Page 2391 – Christianity Today (2024)

For some while there has been a keen debate in the sociology of religion about whether the future of religion is presaged by the three hundred million or so people of Western Europe (in particular North-Western Europe ) or instead by an equivalent number of people in the United States. The debate involves some major theoretical stances on the subject, and in particular it activates a long-term issue about the presumed effects of modernization on religion, given that both regions have been foremost in the process of modernization. A long time ago I wrote that it all turned on whether or not you thought that France, as the model for the clash between Enlightenment and religion, gave us a preview of the global future, or reserved that honor for Scandinavia, as the model for an internally secularized Protestantism. The oddity is that the United States, in its origins and development, presents an alternative to the French version of the Enlightenment and a quintessential Protestant culture, while being the most religious of modern societies (though there have, of course, been those who have argued it is secularized from within). Inevitably a debate of this kind involves some scholars writing about incipient signs of secularization in the baby boom generation in the United States, and evidence for disaffiliation among young people today, while others canvass what Andrew Greeley has called “Unsecular Europe.” A phenomenon like the amazing spread of Pentecostalism in the developing world does not count because the societies in which it expands are not properly modern. You can even dismiss it as a premonition of secularization if you take Protestantism to be just the first step on the way to the secular future.

More recently the debate has taken on a seemingly new form with the popularity of the notion of post-secularity. One version hails a return of religion to the public square, even in Europe. The most recent expression of this is a book entitled God Is Back (2009) by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, which might be paired with Steve Bruce’s God is Dead (2003), but the argument already has a long history. Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God appeared in 1994. José Casanova argued against the supposed privatization of religion in his influential Public Religions in the Modern World(1994), and this points up a major oddity of the current debate about post-secularity, given that religion has been a consistent presence in the public life of Europe throughout the postwar period. After all, the church was central to the emergence of Christian Democracy, and the diminution of its influence, say in Spain or Holland, is a continuing process that bears none of the marks of something called the post-secular.

I suspect we are witnessing a largely intellectual return to the consideration of the role of religion, for example in the new book by Jürgen Habermas entitled Between Naturalism and Religion, which is as sociologically naïve as it is philosophically sophisticated. This intellectual interest is not prompted by anything new in the evidence, in Western or even in Eastern Europe, but by the impact of Islam, including the sizeable migrant populations of Muslims in Europe itself, and by the inclusion of highly religious ex-communist countries like Poland, Romania, and Slovakia in the European Union. There has been a religious revival in Russia and Ukraine of major political significance, but that is hardly the center of the debate. Moreover the debate proceeds as if the challenge to secularization theory were quite recent, whereas the present author initiated it as far back as 1965, interestingly enough just at the time when “the death of God” was at the height of its intellectual popularity. In 1969 I also put forward the idea that the course of secularization (understood most plausibly as a process of differentiation whereby major functions like socialization and welfare are transferred from religious to secular agencies) was significantly channelled by national histories (“path-dependency” in recent parlance), in particular by the type of Enlightenment experienced (French, British, German, or American), and by whether religion played a positive role (as in Poland) or a negative role (as in France) in the emergence of the nation.

Whether or not the concept of post-secularity has any purchase outside intellectual debate, the current discussion has genuine interest since it turns on some major theoretical approaches to religion and secularization. These include classic secularization theory, rooted in the relation of religion to modernity, in particular meta-processes like rationalization, or even the advance of reason and science. Then there is the individualization thesis, which is not necessarily incompatible with classic secularization theory, but shows itself in a very partial shift from religion to spirituality and in believing without institutional belonging, even though the proponents of this approach, such as Grace Davie, recognize it has, to some extent, what David Voas in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies labels a transitional character. Then there is rational choice theory, which assumes a steady demand for religion variously manifest according to the supply, notably whether this is provided by “lazy” monopolies or vigorous competition. It is in relation to ideas of a steady demand for religion that an examination of the very variable channels of secularization, as originally set out in my A General Theory of Secularisation (1969 and 1978), becomes crucial. That is precisely why the comparative analysis of these channels which now follows takes the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR, East Germany) as the focus for comparison and a test case for the central role of culture and socialization rather than some assumed steady demand, whether stimulated by the continuous pressure of existential need or postulated by biological theories seemingly reviving the “religious instinct.” Biological theories have been put forward with remarkable confidence, and are constantly extended, even into a supposed instinct for art. Yet such theories have taken very little interest in how a universal instinct, in this case for religion, can show itself with such vigor on the eastern side of the Oder-Neisse line in Poland, where 96 percent believe in God, and so exiguously on the western side in the former East Germany, where 30 percent believe in God. It seems odd that a biologically grounded instinct can so easily be turned off and on by socialization, and even odder that anyone proposing such a biological approach should acknowledge the role of culture by denigrating religious socialization as child-abuse. The usual defense put forward by those few scholars who take the cultural and historical evidence into account leans on the notion of functional equivalence, which in the case of East Germany means communism. However, the “religion” of communism collapsed twenty years ago, if not earlier, and nothing has taken its place, in spite of opportunities for any amount of expansion in the “supply” of religion from several competing sources.

The Unique Secularity of East Germany Compared with West Germany

After the mid-20th century, East and West Germany followed very different paths, politically and religiously. However, there is some evidence of a distinctive form of secularization emerging in East (then Central) Germany well before World War I. The area had been the most Protestant region of Germany and had therefore experienced a greater degree of religious individualization and a weakening of the communal tie still retained in Catholicism. Moreover the union of throne and altar also associated Protestantism with authority, power, and submission to the state. Secularist and anti-clerical movements emerged early in the east of Germany, and many “free-thinking” associations were founded there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition National Socialism was strong in some parts of the region and contributed to a weakening of the ties of denominational culture. As a result East Germany was already semi-secularized even prior to the communist assault. The newly imposed communist government offered an ideological exchange whereby East Germans would be treated as the innocent proletarian victims of Nazism, provided they accepted their assigned role in the progress of communism and its comprehensive worldview. National identity, which provided a base for religious resistance in Poland, could not exercise that role in East Germany because it had been so thoroughly discredited between 1933 and 1945 by the Nazi regime.

This then was the situation in which a rapid state-sponsored secularization took place. It had less to do with modernization, given that modernization moved forward much more quickly in West Germany, and a great deal to do with changes in regime. The situation has been commented on by numerous analysts, such as Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Michael Hainz, and Olaf Müller, Detlef Pollack, and Gert Pickel in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies. Whereas in the 1940s most people in East Germany and in the West had some affiliation with the Church, by the time of the second millennium the differences had become striking. In West Germany, 21 percent accounted themselves highly religious, whereas in the East only 8 percent did so. In the West, 57 percent of those questioned accounted themselves religious and 22 percent irreligious, while the comparable figures in the East were 28 percent and 64 percent. In short, two out of three in West Germany were well-disposed to religion while two out of three in East Germany were indifferent or hostile. Of course the differences might be somewhat less striking were one to compare the Protestant North-West of Germany with the Protestant North-East, or Hamburg with Berlin. That is a constant problem in this type of data: one requires figures taking into account region, migrant status, and ethnicity. Presumably active Christians were over-represented among those millions who fled the DDR. Or again, Catholic Latvia is not as Lutheran Latvia or post-Protestant Groningen in Holland as Nijmegen. But even making proper regional allowances, the West-East contrasts in Germany are dramatic. In 1998, 18 percent of West Germans declared they had “never believed in God” while among East Germans the figure was 58 percent. In East Germany a high degree of active dissociation from either belief or affiliation meant that the various dimensions of irreligion and religion alike were closely related and internally consistent, whereas in West Germany the higher degree of acceptability enjoyed by religion meant that large numbers of people were institutionally detached or semi-detached without counting themselves irreligious.

West Germany is religiously pluralistic with a noticeable penumbra of “spirituality,” though not one so large that it makes up for losses in traditional religiosity. Withdrawals from the church in West Germany peaked in the Sixties and the Nineties. In their discussion of these withdrawals, Pollack and Pickel in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies report that the highly educated are no longer over-represented, a trend which is observable over much of the continent. They also note a pattern among the better educated both of greater identification with the church and of greater alienation. However, the crucial data of secularization in West Germany are that whereas at mid-century half of all Catholics attended regularly, by the millennium this had dropped to a quarter, and the gap between the generations had greatly increased. Among Lutherans, those over 60 who regularly attended outnumbered those between 16 and 29 by four to one. In spite of the high proportion of those who consider themselves “religious,” the implications for commitment to institutional Christianity are obvious.

Comparisons in Northern and Central Europe

Here I extend my comparison between East and West Germany. I do this, first, within the northern secular heartlands, briefly contrasting Lutheran Denmark and post-Protestant Britain, Holland, and Switzerland. Then I take in other extensively secularized countries in the sometime communist bloc, notably Latvia, Estonia, and the (post-Catholic) Czech Republic. These are the core countries of European secularity, with the exception of the highly secular Franco-Belgian region centered on Paris, where the key element is not the Protestant version of the Westphalian church-state system but the war of the Catholic Church in alliance with the forces of the ancien régime with the French version of the Enlightenment in alliance with Republican nationalism.

East Germany was already semi-secularized even prior to the communist assault. The newly imposed communist government offered an ideological exchange whereby East Germans would be treated as the innocent proletarian victims of Nazism.

Denmark is the nearest Lutheran neighbor to the former DDR, and its capital Copenhagen lies roughly at the midpoint of the secular belt running from Birmingham to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, Berlin, and Tallinn. The religious condition of Denmark suggests how East Germany might have evolved had it not been part of a much bigger entity at the epicenter of European geopolitical tensions. Denmark exemplifies an astonishingly stable pattern of Scandinavian religion, with high levels of identification with the church and low levels of dogmatic assent and regular practice, as well as a fairly uniform Social Democratic ethos. Danish religion is an accommodating habit of the heart associated with a church in an iconic landscape. Its combination of a folk-church with Social Democracy illustrates the extent to which political culture and religious culture mirror each other throughout Europe.

Danish religio-political hom*ogeneity has geographical as well as historical roots. If one compares Denmark with Britain, the country consists of a small, flat peninsula with adjacent islands occupied solely by Danes, whereas Britain comprises two main islands divided into major ecological niches occupied by five different ethnic groups, each with a distinctive version of Christianity. Denmark lies at the junction of the Baltic and the North Sea, whereas Britain is a relatively secure territory looking toward the Atlantic, able to generate a partial pluralism outside the established churches, which later became complete pluralism when exported to the even greater safety of North America. By European standards Britain is unusually diverse religiously whereas Denmark is unusually hom*ogeneous, though both have a history of (mostly) settled evolutionary change rather than revolution. Moreover regular attendance at the respective state churches is not so very different—say, 2 percent.

At the same time Britain has experienced a rapid secularization affecting Catholics as well as Protestants. Over a quarter of a century, regular Catholic practice has dropped very seriously. As analyzed by Anthony Heath, declining religious identity is associated with a decline in all traditional identities, such as political loyalty, a sense of close solidarity with others of the same class, and a specifically British consciousness. Moreover, increasing numbers have shifted from a working-class to a middle-class identity. In the case of religion, in 1964 just over a quarter either did not claim a religion or said they never attended a religious service. In 2005, over two-thirds did so. In 1964, around three quarters of those who claimed a religion attended services, whereas in 2005 only half did so. On the other hand, where class and party have declined in their capacity to offer normative guidance, religion has retained its hold over the ethical norms of the religious minority. Overall one may conclude that the rather generalized notion of individualization receives some support from this case, which would be consistent with the idea that a dominant Protestant culture weakens the communal tie. When the Irish historian Roy Foster refers to the relative weakening of the Catholic Church in Ireland as “Protestantization,” one intuits what he means.

Further evidence might be supplied by the rapid secularization of post-Protestant Holland that followed the breakup of segregated socio-religious “pillars” in the Sixties, or by the much gentler secularization of Switzerland. In Holland, less than half the population are religiously affiliated and over three-quarters attend less than once a month. The decline in belief in God, now held by six persons in ten, is greater than the decline of belief in the supernatural. Unsurprisingly, belief and affiliation are closely related, especially among Catholics and conservative Protestants. Religion declines as younger cohorts replace older ones, as in Britain. In Switzerland, a country socially segregated by geography, religion has become increasingly pluralistic and has had a decreasing influence on education, media, welfare, and leisure. Between 1900 and 2000, membership in the Reformed churches fell from 57.8 percent to 35.3 percent, while the Catholic church has suffered a decline, though a less severe one, since the 1970s. Belief in God stands at 84 percent, far higher than in Holland.

The final comparison is between East Germany and other countries of the ex-Soviet bloc. Of the three Baltic countries, Estonia, which is very largely Lutheran apart from the considerable Russian minority, is the least religious, with 6 percent attending church in the course of a month; the comparable figure for Latvia, which is of mixed confession, is 15 percent, and for Lithuania, which is Catholic, 32 percent. Estonia is closest to East Germany, with 42 percent believing in God, whereas Latvia and Lithuania are quite similar with about 7 persons in 10 believing. Estonia is distinctive in one crucial feature: religion is associated with German dominance, and national feeling therefore retires to the level of folk culture and even pre-Christian religions. Exactly the same is true of the other highly secularized country of the ex-Eastern bloc, the Czech Republic, in particular Bohemia, which lost its German population in the postwar ethnic cleansing. The re-Catholicization of Czech Lands that took place in the 17th century, after the defeat of the Protestant Czechs, was associated with Hapsburg (German-speaking) dominance. The negative impact of forcible conversion, especially when associated with cultural dominance (for example, the very late semi-forcible conversion of North-Eastern Europe), is long-lasting. Belief in God in the Czech Republic stands at 35 percent, only slightly above East Germany. Interestingly, trust in the church was at its highest in several Eastern Bloc countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and East Germany—just at the point of communist collapse. The transfer of political hope to the church was later found unjustified.

This is not the place to reproduce the complex data that allow the late Yves Lambert, in a recent article, to write of “A Turning Point in Religious Evolution in Europe.” I simply note religious stability in Italy, with 40 percent regular church attendance, and in much of Southern and Eastern Europe. Belief in God in Portugal stands at 95 percent and in Italy at 93 percent, while in Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, and Greece it stands at 80 percent, 76 percent, 93 percent, and 91 percent respectively. Even taking into account the rapid post-Franco secularization in Spain, especially among younger people, belief in God there stands at 85 percent.

Lambert identifies the negative effects of radicalization in the Sixties on the churches and on moral ethos generally. He considers that there is a decline in exaggerated expectations of self-realization and permissiveness among the young, and he wonders whether a more pessimistic assessment of modernity might be associated with rising levels of belief in life after death. The great competitors of religion, above all Marxism and certain kinds of rationalism, have gone into decline, and Lambert believes there is a new climate, which he refers to as “pluralistic secularization.” Religion has passed through the filter of individual subjectivity and is firmly non-authoritarian, but it can find a new credibility as a source of meaning, ethics, sociability, and identity.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory(Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

—The is the first part of a two-part article. The second installment will focus on East Germany.

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

Back in the mid-to-late 19th century, the period that these two widely praised volumes explore, books sported modest titles. At mid-century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter and gave it the subtitle, A Romance, which referred not to its protagonists’ passions but to its fictional form. In like manner, the words Great Expectations stand alone atop the cover of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, while George Eliot’s greatest novel, Middlemarch, has a discreet, understated subtitle, A Study in Provincial Life. And at the century’s end, Thomas Hardy finished his novel-writing career with the bleak and blunt Jude the Obscure.

Yet times and tastes have changed on the title front. Simplicity is out, obscurity is in, and the unapologetic earnestness of then has given way to the allusive irony of now. Today, titles tease and subtitles reveal. Without their subtitles, for example, what would we make of Christopher Benfey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds and Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat? Is Benfey writing about the migratory patterns of this smallest of birds, or is this perhaps a memoir about a poignant season in his life? And what is Wineapple offering us? A biography of Jimmy Cagney, or perhaps a primer on one of his greatest films?

From their titles alone, we could never surmise that Christopher Benfey’s interests are in Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade. Nor could we imagine that in White Heat, Brenda Wineapple is setting out to plumb the depths of The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.The titles tease us with an image but leave it to their subtitles to reveal the connections that bind together each book.

For both Benfey and Wineapple, the binding ties are of the kind that literary modernism has long prized. Indeed, one of the central premises underlying these two books was put forward a little less than a century ago by E. M. Forster in Howards End.”Only connect!” the narrator in that novel cries out. “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” Through a series of “quiet indications,” Forster assures us, the bridge may thus at last be built that can “span [our] lives with beauty” and reconnect us one to another.

Christopher Benfey and Brenda Wineapple have written bridge-building books in the Forster line. As he did, they take it as a given that Christian belief no longer provides a span adequate to handle the traffic of our lives. Almost all of the artists these two treat in their works—from Higginson to Dickinson, from Heade to Twain—lived through a dramatic cultural eclipse of Christianity in the final decades of the 19th century. Within a matter of years, a broadly based communal experience of belief, grounded in ritual and steeped in the language of the King James Bible, gave way to the isolating particularities of personal perception and private memory. According to Benfey and Wineapple, it fell to the artists of America to overcome this isolating solitude and forge what connections they could in the desolate decades after the Civil War.

The specific link that absorbs the attention of Wineapple was grounded in the extraordinary friendship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the public man of Boston. In documenting their complex relationship, Wineapple says her purpose is not to write “a biography of Emily Dickinson, of whom biography gets us nowhere,” nor does she intend to offer an exercise in “conventional literary criticism.” Instead, she says of her own narrative, “here Dickinson’s poetry largely speaks for itself, as it did to Higginson.” What Wineapple seeks to do is “to throw a small, considered beam onto the lifework of these two unusual, seemingly incompatible friends.” Her goal is to suggest how “this activist and recluse bear a fraught, collaborative, unbalanced and impossible relation to each other,” a relation “as symbolic and real in our culture as it was special to them” in the 19th century.

With the enduring relationship between Dickinson and Higginson providing the backdrop, Wineapple paints upon a broad canvas that stretches the length and breadth of American history, from the presidency of George Washington to the divisions of our red-and-blue-state nation. She seeks to make her political points “lightly,” but the implications are obvious: “After all, who they [Dickinson and Higginson] were—the issues they grappled with—shapes the rhetoric of our art and our politics: a country alone, exceptional, at least in its own romantic mythology—even warned by its first president to steer clear of permanent alliances—that regularly intervenes on behalf, or at the expense, of others. The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all.”

The Dickinson-Higginson friendship began in 1862, when the introverted poet introduced herself to the established critic by way of a letter. She had read his article, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” in the Atlantic Monthly and was eager to learn what this arbiter of taste might think of her own work. She opened with a question—”Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”—and included four of her poems to serve as his basis for judgment. Dickinson labored as she lived, in private, and she craved an independent appraisal of the poetry that was pouring out of her: “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see distinctly—and I have no one to ask—.”

It was prudent for Dickinson to ask whether Higginson was “too deeply occupied” to assess the poems of a stranger, for he was in the midst of a wrenching transition. After a decade of essay-writing in support of literature and in opposition to slavery, he had concluded in the spring of 1862 that the time had come for him to join the battle raging across the land. That summer he enlisted, became the captain of a Massachusetts regiment, and by fall had assumed command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of freed slaves.Despite the press of personal and public concerns, however, Higginson did reply to this curious letter and its poems, and one of the central friendships in American literary history was launched. He and Dickinson were to meet only twice over the next two decades, but letters flowed freely between them until days before her death in 1886. The relationship outlived her, as Higginson diligently served as co-editor for the first, posthumously published editions of her poems, and as he assiduously promoted her work on the lecture circuit and in print.

In the history of Dickinson criticism, Higginson has long been a stick figure of sorts—the timid, genteel man who failed to tame a woman he couldn’t fathom. There is a hint of truth to this caricature, as Higginson himself admitted after she died: “It would seem that at first I tried a little, —a very little—to lead her in the direction of rules and traditions, but I fear it was only perfunctory, and that she interested me more in her—so to speak—unregenerate condition.”

Wineapple breathes life into this stick figure and gives him a real heft. In her narrative, Higginson compellingly emerges as a bold and engaging man, and she rightly acknowledges the profound debt that the demure woman of contemplation owed to the dynamic man of action. “This radical and, in later years, this apostle of moderation was,” she concludes, “the man Emily Dickinson trusted, for there was something of the radical and conservative, activist and recluse, in her nature, too.” In a friendship sustained through letters, “they invented themselves and each other, performing for each other in the words that filled, maintained, and created the space between them.” And “somehow these two people created out of words a nearness we today do not entirely grasp.”

History may have bequeathed the Dickinson-Higginson relationship for Wineapple to explore, but it did not hand on to Christopher Benfey the connections he traces. The ties he describes are often ones of his own invention, and they do not always seem convincing. “This book is about a cluster of American artists and writers adrift during the seismic upheaval of the Civil War and its wrenching aftermath,” he begins. “It is about a pre-Civil War mind-set and a post-Civil War need,” and that need coalesces for him in the image and ideal of a single bird.

To tell his story, Benfey assembles a cast of “actors … on my little stage”—including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade—and reports that as he was bringing them together, he discovered they “were fanatical about hummingbirds.” They wrote poems and stories about them, painted pictures of them, composed tunes to mimic their songs, and, in some cases, tamed them and stuffed them. A passion for this bird lies behind “the often dizzying relationships that connect the figures” in Benfey’s book, and his efforts “to trace the origins of this informal cult of hummingbirds kept leading back to the Civil War.”

Why did hummingbirds “elicit such a powerful attraction, rising at times to the level of an obsession?” The answer to that question is “the string on which the ten chapters” of Benfey’s book are strung: “Americans during and after the Civil War gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies.” That is, the characters in his book are bound together in a story of religious loss and artistic gain. “In science and in art, in religion and in love,” this “new dynamism and movement” recharged the lives of Dickinson, Higginson, Stowe, and company and imparted to them a vision of “a brave new world of instability and evanescence. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird.”

That bird, however, often seems hidden somewhere within or behind the web of vignettes and biographical sketches Benfey offers of late 19th-century artists. And whether the hummingbird is present or absent at any particular point in the story, the note repeatedly sounded in A Summer of Hummingbirds is one of rigid securities lost and fleeting illuminations found. We are told, for example, that Dickinson was “someone who couldn’t stand—who had a visceral shudder in the presence of—the flatulent rhetoric of church and state around her.” Her poetic career was marked by a strong “resistance to high rhetoric,” as she went about “quietly demolishing myths of heroic pomposity.”

The poet’s resistance was driven by the “dangerous power” she felt “inside her.” In addition to experiencing “a special intimacy with birds and flowers,” she had “an almost hallucinatory awareness of the power of individual words; and she discerned, behind the curtain of custom, the palpable nearness of the great facts of life and death.” But when the falsehoods of faith were set aside—when the “flatulent rhetoric” of sin and grace, providence and redemption, salvation and damnation, was laid away—what remained to sustain Emily Dickinson? In Benfey’s words, it was the gospel of the hummingbird, with its proclamation of “the fleeting nature of all life.” For “human life, all life, is a route of evanescence.”

According to Brenda Wineapple, Dickinson was forced to set out on the “route of evanescence” because she, Higginson, and others in their cultural cohort had suddenly found themselves thrust into “a climate where old pieties no longer sufficed, the piers of faith were brittle, and God was hard to find.” Like Benfey’s hunters of the hummingbird, the Dickinson and Higginson of White Heat each fabricated an ersatz creed for a post-Christian world. To Higginson, “the Bible was a book” like any other, and Christianity was but one form of religion among countless others; to serve his ethical needs, he patched together a personal credo that affirmed “the goodness of people” and celebrated Jesus as the great “brother.” Dickinson meanwhile fashioned a “personal, pantheistic, and paradoxical” faith that found its center in “birds, flowers, the shifting quality of light and of mind.” This is not quite the hummingbird’s “brave new world of instability and evanescence,” but it is close.

Wineapple and Benfey do uncover some enticing connections among late 19th-century artists, but perhaps the most intriguing ties these books reveal are those that run between the writers of that era and the critics of our day. They write of sensitive spirits forced to cast off “old pieties” as they climbed down from the “brittle” bridge of faith and began a long journey across a barren landscape ruled by a silent God. But these books also make it clear that the critics we encounter at the end of that trek are more ironic and less earnest than were the artists who first set out well over a century ago.

To borrow from Benfey’s own earthquake metaphor (“seismic upheaval”), the poets and painters of the 19th century were dazed survivors struggling to regain their tenuous balance even as the aftershocks continued to ripple beneath their feet. They were startled by what they saw in the land of unbelief, and they stood in awe of nameless forces greater than anything they could master or muster. In the world of their 21st-century chroniclers, however, the ground has settled and the fluid forms have become fixed and familiar. The cultural élites now cling to their own “old pieties,” which consist of a set of reflexive judgments about the hollowness of the Christian faith and the homelessness of the human condition.

It was not so for Dickinson and Twain and others in their day: the loss of belief left them riddled with phantom pain. In a poem she composed shortly before her death, Dickinson wrote that those who died in earlier generations “Knew where they went—/ They went to God’s Right Hand—.” Yet “That Hand is amputated now / And God cannot be found—.” For modern criticism, unbelief often seems to serve as a tranquilizer for the spirit. As a case in point, two decades ago Richard Rorty published a book—Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity—that opens with a devastatingly beguiling sentence: “About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.” Rorty’s book appeared in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, and according to him, that revolution had shown how the “whole vocabulary of social relations,” and “the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced overnight.” At the same time, “the romantic poets were showing what happened when art is thought of no longer as imitation but, rather, as the artist’s self-creation.”[1]

In the contemporary world, as a consequence of the shift that Rorty has outlined, the default position has become one of believing that everything of value is made rather than found, and metaphors of construction have supplanted those of discovery when we speak of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In their own way, Dickinson, Higginson, and company were among the first to discover and declare that there is in the end nothing to be found or received, and for more than a century, the humanist tradition has been transforming that startling assertion into an unquestioned assumption.

This brings us back to our opening question about the titles. In describing the titles and subtitles of these two books and other books of our day, I spoke of a pattern of tease and revelation. In terms of older epistemologies, such as those that governed Protestantism for centuries and Roman Catholicism for almost two millennia, the alternate terms might have been annunciation and revelation, or incarnation and proclamation. At the center of those theologies, we find a drama of revelation and discovery, in which men and women hear of a divine love that came to dwell in a broken world so that we might “have life and have it more abundantly.” In this vision of the truth, to know is first to receive and to discover, and then to make of our lives what we can by means of the gifts we have been given.

Now, however, when we study ourselves and our world, we find only a record of our own making, and the connections we trace in the past are simply signs of our Forster-like efforts to “only connect.” For a moment, White Heat and A Summer of Hummingbirds tease us with the illusion of discovery, but the books themselves uncover a world in which there is nothing to be found. That they do so, especially in Wineapple’s case, in prose that often proves to be heartbreakingly beautiful is a pleasure indeed. But this is a pleasure tinged with irony, and the irony is haunted by the shadow of that emptiness which the ancient Christians called acedia—a “state of restlessness and inability either to work or pray”—and which many in our post-Christian world have come to know as a spirit of ennui without end.

Several decades ago, one of the 20th century’s most melancholy and world-weary men, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote at the close of the second volume of his luminous autobiography: “For me, the story that began on those walks with my father through Park Hill Recreation Ground to East Croydon station, was now, once and for all, over. Another Way had to be found and explored.”[2] And so it is today, long after the summer of hummingbirds has passed and its white heat has left only sodden ashes behind. Like that curious crowd that gathered on Mars Hill two thousand years ago, in the midst of our collective ennui, many still wonder and wait to hear of Another Way that might still be found and explored, glorified and enjoyed, forever.

Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age (Eerdmans).

1. Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 3.

2. Malcolm Muggeridge,Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography (1973; repr. Regnery Gateway, 1989), p. 546.

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

The statistics are grim. Rainer Research estimates that 70 percent of young people leave the church by age 22. Barna Group argues that the figure increases to 80 percent by age 30. The Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest denomination, recently observed that growth in their churches is failing to keep up with the birth rate. Taken together, these findings suggest a startling fact: not only are we failing to attract younger worshipers, we're not holding on to the ones we have.

As executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary and a former youth pastor, Kara Powell has her eyes on the youth drop out trend. She is currently in the midst of a three-year College Transition Project, a study that involves over 400 youth group graduates and is focused on understanding how parents, churches, and youth ministries can set students on a trajectory of lifelong faith and service. Though research is ongoing, it is already revealing a promising pattern: youth involved in intergenerational relationships in church are showing promise for stronger faith in high school and beyond.

Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Brandon O'Brien spoke with Kara about her research and what it means for the local church.

Where did the now popular age-segmented paradigm of youth ministry come from?

In the 1940s and post World War II, there was a real burst in parachurch organizations focused on ministry to teenagers and young adults, such as Young Life, InterVarsity, and Youth for Christ. In many ways, they led the way for the church in realizing that we need to focus on specialized discipleship and teaching for teenagers.

Why did the church adopt this age-segmented model of ministry?

Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, liked to say, "It's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel." So he developed some amazingly creative models of youth ministry that took root and bore fruit. I think a lot of churches saw the success of groups like Young Life and started thinking, If the parachurch folks are tailoring their ministry toward young people's interests, then we can—and probably should—too.

What were the benefits of that move?

The church recognized that teenagers are going through specific issues and have specific concerns. As one youth worker told me, "It's hard for a 16 year old to talk about masturbation with grandma in the room."

What other issues do teens face that make student ministry important?

There is a strong link between kids staying in church and their involvement in intergenerational relationships and worship.

A couple of important things are going on during adolescence.

First, teens are in a quest to figure out their identity. They tend to try on different identities in different spheres, which leaves them feeling like they live somewhat fragmented lives—they're one person on the soccer field, another person in school, another person on Facebook, and still another person at church and at home.

Autonomy is a second major focus of an adolescent's quest. "How do I make decisions apart from my parents?"

The third is significance. So teens are asking, "Who am I? Where do I fit in? What difference does my life make?" In a sense, those issues are relevant to all ages, but the flame is turned up under those questions during adolescence.

Why did you begin to rethink this common, age-focused paradigm?

We realized in the 1940s that we were not offering teens enough focused attention. So what did we do? We started offering them too much. All of a sudden churches had adult pastors and youth pastors, adult worship teams and youth worship teams, adult mission trips and youth mission trips. And there's a place for that. But we've ended up segregating—and I use that word intentionally—our kids from the rest of the church. Now we tend to think that we can outsource the care of our kids to designated experts, the youth and children's workers.

On my dad's side of the family, there were too many of us to fit in one room or around one table at family gatherings. So we adopted the two table system. The adult table had pleasant conversation, while the kids' table usually degenerated into a Jell-O snorting contest. Theoretically we were having the same meal; but we were having two very, very different experiences. That's what we've done in churches today.

What is the long-term impact of segregating teens?

A lot of kids aren't going to both youth group and church on Sundays; they're just going to youth group. As a result, graduates are telling us that they don't know how to find a church. After years at the kids' table, they know what youth group is, but they don't know what church is.

There are a lot of statistics regarding what happens to high school seniors when they graduate from a youth group. As I've looked at the research, my best estimate is that between 40 and 50 percent of seniors from youth groups really struggle to continue in their faith and connect with a faith community after graduation.

What can churches do to increase the likelihood that our kids stay in church after they graduate?

I think the future of youth ministry is intergenerational youth ministry.

At this point in our research, we've found that one thing churches can do that really makes a difference is getting kids actively involved in the life of the church before they graduate.

There is a strong link between kids staying in church after they graduate and their involvement in intergenerational relationships and worship. It's important, we're finding, to get beyond a token youth Sunday and start thinking about how to involve kids as ushers and greeters and readers and musicians in our services.

We're also finding a relationship between teenagers serving younger kids and their faith maturity when they graduate from high school. Teens should not only be the objects of ministry; they need to be the subjects of ministry as well. It's the 16 year old that has relationships with 66 year olds and 6 year olds who is more likely to stay involved in a faith community after she graduates.

Let's start with worship. What does intergenerational worship look like?

First, it needs to be theologically driven. This is far beyond any kind of politically correct appreciation of diversity that includes age diversity. God intends for community to be diverse in race, gender, and age. First and foremost, then, a church needs to be committed to being a hub where 16 year olds can have real relationships not just with peers but with 36 year olds and 66 year olds.

How that works out in practice will be different in every church. Some churches try to find a compromise worship style that nobody hates but nobody loves and everybody kind of tolerates. Other churches are doing more of a hodgepodge, where there will be a few songs that sound like youth songs and then there will be a hymn. At the root, being intentionally intergenerational means that churches need to be aware of and flexible about things that can be alienating to kids.

The good news is that with the recovery of ancient practices, spiritual disciplines, and kids' growing interest in tradition, there's a lot more common ground for adults and kids than in the past. And we need to celebrate that. I'm not saying that a 13 year old needs to be the pastor's target audience. But a pastor can do things that will engage a teenager. Using drama and video and telling stories, for example. I have sat through hundreds of sermons, and I watch the teenagers, and when they pay the most attention is almost always when the pastor is telling stories.

Youth can also be involved in the service itself by sharing testimonies and leading worship. One thing we're also doing in our church, which I love, is moving toward having families as greeters instead of just individuals. Kids can hand out stickers to other kids to make them feel welcome.

This could have major implications for church programming.

One youth pastor shared with me that he started questioning the purpose of having both a Sunday and Wednesday meeting for the youth group. They were doing basically the same things twice a week: fellowship, worship, and teaching. At the same time, the kids were disengaged from the wider church. None of them were going to a worship service on Sunday. They were just going to youth group.

So this youth pastor canceled Sunday youth group. Now kids show up on Wednesday for youth group, but on Sunday they are part of the larger church. They serve Communion and are ushers and greeters, and now and then they have roles in the sermon. The youth pastor said, "We knew it was going to be great for the kids; we had no idea how great it was going to be for the church."

It sounds like you have high expectations of what youth can and will do.

Teenagers are up to the challenge. In our college transition project, we asked high school seniors what they want more of in youth group. Time for deep conversation ranked highest. Games ranked last. That's one example of how we're currently undershooting. Tenth graders study Shakespeare. What are we offering them at church? Nothing comparable to Shakespeare.

How else can churches foster intergenerational relationships?

There's a standard ratio in youth ministry: one adult for every five kids. My colleague here at Fuller, Chap Clark, says we need to reverse the ratio and strive for having five adults build into one kid.

When I say that to youth workers or pastors, they tense up. I'm not talking about five Bible study leaders or five small group leaders per teenager. I'm talking about five adults who care enough about a kid that they learn her name, ask her on Sunday how they can be praying for her, and then the following Sunday ask her, "How did it go with that science test?" Our study shows that even these baby step connections can make a real difference.

Tenth graders study Shakespeare. What are we offering them at church? Nothing comparable to Shakespeare.

So relationships are as important as worship styles?

More important. And I think one of the real advantages of being a smaller church is that there is a lot more potential for intergenerational relationships and longer lasting faith. It's a general rule that the bigger the church the more segmented the age groups and generations are from each other. So I look at a church of a hundred and think, Man, what potential there is to have meaningful relationships.

Does that mean larger churches are stuck with age-segregated programs?

No. We're seeing real potential for intergenerational relationships with justice and service projects, too. There's richness in getting folks from the youth group and adult Sunday school classes, for example, serving together. Have the youth ministry do a trip with the senior adult class. Lots of churches have told us that that's been really powerful.

I don't meet many adults who want nothing to do with kids, but I meet a lot of adults who are intimidated by teenagers and don't know how to talk with them. Serving together levels the ground. When we've got a hammer in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, all of a sudden we've created a shared experience, and age is irrelevant.

How is this different from traditional mentoring?

Traditional mentoring typically focuses on kids in whom we see some kind of potential, the best and brightest. The danger with focusing on the best and brightest is it's not good for anyone, because it only reinforces an identity based on achievement and performance for the kids who are good at performing. For those who aren't good at performing, it's just one more way that they're being judged and found failing. Some kids may not be verbally oriented, but they show mercy in amazing ways or they have great cross-cultural sensitivity. And there are adults who feel called to step into relationships with those kids.

If adults in a church caught a vision that every kid needs to have their name known by five adults in the church, then an adult who's interested in computers can connect with a teen who is interested in computers. And it's through things like service that we get to know each other and can follow up later to deepen the relationship.

What is the parents' role in this intergenerational vision?

Many parents ask their children about their church experience. How was church today? What did you learn? What difference do you think it makes at school? "Church was okay," "not much," and "nothing" are the kinds of responses you tend to get from your teenagers.

But one of our more interesting findings is that it's also very important for parents to share about their own spiritual journeys with kids. Teenagers don't know how their parents came to know Jesus. During our family devotions on Sundays, we used to go around the table and have our kids share about what they learned in church. Then we'd look at a Scripture passage and pray together. Now, because of our research, we have the kids share first. Then my husband and I share what our senior pastor talked about in the service. We want our kids to hear about our faith and our spiritual journeys and what we're reading and what we're praying about.

What is the pastor's role?

The pastor is crucial. I'm a big believer in the priesthood of all believers. Yet the reality is that the behavior and attitudes of the pastor ultimately set the course for the church.

One youth worker told me that in his large church, the pastor often asks the youth pastor on Monday something like, "I met a girl who plays violin. I don't remember her first name, but I think she goes to such-and-such middle school. Can you give me her e-mail address?" The youth pastor gives him her e-mail address, and he e-mails the girl that he met on Sunday after church. That senior pastor has a vision for intergenerational ministry and hasn't outsourced it.

What are some of the obstacles to this sort of ministry?

A lot of youth workers fear resistance from other church leaders, parents, and even the kids themselves.

What advice would you give youth pastors who are eager but fearful?

First, I'd tell them that there's research that backs up the effectiveness of this type of ministry. And parents are very open to research.

Second, I tell them the change process often starts small. Look for a subgroup of parents and kids who will embrace this and can help you bring changes into your youth ministry. I'm a big believer in the axiom that people support what they create. So get people involved from the very beginning.

Then experiment and tell people, "We're going to try this, and if it doesn't work, that's okay." Continue to explain why you're making the changes. If the congregation isn't fully onboard, it may be because it hasn't really been explained to them.

Our church has held a couple of donut focus groups with youth group kids who had graduated. And we asked, "What are the most important things that contributed to your faith? What do you wish we did more of?" Any church can ask these questions of current kids, kids who have graduated, and parents, and learn a whole lot about what God is doing and maybe what's hindering what God wants to do.

Give us an example of an experiment you've tried recently.

Last fall my church did a Sunday school class for six weeks where we invited a handful of high school juniors and seniors to meet with senior adults to discuss the theme of Christ and culture. One of the most meaningful moments was toward the end of the series when the kids brought in examples of how they were trying to influence culture. One student brought in a guitar and played a song he had written. A girl who wants to be a fashion designer brought in sketches of her clothes. The senior adults oohed and aahed over what the kids had done. And then they had a real honest dialogue about how their faith intersects with the way they're trying to influence culture. We had 76 year olds and 17 year olds talking to each other for six Sundays in a row.

Where is the generation gap widest today?

Technology. I'm 38, and I'm on Facebook everyday, and I text and all that; but I still feel like a novice compared to the 13 year olds in our youth ministry.

A question we're starting to address at Fuller is how technology is changing the way kids deal with questions of identity and autonomy. Kids are going to sleep with their cell phone on their pillow so they don't miss that next text. There are kids I know pretty well, but on Facebook they take on a different persona and are experimenting with different identities.

Technology today is a lot like a driver's license was for the previous generation. When I got my driver's license, all of a sudden I could do things with my friends and have relationships that I couldn't without my driver's license. And cell phones do that for kids today.

What is the upside of young people's familiarity with technology?

I think technology is a way that kids can lead in our churches. There are some interesting stories these days about kids who are expressing themselves more through technology and even being very entrepreneurial. Maybe that's the way to involve that 14 year old by saying, "Hey, we want to start a social networking group. How do you think we should go about it? What's the difference on Facebook between a group and a page?" That generation gap can be redeemed for kids if there are adults willing to explore the possibilities with them.

How can you reassure adults who are worried about changing their church's approach to teen ministry?

I remember what a privilege it was to be invited to the adult table. Adults underestimate how much kids want to be with us. Kids are far more interested in talking to caring, trustworthy adults than we think they are.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The average funeral now costs $7,323, not including cemetery plot, marker, flowers, or obituary, which can push the total toward $10,000. That’s why cremation is the choice of about one-third of families, and projected to hit 60% by 2025. Cheaper alternatives are popping up, including:

• Discount service providers. New, small storefront operations, they handle the body and the paperwork without parlors or limos.
• Costco caskets. At warehouse clubs, they’re nicer than a pine box, but without the funeral home mark-up.
• Formaldehyde-free farewells. Embalming is more custom than requirement. But schedule the service soon. And in a cool month.
• Cremation. Takes the pressure off a speedy service. In most states, a casket is no longer required for processing, making it even cheaper.
• Back to church. The old way is in again, using the sanctuary instead of the funeral home for the visitation and service.
• Graveside-only options. Create a meaningful farewell without renting a hall. (But beware the boombox tribute.)
• Free plots. Vets, service-club members, and poor people are often entitled to free or inexpensive burial plots.
• Family plots. In many rural places, it’s okay to bury PawPaw in the back forty he loved so well. But check with the zoning board first.

Without a funeral director on hand, be prepared to help out: instruct unskilled pallbearers, pin on boutonnires, and perhaps fold and present the flag. Practice the paper football triangle in case of a protocol emergency.—Eric Reed, with statistics from Newsweek

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

David DiSabatino, director of a new documentary about the late Larry Norman, said in a recent e-mail that his film, Fallen Angel, has “obtained a commitment from a documentary niche-marketing specialist” to bring the film to “a number of theaters in early 2010.”

The company, Abramorama, most recently distributed Anvil: The Story of Anvil, which received high critical marks.

Critical response to Fallen Angel is somewhat lacking, except for a fewthings that had been written about earlier versions of the film – which I saw about a year ago. DiSabatino took some of those early criticisms to heart and apparently has done some heavy editing on the film, and says the new version has a much different vibe than the original. (The first version – available here – was a choppy and a bit too dark, though there were certainly some dark sides of Norman that had to be explored. DiSabatino says the edited version is lighter, but doesn’t gloss over Norman’s problems, many of which he brought on himself.)

DiSabatino also reports that “the legal wranglings that went on behind the scene are over and we have prevailed. For those of you that do not know, after the Cinequest festival [where Fallen Angel screened in March] we were threatened with a copyright infringement lawsuit by the Norman family. We responded by petitioning the courts to judge whether we had fairly and legally used the materials in the film. We prevailed in the case and found out that much of what was contested wasn’t even owned by those protesting.”

CT Movies plans more coverage, including a review, of the film in the months ahead, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, learn more about Fallen Angel at the official site, and watch the trailer here:

Here are the items we’re watching today:

– Some pro-life groupssay the health care bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus would allow the government to pay for abortions.

A Rasmussen Reports survey suggests that 48 percent believe any government-subsidized health care plan should be prohibited from covering abortion while 13 percent believe a plan should be required to cover it. Thirty-two percent of those surveyed favor a more neutral approach with no requirements in either direction.

– The president of Notre Dame plans to participate in the March for Life in January in Washington, D.C. John I. Jenkins took heat after the school invited President Obama to speak at commencement and gave him an honorary doctorate.

– A mayoral candidate in Florida faces scrutiny over his creationism beliefs.

– History nuts might enjoy this item. A man is expected to sell one of 32 copies of “the Bible of the Revolution” for at least $40,000. Here’s more from the Washington Post.

This endorsem*nt by the secular of the spiritual would have been a flagrant violation of the church/state divide – but it was nine years before that concept would be codified and ratified in the First Amendment.

…

On Thursday, at a rare book auction in Manhattan, the 59-year-old retired real estate developer, a self-described devout Christian who avoids affiliation with any denomination and deeply dislikes “political Christians,” is selling one of his copies.

It has been a good year for my old home state of Hawaii: it started the year with one of its own becoming President, and on October 11 one of its most famous heroes will officially become a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

Even among Hawaii’s most Protestant Protestants, Damien de Veuster is praised as a man who exemplified incarnational, sacrificial ministry. The Belgian priest did not first go to the islands to minister to the Hansen’s disease victims of the Kalaupapa colony on Molokai, but in 1873 he eagerly volunteered to minister.

“My Lord, remembering that I was placed under the pall on the day of my religious profession, thereby to learn voluntary death is the beginning of new life,” he told his bishop, “here I am, ready to bury myself alive among these unfortunate people, several of whom are personally known to me.”

Damien was not he first to volunteer to help the settlement (whose residents were not there voluntarily: isolation of those who had contracted Hansen’s disease was enforced by law from 1866 to 1969). But he seems to have been the first to work with the assumption that he too would contract the illness. Where other workers had left medicine, supplies, and food at a distance for the patients to use, Damien’s work almost ensured infection. “The manual labor of the roughest kind which he did for the lepers, to make them more comfortable, could not fail to produce frequently cuts, punctures and abrasions, by which the danger of inoculation was greatly increased,” a 1904 item in the Journal of the American Medical Association explained.

“You know my disposition,” Damien wrote two days after arriving in Kalaupapa. “I want to sacrifice myself for the poor lepers. The harvest is ripe.”

A bit more than a decade after his arrival, Damien discovered an early sign of infection: he had blistered his feet in a scalding footbath, but did not feel any pain.

“From henceforth I am forbidden to come to Honolulu again, because I am attacked by leprosy,” he wrote his bishop. “Its marks are seen on my left cheek and ear, and my eyebrows begin to fall. I shall soon be completely disfigured. I have no doubt whatever of the nature of my illness, but. I am calm and resigned and very happy in the midst of my people. The good God knows what is best for my sanctification. I daily repeat from my heart, Thy will be done.”

From some of his earliest days in the community, Damien had identified directly with his parishioners and patients. “I make myself a leper with the lepers, to gain all to Jesus Christ. That is why, in preaching, I say we lepers, not my brethren, as in Europe.” He continued to serve among them as one of them until his death on April 15, 1889.

Damien’s life, ministry, and death are certainly inspiring. But as his canonization draws nearer, I’ve been thinking more about the role criticism has played in both his life and in his fame. Nearly every biographical sketch talks about some kind of between Damien and other religious leaders. Honestly, much of this seems to be mere boilerplate for modern depictions of heroic Christians–they must always be in conflict with other religious leaders. Still, the depictions are not wholly unwarranted. Damien apparently exasperated some church leaders and government workers with his repeated requests for help. And when word of his work began to be publicized (largely due to the publication of one of his letters in Belgium) and supporters began sending him money, some Catholic officials reportedly worried that he was becoming prideful.

But the bigger conflict came after his death, when a small letter appeared in the Sydney Presbyterian. Australian pastor H. B. Gage had written to a pastor in Honolulu, C.M. Hyde, to see if all of the celebration of Damien’s holiness and sacrifice was warranted. Hyde’s response was published:

Dear Brother,—In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist. The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness. Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.—Yours, etc.,

C.M. Hyde

The letter caught the eye of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote a scathing response and published it around the world. In addition to circulating as its own booklet, it appeared in The New York Times and other prominent outlets. “I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility,” he wrote.

With what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home. … When we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat—some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.

According to Damien biographer John Tayman (The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai), Hyde had believed his letter to be a private one. That it was published in the Sydney Presbyterian was a surprise, and that he had become a target was devastating. A granddaughter of one of Hyde’s colleagues write that after seeing Stevenson’s letter, Hyde “seemed to be an extinguished candle with the last remnants of life ebbing out of the light that had been. He was crushed, distracted, and … on the verge of tears.”

“Oh, what have I done?” Hyde said to the girl. “I have just suffered the greatest undoing of my entire life. I am now being crucified by the most widely read author of our day and on the charges of telling the truth about that sanctimonious bigot on Molokai.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Stevenson didn’t disagree with many of Hyde’s assessments. In one of his own private letters that was later published, Stevenson wrote that Damien “was a European peasant; dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour, and fundamental good humour; convince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of insult) and he would undo what he had done, and like his corrector better. A man with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that.”

What struck Stevenson was perhaps not the pointing out of Damien’s faults but the lack acknowledgment of Damien’s work. He recounted the story of the first time he’d heard that Damien had not been chaste. A man from Honolulu had suggested it in a public house on the beach in Samoa. Suddenly,

a man sprang to his feet …. “You miserable little ______” (here is a word I dare not print, it would so shock your ears). “You miserable little ______,” he cried, “if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you see you are a million times a lower for daring to repeat it?”

Later in life, Stevenson reconsidered his booklet. “It is always harshness that one regrets,” he said.

I regret also my letter to Dr. Hyde. Yes, I do; I think it was barbarously harsh; if I did it now, I would defend Damien no less well, and give less pain to those who are alive. These promptings of good-humour are not all sound; the three times three, cheer boys, cheer, and general amiability business rests on a sneaking love of popularity, the most insidious enemy of virtue. On the whole, it was virtuous to defend Damien; but it was harsh to strike so hard at Dr. Hyde. When I wrote the letter, I believed he would bring an action, in which case I knew I could be beggared. And as yet there has come no action; the injured Doctor has contented himself up to now with the (truly innocuous) vengeance of calling me a “Bohemian Crank,” and I have deeply wounded one of his colleagues whom I esteemed and liked.

Well, such is life.

Indeed, Stevenson had proved right when he wrote in his open letter to Hyde: “If that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.” The world recalls Damien as among the saintliest people of the last few centuries—and he is rarely recalled as a human with faults, temptations, and challenges. Gage (when he is remembered at all) is a one-dimensional foil, a paper villain called in to represent the damning and critical tendencies of envious religious leaders.

To me, both as the managing editor for news at Christianity Today and as a Christian history enthusiast, the public correspondence of Hyde and Stevenson raises all kinds of questions. Over the last four or five decades we’ve gone through a time of tremendous iconoclasm – “warts and all” biographies have often highlighted the “warts” above the “all.” And that’s probably a healthy response to the hagiography and inspirational biographical sketches that bent (or wholly invented) the facts to fit a pietistic lesson. Thankfully, the gleeful search for faults seems to be disappearing from the history shelves (I fear it will always be with us in political reporting). But as we seek to understand those who are affecting or who have affected the church and the world, what should we do with the critics? Can we be content to portray them as mere foils? Bit characters whose main job in the story is to throw stones and raise questions? Must we show them, too, as fully fleshed humans with their own accomplishments, joys, hopes, triumphs, foibles, and failures?

Where I suppose I generally land is that it is okay for a critic in the context of a larger story to be portrayed as merely a critic, so long as those of us who tell the stories never lose sight of their humanity. I have known critics who have cast stones purely out of jealousy, envy, and arrogance and who have deserved every last drop of Stevenson’s harsh critique. (Okay, I’ve more than known them. I’ve been them!) At the same time I’ve known critics who have acted out of love and Christ-like concern, who have spoken truth about popular saints knowing full well that they’re likely to become known more for that act of criticism than for anything else they have done to try to live a faithful life. It’s often hard to tell one type of critic from the other.

I suppose that as someone who is sometimes a critic, it may be helpful to ask myself whether I’m prepared to submit to caricature as a result of the criticism. If this is all history remembers me as, is that okay? I don’t have many moments when I am “ready to bury myself alive” as Damien was. But am I willing to be even face his trials metaphorically? If I speak the truth in love, am I willing to be “disfigured” by those who disagree with me? Or am I “calm and resigned and very happy in the midst of my people”? How often do I confess, “The good God knows what is best for my sanctification.” How often do I “repeat from my heart, Thy will be done”?

(Yes, I know professional historian types don’t like posts that end with a personal, pietistic reflection. If you’re one of these, feel free to pretend my post ended with our professional questions about the duty of historians to those critics who are not central to the narrative.)

Gordon L. Heath, Doing Church History: A User-friendly Introduction to Researching the History of Christianity (Toronto, Ontario: Clements Publishing, 2008)

There are many reasons why professors read books in their field. Among these: to find textbooks for use with their students; to gain arguments, evidence, or illustrations for their lectures; even to enjoy a good book! I picked up Gordon L. Heath’s Doing Church History with all three of these goals in mind.

Heath, assistant professor of Christian history at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, aims this slim (103-page) paperback at seminary students. His brief chapters deal with the commonsense questions that come naturally to seminary students who have often never darkened the door of an undergraduate history course. “Why Bother?” “What about God as a Cause?” “What about Objectivity?”

Along the way, Heath provides a primer of the historical field’s ins, outs, and necessary disciplines.

Do I have to learn history?

There is only one boring course at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: History of Magic. Do you see the cultural bias we seminary professors of history have to put up with? (Don’t weep for us. Just send money.) Discerning this cultural resistance, Heath launches his introduction with the required apologia: No, church history is not as bad as death and taxes, though it is just as inevitable—at least, in most seminary curricula. No, it is not boring and (merely) technical. No, it is not remote from your ministry concerns. Yes, it brings depth and insight into your ministry in ways not available from any other source.

So far, Heath’s got me in his cheering section. Then he adduces what is surely the best argument for doing history in a seminary setting: the historical nature of Christianity itself. And he caps his argument with a list of practical reasons that parallels closely my own “Top Ten Reasons to Read Christian History.” Beyond my top ten are points about how history “clarifies the nature of discipleship and leadership,” “helps in leadership issues,” reminds us of the “reality of life and death,” and provides a mine of “rich devotional and liturgical material.”

Pastors, practice, and papers

In no other book on the discipline of church history have I seen such a helpful practical focus aimed at ministerial students and ministers. For example, having established that the discipline is all about uncovering motives and interpreting causes, Heath reminds his readers that “the question of cause will be one that you face in Christian leadership and ministry. Why is the church not growing (or why is it growing)? Why did the pastor get fired? Why did the church split? Who is to blame for the marriage breakdown? Why did the child run away?” The person practiced in historical interpretation will have a leg up in dealing with such questions.

The book’s practical slant shines in the excellent section “Types of Assignments.” Here Heath does the writer’s handbook thing, taking students through the vicissitudes of book reviews, biographical papers, and research papers in a few well-chosen words. For example, he gives this wise advice on thesis-driven research papers:

As much as possible primary sources must be used in the argument, and secondary sources must be included to supply an interpretive or methodological framework as well as necessary background information. In all cases the argument (or thesis) is clearly stated and argued; the rest of the paper makes a case for the thesis by providing evidence and analysis. It also takes to task those scholars who have argued differently.

If my students would take even this single brief passage from Heath’s book to heart, they could save themselves much wasted effort and heartache.

Providence and objectivity

Heath handles two of Christian history’s “elephant-in-the-room” issues deftly, though I don’t always agree with his nuances. These are the questions of providence and objectivity. Can historians show us the finger of God in the past? And can historians come close to showing us “what really happened?”

On the first question, Heath addresses the seminary student eager to make claims about God’s activity in history—and I have met quite a few of these. He reminds this student that at various points in the church’s development, Christian historians have told us with great certainty that Constantine’s conversion was the work of God, that the crusaders’ victories were ordained by God, and that the destruction of the Spanish Armada was a direct divine intervention. He works helpfully through the issues and emerges with appropriately chastened conclusions: “History has a purpose, but the reason(s) and ultimate outcome(s) for historical events remain a mystery.” “Even if we could step outside of our culture long enough to be able to see things more clearly, there is no reason to think that we could know why God did what he did, or know what he is doing in the world.”

As for the question of whether historians can really get us close to the truth about the past, Heath offers what seems to be the universal conservative Christian interpretation (and one with which I basically agree): he deals in turn with the naïve optimism of some 19th-century historians and the radical skepticism of the postmoderns, then concludes that we can have a degree of confidence in the work of historians.

The upshot

Did Heath’s book fulfill my three goals?

Awkward and repetitive language at points, poor copy editing, and the annoying archaic tic of saying “an historian” (no one I’ve ever met talks like this) did blunt my enjoyment, but Heath said so many good things about how to learn and use history in a church setting—my particular passion—that I couldn’t help but like the book.

There is certainly good “borrowable” material in this book for the seminary professor. Apart from several of Heath’s “reasons to read history,” I’ll also steal his use of the Holocaust (more skillful than is often the case) in the section on objectivity.

As for finding a textbook, I feel a book for students about history-writing should itself be well-written, and this one falls short of the mark. But I know of no other brief guide that steers seminary students through the thickets of reading and writing history. For me, the pros outweigh the cons. I will be assigning this book in my survey courses.

Chris R. Armstrong is associate professor of church history at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Resigned: Geoff Hammond, as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board, on August 11 amid trustee concerns over his leadership. Hammond held the position since 2007.

Died: Geoffrey W. Bromiley, theologian and translator of works by Karl Barth and Ernst Käsemann into English, on August 7. He was 94.

Died: Eunice Kennedy Shriver, pro-life activist whose Catholic faith led her to found the Special Olympics, on August 11 in Massachusetts. She was 88.

Died: Mary Vanden Bosch, co-founder of Bethany Christian Services, the largest adoption agency in the U.S., on August 3. She was 93.

Died: Ernest W. Lefever, conservative minister and founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, on July 29 of a progressive brain disease. He was 89.

Died: Graham Stanton, an award-winning New Testament British scholar, on July 18. He was 69.

Appointed: Ronald Carpenter Sr., as general superintendent of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. Carpenter had directed the denomination’s church planting branch, Evangelism USA, since 1997. He succeeds James D. Leggett, who will become president of Holmes Bible College in September.

Died: Paul William Gericke, founder of popular Christian radio station Lifesongs 89.1, on July 13. Gericke, 85, had served at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary since 1965.

Died: Frank Toews, missionary pilot for Africa Inland Mission, in a plane crash August 1 in Nairobi, Kenya. He had flown for the air transport ministry since 2003.

Died: John B. Coburn, former Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, on August 8 in Bedford, Massachusetts. He was 94.

Died: Bob Lehnhart, former Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot and founder of AirServ, on August 18 from a boating accident in Alaska. He was 76.

Died: Charles E. Blair, scandal-plagued founder of Denver megachurch Calvary Temple, on August 20. He was 88.

Died: H. Wesley Wiley, civil rights leader and former pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in D.C., on July 16 in Maryland from bone cancer. He was 94.

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Westminster Abbey in London is one of the few places in the world that doesn’t disappoint. The main part of Westminster is the cathedral: an enormous, basilica-style monastery of Gothic architecture that leaves one with a breathtaking vision of the height and depth of, if not God, at least of the worshipers’ concept of God.

With the sheer amount of space between the floor and soaring vaults, from the back of the nave to the altar, as well as the complicated artistry on every wall and window, you find yourself awed by everything that speaks of the unimaginable greatness of God. You have a peculiar sense that God is very present and yet not altogether accessible. This is not an unpleasant experience; on the contrary, you realize that your idea of God has probably been domesticated and confined.

We might refer to such an experience as mystical, although the term is commonly associated in the Western mind with something that is highly subjective and meant for only the few. This is, however, a stunted definition. In ancient Christian theology, mystical refers to the wonder of the Christian story, the fulfilling of the Father’s plan of redemption in Christ, which Paul refers to as the “mystery” (1 Tim. 3:16).Mystical also applied to a number of central elements of our worship of God.

Ambrose of Milan, the 4th-century bishop, declared that our very faith “is the mystery of the Trinity,” as is the Lord’s Supper and our Lord’s baptism, which is our own baptism. John Cassian taught that Scripture too contains the mystery in the form of words, which describe the works of God that are disclosed to human minds only by grace. Because God himself is mystery, we should expect to find throughout the divine text depths and hidden realities that exceed our knowledge. None of these mysteries should be regarded as problems. The distance between creature and Creator is not something to be overcome or removed as if it were an obstacle to growth in the Christian life.

In fact, many of the earliest Christians (especially Greek Christians in the 4th and 5th centuries) contended that the way of spirituality is traversed by entering into a wonderful darkness that is everlasting and infinite. Paradoxically, only as the darkness grows will our knowledge of God grow.

Moses’ Blueprint

Christians seem caught in a crossfire between the God who is incomprehensible and the God who has revealed himself. On one hand, the apostle Paul prays for believers that “… the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (Eph. 1:17). Likewise, the Gospel of John places a strong emphasis on why Christ has revealed the Father: “… that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father” (10:38). “No one has ever seen God,” says the introduction to the Gospel, “but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (1:18).

At the same time, the church has always recited these words of the psalmist—”[Your] knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” (Ps. 139:6; cf. Job 36:26)—and these of Paul: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Rom. 11:33-34).

Like many important points of theology, the knowledge of God and the unknowable God have produced a balancing act that historic Christianity has sought to preserve. As a result, Christianity has struggled since the 3rd century to avoid what theologian Jaroslav Pelikan called a “tyranny of epistemology” in its understanding of God and God’s revelation to us. Simply put, this tyranny occurs when Christians think of God as a great field of investigation, a problem to be solved. Ephrem the Syrian, a poet from the 4th century, spoke to this struggle when he wrote:

Let us not allow ourselves to go astray
and to study our God.
Let us take the measure of our mind,
and gauge our thinking.
And as for our knowledge, let us know how small it is, and
Too contemptible to scrutinize the Knower of all.

In a fascinating, little-known book titled The Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa attempts to present an anatomy of Christian spirituality, which he says is a movement from light to darkness. Gregory was a late-4th-century theologian best known for his biblical commentaries and his defense of Nicene orthodoxy. As a theologian, he was very aware of those in his day who claimed to have a rational knowledge of God that violated the very essence of God. Such people asserted that if you know descriptions for God’s essence, you could intellectually grasp the being of the Divine. In response, Gregory wrote, “How can our mind, which always operates on a dimensional image, comprehend a nature that has no dimension?”

His Life of Moses is a commentary on the Book of Exodus, chapters 1-20, with a special focus on how Moses was changed from an Egyptian secular ruler to God’s exemplar of virtue. Like many during his era, Gregory fully embraced the notion that the only way to the virtuous life was by imitating great holy men in the Old Testament and in the Christian past. For Gregory, the stages in Moses’ life that led him to the top of Mount Sinai provided a blueprint for how the soul was mystically transformed into the likeness of God. This meant “beautifying one’s own soul with what is incorruptible, unchangeable, and shares in no evil at all.”

The distance between creature and Creator is not something to be overcome or removed as if it were an obstacle to growth in the Christian life.

Stages In The Christian Journey

As Moses went through stages in his ascent to God, so must we. The first stage Gregory calls “the way of light.” This involves our detachment from the love of things and the purification of the soul. One of the hallmarks of early Christians’ spirituality is that they took the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 very seriously, especially the one that says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (v. 8). Only by purifying ourselves can we become recipients of divine knowledge. Gregory’s expression may be foreign to us, but we would do well to think of acquiring knowledge about God not through purely rational means, as Protestants are wont to do, but by making ourselves a worthy receptacle that can hold such knowledge.

The second stage is illumination, characterized by an awareness of moving from the sensible to invisible realities. One would think that Gregory means progression to greater clarity; however, this is the stage of Moses’ journey in which he entered the cloud. If you have ever been in a thick fog, you’ll know that it dampens all sights and sounds around you. The cloud blocks all outward appearances, compelling and accustoming the soul to look within. Here we find the image of God and thereby a knowledge of God. But we must not confuse this knowledge of God with knowledge of God as he is. There is only an awareness of God’s presence.

The third stage comes from Exodus 20:21, which depicts Moses entering the darkness and seeing God in it: “… Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” What can this mean? In Gregory’s words, “Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses climbed higher and became more perfected, he saw God in the darkness.”

Drawing on the language of paradox, Gregory states that Moses saw God, but not with his eyes, “because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility like a kind of darkness.” In other words, God cannot be seen by virtue of who he is, for just as John 1:18 states, “no one has ever seen God.” The term darkness takes on new meaning, not as mere blackness but rather the kind of darkness you experience when you go deep down into the ocean or high enough in the sky that you leave the atmosphere.

This darkness expresses that the divine nature remains inaccessible because God is infinite; that is, there is no bottom to or end of his being. A writer known to us as Pseudo-Dionysius expresses the wonder of God’s depth when he writes, “Trinity! Higher than any being… Where the mysteries of God’s Logos / Lie simple, absolute, and unchangeable / In the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”

It should be obvious, then, that no finite mind can plumb the depths of God. As Gregory puts it, “How can one arrive at the boundary sought for when there is no boundary?” This is the kind of effect Westminster Abbey can have on the worshiper.

Here is where Gregory of Nyssa makes his most noteworthy contribution to Christian theology: that the Christian life must first be defined by seeking God without end, and “that true satisfaction of the soul’s desire consists in constantly going on with this quest and never ceasing in the ascent to God.” This is a joyful conclusion, since it ensures that one can always progress in holiness because spiritual progress is one of infinite growth. For the Platonist, all change is regarded as a defect or loss; in Gregory’s system, the process of changing may be redeemed by perpetual growth in the good. It is this sort of movement that describes our transformation “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18, ESV). However much the Christian is transformed into the likeness of God, God remains ever beyond, so that the soul must always push forward in anticipation in this life and in the one to come.

Virtue In Darkness

How, then, is this last stage of darkness useful for developing virtue? The discovery that drawing nearer to God is a movement into eternal darkness might not sound like good news; in fact, it may be terrifying. Yet there are two approaches to pursuing virtue that we can take following the example of Moses’ quest.

The first relates to the Divine Being. Moses learns of the things that must be known about God—namely, that none of the things learned by human comprehension can be ascribed to him. Theologians call this kind of knowledge “apophatic theology.” Our knowing God consists of what he is not. This has been a special theme of Eastern theologians going back to Origen of the 3rd century. One certainty of an authentic knowledge of God is how imperfectly we know him.

Second, we must pursue the virtuous life. It begins by emulating those whom God has used to fulfill his purposes of good. This notion dates back to Plato and Plutarch, who wrote of the many “lives” of great men worthy of admiration and imitation. In this same vein, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “Plato, Aristotle, and the whole throng of sages… derived more benefit from the character of Socrates than from his words.”

A similar emphasis is found in the Bible: Job is an example of “steadfastness” (James 5:11, ESV); Abraham a model of faith (Heb. 11:11); Jesus sometimes ended his parables with the words, “Go and do likewise” (cf. Luke 10:37); and Paul encouraged the Corinthian Christians to “be imitators of me” (1 Cor. 4:16, ESV). We likewise find this pattern expressed in the early church, in texts such as The Life of Cyprian and especially the famous Life of Antony.

You can’t teach virtue by means of words. As 5th-century church historian Palladius wrote at the beginning of his history about distinguished male and female ascetics, “Teaching consists of virtuous acts of conduct: cheerfulness, courageousness, bravery, goodness…which generates words like a flame of fire.” There was nothing at all abstract about virtue, being found in living examples. Only in this way can we begin the task of moral instruction and spiritual progress.

One primary result of virtue is that of seeing God. Again we remember the beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Just as the twin notions of knowing God and the unknowable God cannot be separated, we find the same paradox here. Christians are destined to see the living God who cannot be seen. At one point in Exodus, God says to Moses, “no one may see me and live” (33:20).

Mystical understanding works like this: It’s always a mixture of knowledge and ignorance, possession and quest, immanence and transcendence. So, how is it possible to see God? Again we turn to Gregory, who speaks of Moses atop Mount Sinai: “His eyes sharply penetrated the divine darkness and in this way, he was able to contemplate the invisible.”

The divine darkness is not the kind of blackness we experience stumbling into an underground room with no lights. This darkness is a positive reality that helps us to discover God, and hence is called “luminous.” Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, a luminous darkness is one filled with God’s presence, and by faith, the soul can begin to perceive God in darkness. In fact, the closer that God comes to the soul, the more intense the darkness becomes; it is then that all other things of this world are cleared away. The soul looks up to the Lord and never ceases to desire him. The emphasis in this kind of spirituality falls on “seeing” rather than “knowing.”

What we discover, in the end, is that the intellect by itself can never lead anyone to the virtues of the soul. Mere rational knowledge—even about God—does not provide growth or movement toward sharing in the life of God. Some scholars have suggested that Protestantism is built on a Gnostic scheme of a knowledge that saves. This is too extreme. Yet Protestant Christianity’s special emphasis on knowing God and God’s revelation in a very cognitive sense suggests that its spirituality is too closely tied to a way of knowing God that is best represented by the fact that the sermon, not the liturgy, stands at the center of most Protestant worship services.

A balance between knowledge of God and the unknowable God must be preserved, lest we remake God in our own image, according to our conceptions. Gregory’s warning to Christians of his time is a timeless wisdom: When we question God in terms of his being, then it is time to keep silent (as Job was told to do in chapters 38-42); when it is a question of what God does (his actions), then it’s time to speak and use words to tell of his deeds.

Ancient writers like Gregory remind us that the door to joyful mystery must be opened. Knowledge, even the knowledge that comes from Scripture, is not undermined but humbled, as it is placed before the vast depths of God. Because God is eternal and infinite, there will never come a time when we’ve exhausted all that God has to give us; we’ll never plumb the depths of the Almighty, but will always find ourselves going deeper in and higher up.

D. H. Williams is professor of patristics and historical theology at Baylor University. He is the editor of Tradition, Scripture, and Interpretation: A Sourcebook of the Ancient Church (Baker Academic).

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Previous Christianity Today articles about the mystery of God include:

Reverence for the Mystery | God does not have to answer to us for his ways. (March 3, 2009)

What’s the Good News? A Mystery Revealed | Nine evangelical leaders define the gospel. (February 7, 2000)

Incarnating Mystery | Michael Card argues that a proper view of Christ is a key to creativity. (July 10, 2000)