Page 3870 – Christianity Today (2024)

Our late modern culture has become increasingly sensitive to the dangers of abusive structures and institutions that foster self-interest, domination, exploitation, and other forms of violence. Atonement theologies have followed this trend with an increasingly apprehensive stance toward traditional notions of covenant curse, divine justice and wrath, and penal substitution.

Of the many recent examples of atonement theology that illustrate this trend, three books published in the last five years are representative. Joel Green and Mark Baker, in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts, argue that we need to do justice to the “diversity of voices” in the Bible and that we must recognize that not all the New Testament models and metaphors are equally suitable for our situation today. In particular, they are troubled by the uncritical acceptance of penal substitution among North American evangelicals. C.J. den Heyer, a Dutch New Testament theologian with a Reformed background, strikes a more radical chord in Jesus and the Doctrine of the Atonement: Biblical Notes on a Controversial Topic. He states that he can no longer identify with the “old confessions and dogmas”: “I know the old and familiar truths of faith, but they no longer move or inspire me. The words and images have lost their significance. The excitement has slowly ebbed away.” Finally, from a feminist perspective, Darby Kathleen Ray harks back to the patristic ransom model of the atonement in her book Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom. She believes that the other models of the atonement tend toward individualism, the idolizing of power, and and the valorizing of suffering.

Indeed, Ray has little use for atonement theologies that encourage us to imitate the suffering of Jesus. She criticizes the moral influence theory of the atonement that originated in the 12th century with Peter Abelard and that looks at the atonement as an expression of God’s love, inspiring in believers the desire to show the same sacrificial love to others. Den Heyer, on the other hand, stands squarely within this Abelardian tradition, and in certain ways his book is in line with the “lives of Jesus” that the liberal theologians of the 19th century used to write. Green and Baker’s approach is more broadly based. They want to do justice to each of the biblical constellations of images connected with the theme of atonement: those of law, commerce, personal relationships, worship, and battleground.

Despite these differences, the three books share a common opponent: the theory of penal substitution. Much of this opposition is driven by fears that penal substitution leads to violence and oppression. Richard Mouw’s article beginning this series in Books & Culture offers a helpful discussion of these issues.1 What I want to do here is to tease out some of the other underlying theological concerns with penal substitution and to present some ways in which penal substitution may be of assistance in presenting a fuller picture of the significance of the cross.

Penal substitution runs up against a number of theological objections. The first problem is that of dehistoricizing the gospel. Ray argues that by “depicting sin as an a-historical quality, traditional notions make it into an abstract state separate from the particular relationships that shape human beings.” Den Heyer is a “historical Jesus” scholar whose emphasis on the historical Jesus makes him uncomfortable with the classical christological dogmas. Den Heyer’s description of Jesus does not go beyond that of “a special person, inspired and creative, in search of people in need, a man after God’s heart who provoked opposition and ultimately died a violent death on the cross.” From an evangelical perspective that is in some ways sharply distinct, Green and Baker nonetheless share this emphasis on the historical particularity of Jesus’ death. When he explained his death, they say, “Jesus pushed backward into Israel’s history and embraced Israel’s expectations for deliverance.” Clearly, the authors of all three books share an interest in the historical particularity of atonement theology, an interest that they feel penal substitution does not sufficiently uphold.

The second concern is that of individualizing the gospel. Penal substitution, argue Green and Baker, is tied in with an “autobiographical notion of justice” that operates on the basis of an atomistic understanding of people and leads to an individualistic understanding of justification. Concerned that the emphasis has so long been on the individual and his or her personal sin, Ray argues that “the emphasis now should be on the social,” so that atonement theology can address not only individual sin, but also the evil of structures and institutions. Sin should not be defined as disobedience, because this “defuses rage, resentment, and other catalytic emotions, entrapping abused women and children in cycles of violence buttressed by cultural and religious assumptions of male authority and prerogative.” Ray’s steps are clear: she first wants to broaden sin and evil to include a communal and institutional element, and she then argues that this sin or evil is not a matter of disobedience but should be defined as “the abuse of power.”

Finally, the fear is that an ahistorical and individualistic understanding of salvation allows for an abstract and harsh juridicizing where God’s love and mercy and his desire to draw people into a relationship of love fade from view. Den Heyer rejects the notion of penal substitution in which “God cannot just let evil slip through his fingers. Forgiveness is possible only when the law has run its course. Sin must be punished.” Similarly, Green and Baker argue that in the penal substitution model “God’s ability to love and relate to humans is circumscribed by something outside of God—that is, an abstract concept of justice instructs God as to how God must behave.”

There are points clearly worth heeding in these critiques of penal substitution. For example, Ray’s retrieval of a Christus Victor model of the atonement draws on some significant biblical data. On the cross, Christ “disarmed the powers and authorities” and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 1:15). Looking at the atonement from the perspective of God’s battle against evil does render significant support for the human struggle against injustice. And to be sure, an individualistic legal framework may indeed be used to justify sinful human structures and perhaps even to glorify suffering and tolerate abuse. Ray’s penetrating account of the misuse of atonement theology in Latin America—where one identified either with Christ the Conquering One (who sanctions power) or with Christ the Conquered One (the model of the powerless)—reminds us of Christendom’s complicity in horrific forms of cultural and ethnic violence. Den Heyer is right to point out that Jesus’ life and death should function as a model that we are to imitate and that Jesus gives the “poor a new perspective and shows the rich how they can live” (cf. Mark 10:43-45). Finally, Green and Baker are helpful when they draw attention to the notions of shame and honor that need to complement those of guilt and justice; and we do well to learn from their understanding of the different voices in the one New Testament choir that make up a delicate harmony of “wonderful hints of powerful melodies contending with countermelodies.”

One group of voices, however, is consistently banned from choir practice: the legal metaphor, and in particular the notion of penal substitution, hardly gets to sing along. Perhaps the shrillness of these voices in the past is one of the reasons why people are tired of listening to them. A lack of historical awareness, individualism, and a legalistic attitude are not alien to the evangelical mindset. Neither would I dispute that to some extent these problems go back to certain emphases in the Reformation itself. Fear of tradition, distrust of the Church as an institution, and a focus on the individual’s sin and forgiveness have certainly influenced the evangelical North American outlook in unhealthy ways. To the degree that an exclusive focus on penal substitution has contributed to such myopia, I welcome the return of the other traditional models of atonement theology.

But does this mean that penal substitution has no place at all in a proper understanding of the atonement? Aren’t there virtues as well as liabilities to the individualizing emphasis of penal substitution? Ray’s preoccupation with the question of power leads to a narrow definition of sin. She neglects both the vertical dimension of sin—human rebellion against God—and its personal dimension.

Moreover, the fundamental notion of substitution clearly comes with biblical warrant. In fact, both Den Heyer and Green and Baker acknowledge that substitution is part of the biblical picture. “Paul need no longer experience judgement,” comments Den Heyer, “for Christ did that ‘for him’ on the cross. So the expression ‘for us’ or ‘for him’ can also take on the meaning ‘in our/his/my place.'” Green and Baker maintain that the logic of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice “introduces Christ’s dual role in his death—his substitution for humanity before God and in the face of God’s justice, but also his substitution for God in the face of human sin.”

Why then the apprehension toward penal substitution? Why say yes to substitution but no to penal substitution? Could it be that the dehistoricizing, the individualizing, and the juridicizing of salvation in the past now leads to a theological backlash in which we close our eyes to the biblical themes that used to dominate? Could it be that our cultural situation with its (very legitimate!) concerns about victimization and violence so colors our lenses that we run the danger of marginalizing the voice of punishment from the biblical narrative? In negotiating the relationship between our contemporary horizon and the biblical models of the atonement, we cannot simply ignore a large part of the theological tradition.

Green and Baker, as well as Ray, do much more justice to the wider theological tradition than does Den Heyer. Indeed, Den Heyer’s popularly written exposé led the General Synod of his denomination to the unusual step of issuing a reprimand in 1997, charging that the author had not proceeded with adequate care and had insufficiently accounted for the confession of the church. Although Synod did not pass an unequivocal condemnation of Den Heyer’s book—for which the conservative faction of the church had been hoping—the pronouncement nonetheless highlighted a major weakness in the book: it intends to be a corrective to a traditional understanding of the atonement, but it almost entirely fails to engage or even describe the traditional model. By contrast, Ray as well as Green and Baker provide the reader with some detailed descriptions of the patristic, the Anselmian and the Abelardian models of the atonement. Green and Baker, although they severely criticize it, at least explain in some detail the view that they repudiate, in particular Charles Hodge’s penal substitutionary view of the atonement as a derivative from the medieval Anselmian model. And so it should be: theology cannot be done in a historical vacuum.

Today’s inclination to leave behind the penal aspect of the atonement is at least in part the result of our cultural sensibilities. One might argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Green and Baker comment: “For a huge percentage of the world’s population the penal substitution model of the atonement is a stumbling block to people experiencing salvation in Jesus Christ, not because it presents the scandal of the cross, but because its language and images are foreign to their reality and difficult to understand.” For many societies, Green and Baker contend, penal substitution is “simply unintelligible” because these societies have concepts of justice different from those that are dominant in the West. Thus, there is a pastoral dimension to Green and Baker’s account of the wide variety of biblical metaphors for the atonement: the message must be articulated in culture-specific ways.

Seen thus, penal substitution is simply a metaphor that can be readily discarded if it doesn’t speak to a particular cultural situation. It is true, of course, that language about God is metaphorical. But perhaps we need to reflect a little on the character of metaphoric language. Green and Baker argue—rightly, I believe—that in the Old Testament, God’s wrath was a response to Israel’s failure to maintain the covenant. They then go on to suggest, however, that maybe we need to understand this metaphorically, so that “perhaps we attribute ‘anger’ to God only because we have no language other than human language with which to comprehend God.” I would certainly agree that “anger” or “wrath” is not an independent characteristic of God. God is not wrath, but he is love (1 John 4:8). Does this mean, however, that we need to understand God’s wrath metaphorically, while we understand his love literally? I am not so sure. To say that anger as applied to God is metaphorical sounds like it is just metaphorical, and hence somehow less real.

But isn’t all language about God metaphorical? Whether we speak of sacrifice, of punishment, of scapegoating, of justification or of victory, we are making use of metaphors. The various models of the atonement all tend to base themselves on these metaphors. The biblical metaphors used to describe the meaning of the cross are not just metaphors. Colin Gunton has argued cogently that in metaphors we encounter “linguistic usages which demand a new way of thinking about and living in the world. Here is real sacrifice, victory and justice, so that what we thought the words meant is shown to be inadequate and in need of reshaping by that to which the language refers.”2

While metaphors are culturally formed and embedded, we cannot simply exchange them for others without also affecting the contents of what we are saying. We need to ask what is lost in the shift from one metaphor or model to another.

Suppose, for instance, that we drop the metaphors of God’s wrath and of a legal penalty in describing the meaning of the cross. This has certain consequences for the overall biblical message. We are then faced with the question what role the legal codes of the Torah, along with their dyadic structure of blessing and curse, could possibly have played in Israel’s history. We also need to ask why God sent his people into exile, if it was not because of his anger with their rejection of his love and with their disobedience to his law—or if this anger was just metaphorical. After all, the biblical authors saw exile not just as a natural consequence of a certain way of living but also as active divine punishment (Deut. 31:17; Ezek. 5:8). The notions of divine anger and of penal judgment are intimately tied up with the overall narrative structure of the Old Testament (and perhaps also the New). It is not so easy to give up biblical metaphors and to replace them with others that are more culturally acceptable. The Church will regularly find the need to mimic the very words and repeat the very metaphors handed down to us by the biblical witness. It is necessary to do this in order to safeguard the Tradition that has been entrusted to the Church.

How, then, can we retrieve the notion of penal substitution without falling into the traps of dehistoricizing, individualizing, and juridicizing salvation? The history of Reformed scholasticism unmistakably displays some of these tendencies. The covenant theology that developed in the late 16th and 17th centuries was often remarkably ahistorical and individualistic in character. According to a common strand of covenant theology (particularly among the Puritans, the Westminster Assembly and the Princetonian tradition), Adam broke the paradisiacal covenant of works, and so drew all of humanity into the vortex of sin. Only eternal punishment could remedy this situation. By means of his plan of predestination, however, God drew certain elect individuals into his eternal covenant of grace and so saved them from the punishment of hell. Atonement, in this line of thinking, often came to mean a strictly legal exchange between Christ and the elect: the direct imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the elect and the imputation of their sins to Christ who on the cross bore the eternal punishment in their place.3

But such an atemporal and individualistic understanding is not the only possible way to construe a theory of penal substitution. Not all covenant theologians adopted the equation between covenant and election. Many of them had their hesitations about the harsher aspects of predestination, strongly emphasized that the covenant was made not with individuals but with a community, saw this community as the continuation of the covenant community of Israel, and maintained that this covenant bond came with certain conditions: it required a response of faith and obedience. In this line of thought, eternal predestination was not allowed to set the interpretive grid for the historical covenant community. Some scholars so emphasize the differences in approach between the various understandings of the covenant that they refer to this more moderate covenantal theology as “the other Reformed tradition.”4

Yet even with a “mellowed”—more historical and corporate—form of covenant theology, do we not still labor under the juridicizing of our relationship with God? It is true that particularly in the Reformed tradition the “penal voices” of the choir have tended to exclude others. When a “federal theology” structures itself around the biblical notion of “covenant,” one’s theology tends to get one-sided. Still, we must ask what happens if we let go of judgment and punishment altogether.

In Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, Richard John Neuhaus comments that “forgiveness costs dearly”: “Things must be set to right. … Whatever it is that needs to be done, we cannot do it. Each of us individually, the entirety of the human race collectively—what can we do to make up for one innocent child tortured and killed?” Justice must be done, Father Neuhaus insists.5 Otherwise we end up with “cheap grace” that not only trivializes evil, but as a result trivializes good as well, and so shatters the meaning of everything. When atonement theories carve out a place for judgement and punishment, do they really legitimate unjust violence? The opposite may well be the case: By ignoring the judicial meaning of the cross, we convey to victims of violence that their pains and concerns are irrelevant, that they need to “get over it and get on with it.” When punishment has no place at all in our thinking about the cross, sin and evil receive a legitimate and permanent place as an intrinsic part of a world that forever remains out of joint.

By retaining a penal aspect in atonement theology, we do not necessarily turn justice and law into ultimate categories and so juridicize salvation. God’s love for Israel and humanity is the motivating factor that underlies the incarnation and the atoning death of Christ. The restoration and perfection of an alienated creation is God’s ultimate concern and purpose, a concern we need to share. An emphasis on the priority and ultimacy of God’s shalom hardly excludes, however, the possibility of giving a secondary and penultimate position to concerns of law and justice in an imperfect world. The former may not even be possible without the latter.

In a 1994 article in Calvin Theological Journal, Old Testament theologian John Stek called on Reformed theology to address the problem of “covenant overload,” which had been a prominent feature in Reformed thought ever since the second part of the 16th century.6 Stek objected to attempts to make the biblical notion of “covenant” into the centerpiece of systematic theology and insisted that covenants occur in the biblical account only as ad hoc commitments, based on already existing relationships. Stek argued that “covenants were called into play only when circumstances occasioned doubts concerning desired or promised courses of action. The specific purpose of ‘covenants’ was to add a guarantee of fulfillment to commitments made.” The idea of a covenant, in other words, is secondary, and is built on a relationship that was already there prior to the establishment of the covenant. Covenants are simply “emergency measures” that are necessary until God’s kingdom has fully come.

Stek’s insightful corrective to Reformed federal theology has implications beyond its original biblical theological context. The juridical notions of divine law, human transgression of divine law, and Christ’s obedience to the will of God (both in his sinless life and his atoning suffering on the cross) were directly tied up with the covenant theme and have thus been central notions to federal theology. The resultant emphasis on law, sin, and penal substitution have led to some justified criticism: by turning the covenant law into the central biblical category, it is possible to lose sight of the abundance of God’s grace. God’s gracious initiative, his unconditional commitment to the restoration of his relationship with people in the context of a restored creation, and the priority of his love and mercy over judgment and anger have not always been as prominent as they should have been.

My question, however, is whether today’s strident opposition to any penal notion doesn’t fall into the opposite error. Covenants may not be the be-all and end-all of the biblical picture, but as secondary emergency measures they nonetheless have their place. When we see covenants as secondary emergency measures to strengthen an already existing relationship to which God is unconditionally committed, this means that notions of law and punishment may likewise have a penultimate, instrumental value. This means, on the one hand, that the element of punishment does not have an independent place and that therefore the juridical aspect of the atonement is not the overarching element. It means, on the other hand, that punishment may have a positive, instrumental place in God’s project of perfecting his creation.

It seems to me that that Green and Baker offer some stepping stones that may contribute to a more positive appropriation of a penal view of the atonement. They comment that “Jesus developed the sense of his death in terms borrowed from the constitution of Israel as the covenant people of God (Ex. 24:8), the conclusion of the exile (see Zech. 9:9-11), and the hope of a renewal of the covenant (Jer. 31:31-33), so as to mark his death as the inaugural event of covenant renewal.” Jesus, they say, “viewed himself as the focal point of God’s great act of [Israel’s] deliverance.” They in fact argue that Jesus “took the place of the Jewish nation as a representative substitute.” This language about substitution is remarkably historical and corporate: it speaks of Israel’s historical exile and renewal through Jesus’ representative substitution. It is impossible, however (as N.T. Wright, one of Green and Baker’s sources, consistently argues), to speak of exile and restoration without at the same time conjuring up notions of covenant curse and covenant blessing. Jesus’ death may well be the climactic and substitutionary suffering of exile. If it is, this means that his death is the suffering of the exilic curse, and so of divine punishment.7

It seems to me that without allowing it to dominate, we should let penal substitution have a voice in the choir. Suffering the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13), Jesus drew the exilic punishme upon himself—hardly a dehistoricizing view of the atonement. As Israel’s substitute and representative, he endured her punishment on the cross—hardly an individualizing notion. As a means to restore Israel and humanity into fellowship with God, the punishment opened the way for reconciliation and growth into fellowship with God—hardly a juridicizing of the relationship with God. By allowing the entire choir to sing together, I suspect we may end up serving the interests of God’s eschatological shalom.

Hans Boersma is assistant professor of religious and worldveiw studies at Trinity Western University. His book, Violence, Hospitality, and The Cross: Understanding the Atonement, will be published by Baker Academic in 2004.

1. Richard J. Mouw, “Violence and Atonement,” Books & Culture, January/February, 2001, pp. 12-17.

2. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1989).

3. Cf. Robert Gundry’s careful critique of such an understanding of the atonement in “Why I Didn’t Endorse ‘The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration,'” Books & Culture, January/February 2001, pp. 6-9.

4. J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Ohio Univ. Press, 1980); Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition (Westminster/John Knox, 1991).

5. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (Basic, 2000). It should be added that, although Neuhaus believes that justice is done on the cross, he does not think that atonement is also penal in character.

6. John H. Stek, “‘Covenant’ Overload in Reformed Theology,” Calvin Theological Journal, Vol. 29 (1994), pp. 12-41.

7. See my forthcoming book, Violence, Hospitality, and The Cross: Understanding the Atonement (Baker Academic, 2004).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have been reinterpreting colonial American history in the light of the intimate encounter between the colonists and the Native Americans they married and buried, learned from and taught, fought with and against, killed and were killed by. Now a distinguished historian, Cornell University’s Mary Beth Norton, provocatively proposes that this interpretive turn allows us, for the first time, to understand properly one of the most exhaustively studied episodes in American history: the Salem witch trials.

Sevententh-century New Englanders believed that people sometimes covenanted with Satan to acquire the powers of witchcraft. That this assumption was nearly universal in Massachusetts made it no different from other European societies, where witches had been prosecuted, tortured, and executed with some regularity since at least the 11th century. But there is no doubt that something strange occurred in Salem in 1692—by far the largest outbreak of witchcraft accusations, prosecutions, and executions in colonial North American history, with 19 people dying and hundreds more accused before the trials were stopped.

So what happened in Salem? The question won’t go away. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Elizabeth George Speare’s oft-assigned tale, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the witch trials have inspired some of America’s most popular writing. The Internet, predictably, features all manner of sites devoted to the Salem crisis, from National Geographic’s “Salem Online Witchhunt Game” (which allows players to imagine what it would be like to be accused) to a “Salem Tarot” page that offers a “Tarot reading with a Salem Witch” for $45 per half-hour. The town of Salem itself has not hesitated to capitalize on its tourism potential, featuring no less than five museums devoted to witchcraft.

Most Americans who know anything about the Salem witchcraft crisis probably have had their impressions shaped by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play (and 1996 movie) The Crucible, which saw parallels to 1950s McCarthyism in Salem’s trials. For their part, historians have offered many competing accounts, most of them focused on the accusers’ motivations. Probably the most influential recent approach is Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974), which interprets the crisis as a boiling over of long-simmering animosities between the “haves” and “have-nots” within Salem Village, the newer, more agrarian neighbor of old Salem Town. Books and articles on the trials continue to appear at a remarkable pace. Marilynne K. Roach’s The Salem Witch Trials is representative of this ongoing interest: her “day-by-day chronicle” will find a place on the shelves of researchers and history buffs for whom the fascination of Salem never palls.

Mary Beth Norton, however, is not satisfied with this vast literature, and her ambitious and complex In the Devil’s Snare argues that most of the work on Salem witchcraft has failed to connect the accusation patterns to the one factor that may finally help us understand why the outbreak became such a torrent: the external wartime setting that provided the trials’ context. We have heard these sorts of claims before, as many writers have claimed that they will reveal the one compelling piece of evidence that others have overlooked. But Norton’s analysis of the witchcraft crisis in the context of the ongoing wars does make a significant new contribution, probably the most important since Boyer and Nissenbaum.

Historians have done a great deal in recent years to begin understanding the North American colonies in their Atlantic context, and in the case of Massachusetts one should remember that the Puritan experiment did not occur in isolation. Beginning with the Pequot War of the 1630s, New Englanders had regular military conflicts with their Native American neighbors. In the 1670s New Englanders barely beat back the resistance of Wampanoag sachem Metacom in King Philip’s War, which they also called the “First Indian War.” They saw the hostilities that began in 1689 with French-sponsored Wabanakis as the “Second Indian War,” in which Maine settlers faced regular Wabanaki attacks, and lurid reports emerged from the front of surprise attacks, the torturing and dismemberment of English farmers and their families, raids that seemed to come from the pit of hell. (How the Indians saw the colonists is another story.)

This war with the Wabanakis provides Norton’s critical backdrop to the witchcraft crisis. Though she cannot produce a “smoking gun,” Norton provides much circumstantial evidence to show that many accusers and accused had connections to the Indian wars. Numbers of the accusers had lost one or both parents in frontier battles and raids, while some of the accused had suspicious connections on the frontier that might have raised the prospect that they had actually colluded with the French or Wabanakis. Norton makes a plausible case that the accusers and judges believed that a Satanic conspiracy was afoot to destroy New England. Some of Satan’s forces were visible, in the form of marauding Wabanakis, while others were invisible, in the form of witches’ specters, come to torment the accusers and threaten them with the same fate that had befallen the frontier families in Maine.

The key link between the physical and spiritual threats was the regular appearance in the accusers’ testimonies of a spectral “black man.” Often this man whispered in the ears of the accused, guiding them in their responses at the trials or commanding their torments of the accusers. The black man appeared to be a demon or the devil, but Norton would have us believe that this was the devil in the shape of a Native American. “Black” at the time did not necessarily refer to African American skin pigmentation; it might instead refer to the “tawny” coloration of the Native American peoples. Cotton Mather noted that confessing witches called Satan “the black man” and that “he resembles an Indian.” It is not clear, however, why the “black man,” if an Indian, was often described as wearing a “crowned hat.” It is also striking—and damaging to Norton’s case—that no one besides Cotton Mather seems to have made the connection between Satan and Native Americans so explicitly: one would imagine that if the accusers consciously conceived of the “black man” as an Indian they would have had no reticence in saying so.

Among the accused, Norton significantly elevates the prominence of the Reverend George Burroughs, whom the accusers identified as the leader of the witches. Burroughs had once served in Salem Village but as of 1692 he was ministering in Maine and worrying regularly about the Wabanaki-English skirmishes happening all around him. Accuser Mercy Lewis had known Burroughs in Maine before most of her family was killed there and she relocated to Salem. But it was Ann Putnam, Jr., who made the most devastating accusation against Burroughs: his specter had appeared to her and confessed to many terrible crimes in Maine, including killing his first two wives and bewitching colonial soldiers. Burroughs, who showed an uncanny knack for avoiding Wabanaki raids, came under suspicion precisely because of his survival on the front. And, Norton argues, he became “the indispensable man” of the Salem crisis, appearing regularly in accusatory testimony as the “ringleader” assembling the witches for the devil’s sacrament and planning the assaults on Salem.

It is not evident to me that Burroughs has received, as Norton claims, “remarkably little attention” from historians, but she no doubt makes a convincing case that he was more central to the entire crisis than we have known before, and that his pastoral role and ties to Maine made him an obvious candidate for the accusers to paint as the head witch.

So did the Second Indian War cause the witchcraft crisis? Norton is too careful to make such a direct claim, because she knows that New Englanders fought Indian wars before and after 1692 and yet never encountered a witchcraft outbreak like Salem’s. She does argue, however, that the Second Indian War created conditions ripe for the massive crisis. If the war had not provided the backdrop for Salem, the controversy would have likely remained a locally contained issue handled by the pastors. Norton even goes so far as to say that it “would not have occurred.”

Norton’s analysis of the connections between the Second Indian War and the Salem crisis works well because context is crucial to understanding any such historical event. Arthur Miller was, in this sense, wrong to lead us to believe that the backdrop of historical context (1690s Massachusetts or 1950s Cold War America) is largely irrelevant. No one reading this book can come away doubting that the Second Indian War colored the entire Salem episode. But we are still left wondering if Norton really has explained why the crisis came when it did. Though we will likely never have a definitive explanation of Salem witchcraft, the very difficulty in providing one fuels our enduring fascination with it.

Thomas S. Kidd is assistant professor of history at Baylor University.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We tend to take for granted that most Protestant evangelicals vigorously support capitalism and free markets. This is one of the reasons, of course, so many Americans assume that Protestant evangelical is synonymous with the Religious Right. But why are Protestant evangelicals so committed to markets? Where did this commitment come from, and how does it square with the repeated scriptural admonitions against wealth and greed?

Focusing on the first 70 years of America’s existence, the essays collected in God and Mammon address these and many other questions about American Protestants’ perspectives on finance. In a pair of fine essays at the beginning and end of the collection, Mark Noll links Protestants’ support for a market-based economy to the absence of a state-sponsored church. “A move away from top-down monarchical, hierarchical, and colonial control in religion,” he argues, “predisposed many evangelicals in the same direction economically, that is, toward localism and free trade.” Noll also points out that the Protestant view of salvation—each believer must make a personal commitment to Christ—fits comfortably with an economic system that emphasizes individual decisions by individual actors rather than governmental intervention.

This is not to say that Protestants in the early Republic simply lined up behind market-based economics and never looked back. To the contrary, Protestant views on money and markets were every bit as complex then as they are today. Many ministers praised wealth obtained through diligence as a gift from God, for instance, but, as Richard Pointer notes, they also warned that “speculation threatened to turn men into ‘practical atheists’ by persuading them that their business fortunes were more dependent on their skill at exploiting current economic circumstances than on God’s providence.” These distinctions were not always easy to maintain, and the sometimes contradictory positions taken by Protestants make for some of the most fascinating and instructive reading in this very important book.

One of the most refreshing qualities of God and Mammon is the contributors’ insistence on taking religious motivation seriously as they explore these tensions and apparent contradictions. Rather than simply assuming that American Protestants assimilated their theology to the economic conditions of the early Republic, the essays repeatedly consider the ways in which Protestants’ views of money also were shaped by their beliefs, in an ongoing negotiation with the rapidly changing marketplace.

The essays are organized around three general themes. The first set explores the general stance of American Protestants toward the market, with a particular emphasis on the Methodist church, whose explosive growth was one of the great stories of 19th-century American religion. The lightening rod for much of this discussion is the influential work of historian Charles Sellers, who argued that the “market revolution” in 19th-century America displaced a frontier culture that had been anchored in communitarian values rather than the impersonal exchange of the marketplace. Both Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine question aspects of Sellers’s terminology and his thesis. Carwardine casts doubt on Sellers’s claim that the Methodists shifted sharply from localism and community values to a market-oriented perspective during the 19th century. Rather than reflecting a sudden reversal, Carwardine contends that the Methodists’ enthusiasm for self improvement and entrepreneurial values was there from the beginning.

A second focus of God and Mammon is the role of money within the church and in Protestant ministries. Particularly disputed during the early decades of the Republic was the question of how pastors should be supported. Pew rentals were one prominent method of support, and some churches gave their ministers land to farm. An essay by David Hempton explores the striking transformation in the Methodist church on these issues. As the 19th century wore on, reliance on itinerant preachers who depended on the hospitality and financial assistance of the laity whose paths they crossed gradually (and controversially) gave way to a more formal and centralized system of support.

Money issues figured equally prominently in evangelical book publishing. The early publishing societies insisted on always giving their Bibles and other publications away, relying on charitable giving rather than sales to support the enterprise. By 1810, however, the publishing societies had begun charging the wholesale price to those who could afford to pay. A decade later, retail sales had become a primary source of income for sustaining the publishing enterprise. Rather than simply concluding that evangelical publishers succumbed to the market, David Paul Nord tells a more complex and compelling story. The publishing societies seem to have been shaped by emerging new business techniques (they were among the first to use “stereotyped” printing plates, which could be stored for later printings), but they also never lost their commitment to getting Bibles and tracts into as many hands as possible.

The third set of essays shows how money issues worked their way into the two biggest social issues of 19th-century Protestant life: slavery and the great revivals. Both Kenneth Startup, who chronicles the Southern clergy’s stance toward North-South tensions, and Richard Carwardine, who explores how money disputes exacerbated the schism within the Methodist church, point out the role that market rhetoric played in the debate over slavery. Many Southern clergymen concluded that abolitionism was corrupted by economic self interest. Abolition was championed, they believed, by industrialists who stood to gain if the agricultural Southern economy were crippled. On this view, which Startup describes as naïve but not wholly unfounded, the campaign against slavery was steeped in greed, and reflected the dangers of capitalism gone amok.

Although we do not often associate revivalism with markets or money, financial issues and perspectives figured quite prominently in the revivals of the 1850s. An essay by Kathryn Long points out that Charles Finney and other revivalists used modern marketing techniques to promote the revivals, advertising their efforts and playing to the breathless newspaper coverage in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Long also explores how the 1857-58 revival targeted the business community. Revivalists held their events during the lunch hour of Wall Street businessmen and even mimicked the structure of business meetings. Long suggests that many Protestants’ lingering apprehensions about the market melted away as they watched so many businessmen commit their lives to Christ.

As with any edited collection, the essays of God and Mammon do not always fit together seamlessly. The critiques of Sellers’s market revolution thesis, for instance, feel at times like part of a larger conversation that we haven’t heard. Yet this book tells a remarkably coherent and compelling story about American Protestants’ adjustments to the increasingly commercial 19th century American economy.

Of all the multifarious connections between Protestants and money, the only significant issue that God and Mammon seems to me to leave out is the regulatory dimension. Although American Protestants often treated financial issues as questions of private morality, markets obviously cannot exist without governmental support, and several high-profile 19th-century issues forced Protestants to consider the proper role of the state when it comes to markets and money.

The first is bankruptcy. Throughout the 19th century, lawmakers debated whether to enact a federal law that would enable debtors to discharge their debts and start over. Leading proponents of a market-based economy, including Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, insisted that uniform bankruptcy laws were essential to deal with the failures that are inevitable in a capitalist economy. In response, many bankruptcy opponents insisted, among other things, that debtors have a moral obligation to repay their debts. Yet this moral argument receded into the background after the mid-19th century—another sign of Protestants’ acclimation to the market?—even though Congress did not pass a permanent federal bankruptcy law until 1898.

The second issue is gambling and speculation. Protestant ministers routinely condemned gambling, but it was not always clear what counted as gambling. Then, as now, casual and genteel gambling were sometimes excused on the view that gambling is most pernicious if it stems from a greedy desire for sudden wealth. Lotteries were another troublesome issue. Although some ministers warned that lotteries substituted belief in luck for true faith, and supported their prohibition, many church building projects were financed by money the state raised through lotteries. Lotteries were defended as a voluntary tax that went to a good cause, until scandals led state after state to ban them in the mid-19th century.

Closely related to gambling was the question whether to take action against market speculation. God and Mammon touches on this issue (most prominently in Richard Pointer’s essay), but the essays do not fully pursue the tension between Protestants’ hostility to gambling and speculation, on the one hand, and, on the other, their growing sympathy for a market-based economy whose liquidity and efficiency depends in important part on the same kind of behavior—speculation in stocks or commodities—that American Protestants have always denounced. By the end of the 19th century, this tension would manifest itself in fierce battles, replete with dueling scriptural rhetoric, over the regulation of futures—that is, contracts for the future sale of corn, pork bellies, or other commodities.1

The moral, then, is this: if your interest is piqued by the subject of Protestants, money, and the market, leave space on your shelf for a future book that takes up some of the regulatory debates I have just described. For just about every other aspect of American Protestants’ views on money and finance, however, God and Mammon is and will be an irreplaceable resource.

We tend to take for granted that most Protestant evangelicals vigorously support capitalism and free markets. This is one of the reasons, of course, so many Americans assume that Protestant evangelical is synonymous with the Religious Right. But why are Protestant evangelicals so committed to markets? Where did this commitment come from, and how does it square with the repeated scriptural admonitions against wealth and greed?

Focusing on the first 70 years of America’s existence, the essays collected in God and Mammon address these and many other questions about American Protestants’ perspectives on finance. In a pair of fine essays at the beginning and end of the collection, Mark Noll links Protestants’ support for a market-based economy to the absence of a state-sponsored church. “A move away from top-down monarchical, hierarchical, and colonial control in religion,” he argues, “predisposed many evangelicals in the same direction economically, that is, toward localism and free trade.” Noll also points out that the Protestant view of salvation—each believer must make a personal commitment to Christ—fits comfortably with an economic system that emphasizes individual decisions by individual actors rather than governmental intervention.

This is not to say that Protestants in the early Republic simply lined up behind market-based economics and never looked back. To the contrary, Protestant views on money and markets were every bit as complex then as they are today. Many ministers praised wealth obtained through diligence as a gift from God, for instance, but, as Richard Pointer notes, they also warned that “speculation threatened to turn men into ‘practical atheists’ by persuading them that their business fortunes were more dependent on their skill at exploiting current economic circumstances than on God’s providence.” These distinctions were not always easy to maintain, and the sometimes contradictory positions taken by Protestants make for some of the most fascinating and instructive reading in this very important book.

One of the most refreshing qualities of God and Mammon is the contributors’ insistence on taking religious motivation seriously as they explore these tensions and apparent contradictions. Rather than simply assuming that American Protestants assimilated their theology to the economic conditions of the early Republic, the essays repeatedly consider the ways in which Protestants’ views of money also were shaped by their beliefs, in an ongoing negotiation with the rapidly changing marketplace.

The essays are organized around three general themes. The first set explores the general stance of American Protestants toward the market, with a particular emphasis on the Methodist church, whose explosive growth was one of the great stories of 19th-century American religion. The lightening rod for much of this discussion is the influential work of historian Charles Sellers, who argued that the “market revolution” in 19th-century America displaced a frontier culture that had been anchored in communitarian values rather than the impersonal exchange of the marketplace. Both Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine question aspects of Sellers’s terminology and his thesis. Carwardine casts doubt on Sellers’s claim that the Methodists shifted sharply from localism and community values to a market-oriented perspective during the 19th century. Rather than reflecting a sudden reversal, Carwardine contends that the Methodists’ enthusiasm for self improvement and entrepreneurial values was there from the beginning.

A second focus of God and Mammon is the role of money within the church and in Protestant ministries. Particularly disputed during the early decades of the Republic was the question of how pastors should be supported. Pew rentals were one prominent method of support, and some churches gave their ministers land to farm. An essay by David Hempton explores the striking transformation in the Methodist church on these issues. As the 19th century wore on, reliance on itinerant preachers who depended on the hospitality and financial assistance of the laity whose paths they crossed gradually (and controversially) gave way to a more formal and centralized system of support.

Money issues figured equally prominently in evangelical book publishing. The early publishing societies insisted on always giving their Bibles and other publications away, relying on charitable giving rather than sales to support the enterprise. By 1810, however, the publishing societies had begun charging the wholesale price to those who could afford to pay. A decade later, retail sales had become a primary source of income for sustaining the publishing enterprise. Rather than simply concluding that evangelical publishers succumbed to the market, David Paul Nord tells a more complex and compelling story. The publishing societies seem to have been shaped by emerging new business techniques (they were among the first to use “stereotyped” printing plates, which could be stored for later printings), but they also never lost their commitment to getting Bibles and tracts into as many hands as possible.

The third set of essays shows how money issues worked their way into the two biggest social issues of 19th-century Protestant life: slavery and the great revivals. Both Kenneth Startup, who chronicles the Southern clergy’s stance toward North-South tensions, and Richard Carwardine, who explores how money disputes exacerbated the schism within the Methodist church, point out the role that market rhetoric played in the debate over slavery. Many Southern clergymen concluded that abolitionism was corrupted by economic self interest. Abolition was championed, they believed, by industrialists who stood to gain if the agricultural Southern economy were crippled. On this view, which Startup describes as naïve but not wholly unfounded, the campaign against slavery was steeped in greed, and reflected the dangers of capitalism gone amok.

Although we do not often associate revivalism with markets or money, financial issues and perspectives figured quite prominently in the revivals of the 1850s. An essay by Kathryn Long points out that Charles Finney and other revivalists used modern marketing techniques to promote the revivals, advertising their efforts and playing to the breathless newspaper coverage in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Long also explores how the 1857-58 revival targeted the business community. Revivalists held their events during the lunch hour of Wall Street businessmen and even mimicked the structure of business meetings. Long suggests that many Protestants’ lingering apprehensions about the market melted away as they watched so many businessmen commit their lives to Christ.

As with any edited collection, the essays of God and Mammon do not always fit together seamlessly. The critiques of Sellers’s market revolution thesis, for instance, feel at times like part of a larger conversation that we haven’t heard. Yet this book tells a remarkably coherent and compelling story about American Protestants’ adjustments to the increasingly commercial 19th century American economy.

Of all the multifarious connections between Protestants and money, the only significant issue that God and Mammon seems to me to leave out is the regulatory dimension. Although American Protestants often treated financial issues as questions of private morality, markets obviously cannot exist without governmental support, and several high-profile 19th-century issues forced Protestants to consider the proper role of the state when it comes to markets and money.

The first is bankruptcy. Throughout the 19th century, lawmakers debated whether to enact a federal law that would enable debtors to discharge their debts and start over. Leading proponents of a market-based economy, including Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster, insisted that uniform bankruptcy laws were essential to deal with the failures that are inevitable in a capitalist economy. In response, many bankruptcy opponents insisted, among other things, that debtors have a moral obligation to repay their debts. Yet this moral argument receded into the background after the mid-19th century—another sign of Protestants’ acclimation to the market?—even though Congress did not pass a permanent federal bankruptcy law until 1898.

The second issue is gambling and speculation. Protestant ministers routinely condemned gambling, but it was not always clear what counted as gambling. Then, as now, casual and genteel gambling were sometimes excused on the view that gambling is most pernicious if it stems from a greedy desire for sudden wealth. Lotteries were another troublesome issue. Although some ministers warned that lotteries substituted belief in luck for true faith, and supported their prohibition, many church building projects were financed by money the state raised through lotteries. Lotteries were defended as a voluntary tax that went to a good cause, until scandals led state after state to ban them in the mid-19th century.

Closely related to gambling was the question whether to take action against market speculation. God and Mammon touches on this issue (most prominently in Richard Pointer’s essay), but the essays do not fully pursue the tension between Protestants’ hostility to gambling and speculation, on the one hand, and, on the other, their growing sympathy for a market-based economy whose liquidity and efficiency depends in important part on the same kind of behavior—speculation in stocks or commodities—that American Protestants have always denounced. By the end of the 19th century, this tension would manifest itself in fierce battles, replete with dueling scriptural rhetoric, over the regulation of futures—that is, contracts for the future sale of corn, pork bellies, or other commodities.1

The moral, then, is this: if your interest is piqued by the subject of Protestants, money, and the market, leave space on your shelf for a future book that takes up some of the regulatory debates I have just described. For just about every other aspect of American Protestants’ views on money and finance, however, God and Mammon is and will be an irreplaceable resource.

David A. Skeel, Jr., is professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the author of Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), reviewed in this issue.

1. For a fascinating account by a secular historian, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, 1999), pp. 153-202.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Anyone who has casually read the business press over the last few months cannot help but be aware of the high-profile bankruptcies currently pending. Out of the numerous restatements of financial statements have arisen the Enron and WorldCom Chapter 11 filings. The already cost-bloated airline industry was tipped over the edge by the events of 9/11, with US Airways leading the way, recently to be followed by the country’s second-largest airline, United (much to the chagrin of we Chicagoans with many frequent flier miles). These series of filings follow upon those by companies that have sought the refuge of the Bankruptcy Code to cope with unquantified contingent liabilities arising out of seemingly endless litigation, such as Johns Manville, A.H. Robins, and Dow Corning.

At the same time, followers of the federal legislative process will have noticed the ongoing tussle between the consumer credit-card lobby, trying to toughen up the laws pertaining to personal bankruptcy, and the consumer advocate lobby, trying to maintain the status quo. In a strange twist, even by Washington standards, during the most recently completed session of Congress a bill which would have placed tighter restrictions on personal bankruptcy, particularly for high-income filers, failed to garner the support of socially conservative Republicans. The sticking point? Inclusion of a provision intended to appease wavering liberals that would have prohibited those responsible for bombing abortion clinics from avoiding damage payments by declaring bankruptcy.

What the average reader may not realize is that the prevalence of bankruptcy in the United States today, both for individuals and for businesses, is unparalleled in any other society in the world, spiraling upward from approximately 200,000 individual filings in 1979 to nearly 1.4 million in 1998.

Why is bankruptcy so uniquely part of the American landscape? One might be tempted to assume that somehow the country’s early Christian foundations are relevant. After all, the themes of grace and redemption seem to feed nicely into the institutionalized forgiveness of debt; on the other side of the ledger, meeting one’s obligations could be seen as drawing on a Puritanical sense of responsibility.

David Skeel, however, in his book Debt’s Dominion, A History of Bankruptcy Law in America, explains today’s Bankruptcy Code and its evolution over the past 200 years not in terms of any grand philosophical or religious inclinations of the American people, but rather much more mundanely as the result of three secular influences over much of the last 200 years.

First among Skeel’s three root causes is the banding together of creditors, largely from the eastern United States where the major financial institutions were located, to seek federal bankruptcy legislation that would enable the orderly distribution of a debtor’s insufficient assets. For creditors, bankruptcy was a means to enable collective action which would produce a better result for most creditors than an anarchic system in which each creditor pursued only its own interests. The consequence of these creditors’ lobbying was the repeated passage of bankruptcy laws during the 19th century.

Second among Skeel’s three major influences is the counterweight to the Eastern creditors’ efforts—namely, the populist agrarian influences, often in the South and West. Farmers and ranchers feared Eastern bankers would seize control of mortgaged farms and ranch land if a bankruptcy law gave too much power to creditors. The populist influence succeeded in the repeated repeal of the various pieces of legislation enacted in the 19th century and, within that legislation, the inclusion of pro-debtor protections.

The third of Skeel’s dominant influencing factors did not completely come into play until the 1898 bankruptcy legislation—by virtue of a relatively stable period of Republican control of Congress thereafter—had remained in place for a substantial period of time, unlike its 19th-century predecessors. As a result, for the first time a group of lawyers and bankruptcy professionals developed a vested interest in maintaining a bankruptcy structure, and were able to play a significant role in protecting bankruptcy substantially as we know it against attempts to alter it.

While Skeel focuses largely on commercial influences, Bruce Mann, writing about an earlier era in his new illuminating book, Republic of Debtors, identifies a fundamental societal change in attitude toward debtors. In what could be seen as a prequel to Skeel’s book, Mann traces the evolution of American attitudes toward debt and insolvency throughout the 1700s, culminating in the first federal bankruptcy law in 1800, which is just about the point at which Skeel picks up. At the beginning of the 18th century, Mann says, there was still a moral economy of debt: inability to pay was a moral failure, not a business risk. Indeed, even into the early 19th century, the ultimate recourse for a creditor generally was to bring an action to put his debtor in prison. But with the passage of the bankruptcy act in 1800, and concurrent developments in many of the states, Mann says, the nation was set along the path toward “the redefinition of insolvency from sin to risk, from moral failure to economic failure.”

Not that moral questions have not continued to shape attitudes toward insolvency and how a society should deal with debtors. Indeed, it seems to have been moral questions of the type which today surround debacles like Enron’s that influenced William O. Douglas, the post-Depression New Deal chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later prominent Supreme Court Justice, in shaping the provisions pertaining to corporate reorganizations in the1938 Chandler Act.

According to Skeel, Douglas was determined to take away the corporate reorganization practice from the New York investment bankers and lawyers, who had dominated it from the time of the first large railroad insolvencies in the late 19th century. Douglas’ desire was consistent with the general anti-investment banker sentiment of the New Dealers—perhaps not too dissimilar from the post-Enron feelings toward not only investment bankers but also accountants and corporate chieftains. Douglas succeeded, but the next 40 years saw what may have been an unintended consequence. Until the enactment of the present Bankruptcy Code in 1978, corporate reorganization practice fell into disuse for large, publicly traded corporations. Perhaps there is a lesson here for those who might over-react to recent corporate criminal conduct. It may be better to concentrate on enforcing the laws that currently exist, as opposed to dramatically changing them in a fashion that may have unintended unfavorable consequences for the economy as a whole.

The demise of reorganization under the Douglas-inspired legislation highlights the uniqueness of U.S. bankruptcy legislation as it largely existed prior to 1938 and as it has been since the enactment of the Code in 1978. In the corporate arena, what makes the U.S. system so distinctive is that it generally leaves existing management in place to lead the reorganization. In contrast, in most countries’ systems—and in the U.S. during the 40-year period from 1938 to 1978—once a corporation wishes to be reorganized, a trustee or other administrator is appointed to take over the business. This, in fact, generally leads to the liquidation of the corporation.

Another distinguishing feature of the American system is that it is a judicial process, not an administrative one. In this regard, as the North American general counsel for an English company, I often find myself responding to comments from my British colleagues as to the prevalence of lawyers in so many aspects of U.S. society. Bankruptcy is yet another of those aspects. In England, an appointed administrator, generally an accountant by background, tallies up the assets and the debts and attempts to distribute the former in an appropriate manner. In the U.S. system, reorganization is carried out through judicial processes, with existing management of the debtor, represented by sophisticated bankruptcy counsel, and influenced by the creditors, also represented by high-powered legal counsel, often playing a leading role in shaping the plan of reorganization, including who gets what among the creditors, and what the debtor looks like upon discharge from bankruptcy.

It is the discharge, Skeel explains, which is the third peculiarity of American bankruptcy. In no other system can the debtor so easily walk away from all its pre-bankruptcy obligations once a plan is approved by the court and/or the requisite creditors. In more recent times the discharge has become a tool to be used by debtors facing massive contingent tort liabilities, such as those arising from asbestos exposure, even prior to those claims having been filed.

Nevertheless, Skeel concludes that as some of the other social protections that have been prevalent in the societies of Europe and Japan become unsustainable in the face of globalization, it is likely that those societies will need bankruptcy laws more like those of the United States, which make it easier for people and companies to start over. Already, Skeel says, there are steps in this direction. Like others who have written about globalization more generally (for example, Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree with respect to the ascendancy of market capitalism), Skeel does not disallow the possibility that some major jolt could disrupt the seeming inevitability of the spread of U.S.-style bankruptcy laws. Nevertheless, Skeel concludes that America’s horse-and-buggy era laws are most likely to be adequate for at least another century, not only for the United States, but increasingly for other societies as well.

Stephen Smith is general counsel for the North American operations of GKN PLC, an English automotive and aerospace manufacturer.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I don’t like the word “memoir,” and not just because it sounds like a French antique (as in, “Darling, fetch the sherry from the memoir”). It’s an old-world, aristocratic term, too frail to govern the whole unruly territory of autobiographical writing. Prime ministers pen memoirs. So do aging film stars and war heroes. The rest of us write journals, reflections, and thoughtful ramblings too long or too private to give out in person.

Nora Gallagher’s Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace is actually a piece of reflective journalism—occasionally dreamy and poetic, but more often clear-eyed and analytical. It’s a sequel to Gallagher’s first book, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, where she tells about her unlikely return to the Episcopal church of her childhood. A casual visit to a small congregation in Santa Barbara led her to a fresh discovery of faith and Christian community. In Practicing Resurrection, Gallagher chronicles the following years in which she considered entering the priesthood, even taking initial steps toward ordination. The first step was to form a “discernment” committee of friends in the parish to help determine where God was truly calling her. The group met three hours a month for the next year, discovering the process as they went along:

If someone from outside the church had been a fly on the wall during our discernment sessions, she or he would have seen five people sitting together around various dining-room tables mostly in silence. Every now and then, someone would speak. If anything was an example of how the church differs from the secular, this was it. We sat. We waited. I am not sure any of us knew what exactly we were doing in the beginning—we had no “training”—but we took to it, awkwardly at first and then more easily, as if returning to an old, ill-used language. As the year wore on, we became more familiar with what I came to call “the pull.” A particular image or question would rise in the mind and would not fade: it felt the way a fishing line feels when a trout takes the hook below the surface, that singular tug, differing so much from a snag on a weed, of a living, breathing creature.

Gallagher had a huge decision to make. As she tried to discern the direction of God’s “pull,” she saw that in many ways her “inchoate longing” did match the formal priesthood: “I wanted to deepen my life. I wanted to anoint and be anointed, preach and listen, celebrate the Eucharist with the whole community participating because it is the community that makes the Eucharist. … I wanted to ‘live’ that ‘holy life.'” But she knew full well that priesthood had its other side: vestry meetings, diocesan politics, the practical challenge of satisfying diverse groups of people. To say nothing of loneliness. Even as she struggled with friends to discern her real vocation, she faced her brother’s death from cancer and a mounting crisis in her marriage. What if taking formal office cut her off from the very community that gave her strength—the people she loved and wanted to serve? By stepping out of the flow of ordinary life, would she lose the things that drew her to God in the first place?

I found it hard going at times to read about so much uncertainty and vacillation. It’s easy to imagine Gallagher with a bumper sticker on her car that says “Question Everything.” Still, I think she does well by herself and by her readers not to rush to comfortable conclusions. Ultimately she questions why the Episcopal Church keeps its priests separate from the laity: “How had it been established that only priests served the bread? What did serving the bread represent? By preaching in churches, I (and others) had broken a barrier that said only ordained persons could preach. … What other liturgical functions could laypeople fill or share with ordained clergy? And how might this add to the life of the church?” These questions seem legitimate to me, especially given that the mainline Episcopal Church allows so much latitude in matters of doctrine (I needed Valium to get through some of the theological musings in this book) while guarding its collars and chalices closely.

To read Albert Raboteau’s personal history, A Sorrowful Joy, is to think that every book should be written first as a lecture for Harvard Divinity School. A scholar widely known for his studies of African American religion, Raboteau delivered the Wit Lecture at Harvard in 2000. Published by Paulist Press in a tiny paperback volume that looks like a church tract, it somehow manages to cover 130 years in the life of an American black family, beginning with the Creole great-grandfather who looks out from the “ancestor wall” in Raboteau’s house:

My grandfather sits in a chair placed outside in the light. He sits straight; his large hands push against his knees. The sunlight heightens the contrast between the stiff white collar of his shirt and the dark smooth skin of his face, turned in profile.

To introduce his story with a portrait—a sort of icon—is fitting for a writer who converts to Orthodoxy before the tale is over. Raboteau’s Creole grandfather was the son of a Louisiana slave. Though his children and grandchildren were born free, they suffered constant injustices in the segregated South, the worst being the murder of Raboteau’s own father by a white man in Mississippi. The man was never prosecuted. Raboteau’s mother packed her children off to the North in hopes of saving them from such evils and perhaps from her own anger. One summer, though, during a visit South, young Raboteau had his own taste of injustice. When a priest at the white Catholic church denied him Communion, he went away “hot-faced with shame, a blur of numbness.” Years later he walked out of a Mass in South Carolina weeping the tears he hadn’t wept as a child.

Given some of his bad experiences with religion, it’s amazing that Raboteau developed a strong faith and a passion for the Church. He discovered Thomas Merton at 13 and dreamed of becoming a monk. His interest in African American spirituality led him to a teaching career rather than the priesthood, but he continued to be haunted by a “shadow vocation”: “The path not taken still haunted me. … I felt that I had settled for a second best, not the heroic, but the regular. I had chosen the lesser way.”

He became a great success in his career, teaching at top universities, publishing frequently, working so hard that he eventually grew distant from his wife and children. When Princeton offered him a position as dean of its graduate school, he knew it was far from what he’d wanted, and yet he didn’t think he could refuse it. Already overwhelmed with work and guilt, he felt the world pressing down on him:

I remember as I was driving to campus to accept the position, I physically felt that the street was narrowing, closing in on me. I shrugged off the sensation and took the job. It was a “disastrous success.”

Sitting through meeting after meeting, from morning to after dark, I felt that my spirit was shriveling up and dying.

Raboteau ultimately flung aside responsibility, betrayed his family, and wound up with his “spirit bleeding all over the place.” Then, somewhere in the midst of huge grief and guilt, he happened to see an exhibit of Russian icons at the Princeton Art Museum. He was surprised to find himself drawn to one of the icons there, “an icon of the Theotokos with sad loving eyes. She seemed to hold all the hurt in the world with those eyes. … I gazed at her and she gazed at me.”

He went back to see that icon three times. Later he visited an Orthodox church and kept going because of the comfort the community and liturgy brought him. As he began to explore Orthodoxy he discovered similarities between it and African American spirituality. Among other things he found a shared “quality of sad joyfulness, a sense that life in a minor key is life as it is. Christianity is a religion of suffering. The suffering of Christ and of the martyrs is at the center of the Christian tradition and suffering grounds the Christian to the suffering of the world. As the old slaves knew, suffering can’t be evaded, it is a mark of the authenticity of faith.”

Raboteau’s reflections on personal suffering are profound, especially considering that they came from a black scholar in the year 2000, when talking about the redemptive nature of suffering could get you accused of listening to Rush Limbaugh. It will always be a mystery, though, why someone finds one Christian tradition more of a home for his soul than another—why Orthodoxy speaks to a black man raised Catholic while a California feminist falls in love with the Episcopal priesthood. The pull of a particular tradition and particular vocation are as unexplainable, indefinable as the pull of love, but both of these books, in very different ways, reveal that pull in its clumsy fullness. They show the zigzag path that a Christian takes not only to a kind of work and community of people but to a place of satisfaction and new birth. Both show us that the journey is a strange mix of God’s leading, “inchoate longing,” and blind persistence. At the beginning of her book, Gallagher quotes Wendell Berry from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Betty Carter is the author of two novels. Her new book, Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace, will be published by Paraclete Press in May.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Eric Arnesen is emerging as one of the most original and independent-minded historians of American labor. The author of a fine book on dockworkers in New Orleans and a famous article discrediting the jargon-clogged movement known as “whiteness studies,” he is especially good at exploring the ideologically charged territory where race and CLASS overlap. In Brotherhoods of Color, recounting the history of black railroad workers and their union leaders, he fills in a vital chapter in the struggle for civil rights.

One of the principal figures in this history will be familiar to most survivors of American History 101. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, has long been featured in textbooks and documentaries as the éminence grise of the civil rights movement, one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 (a project Randolph began planning during World War II). Randolph is already the subject of an engrossing biography by Jervis Anderson, but Arnesen fills in the background and context that only hard time in the archives can provide.

Arnesen’s story reveals important patterns in the history of race and CLASS. For instance, he presents cases where the initiative behind anti-black discrimination came not from capitalists but from the white working CLASS. In the revealing case of Memphis yard workers around World War I, labor shortages allowed white workers to take low-level jobs formerly defined as black. But after the war, black workers fought to reclaim their positions, and management complied. White rank-and-filers responded with wildcat “hate strikes,” which forced union leaders and government officials to endorse new rules that excluded more black workers than before.

The older Jim Crow system of reserving admittedly unpleasant, low-paid jobs for black workers at least gave them a piece of the pie. But during industrial contractions, the “black” jobs became desirable to white unions, and a tool for controlling the higher positions. White workers in Memphis exploited management’s assumption that black workers could not rise to positions that required education, such as engineer. They insisted on a uniform seniority ladder, while restricting the lowest rungs to “promotable” men, thus achieving the exclusion of black workers. Evil could flow from the bottom up, as well as the top down, and working-CLASS power could produce reaction as well as progress.

Black workers were not passive bystanders. They sometimes made common cause with management, gaining whatever advantages they could. An important corollary to their willingness to be “scabs” when white workers went on strike was what Arnesen calls a “historically rooted antipathy toward organized labor held by a considerable number of African Americans.” This sometimes inhibited their own organization of unions and bolstered the position of organizers like C.W. Rice, who led the National Federation of Railway Workers and edited the weekly Negro Labor News in the 1930s and ’40s. Rice argued that in America black workers could “start at the bottom of an industry and rise, step by step, through the merit system, to the head of that same industry.” Rice championed “company unions,” set up by management as alternatives to worker-controlled unions. Company unions were often genuinely attractive, considering that most “real” unions excluded or exploited black workers. Sometimes black leaders could use these to undercut the more expensive labor represented by white unions, and win real gains for themselves as well as the bosses. Other black leaders denounced Rice as an Uncle Tom and a pawn of management, especially after cio-affiliated unions began accepting black members and fighting union racism. But Rice and other “independent” black union leaders had a big following.

Randolph was on the other side of such disputes. After building a huge, all-black union, he emerged as a national figure. He is remembered partly because, more than any other leader, he forced white unions to recognize organized black workers. But he owed much of his fame to his ability to extract concessions from government—a strategy he borrowed to some degree from rival independent black unions, but used much more successfully than they.

Randolph’s success in winning recognition from government is in many ways more surprising than his winning recognition from white unions. Arnesen shows the U.S. government repeatedly dismissing legitimate black grievances and helping white workers find new ways to exclude black workers. Sometimes this was a result of simple prejudice, as in the case of C.S. Lake, the U.S. Railway Administration official who denied the existence of labor discrimination, claiming to be the Negro’s friend while he invoked his gratitude to his “old black mammy.” But sometimes it was a deliberate technique of CLASS struggle.

Still, in 1941 Randolph won the biggest concession to black rights from a president since the Emancipation Proclamation, and the only significant concession from a Democratic president up to that point. He did this by branching out of strictly labor organizing, into the broader (and in some ways less threatening) field of civil rights. He demanded not only an end to discrimination in government-sponsored industry in the war, but an end to discrimination in the armed forces.

Randolph’s victory on the first demand came more easily than the second. In World War II, labor shortages impelled employers to put black workers into formerly “white” positions when white workers were unavailable. (They tended to allow Mexicans, women, and even enemy POWs to take jobs before black workers, but shortages of white men were so great that the strongest barriers ultimately fell too.) The shortages might have been enough to force, de facto, the change that Randolph demanded, and got, as an explicit policy, in the form of President Roosevelt’s executive order banning discrimination in military industry.

Randolph’s more radical demand to end discrimination in the armed forces was rebuffed until World War II was safely over, and FDR safely dead. Then another Democratic president, the Southern Baptist Harry Truman, far more

conservative on most issues than FDR, was impelled to desegregate the military. The military, which once resisted civil rights as tenaciously and resourcefully as any institution, remains the most successful experiment in desegregation. Once it made up its mind to mix the races, a radically undemocratic, hierarchical organization could pull off what less authoritarian institutions could not.

The most poignant part of Arnesen’s story is the end: other than military desegregation, the successes that Randolph and others strove so hard to achieve were very short-lived. In the 1960s, black unions’ drive merged with non-labor campaigns for civil rights and forced far-reaching changes in employment law. But by then the railroads had begun to shrink. The U.S. government, which lavishly subsidized the railroads in their heyday, now favored the auto, trucking, highway-construction, and oil industries that drove railroads to the margins of American transportation. One gets the impression that white unions yielded to black demands partly because they no longer had much to fight over. The railroad story echoed the broader story: black Americans finally won opportunities in American cities just as industry was fleeing those cities.

But the struggle was not in vain. The efforts of organized black workers—who with often conflicting strategies made discrimination against them ever more difficult—left a legacy that helped oppressed minorities far beyond their own industry. When Randolph and others recognized that unions and corporations could not be changed from the shop floor, they took their struggle to the legislative realm. Randolph—with the workers behind him—was “the crucial link” between an earlier generation who fought the workers and bosses at hand, and the wider-ranging civil rights struggle that finally forced government to outlaw discrimination.

David Chappell teaches history at the University of Arkansas. His book A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion, Liberals, and the Death of Jim Crow is forthcoming in 2003 from the University of North Carolina Press.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We were planning a memorial service for Lew Smedes, and I asked his wife, Doris, whether Lew had some favorite biblical passages that I should use for my homily. “Well, of course, there was the hound of heaven passage in Psalm 139,” she immediately responded. Of course. More than any of my other friends, Lew was a person who clearly felt hounded by God, and it was easy to imagine him praying that psalm: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?”

For him the sense of God’s presence was for the most part a source of spiritual and vocational comfort. He finished what turned out to be his last book just before he died at age 81 of a head injury he received when he fell from a ladder in December 2002. The book, My God and I: The Life of a Chastened Calvinist—he called it “a theological memoir”—will be published soon by Eerdmans. He tells there how he first discovered that it can be a joyful experience to acknowledge the divine presence. He had transferred to Calvin College after a few years as a spiritual misfit at the Moody Bible Institute, and his first class at Calvin was in English Composition. His teacher, Jacob Vandenbosch, “introduced me that day,” he testified, “to a God the likes of whom I had never even heard about.” This God, Smedes discovered,

liked elegant sentences and was offended by dangling modifiers. Once you believe this, where can you stop? If the Maker of the Universe admired words well put together, think of how he must love sound thought well put together, and if he loved sound thinking, how he must love a Bach concerto and if he loved a Bach concerto think of how he prized any human effort to bring a foretaste, be it ever so small, of his Kingdom of Justice and peace and happiness to the victimized people of the world. In short, I met the Maker of the Universe who loved the world he made and was dedicated to its redemption. I found the joy of the Lord, not at a prayer meeting, but in English Composition 101.

But Lew could also be profoundly uncomfortable—even impatient—in God’s inescapable presence. While he learned good Kuyperian Calvinism at Calvin College, he would have nothing to do with the triumphalism that Abraham Kuyper’s disciples often displayed. Jesus Christ may claim ownership over (to use Kuyper’s famous manifesto) “every square inch of the entire creation,” but Smedes worried much about the profound suffering that continues to take place on all of those square inches. And he was not afraid to tell God directly that he, Lewis Benedict Smedes, was beginning to wonder why the Lord was letting all of this bad stuff go on for so long.

That sensitivity to suffering, especially in its systemic forms, was what first attracted me to his way of viewing things. I discoved Lew Smedes when I was a graduate student in the 1960s, during a time when I was struggling with the issues of racism and militarism. The evangelical movement was giving folks like me no guidance in our wrestlings. Then I came upon The Reformed Journal, and especially Smedes’s wonderful little pieces in those pages on social issues. It was clear that he was solidly orthodox and that he hated injustice. When I was offered a teaching position at Calvin College, I was thrilled at the thought that I would actually be his colleague. But the experience turned out to be long delayed. He left Calvin for Fuller just as I arrived there, and it took 17 more years for us to be members of the same faculty.

Smedesian ethics focused especially on the tragic dimensions of our sinful condition. This was an important element in his popular appeal. Two of his books, Sex for Christians and Forgive and Forget, were big sellers—you could buy the forgiveness book at airport newstands for a while, and the sales got a bump when he discussed the topic on Oprah’s show. He had a knack for letting very ordinary people sense that he understood their deepest dilemmas and temptations.

His emphasis on the tragic, along with his refusal to settle for easy solutions, also got him into trouble at times with the evangelical constituency. Actually, on some issues it got me into more trouble than it did him: when I became Fuller’s president, it fell to me to answer the letters from folks who were worried about his refusal to give the standard evangelical answers on moral issues. But even when I thought he was pushing a bit too far—which on my count he did in only about seven of the thousands of pages of eloquent prose that he published—I always willingly defended him as a person who modeled both ethical integrity and pastoral sensitivity.

Smedes did many things with great style. Many people claimed him as their favorite writer. Some folks also said he was the best preacher they had ever heard. His students at Fuller typically describe his class lectures as memorable—although they often added that it was worth showing up just to hear him pray at the beginning of each session.

I found him a good debating partner. A few weeks before he died, we had a leisurely breakfast together. As was typical in these meetings, we—two Dutch Calvinists sitting in a California coffee shop—spent most of the time arguing about God. I always liked arguing with him about that subject. We did not settle our differences. But now he at least is able to take the argument to a new level.

Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Whoops

I’m glad to get mentioned by Ram Cnaan on p. 26 of the latest issue, in Agnieszka Tennant’s interview with Ram [“Counting (Helping) Hands,” January/ February]. However, let it be known that I am definitely not at Duke University. I am at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is especially important now that basketball season has begun. Thanks.

Christian Smith Department of Sociology University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N.C

When Disrespect is Respectful

Darryl Hart [“The Groves of Academe:

When Disrespect is Respectful,” January/ February] fails to realize that scholars committed to, say, Marxist or feminist beliefs and agendas often make exclusive claims on par with those of any religion. In this way they are in fact quasi-religious themselves and are not terribly inclined to include other religious points of view that appear hostile to their own. There is no real religious neutrality in liberal, democratic, pluralistic societies or institutions, but Christians are free to wade into the give-and-take in order to battle for a voice in a system that praises the ideals of equality, freedom, and tolerance even while they are never—and never can be— realized perfectly.

Hart also seems not to understand that it is the taint of the Republican Party and • contemporary “conservatism” on evangelicals that raises hackles among many academics, not Christianity. You can hold to any religious tradition in the academy as long as your politics suits Sixties liberals. There might still be some uneasiness among those with more anti-religious strains of Enlightenment thought, but generally speaking there is great tolerance for sufficiently “liberal” Christians.

This is the case because there is no perceived threat from Christianity in the academy except insofar as it is expressed through fundamentalist and evangelical political efforts that are thought of as crude, exclusionistic, bigoted, moralistic,. illiberal tools of the Republican Party. A few rather unbalanced secular academics. may truly fear the supposed power of the Religious Right; many hate its members as they imagine them to be; all see it as moronic.

I don’t think these prejudices are without warrant. Evangelicals should expect

rpsistanpp nnt” all rpQKtanfp IQ nr^ a cirrn nf

in academic circles unless absolutely nee-‘ essary. I wonder too if recent affirmations of Christian scholarship have more to do with academic politics than the claims of Christ. This is where some attention to the motives behind the Religious Right and Christian scholarship might be instructive.

Politics aside, my point simply was to show that Christianity is far more threatening than many believing academics acknowledge. Mr. Knauss’ comparison of Christianity with Marxism and feminism adds ironic support. These ideologies do

not rely upon the supernatural. They may appear to be as dogmatic, but their truth does not rest on a holy book or the operation of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, Christianity is more than an ideology, and I doubt if comparing it to Marxism or feminism does Christianity justice. To ask non-Christians to respect something as “foolish” as Christianity is to ask a lot.

Too Many Bibles?

As director of product development for an organization that has been devoted to Bible ministry in the United States for nearly 200 years, I was particularly interested in the letter ofW. Ward Gasque [“Too Many Bibles?,” November/December 2002]. There seems to be plenty of evidence to back up Gasques observations, and they are troubling indeed. What is often missing from such laments is a deeper exploration of possible reasons for the decline of Bible knowledge in the American church.

In addition to the usual suspects in this case (the decline in reading generally, the turn to topical sermons in our churches, etc.) I believe there are other causes that . are rooted in the evangelical church’s

n of certain cultural pat-First, as Wheaton Col-y Burge has noted [“The yer Read,” CHRISTIANITY 99], evangelicals have rated with a peculiar ‘. We are extractionists. ime of Charles Hodge •d to think of the Bible similar to the scientists im which we can pull ded. Theological facts key and the stories that discarded as curious but This significantly mod-is a serious disservice to

the Bible God actually gave us. If evangelicals were to adopt a narrative approach to Scripture, it would not just be following some academic fad; it would bring us to a truer and more faithful understanding of God’s revelation.

Second, while as evangelicals we like to think of ourselves as People of the Book, in practice we seem to be interest- . ed in the Bible only if we can see immediately what it has to do with us. We are taught to think in terms of instant, personal application of isolated bits of Bible texts. We are not interested in passages that don’t seem to speak to our immediate situations. We have no time to bother

with learning about those for whom the Scriptures were originally given. We have no notion of the power of latency, of simply taking in the Bible for its own sake, and trusting that in time it will have plenty to say to us.

Gasque is right that more translations and new niche Bibles will not do much to address the underlying problem. There is little hope that Bible publishers captive to market forces can realistically confront this situation. Many of the study notes in our Bibles these days simply reinforce the idolatries of our time and actually show an amazing disrespect for the intended meaning and original context of the Scriptures.

The graphic design of these Bibles tells reader that the important material is the ancillary notes, not the biblical text.

. It is time for American evangelicals f regain a high view of Scripture in actua. practice, to relearn the ancient art of ex{ riencing the Bible as a story rather than God’s Big Collection of Rules, Facts, an Principles, and, most important of all, to hear anew the call to lose one’s life in order to find it—and then ask the questii what this might have to do with our Bib] reading.

Glenn Paa International Bible Soci Colorado Springs, Co

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Speaking of the web, some interesting things are happening on our website. Some of you may have already discovered that we now have a weekly weblog, created by our new editorial assistant, Nathan Bierma, who also contributes to the print magazine. Another new feature on (lie website is tlie Book of the Week. There are far more books worth attention—pro and con—man we can cover in the six issues we publish cad) year. Among tlie regular reviewers for the Book of the Week are Mark Noll—whose masterful work, America’s God: From ]onathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, was published late last : year by Oxford University Press—and contributing editors Jeremy Lott and Preston Jones. If you haven’t visited the website lately, please check it out—and consider signing ; up for our free e-newsletter. i —John Wilson

No poet—and Bono, the 42-year-old lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, considers himself a poet—enjoys having his verse scrutinized. And no musician likes to have to explain what a song means.

Nevertheless, for more than 20 years Bono's fans have been attempting to gauge his spiritual well-being by what he sings, what he says in interviews, talk shows, and awards programs, and what he does or doesn't do in public.

For many Christians of a certain generation, combing through the lyrics of U2 songs (nearly all of them written by Bono) in search of biblical images or references to Jesus Christ and his teachings is almost a sport. Consider it a cross between exegesis and Where's Waldo?

He doesn't attend church regularly. He prays frequently. He likes to say grace before meals. He tries to have a "Sabbath hour" as often as he can. His favorite Bible is Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message. He hangs out with Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, but on a recent visit to Nashville he spent the morning palling around with Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant.

Bono knows the subject of his personal faith is of great interest to others, although he's certain that interest is misplaced. The inquiries don't seem to bother him—Bono seems comfortable with who he is. He just celebrated his 20th wedding anniversary with his high-school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, his band had one of its most successful years artistically and professionally, and he has found his calling, on and off stage. Rarely has Bono talked explicitly about his faith and beliefs. But as he has begun to recruit churches this past year in the fight against AIDS in Africa, that seems to be changing.

'Hi. I'm Bono.'

Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, Ireland, to a Roman Catholic father, Bob Hewson (who died of cancer in August 2001), and a Protestant mother, Iris Rankin Hewson (who died when Bono was 14), he has long carved his own path to Christ irrespective of institutional religion.

Bono, a moniker given him 30 years ago by his longtime friends and taken from the name of a hearing-aid store in North Dublin, has always straddled Protestantism and Catholicism looking for a "third way."

He attended Mount Temple High School, Ireland's first nondenominational coeducational school, which was designed to educate Protestant and Catholic children together in Ireland's troubled sectarian society.

After his mother died unexpectedly, Bono, David Evans (who is now known as U2's guitarist The Edge) and Larry Mullen Jr. (U2's drummer) were all involved in Shalom, a loose evangelical group that met for song, worship, and Bible study.

But when Shalom evolved into something more structured, more akin to the institutional religion he finds uncomfortable, Bono, and soon the others, left.

"I just go where the life is, you know? Where I feel the Holy Spirit," Bono told Christianity Today. "If it's in the back of a Roman Catholic cathedral, in the quietness and the incense, which suggest the mystery of God, of God's presence, or in the bright lights of the revival tent, I just go where I find life. I don't see denomination. I generally think religion gets in the way of God.

"I am just trying to figure it out. Everybody wants to make an impact with their life, whether it's small scale with friends or family—that's really big, is the truth—or whether it's on a grand scale, in changing their communities and beyond. I just want to realize my potential." He recalled one pastor's recent advice: Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed. "That's what I want," Bono said. "I want to align my life with that."

Bono's spirituality is more than just a reflection of antisectarianism, said Steve Stockman, a chaplain at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 (Relevant, 2001). "At the time Bono was involved with Shalom, something unique was happening in Dublin," he explains. "There was a movement of the Holy Spirit that you simply cannot deny. In some ways I think it was the Jesus Movement hit Dublin eight years late. That radical, almost hippie attitude at some level, that this is a radical thing to live in the Spirit … It gave Dublin something that was vibrant and exciting and trendy, almost. Bono and [Alison] were certainly caught up in the middle of that. They've never been able to get over that, no matter how their faith has changed. The roots of what they're doing now are in whatever the Spirit was doing back then."

When expressed in private, one-on-one conversations, Bono's faith in Christ is anything but trendy.

"The idea that there's a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. Actually, maybe even far-fetched to start with," Bono said. "But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in s— and straw and poverty is genius, and brings me to my knees, literally. To me, as a poet, I am just in awe of that. It makes some sort of poetic sense. It's the thing that makes me a believer, though it didn't dawn on me for many years."

And though he tends to distrust religion, he appealed to religious institutions during his recent weeklong speaking tour of the American Midwest with his humanitarian organization, Debt, AIDS, and Trade in Africa (DATA). At Wheaton College, students couldn't help trying to read between the lines of his challenges to intervene on behalf of Africans devastated by AIDS.

"I had students afterward ask me, 'Do you think he's a Christian?' " said Ashley Woodiwiss, a political science professor at Wheaton who helped organize Bono's appearance at the college.

"I just said, these times of prayer that I took part in and observed, these were off-stage. This was the man, not the performer at all. To see that vitality, and yet, he's not going to be captured by anybody. He's not going to be 'Our Saint.' He's not going to be an evangelical for us."

'God is on his knees'

A few weeks before Christmas, the singer also met with Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, during the Chicago stop on his Heart of America tour.

Hybels told Christianity Today about his impression of the rock star: "After a two-hour private meeting in my office, I came away convinced that Bono's faith is genuine, his vision to relieve the tragic suffering in Africa is God-honoring, and his prophetic challenge to the U.S. church must be taken seriously."

"This is the defining moral issue of our time," Bono repeatedly told church congregations during the tour, which was designed to raise people's awareness of the one-two punch of AIDS and profound poverty that is claiming the lives of 6,500 Africans every day.

"This generation will be remembered for three things: the Internet, the war on terror, and how we let an entire continent go up in flames while we stood around with watering cans. Or not," he would say, sometimes pounding his fist for emphasis. "Let me share with you a conviction. God is on his knees to the church on this one. God Almighty is on his knees to us, begging us to turn around the supertanker of indifference on the subject of AIDS."

From Nebraska to New York City, in city halls and union meetings, in diners and truck stops, at colleges and churches, and more than once from the pulpit itself, Bono tossed a gauntlet at the feet of the American church.

"It brings out the best in the church, like you see today in response to these children suffering HIV," Bono told pastors, parents, and children gathered at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport a few weeks before Christmas as part of an airlift of 80,000 gift boxes to HIV-infected children in Africa, organized by Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child. "But if we're honest, it has also brought the worst out of the church. Judgmentalism, a kind of sense that people who have AIDS, well, they got it because they deserve it. Well, from my studies of the Scriptures, I don't see a hierarchy to sin. I don't see sexual immorality registering higher up on the list than institutional greed (or greed of any kind, actually), problems we suffer from in the West.

"This is a defining moment for us: For the church; for our values; for the culture that we live in."

Is Bono a modern-day prophet? He'd be the first to say no. He's a rock star and makes no bones about it.

"There's nothing worse than a rock star with a cause," he said, as actors Ashley Judd and Chris Tucker, fellow speakers on the Heart of America Tour, stood by. "But celebrity is currency and we want to spend it this way. … It's preposterous and absurd that you have to listen to it from us. But that's how the news media works."

Bono is similarly self-effacing about his faith. He doesn't even like to call himself a Christian, although it is apparent to anyone who has spent any time with him—or even just listened to his lyrics—that his faith is rooted in the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ.

"I'm a believer," Bono usually says when asked about his faith. "I don't set myself up as any kind of 'Christian,' " he said as his gleaming silver and chrome tour bus motored east from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Iowa City. "I can't live up to that. It's something I aspire to, but I don't feel comfortable with that badge."

It's no denial of Christ. And Bono is not trying to play hide-and-seek with his Christianity. He wants to avoid becoming an idealized poster-child for Christ when people should be looking to the Savior, not some rock star, for their example.

A few days later at Northeast Christian Church in suburban Louisville, Kentucky, he told reporters: "I'm not a very good advertisement for God. I generally don't wear that badge on my lapel. But it certainly is written on the inside, somewhere."

It's a self-deprecation, something he's fond of indulging in, whether the subject is his faith or his success as a musician.

Self-deprecation is a national trait in Ireland, the singer told Oprah Winfrey on her TV talk show in September. "In Ireland, people have an interesting attitude toward success; they look down on it," he said. "In America, you look at the mansion on the hill and think, 'One day that will be me.' In Ireland, people say, 'One day, I'm going to get that b—d.' "

Still, critics have said Bono is somehow ashamed of his faith; otherwise he would make it clear in plain language that anyone could understand. The singer, they say, is hiding his light under a bushel.

"I think for evangelical Christians, there's a problem when Bono says that kind of thing," Stockman says. "I think you have to go back to [U2's song] 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.' … He's almost denying what he believes himself, because if [he believes] in grace, then wearing the badge is not a pride thing."

But, Stockman adds, Bono's reluctance to be labeled a Christian, or at least a Christian artist, probably has more to do with a lack of faith in journalists than in Jesus Christ.

"I call it the Messianic secret," Stockman said. "He's still not wanting to say too much in case he's misrepresented. Somewhere in the '80s he got a belly full of misrepresentation and thought, 'All right, let's disguise it a bit.' " The band seemed to try to shed its image as rock music's conscience. "Even though they tried to go light, they can't go light because he's always asking cosmic questions, and that's because of his faith."

The Rock Star Preacher

The seven-states-in-seven-days Heart of America tour kicked off at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, before a Christmas-size crowd.

The Rock Star, as he often refers to himself sarcastically, wearing a dark suit and his trademark blue glasses, somewhat timidly mounted the platform.

The first thing he did was make fun of himself.

"Rock Star in the pulpit shot—nope," he quipped, moving away from the raised wooden lectern.

"I'm not often so comfortable in church," he said. "It feels pious and so unlike the Christ that I read about in the Scriptures."

Still, when the microphone on his lapel began to fail, the Rock Star moved to the pulpit, where he slung his arm over the side, casually, and looked thoroughly at home.

"I've always wanted to get into one of these," he said.

During the next week, he would mount several more pulpits and take more than a few shots at Christians in the United States and Europe.

Speaking to reporters at Wheaton College, the evangelical Mecca outside Chicago, he was asked if evangelicals are reluctant to engage the AIDS issue.

"Somewhere in the back of the religious mind," he said, "was this idea [that people with AIDS] reaped what they sowed—missing the entire New Testament, the New Covenant, and the concept of grace. Evangelicals in a poll, only 6 percent thought they should be doing something about the AIDS emergency. … I'm sure that made you, as it made me, wince."

Still, Bono believes addressing AIDS is at the core of the church's purpose and at the core of how outsiders see the church.

"I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake," he said. "If the church doesn't respond to this, the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains."

Privately, Bono's critique of the church, in which he includes himself, is even more caustic. "It's absolutely clear what's on God's mind. You just have to read Scripture," Bono told CT as he rode in a chauffeured SUV down Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

Those who read Scripture and don't come away with God's preferential concern for the poor are "just blind," he said, noting that 2,103 verses of Scripture are about the poor.

"People have been perverting the Gospels and the Holy Scriptures since they were first written—mostly the church. This AIDS emergency actually is just such a valuable example of everything that's wrong and perverted about Christianity today," he said as he headed toward a Manhattan recording studio to lay down some tracks for "American Prayer," a song he debuted on the Heart of America tour.

"There should be civil disobedience on this. You read about the apostles being persecuted because they were out there taking on the powers that be. Jesus said, 'I came to bring a sword.' In fact, it's a load of sissies running around with their 'bless me' clubs. And there's a war going on between good and evil. And millions of children and millions of lives are being lost to greed, to bureaucracy, and to a church that's been asleep. And it sends me out of my mind with anger.

"This is what's important and why I would be doing this interview with Christianity Today, to implore the church to reconsider grace, to put an end to this hierarchy of sin. … All have fallen short. Let's stop throwing stones at people who've made mistakes in their life, and let's start throwing drugs."

There is little hope for most HIV-infected Africans, Bono told crowds on the Heart of America tour, because they cannot afford the $1 a day for medications that are readily available in the U. S. and Europe.

"People are dying for the stupidest of reasons: money," he said.

Dreary Numbers

Each year, sub-Saharan African nations spend $40 million on debt payments to the United States and other wealthy nations, according to statistics from data (www.datadata.org). Africa spends $14.5 billion annually repaying debts, and only receives $12.7 billion in aid, including $1.2 billion from the United States. The U.S. aid to Africa is proportionally the lowest among the wealthiest nations of the world.

More than 28 million Africans are HIV-positive, and 2.3 million died of AIDS last year, according to United Nations figures. Were it not for HIV, the average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa would be about 63. It's now about 47.

More than 6,500 Africans die every day from HIV and AIDS. Another 9,500 become infected with HIV each day. Most Africans have no access to antiretroviral and other drugs that slow the progression of the virus. Families who can afford some drugs almost assuredly cannot afford them for all the HIV-positive members of their family, Bono said. Parents must decide which child receives the drugs (and a chance to live).

Because there's no hope for treatment, Bono said, many choose not to be tested at all and continue to infect their sexual partners and children.

Ten billion dollars a year in aid from the wealthiest nations of the world, including about $3 billion a year from the United States, could put 3 million people on antiretroviral drugs, keep 10 million people from becoming infected, and provide care for 12 million AIDS orphans by 2005, Bono said, citing figures from the newly formed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, created by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2002.

data is not asking people to contribute more of their own money. In fact the organization, nearly entirely bankrolled by Bono, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Ed Scott (another Silicon Valley mogul) doesn't accept cash donations.

"We're not asking for money here," Bono said. "We feel we've already given the money. We're asking you to give the President permission to spend the money on this problem."

To that end, during the Heart of America tour, data distributed more than 10,000 "action cards," red and black postcards to be signed and sent to elected officials, urging them to intervene financially to stave off the AIDS crisis in Africa.

"Two and a half million Africans are going to die next year because they can't get ahold of drugs that we take for granted," Bono would say over and over again during the tour. "That's not a cause. That's an emergency."

Standing amid thousands of Operation Christmas Child gift boxes at jfk airport on the last official day of the tour, Bono was indignant.

"These children that are going to receive these boxes for Christmas, this may be their last Christmas, a lot of them," he said. "And that makes me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I think it's absolutely unacceptable. I don't think we should have it. I don't think our Father in heaven will have it. All of our work is made meaningless in the face of this most wicked of plagues."

Bono and former Eurythmics member Dave Stewart have composed a song that reflects the rocker's hope that America, and American Christians in particular, will respond to the AIDS crisis.

Bono debuted "American Prayer," a work in progress, during the Heart of America tour.

In early December, Bono sang:

These are the hands / What are we gonna build with them? / This is the church you can't see / Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses / All are yearning to breathe free / American prayer, (This is my) American prayer.

It's one song that Bono is happy to explain. "My prayer is that this country, which has unparalleled economic, technological, military, and cultural power, will rethink its humble origins, the purpose that made it great," Bono told CT. "There are millions and millions of lives hanging in the balance in parts of the world, that depend on decisions made a long way from them. And there's the prospect of war around the corner. I'm not saying I know what to do, or what anyone should do. America has got to make up its own mind about all these problems and potentials, but it will make better decisions if it revisits the cauldron of ideas that the country came out of."

The Inquisition

Bono's latest comments—even his talking to Christian media—will surely be scrutinized by many fans seemingly obsessed with the "is he or isn't he" question. But why?

"There are two camps: Those who are dying to call him their own … [and] those who are dying to bring him down and prove that he's not," Stockman said. He thinks it's a tragedy. "We want to be very black and white about who's in and who's out. We want to demonize those who are out."

Perhaps the kind of Christianity that Bono represents is threatening, Stockman posits.

"If Bono is one of us, then we have to take on the challenge of what he's saying. But if we can ostracize him and say he's not one of us, we don't have to think about the marginalization, we don't have to think about postmodernity, we don't have to think about the challenges he's laid before the church. If this guy is right, then I have to sort out my life," Stockman said.

"I think Bono is very culturally aware of who he's trying to reach. I don't think he's saying these things to make the evangelical church realize he's a Christian," he said. "He's willing to sacrifice the understanding of evangelical Christians in order to take God into a broader context. Can you tell me a role model that's bringing God into culture better?"

Michael W. Smith, a Bono-level celebrity within contemporary Christian music, met with the Irish rocker in Nashville in December.

"Obviously, something has happened to him," he told CT. "If you really look back at the early days of U2, I hate putting labels on things, but they really were a Christian band. I think he got really frustrated with the church and became really bitter. I think he's probably sorry for the way he reacted, to a certain degree."

"I really can't judge him for what he does. Everyone's got to work out their own salvation," Smith said. "I think that he has got a bit of a new lease on life. Maybe he's found another place in this world and what he's supposed to do in life. He's been preaching this for a long time, but to know that we might actually be able to pull this thing off [saving Africa from destruction]—I think [this] does wonders for his soul and for his heart."

"I think he would probably love to have that as his legacy, rather than being one of the biggest rock stars of all time."

Cathleen Falsani is the religion reporter and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere

Also appearing on our site today:

'Pop Music with Brains' | From the beginning, U2 has engaged spiritual questions.

Bono's Thin Ecclesiology | Any person can stand outside the church and critique its obedience to the gospel.

The official website for DATA explains its purpose, lays out the issues, and has a series of Bono's diary entries from the Heart of America Tour.

Author Cathleen Falsani is religion reporter and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her articles on Bono and his Heart of America Tour include:

Hard to believe, but this guy is really a rock star (Dec. 25, 2002)

Bono's welcome at Wheaton College does grad proud (Dec. 6, 2002)

'Blame is on both sides' in relationship with Africa (Dec. 4, 2002)

Bono issues blunt message for Christians (Dec. 3, 2002)

Africa in crisis, U2's Bono tells Oprah viewers (Sept. 18, 2002)

U2.com is the band's official site for news, videoclips, tour dates, and the U2 timeline. If you're looking for more U2 info, @U2.is the best unofficial site.

Steve Stockman's Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 is available at Christianbook.com. Christianity Todayinterviewed the author in April.

For the best overview of the band's history and development, read Wall of Sound's "U2."

Previous Christianity Today articles about Bono and U2 include:

'A Rock Band That's Good for Something' | The author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 talks about why politicians listen to Bono. (April 19, 2002)

Bono Tells Christians: Don't Neglect Africa | He urges evangelicals to take a lead in fighting AIDS and poverty. (April 19, 2002)

Inside CT: Bono's Burning Question | Evangelicals and the U2 front man try to figure each other out. (April 19, 2002)

Honest Prayer, Beautiful Grace | The messianic and passionate U2 sounds like itself again. (Feb. 8, 2001)

Previous Christianity Today articles on AIDS in Africa include:

Killing a Pandemic | The church may be best equipped to deal HIV/AIDS a crippling blow. (Nov. 18, 2002)

U.S. Blacks Preach Abstinence Gospel | Mission workers testify that Christ helps control sexual urges. (March 27, 2002)

Mercy Impaired | Let's shock the world by reversing our apathy toward African sufferers. (September 27, 2001)

Kenyan President Suggests Hanging for 'Knowingly' Infecting Others with AIDS | Church organizations criticize use of capital punishment as solution to epidemic. (July 19, 2001)

Dying Alone | Baptist women seek out and care for ashamed, abandoned AIDS patients. (June 15, 2001)

Few to Receive Generic AIDS Medicines | Pharmaceutical companies drop suit against South Africa, but problems remain. (May 18, 2001)

Zambia's Churches Win Fight Against Anti-AIDS Ads | Church leaders are concerned that condom promotion encourages promiscuity. (Jan. 12, 2001)

Mandela, De Klerk, and Tutu Join to Fight AIDS | South Africa's men of peace call for end of silence and stigmatization. (Dec. 14, 2000)

Speaking with Action Against AIDS | A report from the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference. (July 19, 2000)

'Have We Become Too Busy With Death?' | As 4,900 people die each day from AIDS, African Christians are faced with the question. (Feb. 4, 2000)

'Sexual Revolution' Speeds Spread of HIV Among Africans | An interview with World Relief's Debbie Dortzbach. (Feb. 4, 2000)

to the U. S. Black Religious, Intellectual, and Political Leadership Regarding AIDS and the Sexual Holocaust in Africa (Jan. 24, 2000)

Africa: Fidelity Urged to Fight AIDS (July 12, 1999)

Global Death Rates May Skyrocket (May 24, 1999)

I Am the Father of an AIDS Orphan (Nov. 17, 1997)

For more articles on AIDS in Africa, see allAfrica.com and Yahoo Full Coverage

Other relevant recent articles about Bono include:

Bono Named As Possible Nobel Peace Prize Recipient—ET (Feb. 19, 2003)

Bono: "Who in Ireland could have too much respect for organized religion?"—Larry King Live, CNN (Dec. 1, 2002)

Bono: World AIDS Day 2002 Interview—BBCi (Nov. 2002)

Rock Star Bono's Agenda For Africa—AllAfrica.com (March 1, 2002)

Bono's crusade comes to DC—Terry Mattingly's On Religion

Bono: 'You can't escape the politics if you're Irish'—CBS News (February 27, 2002)

Gates, Bono, unveil 'DATA Agenda' for Africa— CNN (Feb. 3, 2002)

Over two decades, U2's leader has evolved from heart-on-his-sleeve idealist to irony-drenched rock 'n' roll Liberace to hopeful pragmatist—Salon.com (Oct. 2, 2001)

Bono: The Beliefnet Interview—(February, 2001)