“Heart of Whiteness: Afrikaners Face Black Rule in the New South Africa”
By June Goodwin and Ben Schiff
Scribner
413 pp.; $27.50
On November 5, 1994, the Reverend Johan Heyns was seated in the living room of his Pretoria home with his wife and grandchildren when an assassin, standing only six yards away, fired a high-powered rifle through an open window. The bullet, modified to wreak maximum havoc, blew off Heyns’s head.
So begins this timely, informative, and often painful account of the postapartheid mentality of the largest white “tribe” in the new South Africa. Heyns’s assassination is a particularly graphic symbol of contemporary divisions within Afrikanerdom, for in the years before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, Heyns had been a foot-dragging spokesman for the main Dutch Reformed church and the once-secret Broederbund who offered endless, theologically grounded reasons for maintaining the white-dominated status quo. Finally, however, he had given in to the tide of events and accepted an all-race political nation. For that malfeasance, and despite his earlier positions, he was condemned to grisly death by a radically reactionary fringe group of Afrikaners.
It is indeed gratifying that most of the individuals profiled by Goodwin and Schiff–capable reporters who carried out their interviews in 1992–do not evidence the extremism that led to Heyns’s assassination. Rather, Afrikaners now seem spread out along a broad spectrum, with a few “liberals” joyfully welcoming the recent changes in South Africa, a few “extremists” fighting them to the bitter end, but most (including large numbers of what can only be called “moderate traditionalists” and “moderate progressives”) making the best of the new situation. As always, the Afrikaners’ gritty Calvinism bulks large in any assessment of their attitudes, actions, and expectations. Sadly, there are all too many examples here of the prostitution of the faith to tribal absolutes. Happily, there are many examples of the reverse, where (often under real duress) Afrikaners testify that the values of the kingdom are more important than the values of the tribe. For readers in North America, it is pertinent to note that the freshest and most solidly grounded theological voice in the book belongs to Elaine Botha, for many years a Calvinist philosopher at Potchefstroom University, who has recently become the provost of Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.
–Mark Noll
“Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy”
By Ronald F. Thiemann
Georgetown University Press
186 pp.; $55, hardcover; $17.95, paper
Thiemann, dean of Harvard Divinity School, reviews the Supreme Court’s widely critiqued recent jurisprudence to show that the dilemma of religion’s role in American public life is unresolved. He refutes the “myth of neutrality” propounded by those political philosophers who–raising the specter of unbridgeable civil conflict, as in Bosnia–would banish religion from public affairs. Without the presence of morally based (including religious) arguments, he notes, our polity can only degenerate into power battles among competing interests.
Thiemann discusses at length the question of “publicity”–whether religiously based arguments can be sufficiently accessible to public scrutiny and suitable for civic discourse. He concludes that religious arguments are permissible, because religious groups as advocates do not differ in kind from political parties, interest groups, and other voluntary organizations, and because religious belief systems are no less rational than nonreligious ones. The desirability of such arguments, however, depends on whether an argument “is compatible with the basic values of our constitutional democracy”; religiously rooted convictions cannot claim “general applicability in a society that includes a sizable minority of non-Christians.” As a result, Thiemann’s position reduces to the weaker claim that persons of religious conviction can speak up, but only to fellow believers or if they say things nonbelievers have already accepted anyhow.
While Thiemann calls for discarding both the phrase “separation of church and state” and the three-part Lemon test for whether a government action violates the Establishment Clause, he acknowledges that his own proposed framework would not change the results of Establishment cases. Thiemann would further restrain government from infringing on the freedoms of religious minorities, but how he would rehabilitate religion’s positive role in public life is left unclear.
Thiemann leaves several key questions unaddressed. If religiously based arguments in public affairs have no claim except upon believers, why bother to construct them at all? How can believers translate their convictions into public discourse in a pluralistic society? What happens when religious conviction and “democratic values” collide–for example, when evangelicals opposed to gay legitimacy are charged with denying human equality?
Proponents of religion’s role in public life will feel at times that Thiemann argues laboriously for points already persuasively made by Richard John Neuhaus or the Williamsburg Charter Project. But Thiemann’s rigorous critique of more exclusionary positions is the book’s greatest strength. His discussion will stimulate any reader and will especially aid those seeking sophisticated, nonreligious ways to dismantle the prevailing “wall of separation.”
–Bruce Barron
BIOGRAPHY
“Dictionary of Evangelical Biography 1730-1860”
Edited by Donald M. Lewis
Blackwell
2 vols., 1,059 pp.; $195
The scope of this superbly produced biographical dictionary is set out with admirable clarity by its editor, Donald M. Lewis: “This volume seeks to provide biographical treatment and to indicate the sources of study of figures of historical, literary, and religious significance who flourished at any time between 1730 and 1860 and were associated with the evangelical movement in the English-speaking world.” The dictionary was the brainchild of missionary and historian Andrew Walls. Work on it began in earnest in the early 1970s but was halted by 1976. The project was revived in 1985 under the direction of Lewis (at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.), who carried it through to completion: a massive undertaking requiring almost ten years.
All the effort was well spent. In the future, those who ask, “But what is evangelicalism?” should simply be directed to read through these two volumes. If, after that, they don’t know the answer, they never will. From these “brief lives” (more than 3,500 altogether) many strong recurring patterns emerge. This man “experienced a dramatic conversion” while in college; that woman “was converted as a child.” Conversion led to action. These entries give an almost overwhelming impression of faith enacted–above all, through evangelism, but also through an enormous variety of other ministries, ranging from schools for servants to homes for indigent sailors. Study was not neglected–indeed, these evangelicals include a number of scholars as well as popular writers. Also striking is the social range of the figures included here, from the biblical scholar John Kitto, the son of “a drunken Cornish stonemason,” to the Scottish philanthropist Lady Darcy Maxwell. And the endless schisms, the proliferation of splinter groups within splinter groups–these too are abundantly in evidence.
One does not consult these volumes merely to note such patterns, revealing as they are, nor–though clearly this will be their primary use–to find reliable biographical data. Here, as in no orderly textbook account, you will catch the tone of another time. Indeed, some of the best entries are those that, like Arthur Pollard’s on John Berridge (“one of the few and earliest of Anglican peregrinating preachers”), draw generously on the the very words of the subject and his contemporaries. And here you will find, again and again, the mysterious idiosyncratic shape of a life, like a face seen fleetingly from a bus. If your library doesn’t already have this set on order, agitate.
–JW
“Twentieth-Century Dictionary of Christian Biography”
Edited by J. D. Douglas
Baker Book House
439 pp.; $24.99
When you use a reference work, you need to have a sense of its boundaries. If I want to know how many errors shortstop Jose Offerman committed in 1993, I won’t waste time looking in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.” The biggest problem with this dictionary of Christian biography is its failure to draw any but the roughest of boundaries. Editor J. D. Douglas seems to anticipate this objection in his preface, but his response is simply to throw up his hands: “Here is a modestly sized book that gives some eight hundred brief entries on a cross-section of Christians who lived during, or whose lives extended into, the present century.” When the field suggested is potentially so large–twentieth-century Christians, and not a few from the previous century besides!–and no criteria for inclusion are specified, the reader is left in uncertainty, and will be disinclined to consult the volume.
Thus, for example, there is an entry on the American historian Robert Linder, but no entry for Jaroslav Pelikan. Charles Colson receives an excellent entry (contributed by Carl Henry), but there is no entry for Richard John Neuhaus. And so it goes, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Moreover, while year of birth and death is given, the entries do not specify date of birth and death. In a biographical dictionary, this is a serious lack. One wants to be able to say, “He married at the age of ___,” or “She lived to the age of ___,” but this volume does not provide the information needed to construct such a chronology. In general, the entries are brief (many are 200 words or fewer) and tend toward flatness, though some (including many of those supplied by the editor) are livelier. Sometimes misinformation is passed on in the guise of summarizing the range of current opinion; the conclusion of the entry on Solzhenitsyn–“Many have been offended by his harsh criticism of life in democratic society and his penchant for monarchy and autocratic orthodox faith”–gives credence to canards that have been decisively exposed as such.
The volume includes a generous selection of figures from Africa, India, Korea, Latin America–wherever the gospel has penetrated. While this exacerbates the shapelessness of the dictionary, it is a welcome testament to the global transmission of Christianity. It is good to turn the page from an entry on the French novelist Francois Mauriac to one on the African theologian John Mbiti, and to find the Korean theologian and missionary statesman Bong-Rin Ro in the Rs with Karl Rahner, Bernard Ramm, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Helen Roseveare, Hans Rookmaaker, and Charles Ryrie, among others. There is poetry in these alphabetical collocations.
–JW
“Auden”
By Richard Davenport-Hines
Pantheon Books
406 pp.; $30
Since it is briefer and less detailed than the current standard biography, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1981 “W. H. Auden,” Davenport-Hines’s book needs to justify itself by offering new interpretations of the poet’s life and work. Early on it bids fair to do so: Davenport-Hines makes a convincing case that the attention previous biographers have lavished on Auden’s relationship with his mother has tended to obscure Auden’s father. George Auden emerges from this book as a vivid figure:
a committed, progressive physician, and a man of wide-ranging intellectual gifts. (In so vividly portraying George Auden, Davenport-Hines creates a new mystery: Why did Wystan Auden in adult life have virtually nothing to say about his father, while he made frequent reference to his mother and her influence upon him?)
After the early chapters Davenport-Hines settles into a pretty straightforward narrative. He differs from Carpenter largely in his apparent belief that Auden’s entire character can be explained with reference to his homosexuality. The complex history of Auden’s Christian faith is scarcely touched upon here, while not just his poems but also his essays and even his book reviews are treated as coded symbolic messages about homosexual experience and culture. Unfortunately, Davenport-Hines seems little interested in Auden’s work in any other respect: his focus is on events rather than ideas. One may contend that such an emphasis is proper in a biography, as opposed to a critical study, but surely the chief reason people read biographies of artists is that they are interested in the artists’ art. A really useful biography of Auden will focus much more attention on the development of his ideas. This is what Edward Mendelson did in the best book yet written about Auden, “Early Auden,” which covers the development of the poet’s mind from his earliest poems to his and Christopher Isherwood’s abandonment of England for America in 1939. My counsel is to save the 30 dollars the Davenport-Hines book costs and put it aside until Mendelson’s “Later Aude”n appears.
–Alan Jacobs
“Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom–Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop”
By J. N. D. Kelly
Cornell University Press
320 pp.; $47.50
Few biographies in English have appeared on the life and times of John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople in the late fourth century C.E. In fact, the last significant English work on Chrysostom’s life was W. R. W. Stephen’s “Saint John Chrysostom, His Life and Times,” first published in 1880. For the last 35 years, readers have largely depended upon the two-volume work on Chrysostom by C. Baur, published in German in 1929-30 and issued in English translation in 1959. Hence, the interest and excitement no doubt to be generated by the publication of a new Chrysostom biography by J. N. D. Kelly, highly respected patristic scholar and author of the well-received Early Christian Doctrines and Jerome.
Kelly does not disappoint. His biography of Chrysostom is largely based on an intimate knowledge of primary source materials. For example, Kelly’s discussion of Chrysostom’s final exile in Cucusus includes a brief analysis of a relatively unknown work of Chrysostom on divine providence and human suffering written in the closing years of his life and only recently available in English translation (“On the Providence of God”).
The Chrysostom that emerges from Kelly’s study is a complex, uncompromising individual on fire with the love of God, a man Kelly characterizes as passionately committed to orthodoxy, unable to compromise with perceived or genuine falsehood or error, and fearsomely outspoken. John’s zeal and occasional harshness was finally to result in a disastrous break with the Roman emperor Arcadius and his wife Eudoxia, the frequent target of Chrysostom’s exhortation and critique.
And yet, simultaneously, there was a gentleness and compassion in Chrysostom’s character that Kelly also observes, demonstrated in a variety of surprising contexts. Chrysostom’s love and concern for the poor is well known. Perhaps more intriguing and enlightening is John’s willingness to hold out hope for those who struggled to break free from ingrained patterns of sin. As John put it, “You are a sinner? Don’t give up. I keep on applying these ointments to you. . . . Even if you sin every day, every day repent.” For the Church of Chrysostom’s time, these were bold, if not revolutionary, words, guaranteed to upset, as Kelly puts it, not a few “puritan-minded people” unsure of the efficacy of postbaptismal repentance.
Kelly has written a detailed, judicious study. Chrysostom scholars will welcome his contribution. Those encountering Chrysostom for the first time will find Kelly to be a reliable guide.
–Christopher A. Hall
“God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan”
By Jonathan D. Spence
Norton
400 pp.; $27.50
Jonathan Spence, in my opinion our foremost historian of early modern and modern China, has in this, his latest book, given us a well-crafted and compellingly told account of the massive mid-nineteenth century Taiping Rebellion, which wracked the empire and almost toppled the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. The story of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), which culminated in perhaps the largest and bloodiest civil war the world has ever known, and its quixotic founder and leader, Hong Xiuquan, is not an unfamiliar one to historians of modern China. All the elements stressed in other accounts (including Spence’s own in the fine general history, “The Search for Modern China”)–the increasingly volatile social, economic, and ethnic tinderbox of South China in the 1840s, aggravated by Qing government defeat at the hands of the British in the Opium War (1839-42), all ignited by the pseudo-Christian doctrines of Hong, derived both from early Christian tracts and from a powerful vision in which he visited heaven and was commissioned by God as the (literal) younger brother of Jesus–are visible around the edges of this work. But to get a full account of the Taipings and their times, including their government foes, the reader must look elsewhere.
The unique contribution of this book rather is to highlight elements often neglected by other scholars; in particular, the religious dynamism and power of the movement, from the context of Chinese popular religion to the painstaking manner in which the “priest-king” Hong emended and excised sections of the Chinese Bible to suit his own theology. Anyone who needs confirmation of the potential of the millenarian aspects of Christianity to fire rebellion in a receptive climate, or the chilling tendency of fanatical messianic leaders to bring tragedy upon the heads of many may look to Spence’s story of Hong, who, claiming to be sent by God to seize “the killing power in Heaven and earth,” did just that, and set a precedent followed in some ways a century later by Chairman Mao.
–Daniel H. Bays
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 30
bcjul96mrj6B40306618
