Rough Times at Hamilton High

The World We Created at Hamilton High 1953–1987, by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press, 296 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Bruce L. Shelley, professor of church history, Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary.

During a visit to a high school campus in the late seventies, Gerald Grant noticed a teacher who was visibly upset. A group of students had verbally assaulted her in the hallway. Had she reported the incident? No, she said. “It wouldn’t have done any good.”

“Why not?” Grant asked.

“I didn’t have any witnesses.”

That incident, according to Grant, exemplifies what has gone wrong with urban public education. Relativism reigns. Moral benchmarks have crumbled. And the value-free atmosphere has turned schools into institutions where teacher and student are peers and adult authority is reduced to what can stand up in court.

Grant’s convincing analysis and argument for the recovery of moral principles in education makes The World We Created at Hamilton High significant reading for Christian parents, youth pastors, and other evangelicals who are concerned about life on today’s high school campuses.

Grant, who is professor of cultural foundations and sociology at Syracuse University, traces how the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies destroyed the peaceful world of the 1950s American high school. He calls the school in his book “Hamilton High” and locates it in “Median, U.S.A.” In reality, the school is Nottingham High in Syracuse, New York, which opened its doors in 1953 in a middle-class neighborhood.

During its early years, Hamilton reflected its setting: high achievement and social conformity. Twenty years later, however, pimps strolled the school grounds. The principal had a full-time bodyguard, and school closings due to violence were commonplace.

Also reviewed in this section:

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Scandal,by Shusaku Endo

What’s Good About the Good News?by Neal Punt

Book Briefs

Eerdmans Analytical Concordance to the RSV • New Dictionary of Theology • The Message of the Bible • Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible • The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia • The Serendipity Bible Study Book of John • Reflections on the Gospel of John • LifeChange Series: Colossians and Philemon • Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Colossians and Philemon • The Wycliffe Exegetical Commentary: Philippians • Word Biblical Commentary: 1 Peter • Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: 1 Peter

A Negotiated Reality

According to Grant, the dramatic changes at Hamilton can be traced directly to a string of reforms designed to guarantee high school students the legal rights of adults. Today, Hamilton no longer thinks of itself as a traditional academic community, responsible to impart moral values to students along with information and skills. As a result, cheating is widespread. The school’s drug counselor claims to be unqualified to tell students what is right and wrong. And teachers do not attempt to impose discipline or to tell students how to live. In short, Hamilton is a bureaucratic, utilitarian institution in which people get what they want and move on.

Students’ rights changed the climate of education completely. Teachers—who are of special concern to Grant—began to feel that their reprimands following even blatant misbehavior would not be supported by school administrators. Many began to “look the other way” to avoid bringing a misconduct charge against a student. They feared not only legal battles, but also physical battles.

The old student-teacher relationships, built on years of informal consensus, were swept away, and in their place stood a new legal “equality.” Teachers, writes Grant, “were placed in the paradoxical position of being asked to socialize their equals.”

By the mid-1980s, teachers and students at Hamilton had reached “a negotiated reality.” Though the harsh, adversarial tone of the seventies seemed a thing of the past, there was no return to the attitudes of the fifties. Students themselves deplored Hamilton’s lack of respect, absence of caring, and hostility; but they celebrated their individuality and diversity, and resented any attempt on the part of a faculty member “to pry” into their personal lives or “to interfere.”

Recovering Moral Authority

According to Grant, today’s substitutes for traditional morality can be found in two practices, one of which is what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “therapeutic contractualism.” This style of interaction and “human relations” management, writes Grant, “tends to encourage the view that if a student gets in trouble it is a psychological problem to be dealt with in a therapeutic relationship, rather than a failure of the community to morally educate.”

The second substitute for traditional morality is “values clarification.” This process, according to Sidney B. Simon, who popularized the method, “involves knowing what one prizes, choosing those things which one cares for most, and weaving those things into the fabric of daily living.” Teachers of values clarification stress that values are different and that no one set of values is better than any other.

Critics of this process, including Grant, charge that it breeds relativism among students, and that it has produced a coercive peer pressure that encourages them to adopt the most popular set of values.

The time has come, says Grant, to restore moral authority. But he insists—and here many Christians may find their most serious difference with him—that the case “needs to be made anew that morality is independent of religion and that religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient justification for the most basic, universal, ethical principles.”

Still, Grant’s argument remains compelling, and the issues he raises are crucial. Schools must affirm and impart moral as well as intellectual values. Any call for educational reform that ignores them will inevitably fail, as a visit to Hamilton High School demonstrates.

Scandal, by Shusaku Endo (Dodd Mead, 261 pp.; $18.95, cloth). Reviewed by Terry Muck, executive editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Perhaps no passage in literature is more in harmony with the apostle Paul’s view of sin in Romans 7 than Feodor Dostoevski’s chilling look at the human soul: “In the reminiscences of every man there are some things that he does not reveal to anyone except possibly to friends. Then there are some that he will not even reveal to friends, but only to himself, and even so in secret. But finally there are some that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself.”

Shusaku Endo’s Scandal, the latest in a long list of brilliant novels, takes a similar look at the dark heart of humanity. It is the story of a Japanese novelist, Suguro (who resembles Endo himself in many ways), whose old age and impending death teach him that “deep in the hearts of men lay a blackness they themselves knew nothing about.”

Suguro learns this lesson when he is threatened by a journalist-blackmailer, who claims he has seen the Christian novelist roaming Tokyo’s red-light district. Others corroborate the story. Suguro strongly denies it and insists an imposter is trying to ruin his reputation. The suspense builds as the reader tries to decide if Suguro is really a philanderer, a moral Jekyll and Hyde, or an innocent man defamed by an imposter.

Recognizing The Dark Side

Endo uses this dramatic story to examine Suguro’s unfolding awareness of his own dark side and of the evil that lurks in all men’s souls. Our simple-minded conception of sin is stripped naked as we learn that the real evil of this powerful, often-unconscious force goes far beyond the do’s and don’ts of everyday morality. Sin affects our relationships with others, distorts the accuracy of our self-awareness, and even defines the boundaries of salvation itself.

Endo paints gripping portraits of relationships in order to illustrate what happens when we fail to recognize the evil side of our nature. Suguro, for example, is “a novelist who peered into the depth of his soul … but as a husband he was careful not to expose himself beyond the essential boundaries.” Toward his audience, Suguro feels “a prick of conscience, as though he had lied … to all his many readers. Don’t overestimate me, he wanted to tell them.” Another distorted relationship in Suguro’s life involves a lady of noble birth and bearing, Madame Naruse—a hospital volunteer of saintly heart by day, and a participant in sadomasochistic parties by night.

In these and many other relationships—with his editor, his fellow writers, and even with the muckraking journalist—Suguro slowly, and then only partially, learns the lesson of self-disclosure: that people simply cannot relate in any meaningful way to someone who does not recognize his own capacity for evil. “Everyone has had the experience of wanting to hurt someone who is too good and too innocent,” Endo writes.

But the real danger is to the individual’s own soul. It is here that Endo masterfully reveals Suguro’s growing awareness of what he has hidden so long. At first he totally denies the possibility of danger. Then he treats it merely as an object of professional, authorial curiosity. Finally he realizes he must come to grips with his dark side or else his whole world will crumble: “A hand somewhere was trying to shake loose the tight grip on the world that he had built for himself. The hand was seeking to hurl him into a nightmarish world he had never before imagined.… He felt as though his entire life had been built on a foundation of mendacity.”

And then, somehow, in this final recognition of evil comes the starting point of—what? Salvation? Maybe. There is some hint that in the very act of recognizing personal evil, the capacity to accept salvation is born. But Endo refuses to tie up the bow so neatly. The missionary Paul does in Romans 7. The theologian Calvin provides a systematic answer. But novelist Endo has made his point powerfully in his story and leaves us to face our own dark side and its death-dealing consequences alone.

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. (Harper & Row, 191 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Katie Andraski, a poet living in Belvidere, Illinois. She is the author of When the Plow Cuts (Thorntree Press).

Walter Wangerin’s intelligence is so rich he could become a lasting voice in American letters. His first novel, The Book of the Dun Cow, won the American Book Award in 1980 and was chosen as the New York Times’s Best Children’s Book of the Year.

Since his initial success, Wangerin’s talent has expanded and grown bolder, leading him to play with his art by stretching the language or inverting classical literary structures (opening a story, for example, with its ending; then returning to its middle and beginning). But Wangerin’s talent is unruly. If given free rein (by Wangerin or his editors), it can turn to overwriting and sentimentality, which tax the perception and patience of his reader.

Unfortunately, this is evident in Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, a collection of 12 short stories—Wangerin’s own confessions of sin and of faith. The stories alternate between boyhood and adulthood, so the climax of the boy’s sin is paired with the climax of the pastor’s growth in faith. Wangerin calls it “chiastic” structure, with the child’s descent crossing the adult’s ascent in the middle of the book.

One of the best childhood stories is “Spittin’ Image,” about the grandfather who teaches the boy not to fear death. With all the lessons over but one, the boy approaches his dying grandfather: “I walked to him and stuck out my lesser hand. He took it and held it to his huge, wide shovel—and he did what you do for the dying. We shook hands.” The story has many such wonderful moments, cleanly written. Pure Wangerin.

But it also holds too many modifiers, which spoil the story’s effect. And in one scene, when the boy and grandfather explore a cemetery, Wangerin alludes to lines from Dylan Thomas: “I was happy as the grass was green, oh, I was lordly in the rivers of windfall light.” I would rather see the scene through Wangerin’s eyes and language.

Lessons To Learn

The title story, “Miz Lil,” sets the tone of the lessons of adulthood that the pastor must learn. Much of the story’s action takes place in the context of the pastor’s daily duties—greeting people at the church door, preaching, visiting them at home. After a sermon one Sunday, the pastor asks the opinion of Lillian Lander, one of his church’s godly cornerstones. In his sermon, he told how he had shut off the church’s water to prevent Marie, a prostitute who lived across from the church, from stealing it. He would not support her business, he proudly announced.

Miz Lil says, “God was in your preaching. Did you hear him, Pastor?… You preach a mightier stroke than you know. Oh, God was bending his black brow down upon our little church today, and yesterday, and many a day before. Watching. ‘Cause brother Jesus—he was in that child Marie, begging a drink of water from my pastor.”

Again, however, Wangerin’s playful talent overruns the power of his story; his inverted structure is confusing.

Material in two other adult stories has appeared elsewhere in the Wangerin canon. Many of the same details and characters of “Yolanda Jones” appeared in The Orphean Passages. And in “Baglady” Wangerin retells the story of Robert, which appears earlier in the collection.

Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace is as much about God’s grace as it is about Wangerin’s childhood or his work as a pastor in a church called Grace. Wangerin himself has said, “Grace is God drawing you through a story.” In this book he shows how God hazed him step by stubborn step into faith and obedience. He invites the reader to see how this strange grace operates in action and character. And when he tells his stories cleanly and simply, their innocence and reality do indeed draw readers through to God.

Baglady

An Excerpt

“The baglady had found what she was feeling for. She snatched it up between us—almost like some talisman against an evil—and she hissed a second sentence with startling clarity, … and my neck began to tingle. But what she held was a half-pint carton of milk. And what she was doing was giving it to me.

I heard an expulsion of air, a sigh from the congregation. I interpreted their sigh. The drama around me diminished me, and I was moved, and the microphone sagged away from my mouth.

Behold: the impoverished is nourishing the preacher. Behold: the servant is being served.”

—from Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

What’s Good About the Good News? by Neal Punt (Northland Press, 142 pp.; $7.95, paper). Reviewed by Donald McKim, interim pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

God’s “plan of salvation” has caused theological wranglings for centuries. Universalists and particularists, Calvinists and Arminians, evangelicals and liberals have all sketched their visions of how God saves people. In What’s Good About the Good News?, Neal Punt, a Christian Reformed pastor, seeks to draw Christians to his central thesis, which was presented in his previous book, Unconditional Good News (Eerdmans, 1980): “All persons are elect in Christ except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be finally lost.” He distinguishes this premise from the one held by most Christians: All persons are outside of Christ except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be saved. There is a world of theological difference between the two propositions.

Punt quotes the Reformed theologian Charles Hodge, who wrote that “all the descendants of Adam, except those of whom it is expressly revealed that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God, are saved” (Systematic Theology). Punt says this means “all humans are to be viewed as elect in Christ unless we have final and decisive evidence to the contrary.”

Qualified Universalism

The author targets what he sees as a significant error made in every theological tradition. He states that although the doctrine of original sin teaches all persons are sinful and deserve God’s judgment, this is “something altogether different” from saying all persons are outside of Christ. Original sin itself does not tell us how many will be saved or lost. The good news is that “the electing grace of God does intervene on behalf of every person except those who, throughout all their life, willfully and finally ‘refuse to have God in their knowledge.’ ” People are only lost when, in addition to their sin in Adam, they reject whatever revelation God gives them. They are lost by their own willful decisions.

This perspective allows for biblical affirmations of universalism and particularism. Punt presents a “qualified universalism”—not all are saved, because the broader context of Scripture clearly speaks of people who are lost. Yet “all those and only those for whom Christ accomplished salvation will be saved.”

Punt, however, will not draw the logical conclusion of double predestination from this. For “while one might say that God’s not choosing some is tantamount to his rejection of them,” the Bible “never draws that implication and neither may we.”

The elect are saved by God’s sovereign grace, and the nonelect are lost by their persistent unbelief and sin, according to Punt. How these two concepts are interrelated is “beyond our ability to comprehend.” Faith, repentance, and obedience are necessary personal responses to the gospel; without them, one will not be saved. Punt holds that all infants will be saved because they have not willfully rejected Christ, despite their sinful nature.

Motive For Missions

Punt’s position implies “that some who live their entire life beyond the reach of the gospel may be saved by God’s grace given to them in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Consequently, the motive for missions is to share the joy and hope of the Christian gospel. The singular message of missions is salvation in Jesus Christ—to which people respond in faith and repentance, also part of God’s grace. Practically, this asks: Do we respect ourselves as equal children of God and treat all other human beings with the same respect?

Punt presents a plan of salvation that emphasizes the good in the Good News. Theologians will ask how his views differ from contemporaries such as Karl Barth and G. C. Berkouwer. By stressing that all persons are elect in Christ, Punt puts the gospel in a positive perspective. Yet he does not neglect the notion of human responsibility and the eternal consequences of a willful rejection of Christ.

Here he is true to the biblical tensions between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, and he refuses to probe into biblical mysteries beyond the limits of God’s revelation.

Book Briefs

Shaking Loose Biblical Fruit

Pause at every verse of Scripture and shake, as it were, every bough of it, that if possible some fruit at least may drop down.

—Martin Luther

Every student of the Bible—and that category should include every Christian—can benefit from the help provided by Bible-study tools. Here are several new general reference works and study aids for specifically shaking the New Testament.

General reference works

The Eerdmans Analytical Concordance to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, compiled by Richard E. Whitaker (Eerdmans, $49.95), was assembled by biblical scholars aided by computers. Rather than separate lists for each Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word, the book uses a single list for each RSV word. The original language words are listed at the head of each entry, and they are keyed to the Scripture texts cited.

The Message of the Bible, by George Carey, consulting editor (Lion, $26.95), is a highly visual tool that does not skimp on information. An impressive lineup of evangelical scholars, many from the British Isles, write succinct outlines, summaries of Bible books, expositions of key tests, and articles on major teachings.

The new Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible in two volumes, edited by Walter A. El well (Baker, $69.96), strikes a happy balance between “too short and skimpy” and “too long and technical.” To study the Gospel of John, for example, you will find a five-page minicommentary on the book, plus 11 more pages on the life and writings of this apostle. Because the structure of the Gospel is built around seven miracles (“signs”), you will find more under “miracle” (with a cross reference to “sign”).

The revised International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, volumes I–IV, (Eerdmans; $39.95 each; four-volume set, $159.95) is now complete. Edited by G. W. Bromiley, the work covers almost everything most students would want to know about the Bible. Articles range from a few lines to near book length.

In the course of Bible study, general readers and scholars alike benefit from a knowledge of terms and ideas such as canon, doubt, millennium, miracle, Pentecost, Sabbath, and wrath.The New Dictionary of Theology, edited by Sinclair B. Ferguson, David R. Wright, and J. I. Packer (InterVarsity, $24.95), provides 630 articles (which fill 738 pages) on these and other biblical topics, as well as theological terms, events, and people. Also included are serious treatments of such unusual topics as African Christian theology, animal rights, bioethics, black consciousness, feminist theology, Indian Christian theology, the Lausanne Covenant, liberation theology, and the sociology of religion. Bibliographies aid further study.

New Testament tools

For home or personal Bible study, The Serendipity Bible Study Book of John, edited by Lyman Coleman et al. (Lamplighter/Zondervan, $2.50; also available for Romans), can be combined with Reflections on the Gospel of John, volumes I–IV, by Leon Morris (Baker, $8.95 each). The former is a creative inductive guide; the latter is a meaty devotional exposition.

Those leading a lay Bible study on Colossians and Philemon will find help in Colossians & Philemon, by Yvonne R. Schultz, a guide in the LifeChange series (NavPress, $4.95); and the Tyndale Commentary Colossians and Philemon, by N.T. Wright (Eerdmans, $5.95). LifeChange provides richer fare than is found in most Bible-study booklets. The guide provides 15 to 20 questions for each passage, using an inductive method to teach study skills and define difficult words and phrases. It also includes pertinent background information and offers optional questions for application or extra study. Wright produces the same succinct, high-quality treatment that marks other volumes of the Tyndale New Testament Commentary.

The first volume in the new Wycliffe Exegetical Commentary has just appeared: Philippians, by Moisés Silva Moody, $23.95). It examines how each passage of Philippians contributes to the argument of the letter as a whole. The result is a commentary that is less atomistic than most. Silva is a master of Greek semantics and syntax, and uses his language skills to clarify meaning. The work is meticulous and the writing is lucid.

First Peter receives fresh, evangelical treatment in two works: J. Ramsey Michaels’s entry in the Word Biblical Commentary, 1 Peter (Word, $24.95); and Wayne Grudem’s 1 Peter, in the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Eerdmans, $5.95). Michaels follows the usual WBC format: bibliography, translation, notes, form/structure/setting, comment (phrase by phrase on the Greek text), and explanation for each passage.

Grudem examines Peter’s use of several Old Testament quotations to demonstrate that “the church has become the true Israel of God.” He includes two additional notes on the dwelling place of God and retribution, which enable the student to see the larger context of Peter’s letter.

By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author of Matthew: People of the Kingdom (Shaw).

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