For more than a century, the Roman Catholic Church was led by a succession of saintly, scholarly pontiffs whose encyclicals provided insight and guidance for both Catholics and concerned Christians everywhere.  So the recent encyclical of the Pope Francis, Laudato Si’:  On Care for Our Common Home (Rome:  Libreria Editrice Vaticana, c. 2015) merits respectful scrutiny.  Unfortunately, when compared with the works of his immediate predecessors (Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II), the current Pope’s work provides little more than unremarkable ethical precepts all too effortlessly  conjoined with easily disputed alarmist assertions regarding the state of the world.  Still more:  Laudato Si’ is seriously impaled on the horns of the dilemma—alternating between biocentric and anthropocentric concerns, between the naturalistic assumptions of modern environmentalism and the theistic perspectives of classic Christianity.    

The book’s title comes from the oft-celebrated song of St Francis of Assisi:  “Laudato Si’, mi’ Signore—Praise be to you, my Lord.”  It’s a joyous thanksgiving hymn that easily resonates within the heart of all believers in the God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth.  With St Francis we rejoice in the beauty of “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.”  Joining the Pope, most of us believe St Francis can serve as the “patron saint” of ecologists and stand as “the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically (Kindle #80).  

Now our “Sister, Mother Earth,” says Pope Francis, cries out in protest at the wounds we’ve inflicted upon her, looking “more and more like an immense pile of filth” (#161) resulting from the “throwaway culture” and “rampant individualism” effected by the technological revolution (which he repeatedly and stridently critiques).  He’s deeply alarmed:  “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.  We may well be leaving to coming generations of debris, desolation and filth” (#1205).  So we must act decisively to reduce pollution.  He believes that a “solid scientific consensus” requires us to assent to the hazards of “carbon dioxide pollution” and the reality of man-caused global warming.  Equally alarming:  thousands of species have been eliminated, the Pope says, threatening the “biodiversity” that should flourish on our “green planet.”  Equally alarming, amidst all this ecological devastation, human beings and society are suffering as growing economic inequalities reduce the quality of life for millions.  

Reading the various items of concern listed by Francis (whose citations often refer to papers produced by various bishops’ conferences rather than bona fide scientific treatises), the shallowness of his diagnosis becomes evident—it routinely appears in Sierra Club newsletters and New York Times editorials.  Consequently there is, for example, no hint of any awareness of how significantly the industrial revolution has increased life expectancy and reduced the actual poverty endured by the world’s peoples!  Nor is there any indication Pope Francis appreciates how significantly the energy derived from fossil fuels has improved the daily lives of earth’s residents!  That devastating famines have largely disappeared as a result of the Green Revolution (hybrid plants and fertilizers increasing the earth’s fertility due to the genius of Norman Borlaug) goes unnoticed.  So in one section he champions the radical reduction of carbon dioxide (requiring the radical curtailment of energy production) while in a later section he urges us to feed the poor (something that can take place only through promoting the Green Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels to provide the energy needed to do so!).  In sum:  inasmuch as prudence—the first of the cardinal virtues—requires an accurate, truthful understanding of what is, much of this encyclical is imprudent.  

When we turn to the “gospel of creation,” however, Pope Francis treads on firmer ground, since he relies on the wisdom of his more-gifted predecessors (Benedict XVI and John Paul II) as well as Scripture and the theological richness of Church tradition.  To recognize that God made a good world and entrusted us with the task of husbanding it is neither novel nor unimportant—it is the basic environmental conviction of all devout theists.  Usurping God’s rightful place in the cosmos by pretending humans can be “lords and masters” of creation clearly violates the divine order.  As God’s creatures, we ought to live harmoniously with (sharing communion with) all creatures great and small.  This is the Pope’s praiseworthy “integral ecology,” though it is rendered problematic when fleshed out in dubious Green clichés, i.e. “everything is interconnected,” and requires us to embrace the sacredness of  “sustainability,” “intergenerational solidarity,” and “simplicity of life.”      

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The scientific depth and environmental expertise Pope Francis patently lacks is ably evident in Alan Carlin’s Environmentalism Gone Mad:  How a Sierra Club Activist and Senior EPA Analyst Discovered a Radical Green Energy Fantasy (Mount Vernon, WA:  Stairway Press, c. 2015).  Though the title suggests a colorful manifesto written for a popular audience, this is actually a fact-filled, rigorously documented, rather demanding treatise written to address readers already cognizant of the issues addressed.  Carlin earned a degree in physics from the California Technological University and a PhD in developmental economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then spent four decades in the Environmental Protection Agency.  So he fully understands his subject.  Indeed, some of the book’s most interesting sections tell his life story and provide insights into his convictions and engagements.  

His commitment to conservation was early evident in his Sierra Club endeavors in Los Angeles (where he headed the largest club in the nation and did battle with David Brower and radicals within the national organization 40 years ago) as well as his many years providing scientific analyses for the EPA.  Unfortunately, during the Obama administration Brower-style radicals gained power within the EPA, imposing global warming dogmas in much the same fashion as the USSR promoted “Lysenko’s biological theories” (#5660).  This led Carlin to resign his position in 2010 to do further research and analysis.  Ultimately he wrote this book “to explain why I changed from my lifelong support of the environmental movement to extreme skepticism concerning their current primary objective of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide” (Kindle #113).  “In the years since I initially embraced what is now called the  US environmental movement it has changed considerably in several ways.  The most obvious change is that it has gone from being primarily concerned about wilderness and other wild lands preservation to primarily restricting fossil fuel energy production and energy use” (# 5677).  This results from the fact “that environmental policy has been hijacked by radicals intent on imposing their ideology by government fiat on the rest of us” and they “are being supported by many Western European countries and the Obama Administration” (#151).  

These radicals disdain the “cost benefit analysis” Carlin values and seem to care little for the high prices ordinary people (especially in developing nations) will necessarily pay as their carbon-reducing policies are implemented.  “I had spent my career trying to promote economic development, environmental protection, good science and economics, and rational analysis of multidisciplinary problems which I regarded as mutually supportive in the larger sense,” he says, but his position now elicits scorn rather than respect.  Disinterested in scholarly research, the radicals began to use the power of the EPA to promote their own agendas (often in defiance of Congress’s clear intent in various environmental laws), repeatedly attaining their goals by selectively pushing cases through a sympathetic judicial system.  

Carlin follows the scientific method and grew disillusioned with its abandonment by alarmist environmentalists and politicians.  To him “there is a correct answer to a scientific question, although it may take some time and considerable effort to discover what it is.  And it is never ‘settled’ or based on ‘consensus’” (#132).  He wonders “if [John] Kerry, [Al] Gore, or [President] Obama have ever taken a course in science or understand what the scientific method is.  The more pessimistic possibility is that they know but think that most of the rest of the population do not and will not figure it out” #2727).  Himself committed to studying empirical data (insisting, for example, on the use of satellite as well as ground-based data for earth’s temperatures), which lend little credence to the alarmist projections of “climate change” based on computer models, he has settled into the “skeptic” camp regarding the issue.  “By late 2008,” Carlin says, to him “it was quite evident that GWD [Global Warming Doctrine] was simply that, a doctrine, in a desperate search for scientific credibility since it could not satisfy the scientific method” (#1707).  

Importantly, he insists:  “Inspection of satellite temperature data available since 1979 strongly suggests that global temperatures are not primarily influenced by gradually increasing CO₂ levels but rather are associated with periodic major ocean oscillations, particularly the 3-5 year El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the 60 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) found in the largest ocean, the Pacific” (#4494).  In addition to oceanic oscillations, Carlin believes solar or solar magnetic activity, more than anything else, ultimately dictates climate change—as it has been doing so for millions of years.  “By combining the variations  in the number of sunspots, one of the longer-running databases based on actual human observations, with ocean oscillations as explanatory variables, Dan Pangburn has managed to reproduce global temperatures with amazing accuracy since 1850 and with less certainty (due to less accurate temperature records) since 1700” (#5334).  

What seems likely to come in the future (in the light of work done by Pangburn and other meticulous researchers) is global cooling due to “diminishing sunspots” and related oceanic  cycles, following “the pattern of temperatures over the last 3,000 years.  All these convince me that the major climate risk we face is much colder temperatures in the next few centuries and millennia in northern latitudes” (# 5392).  That another ice age might be coming should give us pause!  The minor warming that has occurred in recent decades has in fact made life better for us—as it did in the Roman and Medieval warming periods.  But another ice age would devastate vast regions of the Northern Hemisphere!  Maintaining the planet’s warmth (including increased use of fossil fuels) ought to be our mission!  

This is one of those books I recommend people know about rather than attempt to read!  Carlin’s personal experiences and perspectives make it persuasive.  He obviously knows what he discusses and takes care to demonstrate the bases for his beliefs.  The scientific material, set forth in abundant detail, is properly documented, up-to-date and trustworthy.  The arguments set forth are cogent and convincing.  Anyone seriously concerned about “climate change” and public policy will greatly benefit from an exposure to this treatise.  But, unfortunately, this book is almost numbingly repetitive and unorganized, desperately needing an expert’s editorial hand to reduce its length and sharpen its focus.  

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Reared on the High Plains, I’ve always loved the West’s wide-open spaces.  One of the earliest songs I remember hearing on the radio in Dodge City, Kansas (no doubt sung by Gene Autry and the “Sons of the Pioneers”), was “Home, Home on the Range.” And after all these years I still share that early longing for “a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play, where never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”  So I recently read with interest Dan Dagget’s Beyond the Rangeland Conflict:  Toward a West that Works (Flagstaff, AZ:  The Grand Canyon Trust, c. 1995).  

As a journalist strongly committed to environmentalism, Dagget served “as conservation chair of the Northern Arizona Sierra Club group and as a writer for a number of environmental journals, including the Earth First! Journal.”  The Sierra Club once ranked him as one of the 100 top grass-roots activist in the nation.  He glibly chanted the mantra “nature knows best,” insisting she be allowed to follow her inner wisdom.  He also viewed ranchers—particularly those grazing cattle on public lands—as harmful intruders who should be removed in order to allow Mother Earth to heal herself from the wounds of civilization.  He “repeated—too many times to count—the statistics that make up the indictment against western ranchers:  that domestic grazers are responsible for destroying up to 90 percent of some western states’ riparian areas that are, in turn, vital to up to 80 percent of the region’s indigenous species; that livestock are the reason 59 percent of our public rangelands are in poor condition; that the belches of livestock contribute to global warming; their excrement fouls our campgrounds and pollutes our streams, and bits of their bodies clog our arteries” ( p. 7).   

In time, however, a powerful truth overwhelmed him:  the lands wisely used by good ranchers flourished better than those left alone!   As he surveyed the West, talked with the people who live on the land, and studied the issue, he concluded that “much of the western range is in worse shape than even some of the most alarming assessments would have us believe,” with “denuded and eroding” mountains and deserts, dying streams and endangered wildlife (p. 1).  But, contrary to environmentalist rhetoric and federal policy, these problems flowed from the widely-held notion that ecosystems left alone thrive but suffer under the hand of man.  In truth, grazing animals generally improve the health of the land and enable it to promote the biodiversity real environmentalists (including many ranchers) desire.  Thus:  “The main objective of this book is to chronicle the success stories of these ranchers, and, as much as possible, the management teams with whom they work to increase biodiversity, revive riparian areas and watersheds, and restore the vitality of grasslands and savannas.”  Dagget hopes “to encourage more environmentalists to work with ranchers and find their reward on the land, rather than in the hearing room or the courtroom” (p. 11).  

To prove his case, Dagget shows, through personal vignettes and stories as well as gorgeous pictures (often showing, side-by-side flourishing grazed land compared with degraded left-alone preserves), how ranchers in various areas are rightly caring for the land.  He visits ranches in New Mexico, Arizona,  Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, arguing that similar approaches throughout the arid West could restore vast regions to the health they enjoyed centuries ago (when Indians set fires to control the grasslands and wild animals did what cattle can now do). 

“The ranchers and conservationists who populate these pages,” says Wendell Berry in his promotional blurb, “have quit fighting over the contested landscapes and have begun restoring them.  It would be hard to overestimate the importance of their stories.  I read this book eagerly, recognizing it as something I have been waiting for, and it gave me hope.” 

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A decade after publishing Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Dan Dagget wrote a sequel titled  Gardeners of Eden:  Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature (Santa Barbara, CA:  The Thatcher Charitable Trust, c. 2005).  He continues to take issue with those radical environmentalists who portray human beings as parasites or cancers on the land because he now thinks we play a crucial role in maintaining its health.  He’s “fascinated with the idea of ‘life making the conditions for life available to life,’ especially where it involves humans.  One could say the purpose of this book is to establish that humans actually can be a part of this sort of relationship with nature and to make us better able to recognize the instances in which we are” (p. 79).  Historical studies show that man played an essential role that is being reduced by both technological developments (leaving less people in rural America) and environmental ideologies (prizing “wilderness” spaces devoid of human habitation).  This book proposes ways to reintroduce “humans into the environment in the same way that we might reintroduce an endangered subspecies of caribou or flycatcher or cactus” (p. 6).  

Following the pattern established in Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Dagget records his journeys throughout the West’s ranching country, interviewing the people (the Gardeners of Eden) and photographing the lands that are flourishing under their restorative care.  The evidence shows—in dramatic, pictorial ways—how well the land fares when managed by conscientious ranchers.  We now know that for many centuries millions of buffalo, deer, and antelope grazed the land, pulverizing and manuring the soil as they followed their migration patterns.  We also know that millennia before 1492 American Indians routinely burned swaths of the land every other year, thereby controlling growth and enriching the soil.  (Were such fires used today, the catastrophic fires periodically devastating vast sections of the West would be minimized!)  

As Charles Mann says:  “‘Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison,’” using fire to control “‘underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game’” (p. 27).  Today’s ranchers are learning to duplicate these aboriginal wise-use methods, often helping native grasses and vegetation replace invasive species (e.g. sagebrush, salt cedar, thistles, junipers) that often flourish under the “Leave-It-Alone” approach and generally degrade the land.  Yet despite their success—and despite the efforts of Dagget and others to share their strategies—few policy-makers and bureaucrats note the fact that carefully-grazed land is far more healthy than wilderness left to its own devices.  

Instead, various governmental agencies are spending billions of dollars, allegedly protecting the land by “leaving it alone” while it degrades at an alarming rate.  Imprisoned by the Green ideology that “nature knows best,” federal policy-architects have “brought us to the absurdity that the actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to determining if it is healthy or not” (p. 18).  It is now clear to Dagget that “the Leave-It-Alone assumption is woven into our very concepts of nature (especially evident in urbanites), of what nature is and how we are related to it.  It is nothing more than our culture’s story of the creation of nature—the story of the Garden of Eden—adopted as policy.  The Garden of Eden story is the establishment, within our culture, of the assumption that humans are separate from nature, that we are not a part of it, and that we are not animals but something different.  Lots of people who consider themselves to be irreligious or even antireligious subscribe to this piece of religious dogma” (p. 22).  

What’s needed, Dagget says in his final chapter, is a “new environmentalism” attainable by “becoming native again.”  The Leave-It-Alone policies imposed by the preservationists now leading environmentalist groups and federal agencies have clearly failed both the land and its residents.  As the evidence now demonstrates, we need a new approach that truly restores the land and increases its productivity.  For example, ranchers in North Dakota practicing “holistic grazing” now “experience an average return on their money of 16 percent.  Practitioners of other approaches, mostly seasonal grazing, report a 2 percent gain” (p. 142).  By becoming native again and recovering the wise-use policies that made the West what it was centuries ago, this wonderful region could regain its vibrancy.  

Dagget’s books embrace both a sound environmental ethic and a high regard for human enterprise.  Would that his wise words and images could shape the convictions and policies of our nation. 

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 For many decades Thomas C. Oden has been one of the most prolific and significant Wesleyan theologians.  In A Change of Heart:  A Personal and Theological Memoir (Downers Grove, IL:  Inter/Varsity Press, c. 2014) he sets forth a fascinating and illuminating reflection on his life and scholarly career.  Reading his story provides not only insight into Oden—it illuminates much about recent American history as well as amplifies timeless truths regarding the Christian Faith.  In brief, he confesses:  “My life story has had two phases: going away from home as far as I could go, not knowing what I might find in an odyssey of preparation, and then at last inhabiting anew my own original home of classic Christian wisdom.  The uniting theme of the two parts of my life can only be providence” (p. 140).  

Born in 1931 and reared in Altus, Oklahoma (situated in the southwest corner of the state), Oden absorbed and still celebrates many aspects of the high plains frontier culture that nourished him.  Though most Altus residents were what we would now consider “poor,” they had a “can do” spirit and believed anyone could “make something” of himself through hard work, delayed gratification and exemplary ethics.  Joining the Cub Scouts as a boy, Oden embraced their Motto:  “Do your best,” and “memorized the Scout law, which says ‘A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.’  These ideals have never been erased from my consciousness” (p. 20).  

Oden’s father was a lawyer concerned to rightly educate his sons, and his book-filled office early inspired young Tom to live immersed in books.  His mother was a gifted musician, and music became a major part in his life.  In fact, “It was through music that I first learned to reason” (p. 22).  Devout members of the Altus Methodist church, his parents not only attended services but began each day with devotional readings from the “Upper Room” and said grace before meals.  His grandmother was an especially devout woman and significantly shaped Tom’s childhood spirituality.  Though at times he considered becoming a lawyer (as did his elder brother), he didn’t know exactly what career to follow, but he did believe God had a good plan for him to follow.  

During WWII, Oden’s father was appointed to a federal position in Oklahoma City, so the family moved and Tom adjusted to an urban environment, including a junior high school (Taft) where he learned, to his lasting satisfaction, Latin.  Religiously, both in Oklahoma City and Altus, he “became maximally involved in the youth activities of the Epworth League for Methodist young people, where I received ever-expanding doses of social justice aspirations” (p. 31).  Following the war, Oden finished high school in Altus (and also learned to appreciate the “tough, resilient, working people” with whom he worked during the summers.)  

Entering the University of Oklahoma in 1949, Oden qualified for a unique “Letters” program that enabled students to choose their course of studies in literature, history, and philosophy.  He read many of the “greats”—Shakespeare, Plato, et al.—but found himself most drawn to the Marxism and was “a Marxist utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories” (p. 42).  He also met Edrita Pokorny, an unusually gifted actress, with whom he fell in love and soon married.  (His love for, and 46 year partnership with, this remarkable woman, makes for some of the more memorable sections in A Change of Heart).   He also decided, while at OU, to enter the Methodist ministry and became active in denominational activities, including summer camps more devoted to social justice than personal redemption.  “I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment” (p. 50).   Still more:  “I found Saul Alinsky’s teaching of socialist pragmatism and political opportunism extremely useful as I made plans to co-opt religious structures as instruments for the fundamental transformation of society” (p. 53).  

From the University of Oklahoma, the Odens moved to Dallas, Texas, where Tom entered Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology (mentored by the legendary Wesley scholar Albert Outler) and served as youth minister for a nearby Congregational church.  He read voraciously and plunged energetically into ecumenical endeavors (especially promoting the World Council of Churches).  Determined to pursue a PhD subsequent to his seminary training, he was accepted by Yale University, where he profited from working with H. Richard Niebuhr, James Gustafson, Hans Frei, and George Lindbeck (all distinguished luminaries in the Protestant world).  He also embraced, without much thought, the “demythologizing” approach to Scripture personified by Rudolph Bultmann.  Finishing his PhD course work, he returned to SMU’s Perkins School of Theology, where he taught for two years while completing his dissertation (writing on the ethics of Bultmann and Barth and earning for himself a reputation as a “situation ethicist,” fully committed to a “what’s happening now” existential agenda).    

  Now a fully-certified academic, Oden joined the faculty at Phillips Graduate Seminary in Enid, Oklahoma.  Here he remained for a decade, churning out various books and championing everything from Rogerian psychology (with its novel emphasis on “unconditional love”) to existential ethics to socialist economics to radical feminism.    Traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation and Resurrection, he either ignored or “professed” with inner reservations evacuating them of substance.  His “ideological history” parallels (in its indebtedness to Saul Alinsky) that of another Methodist, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who “was reading my essays and working out of the same sources and moving in the same circles as I had been” (p. 86).  

Thanks to a generous Danforth grant, Oden and his family spent the 1965-66 year abroad, living in Heidelberg, Germany, and traveling about to visit noted theologians (including Bultmann and Barth).  He also observed the last session of Vatican II and toured Israel, where the “Bible I had learned as a child, distinguished from the Bible I had learned in historical-critical studies, was coming alive for me in a palpable way” (p. 110).  During this year many things began to change for Oden.  Reading the theological works of Wolfart Pannenberg, he discovered significant flaws in both Bultmann and Barth.  He became disillusioned with Freudian psychoanalysis (long a mainstay in his understanding of and prescriptions for pastoral psychology).  While marching behind Margaret Mead in a WCC-orchestrated march in Geneva, he suddenly realized he was in the wrong place, with the wrong crowd.  

Back in America, sitting on a Houston bench during an Earth Day march in 1969, he fully felt “a revulsion against the self-preoccupation, narcissism and anarchy” that had characterized his adult years.  Sitting on that bench, he turned to the collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer that he had in his pocket.  “I read out loud:  ‘Almighty Father, who has given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may always serve thee in pureness of living and through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.’  My eyes filled with tears as I asked myself what had I been missing in all my frenzied subculture of experimental living” (p. 126).  

His “change of heart” synchronized with his 1970 move to Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey, historically the most distinguished and still perhaps the premier Methodist graduate school.  Thereby established as a tenured professor of theology, he had to learn theology!  In large part he realized this in his first month there as a result of discussions with one of his Drew colleagues, Will Herberg, a “brilliant, diminutive, forceful, bearded Russian Jew” who both accelerated Oden’s growing disillusionment with Marxism and prodded him to seriously study authentic Christian thought.  Herberg abruptly told him that he “was densely ignorant of Christianity.”  Indeed:  “Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, ‘You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas.’  In his usual gruff voice and brusque speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition” (p. 136).  Suitably chastised—and admirably open to Herberg’s wisdom—Oden turned his life around by turning to the classic sources of the Christian tradition.  “Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away:  the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism” (p. 138).  

Thenceforth he devoted himself to following the rule of St Ireaneus of Lyons:  invent no new doctrines!  He realized that by endeavoring to do so during the first half of his life (promoting “vast plans for social change”) he had inadvertently but tragically “harmed many innocents, especially the unborn.  The sexually permissive lifestyle, which I had not joined but failed to critique, led to a generation of fatherless children.  The political policies I had promoted were intended to increase justice by political means but ended by diminishing personal responsibility and freedom” (p. 145).  Guilt-ridden, especially for teaching a situational “social ethics to young pastors” and providing them “a rationale for their blessing convenience abortions” while ignoring the intrinsic evil of the act, he turned to God for solace.  What God said in response was simply:  “no excuse.  I had been wrong, wrong, wrong” (p. 157).  

Oden’s “change of heart” quickly led to a change in his publications.  He worked to bring theological studies back to the classic, “consensual” position of the Church’s first five centuries.  Doing so brought him into contact with conservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus (the Lutheran thinker who eventually established and edited the influential periodical First Things and became a Catholic) and Carl F.H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today who became his “mentor in evangelical theology.”  Though his liberal colleagues were dismayed by his conservative contacts, he “found the evangelicals to be more welcoming and inclusive than the liberals, largely because “Evangelical and Catholic inclusiveness” were more solidly rooted in “transcultural classic Christianity” (p. 175).  

Despite his best efforts, Oden had little influence in Methodist circles or even in his own institution.  Drew Theological Seminary continued its leftward drift during the ‘80s with each new professor.  He became “a lonely voice” for the orthodox Christian tradition “amid a chorus of indignant advocates” (p. 184) of whatever was newest and most “cutting edge” in academia.  Especially belligerent at Drew were the radical feminists who vindictively targeted him (despite his lengthy record of supporting women’s rights) for opprobrium.  To refer to Jesus as the “Son of God” was, in the feminists’ agenda, a sign of an evil patriarchy that mandated denunciation.  As feminists gained control of the seminary, they promoted a radical agenda composed of “gender language, abortion rights, reproductive rights and sexual ethics” (p. 186).  Effectively isolated from his colleagues, Oden focused his attention on mentoring those graduate students who sought him out and publishing works that clarified and defended the ancient confessions.

Thus, in addition to writing his own three volume systematic theology, he embarked on an ambitious effort to make available ancient theological sources in multivolume collections, including Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Ancient Christian Texts, and Ancient Christian Documents.  He also traveled widely, lecturing in Russia and Cuba as well as throughout the United States.  Along with his travels, he cultivated an amazing circle of eminent friends, ranging from Catholics such as Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI who encouraged him to pursue his scholarly interests) to Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, wealthy Evangelicals who greatly assisted with the expenses of publishing the ancient patristic texts.  

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In his final days as a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, Thomas Oden published Requiem:  A Lament in Three Movements (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, c. 1995) to register his “affectionate anguish” with both seminary education and the state of mainline Protestant denominations in the United States.  Having discovered and sought to make available the great resources of the classic Christian tradition, he styled himself a “young fogey” so committed to the truth of the past that he is considered “old-fashioned” by the legions of “modernists” now controlling mainline institutions.  “As a former sixties radical,” he confessed, “I am now out of the closet as an orthodox evangelical (yes, you read me right—orthodox evangelical) teaching in the PC Wordperfect (politically correct) theological school, in a resourceful faculty that has tried to live out the inclusiveness ethic as earnestly as any I know” (p. 15).  Though deeply sorrowful in many ways, this Requiem “is essentially a lament for a friend, not a diatribe against an enemy” (p. 19).  And yet he must utter words of caution:  “Christian worshipers can no longer afford to neglect what is happening to the young people they guilelessly send off to seminary, entrusting that they will be taught all that is requisite for Christian ministry” (p. 22).  

Explaining “the feast I left” (in a prelude to the first of his lament’s three movements) Oden focuses on an incident in his seminary’s chapel devoted to worshipping the goddess “Sophia.”  Presiding at the service was one of the coauthors of Wisdom’s Feast who had described Sophia as “a strong, proud, creative goddess within the biblical tradition,” a “divine saving figure” immanent “in all things, waiting to be discovered.”  Sitting in the chapel of a United Methodist seminary, listening to a feminist homily and hymn devoted to Sophia, he “felt just a little (for the first time in my life) like the apologists of the second century must have felt when confronted with the challenge of attesting the Lordship of Christ amid a pagan pantheon of Greco-Roman deities” (p. 29).  Pondering his predicament as the chapel service moved toward the sacrament of the Lord’s Table, he prayed for a wisdom quite different from Sophia; as the female homilist “offered the invitation to come to the Lord’s Table, not in the Lord’s name, but in the name of the goddess who was speaking through Jesus,” he “quietly, inconspicuously, left the service” (p. 32).  Though this kind of service is, Oden insists, quite limited to radical hyperfeminist circles, it does in fact represent powerful currents within contemporary Christianity.  But since he had read Wisdom’s Feast, he knew what the homilist was doing and he could not endorse it since she had clearly written that “‘in this [Eucharistic] service, Sophia actively replaces Jesus’” (p. 146). 

The fact that a goddess, Sophia, could be worshipped in a Methodist seminary points to the tarnished state of theological education in America.  To Oden, the culprit in the story is Secularization, an “interloper” who has stolen the doctrinal, liturgical and devotional riches of the church.  Mainline seminaries have aided and abetted this secularizing process, wedding themselves to a “modernity” (what Oden calls “mod rot”) that is already passing away.  They have provided a safe place for trendy, tenured radicals who worked closely with ecclesiastical bureaucracies to promote “change” in the church.  Self-consciously “liberated” and socially engaged, they generally considered themselves “doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, multiculturally tolerant, morally broad-minded, ethically situationist, and, above all, sexually lenient, permissive, uninhibited” (p. 34).  Consequently:  “It seems worth noting that the liberated seminary at its zenith has finally achieved a condition that has never before prevailed in Christian history:  Heresy simply does not exist” (p. 46).  Political Incorrectness must promptly be punished—witness the fate of Larry Summers, forced to resign as President of Harvard for untoward remarks regarding women in science.  Heresy must be tolerated andeven celebrated for its “cutting-edge” elements—witness the failure of the Episcopal Church to discipline bishops (such as John Spong) promulgating the most radical denials of orthodoxy.   

Yet for all the bad news Oden presented two decades ago, he had hope for seminary education, for there was an “emerging resistance movement” committed to rediscovering and promoting classic orthodoxy.  Despite his personal struggles with powerful “ultrafeminists” who must be heroically resisted despite their opprobrium (calling folks like Oden medieval, misogynist, puritanical), there are many women in ministry committed to preserving the ancient truths of the faith.  Despite the Marxist ideology underlying much of “liberation theology,” there are advocates of social justice still securely committed to orthodoxy.  Young Evangelicals may very well maintain (if they rightly struggle) their deep convictions while taking advantage of the enormous scholarly resources (libraries, endowments, etc.) of mainline denominations.  

In addition to the seminaries, Secularization afflicts the ecumenical organizations which once promised to unite Christians and make more effective their witness.  In his younger years, Oden invested much time and energy in ecumenical endeavors, but in time he became disillusioned with them.  In particular, they were dominated by elite planners, bureaucrats determined to save the world through political processes!  As “political idealists,” they “care far less about the classical Christianity of the grassroots church than about their ideals and programs and blueprints for reforming the denominational networks” (p. 92).    Quite apart from organizations such as the WCC, a real ecumenical movement (orchestrated by the Holy Spirit rather than bureaucrats) has brought conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox together, affirming their belief in ancient creeds and uniting to oppose the “culture of death” most evident in abortion-on-demand.

Such believers illustrate the emergence and worth of what Oden terms “Postmodern Paleo-orthodox Spirituality.”  It is a spirituality deeply rooted in the Ancient Christianity best expounded by Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley.  “Christian orthodoxy in its ancient (paleo) ecumenical sense is summarily defined sacramentally by the baptismal formula (in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), liturgically the by the Eucharistic event, and doctrinally by the baptismal confession with its precisely remembered rule of faith as recalled in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, and their subsequent consensual interpretations” (p. 130).  Despite having been shunted aside by liberals and modernists during the past 200 years, it retains an abiding strength clearly evident for 20 centuries.   Modernity, Oden believes, is collapsing, though dinosaurs proclaiming its wonders still stalk the halls of academic and culturally powerful institutions.  But Paleo-orthodoxy will survive and prosper simply because it is eternally true and will provide its adherents with eternal life, now and forever.  Routinely declared dead and gone, this classic Christianity revives and flourishes again and again, for:  “Life lived in Christ does not waste time resenting the inexorable fact that each culture like each person dies.  Sanctifying grace offers beleaguered cultural pilgrims the power and means of trusting fundamentally in the One who proffers this ever-changing, forever-dying historical process” (p. 130).  

Young Evangelicals in particular seem committed to exploring and expounding this ancient tradition. Thus Oden, having begun his life within a family still rooted in orthodoxy, has returned to the basic tenets of its creeds.  With T.S. Eliot he has clearly discovered the timeless truth that “In my beginning is my end.”  Consequently:  “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost /  And found and lost again and again:  and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious” (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets).  

Though not deeply immersed in WWII histories, I’ve always been interested in that era and recurrently read things that interested me, for I know how the two great wars (WWI and WWII) significantly shaped the 20^th century.  In Germany’s Underground:  The Anti-Nazi Resistance (New York:  Da Capo Press, c. 2000; 1^st ed. c. 1947) Allen W. Dulles focuses on the oft-unknown and unheralded but heroic effort by conscientious Germans to stop (or at least minimize) the devastation unleashed by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi devotees.  At mid-century the Dulles family was among the most distinguished and influential in America—his brother John Foster became President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State; another brother, Avery, was a significant Catholic theologian and Cardinal; Allen himself, following the war, became the head of America’s Secret Service agency.  During WWII Allen was stationed to Switzerland to make contact with and coordinate activities with anti-Nazi Germans.  He subsequently published this illuminating account.

Dulles begins by describing “the evolution of a police state” whereby Adolph Hitler shrewdly took control of Germany.  He was certainly no “mountebank” or “fool.”  In fact “he was one of the smartest tyrants who ever hypnotized a people” (p. 17), successfully persuading millions of Germans that he would triumphantly lead the nation to the “national and moral rebirth” they craved.  Effectively manipulated by propaganda and deceit, many of them awakened much too late to the brutal dictatorship (carefully following the Bolshevik model) that Hitler had established.  They then discovered, as Count Helmuth von Moltke lamented, that efforts to oppose the Nazis were incredibly difficult; indeed, what could be done “‘when you cannot use the telephone, when you are unable to post letters, when you cannot tell the names of your closest friends to your other friends for fear that one of them might be caught and might divulge the names under pressure?’” (p. 20).     

Nevertheless, once the war commenced, conspirators such as Moltke launched plots to overthrow Hitler.  Eminent military leaders included:  Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Chief of Staff of the German army until the summer of 1938; General (later Field Marshal) Erwin von Witzleben; Field Marshall Erwin Rommel (the celebrated “desert fox” widely lauded by Hitler in the early years of the war); and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (heading the Abwehr—the military intelligence agency), represented the honorable esprit de corps of their martial tradition.  “Immer true und redlickheit—always loyal and honest,” they vowed!  Notable politicians, including Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, formerly the mayor of Leipzig, and Johannes Popitz, the Prussian Finance Minister, were equally involved in underground activities.  Professional men (numerous lawyers), diplomats, labor leaders, and churchmen (such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer) played vital roles.  Probably the best known of the conspirators, Mayor Goerdeler, was “the proverbial German official—conscientious but romantic, intellectual but devoted to the state and every concept of law and order.  He was a devout Protestant and a public servant par excellence.  It took a Hitler to make such a man a revolutionary” (p. 30).  

Without doubt the military officers posed the most serious threat to Der Fuehrer.   During the war there were several daring efforts, beginning in 1939, to assassinate him, but he seemed to live a charmed life.  The most significant underground conspiracy, known as “the Kreisau Circle,” was led by Count Helmuth von Moltke” and brought together a significant number of anti-Nazis inspired by Christian convictions.  Dulles sketches biographical portraits of several of these men, highlighting their character and courage, and reminds us of the “other Germany” Hitler despised and trampled.  Of the dozens involved in various plots, virtually none survived, but their heroic efforts deserve memorializing.  Their final effort took place in 1944 when Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Staffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase under a table near Hitler while he was holding a meeting.  Inadvertently one of the attending officers moved the briefcase away from Hitler simply because it was in his way.  The bomb exploded and four officers were killed.  Hitler was seriously injured and never fully recovered—but he walked away from the scene.  The Gestapo quickly identified Stauffenberg as the culprit and his fellow conspirators were rounded up and executed.   

Since Dulles had personal contact with some of the important anti-Nazi Germans, this treatise gives us valuable insight into some of the significant efforts made to save their country.  That they failed does not tarnish their image—rather it reminds us that even under brutal tyrannies there is often a courageous few who risk their all to combat them.  

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Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was one of the most prominent Germans involved in conspiracies to overthrow Adolf Hitler.  In significant ways he surreptitiously helped the Allies—and had his maneuvers to get England to join Germany in an alliance against Russia succeeded, the world might have been vastly different.  Ian Colvins told his story in Master Spy:  The Incredible Story of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Who, While Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence, Was a Secret Ally of the British (London:  McGraw-Hill Book Company, c. 1952; republished by Uncommon Valor Press, c. 2014).  Though written 60 years ago, Master Spy has the advantage of being written while many of the best sources were still alive.  “Colvin’s ‘contacts with German generals’ and his relentless, if undercover, investigation of the attitudes of the German General Staff toward Hitler ultimately led him to an encouraging conclusion:  admirals and generals high in the Nazi hierarchy were searching desperately for ways of ridding themselves of Der Fuehrer and reaching an accord with Great Britain and France.  First among them was Admiral Canaris, Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence” (Kindle, #28).  

Canaris “had reached the height of his professional ambition when he took over the appointment of Chief of Intelligence” (#177).  He served with distinction in U-boats during WWI and commanded a battleship between the wars, but he had always been interested in military intelligence and moved into that arena during the 1930s.  His love of adventure and intrigue, his intellectual shrewdness, and his quiet, confident demeanor appealed to Hitler, who treated military officers deferentially before committing them to aggressive actions against Austria and Czechoslovakia in the windup to actual war in 1939.  When the dictator began taking some powers away from the General Staff, assuming for himself the post of War Minister, Canaris began to soften his allegiance his commander-in-chief.   

So by the time hostilities began in 1939 Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence had already begun working to undermine his endeavors.  Canaris had wide-ranging contacts with conspirators such as Count Helmuth von Moltke and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and effectively cultivated diplomatic contacts abroad, especially in England and Switzerland.  Before the invasion of Poland, some of the anti-Nazi conspirators proposed arresting Hitler and establishing a military rule—something Winston Churchill noted in The Gathering Storm.  Unfortunately, Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister and thought he could work with Hitler.  Since the German officers thought they needed England’s support if a coup d’etat could be staged, this early plot (one that could have saved the world incredible anguish) dissipated.  

When Hitler notified his military that he would invade Poland, Canaris told his staff “that the defeat of Germany would be terrible, but that a victory of Hitler would be more terrible still!  He considered that nothing should be omitted that would shorten the war” (#1455) and thenceforth committed himself maintaining his position while working surreptitiously to foil Hitler’s agenda.  Through his agents abroad he was able to supply the Allies with important information regarding political and military developments within Germany.  He sought (unsuccessfully) to persuade the British to help the Norwegians resist the Nazi invaders, persuaded that an all-out battle there might transform public opinion in Germany and bring the war to an end.  He secretly admired Winston Churchill (reading his speeches to his wife at home) and rejoiced in the “English bulldog’s” resolve to resist the Nazis.  He used misinformation and diplomatic contacts (including frequent personal visits) to keep Generalissimo Franco from opening Spain to Hitler, who wanted to establish bases in that country.   In Spain Canaris “achieved something lasting.  He had saved this mysterious land from prolonged torture” and obviously helped the Allies thereby (#2344).  He subtly subverted Hitler’s order that Churchill be assassinated when he attended a conference in Casablanca conference.  Whenever and wherever he could—as Colvins shows through many fascinating details—he schemed to thwart the Nazi agenda.  

Hitler at times noted Canaris’ apparent “pessimism” but never doubted his loyalty as the German  armies were conquering most of Europe.  But as the Third Reich began collapsing—and as conspiracies against Hitler proliferated—Admiral Canaris began to be suspected of treason,  Arrests of leading conspirators such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer led to information that led to more arrests.  “Canaris men” in foreign posts had, it seemed, all too often failed to deliver the information needed by the Nazis.  In February, 1944, he was removed from his position as Chief of Military Intelligence—nine years after being appointed to that post.  While technically still free, he knew his days were numbered, though he had covered his tracks with consummate skill.  “‘Canaris was unprotected,’ said Willy Jenke.  ‘He was afraid for his life, and yet he would not budge.  We urged him to flee to Spain with his wife and family.  General Franco would have seen to his safety.  The Military Intelligence could have put an aircraft at his disposal; but he would not go.’”  Asked to explain, Canaris said:  “‘I will never flee.  I want to share the fate of the German people” (#3468).  

When the Kreisel Circle’s plot to kill Hitler dramatically failed in 1944, Canaris was one of the scores of eminent Germans rounded up, implicated in anti-Nazi efforts, and sent to Flossenburg (joining General Oster and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others).  Given a summary trial, he was executed a mere 20 days before Hitler himself would kill himself.  But shortly before dying, Canaris tapped out a message to a fellow prisoner, declaring:  “‘I die for my Fatherland.  I have a clear conscience.  I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler leading Germany to destruction’” (#3727).  

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In Victims of Yalta:  The Secret Betrayal of the Allies, 1944-1947 (New York:  Pegasus Books, c. 2012, first published in 1977) Nikolai Tolstoy (a distant relative of the famous novelist) compiled and analyzed evidence—much of it first-hand oral testimonies taken from survivors—regarding one of the truly tragic results of WWII.   He documents the fact that  “well over two million Russians were handed over to Stalin in the years 1944-7 by the Western Allies, and that the fate accorded to almost all of them was terrible, has been known to an increasingly large public for a number of years” (p. 19).  How and why it was done—and why the story was so studiously withheld from the public in the West—provides the structure for this book.  Amazingly, though many German “war criminals” were brought to justice following WWII, no Russians were held accountable for “the herding of millions of ordinary Russians into cattle-trucks to certain death, torture or unbearable privation” (p. 24).  

During the course of WWII, millions of Russian civilians were, at least briefly, forced to live under Nazi rule.  Nearly three million of them were sent to work camps.  (When Allied troops “liberated” Russian slave laborers who were working on German farms, many of them would beg to be left in their servitude rather than sent “home.”  Incredibly, “life as slave-laborers in Nazi Germany had been better than life in Russia” (p. 315)).   Nearly six million Russian soldiers were captured by the Germans; 1,150,000 survived the war.  Nearly a million Russians voluntarily joined the Germans, determined to help overthrow Stalin’s brutal tyranny.  As the Red Army swept across Eastern Europe, of course, many of these Russians were “repatriated”—which generally meant being sent to the Soviet Gulag!  As the war ended some of the Russians in German camps were handed over to Allied forces, who then returned them to their “motherland.”  To Stalin, all these Russians were in some way “traitors” and he demanded their return to the Soviet Union.  

When it became apparent the Allies would triumph in battle, politicians and diplomats began to discuss how to deal with the POWs and refugees dislodged by the conflict.  Some English officials, in particular, were distressed at the prospect of returning Russians to the Soviet Union, though they also had to consider how negotiate the return of Allied POWS now under Russian control.  Leading the negotiations in 1944, Sir Anthony Eden visited Moscow and discussed the issue with Stalin, whose “wit, humour, and gentle wisdom” rekindled Eden’s “admiration” for the tyrant.  The two men “laughed, drank and gossiped around the festive table until the early hours of the morning” (p. 74) and it was agreed to quickly “repatriate” the Russians held in England.  Similarly, at Yalta, Stalin imposed his will on the confreres, ultimately resulting in the “repatriation” of virtually all his subjects.  George Kennan, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, witnessed this process with concern, knowing that the NKVD was in charge of handling the returning Russians; he had “‘no illusions as to the fate that awaited these people on arrival in the Soviet Union.  I was full of horror and mortification over what the Western governments were doing’” (p. 87).  

Nevertheless, following through commitments made to Stalin, the repatriation process proceeded rapidly.  The fate of the Cossacks who had joined the German army was especially “remarkable,” Tolstoy says.  During the prior century, they had been loyal supporters of the Tsar and had stoutly opposed the Bolsheviks.  The German soldiers who occupied their territories treated them rather benevolently, and many of the men actively assisted Hitler’s Wehrmacht.  Following the Russian triumph at Stalingrad, these Cossacks (often accompanied by entire families) retreated along with the German forces and were ultimately assigned a region in northern Italy.  As Allied troops moved into this area, the Cossacks (numbering in the thousands) peacefully surrendered to Britain’s Brigader Geoffrey Musson of the 36^th Infantry Brigade, having “no quarrel with the Western Allies;” they were interested only in sustaining “their struggle against Bolshevism” (p. 158). 

British soldiers were most impressed by the Cossacks, with their fur caps, knee-high riding boots, and skilled horsemanship.  Led by some famous White Russian officers (many of them émigrés who had lived in the West since the Bolshevik victory in the civil war), they were well-organized, orderly, and fully willing to cooperate with their captors.  They believed (since Winston Churchill and other Western leaders had earlier supported the White Russians in their struggle against the Bolsheviks) that they would escape Stalin’s dragnet.  Under no circumstances did they want to go back to their “homeland” in the USSR.  Some even volunteered to join Allied troops in the Far East battling the Japanese!  English officers on the ground promised the Cossacks they would be protected.  They’d not yet learned of the promises made by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta!  Shortly ly thereafter Brigader Musson faced the Cossack’s leader, Ataman Domanov, and informed him “‘that I have received strict orders to hand over the whole of the Cossack Division to the Soviet authorities.  I regret to have to tell you this, but the order is categorical.  Good day’” (p. 175).  

To the Cossacks, “it was the lying that was perhaps the most repulsive aspect of the whole grim business unfolding” (p. 178).  Their leaders, still operating in accord with the noblesse oblige of their culture, had taken the British officers at their word—and now that word had been broken!  They’d surrendered and been betrayed.  Rounded up, by force when necessary, and packed into trucks, they were delivered to the Soviets in Judenberg, Austria.  Local residents were shocked to see the British orchestrating this process, and the soldiers involved understood they were sending the Cossacks to certain death.  Many of them were almost immediately executed—distant gunfire was heard in Judenberg.  The rest of them were packed into trains sent to slave labor camps in Siberia.    Virtually none of them survived.  

Though British army officers certainly deserve some blame for following orders—first to deceive and then to force the Cossacks to return to Russia—Tolstoy tries to put their behavior in context.  They did, in fact, look the other way when some of the people fled to the woods and in time settled in the West.  Some of the wives of Cossack leaders were helped to escape.  But in general they followed orders to deport the Russians.  To a degree, they did so “because they genuinely believed the Cossack’s fears to be illusory.  For three years British wartime propaganda had represented the USSR [in the words of Dr. John Pinching] ‘as a kind of utopian socialist state.  One rather believed this . . . [and] this echoed the Stephen Spender, Bernard Shaw kind of intellectual Left with which I was associated in Oxford, and which I swallowed hook, like and sinker . . .  Really, I think I was brainwashed by the Psychological Warfare Branch into thinking that Russia was a socialist state, and that they would behave compassionately towards these people whom we were deputed to send back’” (p. 218).  The big lie that sustained the USSR prompted all too many Westerners to help Stalin liquidate millions of his subjects.  

The Cossacks simply represent one of many groups of “Russians” forced to return to the USSR.  At Yalta, Stalin demanded “that all SOVIET nationals found in territories occupied by ALLIES should be returned to the USSR” (p. 254).  For whatever reason, and for however long they’d lived outside the borders of the Soviet Union, they were be “repatriated”!  At Potsdam, Stalin intensified his demands and Churchill promised to cooperate, though he seems to have been personally unaware of many details known to Stalin.  He would soon be replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Atlee, who was far more pliable in Stalin’s hands.  The Soviet dictator was especially determined to round up those White Russians (mostly Ukrainian) who had fled to the West to escape Bolshevik rule.  

Allied soldiers—Americans like Eisenhower and Patten more frequently than British—found the repatriation process abhorrent and occasionally worked  clandestinely to help Russians escape—quietly ignoring the edicts by leaders such as  Secretary of State Stettinius, who declared that “it was United States policy to return all Soviet citizens ‘irrespective of whether they wish to be so released’” (p. 337).  American GIs would register some Russians (especially old émigrés) as non-Soviet citizens—Ukrainians were often registered as Poles—and provide false papers enabling them to flee to freedom.  They simply looked the other way when many “refugees” escaped the camps.  “The plain fact was that almost no soldier, British or American, approved of forcible repatriation.”  At Nuremberg German soldiers were being tried for precisely those “war crimes” Stalin insisted his “allies” commit!  “That soldiers should not maltreat prisoners or war, nor harm women and children, had been a maxim of warriors since the Middle Ages” (p. 348), and many military men were truer to their tradition than their superior’s commands.  

Unfortunately, these soldiers could have only minimal impact upon the forced repatriation (and rapid demise) of millions of Russians.  That only tiny Liechtenstein valiantly refused to cooperate in any way with Stalin is a worthy testament to that nation’s character.  Unfortunately, she did so alone!  

 Though we can never reach a consensus determining who was the “world’s smartest man,” a significant number of scholars would vote for St. Thomas Aquinas.  The “Angelic Doctor’s” genius lay not in his originality or creativity—both attributes he would have disdained—but in his unique ability to synthesize and persuasively explain the perennial truths of philosophy and theology, to effectively conjoin faith and reason.  Commending him to the Church as her finest theologian a century ago, Pope Leo XIII said:  “Because he had the utmost reverence for the Doctors of antiquity, he seems to have inherited in a way the intellect of all.”  Still more, wrote Jacques Maritain:  “St. Thomas cast his net upon the universe and carried off all things transformed into the life of the mind, towards the beatific vision.”  To make  accessible important aspects of Aquinas’ work, Kevin Vost recently published The One Minute Aquinas:  The Doctor’s Quick Answers to Fundamental Questions (Manhester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, c. 2014).  Designed to address “the questions that matter most,” he explores some of Aquinas’ positions (primarily found in his Summa Theologica), treating the nature of human nature (as evident in man’s hunger for happiness), the nature of God, and the person of Christ.  

          We naturally desire happiness.  Exactly how to fully attain and enjoy it, however, perennially puzzles and eludes us!  Many (indeed most) of the things we pursue—wealth, pleasure, status—wrongly promise to make us happy, and even the best and brightest of mortals generally die a bit discontent.  To Aquinas this makes sense because we most deeply long for a joy impossible to attain on earth.  At best we can only partially discover (through God’s grace and a virtuous life) what we will fully attain only in heaven (the beautific vision).  Composed of body and soul, we are special creatures, unlike the rest of creation; so to attain our end (happiness) we must rightly order both our material and spiritual lives.  Preeminently spiritual beings, created to share God’s eternal life, we must rightly respond to His initiatives and commands.  

To do so requires that we comply with our divine design to live as free moral agents, to act responsibly, to do the things conducive to true happiness.  “As the intellect seeks to know the true, the will seeks to obtain the good” (#678 Kindle).  Thus we must be free, for as Thomas said, “‘Man has free will:  otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain’” (#686).  We choose to do right or wrong, to resist or surrender to sinful temptations, to demand instant gratifications or consider long-term goods—and in making such decisions we develop the habits that shape our character.  Good habits—whether playing the piano, building muscles or interpreting Scripture—come through sustained repetition.  “Good habits direct us toward good acts, and another word for a good habit is a virtue.  . . . .  As Aristotle wrote, ‘Virtue is that which makes its possessor good, and his work good likewise’” (#892).  Thus we need to practice the cardinal virtues (prudence; fortitude; temperance; justice—all nicely discussed by Voss in short sections) in order to live well.  Helping us do so is the Law.  To Aquinas, “‘The light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law’” (#1229).  This law is given specificity in Scripture and informs human laws insofar as they are truly good.  

Yet we need more than the Law to guide us to eternal goodness.  Thus the Grace of God grants those infused virtues (faith, hope, and love) that finally satisfy our hunger for happiness, enabling us to participate in the very life of God Himself.  Responding by faith to His invitation, we find the forgiveness of sins and are born again.  By faith we acknowledge the truth fully revealed to us in Christ and learn of Him as the Holy Spirit works within us, giving us understanding and strength to trust and follow God.  Hope grants us the assurance that our future good, our eternal happiness, has been provided by Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross and Resurrection from the grave.  “Josef Pieper said hope captures ‘the very foundation of being in the world for the Christian:  the concept of the status viatoris.’  A viator is ‘one on the way,’ and is translated as ‘wayfarer’ in the Summa Theologica” (#1588).   The best of the infused virtues, of course, is charity—“the friendship of man for God” that “resides not in our passions, but in the will, and the will desires, seeks, and loves the good.  Love in the sense of charity seeks the highest good—the attainment of union with God” (#1655).  Amazingly, God has entered into our world and encourages us to establish a lasting friendship with Him.  Just as loving our neighbors means doing good for them, as well as wishing them well, so too loving God means doing what pleases him, not simply feeling certain things about Him.  

To please God we must first know Who He Is!  To this subject Aquinas devoted himself wholeheartedly.  While yet a six-year old child he is reputed to have asked “Who is God?” and for the next 42 years he constantly sought to answer his question.  By nature we have a vague awareness of a Supreme Being of some sort, though this innate awareness easily slides into denial or forgetfulness.  We can, however, by careful thinking come to certainty regarding His existence.  Thus Aquinas set forth, at the beginning of the Summa, five famous ways to “prove” or “argue for” God’s existence.  Beyond this simple fact, we need Him to reveal Himself (primarily in Scripture) regarding his attributes, though we can reason cogently when deciding various things regarding the Great I Am who is Three-in-One.  

Until quite recently, natural scientists and philosophers took the universe to be eternal.  By taking the Bible as his foundation, however, Aquinas declared it to be created.  Matter began to be as God spoke it into being.  Citing Dionysius, who said all things were divinely caused, Thomas said:  “God’s ability to create belongs to his being or essence, which is common to the three Persons of the Trinity.  God causes things by his intellect and will, as when a craftsman works through an idea or ‘word’ in his mind to craft something that he loves.  So too did God the Father make creatures through the Word, who is his Son, and through his Love, which is the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity, then, created creation” (#3054).  He created simply because He is Good and sought to share His goodness with His creatures.  So, as Augustine said, “the trace of the Trinity appears in creatures” and guides the studious mind toward the Creator.  

The Second Person of the Trinity, Christ Jesus, most fully revealed God to us, and Aquinas labored to fully grasp His nature and work.  With the memorable simplicity characteristic of him, he said of our Lord:  “Being born, He became our friend.  At supper, He became our food.  Dying, He was our ransom’s price.  And, reigning, is our eternal good” (#3432).    “God became incarnate as the most fitting way to restore our corrupted sinful human nature so that many good things would follow, including the building up of our faith, since we could hear God Himself speak; our hope, since Christ’s presence shows us God’s love for us; our charity, so that we would desire to love God in return for his presence among us; and our well-doing, since God himself served as our example; and indeed, ‘the full participation of the Divinity, which is the bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed on us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says . . . God was made man that man might be made God’” (#3467).  

Summing up his commendation of Aquinas, Vost cites the 14^th century Pope John XXII, who  declared, in Doctoris Angelici:  “He enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors together; a man can derive more profit from his books in one year than from a lifetime spent pondering the philosophy of others” (#4321).  Anyone desiring to do so will find in Kevin Vost a most helpful tutor.

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For many years Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, has published a stream of books designed to explain and defend the Christian Faith.  One of his most recent and best works is titled Practical Theology:  Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas—358 Ways Your Mind Can Help You Become a Saint (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2014).  Kreeft believes (as did C.S. Lewis) that the best devotional materials are written by the Church’s most serious and incisive theologians (who appeal to the mind) rather than entertaining communicators (who try to touch the emotions).  Thus an article from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica will be more valuable than the latest “spiritual” entry in Oprah Winfrey’s book club!   Though resembling Kevin Vost’s One Minute Aquinas in intent, Kreeft’s work differs in its organization and approach—citing the saint more extensively and giving greater depth to his presentation.  

Consequently, Kreeft explains:  “In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his ‘existential bite’.  Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other.  I wrote this book to help bring the sun out from its eclipse.”  So, he continues:  “Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain ‘the one thing needful’, the summum bonum or ‘greatest good’, the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality.  Three of its names are ‘being a saint’, ‘beatitude’ (supreme happiness) and ‘union with God’.  That was my principle for choosing which passages to use:  do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e., sanctity, happiness, union with God?” (#330).  

This book seeks to bring us into contact with Aquinas himself.  Kreeft provides some explanation and commentary, but it’s all designed to help us rightly understand St. Thomas.  The 358 selections follow the order of the Summa, but it’s easy to peruse the table of contents and go immediately to subjects that look interesting.  Thus I’ll just lift out a few of the entries to illustrate the worth of Kreeft’s compendium.  Given that life is a journey—and journeys must end somewhere—it’s important to realize that “Our end is to know God—not just to know about Him but to know Him.  ‘This is eternal life:  to know Thee, the one true God’ (Jn 17:3) (#397).  To know Him requires theology—studying God—the “queen of the sciences” to Medieval thinkers such as Aquinas.  

Theology means thinking about God, and Aquinas insists there is a very human as well as divine dimension to this process.  We have minds uniquely capable of reasoning.  Thus we can discern God’s presence in all things.  “God is in all things,” Aquinas insisted; “not indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works.  For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately, and touch it by its power; hence . . . the thing moved and the mover must be joined together.  Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire.  Now God causes this effect (being, existence) in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being, as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.  Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being.  But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things  . . .   Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” (#737).  

The great Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson condensed Aquinas’ explication to a “great syllogism:  (1) Being is innermost in each thing.  (2) God is very being, by His own essence.  (3) Therefore God is in all things, and innermostly” (#782).  This highly important point leads Kreeft to rejoice, for if God is truly present in all things—and if sanctity comes through “practicing the presence of God—we may begin to experience a bit of heavenly joy, see a bit of the beatific vision when we will finally “see Him as He is.”  By delighting in the manifest presence of the Creator in His creation, we may experience some of the transcendent joy of beauty here and now.  If God is everywhere and we manage to clearly see creation’s splendor, “the whole world will light up like a stained glass window when the rising sun (the rising Son!) suddenly shines on it, all the colors bursting into life with one and the same light” (#756).  By carefully attending to all that is—the snowflakes on a pine bough, the ripples on a stream, the colors of a sunset—we learn to “love God in everything because you can find God in every thing” (#1093).  

By nature we humans seek answers to various “why” questions.  The greatest of “whys” focuses on the definitive, the final reason for things—what physicists today label a “grand theory of everything” that explains it all.  To Kreeft, our compulsion to know shows that God has planted, deep in our being, a “desire to know the ultimate explanation for everything, which is in the mind that designed everything, the Author of the story we are all in.  For we desire to know all that can be known about all that is.  (We also desire to attain and enjoy all the good that is and all the beauty that is, but we first have to know it in order to appreciate and enjoy it.) (#816).  Both Aristotle and Aquinas and C.S. Lewis took it for granted that “nature makes nothing in vain.”  So, Kreeft says, “All natural desires correspond to real beings that can satisfy them:  hunger, thirst, eros, tiredness, loneliness, boredom, ugliness, injustice, and pain point to food, drink, sex, rest, friends, interest, beauty, justice and pleasure” (#822).  Surely this desire we have to know the Ultimate Source of all validates its Reality!   What we know about God is much like knowing and artist through his works.  “God is an artist, not a scientist; he designed and created the world, which is first of all the product of his art and then becomes the object of our science.  Therefore all human science—in all senses of ‘science’, ancient (broad) and modern (narrow)—is really an appreciation of the divine art” (#989).  

Though many modern thinkers insist that “chance and necessity” explain all that happens, we often hear folks say (often in the face of some misfortune) that “everything has a reason.” In truth, according to Aquinas, everything does, indeed, have a purpose—and that gives real meaning to life.  In an ordered universe, where everything changes in accord with various causes, there are evident ends towards which things move.  Calves become cattle, not mountain goats.  Heated water dissolves into oxygen and hydrogen, not nitrogen and helium.  “Therefore our human lives, which include conscious purposes, fit into this purpose-filled universe” (#2034).  The world is intelligently designed and we can understand it.  Things move purposively.  We too, if we fit in to this designed order, move to our proper end if we accept God’s will.  “Being sane and being saintly are ultimately the same thing:  conforming our thoughts and our lives to the nature of reality, which is ultimately God, His nature and His designs” (#2040).  Thus “‘Life’s greatest secret is incredibly simple.  It is just repeating two magic syllables each day to God:  the same syllables you said in your wedding vow:  ‘I do’” (#2108).

By saying “I do” to God I commit to a loving relationship to be finally consummated in heaven, where we expect to experience the ultimate joy of the Beatific Vision.  Aquinas said:  “‘Our Lord said (Jn 17:3):  This is eternal life:  that they may know Thee, the only true God.  Now eternal life is the last end. . . .  Therefore man’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, which is an act of the intellect’” (#2404).  Still more:  “‘It is written (1 Jn 3:2):  When He shall appear we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.  Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the divine essence’” (#2417).  Thankfully, we taste a bit of the joy and happiness we crave while still on earth.  But ultimately we can only be truly happy in Heaven.  If we look for a heaven-on-earth we’ll be forever depressed.  But if we think of this world as a training ground for what’s to come we can enjoy some of our trials in view of what’s awaiting us.  

Making our way to heaven involves making ethical decisions, and Aquinas gives us a nicely-nuanced understanding of how we should live well.  He explains, for example, why an act is good only if its intent, its means to the end, and its ends are good.  Unlike the Kantians, who focus only on intent (do your duty without concern for the consequences) and easily become legalists, or Utilitarians, who consider only the consequences (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) and easily become insensitive to motivations and individual differences, or the Relativists (who respond empathetically to each situation and easily dispense with self-evident norms), Thomas insisted we consider all relevant factors when making decisions.  His synoptic vision, insisting we patiently consider all that makes decisions wise and good, truly distinguishes him as a moral thinker.  

Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, we make decisions that help make us who we are.   Even small choices, in their composite, really matter.  Inasmuch as we choose to do good, properly in accord with reason, we become better persons.  There are no “neutral” acts to Thomas!  Fortunately, many of our choices to do what’s reasonable are quite simple—eating, resting, speaking to colleagues, waiting in line, dressing appropriately, speaking politely.  As long as we have the right end (the divinely appointed end) in view, fixing breakfast for children or driving to school or smiling at a sales clerk qualify as ethical acts.  This is true, Kreeft says, “Especially if you offered up all your prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of each day this morning.  God counts that.  You may forget the covenant you made with Him this morning, but He doesn’t” (#2873).  We certainly fail at times, and sin is undeniably evident in our world.  But “St. Thomas is a great optimist.  There is far, far more good than evil in life, just as there is far, far more joy than suffering.  The glass isn’t half full, it’s 95% full” (#2880).  Thus to him, “Ethics is about good and evil.  Everything human, if it’s not evil, is good.  Ethics is therefore not like an umbrella and boots; it’s like food.  It’s not about a checklist, a postscript; it’s about everything” (#2887).  

Doing what’s reasonable aligns us with the Natural Law embedded within our being.  Thus to “‘scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God’” (#2898).  Inasmuch as the Natural Law stands rooted in God’s Eternal Law, “‘the natural law of reason is a participation in the eternal law of God’.  That means more than ‘an image of’ or ‘an effect of’.  It means real sharing, real presence.  That is why to disobey reason is to disobey God.  Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls.  We call that prophet conscience.  (St. Thomas used two terms  for it:  ‘synderesis’ was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and ‘conscience was the application of it.  We use ‘conscience for both.)” (#2898).  

So our conscience is sacred!  Following our true nature, reasoning rightly, means we reject the “if it feels good do it” mantra.  “Feelings come and feelings go,” said Luther, “and feelings are deceiving.”  Making ethical decisions can never be a matter of following our feelings!  “Do you want to meet God,” Kreeft wonders?  “Do you want to touch Him?  Do you want to hear Him speaking to you?  Do you want to know His will for you?  Do you want to have a ‘religious experience’?  You do this every time your conscience speaks.  Seeking mystical experiences instead is a diversion and an excuse for neglecting this hourly, humdrum meeting with the divine will than confronts us, usually in an uncomfortable way.  That’s why we look for something else.  Do you want to be a mystic?  Conscience is mystical enough.  Do you want to meet Absolute Authority?  Listen to your conscience.  Do you want God to come closer to you?  No you don’t; He is already too close for comfort in your conscience.”  In sum:  Ordinary conscience is sacred because it is the very voice of God speaking in your moral reason” (#2952).  

Years ago Malcolm Muggeridge penned a book titled The Third Testament, providing biographical portraits of persons who, in their own distinctive and persuasive ways, came to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ.  Though lacking the authority of Scripture, the lives of the saints and martyrs of the Christian Church have ever provided an on-going affirmation of the abiding Truth revealed in the Gospel.  Several recent autobiographical works testify to the perennial power of the Holy Spirit working within the hearts of folks open to Him and also show how apologetics played a pivotal role in their conversions.  (Parenthetically, the numerous references to C.S. Lewis illustrate the enduring value of his writings.)

In Counting to God:  A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief (Attitude Media, c. 2014), Douglas Ell sets forth the reasons he came to (and continues to) believe in the existence of God.  Primarily it was to answer “the great question” regarding the cosmos.  This “great question” endures as perhaps the most ancient and abiding questions ever posed.   “Accident or design—that is the question.  What do you think?” (Kindle #52).  With an abiding interest in science—taking a double major in math and physics at MIT as an undergraduate, then adding a graduate degree in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland—Ell carefully considered (while busily practicing law for three decades) the evidence available.    He slowly came to believe that mounting scientific evidence fits easily into faith in the God revealed in Scripture.  Consequently he wants “to go right to the core of the new scientific evidence of design in the universe, and thus the existence of God.  To me, it is the most exciting issue of our age” (#86). 

In a chapter devoted to his “personal journey” Ell explains why science and mathematics have been so important to him and now form a solid part of his faith’s foundation.  As a child he found numbers magical, intriguing, something of a key to Reality.  So too he found all aspects of the universe simply fascinating.  Unfortunately,  he could not fit God into his understanding of what seemed so real and important to him.  What he garnered from his childhood Sunday school classes (with their stories of Noah et al.) seemed impossible to accept, so he “began to doubt God and the Bible” (#266).  Science appeared better grounded and  more cogent to him than Bible stories.   

Years later, prodded by his wife, he joined her in attending church services, where he was surprised above all by the inner peace enjoyed by many of the parishioners.  Since his legal work required considerable time on airplanes he began seriously reading in an effort to reconcile science (but not the Scientism which restricts all reality to the natural realm) and religion (but not the Fideism which denigrates the importance of reason).  “We believers,” he declares in ending his treatise, “need to wake up and see the world the way it is.  The most magnificent battle of our generation, and for our children and our children’s children, is not Islam versus Christianity; it is Scientism versus Belief” (#3451).  

Unfortunately, today’s Scientistic elites, ensconced in “most colleges and universities, newspapers, magazines, and television and movie producers—want you to believe that our universe is meaningless and pointless, a grand system where everything somehow arose by accident and with no purpose or design but somehow, miraculously, gives the appearance of design” (#763).  Countering this are the advocates of Intelligent Design.  Their pedigree includes some of the most lustrous scientists of all time—Copernicus, Kelvin, Newton et al.  Carefully following the scientific method—demanding evidence with which to craft reasonable hypotheses—Intelligent Design thinkers then and now argue that the sheer magnitude of “apparent” design virtually proves it’s real and points logically to a Designer.  This is particularly evident when one considers the mathematical probabilities involved in bringing our world into being.  

The natural world (our wondrous universe) clearly reveals the Creator.  It is, to the author, in its own way a Gospel—good news to inquiring thinkers.  At least seven “wonders” deserve our attention and celebration:  1) the universe began, abruptly, 14 billion years ago; 2) this universe is “fine tuned” for life as we know it; 3) life itself is an incredible miracle; 4) living things reveal an amazingly intricate technology, enabling them to function according to meticulous plans; 5) the origin of new species remains a mystery unexplained by Darwinians; 6) planet earth is uniquely suited for life; and 7) quantum physics enables us to transcend earlier ways of thinking about time and space and causality.  Providing the book’s structure, “Each of these wonders is scientific support for the hypothesis of God” (#165).   Discussing these points, Ell provides (in readable form for laymen) insight into the current state of knowledge regarding the cosmos.  These seven wonders provide data for the “logic of belief” that connects the dots and provides the worldview Ell embraces.  

For open-minded readers, for folks interested in finding God:  “You have a choice.  You can accept the dogma of Scientism as fact and believe the universe is an accident, without meaning and without purpose, and live your life that way.  Or you can use the gift of reason to consider new evidence, evidence that just might lead you to believe in the designed universe of absolute wonder and evidence that just might let you live your life with meaning, with purpose, and with a sense of a greater reality, in awe of life’s mysteries and designs.  Choose well; it’s your life” (#443).  

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Though less well-known than his late brother Christopher (one of the more belligerent “new atheists” who wrote God is Not Great), Peter Hitchens has also enjoyed a highly successful journalistic career.  In The Rage Against God:  how atheism led me to faith (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2010) he charts his journey from youthful rebellion (a “carnival of adolescent petulance, ingratitude, cruelty, and insensitivity”) against everything associated with Christianity to a mature faith.  In many ways he represents his generation, and one learns much more from this treatise than one man’s story, for things were dramatically changing in England and he would live out much associated with the transformative ‘60s.   As a child, he “lived at the very end of an era that is now as distant and gone as the Lost City of Atlantis.  There were modern things about it, but in general it was a very old civilization” (p. 59).  

Born in 1951 and reared in a non-church-going family, he was exposed to the state-sponsored Anglican “religion” in school.  W hat he encountered was hardly the real thing—instead it was a “strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it” that could be rather easily tossed aside by questioning youngsters.  So at the age of 15 he melodramatically burned his Bible on a field near his Cambridge boarding school.  He fervently believed “it was the enemy’s book, the keystone of the arch I wished to bring down (p. 18).  In its place he embraced the evolutionary Naturalism and ideological Socialism favored by the educated elite of the day.  Thereby unshackled from any authority, he set out to “do his own thing” without fear of the consequences (at least of the eternal sort).  Above all he resisted any sort of  Authority—he would map his own course and set his own rules.  So his prodigal sins multiplied and metastasized, ultimately leaving him with a deep sense of shame and guilt.  

Hitchens’ atheism easily sanctioned his “moral positions,” which were “fierce opposites of what I had always been taught.  I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable.  I renounced patriotism, too—so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusions of this decision.  I began by embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority over the conventional warmongers” (p. 52).   But in time he would be stationed for two years as a journalist in Moscow, where the absurdity of his adolescent Leftism was made manifest.  The “Soviet Paradise” in reality was an abysmal prison, for the “Communist state had made a serious effort to replace and supplant such forces as conscience and self-control.  It had taken onto itself the responsibilities of God and of believers in God.  But its commandments were very different from those of God” (p. 85).  Inevitably:  “Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood” (p. 153).  

Other assignments around the globe led Hitchens to conclude that “civilization” is a rare and precious thing.  Back home, observing and “writing about the inner workings of Britain’s socialist Labour movement and the increasingly unhinged strikes it kept calling, combined to destroy what remained of my teenage socialism, though I was slow to admit it to myself” (p. 99).  The secularism he had embraced was “a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining Christian restraints on power and the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations” (p. 161).  What he had known as a child in England, he finally decided, was far better than what he found in totalitarian and non-Christian lands.  He could not but conclude that something about Christianity made the world a better place.  And he sensed, deep in his heart, that the loss of Christianity in England could not but dissolve civilization.  As his “secular faiths” failed him he began to open his mind to the truth evident in artistic works on display in chapels and cathedrals.  Then he married his wife—and the words of the Church of England’s traditional “marriage service awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed.  I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being.  It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done” (p. 105).  

So as a prodigal so he returned to the Church.  But the Church found was not the Church he’d known as a schoolboy!  Innovations abounded; neither the majestic words of Authorized (King James) Version Bible nor Cranmer’s Prayer Book suited the trendy reformers.  Within a few decades, “400 years of almost unbroken tradition had been wiped out” (p. 108).  “The new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services were not just ugly, but contained a different message, which was not strong enough or hard enough to satisfy my need to atone” (p. 111).  The secularism he’d found finally inadequate was making powerful inroads into the established Church, threatening to inwardly raze it.  Thus he finds and takes comfort in islands of sanity within the Church of England—small chapels still using the old Book of Common Prayer and fellow believers determined to uphold traditional orthodoxy.  

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David Skeel is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who sets forth, in True Paradox:  How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2014), some beguiling reasons for faith in Christ.  Unlike some, who seek to dumb-down the intellectual content of traditional theology in order to appeal to the masses who have little interest in such things, he rejoices in the many ways a more “complex” Christianity fits the manifestly “complex” world we live in!  Clearly there is an evident simplicity to Christian belief.  “The feature that makes Christianity different from any other religion or system of thought is Christian’s belief that Jesus, the God who became man, suffered, died and was raised from the dead to reconcile humans with God” (p. 12).  That said, however, applying its truth to our world leads to considerable complexity!  

We must inevitably try to make sense of the world within God’s Son revealed Himself, and “the capacity to provide explanations for some of the complexities of life as we actually experience it is a key test of any religion or system of thought that claims to offer a comprehensive account of our place in the universe” (p. 18).  To Skeel, the place to begin this endeavor is with human consciousness, that subjective self-awareness of one’s being that “is the single most complex and mysterious feature of our existence” (p. 33).  He defines our “ability to devise and assess theories about the nature of reality our idea-making capacity” (p. 38).  Whereas materialists can make no sense of this trait—either denying its existence or considering it a strange effusion of matter-in-motion—Christians understand it as an aspect of being created in the image of a supremely self-aware and creative God who calls us to join Him, eternally.  Additionally, Christians understand and uphold a timeless, universal moral standard, whereas unbelievers easily slide into various forms of relativism, making ethical ideals mere local products of history and culture.  The dignity of the person, the equality of the sexes, the importance of just legal codes, the importance of the traditional family are all tenaciously held by traditional, orthodox Christians.  

“Beauty and the Arts” provide a second “paradox” eliciting Skeel’s attention, for:     “Our sense of beauty is thus connected with our idea-making capacity” (p. 65).  He finds Wordsworth’s declaration definitive:  “I have felt /  A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air.”  Materialists vainly endeavor to provide explanations for this unique human attribute.  How do we explain our delight in sunsets or symphonies that apparently diverts us from the “struggle for existence” Darwinists declare explains everything?  To Christians, man’s interest in created beauty points him to an ultimate Beauty, an ultimate Creator who delights in it.  Thus, though an atheist himself, “Leonard Bernstein once said that when he listened to the music of, he thought for a moment that there must be a God” (p. 77).   “‘It was when I was happiest that I longed most,’ the central character in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces says as she reflects on her encounters with beauty.  ‘And because it was beautiful, it set me longing, always longing.  Somewhere else, there must be more of it’” (p. 87).  

On a personal level, Skeel notes he was reared without any religious perspective.  While in college, however, he read texts in some of his literature classes which contained biblical references.  So he decided to read the Bible and was simply “blown away,” for he “hadn’t expected the profusion of genres or the power and elegance of the overarching narrative that we repeatedly go astray yet God loves us and longs to take us back.”  Though other things certainly contributed to his spiritual journey, “the sheer beauty of the Bible is what first drew me in, and it’s still what I go back to when I’m asked over a beer late at night why I believe that Christianity is true” (p. 86).  

Addressing the problem of evil—so often the main plank in atheists’ arguments against God’s existence—Skeel finds the Christian perspective paradoxically satisfying.  To understand that God made a good world that is now marred by freely chosen human sinfulness, and that He entered into our world and suffered on the Cross to save us from sin, provides a key to dealing with pain and suffering.  It’s not an easy answer—but it is, for many of us, a satisfying one.  “The fact that the Son of God suffered an ignominious death means that God fully understands suffering.  Although the Bible doesn’t explain why suffering exists, it teaches that the Son of God—the second of God’s three persons—has experienced suffering firsthand.  Pain and suffering are still ugly, but Jesus having suffered put the ordeal of suffering in a different light” (p. 105).  Importantly, he refuses to say “that God causes suffering, as many Christians do,” preferring to believe “that God allows and eventually transforms suffering.”  This is more than a “semantic” distinction.  “I don’t think it is, and [Bill] Stuntz [one of the author’s close friends, an eminent criminal justice scholar who died of cancer] certainly didn’t.  He called ‘the principle of taking the sourest lemons and making the sweetest lemonade . . . the most beautiful I’ve ever encountered’” (p. 104).  

As a lawyer Skeel takes seriously “The Justice Paradox.”  “Nearly every system of thought gives rise to a theory of justice.  If the proof is in the pudding, a nation’s or civilization’s legal system is the pudding.  The legal system and its effects show us the real-world implications of the system of thought that underlies it” (p. 110).  Surveying world history, it becomes evident how rarely dictated legal codes (from Hammurabi to Napoleon) establish good societies.  A glance at the utopian aspirations of various Marxists, from Russia to China to Cuba, reveals how glowing promises descend into barbarian brutality.  Even the American Republic has failed to fully realize the aspirations of the Founders!  Christians need not be surprised at this.  “The dream of a perfectly just social order is, Christians believe, a dangerous lie that we tell ourselves” (p. 121).  As an old country song declares:  “Ain’t no livin’ in a perfect world.”  

Christians understand justice to be rooted in the understanding and conviction that every person is made in the image of God.  So every person must be treated well.  But materialists, believing man to be nothing more than a higher animal, have no reason to respect “human rights.”  Thus the cruelties of Hitler and Stalin and Mao flowed easily from their deep commitment to evolutionary materialism.  Revering every person, Christians realize how easily socio-political regimes violate human dignity, generally arguing that individuals must be sacrificed for the common good.  So Christians need to understand the inability of the law to fully and finally establish a good society.  Committed to promoting “the flourishing of others,” believers need to embrace “a vision of justice I call ‘law with a light touch’” (p. 129).  Consequently, Social Gospel advocates, whether Walter Rauschenbush promoting Prohibition a century ago or Jim Wallis championing Pacifism today, gravely err.  Determined “to usher in the kingdom of God through law, they are denying Christianity’s teachings, not promoting them” (p. 134).  We need less perfectionistic laws and more reconciliation between a holy God and sinful man!  

“Life and Afterlife” is the final paradox Skeel considers.  Christians, throughout the centuries, have boldly declared their faith in life everlasting.  Beyond the grave there’s Heaven to gain.  Materialists, naturally, disbelieve in anything beyond the physical world.  They have no hope for anything better than physical satisfactions.  Yet they struggle to explain man’s strange awareness of something beyond our time-space world.  C.S. Lewis repeatedly stressed (following an insight of Aristotle) that natural desires unfailingly point to realities which fulfill them.  Thus our hunger indicates there is something real called food.  “All of the longings we have considered in this book may be a foreshadowing of heaven.  Lewis himself experienced those longings with unusual intensity—he referred to the sensation as joy.  ‘If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it,’ Lewis wrote, ‘that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing’” (p. 145).  

History records few things more clearly than man’s hope for some kind of afterlife.  Exactly what’s entailed therein certainly varies (as multitudinous artistic works reveal) but surely it’s a continuation of some sort of the life we now enjoy.  Christians believe we will not be disembodied spirits but resurrected bodies blessed to inhabit a “new” heaven and earth.  Inspired music—classical works such as Bach Brandenburg concertos and the “spirituals” composed by slaves in the antebellum South—offers hints of what lies ahead.  Skeel also finds the scholarly work of N.T. Wright most helpful.  “Wright argues that heaven and earth are neither ‘poles apart, needing to be separated forever,’ nor are they ‘simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism.’  He concludes, ‘No, they are radically different, but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female’” (p. 155).   

Philosophers and educators routinely refer to the importance of one’s Weltanschauung—the philosophy of life or worldview that provides meaning for life.  To be fully human means addressing the “big questions,” wrestling with “ultimate concerns,” finding a unifying belief system.  (Such was the argument of Victor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.)  Though often assumed rather than embraced and frequently absorbed from dubious “authorities” or misperceptions, one’s worldview significantly directs (and at times dictates) much that orders his days.  Thus Paul Gosselin’s two volume set—Flight from the Absolute:  Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West (Samizdat, V. I, c. 2006, 2013; V. II, c. 2014)—provides much to ponder when evaluating current intellectual currents.  While he makes no personal professions, his frequent citations of C.S. Lewis and other Christian scholars indicate his ties to the Christian tradition, and his critique of naturalistic evolution carries with it a defense of  Intelligent Design or Creationism (though not necessarily of the young earth variety).  

Written originally in French by a Canadian scholar with a strong interest in anthropology, literature, music, science, popular culture and philosophy—who apparently works independently rather than within a university—these two volumes are more a series of tantalizing explorations (laced with interesting insights and quotations, reflecting considerable learning) than a systematic treatise.  Thus there are diversions and digressions, repetitions and ruminations that might have been screened out by careful editorial work.  Even the tables of contents (e.g. “vivisecting the Patient,” The Phantom Creed,” “Cannibals”) reveal the impressionistic rather than systematic nature of the books.  But if read patiently—and with serious attention to the lengthy quotations and extensive footnotes—much can be learned from them.    

Gosselin particularly stresses the significant changes, during the past century, wrought by the loss of Christianity’s intellectual clout.  A materialistic secularism has come to dominate schools and media in the West.  This worldview emerged in the Enlightenment and (though kept at bay for a century or more) has gained control of the modern mind.  Portentously, several European countries recently refused to even recognize Christianity’s historical role in shaping Europe!  More particularly, the materialist cosmology decreed by scientists now provides the underlying structure for most every intellectual pursuit.  Though rarely acknowledged as such, this materialist worldview (best understood as an “ideology” of some sort) is as fully religious or mythical as the Christian faith it displaced.  (Importantly, “myth” to Gosselin means a story which may very well be absolutely true.)  Anthropologists generally define “religion” as the effort to answer questions regarding:  1) origins (“where do we come from?”); 2) anthropology (“who am I”); 3) law (“why obey certain authorities, whether human or divine?”); and 4) purposes (“why live?”  “what are man’s proper ends?”).  Once the magisterial authority of Science was established and revered as the source of truth, a series of 18^th and 19^th century thinkers, culminating in Charles Darwin, discarded the Judeo-Christian cosmology which had shaped the West.  

              Consequently, by assuming and insisting that evolution is true, thinkers such as Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins confidently reduce human beings to sophisticated animals interacting with an ever-changing physical world.  “Man is, at most, a garbage bag-full of pompous molecules interacting in a universe totally indifferent to his existence” (V. I, Kindle #302).  As one of the characters in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles said:  “‘That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up.  We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles.  And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix.  Or at least we didn’t think they did.  We were fools.  We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud.  They wouldn’t move very well.  So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.  We succeeded pretty well.  We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for.  If art was no more than a frustrated outfling of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life?  Faith had always given us answers to all things.  But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin.  We were and still are a lost people’” (#314).  So we find distinguished scientists, such as Steven Weinberg, declaring:  “‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless’” (#1325).  To which Alfred North Whitehead wisely decreed:    “‘Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study’” (#4898). 

                  Then quite quickly, at the close of the 20^th century, a repudiation of many key tenets of the Enlightenment project sallied forth under the banner of Postmodernism, which may be best understood as yet another religious endeavor (or, perhaps more correctly, a variety of religious expressions) best evident in popular culture and public education.    Turning away from collective social structures, Postmoderns focus on individuals “and ask:  ‘What’s in it for me?’  Political parties have become self-serve institutions.  Postmodern religion is custom-fitted to the client’s preferences” (#1363).  “The twentieth-century buried the grand collective political projects.  All that remains is the individual and his sexual, artistic, ideological and professional impulses and ambitions.  His salvation is found in self-fulfillment.  Anything that constrains the individual finds itself opposed to the postmodern perspective.  This is the perfect worldview for eternal teenagers” (#2522).  But despite the clear differences between Postmodernism and Modernism one thing remains constant:  a dogmatic allegiance to Darwinian Evolution.  Postmoderns regularly “deconstruct” ethical and aesthetic standards, patriarchy and colonialism; they proudly dismiss all “truths” as mere opinions and weigh in regularly against all forms of “intolerance”; they reject all prescribed principles or traditional authorities; they consider male/female sexual distinctions “out-dated” and celebrate self-fulfilling same-sex unions; but they remain totally committed to “the West’s own dominant metanarrative, the theory of evolution, as it constitutes the logical  basis for postmodern relativism” (#2446).  

Thus Gosselin regularly returns to his central theme:  evolution through natural selection lacks bona fide scientific standing and, as a worldview, has gravely harmed the world.  Rightly defined, “science deals with observable and reproducible processes.  The rest is outside the domain of science (or should be)” (#1524). When dealing with past events (and especially the origins of the universe or life or human consciousness) we “have left the field of empirical science and have begun to navigate the world and wonderful world of myth and cosmology” (#1533).   Without empirical evidence, we have “little more than nice ‘scientific’ stories framed in the context of the dominant materialistic origins myth.  This is the best we can expect” (1543).  Though Darwinists are determined to maintain their status as “scientists” and insist evolution through natural selection is a “fact” rather than a theory, they do so only by denying the proper constraints of their discipline.  

Even more egregiously, they often don the mantles of religious prophets or wise men, as is evident in the works of Carl Sagan, Jacques Monod, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, who provide reasons and recipes—worldviews and philosophies of life—allegedly rooted in their scientific knowledge.  Cornell University biology professor William Provine recently summed up the stark components of this evolutionary view:  “‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear—and these are basically Darwin’s views.  There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal directed forces of any kind.  There is no life after death.  When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead.  That’s the end of me.  There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.  What an unintelligible idea’” (#5166).  Nota bene:  none of Provine’s assertions are empirically evident—all are barefaced assertions of a biologist pontificating on philosophical ideas.  

Yet such efforts have generated a host of problem for their devotees, in part because “those who accept the materialist worldview must also accept that all their cultural and intellectual production is just as rigidly predetermined as the trajectory of a ball falling from the tower of Pisa.  And if that is the case, why should such works be considered significantly or taken seriously?” (#1918).  Necessarily, materialists such as Professor Provine must insist that everything comes into being as a result of natural causes, there is no such thing as free will (whereby man, particularly insofar as he thinks, stands apart from the purely material chain of events).  As C.S. Lewis pointed out quite clearly decades ago:  “‘We do not need . . . to refute naturalism.  It refutes itself’” (#1928).  In more detail, Lewis further explained (in “They Asked for a Paper,” a powerful passage I wish I had successfully instilled in every one of my students):  “‘Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false.  One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; . . . .  The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts.  Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.  Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins.  Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.  Here is flat contradiction.  They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.  The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to may scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not to even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.  The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; thought no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it’” (#7956).

Equally impossible is the discovery of any moral code since “Evolutionary cosmology tells modern man:  ‘You are the culmination of processes that have taken place for billions of years.  Chance is your Father.  Chaos is your mother.  You are alone in the universe.  Your destiny is to establish order as you see fit” (#3958).  Moral values cannot be scientifically proven, so following ones feelings (emotivism) is the only rationale for behavior.  If it feels good, do it!  Most materialistic secularists evade the nihilistic moral message embedded in their worldview, but the Marquis de Sade saw it clearly.  “‘What is man and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world?  None, obviously’” (#4009). So it logically follows that killing a man is no worse than killing any other animal!  Whatever pleases you, whatever gives you pleasure, is allowed.  De Sade himself found pleasure in abusing women since men, the stronger sex, have the natural right to “‘indiscriminately express our wishes to all women, . . . to compel their submission’” and force any available “‘woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, he can employ it lawfully  Indeed!  Has Nature not proven that we have the right by bestowing upon us the strength needed to bend women to our will?’” (#5001).  

Though more mild-mannered and restrained in his rhetoric, Charles Darwin said much the same, lauding the triumph of Caucasians over “lower races” around the world, eliminating them in the “struggle for existence” (#4021).  We must never forget that the subtitle to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species reads:  By means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  A contemporary of Darwin, Dostoyevsky discerned the “difficulties involved with developing ethics in the context of a materialistic cosmology” (#4387), for empirical science inevitably proposes solutions “based on brute force” (e.g. the survival of the fittest).  So within decades of the publication of Darwin’s On the Evolution of Species through Natural Selection (1859) an elite corps of scholars had proposed ways to purify the race (eugenics) and justify ruthless behaviors (Social Darwinism).  Particularly in Germany distinguished evolutionary scientists were proposing, by the turn of the century, ways to eliminate criminals and handicapped persons.  The path from Darwin’s devotees (such as Ernst Haeckel) to the Nazis is well-marked and inescapable.  

Darwinists such as Haeckel and Adolph Hitler denied any meaningful difference between human beings and other animals.  “Hitler was not crazy, a ‘deranged’ individual, but was rather the logical progeny of a dysfunctional civilization developed on the basis of a flawed cosmology” (#7327).  He simply worked out his most compelling conviction, recorded in his Tishegesprache/Table-Talks:  “If I can accept a divine commandment, it’s this one:  ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.”  Haeckel and Hitler discarded the traditional Christian beliefs that man is a spiritual being, made in the image of God, possessing an immortal soul, free to embrace or reject personal responsibilities, to live choose between good and evil.  “These men represented the theoretical, logical culmination of mankind’s humanist rebellion against God.  They declared ‘our innate moral consciousness’ to be self-deception, noxious illusion, fiction—as demanded by a rationally ordered consciousness.  This century’s totalitarianism, trampling the human personality and all its rights, rhinocerouoslike, underfoot, is only the application of this theory to life, or humanism put into practice” (#6511).  

From a strictly materialistic perspective, ethical and moral nihilism (denying there are any values) inevitably results.  As he does recurrently, Gosselin cites C.S. Lewis, who wrote, in The Abolition of Man:  “We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways; to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it.  It is impossible.  Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new  shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural impulses.  Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-reach rulers and ruled alike.  A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”  

Absent such an Absolute—the Natural Law or what Lewis calls the Tao—“ultimately the only real moral absolute left is mere survival” (V. II, #541).  Disciples of Darwinism, such as Steven J. Gould, try to evade the ethical implications of their cosmology—Gould simply posited two utterly separate realms of reality, the tough-hewed materialistic world revealed to scientists and the tender-hearted ethical world indwelt by kindly biologists such as himself who support the basic moral standards of Western Christian Culture.  But other biologists and philosophers (notably Peter Singer) are not quite so tender-hearted and scour for evidence of purely material bases for ethical instincts.  Animals, including man they say, have an altruistic urge (as well as a sexual urge) simply because it enables them to survive.  They animalized humans and humanized animals—energetically defending animal rights (PETA spokesmen) or denying human dignity (pro-abortion or active euthanasia activists) as the moment required, without pausing to consider to the incoherence of their position.  

Though deeply problematic as a basis for ethics, the theory of evolution enjoys an exalted status within the 21^st century intelligentsia.  Both politicians and professors soon discover that opposing it can easily cost one his career.  Yet unlike the theory of gravity, which can be routinely demonstrated through observations and experiments, the theory of evolution, when applied to critical events such as the origin of life requires considerable faith and imagination.  Properly understood, “science” deals only with the observable natural world.  Events in the distant past, whether the “Big Bang” or the origin of life on planet earth can never be observed or tested in a laboratory.  Incoherently, evolutionary theorists insist the process they revere is both unobservable and empirical!  It’s like saying something is both invisible and visible!  And, indeed, lauded Nobel Prize winners and Harvard professors such as George Wald baldly declare “that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet, here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation’” (#1923).  Faith in spontaneous generation is endorsed while faith in any Designing Intelligence is rejected as unacceptable!  

Interestingly enough, the evolutionary myth also invokes the “Peter Pan Effect.”  Asked how he could fly so easily, Peter Pan declared:  “You just think wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.”  When the fossil record remains filled with “gaps,” you simply invoke “Chance” (the materialistic deus ex machina that takes on the role of the theistic God who intervenes and intelligently fills in the gaps).  Or you insist that in time Science will explain everything (precisely as do theists when relying on an Omniscient Mind to unveil creation’s inexplicable mysteries).  Acknowledging “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record” as the “trade secret of paleontology,” a discipline relying on data “so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study,” Steven J. Gould momentarily wondered if an indiscerrnable “punctuated equilibrium” evolutionary process theory was better than orthodox Darwinism.  And so it goes—endless “scientific” proposals designed to finally explain why Evolution is the “theory of everything” we long for.  

Surely, Gosselin insists, there’s a better way to conceptualize our cosmos.  Challenging and departing from the entrenched evolutionary paradigm demands courage and a willingness to suffer for the truth—but such has ever been the lot of dissidents and pathfinders.  Thus a distinguished American geneticist, Richard Sternberg, was demoted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because he published an article questioning some evolutionary dogma in a journal he edited.  “Never forget, Malcolm Muggeridge said, that only dead fish swim with the stream.”  What’s needed is thinkers such as George Orwell, whose prophetic 1984 warned against the “Newspeak” and “Crimestop” designed by “Big Brother” to stifle freedom of thought and speech.    

Now there’s ample reason to begin seriously questioning the claims of naturalistic evolution if we begin to think rigorously and understand all the available evidence.  Much Darwinism is obviously ideological rather than scientific, mythical rather than empirical.  Many (if not most) scientists simply accept the theory of evolution because it’s what they’re taught rather than seriously thinking through its presuppositions and ramifications.   But in truth they are enraptured by a modern origins myth—providing the story primeval history that provides a raison d’être for all that is, telling them why we’re here, who we are, where we’re headed.   When compared with various other origins myths—carefully chronicled by astute anthropologists cited by Gosselin—Darwinism (or Evolution, personified and portrayed as an Agent working its will everywhere) certainly seems to be more mythical than scientific.  That’s because it:  “necessarily involves events in the past; . . . involves a story, a narrative; . . . provides modern man with an answer to the ‘why’ question; . . . deals with metamorphosis theme; . . . providing meaning for society and its activities at diverse levels” (#3209).  But just maybe there’s a better myth!  Just maybe the ancient Judeo-Christian cosmology is really true—and should re reestablished as our culture’s guiding light.

# # #

For its first half-century the Church of the Nazarene’s theology was significantly shaped and masterfully explained by H. Orton Wiley, a close friend and associate of the denomination’s founder, Phineas F. Bresee.  Wiley’s three-volume Systematic Theology was published in the early ‘40s and defined the church’s teaching.   He relied on 19^th century Methodist theologians, as well as the holiness prescriptions of Pheobe Palmer to set forth the church’s “cardinal doctrine,” the call to “Christian perfection.”  Wiley frequently cited Methodists who endorsed Palmer’s insistence on a “crisis experience” wherein believers consecrate themselves completely to God, “place their all upon the altar,” and take God at His Word by believing that the “altar sanctifies the gift.”  Wiley especially emphasized the instantaneous nature of the “second work of grace” and tried to make sure that Nazarenes (unlike 19^th century Methodists) would tenaciously proclaim it.  In 1928 he helped draft and fully endorsed the article on entire sanctification as set forth (in 1928) in the “Articles of Faith” specifying it to be an “act of God subsequent to regeneration, by which believers are made free from original sin, or depravity, and brought into a state of entire devotement to God, and the holy obedience of love made perfect.”  This language still stands in the church’s most recent Manual.  

Wiley died in 1961, and within a decade younger Nazarene theologians began to overhaul the church’s “cardinal doctrine.”  In 1973 Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s treatise, A Theology of Love, sparked a turning point in the denomination’s history, if not in its official declarations.  Nazarene Theological Seminary professor Paul Orjala labeled it “one of the most important books ever published” by the denomination, tagging it “the first modern theology of holiness.”  Wynkoop emphasized the “credibility gap” between what preachers said and people experienced and demanded a comprehensive “restructuring of the conceptual framework within which holiness theologians had worked.”  Quietly turning aside from Wiley and the American holiness tradition, she cited John Wesley to craft a “Wesleyan hermeneutic” with a different definition of human nature and sin.  A person is not, she suggested, by nature sinful, so sin is not a thing to be removed.  Rather, sin results from a fractured, dysfunctional relationship with God.  Restoring that relationship, therefore, solves the sin problem.  Nothing essential within one’s soul is changed, bringing about a “state of grace,” but a healthy relationship with God develops.  Holiness is interpersonal love—nothing more, nothing less.  So she minimized the need for a second, instantaneous work of grace.  

Wynkoop’s position clearly informs Relational Holiness:  Responding to the Call of Love, (Kansas City:  Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 2005) by Thomas Jay Oord and Michael Lodahl, two of the denomination’s best and brightest theologians—who are winsome both in person and as authors.  Though written for the general public rather than the academy, it is endorsed by some of the church’s most distinguished theologians (H. Ray Dunning) and influential leaders (Charles Zink; Ron Benefiel; William Greathouse).  It thus may be taken to represent the current position of the Church of the Nazarene.  

Oord and Lodahl assert the church, in its presentation of holiness, faces more than the “credibility gap” noted by Wynkoop 40 years ago.  Indeed, unless it is explained in ways plausible to 21^st century worldviews, the “doctrine” will simply vanish as an artifact of an ancient religious subculture.  To recast the doctrine in relational terms, however, will suit our “postmodern” world, with its sensitivity to environmental realities and to “individuals-in-relation” or “community-created-persons.”  Within this postmodern consciousness, God may be seen as the One who “acts as an ever-present, divine influence—a necessary cause—in everyone’s relational environment.  Just as people affect others through relations, God as the Maker and Sustainer of all things also affects all things, all people, all the time, everywhere.  There is no environment in which God is not related to others as a present, active, and loving agent” (Kindle #332).  God too “is open to and affected by others, because the Creator and the creatures enjoy mutual relations” (#359).  Interacting with the God Who Is Love, we engage in loving relationships with Him and His world, and consequently are, moment-by-moment, more-or-less holy. 

Amidst the variety of views regarding holiness set forth both in scripture and theological traditions Oord and Lodahl seek to find identify one absolutely essential “core” position.  While various alternatives, have value, only love can be the “core” of holiness.  In the authors’ words:  “To love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote well-being.  To say the same thing in other words, to love is to respond to the inspiration of others—especially God—and by that response effect genuine flourishing” (#862).  Embracing this understanding, life can become an adventure, following Jesus as Guide, responding rightly to the challenges and opportunities we encounter in life’s journey.   Doing so enables us to actively participate in the loving fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit—the Divine Trinity.  “The Spirit is the Breath in whose life and presence we actually share in the mutual life and love of the Father and Son.”  Still more:  “Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that because the Father and the Son ‘make room’ for us in their common life of the Spirit, our common life together really makes a difference in God’s own life and experience of the world” (#1149).  By “our common life together” they mean mainly the “visible, touchable, experiential” activities that ought to characterize “any and every congregation” (#1360).  Working within a loving relationship with God we rightly interact with others.  “God’s love, then, is perceptible to our senses:  visible, touchable—or at least ought to be—in church communions where the word which you have heard from the beginning is heard and acted upon faithfully, boldly, and bodily” (#1366).  

In the book’s final chapter, Oord and Lodahl call us to be “dancers, not dinosaurs.”  All of the Bible’s definitions of holiness—e.g. following the commandments, being pure, committed, set apart, Christlike and perfect—can be subsumed to and expressed by the “core” value of love.  Led by the “Master Dancer,” Christ Jesus, we can dance beautifully as long as we keep step with Him.  And so, they conclude:  “Let the dance begin!” (#1649).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Thomas J. Oord, a professor at Northwest Nazarene University, has long pondered and written about the importance of love.  In The Nature of Love:  A Theology (St. Louis:  Chalice Press, c. 2010)—a book dedicated to three Nazarene theologians (H. Ray Dunning, William Greathouse, and Mildred Wynkoop)—he explores the ultimate, greatest virtue of the Christian life.   With John Wesley, he thinks “‘Love is the end of the commandments of God.  Love is the end, the sole end, of every dispensation of God, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things’” (#204).  In light of the fact that the Bible repeatedly celebrates the importance of love and the best of Christian theologians for 20 centuries have stressed its import, it should certainly “be the orienting concern and continual focus for speaking systematically about theology.  We should discard ideas or theories that undermine love” (Kindle #191).  

Unfortunately, secondary concerns have often distracted Christians from their main message.  Hugely influential 20^th century thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Karl Barth failed to give love its due.  In the past, thinkers such as Martin Luther five centuries ago (and R.C. Sproul today) elevated faith alone to the pride of place.  Calvin in the 16^th century (and Millard Erickson in the 20^th) developed an intensely logical system celebrating the sovereignty of God.  As Oord explores various theologians’ failures to rightly stress love’s importance, he admits that the word is notoriously hard to define.  So he offers this definition:  “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being” (#489).  Carefully spelling out this definition, he grants that there are many valuable aspects to other (e.g. romantic or friendly) loves.  But when thinking theologically, he insists we abide by this definition.  

Consequently he devotes appreciative sections to—and respectfully rejects the positions of—Anders Nygren, Augustine, and Clark Pinnock.  Anders Nygren wrote Agape and Eros and was “the most influential love theologian in the twentieth century” (#758).  To him only God’s agape qualifies as Christian love.  Following Luther, Nygren “rejected every idea of human merit” and located agape solely in God.  Totally depraved, we bask in God’s love but contribute nothing to our relationship with Him.  Augustine focused on love as desiring (benevolence), but not necessarily doing (benefaction) what is good.  Inasmuch as he insisted on God’s impassibility and timelessness, Augustine did not think He would interact with us in a give-and-take relationship.  Oord lauds Clark Pinnock’s “Open Theism,” which portrays God as a relational Being and grants the importance of love and of the freedom of both human and other kinds of beings to freely respond to Him.  Though sharing many of Pinnock’s positions, Oord faults him for failing to resolve the tension between love and power, especially when explaining the actuality of evil.  A major reason for this is Pinnock’s affirmation, in accord with the vast majority of Christian thinkers, of creatio ex nihilo—creation actually came to be without material antecedents.   Oord argues this notion is neither biblical nor suitable for a theology of love.   Rather than ex nihilo, he thinks God created by transforming the eternal “primordial chaos” into the world that now exists.  Neither time nor matter came into being—they were transformed by the creative act described in Genesis.  Thus evil may be attributed to a residue of the “primordial chaos” that ever abides alongside (and beyond the control of) the God who is absolutely loving.  Since “creatio ex nihilo undermines a coherent doctrine of divine love” we “should reject this nonbiblical idea to affirm consistently the biblical claim ‘God is love’” (#2232).  

Oord’s own position, deeply influenced, in my judgment, by process philosophy, is termed “Essential Kenosis.”  Oord calls it a “biblical theology of love” and believes it overcomes the problem of evil by depicting God as essentially—almost exclusively—love.  It affirms “miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, hope for a final victory at the end of history, and a biblically supported doctrine of creation” (#2098).  And it finds its final illustration on the Cross, where Jesus shows us the true nature of God—“one who experiences pain and joy, sorrow and happiness, life and death” (#2242).  Rightly understood, God does not voluntarily limit himself—He was (and is) involuntarily limited by the nature of His relationship with both the primordial chaos and creaturely freedom.  God loves because He cannot help loving; that is what He is.  He cannot destroy evil because a loving being cannot coerce anything.  But this loving God can court and woo His creatures and draw them into an ever-more holy relationship with Himself.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Thomas A. Noble, a distinguished professor of theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary, recently delivered the Didsbury Lectures in Manchester, England.  The lectures, in print, are titled Holy Trinity:  Holy People:  The Historic Doctrine of Christian Perfecting (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, c. 2013).   Targeting a scholarly audience, Noble endeavors to rightly follow his calling as a theologian, “not to perpetuate a Wesleyan ‘distinctive” . . . but to persuade all Christians that this is the heritage of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” (#188).  “Holiness,” he says, “is one of the core concepts of the Christian faith” and deserves the serious, sustained reflection that only comes when one scours the Scripture and consults the long tradition of the Christian Church as well as those “holiness” churches that have more specifically stressed it.  His thoughtful, discriminating discussions of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers, rooting his presentation in the long conversation of great exegetes and theologians, makes this work persuasive and helpful, one of the best expositions I’ve read.    

Importantly, Noble insists, holiness is a perfecting process, not a perfect state of being.  Thus his subtitle urges a perfecting rather than a perfection of the soul.  None of the Church’s greatest theologians “ever taught ‘sinless perfection’—the idea that within this life, Christians could reach that final, absolute state of perfection where they were sinless and perfectly holy” (#804).  They taught, instead, a perfecting process whereby, above all, Christians more fully love as they ought.  At this point St Augustine, one of greatest theologians of love,” famously said, in The City of God:  “Two loves built two cities.  Love of self to the contempt of God built the earthly city:  love of God to the contempt of self, the heavenly.”  We cannot but love, said Augustine—the question is what we will love!  The love of self (concupiscentia) must be tethered while love of God and others (caritas) needs stirring up!   In his wake, great thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley repeated and refined Augustine’s insight.  

Wesley, of course, gave considerable attention to holy living—“faith working by love.”  Indeed, “as Mildred Bangs Wynkoop saw clearly,” bona fide “Christian holiness was a ‘theology of love’” (2411).  In the 18^th century renewal movement he led within the Church of England Wesley urged believers (initially sanctified at their new birth) to seek ever-deeper experiential realities available through the gracious workings of God:  the “‘gradual work’ of sanctification that follows regeneration” (#2361).  Though at times he may have erroneously slipped into perfectionistic language, he typically acknowledged “the paradox of this ‘imperfect perfection’” and would even have given guarded assent to Luther’s dictum that the Christian is simul justus et pecccator, at once a sinner and justified” (#2563).  “As in Clement, Origen, the later Greek Fathers, and in Bernard and Aquinas (to name only some of those we selected from the great tradition), there is no thought here of easy, instant holiness.  Rather there is a concept of different levels of stages or ‘degrees’ of perfection’—rungs on the ladder” (#2608).  

After devoting considerable attention to an account of past developments, Noble turns to the task of “reformulating Wesley’s doctrine today.”  Simply repeating an 18^th century evangelist will not suffice!  But by carefully considering motivation and relationship we can construct a viable understanding of Christian holiness as “an inner revolution in our motivation as a consequence of a new relationship” (#3013).  Freedom from the bondage of sin—consistently defined as “the self-centered mindset”—is possible insofar as we maintain a sanctifying relationship with the Loving Lord who enables us to consistently “will one thing.”  This means the real focus of our attention should be on the Holy Trinity and the provisions made for our salvation through the atoning work of the Second Person, Jesus Christ.

Following Eusebius and a long line of thinkers, Noble emphasizes the Atonement as the key for us to understand Christian perfecting.  Ultimately, on the Cross, Christ, by dying to sin, opened the way for us to likewise die to sin and become all we’re designed to be.  “Only by meditating on the doctrine of the cross can we be captivated by the love of God in such a way as to love him with that full and whole-hearted love of mind, soul, and strength, which is the essence of ‘entire’ sanctification” (#3723).  It’s all about Him, not us!  Too often holiness has been discussed almost exclusively in terms of us—our sins, our needs, our potential, our fundamentally human ways of attaining sanctity—whereas it must be primarily rooted in the Person of God, Christ Himself!  “‘Entire sanctification’ is not a human possibility, nor is it activated by my total consecration as an individual.  It is God’s gracious activity in the life of each believer, within the contest of the Body of Christ, the church, made possible by God’s once-for-all act of grace in the crucifixion of the old sinful humanity on the cross” (#4144).  

In His Incarnation, as well as His atoning death, Christ provided for us salvation full and free.  The Early Church wrestled long and hard to rightly insist that Jesus was “fully God, fully man.”  Consequently, as Athanasius and others said, by assuming our human nature Christ redeemed and sanctified it.  Sinless Himself, he bore our sins.  Thus “Irenaeus writes of ‘the pure One opening purely that pure womb which regenerates humanity to God, and which he himself made pure.’  As the Symbol of Chalcedon (451) expressed it, he was ‘like us in everything except sin.’  Taking our sinfulness in no way polluted him.  Our debt was swallowed up in his riches, our pollution cleansed in his purity, our sin burned up in the fire of his holiness” (#4528).  Living among us (as well as dying for us) Christ showed us how to be holy persons.  

To be holy, then, is to be rightly rooted in Christ Himself.  “In him, ‘the first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5), the old humanity has died and the new humanity, the new creation (2 Cor 5:17), has begun.  Christian holiness is founded upon—is a participation in—what he has done for us, once for all time in his death and resurrection.  It is a participation in him” (#4887).  Empowered by the Holy Spirit, believers may enjoy fellowship with God Himself and allow Him to inspire and work through them.  Inasmuch as God is Perfect Love, there is a perfecting process engaging believers in the on-going-work of sanctification.  At Pentecost, “the final event in the series of the mighty acts of God in Jesus,” this Reality dawned for the infant Church.  Now, as then, Christians are “able—not merely by effort or moral energy or discipline alone, but by the grace or gift of God—to make his or her consecration fully actual, and to love God and his perfect will whole-heartedly.  While still in the fallen body as part of a fallen human race (‘flesh’) and liable therefore to daily temptation, this mature Christian is no longer a divided mind or heart” (#5207).  Rightly understood, then, Christian holiness is “always a prayer, never a claim” (#5256).  

“Charles Wesley,” Noble says, “expresses for us the constant daily prayer that Christ, who is Love incarnate, crucified, and ascended, may breathe into us too his own Spirit that we may be filled with his love:  ‘Love divine, all loves excelling, / Joy of heaven, to earth come down, / Fix in us thy humble dwelling, / All thy faithful mercies crown!  / Jesu, thou art all compassion, / Pure unbounded love thou art; / Visit us with thy salvation!  / Enter every trembling heart.  / Breathe, oh, breathe thy loving Spirit / Into every troubled breast!  / Let us all in thee inherit; / Let us find that second rest: / Take away the bent to sinning, / Alpha and Omega be, / End of faith as its beginning, / Set our hearts at liberty.  / Come, almighty to deliver, /Let us all thy grace receive; / Suddenly return, and never, / Never more thy temples leave. / Thee we would be always blessing, / Serve thee as thy hosts above, / Pray and praise thee without ceasing, / Glory in thy perfect love.  / Finish then thy new creation, / Pure and spotless let us be; / Let us see thy great salvation / Perfectly restored in thee; / Changed from glory into glory, / Till in heaven we take our place, / ‘ Till we cast dour crowns before thee, / Lost in wonder, love, and praise’” (#5226).  

Intent on loving God, we must seek to reflect Him rather than reflect on ourselves and should, with St Paul, seek to “know Christ” rather than worry excessively about personal purity.  (A self-centered religion is the worst manifestation of sinful self-centeredness! )  Above all we must discover that at the heart of the Trinity there is a loving fellowship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The “One in whom we live, and move, and have our being” is most deeply Love.  To say God is Holy is to say He is Love.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In light of these recent presentations this is clear:  if H. Orton Wiley and his followers were right, the Church of the Nazarene has abandoned its historic position; if, on the other hand, today’s theologians (Oord, Lodahl, Noble) are right, Nazarenes were appreciably (and, everyone admits, sincerely) misled for half-a-century.  Then, perhaps, neither Wesley nor any of them are right—as Catholics and Calvinists and Pentecostals et al. insist!  Better minds than mine must sort out the answer! 

          In Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, William Voegeli sets forth a somber history  (the 100 years war between successful liberals and retreating conservatives) with an acute analysis of the creeping Leviathan that’s relentlessly assuming ever-more control of all aspects of American life. The book’s title reflects a 1964 Nation editorial which declared, as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society unfolded promising to complete the New Deal, that whatever it proposed was “not enough” (#556). LBJ himself insisted, in 1964: ‘”We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few'” (#570). Whatever anyone wants Uncle Sam will provide! Underlying this attitude, as Steven F. Hayward writes in his perceptive Foreword is this: “Liberalism’s irrepressible drive for an ever larger welfare state without limit arises from at least two premises upon which the left no longer reflects: the elevation of compassion to a political principle (albeit with other people’s money), and the erosion of meaningful constitutional limits on government on account of the imperatives of the idea of Progress” (Kindle #147).

         Without doubt Progressives have successively enrolled a large majority of Americans in various programs, distributing benefits (from Social Security and Medicare to Food Stamps and college loans) that insure the popularity (even among conservatives) of the Welfare State. “The defining victory of the New Deal,” Voegli thinks, “was not the individual programs it created, but the evisceration of the principle that government, especially the federal government, had no rightful business undertaking a whole range of social improvements, no matter how gratifying the beneficiaries might find them. Once this ‘legitimacy barrier’ was demolished, liberals could frame the politics of the welfare state as a contest between the compassionate party that wants the government to give things to people and do things for them, and the mean-spirited party that wants to deprive people of all those indispensable and beneficial things” (#601).

          So long as “someone else” will pay for all these beneficial things, the “compassionate party” maintains its lock on a large percentage of the electorate. “As the British jurish A.V. Dicey wrote in 1914, ‘The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie out of sight. . . . Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention'” (#3482). Thus Voegeli, though himself a committed conservative, has some somber advice for his compatriots: accept what is and compromise! Forget about abolishing the Welfare State! Republicans as well as Democrats have generally funded and enjoyed its popularity. Ronald Reagan merely tried to “curb” its growth and abjectly failed. His “‘triumph’ was to yield ground more slowly than any other political leader in the battle that conservatives consider their central mission” (#3360). The only workable strategy for those who fear its ultimate destructiveness is to point out its unworkability and support leaders such as Congressman Paul Ryan to carefully correct its abuses and prune away some of its worst excesses.

“Conservatives, in other words, need to take the position that America is going to have a welfare state, should have a welfare state, and it’s not part of the conservative project to bring about the disappearance of the welfare state, even in the distant future. The question is whether we are going to have a welfare state that uses its finite resources intelligently, concentrating on helping the people who need it most, or one that distributes benefits in an undisciplined and nearly random fashion” (#681).

         Having announced his intent in writing the book, Voegeli describes the welfare state. Trying to get a handle on all of the assorted governmental programs (federal, state, and local) truly numbs the mind and tries the soul! Even with official numbers in hand (or in computer) it’s equally hard to rightly interpret them! Limiting himself to federal programs, Voegeli calculates America’s welfare state “was 472 times as big in 2007 as in 1940” (#813). We’re spending 15 times as much on “human resources” (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, Education) programs than we did 60 years ago. Since recipients want “other people” to pay for it, the easiest solution, naturally, is to both inflate the currency and shift the ultimate accounting to coming generations through deficit spending. Progressives talk much about “giving things to people, while  limiting the discussion about the corresponding enterprise of taking things away” (#2413).

          Undergirding all this spending is a philosophical “rationale” carefully crafted by generations of  progressives. Without the historical developments clearing the way for Europe’s socialistic welfare states,  Americans needed to be coaxed into accepting certain economic ideas that were foreign to their limited government, free enterprise traditions. So American Progressives (notably Woodrow Wilson) determined to fundamentally transform things. Rather than taking the Founders’ views of the Constitution—inscribed in memorable documents such as The Federalist Papers—Wilson worked to adapt it to the modern, technological world. Rather than ground government in human nature, he turned to the ever-evolving history of the state, reflecting the influence of 19th century thinkers such as Hegel, Comte and Darwin.

Thus Wilson repudiated the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” declaration that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and declared them state-dispensed. Following President Wilson’s example. Franklin Delano Roosevelt adeptly advanced the Progressive agenda. In a 1932 speech, setting forth the “manifesto” of his New Deal, he celebrated notions of historical progress, justice and equality quite detached from any mooring in the essential human nature assumed by the nation’s Founders. What were once considered “natural rights” (life, liberty, property) by the likes of Thomas Jefferson were now to be re-defined “in terms of a changing and growing social order” (#1455). A “Second Bill of Rights” were now needed and FDR spelled them out—the government should assure everyone “a useful and remunerative job,” a living wage, a “decent home,” good medical care, protection from “the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident and unemployment, and “a good education.” FDR’s expanssive list of “rights” was, of course easily lengthened as increasing numbers of individuals and groups invented them.

         Under FDR’s orchestration, the Chief Executive assumed powers formerly reserved to the

Congress. He transformed the Supreme Court through intimidation and judicious appointments. Thus

began. New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg says, ‘”a revolution in jurisprudence that ended,

apparently forever, the reign of laissez-faire and legitimated the arrival of the Leviathan State'” (#1600). A

“living constitution,” yearly attuned to current conditions by the Court, replaced the one written by

Madison et al. in 1787. In practice, this meant approving virtually all expansions of federal powers.

Anything goes! “‘You’ve got a problem? We’ve got a program'” (2550). Indeed: “The New Deal

changed America’s Constitution from one where the powers of government were enumerated into one

where they were innumerable” (#1772). Yet this progressive triumph poses a very real problem: no one

really knows where we are going or how to scrupulously evaluate our success. Thus the “change” touted

by Barack Obama proves difficult to either define or measure! Just as infinity is immeasurable so too

limitless “rights” cannot be constrained! Consider, for example, the continuously evolving notion of “civil

rights.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strictly required everyone be treated equally, quickly sprouted

into dicta mandating that some folks (through affirmative action) be given special treatment! So an

intensely color-conscious rather than color-blind society quickly emerged.

         Complicating the lack of coherent direction, the Progressive project has manifestly failed to fund

itself. Liberals have sought to evade the inescapable truth that everything must, in some way in due time,

be paid for, indulging in “a protracted exercise in intellectual dishonesty, borne of a conviction that the

question doesn’t need to be answered if it can be made to go away” (#2690). “Don’t worry,” we’re told,

“be happy!” Somehow things will all work out if we trust the social engineers in various branches of

government. Voegeli carefully examines the recipes (e.g. John Maynard Keynes’ economic theories and

John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society) for perpetuating the welfare state and painlessly easing

America into a European-style socialism. Yet, as Milton Friedman, among others have insisted, “There is

no such thing as a free lunch.” But just try suggesting this to Barack Obama while he was delivering his

last State of the Union Address!

         Progressives from Roosevelt to Obama inevitably promise to pay for the promised goods, easing

entrance to the Promised Land, by taxing the “rich.” (Exactly what makes one rich is yet another of those

undefined and flexible standards that makes any clear evaluation of Progressive rhetoric so frustrating!).

What Obama fails to mention, however, is the utter impossibility of taking sufficient funds from the “rich”

to pay for programs, which “cannot be realized merely by making the rich less rich. Enacting any

significant portion of the liberal agenda will also require making the merely comfortable noticeably less

comfortable—and liberals are terrified that imposing tax increases on upper middle-class voters will doom

them when those voters go to the polls” (#2999). Lots of folks who never dreamed they were “rich” would

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 suddenly awaken to the fact that the State officially defines them as such! To keep such voters happily

 supporting the Welfare State requires they be given much and taxed very little.

          Yet another Progressive strategy is to call for taxing “corporations” rather than individuals.

 However, as Voegeli says: “The distinction between taxes paid by corporations and taxes paid by flesh-

 and-blood voters falls apart when analyzed” (#3211). When taxed, corporations immediately pass along

 their loss to consumers who thus pay the taxes by way of higher prices—a sales tax, to be precise. If the

 corporation cuts its profits in order to maintain prices, then investors (many of them moderate-income folks

 saving for retirement) pay for the welfare programs. Liberals surely know that taxing corporations is

 nothing more than passing along the tax burden to the people who buy their products without admitting to

 actually “taxing” the electorate. They also know the average voter fails to fully grasp this simple truth.

          Despite the many problems evident when “never enough” sets the agenda, American conservatives

 have done little to effectively constrain the expanding Welfare State. So rather than trying to destroy or

 even significantly diminish it, conservatives should take a more modest and potentially useful approach.

 The voters, who now regard programs such as Social Security as their inalienable right, will not accept any

 curtailment of such entitlements. So let them be! Just try to find ways to make the entitlement programs

 more efficient, less abused, and financially sound. “Starving the beast” by making careful cuts in certain

 areas—locating duplicate or antiquated programs—will inject a bit of financial integrity to the system.

“Means-testing” some programs—requiring recipients be clearly worthy of their benefits—is another

technique capable of enlisting voters’ support. Wisely pursued, such modus operandi may even enlist the

 support of thoughtful liberals as well as voters. “If liberals and conservatives decide they can do business

with each other it will be because conservatives accept they’ll never sell voters on ther huge benefit

reductions they ultimately seek, and because liberals decide they’ll never sell the huge tax increases they

ultimately need” (#4230).

******************************************

         William Voegeli has followed up his examination of “America’s limitless welfare state” in Never

Enough with The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe against Liberal Compassion (New York:

HarperCollins, c. 2014). He has nothing but praise for the classic compassion found in Scripture or moral

philosophers of antiquity. To personally feel sorrow in the face of others’ pain is always commendable.

But today’s “liberal compassion” is a new phenomenon. Anyone attentive to public life has easily noted

the increasing attention given various kinds of victims and the “compassion” urged with regard to them.

Bill Clinton’s famous words, “I feel your pain” have become a formidable plank in various political

platforms, and exit polls indicate Barack Obama won the 2012 election primarily because a majority of

voters (who thought Romney would do better in many ways as Chief Executive) thought Obama better

understood and identified with them. “Romney won clear victories among the three-fourths of the

electorate who believed a presidential candidate’s most important quality was whether his ‘vision for the

future’ (54 percent to President Obama’s 45 percent), whether he ‘shares my values’ (56 percent to 42

percent), or was ‘a strong leader’ (61 percent to 38 percent). Obama carried the one remaining category so

decisively, however, as to win reelection. Of the 21 out of every 100 voters who believed the most

important quality in a presidential candidate was that ‘he cares a bout people like me,’ 17 voted for Obama

and 4 voted for Romney” (#2321).

         Obama routinely reduces his political principles and objectives to kindness. Thus he appointed

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor not because she was a distinguished jurist but because she could

empathize with people. Such empathy, said George Lakoffin defense of her nomination, ‘”is at the heart of

progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others—not just individuals, but whole

categories of people: one’s countrymen, those of other countries, other living beings, especially those who

are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed” (#368). Liberal politicians’ claims—e.g. Al Gore

sorrowing at his sister dying of tobacco-induced cancer and Obama lamenting his dying mother’s problems

with health care insurance—are frequently fudged (if not fabricated) to elicit maximum audience response.

But such rhetorical indulgences guarantee votes, and the Democrat Party has, Voegeli insists, effectively

turned into the Pity Party! Thus we’re witnessing “the Oprahfication of America, evident in the way

political conventions now aspire to be empathy-tests that can hold their own with daytime talk shows”

(#2195). Sadly enough, “A nation increasingly dependent on heartrending anecdotes to focus and activate

its sense of justice is one that’s losing the capacity for moral and abstract reasoning” (#2220).

         In a 2013 speech President Obama endorsed film critic Roger Ebert’s words (“Kindness covers all

of my political beliefs”) and declared “when I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every

single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a

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 stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not

 enough—I want your kids to do well also'” (#146). Unfortunately, as C.S. Lewis presciently said, a tender

 kindness that wants others to be “happy” often lacks specificity. ‘”Kindness, merely as such,” wrote

Lewis, “cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. …. It

 is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our

 lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible

 and estranging modes'” (#1374).

          Since “compassion” is so widely touted as the core value for Progressives—Garrison Keiller

defines his brand of liberalism as “the politics of kindness”—Voegeli insists we rightly define and

understand the word. “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘compassion’ means, literally,

 ‘suffering together with another,’ and is also defined, more substantively, as the ‘feeling or emotion, when

a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines

one to spare or to succor.’ The OED notes a subtle but significant distinction between those two senses of

the term: the first is an emotion shared by ‘equals or fellow-sufferers,’ while the second ‘is shown toward a

person in distress by one who is free from it, who, is, in this respect, his superior'” (#275).

         Thus fee ling compassion marks one as a good person. To support politicians and policies stamped

compassionate enables one join the righteous crowd. “The term ‘compassion’—or ’empathy,’ or even

 ‘kindness’—is routinely used not just to name a moral virtue, but to designate the pinnacle or even the

entirety of moral excellence. Precisely because this moral conviction is ambient, with so many Americans

taking for granted that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting, and being more compassionate,

it’s an important yet difficult subject to analyze. Compassion is the moral sea we swim in, which works

against our awareness of it, much less efforts to chart its depths and currents” (#136). Importantly, it’s

feeling something rather than doing anything! To “feel your pain” (as tearfully as possible) was sufficient

for President Clinton! Compassion is all about one’s own feelings, not about doing something to help

someone—that would require personally doing acts of mercy or charity. Wealthy liberals love to support

taxes on others to help the poor while evading such taxes themselves through various loopholes.

         This kind of compassion began with the birth of “modernity” in the 18th century. Feeling good

about our good feelings gained credence in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in many ways the

architect of the French Revolution and many subsequent socio-political movements. When he identified

with someone else, he said, ‘”and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not

want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself” (#611). Loving ourselves, we feel better

about ourselves when we feel empathetic or compassionate for others. If we give something to someone in

need, it’s not to actually help him but to inflate our own self-esteem! In the wake of Rousseau, says

historian Michael Kazin, “liberal modernism” has boosted self-expression and self-discovery and self-

esteem rather than self-sacrifice and self-denial: it prescribes ‘”the unchaining of sexual pleasure from

procreation, the liberation of art and literature from the didactic imperative, empathy with ethnic and racial

outsiders and an identification with the rougher aspects of life'” (#707).

         Voegeli charts this form of compassion as applied to such concerns as humanitarian aid, “higher

patriotism,” immigration, poverty programs, race relations etc. Inevitably it promises more than it delivers,

if one judges the actual assistance given needy people. Since they “always want America to be more

compassionate than it is,” (#1532) the needy must be perpetually needy. “Empathizers who get to feel like

good people because of their empathy, however, may prefer to regard empathizees’ sufferings as chronic

conditions to be managed rather than transitory ones to be solved. ‘Pity is about how deeply I can feel,’

[Jean Bethke] Elshtain argued. ‘And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious

reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs'” (#1871). This is especially true today when the

plight of America’s blacks is considered. However much “progress” may have occurred, white liberals feel

guilt for the problems plaguing the black community. Highly privileged themselves, they talk about

abolishing privilege! Since slavery is “America’s original sin,” all symptoms of its survival must be cut out

from the human heart as well as various institutions.

         So it seems, to Susan Sontag, that the great achievements of Western Civilization—Mozart’s

music, Newton’s science—cannot “‘redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.'”

Inasmuch as Westerners had abused non-Western cultures and the environment itself, the “white race is the

cancer of human history'” (#1814). Cancer patients, of course, can do little to save themselves! Seriously

sick people can do little on their own to improve their lot. Appeals to self-reliance or self-sacrifice are

branded hard-hearted and lacking compassion. Victims can neither be blamed for their status nor expected

to escape it. But in feeling pity for them the Susan Sontags of the world feel pleased with themselves!

Eric Metaxis has garnered well-deserved acclaim and awards for prize-winning biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He has also emerged as an influential figure within a flourishing Christian community in New York City.  His most recent publication, Miracles:  What They Are, Why They Happen, And How They Can Change Your Life (New York:  Dutton, c. 2014), bears witness to both his roots in historic orthodoxy and contemporary Christian witness.  Thus he sets forth, in the book’s initial chapters, a philosophical case for the credibility of supernatural workings, followed by a much longer section detailing the stories of persons he knows and trusts who have experienced various kinds of miraculous events.  “To those who might think these stories merely subjective accounts and not objective evidence, it must be said that history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings:  and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an ‘objective’ truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.  There can never be a question whether such things are subjective; the only real question can be whether those subjective accounts are reliable” (#98 in Kindle).  

Metaxis’ philosophical case for miracles relies heavily on arguments set forth by great 20^th century apologists (e.g. G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C.S. Lewis’ Miracles) as well as recent scholarly works such as Craig S. Keener’s recent 1200 page Miracles.  To believe in miracles first and foremost entails believing in God.  If one believes that God created, ex nihilo, all that exists, it hardly seems irrational to believe He could do miraculous things within His creation, including the many biblical interventions and (above all) the Resurrection of Christ.  In a remarkable conversation a century ago between Adolph von Harnack, the incarnation of Protestant Liberalism, and Adolf Schlatter, his orthodox counterpart on the Berlin theological faculty, Harnack said the two were basically in agreement except for one small matter:  miracles.  To which Schlatter replied:  “No we are divided on the question of God, for what is at stake in the question of miracles is in fact whether God is God or merely a part of the realm of subjectivity.”  

As Augustine wisely said:  “Miracles are not in contradiction to nature.  They are only in contradiction with what we know of nature.”  And no one has put the case for the miraculous than Chesterton, who said:  “my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.”  Taking witnesses at their word is basic to historical inquiry and the judicial process.  Ironically, “believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.  The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord.  Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.  Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.  If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural.  If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.  That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle.  You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.  It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.  But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred.  All argument against these plain facts,” Chesterton continues, “is always argument in a circle. If I say, ‘Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,’ they answer, ‘But mediaevals were superstitious’; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.  If I say ‘a peasant saw a ghost,’ I am told, ‘But peasants are so credulous.’  If I ask, ‘Why credulous?’ the only answer is—that they see ghosts.  Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.”  Circular arguments, naturally, go nowhere!  

“The Greek word for miracle,” Metaxis says, “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” (#289).   Rightly understood, the natural sciences can do no more than carefully describe the physical world.  To explain it easily leads us to infer miraculous events—the improbable appearance of life on earth, the existence of our finely-tuned universe, why there is something rather than nothing.  “Reason and science compel us to see what previous generations could not:  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 o 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” (#853). 

Turning to the contemporary “miracle stories” narrated by individuals Metaxis knows and trusts, we’re first reminded of transforming prototypes—some (such as St. Paul’s and Chuck Colson’s) instantaneous and others gradual (e.g. William Wilberforce’s and C.S. Lewis’s).  Metaxis himself bears witness to God’s intervention in his life, through an inexplicable dream involving a golden fish (IXTHYS), changing literally everything for him.  In his student days at Yale he’d hungered from something to give life meaning, but God mercifully “had something more for me:  He gave me his son, a living person, Jesus Christ.  I realized in the dream that Jesus Christ was real and had come from the other side to me—to me—and now I was holding him there in the bright sunlight and I was flooded with joy at the thought of it.  At long last my search was over.  It was over.  And it was true.  There was a God and Jesus was God and he’d 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, had taken the trouble to speak to me in the most intimate language there was:  the secret language of my own heart.  That was that” (#2149).  Later on, another powerful dream led him rather specifically to write his book on Bonhoeffer.  Adding to his own story, he shares those of Frederica Mathewes-Green, a talented writer, as well as “Cisco,” a former drug dealer who now gives witness to the powerful change wrought in his life by his Lord and Savior, and Alice von Hildebrand, the widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand who is herself a distinguished philosopher professor.  

Healing miracles abound throughout the history of the Church—and they continue today in New York City!  Indeed, writes Metaxis:  “They are more common than I ever thought” (#2371).  Cisco, the former drug dealer, prayed that an acquaintance be healed of AIDS—and he was!  One of Metaxis’ good friends, Christine, personally witnessed the dramatic healing of her grandfather, who had been unable to stand or walk for six months.  One of Christine’s aunts felt moved to pray for him and “put her hands on the grandfather’s legs and prayed a very powerful prayer that he be healed.  A moment after she had finished, the grandfather stood up and immediately started walking.  They were all stunned to witness it.  Christine said that even now, so many years after it happened, remembering it makes her very emotional.  She remembers thinking that she couldn’t believe it was possible for a miracle to happen right in front of her eyes, that in just a moment’s time God could wipe away so many months of misery and pain” (#2660).  

“Miracles of Inner Healing” also occur with regularity.  Paralyzing guilt disappears, dissolved by God’s forgiving power.  Broken marriages are re-knit, massaged by the Spirit’s reconciling energy.  “Angelic Miracles” recounted by several of the author’s informants point toward the continuous workings of divine messengers involved in earthly affairs.  Small events—such as finding keys or the inspiration to make phone calls or speaking words that touch the heart of a judge on behalf of an innocent cab driver, and near-death experiences—may all rightly be considered miraculous, Metaxis says, given God’s intimate interest and involvement in every facet of our lives.  

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Last summer, Dr. Rolf Enger, an Air Force Academy colleague of Dieter Rademacher (the pastor of the community church we attend in Lake George, Colorado) gave a fascinating presentation on the Shroud of Turin.  He had been involved, 30 years ago, with a 40-man scientific research team (the Shroud of Turin Research Project) granted access to the Shroud to carefully weigh all the evidence regarding its authenticity.   Members of the team were experts in various fields, representing diverse scientific disciplines, seeking the truth rather than to either debunk or demonstrate the Shroud’s authenticity.  The team were all volunteers and had no obligatory ties to the Catholic Church.  When I asked Dr. Enger to recommend a book detailing the investigation he pulled out a copy of Verdict on the Shroud (Wayne, PA:  Banbury Books, Inc., c. 1981) by Kenneth E. Stevenson (a scientist) and Gary R. Habermas (an historian).  I secured a copy of the book and find it quite well-done and persuasive.  In light of all the evidence, “the more we learn about the Shroud, the more likely it seems that the cloth is what it purports to be—the burial garment of Jesus Christ” (p. 5).  The image on the Shroud is of a bearded male, 5’11” in height, weighing around 175 pounds, well-built and muscular.  His “wounds in their entirety exactly match the wounds Christ received as recorded in the gospels” (p. 43).  

A chapter entitled “The Shroud and History,” provides details regarding the cloth’s 14^th century appearance in France with clues regarding its earlier history.  The image on the shroud resembles the face of Christ portrayed by Christian artists from the sixth century onward.  It is, in fact, “the standard face of Jesus in art” (p. 17).  Documents from the sixth century point toward the “image of Edessa, the ‘Holy Mandylion,’”—a cloth thought by some to have been brought from Jerusalem to Edessa by Jesus’ disciple, Jude Thadddeus, in the first century and then found in one of the walls surrounding Edessa.  This cloth was taken to Constantinople in 944, where it was “revered as the true likeness of Christ” (p. 20).  Following the 1204 sack of Constantinople by European crusaders, the cloth disappeared.  How it arrived in France a century later no one knows, though some think the Knights Templar played a role in preserving it.  When it was presented to the public in 1357 it was believed by some to be authentic and by others to be a “pious fraud.”  There seemed to be no way of resolving the controversy until quite recently, when new technologies facilitate a critical appraisal of the Shroud.  

Modern interest in the Shroud began in 1898, when an Italian lawyer, Secondo Pia, took pictures of it when it was publicly displayed.  Developing his pictures in a dark room, Pia was astonished to see the form of a man clearly evident in the negatives.  One can barely detect the form of a man when looking at the Shroud itself.  But the negatives truly brought to light a remarkable figure!  Obviously “the Shroud was not an obvious forgery.  Why would a fourteenth-century forger have painted a negative image?” (p. 71).  Subsequent, more sophisticated photographs detected no traces of pigment on it, indicating it was not a painting.  After more than a century of ever-improving scientific techniques, the authors “conclude that the scientists’ work made a forgery virtually impossible” (p. 122).  Interestingly, there is today more serious interest in the Shroud than in earlier centuries, and our more sophisticated the testing methodologies  increase the likelihood that it was the cloth covering Jesus’ body in the tomb.  

Clearly, there is blood rather than paint on the cloth.  And the image actually seems to have been generated by a “scorch”—a mysterious emanation of heat, almost like radiation!  The cloth itself is similar to others dating from first century Palestine, and some of the tiny plant pollens and spores found on it (discovered by microscopic analysis) are unique to that era and region.  Other tests reveal “that the Shroud image contains three-dimensional data” that can only be explained by it being placed on a recently-deceased body.  “The three-dimensional picture of the head of the man in the Shroud also revealed another surprise:  small button-like objects had apparently been placed over his eyes” (p. 82).  Coins were frequently placed on corpses in Jesus’ day, and a knowledgeable numismaticist concluded “that the coin over the right eye of the man in the Shroud was a lepton minted in the time of Pontius Pilate” (p. 82).  

Whether or not the image on the Shroud is that of Jesus can never be proven.  But the wounds on the man certainly match up with the Gospel accounts of His crucifixion.  He had been scourged, suffering some 220 wounds, with the Roman flagrum, the device used by Roman soldiers in the first century.  His head had been lacerated by a crown of thorns.  Bruises on his shoulder indicate he carried a heavy object.  He was nailed to the Cross with nails through is wrists, not his palms—something we now know was the Roman custom, though not known in the Medieval Era.  His legs were not broken, indicating he died on the Cross.  A wound on his side indicates he suffered a spear thrust as he expired.  “The evidence is consistent at every point.  The man of the Shroud suffered, died, and was buried the way the gospels say Jesus was” (p. 162).  A mathematician, collating all the data, estimated the probability that “we have 1 chance in 82,944,000 that the man buried in the Shroud is not Jesus” (p. 167).  A rather strong probability!  

So what does it mean for us in the 21^st Century?  It primarily means the Gospels can be trusted, down to their rather specific details.  The Shroud also strongly supports the Christian belief in Jesus’ Resurrection—the “scorch” on the cloth may have been caused by a burst of supernatural energy as He arose from the dead.  And finally, the Shroud reminds us that philosophical naturalism—including its dogmatic denial of miracles—cannot explain a multitude of things, including the Shroud of Turin.  

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Paul Badde is a diligent German journalist, a devout Catholic who has devoted many years to demonstrating the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin and other sacred artifacts.  In the amply, indeed lavishly illustrated The True Icon:  From the Shroud of Turin to the Veil of Manopello (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2010), he provides summaries of the latest research that give reasons to believe in the supernatural origin of the both cloths, both well are preserved in Italian churches.  “The shroud [of Turin] has long been the most thoroughly investigated piece of fabric in the world.  And after all that, the origin of the image that rests on its fibers remains utterly inexplicable” (Kindle #140).  

Badde revisits the history of the Shroud, including its probable journey from Jerusalem to Edessa to Constantinople and ultimately to France in the 14^th century.  Having studied the documents and visited the sites, he asserts:  “Everywhere it was as if we were following the trail of a protective hand that again and again mysteriously rescued this cloth from a great number of dangers” (#647).  And he sums up the most recent scientific studies regarding its composition.  Beyond the Shroud, however, the Veil (the small sudarium or napkin thought to have been placed on Jesus’ face) of Manopello has been little noticed or acclaimed—something Badde is determined to rectify.  “To this day the little burial cloth complements the large burial cloth and makes it accessible.  Together they fit into the Gospel of John [cf. Jn 20:7] like the last pieces of the puzzle” (#1143).  

Granted their authenticity, the Shroud and Veil are the earliest witnesses to the Gospel of Christ.  Written documents were composed two decades later.  But the Shroud, “with the traces of the Passion is the first page of the Gospels.  The delicate little napkin, which was revered for so long in Rome as ‘the veil of Veronica of Jerusalem’, is the second.  Both originate at the zero hour of Christianity.  Thus two images—and not any new scrolls—form the hot core of the Good News of Christendom.  The images were there when words failed—and the apostles were still speechless” (#1373).  To Badde, in “these two cloths the mystery of the Christian faith is presented as in no other document.  They marvelously fill up the brief text of the Gospel” (#1436).

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In The Face of God:  The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2006), Paul Badde sets forth a deeply personal quest, involving scores of journeys and interviews, to validate the Volto Sancto (the “Holy Veil,” thought by many to be the legendary Veronica’s Veil) of Manoppello as the very cloth placed on Jesus’ face when He was buried.  Badde traces the Veil’s journey across the centuries until it was publically displayed in Rome half a millennium ago.  He also studies a multitude of ancient and medieval artistic works, mostly in churches, depicting Jesus in accord with the face on the Veil.  Though far less renowned than the Shroud of Turin, it portrays the exact same image.  Indeed, Heinrich Pfeiffer, a learned Jesuit professor and highly regarded specialist, says there is a “‘complete correspondence that results when you place the Face from the Shroud of Turin on top of that of Manoppello.’”  Thus we are driven to conclude “that the image on the sudarium and that on the Shroud originated at the same time’” (#1299).  If indeed the two images are authentic, they dramatically reveal to us the deepest truth of the Christian faith, for as Cardinal Ratzinger declared:  “‘God,’ of whom there can be no images, nevertheless has a face and a name and is a person.  And salvation consists, not in being immersed in namelessness, but rather in the ‘satisfaction in seeing his face’ that will be granted to us when we awaken’” (#182).  

Similar to the linen Shroud, the Veil preserves the face of a man, but on an almost transparent, iridescent fabric—byssus, the most expensive of ancient fabrics, which was woven with painstaking care from mussels’ fibers.  With modern microscopic technology, we find no traces of pigment, so it is not a painting.  Still more, it is simply impossible to apply paint to mussel silk.  The image must be the result of some other process.  To Professor Heinrich Pfeiffer, who meticulously examined it in the 1990s, the veil had probably “been laid on top of the large sheet in which the crucified Christ had been laid.  That would also explain, he said, why the Turin Shroud bore a negative image, and the veil laid on top of it, in accordance with the rules of photography, a positive one” (#1227). 

In Badde’s passionate perspective, the images on the Veil and the Shroud were inscribed by Christ’s face, supernaturally revealing God Himself.  “The Veil of Manopello is the sudarium of Christ.  This is the mysterious second cloth from the tomb of the crucified Christ that John the Evangelist discovered about forty hours after the death of Jesus in his empty tomb—together with another linen sheet, which is today preserved in Turin” (#3711).  Both cloths are incredible inasmuch as no naturalistic explanations suffice, and together they “reflect nothing less than the miracle of the absolutely inexplicable Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  They are not photos or painting; they are themselves marvelous new creations by God.  The two images are as inexplicable as life itself” (#3723).  

Diana West is a Yale-educated journalist, writing a weekly syndicated column with a decidedly conservative slant.  Determined to understand and explain certain features of modernity, she ties together interesting threads of evidence and teases out possible conduits of elucidation that prod the reader to ponder her presentations rather than thoughtlessly embrace her perspectives.  Four decades ago Eric Hoffer, in Reflections on the Human Condition, warned: “If a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity, it must know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.” Now Diana West declares the adolescents have done precisely that.  In her first book, The Death of the Grown-Up:  How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization (c. 2007) she took a critical look at the effective defection of adults in various crucial societal roles.  Whereas many writers have lamented the “prolonged adolescence” plaguing the Western world, West suggests it has become institutionalized!

  She began awakening to this fact when still a child, after spending a year with her family in Ireland (far away from her Los Angeles home) while her father worked on a novel.  Returning to America, she was struck by the strangeness of many things she’d earlier taken for granted.  This included the childish behavior of adults.  She began to see that:  “Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist, and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise.  No more.  Why not?  A profound civilizational shift has taken place, but, shockingly, it is one that few recognize” (#79 in Kindle).   Teenagers no longer aspired to become adults and adults longed to behave like adolescents.  So “father and son dress more or less alike, from message-emblazoned T-shirts to chunky athletic shoes, both equally at ease in the baggy rumple of eternal summer camp” (#124).  Clergymen, once determined to appear as serious adults, now try to dress more casually than day laborers.  In fact, “More adults, ages eighteen to forty-nine, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN.  Readers as old as twenty-five are buying ‘young adult’ fiction written expressly for teens” (#97).  

If only such similarities were merely superficial!  But abetted by Hollywood films and rock-and-roll music and pop journalism and progressive education, adults (and particularly fathers) have abandoned their traditional roles.  Whereas children were once duty-bound to care for their parents, now parents are obligated to make life enjoyable for their offspring; children once circled around their parents, but today’s adults orbit like helicopters around their kids.  Before WWII, homes were adult-centered; following the war they became increasingly child-centered.  The signal adult endeavor in centuries past was what Lionel Trilling termed “making a life,” seriously pursued by all mature persons.  Now we are more likely to be concerned with “enjoying life,” playing with our “toys,” and we no longer revere “what goes along with maturity:  forbearance and honor, patience and responsibility, perspective and wisdom, sobriety, decorum, and manners—the wisdom to know what is ‘appropriate,’ and when” (#173).  Consequently, as Mike Males says:  “‘The deterioration in middle-aged adult behavior has driven virtually every major American social problem over the past 25 years’” (#665).  

Beyond describing—with a journalistic flair for telling anecdotes and exaggerations and provocative examples—the various symptoms of societal decay, West seeks to explain what has happened, why America has changed so dramatically in half-a-century.  She concludes, in accord with (though never citing) some of the past century’s finest thinkers (notably C.S. Lewis and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI), that moral relativism is the culprit.  Once we began talking about “values” rather than “virtues” we tossed aside the moral objectivity needed for a healthy society.  We thus inhabit a moral universe that “no longer sees any point in inculcating ‘good’ or ‘moral’ behavior in its young.  Rather, it labors to encourage ‘better choices.’  Instead of virtues to live by, society provides ‘news you can use’ about hygiene, about cliques, about tattoos, about sex, about STDs, about alcohol, about drunk driving, about rape, about gang rape, about date rape, about date-rape drugs, about other drugs . . . the list of vices to bone up on is endless” (#1729).   Never is it suggested that casual sex is bad—it’s just something to be properly informed about in order to make personal (i.e. “safe”) choices.  Above all one must never be “judgmental” or “prudish” or “xenophobic” about much of anything lest it “offend” someone.  “Openness and acceptance on every and any level—from personal to national, from sexual to religious—are the highest possible virtues of the postmodern Westerner.  This makes boundaries and taboos, limits and definition—anything that closes the door on anything else—the lowest possible sins” (#3140).  

This is dramatically evident in today’s multicultural climate, wherein nothing critical of Islam is allowed.  Our claims to avoid offense out of respect are more likely the silence of fear.  As President George W. Bush quickly discovered, no reference to a “crusade” will pass the scrutiny of political correctness.   No one dare suggest that Muslims shouting Allahu Akbar—“Praise Allah”—are following Islamic teachings.  None dare insist that Jihad, in Islamic tradition, always means violent aggression, defeating and subduing non-Muslim peoples.   “Terrorists” there may be, we’re told—but they are incidental extremists, a title easily applied to Christians or Jews as well as Muslims.  All religions are equal and thus equally capable of disreputable behavior.  Submitting to this kind of thinking, many Westerners have unwittingly submitted to the dhimmitude described by Bat Ye’or:  the guards around synagogues in Europe and the security lines in airports equally denote a people under siege, a culture capitulating “to the infringement of freedom” orchestrated by the advance wave of militant Islam.  

Unfortunately, “Our leaders and pundits, our generals and academics, pay repetitive and obsequious obeisance to ‘noble Islam’ (with never a bow, of course, to ‘noble’ anything else).  They depict jihad as a mutation of Islam—the ‘distorted,’ ‘hijacked,’ or ‘defiled’ practice by the ‘violent fringe’ or ‘tiny band of extremists’—despite jihad’s central, driving, animating role throughout the history of imperial Islam.  As for dhimmitude, it remains an alien concept, even as non-Muslims in the West are increasingly accommodating themselves to Islamic law and practices.  While the president of the United States appears no longer to consider Islam an out-and-out religion of ‘peace,’ he’s settled into an equally ahistorical formulation by delegitimizing jihad violence s ‘the perversion of a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death’” (#4997).   

How unlike from Barack Obama was Winston Churchill!  “Sharp and direct, Churchill says what he has seen, and what he thinks about what he has seen—sans gag, filter, rose-colored glasses, or net.”  Commenting on the Muslims he’d encountered, he wrote:  “‘How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays upon its votaries!  Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.  The effects are apparent in many countries.  Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live.  A degraded sensualism deprives this live of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.  The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a power among men.  Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. . . .  But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.  No stronger retrograde force exists in the world’” #5027).  Churchill thought as an adult, facing the oft-harsh reality of things.  We need men like him today.  “Eternal youth is proving fatal; it is time to find our rebirth in adulthood” (#5083).

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Few books have sent me to check sources and order cited monographs more than Diana West’s American Betrayal:  The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (New York:  St Martin’s Press, c. 2013).  In part this is because she refers to fresh historical evidence regarding Soviet espionage in America, but mainly because she suggests—almost in a stream-of-consciousness style, studded with journalistic jibes and off-the-cuff comments—connections and plausible interpretations that challenged some of the notions I’d earlier absorbed from mainline historical works.  So I review American Betrayal with a real skepticism regarding West’s position conjoined with an admiration for her willingness to look for fresh explanations while trying to understand this nation’s development.  I also share her concern for what George Orwell discerned in 1936 (when writers dealing with the civil war in Spain lost interest in evidence and objective reporting):  “What is peculiar to our age,” said Orwell, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.”  Still more, he said:  “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines.”  

Unfortunately, some writers (such as Orwell) who have tried to present evidence and stand for truth have all too often been ignored or smeared by devotees of various “party lines.”  Ideology easily trumps truth!  Thus Whittaker Chambers declared, in his memorable memoir, Witness:  “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else.  What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades . . .  [This] is a statement of fact that need startle no one who voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and consciously unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years.  It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power” (pp. 741-42).   Equally important, Chambers—and Diana West as well—probes beneath the details to a philosophical hypothesis, linking today’s “cultural relativism” to critical decisions made by this nation’s leaders during the past century.   

West’s story begins with the 1934 appearance of William A. Wirt, a famous Indiana schools superintendent, before a select House committee regarding an insidious plot to destroy “the American social order.”  There were, he’d earlier alleged, schemers (notably some of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Brain Trusters” such as Jerome Frank, who brought Alger Hiss to Washington, and Rexford Tugwell, who was positively infatuated by the “Soviet Experiment”) working inside some New Deal agencies.  So Wirt came to Washington to disclose what (based on first-hand information) he knew.  The Democrat-controlled committee, however, refused to grant Wirt a fair hearing, taking every opportunity to suppress his evidence and smear his character.  FDR and his devotees in the press ridiculed Wirt and he slid quickly into obscurity.  Six years later, however, one of the Democrats on the committee, John J. O’Connor (D-NY) admitted to helping quash Wirt’s testimony and was lamented having helped turn the “thumbscrews” on him.  In retrospect, O’Connor said he’d come to believe much Wirt had claimed was in fact true.  

That Wirt was right provides Diana West a guiding light whereby to understand how America was first betrayed by supporters of Stalin and his Communist ideology and more recently by defenders of Islam and its role in the world.  Dealing with both movements, American leaders seemed unable to deal honestly with evidence and make clear moral judgments regarding how this nation should respond.  She wrote this book, primarily, what “throughout eight years of George W. Bush and four years of Barack Obama, caused our leadership to deny and eliminate categorically the teachings of Islam from all official analysis of the global jihad that has wracked the world for decades (for centuries), and particularly since the 9/11 attacks in 2001?” (#273).   She actually finds many “parallels between America’s struggle with Communism and with Islam” (#395).  Indeed:  “As enemies of the West, godless Communism and godcentric Islam are strangely, eerily similar, in their collectivist, totalitarian natures, in their dysfunctional ideological reliance on the Eternal Foe for forward thrust, and, above all, in our blindness to all related and resulting implications of our struggle against them” (#513).  

When telling the story of Communist inroads West relies on significant historical studies done since Soviet archives opened to Western scholars in the 1990s, though her interpretations are sometimes more assertive than their carefully-nuanced works suggest.  She also emphasizes the importance of earlier truth-tellers such as the English historian Robert Conquest, the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the American journalist, Eugene Lyons.  Conquest’s delineation of Soviet brutality (ca. twenty million killed under Stalin) began with The Great Terror, a 1968 publication countering the generally pro-Stalinist position of academic historians.  Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich began his career of exposing the Soviet gulag archipelago.  And Lyons’ Red Decade told of Bolshevik inroads into America, while his Assignment in Utopia reveals his transformation from a “committed fellow traveler and dedicated apologist of the Soviet experiment to outspoken and remorseful anti-Communist” (#2253).  

It is now undeniable that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and the Rosenbergs transmitted information regarding America’s nuclear research to the USSR.    There’s little doubt that Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers were witnesses to the truth in their post-WWII testimony before congressional committees.  But West finds much more regarding Soviet influence within the Roosevelt administration.  She takes seriously the words of a Russian researcher, Vladimir Bukovsky, who said:  “‘Because of the documents I recovered [in Soviet archives], we now understand why the West was so against putting the communist system on trial.  It is not only that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and Soviet Union.  This ideological collaboration ran very deep [emphasis added]’” (#1288).  

Consider one of the many instances West investigates, the “Soviet First” policy followed in FDR in his Lend-Lease program.  Initially adopted to help England in its “finest hour,” struggling to defend herself, it turned into a massive funnel moving American industrial goods to Russia, even when it meant denying supplies to American forces under Douglas MacArthur then embattled in the struggle with Japan in the Philippines.  According to Major George Racey Jordan, the officer in charge of distributing massive amounts of war materials from a base in Montana, the Soviets were given “first priority” and received  newly-minted airplanes sorely needed by the U.S. Army Air Force.  Implementing Lend-Lease (dubbed by Jordan “the greatest mail-order catalogue”) delivered “to the USSR those half a million trucks and jeeps that Khrushchev declared in 1970 were indispensable to the Red Army sweep across Eastern Europe, pulling the Iron Curtain down behind them” (#2614).  Among other items Jordan shipped to Stalin were the aluminum tubes and uranium needed to build a nuclear reactor.  Conventional historians think supplying Russia with war materials a wise move, necessary to defeat Hitler.  To West, however, it seems better understood as naively arming an evil tyrant, Stalin, who was above all determined to expand his power throughout Eastern Europe.  Drawing upon Jordan’s diaries, along with other sources, she suggests that Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most influential advisor and virtual “co-president” was primarily responsible for dispatching so much aid (via Lend Lease) to the USSR.  Indeed, Jordan said, “Harry Hopkins’s name was invoked daily by the Russians” (#3317) seeking to secure additional Lend Lease supplies.  

Right at the center of the controversial hypotheses highlighted by West in American Betrayal stands Harry Hopkins, labeled FDR’s “one man cabinet” by Life magazine in 1941.  For several years Hopkins, the one-time social worker elevated to cabinet positions by FDR, lived in the White House and constantly advised the President.  He, or his trusted assistants, accompanied FDR to all the important wartime conferences, and his views were clearly shared by the nation’s chief executive.  At the 1943 Tehran Conference, for example, Charles Bohlen remembered, Hopkins played a central role.  “‘Roosevelt was relying more and more on Hopkins, virtually to the exclusion of others.  At Tehran, Hopkins’ influence was paramount’” (#6636).  Illustrative of his eminence, when Hopkins entered a room, Averell Harriman says, Stalin “‘got up, walked across the room and shook hands with him.  I never saw him do that to anybody, not even Roosevelt.  He was the only man I ever saw Stalin show personal emotion for’” (#6336).  The men he fostered and supported form a “Who’s Who of the Roosevelt years:  Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, White House Chief of Staff Adm. William D. Leahy, Vice President Henry A. Wallace” (#3178).  FDR’s final Secretary of State, Edward J. Stettinius, who represented the U.S. at Yalta, was a loyal Hopkins’ protégé who had earlier worked within the Lend Lease organization.  

Though West stops short of definitively branding Hopkins a Soviet agent, she certainly provides incriminating evidence leading to that conclusion.  For example, she cites Oleg Gordievsky, “a former KGB colonel and KGB London chief who later served as an undercover British secret agent in Moscow (1974-85);” in 1990 he “reported that as a young KGB agent in the 1960s, he had heard Iskhak Akhmerov, the most spectacular of the secret Soviet spymasters or ‘illegals’ in wartime America, devote most of a lecture at KGB headquarters ‘to the man whom, he alleged was the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States:  Harry Hopkins’” (#3401).  If Hopkins was, in fact “the most important of all” agents—surpassing Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs and Harry Dexter White—he deserves serious scrutiny!  Thus far, however, conventional historians have dismissed allegations regarding Hopkins—probably seeking to preserve FDR’s reputation.  Without further research, I cannot render a verdict on Hopkins—but I’m now curious and willing to entertain questions regarding his role in shaping FDR’s foreign policy.  

West tackles yet another controversy when she deals with the Allies’ wartime decision of to open a “second front” in northern France and attain “total victory” against Hitler.  In 1943, given the recent successes of American and English armies in North Africa and Italy, some military leaders (General Mark Clark, commander of Allied forces in Italy) and Winston Churchill, urged a concerted military movement through the Balkans and Austria to the heart of Germany.  It would be a shorter route, benefitting from bases and troops already in place around the Mediterranean.  Since Nazi forces were still mired down in the USSR, these analysts believed a rapid end to the war could be achieved.  Many of them also feared that Stalin wanted to ultimately occupy and control Eastern and Central Europe—something he could not do if the war ended quickly.  He desired, according to the Russian historian Viktor Suvorov, “the war to last as long as possible in order to exhaust both Germany and its Anglo-American opponents.  Stalin was fighting to expand the Communist Empire.  He wanted open-ended war to do so” (#6421).  So “Uncle Joe” Stalin adamantly insisted on an invasion in France and FDR (strongly influenced by Harry Hopkins) supported the Russian dictator.  Thus D-Day! 

West certainly leans in the direction of “conspiratorial” suspicions.   She certainly has incited strongly mixed reviews of her work.  But by challenging, with impressive documentation, conventional histories, she drives us to consider views and scholars worth considering.