365 “No Ordinary Men”

       One of the haunting questions following World War II was this:  why did so many “good” Germans stand quietly aside while Adolf Hitler gained power and unleashed much evil.  Addressing that question, Fritz Stern and Elizabeth Sefton wrote No Ordinary Men:  Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State (New York:  New York Review Books, c. 2013; Kindle Edition).  Given the rapidity with which Hitler seized and consolidated power, granting the orchestrated terror within his regime, it is quite remarkable that some brave souls dared resist him.  These included “two admirable men who from the start of the Third Reich did their utmost, each in his own way, to oppose Nazi outrages, and who then conspired to overthrow the tyrant” p. 1).  For doing so, Hans von Dohnanyi, a lawyer, and his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor, ultimately died as martyrs in 1945.   

       Dietrich’s father, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, headed the neurology and psychiatry unit at Berlin’s principal hospital, occupying “the pinnacle of the German psychiatric profession” (p. 7).  He and his wife, Paula, had eight children (whom she home-schooled) and they enjoyed the privileged life of Germany’s elite.  Nominally Lutheran, they didn’t attend church, though Paula taught the children Bible stories, and the family “observed devout customs:  grace before meals, evening prayers before bedtime, large family celebrations at Christmas and Easter with Bible readings and hymns presided over by the agnostic father” (p. 19).  Somewhat surprisingly young Dietrich was drawn to theology, studying at the University of Berlin where Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch had taught.  Their liberal theology, however, did not appeal to Bonhoeffer, who found the more bracing Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth more satisfying.  He “was enthralled by Barth’s interpretation of the Gospels, and by his great theme:  that above all Christians must heed, in their hearts, the ‘unbelievable, incredible, and certainly disturbing testimony that God himself said and did something; something entirely new, outside the correlation of all human words and things’” (p. 23).  

       Both Barth and Bonhoeffer opposed Hitler as soon as he came to power.  Barth took refuge in Switzerland while Bonhoeffer worked within the German Evangelical Church, helping lead the “Confessing Church” that sought to “keep the church Christian.”  He thought that very soon “‘we shall have to decide between National Socialism and Christianity’” (p. 50).  His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, was one of several prominent lawyers within the Bonhoeffer clan, and he sought (working within the Ministry of Justice) to uphold traditional legal standards while keeping records of their abuse by Nazi functionaries.  In the late 1930s he began working with some senior army officers, including General Ludwig Beck, chief of the general staff, and Hans Oster, who served as deputy to the chief of Germany’s military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.  They crafted plans and imagined plots to remove Hitler, but none succeeded.  Though not directly involved in these conspiracies, Bonhoeffer sought to set forth a moral perspective on their situation, writing a Christmas essay for his family that “was an unsparing assessment of Germans and their conduct over the previous decade—when, as he wrote, ‘the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion,’” when “Germans who knew all too well the need for obedience ‘did not reckon with the fact that [it] could be misused in the service of evil’” (p. 100).  Though formerly an avowed pacifist, Bonhoeffer changed his mind as he wondered how to actually stop the dictator.  

       Ultimately, one of the plots to kill Hitler came to light, and a series of arrests in 1943 brought into custody Hans von Dobnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, along with Hans Oster and Wilhelm Canaris.  Imprisoned, they were constantly interrogated, pressured to reveal fellow conspirators.  Bonhefffer found strength by maintaining “his physical health and spiritual vigor by following a strict daily regimen—rising before dawn, reading and memorizing Scripture, meditating, exercising” (p. 110).  Dobnanyi “increasingly turned to the Bible; his earlier and perhaps unarticulated faith became more conscious, and it fortified him in moments of despair” (p. 114).  Finally, one of the military officers’ plots nearly succeeded.  Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded within a few yards of Hitler without killing him, and a savage retaliation ensued.  Everyone remotely connected with the conspiracy was hunted down and 6000 people were executed.  Bonhoeffer and Dobnanyi were guilty by association and would be killed, along with Canaris and Oster,  shortly before WWII ended in 1945.  

       “Though the world knows of Bonhoeffer in detail and hardly at all of Dohnanyi, they deserve to be remembered together.  The Third Reich had no greater, more courageous, and more admirable enemies than they” (p. 142).

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       Decades ago Herbert Molloy Mason published To Kill Hitler:  Plots on the Führer’s Life (London:  Michael Joseph Limited, c. 1979; reprinted in 2018 by Lume Book).  As soon as Hitler divulged his plans for world conquest a few German commanders turned against him, determined to kill him if necessary and restore the nation to its rightful condition.  “The conspirators, always few in number, never flagged in their determination to rid Germany of the scourge of National Socialism, and many of them paid with their lives for their daring.”  They were men “‘who brought themselves through difficult conflicts of conscience to the realization that legal methods could have no effect against the National Socialist terror.  The path taken by these men was long and thorny.  Their story deserves the appreciation of posterity because their actions had been barred not only by traditions of German soldierdom, which were hundreds of years old, but also by the professional ethics of all soldiers of the world.’  Here, then, is the story of those men who tried to kill the devil” (p. 10).

       Opposition to Hitler emerged early in Germany.  For example, in 1936 Mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, refused to follow a Nazi order to remove a statue of Felix Mendelssohn (a famous Jewish composer) from Leipzig’s main square.  “‘When that statue goes,’ he said, ‘then so will I’” (p. 51).  “Goerdeler loathed the street-gang aspects of the Nazi party” and “refused point-blank Hitler’s personal invitation to join the Party.”  He had “soured on Nazi methods, publicly declaring, ‘The Party will be shattered on the rock of moral law that makes human society possible’” (p. 50).  He began a “one-man crusade” to remove Hitler and frequently talked with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of Germany’s counterintelligence organization (the Abwehr).  The admiral “stood less than five feet four with his shoes on.  His size and reticent manner belied his determination and personal courage.  In Canaris Goerdeler found a kindred spirit” (p. 53).  Canaris considered the Nazis little more than gangsters and worked subtly in several anti-Hitler plots.  These Germans knew that Hitler was determined to create a Third Reich controlling all of northern and easternEurope.  He was willing launch a war to do so, horrifying  senior military officers at its prospects.  Initially they thought they might enlist support for their resistance abroad.  For example, General Ludwig Beck, chief of the general staff, sent a message to the British Foreign Office, saying:  “‘Bring me certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will make an end of this régime’” (p. 59).  But his offer was disregarded as the British sought to appease Hitler.  Thus Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Hitler in Munich inn 1938 and complied with his demands regarding Czechoslovakia, an agreement that deeply depressed Germans scheming to eliminate Hitler.  As Hitler later said, “‘I saw my enemies at Munich, and they are little worms’” (p. 88).  Little worms, lacking backbones, caved in.

      When war erupted in 1939 and Russia later invaded, a series of futile plots (both civilian and military) were launched to kill Hitler.  Mason carefully details a number of them and one cannot but admire the courage with which the plotters risked death in order to rescue their country.  Lieutenant Colonel Count Claus Philipp Maria Schenk von Stauffenberg, was one of them.  He had been seriously wounded while fighting in North Africa, losing an eye and the use of one arm.  “A staunch Catholic, Stauffenberg reached the conclusion that his life had been spared to fulfil a mission of critical importance to mankind:  destiny had chosen him as the prime mover in Hitler’s overthrow by assassination, while Germany’s frontiers were still unviolated, while there was still time to salvage the vestiges of honour rightfully belonging to a once-great Fatherland” (p. 167).  Early on he’d hoped Hitler would be good for Germany but quickly became disillusioned, concluding that Hitler and his entourage were “rotten and degenerate” psychopaths.  

       Working with sympathetic fellow officers Stauffenberg became a proponent of the Valkyrie plan, which included not only assassinating Hitler but reorganizing Germany thereafter.  He recruited some 100 officers and planned to personally detonate a bomb near the Der Fuhrer when an opportunity came.  Given his standing within the officer corps he occasionally took part in meetings with Hitler.  In July 1944 the perfect opportunity came, and Stauffenberg left the bomb in a briefcase near Hitler in the Wolfs Lair (one of Hitler’s command posts in Poland).  Flying back to Berlin after hearing the explosion Stauffenberg thought the deed was done and took steps to seize control of the nation.  But somehow Hitler survived the attack with only superficial wounds and unleashed the full power of his security forces to round up and destroy the conspirators.  Within 12 hours Stauffenberg and Beck and others were shot.  Anyone remotely connected with the conspirators was arrested, tried, and executed.  Germany’s most acclaimed military hero, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel (the “desert fox”), committed suicide when offered that option, though he had nothing to do with the plot.  While Germany’s forces were retreating everywhere Hitler would exert enormous energy and resources to finding and punishing anyone who dared oppose him—some as late as April, 1945, literally days before the Allies occupied Germany.  

       To Kill Hitler presents, in a highly readable fashion, an important a aspect of Hitler’s Third Reich.  It’s clear that it was difficult to oppose the Nazis, and it took unusual courage to plot to defeat them.  No doubt too many Germans remained quiet and submissive.  No doubt much harm would have been avoided had only more courageous men risked their all to do what was right.  But few of us are, in the end, as brave as we ought to be.  The fact that a few Germans rose to the challenge merits our commendation.  

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       Eddie Jaku was certainly no “ordinary man”—as is evident in his autobiography,  The Happiest Man on Earth:  The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2021; Kindle Edition), written after he reached the century mark in life.  Born in 1920, reared in Leipzig, one of the world’s great centers of culture, nurtured by a successful Jewish family, he considered himself primarily German and only incidentally Jewish.  But when the Nazis came to power everything changed for the worse, and he had “to stare evil in the face.”  He couldn’t fathom how “surreal and horrible” it was.  “I could not understand what had happened.  I still don’t understand it, not really.  I don’t think I ever will.  We were a nation that prized the rule of law above all else, a nation where people did not litter because of the inconvenience it caused to have messy streets.  You could be fined 200 marks for throwing a cigarette butt out your car window.  And now it was acceptable and encouraged for people to beat us” (p. 33).   He saw “the very worst in mankind, the horrors of the death camps, the Nazi efforts to exterminate my life, and the lives of all my people.  What he soon learned was that when the Nazis took control the typical German, though not usually evil “was weak and easily manipulated” (p. 97).  

       Jaku would be arrested and sent to several concentration camps, even escaping from Buchenwald and unsuccessfully trying to reach friendly territory, finding “much kindness from strangers” in small French villages.  Ultimately he would be rearrested and sent to Auschwitz, where “a man in a clean white lab coat stood above the mud, surrounded by SS.  This was Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, one of the worst murderers who has ever lived, one of the most evil men in the history of mankind.  As the newly arrived prisoners went by, he indicated whether they should walk to the left or the right” (p. 67).  One group went to the gas chambers; the other would be forced to labor making war materials for the Nazis.  “The high-ranking Nazis behind the Final Solution called the slave labour Vernichtung durch Arbeit.  Extermination through labour” (p. 90).  Fortunately young Jaku was mechanically gifted and had received an outstanding education in mechanical engineering.  So when sent to concentration camps he survived because the Nazis needed his skills.  His father had been right to stress education and work.  They saved his life.  He also determined to live as a “civilized” man, refusing to do evil because he was suffering it.  So he “never hurt another prisoner, I never stole another man’s bread, and I did all I could to help my fellow man. You see, your food is not enough. There is no medicine for your morals.  If your morals are gone, you go” (p. 101).

       Jaku survived the war—the only one of more than a hundred of his relatives to do so.  He then met, fell in love with, and married a lovely Jewish woman and soon sired children.  Becoming a father changed him forever!  “When I held my eldest son, Michael, in my arms for the first time, it was a miracle.  In that one moment, my heart was healed and my happiness returned in abundance.  From that day on, I realized I was the luckiest man on Earth.  I made the promise that from that day until the end of my life, I would be happy, polite, helpful and kind.  I would smile.  From that moment, I became a better person.  This was the best medicine I could have, my beautiful wife and my child” (p. 154).  Having a family literally “saved” him.  Wanting to escape Europe, Jake and his family emigrated to Australia, where he started a succession of successful businesses and in time became a well-known spokesmen for Holocaust survivors.  His adopted homeland became a “heaven” for him “down under.”  

       After living 100 years, he claimed to be the “happiest man on Earth.  Through all of my years I have learned this:  life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful.”  His story “is a sad one in parts, with great darkness and great sorrow.  But it is a happy story in the end because happiness is something we can choose” (p. 4).  Ultimately:  “Here are the lines I try to live by, and which I like to include when I speak publicly:  May you always have lots of love to share, / Lots of good health to spare, / And lots of good friends who care” (p. 176).  This is a simply-told, deeply inspiring account, so different from many reflections set forth by other Holocaust survivors.  For that reason it is so valuable.  Rather than remaining angry following his suffering, he concluded that:  “Kindness is the greatest wealth of all.  Small acts of kindness last longer than a lifetime.  This lesson, that kindness and generosity and faith in your fellow man are more important than money, is the first and greatest lesson my father ever taught me.  And in this way he will always be with us, and always live forever” (p. 175).  

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       For decades I’ve resolved to read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:  Penguin Classics, c. 1964; Kindle Edition) and finally did so.  Controversial when first published, it remains so today, for America’s Jewish establishment effectively excommunicated her!  Her fiercest critics were Jews who thought she too readily blamed Jewish leaders for cooperating with the Nazis, though she insisted she simply tried to tell the truth about Eichmann and the Holocaust.  She refused to ignore the role of “Jewish Sonderkommandos (special units)” who killed Jews in order to save their own lives; she held the Jewish Councils and Elders responsible for helping round up and dispatch other Jews so they themselves could survive.  Throughout Europe Jewish leaders, “almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.  The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people” (p. 173).  Stating what to her was an inescapable truth cost Arendt dearly within the Jewish intelligentsia, who considered her a traitor.  

       Witnessing Eichmann on trial, she considered him and his ilk not “demonic monsters” but ordinary bureaucrats following orders, mindlessly seeking promotions and power, more “morons” than brutes.  Psychiatrists examining Eichmann found him  “normal” rather than psychopathic!  He was, to put it mildly, boring.  He and too many Germans lost their “conscience” and Eichmann’s was eased, he said, by the fact that no one actually opposed killing Jews when it became possible.  While on trial in Jerusalem he found it difficult to speak coherently without resorting to bureaucratic clichés—“‘Officialese [Amtssprache],’” he said, “‘is my only language’” (p. 84).  As Arendt listened to him she concluded that “his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (p. 84).  To her he appeared almost a “clown.”  He was born to and reared by a typical middle-class Germany family.  His schooling was a bit erratic and he seemed disinterested in serious academic work.  He attended a vocational school and falsely claimed later in life to be a “construction engineer.”  His parents enrolled him in the Young Men’s Christian Association, and he later joined the German youth movement, the Wandervogel.”  An inveterate “joiner” of organizations, he joined the Nazi Party without knowing much about it.  He never studied its platform, never read Hitler’s Main Kampf, and just seemed to want to be part of something exciting.  Religiously, he claimed to be “a Gottglaubiger, the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused to take his oath on the Bible,” claiming an affiliation with “a higher Bearer of Meaning,” aligned with the “movement of the universe.” 

       Eichmann used his party ties to secure several governmental positions, ultimately working within the bureaucracy dealing with Jewish issues.  At first the National Socialists supported the Zionist movement, encouraging Jews to voluntarily leave Germany.  Eichmann did some reading and talked with some Jewish leaders and before long claimed  to be an “expert” in dealing with them.  Moving up in the ranks of officials and helping wealthy Jews get passports and visas with which to settle in Palestine or other friendly nations, Eichmann always claimed to have good relations with them.  While he worked in Vienna in the late 1930s, some 45,000 Jews “legally” left the country, cleansing Austria of them before the “final solution” was implemented.  As Reinhard Heydrich (the main architect of the Jewish policies), conferring with Herman Goring on the morning of the Kristallnacht, explained,   “‘Through the Jewish community, we extracted a certain amount of money from the rich Jews who wanted to emigrate.  By paying this amount, and an additional sum in foreign currency, they made it possible for poor Jews to leave.  The problem was not to make the rich Jews leave, but to get rid of the Jewish mob’” (p. 79).  Only after WWII began did “the Nazi regime became openly totalitarian and openly criminal” (p. 106).  But the first gas chambers were built within months of the war’s inception,  and Hitler’s true intent became clear:  the “final solution” meant killing all Jews.  Eichmann was tasked with arranging the transportation for Jews sent to various camps in Europe.  “He never actually attended a mass execution by shooting, he never actually watched the gassing process, or the selection of those fit for work” (p. 132).  He probably lacked the brutal temperament necessary for the actual work of killing people.  Nevertheless he played a significant role in their deaths, organizing mass deportations designed to “make the Reich judenrein [free of Jews]” as quickly as possible.

       However one evaluates her stance, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem remains a valuable record of a gifted philosopher’s views on a prominent Nazi and the genocide he promoted.  She sought to plumb the depths of Eichmann’s mind and discern therein “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.”  Primarily this happened because folks failed to think!  They refused to see how things truly were.  They all too frequently followed “orders” and almost deified the State, allowing it to determine what was right and wrong.  This was “the banality of evil” on display in Jerusalem.

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364 Government Lies

        “If people let government decide which food they eat and medicines they take,” Thomas Jefferson said, “their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”  We should have remembered such cautionary words when watching Dr. Robert Redfield testify before a congressional committee, for the ex-director of the Center for Disease Control blamed Anthony Fauci and the federal government for the deaths of millions of people.  Redfield says Fauci-funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan China laboratory doubtlessly spawned the deadly COVID-19 virus and believes Fauci and associates covered up the lab-leak evidence.  A lengthening list of governmental agencies now declare  the virus was in fact leaked from the Wuhan lab—so what some of us long suspected appears conclusively confirmed.  We also know, due to a recent Cochrane review, that masking did little to slow the spread of COVID-19.  Producing one of the most authoritative scientific publications, the Cochrane Collaboration draws together an international network of researchers who summarize the results of randomized, controlled trials, providing a highly trustworthy source of information regarding health care.  The review on masks says:  “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks.”   

       As such evidence rolls in, Robert Malone’s Lies My Gov’t Told Me:  And the Better Future Coming (New York:  Skyhorse Publishing Co., c. 2022; Kindle Edition) proves perceptive.  Introducing himself, he says:  “I am an internationally recognized scientist/physician, and the original inventor of mRNA and DNA vaccination . . . as well as mRNA- and DNA-based gene therapy.  I am also an inventor or early adopter of multiple nonviral DNA and RNA/mRNA platform delivery technologies.  I hold numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, and vaccines.  I have been working in the fields of advanced clinical development and vaccinology for almost forty years.   . . . .  In short, I have spent much of my career working on vaccine development.  I have also had extensive experience in drug repurposing for infectious disease outbreaks” (pp. 41-42).  Having spent much of his life working as a researcher within or for governmental agencies, Malone says he had “never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys.”  Then came COVID!  Years earlier he’d helped develop mRNA and DNA vaccines and therapies and understood their problematic natures.  So when pharmaceutical companies began using them to produce and distribute vaccines he spoke out, urging caution careful extensive testing before any wide-spread use.  

       For this Malone was quickly attacked by powerful media (the New York Times and Washington Post) and discovered that his confidence in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech was not everywhere shared.  Additionally, few journalists can “comprehend the complexities and ambiguities inherent in scientific discussions and so repeatedly fall back on” simplistic memos issued by governmental or non-profit organizations’ spokesmen (p. 275).  Still more, “the Biden administration, through the CDC, made direct payments to nearly all major corporate media outlets while deploying a $1 billion taxpayer-funded outreach campaign designed to push only positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and to censor any negative coverage” (p. 278).  Thus the media spoon-fed us state-funded propaganda! 

       To resist the propaganda Malone directs us to heed Michael Crichton, who noted how easily we detect errors in the news when we personally understand the subject.  So, for example, I easily dismiss much said about American Indians and their history because I know the subject quite well.  But since I know little about quantum physics or rugby I readily believe whatever journalists say about such things.  Thus Crichton insisted we must think critically about everything.  When reading about something you know well, he say, you often “see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.  Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect.  I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories.  Paper’s full of them.  In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate . . . than the baloney you just read.  You turn the page and forget what you know’” (p. 545). 

       Early in January 2020 one of Malone’s friends in Wuhan told him about the COVID-19 outbreak in China.  Malone and his wife began researching, trying to find therapeutic remedies for folks infected with the virus.  Within a few weeks they had written and self-published the first edition of Novel Coronavirus: A Guide for Preparation and Protection, urging the immediate use of therapeutic drugs such as chloroquine, which had been proven (in 2005) to be effective in treating SARS coronaviruses.  After a month Amazon censored the book!  “And at that moment,” he says, “we knew that something very dark was happening, something we had never seen before.  Little did we realize that this was just a very early example of what was to become a large movement over the next two years, a global movement involving collusion between government, corporatized legacy media, social media, big technology, big finance, and nongovernmental organizations to completely control and shape all information and thought concerning the public health response to the novel coronavirus” (p. 26).  

       He laments that there were“multidrug, multistage lifesaving treatments that could have saved so many lives that have been lost, treatments that are used every day in hospitals around the country for related conditions as well as for COVID” (p. 42).  There was, for example, “an inexpensive lifesaving solution both before and during the pandemic . . .  The inconvenient truth is that even at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, a very simple, inexpensive, and effective treatment was available that could have saved the majority of lives lost.  All that the WHO and national public health bureaucracies (including the US HHS) had to do was to recommend and support people taking sufficient Vitamin D3” (p. 228).  Vitamin D3, researchers discovered, is effective “as an immune system-boosting prophylactic treatment for influenza and other respiratory RNA viruses” (p. 228).  When Anthony Fauci was informed of Vitamin D3’s potential, he disregarded the evidence.  “Therefore, NIAID had no interest in pursuing Vitamin D3 as a prophylactic for respiratory diseases, such as influenza;” consequently, “over fifteen years ago, Dr. Fauci had already set the policies that informed the US government’s present response to the COVID crisis” (p. 231).  His obsession with vaccines meant that “cheap alternatives” were routinely rejected.  “The data for the use of Vitamin D3 are extremely strong; there are now even randomized clinical trials supporting its use for the treatment of COVID, as well as many retrospective clinical trials showing its efficacy” (p. 231).  (I personally have taken Vitamin D3 for many years and wonder if it helped me escape contracting COVID).

          Though Malone himself wrote much of Lies My Gov’t Told Me, he enlisted some of his colleagues to write chapters needing their expertise.  So Gavin de Becker, the author of The Gift of Fear and “considered the leading security specialist in the United States” analyzed the sheer fear that spread throughout the country as COVID-19 infected millions of people.  Some fears are, of course, legitimate and helpful.  Others, however—usually “worst case scenarios” that never materialize—cause much harm.  Throughout his long career Anthony Fauci has tried to panic the public with dire warnings:  ‘HIV/AIDS in 1983, West Nile Virus in 2001/2, SARS in 2003, bird flu in 2005, swine flu in 2009, dengue in 2012, MERS in 2014, Ebola in 2014/16, Zika in 2015/16, and COVID-19 in 2020.  Early on, as was evident in his dealing with AIDS, he “perfected his method of ad-fear-tising, using remote, unlikely, far-fetched, and improbable possibilities to frighten people.  He terrified tens of millions into wrongly believing they were at personal risk of getting AIDS when they were not” (p. 50).  Though there was little evidence that AIDS could be contracted by casual contacts, millions of us believed it could because of Fauci’s declarations.  So too there was never any evidence that anyone other than the elderly and folks with co-morbidities were at significant risk of dying of COVID-19. So all the businesses shut-down, all the school closures, all the frantic pronouncements on the evening news, were due to a panic rather than a pandemic!  

     Dr. Pierre Kory, MD, MPA, a specialist in pulmonary diseases, internal medicine, and critical-care, worked as the chief of the critical care service and medical director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin.  Noted for his commitment to patients, Kory twice testified to the US Senate providing evidence supporting the use of early treatments for COVID-19.   Identifying himself as one of the “maverick doctors” who used therapeutic remedies, he cited the “example of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest states with a population two-thirds the size of the US.  With a careful door-to-door surveillance strategy in combination with a prevention and early treatment regime using Ivermectin, Uttar Pradesh effectively eliminated COVID-19 from their state of 241 million people” (p. 98).  Then there’s the Brazilian city of Itajai, which “offered Ivermectin preventively to the entire city’s population” and found that its “users had a 70 percent lower mortality rate, and a 67 percent lower hospitalization rate, while the citywide COVID mortality fell from 6.8 percent to 1.8 percent during the program” (p. 99).  Ironically, poor nations  fared significantly better than wealthy countries such as the USA, which had one of the highest mortality rates per capita in the world.  Ironically, you were at greater risk of dying of COVID-19 in a Western hospital than in an underdeveloped place such as Haiti or Uganda.    

      Among the many chapters detailing scientific data one finds some philosophically-probing essays, including “science or scientism,” wherein Malone endorses Everett Piper’s charge that Anthony Fauci is “America’s high priest of scientism.”  Fauci, Malone says, “has been dishonest with the American people throughout the COVID crisis and has repeatedly substituted opinion for science-based factual information, directly contributing to one of the greatest losses of life, freedom, and livelihood in the history of mankind. This is an embodiment of the true essence and nature of scientism” (p. 171).  Following his lead, politicians and bureaucrats imposed “lockdowns, masking, and social distancing policies [that] were all based not on science, but on the opinions of the people at the top of the administration—policies not to be questioned by scientists or laypeople.” (p. 172).  Still more:  there is an unquestioned utilitarianism—“one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy”—underlying modern medicine.  Globalist organizations such as the World Economic Forum, led by the likes of Bill Gates, “call for a drastic reduction in global human population, often referred to as the depopulation agenda” (p. 321).  Citing “the greatest good for the greatest number,” they want to control if not reduce the human population.  Public Health courses in prestigious universities are blatantly utilitarian, quite unlike the traditional “disciplines of medicine and clinical research, which are grounded in the principles of the Hippocratic oath and beneficence as applied to the individual patient” (p. 323).  Malone urges us to return to a Christian-shaped, Hippocratic medical care system that primarily focuses on persons and their needs rather than broader “public health” concerns.  

       In sum:  Malone endorses the positions set forth in the “Great Barrington Declaration,” signed by 18,000 eminent scholars, which said that “we should have focused our risk mitigation efforts on the elderly, and that the US should not have vaccinated healthy, normal children (who do not die of COVID) with an experimental vaccine” (p. 42).  Or, shall we say, we should have followed the Swedes!

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       In Overcoming the COVID Darkness: How Two Doctors Successfully Treated 7000 Patients (c. 2022; Kindle Edition), Brian Tyson, M.D. and George C. Fareed, M.D. tell a very personal story of coping with COVID in California’s Imperial Valley.  A Harvard graduate who taught at both Harvard and UCLA medical schools, Dr. Fareed chose to follow the example of his father—a medical missionary who worked with Dr. Albert Schweitzer—and give his life to practicing medicine in a rural, low-income setting in Brawley, CA.  For his work he was named Rural Physician of the Year in 2015 by the California Medical Association.  Dr. Tyson is Fareed’s friend and colleague who owns and operates All Valley Urgent Care in El Centro, California.  As the book’s subtitle indicates, the two doctors “treated over 7000 patients with COVID-19—and saved everyone of them.  Not a single death occurred while using early treatment” (p. 12).  They did so by quickly using repurposed drugs—mixing together hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and antibiotics (now commonly known as the HCQ cocktail) that resulted in “nothing short of a miracle.”  Yet their success meant nothing to the World Health Organization or National Institutes of Health, which “attempted to stop us from effectively treating patients, as well as suppress the information we knew the public needed to hear” (p. 16).

       Fortunately, they worked in an area where they could initially follow their own insights without restraint from hospitals or bureaucrats.  They listened to NIAID spokesmen (Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx) but found their pronouncements demonstrably at odds with what they personally knew.  They were also encouraged by “a very well-written article in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Dr. Harvey Risch from Yale University,” which supported early treatment with hydroxychloroquine.   Nevertheless— and much to their amazement—“powerful forces were mobilizing, and they were prepared to do everything in their power to suppress the success we were having with our patients” (p. 35).  “Despite the success of the HCQ treatment protocol, and despite the 100% success rate for our patients who were treated early, the unthinkable happened:  the NIH, FDA, WHO, and CDC knowingly blocked effective early treatment for a virus enhanced in a lab to infect and kill humans.  The reason?  To sell a vaccine that turned out to be significantly ineffective in blocking new infections by variants and gain control of the populace” (p. 37).

       Despite opposition Fareed and Tyson persevered.  They worked on refining the “cocktail” and pleaded with anyone who would listen to heed their endeavors.  They made videos setting forth their “rationale for early treatment of COVID-19 illness.  But the videos were censored and labeled as ‘misinformation’ by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, all without declaring what content of the presentations was allegedly not true” (p. 68).  In the fall of 2020, Senator Ron Johnson called for a Senate hearing on the Early Treatment of COVID-19 and invited Dr. Fareed to testify before the Homeland Security Committee.  The hearing was sparsely attended and not nationally televised.  Senate Democrats and their media henchmen particularly praised another witness, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, who claimed HCQ had little efficacy and actually posed a risk for COVID-19 patients.  “This false characterization by so-called ‘experts’ such as Dr. Jha, who have not even treated a COVID-19 patient, has likely discouraged countless high-risk patients from seeking outcome-altering early treatment” (p. 66).  Jha even accused Fareed et al. of being “snake oil salesmen”! 

       Unintimidated, in September 2020 Fareed and Tyson set forth a national plan for COVID-19.  They urged caring for the vulnerable (elderly and chronically ill persons) without closing down schools, churches, and businesses.  When diagnoses so indicate, treating infected patients with HCQ and ivermectin within five days would almost always save them.  “Form a massive education program to emphasize early diagnosis and treatment, independent of test results,” and train primary care providers to quickly respond.  Their “plan would have reduced deaths through early treatment, protected the elderly initially by isolating them and later with vaccination, allowed businesses and schools to remain open, and society to go back to normal.  Unfortunately, our plan was not followed; our nation under the leadership of Dr. Fauci adopted a strategy of ‘hiding’ from the virus until the vaccine was available.  Then, when the vaccine failed to stop the spread, we hid again, relying on masks and social distancing while rejecting the one answer to ending the pandemic:  early diagnosis and treatment” (p. 97).  Tragically, “our country embraced an approach driven by fear and not by science, and the results have been catastrophic with almost 800,000 dead (as of December 2021) and the economy in a tailspin” (p. 98).  None of this need have happened!  If only we had looked at the evidence rather than listened to the “experts!” 

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        Yet another account of successfully treating COVID-19 patients—The Courage to Face COVID-19:  Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex (Counterplay Books, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough—merits reading.  A noted journalist, Michael Capuzzo, says “McCullough is a hero for our time and for all times.  When the world collapsed from the COVID-19 pandemic, he led ‘the 500 doctors who saved the world’ and saved millions of people with his global research and at the bedside with his own hands.  When government health agencies and big pharma failed to do their job and lied about repurposed drugs that could end the pandemic, he did their job and called them out.  When reporters and editors failed to do their job and launched the largest propaganda campaign in history to cover up the lies, he did their job and told the truth about the lives lost and vast human suffering.  Instead of giving him a Nobel Prize they all tried to destroy him.  If you can read, you must read this powerful book he wrote with author John Leake, one of the few journalists with the talent and courage to tell the truth about the pandemic” (p. 306).

       An inquisitive reporter, John Leake doubted many public pronouncements as COVID-19 spread around the world.  He’d majored in history and philosophy as an undergraduate and he had long been interested in the history of medicine, which shows how orthodoxy in medicine is often deadly and group-think frequently fails to find the truth.  ​A quick review of the literature on anti-viral therapies showed him that some had effectively dealt with influenza viruses, especially when taken as early as possible, so Anthony Fauci’s “sheltering in place” seemed to him a sadly inadequate response to COVID-19!  He then learned that a noted physician, living near him, was providing an alternative approach to Fauci’s dicta.  Dr. Peter McCullough, the Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, was urging early treatment of the disease, and he’d found that it could be quickly, effectively treated!  After interviewing the doctor Leake determined to write this book.  

       A board certified internist and cardiologist, McCullough was also a Professor of Medicine at Texas A&M University, President of the Cardiorenal Society of America, and Editor-in-Chief or Senior Associate editor of three major academic journals.  He’d published over 600 peer reviewed academic medical papers.  Learning that Chinese researchers were getting good results using hydroxychloroquine and that Indian medical councils were urging medical workers to take it as a prophylaxis, McCullough determined to test it. ​

“Among researchers all over the world, hydroxychloroquine was known as one of the most useful drugs ever formulated” (p. 37) and so it seemed when he treated COVID patients.  His success was confirmed by multiple studies in South Korea, India, and France.  But when President Trump suggested hydroxychloroquine might be effective Anthony Fauci rebuked him, saying the evidence for the therapeutic was purely “anecdotal” and needed “a controlled clinical trial” before approval.  Fauci also dismissed the efficacy of Ivermectin—sometimes called a “wonder drug” for its use for various illnesses.  Since it is also used by veterinarians it was derided as an animal drug!  In time “research teams and independent doctors all over the world studied ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19,” finding it effective.  It too, however, failed to get Fauci’s stamp of approval.  Wait patiently for a vaccine!  We did and millions (worldwide) died!  Sadly enough, the doctors who knew the most were ignored and we witnessed a disaster haplessly handled by highly-paid “public health” bureaucrats.

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363 Race Resolutions

         Wendell Berry is mainly acclaimed for his environmental writings, urging a very Amish kind of labor-intensive, organic agriculture.  Over the years I’ve read many of his 50+ books and consider them akin to works of monastic spirituality—models of an exemplary way to live but unfortunately impractical for ordinary folks.  Berry has also authored two books pondering the significance of race in American history and culture.  The first book, The Hidden Wound (Berkely, CA:  Catapult; Kindle Edition), was written in the Stanford University library during the Christmas holiday of 1968-1969 amidst the “civil rights agitation” evident in various meetings on campus, mainly featuring blacks berating whites—“sometimes addressing them by obscene epithets,” to which “the whites cheered and applauded.  Speakers and hearers seemed to be in perfect agreement that the whites were absolutely guilty of racism, and that the blacks were absolutely innocent of it.  They were thus absolutely divided by their agreement” (p. 110).  

       Deeply rooted in the soil and history of his native Kentucky, personally knowing and working closely with blacks on his family farm, Berry knew the simplistic “racist” rhetoric of the ‘60s was false and could never resolve the deep divide—the “hidden wound”—troubling this nation.  He was both educated and wise enough to know how unhinged rhetoric preceded and help cause the Civil War.  So decided to reflect on his memories and think about race without indulging in either pious outrage or affected innocence.  He took seriously the advice of Confucius’ The Great Digest:  “wanting good government in their own states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart).”  Berry noted that if he only attended to the sufferings of slaves their descendants he would have felt bad for them and thus “highly of myself.”  But he also knows that though “white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly” (p. 4).  He also knew that while suffering discrimination many blacks lived lives of nobility and joy.   

       This became evident as he remembered the stories he heard as a boy, for there were still many children of both slaves and slave owners living in northern Kentucky.  As an adult Berry now considered “the casualness of this hereditary knowledge of hereditary evil” and it shocked him when he realized its actuality and acknowledged his “complicity in history and in the events of your own life” (p. 6).  He thought about the stories, both oral and written, of Bart Jenkins, a slave-seller, that praised him for his heroics in the Confederate army.  Berry reflected on the stories of slave owners kindly treating their slaves but realized that “if there was any kindness in slavery it was dependent on the docility of the slaves; any slave who was unwilling to be a slave broke through the myth of paternalism and benevolence, and brought down on himself the violence inherent in the system” (p. 6).  He weighed “the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used” (p. 16).  

       But Berry also remembered the black people, particularly Nick and Aunt Georgie, to whom he devotes many pages of the book, who “figured large in my experience.”  Working with and listening to them, “it was inevitable that we should come to like and even to love some of those black people” (p. 21).  They were not in the least “objects of pity, but rather as friends and teachers, ancestors you could say, the forebears of certain essential strains in my thinking” (p. 64).  Though they called themselves and were called by whites “colored people,” he always thought about Nick and Aunt Georgie, not that they were “colored.  Certainly there was race prejudice, black-white relations were rooted in very particular, and often very affectionate, bonds.  

      Thus Berry was conflicted by this mixture of guilt and gratitude.  He struggled to balance his memories of the blacks he personally knew with the reality of racism in America.  For him, he said, it “was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness—the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak” (p. 49).  Yet he believed both blacks and whites want to get along, to find ways to “tear away the centuries of hypocrisy and lies, and enfranchise our best hopes” (p. 92).  Can it happen?  Perhaps, though deep divisions persist.  

       Reflecting on four episodes in great literary works—Homer’s Odyssey, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace—Berry appropriated their wisdom.  “Men are whole,” it seems, “not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with the creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.  And perhaps most important of all, these four encounters testify that the real healings and renewals in human life occur in individual lives, not in the process of adjusting or changing their abstractions or their institutions” (p. 104).  Characters were not touched by political movements but experienced deeply spiritual “metamorphoses” that changed their hearts.  “No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.  I believe that the experience of all honest men stands, like these books, against the political fantasy that deep human problems can be satisfactorily solved by legislation” (p. 104).

       Indulging in a fanciful, romantic vision of tribal peoples on this continent, Berry suggested that indigenous Americans—Indians—might help us understand how we need to mend our ways.  He explored this theme in The Unsettling of America:  Culture and Agriculture nearly 50 years ago.  “That we failed to learn from them how to live in this land is a stupidity—a racial stupidity—that will corrode the heart of our society until the day comes, if it ever does, when we do turn back to learn from them.  Inheriting the cultural growth of thousands of years, they had a responsible sense of living within the creation—which is to say that they had, among much else, an ecological morality—and a complex awareness of the life of their land which we have hardly begun to have.  They had a cultural and spiritual whole-ness of which the white and black races have so far had only the divided halves” (p. 107).  As a historian who has read and reflected and written on the influence of Indians on America, I must simply say Berry’s views contain some truths and many falsehoods.  When writing about blacks and whites in the South he’s an insider; when writing about Indians he’s manifestly an outsider.

       Recently evaluating The Hidden Wound, Berry remains persuaded that you cannot separate “the freedom and prosperity of the people” from “the health of the land.  “I wrote the book because it seemed to me that the psychic wound of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself.  I believed then, and I believe more strongly now, that the root of our racial problem in America is not racism.  The root is in our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people—but to our condition.  We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country” (p. 112).  We think of ourselves as free, but it’s only a freedom “to do as we please.”  The finer form of freedom, what’s needed to resolve the racial divide, is the freedom “to take care of ourselves and of each other” (p. 129).  In fact, we need not more laws and forced integration.  We need a moral and spiritual renewal to makes us a better people. 

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       Five decades after writing on racism in The Hidden Wound, Wendell Berry revisited the subject in The Need to Be Whole:  Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (Shoemaker & Company, c. 2022; Kindle Edition).  The book is more a collection of essays than a systematic treatise, and as always he wants us to see holistically, understanding how whites as well as blacks have suffered as a result of racism, for as Plato realized long ago the person suffering a wrong is harmed physically whereas the person doing the wrong harms his soul.  To Berry:  “People of some experience and some self-knowledge know that the contest between right and wrong is perennial in the soul of every human, and that right and wrong cannot be geographically divided” (p. 88).   He rejects the notion that blacks and whites are radically dissimilar, for that would eliminate the possibility of coming together, understanding and working with one another.  We ought never “think with concern of black Americans without eventually thinking also of white Americans, with whom the black Americans share somewhat the same identity, as for example consumers in a consumptive economy, and more than somewhat the same fate—just as it would certainly be wrong to think at any length about white Americans without thinking also of black Americans” (p. 274).  “In fact, much that’s gone wrong during the past half-century has been suffered by both races, for in the deepest sense what’s been lost is authentic communities wherein love and forgiveness, families and churches, may be found.  The prejudice that most concerns him is not racial prejudice, but the ‘prejudice against community life itself’ ” (p. 13).  

       As a pacifist Christian, seeking to follow “the teachings of Jesus and of Martin Luther King Jr.” Berry wants to stop the violence of all kinds and to live at peace with all creation.  Dr. King “was not thinking of white people as ‘the enemy,’ even though he and his people had to confront the enmity of many white people.  It was clear to me that he saw the freedom he sought for black people as a freedom needed also by white people, and I agreed.  No freedom could belong securely to any part of the people that did not securely belong to all of them.  Dr. King’s movement in this way escaped the specialization that usually afflicts movements. He said, ‘Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.’  This is a version of love uncommonly serious, deliberately a religious, a Christian, version, readily allied to Jefferson’s inspired glimpse of human rights as a divine endowment, as opposed to a gift from the state.  This love is not much subject to control or limitation by humans.  It was love’s impulse, its self-moving, toward wholeness that moved King from concern for black people to concern for poor people to concern at last for all people, their land and culture.  So I have understood him” (p. 47). Berry thinks “there is a law of love operating in this world.  If you see the world’s goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed required), then your love itself will be one of your life’s great rewards.  That is the law that rules the ‘sticker,’ the settler, the actual patriot.  The opposite law is that of greed, which sees the goodness and beauty of the world as wealth and power.  It says:  Take what you want.  No individual person is purely a settler or an exploiter, but perhaps every person must submit to the rule of one law or the other” (p. 51).

      Berry’s “a rural American, a writer who by birth and choice is a country person,” and sees things “from ground-level.”  He judges “things above the ground by their effect or influence on the ground” and considers “the good care of the land as the highest human obligation, and the good care of the human community as the second highest.”  Aldo Leopold’s classic essay “The Land Ethic,” has been a lode star for Berry, and Leopold said “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”  Reading that, Berry’s “thoughts of the land and the community became one thought.”  Rather than conquer others we need to live harmoniously with them, but from “the point of view of the land-community” America is declining because we’ve failed to care for the land. “The country is in decline because the people are not properly using it and caring for it.  The people are in decline for the same reason.”  To Berry “both the land and the people are unhealthy” and we need to restore them to health.  Berry thinks urban liberals who dominate discussion of race relations fail to see how “our race problem is intertangled with our land and land use problem, our farm and forest problem, our water and waterways problem, our food problem, our air problem, our health problem.”  Though they talk much and prescribe endless solutions, their focus on equity and diversity and inclusiveness never considers the “land community” so crucial to a people’s well-being.   “They don’t know or think about or talk about the rural problems that are the causes or the results of urban problems.  This makes a great silence into which this book tries to speak” (p. 26).  

       He also tries to speak to persons rather than institutions.  Prejudice cannot be eliminated by edict.  Laws desegregating public places have limited worth.  Says Berry:  “To understand the limits of the public means of opposing prejudice is to understand as well how limited must be the effectiveness of public protest.  I have taken part in quite a few public protests myself, as I have said.  But these events seem now to be too much regarded as ‘all we can do.’  Too many of us appear to have decided that all our problems can or should be solved by the government.  And so the protesters, like nests of baby birds, look upward and cry out for sustenance from on high.  But the government as it now stands is an unlikely mother bird, for it is mainly a flock of caged layers.  We certainly do need to protest, but not to the neglect of the small local tasks and projects that, with the help only of ourselves, can make things a little better.  John Ruskin said that ‘all effectual advancement towards . . . true felicity of the human race must be by individual, not public effort.’  And before Ruskin, William Blake had written: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; “General Good” is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer’” (pp. 264-265).

      Though not a historian, Berry thinks much about the past and its abiding presence, aware that we cannot escape it even when ignorant of it.  He’s particularly concerned with the local history shaping his region, a twenty-mile square section of northern Kentucky.  Both sides of his family lived in and around Port Royal, Kentucky, for more than 200 years.  Thus he gives attention to his home’s state song—“My Old Kentucky Home”—and thinks it has, despite allusions to slavery, enduring worth.  Though Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, many Kentuckians fought for the South and the state suffered considerably during the war, in part because federal troops occupied the state and ruled tyrannically.  For instance, a fourth of its horses and a third of its mules were stolen, largely by Union soldiers, severely harming the farmers needing them to survive.  The “soldiers and marauders” also destroyed fences, barns, and houses.  Staying neutral during the war hardly preserved the state’s residents’ well-being.  

      Berry also writes wisely about Robert E. Lee and the many monuments memorializing him, seeking to rightly appreciate the man despite his leadership in a war to preserve slavery.  We need to remember Lee fought for Virginia, for what Allen Tate said was a “local community which he could not abstract into fragments.”  Berry notes that Lee’s “significance for my purpose in this book is that he embodied and suffered, as did no other prominent person of his time, the division between nation and country, nationalism and patriotism, that some of us in rural America are feeling at present” (p. 199).  Evaluating an attack on a Lee statue, Berry found “nothing admirable or reassuring in a photograph of comparatively well-fed college boys kicking the pulled-down statue of a Confederate soldier.  Why should we not remember the compassion and generosity of General Grant toward just such soldiers at Appomattox?” (p. 188).  Following their meeting, Grant and his soldiers raised their hats to Lee as he rode away, and Lee never allowed “anybody in his hearing to speak unkindly of Grant” (p. 232). 

         Importantly, Confederate generals “were not all alike.  After the war, some of them acted in good faith to heal the wound that afflicted—and still afflicts—this nation” (p. 184).  Think for a moment about Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s best general.  How do you treat a man “who thought slavery immoral, and who never owned a slave, a man ferocious and devout?  And what of General P. G. T. Beauregard, who after the war led a biracial political movement in Louisiana?” (p. 210).  After the war, Lee sought to be a peace maker, writing:  “‘We shall have to be patient, and suffer for a while at least; and all controversy, I think, will only serve to prolong angry and bitter feeling’” (p. 184).  There was a grace and forgiveness in Lee sorely lacking in many of today’s militants.

Unlike Lee and Grant, “People who hate all Confederates, it seems to me, are oversimplifying themselves in order to do so.  They seem to be war propagandists looking for a war, relishing the division of people into abstract or stereotypic categories of Good and Evil, placing themselves among the Good—the Good, as ever in such divisions, being divested of imagination, sympathy, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and thus another version of evil” (p. 235).

      Those tearing down monuments to Southern soldiers see them as “symbols of slavery and racism,” utterly obscuring “a passage of our history that in actuality is hard to understand and, for those with some understanding of it, hard to bear.  And this simplifying and obscuring symbolism seems to have enabled, in some of the liberal writing about this issue, an implicit sequence of equations:  Confederate soldier = only a defender of slavery = only a racist = only a white supremacist = purely a Nazi or neo-Nazi.  And so the verdict of the monument controversy so far is the startling consensus that Robert E. Lee was no more than both sides agree that he was:  a Nazi or a proto-Nazi, eligible to be hated by everybody except Nazis.  The problem, and it belongs to all of us, is that the story of Robert E. Lee, not the statue but the actual man, is a story inextricably involving love, love of several kinds, all inextricably involving grief.  He is one of the great tragic figures of our history, who embodied and suffered in his personal life our national tragedy.  As such, he deserves our study and thought.  I don’t think we can understand our Civil War and our history since without a competent understanding of the character and the life of Robert E. Lee” (p. 190).  Anti-monument zealots operate under “the exceedingly perilous delusion of human perfectability:  If we who are perfect, or nearly so, could demolish present evils or present reminders of past evils, then all of us would be perfect” (p. 186).  Their determination to pursue “a policy of perpetual, presumably eternal, unforgiveness against many thousands of dead people, the ‘modern-day critics’ have got to be people who are morally perfect” (p. 198).  Which, of course, they manifestly are not.

        The Need to Be Made Whole continually prods us to broaden the scope of our concerns, for “we need to pay some attention to unprominent prejudices that are merely habits of ordinary life:  prejudices, I mean, against farmers, country people, people of small towns, white southerners, white people, white men, men, Kentuckians, Kansans, manual workers, poor people, people who have not attended college” (p. 266).  Hillary Clinton, PBS personalities, and New York Times pundits hardly hesitate when discounting the worth of Rural Americans.   Such prejudices are as onerous and perverse in their own ways as race prejudice, for they eat away at the actual communities we need.  Lauding racial “diversity” the nation’s elites “still freely insult farmers,” who “may now be the most threatened minority among us.  It is wrong to rank prejudices as good or bad.  All prejudices are of a kind and are allied. They thrive on ignorance, and they belong to human nature” (p. 267).   To the extent prejudices percolate through ignorance, learning to know actual persons is the only way to defuse them.  “It is love that leads us toward particular knowledge, and it helps us to learn what we need to know.  It leads us toward vocation, the work we truly want to do, are born to do, and therefore must learn to do well” (p. 268).  What we need is “the hardworking familial and neighborly love that commits itself and hangs on like a hair in a biscuit.  This is love that can be enacted, whether or not it is felt. The solutions that this love advocates come from knowing what is right, not for the future, but now and always.  Its solutions propose everybody’s good, not spoils to the victors, not victory” (p. 268).

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362 BENEDICT XVI:  DEFENDER OF THE FAITH 

          The recent death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI merits attending to his life and works.  In the long history of the papacy, few popes have been distinguished theologians.  Leo I (the Great) and Gregory I (the Great) and Leo XIII certainly qualify as first-rate thinkers, as does Benedict’s predecessor, John-Paul II.  But Benedict must be ranked among a handful of the finest.  Indeed, George Cardinal Pell said:  “Pope Benedict is probably the best theologian among all the popes and he should become a Doctor of the Church.”  Joseph Pearce, in Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith (Gastonia, North Carolina:  TAN Books, c. 2021; Kindle Edition), recently wrote a highly appreciative and informative biography.  He feels much T. S. Eliot said when considering Dante—“I feel that anything I can say about such a subject is trivial.  As  feel so completely inferior in his presence—there seems really nothing to do but to point to him and be silent.”  But Pearce refused to be silent and gave us a good gift with this biography, which is more an apology than a “critical” appraisal.  “It is an apologia:  a spirited and heartfelt defense of Pope Benedict’s words and works, a tribute to his life and legacy, an homage to his sanity and sanctity.  It is a vigorous defense of a rigorous and vigorous defender of the Faith.  For this, at least, I make no apology because no apology is necessary” (p. 19).

       Born in 1927 in southern Germany, Joseph Ratzinger was reared by a father “who with unfailing clairvoyance saw that a victory of Hitler’s would not be a victory for Germany but rather a victory of the Antichrist” and instilled in him a deep faith in a Kingdom transcending earthly powers.  Schooled in a gymnasium, he thoroughly mastered Latin and Greek, a linguistic foundation for his later mastery of theology.  He began such studies just in time, for Hitler’s National Socialist regime soon required students to study science and modern languages rather than the classics, replacing religious instruction with Nazi ideology (an anti-Christian neopaganism).  Early in life he decided to enter the priesthood and flourished in his studies, delving into a broad spectrum of philosophy and literature as well as theology.  

       Rapidly gaining renown in academic circles, he served as a theological consultant at the Second Vatican Council, which began meeting in 1962.  Some considered him rather “progressive,” but ultimately he would devote much effort to showing how the council sought to preserve the deepest traditions of the Church.  This was evident when, in 1968, he published Introduction to Christianity, the work that would gain him acclaim “as a theologian of the first order.  The clarity and beauty of the book earned him the reputation of being the ‘Mozart of theology’ and it also won him many significant and important admirers” (p. 36).  In 1977 he was named Archbishop of Munich and soon made a cardinal.  His was “what can only be described as a meteoric rise to prominence within the Church” (p. 44). In 1981 John Paul II brought him to Rome to serve as the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “making him—de facto if not de jure—the most powerful man in the Church after the Pope himself” (p. 44).  Says Pearce:  “the charismatic Pole had made the brilliant Bavarian his right-hand man, the two men forming a dynamic duo, defending doctrine, restoring tradition, and forcing the modernist ascendancy into retreat” (p. 45).  

       Both Ratzinger and John Paul II sought to rightly interpret Vatican II in light of its written documents—not in the modernists’ alleged “spirit” of the council.  “‘The Council,’ explained Ratzinger, ‘wanted to mark the transition from a protective to a missionary attitude.  Many forget that for the Council the counter-concept to ‘conservative’ is not ‘progressive’ but ‘missionary’” (p. 64).  He insisted that both John XXIII and Paul VI wanted to preserve the traditional doctrines of the Church, and neither the popes nor the fathers at the council envisioned the “progressive” reforms implemented thereafter.  What was needed in the Church, Ratzinger believed, was not structural alterations or liturgical innovations but more holiness.  Nor did he endorse any of the many Marxist-based “liberation” theologies of those days, including “women’s lib.”  Ironically, “those who were allegedly ‘liberated’ suffer the hellish consequences of their own ‘liberation’:  ‘It is precisely woman who most harshly suffers the consequences of the confusion, of the superficiality of a culture that is the fruit of masculine attitudes of mind, masculine ideologies, which deceive woman, uproot her in the depths of her being, while claiming that in reality they want to liberate her.’  It is indeed ironic that the feminist movement has its roots in the masculine musings of Marx and has succeeded only in making women ‘equal’ to men as wage-slaves to capitalism, or, as G. K. Chesterton so whimsically put it: “Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to!’ and immediately proceeded to become stenographers!”’” (p. 76). 

       Perhaps Ratzinger’s “primary concern” according to his brother, Georg, was restoring the liturgy—most evident in his strong support of the Latin Mass.  Reformers who championed vernacular liturgies did so “in clear contravention of the specific teaching of the Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium, which stated unequivocally that ‘the Latin language . . . is to be preserved’ in the liturgy and that ‘care must be taken to ensure that the faithful may … be able to say or sing in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.’” (p. 84).  Modernizers also called for priests to face the people rather than joining them in facing the altar.  “Instead of the priest and the people being united in praise, facing the same way, the priest now faced the people and became the central focus of the liturgical ‘performance.’  He was now the star of the show with the sanctuary being transformed into the stage on which he performed” (p. 88).  Such innovations—designed to appeal to the modern mind—“had transformed the majesty and mystery of the liturgy into what Ratzinger described as ‘a do-it-yourself patchwork’ which had ‘trivialized it, adapting it to our mediocrity’” (p. 85).  Properly done, however, celebrating the mass makes Christ really present to His people, most notably in the Eucharist whereby He enters in and transforms the faithful.  To this end Benedict exercised his influence.  

       Shortly before his election as Pope in 2005, Benedict told the assembled College of Cardinals:  “‘Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism.  Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,” seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.  We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’” (p. 97).  To resist this dictatorship Benedict would devote much of his papal work, insisting the Christian faith balances faith and reason.  This was evident when he spoke at the University of Regensburg, differentiating between the Muslims’ Allah who is ultimately irrational and the Christian insistence on a reasoning, rational God.  He set forth “a brilliant synthesis of fides et ratio,” insisting that God is the Logos, “the very Reason that makes reality rational.  This understanding of God is what unites Christian theology with Greek philosophy, a unity of faith and reason that was the catalyst of Western Civilization” (p. 108). 

       In this short and insightful biography, Pearce explains some of Benedict’s encyclicals and lauds his efforts to proclaim the Gospel.  Summing up his work, he says:  “The paradox of the papacy is that a good pope needs to be as wily as the world without being worldly.  He must be worldly-wise without falling for the foolishness that the world mistakes for wisdom.  He has to have lived in the world and to have witnessed its wantonness without succumbing to worldliness or wantonness himself.  In this sense, Benedict XVI was a very great pope indeed, one of the greatest in the long and venerable history of the papacy.  Under his sagacious patronage and guidance, first as the indomitable Ratzinger and then as the incomparable Benedict, he fought tirelessly and largely successfully against the forces of the zeitgeist within and without the Church.  Within the Church, he fought against the spirit of the world in his war against modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age.  He restored the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his restoration of tradition.  He fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting and uncompromising battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death.  In short and in sum, and as the conclusion (in both senses of the word) of this brief and inadequate tribute to a great pope, we can safely assume that Benedict will be remembered as one of the most resolute defenders of the Faith in the Church’s long and tempestuous history” (p. 160).

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       Joseph Ratzinger set forth a brief overview of his first 50 years in Milestones:  Memoirs 1927-1977 (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1998).  Born and reared in Bavaria by devout parents, he enjoyed a blessed childhood.  He attended the gymnasium in Traunstein, where he thoroughly mastered  Latin and Greek, a linguistic foundation for his later mastery of theology.  Entering adolescence, he decided to become a priest.  In 1943, as Hitler’s war effort began crumbling, all boarding school students (Ratzinger included) were required to serve in a civil defense force.  When he became eligible for military service, he was spared active duty but had to work in a labor camp (which he fled as the war was ending) and thus support the regime.  When the war ended, Ratzinger resumed his seminary education at Freising.  Despite the lack of virtually everything material, the students joined together and zestfully studied for the priesthood, delving into a broad spectrum of philosophy and literature as well as theology.  From Freising, Ratzinger went to Munich to study at the university.  Here he encountered outstanding scholars and relished the challenge of new ideas and diverse perspectives.  He also dug deeply into biblical studies and the thought of St. Augustine.  “When I look back on the exciting years of my theological studies,” he recalls, “I can only be amazed at everything that is affirmed nowadays concerning the ‘preconciliar’ Church” (p. 57).  Rather than being a tradition-bound static era, it was a time of ferment and radical questioning.  

His intellectual brilliance fully evident, Ratzinger was encouraged to pursue the doctorate and did so while serving as an assistant pastor in Munich.  He worked hard in youth ministry, received his degree, and then began teaching in the seminary in Freising.  Subsequently he moved to Bonn, where he as awarded the chair in fundamental theology.  Soon thereafter (moving quickly up the academic ladder) he was invited to Munster, then Tubingen and Regensberg.  In the midst of his moves, he was fully involved in the theological discussions of the ‘50s and ‘60s—including the efforts of some to reduce Revelation to the historical-critical method of biblical exegesis.  While at Tubingen, he saw existentialism literally collapse, to be replaced by the pervasive Marxism that continues to shape European universities.  His encounters with Karl Rahner ultimately led him to note that “despite our agreement in many desires and conclusions, Rahner and I lived on two different theological planets” (p. 128).  Scripture and the Fathers, not Kant and the Modernists were his beacons of truth.  

Fully expecting to remain in academia for a lifetime, Ratzinter was, quite unexpectedly, appointed archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977.  He chose, as his Episcopal motto, a “phrase from the Third Letter of John, ‘Co-worker of the Truth’” (p. 153).  To fulfill that calling, he sought to anchor his diocese to the eternal Rock of Christ.  Committing one’s all to “the side of God,” of course, never guarantees worldly success, even in the Church.  But it does give stability to one’s decisions.  And it explains why Pope John Paul II soon called on Ratzinger to take control of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 

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       Following his resignation as pope, a journalist, Peter Seewald, initiated and recorded interviews with him in Benedict XVI, Pope; Last Testament (London:  Bloomsbury Publishing, c. 2016; Kindle Edition).  Over the decades Seewald had interviewed Joseph Ratzinger and had been impressed by his “courage to go against the grain with his old-fashioned thinking.  And strangely, these findings were not only shocking, they also seemed to be right.  The much-maligned ‘Panzerkardinal’’ possessed “a new intelligence for recognizing and articulating the mysteries of the faith.  His speciality was the ability to unravel complicated issues, to see straight through mere superficialities” (p. xx).  For him theology is a prayerful pondering of God’s Word, listening to Him rather than constructing personal positions.  “‘God Himself is the place beyond all places.  If you look into the world, you do not see heaven, but you see traces of God everywhere.  In the structure of matter, in all the rationality of reality.  Even where you see human beings, you find traces of God.  You see vices, but you also see goodness, love. These are the places where God is there’” (p. 238).

         His hunger for God distanced him from the the progressive, this-worldly churchmen claiming to represent Vatican II.  Benedict understood that:  “‘The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon,’” and man is sliding into a nihilistic darkness.  What we need is God, not social reforms, and to find God we must open our hearts to His Revelation in Christ and the Christian tradition.  The grave problem in today’s Church is not simply the catastrophic loss of members but the loss of faith so evident in “the lukewarmness in prayer and worship, the neglect of mission.  For him, true reform is a question of inner awakening, of setting hearts on fire.  The top priority is to proclaim what we can know and believe with certainty about Christ” (p. xiv).  Benedict endeavored, he said, “‘above all else to show what faith means in the contemporary world, and further, to highlight the centrality of faith in God, and give people the courage to have faith, courage to live concretely in the world with faith’” (p. 4).  Of all the Church Fathers, St Augustine proved primary in Benedict’s development.  They both found that ‘“God is so great that we never finish our searching.  He is always new.  With God there is perpetual, unending encounter, with new discoveries and new joy’” (p. 12).  To know Him, to worship Him, to serve Him, is the real work of theology. 

       Extended passages in The Last Testament deal with Benedict’s memories of his earlier years and give insight into his family, his scholarly works, his evaluations of his contemporary theologians, and his positions in the Church.  But the thing that stands out in this book is his deep desire to be a “co-worker with the truth” proclaiming the Good News that God is Love.  

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In 1996 Peter Seewald interviewed Joseph Ratzinger and published their conversations in Salt of the Earth:  Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 1996).  Seevold provided a very personal introduction, indicating that he had, as a youngster, rejected the Faith, so he interviewed Ratzinger with some genuine personal concerns regarding himself as well as his subject.  He noted that Ratzinger was always interested in philosophy, theology, doctrine, and ethics.  He granted that knowing theology doesn’t make one a better person, but when rightly studied and appropriated it matters eternally—both for an individual and the Church.  Though more celebrated “problems” may capture newspaper headlines, the real crisis in the Church was theological—for above all she’s entrusted with declaring what one ought to believe.  To Ratzinger, “To the substance of the faith belongs the fact that we look upon Christ as the living, incarnate Son of God made man; that because of him we believe in God, the triune God, the Creator of heaven and earth; that we believe that this god bends so far down, can become so small, that he is concerned about man and has created history with man, a history whose vessel, whose privileged place of expression, is the Church” (p. 19). 

Typical of a journalist, Seewald also asked Ratzinger probing questions.  The future pope acknowledged that he is something of a Platonist and is openly devoted to St. Augustine.  He also cited a turning point, for him personally, came when Marxists gained power, especially in the universities, in the late ‘60s.  He instantly knew that “Christians” trying to mix Marx with Jesus—flying the flag of  “progressivism”—would lose their integrity as Christians.  Since that time, “progressives” within the Catholic Church have sought to change her sexual standards, to install female priests, to make the Church something akin to themselves rather than Christ.  Obviously, Ratzinger noted, “not all who call themselves Christians really are Christians” (p. 220).  Real Christians seek to live out the Christ-like life divinely imparted to them.  They’re not intent on changing the world!   Indeed, as the 20th century demonstrates, “everything depends on man’s not doing everything of which he is capable—for he is capable of destroying himself and the world—but on knowing that what ‘should’ be done and what ‘may’ be done are the standard against which to measure what ‘can’ be done” (p. 230).  To give us direction we need spiritual renewal, not political revolution.  We need saints, not power-hungry protesters.  “What we really need,” says Ratzinger, echoing his words in The Ratzinger Report, “are people who are inwardly seized by Christianity, who experience it as joy and hope, who have thus become lovers.  And these we call saints” (p. 26).  

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Yet another set of published interviews by Peter Seewald, God and the World:  A Conversation with Peter Seewald (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2000), enriches our understanding of Pope Benedict XVI.  By this time Seewald had returned to the Faith and his questions are both informed and sympathetic.  Setting the stage in his preface, hinting at his own journey back to faith, Seewald wondered what to make of the fact that:  “Within a short period of time, something like a spiritual nuclear attack had befallen large sections of society, a sort of Big Bang of Christian culture that was our foundation” (p. 13).  To which Ratzinger, “one of the Church’s great wise men . . . patiently recounted the gospel to me, the belief of Christendom from the beginning of the world to its end, then, day by day, something of the mystery that holds the world together from within became more tangible.  And fundamentally it is perhaps quite simple.  ‘Creation,’ said the scholar, ‘bears within itself an order.  We can work, out from this the ideas of God—and even the right way for us to live’” (pp. 14-15).  Faith and love, rightly amalgamated, provide us that way.  

Consequently, the Faith, rooted in the Truth of Revelation, cannot be compromised.  “I always recall the saying of Tertullian,” Ratzinger says, “that Christ never said ‘I am the custom’, but ‘I am the truth’” (p. 35).  Thus the task of the Church, in the words of Romano Guardini, is to “‘steadily hold out to man the final verities, the ultimate image of perfection, the most fundamental principles of value, and must not permit herself to be confused by any passion, by any alteration of sentiment, by any trick of self-seeking’” (p. 65).  To the cardinal:  “Christianity makes its appearance with the claim to tell us something about God and the world and ourselves—something that is true and that, in the crisis of an age in which we have a great mass of communications about truth in natural science, but with respect to the questions essential for man we are sidelined into subjectivism, what we need above all is to seek anew for truth, with a new courage to recognize truth.  In that way, this saying handed down from our origins, which I have chosen as my motto, defines something of the function of a priest and theologian, to wit, that he should, in all humility, and knowing his own fallibility, seek to be a co-worker of the truth” (p. 263).  

Seeing the truth—discerning the Logos in creation—enables one to share Sir Isaac Newton’s conviction that:  “The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the universe can only have come into being in accordance with the plans of an omniscient and all-powerful Being.  That is, and remains, my most important finding” (p. 47).  The clear mathematical structure of the cosmos reveals its Logos.  Equally rational, one discerns moral truths that are as objective and inflexible as mathematical formulae.  The Ten Commandments, explained by Ratzinger as “commandments of love” (p. 180), are always and everywhere valid because they tell us the truth about God and ourselves.  Thus it follows, he says, that:  “Setting moral standards is in fact the most prominent work of mercy” (p. 317).  

Since Seewald guided Ratzinger through the major themes of the catechism, God in the World is a rather handy, informal primer for the Catholic faith.  Combined with The Ratzinger Report and Salt of the Earth, it provides valuable insight into the personality and theology of the late pontiff.  

361 Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

            In one of the great pro-life biblical declarations, David said:  “For you formed my inward parts; / You covered me in my mother’s womb.  /  I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;  / Marvelous are Your works,  / And that my soul knows very well” (Ps 139:13-14).  So too Shakespeare’s Hamlet exclaimed, using eight successive exclamation points:  “What a piece of work is man!  how noble in reason!  /  how infinite in faculty!  in form and moving how / express and admirable!  in action how like an angel!  / in apprehension how like a god!  the beauty of the world!  / the paragon of animals!” (Hamlet, 2.2.295-300).   This we know:  as the centuries pass our understanding of human anatomy becomes increasingly complex—indeed bordering on the miraculous—and we ought in humility daily kneel down and give praise for the wonders of our bodies.  We also must, in humility, acknowledge that we have just begun to begin to understand our physical frame.

        Our body’s majesty of is amply described in Your Designed Body (Seattle:  Discovery Institute, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), by Steve Laufmann (a systems engineer) and Howard Glicksman (a medical doctor).  The two bring to the discussion complementary perspectives—a physician’s precise description of what’s known and an engineer’s insight into the mechanics and beauty of architectural designs.  They combine the expertise needed to make their presentation authoritative and the real-world experience to write clearly for general readers.  Though they primarily describe what’s now known—urging readers to understand and (with Socrates of old) “follow the evidence”— they also insist that what’s known cannot be really understood without appreciating its design.  Countering much promulgated by modern biologists who champion evolutionary naturalism, with its hostility to any presence of mind in the physical world, they insist there is a “basic question” that must be confronted:  “Could the apparent design in living systems have happened by accident, or did it require an actual designer? Could any series of unguided errors, over any period of time, achieve the wonders of the human body?” (p. 22).  

       There are purely material causes operative throughout the universe.  They are basic to physics and chemistry and by necessity do exactly the same things repeatedly.  They are suitably studied by experimental science.  But they are “incapable of intent or foresight, which limits their creative powers” (p. 23).   Intelligent causes, on the other hand, “act with intention—they perform actions and build artifacts to achieve intended goals and purposes.  Intelligent agents visualize an outcome, plan how to achieve it, and execute that plan to make the vision reality.  They make specific choices to achieve the desired outcome, guiding the construction, assembly, and activation of the end product.  Intelligent agents generate information and give it meaning. They design systems that harness the laws of nature to perform tasks that nature could never otherwise do—to channel the material forces of nature to achieve specific goals.  Intelligent agents are able, using forethought and the hard work of design, to build large and coherent systems of systems” (p. 24).  Importantly:  “Intelligent causes mainly work from contingency (non-necessary causes) and are not generally repeatable, so they yield much better to inferential science” such as history and archeology (p. 26).  When studying a living human body, inferential science offers robust way to fully understand it, for life cannot be reduced to material entities.  There’s a mysterious organizing dimension within all that lives, what ancient thinkers called the soul.   

      A great chasm separates living from non-living beings.  “As biologist Michael Denton so keenly points out, ‘Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system . . . there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive’” (p. 34). Still more:  living beings never come from non-living beings.  It’s never been seen and simply could not happen. What we see, in the 30 trillion cells (the tiniest parts of our bodies), are incredibly complex living organisms.  As the authors describe how a cell functions one is left almost speechless, awed by the wonder of what takes place within it.  We might well be impressed by the wonders of modern technology, evident in cell phones and computer-driven automobiles.  But a tiny cell far surpasses any human engineering feat, for it is alive!  And:  “To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence” (p. 53).  It must orchestrate a bewildering variety of systems, involving millions of parts, properly sequenced and coordinated.  Then, amazingly, the cell needs to reproduce itself, making new cells to carry on the body’s life. 

       Studying an individual cell and its interactions with all the other cells of the body cannot but amaze!  There are the internal data, informing the cell, making it what it is and facilitating its workings.  But they are also members of a body of trillions of other cells, an orchestra of parts working together.  Information and orchestration—two remarkably different but necessarily interlocked dimensions to the human organism!  There is “orchestration, wherein the cells get instructions from a controller external to the cell; and choreography, wherein each cell determines its own course of action, based on its perception of the situation around it, combined with its internal programming.  If it’s orchestration, where do the instructions come from?  What systems track the development process and decide when and where to send out these instructions?  If it’s choreography, how do cells perceive the situation around them?  What possibilities and differences can they distinguish, and how do they turn these into actions? Most complex systems use a combination of these approaches.  How the body does this is not (yet) known.  But we can apply engineering knowledge to understand what must be there for the specifications and instructions to work, even if we have little idea where these things might be, or how they’re encoded” (p. 341).

       Every tiny cell is itself a marvel, but it also works in even more marvelous ways with all the rest of the body’s 30 trillion cells!  “When a system has all the right parts, in all the right places, made of the right materials, with the right specifications, doing their respective functions, at all the right times, to achieve an overall, system-level function that none of the parts can do on its own, you have what is known as a coherent system.  Coherence, in this sense, is a functional requirement for all non-trivial systems.  Moreover, in life the systems are never standalone—there are always interdependencies between and among the various component systems and parts.  The human body is composed of coherent, interdependent systems” (p. 61).  There are eleven distinct systems simultaneously working to keep us alive:  respiratory, gastrointestinal, renal/urinary, cardiovascular, integegumentary, skeletal, motor, nervous, immune/lymphatic, endocrine, reproductive systems.  

“Each of these is a specialized subsystem in the body.  The body needs all of them, organized properly, and coordinated to remarkably fine tolerances. In turn, each of these subsystems is a complete system, itself composed of many specialized subsystems and parts, organized in specific ways, and precisely coordinated” (p. 63). Consider our respiratory system.  All 30 trillion cells in our body constantly need oxygen (O2), the fuel that enables them to live.  Then they must expel resultant carbon dioxide (CO2), which would destroy them.  So how does the body know how much O2 to deliver and how much CO2 to shed?  It does so through elaborate control signaling systems that govern our breathing and heart pumping processes. When we exercise we breathe more quickly and our heart beats more rapidly, sending precisely the needed oxygen to our muscle cells and efficiently discarding the waste.  Scientists have meticulously observed and described these life-sustaining processes.  But they cannot begin to explain precisely how they could have originated, nor can they tell us why they work so effectively.  When they claim “evolution” did it, they are indulging in  “imaginative storytelling” accompanied by “a lot of hand-waving around the details” (p. 103).  

       Enabling the respiratory system to function, the cardiovascular system is equally necessary and complex.  “All the tissues and organs of your body need exactly enough blood flow to meet their energy needs no matter what you’re doing.  This is a profoundly difficult engineering problem.  Different parts of the body have different needs for different activities. Blood must be directed in exactly the needed quantities, to exactly the right places, at exactly the needed times. And the flows must adapt just as quickly as the body and its organs require” (p. 113).  The “system works a bit like a pipe organ, in which a single pump generates air pressure and the many pipes each have a valve.  When the organist presses combinations of keys on the keyboard, the valves at specific pipes are opened (some more, some less) to achieve the correct timbre, and music happens” (p. 118).  

     Yet another mysterious aspect of our bodies is their heat-regulating capacity.  To survive, we need to maintain a core temperature between 97° and 99°F.  Whether we’re in scorching heat of Death Valley or the freezing temperatures atop Mt. Whitney, we simply must maintain the right temperature.  Fortunately, our body’s  “thermoregulation” governs our metabolism and adjusts to the intensity of our exercise.   Playing a crucial role in this is the hypothalamus, which serves “as the body’s thermostat to keep your core temperature near its target range of 97° to 99°F” p. 168).  It’s informed by thermoreceptors embedded in our skin—many thousands of sensors demanding proper adjustments be made.  Simultaneous, internal thermoreceptors keep track of our cells’ temperature, our “core” condition.   

     We contact and understand the world outside us through the five physical senses.  As Laufmann and Glicksman delve into our seeing and hearing skills the wonders of creation  loom ever larger.   In the 18th century Sir Isaac Newton memorably exclaimed:  “How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?  Was the eye contrived without skill in opticks?”  Good question!  A century later than it still stumped Charles Darwin, and today’s engineers remain mystified by the complexity of the eye, something beyond their ability to manufacture.  (I well remember hearing Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, who was studying the eye, admit in the 1990s that he could only begin to fathom its intricate workings!). Opthamologists describe much about it, but “no one really understands exactly how it works” (p. 194).  “That vision is possible at all is startling.  Vision requires more solutions to more difficult problems than perhaps any other system in the body.  It combines perfectly tuned biochemistry with solutions to complicated engineering problems involving general physics, optics, and electrical engineering, all at a level of nanotechnical sophistication that makes even the best human engineers drool.  Our vision requires perfectly tuned physical structures with orchestrated motion, transparent tissues and fluids (in all the right places and in none of the wrong ones), unique supply chain solutions, constant delivery of energy to energy-hungry cells, layers of complex control systems, high information signaling systems, and information processing and image assembly on a scale we’ve barely begun to understand.  And all this happens with no perceptible delay and no conscious effort, so you can focus on what you’re seeing rather than how you’re seeing.  Vison is both a wonder and an enigma” (p. 197).

       As a systems engineer, Laufmann appreciates complex systems, such as the Apollo rockets and iPhones.   They fuse together an enormous number of parts, working together in multiple systems.  The parts must be shaped just right and the systems must work together smoothly.  Thousands of engineers are needed to make them.  Such things never just “emerge” in some spontaneous event.  Once they’re in place and functioning, they retain their carefully planned programs.  Changes in either parts or systems lead to breakdowns, not improvements.  “If we look across the body’s design hierarchy, there is coherence at each level and interdependencies all over the place, both within each level and among the levels.  All these things occur with a precision and complexity that dwarf any systems human engineers can comprehend, much less design and implement” (p. 354).  Equally important:  “When we look at the whole of the body, which of the systems, or the subsystems, or the sub-subsystems, or any of the underlying information, could be taken away before the body fails?  If it can’t function without hundreds and hundreds of key subsystems and parts, how could it have come to exist a little bit at a time?  In short, the body has chicken-and-egg problems top to bottom.  Indeed, most of the problems the body must solve are chicken-and-egg problems” (p. 358).  

       At work in, and deeply embedded in the body is something even more mysterious than the body.  There’s a self-conscious “me” who’s aware of both the world apart from me and inner world transcending purely physical things.   We are a mind, a rational soul that is metaphysically real.  Neuroscientists know that “while perception, movement, memory, and emotion are mainly caused physically, by brain matter, the human capacity for higher reason, abstract thought, and free will are not.  Thus, though there is clearly a relationship between the two, the mind is distinct from the brain.  We don’t need to plumb the depths of the mind’s mysteries to realize this:  the mind, however it may be connected to our brain and body, isn’t reducible to matter. Your self-ness, while overlaid on your body, is in some essential way more than your body, and independent of it.  Is it possible the entire point of your body is to make the ‘YOU’ possible, and to give it a home?  This may be among the most important questions a person can grapple with, yet it seems far from the minds of most materialists” (p. 382).

       Dealing honestly with the mounting evidence concerning human nature, “the more evident becomes the astonishing engineering ingenuity involved, and the harder it becomes to explain its origin.  It’s hard to make a new, coherently engineered system (at least one that works).  And it’s hard to make a major change to a coherent system without breaking it. Together, these realities present a doubly formidable hurdle for any proposed causal explanation.  Mix in the fact that there’s a person living inside the system, and you’ve got a trifecta of causal problems to solve—you only win if you get them all right.  Anyone who expects you to buy their origins story must account for all these things.  The quality of their explanation should be compelling.  Or at least intriguing.  Or at least plausible. No hand-waving allowed.  And no wishful thinking” (p. 383).

       We can either embrace “a theory of billions of innovative accidents” or a theory of  “biological design.”  As David Gelernter, an eminent Yale professor says:  “This is one of the most important intellectual issues of modern times, and every thinking person has the right and duty to judge for himself.”  Thinking billions of accidents could make anything as complex as the body involves “trying to explain such things through fantastical storytelling, mental gymnastics, and bizarre leaps of logic (and always short on concrete engineering details) as they force-fit all manner of traits into some imaginative survival or reproductive advantage.”  Invoking the “‘survival of the fittest’” smacks of circularity.”  Survivors survive!  So what?  Such tautologies are not explanations!  Nor is “selecting” the same as “generating,” and “no amount of selecting can, by itself, generate a coherent system.”  Nor can “natural selection” select anything!  “Selecting is an act of intention, and nature lacks the wherewithal to intend.  Selection implies agency, but the theory allows no room for agency.” (pp. 397-398).  Indeed Darwin, later in life, admitted that “natural preservation” would have been a better term. 

        The authors of Your Designed Body urge readers to consider the evidence for a new framework, a better worldview, that applies “systems engineering thinking to living organisms—a framework that takes an outlook at least as old as Plato and updates it from a modern systems perspective” (p. 414).  This means understanding that “the history of life is the unfolding interplay of four major causal factors”—Intentional Acts; Internal Adaptation; Design Properties; and Degradation” (pp. 415-416).  As we look at the human body we see all four causes interacting in wondrous ways.  “There are hundreds of systems and subsystems in the human body for which there is neither a known nor even a theorized gradual evolutionary pathway to generating function—no adaptive continuum along which life is viable and reproducing at every step.  Without this, no gradual approach can ever fashion the individual systems in the human body, much less orchestrate the irreducibly complex ensemble of systems essential to our existence” (p. 467).  An engineer cannot but see an intelligent designer-engineer” at work. 

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       For 40 years the Australian biologist Michael Denton has been making the case for “intelligent design.”  In The Miracle of Man:  The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence (Seattle:  Discovery Institute, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), he looks not at human beings per se but at the fundamental elements the universe provides for their well being.  “The human person as revealed by modern science is no contingent assemblage of elements, an irrelevant afterthought of cosmic evolution,” he says.  “Rather, our destiny was inscribed in the light of stars and the properties of atoms since the beginning.  Now we know that all nature sings the song of man.  Our seeming exile from nature is over.  We now know what the medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed ‘manifest in human flesh.’  And with this revelation the… delusion of humankind’s irrelevance on the cosmic stage has been revoked.” (p. 202)  He discerns “an act of extraordinary prescience” that “built into nature from the beginning a suite of properties finely calibrated for beings of our physiological and anatomical design and for our ability to follow the path of technological enlightenment from the Stone Age to the present” (p. 30).

       After devoting many chapters to describing how water and oxygen and fire and various chemical elements simply must precisely as they are for man to be what he is, Denton concludes:  “My argument is not merely that nature is fit for us (which it must be, of course), but that nature is uniquely fit for intelligent, technologically capable organisms very much like us, that we occupy a very special, even privileged, place in the order of things.  That is the central claim of this book.  And it is a claim which, as I have shown, is supported by a mountain of scientific evidence.  Humans are clearly no contingent cosmic afterthought. The exquisitely fine-tuned ensembles of environmental fitness described here, each enabling a vital aspect of our physiological design, amount to nothing less than a primal blueprint for our being written into the fabric of reality since the moment of creation, providing compelling evidence that we do indeed, after all, occupy a central place in the great cosmic drama of being.  This is the miracle of man.  We are not positioned in the spatial center of the universe as was believed before Copernicus, but what we have found over the past two centuries confirms the deep intuition of the medieval Christian scholars who believed that ‘“in the cognition of nature in all her depths, man finds himself’” (pp. 209-210).

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       In Does the Atom Have a Designer? (eThermal, LLC, c. 2013/2016;Kindle Edition), Lakhi N. Goenka argues that even the tiniest material entities contain traces of design.  An atom “is not a passive billiard ball.  It is a complex system of interacting particles called the Atom (which can perhaps be more appropriately referred to as The Atomic System).”  Within the atom, we find subatomic particles—quarks, gluons, and leptons—interacting in wondrous ways.  They are more constellations of energy than hard entities!  Within “fractions of a second after the Big Bang” they were operating in accord with laws, but precisely what “energy” is still eludes us. Equally mysterious are realities such as gravity and “dark matter” which we observe but cannot fully understand.  We observe photons and use them in technologies such as TV, but they mysteriously travel at the speed of light and have zero mass!  They seem like bits of matter but are somehow non-material!  In 1951, Albert Einstein noted “the unfathomable nature of the photon,” confessing he had no answer to its nature, saying:  “Nowadays every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is simply deluding himself.”  Would we all had the humility to simply pause in the presence of Mystery!

360 Deep Church Rising

         A century ago Christian churches in Europe were—despite the ravages of WWI— reasonably strong.  Now they are little more than empty sanctuaries with poorly-attended services and posturing prelates.  Across the “pond,” half-a-century ago, American churches were thriving; both Catholic and Protestant services, seminaries, and schools were doing well.  With Billy Graham and Fulton J. Sheen serving as spokesmen, churches in the 1950s promised to soar and succeed in coming decades.  But during the past two decades things in America have changed.  Indices of various sorts portend a European-style collapse in the 21st century.  Only 64% of Americans now identify as Christians; only 47% belong to a religious congrgation; one-third of Gen-Z claim to be atheists.  

       Consequently, serious thinkers have appraised the situation and proffered significant suggestions.  In Deep Church Rising:  The Third Schism and the Recovery of Christian Orthodoxy Eugene Oregon:  Cascade Books, c. 2014; Kindle Edition), Andrew G. Walker and Robin A. Parry call for the recovery of an historical orthodoxy equipped to effectively address modernity, following Lesslie Newbigin, who “was dismayed at the way in which so many churches had thrown in the towel to modernity” (#65).  Prophetically, in 1952, C. S. Lewis wrote:  “To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the “Liberal” or “Modernist” is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the . . . Last Things.  This unites them not only with one another, but also with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus [lit. everywhere and by all].  The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions . . . is to me unintelligible.  Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether ‘Low’ or ‘High’ Church, thus taken together, they lack a name.  May I suggest ‘Deep Church’; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s ‘mere Christians.’”  

       Following Lewis’s lead, a series of meetings of concerned Anglicans, evangelicals and charismatics, met and acknowledged that what Lewis feared has in fact become a “Third Schism.”  Unlike the divisions between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in 1057 A.D., or between Protestants and Catholics in 1517 A.D., the current schism severs virtually all Christian communities and “undermines the very basis of Christian faith in its denial of the Trinity, incarnation, and the resurrection, and in its treating Scripture as an object of scientific inquiry rather than as a sacred text” (#72).  It is the most ominous development in the history of the Church.  It began in the medieval era when Duns Scotus subtly undermined the traditional understanding of God’s transcendence.  Then William of Occam helped shape the nominalism which became dominant in the following centuries.  In time the “scientific revolution” eliminated Mind from the cosmos.  Responding to the resulting world he faced at the dawn of the 19th century, Friedrich Schleiermacher, “the father of modern theology,” made personal experience the key to faith, and his “influence on Protestant theology has been colossal, and is directly linked with sophisticated and ingenious interpretations of Scripture” (p. 32).  Consequently, theological truth became “person-relative”—autonomous individuals shape their very own “truths”—and nicely-designed to insure personal comforts.  “My truth” trumps “your truth” and has little concern for the “wisdom of the ancients” or for historical Christians creeds or confessions.   

      To Walker and Parry it’s clear that “Christianity is now on sale in multiform shapes and sizes.”  Shop around and surely you can find a version compatible with your inclinations.  While acknowledging how this was probably inevitable in a consumer culture, they insist “that the Christian gospel has a central core of truth that has an objective character about it.  Christian faith is not like a lump of clay that we can reshape however we see fit” (p. 4).  We obviously must deal with modernity and we cannot mindlessly repeat historic creeds.  We must retrieve what’s eternally true and recontextualize it, presenting “a fresh improvisation of the faith that is both deeply rooted in Scripture and tradition but also alive to the worlds we now inhabit” (p. 43).  There are “living traditions” anchored in the “Deep Church” (deep in both history and Gospel truth) that “can survive the wound of the third schism and navigate the rapids of modernity and postmodernity” through “anamnesis, by remembering, by recovering deep church” (p. 44).

       Such recovery involves what C. S. Lewis called a regress, embracing “the Latin sense of regressus—of returning or going back to a former place” (p. 49).   This means fusing “right belief, right worship, and right living.  All three are of the essence of faith in Jesus, of knowing God” (p. 66).  They can be distinguished but not separated—they are all of “faith.”  Right belief (orthodoxia) nourishes itself in what the early Christians called the gospel (evangerlion), which “was a story about what the God of Israel had done for Israel and for the world in Jesus, the Son of God.”  The New Testamernt tells the “story of Jesus—in whom YHWH was uniquely manifest—crucified, buried, raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven. That was the very heart of the Jesus movement and it has remained such to this very day” (p. 69).  What was believed about Jesus was condensed into the Nicene Creed in 325 A.D.—the creed clearly “affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and mainstream Protestant churches to this day.  It was the line in the sand that the churches drew in their attempt to defend the gospel story.  Our contention is that it remains such today” (p. 77).  This Creed the leaders of the Third Schism have denied, contributing to the collapse of the churches.

       Right worship accompanies right doctrine.  In our consumer culture entertainment flourishes, driven by man’s innate human hunger for beauty, one of the great “transcendentals.”  Art and music appeal to what’s deepest in us—though the ways they do so vary dramatically.  Some art is subjective, pragmatic, self-indulging, requiring little thought or discipline because it mainly appeals to our senses and is, consequently, superficial.  Thus young people instinctively flock to rock concerts rather than classical symphonies.  Trying to attract them, many churches have embraced entertainment as the answer to outreach.  “And making worship entertaining does draw crowds—it works.  At least, it works if we think that big numbers of people feeling good for a while is the goal.  But do we have a congregation or an audience?  Do we have worship or a performance?  Are we forming disciples or keeping our customers happy?  Are we honoring God or pleasing ourselves?” (p. 98).  So the Deep Church must always ask whether our worship is shaped by the gospel or by pop culture.  Right worship is “offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.  If it is, then it brings ‘right glory’ because Christ’s worship does” (p. 99).  It focuses on God and Christ, not on ourselves.  Still more:  to worship well Christians need cross-shaped sanctuaries—not fan-shaped entertainment centers—reminding us of Calvary.

       Right practice (orthopraxia) primarily engages us in doing well, being ethical persons.  Long gone is the natural law ethos of traditional Christianity.  Replacing it is an ethical emotivism that normalizes feelings.  If it feels good do it!  To which the Deep Church needs to recover a gospel ethic, a Christian way of living fully evident throughout 20 centuries.  Questions as diverse as abortion and compassion for the poor, property rights and just war, have been fully discussed in the past and give clarity for moral behavior today.  We simply need to “regress”—to recover the way of virtuous behavior.  

       Deep Church rightly identifies the “third schism” impairing the contemporary Church.  It sets forth convincing reasons to explain it.  And some, if not all, of its injunctions might very well help serious Christians work to preach the gospel and do the work of the Kingdom.

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       James P. Shea is the president of the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota—one of a score or so recently-established, deeply traditional Catholic colleges determined to chart different courses from those taken by prestigious “Catholic” universities such as Boston College and Notre Dame.  Shea recently published From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age (Bismarck:  University of Mary Press, c. 2020), a short and very insightful analysis of current conditions and helpful proposals to equip the Church for coming challenges.  In brief, he says Christian churches in the West have, for more than a thousand years, relied on a rich culture within which they could rather easily proclaim the faith and disciple believers.  In my childhood, for example, the public schools openly supported Christianity and assisted students to follow their faith and adhere to biblical ethics.  That world is fast fading away and will probably never return.   Fulton Sheen saw it coming and in 1974 and said:  “We are at the end of Christendom.  Not of Christianity, not of the Church, but of Christendom” (p. 4).

     This means, Shea says, that:  “We are dealing with the first culture in history that was once deeply Christian but that by a slow and thorough process has been consciously ridding itself of its Christian basis.”  Growing numbers of people have turned away from the Faith.  “We are therefore not attempting to make converts from pagans; we are attempting to bring back to the Church those knowingly or unknowingly in the grasp of apostasy, a different and more difficult challenge.  C. S. Lewis once described this difference as that between a man wooing a young maiden and a man winning a cynical divorcée back to her previous marriage. The situation is made yet more complex in that many who have abandoned Christianity and have embraced an entirely different understanding of the world still call themselves Christians” (p. 7).  Apostasy is primarily intellectual—a matter of changing beliefs, denying the reality of God and then rationalizing such things as adultery and sodomy, infanticide and theft.  

       Giving up on reestablishing Christendom would enable us to recover what Shea labels the “apostolic mission.”  The Early Church, working within a pagan culture, reached people with the Gospel.  A small group of believers, facing much hostility, found ways to build and sustain the church.  “They had great confidence in their Lord, in their message, and in the creativity and fertility of the Church.  They knew that their task was to be used by the Holy Spirit to grow the Church, and they knew the graced means by which it was to grow.  And grow it did” (p. 29).  What they did we too must do, embracing an evangelistic task best understood as presenting “the Gospel in such a way that the minds of its hearers can be given the opportunity to be transformed, converted from one way of looking at the world to a different way” (p. 48).  Preaching in an apostolic manner must be theological rather than ethical, aiming at a transformation of the mind (“a conversion of mind to a sacramental vision of the world”), before prescribing righteous behavior.  

       In a remarkably succinct statement regarding our situation, Shea says:   “We receive from Christ both the times in which we are to live and the grace to engage our world as it is” (p. 24).  Consequently we rightly believe that:  “The Holy Spirit is at work in every age, ours included.  If it is true, as we are assured by Saint Paul, that grace is more present the more that evil abounds (cf. Rom 5), we might expect an especially abundant action of the Holy Spirit in our own time.  Our task is to understand the age we have been given, to trace out how the Holy Spirit is working in it, and to seize the adventure of cooperating with him.  May we be given the wisdom and the courage to rise to the challenge of the new apostolic age that is coming upon us and to prove faithful stewards in our generation of the saving message and liberating life given us by Jesus Christ” (p. 65).

       This wise, readable, reassuring treatise provides one of the most balanced and valuable analyses I’ve read dealing with the Church confronting our troubled world.

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      Eric Metaxas first came to my attention when I read his wonderful biography—Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.  Invoking his knowledge of Bonhoeffer, Metaxis recently published Letter to the American Church (Washington, D.C.:  Salem Books, c. 2022;  Kindle Edition), thinking “the American Church is at an impossibly—and almost unbearably—important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim” (p. ix).  The same forces of evil are alive and well, and the American Church needs to combat them.  They “have an atheistic Marxist ideology in common,” and operate under the banners of Critical Race Theory, “radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies,” and wage “war with the ideas of family and marriage.”  Demonic ideologies have “infiltrated our own culture in such a way that they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor” (p. xii).

       German Christians remained remarkably silent when the Nazis took charge of their country.  American Christians, Metaxas asserts, are doing the same, failing to defend the unborn, ignoring persecuted believers, saying nothing about “the deadly perniciousness of Marxist atheist philosophy,” or “criticizing the great evil of Communist countries like China.”  “How dare we be silent about such things?” (p. 5).  We do so, in part, because in 1954 Senator Lyndon Johnson “introduced an amendment to the U.S. tax code prohibiting churches—and any other nonprofit organizations—from taking a public stand on political candidates” (p. 8).  Subsequently, pastors have felt muzzled—unable to denounce  evil lest their churches be taxed.  They also failed to speak out because many of them felt a compulsion to be constantly kind and easily aligned with our deeply therapeutic, entertainment-craving culture.  All too often they resemble corporate leaders “who have become especially cowardly and seem willing to say and do whatever someone advises them is necessary to avoid trouble and keep them from being ‘cancelled’” (p. 10).

       Pastoral cowardice was on display, Metaxas thinks, during the recent Covid pandemic.   Bureaucrats, governors and mayors cavalierly branded churches “non-essential” while allowing marijuana dispensaries and strip clubs to remain open!  Getting supplies at Costco was fine, but finding spiritual nourishment in church was forbidden!  Rather than do their homework and defy the despots, church leaders (with remarkably few exceptions) quietly submitted to the mandates and endorsed useless practices such as “social distancing” and masking up!  “This was a deeply disgraceful moment for the American Church” (p. 12).  Caving into the Covid frenzy promoted by the likes of Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden was certainly less noxious than acquiescing to Hitler, but the same kind of cowardice was on display.  

       On Reformation Sunday in 1932, a few months before Hitler took over, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached a prophetic sermon.  At the age of 26 he wanted to awaken Lutherans to the threat posed by those who recruited Luther to support the kind of nationalism embodied in the Nazis.  Many hearers thought it a “jeremiad” exaggerating problems in their country.  Few heeded its warnings, for they failed to discern the signs of the times, wanting to stay safe and hope Hitler would prove innocuous.  Within a year the German Church would divide into the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen and the Confessing Church, led by Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth, who in 1934 drafted the Barmen Declaration.  Of 18,000 Lutheran pastors, only 3,000 dared support the declaration; 3,000 openly supported the Deutsche Kristen.  But 12,000—a huge majority of pastors—took no position!  They waited cautiously, hoping to avoid trouble.  Some even displayed the swastika—rather like some American churches recently putting up “rainbow banners or BLM flags.”  Given the “silence and compliance” of these 12,000, the Nazis soon began arresting dissident pastors.  Within years, as WWII began, the Holocaust erupted.

       It all happened, Metaxas things, because German Christians failed to speak out against evil.  And he fears todays American Christians are equally cowardly.  Comforted by the “cheap grace” Bonhoeffer condemned, they fail to be true disciples of Jesus, speaking the truth in love.  Our world is not Bonhoeffer’s, but we should ponder some of the issues we face in the light of his life.  Take, for example, “the cultural Marxism that talks about systemic racism, or the transgender madness that says the Bible’s view of human beings and sexuality is completely false.”  We don’t live in a country that imprisons dissidents, but its ruling class certainly champions “the ideology of atheist Marxism” which is manifestly anti-Christian, and serious Christians are increasingly silenced and punished by corporations, universities, and governments.  So we must continually ask:  “What would God have us do?”  

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       Douglas Groothuis teaches philosophy at Denver Seminary and recently published Fire in the Streets: How You Can Confidently Respond to Incendiary Cultural Topics (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan Publishing House, c. 2022).  Reminding readers of the scores of cities set ablaze by rioters in the summer of 2020 following George Floyd’s death, Groothuis says:  “This fire in the streets stemmed from the fire in the minds of many about race, class, and gender.  This fire is strange fire, not holy fire.  While many are rightly concerned about racial justice, economic opportunity, and the fair treatment of LGBTQ people, the leading philosophy behind these protests is CRT [Critical Race Theory]” (p. xix).  An offshoot of Marxism, CRT is currently taught in hundreds of schools, mandated by the military, and endorsed by countless churches.  

       As neo-Marxists, devotees of CRT embrace doctrinaire positions, including atheism, class struggle, revolutionary strategies and utopian aspirations.  To understand it one needs to study Herbert Marcuse, whose student Angela Davis now serves as a “mentor to  a mentor to Black Lives Matter leaders” (p. 12).  Marcuse was frequently invoked by the radicals of the ‘60s, when he “expanded the base for social revolution to include not only oppressed workers (an economic factor), but also those considered to be sexual or social deviants no matter what their economic class (a cultural factor), and those in minority groups (a racial factor).  Thus, he called for homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and those in other nontraditional sexual categories to join the revolution against the capitalist-traditional-family status quo” (p. 12).  Marcuse endorsed “polymorphous” sexuality and encouraged the counterculture “with its motto of ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’” and simple slogans such as “Make love, not war.”

       As the radicals of the ‘60s successfully marched through America’s institutions, “the fires of revolution” were banked “in the minds of academics and activists.”  Given the opportunity in the summer of 2020 these ideological fires took shape in actual fires throughout America’s cities.  “A turning point was the presidency of Barack Obama who, while he presented himself as a moderate, was in reality an advocate of CRT and black liberation theology as taught in his church by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright” (p. 19).   He was significantly helped by William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were part of a band of ‘bomb-throwing Marxists’ called the Weather Underground, that terrorized America” (p. 20).  Within a few years Obama’s Democrat Party turned radically leftward and openly supported socialistic notions and promoted class struggle, especially between whites and “people of color.”  Seeing American history through the lenses of the oppressed, leftists determined to bring into being a new nation—to “fundamentally change” the nation as Obama envisioned.  

       Following thoughtful chapters analyzing both the roots of CRT and its current implications, Groothuis sets forth what he thinks are the best ways for Christians to address it.   We must fight fire with fire!  Countering the fires in the streets we need to respond with the fire of the Holy Spirit.  Responding to the fires of hate we need to stoke the fires of love.  Countering the messianic pretensions of so many politicians we need to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  We should also insist:   “(1) Objective truth is knowable through reason and evidence, (2) individuals have moral value and human rights as opposed to making group identities based on gender and race definitive, and (3) insuring and protecting free speech is better than silencing people” (p. 153). 

# # #

359 Desperate Remedies, Freudian Illusions

       Homeless people gathering at busy intersections remind us that thousands of them are mentally troubled or captive to various additions, needing interventions by caring organizations to help them.  Fully one-fourth to one-third of the homeless are thought to be mentally ill.  Folks my age also remember how the closing of state mental hospitals contributed to this problem.  In Desperate Remedies:  Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, c. 2022; Kindle Edition),  Andrew Shull shows why this has occurred.  “In this book,” he says, “I have attempted to provide a skeptical assessment of the psychiatric enterprise—its impact on those it treats and on society at large” (p. ix).  During the past two centuries, mental “illnesses” have been diagnosed and treated by physicians who thought they were akin to other ailments they treated with medicines or therapeutic remedies.  Psychiatry first developed “as a specialized branch of medicine claiming expertise in the management and cure of what was then called insanity or lunacy” (p. x).  

       For centuries the “insane” had been confined to facilities akin to prisons, keeping them apart from “normal” folks.  This changed, early in the 19th century, when reformers such as Horace Mann and Dorothea Dix, confident they could cure the mentally troubled, helped establish “asylums” throughout the country.  The reformers’ optimism, however, proved illusory, and the medical experts (“alienists” or “psychiatrists”) heading them widely discredited.  They had claimed they could cure up to 80 percent of their patients and utterly failed.  Indeed, by the end of the century the asylums “had been transformed into mausoleums of the mad, a captive population of several thousand and assorted support staff” (p. 4).  Then, following the Civil War, physicians dealing with mental illnesses decided to call themselves “neurologists” and  “insisted that these patients’ troubles had an organic origin and were the result of wear and tear caused by overtaxing of the brains” (p. 7).  They “dismissed asylum doctors as mere boardinghouse keepers and curators of dead souls, willfully ignorant of the latest scientific advances” (p. 7).  

      Rather than try to cure folks, some medical doctors suggested eliminating them.  Influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, they invoked “defective biology” to explain pathologies as diverse as “crime, drunkenness, epilepsy, and hysteria, with madness and feeble-mindedness” thrown into the mix.  Inasmuch as natural selection relentlessly improves the species, defective individuals are necessarily swept aside into the dustbin of failures.  As one “alienist” declared, every year “‘thousands of children are born with pedigrees that would condemn puppies to the horsepond.’  Lunatics were waste products of the evolutionary process, ‘morbid varieties fit only for excretion’” (p. 28).  A “New York physician W. Duncan McKim, heir to a banking fortune and contemptuous of his social inferiors, warned darkly of ‘the ever-strengthening torrent of defective and criminal humanity.’  He urged that ‘a gentle and painless death’ was ‘the most humane means’ of resolving the societal problem that they presented” (p. 28).  Indeed:  “‘The idiot and the low-grade imbecile,’ he hastened to reassure his readers, ‘are not true men, for certain essential human elements have never entered into them, and never can; nor is the moral idiot truly a man, nor, while the sad condition lasts, the lunatic.  These beings live amongst us as men, but if we reckon them as human we shall fare much as if we bargained with the dead or with beasts of prey.’ They should be exterminated en masse with ‘carbonic gas’” (p. 29).  Darwinians such as “Clarence Darrow joined in the chorus, advocating efforts to ‘chloroform unfit children’ so as to ‘show them the same mercy that is shown to beasts that are no longer fit to live’” (p. 29).  That theoretical Social Darwinism leads to actual gas chambers can hardly be better illustrated. 

      Other physicians thought the mentally ill might be rehabilitated rather than discarded.  So they began trying a variety of physiological treatments designed to treat the mentally ill.  Perhaps microscopic bacteria caused schizophrenia as well a syphilis!  Psychobiology was embraced and biological remedies prescribed.  Though slowly embraced by physicians, the germ theory of disease was embraced at the beginning of the 20th century.  Whatever ails one must have a tiny germ as its cause.  Thence emerged a curious theory, focal sepsis—“the presence of unobserved low-grade infections lurking in the corners and crevices of the human body, pumping out poisons via the bloodstream and the lymphatic system—as the likely cause of a host of chronic disorders” (p. 73).  Clean out the sepsis and you heal the disease.  Eat the right food and you cleanse the system—so the health food prescriptions of John Harvey Kellogg were often embraced.  Decayed teeth were suspected of sheltering harmful germs, so extracting the teeth of mentally ill patients became quite popular.  So too it was thought “the poisons that lurked in the bowels” should be surgically treated with colectomies.  Others imagined removing the stomach would resolve mental problems.  There were many claims regarding cures, but virtually no evidence for them.

     Following WWI, with many soldiers suffering “shell shock,” innovative psychiatrists experimented with them, theorizing that their minds needed to be shocked back into normality.  One popular endeavor was to infect a patient with malaria, thinking his elevated temperature would transform his mind.  “The 1920s and 1930s were a period of experimentation with other mechanisms for inducing fever.  Some tried injecting horse serum into patients’ spinal canals, thereby producing meningitis.  Injections of the organisms that caused rat-bite fever were tried, as were injections of killed typhoid bacilli and colloidal sulphur, a technique that by design led to the formation of abscesses.  Alternatively, efforts were made to employ sweat boxes (or diathermy machines, to use the preferred term) to break down the body’s ability to maintain a steady temperature” (p. 95).  Other physicians tried injecting large amounts of insulin, and the director of California’s state hospital system extracted $2 million from the state legislature to implement its use.  Throughout these decades the malarial treatment persisted, and there was a “widespread acceptance of the claim that a biological treatment for a major form of mental illness had been discovered—one that, as crude as it was, seemed to improve the fate of at least a fraction of the afflicted.  Still more crucially, these claims had been validated by the award of a Nobel Prize—an accolade no other psychiatric therapy would achieve until Egas Moniz won the same award in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy” (p. 97).

       Then came electroshock treatments!  They induced seizures thought beneficial for mentally ill patients.  During the 1940s they were widely prescribed, especially in mental hospitals, where they were effective in making troublesome patients more passive and obedient.  In one hospital, it was reported that:  “‘Within two weeks from the beginning of our intensive electric shock treatment the character of the ward changed radically from that of a chronic disturbed ward to that of a quiet chronic ward’” (p. 125).  No one knew precisely how it worked, but some patients said it eased their distress or even restored their sanity.  So rather quickly it was also widely used to treat “diseases” such as depression.  Some patients, however, complained at its brutality, often inducing such violent seizures that broke bones.  Ernest Hemingway was one such complainant.  Before he “blew his brains out with a shotgun, he denounced his doctors at the Mayo Clinic:  ‘What these shock doctors don’t know is about writers … and what they do to them.… What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?  It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient’” (p. 133).

       Even worse were tens of thousand lobotomies done in the 1940s and 1950s!  Nobelist Egas “Moniz asserted that in compulsive psychoses and melancholia, the mental life of patients was ‘constricted to a very small circle of thoughts, which master all others, recurring again and again in the sick brain.’  The ‘anatomico-pathological explanation’ of the psychoses, he deduced, must be that the connections between the neurons making up the brain had become stuck, and ‘after two years’ deliberation, I determined to sever the connecting fibers of the neurons in question’” (p. 144).  Within the medical community there was considerable criticism of the procedure, but the medical press endorsed it with such enthusiasm the public generally thought it efficacious.  In time, however, the disastrous results of lobotomies became clear, as is evident in the case of Joseph Kennedy’s daughter, “Rosemary, whose rebelliousness and slight developmental problems he feared might lead her to pregnancy and scandal.”  He arranged for a lobotomy in 1941, which had “disastrous results.  From 1941 till her death in 2005, Rosemary Kennedy was severely mentally handicapped, unable to speak, incontinent, barely able to walk, and hidden from public view (as well as ignored by her parents while they were alive)” (p. 169).  

       By 1960, despite a half-century’s “orgy of experimentation,” nothing the psychiatrists championed had effectively cured mental illness!  So they were consistently challenged by psychoanalysts (following Freud or Jung) who prescribed “talk therapy.”  Far more popular in America than Europe, and to “the chagrin of most American psychiatrists, Freud’s ideas about the sources and treatment of mental illness drew considerable public interest in the years immediately following the First World War” (p.  203).  His ideas promised a liberation from conservative sexual standards and gained many devotees during the “roaring 20s.”  Psychoanalysts following his theories soon opened lucrative practices treating wealthy folks needing a long series of sessions exploring their childhood, dreams, and sexual fantasies.  Therapists such as brothers Karl and William Menninger established national reputations.  European psychoanalysts, fleeing Nazi persecution, located in New York and other cultural centers and effectively promulgated their ideas.  For a variety of reasons, fully explained by Scull, by “the 1960s, the chairs of the great majority of university departments were analysts by training and persuasion, and the discipline’s major textbooks heavily emphasized psychoanalytic perspectives” (p. 226).  Through stage and film, novels and historical works, Freud and Jung were successfully infused into American culture.  Amazingly, “the first celebrity pediatrician, Benjamin Spock,” in his wildly popular The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care, which would sell 50 million copies, “translated Freudian ideas about neurosis into prescriptions for child-rearing, helping to indoctrinate a whole generation of young parents into the psychoanalytic perspective on life” (p. 229).

       Despite the apparent eminence of Freudianism, any evidence for its efficacy was markedly anecdotal—illustrations rather than empirical data.  Talk therapy certainly helped mildly-troubled souls who mainly needed someone to talk with, but for deeply-disturbed, mentally ill patients it manifestly failed.  Consequently, almost overnight, in the 1980s the Freudians were dislodged by clinical psychologists armed with a panoply of drugs.  The old conviction that mental illness resulted from purely biological malfunctions returned.  It was, Scull says, truly a “psychiatric revolution!”  Psychopharmacology reigned.  Rooted in decades of experimentation, when “few rules rules constrained” their conduct, “the standards for assessing the value of new drugs were remarkably lax” (p. 272).  Nevertheless, some of the drugs seemed effective in certain cases, including “veritable medicinal” lobotomies—in the 1950s Thorazine was touted as a magic pill, reducing “‘the need for electroshock therapy’” (p. 278).  One researcher almost accidentally discovered that lithium carbonate helped schizophrenic, depressed, and manic patients” (p. 284).  

      Psychiatric drugs were also far cheaper than psychoanalysis—something most appealing to bureaucracies and insurance companies!  Insidiously, psychopharmacology established close ties between psychiatrists and pharmacology corporations.  Then the Federal Drug Administration entered the picture, convinced “that mental illnesses had the same form as physical illnesses, a decision that ensured that drug companies would test and advertise their products as treatments for specific diseases” (p. 318).  Armed with the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association, psychiatrists would ultimately diagnose some 380 “diseases” and prescribe appropriate medications following 10 minute consultations.  Prozac, for example, was routinely prescribed for depression.  “‘Shy?  Forgetful?  Anxious?  Fearful?  Obsessed?’  Newsweek asked its readers in a cover story on the wonders of Prozac, only to promise the secrets of ‘how science will let you change your personality with a pill’” (p. 327).   By 2013, 12 percent of Americans over the age of twelve were taking antidepressants, including “nearly one in five people over the age of sixty” (p. 333).  Restless children—kids suffering attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—rose within a decade “by 41 percent. . . .  A recent study found that the United States accounted for more than 92 percent of the worldwide expenditures for ADHD-treatment drugs.  Nearly one in five American high school boys and one in eleven American high school girls had been diagnosed with ADHD, by far the highest incidence in the world” (p. 334). 

       However!  Once again psychiatrists may have foundered!  Psychopharmacology may have run its course!  Study after study, scholar after scholar, have discredited its efficacy.  “Once more, psychiatry is in crisis” (p. 338).  The psychiatric establishment remans “firmly committed to a biologically reductionist view of mental disorder.  Yet the hunt for the physical roots of mental disturbance has not led to the decisive breakthroughs its enthusiasts were convinced it would” (p. 339).  It appears that mental illnesses are something more than brain disorders.  Assertions regarding such ailments as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder seem increasingly “spurious” and the alleged expertise of the profession questionable.  In truth:  “In 1886, the American alienist Pliny Earle lamented that ‘in the present state of our knowledge, no classification of insanity can be erected on a pathological basis, for the simple reason that, with but slight exceptions, the pathology of the disease is unknown.… Hence … we are forced to fall back upon the symptomatology of the disease.’  Nearly a century and a half later, nothing, it seems, had substantially changed” (p. 349).

       After pouring endless streams of money into psychiatric research, the long-term director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “Thomas Insel insouciantly summed up what all these dollars had purchased.  ‘I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded in getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large cost—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, [or] improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness’” (p. 358).  Prescription drugs simply haven not helped people diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and depression.  Unintended consequences—and costly litigation—have made Big Pharma increasingly unwilling to manufacture drugs targeting mental disorders.  

       Desperate Remedies cannot but sober us.  Scull’s exhaustively researched, dispassionate work shows how demonstrably one of the most trusted, allegedly “scientific” professions abjectly failed.  Mentally ill persons can be restrained in various ways, but how to cure them is as yet unknown.  

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      The critique of psychiatry set forth in Desperate Remedies needs to be read in conjunction with Frederick Crews’ indictment of the founder of psychoanalysis in Freud:  The Making of an Illusion (New York:  Henry Holt and Co., c. 2017; Kindle Edition).  Concerned to finally tell the full about his subject, Crews says:  “My main concern here, however, is with Freud in person—and, indeed, with only one question about him.  How and why did a studious, ambitious, and philosophically reflective young man, trained in rigorous inductivism by distinguished researchers and eager to win their favor, lose perspective on his wild hunches, efface the record of his mistakes, and establish an international cult of personality?” (p. 3).  This is a long, meticulously documented, often troubling account, including much material dealing with other psychiatrists in that era, leaving one with a decidedly negative view of Freud and his theories.  Crews reluctantly shows why the “emperor has no clothes.”  He was a plagiarist and adulterer (conducting a long affair with his wife’s sister and funding an abortion of their child).   He mainly treated his “patients” to collect substantial fees and could never produce one of them actually cured by his ministrations.  There’s nothing to respect about the man and no substance to his “psychoanalytic” dogmas.

       Born into an Austrian Jewish family, Freud early embraced kulturdeutsch and “aimed at Germanization,” changing his given name, renouncing his ancestral religion.  He “briefly considered declaring himself a Christian simply in order to avoid a rabbinical wedding.  His bride, the pious granddaughter of a distinguished Hamburg rabbi, would be admonished that no religious observances could be tolerated in his household.  He would arrive late for his father’s religious funeral and would skip his mother’s altogether” (p. 22).  Though trained as a medical doctor he had no interest in practicing medicine, aspiring instead to make a name for himself as a medical scientist, publishing many books and articles between 1877 and 1900.  None of them were pathbreaking or noteworthy, in part because he lacked mathematical aptitude.  “‘To be tied down to exactitude and precise measurement,’ Ernest Jones observed, was not in his nature’” (p. 26).  

       Unfortunately, his “lazy reluctance to collect sufficient evidence” blemished his pretensions to “scientific” methodologies.  He preferred to make sweeping generalizations based on a few “case studies” with selected patients.  He mulled over myths, folklore, and history.  He was, in fact more a philosopher, especially enamored with Ludwig Feuerbach, whom he admired “above all other philosophers,” and who had “‘developed the thesis Freud would elaborate in The Future of an Illusion (1927):  that the God posited by Jewish and Christian theology is nothing other than a projection of human needs and fears” (p. 28).  He would formulate narratives, knowing “that none of his assertions could be checked” (p. 385).  He had, Crews quips, “retired his microscope for good and had replaced it with a crystal ball” (p. 540).  He, not his patients, “reconstructed” their childhood traumas” (p. 514).  Late in life he would even admit to “fibbing” about case studies, and one wonders just how much Freudianism lives by lies.  

     Significantly affecting his career, Crews insists, was Freud’s 15 year long use of cocaine.  Introduced to it in the 1880s, when few medical doctors understood its potency, Freud both used and prescribed the drug.  He early considered it a “magical remedy” that would make him successful and famous.  He introduced a friend of his to cocaine, and a man who had been “a brilliant scientist” quickly became “a broken man” who wasted away into invalidism before dying within a decade.  In time Freud would try to “obscure his record,” but the lengthy chapters Crews devotes to the issue demonstrates how cocaine must be considered when evaluating the man.  His daughter Anna and legions of Freudians carefully censored the fact, but in pivotal works such as “The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud had repeatedly alluded to his preoccupation with the drug.  Among his seventeen long dreams analyzed in the book, no fewer than eight explicitly involved cocaine” (p. 454).  In time Freud replaced coke with wine, drinking heavily, finding it to be “an old friend” he needed to sip every two hours or so, admitting “‘it deludes me into thinking that things are not really so bleak as they appear to me when sober’” (p. 544). 

      In the 1890s Freud moved away from biological reductionism to a position allowing for the reality of non-material ideas, and he began speculating about the importance of “unconscious” factors in the human psyche.  His “hunches” dealing with troubled souls in his Vienna office led him to think sublimation, repressed memories, frustrated sexual desires, wish fulfillment, family traumas, incestuous longings, etc. actually caused mental illnesses.  He ventured many “guesses,” and “he guessed wrong every time” (p. 554). 

Unfortunately, his one-time colleague, Wilhelm “Fliess, growing impatient with Freud’s succession of brainstorms that were never followed up by testing, had come to suspect that his friend was incapable of objective observation.  As he would put it in August 1901, in the most cutting insult Freud would ever receive, ‘the reader of thoughts merely reads his own thoughts into other people’” (p. 547).  There you have it!  A man who projected his thought onto others managed to become one of the most influential (and corrosive) charlatans of the 20th century.  One of the most celebrated icons of the intelligentsia was a fraud.

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358 Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

       For nearly three centuries (since the inception of the Industrial Revolution), gifted thinkers have wrestled with the “good news/bad news” paradox embedded in arguably the most momentous material transformation in human history.  Labor-saving devices and the massive alleviation of diseases and poverty can neither be denied nor despised.  Yet some of the human losses (especially in religious life, educational and artistic excellences) should properly concern us.  Thus the late French philosopher Paul Virilio, noting the many distresses accompanying technological “progress,” spoke of “integral accidents”—apparently inevitable and inescapable spiritual and aesthetic downsides to material improvements. 

       Some of Virilio’s “integral accidents” mar the “digital revolution’s” impact on our schools.  So a decade ago Mark Bauerlein published The Dumbest Generation:  How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30] (New York:  Penguin, c. 2008).  Lest the title tempt you to think it a frivolous polemic written by an idiosyncratic journalist, Bauerlein was a respected professor of English at Emory University and served as a director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts.  In that role he read and analyzed the most extensive research available, seeking to measure the health and accomplishments of the nation’s schools.  He endeavored “to consolidate the best and broadest research into a different profile of the rising American mind” (p. 7).   As the book’s title indicates, he found our schools less than healthy and manifestly failing.  

       Bauerlein discovered, sadly enough, that school kids were “miserable.”  And they were miserable because they were not growing up properly.  “Maturity follows a formula:  The more kids contact one another, the less they heed the tutelage of adults.  When peer consciousness grows too fixed and firm, the teacher’s voice counts for nothing outside the classroom.  When youth identity envelops them, parent talk at the dinner table only distracts them.  The lure of school gossip, fear of ridicule, the urge to belong—they swamp the minds of the young and stunt their intellectual growth” (p. ix).  Teenagers are technologically adept, but their minds have not been opened “to the stores of civilization and science and politics” because “technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them” (p. 10).  

       This shrinking horizon stood revealed two decades ago in a variety of standardized tests.  For example, on a 2001 history exam a majority of high school seniors scored “below basic” and only one percent reached “advanced” (p. 17).  Incoming freshmen at Harvard and Stanford in 2005 averaged a “F” in civics.  Amazingly, attending elite universities for four years failed to rectify their knowledge deficit!  No wonder the novelist Philip Roth labeled them “The Dumbest Generation” in The Human Stain!  And they were dumb because they didn’t read.  In fact they were “bibliophobes.”  To Bäuerlein’s amazement:  “It’s a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading.  Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted a-literacy (knowing how to read, but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers” (p. 40).   Youngsters had simply stopped reading during their leisure times.  

       Rather than reading they stared at screens—TVs, phones, computers, video games—locking themselves into a perpetual adolescence.  Nor did the schools challenge them to move on to maturity.  They were “betrayed” by “mentors” who carried with them a ‘60s commitment to “authenticity” rather than academic excellence.  “By the 1980s, the rebellious, anti-Establishment posture of young adults had become the creed of America’s educational institutions” (p. 182).  Teachers relinquished their “authority,” moving from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.”  They became “facilitators” listening in to small group discussions.  Yet when teachers profess to know nothing why should students work to develop expertise in anything?  In sum, Bauerlein said, the “dumbest generation” was at hand.  

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      Updating his earlier work, Mark Bauerlein recently published The Dumbest Generation Grows Up:  From Stupefied Youths to Dangerous Adults (Washington D.C.:   Regnery Gateway, c. 2022; Kindle Edition).  “This book is in no way a middle-aged man’s ranting against youth,” says Rod Dreher.  “Rather, it is a serious and persuasive analysis of the damage our society has done to its young—wreckage that the Millennial utopians are now visiting on society—and an urgent plea to refuse and resist the mass culture of idiocracy before we condemn another generation.”  Bauerlein urges us to recall an encounter between Herbert Marcuse (the renowned Marxist philosopher inspiring many of the ’60’s radicals) and a group of students on the campus State University of New York, Old Westbury, in 1969.  It was a new college, featuring a student-centered curriculum with youngsters becoming “full partners” with the faculty in learning whatever allured them.  These students eagerly attended Marcuse’s lecture, expecting him to flatter and encourage them, even engaging them in dialogue.  Instead, the aging Marxist spoke with authority as a professor intent on instructing them.  He “‘described the severe Prussian discipline of his own education:  the classics he had to master; the languages he had to learn by exercises and constant tests.  His theme was that no one had any standing on which to rebel against the past—or dare to call himself a revolutionary—who had not mastered the tradition of the West’” (p. 24).  He actually insisted they seriously study great thinkers rather than express themselves!  Sensing the youngsters’ mounting restiveness, he said:  “‘I detect here … a growing anti-intellectual attitude among the students.  There is no contradiction between intelligence and revolution.  Why are you afraid of being intelligent?’”  He reminded them that the greatest revolutionaries—Rousseau, Marx, Lenin—were serious scholars.  The students weren’t persuaded.  Nor did Marcuse back down.  “It was a telling encounter between American upstarts and an Old-World thinker, a clash over readiness, not ideas or politics” (p. 23).  

       The ‘60s generation, of course, went its own way and quickly gained control of the nation’s significant institutions, severing them from the rich traditions of Western Civilization.  “This brings us to the thesis of this book,” Bauerlein says. “The Marcuse affair happened five months before the very first message was sent from one computer to another . . . .  Nobody at Westbury, Sproul Plaza, Kent State, or any other site of student protest imagined what was coming.  They wouldn’t have believed that one day the icon of youth rebellion would no longer be the stormy college student burning a draft card but a bouncy tween on an iPhone.  The generational dynamic would be the same, though.”  This was evident in a 2007 “60 Minutes segment ‘Here Come the Millennials,’ which opened with a warning to employers:  ‘A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred:  from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie.’  The querulous longhairs of ’69 self-righteously suspicious of the Man were reincarnated in the networked high schoolers whose teachers hailed them” for “stepping outside the comfort zone of the school system that they have been subject to for most of their lives, authoring their own learning, and in the process, enjoying it.”  Marcuse had rebuked teachers for failing to immerse their students in classical studies, and Bauerlein labels them ‘false prophets” who “were doing a terrible thing.”  Now, however, they not only endorse “the special acumen of the young and the mustiness of tradition” but celebrate ‘the phenomenal tools kids wielded so much better than their parents and teachers.”  The kids’ cell phones and mastery of Facebook, they thought, heralded a great new day.  Instead it disguised an educational “disaster” (pp. 28-29).  Such educators probably never considered the warning of Hannah Arendt, who “had warned that child-centered child-rearing would free kids from the tyranny of adults only to subject them to ‘the tyranny of their own group,’ of their peers, which terrified them far more than the decrees of their fathers’” (p. 30).

       On a university level, this “child-centered” education shouldered its way into Stanford University in 1987.  Jesse Jackson arrived to speak on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, brought to campus by activist students and faculty.  “Five hundred of them gathered in the plaza at the center of campus to hear this charismatic speaker, who was gearing up for another run for the U.S. presidency in 1988.  As Jackson finished his exhortation and the students departed, they sounded the chant that would be repeated in a thousand news stories:  ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!’ “  A year later, the Western Culture Course of studies was, indeed, gone, and Stanford no longer prescribed a general education core for students.  Thenceforth—and rapidly—our most prestigious universities abandoned the task of exposing students to the foundational thought of our culture.  So we now have young people who have been immersed in a technological world surrounding them with “omnipresent screens” providing a deeply-deranged world-view.  “Their multi-year digital exposure hit them during the very years in which the world takes form in a child’s head.  Digital tools and lax mentors primed them to flee from history, religion, great literature, and art, from music and ethics and American civics, into the fantasy of a society that would replicate the teenage bedroom, where freedom and friends predominated, games and photos and chats never stopped.  When school ended and they hit the workplace, the bills piled up, and bosses weren’t so caring, sex partners came and went . . . they had no religion, no cultural patrimony, and no role models to ease the transition.  So they attached themselves to something else:  a religion of sorts, a pugnacious, illiberal demand, a twenty-first-century American-youth version of, precisely, Utopia.  It has many names—‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Social Justice,’ ‘Racial Justice,’ ‘Democratic Socialism,’ ‘LGBT Rights,’ ‘Antifa’—but ‘Utopia’ captures best the breadth and generality of the attitude” (p. 46). 

       Utopians, by definition, are dreamers.  And our youngsters dream of entering a state of “permanent happiness.”  They don’t want to work to become happy but expect it to be given them.  They claim they’re  entitled to it.  They often espouse “socialism,” not as a philosophical or economic theory but as a longing  for “‘fairness,’ or ‘someone to watch over me.’  It’s a chance to get out from under their student loan payments and find a good job, free health care, and affordable housing in a Millennial hot spot (Austin, Seattle).”  Our Millennials, then are not true socialists, but simply utopians “and they are utopians precisely because they haven’t acquired any political knowledge or weighed any political ideas.  Their worldview fits into neat catchphrases; it doesn’t get any more sophisticated than that.  P. J. O’Rourke pared it down to this in a column entitled ‘This Is Why Millennials Adore Socialism’:  ‘As soon as children discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nice.  And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice?’” (p. 82).   As dreamers rather than scholars they know nothing about the histories of capitalism and socialism but imagine a wonderful society can be construed in accord with adolescent aspirations.  Knowing nothing they can envision anything!  Says Bauerlein:  “Ignorance plus self-righteousness is a dangerous mix.  As avid and unbending utopian desires go unfulfilled, you know what will happen next:  idealism will slide into frustration, the promised happy fellowship to come veering into a merciless search for the enemies who must be obstructing it; the positive will turn negative” (p. 84).  So conservative speakers are shouted down on campuses and American cities in 2020 witnessed fires in the streets. 

         Utopian radicals in the streets reveal the nation’s educational deficit, for in spite of enormous amounts of money expended and philanthropists’ lavish endeavors, students are reading no better than they were decades ago.  Ambitious federal initiatives—“Common Core” and “No Child Left Behind”—have done little but enrich educrats.  We’ve “ignored a reality in plain sight:  the average day for a seventeen-year-old Millennial in 2010 was an intellectual wasteland, an immersion in other things, in games and gossip, photos and messages, shows and songs that would do nothing to help him grow up, to acquire the tragic sense that is essential to shaping prudent hopes of what life can be and to the realization that what they believe and enjoy in adolescence is best forsaken by age twenty-two” (p. 123).   They have become, Bauerlein says, “dangerous adults” dismantling civilization.  

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       Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin, in Battle for the American Mind:  Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2022;  Kindle Edition), urge us to abandon the public school system, believing it is failing our kids and cannot be reformed.  Hegseth, a popular FOX & Friends commentator, served as the lead author, while Goodwin (who years ago began promoting private schools) did most of the in-depth research.  Introducing the book Hegseth says:  “It is my brokenness that brings me to this book.  Our brokenness.  Nothing but the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ affords these two authors—Pete Hegseth (me) and David Goodwin—the sufficiency to undertake such an audacious task:  writing a book that motivates others to reorient their lives around the education of their most precious gift—their children and grandchildren.”  Acknowledging their fallenness, they “appeal to heaven to breathe timeless truths into this earthly work.”  “The insufficient quality of our own educations—in the classroom, and in life—is the inspiration for this work” (p. xv). 

       The authors were both educated in public schools, unaware of their immersion in the progressive philosophy (most effectively promulgated by John Dewey) which has shaped students for more than a century.  During the 1980s and 1990s, this was evident in “self-esteem” rhetoric and “value-free” ethical nostrums.  But for many parents the ramifications of progressivism first became clear as they watched the virtual classrooms their children “attended” during the COVID-19 panic.  They saw the online lesson plans and teachers’ presentations.  Textbooks were opened in homes rather than secluded in classroom desks.  Alarmed at what they found, moms and dads began attending school board meetings, protesting at what what being taught their children.  Basically school boards and unionized teachers told them to shut up!  Educators’ truths are the final truths!  “This is the future, parents were told.  Get with the program!  White people are inherently oppressive.  Gender is completely fluid.  Climate change will destroy the world.  And America is the ultimate source of evil in the world.  Up is down, left is right, good and evil are subjective—until an educator tells you who or what is good and evil, and then you must comply” (p. 6).  

       Given this situation, Hegseth and Goodwin propose a peaceful revolution—“uprooting a century of miseducation.”  Decades ago it may have sufficed for Christian kids to attend church a few times a week, since their values would not be devalued in their schools.  But today’s youngsters need a more robust, clearly Christian schooling.  Hegseth often cites “Abraham Lincoln’s warning that ‘the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation becomes the philosophy of government in the next.’  The statement remains true, but it is incomplete.  To put it more comprehensively, the strength of the church in one generation becomes the culture of its people in the next . . . followed by the philosophy of the schoolroom and the government.  The schoolroom is a vital front in the battle for Christendom and Western civilization, but alone—it is not enough” (p. 14).

       It’s not enough because leftists now occupy the “commanding heights” of our culture.  A century ago Vladimir Lenin used the phrase “commanding heights” to describe a strategy of allowing “limited capitalist activities” on a “local level” while insisting “all the main levers of the national economy would be controlled by the state.”  As long as today’s cultural Marxists control the “main levers” of society—schools, media, foundations—they need not worry about smaller institutions.  For they now “control every strong point, every choke point, and every inch of high ground in the realm of American education, and by extension, American culture.  That was the plan, and it worked” (p. 27).  It’s dramatically evident in the schools’ current commitment to Critical Race Theory.  The dominant teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—promote it.  Indeed, the AFT featured “Ibram X. Kendi—the author of How to Be an Antiracist—at their 2021 national conference.” (p. 28).   The public schools, like the mass media and modern military, talk much about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to camouflage the radical nature of their agenda.  This became clear as early as 1972 when the NEA hired Saul Alinsky to help “train their own staff.   A 1972 NEA training document, titled ‘Alinsky for Teacher Organizers,’ made the case that teachers should be used to organize, not just for changes in the classroom, but for social change.  Think picket lines and teacher walkouts.  As recently as 2009, the NEA website dubbed Alinsky ‘an inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community!  And to every organizer!’  For more than sixty years, the NEA has been in cahoots with cultural Marxists—and growing in power” (p. 37).  “Rather than teaching basic skills and knowledge to America’s children, America’s unions believe their job is to solve America’s problems based on their social-justice, culturally Marxist view of the world” (p. 41).

      Consequently, today’s public schools inculturate rather than educate students, using pedagogical methods designed to impart their agenda.  While Critical Race Theory (CRT) overtly denounces racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., it’s ultimately designed to deconstruct “anything and everything that reflects not just the founding principles of America, but the foundations of our families and our faith.  It’s about control—of thought, and behavior.  To the Left, our Western Judeo-Christian roots are the problem—they must be dismantled, one theory, one word, one classroom, and one mind at a time” (p. 32).  This was evident in the “Common Core” promoted by the federal government and designed to cast aside traditional learning.  So too is the widespread use of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  “It is not hyperbole,” Hegseth asserts, “to state that no other book has had a greater impact on the minds of American youth for the past forty years. When not assigned in classrooms, it has been fully incorporated into the mass-produced textbooks in our classrooms.”  He “was openly anti-American, openly socialist, and always willing to bend history to make America look like an evil country.”  Today’s NEA works hand-in-hand with the “Zinn Education Project,” which has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.  Howard Zinn is no longer an antiestablishment historian . . . he is the establishment” (pp. 39-41).  

     Having despaired of the public schools, Hegseth and Goodman propose recovering a distinctive Western Christian Paideia (WCP), which seeks to purposefully shape the “deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or, more simply, the  rearing, molding, and education of a child.  Classical Christian education creates a paideia unique in all of human history—one that enables freedom” (p. 44).  It takes seriously the fact that we are created in the “image of God.”  It seeks to revive the “common school” that preceded the public school and partnered with “the family and the church, which had been the center of perpetuating the WCP since the first century” (p. 51).  For centuries Christian parents and teachers prioritized “Reason, Virtue, Wonder, and Beauty,” which have largely disappeared in progressive schools.  For example, the widely-used SAT exams measured verbal and quantitative reasoning, essential for succeeding in universities.  But some racial minorities consistently scored lower than whites, so some elite universities are discarding it.  Rather than depreciate reasoning ability, however, WCP schools must recognize and encourage it.  So too with the classical and Christian virtues.  Progressives talk much about “values” rather than virtues, which are “rooted in the affections of a person as they align to God’s affections.  A virtuous person loves the right and the good” (p. 165).  Encouraging youngsters to wonder at the grandeur of creation and the mystery of human consciousness, exposing them to the objective reality of beauty in nature, art and music, will properly educate them as persons with souls, pilgrims on a journey to life everlasting.  The authors persuasively fill in the specifics of their vision of a “classical Christian” education, something both churches and parents should devoutly embrace.

357 Holiness Movement, Ethics, Theology

Darius L. Salter grew up in a Pilgrim Holiness church in North Carolina, earned degrees from Kentucky Mountain Bible College, Asbury College, Asbury Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Drew University.  He pastored, taught at seminaries, including Nazarene Theological Seminary, and served as Executive Director of the Christian Holiness Association.  Few contemporary scholars have his experience and perspective, so much may be learned from his recent publication, The Demise of the American Holiness Movement:  A Historical, Theological, Biblical, Cultural Exploration (Wilmore, KY:  First Fruits Press, c. 2020).  He argues “that the American Holiness Movement has lost its identity primarily because it has been unable to negotiate modernity” (p. 3).  He concurs with and extends the observations made in earlier articles by Keith Drury (a Wesleyan, in “The Holiness Movement is Dead”) and Richard Taylor (a Nazarene, in “Why the Holiness Movement Died.”)  Neither the movement’s distinctive theological commitment to “entire sanctification as a second work of grace subsequent to regeneration,” nor the rules and regulations that once defined “holiness” people, nor the revivals and camp meetings that energized the faithful have endured.  “Holiness” churches survive but the movement has died.

  Rather than develop a systematic treatise analyzing the “demise of the holiness movement,” Salter devotes much of his treatise to significant persons who have shaped it, beginning with John Wesley.   He was obviously a gifted evangelist, his commitment to holy living most admirable, his influence certainly momentous.  But Salter believes “that in his doctrine of Christian perfection, Wesley passed down to his spiritual children a paradigm that has major deficiencies, if not massive contradictions” (p. 20).  By asserting that “nothing is sin, strictly speaking, but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God,” Wesley minimized its power and persistence, leaving his followers with manifold problems.  This was, quite frankly, evident in his personal life.  While preaching “Christian perfection” Wesley was less than perfect, as Salter shows by detailing his troubled relationships with women.  Nor did Wesley give a final statement concerning what he actually believed regarding “entire sanctification.”  Indeed, John once wrote his brother Charles:  “‘I am at my wit’s end with regard to two things—the church and Christian perfection.  Unless you and I stand in the gap, in good earnest, the Methodists will drop them both.’  John was prescient for both English Methodism and eventually American Methodism.  The ideal was too difficult to explain and defend, much less experience” (p. 50).   

As Methodism expanded in America in the 19th century the doctrine of holiness was simultaneously neglected by the hierarchy and popularized, especially by Phoebe Palmer, though Salter devotes little attention to those years.  Instead he jumps from Wesley to two 20th century Nazarene theologians whom he regards as personifications of options ultimately dividing the holiness movement.  Richard Taylor—“the patron saint of the holiness movement” in Salter’s view—“insisted that a second work of grace was the only adequate remedy for inbred sin” (p. 87).  He upheld the positions of the first generation of Nazarenes and “was the most influential person within the conservative holiness movement” (p. 118).  Though Salter knew and admired Taylor, he finds his views of sin and sanctification inadequate.  So too did others, and as he aged he found himself disregarded by younger theologians and preachers and the Nazarene Publishing House no longer published his books.

Leading the opposition to Taylor was Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, who rejected his position on holiness and charted a new way to understand and teach it, claiming she was bringing the church back to John Wesley.  Importantly, as a youngster Wynkoop had tried to fully embrace foundational Nazarene theology.  In revivals and camp meetings she heard how “entire sanctification” could be instantly obtained at an altar.  She sought the “experience” some 40 times and tried to testify to its efficacy.  But somehow the promised “blessing” never came.  Finally, she said, “‘the whole unsavory farce broke around my head, leaving me a full-fledged skeptic, cold-blooded and adrift.  The divine formula upon which I had pinned my faith, didn’t work’” (p. 124).  Rather than leave her church, however, she worked to redefine its theology, ultimately publishing the highly influential Theology of Love, seeking to erase the “credibility gap” she and others had experienced.  The “relational paradigm” she set forth clearly differed from “the holiness formula which until that time, had defined the Church of the Nazarene” (p. 157).  Her treatise was, however, endorsed by the Nazarene Theological Seminary’s official publication, thereby “knowingly or unwittingly” approving a work markedly different from the historic position of the denomination.  Salter provides “insider” information regarding the struggles that transpired in the seminary and denomination in the ‘70s and ‘80s, showing why two versions of “second blessing holiness” competed for dominance, with the Wynkoop faction winning the struggle.  Her theology, Salter contends, is deeply flawed in significant ways, especially in its Pelagian tendencies, but she did in fact became the guru for younger thinkers who would shift the teaching of holiness from an instantaneous experience to a progressive, and basically moralistic, position.

In 2004 the doctrinal uncertainties plaguing the Church of the Nazarene were effectively explained by Mark Quanstrom in A Century of Holiness Theology:  The Doctrine of Entire Sanctification in the Church of the Nazarene:  From Extravagant Hope to Limited Expectation.  The church had come into being at the dawn of the 20th century and shared much of that era’s optimism.  (More that simple optimism, however, Salter thinks “one could argue that the entire Holiness Movement was rooted in a utopian view of life” (p. 159).  After detailing the 20th century’s theological developments, Quanstrom concluded (in a statement not included in the published edition!) that signifiant changes “‘challenge the mission of the denomination which at one time anyway, understood its sole reason for being to consist in the proclamation of the possibility of freedom from sin resulting in a gloriously transformed human nature’” (p. 184).  In Salter’s view, that “sole reason” has dissipated, leaving the denomination rudderless.

Apart from the Church of the Nazarene, Salter devotes considerable attention to Methodists associated with Asbury College and Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.  Henry Clay Morrison dominated the scene in the first half of the 20th century, as did Dennis Kinlaw in the second.  “For many of us,” Salter says, “Dennis Kinlaw had the most capacious mind, the most charismatic personality, the most gracious and appealing platform style, and was the greatest preacher of anyone we had ever known or heard” (p. 227).  He also presided over  “the holiness paradigm shift” inasmuch as nothing he said “could not have been said at a Keswick convention, a Southern Baptist conference or a Roman Catholic renewal convocation” (p. 228).  Kinlaw had a deeply biblical understanding of holiness that Salter fully supports.  It was not, however, the traditional position of the holiness movement.  

In the final section of the book Salter addresses five areas he thinks holiness folks should face:  the world; the self; the other; the animate; and the mind.  But the book’s value lies in its analysis of what has happened rather than prescriptions for what should come to be.  And what’s happened is the death of the holiness movement—which is not to say holiness churches cannot adjust and survive under other flags.

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A young professor at Trevecca Nazarene University, Timothy R. Gaines, has recently published Christian Ethics (Kansas City:  The Foundry Publishing, c. 2021; Kindle Ed,).  He begins with the crucial observation that: “Every day, a dizzying array of moral challenges presses in.  Every day, we make choices between this instead of that.  We face imperfect options because we live in an imperfect world.  Moment by moment, we engage in the work of ethics.  The only question is whether we realize it.  You and I will never avoid ethics” (#70).  To wisely “engage” in this work Gaines embraces the Wesleyan tradition with its “bold optimism” rooted in the confidence that God-in-Christ is at work “making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5).  Jesus came to invite us to join him in living rightly, not by following “moralistic” rules but by allowing Him to make us holy and good.  “The grand hope of the Wesleyan tradition is not that we become ethical people but that we become holy people whose ethics can do no other than reflect the image of God” #779).  Indeed:  “One of the distinctive affirmations of the Wesleyan tradition is the belief in orthokardia—the idea that we must be people of right hearts alongside our right practices and right beliefs” (#262).

Comparing the work of building an ethical edifice with the work of a carpenter, Gaines says “we need plans drawn up so we know what we are working toward. That vision is what ethicists refer to as a vision of goodness, or ‘the good life’” (#336).  To attain that end:  “The most common tools in the workshop of ethics in the Western tradition are the duty tool, the results tool, the God tool, and the virtue tool” (#360).  But these tools are inadequate for the task!  In more traditional philosophical terms, he rejects the deontological (do your duty) position most notably set forth by Kant, the utilitarianism (what’s best for the most people) of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the divine command (follow biblical commands) position of many Christian thinkers such as Robert Adams, and the virtue (develop your character) ethical traditions best developed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.  

Rather than build a “system” of some sort, Gaines thinks we should join Jesus in “the more excellent way,” entering into His new creation and working out its implications.  “‘We cannot create the new creation,’ Néstor Míguez helpfully reminds us. ‘It comes from God as a new earth and a new heaven, which is beyond any human possibility to achieve.’  At the same time, ‘New creation is also an invitation to the hope that becomes an impelling force to join in God’s labor of giving birth to the new creation, a labor conceived, for our side, as a creative participation in the life of God that manifests the liberty of God’s children’” (#502).  Though philosophy has its proper place, its roots are in Athens, where Greek thinkers tried to reason their way to moral certainties.  Mt. Sinai, on the other hand, “is the place where Israel encounters a holy and living God, and comes away from that encounter faced with the question of how they ought to live in response” (#929).  God spoke, calling for a holy people to serve a holy God.

In giving the Ten Commandments—or as Gaines prefers the “Ten Words”—God revealed the right way to live by responding to His holiness.  “The words are spoken as the description of lives lived in dedication to God . . . .  The moral point is that rigid and willful adherence to the ten sayings of God is not the moral vision that shapes holiness ethics.  Rather, a people’s living encounter with a holy God will shape them into and empower them to be a kind of people who won’t murder, commit adultery, or steal—all because they will have no other gods before the living, holy God.  Other gods can’t possibly shape that kind of people because any other god is not holy” (#968).  This means we rightly turn to Scripture, which must be “authoritative.  Looking to Scripture as a source for the formation of Christian ethics is the act of placing ourselves under the authority of the way our ancestors saw God act” (#565).  And God preeminently acted in Jesus.  Reading Scripture in a Wesleyan way means adjusting “our interpretive frequencies to new creation’s wavelength, and we may then be able to work with Scripture in a way that allows us to evaluate how a particular moral command in Scripture intersects with a contemporary moment.”   Thus “we appeal to Scripture in an attempt to find our place within its new creation story and let it speak to us alignment of our life toward new creation’s ends.  It is a dynamic of reading the texts, taking account of ourselves, and being formed by what we find in the biblical story. We can measure ourselves against those texts, asking, ‘Do we reflect a new creation people well?’” (#662).  Reading Scripture in the light of the new creation requires careful, prayerful deliberation as we do ethics, trying to “become holy people whose ethics can do no other than reflect the image of God.  Discernment, therefore, is not the quest to become more ethical but is the work of responding to the grace God pours out, and allowing our motivations, character, and imaginations to be transformed by and aligned toward God.  The shape of the moral life in the Wesleyan tradition is a heart filled with the love of God that spills out into the work of love for our neighbor” (#779).  Such discernment, Gaines thinks, comes primarily in a social rather than a solitary milieu.  So forming small groups to discuss and pray about things is crucial.  

The things we need to think and pray about are highlighted by Gaines in a series of “discernment dialogues” beginning with bioethics, which he reduces to end-of-life decisions.  (Sadly missing in this  “dialogue is the question of abortion, certainly one of the most important issues of our times.).  End-of-life  decisions are complicated by the incredible technologies now available in treating diseases, so the second “discernment dialogue” focuses on the many issues embedded in our technological society, which “perhaps more than any other force . . . shapes our moral lives” (#1866).  We’re easily tempted to wrongly think that anything “quicker, cheaper, and easier” is “automatically better” (#1881).   Technological advances have certainly impacted economics, the focus of the third “discernment dialogue.”  We need to envision a good economy as one whereby an exchange “flows from God and brings flourishing and healing to the whole creation.  Rather than think “‘I earned this, and I’m going to do whatever I want with it’” we should rejoice and say ‘This is a gift from God, and I’d like to use it in a way that helps the world.’ In short, we move from being possessors to being stewards” (#1979).  Political ethics, creation care, racial concerns, sexual and family ethics, are all treated in short, thoughtful dialogues. 

Designed to be used as a study guide for thoughtful laymen, Christian Ethics provides a well-written application of Wesleyan theology (as expounded by Mildred Bangs Wynkoop and H. Ray Dunning) to our world.   Thus there is an underlying existential philosophy that can easily slide into the kind of “situation ethics” set forth by Joseph Fletcher decades ago.  Relying on orthokardia—a good heart—may very will be important in making decisions, but without something like the Natural Law to give guidance one may very well founder in the process.

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For many years Thomas Jay Oord has been publishing books (some 25) urging Christians to make love the centerpiece of their theology.  In Pluriform Love:  An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (SacraSage Press, Kindle Edition, c. 2020)he updates (and frequently repeats) positions earlier advanced in Relational Holiness: Responding to the Call of Love (co-written with Michael Lodahl), Defining Love: Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Investigations and The Nature of Love: A Theology.  Love is pluriform, he says, because it “has multiple dimensions and expressions.  Love cannot be understood well nor experienced fully if confined to only one or a few forms” (p. 6).  And he insists it be understood within the context of “an open and relational theology.”  

Oord says most theologians have minimized the importance of love.  For example, Richard Hays, in his “influential book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament “does not regard love as the focus of Jesus or the New Testament.   His relegation of love to the margins is explicit” (p. 11).  So too, Millard Erickson, a Reformed theologian espousing a “moderate” brand of Calvinism, says much about God’s omnipotence and predestination that Oord believes “are at odds with the meaning of love in most scripture and everyday experience.”  In his Christian Theology, “Erickson chooses the magnificence of God, instead of love, as his overarching theme” (p. 16).  Conversely, Oord thinks, theologians who have dealt extensively with love have failed to rightly define and explain it.  Thus Anders Nygren, in Agape and Eros (“the most influential book on agape in the 20th century”) sought to set forth a biblical theology shaped by is understanding of agape, the only kind of Christian love since it comes down from God, whereas eros moves up from man.  Thoroughly Lutheran, Nygren believes only God truly loves—because of man’s utter sinfulness he cannot love God or others.  “God’s agape, Nygren asserts, ‘seeks to make its way out into the world through the Christian as its channel.’  Christians are like tubes through which love from above passes to neighbors below.  The Christian contributes nothing.  When we see humans loving others, we really see God using humans as instruments” (p. 63).  After citing and analyzing a multitude of texts, Oord explains why he finds Nygren’s understanding of agape flawed and rejects it. 

He also rejects St Augustine’s position on love as eros or desire, which can be either proper (caritas) or improper (cupiditas).  “Charity (caritas) desires something or someone for God’s sake.  Cupidity (cupiditas) desires for the sake of something other than God” (p. 107).  So we should love neither ourselves for our own sake nor our neighbor not for his own sake but purely for God’s sake.  Though Oord rejects Augustine’s understanding of eros, he does believe there is a rightful way to understand it, for properly defined it seeks the well-being of others.  Whereas agape is an “in spite of” love, eros is a “because of” kind of love.  “Eros appreciates value and promotes overall well-being because of the value it encounters.  Because of value present in others, creation, and God, lovers can express eros” (p. 147).  But Augustine not only misunderstood eros, he negatively impacted the Christian tradition, shaping its “classical theism,”  His ideas about God’s attributes, such as timelessness, immutability, impassability, etc., negate (Oord thinks) His ability to truly love.  Consequently:  “The theology of love I propose affirms philosophical ideas that lie in stark contrast to ideas Augustine and other classical theists embrace” (p. 142).  So “classical theism” must be significantly revised, if not repudiated, to rightly understand the nature and activity of God.  

Instead of “classical theism” Oord wants to construct a theology that is “open and relational,” rooted in the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartrshorne he has long championed.  “‘Open’ indicates an open future.  Open and relational thinkers believe God and creation move through time moment by moment into an undetermined future.  Neither creatures nor the Creator predetermine what will occur.  Neither Creator nor creatures foreknow with certainty everything that will happen.  The future does not exist as a set of actual occurrences; it’s a realm of possibilities.  While creatures are born into time’s flow, God experiences time everlastingly.  Love involves actions, and a consistently acting God loves moment by moment. ‘Relational’ stands for the idea God and creatures influence others and others influence them.  Creatures affect God’s experience, and the divine experience changes in response.  God and other creatures affect creatures, and their experiences change in response.  God’s nature is eternally unchanging, but as an experiential agent, God gives and receives in relations with creatures and creation.  Love is inherently relational, and an omni-relational God relates with all others” (pp. 157-158).  

  This omni-relational God is, importantly, “uncontrolling” or amipotent.  Oord “coined this word using the Latin prefix for love we find in positive words like ‘amity,’ ‘amigo,’ ‘amicable,’ and ‘amiable.  ‘Potent’ is the Latin root word of ‘potency’ and ‘potential.’  God is amipotent in the sense that divine love preconditions and governs divine power.  God always exerts power lovingly.  Because love comes logically before power in God’s nature and this love is essentially uncontrolling, divine amipotence never controls.  God’s almighty power is uncontrolling love:  amipotence” (p. 180).  As an important part of his process theology, Oord says God is everlasting (i.e. forever embedded in time) rather than eternal (standing apart from time).  Consequently creation is continually taking place and the traditional notion that God created all things out of nothing (ex nihilo) must be rejected.  “Rather than creating the universe from nothing, God everlastingly, in love, creates in relation to what God previously created” (p. 177).  So, it seems, the material world, as well as God, forever co-exist and are forever evolving.

Reading Pluriform Love reminds us of the multitude of references to various forms of love (agape, eros, philia) in Scripture.  How manifold are God’s ways!  Unfortunately, by repudiating “classical theism,” Oord discards much that is basic to the Christian Tradition and must be read quite cautiously. 

356 Miracles Today

The Christian faith necessarily requires a confidence in miracles—nothing could be more miraculous than Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection, cardinal doctrines of the Faith.  Consequently critics have in various ways denied the reality of miracles while believers remain persuaded that they bear witness to the reality of a supernatural world.  Addressing this issue, Lee Strobel recorded a set of interviews in The Case for Miracles:  A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2018; Kindle Edition).  Before becoming a Christian, Strobel was a deeply skeptical atheist, denying the very possibility of anything miraculous.  But as a believer he has begun to cautiously give credibility to some seemingly undeniably supernatural events, as carefully defined by Richard L. Purtill:  “‘A miracle is an event (1) brought about by the power of God that is (2) a temporary (3) exception (4) to the ordinary course of nature (5) for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history’” (p. 27).  As he began to study the subject, Strobel was amazerd to find that “nearly two out of five US adults (38 percent) said they have had such an experience—which means that an eye-popping 94,792,000 Americans are convinced that God has performed at least one miracle for them personally.  That is an astonishing number!” (p. 30).  Equally astonishing is a study that says:  “Three-quarters of the 1,100 doctors surveyed are convinced that miracles can occur today—a percentage that’s actually higher than that of the US population in general.  So maybe it’s not surprising that six out of ten physicians said they pray for their patients individually” (p. 31). 

Before talking with believers Strobel determined to honestly state “the case against miracles” so he interviewed Dr. Michael Shermer, the editor of the Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor at Chapman University, and the author of more than a dozen books.  Once a sincerely devout Christian, he abandoned his faith while studying psychology in graduate school.  Though resolutely skeptical of all things supernatural, he is neither bitter about his youthful religious experiences nor contemptuous in the “angry atheist” mode.  Rather he simply recites the basic reasons David Hume set forth nearly 300 years ago, insisting:  “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”  To Shermer, “Better words could not be found for a skeptical motto” (p. 53).  Hume’s argument was quite simple:  the natural world is all there is, so miracles cannot happen; any reports regarding them must be disbelieved.   This is obviously a self-defeating, circular argument—assuming your conclusion in your premise.  Furthermore, Hume arbitrarily rejected one of the most basic scientific principles by ignoring all empirical evidence, ancient and contemporary, regarding the miraculous.  

Leaving Shermer and his doubts behind, Strobel went to Wilmore, Kentucky, to interview Craig Keener, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, who’s published 21 books, including an award-winning four-volume  commentary on Acts.  Prodded to think about the many miracles reported by St Luke, Keener began an in-depth study of the subject and wrote a 1,172 page treatise—Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, “‘arguably the best book ever on the subject of miracles,” according to noted biblical scholar Craig A. Evans” (p. 76).  Another fine scholar, Ben Witherington III, thinks it is “perhaps the best book ever written on miracles in this or any age.”  In addition to showing why he finds the New Testament record quite credible, Keener recounted some of the many contemporary miracles he finds compelling.  He mentioned “Cambridge University professor John Polkinghorne, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the intersection of science and faith,” who knew a “woman whose left leg was paralyzed in an injury.  Doctors gave up trying to treat her, saying she would be an invalid for life.  In 1980, she reluctantly agreed to hear a prayer by an Anglican priest.  Though she had no expectation of healing, she had a vision in which she was commanded to rise and walk.  Said Polkinghorne, who has doctorates in both science and theology, ‘From that moment, she was able to walk, jump, and bend down, completely without pain’” (p. 111).  (The witness of Polkinghorne, whom I personally met years ago, cannot be casually rejected!)  And so too are the many other incidents Keener cites, concluding:  “‘Anti-supernaturalism has reigned as an inflexible Western academic premise for far too long.  In light of the millions of people around the globe who say they’ve experienced the miraculous, it’s time to take these claims seriously.  Let’s investigate them and follow the evidence wherever it leads.  If even a small fraction prove to be genuine, we have to consider whether God is still divinely intervening in his creation’” (p. 117).

Though miraculous healings are wonderful, the most amazing of all miracles is creation—creatio ex nihilo!  If God spoke into being the heavens and the earth, smaller-scale miracles would be quite likely.  To get an up-to-date report on cosmology, Strobel interviewed Professor Michael George Strauss, a professor of physics at the University of Oklahoma.  He has done research at the Fermi National Accelerator Center and is now involved with a corps of distinguished physicists working at the “Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, smashing protons together to understand, among other things, the properties of the top quark, the fundamental particle with the highest mass” (p. 166).  Strauss thinks “the incredible precision of the universe and our planet is not just intriguing, but it’s compelling evidence for a miracle-working Designer” (p. 175).   Christians believe this Designer assumed our flesh in the Incarnation and rose from the dead following His crucifixion. 

Having celebrated the glories of supernatural miracles, Strobel finishes his treatise with a sobering section entitled “difficulties with miracles.”  In a very personal passage, he says his wife, Leslie, a wonderful Christian who studies and prays and loves the needy, lives with constant pain.  “She is simply the finest and most devout person I have ever known,” he says.  “Have we prayed for relief from her pain? Continually. Have we beseeched God for her healing?  Often and fervently.  Have we seen any improvement?  Quite the opposite” (p. 235).  Knowing that Douglas Groothuis, a Denver Theological Seminary professor, was dealing with similar issues with his wife, Becky, Strobel visited him.  She suffers primary progressive aphasia—an incurable degenerative disease which begins with the loss of verbal skills.  Watching her slide from a super-skilled wordsmith into a stupor-stricken shadow of her former self has, understandably, tried Groothuis’ faith.  They have prayed and prayed, requested others to pray for them, and nothing has happened.  “‘How has all of this affected your relationship with God?’  I asked.  He exhaled deeply.  ‘I’ve learned to lament,’” he said.  We must remember that “Jesus laments over the unbelief of Jerusalem.  On the cross, his lament came as the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  If Jesus can lament and not sin, then I suppose we can.  And just as his lament was answered by his resurrection, so ours will be too.  Look—God’s good world has been broken by sin, and it’s morally and spiritually right to lament the loss of a true good.  I’m grateful for the lament we see in Scripture—it’s God helping us learn how to suffer well’” (p. 246).  Revealing the depth of his anquish, Groothuis said:  “‘When I’m angry at God, when I’m distressed and anguished and seething at my circumstances, I think of Christ hanging on the cross for me.  This brings me back to spiritual sanity.  He endured the torture of the crucifixion out of his love for me.  He didn’t have to do that.  He chose to. So he doesn’t just sympathize with us in our suffering; he empathizes with us.  Ultimately, I find comfort in that’” (p. 247).

Acknowledging he no longer hopes for a miracle, Groothuis cited a phrase in Ecclesiastes suggesting there’s a time to give up—an insight amplified by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier, who said that “wisdom is knowing when to resist and when to surrender.”  What consoles him is his “confidence that God exists, that Jesus is his unique Son, that the resurrection actually occurred, and therefore his promises to us—promises of hope and eventual healing—are true” (p. 253).  Where someone to ask him “how are you doing?” He says:  “‘Well, of course, I’d tell them the truth.” “That I’m hanging by a thread,” he said. “But, fortunately, the thread is knit by God.”

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Craig S. Keener’s Miracles Today:  The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World (Grand Rapids:  Baker Publishing Group, c. 2021; Kindle Edition) supplements his much longer work on the subject. This book,” he says, “contains only a few samples of the hundreds of millions of miracle claims reported around the world today, many of them similar to the kinds of accounts I have offered in this book.  I have focused here partly on accounts close to me, and (in a majority of cases) on accounts not already provided in my academic book Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, which contains hundreds of other accounts.  Accounts that appear for the first time here are based especially on my interviews with the people in question or on works that provide good evidence for trusting them” (p. 230).  He begins this treatise with an account of Barbara, who had suffered from chronic pulmonary disease for 16 years.  After his freshman year in college, Keener helped a team conduct a Bible study in Barbara’s nursing home.  Suddenly one of the other leaders felt led to pray for her healing.  He took her hand and said “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to rise up and walk!”  Keener was shocked and felt himself utterly without faith.   But to everyone’s amazement Barbara stood up and began walking!  It was a miracle!  Years later, in 2015, Keener interviewed another Barbara—Barbara Cummiskey Snyder—who had been disabled by multiple sclerosis.  A surgeon, Dr. Harold Adolph, said she “was one of the most hopelessly ill patients I ever saw” who’d had been repeatedly admitted to hospitals and expected to die.  She had difficulty breathing, her intestines and bladder worked poorly, she was basically blind and hadn’t walked for several years.  Following a visit from some of her friends on June 7, 1981, “she suddenly heard a booming, authoritative voice over her left shoulder. ‘My child: Get up and walk’” (p. xiii).  She instantly jumped out of bed, standing on feet that were no longer seriously deformed.  Her hands were suddenly normal and she could see!  She removed her tracheostomy tube, and her earlier-atrophied muscles were completely restored.  The next day she went to see Dr. Howard Marshall, who recalls:  “‘I thought I was seeing an apparition!  Here was my patient, who was not expected to live another week, totally cured.’”  After running tests and consulting with his colleagues, he said:   “‘I’ll be the first to tell you:  You’re completely healed.  I  can also tell you that this is medically impossible.’”  She’s lived “roughly four decades with no recurrence of MS.  Dr. Marshall deems it his ‘rare privilege to observe the Hand of God performing a true miracle.’” (pp. xiv-xv).

Amazingly, what happened to the two Barbaras is happening all around the world, and Keener diligently documents it.  Following Augustine and Aquinas, he defines a miracle as “a divine action that transcends the ordinary course of nature and so generates awe.”  By “transcending the ordinary course of nature,” these thinkers don’t  mean an unusually awesome sunset.  They mean “something you would never expect to happen on its own” (p. 3).  Keener briefly acknowledges skeptrics’ questions and quickly turns listening to eyewitnesses, noting that “nearly three-quarters of doctors in the United States believe in miracles.  More important, over half of the physicians surveyed noted that they had witnessed what they considered to be miracles” (p. 26).  He cites scores of doctors’ reports, such as:  “Dr. Alex Abraham, a neurologist, reports cures of severe epilepsy, tumors, heart failure, and other serious conditions.  Dr. Mirtha Venero Boza provides an eyewitness report of a severe burn that healed during prayer.  Dr. Tonye Briggs attests as an eyewitness to the dramatic closing of a massive wound overnight after prayer” (p. 77).   Still more:  “Dr. William Wilson, professor emeritus at Duke University, certifies the healing, after three hours of prayer, of a Methodist pastor friend of his, who had previously had ’75% occlusion of his major arteries’” (p. 77).  

Keener also finds impressive the “dramatic cures” reported at Lourdes, France.  Catholic doctors and theologians devote much care to investigating reported miracles and validate only those demonstrably true.  Some 7,000 healings have taken place there, including Francis Pascal, who was “cured of ‘blindness’ and ‘paralysis of the lower limbs’ at the age of three years and ten months, on August 28, 1938.”  “One might also consider Marie Bigot, cured of blindness, deafness, and hemiplegia on October 10, 1954.  Unable to work and deemed an invalid owing to verified physical causes, the nearly blind Serge Perrin visited Lourdes and, on May 1, 1970, was anointed.  Within hours his vision unexpectedly returned fully, and he was able to walk unaided.  Doctors verified that no trace of his previous medical problems remained; six years later, in view of his continued health, the cure was recognized by the church as miraculous” (p. 58).  

The same kinds of miracles recorded in the New Testament are occurring today.  The blind see, the lame walk, and the dead are brought back to life!  There are nature miracles akin to Jesus’ calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee.  The sheer number of vignettes Keener records and the specific kinds of documentation he presents surely affirm the reality of miracles.  To read this book certainly strengthens a believer’s faith in the reality of the Supernatural.

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Working as an apologist, Eric Metaxas has written Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (New York:  Penguin Publishing  Group, c. 2014; Kindle Edition).  The acclaimed author of Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery  and Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Metaxis has a skilled writer’s gift for clear writing and persuasive logic.   He initially lays the philosophical groundwork necessary for a thoughtful examination of the subject, noting that the “Greek word for miracle is ‘simaios,’ which means ‘sign.’  Miracles are signs, and like all signs, they are never about themselves; they’re about whatever they are pointing toward.  Miracles point to something beyond themselves.  But to what?  To God himself. That’s the point of miracles—to point us beyond our world to another world.  They are clues that that other world is not in our imaginations but is actually out there, wherever ‘out there’ actually is” (#291).  

In a very real sense all of creation points to something actually “out there.”  As rational beings we want to know why things exist, why we are what we are, what is the meaning of life.  “So just as what we call miracles point to something outside themselves—which is to say God—the miracle of the very existence of things does precisely the same.  Things point beyond themselves.”  Consequently, “not just those things we would clearly recognize as miracles but every single thing in creation ultimately points beyond itself to the creator, who is by definition outside temporal and material existence and outside his own creation.  Everything has meaning!  It’s in the nature of things.  De Rerum Natura” (#306).  To those who think modern science has made miracles incredible, Metaxas cites Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum:  “The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of science explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe . . . but they explain nothing.”  Modern scientists describe a mysterious universe brought into being in an instant, usually called the Big Bang.  Furthermore, they find themselves amazed by the intricacies—the fine tuning—of this universe.  “In fact, the speed at which the cosmos expanded out of that microdot in question was so outrageously perfectly calibrated that physicists say it constitutes the ‘most extreme fine-tuning yet discovered in physics.’  Astrophysicist Hugh Ross says an ‘analogy that does not even come close to describing the precarious nature of this cosmic balance would be a billion pencils all simultaneously positioned upright on their sharpened points on a smooth glass surface with no vertical supports’” (#744).  Such data lead us to the question:  “What if everything we learn from science points us toward the idea that information came in from outside the system, from a world beyond the realm of science?  What if science points us beyond science?” (#454).  Mounting evidence simply indicates “that our existence is an outrageous and astonishing miracle, one so startlingly and perhaps so disturbingly miraculous that it makes any miracle like the parting of the Red Sea pale in such insignificance that it almost becomes unworthy of our consideration, as though it were something done easily by a small child, half-asleep.  It is something to which the most truly human response is some combination of terror and wonder, of ancient awe and childhood joy” (#857).  

Like Craig Keener, Metaxas seeks to share the “miracle stories themselves, since they are perhaps the best evidence we can have for miracles” and “decided to limit the book only to the stories of people I knew personally” (#80).  Turning to “miracle stories” Metaxas begins with conversions to Christ, specifically his own.  As a young adult in 1988 he had a dream in which Jesus “revealed himself to me in a way that changed everything and from then on I have had no doubt that he is exactly who he says he is and that I want to give him my whole life” (#1833).  Believing in Jesus so dramatically changed him that he “knew it really was miraculous.  It was as if I could somehow feel God inside me, filling up whatever part of me had sought him in that direction.  I suddenly didn’t want what I had previously wanted.  I knew that God was the answer to all my desires.  I wanted God” (#1847).  His conversion was “the miracle that opened the door to so many other miracles in my life” (#2047).  “At long last my search was over.  It was over.  And it was true.  There was a God and Jesus was God and he had shown that to me in a way that only I could understand, in a way that utterly blew my mind.  God knew me infinitely better than I knew myself, and he had taken the trouble to speak to me in the most intimate language there was:  the secret language of my own heart” (#2145).

The miracles of healing Metaxas documents include his “own grandmother telling me how she had prayed for her own leg, which was hurting, and ‘felt a sizzling’ and was instantly healed” (#2371).  Caring for him and her brother, she “spoke to God, saying, ‘I can’t take care of these children today unless you heal me,’ and as she was talking to God—which is to say, as she was praying” she was healed.  “She was not a woman given to hyperbole.  Although there’s nothing dramatic about it, I mention it because I have heard many stories like it over the years” (#2378).  One of the stories involves Cisco Anglero, who found God in prison.  One of his imprisoned friends, Hector, became sick, “shaking and shivering” in bed, suffering from AIDS.  He’d lost a great deal of weight and thought he was dying.  Hector said:  “‘The Holy Spirit told me that if you pray for me, what I feel now is going to be gone.’” Cisco had been a believer for only six weeks and had no idea what to do.  But he “loved his friend and wanted to do what he could” and prayed a simple prayer.  “Suddenly, Cisco told me, a very bright light—’as bright as the sun,’ he said—covered the two of them, ‘like a halo.  It was a circle.’ They were on the second floor of the facility, so it couldn’t have been actual sunlight.  Cisco said that when he finished praying the light went away and he went back to his bunk and sat down. Then, suddenly, he saw Hector stand up, take the blankets off, and take his coat off and the sweater too.  And then Hector began jumping up and down and saying over and over, ‘Thank you, Jesus!  Thank you, Jesus!  Thank you, Jesus!’” (#2401).  

Hector wasn’t instantly healed, but a few months later, in a hospital, he asked Cisco to pray for him over the phone.  Cisco did.  After he hung up, one of Hector’s relatives told him, his “whole body began shaking violently, so much so that all the intravenous needles came out of his body.  He then fell off the bed, got up, and started jumping up and down, over and over, thanking God.  It was a miracle.  She told Cisco that the Kings County doctors had been checking Hector for the last three days and they couldn’t find any evidence of the AIDS virus in his body.  They decided to keep him there for a few more weeks, just to make sure that he was okay, but after that, they would release him” (#2458).  Restored to health, Hector soon attended a Bible college, preparing for a life of ministry.  

I’ve cited, in detail, only a few of the miracles Metaxas absolutely believes happened.  Placing them within the context of his Christian faith explains them.  Reading his treatise certainly encourages readers who trust him to believe miracles still happen.  

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