Page 2402 – Christianity Today (2024)

A steady stream of books with titles like Pagan Christianity?, Quitting Church, Life After Church, and They Like Jesus But Not the Church show that some of the church’s staunchest critics come from within. Many Christians advocate an ecclesiology in which church is understood merely as the plural of Christian; hanging out at a café talking about Jesus is just as valid an expression of “doing church” as traditional models, if not more valid, because it is more relevant to the culture.

In Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion (Moody), Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, authors of Why We’re Not Emergent, address what they call the “decorpulation” of Christianity, a growing movement of evangelicals who want “spirituality without religion, to find a relationship without rules and have God without the church.” Barista Katie Galli, who this fall begins graduate studies in history at Cambridge University, interviewed DeYoung, senior pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan, about his own struggles with the church and his reasons for remaining in a traditional, institutional church.

What makes a group of Christians a church?

As a theological category, church could refer to just those who are Christians. But when we use the word church as in, “I’m at church,” “we are going to church,” “we are the church,” we’re talking about a gathered body with certain parameters.

In the New Testament, you get a good sense that the church looks a little different in Acts than it does in Corinthians and in Timothy. But there’s teaching. There’s singing. There’s praying. There are sacraments.

It’s important to remember that when you have two people at Starbucks who are talking about Jesus, that’s nice and that may be a group of Christians, but a church has order, offices, and certain worship elements.

How institutional should the church be?

It’s a mirage to think we are going to have something of lasting impact that isn’t going to institutionalize in some way. I don’t think we have to pit structure against the Spirit or believe that somehow the Spirit can only work through spontaneity.

I fall back on the historic marks of the church. The church needs to regularly gather in worship, in prayer, to hear God’s Word, and to receive the sacraments. It should be an ordered body where there’s membership, leadership, and discipline.

You say people are disillusioned with the church for many reasons. Which is the hardest for people to get over?

I think the personal reasons are definitely the hardest and most frequent. There are enough sinners in all of our churches, and we need to be willing to listen to people when they are genuinely hurt. But I think a lot of this “church is lame” stuff is really immaturity.

Hopefully people will look back and say, “We were kind of like petulant children getting tired of our parents and thinking that they didn’t know anything.” Then you get married and have your own kids and realize, “Maybe I didn’t always see everything as clearly as I thought I did.”

Unfortunately, we have so many choices of churches that we don’t have to work through those things (and the growth that God might want to give us through the painful process).

In your book, you talk about past disillusionment with the church. Does every generation go through this phase?

It’s easier for young people now to have their voices heard, so it sounds louder and can have a bigger ripple effect. Ultimately a lot of these folks, I think, will come back to the church.

Some won’t, because we are seeing the stripping away of some of the nominal bark of the Christian tree in this country. I think there are a lot of nominal Christians who no longer feel the cultural pressure to go to church or say that they’re Christian.

What’s the greatest danger of churchless Christianity?

Without the regular routine, sometimes humdrum, mundane gathering—preaching, praying, singing, sacraments, “Yep, we’re doing it again this week, doing it again next week”—without the regular plodding stuff of congregational meetings and nursery workers, I don’t know if the churchless movement is sustainable.

The second danger with churchless Christianity is that in some instances, it might not be Christianity anymore. Churchless Christianity sometimes seems to be anti-pastor, anti-sermon, anti-doctrinal boundaries, and the mantra, “I want Jesus, not religion.”

At the same time, I think there are encouraging pockets of churches in Reformed traditions, Anglican traditions, and charismatic traditions that are getting more serious about doctrine and living out their faith, as the American superstructure is probably getting less Christian.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Why We Love the Church is available at ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

DeYoung and Kluck also won first place in the church/pastoral leadership division of Christianity Today‘s 2009 book awards for Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be).

Previous articles about church life include:

The Church—Why Bother? | There is no healthy relationship with Jesus without a relationship to the church. (January 6, 2005)

Why I Return To The Pews | The church has often left me bemused, bored, or mystified, but I can no more abandon it than I can myself. (December 1, 2004)

Editor’s Bookshelf: Survival Through Community | An interview with Charles Colson, author of Being the Body. (May 19, 2003)

I wanted to love Not That Kind of Girl, a new memoir from “recovering evangelical” Carlene Bauer. On the surface, Bauer and I have a lot in common. We’re women who love the Bible, literature, and pop culture. We are aspiring writers who landed in publishing. She even grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs like me, entrenched in the evangelical subculture. And from early reviews, it was unclear just what, exactly, “recovering evangelical” meant. In the first chapter, Bauer describes her first encounter with the End Times, via a church basem*nt screening of A Thief in the Night with her Christian classmates. At 8, her biggest fears suddenly included the government installing a bar code on her forehead or the back of her hand under a blood-red moon. She goes to bed at night earnestly whispering to God, “Could I live until I fell in love?”

This girl is -me, I thought. I vividly remember telling my mom, myself at 8 years old, that I wanted to be excited for Jesus to come back, but if he could, it would be great if he could wait until I went to college, got married, and had a career and kids.

What critics are heralding as a “good-girl memoir” is actually a tragic story of faith, slowly and painfully lost. Bauer writes for a generation raised in the church of Dare to Discipline: “I sometimes wondered, sitting in church listening to ancient tales of obstinacy, if I had been born with original sin, because stealing and lying and saying mean things had never held an appeal.” For Bauer, faith comes easily at first, and even as she grows up and enters public school, she finds it easy to resist sex and alcohol.

But as her faith lingers during her college years at a Catholic university, belief in God feels like something she would shake off if she could only find the proper motive. Faith is a convenient foil to her introverted tendencies and dislike of the drunken parties and casual sex that consume her classmates. She secretly envies her friend Jane, who came to Christ in college, because it offers her a “platform for radical self-invention.”

Megan Hustad’s review for the Daily Beast identifies the conceit that makes Bauer’s memoir one of interest for evangelicals:

[Bauer] aspires not only to be truly hip, she also wants to be taken seriously in New York’s snobbish literary scene. And she seeks to accomplish both of these goals while hanging on to her fervent faith in Jesus Christ. If life maneuvers received scores for technical difficulty, Bauer would be competing for gold.

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I so wanted to see Bauer accomplish this Herculean task; Bauer writes for Salon, Elle, and The New York Times Magazine, and an accessible story of faith cultivated in such a world would surely impress the intellectual types that Bauer reveals in the book to be quite narrow-minded when it comes to Christianity. But it’s that balancing act—one that relegates faith to a “hanging on”—that undoes any progress I hoped this book might achieve.

Bauer finds glimmers of hope along her quest. She says of her college campus ministry, “It was true that the members believed in ice cream socials and acoustic guitars, and attended a church that believed in worship teams and met in a middle school auditorium. I’d had enough of these evangelical clichfamp;copy;s. But many of the members had been raised Catholic before they turned to evangelical Christianity, which meant that their faith was serious but that they had not been steeped in the attitudes and vocabulary, which meant that I heard them speaking as people, not as Christians.”

Unfortunately, she can’t quite recapture this experience after graduating and moving to New York City. There she bounces from church to church, gradually letting go of her moral convictions in order to “experience life” in the way she’d desired at age 8, in whispered prayers. After a brief stint with the Catholic Church (selected primarily because, as the “church of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene and Walker Percy, it embraces literature, isn’t afraid of moderate intake of alcohol, and encourages social activism”), Bauer’s faith crumbles under the weight of her doubts and questions. Living through 9/11 as a resident of NYC presents an image of suffering she is unable to reconcile with God. “I’ve exhausted it all,” she says. “I’ve got nothing left to give him.” She desires certainty, but a philosophical ideal of truth—”Thinking you know anything makes it impossible to say that God is light”—leads her away from the church and its confident professions of faith.

What is ultimately missing from Bauer’s account is any sense of real community to support her amid her fleeting convictions. Roommates, friends, and love interests, Christian and non-Christian, come and go, and none is particularly memorable. Though Iris Murdoch’s observation that “love is the extremely uncomfortable realization that something other than oneself is real” first led Bauer to the Catholic Church, we never see her live out the “uncomfortable” reality. “If I had to love someone the way I had to love God, I would have to leave,” she says, after she has already left God.

Bauer’s is a truly thoughtful de-conversion story, and that makes it particularly heartbreaking. She seems like the kind of person you could talk to over coffee for hours. Unfortunately, hers is an all-too-common story: disaffected with the church, capital C, she gives up on God. But while I expected to mourn a lost opportunity for that gold-medal move, this book provided a reminder that we can never expect or ask anyone to singularly represent our faith. That’s something we must do every day, as persons who aspire to show not just what kind of girls we are, but also what kind of God we serve.

Style: Storyteller pop; compare to Brandon Heath, Sara Groves and Jason Mraz

Top tracks: “For the First Time Again,” “Fade With Our Voices,” “Help Me, Thank You”

In a nutshell: Lyrically conjuring up memories of the late Rich Mullins, Jason Gray is a Ragamuffin with a pop veneer. Disclosing vulnerable refrains in veritably smart pop, Gray bares his soul without drowning under the drudgery of sad tunes. For example, on “Fade With Our Voices,” an extremely accessible chorus soberly begs, “Does our worship have hands, does it have feet/Does it stand up in the face of injustice … Does it fade with our voices?” And “Help Me, Thank You,” delightfully admits, “These are the two best prayers I know,” over a shuffling snare and easy banjo. Similar to Sara Groves, Gray’s musical journal is poignant and reflected in these songs.

Copyright © 2009 Christian Music Today. Click for reprint information.

– Just when you thought the Carrie Prejean saga was over, she has filed a lawsuit, claiming pageant officials discriminated against her religious beliefs, caused her emotional distress and engaged in slander. Prejean claimed that she lost her crown after voicing her opposition to same-sex marriage during the Miss USA beauty pageant.

– Montana’s high court will consider a claim that a doctor’s refusal to help a patient die violated his rights under the state’s constitution. Depending on the outcome, The New York Times reports that Montana could become the first state in the country to declare that medical aid in dying is a protected right.

– In case you were wondering for some reason, George W. Bush isn’t planning on converting to Catholicism according to his brother Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida. “That would be a great thing, but you won’t see him here as a Catholic — he’s pretty comfortable with his Methodist faith. I’d like him to come here though. It would be fun.” Jeb Bush spoke about his own conversion to Catholic and how he opposes elected officials who think they should keep their faith “in a safety deposit box.”

– Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell is trying to distance himself from a master’s thesis he wrote for Regent University in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family, according to The Washington Post.

He said government policy should favor married couples over ‘cohabitators, hom*osexuals or fornicators.’ He described as ‘illogical’ a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.”

– Controversial Bishop Joseph F. Martino of Scranton, Pa resigned. Michael Paulson and others are taking note because the bishop would criticize its own Vice President Joe Biden, as well as various local Catholic institutions, mostly because of abortion.

– Dan Gilgoff considers the differences of the faith-based offices between the Obama and Bush Administration. “President Obama’s faith-based office has given religious figures a bigger role in influencing White House decisions,” he writes. “We would have gotten killed for doing that,” Jim Towey, who directed Bush’s faith-based office told Gilgoff. “It looks like a political office now.”

When did conservative Christians become odd, fascinating creatures to bring under the journalistic lens? The friendly poking and prodding predated God’s Harvard (Harcourt, 2007), religion writer Hanna Rosin’s dispatch from an 18-month visit to Patrick Henry College, but her account certainly exemplifies the genre. Admitting upfront that she is “democratic almost to a fault,” Rosin spent much of that book trying to cast a humanizing light on conservative Christian youth at the “Harvard for Homeschoolers” in Purcellville, Virginia. Yes, they were sheltered, perfectionist, naïve about the things normal college students indulge in, and driven, to Rosin’s dismay, to “take back the nation” via political and cultural power. Yet they also were becoming open to the world beyond homeschooling life, and were starting to question their inherited model for living out faith in the world. In the students she befriended, Rosin saw an embodiment of evangelicals’ move into the American mainstream—or, as the cover of Christianity Today’s golden anniversary issue put it in 2006, their journey from “cultural curiosities to the new internationalists.”

If God’s Harvard was a portrait of Patrick Henry in words, then Jona Frank’s Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League—published last fall, when the presidential election campaign was still in full swing—should serve as a companion volume, a portrait in, well, portraits. A West Coast photographer interested in American adolescence, Frank learned of Patrick Henry from Rosin’s 2005 coverage in The New Yorker. Frank intended to visit the school for a project about teenage boys, but quickly became intrigued by PHC at large. “I felt like I had walked into a strange time warp,” writes Frank in the book’s postscript. “The first generation of homeschoolers was coming of age, and I was awash with curiosity.”

That curiosity resulted in a sleek collection of Frank’s photographs—mostly of students, but also of their many-membered families, and of paper documents that Frank apparently thought necessary to include for us to grasp Patrick Henry. Among these documents is a homeschooled child’s glowing review of a George W. Bush biography; the school’s honor code proposal, which includes vows to abstain from alcohol and to seek parental guidance when pursuing romantic relationships; and a page from Home School Digest instructing girls how to be helpmeets who are “willing to give up all your dreams” upon marriage. Frank’s choice to include this last piece is a little irritating, especially as it’s placed alongside a picture of an ecstatic young woman huddled with friends in a candlelight ceremony for newly engaged students. It’s true: we can’t understand how Patrick Henry students, including this young woman, think of matrimony apart from the prescriptions given in childhood. But Frank’s juxtaposition suggests a direct pipeline from idea to person—that these students are no more than conduits of a way of living Frank clearly finds “other.” In her introduction to Right, Hanna Rosin writes, “Jona’s gift is to be able to see … the common uniform of the school, without resorting to cliché or judgment.” Yes, Frank does seem more charitable toward her subject matter than many previous onlookers. It’s hard to tell, though, if these documents are intended to help us more fully understand, or to keep Frank’s subjects at arm’s length—to emphasize that they are nothing like you and me.

Still, Frank is foremost a photographer, and she lets most of the images in Right speak for themselves. Her subjects look head-on at the camera with an earnestness that conveys concerns far beyond college life. Most Patrick Henry students wear ties or pantsuits and appear ever-prepared for work, though not without some nervousness about being center stage. Frank places her subjects in surroundings that most clearly reflect their identity: in the classroom, at home with parents and siblings, next to a painting of the founding fathers, on the campus lawn with a romantic interest. This is meant to depict Patrick Henry students as they really are, in their natural habitats. The lighting of the portraits suggests a stance of cool objectivity.

But while Frank’s style is candid and almost harsh, she doesn’t pretend to have the omniscient view of reality that much documentary photography of the early 20th century did. Right is not a hard-hitting investigation into conservative Christian youth with political aspirations, but rather an introduction to a religious community with cultural particularities often outside the American mainstream. In Right‘s final essay, curator and UCLA professor Colin Westerbeck identifies Frank as an artistic heir of Irving Penn, the celebrated portraitist. “Frank isn’t a news photographer,” he observes. “Like Penn’s portraits of public figures, Frank’s of the students at Patrick Henry College give you not just a chance to see her subjects, but a way to think about them.”

So, what are the ways Frank wants us to think about these students? In her other book of photography, High School (Arenas Street, 2004), Frank captured teenagers trying on personas borrowed from MTV and advertising. “I am captivated with states of becoming,” Frank writes, “and I am driven to make portraits of people as they … struggle with the pivotal moment between exploration and discovery.” Frank’s interest in metamorphosis emerges in Right as well: in the portrait of Taylor, a stubble-chinned young man wearing an oversized suit and confident gaze (p. 19); of Juli, proudly standing beside a portrait of George Washington on one page, and on another, patiently sitting with her siblings as their mom reads aloud from the Chronicles of Narnia (pp. 43, 51); and of Sherri and Paul, a couple who in one set revel in goofy traditions for the newly engaged, and in another, stand before a large cross as they make audacious commitments to fidelity and lifelong support that are more “adult” than some married adults can handle. These students are at once children and grownups, but not fully either.

Both Frank and Rosin are quick to find in this tertium quid a fable for politically conservative Christians’ journey from backwoods to big time (and maybe back to the woods, as talk of “the death of the Religious Right” has been revived in the Obama era). They are correct to see in Patrick Henry an explicitly political mission. The college’s founder, Home School Legal Defense Association president Michael Farris, sees Patrick Henry’s students as members of “the Joshua Generation,” who will “take back the land” from secular humanists and corrupt politicians by reaching positions of influence. Many PHC students study government and go on to intern with Republican congressmen or volunteer at the White House. (According to Anthony Buncombe’s 2004 profile in The New Zealand Herald, only one student had interned with a Democrat.) A couple of students Frank interviewed told her of being treated to pizza and sundaes at Attorney General John Ashcroft’s home. It’s no wonder reporters have invented an array of uncharitable nicknames for the students, and are quick to link them to Chancellor Farris’s less-than-PC statements on church and state.

But behind all this scary, ire-raising talk are the very students whom Frank and Rosin seemingly took pains to profile with even-handedness and grace. “The great thing about photography: It describes,” reads Frank’s postscript. “It allows us to glimpse a world different from our own. It brings us in and lets us think and wonder.” As a member of the evangelical community who would likely feel bothered at Patrick Henry, I nonetheless wish Frank had let us think and wonder about the school a bit more freely. I wish she had let her camera attest to the persistent failure of persons and communities to fall neatly into the demarcations we employ to try and grasp the messy reality of American life.

Katelyn Beaty is associate editor with Christianity Today magazine.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I‘m writing in the first week of August. Three nights ago, I started Thomas Pynchon’s just-published novel Inherent Vice, completing it the following night. You won’t have this issue of Books & Culture in your hands until several weeks later, by which time—if you are a Pynchonian—you will already have read the novel twice, maybe three times, even if it isn’t among your personal favorites. (My own list would start with The Crying of Lot 49, followed by Against the Day.) You may have visited the Inherent Vice wiki, maybe even contributed an annotation or two. In that case, you won’t mind spoilers, though you may be bored. If you haven’t read the novel yet but think you might, turn the page for now. And if you haven’t read the novel, have no intention of doing so (Pynchon isn’t your cup of tea, or you don’t read much fiction at all), but are still interested in a report, proceed to the next paragraph.

Inherent Vice is set in 1970 in a fictitious Southern California town, Gordita Beach (mentioned in Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, and bearing a resemblance to Manhattan Beach), where the protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello, is a private eye: “The sign on his door read LSD Investigations, LSD, as he explained when people asked, which was not often, standing for ‘Location, Surveillance, Detection.'” Imagine Philip Marlowe as a laid-back dope-smoking “gumsandal,” much less physically impressive than the Chandler prototype, on the short side in fact, but winsome in his own way, and you begin to get the picture. Sure enough, the book begins with Doc, like Marlowe and Lew Archer before him, visited by a client of sorts:

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking like she swore she’d never look.

In addition to framing the book as an homage to and parody of the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, and the offshoots thereof, this opening paragraph suggests that we will be getting a morality play pitting flatlanders, denizens of “straightworld,” against the free spirits of Gordita Beach, who will inevitably be crushed. Some early readers of the novel have described its mood as nostalgic—mourning the loss of “the Sixties,” yes, but with an emphasis on savoring that moment in time with Pynchon’s enjoyably fanatical attention to detail, memorializing even the most obscure surf bands. And of course there are the Pynchonian names: Ensenada Slim and Coy Harlingen, Dr. Blatnoyd and Dr. Threeply, Detective Lieutenant Bigfoot Bjornsen, LAPD, and Trillium Fortnight, one of the most affecting characters in the tale, who teaches music theory at UCLA and moonlights as “a woodwind specialist in early-music ensemble gigs. ‘Anything from a double-quint pommer down to a sopranino shawm, I’m your person.'” Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker (“Soft-Boiled,” his review is wonderfully titled), concludes that “Inherent Vice is generally a light-hearted affair” even as he acknowledges “familiar apocalyptic touches.”

With Pynchon, a first reading is a reconnaissance, but my first impression of the book, for what it’s worth, is quite different. That may have something to do with my confirmed loathing for druggie narratives (fiction, nonfiction, anything in between) and stoner humor. Obviously Pynchon relishes all this. Still, what I felt most strongly while reading the novel was a visceral sense of sadness and fallenness, human fallenness (my own included), like a bad smell—rotten potatoes, say—that’s hard to get out of your nostrils for a long time after you have taken it in. Maybe that isn’t what Pynchon intended at all, but it seems to follow from the story itself, and moreover it seems to implicate the cool folk, the refugees from straightworld, every bit as much as their uptight counterparts. (The fate of Trillium Fortnight is a case in point.)

The byzantine plot in which Doc finds himself entangled naturally involves deep machinations of principalities and powers (in the Los Angeles Police Department, maybe the CIA, not to mention conniving developers and other familiar villains) in addition to plain thuggery. Clearly Pynchon’s sympathies lie with those who have been cheated, lied to, stolen from, and otherwise abused by self-styled guardians of public order. But human bentness seems pervasive in Pynchon’s novel, as in the great big world outside.

Near the very end of the book, there is a reference to the title—a term in marine insurance, according to Doc’s lawyer friend, Sauncho Smilax. Elsewhere a legal dictionary defines “inherent vice” as a “loss caused by the inherent nature of the thing insured and not the result of a casualty or external cause.” (Doc asks, “Is that like original sin?”)

After I finished Pynchon’s novel, I emailed a friend about the smell, the taste of fallenness, not only in Inherent Vice but in the next book in my stack, William Vollmann’s Imperial, which I have just started. I was thinking about our attempt to recover a sense of the persisting goodness of creation, which has sometimes been lost among evangelicals, so strong is our tradition’s recognition of the reality of sin. “Yes, fallenness,” my friend wrote back. His wife and their nine-year-old daughter had taken a walk a couple of days earlier, and they came across a small turtle in the road that had apparently been hit by a car. It was either dead or dying when they found it. My friend’s wife picked it up and put it in the grass by the side of the road. That night after their daughter was tucked in, he heard her sobbing and went to find out what was troubling her.

“I just can’t get the look in its eyes out of my memory,” she said. “It was so sad. I hope it didn’t suffer before it died, but if it was going to suffer I’m sure God would have killed it so it wouldn’t suffer.”
How can I explain to my wonderful, sensitive, beauty-loving nine-year-old that sometimes, many times, most of the time, innocent creatures do suffer, and suffer terribly, long before they find the mercy of death?
The creation is good and beautiful, and also wrong and terrible, and somewhere in there I hope, and my daughter hopes, there is a loving purpose. Sighs too deep for words.

It’s Pynchon’s unsentimental eye for human wreckage that makes the conclusion of Inherent Vice all the more remarkable. Doc is driving home on the Santa Monica Freeway as the fog rolls in and thickens:

He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind. After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind him. He was in a convoy of an unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anyone in this town, except hippies, do for free.

Doc muses about what might happen if the fog stayed too thick for him to find his way to an exit. Maybe he would keep driving all the way across the border, “where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody.” But

he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over to the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. for a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

Amen.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As one of John Calvin’s biographers has put it, predestination became the “werewolf of Reformed theology”: an often dormant doctrine that periodically awoke with frightening ferocity.[1] Peter Thuesen, a historian of American religion at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, has attempted to describe the story of the beast in America. In his account, nearly the whole of American religious history can be seen as a confrontation between proponents and critics of varieties of the doctrine of predestination, which he defines as the assertion that God determined the spiritual fate of “individuals—and even the Fall of humans into original sin—without regard to their foreseen conduct.” Switching the animal metaphor, he posits predestination as “the proverbial elephant in the living room of American denominationalism.”

In this short book, Thuesen can offer only a selective but nonetheless suggestive account. Retracing the origins of the doctrine, he focuses first on Augustine, who argued that every person was born in original sin and that God bestowed saving grace only on some, apart from any choice of theirs. This position, though never uncontested, became official orthodoxy in the West through the medieval period; even Thomas Aquinas defended it. Late medieval Christians, however, tacitly bypassed the Augustinian position when they developed a sacramental piety—a combination of mystical experience and voluntary participation in sacred ritual—that invested believers with power to choose at least the quotient of grace to assist them on the path to salvation. Luther and Calvin reasserted predestination to be a crucial element in Christian teaching. Calvin especially emphasized God’s sovereignty, a consoling belief for the displaced Protestants suffering under Catholic persecution. He maintained that the Fall (into original sin) itself effected God’s will. For the Reformers, belief in predestination implied utter confidence in a sometimes inscrutable God. It evinced, as Thuesen nicely puts it, a “piety … pure and undefiled, monotheism in its most authentic and compelling form.”

Having given his definitions, Thuesen recounts what he deems to have been a lamentable “decline” during the 17th century—the period of so-called Protestant scholasticism—into doctrinal squabbles, logic-chopping precision, and, overall, a chilling rationalization that voided predestination of its mystery and grace. Puritans such as William Perkins developed it into a detailed system resting on supralapsarianism: the idea that God decreed election of the saved and damned before (or above, “supra”) the Fall (“lapse”), meaning that God controlled every moment of human history from eternity, including the origins of sin itself. When the Dutch divine Jacob Arminius proposed a less severe alternative, that sin was freely chosen and God elected those whom he foresaw would exercise faith, hard-line Calvinists rushed to reassert the absolute sovereignty of God over all things human. In the Netherlands, they opposed so-called Arminianism with the decrees of the Synod of Dort: the affirmation of total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints (making the properly Dutch acronym TULIP). Not to be outdone, Puritan divines in England encoded Perkins’ supralapsarian thesis into double-predestination clauses—God chose some individuals to be saved and chose others to be damned, possibly including infants—in the Westminster Confession of 1644, a nearly canonical text for later Calvinists.

Thuesen eventually brings the doctrine across the Atlantic, showing how tensions between Augustinian predestination and varieties of Arminianism played themselves out in America. In early New England, spiritual virtuosos sometimes experienced “a kind of ecstatic agony” in the doctrine, but the bulk of lay Puritans found Westminster’s creed altogether nerve-wracking. As a result, they embraced religious strategies that offered some measure of personal control over salvation: sacramental and filial piety, ecstatic experience, and a commonsense moral perspective imported through English Anglicans of a liberal or latitudinarian bent. During the 18th century, predestination divided American evangelicals. Calvinists such as Jonathan Edwards argued that teaching the doctrine aided religious revival because it drove people to despair of self-effort and rely on grace; Arminians such as John Wesley maintained that it hindered evangelism because it induced apathy and moral revulsion.

Thuesen’s account of the early Republic and antebellum America reveals his sympathies for predestination’s detractors. He links the popularity of Wesley’s Methodism, the development of a liberal and anti-predestination strain in northern Protestants such as Catherine Beecher, and the creation of new religious communities such as the Stone-Campbell Christians, Adventists, Christian Scientists, and Mormons.[2] They all joined a democratic, rational, and American revolt against the “shackles of old scholasticisms.” Free will, free grace, unlimited atonement, and evangelistic calls to choose Christ, according to Thuesen, made more sense to Americans than decrees laid down with cold, inflexible precision.

The rest of Thuesen’s book, covering the 19th and 20th centuries, offers vignettes of modern American denominations and their eventual dissociation from predestinarian orthodoxy. In this context he treats Catholic efforts to sidestep debates on predestination and encourage instead a sacramental piety that resonated with laypeople and parish priests. And he recounts the late-19th-century Lutheran contest between predestinarian confessionalists such as Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther, an early leader of the Missouri Synod, and less doctrinaire pietists for whom sacramental sensibilities served as an “antidote to predestinarian angst.”

The history of Presbyterians and Baptists, according to Thuesen, also followed their handling of predestination. Presbyterian conservatives tied orthodoxy in general to strict adherence to the Westminster Confession. They defended supralapsarian doctrines as nearly empirical facts, while liberalizing factions attempted to loosen the stranglehold of double-predestination on Reformed theology.[3] As a result, the Presbyterian Church in the United States split into Old School conservatives, led by Charles Hodge at Princeton Seminary, and New School, anti-predestinarian evangelicals. While southern Presbyterians found predestination congenial to racial ideologies, northern evangelicals and liberals emancipated themselves from double predestination, most famously in a 1903 Declaratory Statement that qualified the Westminster confession. Hardened predestinarians subsequently created the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America. Similar divisions, albeit in a less centralized and scholarly fashion, affected Baptist denominations during the same period. Current leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, such as Albert Mohler, Jr., and Frank Page, have hotly debated the Calvinist inheritance.

In his somewhat perplexing epilogue, Thuesen probes one example of a contemporary megachurch, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, for evidence of predestination in popular, purpose-driven Protestantism. Finding no more than mere traces of the doctrine, he concludes that modern disregard for the Augustinian tradition represents a larger trajectory. “Predestinarian debates,” by Thuesen’s reading, “often became sterile exercises” that “made predestination deadly—and sometimes deadly boring,” and therefore dispensable. His interpretation thus suggests the need for a recovery of mystery and grace-filled assurance, especially in the form of sacramental devotion.

It is a brave thing to take on an intellectual history of such a complex issue in these days of cultural and social approaches to religion. Thuesen admirably does the job, but his general perspective—conveyed through the book’s epigraph from Mark Twain, who ridiculed “creeds mathematically precise, and hairsplitting niceties of doctrine”—prevents a full appreciation for the resilience of technical debates about predestination. Thuesen admittedly hints at the appeal of the doctrine, yet he minimizes what his own evidence shows: that the devotees of Dort and Westminster, quarrelsome evangelicals of the 18th century, Old School Presbyterians, and Missouri Synod Lutherans achieved something akin to the status of public intellectuals. They entered a rancorous but lively and widely consumed debate about being Christian in the American democratic context.

The appeal of predestination clearly diminished in post-Enlightenment America, but I suspect that this decline had more to do with shifting psychologies and moralities than with intellectual abstraction, logic, precision, creedalism, or argument per se. Thuesen sometimes takes Victorian-era critics of doctrinal rigor, such as Beecher or Twain, at face value, while dispensing with the theologians and their many followers who found the logic of predestination to be anything but boring. Calvinists rarely divorced even the most technical doctrines from everyday social concerns. Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will, perhaps one of the most persuasive philosophical defenses of predestination, was embraced by fervent patriots in revolutionary New England. So too, 19th-century predestinarians were doctrinally picky and socially engaged: they participated in the Protestant missionary movement, abolition of slavery, and social reform. Thuesen uncovers little appetite for doctrinal detail at Saddleback, but he might also have considered the neo-Calvinism that attracts thousands to avant-garde urban congregations such as Seattle’s Mars Hill Church. Theological precision has its own beauty.

The 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth (on July 10, 1509) has occasioned many conferences devoted to his legacy. I attended one recent gathering in Geneva, where scholars addressed topics such as Calvin and the economy, Calvin and practical piety, Calvin and religious conflict—nearly everything but Calvin and you-know-what. At another recent conference, held at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, the organizers had no such qualms. They opened one session of the conference to the public: an evening roundtable on the meaning of predestination. The event was so popular that it left many of us participants standing in the aisle.

Peter Thuesen’s book introduces us to the American historical precedents for such ambiguity. It may cause us to ponder whether disagreements among believers over a sometimes impenetrable doctrine that affronts common sensibilities isolates the Christian message from outsiders. Then again, his interpretation never quite allows us to grasp why all those people in Grand Rapids bothered to show up. The history of the doctrine is as wonderfully complex as the doctrine itself.

Mark Valeri is E.T. Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education.

1. Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, trans. M. Wallace McDonald (Eerdmans, 1995), p. 323.

2. Thuesen draws from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale Univ. Press, 1989).

3. Here Thuesen relies on E. Brooks Holifield’s Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (Yale Univ. Press, 2003), an influential survey that connects Reformed theology to factually oriented, empirical theories of knowledge.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Stan Guthrie and John Wilson talk about Scott Cairns’ new book.

Michael Chabon’s brief 2007 novel Gentlemen of the Road is the kind of story invariably described as “swashbuckling.” It involves swordplay, axeplay, horsetheft, mysterious potions, damsels in disguise as well as distress, and, to speak generally, the full panoply of effects common to the kind of boy’s adventure story that had its heyday a hundred years ago—though it must be said that few of those older tales, as I recall, were set near the end of the first Christian millennium and in the region of Central Asia dominated by the Khazars, that strange tribe of converts to Judaism; nor did the damsels of such books curse like drunken sailors. The story has chapters with titles like “On Anxieties Arising from the Impermissibility, However Unreasonable, of an Elephant’s Rounding Out a Prayer Quorum.” It is not remotely the sort of book that anyone would have predicted from Chabon when, twenty-one years ago, he published his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Chabon knows this, and adds an afterword to Gentlemen of the Road in which—having noted that his working title for the book was Jews with Swords—he comments on the turn his career has taken:

As recently as ten years ago I had published two novels, and perhaps as many as twenty short stories, and not one of them featured weaponry more antique than a (lone) Glock 9mm. None was set any earlier than about 1972 or in any locale more far-flung or exotic than a radio station in Paris, France. Most of those stories appeared in sedate, respectable, and generally sword-free places like The New Yorker and Harper’s, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters—disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce— I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life.

Chabon insists that he doesn’t repudiate any of that work. He just wants to contend that it is perfectly reasonable for him to do what he did in writing Gentlemen of the Road: take off “in search of a little adventure.”

Chabon’s collection of essays, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, is probably best understood as an extended, entertaining defense of readerly and writerly adventure—and of the sheer pleasure that such adventure often brings. Essential to this defense is a thoughtful and loving account of the ways that children read. And there is one other important element to Chabon’s argument—if we can call it an argument—that we will return to at the end of our own little adventure.

After a brief survey of the modern short story that makes many of the same points as the afterword to Gentlemen of the Road—and exhorts writers not to fear “entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure”—Chabon moves on to the title essay, in which he recalls his early life in the planned city of Columbia, Maryland. What most fascinates him as he remembers those years, what provides an ongoing metaphor for his thoughts about reading and writing, is the fact that the founders of Columbia had laid out neighborhoods and streets and given them names—Phelps Luck (a Neighborhood), Harper’s Choice (a Village), Newgrange Garth (a Street)—before anyone lived there. The “maps and legends” of Columbia invited those who viewed them to imagine the worlds they only slightly and vaguely invoked.

In another essay Chabon comments,

Readers of Tolkien often recall the strange narrative impulse engendered by those marginal regions named and labeled on the books’ endpaper maps, yet nevervisited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings. All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure.Through a combination of trompe l’oeil illusions,of imaginative persistence of vision, it creates a sense ofan infinite horizon of play, an endless game board; it spawns, without trying, a thousand sequels, diagrams, and Web sites.

Maps and legends again. Chabon was initiated into this experience, encountered this “strange narrative impulse,” when he read his first Sherlock Holmes story. “I was born the first time in Georgetown University Hospital, in 1963,” he writes, “and the second time ten years later, in the opening pages of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’ ” Almost immediately he sat down to write his own Holmesian adventure, faithfully narrated by Dr. Watson. And so Michael Chabon became a writer.

But a decade later, as “an English Major, and a regular participant in undergraduate fiction-writing workshops, I was taught—or perhaps in fairness it would be more accurate to say I learned—that science fiction was not serious fiction, that a writer of mystery novels might be loved but not revered, that if I meant to get serious about the art of fiction I might set a novel in Pittsburgh but never on Pluto.” This is no criticism of Pittsburgh, mind you, but simply a plea for the fictional possibilities of Pluto. Or the largely imaginary London of Holmes and Watson. It is pleasant in light of this narrative to recall Chabon’s extraordinary short novel of 2004, The Final Solution, which features as its protagonist an old man, a retired detective who now lives in a small cottage on the Sussex Downs and keeps bees, whose once-world-famous deductive powers are not, it proves, diminished beyond recall or use. Perhaps the novel means less as a tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than as an act of reconciliation with Chabon’s ten-year-old self. You were right all along, kid.

In a sense, Chabon writes, “all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me … . All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” Influence is bliss because reading is bliss, and one of the gifts this book brings is its exploration of writers—as varied as Cormac McCarthy and Philip Pullman—for whom other books, previous books, are living beings with which (with whom) we converse and from whom we draw both instruction and delight. They have the breath of life in them, like Adam inspired by God, or the golems brought to life by the rabbis of old.

The Golem—in Jewish legend, a clay figure animated by prayer and incantation and a Divine Word inserted into its mouth or inscribed on its forehead—is a central figure for Chabon. The most fanciful essay in this collection is called “Golems I Have Known.” One makes an appearance in his 2001 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was perhaps Chabon’s first major act of homage to his past, devoted as it is to the making of comic books. (Chabon was addicted to comics as a child, still writes about them today—several of the essays in Maps and Legends concern comics—and was a co-screenwriter for Spiderman 2.) But perhaps I should say not his past but his identity, for Chabon is Jewish, and as often as he notes, in these essays, his long neglect of his childhood reading habits, he equally often notes his years of neglecting his Judaism. The longest essay here is an autobiographical one on just this subject, and borrows its title from another literary exile, Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands.”

This is that “other important element” of Chabon’s argument that I promised I would deal with, and what is most extraordinary about it is its complex intertwining with all the other stuff we’ve been talking about. The Final Solution is set in 1944, and brings the elderly Sherlock Holmes into contact with a German Jewish refugee and, indirectly, with the world of the death camps—thus the shocking and, for a faithful reader of the book, deeply moving double meaning of the title. Similarly, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate-history tale, a hard-boiled detective story, and a meditation on the history of Judaism, with its unique weaving of persistence and tragedy.

It may not seem to you or me that these themes necessarily belong together; we may believe that it is simply an accident of personal history that Chabon finds himself, in the midst of his career and with four children of his own, simultaneously rethinking his childhood reading habits and his Judaism. But in that afterword to Gentlemen of the Road—or Jews with Swords—with which I began this review, Chabon offers the extraordinarily suggestive idea that there is an intrinsic connection after all:

The story of the Jews centers around— one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and backagain. For better or worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leavehome. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.