Book Briefs: August 17, 1979

C. S. Lewis And Friends

The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends, by Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin, 287 pp., $10.95), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editor at large, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book is a treat, a Sunday after-church brunch, a fluffy omelette, or a smooth piece of cheesecake. Not only does it look good and smell good, it tastes good. The main ingredient is C. S. Lewis.

That is as it should be. For the Inklings, despite Lewis’s own protestations to the contrary, were C. S. Lewis. He leavened the group; he bound them together. The people who gathered on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (or the Bird and Baby as it was nicknamed), Lewis’s favorite pub, and in his rooms on Thursday evenings, were his friends. The commonality that held them together, other than a love for certain kinds of literature and reading aloud, was their relationship to him.

Not that this felicitous book—and Carpenter does write well—is merely a Lewis biography disguised. Much of the information about Lewis has been published before, though perhaps not said so gracefully or poignantly. But Carpenter develops all the other characters as they moved in and out of Lewis’s life. Perhaps since he has recently written a biography of Tolkien, he spends more time on Warnie Lewis and Charles Williams. The book might almost be considered a mini-biography of the latter.

The structure of the book reflects the structure of the Inklings; it is a masterly stroke. Lewis begins and ends the book. The center section (roughly), part two and much of three, concerns Williams. If Lewis was the mind behind the Inklings, one might say that Williams was its heart.

But a heart and a mind flawed. That is the other amazing quality about Carpenter’s treatment. He is nearly objective. (No one can be completely so.)

If you revere these writers and cannot admit a little original—and other—sin into their lives, you will not like this book. Carpenter takes the men as he finds them. He was there. He knew. Lewis was somewhat of a snob. His treatment of Tolkien was not always what it should have been. Tolkien did have a selective memory and an acid tongue in later years. He was jealous and suspicious of Lewis’s success in so many fields. Williams (and this was new information for me) had a sadistic streak and had an idyllic marriage in writing only.

All that merely makes the influence of these men more remarkable to me. No mortal should be above criticism; no one is. And criticism done as charmingly as Carpenter has done should help idolaters take it more easily.

So, the meal is laced with a little medicine. Evangelicals who have idolized these men—let’s admit that some of us have done that—need this book with its medicine. I was glad I took it all.

The Mountains Of Ararat

Where Is Noah’s Ark?, by Lloyd R. Bailey (Abingdon, 128 pp., $1.95 pb), is reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, professor at large, Melodyland Christian Center, Anaheim, California.

With a format similar to that of many books arguing for the ark’s survival, this book will doubtless be read by many who think that it is another work of that genre. It is not. Instead it seeks to refute the arguments that favor the survival of Noah’s vessel.

Bailey, who is associate professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, commences with an attempt to cut ark hunters off at the pass: he argues that “the mountains of Ararat,” where the ark was said to have landed in Genesis 8:4, cannot properly be identified with Mt. Ararat (called Buyuk Agri Dagi by the Turks), in eastern Turkey. In support of this contention, he provides as an appendix an article published in 1901. This argument is hardly new and has been answered frequently. When James Bryce returned to England with his wood relic from Ararat in 1876 and delivered a paper before the Royal Geographical Society, he cited the great Theodor Nöldeke and others in support of the identification of the Armenian Ararat with the biblical mountain and declared that “he could not admit that any other Ararat had superior claims to the mountain of which he had been speaking” (see my book, The Quest for Noah’s Ark, Pt. III, sec. 6). By refusing to identify the Genesis mountains of Ararat with the Turkish mountain, Bailey then has to explain every one of the considerable number of sightings, the wood finds, the photos, and the satellite data connecting the ark to present-day Ararat.

The strain of this herculean task shows throughout the book. Thus Bailey declares that “attempts to date Navarra’s wood by the extent of fossilization and related conditions are totally meaningless”—and cites amateur explorer John Morris (coauthor with Tim LaHaye of The Ark on Ararat) and the Department of Wood and Paper Science at the North Carolina State University in support of his contention (pp. 77–80). Frankly, this reviewer finds it difficult, on such a basis, to dismiss the physical wood analysis not only of the Madrid Forestry Institute, but also that of the Department of Anthropology and Prehistoric Studies of the University of Bordeaux.

When faced with undeniable discoveries of hand-tooled wood at exceedingly high altitudes on treeless Ararat, Bailey prefers any explanation—however speculative—to an attribution of this wood to the ark. Some examples: “There is nothing physically improbable … in the proposal that persons may have carried or hauled heavy timbers to the snow line and used them to build some sort of structure” (p. 91). “Even if the wood grew only at a distance from the mountain, there is nothing improbable in the suggestion that the timbers were brought there overland” (p. 92). G. Ernest Wright, who opposed the whole idea of a universal flood and the literal historicity of the Genesis account of Noah, is quoted for his utterly gratuituous speculation that wood discovered on Ararat could have come from a replica ark: “Industrious monks … wishing to further their livelihood by the tourist trade, may have built something up on the mountain that with great difficulty could be seen and shown to be the ‘Ark’ ” (p. 95). Particularly indicative of Bailey’s approach to his subject is his comment on the absence of any records showing that such a replica was built: “In my view, such an absence of literary evidence proves nothing. Had such a replica been constructed, the monks would have tried to avoid any record of their activity” (ibid.). Thus documentary confirmation of the replica hypothesis becomes impossible in principle; any evidence would have been concealed by the sneaky replica builders.

If you can believe that, you should not have the least trouble believing the admittedly circumstantial, but at least substantial, mass of evidential data pointing to the survival of the one wooden object historically and inextricably tied to Mt. Ararat, Noah’s ark.

American Civil Religion

Twilight of the Saints: Biblical Christianity and Civil Religion in America by Robert D. Linder and Richard V. Pierard (InterVarsity, 213 pp., $4.95 pb) is reviewed by Paul F. Scotchmer, Berkeley, California.

In the mid-1950s, Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew startled religious and academic leaders throughout America with the observation that there are really four major religious expressions in America, not just three. Besides Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, there is also a “common faith,” which Herberg identified as the American Way of Life. Scholars began to pursue this theme in earnest beginning with Robert Bellah’s oft reprinted 1967 essay on “Civil Religion in America.” Making good use of a decade of lively discussion on this topic, historians Linder and Pierard have collaborated to expose the historical development of American Civil Religion and to weigh this “common faith” on the scales of biblical Christianity, evangelically conceived.

Chapter 1 introduces civil religion in general, and its American manifestations in particular. Unfortunately, it is at this early stage that we encounter the weakest aspect of the book: the definition of civil religion. “Briefly stated, civil religion is the use of consensus religious sentiments, concepts and symbols by the state—either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously—for its own political purposes.” The problem is the emphasis on the state. A better definition of American civil religion was supplied by Herberg a few years ago in an address on this subject: “It is an organic structure of ideas, values, and beliefs that constitutes a faith common to Americans as Americans, and is genuinely operative in their lives; a faith that markedly influences, and is influenced by, the professed religions of Americans.” This definition avoids the suggestion of state religion.

In chapters 2 and 3 the authors do a commendable job of illustrating the development of civil religion in America, from its dayspring in Puritanism to its twilight in contemporary society. Fortunately, they deviate from their own definition of civil religion; otherwise, they would not have been able to do justice to its permeation with American values wrought by eighteenth and nineteenth-century evangelicals.

Chapters 4 and 5 offer a balanced evaluation of the good and bad in civil religion. The authors recognize on one hand the usefulness of some sort of spiritual consensus for social cohesion; on the other hand, they underscore the tendency for civil religion to baptize national (and ephemeral) values, and to dilute biblical (and eternal) values.

The sixth and final chapter explores the alternatives for evangelicals in today’s society. The temptation to promote civil religion as a means of gluing back the pieces of our disintegrating social and political order is roundly rejected. This leaves essentially three alternatives: (1) to resign oneself to the fact that America is going to the devil, limiting one’s concerns to the spiritual realm; (2) to attempt to “recapture America for God,” emulating our Puritan fathers; or (3) the author’s solution, simply to practice New Testament Christianity, “re-emphasizing the ‘city upon a hill’ model but applying it only to the people of God rather than to the entire American nation.”

A stronger case could be made for the second alternative, but nevertheless, Christians can certainly profit by reading Twilight of the Saints. It treats a most complex subject in a lucid way, and its colorful illustrations make it a source of entertainment from start to finish. But more than that, it prophetically incites Christians in America to discriminate more carefully between Christ and culture.

The Spiritual Condition Of Europe

The Changing Church in Europe by Wayne A. Detzler (Zondervan, 256 pp., $5.95 pb) is reviewed by Donald D. Smeeton, professor, Continental Bible College, St. Pieters Leeuw, Belgium.

Robert P. Evans’s Let Europe Hear, was issued in 1963 and so for many years evangelicals have lacked a major survey of current conditions in European Christianity. There have been brief overviews, such as Wallace Henley’s Europe at the Crossroads (Good News), but they make no claim to comprehensiveness. Now Evans’s colleague, his associate director of the Greater Europe Mission has provided a worthy successor. Detzler comments on Europe from Great Britain to Greece, from the charismatic Catholics to the order-bound Orthodox.

Europe has moved from nominal Christianity to pragmatic paganism. How could this change have happened? Most readers, especially American evangelicals, will appreciate Detzler’s interpretation of the contradictory movements within Europe. One hears of many towns without an adequate gospel witness, yet one knows about the famous cathedrals. One hears of resistance to the evangel, yet Bible sales are growing rapidly. One views the persecution of Christians behind the Iron Curtain, yet sees the rise of Euro-Communism in “Christian” Europe. How can all these reports be true? Detzler will help the bewildered correlate these opposing movements. Detzler explains why Vatican II can be credited (blamed?) for provoking both a progressive and a conservative reaction among European Roman Catholics. He suggests reasons why the Roman Church appears both to embrace and reject Communism. Because the Eastern Church appears incomprehensible to Western eyes, most readers will profit from Detzler’s summary of recent events in this “enigmatic” branch of Christendom. But one wonders how he can be so suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church in the “free” West, yet so sympathetic to the plight of the Orthodox Catholics in the Communist East. As a resident of Dorset, England, Detzler is at his best in his analysis of strengths and weaknesses in the Anglican and Free Churches of England.

Because of the need for such a volume and Detzler’s gallant effort, I hesitate to criticize, but I think it is better that criticisms come from one who is sympathetic to Detzler’s commitment rather than from one who thinks that evangelizing Europe is unnecessary. The discerning historian will surely question the assertion that Europe’s spiritual decline is the direct result of the rise of nonevangelical theology. Certainly theology that minimizes biblical authority and rejects the supernatural does contribute to the demise of the church, but so do philosophic opinions (i.e. materialism), social conditions (i.e. war), and economic change (i.e. rapid economic prosperity). Europeans will rightly note the unnecessary viewing of Europe through American eyes. About 95 percent of the footnotes and bibliography refer to materials in English; the remainder are from a single European language, German. On noting this Anglo-centeredness, a Belgian friend said, “After all, an ocean separates England from the Continent!” Detzler cites the Billy Graham backed congresses in Berlin (1966), Amsterdam (1971), and Lausanne (1974) as evidence of evangelical resurgence, yet these might better illustrate the needed presence of American organization and finance. I have no doubts, however, that these meetings provided positive impetus in unity and evangelism among European evangelicals. The traditional Pentecostal will wonder why so much concern was centered on the Catholic charismatic movement when the large and growing Pentecostal churches in France, Portugal, and Italy receive such slight mention. He will also wonder why the four pages on Romania concentrate on the Baptists, while leaving the more numerous Pentecostals unmentioned.

Nevertheless, The Changing Church in Europe is still a very helpful book. Detzler’s message needs to be heard.

Periodicals

The field of Christian education has not been well-served by periodicals on the professional level. Now the National Association of Directors of Christian Education has launched Infocus as a 16-page collection of articles and notes. All present and potential DCE’s should subscribe, along with all Bible college and seminary libraries. $5/year (3 issues). Stanley Olsen, 810 S. 7th St., Minneapolis, MN 55415.

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