Page 3429 – Christianity Today (2024)

In the mid-1720s, Alexander Cruden took on a self-imposed task of Herculean proportions, Himalayan tedium, and inhuman meticulousness: he decided to compile the most thorough concordance of the King James Version of the Bible to date. The first edition of Cruden’s Concordance was published in 1737. How could he have possibly completed such a project? Every similar undertaking before or since has been the work of a vast team of people—in recent times made incomparably easier by computers. Cruden worked alone in his lodgings, writing the whole thing out by hand. The KJV has 777,746 words, all of which needed to be put in their proper place. Cruden even wrote explanatory entries on many of the words—in effect, including a Bible dictionary as a bonus. The word “Synagogue,” for example, prompted a 4,000-word essay.

Furthermore, Cruden’s day job was as a “Corrector of the Press” (proofreader). He would give hawk-eyed attention to prose all day long. Then he would come home at night, not to rest his eyes and enjoy some relaxation, but rather to read the Bible—stopping at every single word to secure the right sheet from the tens of thousands of pieces of paper all around him and to record accurately the reference in its appropriate place. He had no patron, no publisher, no financial backers: his only commission was a divine one.

Cruden’s Concordance has never been out of print. Some hundred editions have been published, many of which have been reprinted untold times; shoppers at a popular online bookstore today can choose from 18 different in-print versions of Cruden’s.

The biblical concordance was destined to become a kind of evangelical equivalent to the rosary—an aid to devotion that many could not imagine living without. Cruden’s work was praised by members of the élite ranging from the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford to the Queen. Even more significant, however, are the obscure ministers who wrote to him to express their gratitude. One declared that Cruden’s Concordance was as essential a tool for the work of a Christian minister as a plow was for a farmer. Another observed tellingly that it had taught him how to preach.

Indeed, evangelicals have had 250 years of the type of preaching and teaching that has its form and content thoroughly shaped by the use of a concordance. The internationally celebrated preacher that I admired most as a teenager structured every sermon the same way. He would take up a theme and then go on to show how important it was by demonstrating that it could be found throughout the Bible. He had a brilliant flair for juxtaposing one text with another. I remember sitting enthralled during one sermon in which he began in Genesis with God promising that whenever he saw a rainbow he would remember his covenant. This sermon ended dramatically in Revelation where we discover that a rainbow encircles the divine throne; thus the Almighty is perpetually reminded of his covenant with us.

I also recall a less gifted preacher who took as his theme the thesis that God desires to give his people material blessings. He structured his sermon as a parade of verses that contain the word “things”: “but with God all things are possible”; “how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”; “now faith is the substance of things hoped for.” At their best, concordance sermons can privilege the world of the Bible, deepen a commitment to the whole counsel of God, and foster biblical literacy. Preaching generated in this way need not be crude, but it is certainly Cruden.

Julia Keay’s lively biography, Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Who Unwrote the Bible, assumes a readership for whom denominational differences are inscrutable. In the first ten pages we are twice helped to comprehend Scottish Calvinists by being invited to think of them as a lot like Muslims. Keay never alludes to the notion that Cruden “unwrote” the Bible. If that was a marketing copywriter’s desperate attempt at sensationalism, it mercifully ends with the subtitle. Nor does Keay make any effort to present her subject as a “genius.” The book is largely taken up with the argument that Cruden was “tormented.” Every other source will tell you that he was, if not insane, then at least someone whose mental grip was not always that tight. Keay advances the simple antithesis that he was not mad.

Her argument is grounded in some first-rate scholarly sleuthing and is often cleverly advanced. Nevertheless, this reader thought that she overplayed her hand. To secure for Cruden a clean bill of mental health, Keay has to offer an alternative reading of the evidence that makes him the victim of four separate grave injustices, each perpetrated by different people.

Alexander Cruden was first institutionalized when he was twenty-one years old. In order to take into account all the known facts—but still assert that his mind was sound—Keay’s counter theory is that a woman whom Cruden was pursuing was pregnant with a child by her brother; that the child was successfully passed off as the offspring of the woman’s parents; that the woman later married a different brother and had a child by him as well; that the woman’s father—one of the leading ministers in Aberdeen—colluded in a plot to get Cruden out of the way in order to cover up the scandal (Cruden apparently being the only person in town observant enough to notice all this); that Cruden’s own parents possessed such a strong sense of deference for the minister and his power that they went along with their son being shut up in a prison-cum-madhouse; and that Cruden referred to this man who fathered three incestuous children and unjustly imprisoned him (thereby ruining much of the rest of his life) as a “pious and great minister” in his will simply as a way of showing that “he harboured no grudge.” And this is only one of the times that he was allegedly victimized!

Three of Cruden’s forced confinements are well known, but Keay herself has uncovered a stay in Bedlam that has hitherto been kept secret. She is so enthralled in her revisionist work, however, that this is instantly batted away as a presumed “nervous breakdown.” Would there have been a need to send him to a madhouse, however, unless his behavior was also threatening?

On another occasion, Cruden had apparently gone to break up a brawl but ended up spending the best part of an hour admonishing disorderly soldiers not to swear while periodically whacking them on the head with a shovel. He also would propose to women with whom he had established no romantic bond (one such intended he had not even met). Being unable to take no for an answer, he would then turn himself into a persistent nuisance, if not a stalker.

It would have been helpful if Keay had explored some intermediate terrain between the verdicts of sane or insane, such as the possibility that he was suffering from a non-psychotic mood or personality disorder. Nevertheless, she is right to redress the balance by reminding us that Cruden was more eccentric than mad, and more socially inept than malicious. He was no Don Juan, but rather a Don Quixote.

Cruden took a post as French reader to Lord Derby and wrote grand letters to his relatives about his fine new position. He felt deeply aggrieved when he was fired after his first day of work merely because he did not know how to pronounce French. He decided that he should be knighted and so went about asking any influential person he could accost to secure him the honor. A couple weeks before an election, the notion occurred to him that it would be a glorious thing to be a Member of Parliament, and so he tried to get himself on the ballot.

Cruden also decided that being a proofreader was a kind of metaphor for his divine call to reform the morals of the nation. He therefore started a one-man campaign to have the King name him to a position hitherto unknown in British government, “Corrector of the People.” He then went rambling about the country admonishing strangers to observe the Sabbath.

Cruden’s human weakness and divine gift was an inability to calculate probabilities. This meant that he had no idea how to estimate whether a woman was likely to consent to marriage or whether or not he might be elected to Parliament. (He had done so little work to prepare the ground that, in the end, he could not even find a nominator and a seconder.) It also meant, however, that he did not know—as all normal people do—that when a man gets propositioned he can feel sad for the plight of the prostitute, but there is really nothing he can do to help. Cruden instead hired her to do legitimate work, and she lived a respectable and grateful life thereafter. Cruden did not know that a prisoner’s case was never reconsidered when he was only a few days away from execution. He went at this campaign in his usual obsessive and forthright way and pulled off a political miracle—the man’s sentence was reduced to deportation. Most of all, to his immortal fame, Alexander Cruden did not know that one man working alone in his bedroom could not produce a complete concordance of the Bible.

Timothy Larsen, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and the author most recently of Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Baylor Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The indignities of slavery and racial stigmatizing left many African Americans to cast their nets to the shores of Africa within two generations after their cultural assimilation as Americans. But the dream of an African American political homeland, projected onto the West African coastline in what is today the country of Liberia, was dubious from its inception in the mid-19th century. The first settlers from the United States were ill-prepared for what they found. Many saw their dreams end in economic desperation and premature death; in the long run, the founding vision expired in brutal colonialization. Three recent books explore the disjuncture between West African political realities and African American political aspirations in Liberia.

Claude Clegg writes elegant prose based upon painstaking research. His study is set in North Carolina in Guilford County amid a Quaker settlement. Quakers across the Atlantic world wrestled with the great problem of slavery, which they had vowed to give up by the latter half of the 18th century. Unlike their brethren in Pennsylvania, who had adjudicated the problem of slavery through gradual emancipation, North Carolina Quakers lived in the confines of a growing and entrenched slaveholding state. Their forthright declaration that slavery was a moral evil condemned by God clearly constituted a threat to the economic and political order.

A different perspective on the problem of slavery underwrote the formation of the American Colonialization Society (ACS) in 1818. The ACS took root among the political leadership class and élite religious leaders of the young republic. Clegg argues that the concept of colonialization was hewn out of the dysfunctional Jeffersonian idea that races were “absolutely distinct and dissimilar in nature, interests, and aspirations, and consequently unsuited to exist as equals.” The problem of freedom for black slaves, then, was larger than the abolition of institutional slavery. The central issue for figures such as Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and John Randolph was that ex-slaves and free-born African Americans had to be removed from the country to absolve the United States from the taint of being a slaveholding society. Discussions about the removal of African Americans to the expanding American west or to Haiti had been discussed by many political and religious leaders as early as the mid-1770s, but the opportunity was seized in West Africa to alleviate the American burden.

But more important than the political machinations of those who were embarrassed by the institution of slavery were the views of African Americans themselves. Paul Cuffe, a Massachusetts-born freeman and sailor and a member of the Society of Friends, began exploring the settlement of Sierra Leone, a British colony designed for black Loyalists and London’s black Poor. Cuffe’s stature as a profitable merchant gave him a credibility with African Americans that few black leaders had attained. His initiative to explore whether Sierra Leone’s colony might be duplicated was respected among his more educated peers in the African American community. Cuffe’s enterprise was cut short by his untimely death. Whatever careful plans he might have developed or learned from Sierra Leone—which later turned into a debacle in its own right—were lost. Left in the wake of Cuffe’s efforts were Quakers who desired to extricate themselves from the business of human bondage; freed and semi-freed slaves desperate enough to risk their lives in an unknown land for a separate peace; and the ACS, driven by racism and a missionary impulse.

From the beginning the Liberian colony had miserly economic funding from the ACS and no firm backing from the U.S. government. Many of the first settlers died of malaria as quickly as they arrived; those who survived were left weak and vulnerable to attack by unhappy indigenous people who did not welcome the encroachment by foreigners. Indeed, the settlers’ relationship with indigenous peoples in the region—the Mandingo, Kru, Vai, and Dei—grew more divisive as the settlers increased in number over the course of the 19th century. As word quickly spread from the first wave of urban expatriates that the situation in Liberia was abysmal, the ACS began to concentrate their recruiting efforts on rural slaves. The chief factors that kept the ACS program going were the fundraising efforts of the Pennsylvania Quakers to hire ships and the constant desperation of black North Carolinians to find freedom—freedom from slavery, until the Civil War; freedom from Jim Crow thereafter.

Alan Huffman’s book Mississippi in Africa covers much of the same historical territory that Clegg’s better-researched book does. Huffman’s assessment is more facile. He tells the story of discovering the legacy of Prospect Hill Plantation in Mississippi, allegedly burned down by slaves because the heirs of plantation owner Isaac Ross refused to honor his will, which required his slaves to be freed and allowed to emigrate to Liberia. Huffman story’s, like Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, confirms for us in a human-interest story how intricately the lives of slave and master were interconnected. Unfortunately, Huffman is too eager to generalize about Americo-Liberians and Afro-Mississippians without substantial historical research about either. He tells us, for instance, us that the Afro-Mississippians who were able to settle in Liberia eventually duplicated the grand homes of Natchez and were as cruel to natives as whites were to them in Mississippi. However, because he has only superficially sketched the circ*mstances surrounding the formation of Liberia, his summary judgments are often unpersuasive.

The book is at its liveliest and most interesting when Huffman recounts his visit to Liberia in 2001. He hopes to visit the region where settlers from Mississippi gravitated but is unable to do so; the area was the site of some of the worst fighting in the civil war then raging. Here Huffman’s journalistic style works well as we get a view of Liberia, especially Monrovia, under siege with streams of people flooding the capital city from the interior and the network of friends he develops, who help him to understand the strain of living in Liberia during the awful years of Charles Taylor’s regime.

Ibrahim Sundiata continues this story of African Americans and Americo-Liberians in his erudite, and at times tangential, book Brothers and Strangers. He begins his history with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought to negotiate with Liberian leaders to make an opportunity for trade on Black Star shipping and some emigration by black Americans.

Garvey’s plan, like the schemes of the ACS, was ill-fated. It was thwarted not by the indigenous peoples who had frustrated the goals of earlier generations of settlers but by the creolized population of Americo-Liberians. By the late 19th century, this group had extended its influence into the interior of Liberia through intermarriage and military conquest of various indigenous peoples. In the 1920s, the Americo-Liberian political leadership thought that a massive influx of African Americans might tip the political balance away from them toward Garvey’s organization. In turn, the reluctance of Liberian government officials to assist the Garvey movement in establishing itself in the country made UNIA leaders suspicious of the Liberian political élite. After numerous broken promises, the UNIA became quite critical of the Liberian government, accusing it of gross abuses—including the use of slave labor or nearly slave labor to undergird its relationship with the Firestone Tire Company and Spanish plantation interests in Fernando Po (today the island of Bioko off the coast of Equatorial Guinea). Even after Garvey himself was convicted of postal fraud and later deported to Jamaica, the outcry against Liberian labor exploitation continued, eventually resulting in a League of Nations investigation.

The generalized racist currents running throughout the centers of European colonial powers and the United States in the 1920s produced an uneasy alliance between Americo-Liberian and African-American leaders. For example, Sundiata cites the pan-African journalist and scholar W.E. B. Du Bois, who offered romanticized accounts of Liberia even though realities in the country, especially its more rurally isolated areas, were truly horrendous. In the mind of Du Bois and many others, if Liberia could not govern itself, what would that say about black Americans being able to attain their civil rights and govern themselves? African American leaders in the corridors of Washington managed to lobby on behalf of Liberia so that it could maintain its independence from European powers and the Firestone Corporation, which entertained ideas of controlling the country via U.S. intervention.

When the League of Nations investigated the human rights abuses in Liberia, black American leaders urged that a black American should be given a significant role on the investigatory team. Charles Johnson, the sociologist and later president of Fisk University, wrote one of the more substantive and scathing reports on Liberia, which substantiated the charges of government corruption and brutality. (It is a shame that more work has not been done on the leadership of schools like Fisk, Howard, and Morehouse in human rights and scholarship.) Despite Johnson’s documentation of such abuses, black American leaders still felt themselves to be in a damnable dilemma. Should they, the descendants of American slaves, turn a blind eye on neo-slavery and labor abuse as practiced in Liberia, or should they encourage reform even at the cost of exposing the miserable failures of this exercise in black self-government? Was Liberia, as a country made up of primarily black-skinned, people being judged more harshly than other countries who had well-documented histories of labor exploitation?

Sundiata’s book is written as a cautionary tale to help readers understand that no easy alliance can be formed between African political élites and African Americans. Although racism in its many guises affected, and still affects, Africans and African Americans alike, substantive differences remain between the perspectives of African political leaders and African American political and cultural élites.

All three books tell a tale of woe largely derived from the transatlantic slave trade. Although black and white American religious and political leaders tried to find a convenient escape in the 19th century by imagining a country where slavery’s burdensome legacy could be unloaded once and for all, there was no escaping the consequences of this profound evil. Even today political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic continue to be scarred by the logic and the rhetoric of slavery and conquest.

Randal Maurice Jelks is associate professor of history and director of African and African Diaspora Studies at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Marilynne Robinson's second novel, Gilead, is a quiet, deeply moving celebration of the wonders and sustaining bewilderments of human consciousness. As its narrator John Ames writes to his seven-year-old son, describing a difficult journey through the back roads of Kansas he had taken as a child with his father and remembering a shared vision of the rising moon and setting sun on opposite horizons, "palpable currents of light passing back and forth," consciousness is a sort of sweet mysterious strength most of us only brush up against at extraordinary moments:

I can't tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us. I am glad I didn't understand, because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you're filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn't matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.

Ames is a 76-year-old pastor, struggling with angina and struggling too with the realization that he won't be able to pass on to the young son of a late, miraculous marriage what most mattered in his life. So, in a long letter, worked at over the course of a spring, summer, and early fall, he composes his life for his son. It's as if his life had been a long dream, intricately detailed, much of it having taken place in the rutted world or lonely wilderness he mentions above, and what he does as he writes, his son's face before him, is attempt to read and enact—to see and suffer again—its inner drama. If he begins simply passing on advice and family history, he ends having passed on a sense of consciousness itself, its power and its limits, its strange, almost wordless exhilarations.

The book is a great gift, and worth the wait. As most readers of contemporary fiction know, Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, was published 25 years ago, in 1980. It's one of the three or four strongest novels of that period—the sort of book you press on new friends or your best students. Like Gilead, Housekeeping is the first-person unfolding of a single consciousness. Its narrator Ruth, fatherless, having lost her mother in a haunting suicide, finds herself, along with her sister Lucille, under the care of their transient and apparently unstable Aunt Sylvie in the family home in Fingerbone, Idaho. Fingerbone is dominated by a lake, in whose depths the bodies of Ruth's mother and grandfather, indeed, much of what matters to Ruth, rest. The lake, its surface freezing and thawing, its boundaries shifting with spring floods, is a constant reminder to the lonely girl that there is "some other element upon which our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water." Freed by the example of her aunt's casual approach to housekeeping—doors stay open, flood waters enter and are embraced, meals are eaten in the dark, the broken family attuned to the immense world outside their fragile walls—Ruth opens herself to what Emily Dickinson calls the "sumptuous Destitution" of the empty world she finds herself in. Details of the landscape, fragments of memory, and bits of the Bible all become material for her lyric re-composition of the world. Ruth's thinking becomes a way of dancing under water, her prose a means of touching a world "lost but not perished." Sylvie seemingly leads her through "the slowest waltz, … our clothes flow[ing] like the robes of painted angels." It's the strange, sad beauty of this prose, the exhilaration of it, that readers have in mind when they pass this novel on. And it's just that strange beauty that John Ames wants his son to be ravished by.

The theological underpinnings of Housekeeping were not immediately apparent, though it seems obvious now that Ruth is remembering, and Robinson was expressing her fascination with, Emerson and Dickinson and Thoreau—and not only these writers but the shared religious heritage they drew from. This second idea, however, only became clear with a series of essays Robinson began publishing in the '80s and '90s, many of them collected in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). There, Robinson mounts an impassioned attack on the modern tendency to explain ourselves solely in economic, social, and political terms—essentially "desacraliz[ing] humankind" by insisting on accounts of our actions that reduce us to the drives of competition and self-seeking. Such a world "has no place in it for the cult of the soul, that old Jacob lamed and blessed in a long night of struggle." Against such reductive accounts, in which "Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible," Robinson returns to versions of humankind that celebrate the individual's self-revising encounters with a world grander and more terrifying than we are able to acknowledge. She reads Calvin, for example, her most developed example, as a celebrant of that inward world—God, in Calvin, presenting himself to human contemplation "in the image of the world," a presentation continually overwhelming, but rendering unique and privileged, each individual response it calls forth. Such accounts, she argues, have vanished from the way we talk about ourselves as a culture without ever having been discredited.

Both Housekeeping and Gilead could be said to stand against such cultural amnesia by presenting versions of soul-making so remarkably beautiful and individual that one is forced to wonder why we ever let such habits of mind atrophy. Housekeeping does this by reducing its stage to a young girl with a few books and memories and extraordinary eyes; from that, an entire crystalline world grows. Gilead attempts something broader. John Ames has a full life which he looks back on and reads and re-reads, seeing it as a sort of parable whose full meaning he can never confidently grasp. His first wife and child died decades ago, those wilderness years that followed finally being brought to an end with the surprising marriage of his last years. He has made his life in the small Iowa town of Gilead, within striking distance of Kansas. By 1956, when he is writing, the town's importance during the years of the abolitionist movement, which his family was deeply involved in, has become almost totally obscured—an ember buried under layers of ash and forgetfulness. He has a grandfather, whose abolitionist legacy overwhelms him, a father he is disappointed in, a wife whose radiant sadness seems addressed to him from another world, and a son he adores.

As with Ruth in Housekeeping, Ames often reads his life through metaphor, as in this striking memory of watching as a young child while his father helped pull down the remains of a church struck by lightning, ashes and rain everywhere:

You never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing "The Old Rugged Cross" while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad.

He returns over and over to the ashy taste of this moment of communion, sharing "the bread of affliction" while in the background women abandoned themselves to rhythms so deep that they seemed to all but vanish into them. "I can't tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me," he writes to his son. "But I know how many things it put altogether beyond question, for me." He carries it inside of him as a vision of "prodigal renunciation, … empty-handed prodigality. … I have nothing to give you, take and eat."

There are visions, Ames remarks, "that come to us only in memory, in retrospect," and this is certainly one of them—speaking to him both of the smallness of human life in the face of great mysteries and of the incandescent glimpse of the sacred any one of our gestures provides once we quit clinging to this world and our places in it. Much like Ruth, Ames reads his life and the world around him out of a chastened sense of their utter weightlessness when compared to eternity, and their utter value, as the places of its fragile incarnation:

I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

The novel shifts near the halfway point when the ne'er-do-well son of a friend returns to Gilead, a namesake whom Ames had baptized as a child and then hardened himself toward as he brought grief and heartache to his family and the community. The friend's son returns, "his inexplicable mortal self," and begins taking an interest in Ames's wife and young son, whom Ames must soon lose. Suddenly terrified about a future he'll be able to do nothing about, Ames finds himself, as he writes, in the wilderness again: "I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I've scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. … [But] my present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before." With this turn, Ames' not only struggles to read his past; he must also read and engage his present. It's a mark of Robinson's quiet and deeply meditated artistry, then, that what Ames enacts in reaching out toward the son of his friend in an unexpected blessing, understanding that he will soon be as nothing before the world's larger forces, echoes and completes a series of earlier visions in the novel. We are reminded of the bread of affliction, the grandfather's absorption in a divine call to free the captives, even Gilead's once incandescent standing for principle. Ames' single gesture knocks the ashes off all these selfless moments and sends new sparks flying. "This poor gray ember of Creation," Ames muses. "Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration." Hopkins would have understood.

Thomas Gardner is professor of English at Virginia Tech. His book Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Writers is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects. —G.K. Chesterton

Skellig Michael is a 700-foot-high pinnacle of water-and-wind-worn rock that rises like Excalibur out of the Atlantic waves off the southwest coast of Ireland. If you have ever been there, you do not need it described; if you have not been, no description is adequate. The same is true of that part of reality called the sacred.

I make my reluctant pilgrimage to Skellig Michael in near total ignorance, based solely on three sentences in a guidebook. I expect the usual visitor center and gift shop. Instead, the voice of the fisherman’s wife on the phone says, “Be at the Portmagee pier at 10:30 tomorrow morning. If the weather is good enough, my husband will be there in his boat to pick you up.” The weather the next day is unusually fine, and down the inlet we watch him chug, my son Nate and I, his only passengers for the day.

We hop on board and start out toward the sea. The engine of the fishing boat is loud enough to make talking difficult and it fills the air with diesel fumes. It’s just under an hour out to Skellig Michael, depending on your boat and the conditions. You don’t see the island when you start out from the harbor, but soon you are passing looming Bray’s Head and there it is on the horizon, the first step into the Atlantic. Tiny at first, it’s shrouded today in a thin white haze. It looks mystical—in part because I expect it to look mystical. I think of Avalon, the island to which King Arthur was carried on the barge of singing women, there to recover from his wounds and, someday, return again to a new Camelot. Will my own wounds be soothed today?

Approaching Skellig Michael from the north, we are following a path taken so many centuries ago by a boatload of monks looking for a place to battle the flesh and the devil. They saw themselves as engaged in a war whose object was to be like Christ–that is, to be more like what they were created to be. They saw themselves as spiritual warriors. Their aim, however, was not to kill someone else, but to destroy false selves, to shed counterfeit versions of their own life, so that they might help bring into reality the kingdom of the High King of Heaven.

As is so often the case in fable and tale, we have a harbinger that we are approaching a special place. About half way out, I spot a dart of color winging past the boat at frantic speed. It is a puffin, that compact burst of bird and bill that spends the majority of its life in air and water, touching the land only in obscure places to devote a short time to the birth, feeding, and protection of a puffin chick.

Puffins come to Skellig Michael at the same time we had come to England, in late March, their bills in the process of changing color from the dull yellow of winter to bright red, blue, and yellow of summer. It is May now and they have taken over Skellig rabbit holes and other burrows. But they have approached Skellig Michael cautiously, as I am doing. When the puffins first arrive from unmarked journeys in the North Atlantic, they keep their distance from the island, floating for days in the sea, within sight, but not venturing on the island itself.

I understand their caution. If Skellig Michael is, as they say, a sacred place, then I’m not sure I want to be there. I remember what happened to the poor sap who tried to steady the Ark of the Covenant when it was falling off the wagon. Iona and Lindisfarne have small numbers of people living safely on them today, undoubtedly a few no better than I am. But Skellig Michael is now alone again, severe and solitary, not a place you’d want to spend the night. Perhaps it does not suffer tourists gladly.

Skellig Michael, like two other famous monastic islands I have visited in years past, is named for the archangel, who reputedly came to Ireland to help Patrick with the snakes and the demons. But that name came later. When that first boat load of monks approached, it was only a skeilic—a stone island—one of many islands off the west coast of Ireland. Why did they choose this one? What seemed promising? What made them hopeful? What told them that God was better to be found or served here than at the place they came from?

Perhaps they liked that it points to the sky. Skellig Michael is 714 feet of stony verticality, a natural Gothic cathedral with narrow spikes of eroded rock decorating it like gargoyles. It has twin peaks, one at each end, like the fingertips of two parted hands lifted to heaven. Making no compromise with horizontal reality, it thrusts straight up from the sea floor to the clouds. Any living thing that dares to ride its audacious breaching of the sea will have to hold on for dear life.

Fittingly, there is no place for our boat to tie up. Skellig Michael is little more accessible now than it was 1,400 years ago when the monks arrived. Nate and I jump off the boat onto a concrete platform that has been stuck like a limpet to the base of a cliff–on an island that is all cliffs. The captain backs the boat away, telling us he will wait out in the ocean until he sees we have returned to the platform. I find myself hoping he is a vigilant and reliable man.

We walk a few minutes on a narrow 19th-century concrete path built to service a lighthouse that once provided the only human beings on Skellig Michael but now is fully automated. The path circles around near the base of the island toward and intersects some medieval steps that will take us higher.

Actually there are three ancient pathways to the top of Skellig Michael. An eastern ascent begins near the landing platform and another path starts out from Blue Cove on the northern side of the island. Today there are only a handful of days a year during which a boat could successfully approach the northern steps, part of the evidence that climatic conditions were different in the first few centuries of monastic life than they are today.

Three paths up the mountain. It reminds me of the favorite metaphor of religious universalists. “There are many paths up the mountain,” they say, suggesting that most all quests for the spiritual are equally valid. It is a tempting view, one that certainly fits nicely with our modern let’s get along, affirm everybody, who-are-you-to-say mood.

But the metaphor takes a mysterious turn on Skellig Michael. In addition to the southern ascent, there are also on the south side 14 steps carved into solid stone that begin in the middle of nowhere in particular and lead further on to more nowhere. They do not start at the sea nor do they end in the heights. They are simply there, testimony to an unfulfilled idea—begun in hope, buttressed with sweat, but left hanging, in process and in stone.

No, I do not believe that all paths lead to the top of the mountain. Some lead off cliffs. Some rise promisingly for a ways but then descend back to the base. And some, like the 14 Skellig steps, lead nowhere at all.

Where, I wonder, is my own path leading?

The lighthouse road intersects in a few hundred yards with the southern ascent. I am glad for it. Here, finally, is the real thing, the authentic stuff, the guidebook-promised tangible evidence of ancient spirituality. I am thankful for the steps—until I start to climb them.

I let Nate go first. No use standing in the way of eager youth. The first fifty are a delight. I study each one, trying to picture the monk who dug with maddox into the side of the cliff and the no less than two monks who would have been necessary to wrestle the thick stone slab into place.

The next fifty are also no problem for this now travel-hardened pilgrim. If after still fifty more steps I am now breathing a bit heavily, what of it? Pilgrimage is supposed to include discomfort; besides, the view is growing more spectacular with every step.

And so fifty more steps, and then another fifty.

Have you ever noticed how irrelevant spectacular scenery is to a hiker in pain? How the scope of the world narrows to the tips of your shoes and the few feet of ground immediately in front of you? It is the same with spiritual climbing. The books and brochures promise mountaintop vistas, closeness to God, serenity and peace; they don’t mention that getting there, if one ever does, is a lot like a death march.

But what are another fifty steps among pilgrims? Nate is patient with me, stopping whenever he sees me staring too closely at the steep steps just a few inches from my bowed and bobbing head. So that makes, what, 300 steps?

It is good that I don’t know at this point what I will learn later. There are some 2,300 steps on Skellig Michael, not counting the lighthouse road. I have only climbed a bit over ten percent of them and already I have forgotten why I came. I have forgotten everything I have read and seen in the last six weeks. I do not recall Columba or Aidan or Cuthbert or hills where angels came down. I know only that my thighs are burning and I am again in danger of feeling sorry for myself.

Does the spiritual have a snowball’s chance in hell as long as we are tethered to these bodies? I know I shouldn’t use a word like tethered. I know I am supposed to celebrate the God-created physicality of things—that’s what all the balanced people tell me, the Celtic saints included. But the body is a nuisance sometimes. It is so needy and whiney and insistent on getting what it wants. It is the perennial two-year-old child of our existence. And so I sit for a while and rest.

The rest does me good. The sun is warm and the breeze cool—these are physical too. I feel lucky to be here, a place I hadn’t even heard of a year before. I feel lucky to be here with Nate. And I am luckier than I know. There may indeed be 2,300 steps on Skellig Michael, but only 600 are on this southern ascent. I am halfway there—though at this point I don’t know where there is.

Another few hundred steps take us to Christ’s Saddle, the only open patch of ground on the island, and the place I assume I am climbing to. Christ’s Saddle, so named by the monks, is a small scrap of ground (less than half an acre it appears to me, though I am no good at estimating such things) that lies between the two peaks of Skellig Michael, which tower over it on either side.

It would be too generous to call it level; there is no such thing on the island. It is more of a hump—a saddle. Walk a few dozen yards across to the north side and you find yourself staring down at birds flying beneath you, the sea acting as a green backdrop 500 feet below. It’s disorienting to be looking down at flying birds, and I back away from the deadly attraction-repulsion of great heights.

Nate and I walk toward South Peak, climbing a few yards up its base until the grass runs out and further climbing seems impossible. We sit in the warm sun and look at the small place where I imagine the monks working this bit of soil, which some think was brought here from the mainland, basket by basket, by the monks themselves. After this tiring ascent I have both great admiration for the successive groups of twelve or so men who lived here for 600 years—and great questions about their sanity.

After visiting in 1910, George Bernard Shaw called Skellig Michael “an incredible, impossible, mad place. I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in; it is part of our dream world.” I understand what Shaw is saying, but the sweat running down my back is not a dream. And it was real sweat for those monks who scampered up and down the cliffs, snatching eggs from bird nests on rocky ledges high above the sea. And it was real sweat when they were killing seals for meat and skins to trade with passing sailors for fishing hooks and staples, and when they were growing small patches of grain in this little bit of soil hundreds of feet in the air between the two peaks of the island. It is important to remember the reality of that sweat, because we must keep these men like us if they are to do us any good.

I am also feeling real hunger at the moment. Nate had refused breakfast this morning because he had decided to fast for the day. I was unprepared for it but not surprised. My kids often do in practice the things I heartily support in theory. Given Nate’s plan to fast, my uneaten bowl of cereal before me had seemed suddenly gluttonous. I announced I would be happy to join him, and now my stomach was asking whether I hadn’t been a bit impulsive.

I look out over the sea and spot our boat, waiting patiently, as promised, for us to have our pilgrim experience. The sight of it is comforting, assuring me of the needed escape when I’ve had enough of the sacred.

It is not hard, however, to picture another time and another boat whose sighting would have brought a gasp and a sick feeling in the stomach—a Viking boat. Viking raiders first struck an Irish monastery in 795, two years after their initial attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne in northern England. It was just a matter of time before they found the little community of monks sitting atop this isolated rock off the coast of Kerry.

The Irish called them Finngaill–the fair foreigners. They were the stateless terrorists of their day, which is exactly how John Henry Newman described them: “They ravaged far and wide at will, and no retaliation on them was possible, for these pirates — had not a yard of territory, a town, or a fort, no property but their vessels, no subjects but their crews.”

They traveled on the superhighways of the time—the open seas. Their dragon-headed longboats could be up to 130 feet in length and carry hundreds of men, and could land almost anywhere. More often they were smaller, with a typical crew of thirty to forty, but these smaller craft could attack in fleets of dozens.

Or alone. It would not have taken a fleet to pillage Skellig Michael. One ship could appear on the horizon. It would not have had to be in a hurry. Where were the monks to go? Iona, though small, is filled with rocky hills and crags that could provide some protection. Lindisfarne, though open and flat, is very near the mainland, to which the monks could flee. But Skellig Michael is the equivalent of a modern-day office tower. If death is approaching from below, there is nothing to do but wait or jump.

The Skellig Michael monastery, unlike others, was not a rich morsel for the Vikings. Barely a crumb. It would have had a minimum of the liturgical instruments made of precious metals, and sometimes jewels, that the Vikings were looking for. But it was a place to pillage, and pillaging was their call.

The first recorded Viking attack on Skellig Michael took place in 812. They had a habit of coming back, checking in every few years on places they had raided before to see what restocking might have gone on. They paid another visit to Skellig Michael in 823 and this time took the abbot with them. The Annals of Innisfallen does not tell us much, but enough to give an insight into Viking cruelty: “Scelec was plundered by the heathens and Etgal was carried off into captivity, and he died of hunger on their hands.” A man hardened by a lifetime of fasting does not starve quickly. But the Vikings apparently were in no hurry.

The Annals calls them “heathens.” That is not an acceptable word today. We are told it is intolerant to use any word that suggests that one way up the mountain is superior to another. One man’s heathenism is another man’s indigenous religion. But as I sit now next to South Peak on Christ’s Saddle, imagining a Viking boat sailing patiently but inexorably toward me, laughter and taunts coming over the water, mixing with the cry of birds, I am not inclined to imagine that I am seeing the approach of fellow spiritual seekers.

The Vikings came again in 833 and 839. It must have changed the way the monks of Skellig Michael perceived their place in the world. They had come there in imitation of the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, whom Irish Christians greatly admired. Early Christians went to the deserts of Egypt and elsewhere for many reasons, but primarily to escape everything that would distract them from their dance with God.

Most of those distractions were embodied in civilization—in cities and empires, in getting and spending, in making and selling, in marrying and child-rearing, in all the endless activities and contacts entailed in living with others. All these horizontal demands were seen as the enemy of the main purpose of our creation—to know and be in right relationship with the God who made us. The desert was attractive to these earliest of Christians, as Thomas Merton has pointed out, precisely because there was nothing there. It was an empty space—empty of people, governments, markets, and trivial demands—waiting to be filled with spiritual significance.

We are quite sure today that these people were, to be polite, misguided, possibly disturbed. Some sat for years on tall pillars, some starved themselves into vision-filled stupors, some competed with each other to win triathlons of the soul.

We moderns think they were deluded, but the Irish thought they were grand. They lamented that they had no deserts of their own to retreat to, so they settled for the wooded deserts of the forests, and the stony deserts of the anchorage, and the blue-green deserts of the sea.

When the first monks saw Skellig Michael, they saw a desert—a place away. Sitting in their cells at 600 feet they were higher and more isolated even than Simon Stylites on his sixty-foot pillar. They were free to do what was important in life.

For 200 years that dearly loved isolation must have seemed almost complete. They surely had some regular contact with the mainland for they would have needed to be supplied bread for communion. And they had the occasional visitor or new member. But contact with the rest of the world was infrequent and at their own choosing.

The Viking raids changed all that. The Irish desert had been violated, and could be again at any time. The monks likely did not fear death from the fair foreigners. They feared violation of their sacred space and their sacred routine. It was no longer possible to leave the world. The world had come to them—bearing swords.

I say they did not fear death from the Vikings, but of course that is true only in the abstract. A monk, watching from Christ’s Saddle as a group of axe-wielding, blood-seeking Vikings climbed up the very steps Nate and I had climbed, could not have helped but be afraid. No amount of piety and prioritized thinking can keep the heart from racing in the face of someone wanting to put a hatchet in your forehead.

But at the same time that their adrenaline was surging, they were likely to be more concerned that they die well. As Geoffrey Moorhouse has put it, “If they were to die, they hoped to do so fully recognised for what they were.” He imagines them gathering to say the Lord’s Prayer after they first see the Viking ship, and then scattering to hide what few holy objects they possess among the rocks.

I am both intrigued and convicted by the phrase “fully recognised for what they were.” We live in a culture in which serious religious faith is slightly embarrassing. Faith is seen as possibly a value—something hoped for—and not as a fact—something known. It is benign or even useful for food drives and homeless shelters, but ugly and even dangerous when it publicly asserts its claims as truth. Therefore it is asked to stay private, to speak only when spoken to, to stay in the corner and mind its very limited business.

The Celtic Christians could not have imagined such a thing. All of life was to be organized in light of spiritual realities. There was not a separate truth for monks and for kings, and when kings needed correcting, they were corrected. In the meantime, daily life was an ordered rhythm of worship, work, and study—all as an offering to God. That at least was the intent, though of course human nature often exacted its due.

I am more a modern man than a Celtic Christian in this regard. I want to be polite. I want to get along. When alone in a restaurant, I do not bow my head over meals. I do not cite the Bible in making arguments to people who put little value in it. I do not want anyone organizing prayer in public schools. I do not want my political leaders invoking God as the source of their every policy. And, in the same spirit, I try not to roll my eyes when my colleagues start talking about going to psychics or of prosperity energy fields in their homes.

But I wonder if I am so eager to fit in that I am afraid to be “fully recognised” for what I am. Would I have knelt in prayer as that out of breath Viking raised his axe over me on Christ’s Saddle, or might I have offered to show him where the treasures were hidden in hopes of staying alive a bit longer? More to the point, how willing am I to organize my own life and actions and relationships around those spiritual truths that I claim should define every life? How eager am I to be fully recognized?

Some tell us—and have been for 200 years—that Christianity is dying, hopelessly outdated, destined to be dug up and puzzled over by distant anthropologists as we do now with Easter Island statues. Others say no, the spiritual is again reasserting itself, as it always will, and it is militant secularism that has had its brief moment in the sun.

Sitting on Skellig Michael, I do not particularly care whether the Vikings or the monks are presently in the ascendancy. I have never placed my bets based on the odds or opinion polls. I feel the pagan instincts of my own life, but also hear the one who stands at the door and knocks. I will make my choices, like the good, individualistic westerner that I am, based on the inclinings of my own heart and the cogitations of my mind–to the extent possible given the vagaries of my will.

I did not know what to expect on Skellig Michael, and I am more than pleased at what I’ve found. After the sea journey and hundreds of steps, I feel I have earned the exhilaration of this view and the satisfaction of imagining monks living and working and worshiping on this bit of holy ground floating in the clouds.

But as usual I am settling for too little. As I consider how long I should sit here with Nate before we head back down, I spot what I should have seen immediately after reaching Christ’s Saddle. There, across the way, running up the side of and disappearing behind the north peak, is another set of steps.

I will admit to having mixed feelings about this discovery. I had thought I had arrived. I had done my climb, with the required pilgrimage pain, and had every reason to be satisfied with myself and with what I was experiencing. The views from Christ’s Saddle were mind numbing, the imaginative possibilities rich. Why did there need to be more?

Why in fact does there always seem to be more in the spiritual quest? Why does every level of discipline, of service, of intimacy with God seem inadequate? Why do our spiritual guides—living and dead—always call us to go further? Why does our goal always move, mirage-like, just beyond reach?

I find myself too easily satisfied. I am happy enough simply to be on the team. I have no great desire to be a star. Is this humility? Peaceful resting in God’s mercy? Perhaps. More likely spiritual sleepiness. More likely a failure to recognize and follow my own best interests.

I point out the newly noticed steps to Nate. He is delighted and bounds toward them. We climb up, pass through a short tunnel, and then step onto the place that everyone—except the ignorant and too easily satisfied—comes to Skellig Michael to see.

Here, clinging like an ecclesiastical barnacle to the sheer cliffs, is the tiny monastic village. It comprises six stone huts, two oratories, two cisterns, the foundation of a later medieval church, and a graveyard with eroded stone slabs and crosses. The huts have rectangular bases and beehive-shaped roofs, their flat stones held together only by that accommodation to gravity known as corbelling. Four of them have maintained the structural integrity imparted to them at the time of their making. They still stand fourteen centuries later, without mortar or prop, because they were built realistically. That is, they were built in keeping with the vectors of force inherent in the pull of the earth on everything that aspires to rise above it. They work with, not in defiance of, what is. May your life and mine be so constructed.

On the exterior of the monks’ cells, stone pegs protrude here and there. Perhaps they held sod or thatch in place, a small allowance for the harsh winter winds in a place where there were never any fires or hot food or any sources of heat beyond the sun and their own bodies. The lack of warming fire is hard enough to imagine in spring and fall, but think of a harsh, North Atlantic winter. Some speculate that the monks may have left the island in winter, but that is more a testimony to what we would do than a reflection of any historical data.

The placement of the monastic site on the southeast side of the north peak, however, may itself have been a minimal concession to comfort. The winds strike the base of the island 600 feet below and ride the stone straight up into the sky. Set back slightly from the cliff face, the cells and oratories enjoy a microclimate that is slightly milder than the rest of the island. It heartens me that perhaps they did not think it a sin to ease the conditions just a bit.

They did not build the monastery here because this site provided a piece of flatness on the island. Only extensive retaining walls, constructed one must imagine with their hearts in their throats, make possible the buildings at this place. Just beyond the outside retaining wall is a long drop into the sea that would give you just enough time to briefly review your relationship with God and man before you entered eternity.

Nate and I look into each cell and then into the larger oratory shaped like an upturned boat. It is dark and does not feel holy. I try to picture the monks here at worship. Their daily offices, the six appointed times of formal worship (a seventh added in the 7th century), centered on recitations from the Psalms, sometimes as many as seventy-five of them in one service. Novices newly entered into the monastic life, usually between the ages of 15 and 17, would have first memorized all of the poems of the Psalter. A mighty feat by our standards—my students think themselves tortured when required to memorize 75 words of poetry—but not difficult for an oral culture that preserved all that it knew in the mind and passed it on with the tongue.

In addition to chanting psalms together, the monks would have readings from the Old and New Testament, pray, and sometimes sing hymns. Their prayers were for themselves and the world and the world’s leaders. At various times they would perform their worship on their knees with arms outstretched in the crossvigil position, imitating the crucified Christ. Other times they would prostrate themselves completely on the floor.

Nothing about standing in their oratory inclines me to prostrate myself, or even say a prayer. I am not a good pilgrim. The hoped-for feelings never come on cue. They did not when once I visited Dachau, another terrible-holy place, and they do not now.

But then I see the little window in the eastern wall. I walk over to it and look out. There in the cemetery just behind the oratory is an ancient cross, apparently marking the grave of one of those early monks. And behind the cross is the sky and sea, and in the sea, like a waiting companion, is a smaller companion island, Little Skellig.

It strikes me that this view, tiny window framing sea and island (and cross?), has not changed since the day the oratory was enclosed. On that day this space was marked off as a sacred place within a sacred place, a kind of holy of holies. The monks are long-since departed, but perhaps they left behind more than stones.

As Nate and I sit among the beehive huts, looking over the graves of ancient monks to Little Skellig in the sea beyond, we are joined by fellow pilgrims. Some blond-haired Germans or Scandinavians emerge from the tunnel, perhaps distant relatives of earlier Viking visitors. We nod at each other, separated by language but not, it may be, by quest.

We decide to leave the monastery site to them. Skellig Michael is not a place that improves with company, beyond a friend or two. It’s time anyway to return to our boat. I see it down below as we come again to Christ’s Saddle and then begin to descend the southern steps.

Part way down, those steps take a sharp turn to the right, and at that point is a protruding weathered rock that I imagine to be a medieval Station of the Cross. I tell Nate to stand in front of it so I can take a picture. He looks a bit Viking-like himself: tall, wild red hair, and cunning smile. I am glad he has come with me on this pilgrimage to Skellig Michael. And I am glad we are leaving.

Daniel Taylor is professor of English at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This essay is excerpted from his book In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands (Bog Walk Press). Copyright © 2005 by Daniel Taylor. Used by permission of Bog Walk Press.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When Ronald Reagan died last year, Senator John Kerry neatly captured the public mood when he declared that Reagan “was our oldest president, but he made America young again.” Millions of Americans remembered Reagan not just as an elder statesman but as a kind of secular savior, the man who saved the country from a long period of national traumas and disasters. While “the Seventies” are commonly remembered as a time of weakness and malaise, “the Eighties”—the Reagan years—are associated with vigorous growth, with a confident assurance epitomized by the president himself. The transition between eras is perfectly symbolized by the cumulative disasters of 1980, the year of the Iran hostage crisis. The message, in short, is that Jimmy Carter led the nation to the verge of ruin, but Ronald Reagan pulled us out of the mess.

It can scarcely be denied that Reagan was a great national leader, arguably the greatest U.S. president of the 20th century (and given greater length, I’d be happy to explain why I would rank him above FDR). Yet having said this, the conventional contrast between the Carter and Reagan years, between decades and presidencies, is much too stark, and overemphasizes the role of individuals. Even if “the Eighties” designates a meaningful historical era, Reagan deserves only limited credit for defining the decade.

In Morning in America, Gil Troy makes an excellent case for Reagan’s capacity as a leader, and for the real achievements of his administration. We live in a “Reaganized America.” Fortunately, the more of Reagan’s notes and speeches that have appeared in print, the less time a historian need waste in confronting the canard about the president as an amiable dunce. Reagan had a sharp mind and a clearly defined sense of historical mission, grounded in fundamental moral and political principles. He was also blessed with the ability to convey his confidence, his evident belief both in himself and in American values. Troy rightly identifies the turning point in the presidency in 1983-84, when the Grenada invasion and the Los Angeles Olympics provided dual foci for renewed patriotism, ably exploited by the White House. In retrospect, even Reagan’s co*ckiest and most implausible visions have been vindicated by history. In all honesty, how many informed analysts in the early 1980s believed that Soviet Communism would evaporate within a decade, or that Reagan’s confrontational nuclear policies would really lead to a massive reduction of global tensions? Yet Reagan believed these ridiculous things, and on both points, he was ridiculously right.

Troy’s readable book is impressive in its integration of political and social history, while he rightly recognizes that popular culture can provide an effective gauge of the public mood. Thus, he effectively uses the television series Hill Street Blues to illustrate attitudes towards crime and race, and throughout, he uses television, film, and popular music.

Troy is anything but a Reagan cheerleader, and he stresses the still contentious nature of the Reagan record. Apart from the obvious liberal critics, fiercely defensive “Reagan zealots” will challenge Troy’s balanced approach. As he dryly remarks, “Studying Ronald Reagan is not for the faint-hearted—or the untenured.” To the extent that he is being shot at from both sides, Troy thus emerges as impeccably fair-minded. But I would still argue that his sharp focus on Reagan and the 1980s leads him to over-estimate the presidential achievement.

To take an obvious issue, just how different was Reagan from his predecessor? In terms of popular memory, the contrast seems absurd: the Gipper versus the Wimp. But Carter and Reagan had much in common. Carter was more conservative than is often recalled, and Reagan more liberal. On issues of gender and morality, Reagan had a distinctly moderate record, having endorsed the ERA and opposed California’s anti-gay Briggs initiative. His two terms as governor included liberal measures on abortion rights and no-fault divorce, not to mention a fairly progressive tax policy and a respectable environmental record. At times, he looked like the kind of politician the Reaganites were warning about. The two men also shared much in their idealistic moral vision and their religious sense of national purpose. Both saw national problems in moral terms, as issues of the human heart. Neither was reluctant to invoke moral justifications for policy or to see a divine hand in political destiny, and both were attacked for religious sentiments that the secular-minded regarded as naïve or hypocritical.

While any reconstruction of alternative realities must be speculative, we might reasonably ask just how different the America of the Eighties would have been if Jimmy Carter had won the 1980 election—and that could have happened quite easily. Any number of events might have transformed the political landscape of that year. Carter’s Tehran hostage rescue might have succeeded in April 1980, while through the summer, Reagan supporters worried that Carter might arrange an October Surprise, a last-minute diplomatic breakthrough that would bring the hostages home in time for the election.

And in that case, how different would the 1980s have been? After all, the New Cold War was already in progress following the Afghanistan crisis of 1980. Other areas of crisis in the early 1980s would certainly include Poland and Central America, while the United States would have to respond to recent Soviet missile deployments in Europe. It would have been natural for any U.S. administration to try and weaken the Soviet bloc through proxy forces, who would receive clandestine support or training from the United States. Well before the 1980 election, Carter began U.S. support for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas. In the last days of his presidency, Carter was sufficiently alarmed by the imminent collapse of the Salvadoran regime to restore U.S. military aid. In December 1980, he warned the Soviet government against military intervention in Poland. Throughout 1980, we can discern the stark anti-Communist mood of the Reagan years, the renewed patriotic upsurge, and the quest for decisive leadership.

When comparing the 1970s with the Reagan 1980s, we often forget how many of the characteristic trends and symbols of the Eighties originated in the Carter era, a point rarely made or pursued by Troy. Usually regardless of federal attitudes or policies, America was simply becoming more socially conservative in these years. The drug war, most famously directed against cocaine and crack cocaine under Reagan, originated in the anti-PCP (“angel dust”) panic of 1977-78, and was in full flood by the early 1980s. Already under Carter, American society was becoming much more penally oriented, with the dramatic upsurge of incarceration rates, and the restoration of capital punishment. Fears of rape and child sexual abuse, which so reshaped attitudes towards gender and sexuality, again originated in the late 1970s. Increasingly, the roots of domestic Reaganism seem rooted in the debates and conflicts of 1977, in that year’s attacks on feminism and electoral attempts to reverse gay rights. Even the AIDS scare, so often cited as the symbolic end of the sexual revolution, was closely prefigured by the herpes panic of 1980-82. Of course herpes was nothing like so lethal in its effects as AIDS, but looking back at the herpes literature now, we must be struck by how precisely it pioneers the rhetoric of the AIDS years, with the language of epidemic, plague, and scarlet letters. Reagan succeeded so thoroughly because he inherited a country alarmed by the extent of recent social revolutions, a country seeking an opportunity to be “scared straight.”

In economics too, the Carter/Reagan divide seems much more permeable than Troy implies. It was in late 1979 that the financial policies of Fed chairman Paul Volcker imposed the credit crunch that created the ghastly economic downturn of 1980-82. Reagan was dreadfully unpopular in 1981-82, when the Left enjoyed a significant revival, and Washington and New York witnessed some of the largest demonstrations in their history, especially in the name of the nuclear freeze movement. Reagan’s approval ratings approached Carterian levels. But the Fed policy worked, so that the economy returned to boom conditions from late 1982, beginning an eight-year run of splendid success. Often forgotten in this picture is the role of oil prices, which conveniently crashed in mid-decade, reinforcing the U.S. recovery while further crippling the Soviet Union. If Jimmy Carter was still president in 1983-84, he too would have enjoyed a sunny national mood, as the United States basked in historic prosperity. Under whichever party, a confident and wealthy nation would have been far more willing to confront its overseas enemies while suppressing criminals and social deviants at home. Had he weathered the storms of 1980, perhaps Carter would today be enjoying the credit for national salvation that actually adhered to Reagan. Of course, that assumes that Carter would not have exercised his uncanny talent to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, which he might well have done.

In awarding Reagan the palm as “inventor” of the 1980s, Troy exaggerates the ability of any president to overcome underlying circ*mstances and trends. In support of this argument, we might point to the more general success of “Reaganite” policies and movements around the world, in nations not subject to that particular administration—not least in Thatcher’s Britain. Such parallels surely suggest that more widespread global trends were in progress, whether economic, cultural, or demographic.

In short, Gil Troy has written a valuable and enjoyable book; but I reject his subtitle.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His new book, Darkening Vision: How America Retreated from the 1960’s, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In a period of only a few years right before the Civil War, American authors published a raft of books on the amazing advance of Protestantism in the United States. From a disorganized starting point in the 1780s, they could trace an unprecedented advance to a scene of remarkable vigor as well as remarkable influence on the country’s institutions and mores. Figures as diverse as the Presbyterian Robert Baird and the Methodist Nathan Bangs were of course aware of problems in the denominations they described, but their overarching tone was bewonderment.

Then came the Civil War. When the very Protestant denominations that had risen to such influence divided among themselves in bitter controversy over the acceptability of slavery and when they floundered in responding to the great social and intellectual challenges of the postbellum years, the domination of Protestant values was over. Historians, who thought they were providing a road map to the future, were transformed into eulogists.

It is much to be hoped that the recent publishing flurry on the history of the Bible is not replicating the irony of Protestant histories on the eve of the Civil War. The learned, accessible, but very different books by David Katz and Jaroslav Pelikan that are the subject of this essay are appearing hard on the heels of a publishing boom that includes several of the best books every published on the history of the Bible in America (by Paul Gutjahr and Peter Thuesen), several unusually perceptive accounts of the Bible as literature (including books by David Norton, David Lyle Jeffrey, and Leland Ryken), and several effective narratives retelling the story of the King James Version and later Bible translations (by Alister McGrath, Benson Bobrick, and Adam Nicolson).

Whether this slew of outstanding books on the Scriptures is heralding a new day of biblical vigor (as some of the authors of these volumes so clearly hope) or pronouncing a benediction on a rapidly fading cultural epoch (and so reprising the fate of the antebellum Protestant histories) might depend on which of the contrasting plots inscribed by Pelikan and Katz anticipates the future.

Pelikan’s general account of where the Bible came from is keyed to the diverse contributions of Jews and Christians over a very long history. It is an introductory study in which Pelikan’s prodigious learning is worn lightly, yet authoritatively, as he explains how Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and even Muslim sacred texts took shape and then how they have been transmitted, studied, debated, and translated. By contrast, Katz’s interests are much more specific, concentrating on three centuries of British history (1600-1900) and the specific issue of how the pre-critical biblical beliefs of practicing Christians were challenged, modified, and often abandoned by leading intellectuals. What Katz writes about the chronological bookends of his title is either hopelessly mistaken (Luther and Calvin did not believe that the whole Bible simply interpreted itself to anyone who picked it up) or risibly abbreviated (there are all of four breathless pages on 20th-century fundamentalism). But in between, for the subjects Katz knows well, the book is illuminating and provocative.

The contrasting stances of the two books are conveyed with subtlety. When Pelikan discusses the rise and effects of biblical higher criticism, he accepts that modern scholarship has forced most readers of Scripture, believers and unbelievers alike, to modify earlier convictions about the literal historicity of many biblical stories. He confesses that earlier conflicts among the three great “people of the book” witnessed unpardonable evils arising from misplaced confidence in biblical interpretations. And he repudiates the once popular idea that the coming of Christ superseded God’s eternal covenant with the Jews.

Yet against modern tides that would reduce events among the ancient Hebrews and in 1st-century Palestine to the typical experiences of primitive peoples everywhere, Pelikan stands firm. He does take seriously the pressure that began to build in the 17th and 18th centuries against the church’s historic beliefs, but he also wants testimony from that era by John Milton, J. S. Bach, and G. F. Handel to count in modern consideration of ultimate questions. He does acknowledge that the West’s historic deference to Scripture is irretrievably gone, but also wants to record the significance of translation work that over the last century has made the Bible available to more people in more different languages than over the whole of recorded history before 1900. Above all, he wants readers to appreciate fully the substantial parallels, connections, and even continuities between Jewish reliance on Scripture and Christian reliance on Scripture. The conviction that drives this desire comes from an even more basic proposition:

the Bible is a strange new world because it confronts us with a God who speaks but who in the very act of self-revelation is and remains the Wholly Other One—”My plans are not your plans, Nor are My words your words—declares the LORD” [quoting Isaiah 55:8].

The “us” in Pelikan’s phrase is crucial. It also happens to balance nicely a “we” that David Katz italicizes in the last sentence of his book: “Far from being a deviant group of religious extremists, Fundamentalists [in their insistence upon the literal inerrancy of the Bible] are actually those whose theological position is closest to the message of the Protestant revolution, while we are the ones who have gone into the sunset of the ‘horizon of expectation’.” If Pelikan’s Whose Bible Is It? premises the enduring potential for Scripture to reveal a transcendent God who in words and as Word becomes immanent, Katz’s God’s Last Words provides a detailed, in parts deeply researched, and often funny account of why “we” should not accept that premise. Yet as is so often the case, even when so much depends on such a little word, Katz never pauses to define this “we.” (About his general stance there is little doubt, such as when he compares Spinoza, who propounded his pantheism without paying much attention to biblical details, with the German higher critics “who dissected the Bible and laid bare the wheels and pulleys that made up the biggest conjuring trick in the history of mankind.”)

Regardless of standpoint, God’s Last Words is filled with important material. Thomas Hobbes, for example, whose brutal view of political order is not usually associated with a soft spot for scriptural religion, nonetheless argued that the Bible must be from God since, even though all the writings that went into Scripture were constantly guarded by powerful political and ecclesiastical rulers, yet the Bible still contains very much about the perfidy of the powerful. Equally interesting, and just as relevant, is John Locke’s complaint about the division of the Bible into verses: because of versification, the Scriptures “are so chop’d and minc’d, and as they are now Printed, stand so broken and divided, that not only the Common People take the Verses usually for distinct Aphorisms, but even Men of more advanc’d Knowledge in reading them, lose very much of the strength and force of the Coherence, and the Light that depends on it.”

Katz is also superb on two strangely matched figures of the 18th century. John Hutchinson, a self-taught Yorkshireman, felt he could derive an entire cosmology from the unpointed text of the Hebrew Scriptures and so disprove what Hutchinson considered the God-dishonoring science of Sir Isaac Newton. For his part, Newton dedicated himself, not only to path-breaking explorations in the physics of nature, but also to strenuous attempts at dating the millennium. One of Katz’s signal achievements is to demonstrate that, on Scripture, Hutchinson and Newton stood much closer to each other than either does to modern consciousness.

Lamentably, Katz’s major conclusions about the final character of the Bible are all assumed rather than made. For instance, he describes David Hume’s argument against miracles (“even if it could be shown that the events recorded did actually take place, any supernatural claims for their origin would be impossible to demonstrate because no witness sufficiently infallible could be produced”) as “irrefutable” and “conclusive.” Again, for Katz, the combination of Kant’s metaphysics, Darwin’s natural selection, and Victorian cultural disillusionment means that “the universe had become rather meaningless and has stayed like that ever since.”

However widely shared such views may be, they are inane as stated. Yet Katz does such a good job as historian that even those leaning in Pelikan’s direction can take much away. As an example, the “Victorian crises of faith,” which always had more to do with problems of evil and purpose than with geology or evolutionary biology, continue to pose genuine difficulty. On those problems Katz outlines clearly the ways that Victorians could go. Matthew Arnold thought he had sprung himself loose from the hard choices posed by biblical higher critics when he took refuge in the “spirit” of Scripture, which he summarized as “Believe in God, and live a good life.” A much more thoughtful road was set out by the editors of Punch—who, when angry conservatives tried to have the British Privy Council condemn higher critical views published in a book called Essays and Reviews, opined:

Denounce Essayists and Reviewers,
Hang, quarter, gag or shoot them—
Excellent plans—provided that
You first of all refute them.

The Punch editors were certainly more prescient than Matthew Arnold about what a vigorously faithful stance toward Scripture required in an age of modern critical scholarship. About the general future of the Bible, however, it accords best with biblical truth itself to confess that no human being knows whether, in the short run, the fashionable assumptions of Katz or the traditional convictions of Pelikan will prevail.

Mark Noll is spending the academic year 2004-2005 as Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Sounds like … signature Charlie Daniels vocals and fiddle playing over classic and contemporary hymns performed in the bluegrass style

At a glance … the virtuoso player and his all-star friends provide an intriguing interpretation of many church and Southern standards.

To fans of classic rock, country and bluegrass music, Charlie Daniels is one of the elite few who’s crossed into several genres while continuing to make a mark on new generations. Though best known for the breakout hit “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” the fiery fiddle player has spent over four decades making music. And now, with Songs from the Longleaf Pines (his 45th release), rather than return to his mainstream roots, Daniels has gone straight down the spiritual route for a series of Southern hymns performed bluegrass style.

The set starts with a robust rendering of “Walking in Jerusalem (Just Like John),” with its fast-action banjo, fiddle and steel guitar, and background accompaniment by The Whites. That famous family joins Ricky Skaggs on “Preachin,’ Prayin,’ Singin,'” a rousing romp reminiscent of the Oak Ridge Boys. Also along for the deep-fried ride are the playful “Keep On the Sunny Side,” the careful finger pickin’ of “The Old Account” and the contemplative “What Would You Give (In Exchange For Your Soul).”

Even more familiar are twangy takes on “Softly and Tenderly,” “How Great Thou Art” and an instrumental of “I’ll Fly Away.” Though these are often covered, Daniels approaches them from a much more varied perspective than the typical modern worship collection. The only instances of “filler” are two spoken word segments—the readings of “The 91st Psalm” and “The 23rd Psalm”—which interfere a bit with the album’s overall continuity. Still, Daniels fans will be happy with the results, which could serve as a platform for the Good News to be exposed to those who haven’t heard it.

Look up “Darren Grant” on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and you won’t learn much about the young director, whose first feature film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, opened in theaters last week. IMDb doesn’t have a bio on Grant, but he reveals a bit of his background in his “Diary of a First-Time Director” at the Mad Black Woman official site. He apparently had a career directing music videos and commercials before his father first introduced him to Tyler Perry’s plays. It wasn’t long before he met Perry and the two clicked, and Perry hired Grant to direct the film, based on Perry’s popular play of the same name.

Grant says that working alongside Perry “was truly an honor,” and that “we all had the same vision of creating a movie that showcased our people [African-Americans] in a different light. This would be a defining moment in black cinema that fed our current social consciousness. This would be a film … that took you on a journey of emotions and was visually captivating and ultimately led back to family and forgiveness.” (Indeed, the film’s official subtitle reads: “Time Heals the Heart. Faith Heals the Rest.”)

You can read more about the plot and the film in our review.

We caught up with Grant recently, shortly before the film opened, and asked him about the movie’s redemptive qualities.

This film is very redemptive, and unashamedly Christian in its resolution. Most films cop out and give a very generic spirituality that won’t offend the audience. Did the studio want you to tone it down?

Darren Grant: We were going to make this film with or without the studio. Tyler Perry has had huge success with his plays; they’ve made millions, so he doesn’t care what the studios think.

We made this film for the audience, not the Hollywood types. We took it to Fox and they just didn’t get it. When we talked to Lions Gate they said, “We don’t know much about Tyler Perry beyond what we’ve learned in the past couple of days, but if you are happy with your script, then just go for it.” They pretty much just left us alone.

All of Tyler’s work is a testimony. Spirituality is the thread that runs through Tyler’s work. He was homeless seven years ago and it was his faith that let him persevere. There’s a shortage of films like this and people just eat it up, especially in the black community. People are starving for this kind of film.

I’ve never seen a film, except for The Color Purple, where you were able to capture the altar call and feel it catching the Spirit. We shot that scene in one day in about 20 or 25 takes. The audience was moved on every take, not just the second or third. I’d look around and the guys behind the cameras were tearing up. We had real church-going people as extras and they were crying. We were like, “This is something special.”

Does some of this come from your own spiritual background?

Grant: I go to a church in LA and I know the altar call. When you go to a black church and witness the altar call it just moves you. If you haven’t been to church for a while, it really grabs you and you remember what you are missing. If I go every week I kind of get in the groove, but when I’ve been away for a while and I come back, like some of the characters in the film, it’s really powerful. I just said, “I’ve got to get this on film. I’ve never seen it on film.”

Did you wonder if people would get it?

Grant: I wasn’t worried because I knew that the audience this film is for would embrace it. I knew right away that we had something monumental, a thread that runs through and forms the backbone of the story without being in your face.

It sounds like you were as moved as anyone by that scene.

Grant: I was moved more by that scene than I was by The Passion of The Christ. That movie takes us back to a point in time, but this is right now and it’s real.

You know, men—especially black men—are told not to cry, to suck it up. But guys told me, “I was holding back, and then Steve (Harris, playing the role of Charles) came down the aisle, and then, when the junkie girl comes down, well I just lost it.” That experience of redemption and catching the Spirit, you can’t explain it. You just have to be there.

You mentioned your core audience.

Grant: We didn’t have a small budget, or a big one. It was an average budget, but we wanted to give something to our people that was elegant and grand and beautiful. That’s why Kimberly (Elise, in the role of Helen) just glows. We haven’t had a film like this. Tyler Perry gives you a story that goes through love, and tragedy and humor and faith. The story is about forgiveness and redemption that goes full circle, and then in the end you find yourself.

Photos © Copyright Lions Gate Films

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Evangelicals and Catholics Together “Call to Holiness” is much more church-focused than historic Anglo-American evangelical talk about holiness. That is no doubt because evangelicalism has always warned against mistaking mere church participation for following Jesus. As Billy Sunday said, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”

But many of our evangelical forebears, from the Puritan John Owen to Methodist founder John Wesley and Salvation Army founder William Booth, understood deeply the social nature of holiness. They also understood the social nature of spiritual sloth, and strove to purify the established church.

Historically, evangelicals have suspected that the church gets too easily co-opted by cultural and political norms; so they’ve labored for reform and revival, often creating alternative structures for inculcating holiness, from class meetings to camp meetings. They formed many of these structures because the churches were not “preaching the gospel to the poor.” In the long run, the church has benefited from alternative structures, but only when it has appropriated them in a spirit of self-criticism and a longing for renewal.

Evangelical suspicion of church also prompted some to think about holiness mostly in individualistic terms. Although some 19th-century holiness advocates sacrificed for social reform, others tended to become preoccupied with the self. The title of a classic CT book review about one 19th-century holiness leader says it all: “The Entire Sanctification of an Extraordinary Ego.”

“The Call to Holiness” reminds us how crucial it is to wed individual passion for holiness to perpetual church renewal and social reform. Evangelicals have an abundance of historical resources for all three tasks. The document also talks about radical, cruciform love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that “the way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle.” The Puritan John Bunyan would have said the same.

The difficulty is to find the wisdom to renounce the things that hinder us, while welcoming all the good gifts that God has given us. There is also an opposite difficulty: having the wisdom to affirm and enjoy the good things God gives us, including the fruits of human culture, without lapsing into worldliness. Many of us are rightly wary of falling back into the old “Christ against culture” pattern. Yet we must always engage culture with a critical eye. Even as Jesus loves all human beings, he will judge all human works.

This is a moment of opportunity for us to renew our churches as outposts of the kingdom, as models of an alternative culture that witnesses both to God’s judgment and his redeeming love. And it is a time for us to examine our own lives and band together to “provoke everybody into ‘fits of love and kindness’ ” (Heb. 10:24, Cotton Patch).

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Related Elsewhere:

A Distinctive People | A new document from Evangelicals and Catholics Together challenges narcissism, individualism, and spiritual sloth.

More articles on Evangelicals and Catholics Together include:

What I’d Like to Tell the Pope About the Church | Responding to the main criticism Catholics have against evangelicals: that we have no doctrine of the church. (June 15, 1998)

Evangelicals and Catholics Together: A New Initiative | “The Gift of Salvation” A remarkable statement on what we mean by the gospel. (Dec. 8, 1997)

Evangelicals, Catholics Issue Salvation Accord | The Gift of Salvation,” a document expressing significant theological agreement between evangelicals and Roman Catholics, is drawing mixed reactions from leading evangelicals. (Jan. 12, 1998)

Betraying the Reformation? | Two responses to R. C. Sproul’s critical assessment of the ecumenical document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” (Oct. 7, 1996)

Other ECT statements mentioned in this article are available from First Things:

Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium

The Gift of Salvation

Your Word Is Truth

The Communion of Saints

More about Ecumenism is available on our website.

More about the pursuit of holiness includes:

Dick Staub Interview: Jerry Bridges Is Still Pursuing Holiness | After 25 years, The Pursuit of Holiness is a classic. (April 26, 2004)

Testify! | A glimpse inside the world of “holiness testimony,” through the story of an ex-slave woman evangelist. (July 02, 2004)

Christian History Corner: Holy America, Phoebe! | It swept across church lines, transforming America’s urban landscape with its rescue missions and storefront churches. Yet today, the “holiness movement” and its charismatic woman leader are all but forgotten. (May 14, 2004)

Going through a stack of old Time magazines recently, I was astonished at how different the world looks now compared to 30 years ago. Back then Time was running cover stories on "The Coming Ice Age"; now we hear about global warming and devastating tsunamis. World maps showed a large red stain of communism spreading across Indochina and Africa. Economists predicted the end of American dominance and a new global parity among the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and Europe. Of all continents, Africa offered the brightest prospects for growth.

A more recent magazine, from August 2001, reported breathlessly on the latest developments in the mysterious disappearance of a House intern and her affair with a California congressman. I searched in vain for the words al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Somehow, it seems in retrospect, prognosticators missed all the defining political events in my lifetime, including the war on terrorism and the end of the cold war. As I went through the stack of magazines, I tried to remember how it felt at the time, when I truly feared the prospect of nuclear war, when Saddam Hussein was a U.S. ally, and Lebanon was the most dangerous place in the Middle East.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman once explained that in writing history she tried to avoid "flash-forwards." When a historian writes about the Civil War, for example, he or she should resist the temptation to include "Of course we all know who won" asides. From the early months of the war right through until Gettysburg, it looked as if the South might prevail. Tuchman tried to avoid flashing forward to a later, all-seeing point of view; she sought instead to recreate history for the reader, conveying a sense that "you are there."

Right now, regarding issues like the war in Iraq, the ascendancy of China, nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, we truly are "there," unable to predict how history will turn out. Thirty years from now some researcher may pore over a stack of contemporary Time magazines with similar bemusem*nt.

As I reflected on our poor record at predicting the future, it struck me that the Bible often centers on the act of waiting. Abraham waiting for just one child. The Israelites waiting four centuries for deliverance, and Moses waiting four decades for the call to lead them, then four more decades for a Promised Land he would not attain. David waiting in caves for his promised coronation. Prophets waiting for the fulfillment of their own strange predictions. Mary and Joseph, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth, and Zechariah waiting like most Jews for a Messiah. The disciples waiting impatiently for Jesus to act like the power-Messiah they longed for. (Even cousin John flagged: "Are you the one, or must we wait for another?")

Still we wait. The nuclear threat from the U.S.S.R. has faded, along with the U.S.S.R. itself, but now we worry about "dirty bomb" attacks from terrorists. We no longer fear glaciers, except as they melt. A massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean proved a lot more damaging to Southeast Asia than did the SARS virus. How will all these crises turn out? Still trapped in the "now," we simply do not know.

Jesus' final words at the end of Revelation are "I am coming soon," followed by an urgent, echoing prayer, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus." That prayer remains unanswered in an era of history perilously suspended between his first appearance, as a baby in a manger, and his second, as the one with blazing eyes described in one of Revelation's many flash-forwards.

In the last days, said Peter, some will scoff at the prospects: "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." Peter himself believed that "the end of all things is near." After two millennia of waiting, scoffers rule the day.

In a German prison camp in World War II, unbeknownst to the guards, the Americans built a makeshift radio. One day news came that the German high command had surrendered, ending the war—a fact that, because of a communications breakdown, the German guards did not yet know. As word spread, a loud celebration broke out.

For three days, the prisoners were hardly recognizable. They sang, waved at guards, laughed at the German shepherd dogs, and shared jokes over meals. On the fourth day, they awoke to find that all the Germans had fled, leaving the gates unlocked. The time of waiting had come to an end.

And here is the question I ask myself: As we Christians face contemporary crises, why do we respond with such fear and anxiety? Why don't we, like the Allied prisoners, act on the Good News we say we believe? What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse?

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