Book Briefs: November 21, 1986

Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares, translated by Andrew Hurley; (Knopf, 1986, 381 pp.; $18.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Reed Jolley, pastor of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Community Church.

Shortly after the fall of the Batista regime in 1959, a 23-year-old office worker for the Ministry of Communications of the Cuban Revolutionary Government was arrested. His crime was his outspoken opposition to communism around the workplace. He refused to display a plaque on his desk saying, “If Fidel is a Communist, then put me on the list. He’s got the right idea.” Armando Valladares’s imprisonment would last 22 years.

In Against All Hope, Cuban poet Valladares has produced a painstaking account of his sojourn in hell. His tour of life in Cuban prisons reveals man’s lowest capabilities. At the author’s first stop, Isla de Pinos, 100 pounds of inferior food was allotted to feed roughly 6,000 prisoners each day. Valladares and his fellow political prisoners were routinely beaten, tortured, and psychologically manipulated. Every act of the guards was intended to break the will of the inmates and cause them to enter “political rehabilitation” courses. Valladares held his ground throughout and paid for it dearly. His account is a relentless tale of human degradation: months spent in solitary confinement, submersion in a ditch filled with human excrement, infrequent visits from family, and overcrowded conditions.

Against All Hope takes its title from Romans 4:18, and its author’s faith in Jesus Christ is gripping. When first incarcerated, Valladares heard the nightly cries of those before the firing squads: “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King). This witness led to the author’s conversion. “I not only understood instantly, as though by a sudden revelation, that Christ was indeed there for me at the moments when I prayed not to be killed, but realized as well that he served to give my life, and my death if it came to that, ethical meaning.”

The reader catches in Armando Valladares a faith that works in the depths of desperation. In contrast to the oft-heard American gospel of success and prosperity, the author exposes his readers to a gospel of hope. Valladares cries out to a God who doesn’t “make everything okay” but who is God nonetheless: “I never asked him to get me out of there; I didn’t think God should be used for that kind of request. I only asked that he allow me to resist, that he give me the faith and spiritual strength to bear up under these conditions without sickening with hatred. I only prayed for him to accompany me. And his presence, which I felt, made my faith an indestructible shield.”

Valladares’s nightmare came to an end due to the efforts of his wife and Amnesty International. Both applied relentless pressure to free the increasingly acclaimed poet, and, in time, they succeeded. Against All Hope is a grand testimony to the truth of rhetorician Richard Weaver’s statement, “Ideas have consequences.” Valladares lived through the consequences of communist totalitarianism. He lived as a consequence of his faith in God.

An Excerpt

Surreal Scene

“The guards moved back and forth and handed out blows in what seemed to be a different dimension from the one in which we were praying and singing hymns to God. In the cell in front of mine, I watched guards kicking two prisoners lying on the floor. Those prisoners also began to sing and pray as soon as the guards had left. Now those men over there, who had been singing before, were being beaten. And so the surreal scene went on. Above the shouting and tumult, the voice of [Gerardo] the Brother of Faith was singing Glory, glory Hallelujah!”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY TALKS TO Armando Valladares

What do Christians in the United States need to know about Cuba?

They need to know that the terrible situation described in my book still exists: There are thousands of political prisoners in Cuba who are subject to inhumane treatment. Among those people are Christians persecuted solely for practicing their religion. Christians need to understand that when certain religious groups travel to Cuba and return praising the Cuban revolution, their statements are not in accord with the realities there.

Castro recently released a group of political prisoners. Does that indicate a change of attitude?

The release is not a sign of change. Castro has had a habit of freeing political prisoners when pressure from outside becomes too great or there is a strong reaction from human rights organizations. The best thing is to continue pressuring him and to report publicly the crimes being committed.

When the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Castro, he returned with reports of a new openness on Castro’s part toward the church in Cuba. Was his visit a help or a hindrance to the people you are concerned about?

The only thing Castro has faith in is violence and torture. To go down and talk to Castro in nice, friendly tones is exactly like meeting with Stalin, Hitler, or any other dictator. I wonder whether Jesse Jackson would do the same thing with Chile’s Pinochet or South Africa’s Botha. From the prisoners’ point of view, Jackson’s visit to Cuba was positive in that Castro gave him a gift of 16 prisoners. Perhaps the payment for those prisoners was exacted in the statements Jackson made.

Is the Cuban community in America taking any initiative on behalf of Cuban political prisoners?

Yes. The Cuban American Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Roman Catholic Bishop Agustin Roman of Miami are working actively together as advocates of prisoners in Cuba.

By Beth Spring.

The Genesis Disconnection

The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts Between Science and the Bible, by Charles E. Hummel (InterVarsity Press, 1986, 293 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by John K. Testerman, a marine biologist and family physician who practices medicine in Glendale Heights, Illinois.

Chemical engineer and former college president Charles Hummel has written a history and philosophy of science for the lay reader with implications for theology. The issues raised by the trial and condemnation of Galileo provide the connection between the themes—hence the title, The Galileo Connection.

Hummel, who now serves as director of faculty ministries for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, uses short biographies of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to contradict the popular notion of the “warfare of science and religion.” He convincingly contends that these devout Christian scientists met resistance not because their ideas were unchristian, but because they were un-Aristotelian. The new ideas threatened the Aristotelian intellectual establishment of the universities. Consequently, Galileo’s jealous professional colleagues, who had political connections in the church, managed to use the church to rid themselves of their rival. The struggles and conflicts of the scientific renaissance, as typified by the Galileo trial, succeeded in establishing science for the first time as a separate field from philosophy and theology, with its own subject matter and methods of inquiry.

The history and biography in the first half of this book are but the arena in which the author chooses to display his main ideas. Hummel points out that controversy with the church arose whenever Scripture became wedded to a particular philosophic or scientific world view. When that world view began to topple, clerics reacted as if the Bible itself were under attack.

The medieval synthesis of theology and Aristotle set the stage for the defensive reaction of some churchmen to Galileo. Hummel accuses the “scientific creationists” of falling into the same trap with respect to their opposition to evolution. Hummel argues from a historical-contextual perspective that no correlation of Genesis with modern science should be attempted. As soon as a correlation is attempted, the problem arises as to which science it should be correlated with, for as that science falls, the credibility of Genesis will then fall with it, as happened to the fixity-of-species creationists in the nineteenth century. For the sake of Scripture, therefore, Hummel concludes that the scientific theory of evolution (as distinct from the philosophy of evolutionism) should be allowed to stand or fall on its own terms, without reference to prior philosophical or theological concepts.

God, The Creator

Unfortunately, Hummel, though writing to a conservative Christian audience, does not deal with some important questions that arise with the disconnection of Genesis from science. Christianity is a historical religion. The God of the Bible invites us to know him through his “mighty acts” in history. One of those acts is Creation. Is the God who creates by the brutal and bloody process of survival of the fittest the same sort of person we get to know in the Scriptures? What are the implications for the doctrine of the Fall? of Sin? of Redemption?

The theme that theologians should not meddle in science is old and tired. However, Hummel brings in a fresh approach and a balance frequently lacking in such pieces, criticizing not only the historic tendency of theologians to dabble in science, to the detriment of both fields, but the opposite tendency, equally destructive, to turn science into a philosophy or religion, as happened in the development of deism, naturalism, and evolutionism. He argues that science and revelation deal with complementary aspects of reality, science being limited to describing the what and the how, and religion with the ultimate origin, purpose, and meaning of existence. Galileo put it best: “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

Witness to Annihilation

The Oath, by Elie Wiesel (Schocken, 1986, 283 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Patrick Kampert, a free-lance writer and former managing editor of Christian Life magazine.

It is said that writers produce their best work when they write from their own experience—and Elie Wiesel has never gone about his work in any other manner.

The memories of Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buchenwald cling to him, and it is, paradoxically, the death and horror of the Holocaust that give his writing its intense sense of life and hope.

The Oath is the first English translation of Le serment de Kolvillag, which Wiesel released in France in the early seventies. But Wiesel’s riveting narration and chilling narrative come through loud and clear in the process, perhaps because Marion Wiesel, the author’s wife, did the translation.

This new translation is some 30 years removed from Wiesel’s first book, Night, a harrowing memoir of his concentration camp experiences, but it is scarcely less jolting.

Azriel, the book’s primary narrator, is an old man. Though he has not yet reached 70 years of age, he has been beaten down and ravaged by the secret that he alone possesses. Some 50 years before, he had been witness to the annihilation of his village, Kolvillag, and its Jewish community.

A “Christian” boy named Yancsi, the town ruffian, had disappeared. Though presumably he simply ran away, the “Christians” are quick to accuse the Jews of ritual murder. The tension and suspense mount. But Moshe, a slightly mad mystic (who is also Azriel’s mentor) steps forward messianically to lay claim to the murder and the punishment.

But it is too late. With anti-Semitic retribution only hours away, Moshe swears the Jewish community to silence, regardless of whatever revenge is wreaked upon the terrified Jews.

After the Kolvillag holocaust, the lone survivor Azriel is doomed to carry the burden of “the oath.” Until he comes across a young man who is contemplating suicide—and tells his story of death to convey the sanctity of life to one who thought life was no longer worth living.

These themes of silence and speech, of death and life, are not new to Wiesel’s work. But his dense, stirring writing—not unlike Dostoevsky’s—and his Thomas Hobbes—like view of mankind, that man is capable of the basest acts of a wolf or any beast, bring a sobriety to life’s events that we as people of the 1980s would do well to learn from.

Stricken Family

Home Free, by James C. Schaap (Crossway, 1986, 153 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West (Antelope Island).

Grudges borne and sorrows long nurtured create the dramatic tensions in James Schaap’s novel of a stricken Dutch-Calvinist family. Through taut writing and sustained plot focus, the Dordt College professor captures a bitter sense of urgency.

Missionary Hank Pietenpol and his wife, Ila, come home from El Salvador to visit his parents. Hank and Ila dread this homecoming so much they plan to return to Central America in less than a week. Wim, Hank’s stern Dutch-Calvinist father, thinks Hank’s cultural empathy means acceptance of liberation theology, or worse—communism. His judgmental view of Hank, painfully moralistic and endlessly uncompromising, leaves husband and wife angry yet helpless, unable to breach his ironclad perspective of “obstinate quiet.”

Throughout the visit, Wim seems profoundly troubled, loving his son desperately, yet boastfully challenging him with an irrationality that fills Hank—and the reader—with a mounting sense of despair. So intent are Hank and Ila on understanding Wim that one night they lie in bed, straining to overhear a muted conversation, in Dutch, between Hank’s parents on the other side of the bedroom wall.

Irrevocably polarized, caught in a “vast and intricate, perfect Dutch-Calvinist cobweb,” the pair seems unable to change until a surprising chain of events—including a dark family secret and a sudden death—bring them to profound understanding. “I’m not going back,” Hank finally admits, eschewing the missionary career that had been Wim’s choice, not his own.

As active, lifelong Christians, the family tries to avoid this impasse—but still it happens. Readers who also bear the scars of past family damage will find the ending, where Hank experiences that most powerful of blessings, the healing of memory, to be a well-received reward.

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