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Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930
By Bruce Kuklick
Princeton University Press
253 pp.; $29.95
Bruce Kuklick, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, is a scholar of unusual breadth. He has published substantial books on twentieth-century philosophy and nineteenth-century theology, but also on the modern presidency and on baseball in Philadelphia. Most of these earlier books are marked by skeptical, but also respectful, treatment of traditional faith. So it is as well with Puritans in Babylon, a revealing study of the motley crew of businessmen, ne'er-do-wells, academics, and adventurers who got formal study of the ancient Near East off the ground.
Kuklick is not overly concerned about details of archaeological practice; it is archaeology of head and heart that concerns him. The book does deal expertly with the pioneering American expedition to Nippur (south of Baghdad) and the emergence of formal academic disciplines to study the Middle East. But its central concern is how the historical mindset spurred by archaeological study undercut traditional Jewish and Christian belief in the historicity of Scripture. Kuklick's careful treatment of this complex subject includes sympathetic discussion of William Foxwell Albright, a leader in modern archaeology who yet retained a traditional faith. But Kuklick himself sides with those who saw modern archaeology assisting higher criticism of Scripture in a "reordering of the worldview of the twentieth-century thinker" that rendered traditional belief impossible. What makes this book so effective--but also so challenging--to those who would combine traditional faith and rigorous scholarship is Kuklick's own stance. He exhibits keen self-awareness, for example, that "many learned conclusions [rebutting traditional belief] were not compelled by the evidence but instead were produced by the culturally grounded inventiveness of scholars." But along with that critical self-awareness goes a firm conviction that no serious alternative exists to the "enormous conceptual shift" that came about as both presupposition and conclusion of modern scholarship. This book, and the personal corpus of which it is a part, set a formidable agenda for those who think otherwise.
-Mark Noll
History of Vatican II, Vol. I: Announcing and Preparing Vatican Council II, Toward a New Era in Catholicism
Edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak
Orbis
527 pp.; $80
Historians make bad prophets, but even a historian would not be irresponsible to think that the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) will long be regarded as one of the most significant Christian events in the twentieth century. Along with the shifting in the center of Christian gravity from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, the miraculous Christian endurance under state-Marxism, the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism, Christian reactions to war and holocaust, and (perhaps) the theology of Karl Barth, the effects of the Second Vatican Council seem especially destined as shaping forces in the twenty-first century and beyond. Roman Catholicism, after the council, would never be the same. In its wake, some parts of the Catholic church have become more evangelical, some have rushed toward modernism, and others have tried to regain a conservative Catholic path.
This hefty book, the first of five projected volumes, provides a nuts-and-bolts view of how the council came about. It takes the story from Pope John XXIII's call on January 25, 1959, less than three months after he succeeded Pope Pius XII, to October 1962 and the arrival in Rome of about 2,300 cardinals, archbishops, and bishops. The book's five authors (from Italy, France, Brazil, Germany, and the United States) fill in what happened between these two dates with exquisite attention to detail. They do not try to hide the fact that powerful factions were competing strenuously for advantage. For Protestants, there are full sections on reactions from outside Catholicism, as well as extensive discussion of the large role of Scripture in preconciliar deliberations. Carefully noted details supplement expert accounts of grand strategy. For what lies ahead in the next four volumes, one of the most intriguing of those details is the record that Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, archbishop of Gnesen and Warsaw, reached Rome's main train station "at 8:55 a.m., on October 7, 1962; he was accompanied by fourteen Polish bishops, among them Karol Wojtyla of Krakow."
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