Literature and the Christian Life by Modern Reformation

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.30 | NO.1 | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 | $6.95

Literature and the Christian Life

North Carolina 2021

Aug 6 – 7, 2021

Philadelphia, PA 2021

Oct 15 – 16, 2021

San Diego, CA 2021

Feb 25 – 26, 2022 Waco, TX 2021

April 22 – 23, 2022 Tuition: $649

JUS T IFIC AT ION

MODERN REFORMATION WEEKEND

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG/EVENTS

Join Michael Horton and the Modern Reformation team for a special weekend experience as we delve deeply into the topic of justification. Registered participants will receive materials to read and prepare in advance. Our guests will spend the weekend listening to stimulating lectures and engaging in lively conversation, challenging them to grow in their understanding of the doctrine of justification, and encouraging them to live in the light of what God has done for them in Christ.

V O L . 3 0 | N O.1 | JA N UA R Y- F E B R UA R Y 2 02 1

FEATURES 20

The Place of Imaginative Literature in the Christian Life K A R E N S WA L L O W P R I O R

“After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?” T. S. Eliot’s Search for Salvation B Y PAT R I C I A A N D E R S

T. S. Eliot on Tradition, Orthodoxy, and Ancient Cheese B Y DAV I D H U I S M A N

Imagination, Formation, and the Theological Novel BY GREG PETERS

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN CROTTS

MODERN REFORMATION WEB-EXCLUSIVE ARTICLES. F R E E , D A I LY A R T I C L E S F R O M T O P W R I T E R S . Every week, MR curates new articles on issues of theology and culture. We hand select scholars, pastors, and cultural critics whose expertise, knowledge, and wisdom provide astute, insightful, and timely articles, reviews, works of literature, and poetry for the MR community.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

V O L . 3 0 | N O.1 | JA N UA R Y- F E B R UA R Y 2 02 1

DEPARTMENTS 5

B I B L E S T U DY

R E F O R M AT I O N RESOURCES

The Boxing Match of Faith: Could You Be a Contender? BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

Reading, Thinking, Speaking

The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion according to the Reformed Confession By Herman Bavinck REVIEWED BY

B Y H E R M A N B AV I N C K

R YA N M . H U R D

Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John

BOOK REVIEWS

The Overstory By Richard Powers

By Ike Miller

REVIEWED BY CHARLES KIM JR.

REVIEWED BY PAT R I C I A A N D E R S

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit: What Are They and Are They for Today? B Y VA N L A L N G H A K T H A N G K H AW B U N G

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution By Carl R. Trueman

64 B A C K PA G E

Is Shakespeare Relevant Today? BY MICHAEL HORTON

REVIEWED BY TIMON CLINE

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Editorial Director Eric Landry Executive Editor Joshua Schendel Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Production Assistant Anna Heitmann Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative

Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org | modernreformation.org Subscription Information: US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $50. 3 YR $60. Digital Only 1 YR $25. US Student 1 YR $26. 2YR $40. Canada add $10 per year for postage. Foreign add $9 per year for postage.

LETTER from the EDITOR

early four-hundred feet inside a sandstone mountain on the far northerly Norwegian island of Spitsbergen lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Housing four-hundred-thousand seed samples, the purpose of the vault is to provide a storehouse of plant species in case of loss of agricultural biodiversity. Literature curricula have served similar purposes in history. One thinks, for instance, of the Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum (Institutes of Sacred and Secular Learning), written by Cassiodorus in the middle of the sixth century. It is often purported by historians to have been written to preserve Roman and Western learning through the so-called Dark Ages of the seventh and early eighth centuries. Reading the Institutiones, however, one gets the impression that Cassiodorus was not so much storing up a literary past to protect against the future loss of a culture. Rather, he saw literary treasures of the past as provisions for a pilgrimage—not a pilgrimage back to a culture that once was, but forward to the kingdom that has no end. It is from this perspective that we approach the topics of literature, tradition, and the Christian life in this issue. In our first feature, Karen Prior Swallow—research professor of English, Christianity, and Culture—traces the historical development of the novel in the early Modern period, arguing that for the Christian especially it is important to read good fiction well.

Sometimes enlightening, oftentimes puzzling, and very nearly always penetrating, the writings of esteemed poet, playwright, and literary and cultural critic T. S. Eliot are evidence of his vast engagements with the literary traditions of multiple cultures. Helping us with the task of Eliot interpretation, MR’s managing editor Patricia Anders contextualizes his life and poetry. Next, noted Eliot scholar David Huisman explains Eliot’s understanding of tradition and why it is important to restrain undiscerning iconoclasms. Our final feature weighs in on recent discussions of “the death of the novel.” Greg Peters, an avid reader of nineteenth-century Russian novelists, makes a case for the ongoing importance of reading theological novels that, perhaps somewhat uniquely, have the ability to form character while also entertaining with a great story. With these articles, we hope to have made a case for why literature remains important for all of life, especially the Christian life. We are also excited to begin this year with a new column titled “Reformation Resources.” After a brief introduction to the column, we are pleased to be able to bring to you for the first time in print a series of notes written by famed Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, “Reading, Thinking, Speaking,” and transcribed by Gregory Parker Jr. Consider this issue as one little seed packet to be placed in your personal storehouse—not so as to be able to recover a past culture amid our failing one, but to be well provisioned on our journey together through these fading cultures toward the City whose foundations cannot be shaken.

JOSHUA SCHENDEL exec utive editor

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

B I B L E ST U DY

PART ONE OF A FIVE-PART SERIES

The Boxing Match of Faith: Could You Be a Contender? by Allen C. Guelzo

y grandfather was a boxer. He was never good enough to be a professional, but he did a good deal of amateur boxing when he was a young man and always loved “the fights” (as he called boxing matches) throughout his long life. The biggest compliment he ever paid me was when we were walking past two hulking characters on a sidewalk and he said, “You and me—we could take them.” People of my vintage clearly remember the eloquent image of the boxer in the eponymous song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel:

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

In the clearing stands a boxer And a fighter by his trade And he carries the reminders Of every glove that laid him down Or cut him ’til he cried out In his anger and his shame “I am leaving, I am leaving” But the fighter still remains True, the world of boxing is about fighting and hitting and moving and knocking opponents down, and for that reason it has to sit uneasily beside the apostle Paul’s exhortation in

B I B L E ST U DY

Romans 12:18, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Yet among the other New Testament writers, there is someone who doesn’t hesitate to appeal to the image of the boxer. And that is Jude. We don’t often pay much attention to Jude, largely because Jude’s Epistle is one of the briefest in the New Testament—so brief, in fact, that the translators of the King James Version didn’t even bother to divide his Epistle into chapters for us. That’s not a very good excuse for ignoring him, however, because right at the beginning of his letter, Jude lays out an extraordinarily formidable claim to authority: Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who have been loved by God the Father and who have been secured for Jesus Christ: May mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. (vv. 1–2) This is not quite an autobiography, but there is more here than meets the eye. In Greek, the name is actually Judas. He is the brother of James—the same James who wrote the letter of that name in the New Testament. James is also the biological brother of Jesus himself, and one of the defenders of the decision to expand the preaching of the gospel from Palestine to the larger Gentile world (see Acts 15). This, then, makes Jude either a biological brother, or at least a stepbrother, of Jesus. The early church historian Eusebius of Caesarea noted that in the 90s (at the time of the persecution of Christians

under Emperor Domitian) “of the family of the Lord there were still living the grandchildren of Jude.” He is, in fact, the same Jude mentioned as one of four brothers of Jesus in Matthew 13:55 and in Mark 6:3. Since he is mentioned last among those brothers, he was also probably the youngest. There is an appealing hint of humility in this: Jude doesn’t simply barge in with the announcement that everyone must now listen to him because he is Jesus’ brother. Nevertheless, he is someone who really can speak with authority about Jesus, based on personal experience. That did not guarantee that he would be listened to with respect, then or now. We live in a culture suspicious of authority, since we have seen how much damage can be wrought by people preaching up a superior race, a superior class, or a superior investment opportunity. We tend to identify authority with absolutism, as though authority always involves authoritarianism. Our preeminent virtue today is tolerance—which is all well and good, except that tolerance is only a virtue when it springs from humility (from our awareness of our own personal shortcomings and failures), not when it is the product of indifference, passivity, or confusion. But before we bewail this as a special failing of our times, it’s worth remembering that authority was a novelty to the people of Jude’s day, too. In practical terms, nobody was more tolerant than the Romans, provided you paid your taxes and kept quiet. The Romans come down to us with a reputation as conquerors, which does not seem especially tolerant. But they were not

We live in a culture suspicious of authority, since we have seen how much damage can be wrought by people preaching up a superior race, a superior class, or a superior investment opportunity. 6

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

your usual conquerors. Instead of laying waste to their neighbors’ cities, peoples, and religions, the Romans absorbed them. The cities were expanded with Roman additions (amphitheaters, forums), the people were allowed to go their way undisturbed, and the Romans were at pains to show how the local gods and goddesses were really just local counterparts of the Roman gods and goddesses. By making everything relative, the Romans disarmed any incentive for resistance or troublemaking. The appearance of someone speaking with authority was precisely what the Romans wanted to avoid. So when Jude proposes to speak with the authority that comes from personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, he has a tremendous cultural disconnect to overcome with the people who are receiving his letter. And he does not concede one inch to it. Once he introduces himself (and lays the basis for speaking with authority), he comes directly to his point: Beloved, I am writing urgently to you about the salvation we share in common. I’ve found it necessary to ask you to contend strenuously for the faith which has been delivered to all of you as saints. (v. 3) This is blunt. It is a little like the Marine Corps drill instructor who strides into the barracks, bangs on a trash can to wake up the recruits, and tells them to turn out for PT: “You may have thought the Corps was about comfortable snoozes, but I’m telling you now that it’s time to get up and get out there on the deck and start working out!” The key word here is contend. In Greek, it’s epagonizesthai, and this is the only time it occurs in the New Testament, probably because it was so startling in its strength. (We can even recognize in that Greek word a bit that has passed into English usage—the word agony.) For the people reading Jude’s letter (or hearing it, since it was most likely read aloud to the people he addresses as beloved), it immediately conjured up the image of a wrestler or

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

What Jude then is directing his audience to do, straight from the first, is to get into the ring and box.

prizefighter, or even a gladiator fighting for his life in the public games. It meant straining every muscle until the veins popped out—and not just a fight, but a fight to the finish. Not just agonizesthai, but with the prefix epi, which heightens the stress of the fight. The classical biographer Plutarch used it to describe how Roman General Fabius Maximus defeated Carthaginian General Hannibal, “since he was contending with Hannibal like a clever athlete.” What Jude then is directing his audience to do, straight from the first, is to get into the ring and box. We often speak of a boxer being a “contender” (just as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront dreams that he “could have been a contender”). This is what Jude wants them to become—a contender. Unless you had a grandfather who was a boxer, all this is liable to make you shrink into your seat. We hear contend and immediately think of contentiousness, and that specter is never a pretty one to behold. To contend for the faith that has been delivered to all of you as saints makes

B I B L E ST U DY

You cannot hope to persuade others to become servants of Jesus Christ unless you have been first willing to become a servant yourself.

us fearful that we’re being told to buckle on the flamethrower and go hose down the non-saints with Holy Spirit fire. The odd thing is that this is never the way we behave when we talk about sports and want someone else to be the contender. Ensconced in our La-Z-Boys, we want those bunts beaten out, we want those over-the-wall catches, we want those Hail-Mary passes, as evidence that the players are really in earnest. And we howl in indignation when we suspect that someone is only trying half-heartedly. How then can we be a contender (in the sense of giving it our all as Christians) without being contentious? First, we can do this by knowing what the faith is. The worst way to contend for something is to fail to understand it. If you don’t know how to box, all you’ll be able to do is brawl. Curiously, it’s worth remembering that knowing is itself a form of struggle: it takes patience, humility, and time. Knowledge of what we believe as Christians may not demand the acquisition of a seminary degree, but it certainly requires spending quality time with our Bibles, with good books on the faith, and in conversation with wise Christians. That, to return to the image of the boxer, is the Christian’s roadwork. Second, we can do this by loving the faith for what it is: the message of salvation. I don’t

mean just acknowledging it or treating it as a historical framework, but really loving it as the best story that’s ever been written. Some people read Shakespeare or Jane Austen as though they couldn’t read anything else. But that should be exactly the spirit in which we contend for the faith: by loving the story. Third, we can do this by practicing it. Contending for the faith does not mean squaring off with someone else, as much as it may mean squaring off with ourselves—by taking ourselves to task for spiritual laxness, for doing what we shouldn’t have done and not doing what we should have, for not loving our neighbor as ourselves. Our greatest opponent in life is always ourselves (something any boxer will be the first to tell you). Proverbs warns us, “Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city” (16:32), because the most contentious people are the ones who exhibit the least self-control, who have contended the least with their own shortcomings. You cannot hope to persuade others to become servants of Jesus Christ unless you have been first willing to become a servant yourself, in just the same way that you cannot expect to become an athletic contender until you’re willing to undergo the training regimen your sport requires. Remember, in any sport the first lesson to be absorbed is that you are not the athlete you think you are. You might have been the star of the sandlot team in your neighborhood, but the first time you come into the hands of a real coach and a real fastball whizzes past your head, your confident smirk disappears and a genuine miracle occurs: you become ready to learn. You are not simply born a contender; you have to become one, with everything that worthwhile contending implies. And then it will be time to do the work of contending—which, as Jude will explain, is desperately in need of doing. ALLEN C. GUELZO (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit: What Are They and Are They for Today? by Van Lalnghakthang Khawbung

he doctrine of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is a Pauline emphasis in the New Testament—the major passages being 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, Ephesians 4, and Romans 12— but key passages are also found in Peter’s and Luke’s writings (1 Pet. 4:10; Acts 2). Much concern over this topic has been aroused in this century, largely because of the influential Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal movements. Therefore, the need for retrieving biblical truth is indispensable for biblical churches. In this column, I will first define the gifts of the Holy Spirit and discuss their purpose. Pentecost, in particular, is significant for understanding the

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

purpose of the gifts. Second, I will take up the question of whether the gifts are for today, engaging two basic camps on this issue: continuationism and cessationism. A spiritual gift, I will argue, is an ability given graciously by God for service. “God-given” reminds us that Christ and the Spirit are the givers of gifts, and “for service” reminds us that they are for serving the body of Christ. The New Testament provides a rich array of terms and passages to designate the variety of ways God’s 1 grace has been evidenced among his people. It includes such diverse gifts as eternal life (Rom. 6:23; cf. 5:15–16), the special privileges granted to Israel (Rom. 11:29, referring to Rom. 9:4–5),

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM

The New Testament picture of the gifts is that Christians are given gifts by God to aid them in performing the ministry and mission of Christ until Christ returns.

celibacy and marriage (1 Cor. 7:7), and deliverance from a deadly peril (2 Cor. 1:11). The term is clearly used to refer to gracious gifts from God in 1 Corinthians 12:4, Romans 12:6, 1 Timothy 4:14, 2 Timothy 1:6, and 1 Peter 4:10. Charles Ryrie suggests that “a spiritual gift is given to serve the body of Christ wherever and 2 however He may direct.” In Ephesians 4:11–13, Paul lists five equipping gifts (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers) before defining the purpose of these gifts: “To equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the fullness of Christ” (cf. 1 Cor. 14:12). By equipping Christians to serve, the church leadership helps Christians fulfill the biblical purpose of serving others according to their gifts (1 Pet. 4:10). In Romans 12:5, Paul proclaims that Christians form one body and each member belongs to all the others. He then informs his readers that Christians have different gifts, each of which allows the individual Christian to serve in different ways (Rom. 12:6–8; cf. 1 Cor. 12:7–11). In 1 Corinthians 12:7, Paul declares that these manifestations of the Spirit are given for the common good. This suggests that all spiritual gifts are given for mutual edification. In 1 Corinthians 12:27–31,

Paul relates the spiritual gifts possessed by each Christian to their function in the body of Christ. Through the distribution of spiritual gifts by the Holy Spirit to all members of the body of Christ, all believers are empowered so that they can contribute to the task of ministry to the church and evangelism to those outside the church in a special way. Gifts of insight and discernment prefigure the much greater discernment we will have when Christ returns. Gifts of knowledge and wisdom prefigure the much greater wisdom that will be ours when we “know as we are known” (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12). Gifts of healing give a foretaste of the perfect health that will be ours when Christ grants to us resurrection bodies. Similar parallels could be found with all the New Testament gifts. Even the diversity of gifts should lead to greater unity and interdependence in the church (see 1 Cor. 12:12–13, 24–25; Eph. 4:13), and this diversity in unity will itself be a foretaste of the unity that believers will 3 have in heaven. Therefore, the New Testament picture of the gifts is that Christians are given gifts by God to aid them in performing the ministry and

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

mission of Christ until Christ returns. No gifts are given for their personal benefits and enjoyment, but for the welfare and benefits of the other believers and for the evangelistic proclamation of the good news to unbelievers.

PENTECOST AND THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT We find the foundation of the spiritual gifts in Acts 2. This was in fulfillment of Christ’s promises while on earth. Christ had told disciples that they would receive the Holy Spirit by asking the Father (Luke 11:13). He had informed them that he himself would pray for the comforter, who would come to remain permanently in each and every one of them (John 14:16–17). On the evening of the day of his resurrection, a step further was taken when Jesus breathed on the disciples (John 20:22) and gave them the Holy Spirit to equip them according to the promise of Luke 11:13. The book of Acts reveals the progressive revelation aspect of the spiritual gifts, as it unfolds from prophecy to history, from promise to fulfillment. W. H. Griffith Thomas notes that “the prominence given to the day of Pentecost is to be expected because of the age-inaugurating 4 significance of the event.” Following Merrill F. Unger, let me quickly highlight Pentecost’s 5 significance. First, “Pentecost signifies the coming, the arrival, and the taking up of permanent residence of the Holy Spirit in the new people of God 6 on earth.” Jesus’ promise—“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever” (John 14:16)—has been fulfilled. Second, “Pentecost marks the giving, receiving, and depositing of the gift of the Spirit in the 7 new people of God on earth.” Pentecost was the foundation of the Holy Spirit’s gifts to believers. Therefore, how ridiculous to ask for the gift now, as if it had never been given, or attempt to receive it when it has been a permanent deposit of the people of God for many centuries, and its

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

contents and benefits have been made available to every believer since the day of Pentecost. Third, “Pentecost represents an unrepeated 8 and unrepeatable event.” Merrill writes that just as it is impossible to repeat events such as creation, Christ becoming incarnate and rising from the dead, or any other historical event, likewise what happened on the Day of 9 Pentecost cannot be repeated. This unique event took place at a specially designated time (the Jewish celebration of the early harvest) in fulfillment of a special Old Testament type (Lev. 23:15–22) in a specially designated place (Jerusalem) with a specially designated group (Acts 1:4) for a specific purpose

Pentecost was the foundation of the Holy Spirit's gifts to believers. Therefore, how ridiculous to ask for the gift now, as if it had never been given.

GLOBAL THEOLOGICAL FORUM

(1 Cor. 12:12–26). “Most important,” Merrill writes, “it was designated to introduce a new order, not to be the recurring feature of the new 10 order once it was introduced.”

ARE THE GIFTS FOR TODAY? TWO VIEWS AND FOUR QUESTIONS Having looked at the gifts in the New Testament (what they are and what they are for), we now come to the question of the gifts in our own time. Generally, there are two basic positions on this question: continuationism and cessationism. I’ll take each briefly and in order. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974, signed by Christian representatives from more than 150 nations, contains the following article concerning the Holy Spirit. Article 14. THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT Continuationists, claiming agreement with the Lausanne covenant, argue that the Spirit who gave gifts at Pentecost for the building of the church and the evangelism of the unreached gives the same gifts for the same purpose today. There are, of course, many different stripes of continuationists, and many particular debates—inter-continuationist debates— over particular gifts. But on the whole, continuationists are agreed that the same Spirit gives the same gifts for the same 11 purpose today as in the Apostolic age. On the other hand, the cessasionist argues that in particular the gifts of prophecy, miracles, and tongues ended with the apostolic age. This is not to say that they believe the Holy Spirit is no longer active. It is also not to say that they don’t believe in any gifts of the Spirit for today. The Spirit is active and still gives gifts to the church. But some of the gifts—prophecy, miracles, and tongues—have ceased and are no longer operative for us today. And so, for

example, we should not expect, pray, or wait for certain special revelation to continue. After observing both the views, I would like to close this column by posing a few questions that I hope will encourage you to do your own study and come to your own conclusions from the Scriptures: 1. If healing has ceased today, should we still be praying for physical healing? 2. If God is still delivering special revelation, should it not be given to the whole church? 3. If there is a message from God outside Scripture, is it less authoritative than the message we have in the Scripture? 4. Can we not experience the Spirit-filled life without special revelation? VAN LALNGHAKTHANG KHAWBUNG (PhD, International Institute of Church Management) is the general secretary of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Northeast India. Dr. Khawbung is a regular participant in WHI’s Global Theological Initiative. This essay was originally presented at the Global Theological Initiative consultation titled “Lord and Giver of Life: The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit,” held in India in February 2020.

1. See, for example, Ken Hemphill, Spiritual Gifts: Empowering the New Testament Church (Nashville: Broadman, 1988); Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 163–78; F. F. Bruce, ed., 1 and 2 Corinthians, New Century Bible (London: Oliphants, 1971), 116–17; James F. Stitzinger, “Spiritual Gifts: Definitions and Kinds,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 14, no. 2 (2003): 149–50. 2. Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 1986), 424. 3. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994). 4. Griffith quoted in Unger F. Merrill, The Baptism and Gifts of the Holy Spirit (Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 1974), 50. 5. Merrill, 60. 6. Merrill, 60. 7. Merrill, 61. 8. Merrill, 62. 9. See Merrill, 62. 10. Merrill, 62. 11. See “The Lausanne Covenant,” https://www.lausanne.org/content/ covenant/lausanne-covenant.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

Introducing the Reformation Resources Column by Joshua Schendel

omething is afoot today in the Protestant theological world. Thirty-five years ago in his JETS article, “Giving Direction to Theology: The Scholastic Dimension,” Richard Muller noted that much of Modern theology—and, I add, a good deal of evangelical theology—witnessed the rejection of what it considered to be an “outdated” traditional school theology (i.e., Scholasticism) for the purposes of answering new questions raised by advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The irony of this move, Muller argued, was that by doing so it had severed itself from the rich set of intellectual tools and carefully developed mode of thinking by which the new questions might have been more fully addressed. It turned out that these observations of Muller were not merely observations but something of a research program. Muller, of course, was not alone in the endeavor. He stood on the shoulders of historians, such as Heiko Oberman and David Steinmetz, and joined in the work overall by the likes of Robert Preus, Antonie Vos, Willem van Asselt, and a host of students. Their work has ushered in nothing short of a renaissance of Protestant Scholastic theology. Not only are studies of individuals, institutions, debates, and developments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries now numerous, but new digital technologies enable libraries to make their holdings more widely accessible than at any previous time. Resources such as the Post-Reformation Digital Library, Early English Books Online, Universität-und

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Google Books, and more are providing scholars and interested laypersons a wealth of material to enjoy. As a result, this has enabled multiple translation projects of key Protestant texts that had long been shut up in their original Latin (though that, too, is changing, as we are currently seeing a resurgence of theological students learning Latin). Whether this recovery of the riches of our Protestant theological heritage will remain a smallish movement confined largely to academic circles of confessional Protestants or continue to grow and contribute to generations of clergy and laypersons alike, who—to use J. I. Packer’s famous illustration—become the redwoods of our time and culture, I don’t know. But at Modern Reformation, the one thing we do know is that riches are riches. In its various iterations, the Protestant tradition has a depth to it that has not always been well recognized, even by its own adherents. For that reason, we are excited to contribute to the retrieval of that Protestant tradition with a new column, “Reformation Resources.” With this column, we will be publishing new findings from library holdings across Europe, English translations of original Latin works that have never been translated, as well as English works that have been out of print since the seventeenth or eighteenth century. With each issue, you can now look forward to a new publication of an old work. It is our hope that each of these will further your own understanding of the depth and breadth of our catholic, Protestant heritage.

R E F O R M AT I O N R E S O U R C E S

Reading, Thinking, Speaking by Herman Bavinck Transcribed by Greg Parker Jr.

The following piece was found written on a scrap of paper (dated March 6, 1906), on the back of a death announcement (dated July 22, 1908), and on a list of American cities (e.g., Hotel New York, 1 Asbury Park, Boston, Cambridge) and people (e.g., Longfellow and Emerson). It is possible that this writing dates to the late summer or fall of 1908 when Bavinck lived with his family at 62 Singel in Amsterdam, or his 1908 trip to America where he was introduced as â&#x20AC;&#x153;undoubtedly the foremost 2 living Calvinist theologian.â&#x20AC;? Additional essays in the archival file written in English suggest Bavinck wrote this in preparation for that trip. The italicized words below are found in Dutch in the archival piece but translated here for accessibility. The items in brackets are provided by the transcriber to furnish a smoother reading.

T 14

he Dutch poet [Isaac] Da Costa has said that the printing art has been a gigantic step to hell as [well as] to heaven. And no one who has

only a superficial knowledge of the bad press, the horrible misuses of [the] press, the demoralizing novels and plays, may doubt as to the truth of this expression. [The] press has to a large

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

degree corrupted our manners, customs, habits, our character, and moral and religious feelings. Her victims are thousands and thousands. She has cast down many wounded, yea, many strong men have been slain by her. Her home is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. But surely there is a reverse side. [The] printing press has also been a step to heaven. We owe to it the enormous spreading of the Bible, translated [into] 500 languages; we owe to it that Holy Scriptures and other pious, moral writings have found their way into nearly every home. Bible teaching has permeated our whole private domestic and social life, yea, also influenced our science and art. [The] printing art has democratized Christian religion, put the Bible in the hands of all people—not only of the clergy but also of the laity. She has popularized the good, the true, and the beautiful. She has broken down the high walls, which in the former centuries were erected between the different classes of humanity. [The] printing art has for a great deal opened the sources of knowledge for all men. Now, we all want the sources of knowledge, to know and to understand. We are not born with innate science and philosophy. As the apostle says, “We bring nothing into the world” (1 Tim. 6:7), neither in earthly treasures nor in spiritual. We must gather our treasures from without, out of the whole wide world of God’s creation. We are bound to the environment, just as feet to the ground and grain to the earth. So it is our duty to collect treasures for ourselves and our posterity: to read, to interpret, to understand, to make the whole earth our domain; to subject nature to spirit, matter to thought. And that is the duty of reading. To read is to collect, just as the poor men and women in Israel collected and grasped fallen corn ears. The whole [of] nature is a book, written by God’s hand, and the great and small creatures are letters and syllables and words and sentences. We must gather from everywhere— in the depths of the earth and in the heights of the heavens. We must make all thoughts of the Creator [in] possession of our brains, assimilate them, and stamp them to our own. Reading

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

It is our duty to collect treasures for ourselves and our posterity: to read, to interpret, to understand, to make the whole earth our domain; to subject nature to spirit, matter to thought.

well is better than copious reading books in the second place—[the] staff of Moses that devours 3 other staffs [Exod. 7:12]. But reading is not enough. Men are not machines without consciousness and will. One cannot make the thoughts of other men, of 4 nature, the thoughts of God our own without thinking [ourselves]. And so thinking is the second duty, and a duty much more difficult to fulfill than reading. Reading is tiring, enemies 5 of the flesh, troublesome, irksome. Reading is discovery. Reading is to go out ourselves and to travel the whole world around and to decipher the hieroglyphs of nature, of all being and becoming, of the manuscript of God and men; and in working thus to despise all difficulties, to surmount all heights, to trespass all barricades, and everywhere to go straight to the essence of things. But in this all we have to consider, to deliberate, to think. Thinking is to penetrate the heart and the soul, in the kernel and essence of all things, to assimilate them, to become like them. We cannot understand what we [are not]. A scientist and artist cannot reproduce what [they] learn and know without becoming what [they] intend to reproduce. A painter told Emerson that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree. He must enter into the inmost nature of the object

R E F O R M AT I O N R E S O U R C E S

of his painting, and so it is in all labor of mankind. To think is to descend in[to] the depths of nature, to penetrate into the heart of being. That is a difficult labor, a labor of the body, the brain, much more of the soul itself. It is a self-sacrifice, self-abandoning; it is (as Bacon says) to become a child and so to enter into the kingdom of knowledge. A truly learned man is a humble, modest man, a child. He does not command, he obeys; he does not speak, he listens; he listens to what the Spirit of God has to say to him by his revelation in nature and Scripture; he sits at the feet of nature as Paul was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel. We [are opposed] in our times to all authority and dogma and sentences of men; we try to be quite free and independent. But there still remains one authority we cannot dispense from. It is the authority of facts of nature and history. Whoever rejects this authority cannot know, just as he who refuses to eat and to drink cannot live. Thinking that is not to be as the spiders and the ants, but to do as the bees, which suckle honey out of the blossoming flowers. And so we get rich, fill our heart, brain, soul; we enrich ourselves with the treasures of God’s thoughts, we grow spiritually, we become full-grown men, free, independent, self-reasoning, self-acting; we become rich by the riches of God. But still, reading and thinking are not enough. To these two must be added speaking [who6 ever possesses something shows it]. Nobody is content with his riches, but [the one] who has something likes to talk about it. We have always the inclination to make other men take part in our sorrow and pain, in our pleasure and joy. Man is a social being. He cannot be alone. The prophet believed and therefore he spoke [Ps. 116:10]. There is a beautiful sentence in Revelation 22:4: the saints in heaven “shall see His face and his name shall be in their foreheads.” That means the [citizens] of the holy city shall receive revelation from God; they shall see his face, his perfections and virtues, his knowledge and wisdom, his righteousness and mercy; they shall see it super, fuller, better than ever here on earth in the mediums of nature and Scripture.

And so receiving God’s revelation, they cannot be silent; they become revealers themselves in their turn; God’s name shall be on their foreheads, [and he] shall shine in them and through them. God’s revelation makes us into revealers. And so it is in science and art. He who knows— truly, verily knows—cannot be silent; he must speak. What we have learned and heard, seen, handled—it becomes in us as a burning fire; it bubbles up as water of a spring: “out of our belly shall flow rivers of living water” [John 7:38]. And that generally spoken is speaking: to speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God [Acts 2:11]. [Not] the preacher alone but every man has to speak by word, by deed, by painting and sculpture and architecture, by books of science and works of traffic, agriculture, [and] cattle-rearing. These are all works of men, spoken by the revelation God has given them. And just as reading and thinking, so speaking—this utterance of men’s inmost thoughts—this self-revelation of man must be according to the rules of God’s will [and the] laws of nature. There is a law also for our speaking. Everyone has his own voice—angels, animals, men—they have their own voice, tune, mood. We have to speak the wonderful works of God, each in his own way. But the content is the same and the aim is the same. The content is the work, and the aim is the glory of God. GREG PARKER JR. is a PhD candidate in systematic theol-

ogy at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the co-editor and co-translator of Bavinck’s The Sacrifice of Praise (Hendrickson, 2019) and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion (Hendrickson, forthcoming 2023). He wishes to express thanks to the Advanced Theological Studies Fellowship at the Theological University of Kampen, during which time this transcription was completed. 1. This transcription can be found in folder 213 in the Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) archive at the Free University of Amsterdam, where Bavinck taught in addition to the Theological University of Kampen. 2. “Points about People,” The Courier-Journal (October 13, 1908), 5. 3. Dutch: “goed lezen beter dan veel lezen. Boeken in de 2° plaats. Staf v. Mozes die andere staven verslinden.” 4. Dutch: “van natuur.” 5. Dutch: “nemesis des vleschen.” 6. The original sentence read, “Who something possess, this is to show.”

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

CORE CHRISTIANITY BIBLE STUDIES. A G R O W I N G L I B R A RY O F B I B L E S T U D I E S . Are you looking for an easy-to-use study that will take you deep into the word of God? Our Bible studies are perfect for individual use, small groups, Sunday school, and community outreach. Both four-week and ten-week studies are available. Leaderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s editions are available for all our studies, making it easier for you to start a group study. Go to the Core Christianity website to get a Bible study to answer the big questions about God, this world, and your life in it.

C O R E C H R I S T I A N I T Y. C O M / S T U D I E S

STAY CONNECTED BETWEEN ISSUES. Sign up for our e-newsletter and receive Modern Reformation extrasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a weekly roundup of our best web-exclusive articles, a weekend reader, and highlights from our print edition.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG/MREXTRA

V O L . 3 0 | N O.1

FEATURES

SERIOUS STUDENTS OF THEOLOGY OUGHT TO READ THEOLOGICAL NOVELS. . . . PERHAPS MORE IMPORTANTLY, GIVEN THAT THEOLOGICAL NOVELS ARE EXACTLY THAT— THEOLOGICAL—THEY SHOULD BE READ BY ALL CHRISTIANS.”

THE PLACE OF IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

“AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE, WHAT FORGIVENESS?” T. S. ELIOT’S SEARCH FOR SALVATION

T. S. ELIOT ON TRADITION, ORTHODOXY, AND ANCIENT CHEESE

IMAGINATION, FORMATION, AND THE THEOLOGICAL NOVEL

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

THE

I N AT I G V A

P L AC E

L I T E R AT U R E IN THE

CHRIST IAN LIFE PAGE 20

BY K A R E N SWA L LOW P R I O R I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T E P H E N C R O T T S

e have more leisure time today than in any period in history. We also have more options for spending that leisure time. For most people (unless you are an English professor, like me), reading fiction is easily seen as purely a leisure activity. And for many, watching sports, streaming movies, or scrolling Twitter seem like more relaxing, less demanding ways to fill non-working hours. Adding the reading of fiction to already overscheduled and overthinking lives can seem frivolous in a world of hurry, need, and stress. Even the Christian who is an avid reader can be tempted to view time spent on imaginative literature as taking away from more important material such as Scripture, theology, and history. Yet, fictionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and here I will be talking primarily of literary fictionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has much to offer the Christian. Reading fiction is a pleasure to be enjoyed for its own sake, of course. Like all fine pleasures, quality fiction is an acquired taste that is developed through exposure, intentionality, and practice. But fiction can be enjoyed even

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

more within the understanding that all good stories reflect the ways of our Creator and the world he created. Good stories always, in some way, even if obliquely, reflect the pattern of the biblical narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Notably, the rise of modern fiction, particularly the novel form that arose in the early eighteenth century, is deeply tied to the Protestant Reformation. Some developments coming out of the Reformation emphasized subjective experience over and against tradition (including the authority of the Roman Church). These developments gave rise to the experiential and experimental spirits that birthed the Enlightenment and cultivated skepticism toward institutional religion and institutionalized authorities. Following excessive abuses of authority, a spirit of testing emerged—not only the testing associated with the scientific method, but also that associated with the perseverance required of the individual soul during the trials of sanctification offered by the earthly journey. Amid this transition from the premodern age to the modern age, a sharper distinction also began to emerge between nonfiction and fiction. In an era in which new scientific methods were ferreting out old superstitions, early Protestants—the Puritans in particular—understandably became suspicious of fiction, viewing it as at best, a waste of time and at worst, a lie. Human creativity is irrepressible, however, and in their zeal against fiction, the Puritans cultivated other forms of imaginative literature that have had an immense influence on literary and cultural history. Their contributions include Christian epic (John Milton), allegory (John Bunyan), journalism (Daniel Defoe), captivity narrative (Mary Rowlandson), and spiritual autobiography (John Bunyan, along with many others). However, in one of literary history’s great ironies, these writers and the genres they developed contributed to the rise of the novel, the genre that gave voice to the modern individual, a newly autonomous self responsible for undergoing his own spiritual birth and for finding his own meaning and place in the world.

Both science and the novel center on the subjectivity of our experience within the created order. In his account of the origins of the novel (in a book titled The Decline of the Novel), Joseph Bottum explains, The novel came into being to present the Protestant story of the individual soul as it strove to understand its salvation and achieve its sanctification, illustrated by the parallel journey of the new-style characters, with their well-furnished interiors as they wandered through their adventures in the 1 exterior world. The parallel rise of science and the novel might seem counterintuitive. These are, after all, fields that have in more modern times been set against one another. But it was not and need not be so. In a 2019 talk given at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Norwegian fiction writer Karl Ove Knausgaard noted the connection between these two seemingly opposed ways of knowing: “Science and literature alike are readers of the world. And, sooner or later, both lead us to the

GOOD STORIES ALWAYS, IN SOME WAY, EVEN IF OBLIQUELY, REFLECT THE PATTERN OF THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: CREATION, FALL, REDEMPTION, AND RESTORATION. VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins.”2 While Knausgaard does not say it, I will: the “unintelligible” is a way of gesturing toward God. The new centrality of the individual that was at the heart of certain developments of the Protestant Reformation manifested in countless world-changing ways. For example, the doctrine of sola scriptura necessitated not only the availability of the Bible to individuals (which the printing press made possible) but also the ability to read. The spread of literacy and printed material spurred by the Reformation not only made reading possible for more people, but it also cultivated a robust spirit of interpretation—one that contrasted dramatically with the mediating interpretation of the priests. Fiction, ultimately, is the outward expression of the inward experience of an ordinary individual making sense of (reading and interpreting) the world and his or her place in it for him or herself. The novel, as a long form of fiction written by and about ordinary people in everyday prose, embodies all these emphases of the Reformation. The novel protests the tyranny of institutional and traditional authority. Notably, the word novel also means “new.” The novel truly was a new form, telling new stories (rather than retelling old stories of myth and legend) for a new era, and was understood to be such at the time. Thus the modern novel developed as an expression of a sense of personal agency never before known in human history. Yet, the Reformation and the imaginative literature it spawned merely advanced a trajectory set in motion by God himself according to his original plan for human beings as creatures of language and story. In a 1970 interview (published in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion and Media), the famous communication theorist Marshall McLuhan offered a keen insight into the connection between the time and place of Christ’s incarnation and the centrality of private identity to Christian belief: I don’t think it was accidental that Christianity began in the Greco-Roman culture. I don’t think that Christ would

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

have suffered under Genghis Khan with the same meaning as under Pontius Pilate. The Greeks had invented a medium, the phonetic alphabet, which, as Eric Havelock explains in his book Preface to Plato, made it possible for men to have for the first time in history a sense of private identity. A sense of private substantial identity—a self—is to this day utterly unknown to tribal societies. Christianity was introduced into a matrix of culture in which the individual had enormous significance: this is not char3 acteristic of other world cultures. First with the alphabet and later the printing press, the ancient stories and tales retold orally in communal settings around the fire were eventually replaced by printed works, composed and read by individuals. Parallels can be drawn here to certain Protestant developments that understood the Christian life as the inner, individual journey of salvation and sanctification in contrast to the communal sense of salvation taught by the Catholic Church. Of course, most of history, including literary history, is a pendulum swing from one extreme followed by another. The sharp national decline 4 in reading fiction reported over the past decade is, in some ways, seventeenth-century history repeating itself. We may have less noble reasons than the Puritans had for disdaining novels and short stories, but the obstacles likely owe, similarly, more to cultural climate and pressures than to personal intention. We would do well to heed the lament of Sven Birkerts in his introduction to the 2006 edition of The Gutenberg Elegies (originally published in 1994): The triumph of the digital seems also to have brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power 5 of inwardness? Certainly, modern life makes the distinction between fact and fiction both desirable and

necessary (the phenomenon of “fake news” being perhaps the best evidence of this). Yet, there is wisdom in the words commonly attributed to Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Perhaps reading more fiction can equip us to better distinguish fact from lie because good stories told well attune us to the ring of truth. Good stories can attune us to truth in two ways. First, literature primes us for truth simply by using the medium of language. Only through language do we think abstractly, affirm what is true, and deny what is false. The more fluent we are with language, the better able we are to understand and detect its uses, abuses, and distortions, and to make truth-claims. This is the reason George Orwell depicted the totalitarian regime in his novel 1984 as seizing control of the people by vastly reducing the words in the language. The fewer words we have, the fewer distinctions we can make. Consider, for example, the vast psychological, sociological, theological, and emotional harm done in the simple fact that English uses the word love for so many different meanings. Language—the medium of all literature, including the Bible—in and of itself illuminates and magnifies the image of God in us. Because human beings are made in the image of the one who is the Word and who spoke the world into existence through his word, cultivating our understanding of the gift of language illuminates the one whose image we bear. This is evidenced by the first assignment God gave Adam in the garden: naming the animals. Through language human beings identify, interpret, and name, thereby glorifying God by reflecting his image in us. As Boris Pasternak expresses it in Doctor Zhivago, we are “here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchant6 ment and to call each thing by its right name.” Furthermore, the “acts of naming” by literary writers and “our acts of reading cannot but conjure the possibilities of transcendence,” argues theologian Graham Ward in explaining how lit7 erature by its very nature “resists secularity.” Literary language—the artfully arranged words found in poetry, drama, creative nonfiction,

and fiction—uses language in a more condensed way than everyday language. It thus cultivates skill in using and understanding all language. Regular reading of the dense language of poetry, for example, increases facility with ordinary language in the same way that running occasional sprints helps to improve the performance of a long-distance runner. If the written word were topography, literary language would form an undulating landscape of mountains, forests, and valleys. To traverse it regularly would render the smooth, flat ground of more utilitarian prose into an effortless stroll. Likewise, literary fiction differs from commercial fiction in using the medium of language not merely to entertain, but to recreate artistically a human experience, in much the same way as a painter uses paint not simply to offer a replica, but a recreation of its subject. No one goes to a museum to see what a bowl of fruit looks like. We go to museums to see how a talented artist uses paint, color, light, canvas, and brush to show us something about a bowl of fruit that we likely wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Unlike a painting, which is revealed in space, a narrative is revealed in time and unfolds one word at a time. Second, by taking the form of narrative, fiction practices—and allows the reader to practice—the narrative mode by which we process all our thoughts and experiences, enriching and deepening the same analytical and interpretive skills we use in everyday real life. Narrative— story—is the mode through which we process all our experiences. Every day, all day long, we interpret our own actions, the actions of others, events, our perceptions, and our very place in the world narratively: That was so nice of her. I shouldn’t have done that. I need to call Mom tonight. I’m so glad I ran into him. This was a stressful day. Maybe we can just order pizza tonight. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Even such small narratives as these provide practice in identifying cause and effect, selecting and omitting details, interpreting meaning, and coming to a conclusion—processes upon which all stories are based. The gospel, too, takes the form of a narrative: Jesus Christ was born, was crucified for our sin,

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

THE GOSPEL STORY IS BOTH GOOD AND TRUE—THE BEST AND TRUEST STORY EVER TOLD. EVERY OTHER GOOD STORY THAT REVEALS TRUTH DOES SO ONLY BECAUSE OF THE LOGOS AT THE CENTER OF THE GOSPEL.

rose again, lives now in heaven, and will return one day to establish a new heaven and earth. Notably, the word gospel was an Old English word that combined the words good and spell. We use the word spell today (as then) in a variety of ways: as a verb meaning to recount or to recite letter by letter; or as a noun to refer to an incantation, retelling, or story. Thus in Old English, “gospel” simply meant “good story.” Of course, some stories are factual (“He pulled right out in front of me, officer!”), and some are derived from human imagination (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . ”). Both kinds of stories—fact and fiction, true and false—can be good, or they can be bad. The gospel story is both good and true—the best and truest story ever told. Every other good story that reveals truth does so only because of the logos at the center of the gospel.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

The short etymological history above calls attention to the distinction we now make between true stories and imaginative ones. Indeed, the modern English word gospel is usually translated (from Latin through Greek) as “good news,” in part to emphasize the true nature of the message. But news stories take a form opposite that of fictional ones that reveal themselves through the progression of narrative. News stories use an inverted pyramid, with the most essential facts at the top (who, what, where, when), with additional details added on as advertising space allows (and cut by editors as it does not). But because fiction reveals its meaning and significance one word at a time, the reader’s perspective is enlarged and altered as the story unfolds. In fact, the way a story is narrated is, especially in the case of literary fiction, more important than the events narrated. This is why a Wikipedia or Spark Notes summary of a work of literature can never recreate the experience of reading the actual work. When we read an imaginative work, we enter the mind and perspective of the fictional narrator and experience the unfolding of the story through the eyes of another. This is true whether the point of view is that of a third-person objective narrator or firstperson limited narrator—or any combination of these. To read Vladimir Nabokov, for example, is to enter deeply into the narrow perspective of the odd criminals and misfits who populate his novels. In contrast, to read Charles Dickens is to experience the varied, refracted voices of a multitude of perspectives packed into one lessthan-unified narrative voice. When readers engage in what the English Romantic poet and critic Samuel T. Coleridge (who, by the end of his life, had become an orthodox believer) called the “willing suspension of disbelief,” we allow ourselves to enter into the world of a story as it unfolds. Even so, we do not entirely leave the world of reality and judgment. Indeed, understanding good fiction depends on our ability to both understand the perspective of the narrator and judge the narrator’s unavoidable biases, misperceptions, and errors as they also unfold.

Emily Ediger, a classic literature lover I know, illustrated this idea when she posted a comment on her Instagram account about her experience of reading the nineteenth-century fictional saga Middlemarch by George Eliot for the first time: The book follows multiple characters in the town of Middlemarch as they go through day to day life and face decisions and difficulties concerning love/marriage, wealth, status, and work. I thought it was so interesting to see how each character developed and reacted to moral dilemmas. As the reader, I felt the tension of wanting them to do what would seemingly make them happy and wanting them to do what was right. As this response demonstrates, good stories require us both to enter the mind of the one narrating and, paradoxically, to stand outside and judge the teller’s perspective against reality. Not all narrators are reliable, and every narrator is fallible. Indeed, the good storyteller depends on the reader’s ability to judge well in order to interpret the story’s meaning. Reading a story well is practice for our real lives where understanding does not always mean agreement. (Nor, unfortunately, does agreement always mean understanding.) Our experience of attending to a narrator is, in some ways, akin to listening to a friend, or perhaps even a stranger, share a story, experience, or problem. We pay attention. We seek to understand. We have compassion. We weigh. We consider. We evaluate (even if we don’t voice our conclusion). In other words, we receive a person and her story, much in the same way that C. S. Lewis says in An Experiment in Criticism that we should receive art rather than use it: “‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does 8 not add to it.” The stories others share with us shape and enlarge our understanding of the world and ourselves forever. In employing both narrative and the artistry of language, literary fiction surely demands something of us that much other forms of

reading and entertainment do not. Among these are patience, attention, and time. So much of what we read today—whether on social media, in newspapers, or emails—cultivates the habit of skimming quickly in order to gain the most necessary information that we have forgotten (if we ever even knew) how to read good works well. Like anything else, reading well takes practice. It also takes a conscientious effort simply to slow down in order to pay attention not only to what happens but to how what happens is told. In the same speech cited above, Knausgaard addresses the “slowness” of literature, which he calls “one of literature’s most important characteristics.” By slowness, Knausgaard does not merely mean the length of time it can take to read a literary work (although that aspect should certainly figure in). He explains, I’m not thinking of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to us—and, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently. . . . Literature works slowly not just 9 in history but also in the individual reader. Reading literary fiction requires slowness and attentiveness, and in turn gives those gifts back to us by deepening those habits and abilities in us. A great deal has been written over the past several years about what researchers across a range of disciplines call the “attention economy.” Within a consumerist, throw-away culture driven by digital media, our attention is one of the most valuable commodities there is. In addition to those things in our lives we have created and instituted that rightly demand our time and attention—families, church, work, communities—we are inundated daily at every literal and figurative turn with invitations and temptations to click, post, like, share, and buy at the mere flick of a finger. We can use settings, apps, and controls to try to limit the attention

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

we give in these mediums. But the fact that we need such tricks and strategies suggests that we have already lost the game. In a 2013 essay in the London Review of Books, writer Rebecca Solnit observed,

be gained through immersion in literary language—although useful to anyone whose task is rightly handling Scripture—is not the main reason preachers should read literature. Rather, Plantinga says,

Nearly everyone I know feels that some quality of concentration they once possessed has been destroyed. Reading books has become hard; the mind keeps wanting to shift from whatever it is paying attention to to pay attention to something else. A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It’s an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out 10 or getting behind.

The preacher wants his heart stirred because he will then have some idea how the power and the beauty of the gospel might be presented so that the hearts of his brothers 12 and sisters may also be moved.

Books—which have been around now in the form of printed pages bound in such a way that they can be held in our hands for half a millennium—can train and deepen our attentions with delightful simplicity and power. There may be nothing more countercultural than a book (unless it is a people of the Book). Indeed, Sven Birkerts declares that “for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.” Indeed, he writes, “As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an ele11 giac exercise.” It is also a life-giving exercise. Literature cultivates within attentive readers the virtues that oppose the vices propagated by social media feeds, hot takes, and Instagram’s disappearing “stories” (what a misnomer, if ever there was one!). In contrast to these, literary fiction replicates the process described in Psalm 119:130, which says, “The unfolding of your word gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” The slowness of a good story well read and well told imitates the unfolding of the truest and best story ever told, one that continues to be told in our time. In making his case for pastors to read literary works as part of their vocation, Cornelius Plantinga argues that the eloquence that can

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Not just preachers, but all Christian believers need to have some idea how the power and beauty of the gospel story might be presented— not only to others, but also to ourselves. KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR (PhD, SUNY Buffalo) is research professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012), Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014), and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Relevant, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Religion News Service, Books and Culture, and other places.

1. Joseph Bottum, The Decline of the Novel (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019), 11–12. 2. Karl Ove Knausgaard, “The Slowness of Literature and the Shadow of Knowledge,” The New Yorker (November 6, 2019). 3. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion and Media (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 80. 4. See, for example, the 2018 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts and the 2018 American Time Use Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 5. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), xiv. 6. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (London: Wm. Collins & Sons, 1958), 75. 7. Graham Ward, “How Literature Resists Secularity,” Literature and Theology 24, no. 1 (March 2010), 73–88. 8. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88. 9. Knausgaard. 10. Rebecca Solnit, “In the Day of the Postman,” London Review of Books 35, no. 16 (August 29, 2013). 11. Birkerts, 6. 12. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 6.

“A F T E R

WL EDG O N E W H AT

SUCH

FO R G I V E N E S S ? ”

T. S. EL IOT'S SEARCH

FOR

S A LVAT I O N

PAGE 28

B Y PAT R I C I A A N D E R S I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T E P H E N C R O T T S

ut of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice.1

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 2 A little life with dried tubers.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, the last of seven children in a transplanted Bostonian/English immigrant 3 family. Among his esteemed ancestors were a missionary preacher, a Harvard University president, and the founder/chancellor of Washington University. His father was a prosperous brick-maker. His mother, a poet and deeply religious, raised him to practice self-denial to the point that he felt guilty for enjoying any pleasure, harmless as it may be, for the rest of his life. Suffering from a congenital

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

hernia, young Tom turned his attention to his books instead of social sports and games. From the beginning, Eliot was painfully aware of his own sinfulness and the need for atonement. Yet it would take him years of battling the angst, skepticism, and disillusionment prevalent in the early twentieth century to find the peace that had eluded him. O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint. If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it? Time for you and time for me, And yet time for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, 4 Before the taking of a toast and tea.

ALL THAT REMAINED WAS A “HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES” FOR THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE WAR, WHO WERE LEFT TO PICK UP THE SHATTERED FRAGMENTS OF WHAT WAS THOUGHT AS UNBREAKABLE.

Eliot attended Harvard, completing his bachelor’s degree in 1909 and his master’s in English literature in 1910. In 1911, he visited London, Munich, and Italy, finishing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady.” After a year at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Eliot returned to Harvard as a philosophy graduate student, completing his PhD coursework and beginning his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley. In 1914, he attended Marburg University in Germany. And then the Great War began. The world as Eliot knew it was about to be shattered. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only 5 A heap of broken images

Forced out of Germany, Eliot moved to England and continued his doctoral studies at Merton College, Oxford University. In 1915, quiet Tom Eliot married flamboyant Vivienne HaighWood, who refused to travel across the war zone of the Atlantic to meet his family, creating a gulf

between them as wide as the ocean itself. She became his “muse,” and he published several key poems during this time. After he settled permanently in England, news reached him that his friend Jean Verdenal had been killed at the Dardanelles. By the end of the war, ten million would be dead and millions more traumatically affected. The philosophy, religion, and art of the nineteenth century—with its triumphalism and near glorification of European high culture—were trampled in the mud and blood of frontline trenches. All that remained was a

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

“heap of broken images” for those who survived the war, who were left to pick up the shattered fragments of what was thought as unbreakable. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

In the midst of life, we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour? A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many […]. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 7 “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

Eliot successfully submitted his doctoral thesis to Harvard, but his voyage back to Boston was cancelled at the last minute. Taking this as “a sign,” he never returned to give his oral defense. Leaving his doctorate uncompleted (although he would be awarded many honorary doctorates), he turned to lecturing. Short on money, newlyweds Tom and Vivienne moved in with philosopher Bertrand Russell. While living under the same roof, Russell had an affair with Vivienne who, always nervous and suffering from ill health, is said to have become increasingly unstable and hysterical. Russell wrote, “She is a person who lives on a knife’s edge, and will end as a criminal or a saint; I don’t know which yet.” Eliot, however, continued to be devoted to his wife. For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared. I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him: and in his word is my trust. “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?”

In 1917, due to financial necessity, Eliot began work in London at Lloyd’s Bank and became an assistant editor of The Egoist, while continuing to lecture. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published his Poems 1919 and became friends with the Eliots. In 1918, Eliot tried unsuccessfully

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

(due to his hernia) to enlist in the US armed forces. To add to his sorrows, his father maintained his disapproval of Tom’s literary career, his move to England, and even his marriage to Vivienne; and upon the elder Eliot’s death in 1919, they remained estranged. What little part of the estate the will awarded to Tom was put into a trust that reverted back to the estate after Tom’s death. In essence, his father left him nothing. The war ended, but a sickness of soul pervaded the hearts and minds of all who survived. In 1920–21, Eliot published more poems, began working on “The Waste Land,” and launched a new literary review, The Criterion—all while continuing to work at the bank. Vivienne grew worse. Following the physical war without and the ongoing war of disillusionment and skepticism within, searching but not yet able to recognize the risen Christ on his own road to Emmaus, Tom Eliot was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you

Per doctor’s orders, Eliot retreated to the seaside town of Margate—though, against doctor’s orders, Vivienne accompanied him. Not finding the rest he needed, Tom left Vivienne at a sanatorium in Paris and traveled on to Lausanne, Switzerland. With the help of fellow poet Ezra Pound, Eliot managed to finish “The Waste Land,” and with this poem became a predominant voice of the postwar “lost” generation. O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy. “On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. […]

Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest

In 1925, Eliot joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), publishing “The Hollow Men”—inspired by Joseph Conrad’s psychological novel of depraved humanity, Heart of Darkness. Eliot accepted the doctrine of original sin (the truth of which had become painfully clear to him), but he still stumbled at the conclusion of the prayer that would cost him “not less than everything.” Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Christ have mercy. Christe eleison. Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper

Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Christ have mercy. Christe eleison. After searching and struggling all his life, Eliot finally surrendered to the “peace which passeth all understanding.” In 1927 (at the age of thirty-nine), he became a Christian and was baptized at the parish church in Finstock, a village near Oxford. Soon afterward, he became a British citizen and “Journey of the Magi” was published. Virginia Woolf would later write to her sister, albeit tonguein-cheek: “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. . . . [He] believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.”

ELIOT ACCEPTED THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN . . . BUT HE STILL STUMBLED AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE PRAYER THAT WOULD COST HIM “NOT LESS THAN EVERYTHING.” VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

And with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins. This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and Death, But had thought they were different.

“Ash Wednesday,” the public proclamation of his Christianity, was published in 1930, followed two years later with the first edition of Selected Essays. He returned to the United States to lecture and, unable to bear the relationship any longer, separated from Vivienne. She died in 1947 in a mental asylum; he remarried ten years later. Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.

Westminster Abbey. The one who had survived “the waste land” of his own pain and questioning among the vast suffering of humanity, searching for that living water out of the rock, found forgiveness “after such knowledge” and died at peace with the God who had “plucked him out,” with the hope of “blooming” into life everlasting. I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light. Light invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great 8 glory!

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. PATRICIA ANDERS (BA, University of Southern California; MA and MFA, Chapman University) is the editorial director of Hendrickson Publishers and managing editor of Modern Reformation. This article is an abbreviated version from the March/April 2004 issue of the magazine.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us And I pray that I may forget […] Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. […] Our peace in His will […] Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.

Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. After a lifetime of poetry, critical essays, and plays, T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Between 1949 and 1959, he finished his career with Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and three more plays. He died in 1965 at the age of seventy-seven and was memorialized in the Poets’ Corner of

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

1. Liturgical excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer (1662 and 1789). 2. “The Waste Land.” All poetry extracts taken from T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962). 3. Biographical and historical research in John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage Books, 2000); T. S. Matthew, Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); and Burton Raffel, T. S. Eliot (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982). 4. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” 5. “The Waste Land.” 6. “Gerontion.” 7. “The Waste Land” (cited here and in the next three poetry extracts). 8. “The Hollow Men.” 9. “Journey of the Magi.” 10. “Ash Wednesday.” 11. “The Rock.”

T. S. ELIOT

T I D IO A

N ,

ORT HODOX Y, AND

ANCIENT CHEESE PAGE 34

BY DAV I D H U I S M A N I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T E P H E N C R O T T S

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know. 1 ―“Tradition and the Individual Talent” “How can they whip cheese?” ―Death of a Salesman2

peaking at a conference on “T. S. Eliot and the Literary Tradition” in Eliot’s centenary year (1988), the eminent critic Hugh Kenner discussed at some length A. L. Maycock’s Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, regretting the fact that it was long 3 out of print. Little Gidding, the site of a small Anglican religious community founded by Ferrar in 1620 as an experiment in the devotional life, was visited by poets George Herbert and Richard Crashaw, and on three occasions by King Charles, the last alone at night after the Royalist defeat at Nasby. It became the site of spiritual pilgrimage and so continues today. Eliot visited in 1936 and made it

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

the locale of his last major poem, the fourth of Four Quartets. After Kenner’s lecture, I was pleased to inform him that the book had 4 recently been reprinted. Tongue-in-cheek, he ventured that Eliot’s interest in Little Gidding was likely stimulated by its proximity to Stilton, the market town of one of his favorite English cheeses. Seemingly irreverent—in view of the community’s renown for fostering devout religious observance and prayer, and Eliot’s interest in its role in English history and religious tradition— Kenner’s jest was actually more in keeping with the conference theme than it might first seem. There “where prayer has been valid,” and where “on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel 5 / History is now and England,” Little Gidding represented for Eliot in literary and religious terms what England’s “Ancient Cheeses” (as he referred to them in a letter to the Times) 6 represented in the cultural life of society. In a letter to another paper, he said that Canadian Trappist monks, makers of a Port Salut, “like their cheese, are the product of ‘a settled civilisation of long standing,’” but he feared that 7 “there is little demand for either.”

A LIVING TRADITION In Eliot’s view, literary traditions can suffer the same fate as the culturing of cheeses, and effort may be needed to revive them. But whereas in the case of the latter, “nothing less is required than the formation of a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses,” as he drolly wrote to the Times, revival of traditional literature—especially of poetry—will take a critical reappraisal of the concept of tradition itself. His opening manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), set forth his idea of what a viable literary tradition consists of. It would also prove to be an apologia for the kind of poetry he was writing: poetry that shocked readers in its apparent defiance of every rule of poetic tradition, yet that—once the dust began to settle (a process not yet completed in the century since “The Waste Land” appeared in 1922)—was

found to be rooted in that tradition, and in its method a protracted exercise in reviving it. First, however, he cleared the ground of alltoo-common misuses of the word, according to which “traditional” is either a term of censure of a poet’s work or at best “vaguely approbative, with the implication . . . of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction.” (Little has changed: in a recent syndicated crossword, “Traditional” was the clue for “Old School.”) Indeed, Eliot insists, If the only form of tradition, of handing down [Latin trādere, “to hand over”], consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. (3–4) Awareness of a living tradition, he argues, is not evident in the poets of the generation prior to the Great War, whose “pleasing anthology pieces” were often sentimental, escapist, and static because unconnected to the poet’s greatest 8 resource, the main current of European poetry. This tradition, he insists, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” It can be acquired only in a library by anyone aspiring to be a poet into adulthood. It involves what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” the perception of the existing monuments of literature as “an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. . . . [It is a] conformity between the old and the new.” This sense is not for the timid: it “compels” the poet, the individual talent, to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a 9 simultaneous order. Consciousness of the presence of the past— “not of what is dead, but of what is already

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST— “NOT OF WHAT IS DEAD, BUT OF WHAT IS ALREADY LIVING”—IS WHAT MAKES A WRITER TRADITIONAL.

living” (11)—is what makes a writer traditional. Its corollary is the awareness that new works must be judged in relation to the standard exemplified in works of past writers, a measurement of the new by the old and vice-versa—not of better or worse, for “art never improves,” but of what “conforms,” what belongs, and what does not. Willie Loman—the forlorn salesman of a past for whom and for which, he discovers, the present has little demand—senses that the whipped cheese his wife bought does not conform, that it portends the passing not only of the cheese he had naively assumed was a permanent product of a “settled civilisation” but (more ominously) of that civilization itself. The analogy of poet

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

and peasant—for Willie is an urban hand-tomouth peasant—wears thin at this point, for he is a consumer, not a maker of the cheese whose imminent demise he foresees, whereas a poet (Greek “maker”) is the creator of poems. Yet both function as discerning critics in their respective traditions; whether as creators or consumers, they employ the historical sense in the task of evaluation. “Criticism,” Eliot says in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), “must always profess an end in view, . . . the elucidation of works of art 10 and the correction of taste.” The tools available to poet-critic and critical reader are the same: comparison and contrast, and “a very highly developed sense of fact,” a qualification that develops slowly and whose “complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilisation” (19). Eliot’s early criticism put these tools to work revolutionizing the literary scene and giving rise to what developed, particularly in America, into the “New Criticism,” a school whose founding was credited to him, somewhat to his embarrassment. His practice of the aesthetic criticism he first advocated is best illustrated in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), in which he addressed “the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it pri11 marily as poetry and not another thing.” Thus his insistence that when we read, we first of all bring to bear a discerning grasp of the poetry of the living past—the “existing monuments”—and the “sense of fact” that pays close attention to the text, elucidating rather than interpreting it as a document of the author’s personality and biography, as his contemporary readers and critics tended to do. An illustration of Eliot’s critical method applied to the culinary rather than the literary arts is found in his evaluation of an actual cheese. Kenner relates in whimsical detail an occasion when the poet-critic ordered Stilton for a dinner guest at the Garrick Club, prefacing the account with his admonition on the use of critical tools, written about the same time as the “Tradition” essay:

(“Analysis and comparison, methodically, with sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion, and infinite knowledge: all these are necessary to the great critic.”) With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. . . . He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot 12 recommend it.” The Stilton conformed to tradition but proved the victim of time, as all farm products may. Poems too may suffer from uncritical reading or neglect, but, unlike spoiled foods, they can be rescued by reading such as Eliot urged. Some will be seen in new relations to the existing monuments; some unknown works will be welcomed as belonging. As with poems, so with cheese: “There cannot be too many kinds of cheese”—his letters mention eighteen—“and variety is as important with cheese as with anything else. . . . [P]art of the reason for living is 13 the discovery of new cheeses.”

AN EXTRA-HUMAN MEASURE Eliot’s argument thus far is largely an aesthetic one. In “The Function of Criticism,” he says that the literature of the world, of Europe, of a country, is not to be seen as “a collection of the writings of individuals, but as ‘organic wholes,’ as systems in relation to which . . . individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance. There is accordingly something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself” if he aspires to new creation. Literary tradition, we have seen, 14 stands as the “something outside.” But in this essay, he introduces a new note. In a disputation with his lifelong literaryreligious antagonist and friend John Middleton Murr y on the subject of Classicism and

Romanticism, Eliot responds to Murry’s attack on the former and upon the religion Eliot was then in the course of embracing. “Catholicism,” Murry says in derogation, “stands for the principle of unquestioned authority outside the individual; that is also the principle of Classicism in literature,” a description in which Eliot concurs. But writers, Murry goes on, “inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend upon the inner voice. . . . The man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God” (15–16). Eliot no doubt heard in Murry’s profession of faith in the “inner voice” an echo of the Unitarianism in which he had been raised— “outside the Christian Fold,” as he put it—and from which he had drifted away, first toward Buddhism, then toward Anglo-Catholicism. Declaring himself deaf to the inner voice, Eliot says that those who support Classicism “believe that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves,” something “which may provisionally be called truth” (15, 22). He later wrote, The issue is really between those who . . . make man the measure of all things, and those who would find an extra-human measure. There are those who find this measure in a revealed religion, and those who . . . look for it without pretending to 15 have found it. THE COMPLICATION OF BELIEF Paramount among the literary monuments for which Eliot early developed deep admiration was the poetry of Dante, a devotion that raised the thorny question of the poet’s religious and philosophical beliefs. While Dante emerged for him as “the most universal of poets in the modern languages,” his reading of the Divine Comedy with a translation while he was a Harvard undergraduate was prominent among the influences leading him toward Christianity. Having begun by assigning “the whole of the

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

literature of Europe from Homer” onward as required reading for poet, critic, and discerning reader, in “Dante” (1929) he wrestled with the fact that what Dante meant to him was not only a matter of aesthetics, important though that was. For the medieval philosophy Dante believed and made use of—particularly that of Aquinas—struck him as the truth, and Beatrice’s statement, “la sua voluntade è nostra pace” (“in his will is our peace,” Par. 3.85), seemed to him to be “literally true.” Acknowledging that his appreciation of Dante was enhanced by his sharing the beliefs of the poet, he also attempted (by invoking Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief”) to affirm the nonbeliever’s ability to understand and appreciate it too: My point is that you cannot afford to ignore Dante’s philosophical and theological beliefs . . . but that on the other hand you are not called upon to believe them yourself. . . . For there is a difference . . . between philosophical belief and poetical assent. . . . If you can read poetry as poetry, you will “believe” in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that 16 is, you suspend both belief and disbelief. The problem with this approach to the question of belief is that it resembles I. A. Richards’s psychological theory of value, which holds that— unlike science, whose statements are matters of truth or error—poetry consists of “pseudostatements” and that questions of its truth or falsity are irrelevant, its sole purpose being the efficient organization of our conflicting interests by means of “provisional acceptances.” Eliot rejected Richards’s claim that in “The Waste Land” he effected “a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs,” and pilloried his claim that the poetry of pseudo-statements is, as Matthew Arnold before him had hoped, “capable of saving us.” This, Eliot maintained, is tantamount to saying that “the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled.” Yet, wary as he was of Richards’s “poetry of unbelief,” according to which “the difference between Good and Evil becomes . . . only

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

the ‘difference between free and wasteful organization,’” 17 he insisted that “if you deny the theory that full poetic appreciation is possible without belief in what the poet believed, you deny the existence of ‘poetry’ as well as ‘criticism.’” Pushed to their extremes, he admits, both this theory and the contradictory view that “full understanding must identify itself with belief” are heretical. “Orthodoxy can only be found in such contradictions, though it must be remembered that a pair of contradictions may both be false, and that not all pairs of contradic18 tions make up a truth.”

ORTHODOXY AND A DUAL THEORY OF VALUE The general concept of orthodoxy Eliot advanced in “Dante” to come to grips with what he called “the complication of belief” was not invented for the purpose; in fact, it had been evolving in his thinking since he studied under Irving Babbitt at Harvard. Babbitt proposed a unipolar model of adherence to a central truth, centripetal movement toward which constitutes orthodoxy, and centrifugal movement from which is heresy. In Eliot’s model, truth is elliptical, having two poles with plausible but contradictory ideas, propositions, or allegiances held in necessary tension. Either of them taken too far becomes heretical. Thus, for example, Classicism and Romanticism may coexist, each checking the other’s tendencies to excess in a productive balance. But far from being Eliot’s invention, the model is one of ancient theological standing. In its church councils, Western Christianity dealt with heresies concerning the natures of Christ, affirming that he is both God and man, with a divine nature and a human nature, each distinct yet unified. This affirmation has constituted christological orthodoxy for centuries and surely underlies Eliot’s concept, which he employed in various contexts in addition to literary criticism—religion, history, politics, and social theory. Broadly speaking, we might say that for Eliot, “orthodoxy” was a neutral term

for the formal structure of thought about any topic; “tradition”—secular, religious, or in some combination—his term for substantive content under scrutiny. Gradually, his thinking about tradition was modified by this structure. Under the influence of his friend Paul Elmer More’s insistence on a moral critique of literature, and in reaction to Richards’s purely psychological theory of value, Eliot began to see that a strictly aesthetic model of tradition was potentially heretical, and that it must be balanced by a moral theory of value, one which in his mind must be rooted in 19 sound theology. In a climate of secularism, the aesthetic model, pushed as far as Arnold and Richards had, results in a substitute for religion, a religion of art. On the other hand, a moral theory severed from traditional literary norms, in an age also characterized by a retreat from theology, results in pietistical religious moralism that scorns innovation, is scandalized by exploration of the dark side of human experience, and condemns whatever does not conform to conventional morality, making a travesty of literary taste. In the lectures published as After Strange Gods (1934), he used the bipolar criterion of orthodoxy in approbation of the creedal theology (and of the church espousing it) that held to the mystery of the dual natures of Christ—this in the face of liberalism’s abandonment of it. In the words of William Palmer, a conservative theologian Eliot quotes, liberals “were eager to eliminate from the Prayer-book the belief in the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Atonement, the worship of Christ.” They would, he said, “reduce the Articles [of Religion] to a deistic formulary. . . . Christianity, as it had existed for eighteen centuries, was unrepresented in 20 this turmoil.” For resisting liberal heresy, conservative theology merits Eliot’s designation of “orthodox”; and although this antithesis undergirds his critique of modern literature, he cautions that confusion will occur if terms like “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are taken to be synonymous in all fields of discourse: “You cannot treat on the same footing the mainte21 nance of religious and literary principles.”

ELIOT BEGAN TO SEE THAT A STRICTLY AESTHETIC MODEL OF TRADITION WAS POTENTIALLY HERETICAL, AND THAT IT MUST BE BALANCED BY A MORAL THEORY OF VALUE, ONE WHICH IN HIS MIND MUST BE ROOTED IN SOUND THEOLOGY.

Eliot’s model of orthodoxy requires that discourses be kept distinct in order that there might be a relationship between them. Blurring the distinction results, among other heresies, in the religion of art championed by Arnold and Richards.

READING IN AN AGE OF SECULARIZATION Implicit in the doctrines Palmer censured liberalism for abolishing is that of the fall, to modernity’s repudiation of which Eliot traces the superficiality of modern literature, in that

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in fiction today . . . tend to become less and less real. It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions . . . that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle . . . you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. (45–46) Eliot cites D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” as evidence of an “alarming strain of cruelty in modern literature,” and finds in the relations of his characters an absence of any moral or social sense. . . . [T]he characters themselves, who are supposed to be recognisably human beings, betray no respect for, or even awareness of, moral obligations, and seem to be unfurnished with even the most commonplace kind of conscience. (39–40) Finding Lawrence “an almost perfect example of the heretic,” he offers James Joyce’s story “The Dead” as exemplifying “orthodoxy of sensibility and . . . the sense of tradition” in its portrayal of the human qualities suppressed by Lawrence (40–41). At the end of After Strange Gods, Eliot cites the dangers for writers and readers of modern literature, among them the thirst for novelty: In an age of unsettled beliefs and enfeebled tradition the man of letters, the poet, and the novelist, are in a situation dangerous for themselves and for their readers. . . . Tradition by itself is not enough; it must be perpetually criticised and brought up to date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy. . . . Where there is no external test of the validity of a writer’s work, we fail to distinguish between the truth of his view of life and the personality which makes it plausible; so that in our reading, we may be simply yielding ourselves to one seductive personality after another. (67–68)

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Holding literary works to critical standards—“an extra-human measure”— “might help to render them safer and more profitable for us” by mitigating the enticements of novelty and personality. “Religion and Literature” (1935) begins where After Strange Gods ended, with an even more emphatic statement of Eliot’s convictions on the reader’s need of solid religious criteria: Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical 22 and theological standards. He hastens to add that only literary criteria can determine the genuineness and greatness of literature, be it religious or secular. But in an age dominated by secularization, when Christianity is regarded as “an anachronism,” we must bring to bear a dual critique of what we read. This secularization is most evident in the novel, which, because we cannot help but be influenced by the author’s attitude toward the behavior of his characters, is of special concern: “The author . . . is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings . . . and we are affected . . . whether we intend to be or not” (348). Lest we fall captive to any author, we must use critical tools of comparison and contrast in our “wide and increasingly discriminating reading” (349). This is especially true of what we call reading for pleasure, because it can have “the easiest and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists . . . requires to be scrutinized most closely,” because, although some prominent individual writers can be beneficial, “contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading.” The reader at home among the monuments of tradition, exposed to “the influence of diverse and contradictory personalities,” is immune

to seductions of literary fashion, whereas the reader who knows only the literature of the present is “hopelessly exposed to the influence of his own time” (350–52). Eliot concludes “Religion and Literature” by challenging readers to take responsibility for what they read and how they respond: It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like. . . . What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested. . . . We shall certainly continue to read the best of its kind, of what our time provides; but we must tirelessly criticize it according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press. (353–54) “What we ought to like.” Eliot’s phrase may prompt an unintended echo, “What we ought not to like,” and perhaps the specter of censorship. But Eliot was a vigorous opponent of any official censorship and defended the publication of works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As for knowing what we ought and ought not to like, he would no doubt suggest a nutritional analogy: some foods are simply better for one’s health and longevity than others, and more delectable, as those who enjoy them know from experience—not only one’s own, but also that of one’s forebears, handed down in the cuisine of a settled culture. No food guru’s crash diet will do; no magic-bullet cure but leads the perplexed astray. To us as readers, Eliot offers no checklist, no CliffsNotes on tradition and orthodoxy. What he would require of us is the labor of encountering the tradition one monument at a time, a labor that becomes its own reward as we acquire a taste for literary greatness. The goal

THE READER AT HOME AMONG THE MONUMENTS OF TRADITION . . . IS IMMUNE TO SEDUCTIONS OF LITERARY FASHION, WHEREAS THE READER WHO KNOWS ONLY THE LITERATURE OF THE PRESENT IS “HOPELESSLY EXPOSED TO THE INFLUENCE OF HIS OWN TIME.”

is not vast erudition but the ongoing education of our taste. Also, as Christians, we must keep our theological powder dry, ready for employment in assessing the moral qualities of what we read. A lifelong reading list—from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to James Joyce—is a moral engagement commensurate with the other dimensions of our spiritual lives. These precepts attest to the importance Eliot attaches to our reading and the discipline required for beneficial encounters with modern literature.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

“ALL SHALL BE WELL” The rhetorical tone of Eliot’s argument summarized here is necessarily rather solemn. In his search for a critical standpoint adequate to the literary and cultural crisis of modernity, he may seem to have paid little attention to the enjoyment provided by the best of our time and of other times. But we should recall that, having once defined poetry as “a superior amusement,” Eliot typically emphasized the pleasures of reading in his analyses of particular works, an aspect of his criticism beyond the scope of this essay. Our focus has been on his decades-long pursuit of a theory that claims for modern literature a place among the ideal order of existing monuments and provides both critics and readers a basis for “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” The pursuit was necessitated by what he (and other postwar writers) saw as the decay of a civilization that rejected its traditions—the decay at which Willy Loman, in his humble but perceptive way, took alarm upon discovering the ersatz whipped cheese. When Eliot lamented the possible demise of the great

1. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 6. Hereafter, pages from this essay will be noted in parentheses. 2. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949; repr., New York: Bantam, 1951), 14. 3. Hugh Kenner, “T. S. Eliot and the Voices of History” (paper presented at the T. S. Eliot and the Literary Tradition Conference, Miami University, Oxford, OH, May 26, 1988; part of the paper was also presented at the T. S. Eliot Centennial Conference, Orono, ME, August 1988, and is published in T. S. Eliot: Man and Poet, ed. Laura Cowan, vol. 1 [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1990], 71–81).

English cheeses, it was because, as a poet and reader of poetry, he saw them as symbolic of threatened cultural and artistic traditions that must be defended if the pleasures they afford are to survive. Having had the good fortune to “partake” (Eliot’s word) of such cheeses—including a Stilton in prime condition—at an Eliot exhibit at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, I can say there is reason for hope. Having joined other pilgrims for worship in the Ferrars’ secluded chapel, I believe as did Eliot when despite the terrors of the Blitz encountered on his nightly fire patrol, he ended “Little Gidding” with words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. All shall be well and 23 All manner of thing shall be well. DAVID HUISMAN (PhD, University of Michigan) is professor emeritus of English at Grand Valley State University. He served as secretary of the T. S. Eliot Society and has presented his slide show “‘If You Came this Way’: Landscapes of the Heart in Four Quartets” at Eliot conferences and at Little Gidding. His current project is an examination of a neglected passage in “The Waste Land.”

repr., London: Methuen, 1928), viii. 12. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press), 440–41. The Eliot passage is from “Criticism in England,” Athenaeum (London), June 13, 1919, 456–57. 13. T. S. Eliot to J. D. Aylward, December 18, 1935, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, vol. 7: 1934–1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 868. 14. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 12–13. 15. T. S. Eliot, “Mr. Read and Mr. Fernandez,” Criterion 4 (October 1926): 755. 16. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Essays, 219.

4. A. L. Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (1938; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1980).

17. T. S. Eliot, “Literature, Science, and Dogma,” Dial 52 (March 1927): 243, 241.

5. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909– 1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 139, 144–45.

18. Eliot, “Dante,” 230.

7. T. S. Eliot, “Cheese,” The New Statesman and Nation (London), December 21, 1935, 997.

19. Eliot, “Literature, Science, and Dogma,” 241. On the influence of More, see David Huisman, “‘A Long Journey Afoot’: The Pilgrimages toward Orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More,” in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. Benjamin G. Lockerd (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 251–64.

8. T. S. Eliot, “Critical Note,” in The Collected Poems of Harold Monro, ed. Aledia Monro (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1933), xiii–xvi.

20. William Palmer, in T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 22–23.

9. Eliot, “Tradition,” 4–5.

21. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 28.

6. T. S. Eliot, “Stilton Cheese,” Times (London), November 29, 1935, 15.

10. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” in Selected Essays, 13.

22. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Essays, 343.

11. T. S. Eliot, “Preface to the 1928 Edition,” in The Sacred Wood (1920;

23. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 145.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

A T IO M R

I M AG I N AT I O N ,

AND

THE

THEOLOGICAL N OV E L PAGE 44

BY GREG PETERS I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T E P H E N C R O T T S

heology seems to have a rather bad reputation these days. By the late Middle Ages, she was the “queen of the sciences,” but today she is no longer the queen. In fact, theology is no longer even in the royal family but a kind of awkward stepsister to subjective personal opinion and a third cousin once removed from off-the-cuff social media posts. I do not doubt that many pastors today have heard a parishioner say, “Why do we need to let all of this theology get in the way? We must reach the lost, feed the poor, and be missional.” It does not matter, to this sort of person, that it is precisely the discipline and practice of theology that gives these very practices not only a framework but also a justification as godly endeavors. Doing is more important than thinking to this person, so theology is nothing more than a heady waste of time that gets in the way of really making a difference in people’s lives. This way of thinking has become so common as to be satirized in clergy conversations. But it is even more unfortunate that this mentality

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

has taken hold in those very same clergy circles. Theology was a subject in seminary, not something to be pursued throughout the duration of one’s ministry. I once heard a pastor boast that he had not changed one iota of his theology since seminary. My guess is that he had not read a theology book since seminary either, which is why he had not changed his theology one jot. What he perceived as laudable sounded lamentable to me. Theology is somewhat passé these days or, at best, tolerated, in that it is given due lip service but quietly (and quickly) pushed aside in favor of more pragmatic concerns.

THE “THEOLOGICAL NOVEL” But theology is not the only thing that is out of fashion; so is the “theological novel.” Sure, there are plenty of contemporary novels that deal with theological themes. In fact, if one understands “theology” to be the “queen of the sciences” and therefore the telos to which everything points, then one could argue that everything is, in some sense, theological; thus every novel is theological in its own way. In 2012, evangelical theologian Roger Olsen blogged that many modern novels contain “religious-theological themes,” especially the theme of “God and the problem of evil.” But even Olsen admits that these “are not books 1 of high theology.” This is unfortunate, given that novels used to be “books of high theology.” Of course, not all novels were such, but many were, including many of the world’s classics. Most novels today are written to be consumed and then passed along to the next consumer. You read them on an airplane, but they do not find a home on your bookshelf so you can return to their theological themes again and again. A quick glance at the best-selling fiction books of the past decade demonstrate that there is a fairly weak religious-theological element to modern novels. But this was not always the case. In fact, I would be so bold as to claim that between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the theological novel would have been a sufficient source for studying theology

for the layperson and many pastors. That is to say, if a person read the right novels, they would receive a robust theological formation. Although the novel did not replace Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions or John Calvin’s Institutes, it did entertain while offering a robust theological education. In a world devoid of television, computers, and all forms of electronic entertainment, novels were historically a primary means of amusement. Telling stories was a common form of group recreation in the early modern/modern era. For example, in 1816—famously, “The Year without Summer” due to major volcanic activity—Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851) and her soon-to-be-husband, Percy Shelley, were traveling around Europe. Forced inside by the rain one day, the two of them, along with three other friends (including the poet Lord Byron), spent the day reading a book of ghost stories. Lord Byron then suggested that each of them should attempt to write their own horror stories. Though it took her two years, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, itself a theologically rich novel. An example even more to the point comes from the pen of George Eliot (i.e., Mary Ann Evans; 1819–80) in her Scenes of Clerical Life. In the third part, “Janet’s Repentance,” we meet the newly installed minister Reverend Edgar Tryan. Though unpopular with some members of his flock, Tryan has supporters nonetheless. One supporter, Miss Pratt, a widowed “old maid” owned about five hundred books and was judged “competent . . . to conduct a conversation on any topic whatever.” In possession of a booklist made by Tryan, Miss Pratt’s judgment regarding this list supports the contention above that novels can both entertain and educate theologically: Upon my word . . . it is a most admirable selection of works for popular reading. . . . I do not know whether, if the task had been confided to me, I could have made a selection combining in a higher degree religious instruction and edification, with a due admixture of the purer species of 2 amusement.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

Notice that it is taken for granted by Tryan that his parishioners will read for pleasure, so the books on this list will amuse but also instruct and edify. Of course, this is likely how Eliot thought of her own novel: that it would both entertain and educate, since it too plumbs the depths of human depravity while exploring the nature of God’s redemptive activity.

writings. What is surprising, however, is the depth of these theological themes and their rootedness in the historical Christian tradition. Former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says about Dostoevsky what is true of both authors:

He describes how before he even learned to read, his imagination was fired by events from the lives of the saints, providing models of asceticism, compassion, suffering, humility and self-sacrifice, based on 4 the example of Christ.

Terrorism, child abuse, absent fathers and the fragmentation of the family, the secularization and sexualization of culture, the future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature of national identity—so many of the anxieties that we think of as being quintessentially features of the early twenty-first century are pretty well omnipresent in the work of Dostoevsky, his letters, his journalism, and above all his fiction. The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other—the question standing behind all these critical contemporary issues—is left painfully and shockingly open, and there seems no obvious place to stand from where we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we—characters and readers— saw the world in another light, the light 6 provided by faith.

At the Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky’s classmates called him the “monk Fotii” due to his deep piety. Tolstoy’s religious commitments evolved in his lifetime. Although he was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church, he remained committed to a theology of love founded on Jesus’ Great Commandment (cf. 5 Matt. 22:35–40) for the rest of his life. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were influenced by the religious commitments of the Slavophilia movement, which was centered, in particular, on the lay theologian Aleksei Khomiakov (d. 1860). Given these religious commitments, it is not terribly surprising that both authors incorporated overt religious themes in their

One obvious example from Dostoevsky is the figure of the monk Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Malcolm Jones concludes that Dostoevsky “wished The Brothers Karamazov to serve as a vehicle for the vindi7 cation of the Orthodox faith,” with Zosima and his “Testament” in Book 6 intended to refute the views of the infamous “The Grand Inquisitor” section in Book 5, which is the most excerpted section of the novel. With this section’s important, fundamental role in the theological message of the novel, Dostoevsky makes Zosima’s “Testament” an indispensable theological treatise. It is the theological response to Ivan Karamazov’s attempt to undermine and dismantle the Christian faith.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY AND LEO TOLSTOY: EXAMPLES OF THEOLOGICAL NOVELISTS But perhaps the most obvious examples of this kind of novel come from the pens of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) and Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910). Both of these writers were deeply religious. Dostoevsky was always a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian, even if his 3 “Christianity was profoundly idiosyncratic.” In his Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky says that he came from a pious family and knew the Gospels from earliest childhood. Malcolm Jones explains that in Dostoevsky’s 1877 diary,

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Importantly, it is in this section of the novel that Dostoevsky’s choice of John 12:24 as the epigraph of the novel is illuminated: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” In one place he quotes the latter half of this verse to the monk Alyosha Karamazov, followed by the words, “You will go forth from these [monastery] walls, but you will sojourn in the 8 world like a monk.” In this instance Alyosha the monk is the grain of wheat that will fall to the ground and die; that is, his monastic vocation in the monastery will “die” so that his monastic vocation in the world can thrive. It appears that he will do more good outside the monastery than he can do inside the cloister. Later, also in Book 6, we learn that Zosima was once visited by a “mysterious” man who confessed to the elder that he had, in the past, killed a woman but the murder was pinned on another man, who subsequently died in prison. The actual killer was now living a successful life but tormented by his sinful actions. Zosima’s advice was to is to “go and tell,” for in doing so the guilty man would fall to the ground and die but then bring forth much fruit. The theological message here is about dying to self so that others may live. It is overtly christological—in imitation of Christ. Everyone must die in order to bring forth good. At the heart of “The Grand Inquisitor” section is the contention of the fictitious Roman Catholic inquisitor that humans, particularly Christians, do not want freedom, “For nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom” (252). The inquisitor says that Jesus’ main mistake during his temptation by Satan in the wilderness (cf. Matt. 4:1–11) was that he did not take the bread offered him by Satan. Jesus rejected it, says the inquisitor, because he did not want to deprive humans of free choice. But humans themselves do not want this freedom, for they would rather be fed than be free and starve: “No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but

in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: ‘Better that you enslave, but feed us.’” And they will say this, he continues, because they “will finally understand that freedom and earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together.” And in surrendering their freedom for bread they will look upon those who feed them “as gods, because we, standing at their head, have agreed to suffer freedom and to rule over them” (253). The inquisitor continues to drive the point home by referencing freedom no less than twenty times in this section. The solution, says the inquisitor, is that the church (in this case, the Roman Catholic Church) has stepped in and told its adherents what to do and it puts to death, literally, those who do not want to surrender their freedom. In fact, Jesus himself is on trial in the fictional account of the inquisitor. By doing this, the inquisitor insists, the church “corrected your deed” (257), though she has done so by being in league with Satan! This is the theology/philosophy that Father Zosima’s “Testament” and teachings are meant to correct. Dostoevsky lays out before his reader a deep and troubling theological knot that puts the very existence of Jesus Christ as God in jeopardy alongside the corruptibility of the church. For many readers, this theologically rich and probing section would not only prove to be challenging to read, but its existential consequences are a matter of life and death from a soteriological standpoint. Yet Dostoevsky’s response to the inquisitor is no less challenging. Simply put, as

ALYOSHA THE MONK IS THE GRAIN OF WHEAT THAT WILL FALL TO THE GROUND AND DIE. VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

a monk, Father Zosima has a reputation for holiness, thus highlighting his unusual command to Alyosha to leave the monastery and become a monk in the world, for it is highly unusual for a presumed saint to discourage one’s monastic vocation. This advice is further called into question upon Zosima’s death. Oftentimes, in the Orthodox Christian tradition, one’s holiness is attested to postmortem by the absence of decay and the smell of rotting flesh. Zosima “the saint” (351), however, stunk: “little by little, but more and more noticeably, an odor of corruption had begun to issue from the coffin, which . . . was all too clearly evident and kept gradually increasing” (330). This led those present to start asking, “Why is he considered so holy?” Before long, “the gradual repetition of that one question finally generated a whole abyss of the most insatiable spite” (331). For Alyosha, this “putrid odor” (359) led to existential angst. Should he stay in the monastery or heed the words of a man whose whole monastic life and perceived holiness are now called into question? Alyosha’s decision proves the inquisitor wrong in that Alyosha does exactly what Zosima told him to do: he leaves the monastery in spite of the “putrid odor” and problematic advice of his elder. Alyosha exercises his own freedom despite the fact that the “odds” were not in his favor, if you will. Dostoevsky depicts this christologically, again in line with the novel’s epigraph from John 12:24, as a death and resurrection: [Alyosha] fell to the earth a weak youth [i.e., death] and rose up a fighter [i.e., life from death], steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. . . . Three days later [i.e., as in Jesus’ own resurrection on the third day] he left the monastery, which was also in accordance with the words of his late elder, who had bidden him to ‘sojourn in the world.’” (363) Not only did Dostoevsky tackle a difficult theological topic, but he also provided a deeply

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

sophisticated theological response. He took the “riddle” of human free will and divine sovereignty, which are usually pitted against each other, and joined them into one act of humandivine agency (à la Jesus, who is both human and divine) that defeats Ivan’s (and the Grand Inquisitor’s) greatest challenge to the Christian faith. Hence, the highly deserved appellation “theological novel.” Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy was deeply theological, especially in Anna Karenina. A recurring theme in the novel is death: not just Anna’s but also Nikolai, Konstantin Levin’s brother. At one moment, as Nikolai struggles for breath, Levin lies awake listening to him. Tolstoy tells us that Levin’s “thoughts were most varied, but the end 9 of all his thoughts was one: death.” In rapid succession, Tolstoy drives the point home: Death, the inevitable end of everything, presented itself to him for the first time with irresistible force. And this death . . . was not at all as far off as it had seemed to him before. . . . And what this inevitable death was, he not only did not know, he not only had never thought of it, but he could not and dared not think of it. “I work, I want to do something, and I’ve forgotten that everything will end, that there is—death.” He was sitting on his bed in the dark, crouching, hugging his knees and thinking, holding his breath from the strain of it. But the more he strained to think, the clearer it became to him that it was undoubtedly so, that he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one small circumstance—that death would come and everything would end. . . . [Levin] had just partly clarified the question of how to live, when he was presented with a new, insoluble problem—death. (348–49; my italics) This experience, however, did not defeat Levin; rather it steeled his resolve: “Levin said what he had really been thinking lately. He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere.

But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live life to the end, until death came” (352). This, though, does not bring an end to all of Levin’s questions and anxiety concerning death. Near the end of the novel, Tolstoy returns to Levin and the question of death, reminding the reader that it was Nikolai’s death that caused Levin to look at questions of life and death in the first place (785). Now married to Kitty, Levin is expecting his first child but is rattled by Kitty’s difficult delivery. Shaken by the experience of his brother, Levin is convinced that Kitty will die and, at times, Kitty believes the same: “I’ll die, I’ll die!” This exclamation from his suffering wife is too much for Levin: Levin clutched his head and ran out of the room. . . . [H]e knew that all was now lost. Leaning his head against the doorpost, he stood in the next room and heard a shrieking and howling such as he had never heard before, and he knew that these cries were coming from what had once been Kitty. He had long ceased wishing for the child. He now hated this child. He did not even wish for her to live now; he only wished for an end to this terrible suffering. (715) Distraught, Levin no longer thinks of Kitty as Kitty; her otherworldly howling and shrieking has made her someone, something else. In despair, he no longer wishes for his child and would have welcomed Kitty’s death as a deliverance from her pain and torment. Needless to say, Levin was no longer thinking Christianly about death, which is not to be feared but viewed as a victory because of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross (1 Cor. 15). Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy is working within a theological framework that is overtly christological. Kitty’s suffering ends with the birth of a happy and healthy son, but Levin’s suffering, inasmuch as it relates to death, continues. Tolstoy keeps death before his reader’s eyes by placing Anna’s suicide between Kitty’s delivery and Levin’s own near-death experience. In other words, the novel’s tension vis-à-vis death

and its exploration of death is heightened in the last one hundred pages, culminating in Levin’s salvific choice of life over death. Ostensibly, Levin is a happily married man with a healthy son. He and Kitty are living in the country where Levin puts together his ideas on estate management and maintenance. If there was a nineteenth-century Russian equivalent of the “American dream,” Levin appeared to be living it. But his ongoing melancholy suggests otherwise. Kitty concludes that the root of Levin’s torment is his unbelief (784); that is, Levin’s problem is a theological one. Levin, too, comes to see that this is true. Two passages in particular are pertinent: One thing he [Levin] had discovered since he began to concern himself with these questions was that he had been mistaken in supposing . . . that religion had outlived its day and no longer existed. (786–87) Besides that, while his wife was giving birth an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying he had believed. But that moment had passed. (787) Though he is not “there” yet, if you will, Levin was clearly undergoing a change, a process of conversion and/or faith formation. In the past, Levin sought answers to his religious questions in philosophers “who gave a nonmaterialistic explanation of life” (787), such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel. But these men could not provide answers to all of Levin’s deep theological questions. So he then turns to contemporary theology, especially the theological works of Alexei Khomiakov. These theological works fail to fully convert Levin; in fact, “this edifice fell to dust just as the philosophical edifices had done” (788). Levin’s “tormenting untruth” (789) is that death inevitability makes life meaningless. Such meaninglessness leads Levin to the brink, à la Anna, of suicide:

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

Happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself. But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living. (789) He, however, continued to fear suicide (791). Levin’s ultimate conversion is, in the end, a religious one in that he comes to listen to his soul over reason, discerning thereby that to “live [is] not for one’s own needs but for God,” and not to live for self “but for something incomprehensible, for God” (795). Levin learns this from observing and talking with Fyodor the muzhik, one of the “poor in spirit” (cf. Matt. 5:3). Perhaps it is proper to say that Levin’s conversion was based less on revealed religion and more on the natural religion evident in the world around him. True, this says a lot about Tolstoy’s own unique beliefs, but it is undeniable that this is overtly and profoundly theological. Thus Anna Karenina easily fits into the “theological novel” genre.

CONCLUSION Though there are many more examples of authors who “specialize,” if you will, in writing theological novels (e.g., Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien), Dostoevsky and Tolstoy suffice, I think, to prove the point that theological novels can both amuse and theologically educate. I believe it was the late Eugene Peterson who once said that pastors ought to always be reading, not only the Bible and theological texts, but also great works of fiction. Similarly, Cornelius Plantinga, former president of Calvin Theological Seminary, published a book in 2013 titled Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists. In this book, he recommends a robust diet of theological fiction, including the likes of Shūsaku Endō (Silence), Ron Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy),

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

and Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner). I would suggest that not only preachers read such works but all Christians serious about theological formation. There is no substitute for reading and studying Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica or Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, but serious students of theology ought to read theological novels as well. Perhaps more importantly, given that theological novels are exactly that—theological—they should be read by all Christians. If Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399) is correct and everyone who prays is a theologian (cf. Chapters on Prayer §61), then all Christians as pray-ers are theologians who should actively strive to grow in their theological knowledge and formation. What better way to do that, at least partially, than through the entertainment of theological novels? GREG PETERS (PhD, University of St. Michael's College) is professor of medieval and spiritual theology in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University and the Servants of Christ Research Professor of Monastic Studies and Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Monkhood of All Believers: The Monastic Foundation of Christian Spirituality and The Story of Monasticism: Retrieving an Ancient Tradition for Contemporary Spirituality. He is also rector of Anglican Church of the Epiphany in La Mirada, California. 1. Roger Olsen, “Some Good Novels That Include Theological Themes,” My Evangelical Arminian Theological Musings, October 4, 2012, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/10/ some-good-novels-that-include-theological-themes/. 2. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 206. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 3. Robert Bird, Fyodor Dostoevsky (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 179. 4. Malcolm V. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150. 5. See Leo Tolstoy, Lift Up Your Eyes: The Religious Writings of Leo Tolstoy (New York: Julian Press, 1960), for Tolstoy’s religious convictions. Scholars suspect that the character of Konstantin Levin, discussed below, holds religious views in line with Tolstoy’s own. 6. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 1. 7. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” 169. 8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 285. 9. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 2000), 348. Subsequent references to Anna Karenina will be cited parenthetically.

ONE SUBSCRIPTION, 29 YEARS OF ARCHIVES. A S A S U B S C R I B E R , YO U R E C E I V E A C C E S S T O T H E E N T I R E M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N A R C H I V E . Requires a one-time free registration at modernreformation.org. Log in any time and visit the MR archives at modernreformation.org/issue.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG/ISSUE

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 54

The Overstory

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution

The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion according to the Reformed Confession

Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John

By Richard Powers

By Ike Miller

By Herman Bavinck

by Carl R. Trueman REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Patricia Anders

Timon Cline

Ryan M. Hurd

Charles Kim Jr.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

BOOK REVIEWS

The Overstory By Richard Powers W. W. Norton, 2018 502 pages (paperback), $18.99 t has long been known that powerful storytelling helps us become more sympathetic toward others. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle demonstrated the importance of using drama to create compassion in us toward the plight of others through what he called “catharsis”—a purification of our emotions. Theatergoers in ancient Athens are said to have wept at tragic plays, and we still cry at those emotional stories that produce empathy in us. What happens, though, when the main character of the drama is not human? What can a writer do to move us—to touch our emotions, to enrage us, to make us weep—when we’re talking about trees? This is exactly what I think Richard Powers is trying to do with his bestselling novel The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. But why write a novel instead of producing an environmental journal article or a book? For one, there are already plenty of excellent publications that provide insightful analyses of current environmental problems and possible solutions, which should indeed be read and heeded. What I believe Powers is doing in The Overstory is bring the planet to life, with trees in particular as sentient beings. Apart from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents of Middle Earth, this may seem crazy, but it worked for this reader. When an author can make you feel empathy toward a particular tree—in this case, an ancient, giant coastal redwood called Mimas—then we become

concerned with its welfare. In this book, for example, a couple of activists take up residence in Mimas for two years, trying to protect this towering wonder of creation from becoming a nice deck for someone’s backyard. By calling it The Overstory, Powers is already setting us up to see that the events of this book are overarching, part of the “Big Picture” of this world, something higher, deeper, and greater than the mere humans who spend a small lifetime here. In fact, by the time we arrive at the conclusion of this story, we learn that it is we humans who are the actual tragic characters, moving faster and faster toward “collective suicide.” When we realize this, then we begin to understand the urgent motivation behind the actions of the nine human characters in the novel. By the time we reach the climax of the plot, we should understand what one of the characters means by our desperate need to commit “unsuicide”—that is, stop the death we’re bringing upon ourselves and choose life instead. Although I don’t know anything about Richard Powers’ religious commitments (if any), he does refer to the fall of humanity in that ancient perfect garden when we ate from that one prohibited tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In a fascinating 2019 Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Everett Hamner, Powers says, “As one of the characters in the book laments, we are all ‘plant blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us.’” Readers of Modern Reformation understand what it is to still feel this curse in the world around us. Although Christ has redeemed both humanity and creation, Paul says that it groans now as if in childbirth (Rom. 8:22). Creation groans and humanity groans along with it, waiting

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

for Christ’s return and the new heaven and the new earth. We also feel that curse today when we see how many have turned to a “feel-good” religion, putting themselves first instead of the kingdom of God. In the garden, we wanted to be gods ourselves, and not much has changed since then. The anti-authoritarian, independent mentality so characteristic of American society—as events over the past year or so have evidenced—is, Powers says, moving us closer every day to “collective suicide.” This is consistent with the Christian understanding of sin as self-destructive. We need to wake up and realize that it’s we who really need a healthy planet. The planet has been telling us loud and clear that something drastically needs to change in our behaviors. As Christians, we believe that we were created in God’s image and that we are the caretakers of God’s creation around us. As stated in Genesis 1:11–12, “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it was so. . . . And God saw that it was good.” God’s creation is indeed good, and we are to be responsible stewards of it. The Overstory is a monumental book with nine characters whose lives we follow pretty much from their childhood to their end or near their end—and there’s definitely too much to discuss in this short book review. Suffice it to say that Powers divides the book into four main sections: “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” Throughout these pages, we—along with the characters—begin to understand the truth of what nature is really trying to say to us. After starting with roots that intertwine endlessly underground, we move up the sturdy trunk and into the crown with branches that seem to reach up to heaven, finishing back on the forest floor as seeds that need to be sown in order to sprout new life. Through this journey, we learn that everything on this earth is interconnected—humanity and nature. But in order to hear creation’s message, we humans need to learn to be silent, patient, and humble enough

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

The anti-authoritarian, independent mentality so characteristic of American society—as events over the past year or so have evidenced—is, Powers says, moving us closer every day to “collective suicide.”

for our ears and minds to be fully open. Much like God speaking to Elijah in the still, quiet voice of the whirlwind. At the end of the book Nick, the botanical artist, finds himself in some northern woods (he’s not exactly sure where) with a few Native Americans. Together, they create art out of fallen logs, spelling out the word STILL—something so large, it can be seen in its entirety only from space. When these people of the forest finish their ancient chant, Nick “adds, Amen, if only because it may be the oldest single word he knows” (501). Powers continues, The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, [Nick] read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman

BOOK REVIEWS

came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root. . . . He stares off into the north woods, where the next project beckons. Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end. (501–2) “Tree” and “truth” really do come from the same root word. Perhaps if we can learn to pay close attention, we may indeed hear what creation has been whispering in song to us for millennia. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; They will sing before the Lord. (Ps. 62:12) PATRICIA ANDERS is managing editor of Modern Reformation.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman Crossway, 2020 432 pages (hardcover), $34.99 “

or all intents and purposes, I am a woman.” That was Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, the 1976 men’s decathlon Olympic gold medalist, announcing in a 2015 interview with Diane Sawyer that thenceforth he would identify as a trans woman. Of course, Jenner would argue that this had always been the case. She had merely been trapped inside a male Olympian body. In 2017, Jenner underwent sex reassignment surgery, making sure to add that given that she had always been attracted to

women—sexual orientation now being different from gender identity— she would identify as asexual for the time being, as to not confuse anyone. Though Jenner’s coming out was doubtless a boon for transgender activism, what was more fascinating was how relatively receptive the culture was to Caitlyn’s emergence. Jenner was not only affirmed by her family, two ex-wives and several children, but by the culture writ large, including the sporting world. The famous “Call me Caitlyn” Vanity Fair cover followed shortly after the 20/20 interview with Sawyer. This latter phenomenon—that transgenderism and other fruit of the sexual revolution are palatable to our culture as much as transgenderism itself—is what Carl Trueman’s new book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self seeks to help us make sense of. How did something like what Jenner claims—something inconceivable to prior generations—become so mainstream, so quickly? Trueman’s basic thesis is that today’s revolutions (sexual and moral) are not the cause but the fruit of Western society’s predominate pathologies, which are themselves the product of an older, metaphysical revolution. They are sub-revolutions, so to speak. “No individual historical phenomenon is its own cause,” reads the introduction. The roots of recent developments in sexual mores, sexual expression, and gender identity are rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The emersion of the modern conception of the self that underlies everything from pornography to transgenderism stretches back to groundwork laid by Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Jean Jacque Rousseau, and Sigmund Freud, among others. Trueman does not give too much away at the outset. You know where he is going but have no idea how he is going to get there, which makes the journey all the more enthralling and the conclusion all the more satisfying, if not also horrifying. To realize the ambitions of his thesis, Trueman harnesses the thought of three sem inal critics of modernity: Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The first part of

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

the book constitutes a remarkably readable distillation of these three authors who are at times notoriously unreadable themselves. This is yeoman’s work. Even so, it is in the harnessing more than the distillation that Trueman showcases his own talent. The book is divided into four parts, each helpfully accompanied by an epilogue. Trueman’s organization and prose make an infinitely complex subject and sweeping thesis surprisingly digestible and never tedious. Part 1 is taken up with mining Taylor, Rieff, and MacIntyre. From Taylor, he borrows the concepts of the social imaginary (i.e., how people imagine the world via stories, myths, etc.), the mimesis (i.e., the world as given), and poiesis (i.e., the world as malleable raw material). Out of Rieff ’s eclectic thought, Trueman draws the cultural descriptors of psychological man and expressive individualism, and concepts such as anticulture and the triumph of the therapeutic. The material pulled from MacIntyre is more thematic than conceptual—namely, MacIntyre’s contention that modern ethical discourse is a mess because the claims of morality and truth upon which it necessarily rests are now nothing but emotional preferences. Parts 2 and 3 of the book survey the key thinkers that, in Trueman’s estimation, have shaped the modern understanding of the self. Some of the figures covered have already been mentioned. But readers may be unfamiliar with Wilhelm Reich—a Marxist psychoanalyst who studied under Freud but was eventually arrested in the United States for selling a fraudulent medical contraption he called “orgone accumulators”—and Herbert Marcuse, of Frankfurt School fame and coiner of the idea of “repressive tolerance,” now invoked regularly. Readers

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

may be equally surprised to find sandwiched between chapters on Rousseau and Nietzsche a treatment of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake (the “unacknowledged legislators”). Part 4 brings the insights of the preceding parts to bear on contemporary developments. Chapter 8 examines the triumph of Freud: the centering of the erotic in (high and popular) culture. Not only have the old sexual mores been exceeded, but they have been eviscerated. Chapter 9 continues the demonstration of Trueman’s narrative and is, in my opinion, the most compelling portion of part 4. Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)—wherein the plurality waxed eloquent about the right of all of us to define our own reality—campus protests (especially of Charles Murray), and the infamously shocking ethics of Peter Singer are all enlisted to exhibit certain facets of the long revolution of the self. If chapter 9 is the most compelling, then chapter 10 is the most chilling. The triumph of transgenderism is the culmination of the modern self: radical autonomy, total mastery of nature, full expression of the emotive individual, the elevation of psychological man, and the transcendence of history. Trueman’s prose and command of the subject are commendable, but more importantly for an author, his timing is impeccable. The recent Bostock v. Clayton County decision evidenced another outgrowth of the logic of human nature and personhood begun in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Obergefell v. Hodges. But Bostock may prove worst of all. Therein, the court acknowledged, as a matter of course, the plasticity of the self, as Trueman calls it. That is, the delusion that our identities can be made and remade

BOOK REVIEWS

at will according to our emotional need. But the brilliance of Trueman’s analysis (which predates Bostock) is his recognition of the connection between “my body, my choice” and “I am a woman stuck in a man’s body.” Bostock is not its own cause. The lessons from Trueman’s study are too numerous to list, but one obvious one—exposed also by recent intramural evangelical debates surrounding the doctrine of God—is the need to recover stable metaphysics, a vocabulary for our knowledge of both God and humanity. Without such a framework—the one (per Trueman) chipped away by Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin— we will not only develop false beliefs about God but also a dangerous conception of ourselves. As Rod Dreher says in the foreword to the book, “Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that’s why all this has happened.” Another lesson is that revolutions always produce causalities and unpredictable externalities. The logic of the self-revolution is being pressed to the extreme. Perhaps the internal contradictions and instability of

said revolution—the self-destructiveness of the therapeutic self in an amoral world with an ahistorical consciousness—will eventually shake people out of the madness. But how many plastic people will have melted by then? The church must prepare for the refugees of this revolution, those burned by the prophets Trueman profiles who convinced them all that their persons were so malleable, nature so questionable, truth so unstable, reality so debatable. But before the church can do that, it must understand how we have gotten to where we are. That being the stated goal of Trueman’s book, it is an undeniable success, an unrivaled treatment of what ails us. As with The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, the Creedal Imperative, and pithy commentary in First Things over the years, Trueman has once again, though like never before, proven himself a doctor of the church. TIMON CLINE is a graduate of Rutgers Law School, West-

minster Theological Seminary, and Wright State University. He has published in Areo magazine, The American Spectator, and National Review, and he writes regularly on law, theology, and politics at Conciliar Post.

The Wonderful Works of God: Instruction in the Christian Religion according to the Reformed Confession

Rod Dreher says in the foreword to the book, “Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that’s why all this has happened.”

By Herman Bavinck Westminster Seminary Press, 2019 695 pages (hardcover), $49.99 ere’s a secret: I don’t much like one-volume systematics, and my sentiment is harshened when I turn and see how much they weigh down my bookshelves. I ask myself what volume I should recommend. Grudem has won the populist vote for being nearly the solitary competitor, and Berkhof remains ready in the wings. I can thumb the

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

pages of a dozen others published over my life span—but enough of those books. The volume I chose to write about here is yet another one-volume systematics: Herman Bavinck’s, reprinted and retitled (rightly “Englishing” the original), The Wonderful Works of God. I had not read it before. Thumbing through, I was primed to level my usual complaints. See the familial features. It is short (about 550 pages plus index). There are no footnotes. It is generalist on account of being short. It sags in spots and careens unevenly along its course. And so on. But I must say, this volume is a good one-volume systematics. No, it is a great one. It is the one I will recommend to Protestant pastors, elders, and educated laypeople from now on. And the features above, negative in other cases, on the strength of Bavinck become so many pluses. The volume is tight and tidy, a summary without being trite, and consciously trimmed of things askew for the intended end. Bavinck today is not a name foreign to the English world, thanks to the explosion of Bavinck sources—primary, in translation and secondary, in the form of focused study of some theological topic or now several grades of biography (Eglinton’s recent is the gold standard). And just so, the four-volume Bavinck of the Reformed Dogmatics served during my early seminary years as professor, hailing from other shores to mediate the scholastic lands; he has done that now for many men. Beyond required, Bavinck is worthy, nursed with the piety of the Seceder Tradition and nourished into manhood by his own close study of Reformed orthodox works (though not only those—take his Reformed Ethics in hand and note the footnotes: Bavinck was nearly as familiar with the Neo-Scholastic

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Jesuits and Dominicans as their contemporary Protestant counterparts and so models here a true Reformed spirit). One fact of his life alone furnishes evidence for what he was and what he became with consistent work: The young pastor, at Franeker, took as a first task the editing and printing of the famous digest of Reformed theology, the Leiden Synopsis Purioris (a work now, in our time, that is three volumes fully in translation). Bavinck has proved himself a theologian with grit enough for four volumes of systematics. And as I see it, he has reached a higher field by giving us his own first-rate compendium, which is a testament to his gifts as well as his heart. The work is a fine example of a high mind speaking low, keeping together what he knows and using it to force everything down into an intense but living concentrate. I heard in this volume the voice of the Bavinck I had conversed with for years at a higher register— and felt disarmed by it, like hearing your old professor speak to pews, not peers: all you can do is sit agog. A proof or two at random? I know of no more lapidary way to navigate the complexities of the immanent and economic Trinity, especially in the fallout of the Grundaxiom in the twentieth century, than simply to say, “The Trinity in the revelation of God points back to the Trinity in His existence” (129). Well now, yes, Herman Bavinck, yes, it does. And I suppose this is all anyone should ever seek to know. Another? Bavinck is sensitive to the fact that translating the technical creatio ex nihilo into common parlance, “creation out of nothing,” is open to significant misunderstanding (circa 148). As remedy, Bavinck foregrounds the real distinction between God and creation, and he

BOOK REVIEWS

does so by underlining (without any significant mention of metaphysics) God’s giving of being; that being is accidental to the creature, and so nothing can be a means or instrument of making creatures. This is an act of God alone. A third? Bavinck maintains the privative texture of sin, but he expresses it as “a manifestation which is moral in character, operating in the ethical sphere, and consists of departure from the ethical norm which God by His will established for rational man” (210; my italics). While it is the case that the metaphysical explanation of sin (as specifically parasitic to nature and not a positive something) is not opposed to the “moral” element, it is not unlikely that

“Evil can therefore only come after the good, can only exist through the good and on the good, and can really consist of nothing but the corruption of the good.”

for laypeople the latter would quickly become occluded by the former. Bavinck deftly circumscribes both but brings to the fore what is most helpful for a layperson to know and what is nearest the biblical expression of the nature of sin: “Evil can therefore only come after the good, can only exist through the good and on the good, and can really consist of nothing but the corruption of the good” (211). These are all highly rudimentary instances of a more important point: The signal value of a volume such as this is that it instills the reader with the instinct and reflex of systematics. For a one-volume systematics (stipulated as nontrivial), the details are intentionally blurred so as to leave intact the tectonic pillars. These shapes are still in view for the eye to trace and learn how to move. The reader soaks in the way of going about God. It is not a matter of being “right” on a point, first and priorly, as much as learning to be right on the way to lean. In this volume, Bavinck weights you to a certain side to change your gait, so you walk truer to form on whatever topic you might take up in hand. An ability to do this, in short shrift, is by my lights what separates the wise from the merely intelligent. Bavinck is among the wise. The volume must be picked up and given away in multiple copies. It is a fine printing, and the volume includes a healthy introduction by Dr. Carlton Wynne and an astonishingly thorough index drawn up by Reverend Charles Williams (a labor of love that took a prodigious amount of time). All of these features together are why I shall not condemn another volume to burden my shelves, to purgatory as a collector of dust. Books like this merit being out in the world, so I have sent it off to an elder friend. RYAN M. HURD is a systematic theologian whose area of

expertise is doctrine of God, specifically the Trinity. His primary training is in the high medievals and early modern scholastics as well as the twentieth-century ressourcement movement. His main project is writing a robust systematics of the Trinity; he also teaches systematics on God as a teaching fellow with The Davenant Institute.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John By Ike Miller IVP Academic, 2020 248 pages (paperback), $35.00 f one has read only the Institutes of John Calvin, it may come as a surprise when Calvin writes in his commentary on the Gospel of John that in his exegesis “Augustine . . . is excessively addicted to the philosophy of Plato.” Many following in the wake of Calvin’s thought have therefore seen fit to disregard the sermons and exegesis of Augustine, focusing their attention solely on his more well-known works: City of God, Confessions, and On the Trinity. It is indeed not without reason that these wise and learned works have taken the center of attention in most modern appropriations of Augustinian thought, but the African bishop offers much more. Despite the weight of history and the harsh judgment from someone like Calvin, Ike Miller undertakes to explore Augustine’s doctrine of illumination through his exegesis of John in the collection known as the Tractates on John. While this is not the first study of the Tractates on John, it certainly is a neglected area within Augustinian studies. The quote from Calvin seems more apt when one considers that the doctrine of illumination is itself connected to the underlying Platonic elements of Augustine’s thought. Miller boldly moves past these concerns to find much of value for the contemporary Christian in Augustine’s preaching and exegesis. Miller’s study seeks to remap not only the oft-forgotten territory in Augustine, but that of the great Swiss theologian Herr Karl Barth as well. Many know Barth more for his

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

dogmatic treatises than his lectures on John, which to this point had gone untranslated into English from the original German. Both Barth and Augustine in their exegesis on the Gospel of John expound on their understanding of how Christ, the light of the world, illumines his chosen ones and retrieves them from their own self-inflicted darkness. What better Gospel than John to explore how Christ accomplishes this in his earthly sojourn? Moving to the work itself, Miller conceives of this ambitious project in three parts. He moves chronologically from Augustine to Barth, and he completes the study with his own dogmatic proposal rooted in Scripture to fit within the IVP Academic series focused on Christian doctrine and Scripture. Before embarking on his journey into the doctrine of illumination, Miller carefully demarcates his boundaries. Critical for him is the definition of illumination, which in his own proposal means “human participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit” (1). As Miller continues to give his justification for the study, he importantly highlights that illumination is more than simply cognitive but affective as well (3). To expound and explore the affective element, Miller draws attention to the ways in which Augustine conceives of illumination in more than purely cognitive terms. Barth’s emphasis on revelation and regeneration provides a necessary expansion on illumination. It is worth noting that, although Miller mentions the fact that Barth engages with Augustine directly in the first part of his lectures on the Gospel of John, he does not give any citation to explore exactly how Barth understood Augustine (4). This reviewer would have liked to see in what ways Barth assessed Augustine. Miller also establishes the pericopes that offer the most poignant places

BOOK REVIEWS

for constructing his dogmatic proposal (John 1:1–18; 3:1–21; 4:1–42; 9:1–41; 20:11–18; 21:12– 13). As he progresses through the study, he looks at those passages in Augustine and Barth. To organize and aid the reader in sorting through Augustine’s method of interpretation, Miller creates a tripartite structure based on his analysis of Augustine’s sermons. He argues that to make sense of how Augustine preaches and explains Scripture, one must recognize that he works on literal-historical, salvationhistorical, and rhetorical-historical levels. This is an admirable and novel attempt at explaining Augustine’s approach, but this reviewer found the appendage of the historical as inconsistent among the three. More to the point, the analysis lacked an engagement with other studies of Augustine on preaching, which indicates that Augustine understood himself as a kind of spiritual guide to union with God—what Michael Cameron calls “mystagogy” or Paul Kolbet calls “psychogagy.”

Miller notes that “human blindness to God was not due to the light’s absence from humankind, but humankind’s absence from the light.”

Having set forth his heuristic for interpreting Augustine as preacher, Miller moves through the selected passages of John to describe Augustine’s account of illumination. For want of space, I will highlight only a few insightful sections. In the pericope about Nicodemus, Miller notes that “human blindness to God was not due to the light’s absence from humankind, but humankind’s absence from the light” (37). When discussing the woman at the well, Miller bids us to look at ourselves in the place of the woman in Augustine’s salvation-historical reading of the passage. Rather than chastising Augustine for his “allegorical” interpretation, as Calvin is wont to do, Miller finds Augustine’s reading beneficial insofar as it helps readers enter into the story in a more spiritual way (45–47). He concludes his rehearsal of Augustine’s exegesis by noting, “Christ the Logos is both the light we see and the means by which we see it” (53). The final section on Augustine draws out the more enduring elements of Augustine’s doctrine of illumination—the most significant of which is the notion of participation. As Miller reads Augustine, the participation that Christians have in Christ is a graced participation, not strictly speaking ontological but by adoption. Miller discusses this participation in five ways, but he relegates the importance of the church to a footnote (68). (In my conversation with Dr. Miller, he discussed how this probably reflected his own emphases, and he struggled with whether to include this in the main body of the text.) Part 2 of the work is probably the most significant in terms of its contribution to historical readings of theologians. Miller is the first to write a sustained engagement with Barth’s previously untranslated lectures on the Gospel of John. Furthermore, as he proceeds into Barth’s dogmatic proposals, Miller finds significant passages in the Church Dogmatics to construct a more robust pneumatology from Barth. This has long been a critique of Barth, and Miller goes some way to addressing that need.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

The most noteworthy reason to choose a study of John is that Barth was developing his own theological method while lecturing on the Gospel of John. Miller summarizes Barth’s emphasis: “He asserted that the Bible has one, single, indivisible subject matter—the revelation of God in Jesus Christ” (78). Barth thus does not seek to get behind the text but to be confronted by God in the text. As Miller moves to Barth’s exegesis of John, he highlights that the “Word creates its own hearers” in the Holy Spirit (92). Once the Spirit begins this work, “it commands obedience not in coercion or by threat. . . . Obedience is the manifestation of received revelation. Obedience is ‘knowledge in action’” (120). In sum, he deftly works the importance of the Spirit into Barth’s reading of the Gospel of John and the process of illumination. In his final section on Barth, Miller helpfully summarizes Barth’s position: “The product of illumination is faith and obedience, and the ultimate aim is union with Christ” (123). He expounds on this to argue, though, that we should not assume it ends with Spirit; in the end, it is truly Trinitarian in nature. After a brief section going through the Gospel of John on his own and a short excursus on the topic throughout the entirety of Scripture, Miller offers his own proposal: “Illumination is participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit. Participation in this knowledge is implicit in the faith and obedience of the participant” (178). Leaning heavily on Barth and John, Miller’s proposal helpfully reminds Christians to consider the fullness of participation in divine illumination, obedience, and communion, in addition to the cognitive aspects of illumination. I would have liked to hear more about why Miller explicitly rejects the “ontological” nature of participation. Speaking specifically about Augustine, David Meconi has shown that Augustine has a robust doctrine of deification, which would certainly include an ontological participation in God. It seems that more work could be helpful in defining how exactly this

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

Miller summarizes Barth’s emphasis: “He asserted that the Bible has one, single, indivisible subject matter—the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.”

participation (whether ontological or not) relates to the church. Though Miller mentions baptism in his section on Augustine, one wonders what difference an ecclesiological rootedness might make for the doctrine of illumination. In conclusion, Miller certainly offers much to those who want to consider the doctrine of illumination and especially an engagement with an obviously important text from Barth, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. CHARLES KIM JR. holds a PhD (Saint Louis University) in

historical theology focusing on Saint Augustine of Hippo’s theology of preaching. He is the host and creator of the podcast A History of Christian Theology. To listen to his conversation with Ike Miller, visit https://ahistoryofchristiantheology.podomatic.com/.

B AC K PAG E

Is Shakespeare Relevant Today? by Michael Horton

n 2016, The Economist Espresso asked an intriguing question on April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday: “Would you agree that you find Shakespeare relevant today?” The survey found that in Brazil (85 percent) and Mexico (82 percent), the answer was yes, followed close behind by India, China, Turkey, and South Africa. Yet only half of British and American respondents agreed. Was this imperialism at work? Or did people all around the world truly find Shakespeare appealing? For a couple of generations now, Western literature departments have been embarrassed by their own “classics.” After all, why should we perpetuate the colonialism of past ages? Meanwhile, conservatives have been working tirelessly like monks, trying to save the “Western canon” from another “Dark Ages.” Although the ill effects of colonialism endure and criticism of that legacy remains important, it appears that the time may soon be upon us when many aspiring associate professors in the Western academy no longer know their own culture well enough to be able to offer informed analysis of what colonialism even means. Much thoughtful work has been done by classical, especially Christian classical, schools to remedy this over recent decades. Is enough being done, however, to incorporate non-European classics into our humanities’ canon? There are scores of traditional folktales and modern stories from around the world in every culture. When I was in high school, we started with Beowulf and

followed a predictable reading list from there. But in our new smaller world, it’s time to open our literary minds to the worldview of others. Isn’t it especially time to include Black literature in our American anthologies? The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois made me weep, but it also enlightened me. Though written in 1903, Du Bois’s mastery of sociology combined with his clear and elegant prose felt so contemporary. There are books considered by many now as classics, such as Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Not without Laughter by Langston Hughes, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. These, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. Culture isn’t shaped by politics, but the other way around, and reading lists are critical and living conveyors of tradition. As a Christian of European descent, I know that my canon has been privileged. But the answer isn’t to outright reject the idea of a good reading list. Shakespeare is still relevant today, even for British and American readers. But so is Maya Angelou or North Korean poet Ku Sang, or Things Fall Apart by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Maybe we could find more common ground and even friendship in our society today if we widened the canon and listened to one another’s stories for a while. Maybe this would spark some interest in our own again. MICHAEL HORTON is the J. Gresham Machen Professor

of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

VOL.30 NO.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

HELP THE NEXT GENERATION. B E C O M E A PA R T N E R T O D AY. In a time when the â&#x20AC;&#x153;nonesâ&#x20AC;? (or those claiming no religious adherence) are, according to pollsters, growing and when our own churches are stagnant or shrinking, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. This is Christcentered Christianity at its best, and with the support of our partners we produce resources that help transform churches, prisons, families, and individuals.

WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/PARTNER

“LANGUAGE—THE MEDIUM OF ALL LITERATURE, INCLUDING THE BIBLE—IN AND OF ITSELF ILLUMINATES AND MAGNIFIES THE IMAGE OF GOD IN US. BECAUSE HUMAN BEINGS ARE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF THE ONE WHO IS THE WORD AND WHO SPOKE THE WORLD INTO EXISTENCE THROUGH HIS WORD, CULTIVATING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE GIFT OF LANGUAGE ILLUMINATES THE ONE WHOSE IMAGE WE BEAR.” K A R E N SWA L LOW P R I O R