Page 1355 – Christianity Today (2024)

This piece is the second in a two-part series inspired by the Lausanne Catholic-Evangelical Conversation held at Mundelein Seminary (Illinois) on April 18-20, 2013. The event began with two presentations on the centrality of Christ, by Hans Boersma and Edward T. Oakes. An edited version of Boersma’s paper appeared in the September/October issue of Books & Culture; here we present an edited version of Oakes’ paper.—John H. Armstrong, chair of the Lausanne Catholic-Evangelical Conversation and president of the ACT3 Network in Carol Stream, Illinois.

Let me begin by quoting from the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a passage that I think can explain why we are here for these conversations:

Catholics must joyfully acknowledge and esteem the truly Christian endowments from our common heritage which are to be found among our separated brethren. It is right and salutary to recognize the riches of Christ and virtuous works in the lives of others who are bearing witness to Christ, sometimes even to the shedding of their blood. … Nor should we forget that whatever is wrought by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of our separated brethren can contribute to our own edification. Whatever is truly Christian never conflicts with the genuine interests of the faith; indeed, it can always result in the more ample realization of the very mystery of Christ and the Church (Unitatis redintegratio §4).

Of course when this teaching was promulgated in 1965, nearly all Christian churches affirmed the centrality of Christ. Indeed, the World Council of Churches made it a condition of membership that the applicant church or denomination affirm both the lordship of Christ and an official belief in the Triune God. But in the intervening years, the centrality of Christ to the realization of the salvation of the world has come to be called into question across a wide spectrum of liberal church bodies and by liberal Christians in general, including by some Catholic theologians.

Largely under the influence of something called postmodernism, itself largely the result of the massive influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, claims to the possession of a universal truth have now come to be seen as a hegemonic imposition of one’s own particular and entirely limited perspective on cultures and worldviews that do not share that same view of the truth. Accordingly, any universal claim to the “truth”—whether it be scientific, philosophical, or religious truth—is almost automatically met with skepticism, and even derision.

Although attacks on the Christocentrism of the New Testament became a force to be reckoned with only after Vatican II (at least in the Catholic Church), the roots of the problem well antedate Nietzsche, and can even be plausibly located with the victory of the Copernican worldview in the seventeenth century. Even though Nicholas Copernicus himself certainly held to the centrality of the solar system in the circ*mscribed world of his own frankly medieval universe, the eventual overthrow of geocentrism led to what astronomers now call the Copernican Principle, which might be colloquially described in these words: “We’re not that special, so get over it.” Thus, even the whole question of extraterrestrial intelligence on other planets within our galaxy (not to mention in the billions of other galaxies, which are probably forever beyond our ken) inevitably raises Christological questions.

The 19th century brought a whole new challenge, first from history and then from the other social sciences, especially ethnography and comparative religion. The 18th-century rationalist Benedict Spinoza had already adumbrated the problem in regard to the Hebrew Bible; but perhaps the person who put the matter most acutely in regard to the New Testament was the late-19th-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch. In a shrewd remark, he once compared Christocentrism in theology to geocentrism in astronomy:

[Historical contingency] also seems to make this conclusion impossible—calling the Christian community the eternal absolute center of salvation for the whole span of humanity … . Man’s age upon earth amounts to several hundred thousand years or more. His future may come to still more. It is hard to imagine a single point of history along this time—and, as it just so happens, this midpoint of our own religious history—as the sole center of all humanity. That looks far too much like the absolutizing of our own contingent area of life. That would be in religion what geocentrism and anthropocentrism are in cosmology and metaphysics, respectively. The whole logic of Christocentrism places it with these other centrisms.[1]

Of course, if one asks how a radical historicist and relativist like Troeltsch can get the wherewithal to make such an “absolutist” statement ruling out Christ as the midpoint of history from the outset, he has his answer to that too: he grants the point! He freely admits that all statements about history, including his own, are always probabilistic: “Of course,” he says, “nothing certain can be said here, but it [Christocentrism] is not probable.[“2]

Such is our situation and constitutes the central reason why I consider the Catholic-Evangelical dialogue so important: not just for the central ecumenical reason that Christ wills unity for his Church, but also because only here can Christians address Troeltsch’s dilemma without first abandoning the very Christocentrism that is at issue. In other words, I am convinced that this problem can only be solved if Christians first hold to the centrality and lordship of Christ over the universe and then address Troeltsch’s challenge in terms of Christocentrism.

In the rest of what follows, I want to outline the witness of Joseph Ratzinger, not only because he has thought so long and hard about this, but also because I am convinced his efforts to fashion a Christocentric Christology will prove to be one of his lasting contributions. (I shall be calling him throughout “Joseph Ratzinger,” not just because he is no longer pope but also because I shall be quoting throughout works written by him before his election to the papacy.)

As every physician knows, a hopeful prognosis depends on an accurate diagnosis. So how does Joseph Ratzinger diagnose this now burning issue in the Church?

First, like any good physician, he must determine how far relativism has extended its ideology into the body of the Church and to what extent it poses a danger. Perhaps this might surprise the untutored, but Ratzinger does not condemn all forms of relativism tout court. Like bacteria in the body, which is both essential to metabolism in some forms and dangerous in others, there is a salubrious kind of relativism and a toxic form. For just as bacteria are necessary for digestion, so too certain forms of relativism can serve as an antidote to absolutism, an acid that eats away at dangerous versions of absolutist dictatorships.

In an important address to the heads of doctrinal commissions for the various bishops’ conferences in Latin America in 1996, the future pope pointed out that the greatest challenge for the Catholic Church in the immediate postconciliar years was the claim of liberation theology to represent an authentic translation of the gospel message. Although the Bavarian cardinal was not entirely critical of liberation theology, he certainly saw a problem in those versions of it that uncritically drew on Marxism, which suddenly faced a crisis when the Communist polities of Eastern Europe fell in 1989:

The fall of the European governmental systems based on Marxism turned out to be a kind of twilight of the gods for that theology of redeeming political praxis. Precisely in those places where the Marxist liberating ideology had been applied consistently, a radical lack of freedom had been produced, the horror of which now appeared out in the open before the eyes of world public opinion. The fact is that when politics are used to bring redemption, they promise too much. When they presume to do God’s work, they become not divine but diabolical.[3]

Having recovered from—or at least having come to realize—the damage caused by the communist illusion, public opinion and political thought reacted by shying away from claims to absolutism, a shift that Cardinal Ratzinger actually applauds, at least provisionally:

In turn, relativism appears to be the philosophical foundation of democracy. Democracy, in fact, is supposedly built on the basis that no one can presume to know the true way, and it is enriched by the fact that all roads are mutually recognized as fragments of the effort toward that which is better. … A system of freedom ought to be essentially a system of positions that are connected with one another because they are relative, as well as being dependent on historical situations open to new developments. Therefore, a liberal society would be a relativist society: only with that condition could it continue to be free and open to the future. In the area of politics, this concept is considerably right. There is no one correct political opinion. What is relative—the building up of liberally ordained coexistence between people—cannot be absolute. Thinking in this way was precisely the error of Marxism and the political theologies.[4]

Thus, there can be a legitimate pluralism on the mediate question of politics. But that concession to a legitimate relativism can hardly be the last word. Politics is, after all, concerned with justice. There might be a legitimate pluralism in mediate questions, but ultimate questions are not so easily relativized: “There are injustices,” says Ratzinger, “that will never turn into something just, … while, at the same time, there are just things that can never be unjust.” So, the question becomes, as he says, “setting limits” to relativism.[5]

The first place where relativism must be kept at bay for the cardinal—and it is crucial that this is the first item on his list—is in Christology.[6] For him any type of relativism in Christology will inevitably lead to its attenuation. I presume we are all familiar with the passage early in his book Introduction to Christianity where he compares the situation in theology to the folk tale told by the brothers Grimm about “lucky Hans” who traded a lump of gold he stumbled upon for, in turn, a horse, a cow, a goose, and finally a whetstone, which he then threw away as a valueless encumbrance. Such is the consequence of relativism in Christology, he says:

The worried Christian of today is often bothered by questions like these: has our theology in the last few years not taken in many ways a similar path? Has it not gradually watered down the demands of faith, which had been found all too demanding, always only so little that nothing important seemed to be lost, yet always so much that it was soon possible to venture on to the next step? And will poor Hans, the Christian who trustfully let himself be led from exchange to exchange, from interpretation to interpretation, not really soon hold in his hand, instead of the gold with which he began, only a whetstone, which he can be confidently recommended to throw away?[7]

Ratzinger shrewdly notes that, despite their formal differences, the loud cries for a relativistic Christology now occupy the same ideological space once taken by liberation theologians—and some of the latter have moved seamlessly into becoming advocates of the former.

This swift segue from a Marxisttinged theology to a relativizing one is, to be sure, not without its ironies, since one of the objections raised against Christocentrism by the pluralists is that it leads to fanaticism and particularism—themselves the besetting sins of Communists. Still, the relativizers are not without their absolutes (no surprise there, since everyone is an absolutist about something), and never more so than in their command to dissolve absolutist claims on behalf of Christ:

The relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology, thus becomes a central commandment of religion. To return to Hick’s thinking, faith in the divinity of one concrete person, as he tells us, leads to fanaticism and particularism, to the dissociation between faith and love, and it is precisely this which must be overcome.[8]

This same contradiction lurks in their call to “dialogue.” Of course dialogue is an important value in relation to the plurality of religions and has long had, moreover, an honored place in both philosophy and theology, as we know from Plato and from the art of the medieval disputation. I am reminded in this context of an observation from Josef Pieper:

Thomas succeeds not only in presenting the opponent’s divergent or flatly opposed opinion, together with the underlying line of reasoning, but also, many times, in presenting it better, more clearly, and more convincingly than the opponent himself might be able to do. In this procedure there emerges an element profoundly characteristic of St. Thomas’s intellectual style: the spirit of the disputatio, of disciplined opposition; the spirit of genuine discussion which remains a dialogue even while it is a dispute.[9]

But nowadays the call to dialogue in the relativist creed operates in a different ecology and has become an ultimate value. Both Plato and the medievals assumed without further ado that dialogue always aimed at the truth. Indeed Thomas could be so fair to his opponent and so serene in presenting opposing views precisely because he was so confident that dialogue was but the initiating moment leading to the terminating goal of truth. But once the relativist gives up the notion of truth as an ideal and sees it only as the hegemonic imposition of an opponent’s will to power, then dialogue becomes an end in itself.

Note again the irony of the hidden absolutism lurking here in the insistence that dialogue is the ultimate value before which all other claims must be sacrificed. But leaving aside this internal self-contradiction of the relativists, how is someone like Troeltsch to be answered, who freely admitted that his critique of an absolutist Christocentrism was merely probable? How do we answer Rousseau’s observation that religion is geographically specific, tied to specific cultures not easily transferable to other cultures that operate under different presuppositions? How can the genuine value of dialogue be preserved while also maintaining the Church’s consistently held view that Christ is the single and universal savior of the human race?

Here again, we find a move by the future pope that might surprise both his admirers and his critics. For he rejects the Enlightenment claim that reason can serve as the Great Adjudicator. Indeed, he seems to agree with the postmodernists in at least this point (which they hammer away at consistently): that reason is always historically situated. “For human reason is not autonomous in the absolute,” says the cardinal: “It is always found in a historical context. The historical context disfigures its vision … . Therefore, it also needs historical assistance to help it cross over its historical barriers.”[10]

Remarkably, Ratzinger also concedes that this Enlightenment claim for the absolute validity of universal reason was the besetting error of neo-scholasticism. In a passage that shows he was no unthinking revanchist, the future pope openly asserts:

I am of the opinion that the neo-Scholastic rationalism failed because—with reason totally independent from faith—it tried to reconstruct the praeambula fidei with pure rational certainty. All attempts that presume to do the same will have the same result. Yes, Karl Barth was right to reject philosophy as a foundation of the faith independent from the faith.[11]

While Ratzinger is by no means a Barthian across the board, he does insist with Barth that Christology must establish its own norms for rationality; for taken in terms of worldly logic, the doctrine of Christ will always be couched in the logic of paradox. This is because reason is both a universal endowment in that being Aristotle defines precisely as a rational animal, and is also that human faculty that gives access to the inherent rationality of a rationally structured universe.[12] But Christianity proclaims something revolutionary about that universal Logos, that it is entirely incarnate in but one man, Jesus Christ: “For in him the fullness of the godhead was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19), the acceptance of which claim leads to the overthrow of worldly logic:

It is only in the second section of the Creed that we come up against the real difficulty … about Christianity: the profession of faith that the man Jesus, an individual executed in Palestine about the year 30, the Christus (anointed, chosen) of God, indeed God’s own Son, is the central and decisive point of all human history. It seems both presumptuous and foolish to assert that one single figure who is bound to disappear farther and farther into the mists of the past is the authoritative center of all history. Although faith in the logos, the meaningfulness of being, corresponds perfectly with a tendency in the human reason, this second article of the Creed proclaims the absolutely staggering alliance of logos and sarx, of meaning and a single historical figure. The meaning that sustains all being has become flesh; that is, it has entered history and become one individual in it; it is no longer simply what encompasses and sustains history but is a point in it.[13]

To accept this claim entails an important methodological consideration, one that must overthrow the usual philosophical approach to reality, which seeks out universal patterns, whereas Christianity absolutizes one moment in history:

Accordingly the meaning of all being is first of all no longer to be found in the sweep of mind that rises above the individual, the limited, into the universal; it is no longer simply given in the world of ideas, which transcends the individual and is reflected in it only in a fragmentary fashion; it is to be found in the midst of time, in the countenance of one man.[14]

These assertions by no means make Ratzinger a fideist, still less an irrationalist. Indeed, in his commentary on the first section of the Creed (“I believe in God”) Ratzinger stressed a key motif that runs through all his writings: the harmony between faith and reason, between the God of faith and the God of the philosophers. Nonetheless, and even with that point conceded, a union of faith and history is for him ultimately based on the union of word and flesh, which of course is much harder for the human intellect to grasp and then to accept.

Edward T. Oakes, SJ, is the author of Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Eerdmans).

1. Ernst Troeltsch, “The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith,” in Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (John Knox Press, 1927), p. 189.

2. Ibid. November/December 2013 Books&Culture

3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today. Address to the Presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America, Delivered in Guadalajara, Mexico, May 1996, in The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches, edited by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (HarperOne, 2007), pp. 227-40; here p. 228; cited henceforth as “Relativism.” A revised version of this talk was also published as “The New Questions that Arose in the Nineties: The Position of Faith and Theology Today,” in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 115-13; cited henceforth as Ratzinger, Tolerance. I shall throughout be quoting from the original address.

4. Ratzinger, “Relativism,” p. 229; emphasis added.

5. Ratzinger, “Relativism,” p. 229.

6. It is the thesis of Emery de Gaál,The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) that Pope Benedict has sought to resolve all theological disputes, in both the pre- and post-conciliar Church, from the nature-grace relationship and the nature of the liturgy to the challenge of historical criticism and relativism in Christological terms.

7. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (Ignatius Press, 2004/1968), p. 31; cited hereafter as Ratzinger, Introduction.

8. Ratzinger, “Relativism,” p. 231; emphasis added.

9. Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 77-78.

10. Ratzinger, “Relativism,” p. 239.

11. Ratzinger, “Relativism,” p. 231; emphasis added.

12. Isaac Newton’s law of gravity is of course, mathematically, a ratio—not accidentally also the Latin word for reason. No wonder, then, that later historians retrospectively call Newton’s century the “Age of Reason,” even though that century also witnessed the Thirty Years’ War and such outbreaks of irrationality as the persecution of alleged “witches.”

13. Ratzinger, Introduction, p. 193; Latin and Greek terms italicized by Ratzinger (or at least the translator); other emphases added.

14. Ratzinger, Introduction, 193-94.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his New York Times #1 best seller for nonfiction, Reza Aslan portrays the historical Jesus as a zealot who preached sedition against Rome. According to Aslan, Jesus’ message of God’s kingdom promised the overthrow of Rome, the expulsion of all foreign elements from the Holy Land, and the Jews’ world-wide political dominance under Jesus’ kingship. Though he himself did not take up arms, he said he came not to bring peace on earth, but the sword; and he told his disciples to arm themselves with swords for the coming conflict. Since the Jewish hierarchs who controlled the temple served as lackeys to the Romans, Jesus’ cleansing the temple challenged not only the hierarchs’ authority, but also that of the Romans. Hence his crucifixion as “The King of the Jews” counted as the execution of a messianic rebel. But the kingdom of God as Jesus envisioned it did not come. In fact, even the nearly successful Jewish rebellion against Rome in ad 66-73 collapsed under the onslaught of Roman power. As a result of these embarrassments and the influx of non-Palestinian Jews and non-Jews into the Jesus movement, the historically human Jesus of zealotic rebellion was transformed into the fictitiously divine Christ of a peaceful, heavenly kingdom.

Aslan works from what he regards as the “only two hard historical facts” known about Jesus, viz., that he was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in 1st-century Palestine and that Rome crucified him for doing so. Beyond these, Aslan relies mainly on the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus’ record of various rebellious movements of Jews from shortly before Jesus’ birth through the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in ad 70 to the rebellion led by Bar Kokhba in the 2nd century. Add a basically Marxist analysis of 1st-century Palestinian economy, and you have Aslan’s thesis in a nutshell: Jesus was a proletarian Jewish jihadist who like present-day jihadists of the militant sort wanted, at the cost of his own life if necessary, to rid sacred territory of the ungodly and impose divine rule the world over. It helps this comparison—mine, not Aslan’s—that he was born in Iran, grew up a nominal Muslim at first, converted to evangelical Christianity during his teens in Northern California, lost that faith during his higher education, returned to Islam (minus its usual denial of Jesus’ crucifixion), and has written also on jihadism.

Despite the dust jacket’s claim that this thesis is “entirely new” and “fresh,” it dates back in its essentials to Hermann Samuel Reimarus (18th century) and includes the more recent notables Robert Eisler (1929, 1930, 1931) and S. G. F. Brandon (1967). Though Aslan repeatedly appeals to his “two decades of [‘rigorous’] scholarly research into the New Testament and early Christian history” and “exhaustively” details this research in notes at the end of his book, he is not a New Testament scholar or ancient historian comparable in learning to a wide variety of heavyweights who over the years have discredited the revolutionary thesis. To his credit, nevertheless, he has read widely in secondary scholarly literature (yet only in English), including some of a conservative evangelical stamp. Also to his credit, he admits that “[f]or every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it.” Despite a contrary promise, however, opposite points of view go largely unaddressed even in the supposedly exhaustive ending notes; and the dogmatism, bordering sometimes on bombast, with which Aslan states his own views will unfortunately leave on a popular readership misimpressions of certainty.

One can appreciate a number of Aslan’s observations, such as the following (among others): The progressive demotion of John the Baptist in favor of Jesus from early to late New Testament literature. The lack of ancient debate over the actuality of Jesus’ exorcisms and miracles. The purpose of the exorcisms and miracles to manifest God’s kingdom on earth. The variety of messianic expectations in 1st-century Judaism(s). The tracing to Daniel 7:13 of Jesus’ self-designation “the Son of Man.” The gradual easing of Pontius Pilate’s guilt in later New Testament literature. Development of the Zealot Party not till after Jesus’ career. The possibility that Christianity may have influenced pagan mystery religions rather than vice versa.

Among Aslan’s pronouncements lacking solid evidence are that David hid from King Saul at Masada. That during the first century “[c]ountless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land.” (Excluding John the Baptist and Jesus, Aslan identifies only ten.) That John the Baptist taught Jesus the Lord’s Prayer. That John Mark was from the Diaspora. That Matthew wrote in Damascus and Luke in Syrian Antioch. That Jesus was born “some time between 4 b.c.e. and 6 c.e.” (Most scholars of all stripes say sometime prior to 4 b.c.[1]) That without exception, victims of crucifixion had attached to their cross a plaque inscribed with their crime. That Stephen’s martyrdom made permanent a division between Hebraistic and Hellenistic Christians.

Despite doubting the historicity of all but Jesus’ leading a popular movement and being crucified for doing so, Aslan bases his reconstruction time after time not only on Mark and a hypothetical Q as our earliest documents, plus the grid of Jewish revolutionism, but also on other materials, including John’s Gospel (strikingly). Sad to say, the reconstruction is riddled with factual errors—some significant, others insignificant.

According to Aslan, for example, Matthew and Luke are “the only two evangelists” who mention Joseph, Jesus’ father. (But Joseph is mentioned also in John 1:45; 6:42.) “[T]he building boom in Jerusalem and the completion of the Temple” ended “shortly before Herod’s death.” (The sanctuary proper reached completion a whole decade and a half before Herod’s death, while construction of the out-buildings and courts and the building boom lasted for more than six decades after the death of Herod.) “Nazareth was just a day’s walk from … Sepphoris.” (Make it about an hour’s walk.) The Samaritans worshipped God “in their temple on Mt. Gerizim.” (Not during Jesus’ time, for their temple had been destroyed in the 2nd century BC.) “Jesus replaced the costly blood and flesh sacrifice mandated by the Temple with his free healings and exorcisms.” (Why then did he instruct his disciples to prepare a Passover meal, which included a lamb sacrificed at the temple?)

Luke had no idea of what we mean by “history.” (Why then does he appeal to eyewitnesses?) Crucifixion entailed “the nailing of the hands and feet to a crossbeam.” (The feet too? Only in the case of a contortionist.) John’s Jesus is “an otherworldly spirit without earthly origins.” (But he “became flesh,” had a mother named Mary, had his rib cage pierced and his corpse given a sumptuous burial, and upon his resurrection told Mary Magdalene to let go of him and invited doubting Thomas to touch the nail- and spearprints in his body.)

“[T]he earliest manuscripts we have of the gospel of Mark end the first verse at ‘Jesus the Christ.’ ” (Wrong! Most of the earliest manuscripts add “the Son of God.”) For lack of interest, Mark writes “nothing at all” about Jesus’ resurrection. (“He’s been raised” and “there [in Galilee] you’ll see him,” spoken at Jesus’ empty tomb, trumpet resurrection, as in three passion-and-resurrection predictions earlier in Mark.) “[A]nyone who reads Mark in the original Greek can tell that a different hand wrote the final eight verses [of Mark 16].” (True only of the twelve verses following Mark 16:1-8.)

Greek was “[t]he language of the [Roman] victors.” (How about Latin, as on the Arch of Titus, which celebrated their victory over the Jews?) Noncanonical gospels “written mostly in the second and third centuries … . demonstrate the dramatic divergence of opinion [concerning Jesus] … even among those who claimed to walk with him, who shared his bread and ate with him, who heard his words and prayed with him.” (They must have lived a long time, then.)

Paul’s hometown Tarsus was located “on the Mediterranean Sea.” (Actually, 22 kilometers inland.) Upon his conversion, Saul of Tarsus “changed his name to Paul.” (Saul almost certainly bore from birth the Hellenistic name “Paul” as well as the Hebraistic name “Saul.”) Luke never refers to Paul as an “apostle.” (On the contrary, see Acts 14:14.) Paul “thinks he is the first apostle” (emphasis original). (What to do, then, with his “Last of all … to me”?) “The letters of Paul … make up the bulk of the New Testament.” (Oh? Pagewise, barely over 22 percent, though bookwise 13 over against 14 non-Paulines.) Paul did not preach “to his fellow Jews.” (Scratch the book of Acts, then—also Paul’s saying, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews.”) Apart from Jesus’ Words of Institution, “Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything ‘Jesus-in-the-flesh’ may or may not have said.” (Yet he explicitly cites Jesus’ teaching on divorce.) “Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians 2:7).” (But according to Paul, Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh” and “born of a woman.”)

There are other errors, but it’s time to stop nibbling around the edges. As to the central thesis that Jesus was a revolutionary, Aslan has to admit that in AD 10-36—i.e., during Jesus’ teens and on through his public ministry and beyond—”the Galileans enjoyed a period of peace and tranquility.” This “most stable period in the entire first century” casts doubt on Jesus’ supposed anti-Roman revolutionism. So Aslan has to resort to speaking of a “slow burn.” To maintain that Jesus “render[ed] irrelevant the entire priestly establishment and their costly, exclusivistic [sacrificial] rituals,” Aslan similarly has to say that “Jesus is joking” when telling a healed leper to go offer the Mosaically prescribed sacrificial gift for a testimony to the priests. Jesus’ saying to “go also the second mile” when a Roman soldier requisitions you to carry his gear “one mile” ill suits Aslan’s speaking of Jesus’ “condemnation of the Roman occupation.”

Astonishingly, Aslan affirms Jesus’ teaching that Caesar should be paid back the tax owed him, exactly opposite what a revolutionary should or would have said. Then Aslan tries shifting the issue from tax-paying to that of Palestine as “God’s land” (emphasis original), which should be paid back to him. But nothing in the context speaks of the Holy Land, and Jesus’ addressees (Pharisees and Herodians) were in no position vis-à-vis the Romans to give that land back to God. Aslan might have been better off to deny the historicity of that episode, except that doing so would have made more obvious than ever the Procrustean bed he uses to amputate materials unfriendly to his thesis.

Granted, the Jews who acclaimed Jesus at his triumphal entry into Jerusalem probably thought of him as a messianic king who would overthrow the Romans; but the Jesus who proceeded to cleanse the temple as “a house of prayer for all the nations” and aimed “to give his life a ransom for many” seems to have had in mind something different from a messianic rebellion against Rome. The two swords that he told his disciples were “enough” would hardly have sufficed for such a rebellion, and his repeated predictions of his own and his disciples’ violent deaths betray a nonexpectation of God’s imminent overthrow of Rome.

Though Jesus wasn’t “a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion,” he “instructs his disciples immediately after the Passover meal” to go sell their cloaks and each buy a sword, as for a violent revolution. So says Aslan, but he fails to mention the context of an evangelistic mission requiring not only a sword for self-protection but also a purse, bag, and sandals for travel, just as he fails to mention that Jesus’ bringing a sword has to do, figuratively and contextually, with division in families over whether to follow Jesus, not with revolution against Rome (compare Jesus’ saying in the different context of violence that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword”). Undoubtedly Jesus was crucified as “The King of the Jews”—i.e., as a messianic rebel—but Aslan has to doubt or deny that the Sanhedrin shifted from the religious charge of blasphemy, under which they condemned Jesus, to a false political charge of sedition when arraigning him before Pilate.

Stephen’s seeing Jesus at God’s right hand is supposed to have launched “a wholly new religion,” divorced from “the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth.” Such a dictum requires a denial that Jesus himself predicted he would take a position at God’s right hand. “After the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem [in ad 70],” according to Aslan, “the early Christian church tried desperately to distance Jesus from the zealous nationalism that had led to that awful war” and consequently “transform[ed] their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world.” It’s strange, then, that Paul wrote already in the 50s that “the kingdom of God is … righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:16). But Paul and Peter didn’t share “the same faith,” says Aslan. So it’s strange once more that in 1 Corinthians 3:22 Paul included Peter along with himself and Apollos as those belonging in Christ to the Corinthian believers (see also 1:10-17).

Beyond further criticisms, deserving of mention are Aslan’s flights of imagination, whether they be true or false: “After his baptism” Jesus “stayed in the wilderness for a while … to learn from John [the Baptist] and to commune with his [John’s] followers.” When Jesus cleanses the temple, “a corps of Roman guards and heavily armed Temple police blitz through the courtyard looking to arrest whoever is responsible for the mayhem.” Jesus died “on a bald hill covered in crosses, beset by the cries and moans of agony from hundreds of dying criminals as a murder of crows circled eagerly over his head waiting for him to breathe his last.” The assassin “[w]ho killed Jonathan son of Ananus as he strode across the Temple Mount in the year 56 c.e.” was probably “the first to cry, ‘Murder!’ ” Such lively prose befits an “associate professor of creative writing” who holds “a master of fine arts in fiction” as well as “a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions.”

Epilogue: Aslan’s apostasy from evangelical Christianity stemmed from his discovery of unhistorical elements in the Bible and having been taught that “every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant.” Teachers whose version of biblical inerrancy lacks enough literary sensitivity to acknowledge in Scripture the presence of genres that mix fact and fiction for more than purely historical purposes—these teachers should take warning from the example of Aslan, and of too many others like him.

Robert Gundry is scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College.

1. Aslan uses the politically correct “B.C.E.” (as he styles it) and “C.E.,” but PC isn’t my MO.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If I had the power to "write" (as icon painters describe their act of creating) an icon of S. Kandaswamy, a government official from Chennai, India, I would tell a truer and deeper tale of Andy Crouch's Playing God than I could with any collection of sentences. In April 2011, Kandaswamy instigated a police raid of a brick kiln. Local police forces freed the hundreds who had been enslaved there and arrested the kiln's owner. The raid caused great celebration among the staff and friends of the International Justice Mission, a bastion of the Christian anti-trafficking movement, who had gathered only weeks before to pray for the end of bonded labor worldwide.

In most retellings of this tale, the point would be to highlight the empowerment of the victims. But Crouch signals his book's essential project by noting that IJM celebrated Kandaswamy, as well: a man engaged in the righteous exercise of rightful power, which challenged an unjust institution that destroys human flourishing.

As Crouch notes, icons are meant to be looked through, not at; in Kandaswamy's icon we would see a picture of the redeemed and redemptive power that Playing God so ably outlines. These include the essential relationship between the divine image and human power; the bold equating of idolatry and injustice as manifestations of distorted power (which, by circumventing the tired, zero-sum relationship between evangelism and social action, may well prove to be one of the book's most significant contributions); the significance of institutions as structured conduits of power between generations; and the possibilities and requirements of individual responsibility to account for power and privilege.

Playing God is an audacious, admirable work. Crouch's first book, Culture Making, aspired at nothing less than offering an alternative to H. Richard Niebuhr's seminal Christ and Culture. But the sequel is even bolder in targeting the philosophical giants Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence on the modern world defies superlatives. Crouch's contention is that the philosophers are right that power is everywhere—but perversely wrong in seeing it as essentially coercive and violent.

The first four words of Playing God present its simple and controversial thesis that "power is a gift" and therefore good, when exercised as God intends. The rest of the book unpacks this claim. Though the content in Playing God is new, its thematic structures demonstrate many core concerns also evident in Crouch's other work. Its treatment of power tracks roughly with Crouch's characteristic insistence on a four-part biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation—a schema (not of his own devising, he'd be quick to add, but rather deeply grounded in Scripture and the teachings of the church over the centuries) he proposes as a corrective to the "working Bibles" of many Christians, which omit Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22 in their nearly exclusive focus on fall and redemption.

The inclusion of and emphasis on creation/re-creation provides the basis for understanding the book's project, because the constructive link Crouch draws between power and the imago Dei—the fact that human beings are made in the divine image—serves as the theological key for the entire work. For Crouch, human beings' status as "image bearers" provides both the source and purpose of power as gift. In Crouch's reading of Genesis, God's power is shown most fundamentally in its creative openness, yielding "abundance and delight"—in contrast both to rival ancient creation stories and modern philosophies alike, which are essentially conflictual. True power is therefore "jussive," we learn in one of the book's most delightful sections, referring to the open-ended grammatical form of the "let there be" that God uses to speak the world into gloriously creative existence, "teeming" with life.

The outcome-specific imperative form ("make it so") that many people assume to be power's primary form is actually therefore secondary, in God's command to humankind "to teem and become agents of teeming." That is, humans are designed to wield jussive power as "agents of creativity," rather than acting as bureaucrats imposing a rigid heavenly order. In sum, "power is meant for image bearing, and image bearing is meant for flourishing."

In addition to this theoretical underpinning, Playing God offers practical handholds through Crouch's journalistic penchant for approachable imaginative frameworks, such as the fourfold framework of institutional essentials (artifacts, arenas, roles, and rules) and the "sabbath ladder" of power-redeeming disciplines (daily "gleanings," weekly sabbath, sabbatical year, and Jubilee celebration).

At the outset of Playing God, Crouch expresses a hope that the book will inaugurate a broader Christian conversation about the nature of power. In support of that end, my one significant concern with the book lies in Crouch's treatment of violence. Crouch writes that if sociologist C. Wright Mills is correct in saying that "the ultimate kind of power is violence," then "Christianity is not true and Christian faith is foolish." This is because violence, by Crouch's definition, is "force that is intended to damage," force "that undermines dignity." If violence is ultimate, then power could never be good, because even non-violent power would be compromised by the threat of degenerating into its most extreme form. Since this is incompatible with Crouch's understanding of power as being for the flourishing of image-bearing, he concludes that violence is "the ultimate distortion of power."

In lieu of envisioning human power as a spectrum with violence as its essential limit, Crouch proposes the metaphor of a crossroads. One path leads to violence. The other employs power for the "restoration of human flourishing." The crossroads metaphor perfectly illustrates the aspiration of a "common good" theology, because it portrays a benevolent end as immanent to human action—it is a matter of making good choices with good intention. Playing God proposes a vision of power as ultimately benign, even as it acknowledges pervasive abuses of power.

The difficulty with this move is that it downplays the violence of God that separates us from creation, in the form of God's judgment in history, and new creation, in the form of apocalypse. By Crouch's definition, violence is the ultimate distortion of the fall, degrading the image of God. Hence, it seems God can never be violent. But this forces Crouch to skirt the persistent biblical theme of God's violence, which he must call by another name. In his treatment of the destruction of Sodom and the first 20 chapters of Revelation, he refers to the divine action as "God's judgment."

That it is. Yet can it really be argued that God's judgment in these cases is not violent? That it does not destroy lives made in the image of God? One unpleasant exegetical conclusion to be drawn from such texts—not to mention the accounts of the holy wars of ancient Israel—is that the image-bearing motif might not be sturdy enough to do all the theological work Playing God asks of it. The centrality of the imago Dei to the injunction against murder (Gen 9:6) must mean that God wants us to take it seriously, but the wholesale killings perpetrated by God in the biblical history and in the prophesied apocalypse seem to indicate that God is perfectly willing to destroy those made in his image, in terrible ways, en masse. It is difficult to conclude that these actions are not violent simply because it is God who does them, or because they serve God's purpose.

Yet none of this is to undermine Crouch's essential constructive contribution: that the beginning and ending of the biblical story are visions of creative, thriving power, and that this is thus the greatest form of power. The question might simply be the degree of access we have to these creative forms of power. If we acknowledge the reality of God's violence, isn't it possible that both Nietzsche and Crouch could be right? Because we are hemmed in by violence, Nietzsche and Foucault recognized something true about fallen reality. Postlapsarian power is ultimately violent, both in its essence and fullest expression. But the Christian hope that Crouch relentlessly revisits is that postlapsarian reality is not itself ultimate.

It seems that this dialectic might generate exactly the sort of productive conversation Crouch desires. For example, we cannot imagine that power in the fall will ever be innocent. Per Mills as summarized by Crouch, all power is "part of a system that 'ultimately' tilts toward violence." Yes, which is why Christians must be unceasingly suspicious of power, and rigorous in disciplining it with justice—an introspection encouraged by and demonstrated in Playing God. And this might also chasten some of the cultural ambitions that have attended the ascendant evangelical turn toward "the common good."

Precisely because of future hope, however, we need not participate in the nihilistic reductionism that collapses all present power into violence. Instead, per Crouch, those called to redeemed lives, freed by the promise of resurrection from the prison of seeking status, can regard their power as a very good gift to be given away for the flourishing of all.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is the founder and director of the Two Futures Project, a movement of Christians for nuclear threat reduction and the global abolition of nuclear weapons. He is the author of The World Is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (InterVarsity Press).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

1.The most common mistake made by practitioners of that vexed activity called "Christian apologetics" is to think of the task as a dialectical rather than a rhetorical one. You may be convinced that logic dictates a particular starting point for your defense of the faith, but that will matter very little if you cannot get the unbelievers you would convert to pay attention to your argument or, worse, even to grasp what your point is. Instead, it is vital to find a shared belief, a point of initial agreement on which to build. But what that starting point should be varies considerably according to general cultural context and even individual predilections. Apologetics is hard to do well.

When, in the midst of the Second World War, C. S. Lewis was asked by the BBC to give some radio talks on the basics of the Christian faith, he decided that he could count on his audience sharing with him a commitment to fair play and even-handed dealing. If he could get his audience to acknowledge that they don't like it when someone cheats, and to agree that they respond to cheaters by appealing to a general moral principle—"How would you like it if someone did that to you?"—then he could establish a foundation on which he might, eventually, build a case for the whole of Christian faith and practice. So he came to give a collective title to his first few talks: "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe."

It was a shrewd choice, as the immediate and then lasting popularity of his lectures demonstrates. After all, the English have long prided themselves (rightly or wrongly) on their commitment to fairness, justice, and honesty; and in the midst of war they were confronted every day with appeals—via radio addresses, posters, advertisem*nts in newspapers and magazines—to pull together and work for the common cause of Victory. Lewis' approach was precisely calibrated to his listeners' circ*mstances; no wonder it struck a ringing chord.

But there is another point that needs to be considered when contemplating the apologetic task: not just the circ*mstances of the audience, but those of the apologist him- or herself. Many years ago I spent a summer in Nigeria teaching, in a seminary, a course called "Practical Apologetics." Most of my students were pastors, and many of them came from the Muslim-dominated north of their country; so it seemed obvious to me that they needed to know how to respond to Muslims. I encouraged them to try to think as Muslims thought; to imagine, for instance, how the Christian doctrine of the Trinity might sound to those most radical of all monotheists.

To this encouragement my otherwise generally receptive students responded with stiff resistance. Why should they think as their persecutors thought? Why should they strive to enter the minds of those who burned their churches? Moreover, some of them came from Muslim families and were converts to Christianity, or their parents had been: it was painful for them to re-enter a mode of being that they had left behind; it felt like a kind of self-imposed slavery.

Gradually it dawned on me that, however admirable it may be for the student of rhetoric to learn to anticipate objections, there was a human dimension to this enterprise that I had failed to take into account. Would-be apologists cannot think only of the needs of their audience; they must think also of their own limitations. Those limitations may be intellectual: as Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the 17th century, "Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth." They overrate their own intellectual capabilities, and embarrass not just themselves but the faith they had planned to defend.

But equally important are emotional or spiritual limitations. 'I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist," Lewis wrote in 1945, when he was at the apex of his career as defender of the faith. "No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate." The key word in that second sentence is "successfully": the greatest spiritual danger presents itself not to the one who has manifestly failed (in Milton's phrase) "to justify God's ways to man," but to the one who succeeds, or thinks he succeeds. And the greatest danger is not even pride: it is the discovery that a doctrine put into cold print, or into one's own (fallen, fallible) mouth, loses much of its reality and power.

2.Francis Spufford is one of the most gifted English writers of his generation. He has written insightfully and elegantly about polar exploration (I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, 1996), postwar British scientific and technological innovation (The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, 2003), and his own history as a reader (The Child That Books Built, 2002). Perhaps his finest book so far is Red Plenty (2010), an extraordinarily vivid and ambitious part-fictional part-historical account of Soviet self-understanding. But for all his achievement and success, Spufford has an embarrassing secret—or rather, it was a secret, to the general public anyway, until he gave us the first words of his new book:

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.

(Indeed, as the resourceful investigator may discover, his situation is stranger than that of even the average English churchgoer: he's married to an Anglican priest who ministers at a church near Cambridge.) This familial peculiarity is something that Spufford feels he must now account for—and even defend. This word, defend—as in, "Be prepared to make a defense of the hope that is in you" (1 Pet. 3:15)—is related to apologetics, apology; but that's not quite what he's prepared to do.

Or maybe he is, just in a different way than we're used to. Christian apologists are typically concerned to deny, as strenuously as they can manage, that their attachment to Christianity is in any way an emotional response. Rather, they want to demonstrate that Christian doctrine can meet the most stringent criteria of critical thought, that it holds up to rational scrutiny. Spufford doesn't care about any of that at all. Instead, he wants to show that Christianity "makes emotional sense." He refuses to acquiesce in the common dismissal of emotional responses as unreliable, untrustworthy, and in need of being sequestered or dismissed altogether. So he describes his project in these words:

Ladies and gentlemen! A spectacle never before attempted on any stage! Before your very eyes, I shall build up from first principles the simple and unsurprising structure of faith. Nothing up my left sleeve, nothing up my right sleeve, except the entire material of everyday experience. No tricks, no traps, ladies and gentlemen; no misdirection and no cheap rhetoric. You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defenses of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defense of Christian emotions—of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity. The book is called Unapologetic because it isn't giving an "apologia," the technical term for a defense of the ideas.

And also because I'm not sorry.

But how and where does such a project begin? Spufford's begins with a man at the end of his rope, at odds with his spouse, at odds with himself, frustrated, miserable, and with no internal resources capable of addressing his condition. He has quite personally confronted what Spufford likes to call the HPtFtU, the Human Propensity to and I bet you know what the "F" stands for, especially if you also guess that the last two words are "Things Up." That's the "how." The "where" is a little more complicated, is twofold.

First it's a coffee shop, where the miserable man has come to sit and drink a cappuccino and either think or forget about what a mess he's made of his life. Sitting there and sinking ever deeper into his own shame and guilt he realizes that there's music on in the shop: it's the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, music that, as the novelist Richard Powers once commented, is what mercy would sound like—and how there can be such music, and whatever degree of healing and comfort that comes along with it, is a poser for the miserable man. Something to absorb, on some lower level of the self, if not to comprehend. Something to listen to—except that in a noisy, noisy, world "It's hard to listen, even when misery nudges you into trying."

Which leads to the second "where," a where more available to European city-dwellers than to many of the rest of us:

Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has littered the landscape with specialized buildings where attention comes easier. I walk in. I glance around. And I see the objects that different ages carried in here because they thought they were precious, tattered battle flags and stained glass, carved wood and memorials saying he was a magistrate of unequalled probity: not in order to declare, those past people, that this was a place where only a precious and tasteful selection from human behavior was welcome, but the opposite, to celebrate with the best things they had the way the place acknowledged absolutely all of human behaviour. The calm in here is not denial. It's an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I sit down. I shut my eyes.

And he listens. He hears various things, mainly his own breath and curious sounds in the upper reaches of the building. But it may be that, after a time, he hears other things too: things farther off, perhaps much farther off. Perhaps altogether elsewhere. The universe begins to open up to the miserable man; at the very least he becomes aware of the smallness of his misery, in comparison to all that he perceives and thinks he might perceive.

And so the story begins, a story that leads the reader ultimately to the life of a man who lived long ago, a man named Yeshua, whose life Spufford narrates briefly and piercingly. That story does not quite end with Yeshua's death:

Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She's braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen's been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn't quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won't last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That's enough now, she thinks. That's more than enough.

Don't be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.

Far more can be mended than you know—this is the message of Unapologetic in a sentence.

3.My friend and erstwhile colleague Roger Lundin has for years taught his students that the Christian faith is always practiced under cultural conditions that do a lot to determine its texture. The constant threat of martyrdom sets certain terms; the ease of a politically or just culturally established church, Kierkegaard's "Christendom," sets others. Those conditions will always offer dangers and possibilities alike. For us, in our time, doubt is a major ingredient of the air we breathe: we are constantly being reminded that it is possible to live without God, without faith. An educated Englishman like Francis Spufford understands this as well as anyone. So when he tells us that, whatever happens to us, "Christ will still be looking across at us from the middle of the angry crowd" and "God will still be there, shining," he must if he is to write in good faith go on to say,

If, that is, there is a God. There may well not be. I don't know whether there is. And neither do you, and neither does Richard bloody Dawkins, and neither does anyone. It not being, as mentioned before, a knowable item. What I do know is that, when I am lucky, when I have managed to pay attention, when for once I have hushed my noise for a little while, it can feel as if there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if He's there; to dare the conditional.

And, Spufford says in my favorite passage in this sweary and funny and lovely book, if you dare that conditional over a significant period of time, you change:

Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the first dizzy-intense phase of attraction settles (if it does) into a relationship. Rapture develops into routine, a process which keeps its customary doubleness where religion is concerned. It's both loss and gain together, with excitement dwindling and trust growing; like all human ties, it constricts at the same time as it supports, ruling out other choices by the very act of being a choice … .

And grace, you come to recognize, never stops, whether you presently feel it or not. You never stop doubting— how could you?—but you learn to live with doubt and faith unresolved, because unresolvable. So you don't keep digging the relationship up to see how its roots are doing. You may have crises of faith but you don't, on the whole, ask it to account for itself philosophically from first principles every morning, any more than you subject your relations with your human significant other to daily cost-benefit analysis. You accept it as one of the givens of your life. You learn from it the slow rewards of fidelity. You watch as the repetition of Christmases and Easters, births and deaths and resurrections, scratches on the linear time of your life a rough little model of His permanence. You discover that repetition itself, curiously, is not the enemy of spontaneity, but maybe even its enabler. Saying the same prayers again and again, pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith, somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine times in a hundred, and then be transformed, and then have the huge fresh wind blowing through them into your little closed room. And meanwhile you make faith your vantage point, your habitual place to stand. And you get used to the way the human landscape looks from there: re-oriented, re-organized, different.

Unapologetic captures better than any book I have read the distinctive texture of today's life of faith, faith always ever-so-slightly but also ever-so-constantly eaten away at by uncertainty, by the possibility of a truly disenchanted world, a wholly material life. YMMV, as we say online, your mileage may vary: you may be blessed with the constant blessing of God's full presence. If so, then you won't need Spufford's book. But I am deeply touched and richly blessed by it.

Alan Jacobs teaches in the Honors College of Baylor University. He is the author most recently of The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, just published by Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Greg Thornbury, newly appointed president of The King’s College, thinks theologian Carl F. H. Henry is a dinosaur—but a dinosaur whose DNA can be reanimated a la Jurassic Park. In Recovering Classic Evangelicalism, Thornbury attempts to re-establish the evangelical movement’s genetic link to Henry.

Thornbury has written his book for readers like me—evangelicals who have not actually read Henry’s six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority, but who have been turned off by its reputation as a cool, rationalistic, and impressively dense opus that reduces the truth of the Bible to a set of logical propositions. This reputation is the opposite of Pascal’s heart-cry, “Fire. / ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars. / Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. / God of Jesus Christ. / God of Jesus Christ. / My God and your God.”

Full disclosure: I value the post-Henry evangelical theologies that emphasize the narrative nature of truth and that highlight the dynamic and dramatic quality of the biblical revelation and the church’s reflection on it. I count as friends some of the key narrative thinkers and postfoundationalists that are the targets of Thornbury’s complaint.

Fortunately, Thornbury is not out for blood. His project is positive: to rehabilitate the philosophical, theological, and ethical work of Christianity Today‘s first editor. Thornbury’s complaint about John Franke and Stanley Grenz is not that they have got things all wrong, but that by dismissing the importance of epistemological foundations, they have created systems that are too weak to stand the test of time. However, the currently pre-eminent Kevin Vanhoozer wins Thornbury’s guarded approval: his 12-page critique trumpets Vanhoozer’s “brilliance” as much as it frets over the possibility that his foundations are not entirely trustworthy.

Thornbury apparently assumes that evangelical theology must be constructed according to an academic equivalent to the building codes communities require of contractors. But is evangelical theology like home building? Is there a code? Or is evangelicalism elastic enough to accommodate both Henry and Vanhoozer, both J. I. Packer and Grenz? Must we build our theological dwellings with 90-degree corners, with walls set on concrete foundations of a specified depth? Or can we make room for our theological Buckminster Fullers with their disorienting but efficient geodesic domes?

To recover classic evangelicalism, Thornbury wants to begin at Henry’s starting point, tracing a path from epistemology through theology and inerrancy before discussing cultural engagement and social justice. But to persuade today’s evangelical leadership, he should perhaps have reversed that order. After all, Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, his jeremiad about the lack of evangelical social conscience, three decades before the first volume of God, Revelation, and Authority. A recovered social conscience is flourishing in today’s evangelical movement, and Henry could be the patron saint of that recovery. Henry’s message still rings true: the lack of social conscience is a scandal, while the failure to ground social conscience in a revealed gospel is courting disaster.

Thornbury avers: “Henry envisions a seamless garment linking biblical verities to social responsibilities.” And Henry confirms: “Social justice is not … simply an appendage to the evangelical message; it is an intrinsic part of the whole, without which the preaching of the gospel itself is truncated.”

Why not, then, persuade today’s evangelicals by affirming Henry’s social conscience and by anchoring that to his belief that, in Thornbury’s words, the “redemptive energy of the Christian evangel in the active and practical opposition of social and spiritual evils” is “the only means by which substantive, meaningful, and sustainable change can be effected on cultural and social ills”? I have argued in various venues that evangelicalism’s social activism developed historically by discovering social needs in contexts where it preached the gospel. But the fact that gospel proclamation has both historical and theological precedence does not make epistemology the most persuasive starting point for evangelical recovery.

Thornbury knows his hero has fatal flaws. His catalogue of Henry’s weaknesses: Henry was not a good public speaker, was not politically astute, displayed a temper and a curt manner, was weak in exegesis, had unreasonably high standards, relied too much on big-event, big-organization evangelicalism, relied too much on Billy Graham, linked American democracy too closely to godliness, failed to stand up for civil rights, overstated evangelicalism’s potential, and failed to think strategically with his own writings.

That’s quite a list, and Thornbury illustrates the last item by calling the first volume of God, Revelation, and Authority “a terrible leadoff batter.” It was “esoteric and turgid,” he says. Readers should start with volume 2.

Ironically, it is volume 1, the least welcoming part of this magnum opus, that provides the material for Thornbury’s major concern: the lack of practiced epistemological thinking in evangelical theologians since Henry. “Evangelicalism will never rise above the strength of its epistemological outlook,” Thornbury writes near the end of the book, because that epistemology creates confidence in the Bible and in “the promise that through the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth one can ‘rediscover reality.'” He worries that as evangelical theologians have dismissed Henry’s epistemology without appreciating its nuances, something key has been lost: namely, the idea that “God, and God alone, is the source and arbiter of all wisdom and knowledge, and God himself determines the bounds and limits of all true knowledge.” This is the argument Henry employed against various permutations of natural law thought. And without a theocentric epistemology—that is, with an epistemology rooted only in subjective experience or scientific observation of the world—there is no end to the ways both theology and spirituality can err.

In his explication of volume 2, Thornbury’s excitement for Henry’s thought shines out. Here 15 theses form the backbone of Henry’s theology. Those who know only Henry’s reputation may be surprised. The theses do not dwell on propositional truth (although thesis 10 alludes to it) or scriptural inerrancy (although thesis 11 implies it). Rather, the theses offer a Trinitarian view of revelation, framed in both historical and personal terms, with a focus on the renewal of sinful people and their societies through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit superintended both the writing of Scripture and the church’s faithful response to it, while highlighting the “climax” of revelation in Jesus of Nazareth and the “crowning revelation of power and judgment” at “the consummation of the ages.” Henry even creates space for the future narrative interest of evangelical theologians by asserting the importance of the story of God’s mighty acts in the lives of individuals and empires.

Thornbury shows from these theses that (unlike conservative theologians before and after him) “Henry does not oppose the meaning of the gospel with practices of living and fostering the kingdom. Instead, he combines them.”

When he deals with narrative, however, Thornbury offers a critique (in Henry’s name) of Hans Frei, John Franke, Michael Horton (not usually in the same circle), and Kevin Vanhoozer. He is particularly worried that Vanhoozer’s attention to genre in Scripture opens “a Pandora’s box” and validates Henry’s fears. Anyone uncomfortable with what Scripture seems to be saying can claim previous interpreters were victims of genre confusion. This is an easy out when Scripture and other forms of knowledge clash. Yet Thornbury never explains why genre shouldn’t be a primary concern in interpretation.

In his chapter on inerrancy, Thornbury provides familiar critical assessments of Clark Pinnock and Donald Bloesch (earlier defectors from the inerrancy ranks) and their more recent counterparts, especially Peter Enns. Henry himself (some readers may be surprised to learn) maintained that the first thing to be said about Scripture is not its inerrancy, but its authority. In “Living God’s Faith in a Created World,” an essay included in By What Authority? (Mercer University Press, 2010), I traced evangelical theologians’ shifting emphasis on the Bible’s authority, moving from statements of belief (typical of theologians of Henry’s generation) to affirmations of the Bible’s authority over the life, witness, and formation of believers and the church (represented by theologians such as Vanhoozer, N. T. Wright, Eugene Peterson, and Robert Webber). Thus I welcome Thornbury’s assertion that “the greatest witness to the truth of an inspired and inerrant Bible will be a loving, gospel-motivated church engaged with the concerns, [ills,] joys, and sorrows of the planet around them.” Unfortunately, he makes it sound as if a loving and engaged church exists for the sake of the Bible’s authority rather than the other way around.

Thornbury’s final chapter is titled “Evangelicalism Matters.” Does it? I must think that evangelicalism matters, because I have invested most of my adult life in the movement. And yet a recurring question at Christianity Today has been the viability of the evangelical label. Has the word become so stained by association with hom*ophobia and civil religion and televangelist greed that it has lost its potential? Indeed, as evangelicals have in effect trademarked Christian as their de facto brand, even that word communicates all the wrong things. Thornbury is aware of this challenge: “If the Christian community is indeed interested in reaching an ideologically laden age with the gospel, … then perhaps it is appropriate to begin not so much with an apologetic, but with the words, ‘We’re sorry.'”

Thornbury builds his closing appeal on our awareness of a failed evangelical movement. “Carl Henry died a disappointed man”—disappointed that “evangelical theology was abandoning its key epistemological distinctives” and that “evangelical institutions … failed to live up to their potential, choosing instead to protect their own interests rather than contributing to the common evangelical weal.”

Henry was a visionary whose vision was never fully realized. The same can be said for others of his generation, Harold John Ockenga and Billy Graham among them. Surely the key to recovering classic evangelicalism, however, is not to posit a golden era that never existed, but to stand amazed at just how much God accomplished—and how much he continues to accomplish—through the flawed institutions of this movement.

David Neff is the former editor in chief of Christianity Today and the vice-chair of the National Association of Evangelicals board of directors.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 2001, David Brooks penned a piece for the Atlantic called “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” in which he described crossing the “meatloaf divide,” going from Montgomery County in Maryland to Franklin County in Pennsylvania. “From here on,” he writes of his road trip, “there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.” The differences, of course, were not just in the menu. “On my journeys to Franklin County,” Brooks wrote, “I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed.” This, in turn, led Brooks to an astute observation:

No wonder people in Franklin County have no class resentment or class consciousness; where they live, they can afford just about anything that is for sale. (In Montgomery County, however … almost nobody can say that. In Blue America, unless you are very, very rich, there is always, all around you, stuff for sale that you cannot afford.)

This idea that living in Red America (mostly made up of smaller towns in the South and Midwest) places some limits on residents’ desires is a theme throughout Robert Wuthnow’s new book. In Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future, the eminent Princeton sociologists offers the results of more than 700 interviews with people in 300 towns scattered among 43 states. Wuthnow paraphrases one of the interviewees saying, “It is easier to feel comfortable about what he has.” Not only is there little conspicuous consumption in his small town, but the man says, “You can’t buy stuff” there.

As Wuthnow writes, “the scale of a small town establishes a kind of symbolic boundary around a person’s aspirations. It says, realistically, this is what I think I can achieve. With this orbit of accomplishment, I will be content with whatever happens because other sources of satisfaction are present as well.”

And what are those other sources? Wuthnow sums up: “I can enjoy my family and neighbors and learn new things and avoid becoming overly specialized and escape the pressure of always striving for more,” These alternate sources of satisfaction are not always consciously chosen. Plenty of the people Wuthnow interviews never left their small town, and so they don’t have much to compare it to. Others found that they simply couldn’t afford living anywhere else when they did try to leave.

But there are those who have chosen this life consciously. They have tried out city life and have found it too “crowded and frenetic.” As one woman explained of her time in an urban area, “I felt like I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t know what was going on.” A longtime resident of a town of 6,000 jokes, “Oh, today was very stressful. I had to wait for a car to go by before I could pull out of my driveway.”

Small-Town America explores the complexities behind these commonly espoused benefits. While the research is not conclusive, according to Wuthnow, there have been several studies showing that people walk slower in small towns than in big cities, and that financial transactions, like paying for gas or groceries, actually take longer in small towns. So far, so good—but many of the people Wuthnow interviews have long commutes in order to get to their jobs and don’t have the kind of leisure they might like to wander around town stopping in at the local diner for a cup of coffee and chatting endlessly with the waitresses.

No, despite the slower pace of life, people don’t actually spend the whole day drinking coffee and gossiping. One man Wuthnow interviewed grew up in a small town and graduated from college, planning to attend law school and move somewhere else. But after graduation his father became sick. He went home to help his mother with the local newspaper that his parents put out each week. After his father died, he stayed on to help his mother. Eventually he married and settled down, continuing to run the paper with his wife. The two also run the local post office. Their workday begins at 6 AM and often doesn’t end until 10 or 11 at night. Still, he and his wife take a lot of time for their family. “I guess we’re old fashioned,” he says. “Believe it or not, we actually have sit-down meals with meat and vegetables. And we have a garden. Our kids actually know what vegetables are.”

The stability and “rootedness” that many small-town residents describe are certainly attractive. But Wuthnow reminds readers that the rug can be pulled out from under them very easily. Not only is farming on the decline but when plants or factories close, they take hundreds of jobs with them. Small towns don’t have much in the way of economic diversity.

And to the extent that there is a broader economic base, it is one that is funded by tax dollars. As Wuthnow notes, “The service class in small towns is increasingly supported through government programs, subsidies, and transfer payments.” He notes the sharp rise of health care facilities, whose workers “depend heavily on patients who receive government-subsidized retirement and welfare benefits.”

From economic development specialist to pollution management expert, the jobs available in small towns are not what they used to be. But the growth in public sector jobs may not sit well with other small-town sentiments: “Townspeople also say that big government cultivates dependence rather than allowing people do things for themselves.” As one community leader told him, “You encourage people to think they deserve something instead of doing things on their own and finding their own solutions to problems.” Like most Americans, small-town residents have contradictory feelings about the government. Whether they like a government program or not seems to depend, in part, on how much they themselves benefit from it.

It is true, though, that living in a small town does tend to give people a better sense of who would be helping them if the government weren’t. That is, there are many more voluntary organizations per capita in small towns and everyone knows who gives their time and who doesn’t. Many of the wealthier people in town and even the elected community leaders feel a special obligation to volunteer. One doctor interviewed in the book served 22 years on the town’s civic commission in addition to serving his patients.

Small towns have more churches per capita too, but, just like everywhere else, attendance has been slipping. Surveys show that “36 percent of inhabitants in nonmetropolitan communities of fewer than twenty thousand residents claim to attend religious services weekly or nearly every week.” That’s about 5 percent higher than the national average. And, Wuthnow notes, there may be more social pressure to attend in small towns. Overall, Wuthnow’s picture of churches in small town is reflective of churches nationwide. Mainline churches in the town centers are not filling their pews, while newer evangelical churches on the outskirts are finding a more responsive audience, including among immigrant populations.

Continuing a long trend, the population of small towns is declining. Children of small towns who go away to get a college education are much less likely to return. The only real population infusions tend to come from immigrants, who come for low-skill jobs and lower-cost housing.

And yet there are so many aspects of small-town life that Americans say they want these days. They want to know their neighbors, to unplug from technology, to allow their kids to roam more freely, to get out of the rat race, to “eat locally,” to live in walking distance from stores and restaurants and churches. But for most of us it is simply not feasible. Or perhaps it’s that we refuse to willingly place those boundaries around our aspirations.

Whatever the reason, after finishing this book, the reader in a big city or suburb will likely mourn the loss. “Perhaps the security of small-town life is all the more precious for this reason,” writes Wuthnow. “It cannot last. The community is a good place to raise children and then they depart.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author most recently of ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, published earlier this by Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Do we really need to hear more about desperate depressed housewives? We do. Because the church is full of them. You just don’t see them. Here is what you see: Every Sunday a youngish woman with a cutely dressed baby in her arms, holding a well-dressed toddler’s hand and herding two other children ahead of her, in matching homemade dresses, will smile at you when she enters the church sanctuary. She’ll engage in small talk with friends and glow over compliments about her baby’s new outfit. She might teach Sunday school. After the service she’ll go home to feed her family and guests a from-scratch Sunday dinner. Later in the week she’ll greet women who come to her house for Bible study. But when no one is looking, here is what might be happening: “I lived in deep depression, denied God, struggled with eating issues, frequently cut and burned myself to deal with the pain, had marital problems … . All the while my girls wore pretty matching dresses while I homeschooled and led a Bible study.” So writes Kimm Crandall in Christ in the Chaos: How the Gospel Changes Motherhood.

Nor would you see the scenario that opens Desperate: Hope for the Mom Who Needs to Breathe. Co-author Sarah Mae is in bed, knees to chest, blanket over her head, crying to God, “I can’t be a mother today, Lord, I’m just too tired.” And we find out why, though those who have children of any age already know: waking in the night multiple times, three children under four years old to care for during the day, the constant outpouring of energy, breaking up fights, disciplining, teaching. “It was breaking me,” Mae writes. “I felt very alone, and very, very tired. Depression snuck up on me. There was a shell of a woman where I once was. My ideals, my hopes, my joy were snatched away before I had a chance to notice.”

Rebekah Lyons’ depression was invisible as well. In her memoir Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of Meaning, Lyons describes feeling herself drowning under the stress of a move with her husband Gabe and her three young children from the suburbs of Atlanta to New York City. As she attempted to maneuver her life as a stay-at-home mother in Manhattan with a Down syndrome child and two other young children, she was plowed over by increasingly debilitating panic attacks.

One of the reasons we write books—and read them—is to find our way through woods gone dark, which certainly includes houses gone to chaos, mothers who don’t want to get out of bed. All three of these books feature middle-class Christian mothers of young children who lost their joy, their hope, and their way. They join a still-growing cadre of mothers-in-crisis books, a new sub-genre. The very week I am writing this, I am reviewing a proposal for yet another book for mothers defining the same tortured landscape and suggesting similar reforms.

Part of the angst is universal and inevitable. Raising children is, by nature, soul-tearing, exhausting, humbling work (and yes, joyous and enlivening as well), and it will always be so, but distinctive societal pressures have deepened the paralysis and anxiety so many are facing. The culture continues to move toward family fragmentation, eroding support from the extended family, making mothering more lonely. For those who do stay at home with their children, our societal values belittle sacrifice and family devotion.

These books both critique the status quo and offer suggestions for a better way forward. Their cultural critiques are noteworthy, but even more significant, they reveal an ongoing deep divide over the place and role of women, specifically mothers, that we’ve largely gone silent on. Blame the silence not on too much grace toward one another but on a widespread weariness with “The Mommy Wars” as endlessly rehashed in the media.

Most mothers will tell you the war is long over. In one sense they’re right. Women of all stripes have moved away from verbal entanglement over issues related to mothers working outside the home. The economic realities of the Great Recession have eliminated much of the discourse in that arena (a full 40 percent of women now are the primary breadwinners for their family). But make no mistake: in the church, deep differences remain over the place and role of women with children at home. The arguments advanced by rival factions may be more nuanced and less inflammatory than in previous decades, thank goodness, but the divisions are real and are worth revisiting in these newest expressions. At heart is the question, Do women with children at home have legitimate, biblical callings and gifts outside the home? And I would add a question at the heart of that question: Are mothers, however desperate and depressed, human beings?

All three of the books under review begin by mapping similar terrain: the emotional, mental, and physical toll of caring for babies and young children, challenging a woman’s fundamental sense of identity and purpose. All three describe as well the clash of expectations, the glowing Before Children dreams and the After Children realities. Sarah Mae was sure she was going to be the “fun pancake mom” who always wore lipstick; instead she was slobbing around in pajamas until afternoon sometimes, tired all the time, her house a disaster.

Crandall decided beforehand that of all the models of motherhood available, she was going to be the “quiverfull, all-natural, homeschooling, dress-wearing, bread-baking, whole-foods-eating mother.” After her house was full with four children, she realized she couldn’t live up to her own standard, couldn’t be “the kind of woman I honestly regarded as more godly than others.” Her sense of failure sent her spiralling into several years of “terrible depression.”

In the midst of a massive Thanksgiving Day parade with her three small children, unable to find her husband, Lyons had a near melt-down, one among many. Motherhood just wasn’t supposed to be this hard.

All of this sounds painfully familiar. I was one of those women who anticipated the joy of creating a Christian home, and whose actual home fell far short of my expectations. We ALL expected to be sporty, always cheerful, pancake moms! And that our homes would fairly burst with joy, happy Bible songs, and cheerful busy children. And more than that, we all expected to be godly moms, that the process of motherhood would transform us magically into SuperGodlyWoman. Surprise! Children, beautiful blessings of God, furthered the fall in all of us.

Accelerating the fall, say all four authors, is a feminine proclivity toward perfectionism, a trait that doesn’t abide well with gloriously messy children. And, if that load isn’t enough to carry, they all identify as well a performance orientation that leads women to slip into the comparison trap. Other people’s children are always smarter and better behaved than your own—and other mothers are always thinner, funnier, and far more spiritual than you. All recognize as well that women are poorly prepared for the rigors of motherhood. Abstract, faith-based ideals about the value of children and family collide with the deep exhaustion of motherhood, necessitating real physical help.

But the fall is harder for some than for others, and here the books diverge. Following the admonition in Titus, Desperate is structured as a series of letters between Sara Mae, a younger woman overwhelmed by the demands of mothering, and Sally Clarkson, a wise older woman whose four children are grown. In the view of the co-authors, motherhood is not simply an important role: it is the “best and most lasting work” women can do, Clarkson writes, with “vast consequences in the course and direction of history.” Mae picks up the theme of raising children as one’s central role in life on her blog, where she posts that “Parenting Is My Kingdom Work.”

If a mother’s work raising her children is, in fact, her primary contribution to the kingdom of God, every word and deed is fraught with eternal significance. Mae, reeling under the weight of that significance, seeks relief from Clarkson, who steadies Mae’s panic with memories and advice from her own successful child-raising and homeschooling strategies. Clarkson’s orientation is made clear in the dedication. The book is dedicated to her children, who are named, and then this:”You are the most profound story that I have ever written, the best work I have ever accomplished—the magnum opus of my life. You are the reason for this message that God has crafted in my soul … . You are my treasures.”

Later she writes, “It is no wonder that our children are all musical, literary, passionate adventurers and artists. That is quintessentially who the Clarksons are.” These words are not simple boasting on her part; her adult children validate her view of the home as the woman’s “kingdom” over which she rules for the purpose of “crafting lives” for the glory of God.

In Clarkson and Mae’s view, the primary problem with struggling mothers is not theological or ideological but practical. Mothers with young children simply need more help and support. They offer good-sense suggestions: starting a mothers’ support group, en-listing help from older women, encouraging older women to “remember the tired years” and come alongside them to assuage the fatigue and loneliness. But among the genuinely helpful messages from Clarkson comes the implication that young women are simply not trying hard enough. She urges them, in effect, to work harder, to be not only parent and teacher but playmate to their children as well:

We have to lay down our pride and give up ourselves for our children. Play the game with them they want to play. Put away our books or computers, serve them, train them, encourage them, fill their souls with life. Play ponies with them on the floor. Choose to enter into the mundane with our children: playing ponies, doing crafts, getting wet socks in the snow … do these things so you can say “I was intentional. I was faithful; I chose my children.”

All this is to be done “for the glory of God,” but you may experience a further reward for investing your every moment into your children, Clarkson writes. You will not only experience “joy and fulfillment” but you will also “eventually find that you have developed your own best friends out of your own children, who have learned to love what you love.” I am wondering if the artistic mother whose child grows up to be a mechanic or an accountant who is ambivalent about art will feel like a failure. This kind of “shaping,” “subduing,” and “ruling” requires women to be with their children 24/7.

Kimm Crandall in Christ in the Chaos writes from a parallel milieu. Early in the book she recalls confiding to a friend her fears and despair in mothering her young children. What Crandall got was parenting tips based on her friend’s experience and a few Bible verses to motivate her to do better. Crandall writes, “So while honestly trying to help, she had only given this overwhelmed, guilt-stricken mom even more to do—a heavier burden when I could not even bear the first one.” Crandall identifies the root issue as simply this: neither one of them understood the gospel. “We were two theologically clueless Christian women trying our best to earn favor in the eyes of God and man by living up to a standard that we were quite sure was the only true definition of an excellent godly mother.”

Crandall recognized that in her particular evangelical subculture, the root of the crisis in motherhood was not inattention or selfishness but poor theology. Like Clarkson and Mae, once she had children, she dropped everything else and built her identity upon her mothering. Jesus was still her “ticket in,” yet she was ruled by stronger forces: her “incessant need” for approval from others, her own performance-driven efforts to be judged a godly mother.

But a serious study of the gospel and the grace of Christ eventually freed her from her good-mother-works addiction. Christ has already done it all, she reminds her readers. It’s not her performance as a mother or a churchgoer that earns her Father’s affections; “Christ has already performed perfectly on my behalf.” She challenges her readers: “Does your ultimate worth depend on how you enact your motherhood?” Such a value system, defining worth simply in “the fact that I bore children,” led to her own depression and, she suggests, to others’ as well.

Crandall extrapolates from the gospel helpful prescriptions to heal the crippling culture of Christian mothering: that we lay down our masks, that we boast about our weaknesses to one another instead of our successes, that we quit the “try harder” and “do better” pep talks we give to one another. She sums up her advice this way: “Acknowledge your weakness, abide in Christ and start breaking down the culture of self-righteousness.” While she stops short of suggesting that women develop other callings, gifts, or interests to enrich the experience of motherhood or to diffuse its pressures, she goes a long way toward unseating motherhood from its narrow, impossible throne.

Lyons’ book, Freefall to Fly, takes us in a different direction. With her husband, Gabe, Lyons is co-founder of Q Ideas, a nonprofit organization that “helps Christian leaders winsomely engage culture. “The “found” to her “lost” is her discovery of calling and purpose in addition to her home. As a thirtysomething woman raised in the church, she questions the always-at-home model of Christian motherhood that she unquestioningly absorbed as she was growing up:

I’d never felt encouraged to pursue anything else besides becoming a loving wife and caring mother. Like many other women, I had a predetermined life path. After walking the aisle, I should take the short road to motherhood. After that, my journey would be a cul-de-sac of caregiving in the home. To pursue any other path was second class, less than ideal. And as I’ve learned through talking with Christian women of different ages across the country, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Her story is intensely personal—at times uncomfortably so—but like the other two books, hers is intended as a call to action, which we begin to discern when she moves from her own experience to the statistics on women and depression. One in four women takes antidepressants, she tells us, twice as many as men. Can it be because many women are living frustrated, child-cloistered lives? The turning point for Lyons comes at a weekend seminar on calling, when her own simmering desire to minister to women in need is identified and finally articulated.

Lyons’ approach, like Clarkson and Mae’s, is largely experiential and light on theology. While there is plenty to critique about this book, Lyons signals an important way forward for women in the trenches of motherhood. She identifies the same patterns of isolation, fear, and competitive comparison explored in Desperate and Christ in the Chaos, and she encourages the formation of support communities, but these communities have a different focus than the ones suggested by the other authors: “What if communities of women began empowering each other to discover their gifts?” Lyons asks, gifts to be used fearlessly “for the rescue of others”—”others” meaning other than your own children. And one further step: that the family itself, rather than being the sole focus of women’s service, could support and assist her in serving others.

While some readers may be astounded that women still need urging and affirmation to develop their gifts both inside and outside the home, they do. They need it desperately. Such a message in no way lessens the value of the family; in fact, it enlarges the value of the family beyond the walls of our own homes to encompass concern for other homes and families.

For women with young children at home, adding other work to their overloaded lives, even when it’s called ministry, isn’t always possible, but the larger point must not be lost. When women define themselves solely by the fact that they bore children, they will indeed become depressed and desperate. When we are no longer women or human beings, but mothers first and always, we lose in so many ways. We are losing ourselves in our children’s lives rather than in Christ’s life. We lose our truest identity as children of God, as the redeemed and rescued, as citizens of the city of God, as joint heirs with Christ, as members of Christ’s body, as the ones for whom Christ gave his life.

While I hate war as much or more than others, it’s time we re-engaged in “The Mommy Wars.” Not because it’s fun, but because it matters deeply. The desperate housewife saga going on largely invisibly in churches and neighborhoods near you will not abate until we more closely evaluate our theology, our praxis, and the messages we send to women of all ages. If our children’s eternal destiny and the fate and direction of history rests on mothers’ shoulders, then women and men both will continue to compare and judge each woman’s enactments of her motherhood. Such behaviors are contrary to the gospel of Christ. Such a narrow prescription precludes as well the development of women’s myriad talents given for the strengthening of the church and its witness in the world. Mothers are full human beings. They’re our neighbors. Let’s all work at loving them better.

Leslie Leyland Fields is author of “Parenting Is Your Highest Calling”: And 8 Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt (Waterbrook).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Putting the finishing touches on the second volume of his Church Dogmatics, the volume in which he took up the doctrine of God and with it the doctrine of election, the great 20th-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote: "To think of the contents of this volume gives me much pleasure, but even greater anxiety." Apart from his desire to hew closely to God's own self-testimony in Scripture, Barth feared the repercussions of doctrinal revisionism. In this volume, more than in the previous one, he confessed, "I have had to leave the framework of theological tradition." Candidly, he went on, "I would have preferred to follow Calvin's doctrine of predestination much more closely, instead of departing from it so radically. But I could not and cannot do so. As I let the Bible itself speak to me on these matters, as I meditated on what I seemed to hear, I was driven irresistibly to reconstruction."

These words of Barth came to mind again recently as I read a treatment of the same themes in a revised doctoral dissertation, Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God by Suzanne McDonald, now an assistant professor of systematic and historical theology at Calvin College. Like Barth, McDonald does her theological work from within the Reformed wing of the Christian faith. Also like Barth, she employs fresh readings of biblical texts in an effort to reform the classic Reformed doctrine of divine election. And her thesis, like Barth's reconstruction, is elegantly simple: God chooses a portion of humanity for a twofold purpose—first, to be God's representatives to the rest of humanity, and second, to hold those same people, the "rest," within the sphere of God's promised blessing, thus representing them to God.

God's people are chosen, McDonald says, for the sake of furthering God's purposes of blessing "'beyond' the elect community itself."

Her book starts off with a fine exposition of the 17th-century divine John Owen's doctrine of election. Tapping into the current revival of interest in Owen's work, McDonald presents him as a champion of rigorous Calvinism, including what she terms the doctrine of "individual double predestination" (the belief that God unconditionally, without regard to foreseen merit or demerit, selects some of humanity as the objects of mercy and consigns the rest to eternal punishment). But, for McDonald, the chief virtue of Owen's account of this strand of the Reformed tradition is its robustly Trinitarian shape. Affirming the pactum salutis—the determination between the Father and Son to accomplish the work of redemption—Owen draws on a theology of the Holy Spirit as the vinculum amoris, the love binding Father and Son together, in order to explicate how the elect come to participate in the salvation Father and Son have achieved for them. Since God's triune being and his act "outside of himself," ad extra, for us, are united, Owen argues that it is impossible to apportion God's action of election to the Father or Son only. The Spirit, too, plays a part as the one who enables persons to become the beneficiaries in time of God's eternal choice that they should be those beneficiaries.

This affirmation leads McDonald—seamlessly—into an engagement with Barth's doctrine of election. (I'm not aware of any clearer summary of Barth's position on the matter, and that by itself ensures McDonald's book a place on my shelf within easy reach.) Unsatisfied with "individual double predestination" (Barth thought its whimsical nature undercut the one thing it was trying to do—give us the assurance that we have to do with a God who loves), Barth retooled the doctrine of election, with a recognizably Reformed touch, as articulating God's choice of God to be the one who is with us in Jesus Christ. The "terrible decree" of damnation? God appointed that for himself, suffering and exhausting its horror in Christ. The choice of some for salvation? No longer should the object of that choice be thought of as a finite number of humans plucked from the mass of the damned. Rather, again, God chose God—or, more precisely, God determined himself in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ—to be the elect one, for the sake of all humanity. Jesus embodies God's decision to turn toward us, with our salvation and not our destruction in mind.

McDonald rightly plies this reworking of the Reformed teaching on election with several probing questions. In the first place, she wonders where the biblical evidence lies for seeing all of humanity as elect in Christ. Isn't election something particular, albeit with wider—even universal—effects? Furthermore, she gauges accurately the way in which Owen's emphasis on the Spirit as the agent of election's actualization has largely dropped off the radar in Barth's account. By focusing so much on Jesus Christ as God's self-determination to be God-with-us and God-for-us, Barth leaves little left for the Spirit to do. Divine election, apparently, doesn't need the Spirit, given how all-encompassing Christ's work has become in Barth's doctrine.

With these figures and themes looming large in the background, McDonald turns next to the work of Christopher Seitz, Walter Brueggemann, and N. T. Wright (among other biblical interpreters) to develop the notion that God's election in Scripture is always oriented toward those who are not elect. Abraham, for instance, is selected by God to be the channel of blessings not simply to his own descendents but also to the nations beyond. The children of Israel, the corporate heirs of the Abrahamic promises, likewise were chosen by God to be a light to the nations. Their very existence as a people was intended to show the nations what God was like, and, in turn, to allow the nations a share in God's saving work. The ultimate Israelite—Jesus—was also elected as the one who would represent God fully to the world and, vice versa, the one who would hold the world before God, completing his saving mission for their sake, not just his own. "In his own faithfulness," as McDonald puts it, "Christ is the bearer of unfaithful Israel's sins in covenant judgment. It is because in its own election, Israel represents the whole of humanity, that Christ is also the bearer of the sins of the world."

Out of the nexus of these perspectives, McDonald offers her own proposal. With Owen, she affirms the Trinitarian shape of election: God chose us—those who are in Christ by the Spirit—to be his representatives. Against Owen, she demurs that the purpose of election could be simply its own realization, as if the point were that those who are chosen should come to actualize their chosenness without reference to those who aren't chosen. With Barth, she affirms that in Jesus Christ, we witness God's self-election to be God-for-us. But against Barth, she sees little warrant for thinking that the whole of humanity is elect in Christ for fellowship with God—were that the case, what would happen to the Spirit's task of uniting people to God in Christ?

God's people are chosen, McDonald says, for the sake of furthering God's purposes of blessing "beyond the elect community itself." In fellowship with our electing God through Christ and the Spirit, we exist as channels to extend God's blessing outwards. We bear the divine stamp, the imago dei, mirroring the divine activity of reconciliation to those who haven't yet grasped it. Reciprocally, as we represent God to others, we reflect their life back to God. In this way, the non-elect are "provisionally held in Christ by the Spirit awaiting the consummation of God's purposes in the person of Christ and the final outpouring of the Spirit." There may still be hope for them, McDonald tentatively suggests—a rumored hope that adherents of double predestination haven't yet heard of.

It is unlikely, I think, that McDonald's book will appeal to many today who wear the label "Reformed." The "new Calvinists"—the "young, restless, and Reformed" crowd, as they're popularly known—won't have much time, I suspect, for McDonald's reverent agnosticism on the question of who will finally be saved in the end and her insistence that "blessing may come even to the apparently rejected." And, indeed, her proposal skates lightly over what James Dunn has called "the dark side of the moon" of God's purpose of election—for example, Paul's affirmation in Romans 9 that God "hardens" whomever he wills. On the other hand, McDonald's proposal may go a long way toward invigorating the ongoing discussion of Barth's alleged neglect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Here I would place Re-Imaging Election alongside the work of Robert Jenson and Eugene Rogers as a serious attempt to supplement, or even correct, Barth's doctrine of election—and doctrine of God—with a richer, more robust pneumatology.

Like any good theology, at the end of the day, McDonald's book invites the question, "How does this proposal help us to read Scripture more faithfully?" As Barth knew, any doctrine of election aiming to appeal to lively Christian communities must say, in the end, "I let the Bible itself speak to me on these matters"—and welcome measurement by that yardstick. For Barth, listening to Scripture drove him "irresistibly" to revise classic Reformed formulations. For McDonald, as well, Scripture points in a direction more than a few degrees away from Owen's course. Whatever one decides about her argument, this is her own suggested method for making a decision: pay attention to the text of the Bible, and see if it guides you in a similar direction.

But her book suggests, equally strongly, that our job of understanding election doesn't end with our mind's rest. Only when our assurance of our own election prompts us to turn toward those "outside"—interceding for them, blessing them, holding their pain and joy before God, bearing their lives into his presence—has election achieved its true aim. Election is for something—for the spreading of hope and peace, healing and grace. For love.

Wesley Hill is assistant professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. His next book, Paul and the Triune Identity, is forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Until recently, Mitchell Burford Salter had been largely lost to history. His 90-year-old grandson has rarely talked of him. His great-grandson never knew the man or his story. The name wasn't familiar when he heard it, but he agrees that the sole extant photo of the one-armed man as an adult looks remarkably similar to his youngest brother.

Some of the men whom Salter met 150 years ago in the fields and hills of southeastern Pennsylvania outside Gettysburg have been better remembered, at least among the ranks of amateur and professional historians of the Civil War. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the officer lionized in Michael Shaara's Killer Angels and played in the movie adaptation by Jeff Daniels, has been credited for ordering the desperate counter-attack that saved the United States. Strong Vincent at least boasts a marker on the rocky slopes of Little Round Top, small thanks from a grateful nation for giving his life to defend his home state from co*cksure Southern invaders. Both officers receive due credit in the definitive new account of Gettysburg by Allen C. Guelzo, one of the era's most renowned historians.

But even Vincent and Chamberlain are never far from disappearing into the same fog of history that had enveloped Salter. When Gettysburg National Military Park commemorated the 150-year anniversary this summer, President Obama did not visit. Neither did Vice President Biden. National television programs stayed away. Since sesquicentennial events for the Civil War began two years ago, we have seen no popular revival of interest such as what erupted in 1990 with Ken Burns' acclaimed miniseries. Still, passion for the subject hasn't altogether vanished: Guelzo's demanding scholarly account enjoyed a brief run on bestseller lists, and his book reminds us why we can't understand the ongoing but ever-tenuous American experiment unless we grapple with the events of July 1863.

Guelzo's Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is not the place to start if you have only passing acquaintance with George Gordon Meade, James Longstreet, John Buford, and the like. I made my first pilgrimage to Gettysburg when I was seven years old (shortly before Burns made Shelby Foote's voice famous and introduced the world to poor Sullivan Ballou). I have returned twice since then and read more than my share of battle accounts and Civil War overviews, including Guelzo's recent Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As an amateur student of the period, I felt while reading Guelzo that until now I hardly understood Gettysburg at all. That's a compliment, believe me. But you probably won't want to jump into such a full-dress version until you understand the broader context of the war, envision the terrain at Gettysburg, and become acquainted with the major players.

You also shouldn't dive into Guelzo's history if you're looking for a glamorized narrative of heroism and valor under fire. Yes, you will find in the detailed maze of regiment numbers and brigade commanders many such stories. You will marvel at the 1st Minnesota's suicidal charge into vastly superior numbers of Alabamians storming toward the Union center at Cemetery Ridge. You will observe Guelzo's admiration for certain standout generals: John Reynolds, who defied Meade and determined to make battle at Gettysburg, where he would perish; Otis Howard, "the Christian general" unpopular among his blasphemous peers but who understood the need to defend and hold the high ground; and especially Winfield Scott Hanco*ck, who overcame his colleagues' disastrous errors and staved off Union collapse at the end of the second day. And even as you lament their cause, the soldiers of Virginia and North Carolina who marched with Gen. Pickett into their doom on the third day will make you gasp at what humans will do for the comrades on their right and left.

But mostly you will see Gettysburg as the generals and soldiers did: through the sulphurous haze of uncertainty. Guelzo peers into every long-standing controversy with hopes of finding light. Why didn't Dick Ewell press his advantage all the way to Culp's Hill and Cemetery Ridge during nightfall of the first day? Why didn't Longstreet begin his attack early in the next day? What could Dan Sickels have possibly been thinking by deploying his corps forward on the Emmitsburg Road instead of defending the line between Hanco*ck's 2nd Corps and Little Round Top? Why didn't Meade heed President Lincoln and pursue the retreating Robert E. Lee and seek to end the war before he could escape back across the Potomac? Guelzo takes his best shot at answering all of these questions and many more. Neither one of the commanding generals, Meade and Lee, escapes the unforgiving scrutiny of hindsight.

Why bother revisiting these debates? More than once I've wondered whether my interest in the Civil War betrays a secret bloodlust. When I played as a child with cut-out soldiers wearing blue and gray, no one bloodied his brow. In real life, news from Gettysburg shattered families north and south of the Mason-Dixon. Consider just the Southern casualties, according to Guelzo's accounting: "Even if one takes the lowest mark, the Army of Northern Virginia suffered something comparable to two sinkings of the Titanic, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ten repetitions of the Great Blizzard of 1888, and two Pearl Harbors."

Above all, Guelzo captures the fundamental reason the Civil War continues to demand attention. In his breakthrough exploration of the political machinations and personal rivalries within each army before, during, and after the fighting, he exposes stubborn traits in human nature. Larger-than-life historical figures appear limited, confused, self-absorbed. Immediately after Pickett's Charge, Lee rode up and down the line of haggard survivors and blamed himself for ordering their units' demise. Years later, he and his partisans blamed everyone else, including the men for insufficient determination to carry the colors into enemy lines. Meade, loyal ally of the deposed Gen. George McClellan, understood the political dynamics of military leadership in the snakebit Army of the Potomac. As a result, his unexpected ascent to command prompted crippling self-doubt and concern to make decisions that he could defend, whether or not they actually contributed to ending the war. Scarcely can we comprehend such responsibility for life and death—not only for the men under their command but also for the hopes and dreams of their respective peoples and governments.

Under fire we see the best and worst of ourselves. And no one saw this terrible truth more clearly than Abraham Lincoln. Guelzo's book ends where it must: with the story behind that short and surprising speech by Lincoln to dedicate the new cemetery at Gettysburg. Lincoln saw in the war not only regimental colors and flanking maneuvers but ultimately a test of national character. The battle at Gettysburg called for renewed determination, "that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

But Guelzo, following Lincoln, understands there would be no Union without the success of its arms. And Gettysburg hinged on a host of military decisions big and small, perfectly reasonable and unfathomably irresponsible. Because the flank on Little Round Top held, because the line on Cemetery Ridge wavered but did not break, the "proposition that all men are created equal" increasingly applied over the years to the entire nation, North and South.

History sees the big picture in small events. But history also sees the small picture in big events. Unlike Col. Vincent, Pvt. Salter survived the confrontation on Little Round Top. Bayonet fixed, he advanced with the 4th Alabama toward Vincent's position on the high ground. The attack failed. His war ended that day, two years before the rest of the fighting mercifully concluded. And on that most famous patch of battlefield he left behind a relic only recently rediscovered by his family. Even now, the National Museum of Health and Medicine holds his arm, amputated at Gettysburg by a U.S. Army surgeon after the din of battle ended on the second day.

The young farmer, kin to Lincoln through the president's great-great-grandmother Hannah Salter, had joined up at the beginning of the war. By Gettysburg he had already survived First Manassas, Fredericksburg, and some of the hottest fighting at Antietam. In the end he was saved by his enemies. After returning home, he would see two sons become doctors. One started a hospital in Eufala, Alabama. In turn, one of that doctor's sons would graduate from Harvard Medical School at the end of World War II and become a surgeon in Birmingham. That surgeon would later be joined in practice by his eldest son, who never knew his great-grandfather or his story. But the records of Pvt. Salter's amputation have been rediscovered by his grateful great-great-grandaughter. And I join her, my wife, in giving thanks for this small miracle of survival in the big picture of America's most consequential battle.

Collin Hansen serves as editorial director for The Gospel Coalition. He is the co-author of A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories That Stretch and Stir. He and his wife belong to Redeemer Community Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and he serves on the advisory board of Beeson Divinity School. You can follow him on Twitter @collinhansen.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

First things first: The Complete Peanuts is not yet complete. This ambitious project of reprinting fifty years’ worth of daily strips—some never before reprinted, some “lost” in archived newspapers until now—began in 2004, with four years’ worth of strips published in two volumes every year, and it will conclude only in 2016. The companion volumes of Peanuts Every Sunday, beginning publication this year, will show the Sunday strips in their full and carefully imitated original newspaper color, since all the strips in the The Complete Peanuts are in black and white. Whether you are a Peanuts scholar or merely a passionate fan, it’s a dream come true. No more frustrations at the non-sequiturs caused by other less complete collections’ random deletion of key strips in a sequence. Now you’ve got the whole genetic development of what is quite possibly the 20th century’s greatest comic strip (only Krazy Kat and Calvin & Hobbes offer any competition to that claim).

The earliest strips from the 1950s are the most startling. Peanuts has always been famously spare compared to the visual bombast of adventure strips like Terry and the Pirates or superhero comics. But its first years were even more minimalistic than the now-standardized version we all know so well. Charlie Brown’s head is the size and shape of a watermelon, Snoopy is a sleek and lean little puppy. Their earliest companions are neither the famous van Pelt siblings nor the athletic Peppermint Patty (who doesn’t debut until the mid-60s, with her four-eyed friend Marcie following in the ’70s after a false start as a little camper named Clara) but only the boyishly bland Shermy and mean-spirited Patty, who in turn by the early ’60s are all but phased out. Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus enter the strip as babies and only finish growing up to their final age of eight about twenty years later. Woodstock has countless taller and thinner bird predecessors before he finally stakes his claim as Snoopy’s best friend a year or so after the eponymous concert.

Not long after the strip’s debut, the landscape and characters took on their more familiar contours—I personally find the look from about 1958 to 1966 most appealing—and the retrospective pleasure for the reader comes in finding the firsts: the first mention of Beethoven and the Little Red-Haired Girl, the first attempt to cure Linus of his blanket habit, the first abortive kite flight, the first time Snoopy imagines himself as something else (a rhino, in 1955) and so launches himself into a thousand different personae including, most famously, the World War I flying ace. The suburban Minnesota of Schulz’s upbringing is evident here, too: outside there are wide lawns, low-slung houses with tidy vinyl siding, sporadic birch trees, sprinklers and sandboxes; inside there are hyper-modern chairs and lamps, geometric-print drapes, diminutive radios and fat wooden TV sets, and the kind of toys children had before plastic. And the children’s lives are consumed by the passions of mid-century American suburbia: Davy Crockett, ice cream cones, chocolate creams (but no coconut, please), snowmen, baseball, mud pies, and jump ropes. Over the years these give way to the more sophisticated pleasures—and burdens—of marshmallow sundaes, chocolate chip cookies, root beer, peanut butter sandwiches, thank-you notes, summer camp, the doctor’s office, and school (including one building that, shockingly enough, commits suicide).

The sheer littleness of the Peanuts characters is the source of many of the gags, both verbal and visual. A longstanding source of humor in Peanuts is putting big words in little mouths: in 1961 they talked about higher criticism, syndicated medical columns, communism, and mass communication; by 1985, they were talking about branch managers, satellite dishes, frequent flyer miles, and the private sector. Visually, the early strips show Linus entrapping himself inside Tinker Toys and Lucy unable to lift her tennis racket. That was why, Schulz always said, there were never any adults in Peanuts (a syndicate-inflicted name he always hated for its dismissive attitude toward the subject matter): they just wouldn’t fit in this kid’s-eyed view of the world.

In time, of course, the parental void became a force in its own right—manifested most disturbingly in the feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which must be the most depressing children’s movie ever made. Snoopy plays the adult role as needed, as attorney or surveyor or rescuer, or the children are adults to each other, especially when in need of psychiatric help. Peppermint Patty, who has no mother, is the official latchkey kid of the strip, but really they all are. The general momlessness, perhaps reflective of Schulz’s mother’s death just before he got drafted, appears again and again in Woodstock’s anxiety to find his mom and wish her a happy Mother’s Day, but the poor little bird never manages to do so.

It’s the deep sadness that has always set the strip apart, and The Complete Peanuts is determined that you will pay it due notice. This may reflect a struggle for the soul of Schulz’s creation. Does it lie in the dozens of tv specials and documentaries, the vast array of merchandise from mugs to mousepads to the Snoopy Sno-Cone machine, the “Get Met” insurance commercials that people of my age remember better than the newspaper strip itself—in short, in the first massively lucrative licensing of comic characters? The Peanuts empire basically invented the category of “gift book” in 1962 with Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, after all. And the message is relentlessly cheerful. Schulz may have had the good graces to mock his own success in the mid’80s character Tapioca Pudding, whose sole desire in life is to grace the cover of a lunchbox as a licensed character.

Or is the soul of Peanuts in the strip itself, whose most frequent topic is depression and whose characters regularly run each other down? In the very first strip, on October 2, 1950, a smiling Charlie Brown strolls down the street as Shermy comments to Patty, “Good ol’ Charlie Brown … How I hate him!” The lead character’s biggest flaw is not his unlikeability, as he believes, but his constant droning about his unlikeability in the presence of his friends, not to mention the irritating gullibility that drives him to try to kick the football year after year after year. Still, apart from his own culpability, there are long school days to be endured, the Little RedHaired Girl will never show her pretty face (when she moves away, a heartbroken Charlie Brown mourns, “I wish men cried”), and for all Snoopy’s fervid imagination he will never be anything but a lazy beagle obsessed with suppertime. There is probably no more emotionally raw sequence in the whole halfcentury of Peanuts than Linus’ discovery, upon the birth of Sally Brown, that Lucy wished he’d never been born. Seth, the designer of The Complete Peanuts and himself an accomplished cartoonist, takes this side of it to be the real heart of the matter and deliberately emphasizes the austerity, quiet, and melancholy of the strip. Of the nineteen covers so far, only three show unambiguous smiles on the characters’ faces; the rest show grimaces, howls, reserve. The design of the books is beautiful but deliberately stark, with endpapers depicting almost barren northern landscapes in dramatic shadows.

Whatever the motivation in proving that Schulz was a serious artist and not just a commercial hack, the emphasis on the bleak is not misplaced. Besides the emotional frayedness, sometimes brutality, of Peanuts, there are startling little allusions to the greater fears framing domestic Americana: the H-bomb, fallout, a riot at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm over dogs being sent to Vietnam. And if there is any deep message underlying Peanuts, it is the impossibility of changing yourself or anyone else. Charlie Brown will never talk to the Little Red-Haired Girl, no matter how much Linus cheers him on; Linus will never give up his blanket, no matter how much Gramma bargains; Schroeder will always love Beethoven best, despite Lucy’s wiles; Peppermint Patty will always have a big nose and freckles and get D-minuses; Woodstock will never be an eagle. Peanuts is a modest protest against American boosterism and self-help philosophy, resigned to the fact that the protest won’t make the slightest difference. The medium is a good one for the message, because comics of this sort don’t progress; they only repeat. The characters are forever locked into themselves.

On the other hand, it is a little too easy to overplay the melancholy card. There are real smiles and real victories. Snoopy celebrates with his bunny friends instead of hunting them, as Frieda wishes he would; Marcie’s mom makes Peppermint Patty a skating costume since she doesn’t have a mother of her own to do it; little Milo of the “Goose Eggs” wants to be just like Charlie Brown when he grows up. If Peanuts is manic-depressive, it’s only because life itself is that way, and Charles Schulz is American life’s faithful scribe.

Paralleling the struggle for the soul of Peanuts is the struggle for the soul of Schulz himself. A big, powerful, archetypal artist myth surrounds the memory of the man who died the day before his final strip was published. It is the Citizen Kane myth (reinforced by the many references to that film in the strip): that the man who had it all, accolades and awards and millions of devoted fans, remained to the end lonely, dissatisfied, and unloved. This is the narrative that informs David Michaelis’ biography Schulz and Peanuts; it’s also a narrative that has been persuasively deflated by Schulz’s widow and children, most of all his novelist son Monte Schulz in a long biographical essay for the Comics Journal in 2008. Peanuts may say that people never change, but Schulz in fact did. Like many young people, he had a lot of hurts and grievances. And like many adults, he eventually grew up, moved on, and enjoyed a relatively happy final twenty-five years. Despite the common first name, Charlie Brown is not the spitting image of his maker. If anyone in the strip mirrors Schulz, it’s Peppermint Patty: as others have pointed out, she shares his mixture of self-doubt and bravado, is an athletic whiz (as Schulz himself was, in very pointed contrast to Charlie Brown), and has no mother. Perhaps this is why by the late ’70s she comes to dominate and Charlie Brown in many ways recedes from prominence.

Another archetypal artist myth might better characterize the story of Schulz and his creation, which is that happiness is the enemy of art. It was a good thing for Schulz the man that life got better by the mid-’70s, but it was a bad thing for Peanuts. Despite the earnest protests of comics scholars and admiring fellow cartoonists, by the late ’70s Peanuts had begun to fade. The life went out of Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy; all that was left was stale repetition of the same old routine. Schulz resorts to unconvincing physical humor not emerging naturally from the characters’ littleness, as in the early strips, but rather forced silliness, as well as bad jokes told by the characters themselves that no one else laughs at—a poor cop-out on the cartoonist’s part. The emotional edginess vanishes from the strip, perhaps along with Schulz’s old wounds. Or maybe it’s just that thirty years is the limit of life in a time-arrested comic strip.

But probably all this analysis is more serious than Schulz ever intended for his art. His comic creation may have been worth more than peanuts, but it was, after all, just a daily strip in your local newspaper, a momentary smile or rueful nod of the head, the comfort of familiar faces. Those who learned the fine art of sarcasm from Lucy’s caustic remarks and still say “good grief!” in the face of the ridiculous will delight in the range of trivia this comprehensive collection offers. Here you can learn that long before he was a dreadful minor league player, Joe Schlabotnik was an imaginary piano player made up by Schroeder on the spur of the moment; you can watch the cost of psychiatric help rise to 7¢, then to 34¢, all the way up to an appalling 50¢ before tumbling back down to “five cents, please”; you can meet long-lost characters like José Peterson (whose mom makes tortillas and Swedish meatballs for dinner), the stentorian Charlotte Braun, and Snoopy’s aggressive tennis partner Molly Volley; you can even learn the name of the cat next door: World War II. Happiness is The Complete Peanuts.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is assistant research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, and the editor of Lutheran Forum.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.