Page 4603 – Christianity Today (2024)

(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)

So he was prodded into a creative quest, a resolution to his fears, and that quest culminated in War and Peace. We need not know all the history, which Feuer helps clarify, to appreciate her book. As she notes about Tolstoy’s manuscripts from then:

[they] make it clear that the Decembrist novel plan was still uppermost in his intentions, and that its fundamentally political conception still dominated his thinking. But as the novel grew under his hands it took on a life of its own and began to exert a force that often opposed Tolstoy’s thoughts and intentions.

Tolstoy was in Paris in 1857, surveying the ultimate effects of the French Revolution, as he perceived it, and there began reading Proudhon and reflecting on Rousseau. He witnessed a guillotining and was so appalled he left Paris–convinced that he had seen the epitome of barbarism released by the Revolution. It had produced, ultimately, a despot who seized the crown and placed it on his own head, Napoleon, and as Tolstoy wrote about the advance of Napoleon into Russia in War and Peace, he saw in it an analogue to the revolutionary fervor that began entering Russia in 1856, at the time of the release of the Decembrists.

That fervor, he believed, meant the annihilation of the aristocracy, the class to which he belonged and which, in its independence even from the czar, had become the keeper of Russian history and tradition. He mistrusted, even deplored, those who gained power solely by intellect, such as merchants and monks, and never fairly depicted any such person in his fiction. He did not believe people of their kind could experience life in a panoramic sense or understand, for instance, the relationship of serf to land or landowner, much less engage in independent thought. Their intellectuality tended toward theory or took off in the direction of the ruble–or so Tolstoy denigrated their lack of intellectual objectivity. He wrote at the time that the liberals were talking the same kind of “trash” as the landowners, only in French. By now he despised everything French.

In his fears for the annihilation of the aristocracy, he was absolutely accurate, only off by a few decades. And if he had seen the revision even of history that the Soviets practiced, he would have seen his worst nightmares made flesh. For after the bodies were carted off, the wisdom of tradition that had been established over centuries was wiped out. The “liberal conservatism” that Tolstoy practiced was akin to the later views of one who hoped to help form a new government once the revolution began, but was finally forced to flee the country, V. D. Nabokov, the writer’s father.

The first chapters of the Decembrist novel–all that was written of it–were incorporated into the early drafts of War and Peace, as Feuer ably documents. In its early scenes this novel depicted a weary Decembrist, in return from exile, stopping to visit an aristocrat on his estate–variously called Volkonsky or Bolkonsky. The aristocrat has served in the government, but in a world-weariness of his own has retreated to the country. Politics are discussed. Tolstoy meant to be “instructive” to his contemporaries, Feuer says:

He wrote as an artist for whom one fact–if the right one–was enough, as a moralist distrustful of historians’ explanations . . . and as a prophet whose mission was to inspire people, or nations, to salvation’s change of heart.

Feuer’s view of the political exigencies of the Decembrist novel being carried into War and Peace is not entirely original, as she admits, but an extension of the discoveries of one of the sagest Tolstoy scholars, the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum. By the time Feuer visited Yasnaya Polyana, more careful work had been done on the drafts of War and Peace by Evelina Zaidenshnur, however, so Feuer was able to carry forward Eikhenbaum’s suppositions (and further intuitions by Eikhenbaum’s Formalist colleague, Viktor Shklovsky) into what now seems an airtight case: Tolstoy did not merely bring the political concerns of his Decembrist novel into War and Peace; these were the primary motivation behind its genesis.

But as the novel changed under Tolstoy’s hand, one of its less palatable characters becoming impossible for him to depict, that character split into Anatole Kuryagin. Then Pierre Bezukhov, meant to be a revolutionary, appeared out of the character’s other half. Over a year later, as Tolstoy started drafting battle scenes in “The Olmutz-Austerlitz Manuscript,” a person similar to Prince Andrey appeared.

Andrey at first wasn’t linked to Natasha, nor was Pierre, until Tolstoy was well on the way to what became successful drafts of the actual novel. And as the work changed and grew, it became more a novel of social manners, as some say, or a critique of class structure, as Soviet critics were compelled to parrot. But as Feuer accurately points out, the aristocracy is never demeaned.

Feuer is primarily interested in the political genesis of War and Peace, as she admits, so she is not as forthcoming as I had hoped about what Tolstoy, after his false starts and hesitations, finally achieved. The scene of revision she quotes most fully, Pierre’s visit to his dying father, is primarily used as an illustration of how Tolstoy recognized the power of “limited third-person” point of view, the mastery of which (along with the “interior monologue”) Tolstoy was the first to achieve.

Though War and Peace is largely from an omniscient point of view, there is no other nineteenth-century novel like it, because the overseeing consciousness narrows to the confines of each character. In tracing this, Feuer quotes from the first draft of the encounter between Pierre, an illegitimate son, and his father, who has never acknowledged paternity until he’s on his deathbed: “How much they had to say to each other,” Tolstoy wrote, “this dying father and his frightened son!” He then reports on the perceptions and physical sensations of each, along with a lot of talk, and then Pierre takes his father’s hand and his father places his other hand on Pierre’s head and asks him why he hasn’t visited him. Pierre bends to his father’s face and sobs and says only, “I don’t know.” Then this: “And on the face of the dying man there appeared a smile expressing the knowledge that there was no need to say anything, that everything was now seen and felt otherwise, that all that was painful, grievous and terrible was over now. They said nothing more.”

In the final, published version, Pierre is led into his father’s room just as attendants are turning him in his bed.

At this moment when the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back helplessly and he made a vain effort to move it. Either the count noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded his lifeless arm or some other idea flashed through his dying mind at that moment, at any rate he looked at the refractory arm, at the expression of terror on Pierre’s face, then again at the arm, and on his face there appeared a weak, martyr’s smile, a smile that ill accorded with his features, and seemed to make a joke of his own weakness. Unexpectedly, at the sight of this smile, Pierre felt a shuddering in his breast, a pinching sensation in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. They turned the sick man on his side, face to the wall. He sighed.

The artistic audacity! And we get only glimpses of the poetic power of the scene, viewing it as we do through a scumbled and muffling medium like translucent glass, since we receive it in translation. Here, as in so many parts of War and Peace (and most of Tolstoy’s fiction from the 1860s on), the reason for his brilliance seems to me apparent: the painterly gestures of his people. Or as a painter might say, his genius in revealing the “gesture of a pose.” More is communicated by the look on the count’s face and his flopping arm than two pages of character description. Feuer overlooks this.

To this writer, when Tolstoy realized the effect of such gestures in his fiction and peeled away his prose to further reveal them, he became Tolstoy. The crux of what he understood seems this: If he could picture an action as it ran its course or see on a face the right expression, rather than compose a package of prose to explain these, he was writing in another realm. The best of his work is mostly pictorial, and he anticipated what would overwhelm our century: movies, then television.

He was a blunt and engaging philosophical writer, as we can also trace, but he forsook that to get the look of a character or a scene right. He humbled himself and his prose to that–the moment each character was passing through–and so became the servant of each. Only genius, coupled with the iron-clad confidence that was perhaps the enduring legacy of his aristocratic upbringing, is able to stoop to such selflessness.

Tolstoy set aside his forceful, polemical, restless, sifting, contradicting intellect for his eye and the emotional repercussions of that eye on his heart. He became his characters’ eyes. He is Platon Karetaev as surely as Napoleon, and every person in between. He traveled from the dark of his fears and doubts down lanes of increasing light that opened onto traceries of brilliance. There he dropped his baggage of books and theories, the privileges of aristocracy and the rest, and set his plain peasant face toward the end of what we now know as War and Peace.

Larry Woiwode is the author of five novels and two collections of stories.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 17

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It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divigations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrote philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless.”

So begins The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz’s classic study of intellectual capitulation to Stalinism. Ideas have consequences, not only in Europe during the heyday of “dialectical materialism” but even in America, right here and now.

Among those practicing philosophy in the English-speaking world today, Mark Noll notes in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a disproportionately high number are Christians (half of them, it seems, with Dutch names and present or past connections to Calvin College). In this special section (which features a couple of ringers from literature as well as an impressive cast of card-carrying philosophers), we can only begin to suggest the breadth and depth of what Noll rightly calls “the remarkable renewal of orthodox Protestant philosophy.” No scandal there–unless we fail to avail ourselves of these riches.

-JW

(First of three parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 20

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(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 1)

You tell me, over and over and over again, my friend, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction,” growled Barry McGuire in a hit single that topped the Billboard charts for several weeks in 1965. Though I was not at that time a professing Christian, I remember friends from area youth groups latching on to McGuire’s ballad of doom as a bracing sign of the times. While the gurus of the culture were busy savoring their victories in the first skirmishes of the sexual revolution or salivating over the prospect of the Great Society, these kids were dreaming their dreams of destruction. “Apocalypse now, glory tomorrow” seemed to be the motto of the few who clung to the radical or fundamentalist fringe in those halcyon days.

But even though in hindsight I have come to appreciate the foresight of those prophets of doom, I continue to wonder about the way they relished the prospect of ruin. It is one thing to proclaim judgment in a spirit of mourning and lamentation; it is another thing entirely to greet destruction with a joyful heart. What is it about the North American evangelical tradition that makes it seemingly easy for thoughtful Christians to be so blithe about the prospect of cultural demise?

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats knew all about such cultural ruin. “Now days are dragon-ridden,” he wrote in the wake of World War I and the failed Irish rebellion of 1916. “He who can read the signs,” according to Yeats, “knows no work can stand, / Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent / On master-work of intellect or hand.” How, Yeats wondered, could he justify toiling at the work of culture while knowing at the same time of its inevitable ruin?

Yeats resolved this dilemma by articulating his own distinct view of tragedy in poems he wrote in the tumultuous 1930’s. For instance, “Lapis Lazuli,” a poem written just two years before his death, begins with images of destruction and ends with an expression of tragic serenity. Referring to the perilous state of Europe, Yeats writes that “if nothing drastic is done / Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out” and they will “pitch . . . bomb-balls in / Until the town lie beaten flat.” And the terror of modern Europe, it turns out, is but one form of the universal fate of culture: “Old civilizations” are “put to the sword. / Then they and their wisdom went to rack.” We do our work with the knowledge that it may be “beaten flat” or fade into oblivion. Nevertheless, we persevere in a spirit of tragic gaiety, committed to the desperate struggle to preserve as well as to the inevitable need to rebuild what we have failed to protect from ruin: “All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.”

The sounds of towns being “beaten flat” and “old civilizations being put to the sword” reverberate through the pages of three new Christian assessments of postmodernism. Each book traffics in the language of crisis and cultural demise. Near the end of their work, for instance, J. Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh assert that modern culture “has disintegrated into language games and hyperreality,” has “degenerated into violent and deadly tribalism,” and has “become a grim nightmare of economic contraction . . . and environmental collapse.” Seeming to echo Yeats, they ask, “Might it be the case that the very foundations of Western culture are weak, and we must engage in a painful process of dismantling and rebuilding again?”

In like manner, Stanley Grenz sounds the note of destruction in A Primer on Postmodernism. Imitating Tom Wolfe and Michel Foucault–who are masters of the art of detecting sweeping cultural trends in isolated historical incidents–Grenz names the founding event of the postmodern era: “Postmodernism was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.” On that day, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was “razed with dynamite.” According to Grenz (who cites for authority the architectural critic Charles Jencks), “this event symbolizes the death of modernity and birth of postmodernity.” Grenz’s metaphors are mixed, but his message is clear. Whether it is seen as a writhing body, a blasted building, or a decaying organism, the modern world has reached its end, and we should be glad:

Our society is in the throes of a shift of immense proportions. Like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, the edifice that housed thought and culture in the modern era is crumbling. As modernity dies around us, we appear to be entering a new epoch–postmodernity.

Brian Ingraffia’s Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology also draws upon images of cultural conflict, negation, and destruction, but it is a work of another order entirely. The books by Middleton and Walsh and by Grenz have a secondhand quality about them; in large measure they read like summaries of accounts that others have given of the postmodern era. Ingraffia’s work, on the other hand, is the product of an intense engagement with major figures of postmodern theory, particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Ingraffia has studied these thinkers with care, and his critique is sustained, sophisticated, and substantial. The confidence with which he maneuvers his way through postmodern theory is refreshing, as is the critical charity with which he engages its proponents, who are his opponents. Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology is a major achievement and a superb example of Christian engagement with contemporary scholarship.

Yet for all its differences of substance and argument, Ingraffia’s work shares with the two other books a profound skepticism about the culture of modernity. Ingraffia explains at the start that his goal is to examine Nietzsche’s relentless quest to expunge from Western culture the “‘shadow’ of God which lingers after his death.” He argues that “postmodern theory has been intent on completing Nietzsche’s project of vanquishing God’s shadow,” and he offers his provisional support for the project: “we should . . . vanquish god’s shadow, the shadow god created by human reason and imagination, that we might seek the revelation of the living God in the cross of Christ.”

The language of “dismantling, crumbling, and vanquishing” that permeates these books calls Yeats to mind again. In his most famous apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming,” the Irish poet announces: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yeats has a vision of barbaric power and indifference supplanting the “twenty centuries of stony sleep” that have been the Christian era. The general nature of the coming age is not in doubt; only the specific form of its incarnation is uncertain: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

For all the talk there is of “things fall[ing] apart” in these Christian cultural analyses, of these authors only Ingraffia seems to detect any beasts slinking across the postmodern desert. He alone identifies the militant atheism at the heart of Nietzschean postmodernity and names it for what it is–a blunt denial of the existence of God, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body. Given the frequent equivocation of Christian academics on this point, one is grateful to Ingraffia for his clarity: “Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be understood without a critical appraisal of his attack on Christianity. . . . Nietzsche is not attacking only hypocritical Christianity,” asserts Ingraffia. “Rather, he is attacking Christianity itself as originally and unavoidably hypocritical and ‘mendacious.'”

Yet because Nietzsche and the postmodernists couple their attack upon Christianity with an assault upon ancient and modern rationalism, Ingraffia also considers them allies of a sort. Postmodern critique compels the church to make a choice: “either biblical theology or post-modern theory. Only as a theology of the cross will Christianity recover its prophetic voice.” For Ingraffia, at its best, postmodern theory sharpens the distinctions between Christian revelation and the vain imaginings of human culture. It is the beast that can drive us to the beauty of Christ.

No Yeatsian beasts stalk the sands of Middleton and Walsh’s postmodernity. Indeed, the only thing to be spotted slouching in their book is the archetypal college graduate who lurks in the background of their analysis and to whom their work appears to be primarily addressed. Middleton and Walsh view postmodern people as aesthetes who wander from experience to experience and who are anxious about their confusion but happy for their freedom. Yet even though postmoderns are restlessly superficial and show little capacity for sustained argument or attention, they also are, according to Middleton and Walsh, primed for the Christian gospel and surprisingly receptive to the daunting demands it places upon their lives.

To their credit, in their response to postmodernism, Middleton and Walsh place a useful emphasis upon the all-encompassing nature of the biblical narrative.

It is . . . our story, no matter who we are, capable of speaking to us even in the midst of a postmodern crisis. In answer to the question What’s wrong? the Scriptures tell of our rebellion against our creator, of our willful bondage to futility and our entrapment in no-exit situations (even the situation of postmodernity).

And to the question “What’s the remedy?” Middleton and Walsh respond by speaking of “God’s passionate desire to answer our cries of desperation and meet us in our need, intervening in our no-exit situations to turn our bondage into freedom.”

In Stanley Grenz’s account, postmodernity is neither a lair for the beast of unbelief nor a dormitory packed with angst-ridden aesthetes. Instead, Grenz depicts it as a halfway house for a genial destroyer, with whom Christians can join in the “assault on the modern epistemological fortress.” While we storm together the Enlightenment castle, this postmodern agent of ruin won’t mind us quibbling about his assertion that because “all interpretations are in some sense invalid, they all [are] equally invalid.” After all, once the battle has been won, and modernity vanquished, we will be able to sit down and talk with the angel of death. After we have patiently listened to him catalogue “the longings of the postmodern generation,” we will respond to his needs; we will “embody and articulate the never-changing good news of available salvation in a manner that the emerging generation can understand.” And thus, finished with his works of destruction, the warrior will have become a consumer, a target market for the merchandising church.

In marketing its “available salvation,” the church may use whatever language it sees fit to promote its products. In two revealing paragraphs tucked away in his final chapter, Grenz speaks disarmingly of his willingness to have the church barter away its symbolic heritage for a brief increase in its marketing powers. To Grenz, words such as sin and grace, reconciliation and divine power are merely “categories” that we “appeal to” in order “to bring into an understandable whole the diverse strands of our personal lives.” Doctrinal statements neither point to the divine truth about God nor mysteriously mediate the Word of God. Instead, the words of our creeds are functional ciphers meant to serve the purposes of a romantic self in a managerial age: “The encounter with God in Christ is both facilitated by and expressed in categories that are propositional in nature.” Grenz thus imprecisely labels individual words “propositions” and argues that their purpose is to “serve the conversion experience” by giving expression to “our new status as believers.” Words are tools we “employ” to get “others to encounter God in Christ and then join us on the grand journey of understanding the meaning of that encounter for all of life.”

(Second of three parts; click here to read Part 3)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 20

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(Third of three parts; click here to read Part 2)

The pragmatic nonchalance of Grenz on this point is disconcerting. Without apparent reservation, he trades away the linguistic and liturgical history of the church and receives in exchange only the desperate nominalism that undergirds the structuralist view of language and the postmodern view of the self. In a structuralist theory of language, words are signs that reveal nothing but their differences from other signs and their origins in contingent and arbitrary human longing. The father of modern structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, put the matter directly in the classic text on the subject: “Language is a system of arbitrary signs and lacks the necessary basis, the solid ground for discussion. There is no reason for preferring soeur to sister, Ochs to bouef, etc. . . . Because the sign is arbitrary, it follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition, it is arbitrary.”

Saussure’s judgment about the arbitrariness of tradition dovetails neatly with the view of culture underlying these three different books. To employ the categories of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, these works approach the question of contemporary culture from a “Christ against culture” position. That is, they operate from the assumption that culture has little or no legitimate claim to our loyalty and is, in some fundamental way, inimical to the lordship of Christ. These contemporary Christian books sound a good deal like a series of works that Niebuhr calls “the best loved books” of the second-century church. Those early Christian works “present Christianity as a way of life quite separate from culture,” and whether they see grace or law as the essence of the Christian life, “in any case it is life in a new and separated community. What is common to second-century [and these contemporary evangelical] statements of this type is the conviction that Christians constitute a new people, a third ‘race’ besides Jews and Gentiles.”

Middleton, Walsh, and Grenz explicitly promote the Christian gospel and Christian community as a “third way.” In their view of contemporary culture, modernism is a godless, decaying structure, postmodernism a leveling wind, and the Christian church a group of relief workers who have been flown in to build things right at last. “Like the architects of modernity, the builders of Babel had a grand aspiration,” write Middleton and Walsh. In the analogy they draw between Babel and modernity, the tower turns out to be curiously small, consisting of only three floors: science, technology, and economic growth. Postmodernity is the archaeologist who discovers that “beneath the ground floor” of the tower of modernity lies “nothing but our own strong shoulders. We are carrying this building on our backs, like Atlas. . . . This tower is built on a foundation of radical, self-determining freedom, . . . [which] very closely resembles what is described in Genesis 3 as the primal human sin, which results in death.” Then suddenly in Middleton and Walsh’s account, the archaeologist somehow metamorphoses into “the postmodern winds of [the] icy heights” that rip through the uncompleted fourth floor of the tower, leaving nothing but “shattered walls, broken windows and the roof torn off. . . . The old ‘sacred canopy’ of modern progress which had previously sheltered the inhabitants of modernity has blown off the fourth floor and the biting chill of anomie now settles on ‘the naked public square.'”

What possible hope could emerge from this welter of mixed metaphors–from a world in which we are at one moment Atlas holding up the three-story building of modernity and in the next moment find ourselves shivering in the chill of anomie on the naked public square and dodging the shards of the sacred canopy of progress blowing toward us? If we are homeless, naked, and cold in the postmodern world, and all our building materials are smashing about us, how are we to get on with the task of building a new structure, a truly redeemed postmodern culture? If this is the highly touted “level playing field” created by postmodernity, what is there for us to do on this field but rummage in the rubble?

Grenz does little to answer such questions, beyond welcoming the “struggle among conflicting narratives and interpretations of reality” that has come to the fore in postmodernity. He asserts that these “conflicting interpretations can be evaluated according to a criterion that in some sense transcends them all . . . , the story of God’s action in Jesus of Nazareth.” In Grenz’s words, this narrative “provides the fulfillment of the longings and aspirations of all peoples.” Beyond such generalizations Grenz does not say much about the crucial epistemological and ethical questions raised by postmodernity. He gives no hint of conflict within the church about the nature of the “story of God’s action,” nor does he indicate how this Christian “criterion” is to engage and then persuade the skeptical postmodern mind. (How, for example, would Grenz move from talk of “narrative” and “longings” to engage those who celebrate “the right to die” or unfettered sensual hedonism?)

In a similar fashion, Middleton and Walsh envision the church as the site of holy dreaming, where “the Spirit of God . . . can capture our imaginations and thereby liberate us from the constrictions of the dominant culture.” The imagination becomes the agent of resistance to all of history and the source of the radically new culture that is to replace “this present nightmare of brokenness, disorientation and confusion. A liberated imagination is a prerequisite for facing the future.” Repeatedly, they ask, “Dare we imagine?”–imagine the end of the extremes of affluence and poverty, a relationship of friendship with the creation, a morally sensitive mass media, and an economy that is driven by stewardship rather than profit?

Like Grenz’s positing of a “criterion” without support or development, Middleton and Walsh’s “radical dreams” magically become, without the presentation of evidence or the elaboration of argument, “nothing less than the metanarrative of God’s redemptive plan for the world.” Those “who follow Jesus” must have the “audacity to proclaim this story as the light of the world.”

The rift with culture is apparent even in Ingraffia’s book. “Following in the tradition of Paul, Pascal, Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and more recently JÆrgen Moltmann,” he explains, “I seek to separate the God of the Bible from the god of the philosophers.” This latter god is the “god of ontotheology” and is “always the product of human reason, is always the result of humanity’s attempt to formulate an understanding of god rather than the result of God’s revelation towards us.” Ingraffia considers it essential for the contemporary church to “tease apart” the “synthesis between biblical theology and philosophy, whether this philosophy be ontotheological or anti-ontotheological.” While allowing that “this process can never be complete,” he nevertheless believes that “the strands can be separated to a large extent.” Once the “Judaeo-Christian revelation” has been separated from Greek philosophy, “we are left with a wisdom which can be used to criticize modern ontotheology, but which is separate from and resists the postmodern critique of ontotheology.”

Ingraffia too thus sees “biblical theology” as opening “a third way” between the fatuous religion of popular culture and the virulent atheism of postmodern theory. With some reservations, he embraces the Nietzschean and Derridean argument that the distinction between nature and culture is meaningless. There is no such thing as a natural moral order, Nietzschean perspectivism claims, but only a series of cultural and verbal constructs that humanity has first built and then destroyed. And as Ingraffia sees it, the postmodern vanquishing of the “shadow god created by human reason and imagination” may open a clearing in which the God of the biblical revelation can build his kingdom at last.

Ingraffia situates Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the theological tradition he wishes to join with his work, but Bonhoeffer himself subjected to a withering critique the very Barthianism that Ingraffia champions in his indictment of the culture of modernity. In a 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge, the imprisoned Bonhoeffer praised Barth for having been “the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion,” then criticized him sharply for his faulty view of the relationship between revelation and culture. Barth, he said, offered “a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else.” To Bonhoeffer, “that isn’t biblical.” In offering the Christian faith as a complete alternative to culture, “the positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up . . . a law of faith. . . . In the place of religion there now stands the church–that is in itself biblical–but the world is in some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake.”

Barth’s “mistake” is made in some measure by all three of these books in their response to culture. It is an error that follows from viewing culture melodramatically rather than tragically. In melodrama, the lines are clearly drawn between good and evil; its heroes are pure, its villains malevolent. Because the traits of the characters are fixed before the action begins in melodrama, and because the outcome of the drama is never in doubt, what happens within the play matters only to a point. We endure the action for the sake of that cataclysm that brings that action to an end and ensures the triumph of virtue.

The melodramatic temperament can take pleasure in the ruin of culture, because it feeds upon visions of apocalypse. It is an impulse that runs deep in the Christianity of the New World. In 1692, Cotton Mather defended the Salem witch trials as a necessary final step in the battle between God and Satan in the North American wilderness. “The devil is making one attempt more upon us,” Mather wrote, as accused men and women were being put to death up the coast in Salem, “an attempt so critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet.”

In its response to postmodernity, the Christian church would do well to take Bonhoeffer rather than Mather as its guide. Instead of welcoming culture’s destruction, the imprisoned German pastor pondered its intrinsic worth and the sacrifices required to preserve it. From his cell in January of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote that culture belongs “not to the sphere of obedience, but to the broad area of freedom” surrounding the divine mandates of marriage, work, state, and church. Might it be possible, he wondered, “to regain the idea of the church as providing an understanding of the area of freedom (art, education, friendship, play), so that Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic existence’ would not be banished from the church’s sphere, but re-established within it?”

In understanding culture as the product of human freedom, Bonhoeffer traces it to its sources in the divided human heart. He implies that instead of accepting the ruin of culture, the Christian must labor for its preservation and long for its transformation. We are, Bonhoeffer says, to “defend” cultural activity “against all the disapproving frowns of ‘ethical’ existences” and otherworldly piety. “A ‘culture’ that breaks down in the face of danger is no culture,” he tells Bethge, espousing a view that recalls Yeats’s “tragic gaiety.” “Culture must be able to face danger and death–even if it cannot conquer them.”

For Bonhoeffer, however, culture is to be viewed in light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ rather than in the grim glow of Yeats’s Nietzschean vision. “It is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world,” he wrote from prison. The difference between the “redemption myths” of popular religion and the Christian hope of resurrection is analogous to the contrast between a melodramatic view of culture and a tragicomic apprehension of it. “The Christian, unlike the devotees of the redemption myths, has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and into the eternal,” Bonhoeffer notes, “but, like Christ himself (‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’), he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ.” Even when “old civilizations” are “put to the sword,” those who live in the light of the resurrected Christ struggle to preserve what is of worth in them. Even though “All things fall,” they are to be “built again / And those that build them again are gay.” Even in these vertiginous postmodern times, “this world must not be prematurely written off,” especially when it is easy, all too easy, to believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Roger Lundin is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author of The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World (Eerdmans) and the editor of Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective, just published by Eerdmans.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 20

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Merold Westphal is professor of philosophy at Fordham University. The author of History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology; God, Guilt, and Death and Suspicion and Faith, he is codirector of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and a past president of both the Hegel Society and the Kierkegaard Society of North America.

Last summer Westphal directed a Calvin College Faculty Seminar in Christian Scholarship on the topic “Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought,” made possible by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The seminar explored the hypothesis that, in spite of the intentions of its major proponents, postmodern philosophy is not inherently secular but open to possibilities for appropriation by Christian thought. (A book based on the seminar, Appropriating the Post- modernists, edited by Westphal, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.) The interview took place in the Hekman Library at Calvin College.

There is much confusion as to what postmodernism might possibly mean. How do you use this term?

When I use the term postmodernism I use it in a narrow sense to refer to a fairly small group of contemporary philosophers. What they have in common is a repudiation of certain themes that are not inappropriately referred to as modern.

As far as a larger cultural phenomenon, it’s hard to make postmodernism work as a description of it. I’m tempted to play with the notion that, if there is a transition from modernity to postmodernity, it would be a cultural shift from faith in science to faith in technology. Put in Nietzschean terms, that would mean a shift from the quest for truth to the quest for power–not just in social and collective ways, but in personal and individual ways.

Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, writes: “It is safest to grasp the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” This attempt to write a history of the present, which Foucault finds so significant in Kant’s little essay “What Is Enlightenment,” seems characteristic of postmodern ways of thought. What does it mean to write a history of the present?

I think the first step in writing a history of the present is a recognition of the present as historically produced: the realization that the way we do things now is neither natural nor eternal nor inevitable but the product of historical developments that are shot through with contingencies and worse, so that one learns to see oneself and one’s culture as a particular moment in the historical process. I think the kinds of historical critical analysis that Foucault has done, the kinds of historical critical analysis that people in various dimensions of the Marxist tradition have done, are the sorts of things that need to be done, and one needs to appreciate the ways that these can be seen as insightful from a Christian perspective even if the people who have done them aren’t operating out of Christian frameworks of thought.

How would you write a history of the present in the context of the Christian scholarly community vis-a-vis the postmodern?

I’m not sure I know. I think the Christian scholarly community, like the larger scholarly community, is recognizing that certain Enlightenment ideals of certainty and clarity and objectivity have become problematic. And I think everyone is scrambling, including Christian scholars, to try to find a way to formulate a conception of reason and reasonableness that does not involve inflated claims that cannot be fulfilled and that, on the other hand, doesn’t see cynicism as the alternative to that kind of Platonic or Cartesian optimism.

You stand in a curious relationship to these two modes of discourse. Readers might be interested to know that as active as you have been in the Society of Christian Philosophers, you have also been extremely active and influential in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, which no one has ever accused of being particularly interested in Christian philosophy. You stand in a peculiar position in both camps.

I was enormously helped some years ago when Al Plantinga gave his inaugural lecture at Notre Dame and reminded us all that, as Christian scholars, or more particularly Christian philosophers, we belong to two communities: on the one hand, to the Christian church, and on the other hand, to the academy. And we have different responsibilities; overlapping, but different insofar as we are citizens of those two kingdoms. I do think of my work as addressing two distinct audiences, sometimes at the same time, and having a different impact in relationship to them. I find secular thought to have a critical bite that Christians should be taking seriously, and I say to my Christian friends,  Hey, we’ve got to attend to this. And I say, at the same time, to my secular friends, Look, you don’t have a monopoly on these critical insights; other people can put them to uses quite different from those in which you are most interested.

Do you ever feel schizophrenic?

No, not really. I sometimes feel like I’m getting shot at from both sides, but I don’t feel incoherent in myself.

Following the lead of Paul Ricoeur in his pathbreaking book Freud and Philosophy, where Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are identified as the modern “masters of suspicion,” your recent work has focused on the surprising relationship between suspicion and faith. You wrote a book by this title in which you try to appropriate insights from these three famous atheists, insisting that we take suspicion seriously, and demonstrating the religious uses of atheism. (Suspicion and Faith has not been completely unsuccessful in this regard; I heard that a local pastor was using the book as the basis for Lenten meditations.) I have three questions in this regard: How did you come to this project, what do you mean by suspicion, and what do you see as the benefits and limitations of such an approach?

I came to this project by accident or by Providence. I discovered in the very early days of my teaching after graduate school that in Marx and Nietzsche–and somehow Freud got into the picture there, too; I don’t know just how–there were insights that were compelling and that illuminated my own personal life and the social life of which I was a part. I found myself saying, Hey, my job isn’t to refute these insights, but to recognize their force. Gradually it dawned on me that what these thinkers were doing was reflecting on the fallenness of human nature, though they didn’t use that vocabulary. So I came to refer to them along with some others, like Sartre, as “the great secular theologians of original sin,” as the ones who showed the way in which pride, personal and corporate, which is the heart of human fallenness, works itself out in the particulars of the modern world. Once I came to see them as theologians against their will, I became intrigued in the possibility of presenting them in this light, and that was the origin of the project of Suspicion and Faith.

What I mean by suspicion is something different from skepticism. The skeptic asks about religious beliefs, Are they true? Is there enough evidence?

Suspicion asks a different sort of question. The atheistic masters of suspicion start with the assumption that the beliefs are false, and they don’t usually bother even to argue that. But they ask a different kind of question. They ask, What kinds of motives would lead people to hold these beliefs? What kinds of uses do these beliefs have in the lives of individuals in communities that hold them?

The suspicion is that the motives and functions to which religious beliefs are put are not reputable from the standpoint of Christian values. There is a great deal of will to power, and manipulation, and Phariseeism at work in the functions that these beliefs play in the lives of believers and believing communities; and there is a kind of internal incoherence between what religious communities profess and the way in which they structure their systems of belief in practice. One consequence of this is that one can’t defend oneself against the charge of suspicion by arguing in the fashion of traditional apologetics that the beliefs in question are true. Because even if they are true, the role that they play in the lives of individuals and communities may be problematic.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 24

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(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)

As to the benefits and limitations of this approach, I see the benefits as being a way of reawakening the prophetic voice of biblical religion. I think there is a great deal in both the Old Testament and the New Testament that is the serious critique of the religion of the covenant people of God. Reading the way in which people like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud developed those kinds of critiques in modern settings helps me to see more clearly what’s going on in many portions of the Bible. Also, it helps me to update it to see what those kinds of biblical critiques would look like if they had been made in the nineteenth or twentieth century instead of in biblical times.

The limitations of this approach I’ve expressed by saying that “man does not live by Ex-Lax alone.” It’s a cathartic; it’s a purgative; it’s a critical function. It presupposes that there is something positive that does not come from suspicion itself. So it’s always a parasitic activity. There is, of course, the danger that one will become so happy about developing these kinds of critiques, especially of other individuals and other communities, that suspicion will become itself a vice. I think it can become a virtue if one learns to try to develop suspicion about oneself and one’s own community and uses it as a way of trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the work of sanctification.

It seems safe to say that your interest in, and enthusiasm for, postmodern thought is not shared by many of your fellow Christian philosophers. The names Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and Alston come to mind, all of whom claim to be in the “Christian realist” tradition. All three insist that Christian philosophy is best practiced–indeed, that it must understand itself–as a kind of realism. You don’t see it that way. Kant seems to be the battleground here, as always. As a “Christian antirealist” you draw upon Kant as offering an epistemology that comports well with Christian thought yet is not realist in any simple sense. Yet these three exemplary philosophers are all antifoundationalists of a sort. Where is the common ground between Kant, antifoundationalist Reformed epistemology, Christian philosophical realism, and postmodern thought?

I would be happy to be half as good a philosopher as any of the three friends of mine you have just mentioned. I’m somewhat puzzled by their insistence that Christian thought needs to be realist, though I have some sense of why they feel that way. Kant is indeed the background to the debate, and it seems to me that Kantian antirealism, grounded as it is in the distinction between God’s knowledge of reality and our knowledge of reality, is a very important affirmation of human finitude and what it means to be creatures rather than the Creator. What it means is that we never know things as they truly are, that is, as God knows them to be. Our knowledge never manages to be identical with God’s knowledge. It doesn’t follow that there aren’t ways that we should think about the world that are better than other ways of thinking about the world. But I see Kantian antirealism, which is echoed in the postmodern philosophers in a variety of very sophisticated ways, as having an important theological motivation that Kant recognized, though the postmodernists don’t.

In a paper you delivered here at Calvin you made the claim “The truth is that there is no Truth.” You asked us to pay attention to the capital “T.” Despite this qualification, many will find this formulation disturbing. The question of God’s self-revelation in Scripture will inevitably arise as a major issue here. What do you intend by this formulation?

In the talk to which you refer, I gave that formula–the truth (small “t”) is that there is no Truth (capital “T”)–as a summary of contemporary postmodern philosophers. In my appropriation of it, it gets revised to a somewhat different claim. The truth (small “t”) is that there is Truth (capital “T”), but we are not in possession of it. I think the factors that lead the postmodernists to say that there is no truth are the factors that lead me to say that we are not in possession of it–their claims about epistemological finitude. I find them helpful at developing the Kantian insight. The reason I say that, in spite of the fact that we don’t possess the truth there is truth, is that like Kant, and unlike the postmodernists, I think there is a God, who is in possession of Truth in the fullest sense of the term. The question of God’s revelation in Scripture is important here. But I don’t see that for revelation to take place in a salvific sense it’s necessary for God to be able to impart to us his knowledge of himself, and the world, so that our knowledge of him would be entirely on a par with his own self-knowledge. I recall a teacher of mine, years ago–who held to a very conservative theology–who used to say that the Bible is the divinely revealed misinformation about God. That has always seemed to me to express a very important insight.

Let’s talk about the project of appropriating these postmodern philosophers. As you describe it, appropriation may be understood as a kind of conversation. There are two moments to appropriation: rejection (the placing of oneself as “over against” the other, the notion of critique in its traditional sense) and recontextualization, to use Rorty’s term. There is a sense in which there is no news here. For many years thinkers in every discipline have been engaged in this project. Yet there is something disturbing about appropriation; it has a long and violent history. As far back as Plato and even before, philosophers have found it necessary to kill off the father or mother figure in order to advance their own project. Plato had to kill off Parmenides, and did so in the Sophist. Aristotle did the same to Plato in his Metaphysics, Aquinas to the Aristotle he didn’t like in the Summa, and so on. How do you address the issue of violence and revisionist history in the project of appropriation, and in what sense can this truly be called a “conversation”? Prima facie, it looks more like a wake.

There is an inescapable aspect of what could be called violence in rejection and reappropriation. If I say to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, or if I say to Foucault and Derrida, I reject your atheism, and I want to recontextualize your insights into a Christian hermeneutics of finitude and a Christian hermeneutics of suspicion, they are not going to be entirely pleased. On the other hand, it seems to me that that can be a way of opening a conversation in the sense that one is saying, “Look, I agree with you about these insights insofar as they have real force. Would you agree with me that they work just as well, or even better, in the Christian context in which I’m placing them? Insofar as it is obvious that our deepest and most fundamental disagreement is over the reality of God, is it possible to find a way to talk about that? Or must we, at least for the time being, just lay that aside and talk about the best way to pursue these other insights?”

You asked whether appropriation is a gesture of possession. In one sense it is, and in another sense it is not. When I try to appropriate secular postmodernists, I say to them, “Your claim to exclusive possession of these insights, I challenge. I think that I have a right to these notions, too. And I think I can put them to good use in a Christian context.” I don’t claim in doing so that I have a unique right to possession. And since I leave them in possession of their insights, while I put them to work for my own purposes, I create a situation where we need, if possible, to sit down and talk about it and see where we can get.

One of the jokes making its way around the academic circuit is how ironic it is that while the postmodernists were taking over English departments the Republicans were taking over Congress. In other words, this is just another sign of the marginalization of the academy. And yet few intellectual movements of our day have been as widely noticed in the mainstream media–or as ferociously attacked–as postmodernism. What is your take on all this?

I think it’s terribly interesting that postmodernism, especially in philosophy and literary criticism, has created such a stir, not just among academic aficionados, but across a wider public. I think postmodernism is like Marxism in this respect. It offers a critique of our culture and society, which has a rather direct bearing on the way we go about doing business. And for all of the esotericism of some postmodern writing, the bearing of the critique in the world we live in has been perceived and has evoked responses–often fearful and defensive responses that are natural responses to feeling threatened.

I think this is a good thing. I think it compels all of us, Christians and others, to take a very serious look to see to what degree postmodern critiques really identify things that are problematic about the way our world is put together. To see what kinds of responses are appropriate. And to try to distinguish from that those aspects of postmodernism that are merely the aestheticizing of the ethical or merely rhetorical overkill because the French are fond of fads and scandals and so forth. I think one has to try to separate out the wheat from the chaff. My sense is that there’s a significant amount of wheat there that needs to be taken seriously. That’s not quite the right metaphor, because this wheat has the form of time bombs.

Gary J. Percesepe teaches philosophy at Wittenberg University.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 24

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Bertrand Russell’s critique of Christianity has been one of this century’s most conspicuous. It carried credibility because Russell was generally acknowledged to be a genius of the first rank, and because he attacked with such an intriguing mixture of passion and wit. Now that we have an excellent account of the first half of his life by Ray Monk (whose previous book was a widely acclaimed biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein), I want to raise what has always seemed to me an interesting question: Why did Bertrand Russell hate Christianity so much?

I will be speculating on the basis of Monk’s account about the psychological causes of Russell’s antipathy. This is risky for a mere philosopher, and I do not claim any psychological expertise. Monk doesn’t either. But Russell is so articulate about his own mental states that a substantial account can be constructed without trying to go beyond what he says himself. A trained psychologist will undoubtedly see more, and see more clearly; but there is more than enough material in Russell’s own words to license a layman’s interest.

There is also something distasteful about an opponent mucking around in the history of somebody’s personal life after his death. Should philosophers expect to have their views evaluated in the light of how they lived their lives? This is controversial. Kierkegaard, for example, condemned any attempt to separate the two, especially where the question is a philosopher’s relation to God. Ethical and religious knowledge, he said, “has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower.” In Russell’s case there is an additional reason for overcoming the distaste. He seems to have relished inspection. He expected others to find his life fascinating and was not at all constrained by the usual sense of shame.

Monk’s account is, as far as I can tell, factually accurate, and it has the great merit of being written by a philosopher. As Russell says when talking about the biographers of Socrates, he would himself rather have his biography written by an enemy who is a philosopher than by a friend who is not. It is possible to quibble with some of Monk’s treatments of surrounding philosophers such as Bradley and McTaggart. Also troubling from the standpoint of objectivity is Monk’s clear lack of sympathy for the piety of Russell’s grandmother, who had charge of his upbringing after his parents’ deaths. Monk quotes Russell’s brother Frank at length to show the awfulness of the atmosphere at their grandmother’s house. But the two brothers had very different relations with their grandmother, and Bertrand’s feelings were always, I think, more ambivalent. By and large, however, the biography is convincing as a philosophical account as well as a personal history.

It is also well written and is, in fact, a page-turner. Monk does not spare us the gory details of Russell’s betrayals and lies, his murderous rages and his devastating coldness, his arrogance and his self-pity. And yet, despite all of this, Monk clearly admires his subject and expresses both his admiration and his dislike with a dry and detached wit, which reminds one of Russell himself. Thus Monk records Russell’s reaction to D. H. Lawrence’s visit to Cambridge, “[He was] disgusted with Camb., but not with me.” Monk adds, “[This] seemed to be just what Russell would expect from someone blessed with an infallible perceptiveness.” What keeps the reader fascinated is the unfolding of this double truth; that one of the century’s brightest, most influential thinkers seems to have been at the same time capable of appalling cruelty and moral blindness.

One of Monk’s major themes is that Russell was throughout his life terrified of the possibility that he might be, or might be going, mad. The cover picture of the book is a reworking of a drawing by Augustus John, which the book also contains. It is interesting to compare the cover with the drawing, because John’s portrait of an eccentric has been turned into the portrait of a madman. There was indeed madness in the family, or at least so Russell was himself convinced. His grandmother used this argument in seeking to dissuade him from marrying Alys Pearsall Smith (the daughter of Hanna Whitall Smith, who wrote The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life). She found evidence of inherited instability in Alys’s family as well and said it would be wrong for two people with such heredity to have children. When Russell decided to marry Alys anyway, he promised his grandmother that there would be no sleeping together. “Now that I know she is going to die soon,” he wrote to Alys in justification, “I mind less giving her hopes not likely to be fulfilled.”

Russell’s sense of the hereditary danger was confirmed by his own experience. An informal account of what we would now call a psychopathic personality is the disorder of someone who is amoral, who harbors great rage that he usually hides, who considers almost all others inferior, and who is a pathological liar. Monk gives us evidence of all of these traits in these first 49 years of Russell’s life. I am not trying to say here that Russell was a psychopath, but that he had evidence in his own life to make it reasonable for him to fear that he was predisposed to some such disorder.

There is first Russell’s extraordinary lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others, except on rare and exalted occasions. Beatrice Webb, after a visit, put it this way, “[Russell] looks at the world from a pinnacle of detachment. What he lacks is sympathy and tolerance for other people’s emotions.” One of the most chilling examples of this trait is the story of Russell’s relationship with Helen Dudley, whom he met in America and persuaded to come to England to live with him. When she arrived, he discovered he was no longer in love with her and got rid of her, as a result of which she suffered a complete and permanent mental breakdown. In his Autobiography, Russell puts it this way: “I had relations with her from time to time . . . and I broke her heart.”

It is not just what Russell did that is chilling, but the fact that he talks about this and other such episodes as though they had happened to somebody else. It is as though, in Kierkegaard’s terms, he was merely the lookout on the mast, and not the captain of his own ship; indeed, his life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Kierkegaard’s aesthete in Either/Or. It is Kierkegaard’s point that the aesthete has not managed the transition into the ethical life. In this, as in so much else, Russell knew himself. He was aware of his unusual capacity for “cold-blooded immorality.”

Beatrice Webb continued, “He is a good hater.” Russell’s desire to kill people was sometimes quite literal. Indeed, this was one of his fears about his heredity, because of the fate of his Uncle Willy, who had lost his memory and ended up in a workhouse infirmary. As in Plato’s example in the Republic, the police gave Uncle Willy back a knife he owned and with it he went on a murderous rampage. When institutionalized, he continued to be prone to apparently random attacks of rage and violence. Russell had moods in which he hated the whole human race. But he also had to fight against the desire to kill quite specific people, such as his friend Fitzgerald: “On one occasion, in an access of fury, I got my hands on his throat and started to strangle him. I intended to kill him, but when he began to grow livid, I relented. I do not think he knew that I intended murder.”

Russell’s sense of superiority and therefore isolation is what gives Monk his subtitle, “The Spirit of Solitude.” “When I am talking to an ordinary person,” Russell says, “I feel I am talking baby language, and it makes me lonely.” In prison because of his anti-war activities, he reports that “Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner. One is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one’s own stateroom.” Even when the announcement came that the war was over, Russell found that “the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet.” The biography is one long story of Russell’s attempts to break out of his sense of isolation, even from his family and friends. He never succeeds, except for brief and ecstatic moments.

One of the causes is that his friends always end up ceasing to trust him because he cannot resist constantly lying to them. He seems to have been a pathological liar. This started very early, with his grandmother. He maintained the outward show of piety, while departing further and further from the Christian faith. It became, however, a recognizable pattern in all his relationships, even those he cared most about. “You simply don’t speak the truth,” said D. H. Lawrence to him. “You simply are not sincere.” Russell himself describes the crucial row with Wittgenstein this way: “Then he said he never knew whether I was speaking the truth or being polite, so I got vexed and refused to say another word.”

Finally, there are some troubling suggestions that Russell increasingly got into the habit of lying to himself. One of the almost disarming features of Russell’s character is that he was clearly aware of this tendency (as he was of all the others I have mentioned).

As one might expect, both the deception and the self-deception are painfully clear in Russell’s descriptions of his endlessly complicated love affairs, but self-deception is also present in his philosophical work. There was in this an intellectual dishonesty that “spread like poison” and caused him to think (as he did repeatedly) of suicide. Thus he went on lecturing and writing as though he could ignore what (in some sense) he knew, that Wittgenstein’s work in the Tractatus destroyed the connection Russell was trying to make between logic and psychology. From early on he was aware of his tendency to self-deception and therefore also aware of the danger of losing touch with his “inmost self,” because the “crust” he was building up around it had become so thick.

I want to make three suggestions about why Russell hated Christianity so much. Suppose we grant, first, that Russell was afraid that he might be, or might be going, mad. How did he respond to this fear? With two incompatible strategies, both present in Kierkegaard’s description of the aesthete.

The first was, in Russell’s own words, to “retreat to the surface.” This is a metaphor that relies on a strong dichotomy between reason and emotion. Russell means that he wanted to leave all of the murky passions down below and come up for air to the clear light of the sun. This is a strategy that he implemented by “intellect tempered by flippancy.” I want to suggest as a hypothesis that he thought of rejecting God and rejecting his sense of his own sin as parts of this necessary retreat to the surface.

This strategy seems to alternate, however, with another one, which is to find a healthy outlet for his impulses in his sexual relations. Thus he comments about Dostoevsky’s murderous protagonist in Crime and Punishment that “where the impulse is not trivial, it produces pronounced mania . . . unless some strong and healthy passion is found to replace the one resisted.” He also, I think, hated Christianity because it stood against the “healthy” expression of his desires, and thus required a dangerous repression. The Christian God is the enemy, whichever of the two strategies is adopted. God is either hounding him in his internal life or trying to block him by “senseless prohibitions” from the only kind of external release that would do any good.

Second, there is strong evidence earlier in Russell’s life of his making a dichotomy between reason and passion, and his locating the appeal of Christianity with the latter. There is an initial premise here about what reason requires, which (given the dichotomy) ensures that Christianity will be classed with passion. For Christianity to be credible, Russell thinks, it has to be proved. He sounds very like W. K. Clifford, whose book influenced him deeply just at the point he was rejecting Christianity as an adolescent. He reflects Clifford not only in his views but in the “robustious pathos” (as William James puts it) with which Clifford expressed them.

Clifford’s principle was that Christian belief, just like any belief, needs evidence; and in the case of Christianity there was just not enough evidence for a responsible thinker to accept it. Russell imagines saying to God when he arrives at the pearly gates, “Not enough evidence.” As an adolescent, he vowed to accept “only scientific arguments” for belief in God and “to reject all sentiment.” But if belief in the Christian God is what some philosophers now call “properly basic,” it is a mistake to think that it has to be proved at all.

This review is not the place to pursue that argument. The point here is that once Russell had convinced himself that the evidence was deficient, and that all the standard arguments for the existence of God failed, he was then free to conclude that it is only emotion that holds Christians in thrall. “I do not think,” he says in Why I Am Not a Christian, “that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.”

Third, there were gods still in principle available for his intellect, namely, the god of the Platonists or, alternatively, the god of Spinoza. But because of the empiricist turn of his thought, Russell gradually ceased to believe in these gods as well. There was, first, what he calls “a retreat from Pythagoras.” This was painful for Russell because he could not bear to think of rationality in other than transcendent terms, as an access to a kind of being beyond the realm of nature. But he came to think that this kind of Platonism could not be justified. And in his Autobiography he records how he lost belief even in the somewhat abstract god that Spinoza allowed himself. “I have loved a ghost,” he says, “and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral.”

Russell still felt, throughout the period covered by Monk, an acute sense of the absence of God and a longing for his presence. “The longing for religion is at times almost unbearably strong,” he writes to Lady Ottoline Morrell. It may be that he tended toward religiosity in his writing to her just because he perceived she liked it. But the sentiment can be found repeated in several contexts. This sense of loss is what makes me think his early response to his grand- mother’s piety is more complex than Monk allows. Every now and again, this longing for God breaks through, sometimes as a sense of the gap between what God wants him to be and what he is, and sometimes as a sense of the possibility that he might become better.

An example of the first kind of experience is the intense prayer for forgiveness he records in his diary as an undergraduate, after he has supposedly lost his faith, “O God forgive me; I have sinned grievously.” Later, the sense of sin keeps recurring, as a kind of self-hatred. “The disgust of human life that I have been feeling lately is generally a sign of unrecognized sin.” An example of the second kind of experience is what he calls his “conversion.” It came after reading Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Hippolytus, when Russell was with Evelyn Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead’s wife) during one of her bouts of pain. In his Autobiography he writes,

Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached. . . . For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty.

On another occasion Russell found himself on his knees in a church in Verona, praying for strength to subdue his instincts. He does not associate either experience explicitly with God, but what strikes this reader is the echoes of Russell’s grandmother’s piety, which was also a religion of love, duty, and suffering.

A Christian can see these experiences as God trying to break through, as the untiring chase by the hound of heaven. But Russell himself could not interpret them that way, or at least he could not do so for long. My hypothesis about why he could not do so is the one I gave earlier. The experience of God’s presence and his own failure was just too painful for him, and the pain was too close to his fear of madness. One response was the retreat to the surface and to disengagement. But like Kierkegaard’s aesthete he was, paradoxically, aware of himself. He was aware that he was not only losing a substantial God but also himself turning into a ghost. Another response was to re-engage in his sexual liaisons, which in turn generated a vicious cycle of self-disgust.

It may be that this hypothesis is hopelessly amateur. But we need some explanation for Russell’s hatred of Christianity. It is not merely that he thinks Christianity mistaken; he writes about it with a passion that springs from some deep personal source. This leads him to some surprising errors of judgment and overstatement, such as his claim that Christianity has been the enemy of modern science from its beginning, or his claim that religious persecution starts and ends with Judaism and Christianity.

But I am not going to try to treat these claims further here. I am looking forward to Monk’s second volume, which will cover the period from 1921 to Russell’s death in 1970. It will be interesting to see how the hypothesis fares about his life as the progress of a Kierkegaardian aesthete toward the various forms of despair and its denial. Will we, for example, find Russell increasingly seeking distraction in various public contexts from his internal and private failures, and increasingly distanced from any core philosophical commitments of his own? In the first volume we have, in any case, a fascinating study of Russell’s rejection of God, fascinating because he and his biographer have given us such an acute and unvarnished description of this extraordinary life’s trajectory.

John Hare is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and author most recently of The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford University Press).

B&C May/Jun 1997 p. 26

—Many Christians found no humor in white-buck-wearing gospel crooner Pat Boone‘s recent release of an album of heavy metal hits arranged in his mellow, innocuous style. More fans complained when the 62-year-old Boone, as a joke, appeared at the American Music Awards January 27 with a black leather vest, fake tattoos, earrings, and a metal-studded collar. Trinity Broadcasting Network then canceled his show GospelAmerica, although it may return later. Boone did remain as host of the Christian Film and Television Commission’s MovieGuide Awards on March 19.

—After meeting with Vice President Al Gore, the National Religious Partnership for the Environment on February 6 unveiled a three-year, $4 million campaign to promote programs that link environment and poverty issues. The partnership includes the Evangelical Environmental Network, the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.

—New Man ceased being the official publication of Promise Keepers this month in a mutual decision between the two entities. Editor Brian Peterson says the independence will allow New Man to reach a broader Christian men’s audience. The magazine, published by Strang Communications in Lake Mary, Florida, started in 1994 and has a circulation of 330,000.

—Gary R. Walsh, bishop of the Free Methodist Church in Canada, will take over as president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) in June, replacing Brian Stiller, who resigned after 14 years to become president of Ontario Bible College and Theological Seminary. The 33-year-old EFC, a part of the World Evangelical Fellowship, has 28 member denominations.

—Pastor and writer David H. Chilton died March 7 at age 45. Chilton, of Diamond Springs, California, never fully recovered from a heart attack in 1994. He had been a regular columnist for World magazine and the author of several books, including Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators.

—The Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges, which represents more than 90 schools, is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The Fayetteville, Arkansas-based association is also conducting a study on the future of Bible colleges.

—Joseph L. McCaskey, general director of the Berean Mission in Saint Louis from 1988 to 1993, died February 10 at age 68, following an extended illness.

—Judy Bryson is the new president of the Wheaton, Illinois- based Pioneer Clubs, a church-sponsored weekly program for young people in more than 4,000 congregations. Bryson has been with Pioneer Clubs for 26 years, most recently as vice president of marketing and sales. She succeeds Virginia Patterson, who retired after 27 years with the organization.

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—A bill banning the production, distribution, and possession of “missionary” material passed a preliminary reading in Israel’s Knesset 21 to 7 on February 19. “This is a bad law, an infringement of the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech,” says Chuck Kopp, head of the United Christian Council in Israel. “This could seriously damage relations between Israel and the international church.” Leaders of Israel’s Messianic Jewish community held a day of prayer March 23 to protest the proposed law.

—Portugal’s Parliament defeated a bill February 20 that would have permitted unrestricted abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy by a vote of 112 to 111, with three abstentions. The predominantly Roman Catholic nation has one of the most restrictive abortion policies in Europe, but 16,000 illegal abortions are performed each year. A second bill extended the legal period for abortion in cases of fetal deformity or serious illness through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, and in the case of rape through the fourteenth week.

—A stick grenade thrown into a praying crowd at a crusade meeting in Kampala, Uganda, killed six people, including three children, on January 12. At least 30 other Christians, who were praying at the time, suffered serious injuries in the blast.

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Christianity Today is proud to announce the results of the 1997 CT Book Awards. More than 200 books published in 1996 were nominated. Ballots were sent to a large panel of scholars, pastors, writers, and other church leaders, who chose the titles for our “Top 25” list. (Because of ties, the list includes a total of 26 titles.) These outstanding books, it is important to add, are but a few among a much larger number that merit recognition. The diversity of publishers represented here—18 in all—is also worthy of note. InterVarsity Press, for the third year in a row, led all publishers, with six titles.

Twenty-five years ago, in the issue for February 2, 1962, CT honored the “Choice Evangelical Books” of 1961. Among the 25 books so honored (chosen, at that time, by CT’s editorial staff, and listed alphabetically by author rather than in ranked order) are several that many of our readers will still have on their shelves, including Elisabeth Elliot’s classic The Savage, My Kinsman (which has just been reissued, with a new epilogue, by Servant Books, 152 pp.; $10.99, paper) and the first edition of F. F. Bruce’s superb survey, The English Bible. Also on that lightly annotated list is The Genesis Flood, by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, Jr., described as a “new system for unifying and correlating scientific data bearing on the earth’s early history.”

Evolution is still a live issue for evangelicals, as attested by the selection of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as CT’s Book of the Year and the strong showing of Del Ratzsch’s The Battle of Beginnings. (Nancey Murphy’s Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism also touches on this debate.) But in the quarter-century since The Genesis Flood was hailed by evangelical gatekeepers, the action has shifted. Indeed, Behe (who is profiled in this issue, p. 14), Phillip Johnson, and other proponents of “intelligent design” distance themselves from young-earth creationists like Morris.

Many of the award-winning books have been reviewed—or will be—in CT and its sister publication . In this issue, in addition to the profile of Behe, you’ll find reviews of Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (p. 29) and William Martin’s With God on Our Side (p. 22), also featuring an interview with Martin. Look for reviews of Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament and Rodney Clapp’s A Peculiar People coming soon in CT and, down the road, Tom Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God and Gerald Bray’s Biblical Interpretation.

In the May/June issue of , you will find reviews of Jaroslav Pelikan’s Mary Through the Centuries and Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Augustine and the Limits of Politics. Future issues of will feature reviews of the books by Volf and Clapp, as well as Clark Pinnock’s Flame of Love and J?Moltmann’s The Coming of God. (If you missed Mark Noll’s magisterial review of Andrew Walls’s The Missionary Movement in Modern History in the Nov./Dec. 1996 issue of [print only], let me know and I will send you a copy.) So please stay tuned to these channels.

Thanks to the honored authors, editors, and publishers and all who participated for their good work. We are already looking forward to the 1998 Book Awards.

By John Wilson, Book Review Editor.

1997 Book of the yearDarwin’s Black Box, The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,by Michael J. BeheAn excerptThis book is about an idea—Darwinian evolution—that is being pushed to its limits by discoveries in biochemistry. … The astonishing progress made by biochemistry since the mid-1950s is a monumental tribute to science’s power to understand the world. … We may have to pay a price, though, for our knowledge. When foundations are unearthed, the structures that rest on them are shaken; sometimes they collapse. When sciences such as physics finally uncovered their foundations, old ways of understanding the world had to be tossed out, extensively revised, or restricted to a limited part of nature. Will this happen to the theory of evolution by natural selection?

WINNERS1. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, by Michael Behe, Free Press

2. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, by Richard Hays, HarperSanFrancisco

3. Jesus and the Victory of God, by N. Thomas Wright, Fortress Press

3. A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism, by Alister McGrath, InterVarsity Press

4. Augustine and the Limits of Politics, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Notre Dame Press

5. The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel, by Walter Wangerin, Jr., Zondervan

6. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, by Miroslav Volf, Abingdon

6. Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit, by Clark H. Pinnock, InterVarsity Press

6. Integrity, by Stephen Carter, Basic

6. The Missionary Movement in Modern History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, by Andrew F. Walls, Orbis

6. A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society, by Rodney Clapp, InterVarsity Press

6. Who Speaks for God? The New Spiritual Politics Beyond the Religious Right, by Jim Wallis, Delacorte

7. The Battle of Beginnings: Why Neither Side Is Winning the Creation-Evolution Debate, by Del Ratzsch, InterVarsity Press

7. Biblical Interpretation: Past & Present, by Gerald Bray, InterVarsity Press

7. The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, Riverhead

7. People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture, by David Lyle Jeffrey, Eerdmans

8. Beyond Liberalism & Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda, by Nancey Murphy, Trinity Press International

8. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University Press

9. The Epistle to the Romans: The New International Commentary on the New Testament, by Douglas Moo, Eerdmans

9. The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals & Postliberals in Conversation, edited by Timothy R. Phillips & Dennis L. Okholm, InterVarsity Press

10. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, by Jürgen Moltmann, Fortress Press

10. Genesis: A Living Conversation, by Bill Moyers, Doubleday

10. Luke, Vol. 2: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, by Darrell L. Bock, Baker

10. Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God, by Gordon D. Fee, Hendrickson

10. Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God, by C. Stephen Evans, Eerdmans

10. With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, by William Martin, Broadway

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