What is Donahue doing asking the ultimate questions?
The Human Animal, by Phil Donahue (Simon and Schuster, 1985, 412 pp.; $19.95, cloth). Reviewed by Daniel Pawley, an assignment writer living in Richfield, Minnesota.
Phil Donahue has become the unofficial spokesman for secular humanists everywhere and, consequently, the whipping boy of most thinking people from the middle of the spectrum to the right. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before Donahue would rescue his philosophy from the ephemeral world of TV and preserve it in an attractive four-color hardcover book.
The Human Animal is the logical endpoint of a philosophy based in toto on a gee-whiz confidence in humanity’s goodness and creative genius. Although Donahue gives religion a place in his counter-Christian world view (he has never managed to wash away the residue of his Irish Catholic upbringing), science gets a lot more air time than religion. And whereas the former plays the brawny hero, the latter seems undernourished and impotent.
Why is a television personality and Notre Dame business major writing on serious questions about humankind: Who are we? Why do we behave the way we do? Can we change?
Perhaps the answer lies in Donahue’s efforts at reconciliation. Late in the book, for instance, he tries to reconcile the values of religion and science by asserting: “Science, if all works well, provides the knowledge, and religion provides the perspective; science the information and the means to control, religion the will to control. To go forward without either one is to deny the complexity and subtlety of the human animal.”
It is a valiant attempt to forge a cultural perspective, but the sides of the comparison leading up to the conclusion are not nearly so counterpoised:
• Science comes across as ever-victorious, as when Donahue calls Einstein and Curie “our champions, in the best biblical sense of the word. They represent all of us at the farthest frontiers of human achievement, and when they’re successful, we’re all successful.”
• Religion seems full of narrow-minded hardliners. He presents Jerry Falwell’s arguments against evolution paraphrased in obstinate sentence fragments—“no room for doubts or reservations, or qualifications, or even just a thoughtful ‘I’d like to wait until all the evidence is in.’ ”
• Science is a channel to God: “Darwin’s theories, like all great scientific discoveries … make us more deeply aware of the divine.”
• Religion endorses stories, like Adam and Eve, that Donahue says badly need revision: “It’s wrong to think that God made Adam and then took a rib from his side and made Eve. A better way to visualize it is that God made two Eves and then he sent down the archangel Gabriel with a large hypodermic needle filled with testosterone and he shot up one of the Eves and she turned into Adam.”
• Science is the best reflection of who we really are and what we are most proud of: “If at some point we were called before God or some alien invader to justify our brief existence on this planet, the argument in our defense would undoubtedly begin with a long list of scientific and technological discoveries.”
• Religion shows us at our worst, as in the Bible’s unrelenting “male chauvinism,” where “Eve—formerly the revered goddess of fertility—is maligned as the originator of death and the dupe of evil.” (The Garden of Eden really takes it on the nose in this book.)
The contrast continues up to the book’s ending, where Donahue seems to give science and religion equal billing, despite all previous indications to the contrary.
Here the book’s biggest question obtrudes: How can anyone so convinced of science’s supremacy and religion’s inferiority wind up recognizing the two as equals?
Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, by James Turner (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 336pp.; $26.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Bill Durbin, Jr., a free-lance writer and former associate producer for CBN News.
In his autobiography, eighteenth-century preacher John Bunyan described fits of unbelief: “Floods of Blasphemies” were “poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment” and “stirred up questions in me, against the very being of God.” Yet, “afterwards the Lord did more fully and graciously discover himself unto me.”
• In an 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson defined belief in God as “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.” Such was the Enlightened way to deal with doubt.
• Less than 100 years later, English biologist Thomas Huxley declared the victory of science as the way to truth. He rejoiced that the number of people “driven into the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them … is increasing and will continually increase. The phraseology of Supernaturalism [i.e., religious belief] may remain on men’s lips, but in practice they are Naturalists [i.e., agnostics].”
Such are the signposts on the road to agnosticism in America as skillfully charted by University of Massachusetts historian James Turner. Without God, Without Creed is a scholarly, yet readable, account of how modern belief became modern unbelief.
Professor Turner admits that large forces, such as the scientific revolution, urbanization, and industrialization, adversely affected faith in God and established the environment that bred unbelief. But his book is not just social history, for he claims it was not inevitable that agnosticism should have been a viable option by 1900.
“It was not the inexorable juggernaut of history that crushed belief. It was, rather, the specific responses to modernity chosen by thousands of specific believers which made belief vulnerable.” Therein lies his focus.
Divided God
The new science of the seventeenth century began the switch to a “more enlightened belief.” Religious writings of the Enlightenment itself tended to divide God in two: a distant, divine Architect who had established the laws of nature; and the personal God of the Bible who still responded to the heartfelt prayers of his people.
To be sure, belief for the great majority still involved a personal God, and Turner carefully hedges all his generalizations. Nevertheless, he makes clear that by the time Jefferson wrote to Adams, the seeds of pure disbelief were deeply sown, largely by church leaders eager to adapt God to man’s understanding.
As reason proved itself, and man’s attention focused increasingly on the here and now, religion was reduced to morality. This occurred despite efforts to keep the mystery of God alive by the likes of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century and the evangelicals of the early nineteenth century. Thinking about God gradually moved “away from the nonhuman and transcendent toward the human and the worldly.” God and religion had to be clearly relevant to human aspirations, to a human sense of right and wrong, to human goals for progress.
The church claimed victory when such relevance was discovered. But this worldly faith set God up for the fall. Knowledge of God was supposed to meet scientific criteria. When such criteria became increasingly tough through the nineteenth century, belief was in trouble. Assurance of things hoped for and a certainty of things unseen could not meet the ever-narrowing standards of truth. By Huxley’s time, God was intellectually, morally, and emotionally dispensable and belief was “subcultural.”
While this story may be familiar to some, Turner’s clear account of a complex phenomenon, spanning 400 years from 1500 through the Victorian era, is refreshing, if troubling. His focus on the “surrender” of believers to modernity makes the book particularly relevant.
The moral of this story? Says Turner: “Those who wish to believe in God ought to realize that, if belief is to remain plausible over the long haul, they cannot regard God as if human.… And both believers and unbelievers ought to keep in mind that no one way of knowing reality is the last, best form of human knowledge.”
Or, we may return to John Bunyan whose God would gently pull him out of his doubts. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan describes the world’s conceits this way: “When they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of the town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept called Vanity Fair.”
An Excerpt
The Life of Study
“[M]inisters’ studies … all have a common address: at the intersection of the normative tradition, which the minister is obligated to interpret; the congregation, which the minister is obligated to lead and nourish; and the world, which the minister is obligated to serve and return to the renewing grace of God. Whether situated over garages, in basements, off foyers, or behind furnaces, the address is the same. Other professionals in town have studies, but none at so busy an intersection; not a physician, not a lawyer.…
With the minister … time spent in study is never getting away from daily work but getting into daily work. The hours of study bear directly and immediately on who the minister is and the minister’s influence by word and action. It is in the study that so much of the minister’s formation of character and faith takes place.… Study will protect the parishioners from the excessive influence of the minister’s own opinions, prejudices, and feelings. Study is getting a second and third opinion before diagnosis and treatment.”
Preaching, by Fred B. Craddock, (Abingdon, 1985, 224 pp.; $16.95). Reviewed by Calvin Miller, a pastor in Omaha, Nebraska, and author of the forthcoming satire Fred ’n’ Erma (IVP).
Every pastor could profit from reading one book each year on preaching, and Fred B. Craddock’s long-anticipated book, Preaching, should be that “must book.”
Craddock’s work is a blend of the practical and the enchanting. It progresses according to a disciplined format of instruction and orderliness that is both scholarly and tasteful.
Craddock warns us against the attitude that preaching must be ponderous and dull to be of much good—remember Grandma’s adage, “If this don’t taste bad, it won’t help you”?
Good communication is the thread that stitches this book together. Craddock reminds us that because “every sermon has many ears but only one mouth,” every sermon should be “prepared orally.” Craddock is an excellent writer, yet he warns against making the sermon manuscript a goal of preparation. Writing has a place in sermon preparation, but most sermon manuscripts lay down relational barricades that make communication sluggish.
Every sermon must “carry the freight” in terms of content. Therefore, those who love the well-turned phrase must take a stand against the temptation to be sermonically cute. Craddock himself turns many a phrase with a style reminiscent of author Frederick Buechner. Yet the freight is there as Craddock warns against sermons becoming aimless, progressing from “an uncertain Alpha to no Omega.”
The form of this book is not its genius. Chapters come and go with the same themes one would find in most preaching textbooks. The book’s strength is its solid emphasis on Scripture as the root of good preaching, and its insistence that sermons need to be marked by passion as well as by instruction. Craddock sees the great sermon as a matter of force more than of form.
There are places, however, where Craddock is a little weaker on the nature of Scripture than evangelical readers might prefer. For instance, he refers to Matthew as “an interpretation of the words of Jesus” rather than containing the actual words. He seems to believe that God’s Word “comes through interpreting the word” rather than being the Word in scriptural form.
All things considered, though, this is the most significant book I have read on preaching in a decade. For you who preach, it is a must. For you who preach well, the book will challenge you to even greater excellence. And for you whose preaching needs attention, a thoughtful examination of Craddock’s book may deliver not only you but your whole congregation.
Christian Excellence: Alternative to Success, by Jon Johnston (Baker, 1985, 227 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Cathy Luchetti, coauthor of Women of the West (Antelope Island).
After a swank cat kennel mistakenly starved Jon Johnston’s pet, Rerun, he began to search for an alternative to our society’s widespread mediocrity. “Success”—with its competition-trained “winners” tracking happiness through victory, and future goals dangling as daily bait—wasn’t it.
Dissatisfied with the seesaw dynamics of the limited success-mediocrity options, Johnston opted for a third choice: excellence.
Calling upon his own expertise as a professor of anthropology and social psychology at California’s Pepperdine University, Johnston has defined—in a refreshingly witty and vibrant style—the historical significance of excellence from the reign of the ancient Greeks to the age of the corporate board room, along with a step-by-step disclosure of how it can be attained.
Disturbed that even Christians keep step to the acquisitive beat of success—certain that status and wealth are God’s seal of approval—Johnston summons modern disciples to trade their “self-orbits” for humble servanthood; to “lay down their lives for their brothers” and in doing so, to relinquish Murphy’s law for God’s.
To Johnston, excellence is the perfect biblical standard that comes from a Christ-renewed heart. The simple requisites of servanthood based on “unconditional, sacrificial, and available” agape love result in a Christian lifestyle more countercultural than any touted in the sixties.
Johnston has polled dozens of evangelical scholars and leaders for their thoughts to define excellence further. Their responses, along with scores of incisive, humorous (and footnoted) quotations, offer an accessible blueprint for reformed living.
