Grey Is the Color of Hope, by Irina Ratushinskaya (Alfred A. Knopf, 355 pp.; $18.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Ellen Santilli Vaughn, editorial director, Prison Fellowship Ministries.
The story begins with its ending: Delivered in a black Russian car to her Kiev apartment after four years in a Soviet prison camp, dissident Irina Ratushinskaya offers her KGB guard a cup of coffee. The gesture expresses both hospitality and defiance: the essence of Ratushinskaya’s victory over her captors. After it all, they cannot make her hate.
Grey Is the Color of Hope is Ratushinskaya’s account of her imprisonment after being sentenced in 1983 to seven years of hard labor and five years of internal exile. Her crime? Writing “anti-Soviet poems.”
Ratushinskaya served the bulk of her time in the “Small Zone,” a section for political prisoners in the Barashevo labor camp in Mordovia. Her fellow prisoners, or “zeks,” were an assortment of human-rights activists, Christians, and others the KGB deemed a threat to Soviet civil order.
Ratushinskaya writes without sentimentality or sensationalism, but with a clear-eyed realism born of suffering. She recounts her hunger strikes to protest camp injustices and the fetid fish floating in greasy, meager broth that otherwise made up her meals; she describes the lies that clotted the KGB’s every communication, and the torture of cold and disease in the punishment block—where one day a nonpolitical prisoner chewed through her wrists and bled to death in the cell next to Ratushinskaya’s.
The book balances such horrors with tender images of the sisterhood of shared suffering. While on hunger strike, Ratushinskaya and fellow dissident Tatyana Mikhailovna read Ecclesiastes, comforting one another that “two are better than one … for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.”
Faith In The Gulag
Christians looking for an explicit spiritual odyssey will not find it here; still, Ratushinskaya’s faith permeates her book, emerging from actions recorded rather than from apologetics argued. At one point, for example, she refuses to surrender her cross to a guard.
“Take it off at once,” she is ordered, and then threatened with its removal by force.
“Not on your life,” she responds.
“We’ve broken tougher ones than you,” the KGB man counters. But in the end he is the one who capitulates, muttering, “If only you’d cover the cord so it won’t be visible.”
Ratushinskaya’s faith is also manifest in the fierce love with which she cherishes her fellow “politicals,” and the charity she shows toward those whose will is weaker than her own: “Each bears the burden which matches her strength, and he who is not on the side of your executioners is your brother.”
Ratushinskaya’s trenchant synopsis of the Soviets’ malignant oppression sounds shocking to a lulled Western ear in these ostensibly benign days of glasnost. She estimates that with four-and-a-half million prisoners in the USSR, and an annual zek mortality rate of eight percent, 40 prisoners die every hour. “How many will die by the time you get to the end of this chapter?” she asks.
Ratushinskaya avoided being added to this statistic through international pressure from Christian groups and human-rights organizations along with Mikhail Gorbachev’s strategic concerns. These efforts culminated in secret orders for her release signed two days before the Reykjavik summit in 1986.
Also reviewed in this section:
Spiritual Politics
by Mark Silk
Evangelical Essentials
by David L. Edwards, with a response by John Stott
Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies
by Don S. Browning
Book Briefs:
Insomnia
by Connie Soth
Letters to Jesus (Answered)by Peter Kreeft
Longing for Heaven
by Peter Toon
Happiness Is an Inside Job
by John Powell
Book of the Dun Cow
by Walter Wangerin, Jr
Book of Sorrows
by Walter Wangerin, Jr
A Requiem for Love
by Calvin Miller
Our “Small Zones”
The prose of this prison tale is full of vigorous poetry. Several of Ratushinskaya’s celebrated poems are included, as well as a rhyme sung tenderly to her by Tatyana Mikhailovna while the two lay ill in a punishment cell:
I thank you, rusty prison grating,
And you, sharp glinting bayonet blades,
For you have given me more wisdom Than learning over long decades.…
One cannot help but be reminded of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s similar strange words from the gulag: “Bless you, prison … for it was there I discovered that the meaning of earthly existence lies, not as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul.”
Here then, after all, is the strong meat of a message for U.S. Christians in this story from a Soviet prison camp. Ratushinskaya and her fellow believers weigh their choices carefully. They go on hunger strikes to protest when their Bibles are taken from them. They win them back. They consider every action in light of absolute standards of justice and righteousness. And they live with grace, peace, and even humor in the face of these choices.
Reading Grey Is the Color of Hope reminds us that we each live in our own “small zone.” Our daily choices matter; compromises can wound our witness and grant victory to those who would delight in our downfall. We too must guard how we discern and defend truth in an age accustomed to blurs and lies.
Near the end of her book Ratushinskaya tells the story of fellow zek Lagle Parek, who was six years old when her father was shot by Stalin’s troops and she was exiled with her grandmother. Standing in the Siberian snow, they were told that “by government decree, they were destined to remain in ‘eternal exile.’ [Parek] never forgot her grandmother’s smile and pitying comment: ‘They think they’re masters of eternity.’ ”
Ratushinskaya’s book affirms that her oppressors were master neither of eternity nor of the Small Zone. Its guard towers and barbed wire did not a prison make. Her story is much more about freedom than confinement: a freedom born of hope, trust in the will of God, and refusal to yield to the will of oppressors.
And that, in the end, is why Irina Ratushinskaya could offer her KGB escort a cup of Russian coffee the day she came home from prison.
Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II, by Mark Silk (Touchstone, 206 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Reed Jolley, pastor of Santa Barbara (Calif.) Community Church.
Who would have guessed at the end of World War II that within a couple of decades Americans would elect a Roman Catholic as their president, devote themselves in vast numbers to Oriental gurus, ban prayer from public schools, buy 16 million copies of The Late Great Planet Earth, and celebrate the birthday of a black Baptist minister? Social historian Mark Silk probes these and other ironies in the interplay of politics and religion in Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II.
The Harvard-educated author points to two conflicting doctrines that have given shape to our current mindset. On the one hand, America has a powerful “adhesional impulse.” This is “the desire for a common religious cause as well as the quasi-spiritual allegiance to the religiously impartial state.” Hence, we promote the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” a nebulous term that expresses our desire to see commonalities between Jew, Protestant, and Catholic. (For example, the Moral Majority included Jews and Catholics who opposed homosexuality and abortion.)
On the other hand, Americans also follow “conversionist creeds,” which demand exclusive commitment on the part of their adherents. Converts leave their former world view and cling with tenacity to a specific truth: “The old was wrong and the new is right.”
This tension between “adhesion” and “conversion” is the basis for what Silk calls “spiritual politics”—the interplay between our religious beliefs and the secular state. The author suggests that though Americans have no national religion, they “do not lack a spiritual politics; nor does this politics represent some small action taking place in a remote theater of the nation’s life. Whatever one thinks of it, religion remains an integral part of the American cultural system; for good or ill, it is one of the principal means by which Americans conduct their cultural business.”
Judeo-Christian Americans
Having established his thesis, Silk provides the reader with an insightful and witty survey of the interplay between politics and religion in the postwar era. For instance, immediately following Truman’s dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, the Federal Council of Churches filed protest while the Christian Century called for national repentance. Meanwhile, a Moody Bible Institute professor implied on the radio that the bomb was the will of God. The postwar age of anxiety had begun.
This anxiety was placated in 1952 when President Eisenhower gave a speech before the Freedom Foundation. He said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” Silk comments, “As of 1952, good Americans were supposed to be good Judeo-Christians.” Such was the new national creed.
Alongside this “adhesional Americanism,” the conversionist thinking of Billy Graham and other evangelicals emerged. But their call for conversion became its own ritual of adhesion. “To accept Billy’s Christ was to keep faith with those of other denominations, with the government, with America itself.” Although it was not Judeo-Christian in the full ecumenical sense, “in the postwar situation this was the kind of conversionist message that could prosper.” Conservative Christianity and Americanism used one another: spiritual politics.
Silk’s book is not another exposé of the marriage of conservative Christianity to right-wing politics. The book goes on to chronicle the religious dimensions of the civil rights movement, the development of Roman Catholicism in America, and the decline of mainline denominations who had sold their birthright “for a mess of feminist, Third World, and homosexual pottage,” according to the conservatives. The author covers the political influence of Jerry Falwell and the Southern Baptists, but he devotes equal time to Bishop James Pike, the Berrigan brothers, Reinhold Niebuhr, and William Stringfellow.
Spiritual Politics is a wonderful companion volume to Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict. Colson functions as the evangelist telling us how the church should interact with the state. Silk operates as the sardonic analyst, informing us how the church and state have used one another in recent times. He is suspicious of both.
In the end, Silk opts for pluralism; the haven of rest for most twentieth-century thinkers. In spite of his ill-conceived conclusions, this brief but poignant treatment of spirituality and American society is a valuable, weighty, and well-documented resource for those interested in the social dimensions of our religious life.
Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue, by David L. Edwards, with a response by John Stott (InterVarsity Press, 354 pp.; $12.95, paper). Reviewed by John Rodgers, president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
In this book well-known church historian and theological liberal David L. Edwards engages fellow Anglican John Stott, one of the premier evangelical authors and church leaders of our time, on the question, What does it mean to be evangelical? Edwards’s strategy was to read all that John Stott had written, to grasp the heart and core of the evangelical movement, and from a liberal standpoint to pose rather sharp questions to the evangelical mind as articulated by John Stott.
The book begins with an excellent sketch by Edwards of John Stott’s life, ministry, and writings. It then moves into a series of topical chapters. In each chapter Edwards summarizes his understanding of the evangelical position and poses a series of questions to which John Stott writes a thoughtful and incisive response. The book ends with an epilogue by John Stott.
The topics that come under consideration are the recent success of evangelicalism in England (particularly in the Anglican Communion), the authority of Scripture, the Cross of Christ, miracles, the Bible and behavior, and eschatology and mission. These reflect the emphasis of the evangelical proclamation of the gospel and points where controversy arises between the liberal and evangelical perspectives.
An Enlightening Dialogue
Evangelicals will find in John Stott an articulate spokesperson of evangelical conviction, giving thoughtful responses to the most frequently heard objections. Stott is venturesome in places—note his positions on eschatology and his views on those who never hear the gospel—but at those points he admits that he is moving into positions that are not shared by all evangelicals.
Theological liberals will also gain a good deal from this book. Besides the benefit of grappling with a clear and reasoned evangelical voice, they will also receive a clear and helpful presentation of the liberal tradition. Although in many respects Edwards is a conservative liberal, in some areas he shows a strong tendency to put his own personal sensibilities, shaped as they are by the contemporary culture, above the teaching of Scripture. This sometimes leads to interpretations of Scripture that are highly improbable—this is most graphically displayed in the chapter on the Cross, where his exegesis seems evasive.
In the epilogue John Stott points to what he believes to be the heart of the matter and states that behind all the divergencies in theology stands a different evaluation of the human condition. As he puts it, “Behind our differences in relation to both authority and salvation there lies a divergent understanding of our human being and condition. Both the Catholic and the liberal traditions have tended to exalt human intelligence and goodness and, therefore, to expect human beings to contribute something toward their enlightenment and their salvation. Evangelicals, on the other hand, while strongly affirming the divine image which our humanity bears, have tended to emphasize our human finitude and fallenness and, therefore, to insist that without revelation we cannot know God and without redemption we cannot reach him.”
This is a thought-provoking book that should be read often—especially John Stott’s responses, which alone are worth the price of the book.
Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies: A Critical Conversation in the Theology of Culture, by Don S. Browning (Fortress, 268 pp.; $12.95, paper). Reviewed by Gary Furr, pastor of First Baptist Church, Blakely, Georgia.
Gone are the days of categorical rejection of all things psychological among Christians. This new-found maturity has led to a broad range of investigation and reflection that neither undervalues psychology nor swallows its pronouncements whole.
Don Browning’s most recent work is a welcome addition to that literature. Professor at the University of Chicago and author of several works on psychology and theology, Browning is well-known to pastoral-care specialists.
Psychologists have generally aspired to establish their discipline as a science. In its practical applications, however, this boundary has often been confusing. Too little attention, says Browning, is paid to the moral and philosophical implications.
To rectify that problem, he offers a five-level analytical framework that evaluates the modern psychologies as ethical systems and not simply as scientific ideas. His five levels of moral thinking correspond to the five primary questions we ask ourselves—consciously or unconsciously—about the nature of our world.
The five levels and their corresponding questions are: (1) Visional or metaphorical: “What kind of ultimate world do we live in?” (2) Obligational: “What are we obligated to do?” (3) Tendency-need: “What are the basic motivating tendencies and needs that should be met?” (4) Contextual: “How do we interpret the specific situations that confront us?” (5) Rule-role: “What specific rules and roles should be utilized to carry out the needed practical action?”
The problem with modern psychologies, he says, is a confusion of levels. While most psychological theories focus on the tendency-need level, they in fact imply images and metaphors about ultimate purpose that rightly belong to the first level. What Browning calls the “level of metaphor” is identical with what other thinkers have labeled “world view.”
A Critical Conversation
Once this basic argument has been sketched, Browning begins his “critical conversation.” The book is basically a sustained dialogue between the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” (represented by the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr, William James, and Paul Ricouer) and certain selected and significant systems of psychology (Freud, Jung, Skinner, Erikson, Kohut, and others).
What results is a lucid survey that reveals results unintended by the psychological theorists. Freud believed that his instinctual psychology was built on a purely scientific foundation. But Browning shows that Freud elevated his concepts of the pleasure principle and the death instinct to the status of cosmology. The war of the instincts is in fact Freud’s vision of the nature of the entire universe. Given such a universe, Freud then can only conceive of an ethic of limited mutuality. There can be no agape; indeed, it would be foolish for a person to love in such a way.
Browning subsequently describes the other systems in terms of the visional metaphors that are implied. Jung and humanistic psychology therefore represent the “culture of joy”; Skinner, the “culture of control”; and Erikson and Kohut, the “culture of care.” After carefully presenting his case, Browning then offers the Christian tradition for comparison, which he shows to be far richer, more inclusive, and descriptive of the complexities of human nature.
Browning’s aim is not an apologetic for Christianity, but a true conversation between disciplines. Psychologists cannot speak on the level of metaphor unless they acknowledge it openly. When this is done, it no longer appears that the major difference between psychologists and theologians is simply the presence or absence of theistic assumptions. “We see that the differences are really more a matter of alternative decisions and commitments at these metaphorical and obligational levels. We see, in fact, a subtle process of psychology becoming religion.”
Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies is an important work, though it will not satisfy every reader. Many Christians will object to the loose boundaries for what he calls the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition and to relativistic language. Nevertheless, in the therapeutic maze of contemporary thought, Browning’s work is a valuable and worthy guide.
Book Briefs
“Running, running down an endless dark hall, fear pounding in my chest, I struggle to breathe at the same time I jerk futilely at the back door, unable to unlock it in my panic.” That sounds like the first sentence of a mystery novel; in fact, it is the first sentence of a work dealing with the horror of Insomnia (Revell, $6.95). But the way author Connie Soth has treated the subject is benevolent, as her subtitle indicates, “God’s Night School.”
Many is the night, apparently, that Soth has traipsed the late fantastic in and around Oregon. In Insomnia she explores the medical aspects, distinguishes sleep from rest, and introduces a spiritual dimension to those sleepless, restless nights. In fact, there is a mystical element in the work. “By the time you finish this book, I hope you will be convinced that all insomnia, whatever its cause, can be helped through the God-encounter from which unique peace flows, a healing balm for all hurts and fears.”
The book ends with nine beatitudes—perhaps it’s better to call them somnitudes—the ninth of which is “HAPPY are those whom God calls to their final sleep in Jesus, for they shall awaken at last to look into His Face.”
Why Am I Not Happy?
Happiness Is an Inside Job (Tabor Publishing, $8.95) is not only the title of John Powell’s latest, but also its theme. Happiness is a natural state, he assumes; indeed, it is the supernatural state God intends for all his creatures.
A philosophy professor at Loyola University in Chicago for the last 20 years, Powell has been able to apply some practical psychology to contemporary problems during that time, particularly in titles such as Why Am I Afraid to TellYou Who I Am? and Why Am I Afraid to Love? His books have sold ten million copies to date.
In this book he proposes ten seemingly simple practices that have to do with happiness—such as, “We must accept ourselves as we are,” and, “We must stretch by stepping out of our comfort zones,” and, “We must seek growth, not perfection.” But they are not simple to put into action.
Powell’s style, if always urging, is always encouraging. Each of the ten chapters is concluded with “Processing” the ideas contained in the chapter.
Heavenly Musings
“Heaven cannot be described as if it were like a delightful foreign country encouraging tourists and emigrants to go there,” writes Peter Toon, happily remembered for such celestial works as The Ascension of Our Lord and Heaven and Hell. “Not only do we not have any videos, photographs, or media reports of it, but also we have no travel directions on how to get there.”
Well, Longing for Heaven: A Devotional Look at the Life after Death (Macmillan, $15.95) is something of a Baedeker. It is for those who, recognizing that heaven exists, do not, or cannot as yet, take this belief seriously.
Ever conscious of the modern propensity to know just what benefits may derive from a belief, Toon postulates three with regard to those who “sincerely meditate on things above”: growth in the soul’s holiness, in the soul’s ability to witness to the world, and in the soul’s capacity for praise.
Dear Jesus
An upside-down book is one that might be found in the children’s section of the library, but I just found one for adults, recently published by Ignatius Press of San Francisco. It contains the correspondence of Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College and author of a dozen books revolving around Christian orthodoxy, and—of all people—Jesus.
As Kreeft tells it, the answers came first. He took the sayings of Jesus as they appeared in Matthew’s gospel and imagined that they were answers; he then wondered what the contemporary questions might be—a kind of gospel “Jeopardy.” Finally he chose a format derived from the question-and-answer sort of correspondence he found in the newspaper columns of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Letters to Jesus (Answered) (hardcover, $17.95; paper, $10.95) is the happy result.
“Dear Jesus, Why were you put on earth, instead of in heaven, right from the beginning? [Signed] Second Guesser.”
“Dear Jesus, What kind of a father is God? Is he demanding and hard to satisfy, or is he forgiving and easy to please? [Signed] Curious Child.”
“Dear Jesus, Will the world ever get so bad that there are no believers left? [Signed] Bad to Worse.”
To find Jesus’ answers to these and 280 other questions, one has to turn the book upside-down. The reason for the topsy-turvyness is that Kreeft would like the reader to ponder each question a bit before jumping to a conclusion. That is another way of saying that he would like the reader to give the question prayerful consideration.
The Garden And The Coop
For those who may have missed Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s spiritual fables, The Book of the Dun Cow (1978) and The Book of Sorrows (1985), there is a second chance. Both have been reissued in paperback by Harper & Row in their Perennial Fiction Library ($8.95 each). Through allegorical fiction, the books cover much of the spiritual history of the Western world with such plucky inhabitants of the Coop as Chaunticleer the rooster; the evil invader is Wyrm. The literary forebear of Wangerin must clearly be Geoffrey Chaucer.
Those who did not miss Calvin Miller’s Singer Trilogy (750,000 copies sold in 15 years) or any of his other two dozen books will surely look forward to his new Symphony Trilogy, the first volume of which has just been published. Miller, senior pastor at Westside Baptist Church in Omaha, wrote A Requiem for Love (Word, $12.99) as “a poetic narrative” in the tradition of Milton’s Paradise Lost and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But one does not have to have liked—or indeed have read—Milton or Tolkien to appreciate Miller’s work. His is more simple than theirs and, in a way, more profound.
By William Griffin, religious books editor for Publishers’ Weekly and author of The Fleetwood Correspondence.
