Page 1816 – Christianity Today (2024)

Within the fixed positions and steps of classical ballet, many of its finest practitioners found freedom—from their own flawed bodies, from repressive regimes, from turmoils, public and private. Marie Taglioni, the beloved 19th-century ballerina, practiced relentlessly, acquiring such mastery over her own movement that she became beautiful onstage despite her unlovely face and figure. Her daily six-hour workouts included, among other feats, holding poses while counting to one hundred. A century later, Galina Ulanova, an upstanding Soviet citizen and cultural ambassador, still managed to be an artist first through her poignant renditions of socialist-sanctioned roles. Jennifer Homans highlights these two compelling performers, among many others, in Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, her sweeping account of how revolutions, upheavals, nationalities, and personalities have shaped a highly ordered art form over four centuries.

Homans danced professionally for a time, and if she danced as well as she writes, she must have been very good. We already knew, for example, that Anna Pavlova was important, but Homans tells us why, and does so superbly. Like Taglioni, Pavlova—skinny and frail—seemed physically unsuited to ballet. Her liabilities became assets, we learn, because her “tremulous, fragile” style looked “spontaneous and elusive, as if painted from nature—like Impressionism applied to dance.” Moreover, Pavlova’s legendary performances as the Dying Swan gave rise to the new naturalistic manner of dancing championed by the Swan’s choreographer, Mikhail Fokine. “[Pavlova] skimmed the floor on pointe or stepped through an arabesque, bending deeply at the waist or through the back, arms fluid but broken-winged,” Homans writes. “The power of the dance lay uniquely in the expressive quality of her movements and in the way she showed the expiring life force, the draining of energy and spirit from a creature of great strength and beauty …. As Pavlova slowly weakened, gave in, and folded into a gentle heap, the old ballet, it seemed, died with her.”

While Homans the dancer turns particular ballets inside out, deconstructing, point by point, Homans the scholar (she earned a PhD in modern European history) surveys them from a distance, with the larger world as their backdrop: the societal forces—political, economic, literary—that impacted each piece. The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717), for example, premiered at a “very particular and dynamic historical moment” in London, when aristocrats and commoners met together in coffeehouses for lively debates, while new translations of The Iliad (Alexander Pope’s in particular) reflected a burgeoning interest in the classics. English ballet master John Weaver believed that he and his colleagues “were uniquely poised to cut a path between the senseless and immoral displays of the French and the raucous tricks of the Italians …. They could have their own—distinctly English and very polite—kind of ballet.” Weaver responded with Mars and Venus, a restrained pantomime rooted in Greek and Roman theater that “seemed to achieve the impossible: it was both serious and a box office success.”

But the history of ballet starts much earlier than that, in 1533 to be precise, when a French king married Catherine de Medici from Florence and the aristocratic customs of France and Italy began to entwine. It was under the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century that ballet evolved into a genuine art form. The milestones follow quickly thereafter, at least in Homans’ narrative: ballet’s five positions are codified by page 23; the first modern corps de ballet coalesces on page 113; and, by page 138, Italian ballerinas are dancing on their toes. Homans ornaments this timeline with anecdotes and bright bits of trivia, describing how the Duke of WÜrttemberg celebrated his birthday with fountains that spouted sparkling red wine, and how opera-goers in 18th-century Milan dined in private salons attached to their boxes, parting the draperies between bites to hear their favorite arias.

Apollo’s Angels is more than just chronology shrouded in context, however, thanks to Homans’ ability to tell stories, large and small. The book is divided into two sections: the first half explores France’s central role in the origins and spread of ballet throughout Western Europe, while the second half focuses on Russia and its dominant influence in the 20th century. Homans explains how ballet is passed down from person to person, and this overarching story of transmission permeates and thematically links the two sections. We learn how Western Europeans such as Enrico Cecchetti and Marius Petipa moved to Russia in the 19th century, influencing a generation of Russian dancers who, in the 20th century, revitalized ballet in Europe and America by touring and opening studios in Paris, London, and New York. “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations,” wrote C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love. “[B]eing alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Across the centuries, dancers moved from city to city, continent to continent, carrying their heritage with them, in their minds and in their bodies.

At times Homans loses her way in a clutter of details, such as in her discussion of 18th-century Vienna, but for the most part she tells her larger story by compiling charming smaller ones. Particularly delightful is her evocation of 19th-century Copenhagen, where a gawky dance enthusiast named Hans Christian Andersen courted Jenny Lind, while August Bournonville, removed from the tumults roiling other capital cities, developed an unpretentious style of ballet that thrives to this day. He created works that celebrated the Danish experience—trolls, elfin maidens, scenes of warm domesticity—and still found time to write his memoirs, reorganize schools, advocate for dancers, and stroll with Kierkegaard.

The book’s second half is both more and less satisfying than the first, mainly because the history is more familiar, to the author and to us. Homans attended the School of American Ballet, organized in 1933 by Russian émigré George Balanchine, and she obviously reveres him. “Balanchine was a world apart,” she declares, and she is right. In parts of two chapters, collectively titled “The American Century,” she chronicles his rise and extols his genius. But ballet existed in the United States before Balanchine arrived, and Homans might have made “The American Century” chapters a bit more, well, American. Her summary of the native dance scene before World War II spans only four pages. With an additional paragraph, she might have introduced George Washington Smith, America’s first premier danseur, who partnered Austrian starlet Fanny Elssler during her triumphant U.S. tour in the early 1840s. The enterprising Smith eked out a 60-year career in a country without a classical dance tradition, without serious ballet schools, few teachers, and a limited audience. The Elssler-Smith partnership represents an Old World vs. New World dynamic worthy of Homans’ attention. Equally disappointing is her careless treatment of America’s first blockbuster musical, The Black Crook. This extravaganza was first produced in 1866, not by the Hungarian Kiralfy brothers, as she asserts, but by two American promoters, Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer, who, after a fire destroyed a theater they had secured for an elaborate spectacle, sent the sets, costumes, and ballerinas over to nearby Niblo’s Garden, melded them into a melodrama about an evil sorcerer with a crooked back, and had themselves a hit.

Instead of celebrating these examples of American pluck and self-reliance, Homans seems eager to cast government as the savior. She traces the origins and growth of America’s two leading companies, the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet, both borne of Russian-American collaborations and personal wealth, insisting that “although both companies depended on private patronage, their real guardian angel—the thing that finally lifted them from the constant threat of bankruptcy—was the U.S. government.” True, perhaps, but even tax-paying balletomanes might object to subsidizing a work such as The Cage, premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1951 and depicting insects that vomited, strangled, slashed throats, and ate each other. This ballet, one of Jerome Robbins’ finest, according to Homans, “ends with a frenzied group feeding and an org*smic thigh-rubbing satisfaction.” By the book’s epilogue, Homans is openly scornful of one particular donation, complaining that the New York State Theater—”named for the people it served”—has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater “for the millionaire whose ego and resources substitute for the public good.” Hmm.

But back to Balanchine. He and Robbins were colleagues, and, in a sense, foils. Balanchine was adaptable and famously generous, Robbins inflexible and often hostile. Work sustained them both, but Robbins never found complete freedom from his personal demons, even in dance. Balanchine, on the other hand, possessed an inner calm, grounded in his Russian Orthodox faith. “God creates, I assemble,” he would say. While Homans incisively explores the interplay between Balanchine’s faith and art, she does not address the apparent disconnect between his faith and his personal behavior—he had multiple marriages and countless sexual relationships, at least one involving an abortion. Though godlike to his dancers, he was as mortal and sinful as the rest of us.

But he was vastly more talented. This self-identified servant of God dutifully employed his gifts to distill beauty, however momentary. With Apollo’s Angels, Homans gives him and his art a fitting and permanent tribute.

Sharon Skeel is a ballet historian currently at work on a biography of 20th-century American choreographer Catherine Littlefield. She dedicates this essay to the memory of Samuel Hsu (1947-2011).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Psychologist Neil Clark Warren used to say that when he did therapy with married couples, his primary goal was simply to see a 10 percent improvement in their relationships. It doesn’t sound like much, but he found it made a tremendous difference for one reason. It gave them hope. And hope is the great difference-maker.

Warren always believed in hope, even before he started eHarmony and made millions. He found that if people have hope, it is a tremendous reservoir of energy. Hope will keep people moving when they would otherwise quit. Hope is the single most indispensible, non-negotiable, irreplaceable resource required for big challenges and noble battles.

So, how’s your supply? How are you doing at hope-management?

I suppose pastors and church leaders have always needed hope, but I have been reflecting on why in particular it is needed in our day. It seems to me that hope matters uniquely in our day because many of the social structures that used to prop up what we do are fading. Pastors used to be honored as educated thought leaders in their communities. Historian and Pastor Jim Singleton told me that as recently as 1950, 10 percent of all Phi Beta Kappa’s went into church ministry. Today it is 0.01 percent.

Another friend, John Huffman, recently retired as pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. If you’ve ever visited Newport Beach, you might think anyone who lives there doesn’t need hope, since they’ve pretty much arrived at God’s favorite location. But as John was reflecting on half a century in pastoral ministry, he listed some of the most frequent complaints he would hear over the years—every one of them a hope-stabber. I’ll paraphrase a few. You’ve probably never heard any of these about your own ministry; I share them simply so you can pray more intelligently for your less gifted pastoral friends.

“I’m just not getting fed.” I always find this one a helpful constructive criticism, because it is both clear and easily corrected.

“Why can’t you preach like …?” John notes that there is always the nearby “church of what’s happening now.” He says what he did not realize for many years was that there will always be another more popular preacher within 20 minutes of your church. The important thing is to accept this truth. That way you can find who he is, track him down, hurt him, and then you’ll be the most popular pastor within 20 minutes of your church.

“Why don’t we pay more attention to …” (fill in the blank: foreign missions, prayer, spiritual warfare, the Kardashians)?

But complaints are not the only hope-robbers. Those of us in church ministry also face the reality of our own inadequacy, family pressures, financial crises in difficult economic times, an increasingly polarized culture where faith often seems to be perceived as nothing more than a proxy for political conflict, people we love who slide away from the faith or whose marriages wind up in a ditch. We wrestle with disappointment when people don’t come to church—and complacency when they do. We wrestle with being defined by our successes and self-condemned if we are not successful enough.

A very wise person suggested a great image to our staff recently. I asked him what he thought is the primary barrier people in church ministry face to finding spiritual health. I thought he would speak about how hard church leadership is, but he immediately said that our challenge is no different than anyone else’s: “Learning to depend fully on God for every moment of your life, right where you are.”

The image was this: Remember Atlas, that old character from Greek mythology who carried the world on his shoulder? Put it down. Refuse to carry the weight of the world anymore. Rely on God’s love this moment for your identity and well-being, so that they no longer hinge on outcomes.

I am a recovering Atlas.

When I remember to do this, when I take the world off my shoulders, it always results in life and hope. Hope, after all, is very different from getting myself to believe that things will turn out the way that I want them to. Hope means, among other things, a joyful dying to my need to have my life turn out any particular way at all. Hope comes when I live in the reality that the world is in better, larger, more capable hands than mine.

The ancient Greeks loved virtue, and believed deeply that suffering would produce character. But in the ancient world, only a Paul would top this list (suffering, perseverance, character) with “hope.” The Greeks were not big on hope; they did not believe the universe was kindly disposed to humanity. Paul did, because Jesus did. So Paul said hope “does not disappoint.”

Hope-management may be the single most important thing you do today. No circ*mstance or person is allowed to siphon it from you. When you took this job, when you answered this call—you signed on for hope. It’s much bigger than you are. Rest in it a little while.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Not so long ago, from even the better-informed writers on American musical theater scores one expected the boulevardier more than the scholar, especially on the older works. Typical: a classic survey’s complete take on Jerome Kern’s superhit Sunny of 1925 was that its “value was enhanced more by the bounding Jack Donahue and the Tiller Girls than by any superior qualities in the score.”

Yet Sunny was in fact bursting with music of near-operatic scope. The problem is that the authors of that survey had no way of knowing it. In the old days, Broadway theater music was thought of not as art but as commerce for the moment, no more worthy of preservation than the pit music for television variety shows. Show music was still America’s pop music. 45-minute recital lps of the kind Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald pioneered were technically impossible before the Fifties; before this, even the great song-writers had no sense of contributing to an eternal “songbook.”

Thus after an old show closed, all that was left was sheet music of the songs the producers hoped might become hits—only a fraction of the 14 or so songs in the show. Dance music and underscoring were never published as sheet music, and even if a fullish piano-vocal score was published—which was only for the biggest hits—often not in them.

Once a Sunny was off the boards, it was largely unknowable beyond the sheet music, some photos, and scattered recollections—until 1982. This was when the original performance materials for hundreds of Broadway musicals were discovered in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. Since then, some dozens of projects have used this material to create recordings of the old shows as they were originally heard, and writers can now explore the actual scores of these shows rather than their isolated musical souvenirs. This more comprehensive approach to America’s musical theater heritage has also spurred a similar approach to more recent theater music. A writer whose book on a composer thirty years ago would likely have been heavier on psychobiography than music is now more likely to at least balance the two.

The Yale Broadway Masters series is dedicated to this new style of coverage, and has already shed fascinating new light on Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Sigmund Romberg, Frank Loesser, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webber? Yes, even him—it had never occurred to me that when Mary Magdalene sings “I never thought I’d come to this” in Jesus Christ Superstar‘s “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the music entails “assertive fourth relationships including the modal flattened VII major chord,” but I’ll take it from Lloyd Webber’s chronicler in the series, John Snelson.

It should be said that analysis this musically dense dominates neither Snelson’s nor any of the entries, all of which are accessibly written and include ample biographical information. However, I am struck by the fact that the books, intended as celebratory works bringing to light undersung capacities, leave me with a feeling ultimately describable as sobered. This is due to two running themes, hardly intended as such by the authors, but crucial just the same.

One is a sense of loss. The Secaucus find notwithstanding, a massive amount of American theater music from before about 1960 is now lost to the ages—which becomes especially poignant when we learn from books like these how good a lot of the less-er-known music for these shows was.

For example, earlier verdicts on Sunny were based on the sheet music songs, which happened not to be Kern’s most interesting work. However, as Stephen Banfield tells us in the book on Kern in this series, over a quarter of that score was instrumental, and also included sequences such as a smashing wedding scene first-act finale beginning with a vocally challenging operatic-style trio, continuing through three fine songs the best of which happened not to be published as a sheet, and ending on a spectacular high note for the female lead.

Certainly there were at least flashes of “superior qualities” here. Consider also the case of Sigmund Romberg, who wrote frothy operettas like The Student Prince and The Desert Song, and whose time in the spotlight was largely over by 1930. Romberg’s chronicler in the series, William Everett, explains that this has helped keep Romberg obscure, since traditional musical theater historiography charts the genre as becoming truly interesting only with Show Boat in 1927. Everett, going on to give rather studied, historically oriented reasons why we should care about Romberg now, is in my view a tad timid: full-scale recordings reveal that the man wrote smashing music, period. In isolation, songs like “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise” and “Stouthearted Men” can seem corny eighty years after they were written. However, performed amidst narrative, underscoring, and more nuanced songs unpublished as sheets, they become parts of lush, stirring scores which anyone who likes classical music, in particular, can enjoy.

In this light, it is sad to read that, for example, Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s score for the 1934 The Three Sisters (no, not the Chekhov play!) survives only in pieces. It, too, had elaborate underscoring for lengthy stretches of the narrative, and, almost as if to tempt future aficionados, one of these scenes was for some reason recorded in full on two sides of a 78 by the original cast—an extremely rare practice at the time—leaving us wondering how the rest of a score sounded which, even in its sheet music, included quirky and deathless songs like the classic “I Won’t Dance” as well as a deeply obscure one which I have seen make a grown woman cry when performed.

We can play pieces Mozart wrote when he was a child, and none of his operas are lost. Yet countless lyrics for Rodgers’ early shows with Lorenz Hart are gone forever. For A Connecticut Yankee, a big hit my late grandfather-in-law fondly recalled seeing in 1927, series chronicler Geoffrey Block notes that a whole song is missing, while for several, the melody is lost and only Hart’s lyric survives.

Of course, in no era is even most pop for the ages. It is hardly a tragedy that every bit of stage music people heard long ago is no longer available to us. However, Rodgers and Hart wrote top-rate material; their scores that survive in full are ear-candy of Godiva grade. As the pianist and producer for a group cabaret show, as I write this I am planning to include in the next show one of their duets (“The Heart Is Quicker Than The Eye” from On Your Toes) which I will accompany playing the original stage scoring with all of its musical bells and whistles—including things equal to the splendor of modal flattened VII major chords.

The Yale series is also sobering in requiring a mental adjustment in our sense of who created this music in the proper sense. Recent research makes it increasingly clear that most Golden Age Broadway composers were characterizable as auteurs of a kind: their contribution was decisive to the essence of the production, but was only possible with a great deal of help from other people, often more musically expert than them.

For example, almost none of these composers scored their music for orchestra. There was barely time, and most of them were not trained for it in any case. Stephen Citron’s 2004 book Jerry Herman, also from Yale, is not part of the series but performs a similar service. Citron praises Herman, who plays piano by ear, for furnishing Hello, Dolly‘s “Love, Look in My Window” with “minor chords” and “flatted ninths,” but this is like praising a cook for using salt and pepper. Minor chords and flatted ninths are central to doing what any show music fan would call playing the piano. Herman’s genius, and it is that, is for creating deathlessly memorable melodies. It’s others who fashion them into numbers.

The bells and whistles I referred to above in the song I will be using in my cabaret, for example, were mostly the work of Rodgers’ first favorite orchestrator Hans Spialek. Later, it was orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett who created much of what we cherish about Rodgers’ songs, such as the “O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A” ending of the song of that title. Rodgers’ house dance pianist, Trude Rittmann, composed—uncredited—the music for The King and I‘s “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet, such that Bennett, scoring it for orchestra, naughtily wrote on the first page “by Trude Rodgers.” Rittmann also wrote the famous middle sequence of The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi” (“Do-mi-mi, mi-so-so …”).

New treatments like the Yale ones, submitting the music to scholarly scrutiny, bring these obscure facts increasingly to light, revealing that much of what one comes to love about a recording of a musical was created by the unsung orchestrators and dance pianists. Especially striking is seeing photos of actual music submitted for processing by the composers, with the scoring so telegraphic and thin that the orchestrators and dance pianists come to seem more like co-authors.

A Connecticut Yankee is useful again: it was revived in 1943, with about half of the 1927 score replaced with new songs. Materials from that version, closer to us in time, happen to survive in full. It was the basis of one of the first full-length cast albums, long a favorite of mine, and this 1943 version was performed in New York in the Encores! series in 2001, which yielded a full piano-vocal score that has gotten around among fans. These days, I can know how much of the delight of the thing is Rodgers and Hart’s work versus that of the unsung assistants. One song is most infectious for a quirky vamp that begins it and continues into the vocal; that was the orchestrator Ted Royal. The song bringing on Morgan Le Fay has a marvelous extension involving dance music and chorus boys’ extra lyrics—this was the work of vocal director Buck Warnick and the unidentified dance pianist. And so on.

To be clear, Robert Russell Bennett wrote music of his own, and it was unremarkable. He could not have written even sketches of songs as infectious and deft as Rodgers’. Yet in the end, The King and I is less Rodgers than Lucia di Lammermoor is Donizetti, and the same went for Kern and Frank Loesser in particular.

None of this detracts from the genius of these composers in the end, however, and it is a mark of the maturation of their print coverage that books like the Yale series leave readers with impressions more mature than the mere unfocused admiration that earlier sources were designed to stoke. A final example also involves my cabaret show. One of my singers will be performing “Loads of Love” from No Strings, which Rodgers wrote both music and lyrics to after Hammerstein died. I’ve always loved the tune.

Block teaches me, however, that its appeal can be traced to a key point in the melody, a dissonant tritone above the C chord, which summons jazz harmony newly fashionable in the early Sixties, when the show premiered, and quietly complements the fact that the character singing it happens to be black. I had never thought about that, but such subtle touches are the mark of top-quality songwriting.

We’ve come a long way from “bounding Jack Donahue and the Tiller Girls” indeed, and Geoffrey Block, who also edits the series, is to be commended for what I hope will be a long run of volumes in which authors approach these composers as scholars rather than as fans or dishers of dirt.

Yale Broadway Masters Series

George Gershwin • Larry StarrAndrew Lloyd Webber • John SnelsonKander and Ebb • James LeveFrank Loesser • Thomas L. RiisSigmund Romberg • William A. EverettJerome Kern • Stephen BanfieldRichard Rodgers • Geoffrey Block

John H. McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor of The New Republic. He is the author most recently of What Language Is (Gotham).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In An Autobiography, published in 1939 on the eve of World War II, English philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) reflected on the historical legacy of World War I. “[A] war of unprece-dented ferocity,” wrote Collingwood, “closed in a peace-settlement of unprecedented folly, in which statesmanship, even purely selfish statesmanship, was overwhelmed by the meanest and most idiotic passions.” The war, Collingwood conceded, “was an unprecedented triumph for natural science,” a triumph that also “paved the way to other triumphs: improvements in transport, in sanitation, in surgery, medicine, and psychiatry, in commerce and industry, and, above all, in preparations for the next war.” The Treaty of Versailles had nevertheless failed, on Collingwood’s account, to restore the human side of affairs to any semblance of good order. The “power to control Nature” had overrun man’s “power to control human situations,” and the treaty gave way to a reign of natural science with the power to convert Europe “into a wilderness of Yahoos.”

By 1939, Collingwood had been embarked for two decades on a quest to develop a philosophy and methodology of history that might awaken history as “a school of moral and political wisdom.” This journey had taken Collingwood along a garden of forking paths. He broke away from the philosophical realism prevalent in Oxford in his youth to seek a philosophy of mind that allowed moral theory to make a difference in moral action. From those who believed that an understanding of “the human mind and its various processes” would be best attained through the science of psychology, Collingwood also departed. Dismissing the encroaching materialism of psychology that saw reason and will as mere “concretions of sense and appetite,” Collingwood turned to history as the arena through which human affairs might best be investigated and understood. Here, he had to blaze yet another trail. He dismissed the “scissors-and-paste” methods of examining the past as a dead object of inquiry and conceived of history as the investigation of a living past, a past from which the purposive actions of men continue to generate echoes and resonances into our own time.

Conceiving of history as the study of the self-knowledge of the human mind, Collingwood proposed a question-and-answer methodology by which the historian re-enacts in his own mind the thoughts of those whose history he is investigating. The possibility generated by this approach to historical study was that the historian may then gain both self-knowledge (an awakening to the range of thoughts it is possible for him to think) as well as insight into the broader world of human affairs in his own time. “We study history,” wrote Collingwood, “in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.”

This understanding of the history and possibility of human affairs required Collingwood to part ways once again, this time from English statesmen who misread the growing turmoil in Europe and sided with fascism during the Spanish Civil War and in the Czechoslovakia crisis. Though he would be derided as a Communist for his outspoken opposition to what he saw as England’s betrayal of its own parliamentary system, Collingwood concluded An Autobiography with a ringing renunciation of his “pose of a detached professional thinker”:

I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scien-tific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.

In History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood, Fred Inglis has opened a window on that fight, providing us an opportunity to revisit Collingwood, to seek to understand the questions for which he was seeking answers, and to reconnoiter the history of the bloody 20th century to ascertain whether we can in fact come to a better self-understanding of its legacy for the moral and political questions for which we need answers today.

Inglis introduces us to Collingwood’s early years in the English Lake District, where his father, Gershom, served as a secretary of sorts to the great and aging John Ruskin. Collingwood’s was an idyllic childhood, filled with the making of art and music and poetry alongside his parents and three sisters. He was homeschooled to age 14 in the very atmosphere where Charlotte Mason was working out her pedagogy and Beatrix Potter would soon take up residence to immortalize a naughty rabbit named Peter. The natural beauty of the Lake District provided the backdrop for this life with opportunities for sailing and walking. Immersion in the archaeological and folklore pursuits of his father rounded out a full engagement with the past, present, and future of England.

Through Inglis’ lens on the life of the Collingwoods we can see the advantages of Collingwood’s upbringing against an emerging re-cognition in our own time of the family as the first and most important school of youth. Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, has recently lamented also that modern education has too divorced our heads from the work of our hands and the mastery of our tools.[1] Crawford’s observation that our technologies seem to master us rather than we, them—when was the last time you actually fixed a household appliance rather than replaced it?—resonates with Collingwood’s exposure of modern man’s pretense that we have mastered science well enough to use it to master men.

In 1903, Collingwood took a scholarship place at Rugby School, where he was inducted into the formalities of England’s academic and ruling classes. It is here, in Chapter 2, that Inglis hits his stride as biographer-historian. He not only walks us through the landscape of Collingwood’s life at Rugby but also enlightens our historical imagination with a mini-discourse on the history and “moral point” of English public schools. He leaves us with a glimpse of how the social roles of English public schools have changed—and how, both for better and for worse, the sort of experience Collingwood gained at Rugby is no longer replicable.

Inglis continues this pattern of blending biography and history throughout the book, exploring “how certain key threads of narrative in the tapestry of a national tradition were taken up, recoloured, and extended by this one man’s life.” He proposes to depict for us how Collingwood took up and battled to integrate a “complex, contradictory inheritance of roles … scholar-genius, sportsman, intellectual, Lakelander-‘stateman,’ gentlemanly Oxonian, public professor, local figure, lover, parent, sailor, mortal invalid, and a dozen more.”

This historical attention to settings and social roles serves the biographer well, especially when he deals with Oxford, the environment in which Collingwood completed his education and took up his professorial life. Inglis situates Collingwood in the Oxford immortalized by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. Instead of deconstructing the novel’s nostalgia for the place and time, Inglis uses our familiarity with it not only to illuminate Collingwood’s serious writings on the philosophy of art but also to help us better understand that work of fiction. He shows us that for Waugh’s Charles Ryder, the “love of art and of Oxford are interchangeable” and reminds us that Ryder takes up a mature place in the world as “a serious architectural painter of the noble houses of England.” Collingwood, who took his early tutelage on such questions in the presence of Ruskin, would likewise become a serious practitioner and philosopher of art.

Inglis explains Collingwood’s distinction between the arts and the crafts, the former being an open-ended act of discovery and the latter, a purposeful pursuit of a pre-determined end. The more important distinction, however, may be Collingwood’s differentiation of “amusem*nt art” from “magical art” in his 1937 book The Principles of Art. For Collingwood, the amusem*nt arts (he names football, radio, cinema, p*rnography) provide for “the discharge of emotions in such a way that they shall not interfere with the concerns of practical life.” By contrast, magical arts are those that harness the emotions for the business of living. Magical arts encompass the formal arts—literature, painting, music, sculpture, theater, and the like—but also include propaganda, necessary as a motive social force, but corruptible, as the Nazi’s grand theater in Nuremberg was already demonstrating.

This is to get ahead of ourselves, however. Collingwood’s meditations on art during his early years at Oxford (he matriculated in 1908) were enveloped in his studies of history and philosophy. Neither discipline at the time much lent itself to Collingwood’s way of encountering the world. The emerging realism of the philosophers engaged the world as something outside men and distanced man from his past. Logical positivism joined the fray, divorcing “is” from “ought.” Collingwood, the artistic creator and the archaeological investigator, ultimately took up the cause of the fading side, supported by a Christian faith that could not lightly confine mind to mere materialism and the parlor games of logic that seemed to diminish any relationship between morality and metaphysics.

Inglis reports on Collingwood’s turn to Anglicanism at Rugby School. This conversion and baptism came as something of a shock to the family, whose father “was lapsed from the Brethren.” Collingwood seems to have taken his baptism seriously, writing in Religion and Philosophy (1916) that “the self-dedication of the will to God is not the end of the individual life, but the beginning of a new and indeed of a more active life.” Inglis suggests that Collingwood was in fact exercised by the same sorts of questions T. S. Eliot was posing about the prospects for Christianity in Western culture, and that Collingwood’s defense of historical knowledge was a more pugilistic effort against the imperialism of positivism, which left no room for faith.

Inglis nevertheless underestimates the potential for Collingwood’s continuing relevance in these matters, supposing that Collingwood’s fervor is “likely to stick in the gorge of his unchurched admirers.” This moment is likely the weakest for the biographer, who has declared an intention to “take from the bequests of the past lines of force for transformation” (italics in the original). The revelation that Collingwood received and enacted in his own mind and heart the Christian faith casts another line of access to Collingwood’s thought and weaves more strongly the lines of force for transmission to our present age, so hungry for a thinking and feeling Christian witness. More important, the connection between Collingwood’s reflections on faith and his reflections on history might be more fruitfully explored.

It was Collingwood’s pronouncements on the philosophy of history that would ultimately establish his philosophical legacy. Inglis shows how Collingwood’s archaeological investigations—he collected around five thousand Roman inscriptions, which were still being catalogued and published long after his death—helped inform his distinctive question-and-answer approach. Delving into the remains of Roman Britain, Collingwood recognized the ruins and inscriptions as the artifacts of men who were engaged in purposeful action. Inglis persuasively draws the connections between the work of the archaeologist and the philosopher who presents a five-part “invention” consisting of the elevation of history above all other sciences, the development of question-and-answer logic, the theory of the re-enactment of past thoughts, the insight that thought depends upon metaphysically grounded “absolute presuppositions,” and the unification of theory and practice.

This was the set of ideas that Collingwood would work on for most of his tenure as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford between 1935 and 1941. Inglis gracefully takes us more deeply into each of these themes and sets each against a backdrop of academic discourse, teaching, publication, politics, family life, and finally the chronic illness (high blood pressure and strokes) to which Collingwood succumbed in 1943, only 53 years old.

We consider this today to be a life cut short, and if Inglis the biographer has a pervasive weakness, it is to have written a book haunted from the earliest pages by the foreshadowing of Collingwood’s untimely demise. By the end of the first chapter we have already been confronted with Collingwood as “tragic hero,” and Inglis, clearly out of deep admiration and affection for his subject, continues to hint that we will be asked to mourn for Collingwood sooner than we would like. The sensibility of tragedy, however, seems slightly out of context when recounting a life lived through a century when so many lives were wasted so prematurely on the battlefields and in the concentration camps and killing fields. Inglis’ theme of tragedy at times detracts from his effort to recover the tour de force that was Collingwood’s philosophical production. To characterize Collingwood’s early death as tragedy rings true, but the appellation of tragic hero does not fit well the man or his legacy. Inglis works too hard to recover Collingwood’s life and legacy to leave us looking across the distance at a tragic figure.

When the forces of fascism—aided and abetted, even if only passively, by positiv-ism—threatened the entire world, Collingwood came out swinging. He would not hide his disdain for the irrelevance of the English academy in the present crisis and his government’s appease-ment of fascism “over there.” Collingwood saw the threats to freedom clearly and named them. Returning to his assessment of the Treaty of Versailles, we can see better the continuity with his life’s work. In 1939, Collingwood was asking Englishmen to revisit their presuppositions and assess where they were in history. The confidence they had placed in science to lead them toward progress was misplaced. History was the mode of thought most suitable to enable men to unite moral and material progress as a whole. Inglis quotes from Collingwood’s notes for the posthumously published The Principles of History:

A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them.

There is perhaps tragedy that Collingwood was not around after 1945 to help the Anglo-American victors navigate the treacherous waters of the Cold War, but his insistence that human action is and must be purposeful, thoughtful, and moral may still have something to say to us. The self-knowledge we can glean from history may help us be clear-headed about whether our projections of economic and military and humanitarian might are merely grasping endeavors borne of idiotic passions or honorable enterprises that will in fact advance freedom and peaceful cooperation.

Lenore T. Ealy is executive director of The Philanthropic Enterprise, a research and educational institute that seeks to strengthen our understanding of how philanthropy and voluntary social cooperation promote human flourishing. She is also founding editor of Conversations on Philanthropy and holds a PhD in the history of moral and political thought from Johns Hopkins University.

1.Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If you think Glenn Beck dislikes Progressives, check out Christopher Lasch. This legend among American historians on the Left—once their leader, then their target, finally an object of their bemusem*nt—made a career out of criticizing the class of reformers who arose under the first Roosevelt and soared with the second to become, on Lasch’s telling, the custodians of the American Establishment.

Without being able to manage the rhetoric, Beck would recognize the gist of Lasch’s indictment: Progressivism represented the ascendancy of secularized, deracinated élites enamored of the state, dismissive of tradition, suspicious of community, hostile to the traditional family, and antipathetic to the America that had endowed them with privilege. Hell on earth, Beck would agree with Lasch, would be a “society made up of intellectuals.” Up with “the people” instead—hard-working, common sense folk who want to protect their families, their neighborhoods, and their inherited wisdom from the meddling of arrogant experts.

True, Lasch’s critique proceeded from deep study while Beck is the gunslinger going by his gut. The president who embodied that particular style, George W. Bush, Beck urged on, Lasch would have excoriated. Nonetheless, the appearance of this first full-length study of Lasch coincidentally with the rise of the Tea Party allows us to see how the fragmenting of American liberalism abetted the rise of the Right—and bequeathed it its own image.

Eric Miller, a historian at Geneva College, has written here less the “life” indicated by his subtitle than an intellectual biography. He mines the personal correspondence of Lasch with his parents and an old high-school flame but nothing of his wife, Nell Commager, daughter—not incidentally—of one of the most influential American historians and ardent academic liberals of the mid-twentieth century. In view of the importance Lasch’s mature work assigned the family, it would be appropriate as well as interesting to read more about, and from, Lasch’s children. That said, Miller follows the central quest of Lasch’s life and unfolds its motives, sources, contexts, and complexities with accuracy, thoroughness, and admirable clarity. This will long remain the go-to Lasch study.

In taking on Progressivism, Lasch was excavating native soil. His parents (Robert, a Rhodes Scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Zora Schaupp, Robert’s one-time philosophy professor at Nebraska) were the classic iteration of the 1920s-’30s type: secular rationalists and ardent New Dealers who took art and politics as their religion. Entering Harvard in 1950 and then the top-notch doctoral program at Columbia, the precocious “Kit” spent his apprenticeship in American history coming to doubt these confidences. By the time that Herman Kahn’s “surreal” nuclear “realism” met the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lasch was radically at odds with Cold War liberalism and went gunning for its forebears. The result was The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963 (1965), the book that made him a star. Its thesis was that, in pursuing a psychic agenda of vital experience to the neglect of structural questions of power, the founders of Progressivism blazed a path into rather than keeping critical distance from the new corporate order.

The rest of Lasch’s career amounted to extending that critique to successive waves of the progressive development. For the moment, the Cold War establishment attacked his book just as the emerging ranks of a newer left found in it a revelation and a mandate. This launched Lasch’s political-activist period across a succession of university posts, before the lure of joining a cluster of radical historians being gathered at Rochester by Eugene Genovese landed him there for the rest of his days. But not “for good,” one might say, for the two leaders of this pack soon fell out despite their shared animus against the now fully fledged New Left. The much bruited counterculture was simply the cult of experience in new garb, Lasch charged, while its apocalyptic sensibility foreclosed the hard organizational work needed to sustain a radical project over time. Which institutions might form the base of a genuine movement constituted Lasch’s next question, and his answer marked his permanent break with his erstwhile comrades. It was in the family, the neighborhood, and the traditional culture of work and craft that people might find the resources to defy the hegemony of consumer capitalism. By contrast, the rise of careerist feminism, the universities’ new mantra of diversity and exploration, and the triumph of the “helping professions”—the hot spots of the American Left going forward—in Lasch’s estimation severed the root of resistance, even as they championed the notion in increasingly abstruse jargon.

Lasch laid out this argument most concertedly in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977), and the bestselling Culture of Narcissism (1979). That is, at the dawn of the culture wars he came out on the side of some sort of family values. Exactly which sort got obscured in conversations on the Left and went unheeded on the Right. For all its success and for all its debt to an embattled Freudian psychology, The Culture of Narcissism owed much to the neo-Marxist dons of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Miller adds some nice comparisons of Lasch to Red Tories in other times and places: socialist in economics, traditionalist in culture, ascetic in style, and quite more open to religion than Marxists of the old Left. Lasch felt kinship with Marxists gone Catholic, like Alasdair MacIntyre, who became an important guide, and Dale Vree, who published some of his later work in The New Oxford Review. He preferred his Protestants off the Augustinian page, albeit in secular translation: Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Ellul, eventually Jonathan Edwards. He published in the radical southern Christian voice of the civil rights movement, Katallagete. In sum, Lasch’s defiance of the conventions of the culture wars and his tapping of deep and disparate conceptual wells were the qualities that made him attractive to searchers from both Christian and secularist sides amid the polarizations of the 1970s and ’80s.

Perhaps this very complexity explains why Lasch’s later following never matched the size of his first. Miller brings out some other difficulties too. A traditionalist who liked Foucault, Lasch never finally defined a position on the epistemological battles of postmodernism. This, to me, is par for the historian’s course; we’re almost all realists operationally whatever our formal doubts on the level of high theory. Miller’s theological critique, though charitably delivered, is more telling. “Atheists for Niebuhr” sooner or later have to decide whether to stay with the atheism or accept an irreducible substrate of theistic teaching. In Lasch’s case, he bought original sin, the divided self, the need to accept—even to rejoice in—human finitude beneath a transcendent sky. But does that sky house a personal being traditionally known as God? Can one be Edwardsean without believing in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ? Sin is easy for historians to grasp; salvation is the rub, and here Lasch was finally more of a Stoic than anything else.

To me Lasch’s greatest shortcoming in the last phase of his career lay in a certain shortsightedness on the issue of class. In the Reagan-Thatcher ’80s, with the attack on labor unions and the acceleration of income stratification in American society (one reason that divorce rates were climbing and that all sorts of women, not just careerist feminists, were entering the paid work force), was it strategically most important for Lasch to keep on belaboring the “new class” of progressive professionals? A new class was aborning indeed, one that is now fully ensconced in multinational corporations with their helping professionals on Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the White House-Capitol-K Street circuit of Washington, D.C. Admittedly, the scale of this hegemony became apparent only in and after the foreign policy and financial disasters of the second Bush Administration, but Lasch first distinguished himself as a seer of where old liberals had gone wrong. The later equivalent for him would have been to predict where the neoliberals known in America as “conservatives” were bound to land.

His last great work, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), takes up this theme in its final section. Perhaps this would have been Lasch’s swelling chorus had not metastatic cancer claimed him in 1994 at 62 years of age. A tighter focus on social class would have saved the volume from the perception that its eclectic assemblage of American voices amounted to less than the coherent “populist” tradition Lasch claimed it to be, and more an anxious effort on his part to find as many precedents as he could for the hope he held in the face of all contemporary evidence to the contrary.

As it is, the model of a good society left by True and Only Heaven shows how fully American evangelicalism forfeited its potential for being a truly alternative community. A politics genuinely of the people needs to be by and for them, Lasch repeated after Lincoln. It would require Christians to build local churches for neighborhood needs, not follow celebrity preachers to exurban megachurches to worship under high production values. It would shun the Christian version of helping professionals whose books and media plays are the dominant industry in evangelical conversation. It would in its politics need to recognize limits: the limits of American power, as opposed to willful invasions of nations halfway around the world, and the limits of wasteful growth, instead of adamantly denying global warming. Perhaps out of the detritus of this conformity something is being salvaged in the emerging wave of post-evangelicals’ community building. Its leaders could do worse than read up on Christopher Lasch.

James D. Bratt is professor of history at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The annual Beloit College Mindset List helps professors see the world through the eyes of their incoming 18-year-old freshmen. The List features factoids such as “Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents” to sketch how dramatically different the world is for these youngsters. We have mined Beloit’s new Class of 2015 list, for advice on how to freshen your preaching. If you’re over 40, odds are this list can help you choose which pop culture references might need to join the VHS player in the dustbin.

• Cheers. They don’t remember the theme, so scratch “where everybody knows your name” when describing church.
• Godless communists. What communists? The Politburo was dead before they were born, and China has a market-driven economy.
• Women. With two women always on the Supreme Court, skip stories about women’s lib, inequality, and the glass ceiling.
• Family. Make your fond memories about the Food Network. Their Grandma lives four states away, and she specialized in the drive-thru. If today’s freshmen cook, they learned it from Emeril.
• Sexuality. Gay was never an emotion—or as much of an issue—for today’s kids. Ellen came out when they were in preschool. As Beloit said, “We have never asked, they have never had to tell.”
• Tech. “Don’t touch that dial!” What’s a dial? Also delete “beeper” and “floppy disc.” And nothing ages you faster than referencing your “home phone.”
• Sports update. The only Montana they know is Hannah. Their legendary players are ?LeBron and Kobe. And Arnold Palmer is a drink.

Slow-motion Moral Collapse

“These riots were not about race. These riots were not about government cuts … And these riots were not about poverty. No, this was about behavior … people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint.

“We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong. We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said-about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy.

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore.”

—British Prime Minister David Cameron after riots and looting in major U.K. cities (ChristianPost.com, Aug 2011)

Sunday, Bloody Stun-day

At New Welcome Baptist Church in Alabama an irate minister of music “Tased” a pastor who had just fired him, and a deacon stabbed the musician’s mother.

The shocking incident occurred after Pastor Darryl Riley told worship leader Simone Moore that he was being let go. Moore disputed the amount of his final paycheck and blasted the pastor with a Taser gun.

Several church members rushed the dueling clergymen. In the melee that followed, Deacon Harvey Hunt pulled a knife and stabbed the musician’s mom. “I said, ‘Oh my God, he done cut me,” Agolia Moore told a local television station. Moore suffered a gash on her arm that required 19 stitches. She claimed church leaders ganged up on her son when he was fired. “They owed him,” Agolia said. “He asked them for his money. That was the big thing right there, wasn’t no more or no less.”

The music minister wanted an additional $600.

—Based on a report from NY Daily News, 8/12/11

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

This fall more than 90,000 students across the United States and Canada are pursuing graduate theological or ministry training. Twenty years ago such students had one big decision: which school to choose. Then you typically had to relocate and enroll in a residential program for two to four years of full-time study.

Fast-forward two decades and the options have increased dramatically. Seminaries have been joined by Christian colleges and universities in offering graduate theological degrees. The Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree is now one of dozens of master’s-level options, including specializations in counseling, cross-cultural ministry, youth ministry, children’s ministry, worship leadership, and executive leadership, to name a few.

Meanwhile, the internet has radically changed the way education can be delivered. Distance education options include online programs, satellite campuses and extension programs, and hybrid programs that combine online interaction with on-campus instruction. These allow students to remain involved with their current ministries while earning an advanced degree or certificate. The growth of options has made further education more accessible but also more confusing. There is no longer one standard path for continuing education. The myriad choices can make it difficult to compare and decide.

So how should a ministry leader choose?

No one answer will apply to everyone. But let’s take a look at the stories of three leaders who faced this dilemma. Each chose a different path. Perhaps their experiences will equip you to make better decisions about educational options.

Going “ALL IN”

When Chris Shinnick began considering additional education, a distance program might have been the logical first choice. After all, Shinnick was entering his seventh year of full-time youth ministry in Hawaii, where there were no accredited seminaries nearby.

But Shinnick knew he did not study well on his own. He also knew he was ready for a short break from the pace of full-time ministry. Therefore, the best route for Shinnick and his wife was the traditional one: resignation from his job and relocation to Denver Seminary for a full-time M.Div. program. It was a move that Shinnick calls going “all in.”

“I wanted an immersive experience,” explained Shinnick, who now serves as connections pastor at Manna Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “I lived on campus, I worked on campus as a janitor. I once went 10 days without leaving the campus. I soaked it all up.”

While some leaders want to continue in ministry while pursuing additional education, Shinnick felt the exact opposite. “I felt a borderline conviction to not do anything ministry-wise at least the first two years; we just attended church,” Shinnick said. “It was a great season. I would sometimes think, There are others out there feeding the poor and I have to work on a paper about James, but I knew that school was part of a bigger picture call on my life.”

Shinnick concedes that for some, disengaging from ministry while in seminary isn’t the right move. But he viewed his situation differently. “I had done 50-plus hours a week for seven years straight. I felt as if I had completed a healthy season of ministry. I knew that’s what I would do the rest of my life. A little time in the library wasn’t going to hurt. It was part of my call.”

That big-picture perspective that led Shinnick to pursue his M.Div. degree. “It seemed like the most comprehensive approach for the pastor role I felt called to walk in,” he said. “In my sixth year of being a youth pastor, I finally realized: If I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, I should be as responsible as possible and learn as much as I can about this stuff.”

Shinnick said that responsibility toward his marriage also influenced his decision to pursue an immersive seminary experience. “My wife and I had been married three years and I felt like the pace of full-time ministry was putting a strain on our marriage,” Shinnick said. “All my mentors and especially their wives had mentioned how great their seminary experiences were, especially for their marriages, so that was an incentive as well. It was our first big ‘us’ decision.”

Having graduated with his M.Div. in 2010, Shinnick has no regrets about his path, listing a number of benefits: “We got away to a new and neutral location. It was great for our marriage and we started a family. My wife feels like it was the best season of life so far for us, and that’s saying a lot.”

Shinnick also enjoyed the intensity of the experience. “As a former college football player, being ‘all in’ was key. If I knew anything about myself by then, it was that I sure get focused on the task or season at hand. I can certainly multi-task, but having one ‘big idea’ for a particular season of life is where I flourish.”

Home Sweet Computer

Like Shinnick, Lisa Welter initially decided the best way to pursue additional education was to enroll in a residential M.Div. program, in her case at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. She chose Bethel’s evening degree program, moved into on-campus housing, and began attending classes two nights a week. But Welter soon realized the program was not the right fit.

“I had a call to ministry but I didn’t know what I was looking for,” explained Welter, who currently serves as the ministry director for the Blaine, Minnesota, campus of Eagle Brook Church. “I quickly found out that I did not have the time to sit in class like that. I struggled with the amount of time it took for discussion. I needed my education to be simple and streamlined.”

As a 28-year-old single mother at the time, Welter realized she needed to maximize the limited time she had available. “The best utilization of my time for school was a long-distance program where everything was funneled down for me,” she said.

Meanwhile, as Welter progressed through her first year of M.Div. studies, she also questioned whether the degree was the best fit for her. “I just thought if I jumped into a program that it would work, but that was not the case,” she said.

A spiritual gifts class Welter took at her church that year revealed that she had strong leadership gifts. As she considered other options, she was delighted to learn that Bethel offered a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Transformational Leadership and that the program could be completed primarily online with a few intensive sessions on campus—where she already lived.

“I lived on-campus, worked full-time at another job, and volunteered at the church,” Welter recalled. “I did [on-campus] intensives two times a year, one week at a time; everything else was online. Lectures were videos so I could rewind the professor and play it back. I could do my schoolwork in the evenings in my pajamas, when my kids were in bed.”

Three years after starting her first M.Div. course, Welter graduated with her M.A. in Transformational Leadership in 2008. Last summer she began working toward her Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) degree in Servant Leadership, also at Bethel.

While the majority of students in graduate theological degree programs are male, the gender ratio is growing more balanced each year. For Welter, the alternative delivery method of an online program provided an opportunity she may not have had ten years earlier. And Welter understands the tensions for a female seeking to juggle family, school, and ministry involvement.

“Your top priority is your family and kids,” she said. “Find a program that matches your family’s pace. Ask what they need and how you can fit them into that process, and what kind of time you can devote to school at this point in your life. However long this is going to take is how long it’s going to take.”

Sprint To The Finish

Michael Nieves began his ministry education in a traditional manner. After graduating from Lancaster Bible College (LBC) with a degree in Bible, Nieves moved to the Chicago suburbs where he enrolled in a full-time M.Div. program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). However, the financial expenses were more than he anticipated. In addition, Nieves was tired of school and eager to engage in hands-on ministry.

“My academic passion was fading compared to the thrill of actual ministry, which I was experiencing at Willow Creek Community Church,” Nieves explained. “I was having a tough time reconciling the educational minutiae with the urgency and excitement of seeing actual lives changed by the gospel.”

Nieves withdrew after two semesters at TEDS and he and his wife eventually moved back home to Buffalo, New York, where in September 2002 they planted CenterPointe Community Church. The next eight years were a blur of church-planting and child-rearing, as CenterPointe and the Nieves family both grew.

In 2010, Nieves decided he needed to finish his graduate education. “I didn’t want to look back at a life gone by in ministry and wonder what additional skills or insights might have been leveraged for the kingdom if I’d only had the gumption to push myself through school,” said Nieves. “Anything worth doing is going to be hard. I felt I had built enough margin in my life to take on the challenge.”

I can multi-task but having one ‘big idea’ for a particular season of life is where I flourish.

Nieves considered many options in light of his life situation. “First of all, I had to come to terms with my age,” he said. “I had just turned 40 and the option of being able to put off degree completion indefinitely was becoming unrealistic. My youngest child was out of diapers so I knew there would be some relief of home responsibilities. In addition, church life had moved into a manageable rhythm.

“Programmatically, I looked for ministry relevancy,” Nieves continued. “After attempting a program with a lot of theory and academic rigor, I wanted a program that addressed the needs of ministry professionals ‘in the trenches.’ I knew that in order to balance the needs of church life and family, I would need an accelerated program that could accommodate those factors.”

Nieves found what he was looking for at his alma mater, Lancaster Bible College, which was launching a Master of Arts in Ministry (M.A.M.) “Fast Track” program designed to be completed in one year through a combination of online coursework and five intense, four-day on-campus residencies.

“As an LBC alumnus, I received regular mailings and one of those mailings included an advertisem*nt for the brand-new Fast Track program,” Nieves said. “It was ministry-relevant, distance-learning based, compressed, academic without being strictly scholarly, and just geographically close enough that I could meet the on-campus requirements. It also passed the spouse test. My wife took one look and told me I should do it.”

In May 2011 after 12 months of intensive study, Nieves graduated with his M.A.M. degree. He remains the lead pastor at Center-Pointe, thankful for an educational experience that allowed him to complete a graduate degree while remaining engaged in full-time ministry.

As grateful as Nieves is that he completed his education, he has a caveat for other church leaders about the limits of classroom education. “Don’t expect any degree to make up for the learning that happens from every emotional and spiritual wound you will encounter in ministry,” Nieves advises. “No amount of education will prepare you for the maturity needed to respond as Christ would have you respond.”

Angie Ward is director of The Leadership Lab in Durham, North Carolina, and a pastor’s spouse. She is completing her Ph.D. in Ministry Leadership via a hybrid program at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

For several years Jay Green, John Fea, and I worked on coediting a collection of essays that has recently been published by the University of Notre Dame Press, Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation. The three of us were classmates at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the early 1990s, where we studied with the historian John D. Woodbridge, and in January 2010 we presented a copy of it to him at a symposium in his honor. But at what might have been a moment of sweet consensus and warm reflection, the three of us spent the evening following the symposium in earnest, at times heated debate about what the historian’s vocation actually is and what the present moment requires of Christian historians in particular—this despite hundreds of hours of conversation on this very topic in the years preceding the book’s publication. After our evening of argument we decided to each take a swing at the question, So what is the historian’s vocation?, and the essays that follow are the result.

But a bit more framing of these debates may be helpful. I sparked the argument that evening by claiming that since the conventions of the contemporary academy lead historians into disturbingly reductive conceptions of the past, Christians must seize the opportunity postmodern theoretical frameworks afford to construct narratives that capture more fully the Christian story. Both Fea and Green find this stance problematic, perhaps dangerous. Fea contends that history is not a handmaiden of moral philosophy but an encounter with the past designed to relieve us of our narcissism and teach us the virtues of humility, intellectual hospitality, and empathy for people whom we can only understand through the sources they have left behind. Green insists that even though traditional historical study is capable of yielding only limited kinds of knowledge—which should restrain our expectations about its use as a moral or theological arbiter—its unique facility to root, enrich, and chasten our vision of life in the world makes it indispensable and worthy of our efforts.

We hope these essays give a sense of both the diverging perspectives our book seeks to capture and the kinds of inquiry we suspect will preoccupy Christian historians for years to come.—Eric Miller

Eric Miller, Geneva College

I take the historian’s vocation to center on telling the deepest truth possible about the past. This is a claim self-evident and fraught at once. If historians can’t discover the truth, why bother? But if they can, why such reflexive skepticism?

On this matter of truth, American historians seem invariably torn between Christlike assertion and Pilatesque despair. Confidence about the way, the truth, and the life runs headlong into What is truth? at the first possible sign of epistemic boundary-crossing, and an unseemly proportion of our scholarly societies’ organizational energies are directed toward patrolling these borders. Any truth claims a “professional” historian makes must be properly circ*mscribed by the very particular, contingent, rock-solid set of governing beliefs about the nature of reality the contemporary academy honors and asserts.

Still, the truth claim Hayden White classically made in his 1972 essay “Interpretation in History” stands. An intellectual historian and theorist of considerable influence across the humanities, White proposed that a historical narrative is “necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative.” But he didn’t stop there. Insisting on the primacy of interpretation over the historical profession’s fixation on what he called simply “explanation,” White contended, more controversially, that “there can be no proper history without the presupposition of a full-blown metahistory by which to justify those interpretative strategies necessary for the representation of a given segment of the historical process.”

Although the hermeneutical spiral has since White’s essay was published swept up increasing swaths of the academy, free-ranging discussion of the metahistorical dimension of the historian’s task—and of the past itself—has usually been nipped in the bud by first-order skepticism, which in effect has permitted the established metahistory, scientistic materialism (or what George Marsden terms “exclusivist naturalism”), to continue its unyielding hold. It’s not that historians have failed to notice the regnant epistemological challenges to “objectivity.” It’s rather that to most historians there seem to be no real alternatives to existing interpretive, narratival pathways. Summing up the current state of affairs in Confessing History, William Katerberg notes that “Historians may agree that true objectivity is not possible …. But only rarely do questions about the use and meaning of history shape the thousands of books, dissertations, and essays that they produce in a direct, defining, determinate, and substantial way.”

Is this not a scandal? If for Christians intellectual life centers on the question of the meaning of history, then getting the meaning of history into the heart of our accounts of the past would seem to be a matter of prime vocational importance. The impasse at which the profession finds itself on matters epistemological reflects the triumph of convenience and the failure of imagination. And Christian historians, poised at this impasse, suffer a failure of nerve.

Methodological circ*mspection cannot mask the reality of metahistorical presence. Our narratives do assume, always, a particular stance on and posture toward reality. If postmodernity’s great, perhaps signal achievement is to have crashed the door of “objectivity,” historians (along with academics in allied disciplines) wishing to push past current disciplinary boundaries face what amounts to a political obstacle. Today the question that confronts us is not whether “theory” matters but rather whose theories and which methodologies we should heed.

This, of course, is the kind of political circ*mstance that historically has not been particularly amenable to reasonable argument. There’s too much at stake to allow intellectual consistency to rule. Still, as the journalist Richard Manning writes, “quality is subversive.” Or as Dostoevsky put it, “beauty will rule the world.” If Jesus Christ did indeed rise from the dead on the third day, and if the heavens do declare the glory of God, and if someday we will indeed beat our swords into plowshares, then we must summon the intellectual integrity, rhetorical vision, and literary verve to render such realities through narratives that seek to unveil this world—this real world, with its real past.

How might we move more fully in these directions? How might we do what John Henry Newman imagined Catholic writers and academics attempting a century and a half ago: “create a current in the direction of Catholic truth, when the waters are rapidly flowing the other way”?

First, we must take full advantage of the philosophic and rhetorical space created by such influential contemporary Christian philosophers—our “theorists”—as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and John Milbank. They have arrested attention and commanded respect, making possible the imagining of a form of historical reflection and analysis that fits within their broad historical and theoretical arguments. Christians need not write as if Marx, Weber, Foucault, and Derrida have had the last word about the nature of our world and our circ*mstance.

Second, we must take full advantage of the institutional strength that today undergirds the Christian intellectual project. Our colleges, universities, publishing houses, societies, and journals are capable of, and indeed are currently providing a fundament for, serious theoretical, analytic, and narratival experimentation—of the sort that can have a significant, consequential existence apart from mainstream institutions yet also the power to speak into them. Although tiny in relation to this other realm, the world of Christian institutions is not so small as to preclude real effect beyond it.

In a trenchant essay recently published in Christian Scholar’s Review, the philosopher James K. A. Smith compellingly envisions a scholarly program in which the “architectonic is governed” not by generic secular paradigms but “by Trinitarian faith and the Scriptural narrative.” In response to the retort that this vision of the world would rapidly diminish the audience of scholars brave enough to render it, he poses a question disarming in its simplicity: “But what if it is true?”

If it is true, it will yield light, a worthy end for any scholar charged with illuminating this present—and past—darkness.

John Fea, Messiah College

What is the historian’s vocation? This question can be answered in many ways depending upon the setting in which a particular historian works. As a college professor who teaches American history, my vocation is to teach undergraduates how to think historically and, in thinking historically, how they might grow intellectually and, ultimately, in their love of God.

An encounter with the past in all of its fullness, void as much as possible of present-minded agendas, can cultivate virtue in our lives. Such an encounter teaches us empathy, humility, selflessness, and hospitality. By studying history, we learn to listen to voices that differ from our own. We lay aside our moral condemnation of a person, idea, or event from the past in order to understand it. This is the essence of intellectual hospitality. The act of interpreting a primary source with students becomes the equivalent of inviting a person from the past into the classroom. By taking the time to listen to people from a “foreign country,” we rid ourselves of the selfish quest to make the past serve our needs. The study of the past reminds us that we are not autonomous individuals, but part of a human story that is larger than ourselves. Sam Wineburg, in his masterful Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, sums it up well:

For the narcissist sees the world—both the past and the present—in his own image. Mature historical understanding teaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we have been born. History educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology—humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of history.

I regularly ask my students if we are willing to let history “educate” us—to lead us outward.

Wineburg’s reference to theology is worth further exploration. In A Theology of Public Life, Charles Mathewes argues that Christians today are afflicted by the sin of escapism—the desire to flee from God and each other. God wants us to turn toward him, but he also wants us to turn toward each other. In the process of loving our neighbor—for Mathewes such a practice goes to the heart of civic life—we grow as Christians.

What if we viewed the study of the past as a form of public engagement? Even if the person we engage is dead, we can still enter into a conversation with the sources that he or she has left behind. If we take the Imago Dei—the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God—seriously, then we should also take seriously the idea that those who lived in the past were also created in God’s image. The very act of studying humanity—past or present—can be what Mathewes calls an “exploration into God.” A genuine encounter with history “provides more than enough opportunities for humility and penance, recognition of one’s sin and the sins of other, and a deepening appreciation of the terrible awefulness of God’s providential governing of the world. Indeed, involvement in public life today may itself increasingly need some such ascetical discipline.”

In other words, history is not only a discipline, in the sense that philosophy or sociology are disciplines. It is also a discipline in the sense that it requires patterns of behavior, such as the denial of the self, that are necessary in order to meet the “other” in a hospitable way. Doing history is not unlike the kind of “disciplines” we employ in our spiritual lives—disciplines that take the focus off of us and put it on God or others. If this is true, then prayer, a reliance on the Holy Spirit’s power, and other spiritual practices should provide help in the pursuit of the kind of self-denial, hospitality, charity, and humility needed to engage the past in this way and allow ourselves to be open to the possibility of it transforming us.

Like any type of public engagement, an encounter with the strangeness of the past “inevitably leads to contemplation of the mysteries of providence, the sovereignty of God, and the cultivation of the holy terror that is integral to true piety.” It forces us to love others when they at first glance seem to be unlovable. Failure to respect the people in the past is ultimately a failure of love. It is a failure to recognize the common bond that we share with humanity. It is a failure to welcome the stranger. Moreover, when we uncover sinful behavior in the past it should cause us to examine our own imperfect and flawed lives. This kind of engagement, as Mathewes puts it, “brings us repeatedly against the stubborn, bare thereness of the people we meet in public life; it teaches us again and again the terrible lesson that there are other people, other ideals, other points of view that we can see and appreciate, even if we cannot inhabit them and remain ourselves.”

The discipline of history requires us to apply James 1: 19 to our lives. We must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. This does not mean that we have to agree with every idea we encounter in the past. Sometimes we cannot “inhabit” an idea and still “remain ourselves.” But education—”to be led outward”—does require a degree of risk. Without risk, without being open to transformation, liberal education cannot happen. “Self-denial,” writes historian Mark Schwehn, “is a willingness to surrender ourselves for the sake of a better opinion. Wisdom is the discernment of when it is reasonable to do so.” A Christian who studies the past must be prudent. She must be slow to speak and quick to listen to the people she meets in the past. And she must pray for wisdom.

This dimension of history is what gets me up each morning to stand before groups of students and “profess.” A worthy vocation indeed.

Jay Green, Covenant College

“You may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with you.” This bit of folksy wisdom is repeated throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia. The film’s meandering journey through the anguished lives of his brilliant ensemble cast reveals how each character’s dire circ*mstances can be traced to a troubled, abusive past. While all of these poor souls have clearly been free to ignore, suppress, and forget their past experiences, in the end, none can escape the profoundly destructive legacy of their personal history. If they are ever again to live whole or healthy lives, they must engage in the painful, sometimes cathartic process of remembering.

Here we have a useful synopsis of the historian’s vocation. Historians traffic in memory. Within a craft devoted to the recollection of past cultural expressions, social processes, technological innovations, economic catastrophes, and personal achievements, the historian’s vocation is most simply understood as a project of organized remembering. Our work isn’t exactly the same as the therapist’s—which the Magnolia reference might suggest—but it isn’t altogether different either. To the extent that contemporary societies need and benefit from honest, sober-minded connections to their own pasts, historians serve a vital public interest as custodians of social memory.

The discipline of history requires us to apply James 1:19 to our lives. We must be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.

For individual persons, memory involves far more than the mere retrieval of information about the past. It is the mental faculty that makes personal identity possible. The real tragedy of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia lies in an ignominious annihilation of the self, forever severing victims from the relationships, places, and communities that had always otherwise given their lives grounding and direction. The process of losing one’s memory is, in the truest sense of the word, dehumanizing.

Memory functions in a similar fashion for communities, nations, and every kind of institution. These social entities might display an outward appearance of functionality and strength, but if they proceed in a state of willful amnesia or, worse, by perpetuating self-justifying myths, they will be no more capable of sustaining long-term civic health than the advanced Alzheimer’s patient is of carrying on a meaningful conversation with an old friend. Social organisms must have within them historically minded individuals who will help cultivate an honest, ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable relationship with their pasts if they ever hope to develop in responsible ways.

The divine command to remember, which recurrently punctuates the biblical narrative, seems especially attentive to the link between social memory and identity preservation. God regularly pleads with his people to remember who they are, from where they have come, and by what agency they will continue to survive. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” “Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other.” And, not least, “Do this in remembrance of me.” God has endowed humankind with a capacity for collective memory that is both essential and in constant need of maintenance. Those who devote themselves to restoring and upholding such memory are doing holy work.

And so, whether they recognize it or not, historians occupy a theologically critical office when they practice their craft: when they ask refined and penetrating questions about the past; when they are compelled to comb through and carefully read archival sources; when they resist the all-too-human urge to indulge their standing presuppositions about their subjects; when they instead allow encounters with the past to chasten and revise their assumptions; when they find clear and compelling ways to communicate their results; when they open pathways that enable ordinary people to visit the strange and complex worlds of the past; and when such encounters heighten the ability of such visitors to experience a present existence filled with texture and nuance. In the seemingly simple work of allowing the dead past to inform to the living present, historians support a divinely sanctioned vocation given to all God’s children: the vocation of remembering.

But some reticence is in order here. We should be careful not to exaggerate the power or potential of historical study. Although the work of reconstructing social memories may have great theological implications, the historian’s task is qualitatively different from that of the theologian or the moral critic. There are questions about the human condition that the historian as historian cannot answer and depths of experience and meaning that she cannot plumb. As Harry Stout has argued, the limits that circ*mscribe the historian’s purview require her “to settle for something less than ultimate explanations.”[1] The careful historian must resist the alluring temptation to use the record of the past to advance preexisting moral, ideological, or theological convictions; rather, she should exercise restraint, saying no more and no less than the limited documentary record of the past and the profession’s procedural norms allow.

Even so, the comparatively modest—but still deeply moral—demands of faithfully reconstructing the past remain vital. I have come to believe that, while the historical profession plays a vital role in the refinement of social memory, the calling to think and act in historically minded ways is a more broadly human assignment. And for the disciple of Jesus Christ, the calling to historical awareness is an indispensable category of faithfulness. Regardless of whether we enjoy reading fat histories of the American Civil War or the latest biography of Cleopatra, I believe that we’re all responsible for bearing witness within our communities, our churches, and our institutions to the ways current patterns and practices can only make sense when they are viewed as part of a longer, deeper story. Though we may never feel any special attraction to formal historical study, the demands of active remembrance should be borne by us all.

1. Harry S. Stout, “The Reviewers Reviewed,” Banner of Truth (March 1995), p. 8.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One of the worst kept secrets of the historical profession is what I am going to call Ambrose’s Law, after American historian Stephen E. Ambrose. Ambrose’s Law states that the more popular a historian is, the more other historians will criticize him or her. There is usually a good reason: Ambrose’s chief crime was plagiarism, Joseph Ellis misled the press, David McCullough misquoted Thomas Jefferson, and Simon Schama barely noted the existence of Wales in his History of Britain. But these reasons are not the whole story.

Cynics would say Ambrose’s Law is testament to professional envy. There’s surely something to that. Then there are the perils of greater exposure that fame brings. (Other historians took aim at Ambrose long before the issue of plagiarism arose.) There are, however, more fundamental issues at stake, namely, can history that people actually enjoy reading or watching be respectable, accurate, and honest? Can popular history be good history? The question is about loyalty as much as anything: are these TV historians truly committed to what their guild values above all, careful study and truth-telling? Or have they sacrificed their integrity in order to pursue the wrong type of audience?

Confessing History suggests that there is a Christian version of Ambrose’s Law, which the editors would probably call Marsden’s Law. Their objects of concern are historians such as George Marsden and Mark Noll, who have won the respect of their profession. The worry is that by seeking success with that audience, Christian historians have failed to be sufficiently Christian. Again, the question is one of loyalty to one’s fundamental commitments, but this time it is commitment to Christ that matters. One contributor to the book finds it “difficult to accept the ease with [which] colleagues at Christian colleges seem to regard the status, respectability, power and glory … that [come] with ‘making it'” in academia, and wants “to figure out if the ‘foolishness’ of the Gospel … offers any insights into what a Christian intellectual might look like.”

Confessing History begins with George Marsden, perhaps the most accomplished historian to come out of Christian collegedom in the last several decades. Marsden believes that Christian historians should study what all other historians do: what they can see in the historical record, and not what God might be doing behind the scenes. Eschewing providentialism, Marsden became a star, going on—after two decades at Calvin College—to teach at Duke Divinity School and then the University of Notre Dame. Many Christian historians took the same approach and did well.

But a younger generation are not sure this is the right path. In the introduction, Eric Miller summarizes their concerns in a series of questions:

Is something beyond the current consensus, as represented, for instance, in the work of George Marsden, possible? Is the mainstream historical profession truly the locus of the deepest wisdom and brightest hope for the practice of history? Have our lives as professional historians—and as middle-class professionals—become so straitjacketed that resistance to the status quo is futile? And what within the present moment holds most promise for the advance of a deeply Christian practice of history, whether through writing or teaching?

It would be too much to say that there is a new consensus among younger Christian historians, Miller goes on, but there is “at least a common inclination,” which he describes as follows:

The modern search for explications of causality and agency through the analysis of “observable cultural forces” [Marsden’s words] has proven to be an inadequate approach to the past for many in this generation of Christian historians, and, accordingly, an unsatisfying means to the fulfillment of our vocations. We seek instead to clothe history in rumination, conjecture, meditation, and judgment, all rooted in Christian visions of reality and all in the service of fostering moral intelligence and spiritual vigor in the communities we serve. Moreover, rather than turning to leading theorists of the modern academic disciplines alone for guidance, we find ourselves in consequential and intimate conversation with the work of theologians and philosophers, joining a tradition of reflection with ancient roots and one that continues strongly to this day, with or without the historical profession.

Two sections of the book put flesh on all this. The first is theoretical, and has five chapters that together present a call for Christian historians to care more about shaping their students and societies. Thomas Albert Howard seeks to marry history and virtue ethics, arguing that we should encourage students to face the moral questions raised by the past. William Katerberg makes a forceful argument for history that is useful for society. It should change students’ hearts, not just the historiography. Michael Kugler surveys the histories written by David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Enlightenment figures who wrote with a sense of social purpose that belies their era’s reputation for facts alone. Bradley J. Gundlach calls us to assimilate moral insights from the likes of Christopher Lasch, Robert Bellah, and Jackson Lears. Christopher Shannon advises an overhaul of almost everything, including the abandonment of “the futile effort to build a better monograph” and “a complete reorganization of the undergraduate history curriculum” that would emphasize memorization and historiography.

The second section addresses what it would mean for historians to do this in the communities to which they belong. John Fea describes a class he taught at Messiah College in which he and his students struggled to come to terms with the moral issues raised by the American Civil War. Lendol Calder’s chapter tells the story of a mountaineering disaster to show how shoddy assumptions often lead to educational disasters, and calls us to work harder at our teaching and thereby love our students more. Jay Green wants Christian historians to use their understanding of the past to address the public, thereby taking on the role of society’s conscience. Robert Tracy McKenzie urges historians to win the ear of their local churches, rather than speaking only in the academy. Douglas A. Sweeney’s chapter challenges us to see colleagues not as competitors in the academic stakes but as people we are called to serve.

The book contains great learning, mature reflection, and (most of the time) plenty of humility and nuance. Every Christian historian should read this book. I found the emphasis on teaching especially refreshing. Much of the discussion about Christian scholarship has focused on how to be faithful in the wider academic community; this book recognizes that many Christian historians spend a lot of time in the classroom, and challenges them to use the past to encourage their students to pursue wisdom and righteousness. Yet by the end of the book I felt that the sum was less than its parts. Many chapters sparkled, but the attempt to advance a new direction for Christian historians did not.

For one, there are chapters that strike startlingly discordant notes. Mark Schwehn says he still believes that the quality of his scholarship “should only be determined by [his] professional peers.” James B. LaGrand argues that “preaching through history” is “an unsatisfactory model of Christian history.” There are also chapters that bear an uneasy relationship to the project as whole, namely those by Una M. Cadegan, Beth Barton Schweiger, and Wilfred M. McClay. A book with evenly balanced groups that disagree can be fascinating and rewarding, but this one, with a central thrust and a handful of outlying chapters, has an awkward feel.

Then there is the question of how new this new inclination is. Some of the engagement with postmodern thought is indeed new, but Christian historians have been committed to loving students and addressing society for a long time. In his chapter, Doug Sweeney pays tribute to an older scholar who did just this and yet elsewhere in the book falls foul of Marsden’s Law. The book is dedicated to John D. Woodbridge, who taught all three editors church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and who cared deeply for his students and produced books for non-academic audiences. There is a long history to the argument over whether a Christian historian’s first job is to move people or move the scholarly debate. Greater discussion of that history would have been useful.

There were times when I worried whether some authors were being fair to Marsden, Noll, and company. Katerberg is, giving Noll credit for work that has distinctly Christian aims. But people who read only parts of this book might conclude that the older generation of Christian historians were more interested in their guild than God. The evidence of their work suggests otherwise.

Earlier this summer I was having dinner in a pokey Chinese restaurant in Oxford with two colleagues. One belonged to George Marsden’s generation, while the other was a similar age to the editors of this book. I had chatted with the younger one earlier in the week, and had heard him share a vision for scholarly work justifiable in terms of its usefulness to the church. Over dinner, however, the older scholar said that history had to be written with no eyes on the present. I don’t think he knew that what he said was controversial at that table. But both colleagues believe they are serving God’s good purposes. A few years ago, the same senior historian had told me of his hope that the books he writes will influence the church as teachers at theological colleges read his work and pass it on to future pastors. Just this spring, I heard of someone saying that Marsden’s A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards was one of the most formative books he had read.

I would also have liked to see more exploration of the idea that different historians have different vocations, especially in a book that deals with that very concept. Might God not call some historians primarily to address the world and others to nurture the church, just as he calls some people to work for the state department and others to ordained ministry? Or what about the idea that the same historian can have a vocation to do both these things? That might help solve one of the puzzles of the book: its call for something different is typically tied to teaching, but it is much less clear about what the new inclination might mean for research and writing.

In sum, then, at times the editors over-egged the pudding. But there is wisdom aplenty in this book, and it will do what all authors hope their books will do—stimulate conversation.

Alister Chapman is associate professor of history at Westmont College. His book Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Rob Bell, as you may have heard, sympathizes with those who have left the church because of their discomfort with the doctrine of eternal punishment. Alas, he seems to lack sympathy for people still in the church who believe in a God who sends unbelievers to hell.

“How could that God be good?” Bell asks. “How could that God ever be trusted? How could the gospel be good news?”[1]

Bell’s critique has been a shot across the evangelical bow, sparking continuing discussion and a mini-publishing boom in response. Two books that answer Bell charitably and forcefully are God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News Is Better than Love Wins, by Mark Galli; and Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We’ve Made Up, by Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle. Both books agree with Bell that our understanding of hell hinges on what we make of God’s character.

Chan can relate to Bell’s discomfort with the traditional doctrine. “I have been embarrassed by some of God’s actions,” Chan admits in Erasing Hell. “In my arrogance I believed I could make Him more attractive or palatable if I covered up some of His actions. So I neglected speaking on certain passages, or I would rush through certain statements God made in order to get to the ones I was comfortable with. The ones I knew others would like.”

Galli, after counting 86 questions in just the first chapter of Love Wins, questions the fruitfulness of humans putting God in the dock. Christianity Today‘s senior managing editor reminds readers that

the really important question is not the question we ask God but the question he asks us … “Who do you say that I am?” The answer to that question is revealed on the cross. And until we embrace this answer, none of our questions even make sense, none of the questions raised in Love Wins can be properly addressed, and none of the answers the Bible supplies will satisfy. Until we comprehend who God is, all our questions are like chasing after the wind.[2]

Chan, a pastor and author of the popular book Crazy Love, and Sprinkle, a New Testament scholar, agree that we must be willing “to embrace a God who isn’t always easy to understand.” (Erasing Hell, though co-authored, is written in Chan’s voice.)

Both books bend over backwards to express appreciation for Bell’s role in bringing the uncomfortable doctrine of hell out into the open. To avoid the “tendency to recreate Jesus in our own image,” Chan and Sprinkle carefully examine what the Bible actually says about hell, suggesting that as faithful readers of Scripture we need to “soak ourselves in the Bible’s own culture.”

First, Chan and Sprinkle address Bell’s contention that hell isn’t an eternal place of torment for unbelievers after they die but is instead a catch-all title for the many “hells on earth” that people create. They call Bell’s description of the biblical hell (gehenna) as a literal garbage dump outside Jerusalem “misleading and inaccurate.” They demonstrate that Jesus’ contemporaries “believed that hell was a place of punishment for the wicked after they faced God’s judgment,” using “imagery of fire and darkness, where people lament,” and “a place of annihilation or never-ending punishment.” If Jesus had a different view, they tellingly write, “then He would certainly need to be clear about this.”

However, I find the authors’ discussion of the possibility of annihilation—largely based on the biblical word for destruction—to be unconvincing.[3] Destruction need not imply nonexistence. After all, a wrecking ball can destroy a building—leaving a large pile of rubble where the structure once stood—without vaporizing it. Couldn’t God also destroy sinners without making them disappear?

An online dictionary defines destroy as meaning “to reduce (an object) to useless fragments, a useless form, or remains, as by rending, burning, or dissolving; injure beyond repair or renewal; demolish; ruin; annihilate.” Annihilation is perhaps a possible conclusion about God’s judgment, but not a necessary one. In any case, these authors firmly reject Bell’s hope for a postmortem change of heart and say that fearsome suffering begins at death and ultimately awaits the unsaved on Judgment Day.

After marshaling the evidence, contra Bell, that hell is much more than the misery we create for ourselves on this earth, Chan confesses his own reluctance to believe it and preach it, admitting that his view of God needs expanding. “I really believe,” Chan says, “it’s time for some of us to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself.”

Galli agrees that the dominant metaphors for hell in the Bible are fire, darkness, destruction, and exclusion from God’s presence—though he says the exact nature of hell is unclear. Both books look at the account of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 and note that if the “eternal life” Jesus talks about lasts forever, then so does the “eternal punishment” (at least in its consequences). Galli makes the further point that it is Jesus who “is revealed to be the one through whom judgment will finally take place.”

Chan and Sprinkle excel in asking the “So what?” question. If hell is real, then what does it mean for our lives? Do we really believe? How do our lives point to our true eternal destination? Bell often presents people who believe in a literal hell as arrogant. Chan, however, is painfully introspective, asking whether he really cares about the people at the local Starbucks whose eternal destinies hang in the balance.

Neither God Wins nor Erasing Hell takes on Bell personally, leaving the question of whether he is a universalist to others. Galli simply discusses what Love Wins says. Chan and Sprinkle mainly engage Bell’s specific arguments in the notes. But while Bell styles himself as a radical who is uprooting conventional theological notions, Galli sees him as thoroughly evangelical—and thoroughly American, at that.

Bell asserts that life in God is about “stillness, peace, and that feeling of your soul being at rest.” In a brilliant insight, Galli notes that Bell is portraying God not as the Sovereign of the universe but as the Agent who gets things done for us. “I don’t want to disparage all this, because as far as it goes, it is pretty good news,” Galli writes. “God does marvelous things in our lives. But this is not the gospel. It leaves us trapped in self.” And this self-absorption seems a particularly American trait. “This problem is pandemic in evangelical Christianity,” Galli observes. Echoing John Piper,[4] Galli reminds us that God himself, not the stuff he gives us, is our ultimate good.

Another problem pandemic in American culture is the deification of individual choice, and Galli says Bell falls in line here, too, noting that Love Wins treats the human will as if it never fell.

Given such emphatic differences in our understandings of God, human nature, and scriptural interpretation, is there a way forward for evangelicals—including, I greatly hope, Rob Bell? How might love win in this situation? The answer, like our understanding of the afterlife, is necessarily clouded.

As many have noted before, evangelical religion is non-hierarchical. There are no popes or councils offering a definitive word on theological controversies. If you don’t like your church’s teaching, you are free to start a new one, one that emphasizes what you think are the key points in the biblical story. If a Christian publisher doesn’t feel comfortable with your book, you are free to take it elsewhere.

What about dialogue or debate? Might Wheaton College or Fuller Seminary, evangelical institutions where Bell has studied, organize a gathering—something we evangelicals are always good at? But Bell has proven himself to be maddeningly elusive when others have attempted to pin him down on precisely what he means—in print or behind the camera.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying. If Scripture is still a cornerstone of our movement, then doctrine matters, and so does clarity. But the last thing we need is a heresy trial (or the semblance thereof, conducted by self-appointed inquisitors). We could do worse than to take note of Galli’s appendix on charitable engagement in God Wins. Freely airing our differences, and our agreements, in a public forum might be the best way to lovingly honor the Lord we all claim.

Stan Guthrie, a Christianity Today editor at large, is author of All That Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us (Baker), and coauthor, with Jerry Root, of The Sacrament of Evangelism (Moody). He blogs at stanguthrie.com.

1. Bell asks these questions in the promotional video for Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011). They also appear in Love Wins.

2. For more on questions, see my study All That Jesus Asks: How His Questions Can Teach and Transform Us (Baker, 2010).

3. In a subsequent online conversation, Galli and Chan both express a “leaning” toward belief in annihilation rather than conscious eternal punishment while agreeing that the biblical witness leaves us with “agnosticism” on this point.

4. See John Piper, God Is the Gospel (Crossway, 2005).

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