of Grace disappeared from the ministerial course of study in 1960, and The Spirit of Holiness, by Everett Lewis Cattell, the president of Malone College, was added in 1964.  Cattell urged holiness theologians to get back to Wesley, whose A Plain Account of Christian Perfection had been added, for the first time, in 1954.  Reading Wesley revealed his rather “gradual growth” understanding of holiness, as well as his wariness of claiming it as a personal experience.  What Nazarenes like Richard Taylor labeled “infirmities” John Wesley had called “sins.”  Consequently, the 1976 General Assembly added two new paragraphs to the Articles of Faith, indicating the importance of gradual growth as well as crisis experience.  The 1985 General Assembly featured a vigorous discussion concerning the denomination’s article of faith on Original Sin, responding to a commission’s proposals that it be significantly revised to remove the possibility of its “eradication.”  The delegates ultimately decided to add paragraphs in accord with the commission’s proposal, resulting in a softening of the possibility of sinless sanctity.   

This move reflected the growing influence of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, whose 1973 treatise, A Theology of Love, sparked one of the most significant shifts in the denomination’s history.  Paul Orjala labeled it “one of the most important books ever published by Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City . . . for here is the first modern theology of holiness” (p. 141).  Though it was not added to the course of study until 1986, it early exerted influence throughout the church.  Wynkoop emphasized the “credibility gap” between what had been taught and what was actually lived by most Nazarenes, and she proposed a thorough “restructuring of the conceptual framework within which holiness theologians had worked” (p. 143).  Rather openly rejecting the holiness theology of earlier thinkers, she insisted on a “Wesleyan hermeneutic” with a new definition of human nature and sin.  A person is not, she suggested, by nature sinful, and sin is not a “thing” to be removed.  Rather, when the relationship with God is broken we do sinful things. 

Restoring that relationship, therefore, solves the sin problem.  Nothing particularly changes within

one’s soul, but a healthy relationship with God develops.  Holiness is interpersonal love–nothing more, nothing less.  Though she tried to distance herself from Pelagianism, she nevertheless insisted that we’re not locked into sin’s bondage by birth.  Denying the reality of inbred sin, she had no need for a second work of grace.  With nothing to cleanse, there’s no need for the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” apart from His role in regeneration.  In truth, we’re free to love or not to love, and the decision is largely ours, ironically reviving   A.M. Hills’ focus on the will.  “Specifically, Wynkoop defined a pure heart as a heart that, as Kierkegaard had written, willed one thing” (p. 146).  In the final analysis, says Quanstrom, she discounted the efficacious power of grace and emphasized “the purity of a person’s consecration which would lead to unhindered communion with God” (p. 146).   Thus, however much she may have endeavored to provide a better way to understand entire sanctification, “her definitions tended to undermine the doctrine’s distinctiveness” (p. 150). 

                In 1979 the Board of General Superintendents asked H. Ray Dunning to write a replacement text for Wiley’s Systematic Theology.  It would be titled Grace, Faith, and Holiness:  A Wesleyan Systematic Theology, published in 1988, and added to the course of study in 1990.  Like Wynkoop, Dunning was a Trevecca Nazarene College professor, and he basically shared her position–especially her singular reliance upon Wesley–regarding the doctrine of holiness.  “Dunning’s systematic theology was different,” notes Quanstrom.  “He intended it to be” (p. 160).  Departing from the methodology of Wiley et al., he embraced Wynkoop’s “relational model” of holiness.  One’s very being was shaped by his relationship with God, so being born in a state of sin made no sense if since sin is primarily a dismembered bond.  A right relationship with God is restored in justification, minimizing any need for a “second” work of grace that would cleanse one from inbred sin. 

                Dunning’s work broadened the doctrinal breach within the Church of the Nazarene, since theologians like Richard Taylor and Donald Metz strongly opposed the “relational” approach of the Trevecca school.  Taylor, upholding the church’s traditional position, “refuted the relational understanding of sin and salvation, calling it heretical” (p. 167).  Though he naturally denied it, Dunning’s views on sin and salvation were pure Pelagianism, Taylor argued.  Consequently, Quanstrom says, within a century of her founding it was questionable “whether or not the Church of the Nazarene had a coherent and cogent doctrine of holiness at all” (p. 169).  To Richard Taylor, the holiness movement was virtually dead because it had ceased proclaiming the doctrine as crafted by Wiley and White.  This had happened because sinners were offended by it and too few believers were willing to die to self in order to live a holy life.  Still more, in Taylor’s judgment, a corps of “liberal” teachers had taken control of the church’s teaching institutions and were undermining her doctrines.  He particularly pointed to Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love as “‘a major contributing cause of the staggering of holiness ranks'” (p. 172).  Aspiring preachers who followed her forfeited “the message of a clear, knowable experience of entire sanctification which cleansed the carnal mind” (p. 172).  Taylor’s long-term colleague at Nazarene Theological Seminary, J. Kenneth Grider, shared his views and was equally critical of Wynkoop.  His own treatise, A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology, espoused a very traditional position, stressing:  “This second work of grace is obtained by faith, is subsequent to regeneration, is occasioned by the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and constitutes a cleansing away of Adamic depravity and an empowerment for witnessing and for the holy life'” (p. 173). 

                Hoping to reconcile the factions within the church, the General Superintendents issued a “Core Values” mission statement” in 1999, declaring that both crisis and growth, both cleansing and love, are vital parts of living the holy life.  In an insert accompanying the “Core Values” booklet, sent to all pastors in the denomination, a bright future was envisioned.  “‘Many believe that we were raised up, not for the 20th century, but for the 21st century.”  This was due to the church’s “radical optimism of grace.  We believe that human nature, and ultimately society, can be radically and permanently changed by the grace of God.  We have an irrepressible confidence in this message of hope, which flows from the heart of our holy God'” (p. 179). 

                Such optimism, of course, typified the first generation of Nazarenes.  But it is an optimism largely lacking in the post-WWII professors (e.g. Wynkoop and Dunning) who have shaped the denomination’s preachers for the past three decades.  They did their work by redefining the definitions of sin and sanctification to the point that little differentiated a sincere believer and a sanctified saint.  In Quanstrom’s judgment:  “The problem with these re-definitions for the denomination was that they effectively emasculated the promise of entire sanctification, at least as it had been understood at the beginning of the century” (p. 180).  Consequently, as we begin our second century, we have no clear identity as a “holiness denomination.” 

                Quanstrom clearly presents the evidence for the doctrinal shifts within the Church of the Nazarene.  Whether Wiley or Wynkoop was right he does not say.  What seems clear to me, however, is that the position of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop has largely replaced that of H. Orton Wiley. 

 

 

 

          In an era when large numbers of people take seriously the propaganda promoted by filmmakers such as Oliver Stone and Michael Moore, I guess it’s inevitable that spurious works of fiction, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2003) could be pawned off as a source for historical information about Christianity.  For over a year the book has remained at the top of best-seller lists, selling some 7 million copies in a year.  Rave reviews in the New York Times and Library Journal provided a cover of credibility for it, and many critics applauded its “impeccable” research and historical accuracy.  It’s been translated into dozens of languages, and it’s increasingly evident that its popularity resides in its appeal to people’s religious hungers as well as their thirst for an entertaining mystery. 

          As a story, The Da Vinci Code includes murder, mystery, romance, and action–necessary ingredients for a best-selling novel.  The book begins with the murder of a curator at the Louvre in Paris, Jacques Sauniere, who leaves clues regarding his killer for his granddaughter (Sophie Neveu, a police cryptologist) and a friend (Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology) to pursue.  In time they discover revelations in Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and hidden “truths” in the legend of the Holy Grail and traditions preserved by the Priory of Sion.  They learn that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and their offspring have preserved and transmitted the great truths that will infuse the new wisdom (Sophie means wisdom; Neveu means new) proclaimed by the Mother Earth paganism Brown promotes. 

          Were it merely a mystery story, it would not deserve careful scrutiny.  Indeed, many works of fiction begin with a disclaimer, indicating that all characters and incidents are sheer fictions.  But the first page of The Da Vinci Code asserts:  “Fact:  The Priory of Sion–a European secret society founded in 1099–is a real organization.  In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.  The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic sect that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing, coercion, and a dangerous practice known as ‘corporal mortification.’  Opus Dei has just completed construction of a $47 million National Headquarters at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York City.  All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” 

Dan Brown obviously invites readers to take his novel as a depository of historical truth.  He reinforced this in several interviews, such as the one he gave on NBC’s Today Show, where he asserted that “absolutely all” of the book’s historical data are true.  “Obviously,” he said, “Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies–all of that is historical fact.”  On ABC’s 20/20 Brown explained his breakthrough to a new understanding about Christianity and acknowledged his sense of mission to share it with the world.  He’s a propagandist for a new faith–one that replaces “patriarchal Christianity” with an ancient “matriarchal paganism.”  Enamored with “The Age of Aquarius,” he speaks for  ’60s generation, which has promoted anti-traditional views of sex and marriage, education, ethics, religion, and Reality.   

          Inasmuch as it is a work of propaganda, one should preface any reading of Brown’s work with a warning:  Reader Beware!  The book is riddled with inaccuracies, fraudulent claims, subtle misrepresentations, and blatant lies.  We should heed Paxton Hood’s ancient warning:  “Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.”  So beware:  The Da Vinci Code is a propaganda piece, written by a man seeking to destroy Christianity and replace it with a religion more attuned to the feminist fantasies and postmodern prejudices he favors.  It’s a popularization of esoteric notions found in books such as Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, Lynn Picknettt and Clive Prince’s The Templar Revelation, and Margaret StarBird’s The Goddess in the Gospels:  Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine.  Brown longs for the reestablishment of a pagan cult devoted to Mother Earth, a sexually libertine and morally permissive autonomous individualism. 

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          Taking seriously the claims set forth in The Da Vinci Code, several critiques have been published by first-rate Christian scholars.  Of those I’ve read, perhaps the most thoroughly-researched and blow-by-blow factual refutation is The Da Vinci Hoax:  Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code, by two Catholic scholars, Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2004).  Brown virtually equates Christianity with Roman Catholicism and errs egregiously in many of his denigrations of that body.  For example, he often refers to the Early Church as “the Vatican,” long before that administrative center even existed!  As committed Catholics, Olson and Miesel are particularly adept at providing accurate and appropriate responses to his “central concerns, which are ideological” (p. 33). 

          Brown clearly promotes the revival of Gnosticism, a perennial ideology that promises an individualistic, generally antinomian autonomy in discerning religious truth and following one’s inner light.  Gnostics, ancient and modern, often envision God as androgynous–an amorphous blend of masculine and feminine traits, who is frequently addressed as “Mother.”  Modern Gnostics, like Elaine Pagels, celebrate some “hidden gospels,” such as the Gospel of Thomas, which they insist was embraced by significant sectors of the Early Church.  They further argue (with virtually no documentary evidence) that the Early Church was fully egalitarian, led by female as well as male bishops, until patriarchal “orthodoxy” imposed its fetters upon all claiming the name Christian.  In accord with Pagels and her cadre of disciples, Dan Brown denounces the Christian Church for suppressing the “sacred feminine” and hopes for its recovery. 

          This is most evident, Brown says, in the Catholic Church’s “smear campaign” against Mary Magdalene, who, according to his novel, is the Holy Grail.  According to Brown, Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ first and most important apostle.  They married and had children.  Following Jesus’ death, she went to France, and her descendents clandestinely transmitted the message of the real Jesus.  But as Olson and Miesel make clear, all Brown’s “facts” about Mary Magdalene are sheer fabrications, largely dreamed up by a small group of feminists chatting with each other at the Harvard Divinity School.  Throughout Church history, Mary Magdalene has in fact enjoyed high standing as a loyal disciple of Jesus, but Brown’s portrayal of her derives from a few references in apocryphal works and spurious speculations that have emerged only in recent centuries. 

          Brown misrepresents Jesus as well as Mary.  He asserts, for instance, that Christ was never considered divine until the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) declared Him such by a “relatively close vote.”  In fact, New Testament documents amply indicate a confidence that Jesus, the Incarnate Christ, was God’s Son.  The earliest Christian records we have, subsequent to the NT, shared the view of Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 50-117 A.D.), who wrote:  “There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God; first possible and then impossible, even Jesus Christ our Lord” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 10).  The bishops at the Council of Nicaea, by an overwhelming majority (only two of more than 200 bishops dissented, which is hardly the  “relatively close” vote Brown claims) simply affirmed the deeply embedded faith of the Church.  Still more:  just as Brown misleads readers regarding the Council of Nicaea, so he maligns Constantine, the emperor who called for it.  According to the novel’s “historian,” Teabing, Constantine was a lifelong pagan who manipulated the Church to attain his own ends.  In the process he made Sunday the Christian holy day, established the NT canon to exclude rival “gospels,” and imposed the new notion that Jesus was fully divine.   Few of Brown’s assertions regarding Christ have historical merit, though many naïve readers apparently take them as true. 

          Olson and Miesel carefully investigate one of the book’s main themes, the secret messages of the Priory of Sion, obviously based upon a 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, “co-authored by Michael Baignent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.  So fundamental is this book to The Da Vinci Code that Dan Brown borrowed two of the author’s names for his character Leigh Teabing” (p. 223).  Two of the authors are Masonic historians, and they promote the story of Mary Magdalene, whose alleged descendents became part of France’s Merovingian dynasty and then the Knights Templar, whose secretive operations have continued over the centuries.  Much of this material depends upon Les Dossiers Secrets, a collection of documents in the Bibliotheque Nationale purporting to establish the existence of the Priory of Sion.  In fact, Olson and Miesel show, the Priory of Sion is “a modern hoax conjured up by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard and his associates” (p. 234).  Plantard wrote some books and appeared on major TV networks as an alleged Templar expert.   Holy Blood, Holy Grail relies extensively upon his works.  In time, however, Plantard was exposed and forced to admit that his “history” was a bundle of lies.  Dan Brown, of course, knows this.  But he perpetuates the lies because they serve his cause.

          Olson and Miesel carefully, persuasively document their refutations of The Da Vinci Code.  Footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index make this a most useful critique of Dan Brown’s hoax.

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          A more engaging and philosophically astute critique of Brown is provided by James L. Garlow and Peter Jones in Cracking Da Vinci’s Code (Colorado Springs:  Victor, c. 2004).  Garlow earned a Ph.D. in historical theology from Drew University, and Jones has a Th.M. from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary.  They are fully qualified to dissect the historical and theological claims set forth in Brown’s novel.  (By way of full disclosure, I know the authors and was part of a team that helped them prepare to write the book).  They understand that The Da Vinci Code, on a deeply spiritual level, is a cunning attack upon Christianity.  It’s designed to destroy the very foundations–Scripture, Tradition, Christ’s historical Incarnation and Resurrection–that have supported the Faith for two millennia.  Responding to fiction with some fiction of their own, Garlow and Jones skillfully involve the reader by beginning each chapter with an episode involving a modern university student struggling with some of Brown’s allegations, taught as fact in her women’s studies classes. 

          The authors particularly address “the sacred feminine,” embedded in the worship of Mother Nature, one of The Da Vinci Code‘s central themes, in a chapter entitled “God’s Second Best Idea.”  Brown’s novel is, in fact, deeply sexual in its message, for it “is ultimately–when pressed to its not-so-logical conclusion–an appeal for free sex, separate from the parameters established by God” (p. 35).  The novel’s popularity, one suspects, relates to its rationalization of sex under the guise of  “spirituality.”  Indeed, one of Brown’s main criticisms of the Christian Church involves her historic opposition to sexual sins.  Shamelessly misrepresenting the Church, he says she equates sex with “original sin” and thereby renders all sexual behavior shameful.  On the contrary, Garlow and Jones argue that sex is “God’s Second Best Idea” and defend the view that the very best sex is monogamous and heterosexual, gloriously in accord with the ways of creation. 

          They further argue that it is the very pagan religions celebrated by The Da Vinci Code, not biblical Christianity, that have devalued women.  The matriarchal pagan cultures Brown celebrates never existed.  They’re sheer figments of feminist fantasies.  And pagan religions, for all their goddesses and priestesses, were marked by temple prostitution, sex-selection infanticide, foot binding in China, and suttee (burning widows in India).  The alleged authorities cited by Brown when, for example, he makes wild assertions concerning the number of witches burned by the Inquisition, have been totally disproved by careful research.  Brown parrots the radical feminist claim that the Catholic Church killed five million female witches–a monstrous “gendercide.”  In fact, perhaps 50,000 witches (one-fourth of them male) were executed in 300 years.  Christianity, Garlow and Jones insist, has done more for women’s rights and dignity than any other religion, and both Scripture and Church history reveal how women have flourished in Christian cultures. 

          Years ago Peter Jones attended a graduate seminar at Harvard that included Elaine Pagels, and he understands her real agenda:  to reconfigure Christianity in accord with Gnostic thought.  What Harvard professors were saying 30 years ago now informs a novel read by millions!  They, as well as Pagels and Dan Brown, consider the Bible a purely human construct, not the inspired Word of God.  Thus Cracking Da Vinci’s Code contains some careful apologetics in defense of the traditional canon.  Jones and Garlow point out the remarkable similarities between the ancient heretic, Marcion, and modern thinkers like Robert Langdon in Brown’s novel.  Marcion discarded the Old Testament as well as “legalistic” sections of the New Testament and promoted a lawless spirituality that permitted the sexual license he personally relished.  In response, Tertullian denounced him as “the Pontic mouse who nibbled away the Gospels . . . abolished marriage . . . and tore God almighty to bits with [his] blasphemies” (Against Marcion). 

          Whether or not Marcion was a Gnostic we’ll never know for sure, but he certainly shared many Gnostic views.  Peter Jones has written a fine monograph on Gnosticism, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, and this book’s chapter comparing the Gnostic and New Testament Gospels is quite illuminating.  Jones remembers how Elaine Pagels at Harvard immersed herself in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts, whose most common message “is the rejection of the Genesis creation account” (p. 166).  She then published The Gnostic Gospels and vaulted into an academic super-star status as a professor at Princeton University.  She considers Gnostic Christianity a viable alternative to orthodoxy, and she portrays the Gnostics as victims of a power play by the patriarchal bigots who established the Catholic Church and insisted on doctrinal conformity. 

Though once an evangelical, Pagels has recently “found a spiritual home in the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, led by a ‘woman priest,’ where she was able to reject the notion that being Christian was ‘synonymous with accepting a set of beliefs’ such as the Apostles’ Creed.  Pagels is also interested in the blending of Christianity and Buddhism” (p. 169).  Sharing her stance, influential feminists have celebrated the “sacred feminine” and find solace in occult texts, women’s diaries and communal experiences.  They–and Dan Brown–celebrate the ecstatic pagan mysticism featured in various Goddess cults.  Many radical feminists hunger for “‘the Neolithic, pagan, matriarchal perception of the sacred universe itself'” (p. 203).   Ancient goddesses such as Isis, Asherah, and Cybele illustrate the perennial allure of the “Great Mother.” 

“The religious worldview of The Da Vinci Code celebrates the soft, inclusive womb of the Goddess, from which everything emerges and to which it all returns” (p. 224).  The Goddess cults have recently proliferated in America, making incursions into allegedly Christian circles.  One of Hillary Clinton’s advisors in the 1990s, Jean Houston, “believes our society needs to be rebuilt through the myth of the goddess Isis and her consort Osiris” (pp. 204-205).  The Pilgrim Press, the publishing arm of the United Church of Christ, published (in 1999) a book by a “theologian/pagan priestess, Wendy Hunter Roberts, Celebrating Her:  Feminist Ritualizing Comes of Age, which says:  “‘Deep within the womb of the earth lies a memory of sacredness nearly buried under the weight of patriarchy.  …  More and more women–especially those with Christian backgrounds–are being drawn to this empowering, goddess-centered worship'” (p. 208).  Mary Daly, longtime professor of theology at Boston College and one of the founders of “Christian feminism,” has lately abandoned Christianity, but as early as 1973 she revealed her true faith by declaring, in Beyond God the Father:   “‘The antichrist and the Second Coming are synonymous.  This Second Coming is not the return of Christ but a new arrival of female presence. …  The Second Coming, then, means that the prophetic dimension in the symbol of the Great Goddess . . . is the key to salvation from servitude'” (p. 209). 

The choice we must make is simple and profound:  either pagan monism or biblical theism.  “Is God just Nature or is He the Creator of Nature?  Your answer to that question changes everything you think and do” (p. 230).  To monists, everything is ultimately the same thing.  To theists, as C.S. Lewis so wisely declared, “God is a particular Thing.”  There is an otherness to God, the Creator of heaven and earth.  He cannot be reduced to a “cosmic womb” forever spawning small segments of itself. 

Cracking Da Vinci’s Code is a most engaging and analytically successful of the critique. 

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Ben Witherington III, an incredibly prolific professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, has published The Gospel Code:  Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci (Downers Grove:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2004).  He acknowledges:  “We are facing a serious revolution regarding some of the long-held truths about Jesus, early Christianity and the Bible” (p. 11).  He also demonstrates the affinity between Brown’s novel and two previously published works–Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), and Margaret Starbird’s The Woman with the Alabaster Jar:  Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail (1993)–reminding readers “we’ve been down this road before–twice! (p. 17). 

He then selects some errors in Brown’s novel–aspersions on the N.T. canon, claims regarding Constantine’s role in the Early Church, celebrations of Mary Magdalene, denials of Jesus’ deity–and provides scholarly refutations.  For Brown to suggest that Constantine played a role in establishing the New Testament Canon ignores the fact that the New Testament’s four Gospels “were recognized as sacred and authoritative tradition by A.D. 130” (p. 23), fully two centuries before the emperor ruled!   Brown’s allegation that the Council of Nicaea “proclaimed” the divinity of Jesus “is patently false” (p. 22).  To allege, as does The Da Vinci Code, that the earliest Christian records are contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi documents “is so false it’s what the British would call a howler,” says Witherington (p. 24). 

What Brown “fails to grasp,” Witherington notes, is “that early Christianity, like early Judaism, is not primarily about symbols and metaphors but is deeply rooted in history, including events like the exodus, the reign of King David and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus” (p. 25).  Careful reading of ancient history reveals that the four Gospels are written in the historical and biographical style of that era.  Comparing the Gospel of Thomas (a favorite source for contemporary Gnostics) with the biblical Gospels reveals a world of difference!  It’s the difference between a collage of speculative notions and an integrated, factual position.

Though Witherignton’s treatise has value, it appears as if he simply plugged in some previously written essays dealing with the topics, since it seems curiously detached from The Da Vinci Code itself.  If one’s interested in Witherington’s position on issues such as The Jesus Seminar (a highly publicized Gnostic enterprise) this book is quite good.  But it’s not really a meaningful discussion of Brown’s novel! 

 

 

 

ANTI-AMERICANISM 

 

      Jean-Francois Revel’s Anti-Americanism (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2003) provides an experienced French journalist’s explanation of a pervasive attitude that has characterized Europe’s intelligentsia since WWII.  Early in his life, in the ’50s and ’60s, Revel viewed the U.S. “through the filter of the European press” and considered it “the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were innocent, we believed), of racism and the Korean War and a stranglehold on Europe itself–the ‘American occupation of France,’ as Simone de Beauvior and the Communists used to say.  And then Vietnam became the principal reason to hate America” (p. 3).  In time, having actually spent time the U.S., researching and writing his enormously successful Without Marx or Jesus, Revel came to see that most everything he’d learned about the country was false, largely the product of the “Great Lie” fomented by Communist propaganda.  Without Marx or Jesus elicited much criticism from Leftists, who rightly discerned that the “book was less about America and anti-Americanism than about the epic twentieth-century struggle between socialism and liberal democracy” (p. 12).  Should the American way prevail, Europe’s socialist agenda would fail, so the “Blame America First” instinct became deeply ingrained in the European mind.  So journalists, who should tell the truth, generally “use their forums narcissistically to trumpet their own preconceived ideas instead of serving facts . . . betraying their public” (p. 53). 

     America, of course, has famously succeeded in virtually every way during the 20th century.  Sadly enough, it was Europeans who “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century, forcing the United States to intervene on our continent twice with her armies.  America largely owes her unique superpower status today to Europe’s mistakes” (p. 16).   Europe decayed, primarily, as a result of the “closed economies” imposed between WWI and WWII–various versions of socialism which, wherever implemented, manifestly failed “to deliver the economic goods, even minimally.”  Thereby Europe imploded, and “This weakening entailed the corresponding and virtually automatic rise of the United States” (p. 43). 

     Consequently, European intellectuals have vented a jaundiced view of all things American.  Revealingly, their main concern, following 9/11, was for endangered Muslims in America, not for Americans slaughtered by terrorists.  When U.S. troops attacked Afghanistan, Europeans denounced the action as imperialistic.  Pacifists everywhere carried “banners that said:  “NO TO TERRORISM.  NO TO WAR.’  Which is about as intelligent,” Revel notes, “as:  ‘NO TO ILLNESS.  NO TO MEDICINE'” (p. 59).  Islamic jihadists, in accord with an Osama bin Laden training manual, uphold “the ideals of assassination, bombs and destruction, to the diplomacy of the rifle and submachine gun.  The principal mission of our military organization is to overthrow the Godless regimes and replace them all with an Islamic regime'” (p. 70).  But to Europe’s craven intellectuals, such terrorists should be appeased rather than resisted. 

     Unlike the intellectuals, Revel insists, Ronald Reagan got it right.  The “Evil Empire” he opposed in 1983 collapsed within a decade.  He wisely invaded and liberated Grenada, a tiny island nation overwhelmed by Cubans intent on imposing Communism.  He boldly said, in 1987:  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” much to the dismay of many in his own State Department, as well as assorted Europeans.    The policy of detante, so celebrated by the likes of Jimmy Carter and eminent European leaders, politely condemned millions of oppressed people to Soviet control.  Reagan’s SDI proposals were roundly ridiculed by his critics.  But “Adam Michnik, Poland’s most influential editorialist and press magnate, recalls that the Strategic Defense Initiative–the ‘Star Wars’ so decried by Western leftists–was the decisive factor in persuading the Soviets that they could never win the Cold War . . . .  The SDI was a key trigger of perestroika and the cascade of events that followed” (p. 126).  President Reagan–and now President George W. Bush–may be “simplistic,” but they rightly know there’s a difference between good and evil and act accordingly. 

     It’s clear to Revel that nothing America does could please her critics.  They’re rooted in socialism’s anti-capitalistic obsession.  “Even during the Cold War,” Revel says, “although it was the U.S.S.R. that annexed Eastern Europe, made statellites out of several Africal countries and invaded Afghanistan, and although it was the People’s Republic of China that marched into Tibet, attacked South Korea and subjugated three Indochinese countries, it remained dogma among Europeans–from Sweden to Sicily, from Athens to Paris–that the only power that could be fingered as ‘imperialistic’ was America” (159).  Seeing what they want to see rather than reality, anti-Americans will forever detest the U.S.

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

Paul Hollander escaped his native Hungary as the Soviets occupied it following WWII.  In the U.S. he became a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and published several thoroughly researched monographs, including Anti-Americanism:  Irrational & Rational (New Brunswick:  Transaction Publishers, c. 1995, first published by Oxford University Press in 1992).  In a new introduction, he endorses the words of Eugene Genovese, a noted historian, who said:  “unable to offer a coherent alternative to capitalism as a social system, and with no socialist countries left to identify with, many left-wingers now wallow in a mindless hostility to Western Civilization and to their own identity as Americans” (p. xlvii).  Perhaps they are wallowing, but they’re hardly listless!  They have established an unusually powerful and militant “adversary culture” that dominates much of the media and academe.  Rather than honestly address the failures of Marxism as an ideology, many university professors, Hollander adds, have “immersed themselves with renewed vigor in other matters such as multiculturalism, postmodernism, critical legal theory, revisions of American history, the many branches of feminism, and so forth” (p. l). 

     These professors, such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, have become constant complaint specialists, routinely denouncing the failures and injustices of America.  They piously champion the plight of various victims, and (though highly privileged themselves) they claim to represent the underclass, the folks oppressed by the “system.”  They praise terrorists at home (the Weathermen in the ’70s) and abroad (Islamic jihadists today) so long as they attack the U.S.   Frustrated utopians, they find no goodness in the less-than-perfect world at hand.  As journalist Studs Terkel confessed, he had little interest in the “facts” about America, but wrote in accord with “‘a vision of what still could be'” (p. 49).   Accordingly, when Angela Davis (once the Communist Party’s Vice Presidential candidate, who now enjoys a prestigious appointment at the University of California, San Francisco) spoke to students at Dartmouth College in 1988 and condemned everything American, the students gave her a standing ovation.  It’s a bit like the heirs of a sizeable estate cheering when their deceased father is pilloried with a collage of harsh allegations. 

     Anti-Americanism, Hollander emphasizes, clearly pervades three public sectors:  1) the churches; 2) the universities; 3) the media.  Mainline churches, he shows, in a fascinating, meticulously documented chapter, have become especially anti-American.  During the past half-century, the clergy “have become the predictable voices of social criticism in American society,” and, importantly, their statements differ little from their “secular counterparts” (p. 81).  Though the “peace and justice” activists who fill the churches’ bureaucracies and pulpits and college classrooms pose as biblical prophets, they’re little more than foot soldiers in the Leftist army.  Having lost their faith in a supernatural religion, they address social and political issues in the name of an absent God.  Thus they fund gangs of thugs and terrorists, such as Yasser Arafat’s PLO, and “resource centers” that are outgrowths of the Weather Underground (p. 117).  They coddle Cuba and North Korea while condemning Chile and South Korea. 

     For me, Hollander’s discussion of the churches proves embarrassing, for he details some sobering truths about some “evangelicals” who influenced me for 20 years.  I long trusted Jim Wallis and the journal Sojourners Magazine to help me assess the social and political world.  Thus I read recommended books, written by radicals like Noam Chomsky and Richard Barnett and the brothers Berrigan.  Naively I absorbed much of their anti-American, pacifist critique.  By 1972 I’d embraced their critique of the Vietnam War–and then was utterly uninformed about the massive loss of life in Southeast Asia that followed America’s retreat.  Amazingly, Hollander shows, Jim Wallis condemned the Vietnamese who fled to the U.S. following the war.  They were, he averred, too addicted to American “consumerism” to appreciate the new society the North Vietnamese would establish!  That thousands of boat people perished rather than bow to Communist dictatorship simply didn’t meet the Sojourner criteria for “peace and justice”! 

Following President Jimmy Carter’s lead, I welcomed the fall of Samoza and the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  But then, in the mid-’80s, I began to suspect that Jim Wallis and like-minded informants had misled me!  It dawned on me that they always gave favorable treatment to Marxist movements, whereas anti-Communists–like the Contras in Nicaragua or Pinochet in Chile–were routinely assailed.  Nicaraguan developments, as the Sandinistas slipped into the Soviet orbit, were favorably massaged by Wallis and Sojourners Magazine.  In an issue devoted to a tour of Nicaragua, Hollander observes, “Every stereotyped misconception of Marxist one-party dictatorships reappeared as the authors retraced, figuratively speaking, the path traversed by their ideological forebears who had visited, in the same spirit, the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and Cuba.  The new ‘sojourners’ were similarly impressed by the various accomplishments (real or claimed) of the new regime and were ready to accept all the official arguments and rationalizations regarding the less appealing aspects of life in revolutionary Nicaragua” (p. 130).  In 1987, Wallis actually compared Iran’s Ayatollahs to American Fundamentalists!  So the data in this chapter remind of how wrong I was on many issues, largely due to believing anti-American clergy such as Jim Wallis! 

     Higher Education, Hollander shows, is as rife with anti-Americanism as the churches.  Ever anxious to re-make the world in accord with their desires, leftist professors now dominate most of the nation’s universities.  Interestingly enough, academe seems alluring to leftists.  In one study, 60% of students who considered themselves socialists were interested in becoming professors; 30% of liberal Democrats were so inclined; only 15% of the conservative Republicans aspired to academic careers (p. 151).  In part, it seems, this is because leftists see the schools as opportunities for political action, vehicles for social transformation.  This results from the “academic freedom” that now allows professors to use their lecterns as pulpits!  Before the ’60s, most professors understood that academic freedom applied to their discipline, to research and publish without fear of retribution.  But now professors are hired as feminists or Marxists and urged to promote their ideologies in whatever they teach.  Hollander’s own discipline, sociology has especially “become a vehicle for an impassioned social criticism” (p. 156). 

     No one could consider the 70 pages of meticulously documented sources in Hollander’s chapter on Higher Education and fail to see how anti-American it has become.  He provides the data, the illustrations, the analyses, necessary to demonstrate that, as Irving Kristol wrote, “‘Never in American history have major universities been so dominated by an entire spectrum of radical ideologies as today'” (p. 146).  And what the educated elites acquire in universities is then served to the masses by the media, now controlled by the adversary culture.  Consequently, according to Meg Greenfield, journalists portray America in “surpassingly bleak” ways, suggesting the nation is “‘composed entirely of abused minorities living in squalid and sadistically-run state mental hospitals, except for a small elite of venal businessmen . . . who are profiting from the unfortunates’ misery'” (p. 215).  Inordinately large numbers (approaching 90% at points) of journalists are liberals who vote for Democrats.  They lionized Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Andrew Young but disdained Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  Indeed, among journalists “Fidel Castro was far more popular than Reagan,” according to one comprehensive study (p. 252). 

     “Objective” reporting no longer elicits much support in the media, since it fails to unveil the hidden “structures of power and privilege” the enlightened elites discern.  Promoting one’s cause–celebrating mantras such as peace and justice, condemning the evils of racism, sexism, poverty, apartheid–are no longer restricted to editorial pages and opinion pieces.  So we find that “National Public Television refused to air a documentary made by Cuban émigré film-makers, exposing human rights violations in Cuba, unless it was paired with a reverential program made” by one of Castro’s henchmen (p. 225).  Imagine PBS insisting on a pro-KKK documentary to accompany a film on lynching in the South!  The maker of an award-winning documentary on Vietnam refused to interview refugees from Vietnam but gave ample exposure to Communist Vietnamese officials.  Hollywood films, made by Oliver Stone et al., spoon-feed little but anti-American propaganda into the mouths of a gullible public. 

     Having documented the anti-American phenomenon in three institutional settings, Hollander proceeds to demonstrate its results.  In a detailed chapter entitled “The Pilgrimage to Nicaragua,” he illustrates the power of “political tourism” to shape public opinion.  During the ’80s, the Sandinistas effectively manipulated the American public by orchestrating tours of American clergy like Jim Wallis, professors like Richard Falk, politicians like John Kerry and John Conyers.  Folks wanting to see a successful, egalitarian revolution beheld their dream world when they spent a few days in Nicaragua.  “Here,” reported one journalist, “was a place seemingly run by the kind of people who were Sixties radicals.  Wherever one went, people were young, singing political folk songs and chanting ‘Power to the People.’  One night there was even a Pete Seeger concert in town!” (p. 265).  It was, of course, all tightly orchestrated theater!  Interior Minister Tomas Borge, often a convivial tour guide, actually had two offices.  One, with Bibles, crucifixes and pictures of his family, was reserved for foreign guests.  The other, his real one, showcased pictures of Marx and Lenin.  Nicaragua’s people knew the real Borge and, given the opportunity to vote, removed him and the Ortega brothers from power.  As one voter explained:  “‘It was all lies, what the promised us'” (p. 306). 

     But the lies of the Left, repudiated in Nicaragua, still shape the “worldview of college students” in America.   Few entering freshmen identify themselves as Leftists, but they’re pressured to acclimate to an academic culture strongly tilted toward the radical Left.  They learn to feel alienated from and angry at American culture, especially in its capitalist components.  While wealthy and privileged themselves, they join their professors and pretend to identify with the world’s poor and oppressed.  Consequently, polls reveal that students in the ’80s disliked Ronald Reagan as much as Joseph Stalin.  Indeed, next to Hitler, Reagan was the most “unappealing political leader” (p. 324).  They even equated the atrocities of the Holocaust with the Vietnam War–a striking illustration of moral equivalence. 

     Much the same may be said about the Third World and Western Europe, where the Italian Marxist writer, Eugene Ionescu, proclaimed:  “I am one of the rare European intellectuals who has never been anti-American” (p. 367).  Heading the list of acidic anti-Americans was the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who (in the early ’50s) compared the U.S. under Truman to Germany under Hitler, warned that Joe McCarthy would be elected President, and accused the U.S. of waging germ warfare in Korea.  In time he devoted himself to opposing both the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and any reliance upon nuclear weapons.  “Late in life Russell reached the conclusion that ‘the American government was genocidal, the police efforts pretty much on par with the camp guards at Auschwitz and black rioting a justified response to a campaign of extermination'” (p. 373).  Such animosity also characterizes Mexican and Canadian intellectuals.  According to Canadians, the most “reprehensible” political leader in modern times was Ronald Reagan, who was judged worse than “Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, or the Ayatollah Khomeni” (p. 434). 

     Having exhaustively (in 500 pages) examined the subject, Hollander concludes that socialists cannot be other than anti-American.  That’s because, Kenneth Minogue says, socialists uphold positions that cannot “be rationally modified,” finding a moral sense of identity not in any commitment to improving man’s lot, but finding fulfillment in struggling “against the world in which they live” (p. 466).  Thus we find the influential postmodernist literary critic, Duke University Professor Frederic Jameson, championing “counterinsurgency warfare” and denouncing America’s  “neocolonialism,” all the “while cherishing and defending memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution!” (p. 467). 

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                A syndicated columnist, Mona Charin, deals with related issues in Useful Idiots:  How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Washington:  Regnery, c. 2003), and her notes indicate a significant reliance upon the scholarly works of Paul Hollander.   The book’s title, Useful Idiots, is allegedly a phrase used by Lenin to describe naïve Westerners who helped Communists propagandize the world, and certainly there have been legions of such folks–”liberals” in Charin’s lexicon.  She begins her treatise by endorsing Winston Churchill’s assertion, following WWII, that “the whole world [was] divided intellectually and to a large extent geographically between the creeds of Communist discipline and individual freedom” (p. 2).  Liberals in the West, she argues, have sided with the Communists for 60 years, finding ways to excuse the evils of the USSR and Red China while castigating the any nation–and preeminently the U.S.–committed to free enterprise and personal liberty.  Thus, when President Reagan referred to the USSR as an “evil empire,” a prestigious history professor, Henry Steele Commager, called it “‘the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.  No other presidential speech has ever so flagrantly allied the government with religion.  It was a gross appeal to religious prejudice'” (p. 12). 

                To many liberals, to be an anti-communist was worse than being a communist.  Joe McCarthy was worse than Joseph Stalin!  Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were portrayed as victims of American bigotry.  ABC’s Peter Jennings freely labeled Cuba’s Fulgensio Batista an evil dictator, but never in 40 years has he seen Fidel Castro as equally despotic!  During the Vietnam War, the New Left solidified its support for socialism and antipathy toward America.  As Susan Sontag declared, concerning her trip to North Vietnam during the war:  “‘Vietnam offered the key to a systematic criticism of America'” (p. 40).  Charin shows how TV and major newspapers misrepresented the war, leading to America’s defeat, something much desired by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.  The ’68 Tet Offensive, for example, was portrayed as a major military defeat, when in fact it was a stunning victory!  But we who watched Walter Cronkite on CBS never knew that.  Photographs were staged and quotations were manufactured, by journalists like Peter Arnett, in their effort to facilitate the Communists triumph in Vietnam. 

                Subsequently, between 1974 and 1980, ten nations, including Laos, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua, were sucked into the Communist orbit.  Though such events occurred without a single “free election, liberals persisted in the argument that they represented the popular will and took communist regimes at their word when they claimed to be pursuing the ‘people’s’ interests” (p. 82).  Influential writers, such as Edmund Wilson, considered “the USSR the ‘moral light at the top of the world'” and found no fault with its endeavors.  The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, published his autobiography in 1977, proudly including photographs of himself with Fidel Castro and Vietnam’s premier Pham Van Dong.  As recently as 1985, Paul Samuelson, whose economic textbook was widely used in American universities, praised the central planning strategies of the USSR, agreeing with John Kenneth Galbraith, who lauded the Russian prosperity which manifested itself “in the appearance of solid well-being of the people in the streets” (p. 105). 

                Vis a vis Soviet arms and expansion, liberals consistently counseled disarmament, diplomacy, and U.N. resolutions.  So Jimmy Carter cancelled plans to build the B-1 bomber.  The “nuclear freeze” movement elicited much support.  President Regan’s deployment of SS-20s in Europe and his proposed Strategic Defense Initiative were stridently condemned, with Senator John Kerry helping block the SDI.  Liberals opposed the higher military spending Reagan championed and did whatever possible to gut the CIA.  Mainline churches that provided “sanctuary” for refugees from El Salvador provided little comfort for folks fleeing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  Little Elian Gonzalez was returned to Castro’s Cuba, a comfort to liberals like Eleanor Clift who celebrated the fact that he’d attend safe schools and have free health care, much better than Florida.  “New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:  ‘Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him the name of the U.S government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart”” (p. 245).  To Charin, appeasers in the Cold War, like Friedman and Clift, were as misguided as the appeasers in WWII. 

                Space precludes further details set forth in Useful Idiots.  It’s thesis, however, is graphically illustrated by the words of an avowed socialist, Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, a former president of the Organization of American Historians, who wrote, following 9/11, that he “wasn’t sure ‘which is more frightening:  the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House'” (pp. 254-55).  Useful Idiots!

 

 

 

POWELL & LODAHL:  PLNU THEOLOGIANS 

 

Two of Point Loma Nazarene University’s accomplished theology professors, Samuel M. Powell and Michael Lodahl, share nearly identical career paths: both attended Nazarene colleges and graduated from Nazarene Theological Seminary in 1981, received graduate degrees (Powell from Claremont Graduate School, Lodahl from Emory University) in 1988, and have recently published scholarly books on the doctrine of creation. Earlier the two co-edited Embodied Holiness (IVP), and they are clearly two of the brightest and most prolific scholars in the Church of the Nazarene. Both seek to engage contemporary thought and address it from a committed Wesleyan stance. Professor Powell tends to deal with things as a systematic theologian, carefully consulting historic thinkers and logically building his case. Professor Lodahl tends to think speculatively, weaving together theological notions in accord with his commitment to process thought. Powell stresses the Logos of God in creation, whereas Lodahl celebrates His Love.  Though I differ at points with my colleagues–as some of my illustrations reveal–I’ll try to sum up rather than critique their books, encouraging all interested in current Nazarene thought and teaching to read and evaluate them.

Professor Powell’s Participating in God: Creation and Trinity (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, c. 2003) is “an exercise in systematic theology” that endeavors “to think about the world in a way that is scientifically responsible and also faithfully Christian” (p. xi).  He assumes the Christian faith and the contemporary scientific worldview are both (in their appropriate spheres) truthful, and he seeks to blend them.  Modern science, however, trumps certain traditional beliefs concerning God’s activity in the world, so “we may, for theological reasons, affirm that God operates in the universe through the laws and may wish to hold that God can operate directly and apart from the laws, [but] the Bible’s affirmation that all, or nearly all, events are the direct and immediate result of God’s action is best regarded as part of an ancient and (for us) incredible world-view” (p. 115).

Powell particularly stresses that the inner essence of the Trinity–one nature in three persons–provides a key to understanding the natural world.  To argue his case, he follows “the regulative, the hermeneutical, and the ethical dimensions” of the Christian faith (p. 4).  “Faith designates the regulative dimension of doctrine.  Understanding denotes the interpretative or hermeneutical dimension.  These two, together with the ethical dimension, constitute the substance of Christian doctrine” (p. 26).  The Bible and its interpretation in the Christian Tradition provide the regulative aspects of theology.  Tracing the development of Christian thinking from Irenaeus to Athanasius, Basil, and Aquinas, one finds a growing understanding of God’s involvement in His creation.  As they plumbed the depths of biblical revelation, they grasped this truth:  “We participate in the trinitarian life of God” (p. 42).

This was particularly evident in the Logos focus of St. Athanasius, the great architect of the Nicene Creed, who stressed the importance of what was called “deification.”  The Eternal Word–God of God, Light of Light–certainly became man.  But our salvation, our “deification does not occur simply by virtue of the incarnation. The grace that brings this about is received by participating in the Word ‘through the Spirit.’  It is by our participation in the Spirit that we are deified” (p. 47).  St. Thomas Aquinas embraced this truth and clarified the critical difference between the infinite Being of God and the opportunity He gives finite beings to have communion with Him.  “This distinction allowed Thomas to assert that a trace of the Trinity is found in all creatures, since they are all effects of God’s causality, but only rational creatures bear the image of the Trinity, since only rational creatures have mind, the structure of which is analogous to the Trinity” (p. 49).  Surpassing Aquinas, however, is Paul Tillich, whose views undergird Powell’s.  Tillich equated salvation with attaining a “new being” through participating with the Spirit in the “Ground of Being,” God Himself.  Tillich’s “presentation is more solidly trinitarian than is Thomas’s,” says Powell, “especially with regard to the Spirit.  Indeed, God as Spirit is the fulcrum on which Tillich’s analysis rests” (p. 54).

Having rooted his presentation in trinitarian theology, Powell then seeks to understand the universe “in a trinitarian way.”  In successive steps, he shows how the inorganic, organic, and human worlds illustrate certain trinitarian truths.  There is, for example, “persistence and change in time.”  Some things, like atoms, persist without development, simply appearing and disappearing.  Other things, like molecules, combine atoms and develop.  We, like molecules, constantly change, so “human nature is also something not yet accomplished; it is underway” (p. 70). Especially as we enter into the kingdom of God, where freedom flourishes, significant personal growth occurs and “the distorting effects of sin are being overcome” (p. 82).  

Powell especially emphasizes–in accord with “theologians of hope” like Jurgen Moltmann–man’s openness to the future and the importance of hope as a theological virtue.  In the Christian tradition, hope has primarily been rooted in the prospect of a specific person’s victory over death.  But, Powell insists:  “God’s response to the phenomenon of death” takes shape in the “metaphor” of “eternal life,” which “is not the unending continuation of human existence but must be thought of as a present reality, much as the future is to be thought of as that which presses on the present as the domain of the possible.  Eternal life is a life conducted in the face of the future of God’s kingdom and in the power of that future” (p. 84).  Precisely what this means, Powell cannot say:  “Does it mean the survival of the individual person as an individual?  A re-creation of the universe?  Or something else?  It is impossible to know” (p. 84).  In part this is because “persons” have no specific, given metaphysical “essence.”   Aquinas helpfully portrayed the Trinity as three divine persons’ “subsistent relations” within the unity of the Godhead.  Consequently “personhood,” Powell insists, “is essentially a social phenomenon” (p. 139).  We become persons as we interact with other persons.  We have no essential “self” per se, for selfhood develops through time.  This takes place much the same as “one becomes a scientist,” which involves “learning to think and practice in certain ways and . . . see some things as more important than other things.  This teaming is an intensely interpersonal process.  So it is with becoming a person.  Our entry into the social order is an entry into the realm of persons and we do so by means of interpersonal interactions” (p. 142).

As we become persons we embrace the moral standards of our social world.  To be fully human is to be morally responsible.  Our foremost ethical challenge, Powell says, is to interact rightly with the world around us.  Historically, some Christians have withdrawn for the world, trying to transcend it in otherworldly, often ascetic ways.  Others have sought to embrace it, fully participating in all its endeavors, jettisoning Christian distinctives.  Powell suggests we follow a via media, taking some clues from Albert RitschI, who called Christians to both transcend and participate in the world. To a degree, this follows Aquinas’ emphasis on the Natural Law–discerning and following the divine principles evident in the natural world.  It also fits the Protestant Reformers’ call to discover and live out one’s vocation, making the world a better place through creative work.  Participating in God means sharing His concern for His world.

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Professor Powell’s most recent publication is Holiness in the 21st Century: Call, Consecration, Obedience Perfected in Love (San Diego:  Point Loma Press, c. 2004).  He declares that “the doctrine of holiness is not just one important doctrine among others but that it is the center of the Christian faith.  It is the center of our faith because God is love and because there is no higher calling for human beings than to share in the nature of the God who is love” (p. 21).  Consequently, he seeks to “contribute to the discussion about holiness that has been taking place in the Church of the Nazarene since its beginning” (p. 7).

During her first 75 years the Church of the Nazarene cohesively affirmed her “cardinal” doctrine of entire sanctification.  “According to this consensus,” Powell explains, “holiness was achieved by an act of consecration, in which, in a decisive moment, one gave oneself utterly to God in an act of devotion.  The results were threefold:  first, one received the Holy Spirit in full (usually referred to as ‘the baptism in the Holy Spirit); second, many of the effects of original sin were overcome (or ‘eradicated’); third, one began to experience perfect love for God and neighbor” (p. 8). This consensus began to unravel during the 1970s as a “relational” understanding of holiness (rooted in the thought of Martin Buber and propounded by Mildred Bangs Wynkoop and Rob Staples, former Nazarene Theological Seminary professors) challenged it.  Though the Wynkoop-Staples view has exerted considerable influence in many circles, the denomination has not fully embraced it.  Consequently, unless a better approach is found, Powell thinks the doctrine of holiness may very quickly become an interesting “fossil” without much currency in the church.

To provide a solution (fully understandable in light of his Participating in God), Professor Powell urges us to rethink our theology, to understand holiness as a mystical “participation in the trinitarian life of God and [acknowledge] that the perfection of holiness means the full actualization of this participation” (p. 17).  To join in the loving communion of the Father and Son through the Holy Spirit is to enter into the depths of divine holiness.  This means more than following some rules, more than asking what would Jesus do.  “We do not merely become like God,” says Powell.  “Instead, we abide in God and God abides in us.  Or, to use the language of 2 Peter, we become participants in the divine nature” (p. 18).  Participating in God, we should live differently, so Powell suggests some practical ramifications of this transformation.  We should deal responsibly with our wealth.  We should be pro-life, opposing abortion as a means of birth control. However, he cautions, there are no absolutes in such areas–loving God and our neighbor leads to various particular, prudential, Spirit-led decisions.  In all these areas, we cannot escape struggles, doubts, and imperfections, because “the fact is that the holy life is lived under the condition of sin” (p. 25).

The older (and to Powell no longer plausible) approach to holiness, with “its emphasis on the instantaneous character of becoming holy ignores the dynamic character of human existence” (p. 28), whereas holiness understood as participating in God, led by the Spirit, allows for constant growth with little need for defining moments of crisis experience.  Such spiritual growth requires participating in the life of the Church as well.  To Powell, the nation of Israel was holy, and so is the Church.  Within the social web of relationships, one becomes a person and learns how to live a holy life.  Indeed, “the Church, as an ensemble of relationships and mutual influencing, has a sacramental function” (p. 33).  In the Church we’re taught truthful doctrines, especially concerning Jesus.  In the Church we interact with others who illustrate the ways God works within our lives.  And in the Church we are held accountable for our decisions and development sharing life with fellow believers makes one holy.

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Professor Michael Lodahl sets forth his understanding of creation in God of Nature and of Grace:  Reading the World in a Wesleyan Way (Nashville: Kingswood Books, c. 2003.)  The book’s title comes from lyrics in a Charles Wesley hymn:  “Author of every work divine / Who dost through both Creations shine: / The God of nature and of grace.”  He finds John Wesley’s “hermeneutic grounded in love and a method attentive to experience” liberating, and he reads Scripture thusly.  Though he admits to “reading Wesley as a champion of a decidedly strong version of the doctrine of divine immanence” (p. 124), Lodahl clearly seeks to accurately apply some of Wesley’s insights to very contemporary concerns.  He also acknowledges his debt to the relational theology of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, incorporates some threads of feminist thought, and explicitly commits himself to process theology as expounded by John Cobb.  The gerunds he uses to identify the major points of his presentation–Making, Molding, Mending–indicate that everything moves, and in the midst of it “God the Weaver reaches deeply into our mothers, indeed into our great mother Earth, to knit us together with great care” (p. 18).

Lodahl first examines Psalm 104 to demonstrate how God is at work–”Making” all that is.  Neither this psalm nor other biblical passages describing creation should be taken literally:  “This ancient cosmology is beautiful, but it is not science” (p. 35).  Rather, it is poetry, allowing the reader to engage in “what Paul Ricoeur called a ‘second naivete’–a playful and imaginative reading of Scripture that frees me to stand on the Sunset Cliffs of San Diego (as I often do) and breathe deep of ‘the breath of God'” (p. 44).  God’s love-making, revealed in Scripture, Lodahl says, is necessarily non-coercive and is best illustrated by Jesus’ suffering on the Cross.  So God must have created through wooing a pre-existing chaos into creation’s evolving realms.  The creative “Word” celebrated in St John’s Prologue “is not a coercive omnipotence unilaterally forcing the world to conform to its demands; it is, to the contrary, a vulnerable, sacrificial, and ostensibly ‘weak’ Word that invites and allures through the wooings of love” (p. 66).  This Word (Jesus Christ), “This one whom Christians confess to be the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, did not (and I believe does not and shall not) fit the description of the world-conquering, apocalyptic lord” (p. 181).  He imposes no predetermined qualities, not even goodness, on His creatures.  Creatures are not called “good” in Genesis because a good God designed them to be such.  Quite the contrary, “God does not ‘already know from eternity’ that the creatures are good; God sees (experiences?) their goodness, their fittedness to God’s creative purposes.  God, in other words, responds with approval to the world’s own response to the divine invitation to let there be” (p. 65).

Professor Lodahl’s position also entails revising the ex nihilo doctrine of creation as generally understood in the Christian tradition, which has generally pointed to a definite beginning point–much like the “big bang” of modem physics–where time and space and matter dramatically appeared.  To Lodahl, creation ex nihilo is better understood as a declaration that everything is radically dependent upon God, that nothing could be apart from Being itself. Perhaps, he says (with John Cobb), the material world and its Creator are co-eternal.  The Eternal God is thus eternally loving and shaping the world in a self-surrendering way; He influences rather than demands.  His “influence is, then, an empowering of the creature to ‘move itself,’ to exercise the agency appropriate to its capacities.  God does not ‘move’ the creature, but graciously and humbly gifts and graces the creature with the power of its own agency and integrity as a creature” (p. 98).  He is, as described in the book’s second part, gently “Molding” a material world which is, as Sally McFague says, the “body of God.”  We must, whether thinking about God or man, reject any rigid metaphysical dualism, for a fully immanent God cannot be severed from the physical world, just as a person’s “soul” cannot be separated from his body.  Still more:  God’s engaged in saving all creation, not simply human beings within it.  Thus God surely laments animal suffering, eating meat, global poverty, capitalistic consumerism, etc.

And God’s also engaged (as we discover in the book’s third section) in “Mending” this not-yet-perfect world.  God “saves” us by transforming (mending) us here-and-now as we enter into a loving relationship with Him.  We should move beyond the “all-too-traditional Christian understanding of redemption, essentially gnostic in nature, that even today tends to envision salvation as the individual soul’s postmortem ascent to heaven” (pp. 222-223).  God alone is eternal, “but apparently the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not above sharing the divine life or gifting the creature with the Creator’s own Spirit, in such a way that God does not possess but instead passes on God’s own life to the creaturely, the finite, the mortal” (p. 229).  As Lodahl reflects upon broader eschatological themes, he rejects both premillenialism and postmillenialism (and amillenialism as well, I assume), for they envision a terminal  “end” of history.  Rather than “simplistically” taking the Apostles’ Creed’s assertion that Jesus shall dramatically “come again to judge the living and the dead” to mean that He will split the heavens in a dramatic “second coming” moment, Lodahl asks, “what if the real ‘end’ of history, God’s most fundamental telos or purpose for our world, is the gracious (re)creation of human beings to become, in this life, creatures made, molded, and mended by divine love?  What if God’s ‘end’ for the world is that love might flourish–that we might become lovers of God and all of our neighbors? Might this provide a more adequate Wesleyan reading of eschatology?” (p. 172).  Rather than an “end” of time, the “end” will be God’s eternal mending of a world forever in process.

To join God in mending things we should address “ecology in a Wesleyan Way.”  All around us it’s evident that “human selfishness, greed, and violence–especially in tandem with industrial and technological developments of the past several centuries–have done perhaps irreparable damage to our planetary home” (p. 209).  Along with John Wesley, in his sermon “General Deliverance,” Lodahl decries the sufferings endured by the good earth and animal world.  All this is, basically, an unfortunate aspect of a world not sufficiently evolved, not yet persuaded to live in perfect harmony.  But we’re called, Lodahl says, to be “the vanguard of God’s ongoing labors to create a world of which it might be said, ‘It is very good'”(p. 198).  Shelving Wesley’s notion that man’s sin destroyed the Garden of Eden’s perfect harmony, he says:  “Whatever might be entailed in the Christian affirmation that God’s creation is good, it cannot mean that there once was a pristine, painless perfection from which he world has fallen due to human disobedience” (p. 208).  Creation always groans, as Paul says in Ro 8:26, and we may join with him, praying, working and hoping that in time God’s perfect plan will be realized and groaning cease.

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Professor Lodahl’s latest work is titled:  “All Things Necessary to Our Salvation”:  The Hermeneutical and Theological Implications of the Article on the Holy Scriptures in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene (soon to be published by PLNU’s Point Loma Press, so I cannot provide precise page citations).  Therein he explains why the Church of the Nazarene came to her position on biblical inspiration and suggests how it applies to a proper understanding of the doctrine of creation.  The official position of the church affirms “the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures . . . given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation; so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.”

This statement largely appropriated the position of the Anglican and Methodist churches, taking its final form as a mediating position between Fundamentalism (espoused by former Methodists such as H.G. Morrison, who became a general superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene) and Modernism (evident in many mainline denominations).  Professor Lodahl’s explanation of developments in the early decades of the church, moving from a simple movement’s commitments to a denomination’s creed, cogently places the Church of the Nazarene in the nation’s ecclelsiastical rainbow.  He deeply appreciates and appropriately cites the “greatest” 20th century Nazarene theologian, H. Orton Wiley, who worked skillfully at the General Assembly in 1928 to steer the church away from affirming an inerrant (i.e. verbally inspired) text while retaining a deep commitment to an authoritative Bible.  The “salient additions” Wiley made in 1928 were “plenary inspiration and inerrantly,” insuring “that the denomination would espouse the conviction that biblical authority is rooted in soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation.”  Doing so he carved out “a little bit of elbow room” for a scholarly hermeneutic that allows for a fully divine-human composition of the sacred writings.

Wiley, Lodahl argues, especially committed Nazarenes to interpreting the written word in accord with the “Living Word,” the Lord Jesus Christ.   God fully revealed Himself in His Son, and all Scripture bears witness to Him.  Thus we must not allow “usurpers” such as the Church, or the Bible, or human Reason, to displace the Living Word.   “To put it simply, Jesus Christ is God’s full and final Word, a Word uttered incarnationally.”  Consequently, “Scripture’s authority rests essentially in its capacity to testify truthfully, and therefore salvifically, to this Living Word in history.”

Given this understanding of biblical inspiration, Professor Lodahl urges us to read Genesis 1 as a declaration that God has created all that is, not a depository of scientific information concerning creation.   As Wiley said, “The Genesis account of creation is primarily a religious document.  It cannot be considered a scientific document, and yet it must not be regarded as contradictory to science.”  More importantly, approaching the text christologically leads one to root one’s doctrine of creation in John 1 rather than Genesis 1.  Consequently, Lodahl thinks “Wiley would have profited by more aggressively incorporating his appreciation for the Johannine theme of Jesus Christ as God’s Living Word into his interpretation of Genesis 1.”

Doing precisely this, Professor Lodahl applies Wesley’s “hermeneutic of love” to Genesis 1.  The great call of the Bible is to love God and neighbor.  “The church of Jesus Christ, then, reads the creation stories of Genesis in Christ, through Christ, and toward Christ–and so within the dynamic, the dynamo, of the age to come.  It is not back to Adam and Eve in a garden that Jesus’ disciples are called.  Rather, they are beckoned forward into God’s unimaginable future, foretasted now in Jesus Christ and his Spirit-breathed fellowship of the local church congregation, where ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female’–and may I dare to add, ‘there is no longer creationist and theistic evolutionist?–’for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28).”

# # #

 

 

 

APPRAISING THE CRUSADES 

 

          Crusades and crusaders have lately elicited little more than antipathy and abuse.  After mentioning the need for a crusade in response to 9/11, President Bush quickly cleansed his language of all such references.  In Christian circles, where we used to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” any hint of Christian militancy has been suppressed.  Billy Graham once held crusades around the world but now uses less offensive terms.  For a century, Christian colleges–such as Point Loma Nazarene University, where I teach–happily embraced the crusader as a suitable mascot for athletic teams.  After all, Crusaders were brave men who risked their lives as cross-bearing pilgrims, determined to rescue the holy city of Jerusalem.  But PLNU recently discarded the Crusader logo and now portrays its representatives as Sea Lions.  (Ironically, the most notable historical reference to this creature was “operation Sealion”–Hitler’s proposed invasion of Britain in WWII). 

          Given the Crusaders’ current disfavor, it’s important to learn a bit about their history!  As a rule of thumb, those who most detest the Crusades know the least about them!  Fortunately, there’s  been a revival of serious historical work in this area, for which Thomas F. Madden’s A Concise History of the Crusades (New York:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 1999) provides a convenient entryway.  A chronological narrative, Madden’s account begins with “the call,” first evident in Pope Gregory VII’s proposal to send a Christian army against the Turks in 1074, just 20 years after the momentous schism between eastern and western branches of Christendom.  To Gregory this would be “an errand of mercy and an act of charity” to restore the unity of the Church (p. 7). 

          Gregory’s aspiration found a clear voice in his successor, Pope Urban II, who responded, in 1095, to the Byzantine emperor’s request for assistance with a call for the First Crusade.  Thousands of folks rallied, taking up the Cross as pilgrims, “cross bearers” determined to do penance by going to Jerusalem and restoring her sacred sites to Christian control.  Typical of feudal society, crusaders moved without much cohesion or plan.  Thus, needing supplies, they pillaged the countryside as they moved and especially alienated the Byzantines they supposedly came to rescue.  Multiplied thousands of them–especially the followers of Peter the Hermit–were slaughtered by Muslims in Turkey.  But in time a remnant of the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099 and established a Christian kingdom that lasted for nearly a century. 

          What they lacked, however, were three essentials for permanent success:  “a strong ruler, ready troops, and abundant supplies” (p. 39).  Lacking organization, continual dissent plagued the feudal states established along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.  Though many Europeans fought as Crusaders, few of them stayed–indeed virtually all the great nobles returned home as quickly as possible.  Often there were only a few hundred knights, plus a few thousand foot soldiers, in the entire region, holding out against thousands of Moslem warriors.  Losses, by 1140, led to the preaching of the Second Crusade, primarily by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, though little resulted from the campaign that failed (in its only significant action) to take Damascus in 1148. 

          Resurgent Islam in the 1180s prompted the Third Crusade, which enlisted the largest number of warriors.  In 1187 Saladin defeated a Christian army near Nazareth at the Horns of Hattin, one of the most decisive battles ever fought.  (The real Saladin, parenthetically, bears little resemblance to his benign popular image–he was, in fact, a rather ruthless, dictatorial man.)  The Christians were decimated, and all the gains of the previous century seemed imperiled.  So Richard the Lion Heart and other European kings orchestrated “the largest military enterprise of the Middle Ages” (p. 81).  Some victories were won, but basically the Crusaders negotiated with Saladin and retired from the fray.

          Five more crusades, during the 13th century, targeted the Holy Lands.  One ended up sacking Constantinople after a complicated struggle between Latin and Orthodox forces.  Others bogged down in Egypt, and one imploded with the death of Louis IX in Tunis.  In 1291, the final fortress in the Holy Land fell, and the Crusaders withdrew.  However, conflict between Christians and Muslims continued.  Constantinople fell in 1453 and Vienna was besieged in 1529.  Crusades of various sorts still attracted followers.  But the Reformation divided the Church, and in the 16th century political divisions and loyalties became paramount.  “In that new world,” Madden says, “the crusade had no place” (p. 213). 

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

          Madden frequently cites the work of Jonathan Riley-Smith, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, who is generally considered the premier authority on the crusades.  Of his many monographs, the volume to first consult is What Were the Crusades? (3d ed., San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2002).  He notes that computer-aided research has especially revised historians’ understandings of the crusades.  “In particular,” he says, “I have become much more aware of the penitential element in crusading and the way it coloured the whole movement.  I now believe that it was its most important defining feature” (p. xii).  Piety–doing penance so as to receive indulgences–not avarice or ambition, prompted the Crusades.  Urban II, calling for the First Crusade, “was, in effect, creating a new type of pilgrimage, like the perigrinatio religiosa in that it was volunteered out of devotion, but also like the penitential one oin that its performance constituted a formal penance and was set by him in the context of the confessional” (p. 55). 

          Waging war for pious reasons was permitted, according to Christian teaching, so long as it was a “just war.”  Rooted in the thought of St Augustine, sanctified by the approval of saintly preachers such as St Bernard of Clairvaux, Crusaders considered themselves fighting to defend innocent Christians who had been violently overwhelmed by Moslems.  Urban II, calling for the First Crusade, urged his hearers to “liberate” fellow Christians suffering the tyranny of Seljuk Turkish rule, to liberate the holy shrines in Jerusalem, to love their brothers enough to lay down their lives for them.  It was a just and righteous reason to take up arms.

          Valid crusades were duly declared by legitimate authorities–another mark of a just war.  For two centuries a series of popes–many of them, beginning with Gregory VII, quite godly–urged crusaders to sally forth, doing the Lord’s work.  And Christian kings–such as the revered Louis IX–invested time and talent seeking to do it.  Crusaders fought with the assurance that the highest authorities, both spiritual and secular, supported their efforts.  Most importantly, crusading was a means of grace, placing “the act of fighting on the same meritorious plane as prayer, works of mercy and fasting” (p. 56).  This is evident in that, despite the Crusaders’ penchant for indiscriminate and ruthless violence, the “first crusaders began each new stage of the march barefooted and fasted before every major engagement.  In June 1099 they processed solemnly around the city of Jerusalem, which was still in Muslim hands,” following robed priests and singing songs (p. 58).  Crusaders went forth only because they were buoyed up by words, such as St Bernard’s:

 Go forward then in security, knights, and drive off without fear the enemies of the Cross of Christ, certain that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ. . . .  How glorious are those who return victorious from the battle!  How happy are those who die as martyrs in the battle!  Rejoice, courageous athlete, if you survive and are victor in the Lord; but rejoice and glory the more if you die and are joined to the Lord.  For your life is fruitful and your victory glorious.  But death . . . is more fruitful and more glorious.  For if those who die in the Lord are blessed, how much more are those who die for the Lord! (p. 65) 

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

          With the most recent, highly-respected historical scholarly works in one hand, it is fascinating to pick up two books written two notorious generalists–Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton–nearly a century ago.  The two friends–known as “Chesterbelloc” by some–shared similar interests but contrasting personalities.  This appears in the books the two wrote dealing with the crusades. 

          A bellicose Belloc’s The Crusades was first published in 1937 and was reprinted by Tan Books and Publishers in Rockford, IL in 1992.  He wrote with the conviction that the Seljuk Turks’ victory over Byzantine Christians in 1071 at Manzikert, the incident that led to the First Crusade, would have quickly led to the conquest of Constantinople and perhaps of all Europe, had not the Crusaders rebuffed them.  “The Mongols overran, devastated, and destroyed all that land of hither Asia which had been the solid foundation of the Byzantine power; the reservoir of Byzantine landed wealth, the nursery of our religion.  The victorious Turks pillaged and killed wholesale . . . .  They so cut at the roots of all civilization that it withered before them.  Within much less than a lifetime the whole vast district of interior Asia Minor was ruined” (pp. 16-17).   At that moment, both Pope Gregory VII and Hilaire Belloc recognized:  “The issue was the life or death of Christendom” (p. 17).  And that issue still stands unresolved, for the crusades unfortunately failed to crush Islam, which remains intact and still threatens Christianity. 

          Belloc’s account mixes narrative and analysis.  “Human affairs are decided through conflict of ideas, which often resolve themselves by conflict under arms” (p. 1).  At times he provides gripping descriptions of the men and armies, terrain and cities, weapons and strategies, battles and bloodshed, which characterized the crusades.  Of the armies that assembled in the First Crusade, he writes (anticipating the conclusions of today’s historians):  “The host was essentially a host of pilgrims; the armed as well as the unarmed thought of themselves as men engaged on a pilgrimage; a journey undertaken with a religious object for its goal and under a vow” (p. 36).  

Crusade leaders such as Bohemond, Baldwin, and Tancred come to life in Belloc’s story, for they’re portrayed with a novelist’s attention to detail–physique, hair color, temperament, character.   He even provides numerical estimates (too often unmentioned by crusade historians) of the forces involved:  perhaps 300,000 people crossed over the Bosphorus into Asia, of whom some 40,000 made it to Jerusalem.  Of the 40,000, only 1,500 were knights–the virtually irresistible mounted warriors who consistently defeated far greater numbers of Islamic warriors.   Their religious fervor was clearly illustrated in the transformation that took place among the crusaders when the lance head that pierced Christ’s side was unearthed in Antioch and the solemn processions around Jerusalem shortly before the city was attacked.  “They went in solemn train, chanting the holy chants, from the Mount of Olives, dominating the town, round by the north and west to Zion hill; and all the walls were crowded with the Negroes and the Saracens, jeering at them and their canting–planting crosses in full sight of the Christians, which they spat upon and otherwise defiled” (pp. 113-114).  The subsequent savagery of the Crusaders’ behavior in Jerusalem was fueled by the Muslims’ sacrilege, and “a violent resistance ended in general massacre” (p. 115).  Though the valiant Tancred tried to restrain them, the Christians slaughtered the holy city’s defenders, sadly blemishing their endeavor. 

Apart from the descriptive passages–devoted singularly to the first three crusades–Belloc’s strength lies in his analysis.  He particularly emphasized how the failure to take Allepo (mid-way between Antioch and Edessa in northern Syria) in 1097 and Damascus in 1098 ultimately doomed the Christian cause.  By failing to occupy these strategic sites, Muslims controlled the important north-south road that skirts the desert east of the region’s mountains.  Had the Crusaders seized control of Allepo and Damascus and “permanently occupied the whole maritime belt of Syria between the Mediterranean and the Desert, they would have cut Islam in two.  That is the central strategic truth of the Crusades–but they never occupied the whole” (p. 181). 

Further hindering the Crusades was the incessant internal strife and disorganization that forever limited the Christians’ efforts.  Though they allegedly came to “help” Byzantium recover her lost lands, the Crusaders all too often battled the Greeks whose objectives differed from theirs.  Crusaders constantly squabbled among themselves, even resorting to violence to resolve disputes.  Decisions were endlessly debated and delayed, simply because of the nature of Western Europe’s feudal society.  The first generation of Christians, a small minority surrounded by Greek Christians as well as Muslims, soon intermarried, and their descendents often opposed the Europeans who came to help them in later crusades. 

Thus weakened, the Crusader states were vulnerable to Saladin, the “fanatically anti-Christian” Muslim who won the pivotal battle of Hattin in 1187.  Subsequently, despite various crusades, the Muslims would control the region.  However, Belloc insists, the first century of crusading arrested the Turkish advance and saved European civilization.

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

Belloc’s friend, G. K. Chesterton, dealt with the Crusades in a travel book he wrote shortly after World War I, titled The New Jerusalem (Fort Collins, CO:  Roman Catholic Books, reprint of 1921 publication).  Typical of Chesterton, this book abounds with imaginative insights, unexpected correlations between modern events and ancient history, and an enthusiastic defense of Christianity accompanied by a warm-hearted critique of her foes.  Beginning his journey, for example, he noticed the cross-roads in his own village.  This reminded him that “The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross.  For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice.  As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our civilization had indeed come to the cross-roads” (p. 16). 

That civilization, of course, for centuries has battled Islam, which denies free choice!  And as Chesterton traveled to Middle East he witnessed many manifestations of these two worldviews.  Muslims had flowed out of the desert, everywhere evident to travelers such as Chesterton, and “it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it is capable sooner or later of tearing anything and everything in pieces; it has no instinct of preservation or of the permanent needs of men.  Where it has passed the ruins remain ruins and are not renewed; where it has been resisted and rolled back, the links of our long history are never lost” (p. 29).  They were–and are–barbarians, and “there is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary” (p. 67). 

These barbarians invaded Christian lands.  Whatever heroic virtues one may find in the Islamic invaders, “certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.  An Arabian gentleman found riding on the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardly complain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert” (p. 34).  As invaders, the Muslims occupied territories long shaped by the Roman Empire.  Crusaders, following the challenge by the Pope in Rome, simply endeavored to restore that empire.  They were “not riding into Asia” but determined to restore lands in Asia to European control.  “In one sentence, it meant that Rome had to recover what Byzantium could not keep” (p. 208). 

As a tourist in Jerusalem, Chesterton noticed small things that reveal much larger realities.  Take for instance the fact that Muslim women wore black dresses whereas Christian women wore white.  “A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel something like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces.  It is as if in that world every woman were a widow” (p. 101).  The Christian woman in Bethlehem, however “is made to look magnificent in public.  She not only shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful,” but she wears a jeweled crown that “can only conceivably stand, for what we call the Western view of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women” (p. 108).    The differences could not be more black and white! 

Important differences are equally evident when one compares the Medieval Crusaders with their Muslim foes.  Unfortunately, Chesterton says, the anti-Christian bias of the Enlightenment led to a hostile misrepresentation of the Crusades in 18th and 19th century novels and histories.  Such prejudice underlies the erroneous tendency to compare Crusader “intolerance” with the “toleration shown by the Moslems” (p. 261).   “In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignity and courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty.  The same injustice is introduced into history, which by means of selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction.  Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christian mob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one who mentions that the Moslem commander [Saladin] commanded in cold blood the murder of some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies after the victory of Hattin” (p. 260).  This bias is evident, Chesterton notes, when writers such as Voltaire vent their hostility to the Cross by condemning–or ridiculing–those who marched under its banners as Crusaders.  All such prejudice, however, must be understood as “a prejudice not so much against Crusaders as against Christians” (p. 264). 

To confront such prejudices, Chesterton would have us recover the Medieval mind, to get back on the “right road” that led to the Crusades!  Indeed, he believed Europe (represented by English troops occupying Palestine when Chesterton visited) should re-establish Christendom in the Middle East.  Intrinsically barbarian, locked into an oversimplified theology, Islam simply cannot sustain a civilization.  So “It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe must rescue some lordship, or overlordship of these old Roman provinces” (p. 266). 

 

 

 

THE CASE FOR A CREATOR            

            In 1959, Chicago hosted a Centennial Celebration marking the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.  Speakers like Sir Julian Huxley boldly portrayed the Darwinian theory as fully established, and Stanley Miller’s recent origin-of-life experiment seemed to prove that lifeless chemicals, properly jolted by electricity, had fused to make amino acids, the organic building blocks for proteins and thus life.  James Watson and Francis Crick had just unraveled the mystery of DNA, which promised to deliver a fully naturalistic explanation for terrestrial organisms.  Evolution through natural selection reigned as absolutely in the life sciences as did Marxism in the U.S.S.R.    

Few then would have imagined that, 40 years later, a vigorous scholarly movement labeled “Intelligent Design” would challenge Darwinian dogmas and elicit serious attention, including discussions in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and essays in prestigious journals such as Natural History, the publication of the American Museum of Natural History.  A fine scholarly overview of this movement is now available in Thomas Woodward’s Doubts about Darwin:  A History of Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids:  Baker Books, c. 2003), a highly readable rendition of his Ph.D. dissertation. 

            “Murmurs of dissent” from Darwinism had occasionally rippled the scientific waters, as was evident when the noted French zoologist Pierre Grasse published L’Evolution du Vivant in 1973 and boldly rejected its core concepts.  The fossil record, he insisted, holds all the evidence we have for  life’s ancient history, and it reveals nothing akin to the “gradualism” basic to Darwin’s theory.   Sir Fred Hoyle, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, evaluating the mathematical probability of life evolving through chance and necessity, concluded that it was about as possible as a tornado putting together a Boeing 747 with materials sucked up from a junkyard.  Darwinian disciples, such as Stephen Jay Gould, occasionally admitted this–all the while devising improbable hypotheses to sustain it. 

But such “murmurs” hardly troubled the scientific community’s entrenched commitment to Darwinism.  “Intelligent Design” surfaced in the 1980s, Woodward says, with the revisionist scientific work of Michael Denton, an agnostic who declared:  “‘Neither of the two fundamental axioms of Darwin’s macroevolutionary theory–the concept of the continuity of nature . . . and the belief that all the adaptive design of life has resulted from a blind random process–have been validated by one single empirical discovery of scientific advance since 1859′” (p. 47, italics Woodward’s).  Indeed, as he concluded Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis:  “‘One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.'”  But in fact, “‘the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century'” (p. 24).         

Denton’s work was soon absorbed by Phillip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed an interest in Darwinism fueled by his conviction that neither the evidence nor the argumentation demonstrate its truth.  It seemed obvious to him that “metaphysical naturalism,” not empirical data, sustained the evolutionary creed.    Johnson maintains, Woodward says, that “‘Darwinism functions as the central cosmological myth of modern culture–as the centerpiece of a quasi-religious system that is known to be true a priori, rather than as a scientific hypothesis that must submit to rigorous testing'” (p. 95).  Following Johnson’s wedge in the 1990s came “the four horsemen” of the Intelligent Design movement who were just finishing their graduate studies:  Steven Meyer, earning a degree from Cambridge University; William Dembski and Paul Nelson at the University of Chicago; and Jonathan Wells, at the University of California, Berkeley.  Linked up through the internet and scholarly conferences, they published and argued their position in collections of essays such as The Creation Hypothesis and Mere Creation.  

A well-established scholar, Michael Behe, was also drawn to the movement by his own disillusionment with orthodox Darwinism.  As a tenured biochemist at Lehigh University, he defended  Phillip Johnson in a 1991 letter to the prestigious journal Science.  Then, five years later, he tossed one of two “rhetorical bombs [that] jarred the world of biological science” (p. 153).  The first, an article by David Berlinksi (a Jewish mathematician) in Commentary, launched “a full-scale attack on the credibility of Darwinian evolution” and then Behe published Darwin’s Black Box, vividly and persuasively showing that tiny parts of the cell, like the flagellum, appeared to be “irreducibly complex” and thus inexplicable in Darwinian categories.  The book was reviewed in more than 100 publications and enjoyed unexpected sales. 

Like Johnson, Behe was influenced by Michael Denton’s Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis, which dealt him “the greatest intellectual shock of his life” (p. 157).  But he was also angered by the scientific establishment’s deceit in portraying (especially in school textbooks) macroevolution as demonstrably factual.  Rethinking what he knew best, biochemistry, he suspected that complicated systems, including “blood clotting, the cilium, and intracellular transport” defied Darwinian explanations.  Subsequent searches of the literature confirmed his suspicion, for he found therein a “‘thundering silence.’  Not one biochemist in the past forty hears had even attempted a testable explanation for the origin of any of the systems about which he was writing” (p. 158).  Indeed, the intricate design he observed in tiny cells seemed best understood as a product of Intelligent Design rather than chance and necessity. 

Finally there’s William Dembski, with earned doctorates in both mathematics and philosophy of science, who brought intensity and high velocity intelligence to the movement.  Establishing his “explanatory filter” as a means whereby one can differentiate between events that are merely natural and those that are clearly designed, Dembski roots his presentation in advanced mathematics and probability theory.  In the words of Ron Koons, an erudite philosopher at the University of Texas, Dembski is the “Isaac Newton of information theory, and since this is the Age of Information, that makes Dembski one of the most important thinkers of our time” (p. 178).  A torrent of articles and books by Dembski, addressing both highly scholarly and lay readers, have bolstered the ID case.  

---

In 1966, at the age of 14, sitting in a high school biology class, Lee Strobel embraced atheism, confident that some basic truths he was learning fully justified his decision.  He took as demonstrable four propositions:  1) life had originated–as Stanley Miller allegedly proved–that life could accidentally spring from primordial soup; 2) Darwin’s “tree of life” demonstrated the evolution of everything from a common ancestor; 3) Ernst Haeckel’s portraits of different embryos showed the similarity of fish, hogs, rabbits, humans, et al. at the beginning of their development; 4) a “missing link,” the archaeopteryx fossil–half reptile, half bird–validated the Darwinian hypothesis.  Alas, all those planks of his childhood atheism, Strobel says–in The Case for a Creator:  A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2004)–have been largely refuted by recent scientific developments.  He–and many others whose atheism seemed justified by science–had based his worldview on fantasy rather than fact!  And since science should relentlessly seek for truth he wrote this book to illustrate how some eminent thinkers–loosely aligned in their support for “Intelligent Design”–find it reasonable to believe in a Creator. 

As an experienced journalist, Strobel first interviewed Jonathan Wells, the author of Icons of Evolution, whose undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology were earned at U.C. Berkeley.   Responding to a question concerning the origin of life, Wells noted that “Science magazine said in 1995 that experts now dismiss [Stanley] Miller’s experiment because ‘the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation'” (p. 37).  In fact, doing Miller’s experiment with the chemicals now thought to have constituted early earth’s surface would produce formaldehyde and cyanide, hardly the building blocks of living organisms!  Wells also deconstructed Darwin’s “tree of life.”  Darwin himself admitted that the fossil record looked nothing like the tree he drew in The Origin of Species, but he trusted evidence would turn up in time to demonstrate it.  In fact, Wells says, fossil finds during the past 150 years “have turned his tree upside down by showing” that virtually all major forms of life appeared suddenly in the Cambrian explosion, a five million year window of time in earth’s five billion year history (p. 43).  According to one expert, “the major animal groups ‘appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus–full blown and raring to go'” (p. 44).  Rather than a tree, one sees something like a lawn!  The fossil record, one Chinese paleontologist asserts, “‘actually stands Darwin’s tree on its head, because the major groups of animals–instead of coming last, at the top of the tree–come first, when animals make their first appearance'” (p. 45). 

Haeckel’s embryos were Strobel’s next “facts” to fall!  It turns out, Wells says, that Haeckel forged the drawings that have been endlessly reproduced in biology textbooks!  Though some of his German colleagues asserted, in the 1860s, that the drawings were false, devout Darwinians found them helpful illustrations and continued to use them.  Eight of ten textbooks on evolutionary biology currently used by universities contain them!  On a popular level, “in 1996, Life magazine described how human embryos grow ‘something very much like gills,’ which is ‘some of the most compelling evidence of evolution'” (p. 51).  In fact, Wells says, human embryos have no gills!  What looks like gills are simply wrinkles on the neck of the tiny baby!  No less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, late in life, condemned the fraudulent drawings, labeling them “‘the academic equivalent of murder'”–though he did little for 20 years to expose them. 

Finally, the fourth of Strobel’s childhood certainties, “the archaeopteryx missing link,” collapsed under the evidence presented by Jonathon Wells.  Allegedly, the archaeopteryx fossil demonstrated the transition from reptiles to birds, a basic Darwinian assumption.  Actually, we now know, it’s not a reptile at all.  “‘It’s a bird with modern feathers, and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways–their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles” (p. 57).  It’s a strange looking extinct bird, to be sure, but it’s purely bird!  Even more striking, this bird, so long cited as proof for the Darwinian theory, appears much earlier in the fossil record than the alleged reptilian ancestors of birds! 

Worse yet are “missing links” such as the archaeoraptor, featuring the tail of a dinosaur and the forelimbs of a bird.  In 1998 National Geographic trumpeted that this fossil illustrated the evolution of feathered dinosaurs into birds.  Unfortunately, the fossil was a fraud–someone glued together reptile and bird fossils and sold the artifact for a tidy profit!  Indeed, fake fossils litter the paleontological marketplace!   Something of the same applies to “Java man,” a primary entry in the World Book Encyclopedia Strobel religiously read as an adolescent atheist.  In truth, the pictures of “Java man” were imaginative drawings based upon a skullcap, a thigh bone, and three teeth.   In fact, the thigh bone doesn’t go with the skullcap, which seems to be the same as that of modern humans.  “In short, Java man was not an ape-man as I had been led to believe, but he was ‘a true member of the human family.’  This was a fact apparently lost on Time magazine, which as recently as 1994 treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor” (p. 62).  

The biological evidence set forth by Jonathan Wells finds fascinating parallels in physics and astronomy.  Allan Rex Sandage–as Edwin Hubble’s protégé, probably the world’s foremost cosmologist–declared in 1985 that he’d become a Christian, at the age of 50, because the “Big Bang” defies naturalistic explanations.  “It was my science,” Sandage said, “that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science.  It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence” (p. 70).  Similarly, Nobelist Arno Penzias said:  “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan” (p. 153).  Indeed, he noted, “‘The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole'” (p. 77). 

The implications of the Big Bang congealed for Strobel when he interviewed William Lane Craig, who unpacked the deceptively profound “Kalam” argument for God’s existence.  This involves “three simple steps:  ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause.  The universe began to exist.  Therefore, the universe has a cause'” (p. 98).  By contrast, atheists such as Quentin Smith claim:  “‘the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing'” (p. 99).   Craig, however, cited evidence for each step in the Kalam position, responded to its critics, and established, to Strobel’s satisfaction, the validity of taking the Big Bang as a clue to the necessity of positing an eternal God presiding over the whole finite process of creation.  

An interview with Robin Collins revealed the intricate “fine tuning” of the universe, perfectly suited for life on earth, and a similar talk with Jay Wesley Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of the recently-published The Privileged Planet, demonstrated the amazing coincidence of factors that makes the earth quite special, if not utterly unique.  The acclaimed John A. O’Keefe, considered “the godfather of astrogeology,” summed it all up by declaring that it is mathematically probable that “only one planet in the universe is likely to bear intelligent life.  We know of one–the Earth–but it is not certain that there are many others, and perhaps there are no others” (p. 191).  Still more, O’Keefe said:  “We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures; our Darwinian claim to have done it all ourselves is as ridiculous and as charming as a baby’s brave efforts to stand on its own feet and refuse his mother’s hand.  If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence.  It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in” (p. 191). 

Turning from the “privileged planet” to the miniscule cell, Strobel sought out biochemist Michael Behe, whose Darwin’s Black Box, David Berlinski says “‘makes an overwhelming case against Darwin, on the biochemical level,” arguing with “‘great originality, elegance and intellectual power.’  Added Berlinsky:  ‘No one has done this before'” (p. 196).   Behe explained how a tiny bacterial flagellum moves, propelled by what one scientist calls “the most efficient motor in the universe” (p. 205).  He also explained the intricate process whereby blood clots to stop bleeding.   Just as a mousetrap illustrates a “specified complexity” indicating intelligent design, so too do the extraordinarily more sophisticated marvels of nature. 

            Equally persuasive of design is the presence of information in DNA.  “Human DNA,” says George Sim Johnson, “contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica.  If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence” (p. 219).   So where does that information come from?  To Stephen A. Meyer, this is the critical question.  “If you can’t explain where the information comes from, you haven’t explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions” (p. 225).  Given its information content, it’s mathematically improbable that even a simple protein molecule could have come into being through purely naturalistic means during the limited time following the Big Bang.   And since we cannot escape concluding that information comes from a mind, we are justifiably inclined to conclude that the information pervading the cosmos is derived from a Cosmic Mind.             

            The alternative, the purely naturalistic view, strikes Strobel as “simply too far-fetched to be credible” (p. 277).   Such a position requires one “to believe that:

·         Nothing produces everything

·         Non-life produces life

·         Randomness produces fine-tuning

·         Chaos produces information

·         Unconsciousness produces consciousness

·         Non-reason produces reason” (p. 277)

Such propositions, he concluded, require a great deal of “blind faith” in the Darwinian hypothesis, taxing reason far beyond that required by Christian theism.   Indeed, we may very well be entering an era of scientific breakthroughs that restore the powerful union of faith and reason evident in great scientists of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton.        

            Strobel’s strengths lie in his journalistic skills:  he interviews some of the finest thinkers in the Intelligent Design community (including a few, such as J. P. Moreland, I’ve not mentioned), helps them clearly explain their positions in ways ordinary readers can comprehend, and adds personal touches to enhance the discussions.  His own story provides an interesting context to the presentation, but he never makes himself its centerpiece.  One closes the book with a profound appreciation for the brilliance of the men interviewed, supplemented by dozens of quotations from the world’s elite scientists, and a conviction that one is fully warranted when affirming faith in the Creator.