Page 3404 – Christianity Today (2024)

Reflective people of all walks of life find themselves, from time to time, pondering what I refer to as “dark thoughts.” What makes these thoughts “dark” is not that they are particularly macabre or especially sinister. Rather, it’s that for most of us of post-college age, the activities of daily life—working, caring for children or aging parents—occupy the preponderance of our time during the light of day, and it’s only when the lights go out—when our heads make contact with our pillows in the dark of night—that a space opens between our ears wide enough to accommodate them. The sorts of thoughts I have in mind are these: Is the life I am now living a meaningful one? Do I really believe that mom’s multiple sclerosis has come to her from God’s fatherly, providential hand? Given the religious pluralism that surrounds me, and the devout and sincere believers of other faiths that I know personally, is it really rational for me to continue to believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation? Except for people like me, who get paid to ponder and explore such questions in the light of day, these are thoughts that typically pay us a visit under the darkness of night, when we slip under our covers and wait patiently for sleep to come and usher us off to temporary rest.

The dark thought that I want to explore here is this: Could it be that God’s saving love is so radical that, eventually, all human creatures are saved? For me this thought was most recently occasioned by the death of my best friend from college. Sam and I met at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1987. We were enrolled in the same philosophy course with a professor who would become our favorite—Stephen Vicchio—and with whom we would take many more courses. After graduating from UMBC I went on to do graduate work while Sam eventually made his way into computer programming. I loved Sam. He was raised Jewish, although his pilgrimage of honest and sincere truth-seeking led him to embrace more characteristically Eastern forms of belief. Sam was a kind soul, and he leaned into life with the kind of childlike openness that inspires. He was, indeed, a dear friend. Over the course of 17 years Sam and I talked for countless hours about God, the Christian faith, and other matters of fundamental human concern. Shortly before Christmas last year, Sam called from the hospital and left a message on my answering machine. He told me that the doctors were going to have a look at his brain in order to figure out the source of a persistent headache. They found it—an inoperable brain tumor. Nine months later I helped to bury him.

Sam, so far as I know, did not die in Christ. Is he damned? Forever? It’s a question that pricks the heart when someone you know and love—someone who, so far as you know, did not embrace Christ—dies. It’s an important question, one that I tell my students ought to keep them awake at least a few nights of their life.

Many of us who were raised in the church have come to understand hell in the terms bequeathed us by Dante, as a place of unremitting torture and horrible agony. Such, we believe, is the eternal destiny of unbelievers. There is biblical evidence for the doctrine of eternal damnation. For example, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, “They shall suffer punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” Now, depending on whether your theological sensibilities incline you toward a tough-minded, double predestinationist view, or toward a kinder-gentler picture of God, the doctrine of eternal damnation will either sit comfortably in your bosom or make you squirm. Okay, perhaps it makes all of us squirm; or at least it should!

The doctrine of double predestination, in case you’ve forgotten, is the belief that before the foundations of the earth God chose some to spend eternity in heaven and all others he destined to be eternally damned. Let us call those who believe that some people will spend eternity in hell, separated from God as the source of eternal joy, separationists and let us call those who believe that, eventually, all will be saved and reconciled to God, universalists. If you believe in double predestination, then you are a card-carrying separationist. But one doesn’t have to believe in double predestination in order to embrace separationism, and indeed most separationists don’t. Separationism is, we might say, an equal opportunity employer; lots of staunch Arminians embrace the belief as well!

I must confess that I find themes in the Reformed branch of Christianity to which I belong that nudge me toward universalism. For example, I believe that God’s purposes ultimately will be realized (that God is sovereign and ultimately gets what God wants). And I believe further that among God’s purposes is that human beings flourish. Since I cannot fathom how human beings could possibly flourish if they are burning in hell forever, or even just separated from God as the source of all joy—forever—I admit to experiencing a strong tug toward universalism. The alternative, it seems to me, is to believe that frail, finite creatures like ourselves can ultimately and forever thwart God’s purposes. That thought doesn’t travel down my Reformed gullet very smoothly.

And just as there is biblical support for the doctrine of eternal damnation (and therefore, separationism), so there is biblical support for universalism. Consider for example Romans 11:3, “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (RSV). Many Christians I know believe that universalism entails a rejection of the doctrine of hell and the elimination of the need for Christ’s reconciling work. That, however, is simply false. Although some universalists believe that all roads lead to the heavenly banquet—the way of Christ for us Christians, the way of detachment for Buddhists, etc.—others are what we might call Christocentric universalists. Christocentric universalists believe that there is only one way to salvation and that way is through Christ’s reconciling work. They simply believe that eventually all will be reconciled through Christ. And what of hell? Well, the Christocentric universalists that I know believe in it. They simply believe that hell is not forever, that eventually, God’s love will be found so winsome and irresistible by hell’s human inhabitants that all will finally embrace it.

The universalists I know are also committed to what we might call a doctrine of “second chances,” i.e., the belief that although some reject God prior to death, death does not close off further opportunities to embrace God. Indeed, if one is a Christocentric universalist who believes that an existential embrace of Christ is necessary for salvation, and who also believes that some people in fact reject Christ during their earthly existence, then such a universalist must be committed to a doctrine of second chances.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is not only universalists who believe in second chances. I know separationists who believe that for some—those rendered psychologically incapable of receiving the gospel because of upbringing or those who die ignorant of the gospel—God extends further opportunities for reconciliation post mortem. But those same separationists also believe that even with further chances some will either not embrace Christ or will persist in their rejection of God’s love, forever. Separationism is not, therefore, incompatible with belief in second chances.

So what are we to make of all this? My commitment to the authority of the Scriptures requires that I submit to what it seems to me those Scriptures teach on this matter. While it seems to me that there is some biblical support for universalism, the evidence does not strike me as overwhelming and conclusive. On the other hand, while there is some biblical support for the doctrine of eternal damnation, the evidence does not strike me as having the same force as the evidence for separationism.1 Is the evidence for separationism stronger than the evidence for universalism?

Being a philosopher I confess a certain fondness for drawing distinctions (especially when I find myself in a pickle). And I find the following distinctions to be rather helpful here. Suppose someone tells you that it is raining. You might, as a result of being so told, come to believe that it is raining. Alternatively, if you left the windows to your house open you might, as a result of being so told, come to fear that it is raining. Or, supposing that it hasn’t rained in quite some time and that your garden is looking rather withered, you might, as a result of being so told, come to hope that it is raining.

I guess I would put my thoughts this way. I do not believe universalism to be true. For if universalism is true, then it is a flat metaphysical impossibility that any should reject Christ forever. And it seems to me possible that some should do just that. Nevertheless, as a result of the evidence there is in its favor, and considering the prominent place universalism has held in the thinking of some of the church fathers, I think that there is room for me as a Christian to hope that universalism is true. Indeed, even if one believes that separationism is the clear and unambiguous view of Scripture, there is room to hope that universalism is true. After all, with the American League Championship Series this past October standing at 3-0 in favor of the Yankees, I firmly believed that the Yankees would win the series; nevertheless, I continued to hope that the Red Sox would win. (And win they did!) Likewise, I find myself hoping—with all my heart hoping and even sometimes praying—that God’s love extends to everyone, and that, eventually, that love will have its way with all and all will embrace it. Speaking personally, few things would bring me such joy as to embrace, once again and forever, my dear friend Sam, whose voice from the hospital that fateful day I cannot bring myself to erase from the telephone answering machine.

Kevin Corcoran teaches philosophy at Calvin College. He is the editor of Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons (Cornell Univ. Press).

1. The Greek term that gets translated as “eternal” in the passage from 2 Thessalonians literally means “age-enduring,” and is in fact used by Paul himself in other places (Rom. 16:25-26, for example) in ways that clearly do not mean forever or eternally. So the biblical case for eternal damnation is complicated by the Greek.

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

I will never forget that March morning in 1996. Just as I was preparing to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to pick up my husband, who was coming in on a flight from South Korea after a long missions trip, the phone rang. It was from my son, Tom, who was then 34.

“Mom,” he said, “please be extra careful on the freeway this morning. It’s still dark, and there are fog patches.” I assured him that I’m always careful when driving the freeways. “I know you are,” said Tom. “It’s just that I had a nightmare. I dreamt that when you were driving to pick up Dad, something hit your windshield and you lost control of the car and crashed into other cars around you.”

“Oh, Tom, what a terrible dream,” I said. “But don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”

“But Mom, promise me you’ll leave a little earlier and drive very carefully.”

“I will, but don’t worry. I am sure you just had a bad dream.”

As I backed out of the driveway, I said a quick prayer for myself—and for Tom. He clearly had been shaken by that dream, since he had called me when he normally would have been asleep.

I suspected those kinds of dreams came from an overheated imagination, and perhaps unconscious expressions of personal fears. But, to assure my son, I promised him I would call him when I returned home with his dad.

Crisis on the freeway

About 45 minutes after leaving home, I was preparing to transition onto another freeway when suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard a horrendous noise that sounded like a gunshot going off beside my head. An unidentified object had slammed into my windshield.

And then I felt it.

Splintered pieces of shattered glass were flying into my face, hair, and mouth.

Trembling like a leaf and spitting glass pellets out of my mouth, I clung desperately to the steering wheel in an effort to keep the car under control and slowly guided the vehicle to the side of the road. Peering out of my side window I looked for some sign of abnormality. Cars of all shapes and sizes were speeding past me. I could see nothing unusual, and no one seemed to be paying much attention to me with my blown-out windshield. It was like any “normal” morning on a southern California freeway. Cautiously, I made my way back onto the road and continued on to the airport.

When I arrived at lax and examined my car more closely, I discovered that besides the shattered glass, the windshield frame was bent and there was a six-inch slice in the roof that looked like a can opener had ripped into it. But more disturbing was the large hole in the windshield. It was just above the level of my forehead.

Up until the minute my husband, Dick, cleared customs and met me, I had been able to keep my emotions under control. But the moment we embraced, I began to shake uncontrollably. Dick assumed it was because I was so happy to see him.

As we walked toward the parking garage, I told him about the accident. He was horrified to see the condition of the car and the little piles of shattered glass by the driver’s door that had fallen off my lap when I had exited the car.

As soon as we arrived home, I phoned Tom.

“Son, you’ll never believe what happened to me on the way to the airport…”

As I related my story, all I could hear was a grand silence. Tom was literally speechless.

“Tom, I believe you were God’s messenger today,” I told him. “The Lord most certainly sent me a warning through your dream.”

More than luck

The next day, when the auto-shop repairman looked at the car, his jaw dropped in disbelief.

“Lady, you were very lucky,” he said. “From the look of this impact, you should have lost control of this car.”

He explained that whatever hit my car had slammed into the windshield frame first, bounced off the windshield just above my forehead, and then hit the roof.

“If it had hit the windshield first,” he added, “it would have penetrated directly into your head and you wouldn’t be here today.”

I smiled and said, “Luck had nothing to do with it.”

In my heart I knew it was all about a loving, gracious Lord. God protected me. But I believe He also wanted to strengthen the faith of my son, who at that time saw no need for God in his life. The irony was that, in order to wake him up from his own self-sufficiency, God gave him a nightmare. A nightmare that not only helped save my life, but that gave my son a new vision of reality and brought him back to the Lord. Sometimes dreams do come true.

Doris J. Grace is a writer living in California.

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

It might be possible, C. S. Lewis suggested, to create a decent theology based on nothing more than dirty jokes; of all the animals, only human beings seem to find something strange or unnatural about their bodily functions, and this, in turn, may be a clue not only to our spiritual natures, but also to the fallenness that has impaired the relationship between our spiritual and animal natures. Could something similar be said about a phenomenon like suicide? As far as we know, human beings are the only animals that consciously choose to end their own lives, and in this, we may see evidence of the freedom and self-knowledge which are ours as beings imprinted with the image of God. Paradoxically, it is our very ability to negate the breath of life that indicates God once breathed it into us.

Million Dollar Baby, which won Academy Awards for picture, director, and two of its co-stars, kicked up a firestorm of debate with its surprise third-act twist. For its first hour and a half, the film seems like a Rocky-style movie about a scrappy young boxer, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), who rises to the top of the boxing world under the reluctant sponsorship of a trainer named Frankie Dunn (played by director Clint Eastwood). But then an illegal punch thrown by one of Maggie’s opponents, combined with an unfortunately placed stool, breaks Maggie’s neck and turns her into a quadriplegic who will be hooked up to a respirator for the rest of her life. As her body wastes away, forcing the amputation of one of her legs, Maggie asks Frankie to kill her, just as her father once killed their similarly crippled family dog. Despite the warnings of his ineffectual priest, Frankie does as Maggie wishes.

Much of the debate has swirled around whether the film “promotes” euthanasia. Films tend to glamorize whatever they portray, simply by focusing our attention on it and giving it big-screen treatment, and this tendency may be even more pronounced when the actions onscreen are performed by famous actors who dazzle us with their skill. Eastwood has insisted that his film doesn’t promote euthanasia any more than his Westerns and detective stories promote gunfights—and he has a point. Million Dollar Baby hardly romanticizes the right to die. But on a much deeper level, it is still a basically nihilistic film, not unlike Eastwood’s previous multiple Oscar-winner, Unforgiven (1992).1

One of the film’s recurring themes is abandonment. Frankie is abandoned by the fighter he was managing before Maggie comes along. One of the gym’s regulars has been stuck in that city ever since his mother’s boyfriend abandoned him there. Frankie and his best friend, Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), were abandoned by a manager in Mississippi a few decades ago—and Frankie himself abandoned Eddie by hitching a ride out of there, until his “conscience” got the better of him and he walked two miles back. Most important, Frankie has been abandoned by his daughter, who returns all his letters unopened, and he feels abandoned by God, from whom he senses no forgiveness. And finally, Frankie is abandoned by Maggie, who demands that she be allowed to die. It is this grim overarching worldview, rather than Maggie’s decision, that is the film’s most unsettling aspect.

For a film that does endorse and promote euthanasia, one need look no further than The Sea Inside, the Spanish film which won this year’s Oscar for foreign-language film. Director Alejandro Amenábar has broached the subject of death before, in Open Your Eyes (1997) and The Others (2001), but there he did so through the genre trappings of ghost stories and science fiction. The Sea Inside, based on the life of quadriplegic right-to-die activist Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), is a much more conventional sort of movie, in which Ramón lies in his bed and explains his point of view to everyone who visits, while friends and activists argue his case before the courts. Life, he says, is “a right, not an obligation.” Religious objections to euthanasia are brushed aside—a lawyer argues, in effect, that secular courts have no business addressing the alleged sanctity of life—or caricatured, as a quadriplegic priest whose wheelchair won’t fit in the stairwell hectors Ramón from downstairs.

Amenábar introduces some interesting flights of fantasy that help make his film a work of cinema and not just a political tract. Ramón, who lost the use of his arms and legs after a diving accident nearly three decades ago, becomes smitten with Julia (Bélen Rueda), one of the lawyers working on his case, and at one point, when she says she is going down to the beach for a stroll, he imagines himself getting up out of bed, running to the window, and flying over hill and forest until he meets her in a passionate embrace by the sea. Curiously, this scene kind of works against the film’s central theme; if Ramón can say his life has no dignity because he is confined to his immobile body, the aerial shots serve as a reminder that we, too, are confined to bodies that cannot do certain things, such as fly—and just as we transcend our limitations through art, technology and, yes, aerial shots, so too Ramón transcends his limitations by writing books of poetry.

The Sea Inside was the second Oscar-winning foreign film in a row to climax with a scene of assisted suicide; the year before, the award went to Quebecois director Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions. But Arcand is a much more complicated filmmaker, and his film is infused with a critical realism and a generosity of spirit that allows for a wider range of responses than a simple yea or nay. This is partly because the film builds on Arcand’s two previous Oscar-nominated successes: The Decline of the American Empire (1986), a satire of highbrow hedonism and sexual mores among the intellectual class, and Jesus of Montreal (1989), a film about actors looking for meaning in a shallow, media-driven world.

The Barbarian Invasions is, primarily, a sequel to the former film. Rémy (Rémy Girard), the serial adulterer of Decline, is now long divorced and estranged from his children, but his friends and family reunite when he finds himself confined to a hospital bed with just a few months left to live. Rémy’s son Sébastian (Stéphane Rousseau), a successful securities broker now living in London, has never forgiven his father for the dissolution of their family, but out of concern for his mother, Louise (Dorothée Berryman), he comes home and bribes hospital administrators, union officials, and others to ensure that his father has the best treatment possible. Rémy’s friends and colleagues, including two of his former mistresses, are simply happy to swap stories and relive the days when they pursued vain philosophies (“Is there an ‘ism’ we haven’t worshipped?”, asks one) as well as their own personal pleasures.

Rémy is such a charismatic character—as any successful womanizer would have to be—that it is tempting to think the film shares his lecherous superficiality. (When he recalls watching the spiritual masterpiece Heaven over the Marshes at a Catholic school, all he can talk about is how he masturbat*d at the sight of the star’s thighs.) But Arcand is also careful to show moments of panic and introspection, when Rémy drops his guard and worries that he has made no mark on the world. A history professor by trade, he bemoans the fact that he never published anything significant, and his students barely notice when a teaching assistant takes over for him in the lecture hall. When someone reminds him that death is a law of nature, and many other people will die at the same moment that he does, Rémy fails to find any consolation. “I won’t be here any more,” he insists. “Me. I’ll be gone for good. If at least I’d learned something. I feel as helpless as the day I was born.”

Rémy bemoans the fact that he has not yet found any meaning. But Arcand does, at least, hint at where meaning can be found—and he does this by subtly introducing a handful of characters from Jesus of Montreal into this parallel storyline. In particular, we learn that Constance Lazure (Johanne-Marie Tremblay), the compassionate single mother who joined the passion play in that other film, has become a nun and is stationed at Rémy’s hospital. She teases him about his chances in the afterlife, and she encourages Sébastian to be reconciled to his father. In one scene, after Rémy rants at her about all the atrocities committed throughout history, Constance tearfully replies, “If what you say is true, and history is a series of abominable crimes, then someone has to exist who can forgive us. That’s my belief.” Rémy, silenced by her sincerity, can only say, “I envy you.”

When Rémy finally leaves the hospital, Constance takes his hand and kisses it. “Embrace the mystery and you’ll be saved,” she says. Rémy kisses her hand in reply, but it is not clear that he ever does know what to make of this advice. His friends take him to a cottage by a lake, where he is surrounded by natural beauty as the daughter of one of his mistresses gives him a morphine overdose. Yet the last image on his mind is that of the movie star’s naked thighs; right to the end, he misses the spiritual mystery before him, preferring to dwell instead on the most banal kind of sensuality.

Like Million Dollar Baby, The Barbarian Invasions finds solace in the precious, rare gift of friendship in an otherwise indifferent universe. But the two films set up their climaxes in radically different ways. Frankie is entitled, and perhaps even required, to end Maggie’s life because he helped her to find a sense of purpose through boxing; rather than emphasize the possibility that Maggie could go on to find new forms of purpose, Eddie tells Frankie that, when Maggie dies, she’ll go out cherishing her recent successes. For Rémy, however, death is the ultimate hollow experience, after a life spent in hollow pursuits. Admittedly, Rémy’s death is depicted in terms as beautiful as possible, but it is to Arcand’s credit that he allows for the possibility that there just might be something better out there after all.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in British Columbia and writes about movies.

1. In Unforgiven, bounty hunter Bill Munny (Eastwood) is a wicked man who is haunted by nightmares of his good wife’s rotting, worm-covered corpse. Hence, when Munny famously says that “we all have it coming,” he is not referring to meaningful judgment—as many Christian interpreters of the film have supposed—but rather to meaningless death: good or bad, it doesn’t make a difference; every one of us will still die.

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

Perhaps you got one too—the map a friend emailed to me the day after the 2004 presidential election, the one that shows a blue America of Canadian provinces and seacoast states capped over a vast, red territory labeled “Jesus Land.” The implied equation of Christian faith and right-wing politics also appeared on a picket sign my daughter saw when she and a carload of like-minded college students drove to an airport to protest the arrival of George W. Bush. Ranked in a vertical row and each stamped with a large black X were the letter “W,” a swastika, and a cross.

My first reaction, both to the map and to my daughter’s description of the sign, was to say, “They asked for this.” Of course, by “they” I meant the Religious Right. I meant the way that a large number of American Christians seem willing to offer their political allegiance to any candidate who professes his allegiance to Christ. I meant what has emerged as a compelling, if ultimately unfair, argument for the bankruptcy of evangelical religion. Once you make “confessing Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior” the sine qua non of faith, haven’t you made yourself the dupe bar none of any party willing to make the same confession?

So much for my first reaction. My second thought was that I might be seeing early glimmers of a backlash against evangelicals and even against co-religionists of different stripes. When Iraq war veterans begin to evaluate how they came to be maimed, when the post-Depression generations get their first bitter taste of pre-Depression social “security”—when the falling abortion rate reverses itself because fewer and fewer people have the means for supporting an extra child while more and more children lack the wherewithal to avoid getting pregnant, a whole lot of fairly amiable people sitting down to potluck suppers in church basem*nts are suddenly going to seem like the ugliest, stupidest creatures to have walked the earth since the dumber dinosaurs stumbled into tar pits. People who clucked about their “values” while missiles blew children apart. People who thought they were making a “faith statement” when they clapped a Jesus-fish on the tailgate of their ten-mpg SUV. What makes me so confident of a backlash? The fact that I’m a Christian and that’s how some of these people are starting to look to me.

So much for the second reaction. In a more sober state of mind, I began to reflect on a strange mix of duty and irony. The duty is that of thoughtful Christians to expose the hoax of “compassionate conservatism” and to resist the drift toward theocratic despotism. The irony is more complex. For one thing, there is the irony that in doing what I’ve just stated, Christians of liberal sympathies could emerge as the true evangelizers; that is, as the only voice that isn’t preaching to the choir. And it may be, too, that nonbelievers will emerge as the true “people of exile,” conscious of what it means to weep by the waters of Babylon and to preserve the memory of a Zion where international law was respected and the hungry were fed. The prophetic words “Comfort ye my people” may in the end be taken to heart by the very same people who have hitherto had no use for prophecy. The stone that the builders rejected will become the chief cornerstone.

So much for irony. And so much for self-congratulation. Christians of my ilk face a difficult temptation, one to which I could easily have succumbed had I stood where my daughter stood at her protest. I mean the temptation to distinguish oneself from the Christian Right for no other reason than to preserve one’s own respectability. I mean the temptation to care more about justifying oneself than about fighting for justice. I think of those Hellenizing Jews of the Maccabean period who joined their Greek masters in decrying the backwardness of “fundamentalists” who wouldn’t try a nice piece of pork.

We are back to irony, because the temptation I’ve just described recapitulates what I see as the very error of the Religious Right. It is the error commonly committed by the person who desires more than anything else to be “a player.” Isn’t that the desire that has led so many Christians to become the lapdogs of global capitalism and preemptive militarism: the wish to come away from the margins and into the mainstream, to count as a force to be reckoned with—to count, quite literally, in the polls? If I give way to the same desire that informs the Christian Right under the pretext of opposing the Christian Right, what have I accomplished?

Of all the sayings attributed to Jesus perhaps none are as relevant to our current political situation as these two: “One’s foes will be members of one’s own household” and “Love your enemies.” Should it come as such a surprise to find so many of my political enemies within my faith tradition? I intend to oppose them as enemies. But I also intend to make it clear that if you want to attack Christians as Christians, then you are also attacking me. I want no exemption. No safe conduct pass. I intend to wage guerrilla war within the borders of Jesus Land, but it is still my country.

I can’t claim to have all this figured out. Earlier this year I published an essay attacking the Religious Right in Harper’s Magazine. In the following month an essay of mine attacking “compassionate conservatism” appeared in Mother Jones. And here I am writing to affirm my solidarity with Christians in Books & Culture. As I said to my wife the other evening when we were trying to replace a broken light switch in our kitchen, “I know for sure these are the three wires I want. I’m just not sure I’ve got them connected to the right screws.”

Garret Keizer is author most recently of Help: The Original Human Dilemma (HarperSanFrancisco).

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

It takes a certain temperament to herald reconciliation on God’s holy mountain. It takes hope. One doesn’t think of Joy Williams as a writer much given to hope. Those who know her fiction are more likely to remark its fatalism and its outré collection of jaded vagabonds and shallow sophisticates; of uncanny teenagers and preternaturally knowing children; of women who drink too much and think too critically; of the lonely, the broken, the undone.

Williams’ cabinet of misfits is often compared to Flannery O’Connor’s, and justly so. The comparison with O’Connor goes further, too, as both authors entertain fertile religious themes. But where O’Connor’s work is avowedly, if obliquely, redemptive, Williams’ is dubiously so. And Williams’ sacramentalism, if it can be called that, encompasses nature first and only fitfully leaks back to humanity. Indeed, the most remarkable presence in the work of Joy Williams is neither personal nor transcendental. What sets Williams apart is the animals.

Williams is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. She has penned two highly regarded collections of short stories, a volume of essays, and a book on the Florida Keys, part history and part travel-guide. She lives mainly in Key West. If she can be called a Christian writer—and I think she can—she is the kind who wrestles endlessly with faith and who broods deeply over death and the human condition. There is a word for believers like Williams, and that word is “unconsoled.”

Williams is also a brilliant ironist, perhaps peerless, and much admired by other writers for her consummate craft. Of the many qualities of her prose—clarity, economy, intelligence, complete mastery of the sentence—the most conspicuous is authority. Writing for Williams is a truth-telling enterprise, an act of witness, a form of prayer.

In Honored Guest, her most recent collection of stories, all these gifts are on display, along with the usual Williams suspects. Her characters are wholly American, wholly contemporary, and decidedly unlikable. They are hip yet stupid, clever yet wrong, vain in the desert, cruel in Nantucket, clique-ish in friendship, soulless in marriage, selfish in death. They are given to philosophical asides, yet trapped in subdivisions. Williams exposes our social frauds mercilessly, and in this she approaches Oscar Wilde. There are Wildean episodes (a woman actually misplaces her husband at a highway gas stop) and Wildean lines (“She’d like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little”). There are echoes of Tolstoy, Eudora Welty, and of course O’Connor. Is Williams really this good? In her finest stories, yes. “Congress,” “Hammer,” “Visiting Privilege,” and “Anodyne” are the best of the offerings in Honored Guest, though the other stories have their beatitudes, and their clever bits, and their overpowering grief.

Death haunts this book, and it is for the dead that Williams reserves a special and intimate affection. It is the same intimacy she shares with animals, who figure here as emissaries, or illuminations, of holiness—Williams does not hesitate to suggest they are angels. In these stories, animals comfort, enlighten, suffer and die for us, peripherally. They are fabulous, in the sense that they are granted thoughtfulness, emotion, and intent. They have natural life, but also resurrected life. In the mysterious and haunting story “Congress,” a lamp fashioned from deer hooves becomes a woman’s boon companion after her husband, a forensic anthropologist, is permanently disabled in a freak (and freakish) hunting accident. “The lamp,” Williams tells us,

had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God—the mouse, the bear, the turtle, and so on—and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses, but the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence.

To read Williams is often to behold an immaculate, holy world—but it is not the world of men. In “Hammer” she describes a painting of beavers on a lake:

The colors of the landscape were deep and lustrous. The water was a fervent rumpled barren of green, the trees along the curving shore like cloaked messengers. Everything seemed fresh and clean with kind portent, even the sky. God had poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, Angela thought solemnly, to each as much as it could receive. Beavers were peculiar and reclusive, but that was their nature. They were not frivolous beings. They behaved responsibly and gravely and with great fidelity.

The mute and still are also vessels of grace in these stories. Taxidermy specimens, beached whales, and mechanical dogs are treated with the same tenderness as the living, and may even have attained a kind of transfigured blessedness that surpasses living and dying—a condition Williams describes in “Congress” as “beyond all that.”

Williams has long been noted as a fierce, some would say frightening, defender of wildlife. Her collection of essays, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, a finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award in 2002, is a withering book, not for sissies or nature sentimentalists. One man’s profit is another man’s loss, wrote Montaigne. One person’s profit is many animals’ loss, argues Williams. We are all complicit in the destruction of nature—hunters, developers, latté-drinkers, suv drivers, preservationists, progressives—and everyone alive is trespassing on the lives of animals. Her accusations are scathing, one feels blamed reading them, sorry to have existed at all, yet the passion of the assault and the unrelenting sarcasm of the invective are dazzling. Even her cadences are blows:

Zoos are pretty, contained, and accessible. These new habitats can contain one hundred different species—not more than one or two of each thing, of course—on seven acres, three, one.

But Ill Nature also prescribes, and it does so in deliberately biblical tones:

Have few desires and simple pleasures. Honor non-human life. Control yourself, become more authentic. Live lightly upon the earth and treat it with respect. Redefine the word progress and dismiss the managers and masters. Grow inwardly and with knowledge become truly wiser. Think differently, behave differently. For this is essentially a moral issue we face, and moral decisions must be made.

The question to ask about this call to conversion is why? Animals are part of the answer, and they can be an occasion for conversion, but it is not for the sake of nature that we grow inwardly and become wiser. It is not for ecological balance that we refuse death. Animals are innocent; only humans can become holy. Morality, especially Christian morality, must explain why this is so. If earth is the last place, and death is the last word, then all our philosophy and religion is dilettantish at best.

In the title story in Honored Guest, a hairdresser tells her teenaged client the Japanese folktale of the bear cub who was nursed by humans, raised as a member of the tribe, respected by villagers as an “honored guest,” until one day according to custom it was tortured and sacrificed. As in all fairy tales and folktales, the easy congress between human and animal is brought up sharply by worldly reality, and by nature itself. Transfiguration never lasts. But to this seemingly self-evident fable the teen retorts, “Was there something more to it than that? Did something come after that?” The remark is a typically Williamsesque one, querulous, contrarian, and slightly obtuse. Yet if it is naïve it is also intuitive. The materialist demands an explanation from the manifest world. The reformer demands justice. The believer demands redemption.

The stories in Honored Guest have got as far as grace and transfiguration. But they stop shy of redemption. It may be that Joy Williams does not quite believe in redemption, at least for mere humanity. Some holiness does attend to those Williams characters who carry mortality lightly yet responsibly, who are wounded but not therefore cruel, who are afflicted but do not despair—a caretaker named Carl, an ex-con named Deke, a lovelorn gardener, a bereaved brother, a farsighted marksman. But they are sympathetic only by default. The gift of nobility, of willed and intelligent sacrifice, of fidelity to life and courage in the face of death—these are all on the side of animals. That is unfortunate. Joy Williams’ stories are illuminating, burning, intelligent, and large, but there is nowhere in them to lay the human heart.

Sara Miller’s reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Century, and elsewhere.

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

Is it cooler to be a Jedi or a Jesuit? A band of Jesuit novices argued this question on the way to see the then-new Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace. The Jedi side had a lot going for it. These twentysomethings had all been raised on the Force, the Dark Side, and Obi-Wan. The rich mythology had not a little to do with their pursuit of mystery and desire to save the world.

Yet Jesuits were cool too. Cool enough to make these smart, attractive, basically well-adjusted young men vow to poverty, chastity and obedience. Another movie added to their sense of vocation: The Mission. They didn’t just weep at that film’s portrayal of sin, conversion and nonviolence in colonial South America. They signed up with today’s version of the Society of Jesus.

On the way out of the colossal disappointment of Menace, the novices were quiet. The Jedi side had so obviously lost that the argument was no longer fun. One finally sighed: “Definitely cooler being a Jesuit.”

The pairing of God and the movies, variously construed, has been the subject of a raft of recent books, dozens in the last several years alone. Interest goes both ways—theologically minded writers paying more attention to movies, even as the movies seem to be paying more attention to God—ensuring that our authors have lots to work with. How ought Christians go about discerning God’s presence at the movies?

With enthusiasm, according to longtime Calvin College Professor Roy Anker. The movies don’t just physically depend on the light shining through miles of film, they also depict well the divine Light that occasionally shines at the edges of things. In Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies, Anker organizes his detailed readings of mostly blockbuster films over the last 30 years around Frederick Buechner’s tripartite discussion of the gospel as “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.” In Anker’s hands, great movies become great religious commentary: The Godfather, with its chilling portrayal of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone making baptismal promises as his henchmen slaughter his rivals, shows us tragedy. Robert DeNiro’s Rodrigo in The Mission, looking strikingly like Jesus, weeping and laughing at his absolution from the very Guarani whose children he had abducted for slaves, demonstrates the redemptive comedy of the Christian story. The grand, sweeping mythology of Star Wars suggests the extravagant promises of the true fairy tale of the gospel. Anker adds to Buechner’s scheme a fourth section called “found.” Here, for example, is Kevin Spacey’s suburban dad in American Beauty, converted—just before he is shot—from seeing his daughter’s friend as an object of sexual conquest. The slogan of that film, “look closer,” could describe Anker’s overall approach. Movies can help us see “the world as it truly is: resplendent and suffused with a radiant, implacable love that shows itself in the exquisite beauty of the very fabric of the created world.”

Anker’s enthusiasm as a theological interpreter of the movies occasionally gets the better of him. I don’t doubt that Superman‘s creator meant for Kal-El, his white haired father Jor-El, and the green crystal that teaches the former about the latter to hint at the Christian Holy Trinity. But should Christians agree to so thin an analogue for the Godhead we worship? Is Luke’s willingness to die instead of killing Darth Vader really “a perfect rendition of the notion of substitutionary atonement”? Films may be best at showing the faint light around the edges, the numinous spirituality that is broadly interesting to the movie going public, and less at showing the particularities that make specific religions most precious to their adherents. To speak in literary terms, they may do better with Tolkein-style typological allusions to faith rather than Lewis-like allegorical showings.

We might expect an antidote to reading movies as Christian allegory in Robert Johnston’s Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film. Johnston seeks a genuine dialogue between Qoheleth and Hollywood. For better or worse, “the sages, the wise men and women of our age are often filmmakers.” Their explorations of paradox and contradiction, of how to live life in the shadow of death, function as “modern-day parables.”

While the use of Ecclesiastes could provide some greater circ*mspection as we compare faith and film, the dialogue Johnston seeks often collapses into monologue: filmmakers talk, Christians listen. Quotations from Qoheleth pepper the book but normally as decoration after Johnston makes a film’s point. He tips his hand with a chapter about “existentialism” in the 1950s and ’60s. That movement’s vaguely religious primary themes are those of the movies treated in this book as well: “Life is random, and yet life is precious and wonderful too.” Johnston speaks glowingly of “common grace” as the “Spirit’s positive role in culture’s outworking.” While the church has struggled to see this “grace” in the last few years, “given 9/11, the decline of the stock market [!] and the war in Iraq,” nevertheless common grace teaches us that “beauty must be found within the terrible or not at all.” Such nebulous spirituality is abundant in popular culture and traceable in Ecclesiastes. But it is, at best, the lowest common denominator for a “dialogue” between church and world, like the truncated vision of “diversity” that collapses when anyone dares actually to be different.

In A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor write in an edgier manner than Anker or Johnston. Detweiler and Taylor point to the importance not just of the suburban midlife crisis film American Beauty but also to the raw and bloody cult classic (and popular smash) Fight Club, which a friend of mine calls a “violent instantation of the Year of Jubilee.” They echo Beauty‘s admonition to “look closer”: to “discover the surprising messages God may already be broadcasting through the mass media.” Popular culture as revelation?

The authors proclaim that “God has never been more alive in western culture.” Stop frowning—things aren’t getting worse, they’re better than ever! Detweiler and Taylor have a message for church leaders who would absent themselves from the rich conversation about God underway in the public square. They must be conversant with the “new canon, the new literacy, and join the new conversation. Only in this way … can we allow God to be fully God.” Popular culture as intrinsic to the divine life?

Detweiler and Taylor know whereof they speak, living in California, personally participating in the entertainment industry, and teaching on religion and pop culture at Fuller and Biola. Their clarion call reminds me of the Vatican II-era rhetoric insisting that Catholics must leave the cloistered walls of the church and engage the world. Evangelicals must leave comfortable shores and sail amidst the turbulence where lie both risk and adventure. But I wonder. Some Catholics feel they left behind too much in the cloister and blessed too much in the world. These authors have a terrific eye for God in the movies and elsewhere in popular culture. But must we baptize what we find there, or speak of it as revelatory to such a degree that anyone not frequently in theaters is missing out on the very word of the Lord?

It may not be accidental that all four of these authors teach at evangelical institutions. Their books imply a hypothetical disputant for whom any moviegoing at all is sinful or at least problematic. Their response of “movies are where the action is” may be inspired by their experience with students from fundamentalist homes who are just learning to engage with broader culture. From my vantage as a mainline Protestant whose tradition has baptized “the culture” for centuries, even after it stopped asking for our blessing, this sounds like a clarion call for a battering ram through an open door. Of course we’re always already engaged with “culture,” whatever that is. We go to movies because, well, that’s what middle class Americans do for entertainment. Lo and behold, sometimes they talk about God. Should we celebrate, as these authors suggest, reach for the remote, as I’m inclined to do, or something else?

Rodney Clapp may have the best answer. His recent essay, “God is Not ‘A Stranger on the Bus,’ ” included in the Brent Laytham-edited volume, God Is Not, refuses to thank Joan Osborne simply for mentioning God in a popular song. As a Christian, Clapp wants to remind us that the story told about God in that tune is not fully true. To ask “what if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us” may express a profound longing with enough cultural traction to become a hit on the airwaves. But it still represents “religion” as Karl Barth critiqued it—humanity’s attempt to lob our projections skyward and then idolatrously worship our own creation. Clapp shows that for the Bible, being one of the “crowd” is not necessarily a laudable station—think of the revelry at Sinai and the demand to “crucify him!” We cannot simply cheer because others do, or even because movies use the “G” word. But case by case we can discern God in specific films, praise what is praiseworthy, and argue with the rest. If we are to have genuine “dialogue,” that is.

Some years after their argument about the respective coolness of being a Jedi or Jesuit, what would those former novices now say? Many have left the order, having found the demands of poverty, chastity, or obedience too costly. Others, though they have stayed, seem aged beyond their years (perhaps by too many shouting matches about whether the “conservatives” or the “liberals” are right on some issue or other). However praiseworthy it may be to be a Jesuit, it no longer looks cool either.

But there’s the rub. In that Society, in any society of actual humans, there is the chance for both woundedness and restoration. Movies, great as they are, are tightly packaged two-hour segments that are neat and then over. We walk out and the arguments we were having on the way in still linger in the air. But at least with flesh and blood we can ask forgiveness, break bread, hold one another, and worship God. Glimpses of light through film are amazing things, miracles even. We all know the movies rule. But a church gathered around Scripture and sacrament—that’s really where the action is.

Jason Byassee is an assistant editor at the Christian Century.

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

Contemplating death and judgment, many have come to the conviction of that Southern writer on things Christian and spiritual, Robert Benson, who recalls a conversation with a priest who spoke about the all-inclusive and conquering love of God:

One of us who was listening asked Father Kelly what that sort of thinking did to his concept of heaven and hell. “Oh, I believe there is a hell all right,” he said, flashing his grin again, as though he had heard this question before, and from some folks who were more theologically imposing than we were. “I just do not believe there is anyone in it.”1

Of course there are those who suspect mischief behind the grin of the priest; indeed, at least since Dante, many have already taken the opportunity to tell us who will be where. And then there are others—the majority today, probably—who prefer evasive tactics. But not Alan Segal, who meets the subject head-on in Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (the subtitle appears in a slightly different form on the dustjacket). Segal, the Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College (Columbia University), asks straightforward questions: Is heaven (or hell) merely the projection of our own hopes and fears? Is all our talk about the afterlife a justification for this present life and a warrant to get others to fall in line? Is it merely rhetoric for expressing our moral values?

Life After Death is a wide-ranging, massively erudite, but readable survey of ancient views of the afterlife, with stops in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, ancient Israel, Iran, the classical world (mostly Plato), and then a long stop in the Second Temple period with serious looks at Daniel (where we are treated to mini-soliloquies on stars and angels), the apocalyptic writings, and early and patristic Christianity, followed by long stops with the rabbis and Islam. At each stop Segal works to show the correlation between values on earth and their warrant in the afterlife.

The Apostle Paul provides but one notable test case for Segal. For Paul, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, the (real) body would be raised indeed, but (somewhat in contrast to the views of many of those same contemporaries) the raised body would be a “spiritual body.” Though Segal does not adequately expound the paradigmatic passage in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, focusing instead on 1 Corinthians 15, his study of the nature of the resurrection body in Paul provides an opportunity to explore a sociological hermeneutic for an Apostle who seems to be “between two worlds”: the apocalyptic Jewish world, where the resurrection of the body is real and earthy, and the Greek (post-Platonic) world, where instead the focus is on the immortality of the soul. In Segal’s reading, Paul’s theological background among the apocalyptists and his missionary drive to speak to Greece created the need for both sorts of lives after death: in the intermediate state one has immortality of the soul until the final state, where one is granted the resurrection of the body. And here Segal points us to the correlation between one’s vision of life here and now and warrants for that life in the afterlife. In short, his book presses us to ask this question: Is the Church’s witness to redemption in Christ simply an illustration that, in the words of the Peruvian savant Mario Vargas Llosa, “societies have the religions they require”?2

We should pause to note that, a year or so before Segal’s book appeared, N. T. Wright published his massive tome The Resurrection of the Son of God, in which he charged contemporary biblical scholars with smuggling their own preoccupations into the text, turning “resurrection” into a metaphor for “life after death.” Wright drove the point home that both the Testaments witness to a belief instead in re-embodiment or, as Wright so cleverly put it, “life after life after death.” Scholarship, Wright argued, needs to alter its view. For Segal, in contrast, the mischief of viewing life after death “from below” is inevitable, all we really can do, and ultimately a good thing. In our projections we discover who we are. Perhaps we need to hear this more clearly, even as we dissent from Segal’s conclusions. Doesn’t much of what we think heaven will be like—the heaven of popular imagination—boil down to what we’d like heaven to be, what we need in order to justify our present life?

No other book does for us what Segal’s book does. It takes our eschatologies and turns them around to face us; in the act of looking anew at them we discover (to our shame) not so much what the Bible says but our projections. Segal does this by contextualizing ancient beliefs about life after death in the day-to-day life of the societies that gave rise to them. I wondered—I couldn’t avoid the thought—what the Left Behind series is attempting to justify for a life in this world through its confident images of the future. I also pondered the many who don’t believe in life after death and how that might establish a set of warrants (or lack thereof) for life in a postmodern world.

Segal has neither the hopefulness of many Christians nor the despairing irony or cynicism of a radical postmodernist. But he offers few consolations to the one who wants to know “what will happen when we die?” His sociological hermeneutic is quietly presented in a discursive, rather than argumentative or polemical style. Nevertheless, his judgments are unambiguous. The afterlife is not empirically verifiable; notions of that afterlife correlate (too) highly with social structure, social power, and social strivings to be accidental. These notions are worthy of attention, for something can be learned from each culture’s vision of life after death about what was most important to that culture. Behind each, he concludes, we find the human yearning for transcendence. And maybe little more.

Segal refuses to engage with the long history of Christian discussion and debate over the resurrection of Jesus Christ. An adept when it comes to religious “experience,” he thinks the “resurrection of Jesus” was a genuine experience on the part of early Christians. But we are not treated to a serious historical analysis of whether or not Jesus’ resurrection happened in the traditional sense that the early Christians believed and that Christians today affirm each time they join in the Apostles’ Creed.

Why not? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to Segal. Why? I think the following quotations tell us why. But let me preface this battery of statements with the observation that Segal is himself a person of faith, that he in no way means to demean other faiths, and that of all the Jewish scholars who work also in Christian texts few have matched his sympathy. Still, his hermeneutic leads to an afterlife “from below”:

Not surprisingly, we have seen that every group in society normally searches for a transcendent justification for its religious position, lifestyle, and political position. Each group within the society develops an afterlife doctrine to parallel and legitimate its own position, taking the elements of its position from the historical past of the society and attempting to argue that its interpretation is the truest representation of it. This combination of functions and structures, we are used to calling religion. … It is the afterlife that provides the answer to every unbalanced equation.

One is reminded here of Dante, who wrote about hell, purgatory, and paradise and assigned people to various stations. And this is how Segal sees all of us: he who fashions the story assigns the glory. Nothing more clearly epitomizes Segal’s view than this claim, after considering Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet:

But is not culture a kind of drama in which we play ourselves and give ourselves lines and then judge ourselves as the audience? So perhaps that is how, in the end, we must treat our religious values—as a script for the performance of a life—that is, as very important and meaningful lines to us because they are beautiful, true, and enduring in their own way, even if they are fiction [italics added].

It comes as no surprise, then, that Segal’s final chapter makes a flourishing appeal for American pluralism and tolerance.

This leaves us in an unappealing position. Whatever we believe, whatever canonical or eclectic views of the afterlife we hold, we must face the surety that all are, at best, but approximations of what may await us. Maybe nothingness awaits us all. We have no real way of determining which view, if any, is right. From our social context within a specific culture, the best we can do is articulate what appeals to us most.

Unless, of course, it is true that Jesus was actually raised from the dead—in which case we come face to face with one person’s life after death on earth.

Segal’s is one of the most challenging books I’ve read in some time. What it has done for me is not what Segal intended (or maybe he did): it has made me much more conscious that I am a Protestant who believes in sola scriptura and an Anabaptist who thinks that what Jesus had to say about life after death is where we ought to begin.

Scot McKnight is Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. He is the author most recently of The Jesus Creed (Paraclete).

1. Robert Benson, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp. 60-61.

2. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Trench Town Rock,” The American Scholar, Vol. 71 (2002), p. 56.

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

This issue we feature a guest column in the form of a letter from Susan Wise Bauer, who has been writing for Books & Culture from the early days. —JW

I have just had the most bizarre evening watching the National Theatre’s staging of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. (I’m in London, working at the British Museum for a week. This history-of-the-whole-world project is a great gig; I can go do research pretty much anywhere and chalk it up to the necessities of work.) I bought a ticket a while back because I was thoroughly curious. How on earth would you stage such a thing?

Well, it was painful. I actually enjoy a good fantasy, but fantasy should at least be consistent. “The knife we have just discovered is the only one that will kill the Authority!” No particular reason. “You can become the Bearer of the Knife if you learn to master and use your pain!”—this straight out of thin air, three hours in, with absolutely no setup. “I will kill him if I see him … but I cannot go with you!” No particular reason. “The dust is seeping through the rips between worlds!” Er … why would that be, exactly?

All of the middle-school children around me (the performance is sold out to the end of its run) loved it, though. I figured out eventually that their imaginations were seized by the pure mechanics of taking a fantasy novel and putting it on stage. Going out, do you know what I heard over and over? “I can’t believe they figured out how to do that!” That was what held the attention for three and a half hours. Nicholas Hynter figured out how to put demons and talking bears and rifts in the universe onstage, and yes, it was interesting to see. (Innovative use of puppets and very big masks.) I had a glass of wine at the interval, which made the beginning of Act II a bit more interesting, but by the middle of the second half I was in a state of eye-rolling and sigh-heaving exasperation: If I hear one more idiotic garbled badly researched rehashing of popularized gnosticism plus quantum mechanics, I will EXPLODE, that’s what. And please don’t get me started on the one character with an American accent—a Texan with a cowboy hat, a Burt Reynolds beard, a pet jackrabbit, and a penchant for blasting off his six-shooter at anything in sight.

But then I realized that no one was following the gnosticism. It was a Cool Spectacle. I had dinner afterwards at the Mezzanine Restaurant overlooking the Thames, which had one other occupied table in it (the first week of March is definitely the best time to visit London). The party at the next table turned out to include one of the lead actors, who had removed a huge amount of character makeup, not to mention claws and tail (if you haven’t read Pullman, it’s a long story) in record time. He was having a late dinner and champagne with a couple of friends who had just seen the production for the first time. One friend says: “So has Philip Pullman been around?” and I shamelessly eavesdrop.

Actor: “Yes, he’s been in and out, he’s rewritten a lot of the lines for us. There was a lot of protest about the way the play treats Christianity, you know, but he was absolutely right, he stuck to his guns and it’s just brilliant, very brilliant, really a wonderful commentary on Christianity.”

Friend: “Oh, I’m so ignorant about all of that, you know? Hey, how many levels are there in that theater? How did they get all those scenes up?”

Actor: “Well, they’ve put half a million quid into rebuilding the Olivier stage, you know. … “

Half an hour of “How did they do that?” followed. They never did get back to the gnosticism.

This, mind you, was only a few hours after I’d been to Evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Which was lovely, let me say, shiver-inducing and gorgeous, but also a spectacle. All of the responses had become choral pieces. This, I guess, is inevitable when you have a cityful of tourists. But in fact there were only eleven of us there; the choir outnumbered us, and I realized about halfway through that all the other people must have been tourists, because they were looking at me to figure out when to stand, sit and kneel. And considering that I was raised a Baptist, that’s tragic.

It was much more than spectacle for me; the beauty had actual meaning. But only because the service followed the same pattern of confession, forgiveness, worship, prayer, and blessing that was already filled with significance for me, thanks to the last fifteen painful, non-gorgeous, non-shiver-inducing years of learning how to live in a believing community back in Charles City, Virginia. Essentially the performance of the service itself was spectacle, just as much as the Pullman play; but a spectacle whose audience had moved on.

Maybe the audience will come back, in time. It’s odd to realize that what held that audience at the Pullman play was the difficulty of putting special effects onstage, in this era of amazing movie effects. But that’s why they were enthralled. Movies have lost their thrill, frankly; all of the work that goes into producing the effects goes on behind the curtain, as it were, and the audience simply accepts them. Sure we can put a hundred thousand Orcs besieging Helm’s Deep on screen, why not? (Er … was it difficult?)

But to do this onstage has, paradoxically, become that much more impressive, because the audience can see the seams. When the seams are invisible, everyone forgets that they’re around. Not too long ago I found some old records (yes, records) that I’d loved in high school, dragged them out and played them on a very old portable record player for my kids. The sound quality was horrendous. But the boys were fascinated. My ten-year-old, who plays CDs and incredibly elaborate role-playing computer games without once stopping to ask how it all works, said, “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” and went to find an encyclopedia so that he could figure out how that needle makes a sound. Spectacle gains most of its power when the seams are visible.

Tomorrow night, mercifully, I get to go see Macbeth as staged by the RSC. And yes, I am doing some work between theater visits. Today I saw the actual tablets of Gilgamesh and the cuneiform Babylonian version of the flood story. I stood there with my mouth hanging open and took, oh, thirty pictures or so (all of which will probably look like clay tablets, when I get them home and developed).

Yours, Susan

Susan Wise Bauer is the author most recently of The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Norton). She’s writing a history of the world, also to be published by Norton.

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

“‘I believe,’ said Bonhoeffer, ‘that God can and wants to create good out of everything, even evil.’ … In America, very recently, we have also seen the horror of evil and the power of good.”
—George W. Bush, speaking to the German Bundestag, May 23, 2002

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not a comfortable saint; his is a sainthood of contradictions. Since September 11, 2001 no Christian figure has been appealed to so much or so broadly as Bonhoeffer. But Bonhoeffer has not been a single saint. He is now the pacifist Bonhoeffer, the just-war Bonhoeffer, the resistant Bonhoeffer, even the terrorist Bonhoeffer. We are left to ask, where is Bonhoeffer the man in all of the invocations of his name?

The reasons for Bonhoeffer’s appeal are varied, but they rest on the “impressive unity” formed by Bonhoeffer’s life and thought. As Stephen Haynes has written in The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, “Bonhoeffer’s life reveals a symbiosis between thought and existence that sets him apart from most public figures in his time and our own.” Bonhoeffer is relevant now because he was an incarnation of the incarnation, not just a guide along the way. But because we are appealing to a life rather than a principle, we must reckon with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with unresolved tensions.

Bonhoeffer spent much of his life articulating a theology of peacemaking based on the Sermon on the Mount, even as Germany grew ever darker under the Nazi regime. But when he was unable to engage the German church to speak truth to the Nazis, he became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, “to cut off the head of the snake.” When this plot was uncovered, Bonhoeffer was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually executed, hung naked with a piano wire.

Bonhoeffer’s life is wrapped in the dilemma of faithfulness. And we who come after him are left with that dilemma no more clearly resolved. Are we to follow Bonhoeffer in his calls toward peacemaking, or are we to go his way of drastic action for the sake of justice? Some would-be followers deny that there is any ambiguity in his example. They make him a pacifist and only a pacifist, or a model just warrior who rejected his earlier idealism. To step out of line with either position is a step that demands correction.

When John Buchanan, editor of The Christian Century, wrote that Bonhoeffer “move[d] to the Niebuhrian conclusion that the evil of Nazism should be opposed on Christian ethical grounds,”1 he was upbraided by a reader who responded that “there is no hint that Bonhoeffer ever justified this choice on the grounds of Niebuhrian ‘Christian realism’ or denied that pacifism was the most faithful Christian commitment.”2 In the same vein, Walter Wink wrote a short piece in Sojourners reminding readers that “American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action—that it’s a sin—and that he throws himself on the mercy of God.”3

The divided witness of Bonhoeffer is represented in a more nuanced way by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Stanley Hauerwas. Both Elshtain and Hauerwas have been theologically engaged with the “war on terror,” and both have drawn on Bonhoeffer, yet they arrive at very different positions.

Elshtain has sought to frame the current “war on terror” in terms of classical just-war theory. Her argument has centered on the need to act decisively against those who target the innocent. In Just War Against Terror, she writes that “to do nothing as people are slaughtered makes one complicit in injustice.” She goes on to appeal to Bonhoeffer, saying that he “judged harshly those who retreated into the ‘sanctuary of private virtuousness‘ when confronted with hideous injustice,” and she rejects standards of moral purity that would cripple the ability to respond to rampant evil. ” ‘Responsible action,’ ” she says, “involves contamination—one cannot altogether avoid getting ‘dirty hands’ when acting in the political world in a responsible way.”

Toward the end of Just War on Terror, Elshtain argues that “Unless America proposes to close itself up behind its borders … we can and we must become the leading guarantor of a structure of stability and order in a violent world.” For Elshtain, responsible action lies with the United States and other democracies guided by the rule of law. But for Bonhoeffer such action rests on faith and allegiance to God; any state involvement is placed under this allegiance. Against “private virtuousness” Bonhoeffer does not offer the responsible nation state but the Church. In the passage that Elshtain quotes above, Bonhoeffer goes on to say, “Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God.”4

Furthermore, security was not among the goals of Bonhoeffer’s actions against Hitler. Writing before his involvement in the Abwehr plot, Bonhoeffer addressed “a world which feverishly arms to guarantee peace through arming, a world whose idol has become the word security.” He asks, “How could one think that these demons could be driven out, these powers annihilated with a bit of education and international understanding, with a bit of goodwill?” But against these humanist attempts at peace, Bonhoeffer does not offer a theory of just war. “The crucified Christ is our peace,” he writes, “The world trembles only before the cross, not before us.”5

In a 1996 article in First Things, Elshtain wrote, “Some of Bonhoeffer’s later readers have looked to his writings for a general rationale for opposing tyrannical power even to the point of violence. But they have been disappointed, for Bonhoeffer never penned a full-fledged justification of his determination to resist.” She goes on to say, “Bonhoeffer refrained from writing such a justification because he feared that it might be taken as grounds for resistance to situations less dire than his own.”6 We are left to ask, is our time so dire?

In The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Geoffrey Kelley and F. Burton Nelson argue that “The recent war against terrorism elides well with Bonhoeffer’s own decision to join a violent conspiracy, not as a virtuous decision in keeping with the gospel, but as a sinful, albeit tragic necessity in order to protect the lives of the innocent.” However, they add, “Bonhoeffer’s spirituality that challenges us to ‘dare peace’ stands as a bracing reminder to America’s gung-ho ‘patriots’ that war … is still a denial of the gospel teachings of Jesus Christ.” And if we were to ask what Bonhoeffer might look like in our time, Kelly and Nelson suggest, the answer would be Stanley Hauerwas. “Hauerwas’s critique of militarism and of the churches’ failure to emphasize the teachings of Jesus Christ in assessing moral issues,” they write, “is uncannily reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s own unpopular, lonely struggle for a restoration of gospel values in the Hitler era.”

Hauerwas has engaged with Bonhoeffer in Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. While Hauerwas admits that Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the Abwehr plot “seemed to make him an unlikely candidate to support a pacifist position,” he argues that Bonhoeffer’s “attempt to reclaim the visibility of the Church as the necessary condition for the proclamation of the gospel” creates a framework from which to reclaim the Church as peaceable community.

Rather than approaching Bonhoeffer as a moral exemplar, Hauerwas appeals to Bonhoeffer as a theologian in service of the Church. For Hauerwas, what Bonhoeffer gives us is a vision of how the Church should act responsibly in a nation state. While Bonhoeffer sees the state as an ordained “restrainer” that establishes and maintains order, it is the Church that must remind the state of its obligations. It is the Church’s existence as a truth-telling community that gives it this role. “The failure of the church to oppose Hitler,” Hauerwas writes, “was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world.” And it was in the context of this failure that Bonhoeffer took action at the risk of incurring guilt through violence.

On the imperative of truth-telling Elshtain and Hauerwas agree, and it is here that they are closest to Bonhoeffer. But how can we begin to speak truthfully? Elshtain calls us to the task of describing things as they are. The attacks of September 11 were clearly murder, an act of evil that we must respond to. But Hauerwas is more cautious; with Bonhoeffer, he reminds us that telling the truth sometimes requires more silence than the world would like. “No good at all can come from acting before the world and one’s self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not,” Bonhoeffer once said. “Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very unqualified.”7

In the world after September 11, we are faced with the question of when to speak. It is a terrifying question, but we are not without direction. With all the speaking of his name, we can still turn to Bonhoeffer, wrapped in the silence of his contradictions, as our guide.

Ragan Sutterfield is a farmer and teacher living in Arkansas.

1. John M. Buchanan, “In Adversity,” The Christian Century, April 6, 2004, p. 6.

2. Ted Grimsrud, “Letters,” The Christian Century, May 18, 2004, p. 53.

3. Walter Wink, “The Bonhoeffer Assumption,” Sojourners, January/ February 2002, p. 33.

4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, enlarged ed. (Touchstone, 1997), p. 5.

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom, ed. Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), p. 104.

6. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Bonhoeffer and the Sovereign State,” First Things, August/September 1996, p. 27-8.

7. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 159.

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

The title of Lauren Winner’s first book, Girl Meets God, invoked courtship to describe conversion; her new one gets right down to the earthy aspects of human romance. Real Sex aims to rehabilitate the virtue of chastity in the Christian life. This title seems calculated to raise eyebrows on both sides of the colon. First there’s real sex—wow!—and then we hit “chastity” in the subtitle, a noun scarcely in the language any longer, hard to speak without either a smirk or an embarrassed inflection (or both?).

Some words of definition are in order straightaway. For Winner, “real” sex means the gift of embodied love that is only authentic when it conforms to God’s creative intent, within marriage. This is decidedly not the “faux sex” to which Americans have grown accustomed. To our spiritual peril, we have gotten used to the “lies our culture tells about sex”: that sex is for adventure and pleasure (not babies), hugely important to happiness but also no big deal, just another form of recreation, my affair and none of your business.

Christians, especially singles, need help if they are to remain faithful in such a vale of temptation. To the author’s regret, the church often does a poor job providing this help because it is hampered by its own untruths. Too often churches are hysterical about sex, or else make chastity sound easy, “sweet and obvious.” Unrealistic abstinence preaching gives struggling singletons only the thinnest support in romantic temptation and makes forgiveness hard to grasp when they fall.

It’s a little disconcerting that a book on chastity repeatedly has to remind readers that sex is important. Even Christians seem to need persuading. A Christian friend asks Winner, “Shouldn’t I focus on learning to pray, and deal with the sex stuff later?” Another, not identified by faith, demands, “Look, we’re two consenting adults. Why is what we do under the sheets anyone else’s concern?”

Or, since Winner is writing from Charlottesville, Virginia, we might ask the question in terms lifted from that town’s patron saint, Thomas Jefferson: does it break my leg or pick my pocket whether my neighbors have no sex partner or twenty? What difference does it make? It makes a great deal of difference, Winner insists, but explaining why takes some effort. Sure, there are possibilities of unplanned pregnancy and the costs of unwanted children and social breakdown. The case becomes more convincing when she returns to Scripture. Two points of theology indicate why the intimate behavior of Christians matters: because God intended sex to be exclusive and marital, and because Christians are united in the body of Christ. Therefore, what I do with my body touches everyone else in the Body of Christ. What we do privately matters because community matters.

Community looms large throughout the book. It is both a motivation to purity and a big part of the solution to sexual temptation. Here Winner speaks beyond the singles crowd to address Christians more broadly. She reminds us that congregations pledge to support baptismal candidates and married couples in keeping their vows. Thus, it is the community’s responsibility to help its members embrace discipline, uphold accountability, and mediate forgiveness. Purity is an active practice. The book’s second half explores particular means, like prayer, fasting, and pastoral care, that church communities can use to nurture chastity.

Married people are supposed to serve the community by imaging God’s love—another reason why what we do in our private lives matters to everybody else. Married couples, though, can run aground on the culture’s falsehood that sex always is supposed to be exciting. Winner musters some enthusiasm for Christian marriage manuals that translate “The Joy of Sex into a Christian idiom,” but she also acknowledges serious reservations about them. Her objection is that these books often accept the claim that sex must be thrilling, a transportation out of ordinary life. In response, she takes inspiration from Wendell Berry to offer a paean to “household sex,” sex amidst the sock-sorting and dishwashing and bill-paying realities of everyday existence, rather than sex as deliverance from the dreary routine. Sometimes awkward, this kind of intimacy is nevertheless real and good: “Our task is not to cultivate moments when eros can whisk us away from our ordinary routines, but rather to love each other as eros becomes imbedded in, and transformed by, the daily warp and woof of married life.”

The trouble is that for those who live in our time and place, with Temptation Island on TV, Cosmo at the check-out, and racy catalogs in the mail, that worthy suggestion is at a distinct disadvantage, to say the least. To borrow Walker Percy’s phrasing, it is hard to imagine the hip, young American single settling for “settling down with a wife and family any more than Jove settling down with Juno. Juno—yuck! Wife, children, home, fireside, TV, patio, Medicare in Florida, growing old together … yuck! Better to grow old alone in the desert, sit on a rock like a Navajo.”

Perceptively, Winner argues that Christians should counter not only promiscuity but a secular view of romance that renders household love unattractive, squeezing out “the sorts of values that marriage and sexual intercourse, when understood as distinctly Christian practices, must be made to honor.” This is why my neighbors’ twenty partners do me harm (and not them alone, but also the sitcoms provided for their entertainment and the commercials trying to sell them things)—not breaking legs but twisting our view of the body and our sexuality.

Christians should have a way of describing sex that is characterized neither by prudish disapproval, nor by adaptation of secular norms, nor by domestication of romance. Winner gives two excellent reasons to reject extramarital sex, one vertical (very vertical: God’s command) and one horizontal (honoring our brethren in Christ). The case would be strengthened by a theology of the body, like that developed by Pope John Paul II, which describes sex as an opportunity for profound self-giving. Such a theology gives us reason in our own persons to live our sexuality seriously and well, unmasking casual sex as a kind of self-betrayal and rendering marital intimacy more than merely a realistic accommodation—rather, something worth our aspiration.

It makes perfect sense that a Christian book honoring real sex should praise marriage, although Winner admits this came as a surprise to her. (“Initially I set out not to mention marriage at all. … I was sick of hearing about nuptial bliss.”) In part her change of mind came with her own recent marriage. In fact, much of the book springs from the author’s experience, from her own romantic past, conversion of life, and attempts at chastity, right up to her newly wedded state. Her proximity to the life of a young single Christian is both a resource and a limitation. She is likeable as a fellow pilgrim on the way to purity. She handles hard subjects with frankness and delicacy. But chastity and eros have a long history in Christian reflection, and while some theological heavy hitters—St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis—get walk-on parts in Winner’s account, she might rely on them still more. Our culture may present its own special stumbling blocks to virtue, so we should listen for faithful voices that address us from outside it.

Finally, since the book reflects Winner’s experience, one wishes she had held off a while to write it. Maybe even until the next important milestone in real sex had been crossed: motherhood. Childbearing makes practical, visible, and incontestably real that other aspect of sex according to God’s purpose: the procreative. It allows the unfolding of another dimension of sexuality, and not only in the honey-not-after-this-kind-of-day-with-the-kids manner.

Then again, maybe this should make us expectant for Winner’s next book. For while Real Sex might be of particular interest to “spares and pairs,” Winner impresses us with the conviction that chastity is not just the exercise of the celibate but, insofar as it means inhabiting one’s sexuality consistent with the gospel, everybody’s business.

Agnes R. Howard teaches English and history at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts.

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