Page 4416 – Christianity Today (2024)

The music of Arvo Part (the ar is pronounced like “heir,” so it’s “Peirt”) bids us enter an unhurried world. More precisely, it takes us into the realm where “deep calls forth unto deep,” and time is a faculty of life in the Spirit. His De Profundis, a setting of Psalm 130 (129 in the Vulgate), is a musical metaphor of the composer’s challenge to the uncontrolled clamor of our age. This psalm is one of the psalms most frequently set to music by Western composers. In Part’s version the texture is elemental, consisting of open chords and punctuated only by the most subtle changes. Like a Japanese vase, it has a simple consistency that yet draws its admirer slowly into its rich grain. Scored for a choir of male voices, organ, and chimes, it moves slowly, very slowly, from the haunting plea, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord,” to the climactic confidence of “Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy,” and finally it returns to the quiet confidence that “He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” Besides articulating the psalmist’s experience with the power of sparse language, it is a quintessential countercultural statement.

We live in an overarticulated world, full of signs, symbols, sounds, images: an environment where noise pollution is so pervasive that we are largely unconscious of it. Some artists, it is true, celebrate the noise. Stuart Davis declared that art should not fight for contemplation, but should reflect a Public View of Satisfaction of Impulse, incorporating taxicabs, electric signs, and fast travel as its main images. But many others invite us to leave modernity, at least in its more secular temper, for another world, a simpler, more profound sphere. The way to get there is by the austere language of minimalism.

It would be unjust to label Part a minimalist without a word of explanation. The minimalist movement is arguably one of the most compelling trends in the arts in recent times, though it has not been well studied. As the word suggests, the smallest units are featured, the most reduced lines and harmonies employed. Though one can find antecedents in almost every age, the term minimalism was born in the 1960s to describe a school in the visual arts that opposed the complexity of modernism with greatly reduced shapes and forms. Some of it was an “in-your-face” rebellion against the beautiful, and other Western ideals; so one might encounter a single rock in a large museum room, otherwise empty. At best, it was an approach that drew attention to basics, to primary colors and shapes, inviting the viewer to participate in the purity of the objects. It was a call to reform, to the discipline of the artistic process at the most fundamental level.

In music, minimalism meant a re turn to tonality and pure sounds with little attention to dramatic development and contrast. Like a mobile, the sounds were examined from different perspectives, inviting the listener to enjoy the most elementary pitches and rhythms. American minimalist composers are a significant family, including figures well known to the public as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young.

Paul Hillier, in his marvelous study of Arvo Part, rightly warns that the label “minimalist” is somewhat misleading as a description of the Estonian composer’s music, because he was not particularly involved in its American 1960s phase. In fact, though, there is a broader sense of a minimalism that should properly include composers as different as Henryk Gorecki (often associated with Part), Brian Eno (who popularized “ambient music”), and even Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. In essence, it refers to a generic approach that eschews perspective and linear progress. It is not that nothing “happens” in the music, but that most of the development is achieved by the listener, who discovers the different shapes and contrasts in the texture. Think of Gregorian chant. Though chant is laid out in time and, indeed, delineates a biblical text, one is hard put to identify its different chapters or its milestones. Rather than offering a story with beginning, middle, and end it creates an ambiance, a mood.

Arvo Part is a minimalist, but with a difference. At the heart of his music is ritual. Instead of calendar time or clock time, it suggests prayer, being in tune with eternity. Hillier points out that the music represents a hesychast answer to our noisy environment. The term was first used in the fourth century to designate that inner peace, that tranquility of soul needed for the proper contemplation of Christ. While it is associated particularly with the monks of Mount Athos, and has been preserved and developed in its strongest form in the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is a tradition that dates back to biblical times. The hesychast avenue is neither passive nor in active. The condition it commends is listening to God, actively, using the faculties. But it cultivates sobriety, watchfulness, chasing away distractions. By “keeping the heart with all vigilance,” we discover the springs of life filled up to God (Prov. 4:23).

Part did not come to this place over night. Born in Estonia in 1935, he was still a boy when his country was absorbed by the Soviet Union, and he re members times of privation and scarce resources. He had a voracious appetite for music of all sorts and was composing by the age of 15. He trained at the Conservatory in Tallin, and came under the influence of the leading musical figure in Estonia, Heino Eller (1887–1970). Part composed in a number of styles, and even scored music for films (as many as 50 list him in the credits). His early works reveal an impressive command of musical technique, and at the same time display a certain sternness of mood. One hears Shostakovich and Prokofiev in these pieces, but one especially detects the shadow of Bartok.

In the early 1960s, Part committed himself to the ultimate modern method, the serial technique. The term refers to composition that eschews melody and harmony in the traditional sense, and instead uses a series, or a sequence of 12 tones (the number of different notes in our chromatic scale). The relationship of the notes in the series becomes the foundation for the whole composition. Because it has no key, and lacks the familiar sounds of functional harmony, such music is sometimes called atonal.

In Part’s case this is not an altogether accurate label, because he often mixed elements of tonality and even collage techniques with his stricter 12-tone writing. Part’s first serial composition met with considerable controversy. Called Nekrolog (1960–61), it was ostensibly a protest against the suffering of victims of fascist oppression. The Soviet cultural powers correctly detected a critique of their own regime; in 1962, the All-Union Congress of Composers condemned the piece. The significance of Nekrolog is not in its ideology, however. It is in its lack of hope. Hillier notes that indeed the piece is unremittingly bleak, and that it represents a time in the composer’s pilgrimage where suffering could only be tragic, with no hint of its ca thartic value.

Throughout the decade, Part struggled to use advanced technique that never fully expressed what his heart longed for. It all came to a head in 1968 with the composition of Credo, a setting of Matthew 5:38–39 (“You have heard it said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you: do not resist evil”) for piano, chorus, and orchestra. The audience loved it. The authorities, who by now could accept serialism, believed it was an act of defiance because of its title. The piece was banned in the Soviet Union for over a decade. The composition does have a message embedded in its musical development: nonviolence is ultimately more forceful than violence. Hillier thoroughly analyzes Credo. He is well qualified to do this, being not only a specialist in early music (he is director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington) but also the conductor of the Theatre of Voices, a group that has recorded more of Arvo Part’s work than any other.

Hillier’s argument is that Credo brought the composer to a sort of impasse, a crisis that deeply affected his creative process. Part uses tonality in this piece with a constant reference to Bach’s Prelude in C from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. But the piece is also strongly serial, with the use of chance elements as well. The piece uses the conflict of tonality and serialism to symbolize two forces, the conflict of two basic styles, neither of which can pave the way for the future of music. This may sound naive, but be cause of Part’s skill, the allegory works musically, and so it is more than just an aesthetic statement in sound. On one level, the angry sounds of atonality are challenged, and eventually transformed by the more serene Bachian harmonies. But at the same time, tonality is broken down, de constructed into its fundamental elements, and so yields to serialism. As Hillier puts it, “in Credo the two elements of order and disorder, good and evil, are presented not as separate blocks of energy, but as linked forces, each containing the seeds of their opposite, with a continuum of gradual disintegration (and reconstitution) lying between them.”

Perhaps tonality is regained, but then comes the question: How does the composer move forward, writing contemporary music, without simply being nostalgic about the past? After Credo, Part wrote virtually nothing for seven years. He had searched for truth and found it in Bach, who wrote in the eighteenth century. So how could there be progress, the great idol of modern music? Many composers and artists have wrestled with this dilemma. Some have simply returned to the past, be coming neoclassical and traditionalist. Others have proclaimed postmodern ism as a way out, allowing them to throw together all kinds of contradictory styles. Part went on a quest for a “third way.” He questioned the propriety of progress in art, and affirmed the “modernity” of all great music, be it Bach’s or that of any other master. In a remarkable interview right around the time of Credo, he suggested that “the secret to [better music’s] contemporaneity resides in the question: How thoroughly has the author-composer perceived, not his own present, but the totality of life, its joys, worries and mysteries?” And so he went on a quest for authenticity, one that led him, finally, to shed the pretenses both of an angry spirituality and of modern music. (Olivier Messiaen went through a similar process, though with very different results.)

Spiritually, Part rediscovered the Christian faith of his upbringing. He joined the Russian Orthodox Church. There he found a way to remain honest about the surrounding evil while ultimately resting in the love of a sovereign God. Hope was restored. Musically, he began to explore the riches of ancient music. He studied the Notre Dame school, and Guillaume de Machaut. He developed a great affection for the Netherlands school, with Ockeghem, Obrecht, and especially Josquin des Pres. The masses and motets of Dufay were seminal for him. What he found in this tradition was much more than compositional techniques. He found a unique spirit, one of simplicity and depth, and of doing all for the sake of Christ, the Logos. Rooted in plainchant, so much of this music was fixed on that Word that it made it real to the congregation. Part had been looking for an alternative to postmodernism on the one hand and mere antiquarianism on the other. He found it in the spirit of this tradition. The key that unlocked the door was—bells!

Part arrived at a style of composition that bespoke the complex of sounds, changing yet the same, rich in harmonics yet simple in tone. Because his musical substance would now be so resolute, allowing us to hear music long after the notes have been sounded, Part has called his style “tintinnabuli.” Literally, the “tintinnabulum” is a small tinkling bell. It can be struck on the outside or chimed from within, giving out a rich timbre of a single note with harmonics and overtones. It has a ritual function for the church, calling the faithful to worship, announcing the canonical hours, or marking various parts of the service.

We can indeed hear the sounds of the bell in a number of Part’s compositions, including De Profundis, mentioned above. Interestingly, in 1610 Pope Paul V required ringing the De Profundis bell on All Saints Day at one o’clock in the morning as a way to re member the departed. And we hear a bell-like punctuation throughout the choral meditation that bears the name. But more often it is the shape of a phrase, the growth of a sonority, the overall form of the piece that rings like a bell. Tintinnabulism has many implications for this music, inspired as it is by the atmosphere and teachings of the Orthodox Church. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, bell ringing bids believers enter into the realm of God’s presence, and thereafter to order their lives according to a divine tempo. Though not evangelistic in any direct sense, the Russian bells invite the seeker to listen further, to look within, to leave the outside world for a time and consider the things of the Spirit. In the noisy West, do we not hear the sounds of the bells and long to enter into the heavenly places?

And so Part moved out of the impasse, and in 1976 he resumed his production at the most vigorous pace imaginable. His output includes numerous choral works on liturgical or biblical themes, but also a generous amount of instrumental compositions. Liberated as an artist, his life was nevertheless one of hardship and strife. In the 1970s he agonized over whether to stay in Estonia and endure opposition from the Soviet authorities or leave. His wife, Nora, is Jewish. Their friends urged them to take advantage of the policy allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel. In spite of numerous conflicts, they had no desire to leave their homeland. Eventually, though, in 1979, they applied for exit visas from the Soviet Union, which were granted the following year. With their two sons, the Parts left for Israel, but then, along with many others, never got to their official destination. Instead, they were hospitably greeted by a music publisher in Vienna and decided to stay for a while. They became Austrian citizens. Finally they moved to Berlin, which remains their main home today.

Writing minimally hardly means the pieces are short. The Passio (1982) is undoubtedly Part’s ultimate tintinnabulist composition. Stemming from the glorious tradition of Passion music, this extended musical narrative retells the story of Christ’s suffering based on the Gospel of John. Like the proverbial sermon, the piece has a beginning, middle, and end. The opening chorus (Exordium) announces, “The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ ac cording to Saint John.” The story then lengthily unfolds from the Garden of Gethsemane to Jesus’ expiration on the cross. The Evangelist narrates the story with a double quartet of four singers and of four instruments. Pilate and Jesus are given solos, but the feeling of the work is of one, slow-moving, enveloping whole.

There is much human drama in the juxtaposition of the different personalities. Each interlocutor asks, in a different way, Who is this man? The answer is resolutely the “I Am,” the God-man who is savior and Lord. Finally (Conclusio) the chorus soberly chants, “You who have suffered for us, have mercy upon us. Amen.” Musically, Conclusio reverses the movement of the Exordium, closing on the “nobis” of the cry for mercy on us in D major, a sort of resolution of all previous tension. We are not so much listeners as participants through prayer.

Not every reader of BOOKS & CULTURE will be comfortable with Part’s particular solution to the artistic quandary of our times. Has he truly rediscovered the spirit of traditional music with his veneration of medieval principles? Is his minimalism compatible with the historical dimension of the gospel? Historical consciousness likely has led artistically to greater linear development, perspective, and organic relationships. Many Christians believe these to be singular gains over the last five hundred years, ones which Part’s music at least questions, if not denies.

But whether these issues are satisfactorily resolved by this extraordinary composer, his example of courage in the face of opposition certainly remains his greatest inspiration. He found a way to face evil while yet resting in the everlasting arms. We can look with deep admiration to his compositional creed and hope to emulate it if only in a small way:

A composition comes as a single gesture which is already, in essence, music . …If this gesture, like a seed, takes root, it must be cultivated with extreme care so that it may grow; meanwhile you are oscillating between heaven and earth. The compositional task is to find the appropriate system for the gesture. It is one’s capacity for suffering that gives the energy to create.

William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Every Sunday they do it again: four or five hundred thousand ministers stand before listeners and preach a sermon to them in the English language. If the sermon works—if it “takes”—a primary cause will be the secret ministry of the Holy Spirit, moving mysteriously through a congregation and inspiring Scripture all over again as it’s preached. Part of the mystery is that the Spirit blows where it wills, and with peculiar results. As every preacher knows, a nicely crafted sermon sometimes falls flat. People listen to it with mild interest, and then they go home. On other Sundays a preacher will walk to the pulpit with a sermon that has been only roughly framed up in her mind. The preacher has been busy all week with weddings, funerals, and youth retreats, and on Sunday morning she isn’t ready to preach. Miraculously, her rough sermon arises in its might and gathers people to God.

Strange things happen when a minister preaches. After the service, people thank the preacher for things she didn’t say, or for things she did say but hadn’t understood as well as the listener had. Our words can be “wiser than we are,” said Ben Belitt, and never more so than when the Spirit of God is in the building. On such occasions, as Barbara Brown Taylor (1993) writes, “something happens between the preacher’s lips and the congregation’s ears that is beyond prediction or explanation.”

But the unpredictability of the preaching event gives no one license to wing it. Faithful preachers work hard on their sermons, understanding that although a fruitful result may be God’s gift, hard work is the preacher’s calling. To help with this calling, authors write books that address every conceivable facet of preaching. Leona Tisdale (1997) writes of the preacher’s calling to exegete not only Scripture, but also her congregation, so that her preaching achieves a genuinely local character. Never letting go of the universal gospel, the preacher must theologically and artistically customize her presentation of it to fit these people at this particular time in their history. In fact, the preacher’s goal is to become the congregation’s ethnographer to such an extent that if one Sunday morning she stirs up old ghosts or tamps down new fears she knows exactly what she is doing.

Other recent authors ponder how to preach to particular sections of an audience, such as the elderly, whose hard-earned wisdom may be losing ground to a muddle-headedness that threatens to overtake it (David G. Buttrick in Carl, 1997). Looking at an audience two generations younger, William Willimon, dean of the chapel at Duke, reflects on preaching to college students who are the children of divorce or neglect. Many are children of absentee parents who never anchored them in faith or in virtue, who perhaps never even spoke seriously of these things. Such students now live off their disinheritance, and they sometimes show it by blending detachment and longing. Generally speaking, today’s college students don’t vote or follow the news from Kosovo (“or wherever”), but they do cleave to their friends. Some of them also believe in angels. Some get drunk a lot. One of Willimon’s friends, a rabbi, remarked to him that a good number of college students—children of the children of the sixties—are looking for their parents (Willimon in Callen, 1995).

Besides thinking of her audience, the preacher must also consider her message. Will she preach the goodness of creation? Will she move behind sin and grace to preach nature, sin, and grace? And will she develop an artist’s eye for God’s goodness in places where nobody is looking for it (English, 1996)? On the other side of the page, how about the Bible’s “texts of terror”? Should a minister preach the Bible, including its hard texts, or preach the gospel (Hilkert, 1997)? Do the hard texts sometimes set us up for hearing the gospel? How will the preacher handle passages such as the terrible ending of Psalm 137 that seem to work against the message of Jesus?

Several of the recent books urge preachers to emphasize particular biblical themes. Thus Walter J. Burghardt (1996) argues that, properly understood, social justice is the Bible’s big idea and that preaching it therefore counts as an act of mere Christianity, not liberal politics. Burghardt makes his case in a book he has entitled Preaching the Just Word. Here just is a Catholic adjective, not an evangelical adverb, with the result that, in Burghardt theology, “just sharing” has little to do with spiritual “schmoozing” and much to do with softening our hard hearts, opening our closed hands, and making common cause with people God loves, especially “the bedeviled and the bewildered.” Citing Isaiah, Jesus, and Chrysostom (“the poor are a venerable altar on which we must heap our offerings”), Burghardt encourages preachers to present biblical justice as God’s shalom, the webbing together of God and all creation in harmony, fulfillment, and delight. When we see justice in this big “covenantal” framework, says Burghardt, we will quit calculating what people deserve and start imagining what they need. He adds that we should particularly imagine what children need, and people with aids, and prisoners on death row. We should think of the elderly: “There they sit in the nursing home, watching and waiting, waiting for someone they carried in their womb to visit and ‘watch one hour’ with them.” All along, we should think beyond the lives of human beings and get enthusiastic about the flourishing of the whole creation. The earth is the Lord’s, after all, and so God makes covenant in Genesis 9 not just with Noah, but also with “every living creature.” Accordingly, we ought to undertake earth-keeping sheerly as a matter of justice.

Though Burghardt says little about the sovereign grace of God in the establishment of shalom and much about human responsibility in this project; though his book therefore moves naturally toward the imperative mood, its tone is passionate, not shrill. The author doesn’t lobby for particular political solutions to complex social problems, and he reminds preachers that their expertise typically lies elsewhere. When he comes to the church’s most agonizing issues, such as the nature of her hospitality to gay and lesbian persons, Burghardt proposes humility. He proposes that ministers listen long and preach short. In sum, what Walter Burghardt wants is biblically passionate preachers who can kindle a flame of love in listeners who might otherwise think of compassion as a moral handout, or social justice as a euphemism for “rerouting hard-earned money to loafers.” If preachers and listeners will keep an eye on biblical shalom, they should be able to see why social injustice is a disaster, and why glory shines from such a basic kindness as helping a refugee get access to a telephone.

Recent books discuss the preacher’s audience, message, and social location. They discuss biblical theology, hermeneutics, and how to define a preachable text. They debate whether the contemporary habit of preaching from the common lectionary has had the happy effect of forcing preachers to handle some of the Bible’s less fingerprinted passages, or whether lectionary preaching has yielded boring sermons by preachers who couldn’t find anything lively to do with an assigned text. One book (Norrington, 1996) wonders whether we ought to have sermons at all, arguing that modern Christians take preaching much more seriously than did the prophets and apostles.

But to read a stack of books by some of the acknowledged masters of homiletics is to discover that the hottest is sues in the discipline center on sermon design. For the last quarter-century, prominent writers have united to reject “deductive” or “discursive” or “propositional” de signs, as well as a formal style of rhetoric that often goes with them. According to these writers, such approaches represent the lost cause of the “old homiletics,” which is now being replaced in the “new homiletics” with various “inductive” approaches that give sermons a more narrative and colloquial sound, especially when their rhetoric matches their design.

THE WAY IT USED TO BE

What did a sermon sound like when seminaries still taught the old homiletics and preachers still designed sermons in sonata form—that is, with a statement, development, and recapitulation of a theme, finished off with a practical application to the lives of believers?

As a boy in the early 1950s I be longed to a church whose minister wore a tailcoat when he preached. Dressed in a cutaway coat and striped trousers, our minister would stand in his pulpit and deliver sermons as stiff as his collar. These sermons typically began not with a story from history or an observation of current events, but with a businesslike statement of the preacher’s theme and of the three “points” or subdivisions by which he proposed to develop it. Like many of his colleagues, our minister would often start in this way no matter what biblical literature he was preaching. Thus a sermon on the parable of the Prodigal Son might have begun as follows:

Beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ: my theme this morning is the Justification of Guilty Sinners. Three points, beloved, under the head of God’s sovereign justification: firstly, its origin in the divine decree; secondly, its forensic realization in the satisfaction of Christ’s righteousness; thirdly, its vindication in the eschatological glorification of the elect in life eternal.
Firstly, then, its origin in the divine decree . …

A heavy-duty sermon of this kind, thick with its Latinate language and dogmatic purpose, would partially eclipse Jesus’ story of a man who had two sons. Instead of drawing us into the story, and then moving us along inside it, our minister would use the story to illustrate some doctrinal truths he had brought to it from the Canons of Dort or from the Systematic Theology of Louis Berkhof, and he would perform this task with a good deal of theological zest. (Berkhof, by the way, sat at the end of a row on the south side of our church, benignly absorbing his own theology as it was preached to him.) In general, our preacher’s aim in those days was not to tell stories, but to teach Reformed doctrine, which he did with such gusto that when men from our congregation hunted deer in November with their Baptist buddies, they would sit in the woods arguing with the Baptists over the meaning and member ship of the covenant of grace. (Everybody agreed that deer weren’t in it.)

Sunday after Sunday our minister proclaimed Reformed doctrine with “a mighty clarity.” He did this until he came to a juncture in the system where two of the doctrines clashed, at which point he would declare a mystery and strongly recommend that we adore it. Along the way, he sought to sharpen our understanding of Reformed doctrine, and of its advantages, by exposing the errors of non-Reformed Christians and especially of Catholics, who, for some reason known only in Rome, stubbornly conflated justification and sanctification.

When I was in the third grade, I thought a sermon was simply another piece of heavy weather that children had to endure. While the minister filled the sanctuary with his whences and thences and wherefores, a boy of eight could doodle on a bulletin, or make a fan out of it, or just sit there, waiting for the sermon to subside. What made matters tricky was that our minister liked to divide his three points into subpoints, and then gather up the subpoints in a sort of coda at the end of each point, with the result that he kept raising and dashing the hopes of us youngsters. We would hear such phrases as “In summary, I say to you, be loved,” or “to whom be glory forever and ever,” and our hopes would rise like a Mannheim rocket. Surely the morning sermon had nearly blown itself out! But then our minister would pause, reach for his glass of water, and say, “And, now, for my second point . …”

At the end of the century it is hard to find homiletic events of the kind I’ve just described. Nobody preaches in a tailcoat anymore, or in language to match. In deed, in some church settings the language has loosened up so much (“Lord, just help us, Lord, to just plug in to where you’re at”) that we yearn for middle ground between the kind of language that goes with tailcoats and the kind that goes with tank tops. Perhaps good pulpit language ought to find a level I’ll call “upscale casual” or, maybe, “L. L. Bean colloquial.” This language possesses a quality that the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II describes as “noble simplicity,” and we can find it in the sermons of such accomplished preachers as Barbara Brown Taylor, Eugene Peterson, and Deborah Block.

A couple of sharply written books (Jacks, 1996; Eslinger, 1996) advise preachers on the kind of pulpit language and sermon strategy that fit a contemporary narrative style. Robert Jacks tells preachers how to write for the ear, not the eye. He wants them to prepare sermons that speak naturally, using stories, dialogue, and sentence fragments just as a person would in good conversation. Looking for noble simplicity, Jacks cautions preachers against teen-speak (“I’m, like, ‘Awesome!’ and he goes, ‘Whoa!’ “) and also against an essaylike formality expressed not only by the use of whence or thence, but also by the use of so innocent a conjunction as for. According to Jacks, we might not notice the awkward formality of this conjunction in a preached sentence such as “Let us trust God, for we know God’s love is true” till we compare it with ordinary speech, in which none of us says “Let’s go to Gagliano’s tonight, dear, for we know their cannelloni is delicious.” The preacher who writes for the ear also remembers that congregations can’t hear commas. Thus, to save his congregation confusion, the preacher should avoid such sentences as “Jesus Christ, says the New Testament, died for you.” Congregations can’t hear certain consonants very well either. Thus, no risky locutions such as “half-asked questions.”

In Pitfalls in Preaching, Richard Eslinger places his theory of preaching within the new homiletics, and then offers preachers one savvy counsel after another, including the judgment that the sermon, like the road to Emmaus, ought to lead to the Communion table. Following David Buttrick, Eslinger also offers linguistic advice based upon his conviction that congregations don’t hear individual items in a string, not even a short string. Hence the preacher ought to delete “doublets” such as “justice and peace” and talk about one thing at a time. Moreover, in the interest of pulpit etiquette and general wisdom, the preacher should observe such commandments as these:

• Don’t top a biblical story with a better one from Annie Dillard;
• Don’t obstruct the flow of your sermon with an illustration so big that it becomes an embolism;
• Don’t presume to read Jesus’ mind, and especially not if you read banalities there (“The little boy Jesus sat on a sand dune outside his native hamlet of Nazareth wondering why all men weren’t brothers”);
• Don’t manipulate congregants by asking them to raise their hands in order to answer your questions;
• Don’t tell stories about yourself all the time, and certainly not ones in which you win big or lose big. Stories of the preacher’s triumphs sound self-important, and stories of his failures distract a congregation with anxieties (Is our preacher ok? Does he need to go to that detox center again?).

But beyond their interest in a sermon’s language, books in the new homiletics focus especially upon a sermon’s form and dynamics. In doing so, they reject most of what my boyhood preacher assumed as normal. To begin, many books in homiletics of the last 25 years reject sermon designs in which the preacher announces a theme up- front and then sets out to develop and apply it. This old method (perhaps it goes back to Luther) was practiced until, say, 1960 not only by Western Michigan Calvinists but also by all kinds of other Protestant ministers, including liberal ones who used it to teach liberal doctrines.

Recent books disapprove. “Deductive” preaching of this kind, says Fred Craddock in a pioneering book of 1971, works against the way we live. According to Craddock we live inductively, moving from particular experiences to the general truths that we learn from them. That’s why wisdom is so hard to teach to a youngster. You might teach her a proverb such as “the more you talk, the less they’ll listen,” but chances are a youngster will still have to learn it the hard way, just as the author of the proverb did. Similarly, says Craddock, a sermon with a natural flow will move from particular observations or experiences toward some kind of conclusion, and maybe not a tidy one. According to the new homiletics of such writers as Craddock, Lowry (1997), David Buttrick (1994), Richard Eslinger, and Lucy Atkinson Rose (1997), sermons should therefore sound less like essays and more like odysseys. They should sound like stories, poems, parables, “plotted narratives,” or even conversations, and thus follow the shape of the nondiscursive genres of Scripture; that is, the ones that do not proceed by arguing for a thesis. In a much-discussed option, David Buttrick wants a sermon to zig and zag as a human consciousness does when reacting to a significant event.

In any case, sermons designed according to the new homiletics always move, and not by argument or by application of a thesis. Instead, the sermons tell us what happened, and what happened next, and who said or did what to make things happen. They also suggest what it felt like to experience the things that happened. Otherwise put, sermons constructed according to the new homiletics display a dynamic sequence of linked “frames” or scenes that reminds us more of a film than of a still photo (Buttrick, Eslinger, and Wilson, 1999).

Don’t presume to read Jesus’ mind, and especially not if you read banalities there.

Accordingly, the new books want the preacher to end with her conclusion, not begin with it. As Eugene L. Lowry explains to preachers, if you announce your conclusion at the outset you spoil your sermon’s suspense as surely as if you begin a joke with its punch line. Better, says Lowry, to follow the ancient wisdom of storytellers and conceal your conclusion by means of a “strategic delay.” Make people wonder and make them wait. Play a string of seventh-chords and, like Bach in the C major prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier, resolve them only at the end. That is, follow the prophets and Jesus by telling stories whose meaning doesn’t come clear right away. Thus, in 2 Samuel 12 the prophet Nathan tells King David a short story of a rich man with “many flocks and herds” and a poor man whose “one little ewe lamb” drank from his cup and nestled in his bosom until it had become “like a daughter to him.” Garnishing the account with such gemutlich details, Nathan sets up the king for righteous anger at the point in the story when the rich man steals and kills the poor man’s single lamb so as to spare his own stock. Nathan deliberately incites indignation in the kind heart of his sinful king (compartmentalizing is no modern invention) before he finally sticks the king with the point of his story: “Youare the man.”

Black preaching has practiced the new homiletics for decades, but with its own acoustics. Kenneth Woodward (1997) writes that black preaching is “a highly relational folk art that can’t be duplicated in a white church, even by blacks,” and that black preaching does not travel well because it needs the black congregation, rich in its stores of cultural wisdom and expectation, to join in duet with the preacher. In the “call and response” of black preaching, a congregation pushes the preacher through valleys (“Help him, Jesus!”), along some detours (“Take your time!”), up the mountainside (“Don’t be afraid!”), higher and higher till the preacher reaches his peak (“Say it! Say it now!”). None of this would work without the strategic delay. Imagine our loss if Martin Luther King, Jr., had stood before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, and had begun his speech with the triumphant hope of the old Negro spiritual: “‘Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

With the strategic delay, says William B. McClain (1990), classic black preaching presents an unmistakable trajectory:

Start low; go slow;
Go high; strike fire.
Sit down.

THE ELOQUENCE OF THE PROVISIONAL

According to Eugene Lowry, what’s crucial in a sermon is its dynamic tension and resolution—what Lowry calls the move “from scratch to itch.” In Lowry’s scheme, the preacher starts with characters or a situation in which she spots trouble, or ambiguity, or discrepancy. The preacher then notes certain complicating factors in this situation (“the plot thickens”). At a climactic point she suddenly shifts the account (the “turn” or the “gasp,” as in Nathan’s accusatory disclosure), and then resolves the main tension into a new situation that usually involves the growth of the main participants. And, of course, “the main participants” include listeners.

But even at the end—that is, when the sermon resolves its conflict, or discloses its secret, or scratches its itch—we will not find ourselves in perfect repose. The reason is that the new situation resolves something for us, but not everything. We still itch a little. And this is by the preacher’s design. The preacher’s hope is not to tidy everything up at the end and send us home with a packaged truth or two. Indeed, Lowry insists that the aim in preaching is not primarily to expose and apply biblical or doctrinal propositions (propositions are suspect or even verboten within the new homiletics), but rather to “evoke an event” or stimulate an encounter by making “gestures towards the ineffable with the finest words that can be used” (Browne, quoted approvingly in Lowry). The preacher’s task is to deliver the sermon, but the preacher’s goal is to proclaim the Word of God so as to generate a transforming encounter with the mystery of God. Whether a sermon will reach its goal is unpredictable. As Lowry has it, “preaching is an offering intended to evoke an event that cannot be coerced into being.” To avoid coercion, the preacher must shy away from a frontal approach to truth—the approach, Lowry imagines, of biblical literalists who believe in propositional revelation. Instead, the preacher must come at the mystery of God sideways, making full use of “analogy, metaphoric tease, and the ‘tensiveness’ of parabolic thought.” By this in direct approach, says Lowry, borrowing his phrasing from Buttrick, the preacher may “dance the edge of mystery.” Otherwise stated, in the event of preaching and listening we may find ourselves “so close to the heart of some matter” that “we dare to move toward the eloquence of the provisional” (Lowry’s italics).

Readers may find themselves struck by the potentially misty quality of sermons designed in this way. After hearing one of these sermons, could you bring the gist of it home to your spouse who was sick with the flu? Moreover, do sermons of a poetic temperament fit all kinds of biblical literature? Could someone effectively preach a big social justice text by dancing the edge of mystery? The biblical prophets often approached their topic with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer. Should they have danced around it more? When we ourselves preach against racism, should we gesture toward the ineffable or speak out very plainly?

I should add at once that while Lowry winces at any attempt to proclaim “the right propositions,” he also rejects what he calls irrationalism. He rejects doctrineless relativism. He rejects any homiletic position that wholly dispenses with truth claims. But he insists that the preacher must find ways to combine aesthetic, ethical, and visionary modes of expression with more rational and explanatory ones, so that when the gospel truth comes home it does so in a dynamic and evocative way.

Fair enough, and readers who are familiar with the sermons of, say, Frederick Buechner know what Lowry has in mind. In “The Magnificent Defeat,” for instance, Buechner shows us Jacob at Peniel, wrestling with God till dawn:

The darkness has faded just enough so that for the first time he can dimly see his opponent’s face. And what he sees is something more terrible than the face of death—the face of love. It is vast and strong, half ruined with suffering and fierce with joy, the face a man flees down all the darkness of his days until at last he cries out, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”

Thousands of young preachers have tried to imitate such virtuosity, and without much luck. Buechner is almost inimitable, and bad Buechner imitations are very bad sermons, full of mystifying wisps and vapors. But Buechner’s own sermons, for all their suggestiveness, usually deliver real freight. In fact, alarmingly enough, a Buechner sermon usually delivers a proposition or two. And so in the sermon about Jacob, the author ends with an unmistakable message: God, our “beloved enemy,” defeats our old self, and by this magnificent defeat gives us victory.

There they are, a pair of declarations, and, in a book published shortly before her untimely death, Lucy Atkinson Rose rejects them. According to her theory, sermons ought to resemble conversations as much as possible, and especially open-ended ones. Indeed, she regrets that as recently as 1984 the regnant homiletical theory was that “a sermon should contain a message or an idea.” In her view—more extreme than Lowry’s—preachers should not deliver messages. They should not make claims. Rose rejects both “propositions,” by which she means the main claims in the theme-and-points type of sermons, and also what is “propositional,” by which she means “truth that is ex pressed in a statement.” If I understand her, Rose rejects any use of assertions, claims, declarations, or statements—that is, the kind of thing that could be true or false. Traditional preaching that makes a claim or contains a message has been superseded, says Rose, and properly so. She concedes that traditional preaching “does still work for some people” and should therefore not be wholly excluded, but she worries that the use of truth claims within sermons might signal the preacher’s hierarchical assumption of objectivity and certainty. Such a preacher assumes he possesses truth and that his congregation doesn’t. He thinks his job is to “transmit” this truth and their job is to believe it. But such an assertive posture, says Rose, privileges the preacher and silences or excludes certain listeners, especially women. Alternatively, such assertiveness on the part of a preacher may cause women to become dependent upon the preacher.

Rose also worries that sermons employing statements might strive for clarity of thought and expression, and that this attempt might exhibit an assertive edge all by itself—as if the preacher were to shake a bony finger in people’s faces and say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.”

To soften matters, and bring the preacher and congregation into dialogue where neither is privileged, Rose recommends the use of “poetic, evocative language” within sermons and a nonassertive conversational style in which no conclusion is sought. With such an approach, the preacher no longer declares anything but rather “invites to the sermonic round table the experiences, thoughts, and wagers of all those present and even of those absent.” We might say the preacher proposes to the congregation in a respectful, gently interrogative fashion, and the congregation proposes back to the preacher—perhaps in a postsermon adult forum, or the like. When the preacher proceeds in this way, distinguishing proposals from propositions and meshing old words of Scripture with new words of contemporary experience, then the sermon’s words will “dance from our deeps to the surface and back, from our centers to the periphery and back, inviting Mystery to be part of our always-too-small stories.”

Five comments: First, along with Rose we should sense danger when a human being undertakes to speak for God. The “folly of preaching” includes the danger of tyranny. With this in mind, we naturally recoil from ignorant assertiveness, coercive assertiveness, macho assertiveness, and other homiletic oppressions. Preachers who are full of themselves instead of the Spirit of God sometimes patronize or even assault their congregations, pushing people around, making up their minds for them, accusing them while excusing themselves. Arrogance is an ugly sin, and pulpit arrogance is a particularly ugly sin. “The corruption of the best is the worst,” and Rose is right to post warnings in this regard.

But, second, does the recognition of such danger require the elimination of all assertions from sermons? What if the preacher’s assertions are sensitive, inclusive, pastorally mature? What if they are biblical and true (“love is patient”)? Wouldn’t these qualities allay a number of Rose’s concerns? Consider two summary propositions with which Barbara Brown Taylor concludes a sermon on the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: “God is generous, and when we begrudge that generosity, it is only because we have forgotten where we stand.” Is it really conceivable that there is something amiss in the sheer form of these declarations, and that Taylor should have converted them into, say, questions?

Third, it looks like we’re stuck with propositional expressions or statements in sermons, regardless of anybody’s hesitancy about them (Rose isn’t alone here). Mainly, it’s awfully hard to get anything said in a sermon—or in the monthly report of your checking ac count—if nobody may use any statements at all. Imagine a sermon without a single statement. Imagine a whole sermon that consists entirely of questions, commands, optatives, and ejacul*tions. Wouldn’t a sermon of this kind taste too much like clam chowder without the clams? Maybe a preacher could try to split the difference between the forbidden declarative mood, on the one hand, and the permitted interrogative mood, on the other, by raising her inflection at the ends of statements in the recently popular fashion (“Hi, my name is Tiffany? And I’ll be your server tonight?”). But without the option of using any real assertions the preacher might still find herself hamstrung:

Elijah was a prophet of the Lord? And the prophets of Baal weren’t? Are you listening, folks? Please listen now! Would that some of us had been there to see God send fire on that soggy altar! Holy smoke!

A few rounds of this, and people might feel a bit cranky.

Fourth comment: Besides incidental claims (“Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran”), the Scriptures are full of summary propositions, and it is hard to imagine why a sermon would go wrong by following Scripture in using some of them. Biblical authors use such propositions to start an epic (“In the be ginning, God created the heavens and the earth”), or to refocus a letter at its midpoint (“God has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation”), or to climax a hymn (“The greatest of these is love”), or to congeal centuries of experience in a proverb (“Pride goes before destruction”). Biblical authors use summary propositions to do such things all the time. Would it not be perfectly natural for contemporary preachers to follow suit? In fact, for discursive texts, maybe a preacher should try the old theme-and-points approach, employing it with noble simplicity. Good doctrinal preaching gives ministry some spine. One of the strengths of a confessional tradition is that it disciplines the preacher’s reading of biblical texts with wisdom distilled from millions of the faithful. The preacher needn’t succumb to his own whims or sentimentalities in preaching the power and love of God out of Scripture. He can declare what the whole church declares: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord.”

But (fifth comment) whether a preacher discloses her theme early or late (and Lowry persuades me that late is generally better), it’s important to insist, I think, that the mere statement of a theme cannot sensibly be called presumptuous. After all, the preacher is only trying to say in other words what the text says. She is trying to transmit not her own thoughts, cooked up from scratch, but those of Scripture, which is her community’s book. She’s especially trying to preach the gospel out of Scripture, which is her community’s message for the world. In any case, she stands under the claim of the gospel just as her congregants do. As Thomas G. Long (1989) has it, she is “the one whom the congregation sends on their behalf, week after week, to the scripture,” authorizing her to bear witness to what she finds there. If this arrangement involves hierarchy, then the hierarch is God, who speaks in Scripture, not the preacher, who testifies to what she has seen and heard. By such testimony God chooses to speak to us, and especially to our hearts. As Jonathan Edwards wrote, the reason we preach Scripture instead of merely reading it is that we want the Word of God to start our hearts again.

In a rich and finely balanced book—one of the best of the recent ones—Paul Scott Wilson (1999) endorses many of the new approaches to preaching, but he also holds out for some old ones. For example, he wants dynamic, filmlike movement in a sermon, but he also wants sermons to confine themselves to one clearly stated theme, representing “one main path through the heart of a text.” He welcomes stories within sermons, but he also wants a theological frame to hold our stories and to keep them from wandering. He encourages the use of imagination in preaching, but not unbridled imagination that just “lets the horses out of the corral.”

In a refreshing feature of his book, Wilson strongly recommends to ministers that they preach about God. Gesture toward the ineffable, as necessary, but speak of God. Respect God’s mystery and our finitude, but preach about God. Admit our sin, our corruption, and the corruption of our knowledge of God, but do preach what we know of God: God’s mercy, God’s wisdom, God’s Messiah, God’s Spirit, God’s enthusiasm for losers and nobodies. After all, as Wilson re minds us, the Bible’s big story is not human sin, but God’s redeeming grace centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the preacher must find excellent ways to tell this story and preach this gospel.

Yes, indeed, and Wilson offers a big book to help. He offers a scheme (his “four pages” of trouble, old and new, and God’s address to each), a global focus, and a wide range of homiletic wisdom, including thoughtful ambivalence about the preacher’s role in addressing perennial dilemmas. At minimum, the compassionate preacher will acknowledge the dilemmas Christians face every day. He will acknowledge, for example, that Christians may have to choose between simple jobs, in which they may keep their purity, and high-impact jobs, in which they have a chance to make a major contribution to the kingdom of God, but in which they may also have to get dirty once in a while. (Perhaps here is a place to respect Rose’s desire for sermons that help a congregation focus its conversations, and that resist the temptation to seek early closure on these conversations.)

In any case, Wilson’s book and another beautifully wrought work by Charles L. Bartow (1997) remind the reader that preaching is at least a craft, requiring an eye for raw materials, a knack for shaping them, a dissatisfaction with poor work, and a painstaking readiness to improve it. But preaching is worth the trouble only if, beyond craftsmanship, it is a divine ministry, a divine address, a form of God’s speaking. Properly understood, a preached and heard sermon may then become a means of grace to us who, like Jeremiah’s King Zedekiah, secretly wonder whether there is “a word from the Lord” and especially a word of grace.

I think we have to concede that while we wonder about this word, we probably want it less than we think. The reason is that a word of judgment may sting us, but, as Dostoevsky knew, a word of grace may devastate us. A word of grace may cause in us a self-knowledge we cannot endure until our self is changed.

And so the preacher has to take care what she says and—drawing upon all available wisdom—how she says it. Fortunately, these days she has a lot of books to help her.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is dean of the chapel at Calvin College.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Books Mentioned in this Essay

Charles L. Bartow, God’s Human Speech: A Practical Theology of Proclamation (Eerdmans, 1997).Frederick Buechner, “The Magnificent Defeat,” in Thomas G. Long and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., ed., A Chorus of Witnesses (Eerdmans, 1994).Walter J. Burghardt, Preaching the Just Word (Yale, 1996).David G. Buttrick, A Captive Voice (Westminster John Knox, 1994).David G. Buttrick, “Threescore, Ten, and Trouble: A Biblical View of Aging,” in William J. Carl, ed., Graying Gracefully: Preaching to Older Adults (Westminster John Knox, 1997).Fred B. Craddock, As One Without Authority (Phillips University, 1971).Donald English, An Evangelical Theology of Preaching (Abingdon, 1996).Richard L. Eslinger, Pitfalls in Preaching (Eerdmans, 1996).Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (Continuum, 1997).G. Robert Jacks, Just Say the Word: Writing for the Ear (Eerdmans, 1996).Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Westminster John Knox, 1989).Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Abingdon, 1997).William B. McClain, Come Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion (Abingdon, 1990).David C. Norrington, To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church’s Urgent Question (Paternoster, 1996).Lucy Atkinson Rose, Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church (Westminster John Knox, 1997)Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Cowley, 1993).Leona Tubbs Tisdale, Preaching As Local Theology and Folk Art (Fortress, 1997).William H. Willimon, “Hunger in This Abandoned Generation,” in Barry L. Callen, Sharing Heaven’s Music: The Heart of Christian Preaching (Abingdon, 1995).Paul Scott Wilson, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Complete Guide to Biblical Preaching (Abingdon, May 1999).Kenneth Woodward, “Heard Any Good Sermons Lately?” Newsweek, March 4, 1997, pp. 50–52.

Unless you live on a remote Montana homestead and generate your own electricity (in which case you have nothing to worry about), you’ve heard about the Y2K bug. When the digital clocks on billions of computers roll over from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00 on December 31, 1999, Western civilization could cease to exist. Power will cut off, groceries vanish from store shelves, banks go broke. Nuclear warheads might automatically launch themselves from unstable Middle Eastern dictatorships. In fact, God’s wrath will finally descend upon our evil civilization, and we know the exact day (and minute, and second) it will arrive. “Dust Y2K,” declares one best-selling Christian author, “and you will find the fingerprints of God all over it. This is not the first time God has interrupted the plans of man. The first time He confused language. This time He is going to confuse technology.”

According to Gary North, the Reconstructionist historian who has become Christianity’s loudest Y2K doomsayer, this is “the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced.” North’s opinion is shared by Hal Lindsey (Facing Millennium Midnight), Michael Hyatt (The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos), Steve Farrar (Spiritual Survival During the Y2K Crisis), Grant Jeffrey (The Millennium Meltdown), and a score of other evangelical prophets. Y2K is bigger than World War II, the Bomb, the Cold War, Ebola, Chinese nuclear capabilities, or sunspots. Y2K is the strongest contender for TEOTWAWKI (“The End of the World As We Know It”) since Jerusalem fell to the Romans in a.d. 70.

By an odd coincidence, none of these doomsayers is a programmer.

“I have no expertise in computers,” writes Steve Farrar. “My training is in Bible and in theology.” Gary North’s disclaimer is similar: “I’m not a programmer. My Ph.D. is in history.” Michael Hyatt, who has written two bestselling Y2K tomes and maintains an alarming Y2K Preparation Web site, is a book publishing executive with a B.A. in philosophy. Grant Jeffrey is a prophecy maven and ex-financial planner. Hal Lindsey needs no introduction.

Whatever the probabilities of the world’s ending in January may be (and they may, realistically, be high; I am not here attempting to calculate the odds), such widespread and all-consuming interest on the part of Christians who have no technical expertise suggests that the Y2K threat sounds some deep and powerful resonance with evangelical thought.

Why has this computer glitch so fired the Christian imagination?

Once upon a time, folks sat out on their front porches and swapped stories as the sun set. Children sprawled on the floor in front of the fire, reading books full of complex sentences and high ideals. Families spent quality time together—poring over McGuffey’s Readers, making hand-cranked ice cream, milking the cows, reading Shakespeare by firelight. Local people depended on each other for help. Public opinion kept moral standards high. Schools taught real math and grammar.

After the computers crash, this world may be born again.

At Gary North’s Web site, the mother of all Y2K Web sites (even Time online provides a link to North), a simple theme repeats itself again and again: Prepare for a return to the nineteenth century. “If most mainframe computers in 2000 read 2000 as 1900,” North writes, “then it soon will be 1900, economically speaking.” Any occupation that did not exist at this century’s turn, North warns, will not exist after the next; therefore, learn a trade and be prepared to use your hands. All journalists, he adds with ill-concealed glee and a surprising disregard for history, will soon be unemployed.

The Y2K Preparedness Links leading from North’s site round out this picture of an America that looks (once you get out of the burning cities) a lot like a rosy episode of Little House on the Prairie. Y2K preparedness companies sell home remedies, herb-growing kits, kerosene lanterns, canning and pickling supplies, farm implements, and treadle sewing machines. Links from Michael Hyatt’s Y2K site point to the Cumberland General Store (which sells woodburning stoves, pine churns, candle-making kits, windmills and—their most popular item—top hats) and to the Robinson Curriculum for homeschoolers (once Western civilization ends, home education will be your only option). The Robinson Curriculum, advertised as a complete self-teaching program for grades K–12, prides itself on using no book published after 1913.

Indeed, late-twentieth-century evangelicals seem to have a deep longing for the nineteenth century. Christian bookstores carry Thomas Kinkade’s retro paintings, done in the style of the nineteenth-century Luminists and inviting viewers to “bask in the nostalgia of earlier, less stressful times.” Prairie romances and historical novels sweep readers back to a simpler, godlier America. A leading Christian newsmagazine helps to promote the Lost Classics Book Company, which publishes nineteenth-century books guaranteed to “rekindle, in children and parents alike, a fuller appreciation of the virtues which shaped the lives of our forefathers and made America great.” According to the Washington Times, these old books are making a phenomenal comeback among Christian readers: “There were norms back then,” one evangelical parent tells reporter Julia Duin. “There were expectations of behavior. People acted in proper ways and were concerned with doing the right thing. … There’s nothing good being written today.”

Notwithstanding the disadvantages (lynchings, grinding immigrant poverty, robber barons, abandoned children, rampant disease), there is at least one good reason to regret the passing of the nineteenth century: In 1895, Microsoft, Disney, and Time-Warner could not reach into every living room. The web of telephone switches, electrical connections, and software applications that allows me to shoot five e-mails per day off to my brother in Colorado Springs, half a continent away, also allows NBC to invade my daily routine and order me (through the ads that punctuate the news, through the pop-up announcements that appear on my computer screen) to watch Thursday Night TV. Our use of technology has woven the routine of our lives together with the wishes of corporate marketers, and these interconnections have pulled us away from that neighborly nineteenth-century ethos. Wendell Berry says it well, in an essay excerpted by the Family Research Council’s bimonthly,Family Policy:

There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as “sitting till bedtime.” After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories … about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. … But most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories. We tell our stories now mostly to doctors or lawyers or psychiatrists or insurance adjusters or the police, not to our neighbors for their (and our) entertainment. The stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce.

—”The Work of Local Culture,” in What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry, North Point Press, 1990.

The interconnections that make modern times possible may make life easier, but they also replace the local imagination with the mass-produced version. They destroy local culture in favor of flavorless culture manufactured by corporations for the sake of profit. We can’t sit on the front porch any more and swap stories over a bowl of popcorn; the front porch is in a drive-by shooting zone created by rap music and Hollywood gangster films, the boss needs numbers crunched so that the deal with the overseas corporation can go through, and the kids are inside surfing the Web. We can’t shake free.

Fear of this web of interconnections is central to Y2K doomsaying. As Grant Jeffrey tells us, the fact that America is “interconnected in countless ways by complex and often hidden computer systems” makes us “tremendously vulnerable.” “If you lose electricity,” Michael Hyatt warns, “everything else is moot . …Planes are grounded, the majority of other vehicles stop running as petroleum products are used up. Basic food items cannot be delivered and supermarkets are empty, people are hungry. There are no phones. … Perhaps the President invokes the emergency powers act and there is martial law.” International connections are even more alarming: “What happens when Japanese housewives draw cash out of the already shaky Japanese banks?” Gary North asks. “Those banks hold billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt. … What happens to the dollar? To U.S. interest rates? To the world’s stock markets?”

Computers tie the whole mess together. But Y2K will unravel it.

“Technology has become God in the United States,” writes Steve Farrar. “And this god of technology to which we have all become so accustomed could be melted down in minutes, as Moses melted down the golden calf centuries ago.” Y2K, he predicts, will bring revival to America. But despite repeated affirmations that Y2K is an instrument of God, the crisis imagined by North et al. is essentially a secular apocalypse. And the age that follows the computer breakdown is most certainly a secular millennium; only the well-prepared shall enter in.

As I type, a digital clock on the shelf across the room counts off the minutes: 9:54 a.m. At the bottom of my computer screen, another clock ticks off the seconds: 9:54:36 a.m. Without this innovation—standardized time that allows us to reckon the turn of the century with such precision—the Y2K panic would not exist. The computers will crash, as Gary North warns us, at the second that the digital clocks turn from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00. We all know exactly what year, what day, what hour, minute, and second the end will come.

In this, we are far different from the Christians of the last millennium. In their novel Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down, Michael Hyatt and George Grant describe the midnight panic of December 31, 999:

The old church of St. Peter in Rome was thronged with the faithful. … Weeping and wailing, they had gathered there to await the end of the world . …The tormented cries of the people hung in the air, thick like incense. The great bells in the towers above the adjacent courtyard began to toll ominously. Every sight, sound, texture, and aroma bore the manifest taint of judgment. Grievous, they were observing a wake for the world. The holy seers had all foretold this dreadful day—indeed, most had expected it for quite some time.

Compelling as it is, this scenario is unlikely. “There were no Terrors of the Year 1000,” concludes Damian Thompson in The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium. “It is a romantic invention, dating back no further than the sixteenth century.” Some clerics did think that the world would end 1,000 years after Christ’s birth, but others plumped for 1033 (1,000 years after the resurrection). And for most people, the question was irrelevant. There was no mass panic, Thompson dryly notes, “for the simple reason that the vast majority of people did not know what year it was.”

As December 31 of 1999 approaches, we all know the year—down to the very second. Historian Ann Douglas calls this preoccupation with split-second accuracy “clock culture,” and dates it from the 1920s. She writes in Terrible Honesty:

More precision, more exactitude, was available in the 1920s than ever before . …Wristwatches replaced the old-fashioned and ponderous watch kept in a vest pocket—people now needed to know the time all the time—and the various terms still in use today for commodifying time gained wide circulation. People “buy time,” “pass the time,” “spend time,” “borrow time.”

The clock, Douglas concludes, became “the ultimate reality check.” And the clock, not God, is the ultimate power behind the looming 2000 apocalypse. In Grant Jeffrey’s The Millennium Meltdown, the ticking clock has replaced God’s sovereign will as the bringer of disaster on this present evil age: “Every day brings this danger twenty-four hours closer. There is no time to waste. … Remember: time is of the essence, and countdown to the Year 2000 cannot be stopped.”

“The Y2K problem,” Gary North warns, “is about an absolutely fixed deadline. There has never been a more fixed deadline in recorded history. Will the world meet it? I don’t think so.” In North’s apocalyptic scenario, the clocks may even bring martyrdom:

To survive a breakdown in the banking system, let alone the power grid, you must take an emotional stand against your government, your church, your friends, your in-laws, and maybe your spouse. … You will remain alone until the people you warned show up on your doorstep, hats in hand, saying, “Now we’ll listen. In the meantime, feed us.” You will get agreement only when the new converts want something from you. And if you don’t provide it, you will be hated. Maybe killed.

This overtly religious language, applied to a man-designed and man-triggered apocalypse, provides a chilling contrast to the words of Christ himself. “It is not for you to know the times or dates,” Jesus tells the overinquisitive disciples; and there is no reason to think that the invention of the digital clock has altered this command.

If the Y2K apocalypse is essentially secular, the millennium that follows is even more so.

To enjoy the nineteenth-century America that’s coming, you have to spend money now. Lots of money. A Glowmaster kerosene lantern (“A must for any emergency situation!”) is $60. A single nonhybrid seed kit (three 10-lb. cans) from Y2K Foods costs $185. A water filter from Y2K Chaos costs $300. A one-year supply of food for a family of four from Y2K Prep costs $3,395 (plus shipping).

In 1999, Y2K hucksterism has become a mainstay of Christian marketing. Y2K products warn about the dangers of interrelated systems, but the Y2K publishing and supply industry feeds on the national audience that can be reached only through the advertising and entertainment channels that Farrar and North deplore. Hyatt’s The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos is positioned as “The hot new blockbuster book! Already on the New York Times bestseller list!” Steve Farrar, the publisher’s blurb in forms us, is “nationally known,” a “best-selling author” whose last book sold more than 300,000 copies.

Everyone is selling. In early 1999, Bookstore Journal, the trade journal of the Christian Booksellers Association, ran an entire feature on prophecy/apocalypse/Y2K books, calling them the “hot test-selling category around.” The article exhorts Christian retailers to make endcaps and special displays for these books, promising them that sales of merchandise will “impact their communities for Christ.” The selling of Y2K books (and the making of profit) has become a religious duty. The buying of supplies has also taken on moral overtones. Michael Hyatt, Y2K Prep’s founder and president, exhorts his customers, “Even if there are just two of you or you feel that the Millennium Bug will never be more than a ‘Brown Out’ and last only a few weeks or so, I urge you to purchase the full one-year, four-person package [for $3,395]. You MUST have enough food to allow you to rebuild your life and help those who have been unable to prepare. You don’t want to turn friends and neighbors into adversaries by turning them away in their hour of need.”

Only those who purchase will survive into the coming millennium. That cozy, nineteenth-century, postapocalypse America is reserved for the prepared. Wendy M. Grossman, author of net.wars, describes the strong element of satisfaction among Y2K doomsayers: they are the “in-group that is going to survive be cause they’re smarter and tougher than the rest of us.” Like all millennia that are not built by God alone, the kinder, simpler, post-Y2K world is occupied by the fittest.

Hyatt’s The Millennium Bug warns us: “Y2K will affect your life. Can you do anything to protect yourself and your family?” Fortunately, the answer is yes. Call the publisher’s toll-free number and shell out the cover price of the book, and you too can be among the elect.

In his classic study, Primitive Rebels, historian Eric Hobsbawm separates those who believe in the End into two camps. The religious camp thinks that God will bring about the end of history and establish the new world that follows; the secularists think that mankind will manage both the destruction and the rebuilding on its own. And the Y2K doomsayers have edged perilously close to the secular tents.

Secularists have the comfort of prediction. Because they are not depending on a dangerous and omnipotent deity to bring apocalypse, they can forecast disaster and outline its possible paths. But there’s a downside to this man-centered eschatology: Secularists have no radically new pattern to use as they strive to build a new world from the wreckage of the old. They cannot reach outside their own experience to envision a completely different way of life. They can only revert to the patterns of the past.

Secularists are reformers; they believe that the basic structure of civilization is sound, if only the rotting excesses could be trimmed away. If we could return, well-stocked with goods, to a nineteenth-century America no longer dependent on Japanese computers, we could fix the present mess. If only we could clear the corruption from the government, and put good men back into office, the institutions would work again. For a stunningly clear illustration of this, consider that extremely long Kevin Costner vehicle, The Postman, in which the remanned United States Postal Service brings about millennial restoration after a civilization-destroying apocalypse.

My local post office has a Countdown to the Millennium digital clock; it is about three hours slow.

But a truly Christian vision is revolutionary, not reforming. God will remake the world from scratch, and the new creation of the divine mind will go far beyond what we can think and imagine. Only fire can cleanse the world, and only the Messiah (coming unpredictably into creation from the outside) can set it right. And no prophet will make a single dime from the catastrophe.

Susan Wise Bauer is a novelist; she teaches literature at the College of William & Mary. Her book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, written with her mother, Jessie Wise, has just been published by Norton.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Novelist, biographer (of Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis, among others), reviewer (one of the sharpest), literary editor, polemicist, A. N. Wilson has been a lively presence on the British literary scene since the 1970s, when he was still in his early twenties. In addition to producing a steady stream of fiction, he has written most recently Jesus (1992) and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997). His new book, just published by Norton, is God’s Funeral, a narrative of the loss of Christian faith particularly among intellectuals in nineteenth-century Britain. Wilson’s own faith pilgrimage has taken him from the church (he was one of the few Christians among the British literati) to a highly publicized deconversion (the Saul-Paul story in reverse) to his current status as a “Christian fellow traveler.” Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa met with Wilson in Boston near the end of the June heat wave.

DONALD YERXA: In God’s Funeral you write with great empathy about the loss of faith. Did you yourself receive a religious upbringing?

My father was an agnostic; my mother is a practicing Anglican, not of a very enthusiastic kind, but she is a believing Anglican, and so she goes to church each week. For reasons which are quite strange, but trivial, I went to a Roman Catholic primary school. I was taught by the Dominican nuns until I was 7. Then from the age of 7 to 18, I went to boarding schools, which were, broadly speaking, Church of England. I would say I was a more than usually religious child and certainly had aspirations to become a priest, which did not entirely leave me until my mid- to late twenties. So that was my background: Episcopalian, but with a strong element of agnosticism on my father’s side. In deed, he was positively antireligious.

YERXA: So you had both influences.

Yes, and I daresay that they both exist in my own psyche. I am naturally pious and naturally skeptical—and probably I’ve learned both at my father and my mother’s knee. It was the only area between them where I would say that there was serious conflict. They were married for 44 years, but it was an area of real disagreement between them.

KARL GIBERSON: In God’s Funeral, you describe your youth as “morbid” and your middle age as “sunny.” What were you getting at with those descriptions?

I am using the terminology of our old friend Professor James. William James had this idea of the sick soul and the healthy soul. The sick soul would be somebody like Saint Augustine or Tolstoy, who was full of a sense of sin, whose religious life begins with the idea of themselves and the world being drawn awry. Whereas a healthy soul is somebody who becomes religious out of a sense of joyful gratitude in the nature of things—whether they be come Christian or not. Emerson is a classic example of the healthy mind as far as James is concerned. The morbid ones are often much more interesting, of course. I think most teenagers are sick souls rather than healthy souls, and I certainly was a sick soul. I had a sense of guilt, probably due to sex; I can’t remember—about everything, really. The sense that life was bleak and gloomy and that religion was all part of that. Very self-indulgent. Whereas, of course, I am now a much more superficial character [laughing]. And I don’t suffer from depressions, I am happy to say. I am much more cheerful, as middle-aged men tend to be.

GIBERSON: Where does the novelist in you reside when you’re working on something like God’s Funeral? Perhaps in the often quirky details you include that make the people you discuss so palpably real?

It is probably novelistic, isn’t it? As well as telling you what they thought, I tell you what they were like to meet—their funny little habits. In this book I didn’t set out to write straight intellectual history, because there are many people who are better qualified than I am to do that. And after all, there have been plenty of good books about the Enlightenment, and plenty of good books about the loss of faith in the nineteenth century, and certainly many better books than I should ever write about the history of science. But I wanted to chronicle what it was like for people on the inside—how it affected people’s inner life deciding either that they had to change their religious views or lose them altogether. And to that extent, perhaps being a novelist helps. In that sense the book may be regarded as a very novelistic enterprise, but I was not trying to fictionalize a story. I was trying to tell the truth.

GIBERSON: Your 1985 book, How Can We Know?, takes a perspective on faith somewhat different from that in God’s Funeral. Can you talk a little bit about this transformation?

That is a reasonable question be cause, obviously, in How Can We Know? I am being—though hesitantly—very specifically Christian. I think that is a position that in subsequent years I have revised or moved from. I couldn’t exactly explain to you how or why. But when I was commissioned by a publisher to write the life of C. S. Lewis, I thought, “Oh, good, I am going to enjoy this very, very much.” And I did enjoy it, but I found, in the course of writing that book, something had happened to me. I wouldn’t put it as strongly as to say that I had lost my religious faith because I don’t think I have, exactly speaking, but I realized what Lewis called “mere Christianity”—in the way that he de fines it—was not a position which I had entertained in some years. I think I realized that I needed to place myself a little bit outside the Christian fold for a while to think things through after finishing the C. S. Lewis book. Now, here in 1999, I feel much closer to the Christian fold. I feel more like a Christian fellow traveler and indeed do go to church and worship in church on an occasional basis. But I found the C. S. Lewis thing to be troubling, to tell you the truth, because I thought that his attitudes and his arguments for Christianity were so inadequate on many levels. And I also felt that his arguments were dishonest, not in the sense that he was lying, but in that they only came from part of himself. I didn’t feel that they were part of the rounded C. S. Lewis who had written the literary criticism.

YERXA: Could you describe in broad terms the Victorian anguish over the loss of faith?

That was certainly something that I wanted to convey. Perhaps this is very novelistic, but I think I can get at it best by anecdote. A few years ago in England there was a book published called The Myth of God Incarnate, written by a group of Anglican theologians, philosophers, and so on. The message of the book is self-evident from the title: that Christianity as popularly understood by a vast majority of the Christian world is not true. So they gave a press conference, and they all had these grins on their faces. They sat there smiling, quite so confidently, wearing their priestly collars. When I watched this on the television (and they are admirable and excellent people; I’m not criticizing them in any way), I couldn’t help but think of George Eliot as a young woman in the 1840s, before the novels were written, when she was still Marian Evans, translating David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Although by then she had al ready lost her religious beliefs in many respects, when she reached the passage describing the crucifixion, the analytical German coldness with which Strauss described the scene was too much for her. She sobbed as she translated it and stared for comfort at a sculptured relief of the crucifixion by the Scandinavian sculptor Thorvaldsen.

What Eliot and many others recognized is that they were giving up the consolations of a collective view of human experience which, once lost, could never be recovered. They all saw that—limiting ourselves for the time being to Christianity—if Christianity was not true, then society had enormous questions to face in terms of how it cohered.

YERXA: Is there anything peculiarly English about this Victorian loss of faith?

Well, obviously, I am English, and it was necessary to draw some lines around it, otherwise it would have turned into an encyclopedic project. I don’t think there is anything fundamental about the nineteenth-century experience of the loss of faith that’s peculiar to England. It all very much began in Germany. The chief figure in all this is Hegel. Hegel is the most important figure in the nineteenth century as far as religious philosophy goes, as is evidenced by the fact that whichever side of the argument you think you come out on, by the end of the century—whether you are pro or anti—you are likely to be quoting Hegel—until you get to William James, who represents one of the great reactions against Hegel.

What was perhaps unique to England in the European context was the feeling of—I use this phrase advisedly, because it is obviously not completely true—a greater political freedom in England than there was in the continental countries, freedom of speech in particular. There was the feeling that hand-in-hand with the extension of the political freedom there should be a loosening up of church-and-state ties, to the point where you get people like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham—who really were the most influential figures in nineteenth-century English political life—believing that genuine political freedom was not possible in a world where the old religions were insisted upon. Indeed, all these people were very opposed to Christianity. So, yes, to that extent England was a bit special.

It’s true, of course, that the most famous English liberal prime minister was infinitely more religious than any other political leader I can think of. Gladstone was a very devout, high Anglican churchman, going to church at least twice, sometimes three times, a day. But by the 1880s, you have the Bradlaugh case. Charles Bradlaugh was a working-class man, self-educated, who was elected eventually as a Member of Parliament from Northampton—though he was a Londonite himself. When he was presented at the Bar of the House of Commons, where it is customary to take an oath by Almighty God to be loyal to Her Majesty the Queen, Bradlaugh refused to do so. He said he would make an affirmation, but he wouldn’t take an oath because he did not believe in God. He was quite specific about this. They threw him out of the House of Commons and sent him back to the people of Northampton and said, “You’ve got to elect a religious believer.”

It all seems fantastical to us now. The people of Northampton did not much like being told what to do by the MP’s in London, and as a consequence, many people who were religious believers voted for Bradlaugh again. This went on for eight years; his coming and presenting himself and actual fisticuffs breaking out. Eventually, there was a debate going on throughout the country about it; it extended even beyond England, through out Europe, this Bradlaugh case. The debate, roughly speaking, is one that we see resonating and being repeated, for example, in the United States at the moment by conservative-minded people who think that religion is the foundation of civilized society, and if you depart from it, or openly allow public expressions of unbelief, then you are asking for not merely unbelief but anarchy to follow.

YERXA: You have provided gripping narratives of Victorian intellectuals who lost their faith or struggled with it. If you were to write a companion volume about the great theists of the nineteenth century, who would you portray in that book?

Of course, it would be possible to do just that. There’s one fact which I don’t think I recall including in this book—and I should have done—namely, that of the, let’s say, one million books published in the nineteenth century (and I can’t remember how many there were, as a matter of fact), 999,000 were religious books. Reading this book of mine, you might be under the impression that nobody believed anything when, in fact, for example, there was an evangelical revival going on that was extremely powerful both in England and America.

But the great theists of the nineteenth century—well, one of them was George MacDonald. I’ve told you that I’ve written a book about C. S. Lewis and that I didn’t see eye-to-eye with him religiously speaking. If I had to explain why I found it difficult to come to terms with Lewis, it has to do with George MacDonald. MacDonald was Lewis’s hero; he has been my hero, too, and I fault Lewis here only for failing to take MacDonald’s example seriously enough. MacDonald saw that religious belief is an imaginative act. When you respond to the Christian story—and doubtless this is so in other religious traditions too—you are engaged, among other things, in an act of imagination. MacDonald, particularly in Phantastes, which was the book that changed Lewis’s life, shows this brilliantly. So, I would certainly want to put MacDonald very high up.

He, like another great Victorian Englishman, Frederick Denison Maurice, tried to come to terms with the modern age without being a modernist. He was a much more orthodox Christian in that sense. Both MacDonald and Maurice lost their jobs, because they wouldn’t believe in the eternity of punishment for anyone who didn’t share their own particular opinions.

And now to give you a third, cheeky reply: I would want to include among the great nineteenth-century theists a man I’ve already included in this book, William James. Today on every hand there are bigoted scientific materialists who never tire of explaining that you have no right to say that you believe in anything which cannot be verified on scientific grounds—which would, of course, give you no right to say why you like Beethoven’s last quartet; no right to say that you are in love with anybody, or anything else; why you miss somebody when they die; no right to say most of the interesting things that human beings have ever said. James came along when this scientific atheism was still gathering steam. Having been a very attentive and scientifically minded psychologist— in many senses he pioneered the whole field of psychology—and having had great difficulties with orthodox religious belief—he asserted, contra the programmatic atheists, that even if we ourselves haven’t had authenticated or authenticating experiences which lead us to believe in a deity, this is no reason why we should deny the right to others. I think that is an absolutely essential part of the story.

YERXA: Why do you conclude your book with the Catholic modernists?

I think perhaps the reason I ended it with the modernists, rather than with James and The Will to Believe, is that James, in his own terms, is a noncontroversial character. I know that there are many people who remain scandalized—I have evangelical friends who remain scandalized—by James’s casual approach to these various matters. But I wanted to end the book with some people who had tried within the mainstream of practicing Christianity to come to terms with the tension between, on the one hand, a total dedication to the pursuit of truth from an intellectual point of view, whatever your discipline may be—whether it is scientific, historical, or literary—and, on the other hand, the need to be tender and affectionate and gentle with the side of our natures which is religious and which responds, not merely to religious experience as individuals—which interested James very much—but to the Christian tradition, which is why the Catholic modernists as people are very interesting.

In particular, the French ones—Alfred Loisy and Henri Bremond—genuinely, with absurd idealism, thought they could persuade the pope, or at least some parts of the Catholic church, to go along with this. They were trying to persuade people who thought democracy was a plague. You had encyclicals condemning the electric light. So it was a fairly hopeless task. And yet, you can see in the seeds to that quarrel that it was not just a quarrel between some idealistic French priests and the pope at the time—it is a quarrel that goes on now.

In fact, it is a quarrel that we all recognize as going on. If you are a religious person and a modern person, you’re aware of this tension within yourself. Now if you are a religious person who is not modern, or if you are a modern person who is not religious, you might not see the point of the people in between. I think it’s the people in between who are going to keep the show on the road. And this may seem a very paradoxical thing to say, but I don’t see any hope for conservative religion.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

When I first called Margaret Edson to arrange an interview, I had no idea that she was about to win the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Wit. Nor did many other people, I expect, since she was still answering her telephone. Back then (oh, all those six months ago) no one knew much about Margaret Edson apart from the apparently contradictory facts that she’d written a hit play on Broadway but spent most of her time teaching (gasp!) kindergarten in Atlanta. A few newspaper articles and TV appearances notwithstanding, Edson lingered in blissful obscurity. When asked by reporters about future plays, she replied maddeningly that she hadn’t finished any others and didn’t necessarily intend to. She had a whole school of other fish to fry: teaching kindergartners to read wasn’t a pastime, it was her passion.

Next came the Pulitzer Prize, and with it a new level of public curiosity. Before interviewing Edson on the News Hour, Jim Lehrer admitted that they were old acquaintances (she having attended the famous Sidwell Friends School with his daughter in Washington, D.C.). Lehrer listened to the usual Edsonian declaration that she loved absolutely everything about teaching and did not plan to pursue a life as a writer. He responded with fatherly flabbergast: “You know how few people win the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a really big deal, Margaret, if you don’t know, then I’m going to tell. … This is not going to change your life at all?”

“Once the day starts in the classroom,” she replied, undaunted, “the affairs of the outside world really do not come into it at all. The day in the class has its own momentum. And New Yorkers find this very hard to believe, but the intricacies of New York theater are not part of what we’re doing down in kindergarten.”

No, and thank God for it! But despite Margaret Edson’s disavowal of literary ambitions, she remains the rather literate person who, in the summer of 1991, wrote a two and a half-hour play turning upon the intricacies of metaphysical poetry and the use of wit as a shell for the soul. From a writer’s point of view, what could be more ambitious than that? Even in its edited 90-minute form, Wit is a heady play, pitting the arcane vocabularies of medicine and literary criticism against one another in a brilliantly entertaining, if sometimes exhausting, word joust.

Not that Oscar Wilde could have written it; the drama in Wit arises from a woman’s struggle with terminal cancer, hardly the stuff of light comedy. Prof. Vivian Bearing, renowned scholar of John Donne and terrorizer of hapless undergraduates, endures eight punishing rounds of chemotherapy with characteristic conceit (pun intended) and disdain for human weakness. She confronts a chest X-ray, for instance, by throwing down the literary gauntlet:

VIVIAN: I am a doctor of philosophy—

TECHNICIAN 1: (From offstage) Take a deep breath and hold it.

(Pause, with light and sound) Okay.

VIVIAN: a scholar of seventeenth-century poetry.

TECHNICIAN 1: (From offstage) Turn sideways, arms behind your head, and hold it. (Pause) Okay.

VIVIAN: I have made an immeasurable contribution to the discipline of English literature. (TECHNICIAN 1 returns and puts her in the wheelchair.) I am, in short, a force.

No worries about this play metastasizing to the screen, reappearing as some weepy Hollywood cancer opera. Though Vivian Bearing can certainly make us laugh, she doesn’t easily provoke our tears; we feel she’d hate us for it. In fact, like the poetry she studies, Dr. Bearing is more wit and tongue than heart. She’s become a subject for research, a text for passionless doctors to deconstruct. The most arrogant of her physicians is Dr. Jason Posner, a former student who brags that he took her class simply for the challenge and got a coveted A (well, an A-, he grudgingly admits). He tells Vivian this as he’s performing a pelvic exam. Later in the play, a kind but not-too-bright nurse asks Jason about his student days with the famous Dr. Bearing:

SUSIE: She’s not what I imagined. I thought somebody who studied poetry would be sort of dreamy, you know?

JASON: Oh, not the way she did it. It felt more like boot camp than English class. This guy John Donne was incredibly intense. Like your whole brain had to be in knots before you could get it.

SUSIE: He made it hard on purpose?

JASON: Well, it has to do with the subject. The Holy Sonnets we worked on most, they were mostly about Salvation Anxiety. That’s a term I made up in one of my papers, but I think it fits pretty well. Salvation Anxiety. You’re this brilliant guy, I mean, brilliant—this guy makes Shakespeare sound like a Hallmark card. And you know you’re a sinner. And there’s this promise of salvation, the whole religious thing. But you just can’t deal with it.

SUSIE: How come?

JASON: It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. But you can’t face life without it either. So you write these screwed-up sonnets. Everything is brilliantly convoluted. Really tricky stuff. Bounding off the walls. Like a game, to make the puzzle so complicated.

SUSIE: But what happens in the end? … His Salvation Anxiety. Does he ever understand?

JASON: Oh, no way. The puzzle takes over. You’re not even trying to solve it anymore. Fascinating, really. Great training for lab research.

Jason is, of course, a mirror image of Vivian herself, devoted to the means (research) rather than the end (salvation, whether physical or spiritual). Only a very cold-hearted writer could leave her characters in such a hellish state, and before the play’s end, both Vivian and Jason do find (or in his case, begin to find) redemption. Vivian’s salvation is certain once she realizes the power of death and her utter helplessness in the face of it. As a teacher she had praised Donne’s distrust of simplicity:

So we have another instance of John Donne’s agile wit at work: not so much RESOLVING the issues of life and God as REVELING in their complexity.

As a patient enduring unimaginable pain, she admits that nothing could be less appealing than “Erudition. Interpretation. Complication.”

Now is not the time for … metaphysical conceit, for wit. … Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.

Vivian accepts the tenderness of Susie, and in a scene brimming with religious meaning, listens tearfully while her old Donne professor, Dr. E. M. Ashford, reads her the only thing on hand—Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, a book for children.

E.M: … “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”

“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will be come a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

(Thinking out loud) Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?

In the end, Vivian comes out of hiding, dropping all pretense, both metaphorical and literal. In a miraculous resurrection scene she steps from her nightgown, lets her cap fall to the ground, and sheds her hospital brace let (an act of God for sure—ever tried to get one of those off without scissors?). Naked and beautiful, she walks away from the chaos around her hospital bed toward a small light.

One writer asked Margaret Edson why she chose to end the play with Vivian in the buff.

“What else would you wear to a redemption?” Edson replied, laughing. “It’s ‘Come as you are!’ “

I met Maggie Edson as arranged at the tenth annual Chattanooga Conference on Southern Literature. We spoke in a gallery of the elegant Read House Hotel just a day after she received an award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two days after I had a chance to see a fine reading of Wit sponsored by the Chattanooga Arts Council. My in formed belief is that Ms. Edson does know what sort of award she’s won. Certainly she’ll appreciate the fortune she makes from a commercial success (a rare thing for the off-screen arts). Fame, though, has blighted many a happy life, and so I hope for her sake that success in New York won’t wreck her privacy in Atlanta or suck her away from Centennial Place Elementary. Though Edson herself doesn’t seem to mind the attention to her or her profession (“it’s opening minds”), my own opinion is that the world should have its brief look at her and move on. To misquote John Donne, “For God’s sake, hold your tongues and let her teach!”

Betty Carter is a novelist living in Alabama.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It’s sort of funny that you’re being honored here as a southern writer when you’re from Washington, D.C.

Well, it was southeast D.C. They were willing to make an exception.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I changed around a lot, not one thing more than anything else. I was very interested in theater in high school.

Did you act?

Yeah, and was involved in different parts of production.

What about teaching? Where did that come from?

I didn’t start teaching till I was 30, and this is my seventh year, I’m 37. I was a volunteer in an ESL classroom in a D.C. elementary school and I just started loving the tutoring I was doing, and so I had to come teach.

What kind of teaching gives you the most joy? For instance, is it more exciting to you to work with challenging kids as opposed to privileged or gifted—?

I loved teaching ESL and had students from 20 different countries. That was really fun. I taught K–6 in small groups. Of the different kinds of work, the thing I liked most was teaching reading. So then I taught first grade in a typical classroom for a year and now I’m teaching kindergarten.

It’s kind of controversial to teach kindergartners to read, isn’t it?

Not to the kindergartners!

What kind of school is Centennial Place Elementary?

It’s a brand new school. It’s an Atlanta public school, and it’s in the middle of a mixed-income housing community.

So do you work with kids from a lot of different economic backgrounds?

Mostly lower.

Could you have pictured yourself as a kindergarten teacher 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when you were at Smith College? You know how people are. I keep hearing people talk in this amazed way about you being a kindergarten teacher, just like they talked about Alice McDermott being the “soccer mom” who won the National Book Award. To me that seems a little patronizing somehow.

It doesn’t bother me at all. To me it’s opening people’s minds.

OK. So let’s talk about John Donne.

Yes [laughing]. Enough of that.

Do you like Donne’s poetry? Or did you pick it because you didn’t like it?

It’s very fun to get yourself educated to a level where you can get it. But it takes a lot of hard work, and the fun of catching it is greater than the benefit of the insight to be gained. So the points that are made about it in the play are that it’s complex and difficult, but the complexity doesn’t necessarily lead you to a higher level of in sight. The poems are complex for their own sake. They were written not to be published, but to be passed around in manuscript among a group of friends. He was a “coterie” poet at that time, so he was writing for his friends who would “get it.” He wasn’t trying to make a point that would reach people, be cause although there was printing at the time he was writing, he didn’t allow his things to be printed. In fact, he forbade any type of printing of them. He wasn’t trying to reveal any truth or even pursue any truth. He was just trying to be witty and clever.

I don’t approach John Donne the same way. Maybe that’s because I like cerebral poetry. To me Donne’s poetry is very passionate. His love poetry, some of it, is nice and earthy, and then when you get to the Holy Sonnets and “Batter My Heart Three-Personed God,” where he uses almost a rape metaphor for religion, well, I always thought there was a lot of passion there, a lot of violence under the surface. I guess I sympathize in the play most with Vivian’s old professor Dr. Ashford, a person of deep feelings who also takes a great interest in punctuation. So it’s not that you’re getting on Donne himself, right? There can be intellect and also passion at the same time?

Yeah. I don’t see them as distinct.

But Vivian’s problem is … ?

When the young doctor is talking about research biology, the nurse says, “Aren’t you going somewhere with this, don’t you ever get to solve the puzzle?” and he says, “No, we’re just trying to quantify the complications of the puzzle, we’re trying to describe how complex the puzzle really is.” And that’s exactly how Vivian treats the poems. Those two are birds of a feather.

That’s one of the deadliest sins of academics anyway, I think. A lot of people start out loving the thing and eventually it becomes a passionless exercise. Incidentally, the name of Vivian’s dissertation is wonderful: ejacul*tions in Seventeenth-Century Manuscript and Printed Editions of the Holy Sonnets: A Comparison. Everybody laughed.

Oh, good.

Have you ever known anyone like Vivian Bearing?

No.

Where did she come from?

I made her up. That’s my job.

I know, I know; but how do you think she came to be? Did you just create the person to make a point or did she come alive for you?

I was hearing the voice in my head and I just happened to be there to write it down. That’s how it felt.

What do you think makes people hard in the way Vivian Bearing is hard? She has that armadillo shell—why do people become that way? They don’t start out that way as children.

They do it to be safe. To protect themselves. And if Vivian Bearing had lived for 20 more years and had died suddenly of a heart attack at 70, she would have made it. She would have slipped through her life without ever having to open her heart. And she would have been safe, and she would never have noticed what she was missing. In a certain sense, that’s a very efficient way to live. And he was great at it, and she knew it, and that’s why it cost her so much to fall. But in her fall is her redemption, as usual.

Let’s talk about The Runaway Bunny. One of my favorite books. I think the reason it appeals to me is that it’s about the search for a mother. I don’t know why that’s a theme the appeals to me, but the search for mother love or safety—

But the little bunny’s not looking for his mother! He’s trying to get away from her. It’s not Are You My Mother?, which is the search for the mother.

Yeah, but for instance, my favorite hymn is “Come, Thou Fount.” There’s a part that goes, “Prone to Wander, Lord, I feel it, …

[UNISON] … prone to leave the God I love; Here’s my heart, O take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above.”

Yes! And I am, personally, prone to wander. I’ve always had that conflict between being a rebel and de siring safety or love. So I like that book because it’s the idea that “no matter what you do, I’m going to be there. So give it up!”

That’s how my Sunday school teacher explained the book to me.

I was going to ask you if you saw that as a religious message. In the play, you drag in all these religious themes, Donne and all this stuff, and then you’ve got The Runaway Bunny at the end, which, if somebody really really wanted to work hard, they could make that an incarnational thing—but I won’t do that to you. But do you see a religious message in the play?

[Long pause] It’s a very religious play, and you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me in an interview. People always want to talk about the medicine, want to talk about the punctuation, and so I compliment you and thank you for that. It’s not doctrinal, and that’s a very important distinction. And it’s about a point that a lot of people who call themselves religious would not necessarily commend, which is the point where you leave off even religion. Vivian has to let go of knowledge, of scholarship, of expertise, of pride, of everything, including religion. By the end of the play—and when it’s staged, it’s so unlike the rest of the play that it’s shocking—as Vivian drops her bracelet and drops her cap and drops her gown and crosses the stage, she lets everything fall away from her.

I don’t think I noticed that. I don’t think she did that in this production.1

If you’re completely united with God, you don’t need religion. And this all happens very quickly, it happens in the last ten seconds of her life. Her redemption is delayed through her own efforts. It could have happened a lot sooner, but she keeps putting if off and putting it off and putting it off, and finally there’s a breakthrough, and it happens in the last ten seconds of her life, which is plenty of time.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

1. Author’s note: This has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. Did I really think I might have overlooked a woman dropping her clothes in Chattanooga, Tennessee?

Some might call it bad timing. The Matrix, a sci-fi film conceived by Andy and Larry Wachowski, was released at the end of March and was still number one at the box office on April 20 when reports of a killing spree began to emerge from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Hardly had the shooting stopped when fingers began to point at media violence—especially in movies and computer games—and the creepy virtual violence of the Internet. Had Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Columbine’s teenage killers, seen The Matrix shortly before they acted out their long-savored scenario?

At first glance, The Matrix seems an unlikely candidate for such censure. Although it features dazzling special effects, it is a cerebral film, with more time given to philosophical discussion than to mayhem. The premise of the film is that Earth has been taken over by a massive computer system, the Matrix. When the humans who created this network tried to knock out its power source by obscuring the sun, the Matrix learned to harvest human beings and use them like batteries to power itself—thus humans are “copper tops.” The network also created a make-believe world to ensure the docility of its subjects, and so, in their minds, humans are living in the world of 1999, at the pinnacle of human achievement before the triumph of artificial intelligence.

A renegade band of human beings was able to stay free of the evil computer system, and its members live in hiding in Zion—a place that we won’t see until the sequel. Further, a group of humans who have freed themselves from the Matrix roam the sewers and tunnels of Earth in a spaceship called The Nebuchadnezzar. Led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), they are seeking the One, a man who will be able to figure out the Matrix and begin to free humanity from its bondage. With the help of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Morpheus tracks down the man he thinks is the One: Neo (Keanu Reeves). A meeting is arranged, and Neo is given the choice to go back to his known life in the Matrix or step out into the real world. “The Matrix is everywhere,” Morpheus explains.

“It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bond age, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. … Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

Neo chooses reality, and, after a dramatic episode in which he is born again, he leaves the world of gleaming skyscrapers and enters a world of darkness and rusty spaceships. After learning the ways of being an “unplugged” person, Neo is confronted with a choice: in order to save Morpheus, his mentor and friend, he must re-enter the Matrix and battle evil federal agents (who are themselves constructs of artificial intelligence, contemptuous of humanity and disgusted by mere flesh).

This is a seemingly impossible task, except for the One. And it was here, in the last 30 minutes of the movie, that movieland and our world collided on April 20, 1999. When he descends into the Matrix to save Morpheus, Neo dons a black trench coat and takes up a vast array of automatic handguns and rifles—frighteningly similar to the garb and tactics that Harris and Klebold employed at Columbine High School. The Matrix quickly became the subject of editorials and talk-show conjecture: James Wall, senior contributing editor of the Christian Century, singled out the film as a symptom of media gone bad. Vice President Al Gore, after stating publicly a few weeks earlier how much he and Tipper liked The Matrix, recanted. And on May 4, at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on marketing violence to children, Denver Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput said that one scene in film “left me completely stunned. … The heroes wear trench coats and in a violent, elegant, slow-motion bloodbath, they cut down about a dozen people with their guns. Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold may have seen that film. If so, it certainly didn’t deter them.”

In the months since the Columbine killings, we’ve heard a good deal more from Washington about violent entertainment and the too-easy availability of guns. I don’t want to belittle those concerns, but I wonder if The Matrix doesn’t suggest another, deeper understanding of that tragedy. In the youth group at our church on the Wednesday night following the shooting, we gave the junior high students a chance to talk about their reactions. One boy said, “I would have thought that when they killed the first one and saw the blood, it would have become real to them, and they would have stopped.”

But what was real to Harris and Klebold? Much has been made of the one-liners they shouted as they killed their 13 victims. Even their infamous question of Cassie Bernall—”Do you believe in God?”—smacks of Arnold Schwarzenegger. These boys could have been acting out a part in a movie.

What we have seen in Columbine, perhaps, is a prime example of what will be increasingly common in postmodern culture: the border between reality and fiction is becoming more difficult to discern. Harris and Klebold were immersed in movies, video games, computer games, fantasy board games, and comics. The line between reality and virtual reality had blurred to the point of being erased. These two didn’t stop when they drew first blood because their reality had morphed with their fantasy.

I know this feeling myself. At my last job, we received a free virtual reality spaceship game when we purchased some business software. I spent many lunch hours and coffee breaks playing the game, trying to achieve the next level—until the game began showing up in my dreams and my daydreams!

In The Matrix, Neo’s guerrilla training is conducted via computer simulation. When Neo asks, “Is this real?” Morpheus responds, “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” This exchange is what the film is all about. And it points to a major cultural watershed that we as Christians dare not ignore.

Of course, long before the advent of computers, human beings had to wrestle with the problem of how to recognize the really real—and how to choose rightly between reality and beguiling self-deception. (Before the Brothers Wachowski there was Plato and his Myth of the Cave.) A book is a powerful technology for altering one’s sense of reality—hence Christian interdictions against fiction. But the mind-twisting technologies we’re just beginning to explore pose these perennial problems in new and more acute forms.

Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), the Judas figure in The Matrix, meets with the evil Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) at a virtual restaurant and eats the best-looking virtual steak you’ve ever seen. “You know,” he says, lifting his fork and eyeing what appears to be a tasty morsel, “I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I’ve realized?” He takes a big bite. “Ignorance is bliss.”

As virtual reality becomes less virtual and more real, more and more people—especially youth—will choose this kind of ignorance: a life lived inside movies and games rather than in families and schools and relationships and jobs. Thankfully, we follow a Lord whose life and words “invade our ‘real’ world with a reality even more real than it is.” Our teens need that reality. So does our world.

Tony Jones is minister to youth and young adults at Colonial Church of Edina (Minn.), www.colonialchurch.org.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Is eugenics—the movement for improving human characteristics by controlling heredity—reviving? No more than two decades ago, such a revival would have seemed extremely improbable. Eugenics was almost universally condemned as a horrifying example of science run amok, conjuring up grotesque images of Nazi death camps and “euthanasia” centers, where German physicians murdered millions in an attempt to fulfill Hitler’s dreams of a racially pure breed of Germans, free from genetic “defects.”

Other factors had also contributed to the decline of eugenics in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, the social sciences and psychology had for the most part rejected biological determinism, which exerted a powerful hold on many intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Social scientists in the 1960s placed far greater emphasis on the power of the environment to shape individuals and their character. The civil-rights campaign and the women’s movement brought intense pressure against all forms of biological determinism. The new emphasis on reproductive freedom that accompanied the abortion-rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s dealt a further blow to eugenics. Progressives, who earlier in the century promoted government measures to control reproduction, were now appalled by eugenics legislation of the early twentieth century, such as compulsory sterilization of the mentally handicapped. Individual choice supplanted responsibility to society in reproductive matters.

In Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China, Frank Dikotter explains that the trajectory of eugenics in twentieth-century China has roughly paralleled developments in the rest of the world. Despite the popularity of eugenics among physicians and intellectuals in early twentieth-century China, after the success of the Communist revolution in 1949 eugenics lost official approval. Chinese Communists, like their Soviet counterparts, rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of Lysenkoism—that is, a neo-Lamarckian view of heredity holding that organisms can pass to their offspring traits acquired through environmental influences. China was thus in step with the rest of the world in rejecting eugenics in the 1960s and 1970s (though not necessarily for all the same reasons).

Despite considerable opposition, eugenics is experiencing a comeback today, and not only in China. Memories of the abuses of Nazi Germany or of compulsory sterilization in the United States and several countries of Europe are less vivid. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have made biological determinism intellectually respectable again, despite intense op position in some circles. Finally, abortion is now seen by many as a valid way to select human traits; mentally or physically handicapped fetuses often never see the light of day. New reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and amniocentesis, have emerged in the past decades, slowly accustoming us to some forms of artificial selection of humans. The Human Genome Project is currently mapping all the genetic information contained in human DNA; the prospects for both good and ill are enormous.

To be sure, eugenics is still controversial, and many still fear the specter of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where technocrats supervised the biological engineering of human beings, who were manufactured in assembly-line fashion to fit into their intended niche in society. Some of these fears were expressed in an issue of Time magazine (Jan. 11, 1999) featuring a discussion of recent advances in genetic technology. But other articles in that issue of Time actually promoted eugenics: Robert Wright, a popularizer of evolutionary psychology, argued that since eugenics is already a reality we cannot evade (he merely assumes this without argument), the government should subsidize eugenics for the poor to avoid social stratification that will allegedly be caused by unequal access to genetic technologies. Even more remarkable than his suggestions is his frank use of the notorious term eugenics to describe his proposals. This was still unthinkable just a decade ago.

Judging from the flood of scholarship on the history of eugenics pouring forth from academic presses over the past decade, it seems that fears of eugenics are not abating as fast as Wright would like. The history of eugenics is a cautionary tale, the contemporary relevance of which is all too apparent.

In 1995 China passed a eugenics law requiring that prospective brides and grooms have physical examinations to determine their “fitness” for procreation. If physicians deem one of the prospective marriage partners unsuitable to bear children (usually because of physical or mental disability), he or she will be encouraged to be sterilized or to abort any child that may be conceived. While compliance is technically voluntary, Dikotter is skeptical that it works out that way in practice, because the Chinese government is known for enforcing its will and suppressing dissent. Furthermore, some Chinese provinces have their own laws making sterilization compulsory for certain categories of people with physical or mental disabilities.

China’s one-child policy to curb population growth also strengthens the drive for “better quality” children, and not only from government pressure. Any good parent is solicitous of his or her child’s health, but it be comes even more urgent to have a perfectly healthy child if you only have one chance. Thus eugenics has become a popular concern in China, not just a government mandate. By focusing on birth defects in Chinese medical writings over the past several centuries, Dikotter helps illuminate how eugenics in the twentieth century reflects both continuities and discontinuities with Chinese medical discourse relating to the health of children in utero. Dikotter’s early discussion of reproductive health takes us back to the early days of the Qing period (1644–1911) where medical manuals stressed various environmental factors, such as time of conception and moods of the mother during pregnancy, as influences on the developing child. Though Dikotter ably shows us the advice Chinese physicians gave to promote good fetal health, he constantly resorts to supposition and educated guesses when discussing the treatment of disabled children during the Qing period. Without a shred of evidence, he assumes that many if not most disabled children were discarded by their parents: “Most babies with severe birth defects were considered to be inauspicious and ill-fated, and were probably destroyed at birth.” Notice the word probably, which recurs rather frequently in the first part of Dikotter’s book.

Judging from what we know about infanticide in some other societies, Dikotter may not be wrong, but he admits that there is no evidence directly supporting his assumptions. Even in premodern European societies, where killing handicapped infants was not uncommon, neither authorities nor society in general condoned infanticide. The first Chinese statement that Dikotter could find actually articulating support of infanticide for handicapped children occurs in the secret journal of the scholar Wang Shiduo, written during the time of the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64). Wang stated in his journal, “Heaven has its material for slaughter. Among animals they are the sheep, the pigs, the chickens and the ducks; among humans they are the short and puny, ugly, mean-eyed, short-stepped, garrulous, effeminate and stupid people.” Why did neither Wang nor any other Chinese scholar ever publish similar views before the twentieth century? Dikotter never draws what seems to me the obvious conclusion: The reason the Chinese did not discuss infanticide publicly is because the Chinese on the whole did not condone it but considered it immoral. Perhaps they practiced it; perhaps they didn’t. But even if they did, that doesn’t mean they considered it morally justifiable.

The overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911 brought a new elite into control of Chinese society who overturned traditional Confucian values. Dikotter informs us that “Republican China was characterised by an intense faith in the capacity of ‘science’ to dismantle ‘tradition’ and to achieve its opposite, dubbed ‘modernity.’ ” Scientists and physicians, who were supposed to lead the world into a more enlightened age of progress, em braced the latest scientific theories from the West, including biological evolution, and this made them more open to eugenics. Dikotter notes that most of the Chinese scientists and physicians were neo-Lamarckians (upholding the inheritance of acquired characteristics), but they nonetheless believed that humans should practice some form of artificial selection in human reproduction to decrease the numbers of physically and mentally handicapped individuals. This neo-Lamarckian eugenics was not peculiar to China, but was also the dominant form of eugenics in France and Latin America. The eugenics mentality meshed well with more traditional Chinese notions emphasizing supremacy of the collective good of society and one’s own progeny rather than the individual and his or her rights.

Though it became quite popular in medical and scientific circles in the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics did not be come institutionalized in China the way it did in the United States and Europe, where journals and societies specifically devoted to eugenics arose. By the late 1930s, however, eugenics was gaining support in Guomintang (Nationalist) government circles. The government’s Ministry of Social Affairs formed a Committee for the Study of Population Policies, which in 1941 recommended segregation and sterilization to keep physically and mentally handicapped people from procreating. Dikotter believes that only the war against Japan and the civil war against the Communists prevented the Guomintang from implementing eugenics policies in the 1930s and 1940s.

After facing official disapproval during Mao’s regime, eugenics has re-emerged in China in the post-Mao era. China is now the only country in the world to promote eugenics officially, both through legislation and propaganda. China currently has a Eugenics Society, and high Communist party officials hold leadership positions in it. In January 1989 a Eugenics Symposium was held in Beijing, and a national exhibition promoting eugenics, “Human Reproduction and Health,” opened in 1993 in Shanghai.

The discourse of the present eugenics movement in China is hauntingly reminiscent of early twentieth-century eugenics proponents. Some Chinese eugenicists today estimate that there are 30 million “defective” individuals in China, and they continually stress the costs of supporting the physically and mentally disabled, whom they describe as burdens to society. They also relativize the value of an individual’s life. Mu Guangzong, a lecturer at the Population Studies Center of the People’s University, for example, argued in a 1991 article that the value of one’s life is measured by one’s contribution to society; he maintained therefore that “inferior” infants have no value at all. Based on this kind of reasoning, some Chinese eugenicists are advocating infanticide or abortion to rid society of disabilities. The geneticist Zhao Gongmin, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, believes that infants with Down syndrome or hydrocephalus should be killed at birth. Many voices are likewise supporting abortion as a means to rid society of disabled persons.

Dikotter is clearly uneasy about the developments he discusses, but he criticizes Chinese eugenics legislation primarily because it is compulsory and restricts the reproductive freedom of individuals. He suggests in his conclusion that this problem will be solved if China follows the West by democratizing and giving individuals greater freedom of choice. But is it really right to assume that voluntary eugenics is more beneficent than compulsory eugenics? I don’t think Dikotter sufficiently takes into account the dangers posed by voluntary eugenics. Is killing a handicapped infant any better because the father and/or mother make the decision rather than the state? The moral dilemma of eugenics is not solved by giving everyone the right to make his or her own reproductive choices, any more than the problem of racism will be solved by allowing individuals to practice racial discrimination wherever they see fit.

Dikotter’s position is especially problematic since he so perceptively demonstrates how often eugenicists have been influenced by socially de fined categories—such as race, class, or disability—to discriminate against certain groups. If the intellectual elite in China and elsewhere have been so heavily influenced by their prejudices, what will stop the common people from making decisions based on social prejudices?

Dikotter’s work should remind us of the perils of eugenics and the fragile position of the disabled in a world that is becoming increasingly schizophrenic about human rights. On the one hand, we can congratulate ourselves about more humane treatment of the disabled, reflected in the Americans with Disabilities Act and other international efforts on behalf of the disabled. On the other hand, we are becoming less hesitant to kill infants with disabilities since they allegedly have little or no value to themselves or others. Which side will win out? It may depend on how insistently we proclaim the truth of the dignity of all human life.

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One of the purposes of “The Science Pages” is to correct the notion that to talk about “science” is to talk about Darwinian evolution, pro or con. At the same time, one can hardly give sustained attention to science without addressing, on occasion, the various Darwinian claims that provide the interpretive framework for work in so many fields today (including much of the work being done by scientists who are also Christians).

In this issue we focus on a book published by MIT Press in the spring of 1999: Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, by Robert Pennock. Since Pennock’s book includes a substantial critique of Phillip Johnson, we asked Johnson to respond, with a rejoinder from Pennock. In the November/December issue, we’ll take up one of the principal strands of Pennock’s argument: the analogy between biological evolution and the evolution of human language.

Our hope is that this discussion, which will be continued in future issues, will produce more genuine engagement, more careful argument, and perhaps even more illumination than is generally afforded by treatments of this subject.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Robert Pennock’s book is an all-out attack on the “new creationists,” a.k.a. the Intelligent Design Movement (hereafter IDM), an informal group of which I am currently the most prominent representative. It is an honor to be the main subject of a book-length attempted demolition by a professor of philosophy, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

Here is where the debate stands, as I see it. The IDM aims to transform the evolution/creation debate by focusing on the main issue and pushing the details to the background. The main issue is the scientific naturalist claim that the origin and development of life can be explained employing only unintelligent natural causes like chance, chemical laws, and natural selection. This claim is as important for philosophy and theology as it is for science. The neo-Darwinian theory was discovered by a science that was committed a priori to methodological naturalism, the principle that research should always be guided by a commitment to discover strictly natural causes for all phenomena. Most educated people today have been taught to regard the theory as unassailably confirmed by objective scientific testing. Many think that it follows that the success of the theory provides a powerful justification for basing research in all fields, including even biblical studies, on methodological naturalism. Darwinism (i.e., naturalistic evolution) is thus not just a scientific theory but a creation story so culturally dominant that it is even protected by judge-made law from criticism in the public schools.

We in the IDM argue that the supposed confirmation of the neo-Darwinism as a general theory is the product of philosophical bias in the selection and interpretation of evidence. When the evidence is interpreted without a bias in favor of naturalism, it does not support the claim that evolutionary biologists have discovered a mechanism that can create life in the first place, or cause simple life forms (like bacteria) to develop into complex plants and animals, or build even relatively simple adaptive organs such as bacterial flagella. Our argument makes no reference to the Bible or to any other authority other than empirical testing. Indeed, we argue that it is the Darwinists who embrace a religious prejudice by refusing to give fair consideration to evidence or reasoning unless it supports their a priori commitment to naturalism.

I will illustrate the difference between IDM thinking and Darwinian thinking with two examples from Pennock’s book. The first is the most famous instance in which evolution by natural selection has actually been observed, the variation in finch beaks on an island in the Galapagos. To tell the story as briefly as possible, the average size of the beaks in the island population increased by 4 to 5 percent after a devastating drought, probably because the larger-beaked birds had an advantage in opening the last tough seeds that remained. A few years later there were floods, again killing most of the birds, following which the average beak size returned to the predrought norm. Nothing new emerged, and no permanent change occurred.

Pennock says that the scientists “were able to see the Darwinian mechanism at work, sculpting individual traits.” He argues that to accept such an example of “evolutionary change within the type is tantamount to accepting it generally,” because “[t]here is no essential difference in kind between microevolution and macroevolution; the difference is simply a matter of degree.” To set any limits to change would be arbitrary, because all creatures are made from the same genetic material and one needs only to change a fraction of the genes to produce a new species. Hence, for Pennock the cyclical finch beak variation demonstrates a mechanism that is in principle capable of the kind of major changes, producing new species and even new phyla, that we call “macroevolution.”

From our IDM viewpoint, this example—hyped in textbooks and TV programs as proof that the Darwinian mechanism has actually been observed—tells us nothing about how birds or other animals might have come into existence. It is not merely a matter of saying that small changes do not necessarily add up to large changes, although the fallacy of extrapolation is a notorious path to absurdity. The more important point is that variation of the finch beak sort involves no increase whatsoever in genetic information or adaptive complexity. When evaluating such an example we have to make allowances for the limited time available for observation, but a process that never gets started isn’t going to reach a distant objective no matter how much time we give it.

Besides the experimental failure, there is a theoretical reason to conclude that a combination of random mutation and natural selection cannot create new complex organs or organisms. Even the simplest of living organisms, the bacterial cell, is a miniaturized chemical factory far more complex than an airplane or a computer. Such a complex entity requires an enormous quantity of information in the form of instructions that tell the many parts just what they are to do and in what order they are to do it. Even the archmaterialist Richard Dawkins agrees that a single cell requires a program with more information than all the volumes of the encyclopedia, and a complex organism like ourselves contains trillions of cells working in concert. The genetic information, like the information in a book or computer program, is complex, specified, and non repeating, which means that it cannot be the product either of random movement (which produces disorder) or chemical laws (which produce simple, repetitive order). (For a more complete explanation, see my review of The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/fifthmiracle/).

How do Darwinists argue that their mechanism is information-creating, given the absence of any biological examples? One of the main arguments is a computer analogy most famously employed by Dawkins. Here is how Pennock describes it:

In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins beautifully illustrates the power of cumulative selection with an example that considers the probability that a monkey banging at a keyboard would type out a line from Shakespeare at random. The chance of our monkey hitting upon the line “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” from Hamlet is tiny if we require him to get all 28 characters right in a single step. But switch now to a Darwinian monkey who be gins with a random string of 28 characters, produces multiple replications of this sequence with some chance of a copying error each time, and then repeats the process starting for the next set of copies with whichever of the copies is closest to the target sequence as the original. If he continues in this way, in a surprisingly small number of generations he hits the target [emphasis added].

Of course, the “Darwinian monkey” is really a computer that generates random letters and then produces the target text by retaining the correct letters when they appear in the correct places in the sequence, as they are eventually bound to do. Careful readers of The Blind Watchmaker will know that Dawkins admits that the computer analogy “is misleading in important ways,” and Pennock seeks to disarm criticism by citing the warning. This concession has not prevented Dawkins or Pennock from misusing the analogy repeatedly to exploit the very feature that is misleading about it: it smuggles intelligence into an argument whose purpose is to illustrate how a text can be written without intelligence. It is not cumulative selection that writes the target text; the program designer writes the text into the computer’s memory along with the instructions for retaining the correct letters and discarding the incorrect ones. The reference to Darwinian monkeys and copying errors serves only to distract attention from the fact that the computer program would require less intelligence if it bypassed the cumulative selection charade and printed the target text directly from its memory. The example illustrates intelligent design, in the form of programmed instructions.

What I have said so far should not be controversial. If scientists—and professors in general, and elite journalists—understood the issues correctly, Darwinism would self-destruct over night. Once the analytical spotlight is properly focused, few people will defend the finch-beak example as evidencing anything beyond trivial variation, or the computer selection example as anything but the kind of logical fallacy you can legitimately flunk an undergraduate for misunderstanding.

The other Darwinian arguments are no better. I doubt that any but true believers in Darwinism will be impressed by Pennock’s centerpiece argument, the evolution of languages. Of course language has evolved, just as symphony orchestras and computer software have evolved. All these examples illustrate the often unpredictable results of interaction among intelligent agents. They do not support an inference that intelligence is not needed to produce either language or software.

Despite these rather obvious points, which bright high school students can readily understand, the mainstream intellectual community remains devoted to Darwinism and is predisposed to believe that the IDM is “against science.” How did this perception become so widespread, and why is it so difficult to change? The primary answer is that Darwinists have successfully exploited what I call the “Inherit the Wind stereotype.” They have framed the issue as “biblical fundamentalism versus scientific fact,” and in such a contest only the latter can win. That is why I have been so determined to keep the Bible out of the debate, and why the Darwinists have been so determined to keep it at the center. Pennock’s book is based on the stereotype, and he spares no effort to keep it alive. If you believe him, the only question is whether you are going to credit the evidence of repeatable experiments on the one hand, or some cloudy mysticism or Bible-thumping fundamentalism on the other.

If that were the issue, I would be on Pennock’s side. But that is not the issue. What the IDM stands for is resolving disputed issues by unbiased scientific testing, where this is possible, without making any exceptions either for the worldwide flood of Noah or for the creative power of the Darwinian mechanism. The Darwinists want to make an exception for the latter. It is often claimed that science by its nature rejects the miraculous, but it would be more accurate to say that science ceases to call something a miracle once it has decided to accept it. The inflationary Big Bang assumes that the universe emerged at a point in time from a subatomic vacuum somehow seething with quantum particles, and expanded in a fraction of a second to cosmological size. I do not ask biologists to contemplate anything as bizarre as cosmic inflation or quantum indeterminacy, but they might consider giving credit to that everyday reality we call intelligence, which can do things that chance and chemical laws can never do.

What Robert Pennock is defending is not science, but a nineteenth-century philosophy that has survived so far because materialists have seduced the leaders of biology into their philosophical camp. Once the issue is grasped, the best scientific thinkers will agree that the term science properly understood refers to an unbiased procedure for testing hypotheses, not to a dogmatic adherence to philosophical materialism regardless of the evidence. What Pennock’s argument actually demonstrates is that Darwinism can maintain its cultural power only by sowing confusion and appealing to prejudice.

Phillip Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including most recently Objections Sustained (InterVarsity), a collection of essays, many of which first appeared in BOOKS & CULTURE.

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