Mark Walhout
A theology of reading.
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His purpose in writing A Theology of Reading, Alan Jacobs informs us, was to make “an academic case for governing interpretation by the law of love.” Hence his frequent references to the work of literary theorists and moral philosophers, the most important being Martha Nussbaum and Mikhail Bakhtin. But this is by no means a purely theoretical exercise; readers fearing a heavy dose of academic prose will be delighted by Jacobs’s light touch and charming examples from Shakespeare, Dickens, and company. A Theology of Reading is best described, perhaps, as a cross between a scholarly monograph and a collection of essays aimed at Christian readers. It is obviously a labor of love: of Jacobs’s own passionate love of reading.
The patron saint of Jacobs’s “hermeneutics of love” is St. Augustine, who made charity the test of biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine. Early on, Jacobs quotes Augustine (as translated by D. W. Robertson):
Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived. (1.36)
Later, Augustine offers the following example of charitable interpretation:
It is written, “Give to the merciful, and uphold not the sinner.” The last part of this lesson seems to condemn beneficence. It says, “Uphold not the sinner.” Therefore you should understand “sinner” to be used figuratively for sin, so that you should not uphold the sin of the sinner. (3.16)
The question is whether Augustine’s rule of charity ought to be extended to the interpretation of “profane” texts, where there is no presumption of divine meaning.
Jacobs’s answer is yes, but it involves a significant twist. In the case of secular literature, he suggests, the rule of charity applies not to the meaning of the text but to the will of the interpreter:
Fundamentally, it is the reader’s will that determines the moral form the reading takes: If the will is directed toward God and neighbor, it will in Augustinian terms exemplify caritas; if the will is directed toward the self, it will exemplify cupiditas.
It is here that Jacobs parts company with Martha Nussbaum and her mentor Aristotle, for whom love is a matter of passion rather than will. Aristotelian philia, Jacobs adds, is an aristocratic virtue applicable only to one’s friends (or one’s favorite books); it lacks the universality of Augustinian caritas, which applies to all one’s neighbors (and all one’s books).
To clinch his academic case for a hermeneutics of love, Jacobs turns to the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work he finds more relevant to questions of reading and interpretation than I do. (Perhaps Jacobs is simply a more charitable reader.) Rather than follow Jacobs through the narrow gate of Bakhtinian exegesis, I would prefer to return to Augustine, whose “theology of reading” deserves a closer look. For charity is by no means the only hermeneutical principle taught in On Christian Doctrine; Augustine acknowledges a number of complementary principles as well.
The first of these complementary principles is truth. Thus Augustine proposes the following method for determining whether a scriptural locution is literal or figurative:
Whatever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative. Virtuous behavior pertains to the love of God and of one’s neighbor; the truth of faith pertains to the knowledge of God and of one’s neighbor. (3.10)
As with charity, Augustine considers truth to be a surer guide to meaning than authorial intention. Thus he writes,
When … from a single passage in the Scripture not one but two or more meaning are elicited, even if what he who wrote the passage remains hidden, there is no danger if any of the meanings may be seen to be congruous with the truth taught in other passages of the Holy Scriptures. (3.27)
But what if there are no clear parallels elsewhere in the Scriptures? Augustine has an answer for this interpretive situation, too, although he calls it “a dangerous pursuit”:
However, when a meaning is elicited whose uncertainty cannot be resolved by the evidence of places in Scripture whose meaning is certain, it remains to make it more clear by recourse to reason, even if he whose words we seek to understand did not perhaps intend that meaning. (3.28)
The implication is that the meaning of Scripture is reasonable—that reason, used with caution, is a necessary help in discerning the truth of faith. In addition to a hermeneutics of reason, Augustine teaches what might be called a “hermeneutics of freedom,” applying the doctrine of Christian liberty to the practice of interpretation. Thus he warns the interpreter against a purely literal reading of Scripture:
He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else. For example, if he hears of the Sabbath, he thinks only of one day out of the seven that are repeated in a continuous cycle; and if he hears of Sacrifice, his thoughts do not go beyond the customary victims of the flocks and fruits of the earth. There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things. (3.5)
But Christ died to set interpreters free, teaching them the true, figurative meaning of the Sabbath, the sacrifices, and other things signified in the Scriptures:
On this account Christian liberty freed those it found under useful signs [i.e., the Jews], … interpreting the signs to which they were subject, and elevating them to the things which the signs represented . …For those it found under useless signs [i.e., the Greeks] it not only prohibited and destroyed all servile obligation to those signs, but also destroyed the signs themselves. (3.8)
Thus the Christian reader, having been liberated from bondage to the letter of the law, is free to interpret the whole of Scripture spiritually, in charity and in truth.
Few interpreters have asserted their Christian freedom from literal meaning more forcefully than John Milton. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, for example, he defends the right of divorce in cases where the divine purpose of marriage—namely, companionship—is incapable of fulfillment. When confronted with Christ’s words in Matthew 5:32 (“whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery”), Milton replies that we must consider the occasion (controversy with the Pharisees) as well as comparable sayings of Christ (“in one place he censures an unchaste look to be adultery already committed, another time he passes over actual adultery with less reproof than for an unchaste look”). In such cases, Milton concludes, “we are not to repose all upon the literal terms of so many words.”
More important than the technical rules of exegesis, however, is what Milton calls “the all-interpreting voice of charity,” which is the great end of every divine commandment. Charity alone, Milton implies, should teach us that Christ did not intend to limit divorce to the sole cause of fornication in the literal, carnal sense. In fact, says Milton, we cannot believe a commandment that is inconsistent with charity. That is why Paul proclaimed, in 1 Cor. 13, that “charity believeth all things”—”not as if she were so credulous,” Milton explains, ” … but to teach us that charity is the high governess of our belief, and that we cannot assent to any precept written in the Bible, but as charity commends it to us.” This is not just the hermeneutics of love but also the epistemology of love.
As with Augustine’s hermeneutics of love, however, we must ask whether Milton’s hermeneutics of freedom is applicable to secular literature. It is worth noting that Milton himself applied the doctrine of Christian liberty, as taught by the Apostle Paul, to the reader of secular literature. I refer, of course, to the Areopagitica, Milton’s famous plea for the unlicensed printing of books. Quoting Paul’s reminder that “to the pure all things are pure,” Milton adds,
not only meats and drinks; but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil: the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said without exception, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat,” leaving the choice to each man’s discretion.
To this I would add that a purely literal reading of any text—not just the Scriptures—is liable to miss its true meaning.
I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for prompting these modest footnotes to his “hermeneutics of love.” Whether he will succeed in convincing his fellow academics to make love the law of interpretation remains doubtful. But if his little book accomplishes nothing except to send us back to Augustine, Milton, and other passionate Christian readers, he will have done us a great service indeed.
Mark Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. With Susan VanZanten Gallagher, he is the editor of Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere (St. Martin’s).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Interview by Bruce Ellis Benson
A conversation with philosopher Charles Taylor
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Charles Taylor is one of those rare philosophers who influence the conversation in several distinct fields of inquiry within their discipline. A noted Hegel scholar, he has also addressed contemporary social and political debates in books such as The Ethics of Authenticity and Multiculturalism, and he has given considerable attention to the role of religion in the modern world, in works such as A Catholic Modernity? and Varieties of Religion Today: Williams James Revisited (both of which are reviewed in this issue of Books & Culture). Taylor is perhaps best known for his magisterial work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, published by Harvard University Press in 1989.
Bruce Ellis Benson met with Taylor several months ago in New York, where Taylor was lecturing at the New School University.
We live in a secular society. What do you think that means?
To say we live in a secular civilization is to say that God is no longer inescapable. It doesn’t mean that we live in a society from which God has been expelled. I don’t think we ever will live in such a society for very long; the Communists tried that. But the nature of this modern secular society is that it’s deeply plural. We have to accept that the ultimate grounding of the civilization we share in common is up for grabs.
Every society has an implicit order—a set of understandings out of which its members make sense of their practices. This set of understandings I describe as a social imaginary, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and on the work of JÜrgen Habermas and Michael Warner, among others. Why imaginary? Because it’s very important to get away from the mania for strictly theoretical approaches that proceed as if these implicit understandings were explicitly spelled out in a series of propositions.
If you compare the different political cultures of the Western European and North Atlantic liberal democracies, for example, they look very similar at the level of theory. But the way the political system actually works, the deeper understanding of how the individual relates to society in France as opposed to Germany, in Canada as opposed to the United States, can be very, very different. It’s that deeper underpinning that the term imaginary suggests.
In the social imaginary of Latin Christendom, God is inescapable. For the French monarchy in the Middle Ages, let’s say, there’s an understanding that this whole monarchical authority only exists against the background of a cosmic order, a divine order in which it occupies a certain place. And all of the ritual of coronation and anointing and so on has meaning within this context.
In the social imaginary of our secular day, the underlying moral order exists to promote the mutual benefit of individuals and defend their rights. This understanding of society, which is central to modernity, has developed over the course of several centuries. By now we are so well installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one. After all, are we not all individuals? Do we not associate in society for our mutual benefit? How else to measure social life?
In such a society, the notion that moral order is ultimately grounded in God may appear to threaten to upset the kind of polite sociability and tolerance that ideally characterize the modern public sphere. From this perspective, Christianity becomes not only something that you don’t need but it actually becomes a danger.
But that is itself simply one understanding of our political predicament. There are competing understandings, mutually contradictory, but none is capable of a knockout blow against all the others. That’s what it means to live in a secular civilization. We will never experience the kind of unanimity about the underlying order that existed in pre-Revolutionary France. That will never exist again in human history unless we catastrophically destroy modern civilization and go back to the caves. And any attempt to impose such unanimity, whether of an atheist or a theist kind, will come to a terrible end as Communism did.
You’ve said that there is a new space for God in the secular world. What is the nature of this “new space”?
Modernity is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane time. Just as in personal life the dissolution of the enchanted world can be compensated for by devotion, by a strong sense of the involvement of God in my life, so in the public world the loss of sacred time and an unquestioned transcendent order can be replaced by a strong sense of God in our political identity. God’s will can still be very present to us in the design of things, in the cosmos, in both social and individual life. God can still be the source of our power to impart order to our lives.
There is an alternative reading—namely, that we’re moving to a society where more and more the consensus will be around an unbelieving variant of the modern social imaginary. But to me this seems to be just a dream. It’s a dream that arises among those who are deeply into an atheist or non-believing position and are convinced as a matter of faith that religion will gradually disappear and everyone will think as they do. For them, the secular world is one in which we all end up agreeing fundamentally that there’s no God, and that agreement is the basis of everything. That’s an impossible scenario, and the more they think like that, the worse it’s going to be.
We’re living in a new epoch in which the degree of diversity people have to face is in some ways frightening. It means that on the deepest level you’re going to be disagreeing with the people you’re co-citizens with. I think that there are lots of liberals—atheist liberals, if you like—who still don’t understand this, and then there are also many people on the other side who still don’t understand this.
So it’s the multiplicity of possible understandings of the social order that is the defining mark of the secular world, rather than the decline of religion?
Yes. We’re living in the best political order yet achieved in human history. With all its faults, we’re nevertheless accurate in our sense that it answers the fundamental human need to be anchored in the good. But this distinctively modern understanding of the good is such a kind that it can be enframed in more than one way.
It follows from this that there is something unstable about everyone’s position. There will be a lot of worrying about alternative enframings. People will be moving back and forth; the children of people who enframe the social order this way will choose to enframe it that way, and so on.
In this state of affairs, there is an enormous yearning for a common enframing—and this is true even among many of those who most vigorously champion “diversity.” There’s a kind of nostalgia for a time when people were deeply anchored all the way down—or all the way up—in a common understanding of the underlying order.
And the model for this in our own civilization—the model for being anchored all the way down—is Christendom. In Christendom, there was no room for heretics, not because the people of that epoch were especially narrow-minded but because their common enframing was threatened by important differences in religious belief. A desire to revive that model seems to animate much of the American Christian Right.
Today the yearning for a common enframing is a temptation. We are particularly tempted to uncritically identify the modern social imaginary with the highest and best in human life. Modern liberalism has done that to an almost idolatrous degree. Now as I’ve said, I’m not siding with the reactionaries who reject modernity across the board—not at all. But there’s no human social order which captures everything that is right.
That’s what I get from the gospel. I’m thinking of something like the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Is this a workable model of social distribution? The answer to that is clearly no. You can’t pay someone who worked from 4 in the afternoon to 5 the same as you pay someone who came in at 9 in the morning and worked all day. You can’t run a business that way; you can’t run a society that way.
But human life is such that sometimes you have to go beyond the self-contained code of the social order—and God goes far beyond giving you your exact due. And sometimes we have to be operating with God and not with the best social distribution system.
Bruce Ellis Benson is associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry (IVP) and The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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David S. Dockery
How to think with the mind of Christ.
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What is the place of Christian faith in the modern (and postmodern) world? Particularly what is the place of the Christian mind in the modern world? These questions are the centerpiece of the Marianist Award Lecture delivered by renowned philosopher Charles Taylor at the University of Dayton and published with a set of provocative responses and a final reply by Taylor.
Modernity, Taylor tells us, must be seen to include the espousal of universal and unconditional human rights and the affirmation of life, universal justice, benevolence, freedom, and the ethic of authenticity. Modernity certainly has its dark side as well, including the overweening claims of reason and the drive toward control of every facet of life. Taylor distinguishes between the fact of modernity and various theories of modernity. The fact of modernity is the cultural shift that has been taking place over the last 200 years; theories of modernity offer contending explanations of that shift.
Taylor considers four such rival explanations, as offered by (1) exclusive humanists, whose understanding of the good is strictly limited to our worldly life; (2) neo-Nietzschean antihumanists; (3) those who both acknowledge good beyond this life and oppose the primacy of life as defined by exclusive humanism—”knockers” of modernity, as Taylor calls them; and (4) those “boosters” who, while acknowledging good beyond this life, nevertheless regard modernity’s emphasis on the practical primacy of life as a great gain and find legitimate values in modern culture more generally. Taylor contends for the fourth approach.
Modernity for Taylor cannot be limited to the ever-more restrictive pursuit of a set of value-neutral facts and the consequent replacement of traditional beliefs with “scientific” ones. Those are aspects of this great shift, yes, and yet he contends that modernity originated in a shift in our horizons of understanding—of humanity, the cosmos, society, and God—and constitutes an unarticulated background against which changes, as well as continuities, of practice and beliefs stand out and must be understood. It is in light of this concept of modernity that Taylor argues that Christians can participate constructively in it. At the very least, he maintains that modernity does not imply the end of Christianity, whether Catholic or Reformed.
The real obstacle to religious belief in the modern world, Taylor argues, is not the triumph of the scientific worldview. Instead, the obstacles are moral and spiritual, having to do with the historical failures of religious institutions. He is not necessarily calling for a Catholic modernism, but for serious reflection on how Catholics and other Christians can participate fully in this culture without drowning in it intellectually and spiritually. He wants to explore how we can be Christian in a culture that seems antireligious, whose life forms and practices undercut the forms and practices of the historical Church. Taylor is not naÏve about the dangers posed to religious insight and freedom by the multiple perversities of modern culture. Yet, since he does not think all aspects of modernity are against the Church, he proposes a model of “whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40).
Among the respondents to Taylor’s lecture, William Shea carefully offers a case for modernity in “A Vote of Thanks to Voltaire,” while Jean Bethke Elshtain makes a nuanced case against in “Augustine and Diversity.” Mediating positions are suggested by Rosemary Luling Haughton’s “Transcendence and the Bewilderment of Being Modern” (more “booster” than “knocker”) and by George Marsden’s discussion of “Prodigal Culture” (more “knocker” than “booster”). Important questions and multiple tension-filled issues are suggested by each of the participants, but Taylor, in his conclusion, maintains that the “big question” is the one raised by Marsden concerning “the place of Christians in contemporary academic and intellectual life.”
Academic culture in the modern Western world notoriously breathes an atmosphere of unbelief. Taylor claims that we are not surprised enough by this phenomenon. Unbelief is an overriding feature of this important subculture in our civilization, more so than of society as a whole. There is in this subculture an element of “anti-Christian rebellion.” This recognition is crucial for those who want to know how to live in and with modernity. Taylor observes that a hermeneutics of suspicion, which characterizes much of the academy, fuels an absolutist rejection of transcendence.
How then do Christians constructively engage the modern world? Taylor calls for believers to look for the good that the rights-culture of modernity has produced. Yet it is important to be clear that the goal of promoting good or “human flourishing” with the widest possible equity is going to look very different with God in the picture than if God is out of the picture.
Taylor is right to look for good and truth in modernity, but he may be in danger of letting modernity establish the agenda, seeking to set the standard that Christians must meet to gain credibility. But to be fair, he is well aware of this potential quagmire, for many Christians and Christian institutions have fallen into the modern trap of unbelief without intending to do so. Thus we need to be reminded that theistic and nontheistic humanism are not the same.
Overall, as Marsden summarizes, Taylor’s essay is a model of what scholars who are Christians should be doing. They should be explicitly reflective on how their faith provides fresh perspectives for viewing contemporary issues. They should be fully engaged with modern scholarship yet be openly critiquing the premises of modernity (which includes postmodernity) in light of their Christian commitments.
The big question which Marsden raises points us to the significant place of the Christian mind in the world of scholarship. The Christian mind must be critical of the inadequacies of modernity without necessarily declaring war on it. The grand ideals of the Christian intellectual tradition will fail if they fully identify with a particular culture or if they seek to marry these traditions to political coercion. Christians seeking to engage the academy must avoid adopting the uncritical acceptance of Enlightenment dogma often associated with liberalism on the one hand as well as the snarling tone and outright denunciation of modernity often adopted by fundamentalists on the other.
Engaging the modern academy and its characteristic unbelief is complex because it calls for affirming what is good and true in modernity while recognizing that its most basic principles are deeply flawed. Thus a deep ambivalence is created for us and within us as we seek to engage a culture that is not just neutral, but is in part anti-Christian. How do Christian scholars handle these complex issues? The answer seems to me to come with an intentional commitment to integrate faith and scholarship.
Many scholars, even in church-related institutions, wrongheadedly view their scholarship as “public” and their faith as “private” and characteristically keep these domains separate. Though their Christian faith is genuine, these scholars seldom think about the implications of faith on their scholarship. Both explicitly and implicitly, the academy has taught us a form of self-censorship of our Christian faith, as if it were the professional duty of scholars to separate faith from learning.
Christian scholars, for whom Taylor and Marsden both serve as worthy models, must challenge these contemporary assumptions with tough-minded commitments, self-consciously shaped by faith. Christian scholars must, in the words of T. S. Eliot, be able “to think in Christian categories.” This means being able to define and hold to a worldview grounded in the truth of God’s revelation to us. It means thinking with the mind of Christ.
We certainly recognize that it is easier and more appropriate to articulate the implications of one’s faith in some fields than others. But wherever any discipline touches on the broader question of meaning, faith can and should have an important bearing. This may indeed be more often the case for philosophers than computer scientists. Yet, it is vital that scholars in all fields recognize their Christian calling to think Christianly—which means more than mere piety, more than creating a context for learning in a caring Christian environment. Christian thinkers—like those participating in the intriguing conversation in A Catholic Modernity?— must actively challenge modern scholars to see that the goal of advancing what is good and true is ultimately unobtainable without God; we must not only engage the subject matter and issues of our day but also recognize that our great God is central in every discipline. The integration of faith and knowledge is the most distinctive task of the Christian scholar—always has been, is now, and always will be. As Taylor concludes, our thoughtful response to and reflections on these important matters can help to revivify our love, worship, and service of God.
David S. Dockery is president of Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the editor of The Challenge of Postmodernism: An Evangelical Engagement (Baker).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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Christopher Shannon
William James and consumer religion
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Charles Taylor is one of the leading philosophers in the English-speaking world today. A wide-ranging humanist in an age that has seen intellectual life dominated by narrow academic professionalism, he speaks to an audience that transcends disciplinary boundaries and occasionally even reaches that most elusive of publics, the general educated reader. As a Christian, more specifically a Catholic philosopher, Taylor is for our times what William James was for his: a modernist intellectual committed to defending the intellectual integrity of religion against its secular modernist detractors.
In Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Taylor reflects on the defense of religious faith put forward by James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, originally published in 1902. Astonished at how well James’s work has held up over time, Taylor nonetheless takes James’s modernist text as a jumping off point for addressing a distinctly postmodern dilemma: the successful defense of religion as an experience has bequeathed to the quest for the divine a withering, almost solipsistic, subjectivity virtually indistinguishable from the nihilism of the narrow Victorian materialism James sought to refute. Indeed, Taylor argues that the expressive (and excessive) individualism that characterizes so much of contemporary religion reflects the triumph of a basically Jamesian conception of faith. At the same time, however, a justifiable admiration for James’s modernist achievement leads Taylor to an evasive, equivocal assessment of the Jamesian legacy.
The timidity of Taylor’s conclusions is all the more disappointing given the initial directness with which he confronts the limitations of James’s understanding of religion. Taylor begins where other admirers end, with a critique of James’s definition of religion as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” James’s approach to religion favors not only individuals over community but also certain kinds of individuals over others, namely those “geniuses” for whom “religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever.” Varieties of Religious Experience is primarily a reflection on the writings of these geniuses, including an account of the spiritual agonies of a mysterious, anonymous “Frenchman” whom James later revealed to be himself. For all his vaunted openness to variety, James held religious experience to a very strict standard of authenticity: religion experienced firsthand is real; religion handed down from others is false. James’s privileging of religious innovators leaves one with the impression that the only true religion is that which one creates for oneself.
Taylor sees James’s spiritual individualism as leading to a seriously impoverished understanding of religion. He does not shy away from identifying James within a particular strain of American Protestantism, and calls James to account for the blatant anti-Catholicism expressed in his great book. Still, Taylor traces the radical interiority of James’s conception of religion to developments within Catholicism itself. Beginning in the high Middle Ages, church leaders in the religious orders and the hierarchy began to stress the importance of personal commitment and devotion over mere external compliance with communal rituals. The Lateran Council of 1215 marked a key turning point in this development by making annual individual confession and reception of the Eucharist a requirement for all faithful Catholics. Luther’s emphasis on faith over works went even further by tending to devalue even conscious participation in external rituals as a marker of true religiosity.
Taylor’s sympathies are broadly Catholic, yet he sees the Reformation emphasis on interiority as a positive contribution to the history of Christianity. Taylor reads the Counter Reformation as, at its best, an effort to sustain the vitality of communal rituals while still addressing the needs of those desirous of a richer inner spiritual life. Judged in terms of baptisms and Easter communions, European Catholicism’s golden age of participation peaked in the late nineteenth century. The genius of Catholicism during this period was its ability to view “the relation between those who were more personally devout and committed, and those whose main participation was in collective ritual … in terms of complementarity rather than ranked as more and less real.” This appears to be Taylor’s ideal, though it clearly fails the strenuous test of authenticity laid down by James.
For Taylor, the enduring appeal of James lies in the grace, clarity, and insight with which he refuted the secular, rationalist assumptions of the dominant thinkers of his day. James remains a significant figure today if for no other reason than that when the subject of religion arises in contemporary debate, even radical, self-styled postmodernists slide back into the debunking mode of Victorian rationalists, invoking a conventional standard of evidence whose validity they deny in their own deconstructive exercises. Anticipating developments in postmodern thinking, James insisted that belief and unbelief are equally circular in their argumentation. Breaking down the distinction between thinking and feeling, James argued that agnosticism “is not intellect against all passions … it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.” Militant atheism is the bad faith of what James would elsewhere call “the sentiment of rationality.”
James defended religion not as a booster but as a believer who had experienced the depths of despair, doubt, and uncertainty. In the second section of his book, Taylor addresses James’s famous distinction between the healthy-minded, “once-born” believer and the sick soul or “twice-born” believer. Here too James draws very sharp evaluative contrasts, with the once-born a back-slapping, proto-Babbit and the twice-born a would-be Hamlet, the dark, brooding, melancholy man of European Romanticism. Taylor follows James in his sympathies for the twice-born, and clearly offers this personality type as a model of responsible belief in an age when the existence of God can no longer be taken for granted by educated believers.
Were all believers intellectuals, one might make a case for Taylor’s endorsement of James’s melancholy man. But thankfully, the world of religious experience offers a variety that cannot be contained within the comparatively narrow range of personality profiles found within the intellectual classes. The Filipino peasants who nail themselves to crosses in imitation of Christ have most likely not undergone the agon of unbelief that James experienced, but neither do they fit the model of the smug, middle-class American liberal Protestant that James had in mind when he sneered at the once-born. Traditional Christianity maintains its hold on millions of ordinary believers because it speaks directly to the pain and suffering ignored by the spiritual sensibilities dominant among the middle classes of the modern West.
This populist critique would be unfair except that Taylor himself addresses the broader question of belief across the range of social experience in the contemporary world. Returning to themes that he and other communitarian writers such as Robert Bellah have been developing for the past 20 or so years, Taylor characterizes contemporary Western society as dominated by an expressive individualism, an “ethics of authenticity” in which moral and spiritual truth have become matters of individual choice, with that choice more often than not guided by little more than subjective feelings and a manipulable sense of well being. As this social vision reflects James’s impoverished social understanding of faith, it also forces belief into James’s categories of once-born and twice-born. Anyone, of any education level, not completely isolated from the capitalist marketplace is increasingly forced to view his or her faith from the perspective of a Jamesian intellectual.
Torn between his communal and Jamesian sympathies, Taylor concludes: “I’m not sure we wouldn’t be wiser to stick with the present dispensation.” His reasons are predictable: there is no going back, and even if there were, “we shouldn’t forget the spiritual costs of various kinds of forced conformity: hypocrisy, spiritual stultification, inner revolt against the Gospel, the confusion of faith and power, and even worse.” Taylor has been accused of defending modernity the way Locke defended Christianity. I used to agree with that assessment, but now I wonder. His ritual slaying of nostalgia simply does not help us to think constructively about the possibilities of communal faith after the passing of the “paleo-Durkheimian” total integration of religion and society.
C. Wright Mills once defined the balanced view as the midpoint between two clichés. Taylor’s quest for balance plays into the hands of what I would call, to draw on James’s terminology, a “once-born” modernism that locates all violence in tradition, or interprets contemporary violence as cultural lag, a symptom of a modernity not yet completed; Taylor’s other writings suggest he knows better. In Varieties of Religion Today, Taylor appears willing to sacrifice “intergenerational continuity of religious allegiance” as atonement for the past sins of communal religion.
The two main rivals of organized religion in the modern world, the state and the capitalist corporation, show no such generosity. Mandatory schooling and an all-pervasive market have ensured the social reproduction of law-abiding, citizen consumers for whom religion is one among many cultural options. Taylor sees hopeful signs that people continue to choose community, but such a “choice” reduces community to a voluntary association. Tocqueville’s classic solution to the problem of community in America has only reinforced a classically American inability to think clearly about non-contractual social relations. Taylor’s optimism replaces Catholic nostalgia for the Middle Ages with a liberal nostalgia for the nineteenth century.
Christopher Shannon is author of A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Rowman & Littlefield) and Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought from Veblen to Mills (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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John H. McWhorter
Neither syntax nor semantics maps the full richness of everyday speech.
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Ray Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language is a response to what the author sees as a crisis. In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky electrified theoretical linguistics with his hypothesis that humans possess an innate capacity for language. The heart of his conception was a linguistic “deep structure,” invariant across the species, with individual languages varying according to how they translate this foundation into “surface structure,” plugging in their own words and rules of grammar.
Showcase example of “deep” versus “surface”: we are more likely to render Who do you want to see? as Who do you wanna see? than we are to render Who do you want to win the game? as Who do you wanna win the game? Now why is that so? Chomsky’s theory proposed that if we look at the deep structure of the latter case, who immediately precedes to win—the verb that who is, if you think about it, the actual subject of in the sentence. (And if you are already having trouble sorting all this out, that’s merely evidence of the efficiency of our innate linguistic capacity, which allows us to make such complex distinctions effortlessly, so long as we don’t have to explain what we’re doing.)
Thus what begins as You want who to win the game? becomes Who do you want to win the game? when who “moves” to the front of the sentence in surface structure. And the reason we are loath to say Who do you wanna win the game? is that when who moves, it leaves behind a “footprint” that blocks want and to from coming together as a contraction: Who do you want __ to win the game?
As originally proposed, Chomsky’s deep structure was taken as synonymous with “meaning” itself. Psychologists and philosophers were fascinated with the possibility that linguistics had identified universal structures of meaning underlying the bewildering variousness of the world’s languages. Indeed, the notion of deep structure, like relativity or the Uncertainty Principle in physics, quickly became unmoored from its context to be bandied about with abandon in pop intellectual circles. But to nonlinguists, whether scholars or civilians, “traffic rule” issues such as the wanna quirk were of little interest, while syntacticians were much more interested precisely in such details than in exploring the nature of meaning in a larger sense. The trend continues, and the promise Chomsky’s hypothesis once held outside linguistics has long been dismissed as a mirage.
Meanwhile, many linguists have themselves rejected Chomsky’s view and focused instead on meaning, or semantics. To them, the operations that fascinate the syntactician appear a needlessly elaborated, epistemologically suspect distraction, isolating linguistics from other disciplines. The semanticist notes that in the sentences The ball rolled down the hill and Beth rolled the ball down the hill, rolled is identical in terms of grammar. But the semantics are different: in the second sentence, rolled refers to someone having caused the ball to roll, rather than it just rolling itself. That is, there is an underlying element of causation that expresses itself throughout any language’s grammar, and semanticists point to other such elements as well. There is more for the philosopher or psychologist to grab onto in this approach; it seems to address what we think of as “language” more directly than fretting over why we don’t say Who do you wanna win the game?
The unseemly warring between the two sides that raged throughout the 1970s has today devolved into a sullen stalemate. The syntacticians hope that the traffic rules alone will explain most of the quirks within languages and the variations between them. Paying minimal attention to the messiness of real-world meanings, they tend to dismiss those who do as “unscientific”—even when overall their work addresses but a sliver of what most of us would call “language” at all. Meanwhile, semanticists pride themselves on forging a more “realistic” or perhaps even humanistic model. But at the end of the day, few of them attempt to demonstrate how their strategies explain the relevant facts better than syntactic ones, such that their work often seems tangential to what most would consider “linguistics” at all.
Jackendoff bemoans this scarcity of cross-fertilization and fears that the syntacticians in particular—victorious in America due largely to Chomsky’s charisma and influence—have grown too introverted to communicate effectively with other thinkers. In this book he fashions a compromise, informed by decades of celebrated work in both syntax and semantics. The book is a magnum opus seeking a model of language compatible with how humans process and produce it online.
Jackendoff criticizes the “syntactocentrism” of Chomskyan work, where the traffic rules are the driving force in how we speak, with other aspects, such as meaning and how we translate thoughts into actual sounds (phonology), as “garnish.” But Jackendoff also notes that in practice, syntax and semantics alike are too limited in what they map for either one to be seen as central. In the sentence The chair has a stain on it, the syntax involves a subject (The chair), a verb (has), an object (a stain) and then what is called a prepositional phrase, on it. But this last bit doesn’t readily offer anything to the semanticist: what the sentence “means” is that there is a stain on the chair. The on it adds no additional element of “meaning.” Chalk up one for the syntacticians.
But then, when the waitress says The ham sandwich over in the corner wants more coffee, her referring to a person by means of what he or she ordered requires a feint of abstraction that has nothing to do with the fact that The ham sandwich is the subject of the sentence. If linguistics seeks to identify how we translate the world around us into speech, then a theory that dismisses things like this as “beside the point” will deserve the charge of navel-gazing.
Jackendoff argues that language is based on three modules of equal importance. The first step in saying something is not the syntactic but the conceptual module, the home of meanings: an utterance begins with the thoughts that it consists of. Syntax comes second: here thoughts are arranged into sequences of words. Jackendoff’s conception of syntax is a novel one. Linguists traditionally distinguish between “rules” that we apply regularly (such as “add-ed to a verb to make it past) and things that must be “stored individually” because they are unique, such as individual words or irregular verb forms like bought or went, that we cannot create by applying the regular rules.
Jackendoff discards this division and treats as “stored” everything from words, to idioms like kick the bucket (whose meanings have so little to do with their words that they are essentially “words” in themselves), to “constructions” using words in unusual ways (He belched / cried / spent up a storm), to regular rules like the –ed one.
Indeed, Jackendoff pointedly warns against our temptation to treat such idioms and constructions as mere “static” when any language in fact has thousands of them—they are central to speaking. For him, they constitute a continuum between the extreme poles occupied by words on one end and rules on the other. All of these things are stored in the memory and called upon to create utterances when combined, in an overriding process called “UNIFY.” Thus a word (walk) is combined with a rule here (“add –ed for past”), or plugged into a construction like the up a storm one there, and what is universal and innate is the broad default tendencies in how such elements are combined.
Finally, the phonological module produces the sequences of sounds that we actually pronounce. Just as semantics and syntax work independently too often for either to be treated as central, our sound system has a way of working “against” the other two. For example, when we say The man’s coming, the ‘s, a truncation of the verb form is, hangs on the noun man instead. If syntax were “the real deal,” then the ‘s would hew to its fellow verb coming. It is the exigencies of English’s sound system that prevent us from keeping nouns and verbs in their separate corners and saying The man scoming.
In light of burgeoning examinations of how language, if innate, could have evolved via natural selection, Jackendoff also argues that his conception is more compatible with evolutionary theory. Namely, the modules he proposes appear to recapitulate an evolutionary sequence for language that we can deduce from various types of evidence.
Aphasics, for example, lose grammatical capabilities but retain full memory of individual words, suggesting that language begins in the conceptual module, with syntax coming afterward. Primates can be taught a rudimentary sign language, where basic concepts of meaning can be strung together—which suggests not only that meanings come first but also that what distinguishes us from primates is the other two modules: apes can think the thoughts but have no way of translating them into speech.
Even particularities within modules appear confirmed. Jackendoff, like many, divides syntax between the “phrasal” (word order) and the “morphosyntactic” (endings like –ed or Latin case endings). He hypothesizes that the phrasal comes first in producing an utterance, and indeed, aphasics often lose the ability to handle endings while still controlling word order.
Despite Jackendoff’s clear, engaging prose, Foundations of Language is written largely for academic linguists, psychologists, and philosophers. The author’s accommodations to the reader are generally just those necessary for the latter two groups, and overall one needs a basic familiarity with modern linguistics to follow the text. The arc of argument also flags a bit in the final third on semantics, where he is concerned more with indicating what schools of thought he finds cogent than fashioning his own reinterpretations. In such a wide-ranging and richly considered work, however, this is inevitable. Jackendoff compensates with cogent suggestions for further research throughout the text, with these especially frequent in this last section.
It is a truism in linguistics that books are used only for reference while articles truly drive debate. That is unfortunate for this book, because Jackendoff’s teachings are some of the sharpest, most comprehensive ones on linguistics currently available. He is a boon to the field, and I wish all linguists would sit at his feet by reading this book.
John H. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author most recently of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Times Books).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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John Wilson
Mixedblood Trickster
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The ACLU handbook, The Rights of Indians and Tribes, by Steven L. Pevar, is laid out like a catechism, with the questions in bold print—for instance, Who is an “Indian”? The answer doesn’t mince words. “There is no universally accepted definition of the term ‘Indian,’ ” Pevar writes. “Therefore, determining who is an Indian is difficult.” Indeed. Quite apart from legal contexts, Larry McMurtry makes the same point in “Chopping Down the Sacred Tree,” included in Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West, a first-rate collection of a dozen pieces originally published in The New York Review of Books. After 500 years “in which both blood and cultures have been mixing,” McMurtry writes, “it is now less easy, in speaking of Native Americans, to know to what extent they are we and we they.” (And Sacagawea’s nickname was Janey, but you have to read the essay—a jewel—to know why that matters.)
Of course, this sort of question is not peculiar to Native Americans. (In a future issue of Books & Culture, Timothy Sato of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture will be taking on the subject of mixed race more generally.) But that’s where our concern lies in this issue, which introduces a series on “The Persistence of Indians: In Search of Native America” (pp. 16-21). The seemingly straightforward question—Who is an “Indian”?—turns out to be fiendishly tricky, and the way we answer it—including the always popular “Who cares?”—is tangled up with other questions, not least our understanding of what it means to be an American.
No one has thought longer, harder, and more trickily about this trick question than the prodigiously inventive Anishinaabe (Chippewa) mixedblood writer, Gerald Vizenor, author of Griever: An American Monkey King in China and a whole shelf of other books. For one series of passes at the question, see his Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, published by University of Nebraska Press in 1998, wherein among other matters Vizenor considers the curiously recurring figures of “the varionative,” whose “native antecedence” is uncertain, and “the autoposer, the autobiographical poseur, or the almost native by associations and institutive connections.” (Vizenor, as you may have already guessed, is an incorrigible and unrepentant coiner of neologisms.)
These are writers whose claim to identity as Indians entails some degree of deception built on a shaky foundation—Jamake Highwater is a prominent example of the varionative whose deceptions were unmasked—but who are to be distinguished from the producers of brazen “simulations” like the sentimental fake-Indian bestseller, The Education of Little Tree, by Forrest Carter, whose real name turned out to be Asa Earl Carter, a violent segregationist and anti-Semite who later renounced segregation. (Vizenor observes that The Education of Little Tree “has sold close to a million,” exceeding the sales of N. Scott Momaday’s classic, The Way to Rainy Mountain.)
If your head is spinning, Vizenor wants to give it an extra whirl. Singer of all things tricky and multiple, he hates monotheism and Christianity in particular. It would be a good exercise to go through his books, most of them published by university presses, with a highlighter, marking the passages in which he explicitly denounces either monotheism or Christianity, then imagine the values reversed (bitter diatribes against “paganism” or “polytheism,” say—the university presses would have no problem with that, would they?). But he rages too against the politically correct censors. He has drunk deeply—too deeply—from the perverse Frenchmen, Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, Derrida and Foucault and Baudrillard et al.; he flirts with evil and doesn’t recognize the reality of sin.
At the same time, as is abundantly clear in the memoir Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990), one of my favorites among his books, he is a decent and humane man, devoted to many traditional liberal causes and an unembarrassed champion of constitutional democracy. The contradictions remind me of Richard Rorty, though I find Vizenor far more appealing. He would be a good friend, I think, trustworthy and wickedly funny.
All of this and more emerges in answer to the question, Who is an “Indian”? The answer is not a package deal. You don’t have to choose between accepting it whole or rejecting it whole. Part of the answer in Fugitive Poses that we should pay attention to concerns the nature of animals and their relation to humans, a theme that also appears in Diane Glancy’s story in this issue, “The Bird Who Married a Blue Light” (pp. 18-20).
And this: “The earth is a trickster creation.” There is indeed something of the trickster in the God of the Old Testament, more than we are wont to acknowledge in our sanitized, prettified versions, but a divine trickster, clearly distinguished from his creation—a distinction that gives Vizenor fits.
Question: Who is an “Indian”?
Answer: God is red, too.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
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(Not) Guilty
The article by Steve Wein-berg [“(Not) Guilty,” May/June] raises critical issues about which every Christian should be informed. I am both a pastor and a criminal defense lawyer, and 1 can confirm that the criminal justice system is broken, but not in the way the common person thinks.
How can an innocent person confess to a crime they didn’t commit? The purpose of a
police interrogation is not to elicit the truth. The purpose is to emotionally isolate the suspect, intimidate him, and do whatever is necessary in order to get him to say what the police want him to say. Psychologically, even an innocent person after hours of interrogation can be convinced that he was wrong. Steve Linscott graphically illustrates this from his personal experience in his book Maximum Security.
The police will routinely lie in order to get their confession. In one recent case I handled, the police claimed to have a “voice stress analyzer” that could spot a lie with 100 percent accuracy (it was nothing more than a common lap lap
top computer), while in another case they claimed to have swabbed a murder suspect’s hands and discovered gunpowder residue (a test that this particular police department hasn’t used in over ten years).
The police continue to use faulty techniques for conducting eyewitness examinations. The psychological literature is now replete with explanations as to why so many eyewitness identifications are erroneous and have provided protocols as to how a proper eyewitness identification should be conducted in order to minimize false identifications. Police departments routinely ignore these protocols, including the suggestions of the U.S. Department of Justice.
I could go on. This is certainly not to minimize the damage done by criminal defense lawyers who fail to
adequately investigate a case and lack the skills to successfully present a defense to a-jury.
The typical person on a jury has no idea how poorly the system operates. The common assumption is that the defendant must be guilty or the state wouldn’t have charged her. I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the Soviet Union was successful in falsely prosecuting so many of their own citizens because their neighbors simply couldn’t believe their own government would falsely prosecute one of its own citizens.
The juxtaposition of this article with Vitullo-Martin’s “By the People” and the defense of the jury system was quite interesting. Since 1980, the percentage of criminal defendants going to trial has decreased by two-thirds. In 1980, one defendant went to trial for every four who pled guilty. By 1999, that ratio fell to one in twenty. Such statistics should prompt questions.
Irwin Schwartz, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, makes a convincing case that the failure to try cases lets police and prosecutors get sloppy and removes citizens from their critical participation in the criminal justice system via jury participation. Last year, more than 100 criminal convictions were set aside in Los Angeles as a result of police misconduct. The misconduct went undiscovered for a long period of time because few cases were adequately investigated and tried.
Why are so few criminal cases tried? The answer to that question is very complex. Part of the answer involves the problem of prosecutors overcharging a
defendant, that is, charging the defendant with crimes that probably can’t be proven but which “up the ante” and encourage the defendant to settle in order to avoid the risk of a much longer incarceration. Another part of the answer is the recent spate of “three strikes and you’re out” laws which give the prosecutor enormous discretion in the way a case is charged. Another part of the answer is the sentencing leniency built into the federal sentencing guidelines for criminal defendants who “rat” on others.
I wonder why Christians so often identify with the state and the prosecution rather than the defense. One great criminal defense lawyer asked, If Jesus had been a lawyer, would he have been a prosecutor or a defender? There is a redemptive approach to the practice of criminal law!
I hope you will devote more debate to these problems in, future issues.
Steve Long Albuquerque, N.M.
Seducing the Underworld
Thanks so much for the excellent review of Moulin Rouge [“Seducing the Underworld,” March/April], certainly the most challenging film I’ve seen out of recent industry efforts. Douglas Jones’s analysis helped me get my mind around some of what has inexplicably gripped me about this movie. More importantly, his critique ‘took on the admirable and rare job of serious interpretation of what are all too frequently dismissed as hollow “postmodern” strategies of appropriation and reference.
The film’s creators obviously took popular culture seri-‘ ously when they made Moulin Rouge; they earned our serious consideration, as well. Thank you for providing a
forum for this exemplary effort.
Kevin .Hamilton
Grand Rapids, Mich.
In his otherwise illuminating review of MouKn Rouge, Douglas Jones writes about the silliness of the love songs of the protagonists Christian and Satine: “And their silliness is no worse than the ‘silly’ passions of the Song of Solomon. Solomon and the Shulamite [sic] are utterly
lovesick for each other, too.”
Let me recommend to Jones ‘(and your readers) Calvin Seerveld’s entirely sober, and yes, critical, poetic, and even liturgical, translation/interpretation of The Greatest Song (Toronto Tuppence Press). Seerveld challenges the historical hoard of spiritualized readings as well as the latest casual, clearly mistaken, write-off of the canonical Song of Solomon. Solomon is revealed as the historical lecherous, idolatrous king that he’was, and the Shulammite woman as the exemplar of true sexual love, offended by his lustful overtures and faithful to her true
lover (7:10-8:4).• .
There is nothing silly about either of them. Instead,
God here reveals (literally) the sadness and futility of King Solomon’s lust and the gladness and strength of
the Shulammite’s love (8:6-7).
Dewey Hoitenga
Grand Rapids, Mich.
Culture
Review
Douglas LeBlanc
A Hindu director who attended Christian schools tells a parable about a Christ-haunted ex-priest
Christianity TodayJuly 1, 2002
There’s plenty to fear in 21st-century America, from terror strikes to the abductions and murders of children, especially if we have no sense that God cares or will do anything when we are imperiled. In his third major film as a director, M. Night Shyamalan takes our fears to an extraterrestrial level. Along the way he tells a less fantastic but more important story about loving God amid both fear and suffering.
The premise of Signs is that the large, hieroglyphic crop circles that show up in fields throughout the world are the work of menacing extraterrestrials. Shyamalan builds the tension with a subtlety worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, showing only glimpses of these threatening aliens; we hear them more than we see them. James Newton Howard’s score echoes the tense music of Bernard Herrmann, who made several Hitchcock classics (including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho) so memorable.
The circles end up in cornfields belonging to Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a former Episcopal priest who has resigned his ministry and nurses a grudge toward God. Yet Hess, or “Father,” as his neighbors persist in calling him, cannot escape God so easily. He has removed a cross from a hallway wall, but its outline remains framed by household grime. When he tries to sound threatening to a nighttime intruder by cursing, the results are comical.
Although the possibility of seeing extraterrestrials pummeled is what will draw most people to see Signs, the dramatic heart of the film occurs when Hess is trapped in his home’s basement with his son, Morgan (Rory Culkin); daughter, Bo (Abigail Breslin); and brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix). Morgan begins suffering an asthma attack, his inhaler of medicine is upstairs with the space aliens, and it looks as though Hess may now lose his son too. “Don’t do this to me again,” Hess tells God. “I hate you. I hate you.”
But Hess suddenly is able to comfort and guide his son through the attack, choosing the odd language of “Believe the air will come,” while Merrill prays for them. God is present even in the former priest’s most despairing and frightening moments.
Hess is bitter about losing his wife in an auto accident, yet he shows compassion toward the guilt-ridden veterinarian (Shyamalan) who caused her death. Even as he expresses hatred for God, Hess ultimately cries out to him. Hess is one of the most Christ-haunted figures in contemporary cinema.
This astonishing story of suffering, grief, and redemption comes from a 32-year-old wunderkind who was born a Hindu and attended Roman Catholic and Episcopal schools in his formative years. Shyamalan is making brilliant, significant, and provocative films in a time when more experienced directors flood the market with sludge.
In a pivotal scene with his brother, Hess explains that people see life’s circumstances either as miracles, as proof of God’s caring for them, or as mere luck. In a film culture so rife with cynicism and multimillion-dollar product placements, it is a miracle to behold this film by M. Night Shyamalan.
Douglas LeBlanc edits The CT Review.
Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere
Today’s Film Forum also has advanced reviews of Signs [see the official site].
RottenTomatoes.com offers a selection of reviewer’s reactions to Signs.
Articles on M. Night Shyamalan and Signs include:
Out of This World | Director M. Night Shyamalan is proving himself to be our next great storyteller. A close encounter with the man behind ‘Signs.’ (Newsweek)
Cerebral Fright Films Gain Ground | Basically, the movie developed into a parable about a man’s faith,” Shyamalan says (Associated Press)
Shyamalan hopes ‘Signs’ point to box-office killing | An ‘A’ approach to ‘B’ subjects. (CNN)
‘Signs’ Director Seeks More Emotion | His newest movie is about spirituality, not religion. (Associated Press)
For more CT movie reviews, see our Film archive and also our Film Forum area, a weekly roundup of what Christian critics are saying about new and noteworthy movies.
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The best challenges force you to identify yourself
Christianity TodayJuly 1, 2002
Author Chaim Potok, 73, died Wednesday of cancer in his Merion, Pennsylvania home. Potok was a conservative rabbi and author of nine novels including The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969),My Name is Asher Lev (1972), Davita’s Harp (1985) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990), for which he was awarded The National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
His writing is known for its questions of spirituality and meaning. His novels often chronicled tensions between various factions of Judaism and the struggle between Judaism and the secular world.
At Potok’s funeral, University of Pennsylvania professor Jeffrey Tigay said the author “opened a window to the Jewish soul for the Jew and non-Jew alike.”
In 1978, Christianity Today assistant editor Cheryl Forbes interviewed Potok. This article originally appeared in the September 8, 1978 issue of CT.
Chaim Potok is a small, quick man filled with intellectual intensity. His novels—including The Chosen, The Promise, My Name Is Asher Lev, and In the Beginning—are not just popular; they are well written and deal with the problems of faith in a secular society. Even though the faith Potok writes of is orthodox or Hasidic Judaism, evangelical readers (and there are many) find themselves understanding and empathizing with the conflicts he presents. Evangelicals and Jews both live in what Potok calls a religious subculture, one that holds a firm belief in God, in the supernatural, in miracles, and in a way of living that contradicts everything contemporary society appreciates and approves. And we live under that secular umbrella.
Potok’s books do something more. They explain Jewish tradition and religion. As Harold O. J. Brown has said, Jews and Christians are bound together. We need to understand each other. Potok, who was raised a Hasidic Jew and attended a yeshiva (Jewish school), brings us closer to that goal. He recently spoke at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Soon after that, assistant editor Cheryl Forbes interviewed him at his home in Philadelphia.
Some evangelicals who have read your novels have found little theology in them. Do you agree with this?
There is theology in the novels. Some of those presuppositions are in the titles. No one talks about being chosen in The Chosen. The same is true of The Promise. This, by the way, is more or less typical of the Jews, who, until they confronted major cultures, simply never talked about their theological assumptions—or talked about them rarely. Ancient Near Eastern peoples rarely theologized.
But what of the theology in the Old Testament?
Well, there isn’t a lot of explicit theology in the Old Testament. Most of the Old Testament is poetry, history, law, narrative, saga, epic, tales, chronology, genealogy, and so on. That’s typical of a civilization that lives its doctrine rather than talks about it. You see, theology becomes explicit when antagonistic faiths collide or when creed dominates a civilization. There was no such notion as salvation through creed in the ancient world, as far as I know, unless one turns to some of the mystery religions. Paul invented it. Jewish tradition is a kind of deedology, rather than a creedology.
I’m talking about the concepts of God, providence, miracles, the parting of the Red Sea, the ten commandments. Occasionally you give the content of the prayers in your books. But generally you just say that so-and-so prayed, rather than telling what he prayed.
Well, even if we agreed that all of those Bible passages are theology, we would still find ourselves with a fairly small portion of the Bible.
Can you be a good Jew and an atheist?
The Israelis are good Jews and about 50 percent of them are secularists, atheists.
Then what do you mean by “a good Jew?”
I think that until the modern period, that is up until two or three hundred years ago, a good Jew was someone who observed the commandments, who accepted the authority of the Jewish community and its rabbis. All of that began to break down in the eighteenth century, and we have as much of a problem defining a good Jew today as we have of defining a good secularist or a good Christian. The spectrum has broadened enormously and it now includes someone who shares a sense of identity with the Jewish people and its history, who participates in the drama of Jewish peoplehood, gives money to Jewish causes, has a sense of loyalty toward Israel, a sense of responsibility toward Jews who might be in trouble anywhere in the world. It does not necessarily exclude those who are not observers of the commandments; nor does it exclude those who don’t believe in God. No one in Israel would deny the Jewishness of the youth from secularist agricultural settlements who died for the country in the wars, or of the people in the kibbutzim where they don’t even observe the Day of Atonement. We’re living in a framework now where the old definitions don’t work. No, I would not say that someone who is an atheist is not a good Jew.
But if a person says, I do not believe in God, very few people would say that that person could call himself a Christian.
That is correct. You could not call yourself a Christian.
Then, how, in any other sense than race, could someone call himself a Jew?
Because Judaism involves a concept of nationhood. Christianity never had that. Where you create a system that is entirely dependent on creed, clearly if you strip the creed away you have nothing. Where you create a total civilization, where it isn’t only a matter of the theology but of the life style, the art, literature, language, the forms of thought, the geography, when you create a configuration of that kind, then if one component of it is lost, the system doesn’t necessarily crumble. This is one of the fundamental differences between the Jewish way of structuring reality and the Christian way. We’re now trying to build a third Jewish civilization. We’ve had the biblical, we’ve had the rabbinic. The biblical pretty much came to an end with the destruction of the first temple, and the rabbinic pretty much came to an end with the destruction of European Jewry. Jews today are engaged in an effort to create a third civilization. Secular Jews are very much part of that effort.
What is your theology?
I’d rather sidestep that. I’ve trained myself since I was fourteen or fifteen to think by means of the process of writing. If you were to ask me which of the people in the novels is closest to my way of thinking it would be Reuven Malter, Asher Lev, and David Lurie. From the heart of their Judaism they confront some of the core elements of Western secular humanism and try to deal with them.
Are there points of agreement between Judaism and Christianity? What are the points of tension?
I think that traditional Judaism and the evangelical church have in common a belief in God the Father, the supernatural God who is concerned with man, with the life and soul of every individual man and woman. I think we part from that point on. It is the mission of the evangelical church to spread the good tidings about Jesus; the Jew says that these are not tidings that are terribly good to him. That notion of good tidings means that Jewish history has ground to a halt. If the Messiah has indeed come, then what’s the point to Jewish history? Jewish history is over. That was one of the basic quarrels that the Pharisees had with Jesus, or with the followers of Jesus. Jewish Messianism is something that’s about to happen.
So that if somebody came today and convinced the majority of people that he was the Messiah, you think that Jews would still not believe that the Messiah had come?
Yes, I think that what you have just said is substantially correct. The concept of Messiah in the Jewish tradition, aside from those who reduce it to the folk level and vulgarize the notion, is essentially a concept of future hope, future redemption. There have been times in the past when Jews believed a Messiah had indeed come. Those comings trailed off into bitter disappointments. Traditional Judaism has neutralized the messianic idea by deferring it to some vague future time about which Jews speak with the rhetoric of nebulous dreams. It is that which is always to be.
And therefore it never can be?
The unspoken corollary of that is that once it is, it is not messianic by definition.
Yes, but it strikes me as convoluted somehow.
But it’s the way the Jew redirected history. He tore it out of its cyclical patterns in the ancient Fertile Crescent pagan world and hurled it forward. He broke with the nature cycles. That was the basic point to Israelite religion. If there is a theological heart to Israelite religion it is that it is event-triggered or oriented, that is to say, its triggering element was history rather than nature. Sumerian faith was grounded in an uncertain world of raging rivers. And the Egyptian pantheon, that cluttered impossible-to-count world of ancient Egyptian gods, is inconceivable without the Nile and the desert sun that burned in the sky over that Nile. The Israelite had a different kind of triggering experience altogether, the Exodus. It’s an event-oriented experience; that is to say, slaves escaped. How did it happen? In the ancient world nothing happened by itself, you see. Everything was God directed.
Now, which God engineered the slave escape? How did they get out? That’s what they had to ask themselves. Was it the gods of Egypt? Why would the gods of Egypt engineer a slave escape? Was it the gods of Canaan? How could the gods of Canaan engineer a slave escape? This was what Mosaic religion came into the world to explain—that escape. They covenanted with the God who had made the escape possible. They had to express a relationship to that God. They adopted a suzerainty treaty, one of the forms used in the ancient world to establish international relations. To me, if you talk about Jewish theology, that’s the heart of it all. The ten commandments constitute a treaty between God and the people, a treaty into which the people willingly entered. The concept of Messiah, the messianic idea, came out of that treaty. At a certain point in later Jewish history the covenantal relationship didn’t seem to work. The notion developed that it would work at a future time.
But it’s like looking for something you never expect to find, like saying tomorrow we’ll do such and such, but when tomorrow comes it’s no longer tomorrow.
It’s a concept that effectively managed to keep the people alive through 2,000 years of hell. They kept trying to figure out when the Messiah would come; they kept giving him arrival dates, and when the dates wouldn’t work they figured that they had miscalculated and they fixed new dates. And then, when the traditional notion of the Messiah as an actual person didn’t seem to be working out, the Messiah became the messianic era, and much of this messianic energy got diverted into the creation of the State of Israel. It gets diverted now into the creation of thought and art. We are goal-oriented. The concept affected all of Western civilization through Judaism and Christianity. More than half the world doesn’t think that way, you know. It doesn’t think in terms of future direction. It thinks cyclically. As a sheer mechanism of survival, baldly put, it seems to have worked. Messianism has given the Jews, despite all the hell they have been through, the driving idea that has enabled them to live and create and now to begin to create again.
Not that there is a literal Messiah who’s going to come and make it better?
Yes. Many of those who believed that there was a literal Messiah remained behind in Europe and died.
What do you think about Jews who call themselves completed Jews, who believe in Jesus as Messiah?
I think they have crossed the line and for them Jewish history is over.
Even though they think that Jewish history is continuing?
I don’t understand that, you see. That’s a contradiction in terms. If Jewish history is continuing in the creedology of Christ the Savior, then the Jews who are living their own Jewish history are less than peripheral to the human adventure. You simply can’t have it both ways. It isn’t entirely clear to me how someone who sees himself as part of the Jewish people can cross the line and accept Jesus as the Messiah, because what that means is that the Jewish component of the human adventure has terminated. And this vast excitement now about the real possibility of a third Jewish civilization is an unnecessary adventure; it’s an exercise in absurdity.
I don’t understand that. Christians wouldn’t say that, and many evangelicals are almost Zionist, because their view of history says that Israel is essential.
But what is the event that they look forward to?
The second coming of the Messiah.
And what will that do to the Jewish people? There are all sorts of unstated assumptions here.
In other words, you think that history must never end, that there can never be a time when history is no longer.
Yes. That’s correct. Other Jews would disagree with me. That’s my own feeling at this point in my thinking. But that does not mean that history is without meaning.
Whereas Christians would see that history is vital, but that there will be a point at which history will end and we will enter timelessness or eternity.
I don’t know if I can stake my life on that. I don’t know what those words mean.
You mean timelessness? History ending? You don’t understand that?
I don’t know what any of that means—history ending, timelessness. I think that all of those words are in an empty set, as one would say in logic. I think that they are vacuous terms, which people really don’t understand.
Why? Because they seem mystical?
They are words that don’t designate. And I don’t use words that way. A writer can’t use words that way.
In Asher Lev the cross is the chief symbol, one of oppression. Is that all it stands for?
For Asher Lev the cross is the aesthetic motif for solitary, protracted torment.
So therefore it has no religious significance, right?
Any artist who functions in the secular world has emptied the cross of its christological vicarious atonement content and utilizes it as a form only.
How can you have a symbol that has no meaning?
Art is full of what I call aesthetic vessels, that is to say, motifs, which an artist fills with his own being. For example, when Beethoven wanted to express his feelings for a particularly heightened moment in the history of his time he cast about in music for a form into which he could pour his feelings and what he found was the mass. Into the form called the mass he poured Beethoven and out came the Missa Solemnis. When Picasso, who by no stretch of the imagination could be called Christian—you might have been charitable if you called him a high pagan—when Picasso’s mistress began to die of tuberculosis, he drew a crucifixion. What did that drawing mean to Picasso? As far as he was concerned, the crucifixion had no religious significance. Well, that’s what I mean by a form. These are aesthetic motifs. They are a triggering mechanism for certain emotions, and in this instance the emotion is evoked by solitary, protracted torment. And since Asher Lev had been studying art from the age of thirteen with the artist/sculptor Kahn, the crucifixion to him was clearly stripped of all its christological salvationist content and was a vessel. To his parents it’s what the crucifixion is to most Jews—even to many secular Jews, by the way. It is and remains, and probably will remain for a long time, a triggering mechanism for images of rivers of Jewish blood. Countless Jews have been slain through the centuries for the deicide charge. That’s what the crucifixion instantaneously triggers in traditional Jews and probably in most secularist Jews. Asher Lev is essentially about a conflict of aesthetics.
I can understand how the crucifixion would not have religious significance for a painter who used it, but I do not see how the crucifixion could say solitary, protracted torment unless the crucifixion of Jesus Christ had occurred. If you strip a symbol of its original meaning it’s not a symbol any more.
Of course a man named Jesus was crucified. Of course the crucifixion has religious significance: There’s no question about that.
Absolutely. Otherwise, Asher Lev wouldn’t have a problem. If he weren’t aware of the religious significance of the cross, he wouldn’t have spent months walking around Paris trying to decide if he could really paint this.
Of course. Let’s look at a theme that’s less charged than the crucifixion. After Guernica was bombed by Fascist planes during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was told about it. He was overwhelmed by the horror of that bombing. He wanted a motif for the mural by means of which he could express that horror, and that motif is the Massacre of the Innocents. Again, Picasso was not a Christian, but Picasso utilized these as forms. The Massacre of the Innocents would have no significance whatsoever in Western art had it not had that initial christological charge. Yes, these old forms are charged with christological content, but they clearly don’t have that content for the modern artist. The crucifixion certainly doesn’t have it for a man like Chagall, who utilized that form to depict the slaughter of Russian Jews. He put a Jew with a prayer shawl onto a crucifix. You can see that crucifixion in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Is that why some Christians fear or resent art, because non-Christians and Jews use their symbols?
Yes, rightfully so. We have similar problems in Judaism. Things very dear to devout Jews have been secularized. We all live beneath the vast umbrella civilization we call secular humanism or modern paganism. It has among its treasures all the civilizations of Western man—Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish. But it makes no appeal to the supernatural. Man is the measure of all things. Civilizations are man-made creations, says secular man, and I will use them as I see fit and at the same time I will use them knowing the emotive connectedness that a Christian or Jew has to them. And, in one way or another, we all participate in this umbrella civilization.
What is your background?
Very orthodox.
Not Hasidic?
Well, I was Hasidic without the beard and earlocks. I prayed in a little shtiebel and my mother is a descendent of a great Hasidic dynasty and my father was a Hasid, so I come from that world.
Is it necessary for an artist to rebel against his culture? Is that part of the definition of an artist? If so, I can understand how a Christian could fear art and how someone could say that a Christian cannot be an artist.
Most modern artists think it is.
I don’t want to know what an artist thinks is necessary, but whether it really is part of being an artist.
There’s no simple answer. In the ancient world, the artist wasn’t separated from his community; he was part of it. He gave aesthetic expression to the relationship of the community to the cosmos, to the gods, and so on. All of this has changed in the past couple of hundred years. Certainly in literature and probably in painting as well. The modern novel developed as a very special genre, a genre that deals for the most part with social tension and rebellion. Certain people picked up on an old form called storytelling and began to use it to explore middle-class hypocrisy and the relationship between an individual’s effort at self-identity and a community’s insistence that tribal loyalties are primary.
Back to the question. Robert Henn, whom you quote in Asher Lev, says that an artist cannot believe in anything and be an artist. He can only be himself, and totally isolated, in a sense, from society. He can have no culture other than what he creates. Do you think that is intrinsic to being an artist? And therefore all good or great art comes out of this isolation?
Yes. You function inside the world, but you float inside an ambiance that you create for yourself. Do you understand what I mean? When I say that the artist isolates himself, I don’t mean that he goes off to live on a desert island. There are parts of an artist that can sit and have a drink, and at the same time another part functions in a working way all the time as an artist. Henri wasn’t a hermit.
But Henri also says that you cannot believe anything, have any doctrine or dogma, and be an artist. Therefore, following his view, one could not be a Christian and an artist. Or a Jew and an artist. There’s a conflict there.
I think that he’s talking about when the gauntlet is thrown, as it were. And that’s the problem that Asher Lev had. You can go along for quite a while without any problems. But sooner or later if you are a serious artist there’s going to come a time when you will encounter an enormous conflict of values between individual and societal truths. At that point you have to be true to yourself. By the way, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a conflict with your background. It can be a conflict of values inside your artistic world. It’s not only a matter of an individual rebelling against the system of societal or religious values that gave him life. You might rebel against the system of values that formed your artistic tradition.
So you are answering my question by saying, yes, art always comes out of rebellion.
Serious art, high art. Always, always.
Do you think your last novel is more complex because of the use of dreams and the images of sickness—the sheets, the pure world, David’s tongue licking the white crispness of his bed linen, his mother traveling back and forth in time in her mind?
You have to reverse it. I’ve used all of those in order to handle the complexity of the problem.
Biblical criticism?
No. That’s one component of the problem. Each of the books deals with a culture confrontation, what I call a core to core culture confrontation: The Chosen with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which comes from the core of Western secular humanism; Asher Lei, with art; In the Beginning with anti-Semitism, the dark underbelly of Western civilization. Throughout the last book you have the entire spectrum of Jewish responses to anti-Semitism. The final confrontation with anti-Semitism comes to this boy from modern Bible criticism. A lot of scholars have used this as a highly sophisticated weapon to get at the Jews. This boy knows that it is a weapon; but he also comes to realize that it contains truths. He asks himself, What do I do? How do I handle the truths? They are being used by Germans. Germans are killing my people. What do I do with those truths?
His response was to the truths imbedded in that scholarly discipline. Everything that happens in that book is triggered by anti-Semitism. The father leaves Poland because of a pogrom. The mother leaves Poland because of a pogrom. Earlier, the father joins a Polish unit in the Austrian army to be a machine gunner so that he can kill Russians in some legitimate way. He hates Russians. They massacre Jews. The boy doesn’t know how to respond at first. In the end he joins the enemy camp in order to change the face of the enemy. Some of my friends did that. They entered Bible scholarship in order to change the attitude of that discipline toward Jews-and they have succeeded. This is their story.
How do you explain the appeal of your novels for non-Jews, in particular evangelicals?
Well, I think that I stumbled quite inadvertently upon the central problem of any system of faith in the secular world.
Can you have art without morality?
There’s a good case for art as delectation, for the sheer joy of a pure aesthetic experience. To read Nabokov is to confront a writer who is unconcerned with moral issues, but whose writing is a delight—a lawful magic.
How can you use words that way? They are in a different category, it seems to me, than paint on canvas or notes on a page.
Of course, words designate and are tied up with canonicity and sacraments and rites. At the same time, one can be an exquisite wordsmith and just bring sheer delight. But a writer would have to be in the category of Nabokov to arouse my interest in that kind of handling of words.
Christianity faces an undermining of its absolute values. You deal with that in your novels. What advice do you have for people who are responsible for guiding young people who are facing our secular society? How should that be handled to avoid alienating the young person?
I would say that the teacher should be somebody like Reuven Malter’s father. In many ways, he exemplifies the Jewish adventure. We have lived through a series of culture confrontations. Every time we’ve confronted a high culture we have always managed to borrow from it the best that it had to offer, to blend with it, to enrich our core in the process, and then to pass on to the world that blend of high culture with our own core.
By being in the world but not of it?
That’s what I’m saying.
But now that’s not happening.
I’ll get to that. The core remained intact all along, until our contact with the secular enlightenment. For the first time the core has been radically altered. For the first time the Jew has encountered an umbrella civilization stripped of pagan gods. Modern paganism is entirely devoid of appeal to the supernatural. Because of that the Jew—even the traditional Jew—is able to participate in it. All along it was the element of paganism in high cultures that kept most Jews from an eager acceptance of whatever umbrella civilization they were in at any given time. But that pagan element is absent from the culture today.
So that it doesn’t matter that secular culture is nonreligious so long as it is not anti-religious?
It matters tremendously that it is areligious. It has no religious components.
But it is not areligious. Secular culture is in many cases quite antireligious.
Let’s look at this a little further. There are many kinds of secularists. There are fundamentalist secularists. They are the ones who are antireligious. There are, on the other hand, very tolerant secularists who see secularism as an umbrella civilization under which all peoples can participate. A Jew may not enter a world of paganism, but if it’s an empty world—that the Jew may enter. This is the crucial difference between this culture encounter and the culture encounter between the Jew and the Canaanite. The covenant does not state that the Jew may not have contact with any culture. The Jew may not form loyalties with paganism.
Unlike Christianity, which compels us to contact pagans to convert them.
We don’t have the notion of converting the pagans to a system of belief. We have the notion of sanctifying the behavior of Jews and of the world.
What absolutes do you hold on to? Are there any?
I can tell you what my basic commitments are. This business of living is very difficult indeed, and very precious. It’s something you have to work at. You must regard it with heightened concern, because of the possibility of losing it at any moment. Every moment of beauty has its melancholy aspect. I would prefer to say that the universe is meaningful, with pockets of apparent meaninglessness, than to say that it is meaningless with pockets of apparent meaningfulness. In other words, I have questions either way.
I see it as my task to attempt to infuse with sense those elements that make no sense. That’s the task of man. Specifically, it is the task of the artist. In terms of the model teacher, he or she is for me the individual who attempts to fuse the finest elements of secularism with the finest elements of his or her faith through a process of selective affinity. You select elements of the umbrella culture toward which you feel an affinity and integrate them into your own life. New breath enters your being-new ideas, new challenges. The best challenge, by the way, is the kind that forces you to identify yourself. You go along without any problems and suddenly you come up against an idea, and the idea says to you, who are you? I know who I am. That idea forces you to say to it, I am this and this and this. That’s what culture confrontation is really all about. The Greeks forced Christendom to define itself. One can turn one’s back on that kind of culture challenge, or laugh at it. Many did. But others said, You can’t do that; these are serious questions.
What do you think of the strong evangelical support for Israel?
I welcome it. I’ll tell you candidly that I welcome it, even though I know that its ultimate aim is the conversion of the Jews.
Why do I say that? We have an old Talmudic saying that you can do good things for inappropriate reasons. I hope evangelists will come to understand and value the intrinsic nature and purpose of Jewish faith. If I can’t meet the challenge of an evangelist I have no reason to be in business. This world in which we live today, especially the United States, is a vast open marketplace of ideas. If Jews can’t compete in this open marketplace of ideas, then we should close up the store. I am not offended when a Christian witnesses to me. I know that his teachings bid him to do that. I know that there are Jews who are upset by it, but I am not.
To the Jew first and then also to the Greek.
Of course, to the Jew and to the pagan. I used to get upset by it. Many Jews suspect that all the evangelical support for Israel is really for the purpose of converting the Jews. They say that there’s really nothing altruistic about it.
How do you view the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Primarily as a conflict of nationalisms into which a great deal of religious and historical rhetoric has been infused. It will ultimately be resolved as the European conflict was. You have two peoples fighting about territory.
But what about Begin’s view that the Bible gave the Jews this land and they must keep it?
It depends on what biblical passages you read. The Bible is very unclear about the borders of the land. If you read Kings you discover that when King Solomon couldn’t pay Hiram of Tyre his bill for some construction work he gave him a number of Israelite towns that are now good Israeli cities along the coast of the Mediterranean. Clearly King Solomon didn’t have a frozen notion of the sanctity of every inch of the land. Or if he did he didn’t let it bother him too much when it came to international diplomacy.
If the Israelis are going to give up any land, my feeling is that they had better be certain that they’re getting something really solid in return. I wouldn’t give up anything for a piece of paper or a nebulous promise. The Arabs held all that territory for nineteen years before the Israelis took it in the June 1967 war. Was there peace during all those years? Did the border raids stop? Or the Arab boycott? Why should the Israelis give up territory unless they get something substantial in return? Would we Americans give up territory in some comparable situation?
What’s your view of Jesus?
There is a historical Jesus and he is discoverable to anyone who reads with an unbiased eye and ear and head the first three Gospels.
Do you find them anti-Semitic?
The anti-Semitic elements in the Gospels are both latent and loud. They’re polemical in nature. There is much in Judaism that’s anti-Christian. There are about 1,500 years of Jewish and Christian polemics. And the two sides are often crude and vicious. That’s the nature of polemics. The Crusades finished it in France and Germany. When Christians started slaughtering Jews, the Jews decided it was not worth talking. Up until that point the polemicizing went on and was very open and strong on both sides. Bitter things were said in typical polemical fashion.
But you wouldn’t accept the resurrection.
No. The historical Jesus that’s reported to us in the synoptic Gospels is an account of a young man who grew up with some tension in his family for reasons that aren’t too clear, who was a brilliant rabbinical student, a Pharisee, who encountered John the Baptist, was baptized, and then received the call and became an apocalyptic Pharisee. That is to say, he became a preacher and a miracle healer. There were many such preachers then, and a few such miracle healers are recorded in the Talmud.
Toward the end of his life he began to believe that he was a prophet and the manlike judge described in Daniel, and then that he was the Messiah. He was executed in Jerusalem by the Romans apparently at the behest of some sort of court of priests, who regarded him as a menace because of his prediction of the destruction of the temple. During a pilgrim festival Jerusalem was always tense because the crowds could be worked up to riot. All you needed was one hothead to cause trouble. The priests took Jesus to be a hothead; he had overturned the tables of moneychangers, caused trouble. Most Jews have no difficulty accepting this historical Jesus. The Jesus whom Christians talk about—the Jesus who is worshipped—is the Jesus Jews don’t understand. The concept of Jesus as man-God is simply incomprehensible to the Jewish mind. That concept is pagan. Hellenists and Romans used to deify kings. That’s why medieval Talmudic law generally linked Christianity with paganism. But Jews today can associate with a paganless secularism.
The battle of David Lurie with Bible criticism is somewhat akin to that faced by evangelicals today. What is the significance of this?
Bible criticism presents a particular problem to the Jewish tradition that isn’t faced by Christianity. Orthodox Jewish law is predicated on the assumption that the Pentateuchal text is fixed and divinely given. Once you touch the fixity of the Pentateuchal text the whole mountain of Jewish law begins to tremble.
That’s similar to the problem within Christianity. If you accept one portion of Scripture as culturally conditioned, say, who’s to decide where to draw the line?
Yes, if you say a text is spurious you might say it about a doctrine as well. That’s perfectly true. Essentially both fundamentalisms face the same problem. That’s why fundamentalists are afraid to confront Bible criticism. They don’t know how to handle it.
You don’t think that in confronting it faith will crumble.
Here’s the problem in Judaism: The tradition itself has Bible criticism in it. You can find it all through the medieval Jewish Bible commentaries. If the tradition were entirely devoid of Bible criticism, then a David Lurie might never have been attracted to the excitement of that discipline. First, David Lurie turns his back on the modern version of Bible criticism. Then he realizes that there are truths involved. How do you relate to the truths? You have to rethink your relationship to the tradition. You have to come to an understanding of how you relate to the tradition without basing yourself on a fundamentalist version of its sacred text. And that involves rethinking your relationship to the history of your people. Many people don’t want to do that and simply use Bible criticism as the most convenient excuse for the quickest way out of the Jewish tradition. They claim that Bible criticism proves the tradition to be infantile fables. Well, Bible criticism doesn’t prove that at all. Quite the contrary. We know today that the Bible is far more complex and sophisticated than we ever suspected; it is far more awesome as a creation of man than as a word-for-word revelation by God.
Why does a good Jew study Talmud rather than the Bible?
You’ve crossed into another civilization. There was biblical civilization—the first civilization of the Jewish people. Then there was talmudic civilization. Talmudic—or rabbinic—civilization was built on the civilization of the Bible, but it created its own literature. Talmudic civilization stresses its literature, which is the Talmud. For the Jew, biblical civilization is now secondary to talmudic civilization. Therefore Jews concentrate upon the Talmud.
But if Talmud is built on the Bible, to stress the Talmud is to stress the secondary.
No. Talmudic civilization is what biblical civilization became in the Greek and Roman period.
So that they exist side by side, and not like a foundation and first floor.
I would say that they exist like a foundation and a first floor. If you’re living on the first floor you take advantage of the sunlight and don’t worry too much about what’s in the foundation. Also remember that during the Roman period learning became a sacred obligation in the Jewish tradition. And learning meant learning how to live, how to sanctify life, how to live by the law. Therefore everyone had to know the law. That’s the reason for the emphasis on talmudic study. After the destruction of the temple, learning became a form of worship. The Jew assumes that the youngster will know the Bible by the time he’s ready to start Talmud. The Talmud is comprised of the Mishnah, originally an oral code, and of later discussions on passages in the Mishnah. There are also tales, homilies, and other forms of literature in the Talmud. It is really a vast collection of many kinds of literature, not all of it having to do with law. Fundamentalist Jews regard the Mishnah as having been part of the original revelation at Sinai, an oral revelation. Today most elements of Jewry have restored the importance of the Bible, of poetry and Hebrew literature; these are taught now, too, as well as Talmud.
You alluded earlier to conflicts with your tradition as being part of the reason you shifted from painting to writing.
The writing simply delayed it for a while. Asher Lev was the metaphor for the problems of the writer. David Lurie is another example of the problems that you ultimately have to confront in writing and the decisions that you have to make as a writer. I didn’t win many friends among the orthodox as a result of those two books.
You are ostracized, then?
I left fundamentalism when I graduated from college. I entered the Western, liberal element of the Jewish tradition. Am I ostracized? Jewish orthodoxy is not monolithic. Some orthodox receive me warmly; others regard me with suspicion; still others are certain that I have crossed into dark heresies. There’s an orthodox synagogue two blocks from my home that once refused to let me in to give a lecture. And there’s an orthodox school about half a dozen blocks away from my home that bans The Chosen.
Yet you’ve spoken at Christian and secular colleges.
We live in a strange, exciting, new world.
This article originally appeared in the September 8, 1978 issue of Christianity Today. At the time, Cheryl Forbes was assistant editor of the magazine.
Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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- Other Religions
John Wilson
Remembering Jeremiah Evarts and Samuel Worcester
Christianity TodayJuly 1, 2002
Nearly two months ago—on May 22, to be precise—the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., held a meeting on “Evangelicals and Political Engagement: Assessing the Past, Scouting the Future.” The political scientist and master interpreter of survey data, John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron, led off with a paper on “Evangelicals and Civic Engagement: A View from (near) the Top.” That was followed by the main event, pitting columnist Cal Thomas against Focus on the Family’s VP of Public Policy, Tom Minnery, authors of dueling books on the subject. (Thomas’ coauthor was Ed Dobson, a refugee from the Land of Falwell who repents of his former ways). The debate sputtered, in part because “political involvement” was never clearly defined and thus real differences were never substantively and clearly articulated—Thomas’ passion surfaced in recurring complaints that James Dobson has repeatedly refused to meet personally with him to air their differences, an issue that hardly seemed relevant to the question at hand—but the conversation caught fire around a slightly different but important subject: how a pastor, in his role as preacher and not considered as a private citizen, should or should not speak to political issues from the pulpit.
I have been thinking about that debate-that-wasn’t off and on ever since, wondering what form a real debate on the subject might take. It’s a puzzle because I have a hard time imagining how one would go about building a case that Christians should shun political involvement across the board. (I know that various Christians have held that view over the centuries in many different times and places. I guess I should have said, “building a persuasive case.”)
That question came to mind most recently when I was rereading The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation, by John G. West, Jr. (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1996), a book I highly recommend. Particularly valuable is West’s account of evangelical reformers in the early 19th century. He devotes one chapter to evangelical battles against Cherokee removal during the administration of Andrew Jackson—an episode in evangelical history unknown to me until I read West’s book.
If you are a reader of , or simply a regular visitor to our website, you may have seen Kenneth Moore Startup’s fine piece, “Red, White, and Gray,” a review of two books on Jackson and Indian removal published in our July/August issue and now posted on the web. West’s chapter concerns an aspect of this sorry tale not covered there.
In order to evict the Cherokees from the lands they had occupied before the first Europeans settled in the Georgia colony, Jackson had to brazenly disregard treaties that the United States had signed with the Cherokees, who had already been persuaded to sell a good deal of the land “granted” to them in those treaties but who didn’t want to give up their ancestral lands altogether. Persuasion having failed, Jackson and many of his fellow Americans were ready to resort to force.
Looking back, insofar as we ever do look back at this event, we have the impression that it proceeded with very little opposition. But in fact, just as many Americans of that period were against slavery—which still reigned supreme in the South—so there were many who were deeply uneasy at the prospect of removal. (History is always messy, as Startup observes: West mentions in a note on the Cherokee Constitution that it explicitly denied rights to blacks and mulattoes; many Cherokees were slaveholders.)
What galvanized opposition, however, was a series of 24 essays—published in countless newspapers and journals and then as a pamphlet under the pen name “William Penn”—written by Jeremiah Evarts, an evangelical missionary who had spent time among the Cherokees and who was currently serving as corresponding secretary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. (West describes the series of essays as “the most celebrated piece of political journalism since The Federalist.” They are available in a modern edition, Cherokee Removal: The “William Penn Essays” and Other Writings by Jeremiah Evarts, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, published by the Univ. of Tennessee Press in 1981.)
West tells the story of Evarts, the courageous missionary Samuel Worcester (who risked great harm and was for a time imprisoned), and the campaign against removal with narrative economy and drive. He also has valuable things to say about the way in which Evarts drew upon both “natural reason” and Christian revelation in making his case. (“Chief Justice John Marshall,” West notes, “called the essays the ‘most conclusive argument that he ever read on any subject whatever.’ “) And yet finally it makes for very painful reading.
As West writes, despite the rightness of the cause and the persuasiveness of the advocate, “the fact remained that many Americans were not prepared to treat the Cherokees as equals. In Evarts’s mind this raised a terrible question about America’s identity. In the end what defined America—a common racial identity or devotion to a common ideal?”
Evarts and the others who fought against removal lost, but as West shows, the outcome was not inevitable, any more than the modern civil rights movement and its outcome were inevitable. As Jackson tried to ram the bill through Congress, there was considerable debate, and removal was nearly defeated.
It’s interesting to learn that one of the sleaziest advocates of removal, Georgia Congressman Wilson Lumpkin (who was also a vice president of the American Sunday School Union), “decried those Christians who left their proper realm and sought to involve themselves in politics as ‘canting fanatics.’ He said he had no trouble with ‘pure religion’ (that is, religion that steered clear of politics), ‘but the undefiled religion of the Cross is a separate and distinct thing in its nature from the noisy cant of the pretenders who have cost this Government, since the commencement of the present session of Congress, considerably upwards of $100,000 by their various intermeddlings with the political concerns of the country.’ “
While we’re remembering Evarts and Worcester, let’s also remember that Dickensian figure, Wilson Lumpkin, the patron saint of Christians undefiled by politics.
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.
Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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World magazine publisher Joel Belz wrote editorials on the issue both before and after the debate between Minnery and Thomas.
appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:
The Pledge Controversy | Asking the wrong questions? (July 8, 2002)
Reading Danny Pearl | How would the murdered journalist want to be remembered? (July 1, 2002)
A Cry for Help | Sudanese Christians gather in Houston and ask for U.S. support. (June 17, 2002)
Agrarians of the World, Unite! | Wendell Berry’s vision, and how Christians should respond to it. (June 10, 2002)
Stop, Drop, and Cover … | Then hack your lungs out and die. (June 3, 2002)
Death of an Evolutionist | RIP Stephen Jay Gould. (May 31, 2002)
Closing The X-Files … | … with the sign of the Cross. (May 20, 2002)
And the Next Thing Is … | Marxism (or not). (May 13, 2002)
God Bless the Eliminator | Mother Jones magazine makes known a shocking discovery: evangelicals are sending missionaries to Muslim countries! (May 6, 2002)
‘A Peculiar People’ | The uniqueness of the Jews. (April 29, 2002)
‘Nebuchadnezzar My Slave’ | Was the Holocaust God’s will? (April 15, 2002)
‘In the Beginning Was the Holocaust’? | Blasphemy, rage, memory, and meaning of the Shoah. (April 8, 2002)
The Gospel According to Biff | A conversation with novelist Christopher Moore. (April 1, 2002)
Baseball 2002 Preview | Part 2: Saving the game? (March 25, 2002)
The State of the Game | After one of the best World Series ever, baseball faces a crisis. (March 18, 2002)
America’s Homegrown Islam—and Its Prophet | The strange story of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and onetime mentor of Malcolm X. (Mar. 11, 2002)
‘Must Be Superstition’ | Rediscovering spiritual reality. (Mar. 4, 2002)
Science Holds a Meeting | A report from the annual convention of the AAAS. (Feb. 25, 2002)
Saint Frodo and the Potter Demon | The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series spring from the same source. (Feb. 18, 2002)
- More fromJohn Wilson