Also reviewed in this section:
The Restructuring of American Religion, by Robert Wuthnow
The Struggle for America’s Soul, by Robert Wuthnow
Faith and Freedom, by Benjamin Hart
Justification by Faith, by Alister E. McGrathIustitia Dei, by Alister E. McGrath
Why Narrative?edited by Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones
Princeton and the Republic 1768–1822, by Mark A. Noll
What Are People For?by Wendell Berry
Inside America’s Christian Schools, by Paul F. Parsons
The Demythologized Lewis
C. S. Lewis: A Biography, by A. N. Witson (W. W. Norton, xviii + 334 pp.; $22.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Virginia Stem Owens, who is the author of If You Do Love Old Men (Eerdmans).
This is a book that will upset many people; yet it is a book that had to be written. In it, A. N. Wilson, British novelist and biographer, undertakes to demythologize C. S. Lewis, the man who has been for many Americans the modern counterpart of Saint Augustine.
Wilson does not set out to discredit Lewis, however, nor to undermine the significance of his work. Rather, his goal is to get Lewis devotees to take seriously the writer’s description of himself as “a sinful man,” a claim many readers accept only as an abstract theological proposition. They will not thank Wilson for supplying uncomfortably specific details of Lewis’s infirmities. Yet only those very details will finally convince us, and, in fact, will make the reality more edifying than the fantasy.
Mere Humanity
I admit to being one of those readers Wilson describes as “so uplifted by the sublimity of Lewis at his best as a writer that they assume he was himself a sublime being.” In fact, I had Lewis pegged for a “natural Christian,” one who was constitutionally predisposed to faith and faithfulness.
The Lewis industry in America has effectively fostered the myth of the bluff and hearty Oxford don, sacrificially caring for the mother of a fellow officer killed in World War I. Only in recent years has it come to light that for at least ten years the relationship between the pre-Christian Lewis and Mrs. Moore was actually adulterous. Unlike Augustine, who, in his Confessions, told us plainly about his mistress, Lewis wrote in his autobiography that he was not “free to tell the story” and refused to discuss the subject even with his brother.
Unlike previous biographers, Wilson does not make Mrs. Moore the villain. Evidence he supplies shows her to have been a generous and lively woman who provided Lewis with the home and warmth his mother’s early death had taken from him. Lewis never gave any sign of resenting the demands made on him, even during Mrs. Moore’s dotage.
This information about the Lewis-Moore liaison is not altogether new, though Wilson’s interpretation is. What will be startling is Lewis’s adolescent absorption with sadomasochism. The evidence that Wilson supplies, mostly letters the teenage Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, is incontrovertible; the way Wilson uses this evidence throughout his book, however, is not.
Having established that Mrs. Moore’s domestic routines were not onerous but merely ordinary, Wilson then claims that Lewis’s “apparently cheerful domestic enslavement to Mrs. Moore” was actually his way of substituting his earlier sadistic “pleasure of voyeuristic torture” for a later masochistic “pleasure of having his nose rubbed in it.” Supposedly, scrubbing floors provided Lewis with sexual pleasure because he saw it as punishment for his adolescent fantasies. Yet how can Lewis have perversely enjoyed his chores as punishment if he accepted them as ordinary?
Such logical inconsistencies appear often in Wilson’s interpretation of facts. He appears impervious to the notion that any motive other than oedipal impulses might account for Lewis’s refusal to expose Mrs. Moore or her daughter to public scrutiny. Furthermore, he consistently blames Lewis for the chasm that opened between him and his father, a man who sent his nine-year-old son away to a strange boarding school two weeks after his mother had died. He discounts the disastrous effect this school had on Lewis, despite its headmaster’s certifiable insanity. In fact, Wilson comes very near to blaming Lewis and his brother, Warnie, for their father’s alcoholism. Someone with Wilson’s psychological perspicacity should know better.
Irish Brawler
On the other hand, this biography does provide a corrective to the myth of Lewis as the quintessential English don. Wilson’s Lewis is thoroughly Irish, and he makes us believe that, had the Belfast native been denied the outlet of verbal assaults, he might have become a barroom brawler of heroic proportions. Because of his own connections to Oxford, Wilson supplies a new depth of information and understanding about Lewis’s professional life at the university. He tracks the interplay between Lewis’s life and his writing with skill, though his analysis of Lewis’s theology suffers from inconsistencies at times. He faults Mere Christianity for underrating grace, yet complains that Perelandra’s Lady was rewarded “for something she has not done herself.”
Wilson also lets Joy Davidman Gresham, Lewis’s wife through three pain-filled years, explode on the page in all her improbable paradoxes, just as she exploded all the expectations, presuppositions, and rules Lewis had about women. Loud, assertive, and worst of all, American, she drove off his Oxford cronies. Yet thoroughly smitten, he defied his bishop to marry her. Though one senses Wilson’s own priggish disapproval of Joy, the cosmic comedy played out here is not lost on the reader. Nor is the pathos of her death.
And in the end, Wilson’s final conclusion about Lewis, however arrived at, rings true: “His whole life had been warped by his failure to express grief for his mother.” And it was only by falling in love with a woman like Joy, in violation of his own and his church’s moral code, and even more by losing her, “that the essential work of healing mysteriously began.”
As Lewis himself said in his most intensely personal book, A Grief Observed, “All reality is iconoclastic.” Just as he longed for his dead wife, Joy, “with all her resistances, her faults, … her foursquare and independent reality,” those who truly love Lewis should be willing to have their image of him shattered so that they may have instead the deeper reality.
Sociology Of Souls
The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II, by Robert Wuthnow (Princeton, xiv + 374 pp.; $25.00, hardcover); The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism, by Robert Wuthnow (Eerdmans, 208 pp.; $22.95, hardcover; $14.95, paper). Reviewed by David K. Winter, president of Westmont College.
Robert Wuthnow, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, has produced two recent studies that illuminate the changing posture of the American church, particularly in reference to the polarization between liberals and conservatives.
His thesis is this: American religion was still largely structured by its denominational forms as we emerged from World War II, but a number of societal factors helped to create new loyalties and orientations. The result has been that today we often feel more kinship with conservatives (or liberals) from other denominations than we do with many of those within our own denomination. Conservative Presbyterians and Episcopalians, for example, find that they share more common ground with conservative Catholics than they do with the liberal wing within their own churches.
The Restructuring of American Religion is a commentary on the changes that have taken place since World War II within American religion, largely in reference to Protestantism. Wuthnow captures the religious mood before, during, and after the war, and then shows how external factors began to modify the character of local churches. He examines the emergence of fundamentalism and the continuing struggle of many evangelicals to maintain their orthodox theological beliefs while developing a stance and strategy that contrasts with fundamentalism. He is familiar with the multitude of evangelical causes and agencies, and he is able to relate many of them to larger issues of our society as they have moved, with some exceptions, in a more conservative direction.
The Struggle for America’s Soul, the more accessible book of the two, overlaps to some extent the first volume in its emphasis on the liberal/conservative structure of American religion, but it adds some helpful chapters on religion’s place within voluntary associations, highlights the Presbyterian church as a case study, and provides an extensive discussion of the multitude of issues that have occupied evangelicals in recent years. Wuthnow examines the role of the state and mass media and the extent to which these have contributed to the privitization of religion. Several chapters deal with higher education and its effect upon American religion, which probably has been far more significant than is generally recognized. One chapter is devoted entirely to evangelical colleges.
A Common Enemy
Wuthnow clearly laments the growing separation, even hostility, between liberal and conservative Christians. He points out the essential commonality of their faith, and he urges both groups to remember that their common enemy is the value system of the secular world, which ignores the significance of religion altogether.
He correctly observes that evangelical colleges frequently find themselves suspect among conservatives, and lumped with fundamentalists by liberals. But this awkward position has the potential, in his opinion, of helping to bridge the chasm and bring the two factions closer together. He makes some very specific suggestions to faculty members at these colleges, urging them to use their unique positions to conduct research on the evangelical movement and participate more actively as scholars within American higher education.
Any Christian interested in a more forceful presence for evangelicals within our society should find a multitude of new perspectives and suggestions within these two volumes. The sociology of religion can enable us to become more effective within our society by identifying, and then helping us resist, the pervasive influence of our culture.
It Was Our Idea
Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty, by Benjamin Hart (Lewis and Stanley, 394 pp.; $18.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and a nationally syndicated columnist with Copely News Service.
The entrance of evangelicals into the political process this last decade has polarized not only debate over issues, but also the discussion of history. To the secular Left, America was saved from theocracy by deists such as Thomas Jefferson, who championed the separation of church and state and backed the First Amendment. To the Religious Right, the U.S. was an avowedly Christian republic whose heritage was subsequently stolen by atheists aided by an unelected Supreme Court.
Yet neither caricature is accurate. Providing a much-needed corrective is Faith and Freedom, by Benjamin Hart, formerly the director of lectures and seminars at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Hart’s thesis is that while biblical principles dominated the political sphere at the time of the Revolution, the institutions of church and state were kept separate largely at the insistence of Christians, not secularists. Though the founders did not intend to eliminate every vestige of religion from the public square, as some modern Supreme Court opinions suggest, they also did not intend to recreate the clerocratic state of ancient Israel.
Theology did underlie the devotion of many of the revolutionaries to personal liberty. The Declaration of Independence asserted that individuals were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Also the new government was structured to restrict the potential for officials—sinful men like everyone else—to abuse their power.
But the founders’ generally Christian world view did not lead to an established national church. Hart points out that it was a devout believer, Roger Williams, who left the Massachusetts Bay colony and created Rhode Island as a haven for religious nonconformists. Later on, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and members of other denominations resisted attempts by the British Anglican Church to appoint bishops in the colonies. Boston pastor Jonathan Mayhew said the bishops, whom he considered to be mere arms of the British government, were instruments for “establishing tyrannies over the bodies and souls of men.”
Moreover, passage of the First Amendment was preceded by Virginia’s disestablishment of the Anglican Church. The legislation, while drafted by Thomas Jefferson, was not an attack on Christianity. Instead, observes Hart, the bill justified itself “on Protestant theological principles.” The legislation called an established church “a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions.”
Hart’s contribution to the church/state debate is particularly welcome because he eschews the forlorn attempt of many conservative activists to turn America officially into a “Christian nation.” However, his ideological bias still gets in the way of his analysis at times—such as when he ties the Vietnam War to the Puritan spirit of America.
Nevertheless, Hart has written a book that can give the reader enjoyment and that makes an important point. We need to “return to first principles,” he says, “principles upon which America’s founders were in overwhelming agreement,” namely, that “liberty was essential to happiness and prosperity in this world; that constitutional government was essential to liberty; that the preservation of both was contingent on Christian morality informing both voters and leaders; and that Christian morality could not long stand without firm faith in Christ.” Christians should take seriously his charge.
Book Briefs
Reformation Update
Is the doctrine that stood at the center of the Reformation still valid today? This is the question Alister McGrath, lecturer in Christian doctrine and ethics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, attempts to answer in Justification by Faith (Zondervan, $11.95). His argument is divided into two major sections. The first part offers a sketch of the relevant biblical materials and historical development of the doctrine, whereas the second applies the doctrine to the contemporary situation.
The background for the historical section lies in the author’s earlier two-volume work, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge; vol. 1, $42.50/$14.95; vol. 2, $42.50), which comprises a masterful history of the development of the doctrine from the biblical era to Karl Barth. In fact, it was through his ten-year-long work on this study that McGrath became aware of the importance of the doctrine of justification for the church and believers.
The two titles are directed toward different audiences. Whereas Justification by Faith is written for the church at large, Iustitia Dei is a work for scholars. The latter is narrated in a detailed manner, filled with quotations in the original languages of the primary sources (mostly Latin and German). In Justification by Faith, McGrath indicates how the doctrine applies to three dimensions of modern life: the existential, the personal, and the ethical.
Of the two titles, the two-volume history looms as the greater contribution. Some may quibble with his historical interpretations here or there. And as is often characteristic of studies covering the general sweep of theological history, Iustitia Dei omits from its purview contributions lying outside the major Western church traditions—Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed. Yet McGrath has produced a study of major importance that promises to become a standard reference work on the subject.
Justification by Faith, on the other hand, is too short to be a major step in applying the doctrine to our times. McGrath’s choice of models, especially existentialism and personalism, may engender criticism from some quarters. However, the author is to be applauded for attempting to articulate the relevance of this central theological tenet to the contemporary world.
By Stanley J. Grenz.
The Importance Of Stories
Fifteen years ago certain theologians began to tout the importance of story for understanding and doing theology. To date, narrative theology is still with us. It may be too early to tell whether or not it is a passing fad, but Stanley Hauerwas and his former student L. Gregory Jones don’t think so. They suspect narrative provides indispensable keys to such issues as our knowledge of God, the depiction of personal identity, and presenting the content of the Christian faith. In Why Narrative? (Eerdmans, $29.95/$19.95) they have put together an impressive collection of essays—most of them at a level that will try the mettle of graduate students in theology or philosophy—to prove the point.
The reader of this anthology will receive a crash course in the early, basic articles on narrative, including formative pieces by H. Richard Niebuhr, Hans Frei, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The second portion of the book focuses on philosophical issues and includes a provocative recent piece, by classicist Martha Nussbaum, on the narrative construction of emotions.
The anthology concludes with its longest section, devoted to the theological application of narrative approaches. Evangelical theologians (such as Carl Henry) have been concerned that narrative may provide a method for fudging on the historical veracity of Scripture’s stories. Accordingly, they will find helpful an exchange between Julian Hartt, Stephen Crites, and Hauerwas.
Why Narrative? is for those wondering what all the fuss over story is about. It may not make up minds, but it should render impossible any glib dismissals of the excitement.
By Rodney Clapp.
The Princeton Experiment
In Princeton and the Republic 1768–1822 (Princeton, $35.00), historian Mark Noll argues a definite thesis on the basis of impressive erudition and in a well-organized, transparent style. Noll contends that under three successive presidents, Princeton College sought to educate its students on the basis of what seems to be an unobjectionable ideology: “that the old religion and the new science could be harmonized, that such a harmony could be taught in educational institutions, that it could ground personal virtue and social order, and that careful observers, through scientific procedures, could accurately diagnose the state of society.” Yet, he shows, this project failed, and he attempts to explain why. Nevertheless, one might ask, why should anyone care?
People who care about modern Christian thinking should care. Intellectually responsible preachers, concerned to stand between John Stott’s “two worlds” of Scripture and contemporary culture, could learn from the successes and failures of Princeton’s distinguished leaders who attempted the same feat. Christians involved in politics can learn cautionary lessons about melding particular political philosophies, much less specific policies, with biblical principles—efforts that can compromise the philosophies or the Christian faith or both. And Christian educators, who seek to integrate faith, learning, and civic responsibility, should see here both some of the combinations possible in such an agenda and some of the problems attending the version characteristic of Princeton (and of many evangelical schools in our own day)—namely, a combination of Reformed Protestantism influenced by revivalism, Enlightenment intellectual principles, and republican politics.
This study, then, is historical scholarship at its best: It tells a story well and relates it to larger themes and issues.
By John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Shalom On The Farm
A former literature professor, Wendell Berry has, since 1964, lived in Port Royal, Kentucky, above the Kentucky River, farming 125 acres with mules, and writing—four novels, a book of short stories, ten books of poetry and ten of essays. He refuses to buy a computer because, among other things, it would use electricity produced by strip-mined coal.
His refusal to compute is typical. He sees connections that others ignore. Some are destructive (strip mines and electricity) and some are constructive (the fabric of a farming community). The connections he desires lead to health. He resists the separations of our industrial culture, keeping the individual, the human community, local economy, and the health of the land together; they all must be healthy and in communion for any to be healthy. A predominant impression one carries away from reading Berry is wholeness, biblical shalom. Although his setting is rural, this wholeness is a paradigm for the city and its suburbs.
What Are People For? (North Point, $19.95/$9.95) is introduced by two long poems, “Damage” and “Healing,” the themes of the collection. The essays describe several healers (authors who love the land and its people) and speak of harmony and diversity in land use, waste, economy, pleasure (at work, in eating), local culture, computers, nature, and community. Running through all the thoughts and words like an underground stream, unseen as it moistens the earth, are the biblical truths of Creation, Fall, and redemption.
Berry believes that industrial agriculture (with its machinery and chemicals) endangers; it exploits the soil and the people. The soil goes down the river and the people’s profits are drained off by those in packaging and marketing. Industry lives by competition, but, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
He finds the source of ecological justice and mercy in the biblical concept of God’s pleasure in his creation. Our stewardship consists in preserving that pleasure for God, caring for his creation. If we know the land to be beloved by God, we will be careful.
By Larry Sibley.
Grading Christian Schools
It was not too many years ago that the term “Christian schools” referred to Catholic schools and schools established by denominations such as Lutheran and Christian Reformed. But over the past two decades this term has taken on an entirely new meaning, thanks to the emergence of thousands of fundamentalist and evangelical schools across the United States.
What are these schools like? Paul F. Parsons tells us in his lively book, Inside America’s Christian Schools (Mercer University Press, $12.95). As part of his research, Parsons, who holds the R. M. Seaton Professional Journalist Chair at Kansas State University, performed the heroic feat of visiting approximately 100 schools in 30 states.
Parsons’s book focuses on “fundamentalist schools,” because they are dominant in the Christian-school movement. As Parsons discovered, these schools have certain common denominators. Perhaps most important is the effort to place God at “the center around which all lessons revolve.”
This merger of academic and religious instruction (as well as the fusion of theological and political conservatism) is particularly evident in the textbooks. In science texts, evolutionists and ecologists are lambasted as anti-Christian. In history texts, socialists are lazy and immoral, the United Nations is contrary to God’s plan, and the United States was founded as “that nation ‘whose God is the Lord.’ ” Even math texts are bathed in religious commentary: “Ace and his friend went soul-winning on five streets. There were nine houses on each street. To how many houses did they go?”
Parsons also discovered an emphasis on submission to authority. In the classroom, students are to take in truth with a minimum of questioning. Outside the classroom, students must obey strict rules against drinking, dancing, and listening to rock music; disobedience can result in paddling or even expulsion. In some schools boys must have short hair, as long hair signifies rebelliousness; in some schools girls must wear dresses, as wearing pants signifies a desire to be equal with men and not be subordinate to God-established male authority. Finally, students must always display respect for adults.
Outsiders may wonder if these indoctrinated and restricted students are happy. Parsons reports that he “talked privately with hundreds of students,” and their response was “overwhelmingly positive” about being in a Christian school. Parsons fails, however, to assess critically the reliability of his interviews, which points up the one major failing of Inside America’s Christian Schools: It lacks substantive analysis. This is intentional. Parsons notes in the introduction that this “book has a modest goal—to inform.” Fair enough, and toward this end Parsons offers a host of fascinating anecdotes. Still, at times the result is a scattershot collection of stories. There are also historical errors, including the claim that church attendance “dropped precipitously” after World War II (actually, it increased dramatically in the 1950s).
Nevertheless, Inside America’s Christian Schools provides a good and absorbing introduction to the phenomenon of fundamentalist schools.
By William Vance Trollinger, Jr.
