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Books & Culture, Nov/Dec 1998
Robots with Choice?
I am grateful for C. Stephen Evans's thoughtful and suggestive "Robots with Choice?" [July/August]. But I wonder whether he too quickly dismisses the salvific import of explicit theological beliefs. In rejecting R. C. Sproul's suggestion that theological misconceptions can influence our salvation or damnation, Evans labels Sproul's idea "fantastically implausible," adducing the example of a simple pious believer whose "salvation would not depend on a mistaken belief about how her faith was produced in her." But surely one's self-understanding is crucial to one's character, and if the believer thought that her faith was the product of her own decision (with God waiting on her choice), then perhaps that would have deleterious effects on her character; by describing her as good, that is, and then ascribing to her false beliefs, Evans has stacked the deck against Sproul's position.
I do not mean to come down against Evans here; rather, I want only to complexify the issue somewhat. Ultimately this debate relates to the nature of grace, and one might look to historical resources for assistance. One resource to study would certainly be the exchange between Luther and Erasmus over free will and salvation, in which Luther argued—to my mind persuasively—that doctrinal matters were critical to the ordinary believer's salvation. One of the burdens Christianity puts on us is a fairly high level of thoughtfulness; Evans's argument—powerful, attractive, and illuminating as it is—ought to allow that such matters may not be, after all, quite so irrelevant.
Charles T. Mathewes
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Va.
Yoder's Dark Side
About a year ago I became entranced with the theological writings of Stanley Hauerwas and, by association, John Howard Yoder. It was with great distress that I learned of the latter's death early this year. I have therefore been anxious to read as many of the obits on him as I have been able to find. I was pleased to see the one carried in the May/June issue of B&C. However, after doing some investigating, I have come to believe that we in the Christian academic community have erred in our almost uncritical adoration of the man and his work.
Not being a Mennonite (but marrying someone whose family is deeply rooted in the tradition), I was unaware of the darker side of John Howard Yoder's life. My mother-in-law happened upon a Yoder obit in the March 3 issue of
The Mennonite (a newly merged publication bringing together Gospel Herald and The Mennonite) and rightly noted that I "might be interested in it." To my astonishment, the short piece revealed that Yoder had engaged in a long pattern of sexual misconduct, preying on young female students for many years. The obituary made no attempt to thereby dismiss the man's admittedly herculean contributions to our understanding of Christian social ethics. But it did frankly struggle with the enormous contradictions between what Yoder taught and how he lived.
It reminded its readers that "many of our leaders have had feet of clay." I do not wish in any way to suggest that B&C was wrong in lauding Yoder for his wonderful and thoughtful scholarship and teaching. But I struggle to understand how B&C could print the following:
Despite his broad openness to others' points of view (or perhaps because of it), Yoder's relations with his own denomination were sometimes prickly. Though he was frequently recruited, his Mennonite employers and colleagues were not always reluctant to see him move on to another job. Perhaps these difficult relations were a price he paid for the prophetic and experimental style in which he taught and lived, exploring ways not taken or long neglected, but always in what seemed to him biblical light.
I would guess that the many women Yoder preyed upon would also have a difficult time with this characterization and might find its reference to the "experimental style in which he … lived" painfully ironic. I have been told by some of my wife's relatives that his sexual misconduct was the essential reason for his leaving Elkhart for Notre Dame. I do not know this for a fact. I am told that it was the road of least resistance at the time. Yoder did submit fully to the discipline of his church, and was, in time, fully restored. For this he and his church are to be commended.
What bearing should a man or woman's personal life have on the way we receive his or her ideas? I, for one, will continue to read and cherish John Howard Yoder, and will even assign his works to my students if the appropriate opportunity presents itself. His work continues to inform my own scholarship. But it will be difficult for me to plumb the depths of Yoder's Christian social ethics with my students while pretending that the realities of the man's life somehow did not exist or do not matter. They matter a great deal, if only to remind us of the tension that living in the "already" and the "not yet" confronts us with. In presenting an alternative way of thinking about ideas, books, and scholars, I hope B&C will not again seek to hide the clay feet of our intellectual heroes.
Jay Green
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
Lord of the Pets
As a subscriber and fan of Books & Culture, I was disappointed to see my book, On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals, so poorly and misleadingly reviewed in your September/October
issue. My book explicitly rejects the secularity of the animal-rights movement and retrieves a biblical theology of grace as the basis for animal welfare. As an evangelical theologian, I extensively analyze the Eucharist, Atonement, the Bible, the afterlife, the doctrines of Creation and the Fall, the church fathers, and ecclesiology for their implications about animal welfare. While it is true that I draw from the ecofeminist emphasis on caring for animals, I explicitly and repeatedly reject the ecofeminist sacralization of nature (and its implicit pantheism). The reviewer bizarrely suggests that I draw from Matthew Fox, a writer I mention only once in the book, in order to completely denounce and reject his views. The quote from me about the Eucharist being used to justify the food chain is not a "bewildering line" but a summary of Fox's strange position, which I clearly explain and critique.
Why is it "weird," "awkward," and "silly" to think that God's incarnation in Jesus Christ can empower us to transgress species barriers in order to love other animals? Why should we "titter" at the prayers of children for their pets? Why is it "dubious and freaky" and "gobbledygook" to think about the Eucharist as a vegetarian meal that looks back to Eden and forward to the eschatological peace of the lion lying down with the lamb? These pressing issues deserve a better discussion in your pages.
The reviewer makes the Kantian and humanistic argument that we should value animals only because that would make us "likely to be a people committed to the humane treatment of humans." I make the biblical (and not "ecomaniac") argument that we should value animals because God takes such great pleasure in them and pronounces them good. Christians should not have to "wonder if God pronounces them good." Christians should not have to "wonder if God cares about animals." Instead, Christians desperately need to develop a theological voice on animal debates, and my book tries to begin that process with biblical and scholarly integrity. Anybody who wants to know more about my position can contact me at Webbs@wabash.edu or by mail at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN 47933.
Stephen H. Webb
Wabash College
Crawfordsville, Ind.
Cracks in the Liberty Bell
I take great exception to Mark Noll's description of my book Liberty! The American Revolution as simplistic history [July/August].
I have been criticized in the past for being too hard on the Founding Fathers. This is the first time anyone has ever said I was simplistic . …
Mark Noll obviously has a thesis that he sets out to prove by a highly selective reading of my book. Take the idea of liberty, for instance. He never mentions that I discuss four distinct ideas of liberty loose in the American revolutionary struggle. Instead, he wonders if my description of southern liberty conflicts with New England's idea and seems to think this is a flaw in the telling. Ye Gods! Of course they conflicted. That's why we fought the Civil War 86 years later.
Noll's biggest and most egregious mistake is conflating my book and the PBS film. They are not identical, which even the most cursory reading and viewing would soon make apparent. The film does a fine job within the severe limitations of time and technique which TV imposes on historical narrative. As writer Ronald Blumer recently said in response to the criticism of a historian who thinks somewhat along Noll's lines, the makers of the PBS film had a primary obligation—to tell the basic story of the Revolution, which surveys have repeatedly shown to be all but lost to contemporary Americans. They did touch on other concerns, such as the blacks and Indians.
In this regard and many others, the book is far more nuanced. It is simply not true, for instance, that I don't discuss the Americans' uneasy feelings about slavery. I note that Abigail Adams was among the first to raise the troubling question of fighting for liberty and owning slaves. I point out George Washington freed his slaves on his death. I narrate with (if I may say so) vivid detail the slavery debate in the Constitutional Convention. I have a sidelight on black participation in the war. I make ex-slave James Lafayette one of the five major illustrations in the opening pages. Finally, I quote Christopher Brown, a brilliant young black historian on the staff of the Omohundro Institute of Early American Culture at Williamsburg, who calls the Revolution "a turning point in the world history of slavery." Noll's knowledge of the Revolution seems minimal. At one point he says the British were the defenders of the slaves! This must rank high among the silliest comments anyone has ever made about the struggle. The British were running the most barbaric slave society in the world at the time, on their sugar plantations in the West Indies. When they encouraged American slaves to desert their masters, they were simply trying to cripple the American economy. They kidnapped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the slaves who fled and sold them to the West Indies, making a tidy fortune.
Noll seems to think a historian should take sides. I don't. I describe the horrendous barbarity of the Indian style of warfare in northern New York and then describe the American retaliation—Sullivan's expedition, which knocked the Iroquois out of the war. Noll bleats over the Indians' fate. This is politically correct these days. But bleating is not my style … Noll is an intellectual historian, who wants sermons instead of the vivid human details that bring history alive with all its maddening ambiguity. Intellectual history has its place. But intellectual historians have no business reviewing books like Liberty! The American Revolution, which sums up my 35 years of thinking and writing about the event that shaped our country.
Thomas Fleming
Westbrook, Conn.
Editor's Note
Books & Culture is pleased to report that God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton University Press), by B&C contributor Charles Marsh, has been awarded the 1998 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, given jointly by the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The award carries with it a prize of $150,000.
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