Regent Bookstore :: Footnotes

A Tree that Marks

2007-12-05T16:17:00.001-08:00

The sun came out for a few minutes this afternoon. Life just clicked for me today. My bother-in-law had called this morning with a coupon for a time-share condo that my family could use sometime in a beautiful part of the world. A couple of hours later I breathed a sigh of relief after finishing marking the 61st and last essay of a course that I TA for. The wind just filled my sails and I sat back in my swivel chair with my second latte of the day.

Circumstances. So often they dictate our happiness. Even our spiritual experience. I am in good health. They say that middle-age for males can be the most satisfying years. But I think of another bookseller who has just suffered a coronary. I had lunch today with a friend who is slowly adjusting to the hard, cold reality of separation from his wife. Still another friend that I had lunch with on Tuesday experienced the “til death do us part” of his wedding vows as his wife succumbed to cancer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Sitting at my computer I read regular updates on another friend’s “bloody” experience with chemo. And all the time that I go about my daily routines another friend’s father lies across the street in a diaper, suffering from the painful sores that accompany the experience of lying for years in that hospital bed. I glance at my watch and have a momentary wince of regret that another week has gone without my taking those few steps that stand in the way of a brief visit.

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Alister McGrath debated Christopher Hitchens in DC this past week. I look forward to listening to the debate on the web sometime soon. I read that Hitchens quipped something to Alister about not believing that Jesus healed the blind man since God hasn’t healed blindness. Why not?

The Why not? remains a mystery to me. You come to something approaching terms with it as you make your way through life. I am not referring to stoic terms. Again and again I fall upon the distinctively evangelical understanding of the death of Christ. I have not read through The Cross of Christ by John Stott, but a number of times I have read the passage from it on Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel, and the Cross of Christ. Stott writes in response to Wiesel:

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God whowas immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have to turn away. And in imagination I have turned to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wretched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. “The cross of Christ . . . is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours.

John Stott, The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity Press, 1986.

A few weeks ago I visited a little bookstore in Stanwood, WA, birthplace of Eugene Peterson. It was the 60th anniversary of the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, (September 21, 1937) and we wanted to pick up a copy for a friend who was an MA in English Literature but had never read it. I’ve asked before if they carried anything by Stanwood’s most published author and on this visit I was pleased to see a copy of The Message in the New Age/Religion section. At the front of the store in the “New Releases” section I noticed a copy of Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, strategically placed alongside Mother Teresa’s posthumous Come Be My Light. Some years ago Hitchens pilloried Mother Teresa in a book entitled The Missionary Position. Now here was that little woman standing up to Hitchens simultaneously on the main street of Stanwood, WA and on the NY Times bestseller list, where it remains ahead of Hitchens.

Mother Teresa is an embodiment of the biblical paradox of deep strength in weakness. Her book gives the reader a glimpse of her often deep, inward despair, a despair that Hitchens interprets as manifest proof of the absence of God. But surely God has rather manifested great power by taking a small Albanian woman, born in Skope, Macadonia, and giving her the agency to transform the lives of the dying in Calcutta and to rebuke the powerful in the halls of places such as Harvard.

Over the centuries Word, theology and music have been able to combine in ways that speak to us and for us.

There is a river that washes you clean
There is a tree that marks the places you've been
Blood that was spilled, although not your own,
For all of your tears, are the wages for things you have done

And all of those nights
Spent alone in the darkness of your mind
Give it up, Let go
These are things you were never meant to shoulder

So, give up the right
To control the waves that empty out your life
Above wild skies
Are the rays that break the shadows we design

I know the world can turn in different ways
Most of the time, we're simply hanging on
And under the signs of how we all behave
We might find the place that we belong

There is a river that washes you clean
There is a tree that marks the places you've been
Blood that was spilled, although not your own
For all of these things, love will atone

-Jars of Clay, from “Good Monsters”

Bill Reimer, October 19, 2007

Herding Turtles

2007-07-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens is a writer that I always enjoy reading in spite of being worlds apart when it comes to religious belief. His new book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is for the believer a bit of a white-knuckle, high speed Disney-type ride that has a few stomach-tightening moments. But after reaching the exit and closing the cover of the book, this reader was left with the feeling that Hitchen’s world remains another world and even an unreal world.

The book opens with Mrs. Jean Watts, Hitchens’s childhood religion teacher, a kindly widow with a dog named Rover who gets it all wrong, according to Hitchens, when she asserts that:

So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be.

I was reminded of some words of Garrison Keillor who once said in an interview on the CBC that “the Plymouth Brethren aunt living in Minnesota has a much bigger, grander view of the universe than the person that lives in New York.” Hmm.

I am a Christian who has always battled with periodic doubts about the truth of what I believe. I remember my baptismal interview at age fourteen when my pastor (he later left the ministry and the love of his family for his secretary) asked if I knew myself to be a Christian “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” “Yes,” I lied. For Hitchens there is no “shadow of a doubt” that god has an existence. For him the last Christians with any substance were the likes of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or C.S. Lewis. Lewis and Pascal have some good qualities but both are marked by “an appalling load of strain that they have to bear.”

Pascal, Lewis and Bonhoeffer would have course found that ultimately this “yoke is easy and his burden light.” Pascal died after receiving the sacrament with tears in his eyes and crying out “May God never abandon me!” Just before going to the gallows Bonhoeffer wrote, “For me this is the end, but also the beginning of life.”

According to Hitchens today we have “no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter.” The contemporary examples of Christians today that bear mention in, God is not Great, are Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson. The Christian thought of a Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher, or the Lithuanian-born, Nobel-prize poet, Czeslaw Milosz, are conveniently overlooked (although Milosz is described by Hitchens, without reference to his Christian beliefs, as “the great laureate of Poland”).

I was left scratching my head as to how this Oxford educated public intellectual could say of the Nag Hammadi “Gospels” that they were of the “same period and provenance” as many of the “authorized” Gospels. Or his seeming acceptance of the Wells thesis of my childhood that even questions the historical existence of Jesus. (Wells was an English professor of German and how that qualified him to be an expert on New Testament history I’m not sure.)

Without God it would seem that the only way Hitchens can account for the existence of something is by proposing an endless multiversity of universes. Some years back I heard a theoretical physicist use the legend of the earth sitting on the back of a turtle to characterize this multi-universe doctrine. The story has numerous variants but it always ends with “its turtles all the way down!”

James Connor, in Pascal’s Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God, asks the questions that need to be asked of Hitchens (and it must be added that Hitchens sees Pascal’s theology as “sordid” and his wager as “hucksterish”):

For myself, I’d rather not believe in multiple universes. They don’t excite my imagination. Just more real estate. I sometimes imagine them filled with a trillion variants of strip malls, of quintillion variants of MacDonalds. What would a Big Mac be like in Universe #43,598,567,321? Would the secret sauce taste the same? Personally, this one universe is enough for me. I find it to be as weird as I can handle. Weirdness is a value in and of itself, for in weirdness lies poetry, and in poetry lies beauty, and in beauty lies truth, weird as it is. Pascal would appreciate this.

So in the end the worldview of Mrs. Jean Watts does better against the blade of Ockham’s razor than does the thought of Christopher Hitchens, named number five on a list of “The Top 100 Public Intellectuals.” For Hitchens, in spite of his awe and wonder at the universe, it can only be “turtles, all the way down.”

"Veni Creator"

Come, Holy Spirit,
Bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in the church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me-after all I have some decency–
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.

-Czeslaw Milosz: Selected Poems 1931–2004
Berkeley, 1961

Bill Reimer
July 13, 2007

That Other Code

2006-08-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

The combination of The Da Vinci Code and September 11 has played out in interesting ways on the book bestselling lists. Sometime after Da Vinci was released I noticed a marked interest in books about Mary Magdalene and the apocryphal gospels. Although most of these books are, like Da Vinci, sensational in the extreme, there are a few serious scholars who have capitalized on the phenomenon. Bart Ehrmann a New Testament scholar from University of North Carolina, has written a cluster of books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the aggregate. Their jackets carry provocative titles such as Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew; Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make it into the New Testament; Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine. But the big surprise has been Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why which cracked the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list and even today after 10 months is still tracking at #382 on amazon. Note the conspiratorial sounding titles. I’m sure Regent’s Gordon Fee, one of the world’s foremost NT textual scholars, must be shaking his head in disbelief at this book, which is mainly about textual criticism, gracing the bestselling lists. I am myself not a NT scholar but am fascinated by Ehman’s brief consideration of the very early “proto-orthodox” documents such as the Didache (ca. 100) and 1 Clement (ca. 96) and the way he seeks to maximize the diversity of the early church by focusing on later Gnostic writings.

What has really caught my attention about the Ehrman phenomena is his personal story. In an interview with the Washington Post he called himself a “happy agnostic (although a colleague of mine heard him describe himself as a “Protestant atheist”) and described his understanding of life after death: “I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.” Ehrmann studied at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and Wheaton College in the late 1970s and gradually found himself moving away from faith during this time. (Interestingly I was working as an intern in a church office at the same time about 100 yards away from Moody, and was in the process of moving back towards Christian faith after a time of intense intellectual doubt. As I write this I just nailed a mosquito!)

Books by atheists seem to be making a comeback and this I would attribute largely to September 11 and the polarization of politics in the U.S. Many have come to view religious beliefs as uniformly dangerous with evangelicals becoming the equivalent of militant Islamists. Combine this with Da Vinci, evangelical opposition to certain types of stem cell research and the aggressive promotion of Intelligent Design and we get the biggest market for atheist books since Bertrand Russell. Richard Dawkin’s, The God Delusion is already clocking at #325 on amazon and it isn’t due for another two months. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris arrives next month and is already #125 while his The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion still sits at #205 two years after being published.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by the Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett has attracted a good bit of attention from the reviewers. Interestingly enough both the TLS and the NY Review of Books ran with critical reviews by scientists who describe themselves as Christians (Freeman Dyson in the NYRB calls himself a skeptical Christian.) At one time reading a book such as Dennett’s would cause me to literally stiffen with fear as I took it off the shelf to risk a glance at the contents. As an undergrad university student in the sciences my Christian faith would fluctuate weekly, depending on the books I had read, from a despairing atheism to a faint flicker of Christian faith. Today I don’t find a book like Dennett’s very persuasive and I hope this is not simply a result of being a stuck-in-a-rut middle-aged male. The spell that Dennett seeks to break is “the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” Certainly he causes the Christian to think about all the suffering in the world and God’s apparent absence in the face of it. I remember thinking, when confronted with a relative in deep pain in a hospital burn unit, about why God doesn’t instantly heal these severe burn cases. Dennett certainly pushes one on this. It is not enough for the Christian to simply say “we can’t measure a sunbeam with a ruler.”

A new book, entitled The Language of God, by Francis Collins who is the head of the recently completed Human Genome Project, takes a crack at a personal, contemporary, and scientific argument for the truth of Christianity. Probably not since C.S. Lewis has an orthodox Christian academic hit the bestselling list in the way that Collins has. I noticed him at the #2 position on at least 2 days and he was in the top ten for at least a couple of weeks. Several days ago the publisher, Simon & Shuster’s Free Press imprint, announced 90,000 copies already in print. I found the book a good read, quite inspiring, and persuasive. It also has a wonderful description of DNA and the successful hunt that he was involved in to find the abnormal gene that causes cystic fibrosis. At the conclusion of the book Collins calls for a truce between science and faith as the two are entirely harmonious and the two centuries old conflict between the two entirely unnecessary. Alister McGrath echoes this viewpoint in his recent Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell, 2004). I do largely agree with Collins and McGrath but the accommodation of Christianity and science has understandably been more than a small hiccup.

Without getting into the issue of human origins, we now know that human beings have been living for at least 100-200,000 years. Archaeology is showing us today how brutal human life has been in the past. One book in particular has given me an entirely new perspective on this subject; Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization (Oxford, 1993). Imagine life for, say, a woman in Africa 60,000 years ago; a teenager coming of age in Eurasia 12,000 years ago; or a young Mayan warrior 1,200 years back? Life was no doubt, on average, short and marked by constant low-intensity internecine warfare. I do believe that Christianity with the Incarnation makes the best sense of this human past but still we are up against the deep mystery of human existence and suffering that Collins and McGrath are somewhat prone to paper over. In the end we as Christians simply fall upon the grace of God. Non-Christians tend not to see the harmony between science and faith. Kurt Kleiner, a science writer illustrates this in his review of Collins in the August 19^th Globe & Mail:

Collins berates atheists who argue that science leaves no room for God. Logically, he’s right-if you propose a God who lives completely outside time and space, then yes, science can not beused to disprove God. But neither does science give any reason to believe . . . . Science offers a consistent and satisfying world view in which God is completely unnecessary. Right or wrong, Collins proves by example that it is possible for an intelligent person with a deep understanding of science to believe in God. Whether he can argue anyone into that belief is a different question.

Even if Kleiner has got Collins wrong he illustrates the need for God to draw us to himself. Of late I’ve been listening to “Cash” by Johnny Cash. Recorded in his home during the last few weeks of his life it is a powerful testimony of faith in a time of deep suffering. I’ll give the last word to John Cash.

I Came To Believe
I couldn’t manage the problems I laid in myself
And it just made them worse when I laid them on somebody else
So I finally surrendered it all brought down in despair
I cried out for help and I felt a warm comforter there
And I came to believe in a power much higher than I
I came to believe that I needed help to get by
In childlike faith I gave in and gave him a try
And I came to believe in a power much higher than I
-Johnny Cash

Bill Reimer

PS For an excellent lecture by Francis Collins, “Are We More than our Genes,” check out http://gfcf-ubc.ca/archive_2003_2004.htm. An outstanding lecture by Alister McGrath, entitled “Has Science Killed God” is available for download purchase at regentaudio.com

The Post-C.S. Lewis Era?

2006-05-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

Writer, Bono apologist, and university chaplain Steve Stockman graced our campus here at Regent last summer. Steve is an astute observer of popular culture, so when he makes cultural observations I take notice. While he was here he gave an interview to a local, alternative journal, Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice. In it he made the comment in response to the question:

What do you make of the way Bono is modeling spirituality and justice?

Stockman:

On their recent tour, Bono at one point addressed the crowd, “Did you
come here to play Jesus, because I did.” I don’t want to simply say he’s
a Christian.” I want to know, what he is saying that we are missing? What
is it that we can learn from them [U2]? …Regent is interesting, but there’s
a lack of pop-culture post-C.S. Lewis. He died between “She loves you yeah,
yeah, yeah” and “I want to hold your hand.” A lot has happened in pop
culture since then, but who has held the flag higher at that level? [ than U2?]

Having spent the last 17 years just inside the front door at Regent I don’t feel that I can objectively say much about Regent and pop culture other than to say that Regent is the kind of place that would sponsor a lecture on U2 by a Steve Stockman. (It was a great lecture and you can download it at www.regentaudio.com). Steve delivers a challenging message to the church, and uses Bono as an example of a Christian who reaches out to the world. According to Stockman, “He [Bono] will befriend those I would not befriend. He welcomes those I would want to push out. The other side is that evangelicals’ relationship to U2 is that so many are dying to prove they aren’t Christians. Why?”

These are good observations. In many ways Bono and his fight against extreme poverty has parallels with Wilberforce’s 19th century leadership in the fight against slavery. Bono effectively uses his voice and stature to catch the ears and eyes of prominent world leaders from George W. Bush to Kofi Annan. Whether the issue is hunger, AIDS, malaria, or TB, the cover story on Bono as a Person of the Year makes it clear that Bono is absolutely and unselfishly, relentless in his seeking to let the West know that it is our crisis.

It is clearly a Christian duty to respond to extreme world poverty and we all have much to learn from Christians such as Bono, or non-Christians such as Jeffrey Sachs, for whom Bono writes the introduction to The End of Poverty. Aid is needed, but there are still questions to be asked about the aid agenda that is in the media spotlight. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but a few questions come to mind. Take a best case aid scenario such as Katrina. Here you had a disaster within the most advanced society in history. As I recall, Congress has allocated over $200 billion for the rebuilding of the region that was devastated. Even with this kind of aid there were still people living in tents weeks after the disaster. Or take Iraq. Whatever your views on the subject, the U.S. has poured over $1 billion into the country per week with no end in sight. The tsunami is another example in which all the combined aid agencies had a very difficult time absorbing the amount of aid that came in. Without the assistance of the U.S. and Australian militaries there would have been an aid disaster.

One expert who knows something about worldwide aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006). Eastley is a veteran economist who has spent his life in the trenches, working at development in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. The jacket blurb describes him as someone who “wears the good-humored but weary resignation of a lifetime idealist mugged at last by reality.” Easterley has the temerity to ask why, after the West has given $2.3 trillion in aid to the developing world over the last 50 years, there is so little to show for it. (In contrast the much-vaunted Marshall Plan was $213 billion in 2005 dollars). Easterley labels activists such as Bono and Sachs as the Planners who have big plans but seldom deliver what is really needed on the ground. In contrast, Eastlerley gives the nod to the Searchers. The Searchers don’t have it all figured out. Instead they tinker away on a smaller scale looking for practical schemes to help the poor and through trial and error find good solutions. Easterley makes for fascinating reading alongside Sachs. In the end I tend to think that we need a bit, make that a lot, of both approaches.

I am disappointed in one respect with Bono’s media campaign. The media (and the academy) put clear strictures on discourse about social ills in the world today. The approved “sins” are those that concern race, gender, global warming, AIDS, TB, malaria, hunger, etc. There are deep-seated protocols that confine social protest to these topics. Issues such as the global slavery that exist in the world today (I understand there are more chattel slaves today than in the days of the North Atlantic slave trade), and in particular, partial-birth abortion are verboten. (Notice even I am under the influence of these protocols in that I have mentioned third-trimester, partial-birth abortion rather than abortion in general). When U2 was in town last year, Bono, in the middle of the concert, berated the then Canadian PM Paul Martin for not delivering on his pledge of 0.7 % of GNP for foreign aid. Can you imagine the reaction if Bono had instead chastised Martin on the barbarous practice of partial-birth abortion and then displayed Martin’s cell # on the big screen? Would Bono have made a Person of the Year? I doubt it, although it would have been Story of the Year.

After reading the Time Person of the Year article on Bono I took a trip to the library to look at the Time cover story on C.S. Lewis from September 8, 1947. I love the cover caption: “Oxford’s C.S. Lewis. His Heresy: Christianity.” How would one compare Lewis to Bono? Maybe it’s a bad question, but one that I ask. The Lewis article bluntly describes his Christian beliefs on a variety of subjects. God, death, sin and the Devil, sex, and Christianity among the intellectuals. In the Bono article one does not overtly pick up his Christian beliefs. However, if one peruses the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (Riverhead, 2005) his Christianity is splattered throughout the book. And one of his guides is clearly C.S. Lewis.

Returning to Steve Stockman and his comment about the post-C.S. Lewis era, I recently heard that someone had said that the C.S. Lewis for the post-C.S. Lewis era is C.S. Lewis. Hmm. With the release of the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia held down the #1 and #3 sales spots for books shipped by amazon over the Christmas season and even outsold Harry Potter (#2 was The World is Flat by Tom Friedman). All I can say, Steve, is that for the guy that left us between “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that’s called staying power. Let’s let Bono have the last word:

"Grace"
She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain
It could be her name

Grace
It's a name for a girl
It's also a thought that changed the world
And when she walks on the street
You can hear the strings
Grace finds goodness in everything

Grace, she's got the walk
Not on a ramp or on chalk
She's got the time to talk
She travels outside of karma
She travels outside of karma
When she goes to work
You can hear her strings
Grace finds beauty in everything

Grace, she carries a world on her hips
No champagne flute for her lips
No twirls or skips between her fingertips
She carries a pearl in perfect condition

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
-Bono

Bill Reimer, May 23, 2006

The Gospel of Judas: A Plea for Some Sanity

2006-05-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

The following is a guest commentary by Dr. Rikk E. Watts, Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Regent College.

The newswires have been buzzing this week with racy headlines announcing the newly published Gospel of Judas. Various members of the academy have chimed in. Bart Ehrmann declares it to be “one of the greatest historical discoveries of the twentieth century.” Another noted scholar Elaine Pagels triumphantly declares that it “explodes the myth of a monolithic religion, demonstrating how diverse and fascinating the early Xn movement was.” For those who have not heard, this gospel relates a purported secret conversation between Jesus and Judas during the last three days of the Passion Week. The juicy bit is actually just one line toward the very end where Jesus instructs Judas to betray him so that his eternal spirit can be freed from his mortal body.

Coming hard on the heels of The DaVinci Code, for some the Gospel of Judas raises new questions—did Jesus collude with Judas?—and presses old ones—was Judas really the bad guy, are the canonical gospels reliable, and is Christian orthodoxy merely a later suppression of an early, free-thinking carnival of ideas?

To put the headlines in perspective, I’d like to say some things about the actual content of GJu (Gospel of Judas) and then to reflect on what this document does and does not tell us.

First, the content. Even though we have about 3000 words of text, as with most ancient documents the manuscript is fragmentary. There are places where the text simply drops out. In general outline, GJu begins by telling us that it is a secret account of the revelation Jesus gave to Judas three days before his (Jesus’) death on Passover. It next recounts a conversation Jesus had with the twelve, but they are obtuse, work for “the other god,” and blaspheme Jesus in their hearts. Sensing Judas’ special spiritual sensitivity, Jesus separates him from the others and offers an enigmatic hint of his future superiority over the other disciples. Jesus then disappears (apparently to another realm). On his return, the disciples tell him of a vision they had about the Temple, which he interprets and which again reflects poorly on them. At this point, about half way through the document, Jesus focuses on Judas and launches into an extended Gnostic speculation on the cosmos which continues almost to the end when he reveals his unique plan for Judas.

The Gnostics were a diverse array of second century AD groups with an even more bewildering variety of doctrines which makes it very difficult to isolate any definitive body of teaching. Essentially these elitist groups believed the physical world and hence the body were inherently evil, and only the purified spirit good. This created something of a problem given that Genesis says God called creation good. In order to get around this and to separate the transcendent God (or, better perhaps, Good Spirit) from evil matter, the Gnostics proposed the existence a complex hierarchy of emanations—imagine the waves of a radio transmitter with the transcendent Good Spirit at the centre—which became more and more distorted the further they were from their origin. Far down the emanation chain came a lesser ignorant deity called the Demiurge, whom they often associated with the God of the Old Testament, who created matter and so caused the pure human spirit to become trapped in the prison of the material body. They were elitist because they believed that only a few specially enlightened people would eventually be saved. Most people, including most Christians, were too dull to gain the necessary insight. Finally, their Jesus was sardonic and escapist. More concerned with abandoning this world than transforming it, he is detached, clever, and self-absorbed. He is hardly to be confused with the canonical gospels’ Jesus who envisaged heaven on earth and a new humanity predicated on an inclusive love of not only one’s neighbor but one’s enemies.

It is not hard to see why the early shepherds (bishops) of the church strongly opposed the Gnostics. Israel’s God was not to be divorced from Jesus, nor Israel’s scriptures from what God had done in him. Creation is good and Jesus’ healing of bodies shows that they too are to be valued, as does Jesus’ own bodily resurrection. Finally, the entire ancient world was built on a crushing elitism. Early Christian belief undermined this since in Christ there was no longer Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free. In what was a scandalous claim at the time, they held that everyone had equal status before him. In denying that Christ’s death was sufficient for all the Gnostics were simply reintroducing the old pagan hierarchical elitism even if on their own terms.

In this particular document one finds then the characteristic fantastic references to emanations, aeons, clouds, and various beings fanning out from the one to four, then twelve, 24, 72, and finally 360, along with references to variously named angels, etc. There is also a strong animosity toward the disciples—they blaspheme Jesus in their hearts and they serve the other god—whereas, in true elitist form, Judas alone reflects on exalted things. And one meets the same superior, slightly mocking, and disengaged Jesus. Only toward the very end does one get the one line that has created this no small stir: “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” That is, you will release me from my body. Judas then enters a luminous cloud (his own transfiguration experience?) and hears a voice (all this purportedly happening by the way during the last three days of the Passion week). There’s another gap in the text (about five lines) and then Judas is in the temple and accepts money in return for information on Jesus’ whereabouts.

The point is not hard to see. Judas, far from being a traitor, was Jesus’ closest confidant and ally, and as such had the special task of betraying him so that he could be released from his body. In other words, Judas (and those who like him are “in the know”) alone of Jesus’ followers is the truly enlightened one (and all those thousands of ordinary Christians who follow the other disciples are not).

What can we say about all this? First, the reports are right in that GJu is indeed a truly ancient document. But based on well-established parallels, the developed nature of its cosmic speculations clearly indicates that GJu belongs to the second century. Indeed, the hostility toward the twelve and the rehabilitation of Judas helps us be even more precise. This fits well with a particular sect of Gnosticism known as the Cainites who sought to turn Cain, the people of Sodom, Esau, and Korah (who led the wilderness rebellion) into heroes. Irenaeus, a second century church father who steadfastly opposed the Gnostics, apparently refers to GJu and so this discovery also corroborates his accuracy. So it is old, but, and this is crucial, it is certainly not as old as the first century canonical gospels.

It also further illustrates the diversity of “Christian” belief from this period. But this hardly justifies Ehrmann’s and Pagel’s sensationalist claims. Anyone who has read the church fathers already knows about this diversity and the fathers have been around for 1800 years. What happened was that in the middle of last century scholars found ancient copies of the documents to which the fathers refer: primary evidence that these groups existed. So what is new is certainly not “diversity.” What’s new is this particular copy of a Gnostic document. But we’ve already found numbers of them before so most of what GJu says, apart from the comments about Judas, is largely ho hum. In this sense there was and is “no myth of a monolithic religion” in the second century to be exploded. We have known about it for a long time.

So why the fuss? First, Ehrmann and Pagels, by reading this second century diversity back into the first, want to suggest that the idea of a common core of orthodox belief in the first cent is a fiction imposed later by a hierarchical church. In other words the unity of the NT is the result of a conspiracy (enter the equally Gnostic-like speculations of The DaVinci Code, which apparently 17% of Canadians take to be largely true). Second, for others, GJu offers a more accurate account of what happened before Jesus’ death and so rehabilitates Judas.

But one can no more read back second century evidence into the first than one can read the twentieth century use of “gay” to mean sexual orientation back into nineteenth century reports of “gay” times at church picnics. Since the only concrete evidence for this kind of diversity is from the second century, the simplest and therefore most likely best explanation is that as the church expanded geographically and attracted more people the greater the potential of various fringe groups forming outside the mainstream. In other words, GJu is only evidence of growing diversity away from a core first century tradition, not of an initial first century diversity. As perhaps the premier North American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has pointed out, when the first century church father Ignatius took his long walk to Rome and martyrdom, the fact that he was well received at a host of small Xn communities along the way suggests they shared a common conception of their faith. Ehrmann and Pagels are engaging in wishful thinking—and as scholars they really ought to know better (and frankly we all end up getting tarred with the same sensationalist brush). There was no conspiracy and there is no myth to be exploded.

Finally, does GJu tell us anything about what really happened? Almost certainly not. The wild disembodied speculations of the group who created GJu do not inspire confidence. Would you buy a used car from these people? If there was a highly secret conversation between the uniquely enlightened Judas and Jesus, both of whom died very soon afterward, to whom was this story told and how was it passed on? Some might suggest that Judas passed it on to his friends and family in his last hours. But if Jesus did not share this secret teaching with the twelve whom he had chosen to be with him for nearly three years, why would Judas just a few days or hours later share it with even more unenlightened outsiders like his family or friends? Further, if Judas truly was the uniquely enlightened figure GJu suggests and if he was acting directly on Jesus’ instructions, why would he commit suicide just a few hours later (assuming of course that he did and did not end up marrying Mary Magdalene’s cousin before heading to India where he and Jesus spent the rest of their days constructing hidden clues for Dan Brown to discover)? But perhaps the biggest question is this. If all Jesus needed was to be freed from his mortal body, why use Judas? Why not just hand himself over or throw himself sans angels from the Temple (as in the Temptation)? Why the charade of a betrayal at all? Indeed, just how reasonable is it to suppose that after spending three years with Jesus the only one of his followers who really knew what was going on was Judas? Not very.

A friend of mine who works with Revenue Canada at a border crossing once told me that the fundamental assumption in his job is that “the truth is bottomless.” No matter how many questions you ask, the answers will fit. Clearly this is not the case with GJu. Even a few simple questions like these see the whole thing begin to unravel. Everything suggests that this is a later, somewhat clumsy, attempt by an fringe group to rewrite a well-entrenched betrayal tradition to fit their own particular elitist agenda.

So yes GJu is a new and interesting discovery for students of an aberrant and marginal second century group. But I suspect that once the circus has left town, more sober minds will see the present media brouhaha for what it is: a great deal of overblown fuss about a mildly interesting curiosity. Perhaps the more interesting question, at least for me as a member of the academy, is why do scholars who really ought to know better behave in this way? Would you buy a used car from them?

Rikk Watts, BSc (hons), MA (summa), MDiv (summa), PhD (Cambridge University). For more information on Rikk and Regent College click here.

RegentBookstore.com carries a number of compact discs, MP3-CDs, and audio cassettes by Rikk Watts. In addition, RegentAudio.com has MP3 downloads available, with more being added on a regular basis.

Friendship With Job

2006-01-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

Over the past 27 years my employment has been on the fringe of the academy. This has given me a ringside seat to hear scores of lectures and talks on a variety of subjects. Most memorable include John Stott in the lounge of an inner-city YMCA in Chicago in the winter of 1979 as I recall; in the fall of '82, Os Guinness in an oak-paneled room at the University of Chicago with a nimble-minded 22-year-old John Stackhouse in the back corner asking all the hard questions; Elie Wiesel at the University of MA sometime in the early 1980s (I still kick myself for not going to hear Mother Teresa during this time); John Lukacs in the fall of '99 addressing the history department at UBC on Hitler; Jean Bethke Elshtain in 2001 in Denver at the American Academy of Religion; Richard John Neuhaus at Robson Square here in Vancouver in the fall of 2000; and Desmond Tutu at UBC in the spring of '04 when he completely stole the show on a platform that included the Dali Lama.

Here at Regent I’ve also heard some outstanding lectures. Most memorable was Tom Wright one summer evening in '93 when he spoke in a jam-packed Regent chapel on the topic of “Who Was Jesus?” Others include Neil Postman on modernity in the winter of 2000; Ralph C. Wood on Tolkien in the summer of '03; Steve Stockman on Bono and U2 in the summer of '05; and just last month Alan Jacobs on C.S. Lewis.

When I think back I can’t remember much of what was said. Rather, I remember the speaker and the electric atmosphere of the audience. (I am also reminded that in deciding to be a bookseller rather than an academic I made a good choice. In a public forum I have a hard enough time trying to spit out a question let alone trying to give a lecture.)

There is one particular talk, which I haven’t mentioned, of which I do remember something of what was said. I think it was in the winter of '79, in a cold and dark church basement on LaSalle St. in Chicago. The speaker was Marjorie Branch, the principal of an all black, inner-city Chicago school. At some point in the talk Marjorie said something like this:

Now I want middle-class white values for my kids. This means good schools, good neighborhoods, police protection, good parks, and two-parent families.

The small audience was stunned. I’m sure some of us almost wet our pants. Here we were, Sojourner/Other Side types, mostly white male, young radical seminarians, who had left white suburbia to learn to minister in the inner-city. Now we were being told that what we left behind was what was needed for poor black kids. One of us, a guy by the name of Roy from Minneapolis who ended up going to medical school, spluttered some kind of a protest but for the most part we said nothing. You see, Marjorie was a Rosa Parks of the Chicago evangelical community. She and her brother had forced the issue of white racism to a head in the early 60s at Moody Church, where they were the first blacks to be received into membership at that historic evangelical establishment. What could we say?

(I am reminded of another incident during the Chicago winter of '79, the year of the Blizzard of '79. One crisp morning I came out of my apartment to find my little Honda at the top of a giant snow mound. I was stunned by the sight, as were all who saw it, including the tow truck driver who refused, for liability reasons, to pull it down. I was at a loss as to how it got up there until I saw the note on my windshield that I still possess. It said,

Next time I put you in lake.

[signed] Big Al

p.s. Me and my 4x4

Big Al thought he owned a parking spot on the street in front of the apartment. I called the police, and the officer who came shook his head and, not knowing what to do, said to me, “Well if I were you I would smash his window, toss a flare in and torch his truck." I protested that he might come after me with a baseball bat, and to that he said, “Well, wait until you move out of town.” Sounds like a Prairie Home Companion story but it really did happen!)

In my five years in Chicago I learned much from the radical evangelical (and sometimes not-so-evangelical) movement. I particularly respect those who have stayed in the city for the long haul to work with the poor. Most are not known outside of their places of ministry. Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, inner-city Christians who are known, are genuine Christian statesmen who I deeply respect for their integrity and commitment. As I was reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, it was the writing of Sider and Wallis that I turned to see what Christians were saying about globalization. Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, now in its 5th edition, has been enormously influential. Growing up in Ontario it was Sider’s book that most opened my eyes to see the poverty that existed in other parts of the world. At the end of the book Sider has a very powerful prayer. He writes:

If you want to be a member of God’s generous minority, I invite you to do one simple thing each day. It will only take a minute, but it might change your life. Daily, stop, for a moment, look into the face of Jesus Christ, and whisper softly, “Lord Jesus, teach my heart to share your love for the poor."

These are soul-penetrating words. And yet when Sider and Wallis leave aside critique and move to what needs to be done I find their writings, and radical Christian writings in general, less than satisfying. Sider in particular is now more accepting of global free markets but there is still an unreality that I sense in Rich Christians. How exactly would life expectancy in Somalia, where currently 20% of children die before the age of 5, be extended to 70 years? I can’t imagine it without massive changes in infrastructure which, beyond good government, would require huge amounts of concrete, hydrocarbons, asphalt roads, electricity, cell-phone networks, medical labs and equipment, and everything that full-scale modernity requires. Sure, there can be local adaptations and small-scale enterprise funded by micro-loans, but there is no significant bypassing of modernity in order to get to extended life expectancies and a generally improved quality of life for peoples that are mired in extreme poverty.

Differences among Christians concerning this subject are illustrated in Globalization and the Good, edited by Peter Heslam (Eerdmans, 2004). Hands-on business practitioners such as Shell’s Clive Mather and economist Brian Griffiths are side-by-side with Jim Wallis and Cambridge theologian Timothy Gorringe. While all espouse a Christian witness in the world, Wallis and Gorringe put the accent on a prophetic witness which is less than satisfying when it comes to the question of what steps need to be taken in order to end extreme poverty in a world of 6 billion people. The London School of Economics social thinker, Bernice Martin, levels trenchant criticism on Gorringe when, in a review of another of his works, she writes:

There is little by way of specific programme or policy beyond reference to “protest” and the construction of “concrete utopias or “counterhegemonies” alternative to the “global dominance of the market.” There is certainly no assessment of the eclipse of liberation theology or of the reason why the “poor” of the South themselves seem to prefer the Pentecostal option. But the empirical world impinges little upon the text; apart from a brief excursus on the gross facts of inequality, the argument stays at the level of theoretical abstraction.
Times Literary Supplement, July 15, 2005, p. 26

Tough words on a subject where there are no easy answers and where Christians will continue to disagree with each other vigorously.

This year under the Christmas tree was a package with my name on it, and in it was a copy of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, a book my son says every household should have a copy of. I enjoyed (not the right word) reading it and will try to write about it soon alongside some comments about Bono being named a “Person of the Year.” I do write this all as one who is conscious of the fact that writing about global poverty automatically makes one fall into the category of being “one of Job’s friends.”

Nonetheless . . . whatever one's perspective, the words from a song on the recent U2 How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, has something to say to us all:

"Yahweh"

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street
Take these shoes
And make them fit
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticise
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up
The sun is coming up on the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean…

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will
What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break
-U2

Bill Reimer
January 2, 2006
bookblog@regent-college.edu

By the way, a Google search tells me that Marjorie Branch is still watching out for “her kids” as at least until recently she was the Chicago representative of the nine member Illinois State Board of Education. Also, Regent has recordings of some of the lectures I mentioned: Wright RG2265J, Neuhaus RG3042, Lukas RGCD2043A, RGCD3309J, Stockman RGCD3509E, Jacobs RGCD3534E. That’s global capitalism for you!
www.regentbookstore.com

Rick Warren in a Flat World

2005-10-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

The World is Flat continues to stir up discussion and I have spotted a good number of reviews in key journals. The London School of Economics thinker, John Gray, whom I always read with interest, labels Friedman a neoliberal, economic determinist (NY Review of Books, Aug 11, 2005). This description fits loosely, but Friedman cannot be dismissed as a simple economic determinist. The mountain ranges that cultures present loom large on Friedman’s map. Cultural endowments are vital to the flattening process, with top marks going to cultures that are open and willing to change. If one were asked to predict what recent immigrant group to Britain had produced the most millionaires, one might predictably answer white South Africans or Hong Kong businessmen. The correct answer is Ugandan-born Indian minorities who were booted out of Uganda by Ida Amin in the 1970s. In a day when suicide bombers capture media attention, Friedman affirms the ongoing importance of culture and nationalism in a flat world. What Friedman tends to downplay is the role of religion. In his view Al-Qaeda is more of a political phenomena than a religious one. Here I think Friedman very wrong. (If one wants an entirely different take on the role of religion in the world today read Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity).

What does a flat world mean for the Christian faith? Certainly Christianity has been a global faith from the beginning. However, it wasn’t until the twentieth-century that it experienced its greatest numerical growth, becoming truly “global.” A Christian communications revolution has been very much at the heart of this growth. A number of years ago I discovered a book edited by Leonard Sweet entitled Communication and Change in American History (Eerdmans, 1993). Essays focused not only on the role of print culture in the history of Christianity in the U.S., but also on the pioneering use by evangelicals of radio and television. At the time of its writing the communications angle was an understudied subject in church history. A glance at current works on global Christianity by David Martin, Phillip Jenkins, and Andrew Walls, reinforces the impression that this continues to be the case. All of these writers focus on indigenous Christian movements although there is a great deal to be said for this given the inordinate attention that Western missionaries have received in the past. Still one can miss massive global developments. Take Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, a book that I still have yet to read. Last I saw, The World is Flat was still up towards the top of the NY Times bestseller list with a total of 940,000 copies in print. Purpose Driven Life has sold over 17 million in the U.S. alone and 22 million worldwide, making it the biggest non-fiction seller in the history of U.S. publishing. If one is quick to see this as an American thing, look at Canada where over 700,000 have sold, check out Manila where a single general book chain has sold a whopping 350,000, and then go to South Korea where it tops the Christian best-selling list. Or take Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now which has over 3.2 million in print. Most scholars of global Christianity probably have never heard of Joel Osteen. This global communication phenomena is not simply an exporting of American Christianity. In Venezuela, The Fourth Dimension by Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho recently won a platinum award for sales.

I attended the Christian Bookseller’s Convention in Denver this past July. While I am astonished by the world-wide sales of PDL, I was startled by a conversation I had on the convention floor with a fellow bookseller, Ford Munnerlyn, from Giessen Germany. Ford related the following developments that he kindly summarized in an email to me.

Our church, the Freie Evangelische Gemeinde Giessen, (the Evangelical Free Church) is one of the larger evangelical churches in Germany, with about 900 - 1000 people on a weekend in attendance. Previously on Wednesday nights we had about 150 - 180 people involved in a Bible study program. Then in October and November of last year 2004 we invited many of the Wednesday night absentees and their friends, and anybody else, to join us for about six weeks of the Purpose Driven Life campaign and organized them into small groups. Over 600 people signed up and we experienced some dynamic impetus into our church life. It took a lot of group leaders (about 50 of them) to volunteer.

Groups starting meeting every night of the week, either at church or in private homes and offices all over the county. A year later we still have about 600 people in small groups discussing other topics or biblical texts, some having dropped out of the original group. Others joined existing study groups. All in all, it was well worth the effort.The leaders of the contemporary worship program on Sunday evenings decided to organize anyone in their crowd into small groups meeting weekly as well, which suddenly added six or seven new groups. Most of the congregation has really identified with the more flexible structure, though change is always difficult. God is still working in our midst, in spite of a lack of cosiness that fifty groups necessitate. You don't know everybody anymore. But praise God, many others are studying his word, learning how to grow spiritually, and the church is much more effective as a whole.

Now Canada is one thing, Manila and South Korea you can comprehend, but secular Germany? It still startles me. There is something major here that is not restricted to PDL or American Christianity. Working at Regent on the UBC campus, where my wife and I do volunteer work with international students, I get to meet many very talented international students. One of our friends from Uganda is doing a doctorate in AIDS education. Due to the fact that she had to give a paper at the University of Wisconsin she expressed her deep disappointment at missing a Newsboys concert. I was surprised that she so fond of this Christian rock band that got its start Down Under. She informed me that they are very big in Kampala, her city, and that you can hear them constantly on the city’s three Christian radio stations as well as on the secular stations. I would have totally missed this phenomena in my perusal of our offerings of books on global Christianity. Here’s a few global lines from a Newsboys tune.

It's the song of the redeemed
Rising from the African plain
It's the song of the forgiven
Drowning out the Amazon rain
The song of Asian believers
Filled with God's holy fire
It's every tribe, every tongue, every nation
A love song born of a grateful choir

It's all God's children singin'
Glory, glory, hallelujah
He reigns, He reigns

Let it rise above the fore-winds
Caught up in the heavenly sound
Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals
To the faithful gathered underground
Of all the songs sung from the dawn of creation
Some were meant to persist
Of all the bells rung from a thousand steeples
None rings truer than this

And all the powers of darkness
Tremble at what they've just heard
Cause all the powers of darkness
Can't drown out a single word.
-Newsboys

Bill Reimer
October, 19 2005
bookblog@regent-college.edu
to be continued

P.S. This isn’t just books and music. Whatever you think of Mel, The Passion of the Christ was a global phenomena. And The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is going to take off like a rocket this December and will continue to shake up Hollywood. In 2006 watch for Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce which stars Albert Finney as John Newton.

The World Is Flat and a River Runs Through It

2005-06-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

Where were you when you realized that the world was flat? This is one of the questions that NT Times op-ed columnist, Thomas Friedman, poses in his best-selling book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. While this question initially doesn't seem to have the significance of, say, Where were you the day JFK was shot?, on further reflection it may. For myself as a bookseller, I became aware that things had flattened when, just before Christmas, Amazon announced that it had received 1.8 million orders in a single day! Staggering. I also realized it when my wife lined up to buy a U2 concert ticket for our son and reported later that there were people in line who were also on-line with their wireless computers and on their cell-phones trying to buy tickets.

What does Friedman mean by a flat world? Basically he argues that the explosion of computer-based technology coincided with a series of historical events that allowed India, China, and other countries to join a global-supply chain. This chain brought into being a new middle-class in these countries and gave millions of new people a stake in the global economy. In a triple convergence, business developed horizontally so that a new playing field came about with new ways of doing business. Onto this playing field came literally billions of new players from China, India, and the former Soviet Empire. Whether one likes it or not, this change is a reality, and Naomi Klein or Bill McKibbon to the contrary, and barring something like an al-Qaeda nuclear bomb, the process is irreversible. In the long run Friedman thinks that this is for the best and is the only way possible to lift the hundreds of millions that are mired in grinding poverty.

Certainly Friedman is aware of the drawbacks of globalization. This flat, frictionless world makes global businesses hum but it also can destroy the local distinctives that give us a sense of community and place. A Minneapolis friend complained to Friedman,

"Everything is by e-mail now," he said. "I am dealing with a young kid at [one of the biggest retailers in the nation], and he says, 'Just e-mail me your bid.' I've never met him. Half the time he doesn't get back to me. I'm not sure how to deal with him...In the good old days, I used to stop by the office, give the buyers a few Vikings tickets. We were friends...Tommy, all anyone cares today is about price."

I have spent my last 24 years working in a bookstore. The flattening world has played havoc upon my book-selling world in just the past two years. At times I think our store has become a well-stocked showroom for Amazon. Customers will stand in front of a shelf comparing prices on-line through the wireless network in the building. I've heard of students ordering books on-line and even unpacking them in the classroom. A brick-and-mortar store is extremely vulnerable in this kind of environment. A local bookstore needs local expertise on staff in order to operate. Most of the inventory needs to be paid for long before it is sold. In contrast on-line sellers on average simply broker the sale and drop-ship it from a supplier without actually being in possession of the book. The economies of scale are vastly different and the cyberspace seller is able to skim the cream off the top.

The optimum income statement for a bookstore doing $1 million and showing a net income of 5% a year would typically look like the following:

Income
Revenue: 1,000,000
Cost of Book Purchases: -600,000
Freight In: -30,000
Gross Income (before expenses): 370,000

Expenses
Wages & Benefits: 200,000 (7 full-time equivalent employees)
Rent & Utilities: 60,000
Advertising: 15,000
Office Supplies, Bags, etc.: 15,000
Bank & Credit Card Charges: 12,000
Misc. Expenses: 18,000
Total Expenses: 320,000

*Net Income: 50,000

You can see why there are so few bookstores opening in a neighborhood near you. And this is a best-case scenario. Local brick-and-mortar bookstores have to purchase inventory that they don't know whether or not it will sell plus they need to maintain local expertise. Say, an average employee salary not including benefits is $25,000 and the employee takes home $21,000 per annum. In an urban area rent for a modest one-bedroom apartment can easily run $1,000 per month. If the average rent of an employee's apartment is $1,200 (some have children) then rent is running almost 70% of an employee's take-home pay. Again, this is a best-case scenario. In a flat world the internet plays havoc with this scenario. Internet book brokers don't have the overhead that a traditional bookstore has. Thus they can operate on very thin margins. If a bookseller is forced to add on average an additional 10% discount to sales in order to compete and keep revenue at $1 million then net income easily becomes -$50,000 instead of +$50,000. The bookseller is then forced to slash wages and expenses.

Recently I talked to another bookseller who painfully had this to say:

Is there any hope for us as booksellers? Are we going to be forced to sell a lot of knick-knacks with just a few books? I'm not interested in doing that. I'm paying $5,000 a month rent for 2,000 square feet. I don't know whether I should renew the lease when it is up.

After reading Friedman I am certain that the changes in book-selling are permanent. But I do remain hopeful. Local independent bookstores remain watering holes and many people continue to love to browse the shelves. For Christians books have been important tools of the Holy Spirit and I'm sure they will continue to serve a purpose within the Church as well as for those that are looking in from outside. But bookstores will need to rethink much of what they do and to retool their business.

To be continued....

Bill Reimer
June 22, 2005
bookblog@regent-college.edu

Don't Cut Down All the Tall Poppies

2005-05-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

We middle-aged males tend to go off course, to become cold, cynical, hard-hearted or worse. More than any contemporary writers I find that books (and lectures) by Eugene Peterson and James Houston help nudge me back on course, a bit like a powerful tug boat coming alongside a slow freighter, pushing it back into the channel. I confess that I sometimes hesitate to read or listen to these two spiritual theologians. I instinctively reach for the academic title and avoid the book that deals with the interior of my self. So when the review copy of Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology arrived, it stayed in the pile of books at my desk for several months. But when I took the time to read it, it was good for my soul.

Like all of Peterson’s writing, Christ Plays is about a Christianity that is God-centered. We are called to live the way of the cross with others and for others. Peterson cries out against the way our shrunken, secular culture reduces persons to a modern “self” that is solely bounded by issues of biology, sexuality, utility, race and ethnicity. Instead he rightly opts for “soul” which captures the God-created, blessedness and wholeness of what it means to be a person created in God’s image. The church too, according to Peterson, is all too absorbed in the programmatic when instead it is called to be a community that listens, practices compassion, forgives, and loves.

While I was reading Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places my 20 year old son, Jonathan, said in passing on a couple of occasions, “I want to read that book.” I later asked him why he was attracted to the book. He said, “The title caught my eye. To be honest, a lot of books are about an ethereal Jesus that I don’t know.” My copy is going straight to my son. There is another reason why I have no hesitation in recommending this book to him. Towards the end of the book Eugene tells the story of going to hear a writer (Paul Tournier) and being impressed by the fact that who the writer was and what he was saying were completely congruent. The same can be said of Eugene Peterson. There is a deep congruence to who Eugene is and what he says. I can think of no finer example.

Does this mean that I am not left with lingering questions about the book? No. On Peterson’s critique of sectarianism I was not convinced. Along with gnosticism and moralism, Peterson sees sectarianism as a contemporary threat to the church. Sectarianism, Peterson contends, is driven by selfishness and special interests and can be likened to the effect that termites have on wooden buildings. While I do see danger here I would see most sects as being rather like lady bugs in a garden. They are beneficial for the most part. Surely the history of spiritual theology owes much to sectarians. One immediately thinks of Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, and Countess Huntingdon, who in their time were highly sectarian. The impetus for the movements that they were part of was a bubbling of renewal from “below” rather than a selfish dictator who imposes from “above.” Among orthodox Christian bodies today, it is my guess that it is only in evangelical Protestant churches that Roman Catholic, Orthodox and evangelicals could all partake of the Lord’s Supper together, and surely this is also a test of Christian ecumenism.

On the extreme right there is certainly a sectarian danger and this is generally what springs to mind. However, perhaps the most dangerous sectarian force today is from the left wing of the church. Mainline Protestant bureaucrats and scholars have emptied the pews of many churches, imposing a heterodoxy from above. In a recent essay, Regent College alum Markus Bockmuehl excoriates much of contemporary biblical scholarship, and William Countryman in particular, for this “sectarian” tendency that comes from the left. (See his essay in I Am the Lord Your God, ed. Carl Braaten and Christopher Seitz, Eerdmans, 2005).

As a bookseller I am usually reading a number of books simultaneously. In the aftermath of the Pope’s death two books in particular caught my attention. The first book, or rather essay, is by George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God (Basic, 2005). Weigel is one smart cookie who could easily be mixing it up with Friedman, Brooks, Dowd, and Krugman on the op-ed pages of the NY Times. Instead he has chosen to serve the Church. Each summer over the last 11 years he has taught in a school in Krakow. This book comes from his observations, perhaps a bit like Tocqueville in reverse, of Europe and its increasing distance from America. The colossal “cube” of Paris’ Pompidou Center, which houses the International Foundation for Human Rights, is contrasted with the Cathedral of Notre Dame. While visiting Paris, Weigel’s tour guidebook assured him that the height of the arch of the “cube” could contain Notre Dame in its entirety. Hence the title of the book.

The “Europe problem” that Weigel poses is at its root a problem of “cultural and civilizational morale.” Simply put, Europe is severing completely its Christian roots at a time when it is committing demographic suicide with a birthrate that is far below replacement levels. It is into this vacuum that Muslim immigration flows. Given this scenario Weigel asks whether the “cube” will better protect human rights than the “cathedral.” The only hope that Weigel has for a Europe in which human rights are respected is for Europe to be reconverted. Any reconversion would have at its heart John Paul’s spiritual vision which, much like that of Eugene Peterson, emphasizes the importance of the human person and of history, precisely because of the centrality of God.

John Paul’s spiritual vision is powerfully presented in Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (Rizzoli, 2005). Consisting of conversations between John Paul and two of his Polish philosopher friends, the book covers politics and democracy but most passionately the Pope speaks on the atheism, consumerism, and materialism that plagues Europe today. This recently caused much controversy in Europe. John Paul speaks of “ideologies of evil” and applies the phrase to the contemporary European culture of death which he sees as being brought about by the rejection of God as Creator. Perhaps, along with, “Be not afraid,” the Pope will best be remembered for this warning about the “ideologies of evil” that stalk the land.

Recently I heard a scholar remark in a lecture that Australians are in the habit of cutting down all the tall poppies. I have no desire to comment on the reference to Australians but surely this observation applies to bloggers and op-edders. Now Eugene Peterson, George Weigel, and John Paul are all rather tall poppies. All I can do is take off my hat. However, Tom Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, and himself a rather tall poppy of the Irish American variety, took a swipe at John Paul after his death (and even before he was buried) in an op-ed column in the pages of the NY Times. Cahill calls John Paul “a great political figure” but not “a great religious figure.” Instead Cahill charges that he emptied Catholic churches by failing to adjust to present day realities, and that in time John Paul may be credited with “destroying his church.” Cahill is a marvelous writer (and speaker) but he wildly misses the mark with his scythe. John Paul stands even taller in the field while Cahill is a much-diminished poppy with a flower that now droops.

The op-edders are now after Pope Benedict. Cahill has labeled him John Paul’s “grand inquisitor.” In sharp contrast I came across a description of Benedict contained in a piece written by Father John Jay Hughes from St. Louis in which he quotes a story that Benedict once told.

The memoir concludes with some of Ratzinger’s reflections on his coat of arms as archbishop of Munich, which is vintage Ratzinger. The coat of arms contained two symbols: a scallop shell and a bear. The first is the pilgrim’s emblem, still given to pilgrims at the shrine of Compostela in northwestern Spain: a reminder, Ratzinger writes, “that we have here no lasting city” (Heb. 13:14). The shell reminds him also of St. Augustine, about whom Ratzinger wrote his doctoral dissertation. Walking along the seashore as he reflected on the mystery of the Trinity, Augustine came on a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was trying to pour the sea into it with a shell. Augustine realized that his efforts to understand the mystery of God were as futile as the child’s attempt to get the sea into the hole. “The shell reminds me of my great master Augustine, of my theological work, and of the vastness of the mystery which surpasses all our learning.” The words place Benedict XVI squarely in the classical tradition of great theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. What we can know of God remains always less than what, in this world, we can never know. The bear comes from a legend about Munich’s first bishop, St. Korbinian. Traveling to Rome, the saint encountered a bear that attacked the horse carrying Korbinian’s luggage. As punishment Korbinian made the bear carry his pack to Rome. “Isn’t Korbinian’s bear, compelled against his will to carry the saint’s pack, a picture of my own life? The legend says that Korbinian set the bear free once he reached Rome. It doesn’t tell us whether the animal went to the Abruzzi mountains or returned to the Alps. Meanwhile I have carried my pack to Rome and wander for some time now through the streets of the Eternal City. When release will come I cannot know. What I do know is that I am God’s pack animal, and as such close to him.” The passage takes on special poignancy when we know that Ratzinger several times asked Pope John Paul II to release him from his position in Rome to return to Germany and to his first love, theology. The Pope asked him to stay on. “We’re both getting old, Joseph,” the Pope said, “but we’ll work together.” Now his fellow cardinals have asked Joseph Ratzinger to continue carrying his pack, until the end.

Enough said. If anyone wants me to send the entire piece just drop me an email. I have borrowed it from the newsletter of my friend, John Conway.

Lately I’ve been listening to one of my son’s CDs. The song “God Will Lift Up Your Head” really caught my attention. It has solid sectarian credentials but I think even John Paul and Benedict would nod in assent. Written by the Lutheran Paul Gerhardt, translated by John Wesley, and adapted by Jars of Clay, a bunch of young guys out of Free Methodist Greenville College, it goes like this:

Give to the wind your fear,
Hope and be undismayed,
God hears your sighs and counts your tears,
God will lift up, God will lift up, lift up your head…

Leave to His sovereign sway,
To choose and to command,
Then shall we wandering on His way,
Know how wise and how strong…
God will lift up your head…

Through waves and clouds and storms,
He gently clears the way,
Wait because in His time, so shall this night,
Soon end in joy…
God will lift up your head, God will lift up your head,
God will lift up your head.

Bill Reimer
May 17, 2005
bookblog@regent-college.edu

Stanley J. Grenz, 1950 - 2005

2005-03-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

I saw Stan for the last time as he walked, briefcase in hand, determinedly from the UBC library. I knew he had already been to the Regent-Carey library as I had noticed his signature in the photocopy log. We greeted each other but on this occasion didn’t stop to chat. I will always carry this rather small regret. I know, I couldn’t foresee the events of the next 48 hours. But . . . Stan was busy tying up some loose ends before sending a manuscript to a publisher. Unknown to both of us, this would be his final task. On Monday I talked to Stan's friend and former TA who told me that Stan had set last Thursday as the deadline for his next big book in the "Matrix" series. Late Thursday night Stan took the time to email this friend, to thank him for his help, and to let him know that, yes, he had finished the book. I don’t pretend to be able to make sense of death but I do see God's grace in small details like this.

Since we received the news of Stan's death I've heard numerous little stories about Stan. In the lunchroom one staff member commented on Stan's kindness and how Stan would always ask as to how she was doing after a time of illness rather than simply ask something innocuous about her job. Another friend related how, when he was struggling with unemployment, Stan offered to help with organizing an old-fashioned cottage prayer meeting for him. When a job opportunity did come along it was Stan who put a good word in for him. A Bookstore colleague recalls Stan as someone who remembered your name and took an interest in you as a person.

Yesterday one of Stan's doctoral students at Carey related a classroom story to me. This past January Stan informed the class that it was the tenth anniversary of an automobile accident that he had been involved in while in Germany during a sabbatical. While driving Stan went over a cliff and he thought that he was going to die. In those long seconds he had a distinct sense of peace and closure. But in God's providence the car landed on some marshy soil with the result that all the members of his family escaped unharmed. In reflecting on this incident Stan was quite conscious that it was God who had given him another ten years.

Just today a staff member mentioned a story from last week of a Continuing Ed student who was taking one of Stan's courses on audio and talked of how Stan ministered to him even though he didn't know him. This past Saturday the student finished his paper entitled, "What Happens to Christians When They Die" and then logged on to his email only to discover that Stan was no longer with us.

This fishing around, looking for meaning and continuity in a life, is scoffed at by many postmoderns who see only meaninglessness and discontinuity. Stan believed passionately that there is deep meaning to life and that in it we can have fellowship with the living, triune God. And he believed that the life to come is, in the words of one of his chapter headings, "Our Eternal Home."

Yesterday in the Regent chapel service Mark Davies, one of Stan's Carey colleagues, gave a eulogy. Here are his words:

Remembrance of the Life of Dr. Stanley J. Grenz
Regent Chapel
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Dr. Mark Davies

James 4:14 You don't know what will happen tomorrow. What is life? You are a mist that is seen for a moment and then disappears.

In the early hours of this past Friday morning, our teacher, our colleague and our friend Dr. Stanley J. Grenz suffered a major brain hemorrhage and died the following morning.

From 1990 to 2002, Stan held the position of Pioneer McDonald Professor of Baptist Heritage, Theology and Ethics at Carey Theological College, holding a cross-appointment to Regent College. After a brief engagement as Distinguished Professor of Theology at Baylor University and Truett Seminary in Waco, Texas, Stan returned to Carey Theological College where he resumed his duties as Pioneer McDonald Professor of Theology.

This of course is a profound loss to his family and his friends, and to those with whom he worked and taught. It is also a great loss to the wider evangelical community. Stan’s gifts as a writer, teacher and theologian were formidable and his influence on evangelical Christianity was profound. The emails and tributes, many of which can be read on his website, have begun to pour in from all over the world.

Stan had many gifts, and of course will be remembered most widely for his ministry through writing. The author of 25 books and literally hundreds of articles, Stan was one of the key figures in helping move modern evangelical theology to the new frontier of post-modernity. Writing was what Stan not only did, but what he loved. For all the books he published he never tired of his work or calling, but embraced each new project with great enthusiasm, always hoping that the end project would bring glory to God and encourage the people of God.

But Stan was also an excellent teacher. Many here today know firsthand of what I speak. And this ministry of his, perhaps lesser known was something he took very seriously and few things excited Stan like a student who was keen on learning theology. Stan delighted in mentoring young theologians. And yesterday alone I have heard of three former students who are flying in from various parts of North America to attend his memorial service this Sunday at 2:30 at First Baptist. But perhaps the best summary of Stan’s impact as a teacher was voiced yesterday. We had gathered at Carey as faculty and staff to mourn the loss of Stan, and Stan's current TA, Jay Smith, was there with us. As his tears flowed freely he simply said, "Stan has changed my life forever." I can think of few compliments more profound.

Stan was also a colleague and a friend. I had the privilege of working with Stan for the past 10 years. And the thing I most left with was his ability to encourage us in our task. I cannot remember him ever being critical or negative. He was always optimistic, always trying to spur us on to do even greater work for the kingdom and was there to celebrate when we did. His loss is a devastating blow to the community of Carey Theological College.

But Stan was also very much a family man. It is telling that the only picture we had in the office of Stan was placed there by Stan and it was him holding his newborn granddaughter Anika Grace on his lap and there is a smile on his face as wide as you can imagine: the great theologian, as nothing more than a proud, happy grandpa. He loved his wife Edna deeply and spoke of her often. He also had a deep and abiding love for his two married children Corrina and Joel, of whom he was so very proud. Their loss is profound and we stand with them in sympathy and prayer.

But I would draw an incomplete picture of Stan if I did not also mention his limitations. Like the rest of us, he was after all human. And perhaps his most evident limitation could be found in his somewhat limited ability to tell jokes. When he would tell them, he was as excited as a school child getting out for recess, and inwardly you would groan, knowing that somehow you would have to laugh – mostly as a act of pastoral care.

He often would begin his classes by playing a guitar and leading worship songs. And again, his singing and playing were not as strong as his teaching and writing. And one of my colleagues, Paul Beckingham asked him about this, and he said in all seriousness, "I have strong gifts and that is why it is important for me to minister out of my weakness."

Our teacher and our friend, Stan leaves us with one last lesson. And we are grateful.

Stan had many gifts. But today, what we miss most is the gift of Stan.

Let us pray . . .

-Mark Davies, March 15, 2005

Bill Reimer, March 16, 2005

The Rainbow at the End of the Unspeakable

2005-03-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

University years for me were bittersweet. Having taken my childhood faith for granted, it crumbled as I encountered the world of science. Although I desperately wanted to cling to my beliefs, deep down I was afraid that God didn’t exist and that what was “me” was just a chance, temporary arrangement of a few molecules. When I died, the lights would go out. Looking back I see that it was the love of God and the love of my family and his people who saw me through. And there was the world of Christian writing that helped me along the way. I scoured Christian “bookstores” desperately looking for some help with my questions and usually came up short. I did find the InterVarsity book table and was relieved to discover there were other individuals that had struggled to believe. I made new “friends” through books. C.S. Lewis, Pascal, Luther, F.F. Bruce, Donald Mackay, Clark Pinnock, Michael Green, I. Howard Marshall, John Stott, and others. I found them all lacking in some way – never did find that book that answered it all – but they helped me through deep times of doubt about the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity. In 1975 I took a little time off and went to England to work, and one rainy day while pushing a wheelbarrow up a wooden plank, I said to myself, “I believe again, I really believe again.” It wasn’t that the intellectual doubts had disappeared but my faith was taking root.

One book that I found quite helpful was In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt and How to Resolve It by Os Guinness (now entitled God in the Dark). It helped me learn to suspend judgment on some questions and know that I simply needed to trust God. Today I still watch for the announcement of a new Os book. Perhaps he errs a bit on the stoic side but there is an experiential side that one is able to pick up in his writing. His new book, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror, is written for a broad audience and doesn’t presume faith on the part of the reader. Guinness genuinely wrestles with the problem of evil that the atrocities of the 20th century presents. Guinness examines the topic by asking seven questions:

Where on earth does evil come from?

What’s so right about a world so wrong?

Are we really worse or just modern?

Do the differences make a difference?

Isn’t there something we can do?

Why can’t I know what I need to know?

Isn’t there any good in all this bad?

Guinness was born in China during World War II and narrowly escaped the death that took two of his brothers. He writes as someone who has been there. In the end he of course presents Christian faith as the answer to his seven questions. However it is not a formulaic answer and faith can be hinted at even in the genuine “Goddamnit” prayer of an atheist.

Guinness rightly universalizes evil. It is the common human experience. But, in a chapter entitled “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Evil,” he implies an unfair equivalence between Nazi atrocities and the Allied area bombing of Germany. “Ordinary People” is surely derived from Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Browning recounts how middle-aged German men were involved in the shooting deaths of tens of thousands of Polish Jews in the lead up to the Final Solution. Were the bombings of Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden by young British and Commonwealth aircrew that Guinness mentions the moral equivalent of what Browning gut-wrenchingly describes? Certainly if one is a pacifist then one can perhaps accept this. However Guinness is not a pacifist. Very early in the war studies showed that the average RAF bomb dropped over Germany landed on average of 5 miles from the target. This reality led to the British policy of area bombing whereby city centers were targeted in order to maximize e damage to German industry. While this is all part of a very large debate the bottom line is that without area bombing there would have been no Western Front prior to 44 and a considerably different Eastern Front given the amount of German personnel and material needed to defend Germany during the Allied air offensive.

At the end of Unspeakable, Guinness relates the powerful story of the pacifist Huguenot village of Le Chambon. Located in Vichy, France, the people of this little village and its pastor, Andre Trocme, succeeded in sheltering 5,000 Jewish children. Le Chambon and its non-violent resistance is for pacifist and non-pacifist alike, “a diamond flashing in a pile of dirt.” La Chambon was the rainbow in the midst of holocaust and represents a problem for the “problem of evil.”

The story of Le Chambon is taken from Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. Hallie, an embittered ex-artilleryman and atheist philosopher, was personally transformed upon encountering the story of Le Chambon. In the introduction to the revised edition of his book he relates a lecture circuit story that is worth printing in an extended fashion:

One evening I was speaking to a group of women in the assembly room of a large hotel in Minneapolis. The women were all leading fund raisers for the United Jewish Appeal. They were a formidable audience, with their intense eyes and their energetic personalities. I was talking to them about the killing of more than a million children by the Nazis and about the village of Le Chambon as the safest place for children on the continent of Europe during the war years.

When my lecture was over, I asked for questions or comments. A woman in the back of the room stood up . . . She was a powerful woman wearing a sheath dress that made her body look like a slender cannon, taut, full of explosive power. But for a moment the cannon seemed to crumple. She stood there silent for what seemed like a long time and then she said, “Well, you have been speaking about the village that saved the lives of all three of my children.”

There was absolute silence. She drew herself erect in her sheath dress, and said in formal tones, “I want to thank you for writing that book…She came to the front of the room, turned to face the audience, and said, “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Chambon was the rainbow.”

Hallie continues,

The rainbow reminds God and man that life is precious to God, that God offers not only sentimental hope, but a promise that living will have the last word, not killing . . . I do not regret fighting in that war – Hitler had to be stopped, and he had to be stopped by killing many people. The war was necessary. But my memories of it give only a sullied joy because in the course of the three major battles I participated in, I saw the detached arms and legs and heads of young men lying on blood-stained snow.

The story of Le Chambon gives me an unsullied joy.

-Philip Hallie, pp. xvii-xviii.

A powerful narrative that Guinness quite rightly picks up. I think Os has hit a home-run if that can be used for a topic that is so dark. Whether or not a book makes it as a bestseller can be tough to predict. I’ve been tracking Unspeakable almost daily with warehouse levels and Amazon sales, and while it has not exploded out of the starting blocks, it seems to be picking up. For an interview with Os, head here.

Os closes In Two Minds with this prayer of Martin Luther:

Dear Lord,
Although I am sure of my position,
I am unable to sustain it without Thee.
Help Thou me, or I am lost.

Bill Reimer, March 10, 2005

Revolution Meets Empire: Colossians Refried

2005-02-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago in response to the U.S./France falling out, French fries were renamed Freedom fries in certain parts down south. At the time I thought the whole thing the epitome of silliness. Over the past week I’ve been reading a couple of quite different authors, which reminded me of the fries kafuffle. For the purposes of this blog-posting lets have a slight change in nomenclature and go with French fries and Empire fries. Under Empire fries let’s put the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson who commutes between Harvard and Stanford when he isn’t in London. In the January issue of Atlantic Monthly Ferguson comments on the growing cleavage between the U.S. and Europe and concludes that the reason for this is not changes in the U.S. but rather deep changes in Europe. This widening of the Atlantic, with the end of the Cold War, is due to the simultaneous secularization of the native European stock while at the same time the increasing upsurge in Islam as the result of immigration. America in contrast is marked by continued and vigorous Christian discourse.

It is in this context that Ferguson has been writing about “Empire.” In Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power Ferguson portrays Britain as the “mid-wife to modernity.” Positive achievements included English forms of land tenure and law, limits on the state, representative assemblies, the idea of liberty, and Protestantism. There were certainly “blemishes” and Ferguson paints them, but whenever there was despotism, liberal movements within Britain spoke out. Slavery was of course at the heart of British despotism. However at the height of the commercial success of slavery, at the time when commercial interests were most predisposed not to abolish slavery, evangelicals at almost the “turn of a light switch”, as Ferguson describes it, succeeded in abolishing it. Indeed, the Royal Navy was used in full to shut down the trade and to carry liberated slaves to the colony of Sierra Leone. Evangelicals could also have a vengeful side and Ferguson portrays it in his description of the popular response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

American power today has an uncanny resemblance to the British Empire. However there are key differences that Ferguson spells out in Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. Unlike the earlier Britain Empire, the U.S. is a net importer of people and capital. America’s budgetary woes are due to domestic spending on entitlement programs such as social security rather than “imperial overreach.” Ferguson has a positive perspective on the U.S. projecting itself into the world to help especially needy areas but questions whether the U.S. will have the self-willed staying power that is required for the long view.

And now, for an entirely different view of Empire! Not long ago a student came to my desk raving about a new book. “This, is the funnest book that I have read in a long time.” Today I asked him exactly why he likes the book. “It was just something different. It imaginatively brings together Paul’s context and ours. This is the kind of stuff that could even get a non-academic interested in this period. Why aren’t there more books like this?”

The book is Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by the husband and wife team of Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. After reading the book I agree that it is a good read. It creatively makes use of prose, verse, and extended modern day “targums” that expand the text of Colossians. It held me and motivated me to re-read Colossians a couple of times.

In the subtitle (Subverting the Empire) Walsh and Keesmaat make a direct, no ifs, ands or buts, transference of “Empire” from Rome to the United States. My friend did say that, “They press a point to such an extent that if the early church had done so it would have been squashed.” Certainly, if given the choice between Empire or French fries Walsh and Keesmaat would grab the French fries. While I have difficulty getting my mind around French literary theory, due to my rather thick skull, I get the impression in their cultural analysis that the authors drink deeply of the wine of the French cult of reason. Foucault, Lyotard, and Levinas use this French tradition to critique modernity. I remain unconvinced that one can decouple modernity from postmodernity in the way it is done here.

And each time that the authors use “hegemony,” the ghost of the Italian theorist, Antoine Gramsci, sits quietly in the background sipping cups of espresso. I would maintain that, as with the British Empire, Christians have had a marked impact on the history of the U.S Empire. Gramsci (and I think Brian and Sylvia) would say that American evangelicals are “mere puppets dancing on the string” that is controlled by the “dominant ones.” So, the Christian living in Kansas has been entirely hoodwinked by Empire.

Sam Brownback is from Kansas and he sits in the U.S. Senate at the very heart of the hegemon. He has worked tirelessly to bring an end to sex trafficking and war in Sudan. Not long ago Nicolas Kristoff, normally a critic of all things Christian, wrote a complimentary op ed piece in the NY Times on Brownback. Although Brownback is a card-carrying member of the Religious Right, Kristoff says:

So, all in all, I find Mr. Brownback perhaps the most intriguing man in Washington - so wrong on so much, and yet such a leader on humanitarian issues. He is also working with liberals like Ted Kennedy to press for immigration reform, prison reform, increased funds for AIDS and malaria, construction of an African-American history museum and even an apology to American Indians.

This is the key difference between Roman and American empires. There is mystery and murkiness to it all. No two Christians will agree on just how much change Christianity has brought to any culture. But wouldn’t it be great to have Brian, Sylvia, and Sam sit down and have a conversation? Brian and Sylvia would lecture Sam on Kyoto, globalization, and capital punishment. Sam would hammer back on the priority of dealing with Darfur, human rights, and partial-birth abortion. But….if you can’t wait for this conversation try reading Colossians Remixed along with Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights by Allen Hertze, who highlights some other unlikely conversation partners who are working as activists in the public arena. Both books will challenge us all to do a little personal remixing, or, as I prefer the pre-modern, try a little personal “refrying.”

Bill Reimer
bookblog@regent-college.edu

P.D. James As Witness

2005-01-19T14:58:00.000-08:00

Date: January 4, 2005.
Crime Scene: Silver City movie complex, Burnaby, BC.
Facts: A young man was attacked and knifed by strangers in the lobby of the theatre after a movie with the end result that he lay in hospital in serious condition with six stab wounds. It seems he had complained to management during the movie that a group of viewers were making a nuisance of themselves. (National Post, Jan. 4, 05)
Witness: P.D. James

P.D. James, the British murder mystery writer, would have some scathing social commentary on this event if she were to come across the article while drinking her morning cup of tea. Perhaps the reigning Queen of Crime, Lady James is also viewed as a serious Christian novelist by the literary critic, Ralph C. Wood. Over the holiday I went on a P.D. James binge reading three of her more recent novels plus her autobiography. Through her characters, I was struck (but still alive) by how James portrays the disengagement of British culture from its Christian heritage. She is a writer who bears witness to this descent into “barbarity.” In Death In Holy Orders (2001), the confessed murderer writes to Adam Dalgleish, the detective hero of the James novels:

People who, like us, live in a dying civilization have three choices.
We can attempt to avert the decline as a child builds a sand-castle on the edge of the advancing tide. We can ignore the death of beauty, of scholarship, of art, of intellectual integrity, finding solace in our own consolations. And that is for some years what I have tried to do. Thirdly, we can join the barbarians and take our share of the spoils. That is the popular choice and in the end it was mine.

James clearly thinks there is an alternative. This is often portrayed in the faithful worship and prayers of older characters who often become the victim. In Murder Room (2003), Tally Clutton, as she falls into unconsiousness, says “thank you to the God in whom she had always believed and of whom she had asked so little.” Likewise in Death in Holy Orders, James describes the last moments of another victim who happened to be a priest:

How could he continue to minister to others, to preach the forgiveness of sins when his own great sin was unacknowledged? How could he have stood up before that congregation tonight with this darkness in his soul? He put out his hand and switched on the bedside lamp. It flooded the room with light, surely brighter than when, by that gentle glow, he had read his evening passage of scripture. He got out of bed and knelt, burying his head in his hands. It wasn’t necessary to search for the words; they came to him naturally, and with them came the promise of forgiveness
and peace. ‘Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.’

Eugene Peterson used to lament that there are no more living Christian murder mystery writers. Well, we still have P.D. James with us, and she is full of life.

For an interview with her conducted by Ralph C. Wood follow this link:
http://www3.baylor.edu/~Ralph_Wood/james/InterviewPDJames.pdf