Page 3882 – Christianity Today (2024)

The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today
by Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh E. Schmidt
HarperSanFrancisco, Rev. ed., 2002
464 pp.; $29.95

If you want proof that all the scholars involved in writing these two volumes are men, look no further than the fact that they have forgotten at least one very significant anniversary. Only by an effort of will can two major religious histories of America published in 2002 have failed to note that they appear exactly three centuries after the pioneering work that invented this whole genre, Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Three decades ago, moreover—in 1972—Sydney E. Ahlstrom published his Religious History of the American People (Yale Univ. Press), the book that taught a generation of scholars the crucial importance of moving beyond denominational boundaries to integrate religious history into the broader picture of political and social life.

Reading both the books to be discussed in this essay gives us a splendid opportunity to see how American religious history has evolved in the past generation. This process of development is all the more evident because The Religious History of America is a fully updated version of a book first published by Edwin Gaustad in 1966, and aptly described as a "modern classic." Just what have we learned in the intervening decades?

What has not changed—arguably, since Mather's time—is the realization of the central role of faith and faiths in the making of America. As Jon Butler et al. note in their beautifully written volume, "the story of religion in America therefore usually stands with the grain of American secular history, not against it." That formulation brings me up short only to the extent that I struggle with the concept of "secular history." In the American context, just what is that? Have not religious movements provided the organizing framework for most of the transforming events of American history, the social movements that bubbled forth from successive awakenings, revivals, consciousness reformations, or whatever we call them? Was abolitionism really a secular movement? Was feminism (whether in the 19th century or the 20th)? The civil rights movement? Can we hope to understand the antebellum period without taking account of concepts like millenarianism and restorationism? What about the Progressive Era, the age of the Social Gospel? Who can doubt that in studying American religion, we are dealing here with the heart of the nation's story?

Having said this, the heart looks very different than it once did. Cotton Mather told a simple story of good and evil, night and day, in which English Puritan Christianity was unquestionably in the right. His aim was to "report the wonderful displays of [God's] infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian Wilderness." Later historians were less overtly triumphalist, but well into the 20th century, the Protestant story was clearly meant to be the dominant thread.

Obviously this vision has been diluted in recent scholarship, and by no means as a mere response to political correctness. To take one obvious point, an America in which the population's center of gravity is so rapidly shifting south and west inevitably has a greater appreciation of the non-Puritan, non-New England Christian traditions that have exercised such an influence in other parts of the nation. When you pass Spanish missions on the way to work, and the driver in front of you has a bumper sticker of the Virgin of Guadalupe, there is something unconvincing about the implicit claim that America's Christian culture fanned outwards from Massachusetts Bay.

Religion in American Life: A Short History
by Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer
Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 544 pp.; $35

At every stage, then, both these new studies try to get beyond the Puritan/Protestant emphasis to give due attention to non-British traditions, to the Catholic side of the story, and to the history of non-white religion. The revision of Gaustad's survey especially notes the greater stress now placed "on the varieties of Christianity, African and Native American traditions, religious diversity, and Eastern religions in America." Butler et al. likewise offer a wonderfully polychrome account, giving the most extensive coverage I have ever seen in such a general history of Native spiritual traditions and their interactions with Catholic authorities. (To indicate just how far we have moved from traditional emphases, this is a book of 420 pages of text in which the Pilgrim Fathers do not even appear till page 51, and the Great Awakening not till page 127.)

In stressing diversity, both books also try to give due weight to European religious stories that were once rather submerged, including the ubiquitous occult movements and the many strands of what Catherine Albanese has called "nature religion" running through American life from the earliest times. Such a wide-ranging definition of religious life is all the more important if we are to reclaim the story of African American spirituality, which has often been manifested outside formal church structures. Even more so than for white Americans, "fringe" movements have often been quite central to the black religious story.

The problem with any kind of comprehensive history of the sort we are dealing with here is likely to occur at the very end, in reacting to recent developments. Looking at the last decade or so, what exactly are the major religious themes that are likely to resonate in another 50 or 100 years? In the 1970s, everyone knew that the most important fact in American religious life was the growth of the New Age and the "culting of America"—a perspective that now looks incredibly dated. Today, it seems inevitable that events like the Waco massacre will be remembered into the foreseeable future, but who knows? My interactions with classes of college students suggest that trends that seemed overwhelmingly significant just five or ten years ago have already faded into oblivion (To take an alarming example, nobody in one of my current undergraduate classes had ever heard the term "Hare Krishna"). Randall Balmer may or may not be correct in devoting substantial coverage to Promise Keepers in his account of the 1990s, but does this movement really merit that much more attention than the pro-life organizations? (I was also surprised to see Balmer take so seriously the 1996 crisis over alleged arson attacks at black churches, a phenomenon that many subsequent writers portray as largely mythical). Reading Gaustad and Schmidt, we find a heavy emphasis on gay and women's issues as the defining trends of the last decade or so, and generally more consideration to events outside the Protestant world. They end with a discussion of religious pluralism, implying that the new religious America coming into existence will be reshaped by the encounter with other non-Christian religions. Who can tell?

Both books seek quite heroically to tell a vast story in a limited space, and any number of additional topics could have been included. I have no wish to criticize the authors for keeping both books within manageable bounds. The only omission that I really regretted was the comparison that could have been made at so many points between religion in America and the situation in comparably advanced European lands, or in the British Empire. How for instance can we determine what difference it made that the United States lacked a formal church establishment unless and until we consider the experience of other countries like England or even Canada? And why is it that "years of revolution" like 1848 result in purely political upsurges in Europe, but often produce religious consequences in the United States?

The lack of comparison with Europe becomes all the more important when considering the last 50 years or so, when the continuing high level of religiosity in the United States is in such sharp contrast to the rapid secularization in Europe. This point never emerges from either of the books discussed here, which both note matter-of-factly that religious issues continue to be central to American life, in a way that would be unthinkable in contemporary Germany or England. Indeed, American clergy are still deemed worthy of being furiously denounced by political enemies, a luxury that their European counterparts have rarely shared in recent years.

Even for America's most supposedly secular social movements, the most potent rhetoric still draws on underlying religious assumptions and frames problems in the language of martyrdom and crucifixion, of righteous victims and evil Pharisees. Witness the crucifixion imagery in media accounts of the death of gay martyr Matthew Shepard, or the powerful themes of martyrdom and vindication running consistently through black political rhetoric. One reason that Bill Clinton retained the presidency for eight years was that he was such a master of the pseudo-evangelical oratory that clearly resonates with large sections of the American public, at the same time that it appalls secular Europeans. Why, though, should such similar economic, cultural and demographic trends seem on the face of it to have produced such radically different consequences on either side of the Atlantic? I don't have an answer, and I am little the wiser for reading these books. But perhaps this transnational approach represents yet another kind of "diversity" that will reshape a future generation of American religious history.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author most recently of The Next Christendom: The Coming Global Christianity (Oxford Univ. Press).

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

Why does a loving God allow people to suffer? It is sometimes those who have suffered the most who are most at peace with this question. David and Nancy Guthrie are such people.

In 1998, Nancy gave birth to the couple’s second child, a daughter they named Hope. But within hours of her arrival, Hope was diagnosed with Zellweger syndrome, an extremely rare chromosomal disorder that is always fatal, usually within the first six months. There is no cure, no treatment. Neither is there much of what we call “quality of life.” These babies are blind, probably deaf, unable to suck, coo, or respond in any intentional way. So the Guthries went home with a baby they knew would move closer to death with each passing day. Soon after she reached the six-month mark, Hope died in her sleep.

The odds of the Guthries having another child with Zellweger were one in four, so David underwent a vasectomy. Several months later, his wife came to him with the news that she was pregnant. Prenatal testing revealed the awful truth that this child, too, had the disease.

Gabriel Guthrie was born on July 16, 2001. He died in the arms of his dad one day shy of his six-month birthday. Two births, two dead children in the course of three years. It’s more pain than most of us can comprehend. The experience led Nancy to write a book, Holding on to Hope (Tyndale), which uses the book of Job as a sort of primer on suffering.

How did you deal with the news that Gabe had Zellweger syndrome?

Nancy: For me, there was a clear sense of the sovereignty of God. It sounds strange, but I had a sense of anticipation. There is something thrilling in knowing that God is at work. God had to be up to something for this to happen. It reminded me of Genesis 45:8, where Joseph says to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “It wasn’t you who sent me here, but God.” Joseph had a picture of the invisible hand of God behind the circ*mstances.

It was a very hard thing to tell our ten-year-old son, Matt, about the baby we were expecting. But we reminded him how Hope had added so much richness to our lives, and we knew and he knew that this baby would be a blessing, too. We don’t regret receiving the gift of Gabe by any means.

David: One of the interesting things about babies with this disease it that it’s easy to be peaceful in their presence. They are totally dependent. As parents, we see our children as they are, but also as who they’ll become. We’re always processing their future. Hope and Gabe were completely as they would be. We found ourselves embracing the mystery placed in these children by God. We weren’t blind to the medical reality of the situation. These were not magical children. But there is a mystery of inestimable value in them.

The experiences we walked through with Hope have become a part of us, so in some ways, we are different people. The basic lesson through Hope’s life and death for me was that I had spent most of my life avoiding the difficult, living in fear of suffering or tragedy. But the worst thing I could imagine happened to me and it didn’t destroy me.

Your book is not so much about your own losses as about the nature and purpose of suffering. What do you think is missing in our understanding of suffering?

Nancy: The church today doesn’t seem to have a prayer vocabulary for suffering. We only know how to pray for it to be taken away. When Hope was diagnosed, people in the church prayed for healing. Maybe it’s the faithless part of us, but we didn’t pray that way.

David: The nature of this disease is that every cell in the child’s body is impacted. When we announced to our church that the baby Nancy was carrying had Zellweger’s, there was almost a sense that, “Well, it was too late for Hope, but this baby is still being formed. There’s still a chance God can heal this child.” But at 14 weeks, when they did the testing, they could already see the deterioration in Gabe’s organs. The disease was already taking effect.

Nancy: There’s an inconsistency in the church. If a child is born with Down syndrome, people don’t pray for that child to be healed. We believe that is the essence of that child. There are certain physical conditions that, in our experience, we’ve never seen God heal. It was hard for us knowing that there were people who thought we didn’t have the faith to pray for our children to be healed. But, actually, I think it takes significant faith to say, “God, I trust you and I believe you are good even though I don’t believe you are going to heal my child.”

David: It’s not that we don’t believe God is capable of healing a baby with Zellweger. But he’s never done it.

Nancy: I got an e-mail from a woman who told me she and her kids were praying for us. She said she was looking forward to showing her kids the miracles God can do.

David: What happens to those people and to their children when our babies die? Now they are left with questions about God’s goodness.

Nancy: If healing is the only answer or the only pursuit, that’s confusing. Matt came home from school one day and asked me if there was any chance Hope might live. “God can do anything,” I told him, “but all I know is that the doctors have told us that there is no treatment and no cure and that there are no survivors.”

We need to train our children to invite God into suffering, to ask for him to show us himself and show us who he wants us to be in the midst of our pain. I think about myself as a parent. I don’t want Matt to tell me what he wants all the time. I love it when he just wants to talk. That’s the heart of our Heavenly Parent. That’s that kind of prayer life I want to have—where I’m having intimate conversations with God and asking him to reveal himself to me, not just telling him what I want or demanding that he act in the way I think he should. A woman in my Bible study told me she was going to pound on the doors of heaven for God to heal Gabe. That’s not how I want Matt to talk to me—pounding me in pursuit of what he wants.

Do you ask the “why us?” question?

David: We live in a fallen world. There is grief, sorrow, pain, death, disappointment, but also joy and happiness. In his book, Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan), Philip Yancey writes about seeing interviews on Christian television following the Columbine disaster. Typically, they were joyful stories of how God miraculously spared some students from harm, or miraculously prevented some of the injured from dying. He says in the book that he couldn’t help but wonder about how parents who lost children responded to these stories. Would they ask, “If God intentionally caused those children to be spared, does that mean he intentionally caused mine to be killed?” I choose to believe that it’s our job to try to do what God asks us to do in this situation. We can’t do anything about the why, but we can choose how to respond.

You’re calling for a radical shift in the way Christians and our culture think about suffering—as something to be embraced, not prayed away. How do we begin that shift?

Nancy: I love the way Eugene Peterson translates 1 Peter 4:1-;2 in The Message. It says, “Since Jesus went through everything you’re going through and more, learn to think like him. Think of your sufferings as a weaning from that old sinful habit of always expecting to get your own way.”

When we recognize that God can uniquely use suffering to draw us to himself and to glorify himself, we’re able to actually see it as an opportunity to come to know God in a way we haven’t known him before, in a way we couldn’t have known him without the suffering.

Carla Barnhill is the editor of Christian Parenting Today magazine.

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

The world of Bach scholarship was rocked in the 1950s and early 1960s, when new research into the chronology of the Leipzig cantatas overturned the view of Bach that had prevailed since Philipp Spitta’s monumental biography of 1873-1880. It had been believed that during Bach’s 27-year tenure as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig he had devoted himself primarily to the creation of sacred vocal music, writing around 150 cantatas, the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, the Christmas Oratorio, and the B Minor Mass. But the new research indicated that the vast majority of the cantatas and the two passions were all produced in a four-year period, from the middle of 1723 to the middle of 1727. These revelations had two main effects: they demanded reevaluation of the place of the sacred vocal music within Bach’s oeuvre, and they raised the question of what had occupied Bach’s energies in the final 23 years of his life.

Bach scholars frequently use seismic imagery when describing the new cantata chronology and its effects; Malcolm Boyd, in the preface to the original 1983 edition of his Bach, wrote that “the new Bach image … will not be seen clearly until the tremors set up by that earthquake have subsided.” One might hope that in the intervening 20 years this new image would have been brought into clearer focus, and if anyone could be expected to do this it would be Christoph Wolff, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and arguably also dean of current Bach scholars. Wolff’s Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician is one of several books on Bach that appeared in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of his death, and it is the most substantial biography to appear since the crisis of the late ’50s.

Readers coming to Wolff with hopes of finding this new image will therefore be surprised to read in the preface that his intent is “not so much to rewrite a full account of Bach’s life and works as to update and adjust [Spitta’s] image of Bach in order to bring it in line—as objectively as possible and as subjectively as legitimate—with the current state of scholarship.” Perhaps motivated by a desire to speak to a broad audience, Wolff never mentions any of the debates within Bach scholarship, presenting his narrative as a sober reading of the original source documents. An extremely cautious and conservative scholar, Wolff probably believes that his account is as much of a “new Bach image” as can be constructed at this point, with hope for future clarity resting solely on the possibility of discovering additional primary source materials. But by denying his readers exposure to questions that he seems to regard as unanswerable he does them a disservice.

Wolff consistently emphasizes the intellectual aspects of Bach’s life and the systematic and exploratory nature of his compositional career. Thus he underlines Bach’s educational achievements, from his attendance of a traditional Latin school—a departure from the craftsman’s training typical in his family of musicians—to the Latin theology examination that he had to pass prior to assuming the cantorate in Leipzig. During his lifetime Bach was famous primarily as one of the leading keyboard virtuosi of the day, and Wolff stresses Bach’s consistent career choices to make composition more central to his job description. This is certainly true of his early trajectory, when he gradually went from church organist at the age of 18 to court music director for a minor German prince at age 32, late in 1717.

Biographers wishing to see Bach as devoted first and foremost to church music have sometimes read Bach’s move to Leipzig in 1723 to take the position of Thomascantor as a welcome return to the world of sacred music after his sojourn at the Calvinist court of Anhalt-Cöthen. This view is flatly contradicted by documentary evidence, however, as Bach wrote to an old friend in 1730 that he had been extremely happy in Cöthen and only thought of leaving when the court reduced its once lavish spending on music. Bach knew of the opening in Leipzig long before he applied for the job, and he had good reason to hesitate.

On the one hand, the Thomascantor functioned as a sort of municipal music director for one of the most vibrant cities in Germany, a point Wolff underscores by discussing Leipzig’s importance as a commercial, cultural, and intellectual center. The cantor provided weekly music for both of the main churches, as well as music for ceremonial occasions at Leipzig University, one of Germany’s oldest and most prestigious academic institutions. Wolff stresses the desirability to Bach of the connections available, and he includes biographical sketches of a fairly long list of Leipzig University professors with whom Bach is known to have had personal contact. The position also offered good educational prospects for Bach’s sons, who in Cöthen attended the poorly run school of the town’s small minority Lutheran congregation. Most important for Wolff, who sees a drive to develop as a composer as the most prominent of Bach’s recoverable character traits, in Leipzig Bach would have far more musicians at his disposal than in Cöthen, and his music would be heard by larger audiences in more prominent venues; in moving to Leipzig he would take one of the more important posts a musician could hold at that time in Germany.

On the other hand, his workload increased dramatically with the move to Leipzig. In addition to preparing weekly music to be presented at two different churches each Sunday, he was expected to teach music classes, give private instruction in both singing and instrumental performance, teach Latin (a duty he, like his predecessor, delegated), and serve as a sort of hall monitor for one week each month, calling the boys for morning prayer at 6 o’clock or earlier, supervising meals, and enforcing curfew. Moreover, though he was apparently led to expect a raise of around 50 percent relative to his income as court music director, he instead found himself with the same income as before—but in a more expensive metropolis. He also proved to have a very limited budget for paying professional musicians, so that for the most part he either had to use children whom he was in process of training himself, or else trade instruction for performance with some of the more musically advanced students at the university. It’s not surprising, then, that in the same letter of 1730 he stated his intention to find new employment, an intention he never realized.

Wolff draws relatively little attention to the main questions about Bach’s period of frenetic cantata composition—namely, why it began in the first place and why it stopped. It certainly wasn’t a rush to complete a burdensome task; Bach was not required to provide a cantata of his own for each Sunday and major feast in the liturgical year, let alone the five annual cycles he is believed to have composed (only three survive mainly intact). No other Thomascantor ever did this, and Bach’s superiors on the Leipzig town council were not entirely supportive of the project, at least not agreeing to Bach’s requests for allocations for hiring additional professional musicians, the ideal performers for Bach’s complex scores.

Wolff takes a very traditional position in suggesting that the Leipzig cantatas represented the fulfillment of his goal of “a well-regulated church music,” stated in a letter of resignation of 1708. This phrase has probably been overrated as a historical datum, judging both by its context and by its date (in 1708, Bach was 23 years old and 15 years from assuming the Cantorate). Wolff is usually much more cautious in interpreting such statements from the Bach documents. While not explaining the pace of Bach’s work, the most satisfying explanation for the Leipzig cantatas to be gleaned from Wolff is that these works fit a pattern of exhaustive exploration of musical possibilities, whether of a single theme, as in the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue, or of a genre (and of the circle of keys) in the two volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Wolff offers no explanation for the shift in Bach’s attention away from sacred vocal works, though again he offers grounds for inference. In 1729 Bach became director of the town’s most prestigious Collegium Musicum, a student performing ensemble which had served as a training ground for some of Germany’s leading musicians. The Collegium offered Bach opportunities to present a greater variety of works via weekly performances for as many as 150 at Leipzig’s most prominent coffee house. Yet while Wolff makes clear that this added to the already busy Cantor’s obligations, he steers well clear of implying post hoc ergo propter hoc.

No “new Bach image” can yet claim the completeness of the old one. Wolff’s narrative loses steam after 1730, in part because of the insertion of two topical chapters, one of which defends and explores Wolff’s thesis about the intellectual side of Bach, but largely because we still don’t know much about those years. Bach scholars universally stress that a good deal of information about Bach’s life has been irretrievably lost, and that what remains paints an uneventful, even boring, picture.

This last description is, of course, largely a matter of context. Bach’s life is deadly dull if placed next to those of Carlo Gesualdo, Frederic Chopin, or Franz Liszt. But compared to the average boy born into a tradesman’s family in small-town Germany in 1685, Bach’s career was meteoric. A virtuoso from an early age, he ranked among the most accomplished keyboard artists of his time, and events of his life were reported in the major newspapers of Northern Germany with the adjective “famous” routinely applied; by the end of his life his achievement as a composer was described as unsurpassed and even unequalled by musicians in Germany and on the larger European scene. It is, then, the many lacunae, and not the nature of the subject itself, that give the later chapters of Wolff’s account a certain flatness.

The eminent Bach scholar Robert Marshall, in The New York Review of Books, charged Wolff with 19th-century-style hagiography.1 If this is true, Wolff’s hagiography is a sin of omission, not of commission. Yes, Wolff is steadfast in his refusal to speculate about Bach’s character and emotional life, but the vast majority of Bach documents are of an impersonal, official nature. With the exception of diligence and hard work, Wolff attributes neither virtues nor vices to Bach. Also the editor of The New Bach Reader, a collection of the most important Bach documents in English translation, Wolff is as qualified as anyone to make judgments about the reasonable limits of speculation about Bach.2 It is disappointing nonetheless that Wolff neither opens areas of conjecture for his readers nor exposes them to debates within Bach scholarship. Though he states in the preface that “it would not be difficult to devote entire chapters to what is not known about Bach’s life,” the brief sentences regarding things unknown generally serve as barriers to restricted areas rather than invitations to the reader to personal engagement with difficult questions.

It is clear that Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician has been both designed and marketed for a general audience, from the minimal use of endnotes (almost exclusively referring to The New Bach Reader or the more exhaustive German collection) and the avoidance of technical discussion of music to the quotes from famous performers (n.b. not scholars) that adorn the dustjacket. Perhaps he wished to spare his readers difficulty; if so, he was probably underestimating them. It is hard to imagine that anyone willing to read the 450 pages of Wolff’s account would not also be willing to wrestle with challenging issues.

For readers who wish to delve into issues of Bach scholarship beyond what a single volume offers, Wolff’s book will be particularly frustrating in its failure to offer any orientation at all to the Bach literature beyond the original source materials. Such readers will probably want to consult Malcolm Boyd’s update of his life-and-works Bach. Boyd packs twice the material into a book half the length (Wolff will survey the music in a planned second volume), and in the process orients readers well to current issues in Bach scholarship. His bibliography is also both more complete and more usefully organized than Wolff’s.

Boyd’s book lends itself to selective reading. Interleaving biographical chapters with chapters on the music breaks the flow of the narrative, especially as the treatment of the music can be heavy going. But those looking for a briefer account of Bach’s life than Wolff’s could read the biographical chapters only and gain a good overview in a hundred pages. And because Bach tended to focus on a few types of composition at a time, Boyd’s chapters that treat related clusters of genres fit logically between the biographical chapters. Performers wanting to increase their understanding of a particular genre will be grateful for this sensible organization.

Boyd’s treatment of the music is clearly intended for a more scholarly audience than Wolff’s. It’s not that Boyd is particularly technical in his discussion, though he does use more musical jargon than Wolff. Rather, his focus on the overall character of a genre will only be meaningful and interesting to real aficionados of music. Musical novices tend to respond well to detailed exegeses of individual works (provided of course that these are couched in simple enough language). It takes a much more knowledgeable and experienced listener to find interest in a discussion of the evolving role of the chorale in Bach’s cantatas. Readers who do have such interests might well enjoy reading only the chapters on the music; Boyd offers many fascinating insights, such as a suggestion that Bach prefigured the tonal plan of sonata form in both keyboard preludes and da capo arias.

Boyd calls more attention than Wolff to the apparent decrease in Bach’s output around 1730, but he doesn’t have much more to offer in the way of explanation. Though admittedly speculative, as of course any hypothesis would be, the best account I have seen is probably the one offered by Gerhard Herz in “Toward a New Image of Bach” from his Essays on J. S. Bach.3 Herz, who has studied the new chronology in great detail, correlates Bach’s compositional activity with his professional hopes and frustrations. Many times, Herz shows, intense compositional activity ceased when new jobs or positions that Bach had desired failed to come his way—or, in the case of the cantatas, when promised income and privileges were withheld. Particularly with the cantatas Herz makes remarkably close correlations between the dates of Bach’s various exchanges with his superiors and the stages of his turning away from cantata composition. Herz and Boyd both believe that at the end of Bach’s life, when published criticism of his music made him clearly recognize how deeply out of step with his time that music was, Bach made posterity his audience, producing the B Minor Mass and the Art of Fugue as magisterial summations of his art. For Herz, only then were Bach’s compositional efforts fully freed from attempts to gain recognition and reward.

Bach’s biographers frequently mention that the man would hold little interest if not for his music, and many Christians are likely to find engagement with the music more deeply edifying than engagement with the man. It is ironic that while Bach is frequently regarded as the paradigmatic example of the Christian composer, the works that earned him that place remain relatively little known. Remedying that situation, and thus allowing Bach’s sacred music to benefit contemporary English-speaking believers, is the goal of Calvin Stapert’s My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach. Stapert’s book is a guide for listeners who wish to use Bach’s music devotionally, organized around basic doctrines as expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism. Any concern that this Calvinist document might be used to co-opt the Lutheran Bach is set to rest in the preface, which forthrightly brings up the evidence that Bach was probably not sympathetic to Calvinist teachings. Stapert’s use of the Heidelberg Catechism is not historical but devotional; it is the doctrinal statement he is most intimately familiar with, and he feels that it, like Bach’s music, puts primary emphasis on the most basic themes of orthodox Christian belief.

My Only Comfort is a real gift to the church, as it offers insightful readings of many of Bach’s greatest sacred works in language accessible to readers with only moderate musical training. Some of these readings are original, and some are culled from writings by Jaroslav Pelikan, Eric Chafe (both discussed below), and Friedrich Smend. Smend, the godfather of all who do theological close reading of Bach, is curiously never explicitly cited, perhaps because the intent of the book is devotional rather than academic. Among Stapert’s original contributions, his discussion of the connotations of instrumentation in the second cantata of the Christmas Oratorio is particularly valuable. This kind of work requires considerable insight into both music and theology, and Stapert shows both in abundance. Such insight is also on display in his relatively extended discussion of the complementary relationship between freedom and constraint in both music and theology; also discussed at length in Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music and Time, it may be an idea whose time has come.4

One of Stapert’s virtues is that he requires his readers to have relatively little in the way of musical background. The book should be readable by anyone who played an instrument moderately seriously as a child and who has some degree of knowledge about Baroque music. Stapert frequently discusses the basic materials of music (notes, intervals, time signatures, etc.), and he also uses musical terms such as “basso continuo” or “ritornello” that are the stuff of college-level music appreciation courses. A glossary of terms at the back will help fill in gaps in readers’ knowledge, but will probably not be sufficient for those who are starting from scratch. The one complaint in this area is the lack of musical examples. Stapert does admirably well without them, but as few people who can’t read music could really follow his discussion in the first place, some well-chosen musical examples might well have been included without driving many readers away. They would be particularly useful in listening to chorale preludes; the hymn-tunes so familiar to Bach’s listeners are often hidden in complex textures, and without knowing the tune it can be hard to distinguish the main melody from the rich tapestry Bach weaves around it.

Though generally very illuminating, Stapert’s readings are not all equally convincing; at times he stretches his interpretations a little too far, and his reading of Cantata 56, “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen,” doesn’t seem to fit as well as other works might have with the theme of discipleship under which he discusses it. (To Stapert’s credit, the friction is between a good reading and its place in his argument, not between a forced reading and Bach’s music.) His insightful readings of progressions in discipleship in the passions and in Cantata 147 occasionally have a stronger flavor of late-20th-century conservative American Calvinism than of 18th-century Lutheranism, but the reader attuned to such fine points will have no trouble in making the necessary adjustments herself. The relatively minor flaws in this book will not substantively diminish the service it will render to the reasonably musically literate reader who wants to open her ears to the theology Bach embedded in his music.

Stapert wishes to encourage an engagement with Bach cantatas beyond those that he discusses, so he informs his readers about several translations of the texts of the cantatas, the German language being of course the primary barrier for English-speaking listeners. A resource that I suspect he would have endorsed strongly had it appeared prior to his own is Richard Stokes’s new translation, J. S. Bach: The Complete Church and Secular Cantatas. This work is in general very accurate, and Stokes follows earlier translators in including helpful features such as italics for biblical quotations and boldface type for preexisting hymn stanzas. Most important, he almost always translates line by line, which is ideal for listening to the music; a less precise translation makes it hard to correlate text with music, while a word-by-word translation is rarely comprehensible as English.

The most significant problem in using the translation is found in the biblical quotations. Unlike the rest of the texts, which are formatted as poetry, they are formatted as prose paragraphs, making it harder to correlate text and translation. Stokes also chose to use the King James Version, which can be somewhat different from a literal rendering of Luther’s translation into English. In general, though, Stokes’ translations will be a much more consistently useful guide than most translations included in cd booklets, certainly better than previous full translations.

Readers with the musical background to delve more deeply into Bach’s musical expressions of faith will find that detailed theological exegeses have not formed a large part of Bach studies. Jaroslav Pelikan presents a historical theologian’s perspective on the sacred music in his Bach Among the Theologians, placing the works in the context of the intellectual and theological currents of their day.5 Unfortunately Pelikan deals primarily with the texts of the cantatas and passions, saying relatively little about the music.

It remains rare for a musicologist to examine the role of the music in the theological statements of the cantatas with the kind of depth that would be standard in a literary study. Among contemporary scholars, Eric Chafe is at the forefront of this enterprise, and his Analyzing Bach Cantatas is a truly remarkable achievement, at once expanding the depth of his inquiry and making his theories accessible to readers with relatively little knowledge of music theory. Though the range of disciplines Chafe draws upon is formidable, much of the book should be comprehensible to anyone with the equivalent of one college-level harmony course. Some knowledge of German is helpful, and access to a library that has scores and recordings of the complete cantatas is essential.

Chafe’s basic premise is that Bach made allegorical use of the musical relationships between tonal centers in his music. Keys relate to one another by being sharper or flatter, which corresponds to using higher or lower notes. For example, the notes used in C major differ from those used in G major in that the key of C uses Fs while the key of G uses F-sharps, which are higher than Fs. All other notes used are the same. We thus say that G is sharper than C, or that G is higher than C. (This latter usage has become less common than it was in Bach’s time because of increasing realization that the keys form circles. If you continue moving to higher keys you eventually return to your starting point via lower keys, making the higher/lower concept problematic.)

For reasons having to do with the history of music theory, Chafe maps movement among keys in terms of motions to higher or lower keys; in Analyzing Bach Cantatas, Chafe calls these relative motions tonal ascent and tonal descent. Because Bach frequently changed key when a significant change in the text occurred, and also frequently changed key between movements of a larger work, Chafe is able to correlate the relative position of the keys with certain kinds of oppositions within the texts. The description of relative position as higher and lower had a history of being associated with affirmative/negative; thus keys can be mapped to such pairs as happy/sad, future/present, heavenly/earthly, fulfilled/anticipating, divine/human, etc. There was also a history of describing higher and lower keys as relatively hard or soft, respectively. This reinforces some of the correlations already present, as well as opening ones such as strong/weak and harsh/gentle. Motion among keys can thus function allegorically in a number of different contexts.

Chafe’s book divides roughly in half, with the first four chapters laying out his methodology and the latter five applying it in increasingly in-depth analyses. Early chapters provide an overview of orthodox Lutheran theology, hermeneutics, and liturgical practice, and present his theories about the allegorical use of keys. After a chapter that illustrates his theories in a detailed analysis of Cantata 21, “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” chapter 4 presents the main new extension of his theory, which has to do with the use of modal chorale melodies. Bach frequently incorporated these old modal hymns in his cantatas, and when viewed from a perspective of tonality, and especially when embedded in a tonal setting, these modal melodies opened a wealth of possibilities. This chapter is the most dense and challenging in the book, and it will make for slow going for readers with less background in music theory. Some basic knowledge of modal theory will be needed, and some of the terminology Chafe introduces will likely be unfamiliar.6

The remaining chapters explore Chafe’s theories by means of increasingly large-scale analyses. These culminate in chapters 7 and 8, which are devoted to Cantata 77, “Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, Lieben” (“You shall love the Lord your God”). Chafe’s analyses are consistently illuminating, and this one serves well as the centerpiece of the book. In Chafe’s treatment of the first movement of the cantata we see his interpretive approach functioning at its best, performing a revelatory exegesis of a remarkably complex musico-theological statement. The text for the movement is taken from the gospel reading for the day, the statement of the greatest commandments in Luke chapter 10. The melodic materials, however, come from the tune usually associated with Luther’s chorale “Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot,” which paraphrases the Ten Commandments and places them within a distinctly Lutheran theological context. For Luther the main purpose of the Old Testament law was to enable recognition of human sinfulness, and thus of the need for the gospel. Though the greatest commandments are presented as instructions to be followed elsewhere in Bach’s sacred music, here Bach emphasized their status as a summary of Old Testament law. By using the melody of the familiar Ten Commandments chorale, Bach was reminding his listeners that the greatest commandments cannot ultimately be fulfilled, but instead point to the need for grace.

What Chafe’s analysis reveals is that Bach’s musical statement goes far deeper than merely using the melody to Luther’s chorale. He first examines the modal melody, and shows that it moves consistently toward lower keys, also moving from major to minor. Put more precisely in modal language, the melody starts in a bright G Mixolydian. Its initial cadence points are Cs, and it continues an implied tonal descent, cadencing on F. B-flats are then introduced, so that the melody ends in G transposed Dorian.

In Chafe’s analysis of the first movement of the cantata he then reveals that, in parallel with the previously known use of the number ten in the segmentation of the movement, Bach created a tonal path similar to that of the chorale melody. The movement starts in an optimistic major (C major or G Mixolydian), but gradually makes a tonal descent to F major and B-flat major. It then switches to the parallel minor mode and continues the descent, moving from G minor to C minor, before an eventual return to G Mixolydian to end the movement. Both in its tonal descent and its move from major to minor, the first movement expands the tonal dynamic of the chorale melody so that it steers the course of the movement as a whole.

Chafe’s analysis does not trade in music theoretical arcana, but rather in structures which will be readily hearable for many listeners, especially the shift from major to minor. Heard as Chafe suggests, the movement’s gradually changing keys represent the dawning awareness of the impossibility of obeying the law.

The rest of the treatment of Cantata 77 is unfortunately marred by Chafe’s most frequent failing. Bach’s cantatas are sufficiently rich that Chafe’s interpretive method often raises more potential interpretations than can coexist without at least apparent contradiction. Chafe does not always make a choice when these conflicts arise, and in this case he seems to suggest that Bach is simultaneously reminding his audience about the impossibility of perfectly fulfilling the law and also suggesting love of neighbor as a solution to this dilemma. But if we agree with Chafe that the first movement has powerfully expressed the law’s role in conviction of sin, then for a Lutheran of Bach’s time the only next step can be faith in the atonement of Jesus for salvation. Without that prior step, extolling love of neighbor would sound like endorsing justification by works.

There are, to be sure, many issues of history and music theory raised by Chafe’s book, and I have dealt with some of these in a review in the journal Current Musicology.7 For readers who are not scholars of music, however, the main question is, does Chafe’s interpretive lens lead to a richer hearing of the cantatas? The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. Though certainly needing to be used with discretion, Chafe’s approach brings attention to rich relationships within the music, and allows large works to make coherent statements in new ways.

In particular, musicians, composers, and musicologists concerned with how music might be able to express theological truth should not miss Chafe’s book. I know of no work that offers a more powerful or comprehensive picture of how the basic materials of music can serve the expression of faith. Chafe’s earlier book on Bach, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach, also contains many insightful discussions, in particular a chapter on the relationship between faith and reason and extended analyses of the passions.8 The more recent book should definitely be read first, however, as it provides a much clearer introduction to Chafe’s theories. The first several chapters of Tonal Allegory are very heavy going and can be skipped by readers of Analyzing Bach Cantatas. They will only need to know that the cumbersome terms catabasis and anabasis are forerunners of the more direct tonal ascent and tonal descent of the later volume.

Some of Bach’s works approach timeless universality more closely than any other body of music. A perfect example of the 19th-century concept of absolute music, the inner structures that can be abstracted from the surface of the music can be dressed in the trappings of almost any style of Western tonal music. Bach’s works have been endlessly reorchestrated, adapted into jazz pieces and pop tunes, and overlaid with operatic melodies. When European art music is combined with music from other cultures, Bach’s works are often called upon as the most flexible representatives of the West. His A minor Invention even survived a mechanical performance by a Commodore 64 in television commercials of the 1980s. As particularly extreme examples, the riddle canons are perfect models of a deistic Enlightenment cosmos: they have been designed to run perfectly and perpetually, sustained by the mathematics of their contrapuntal dynamics, and requiring no involvement from their creator apart from that initial act of creation—indeed, any intervention would be a sign of the imperfection both of the creator and of his creation.

The flip side of the coin of transcendence is emotional distance. Many of Bach’s more translatable musical creations speak with a certain reserve; though all are not as austere as the Art of Fugue, they are not usually among Bach’s most impassioned works. The B Minor Mass is a particularly interesting example. As a setting of the Latin Mass, the work seems to embody the voice of the Church Universal. Though certainly containing strong emotional statements, as for example when the Crucifixus leads to the Et resurrexit, these tend to be public, communal emotions. Perhaps most tellingly, the Et incarnatus, in sounding a theme that so often led to intimate statements in the cantatas, emphasizes the mysterious aspect of the Incarnation with jarring chromatic harmonies and dissonant voice leading.

What a contrast there is between the B Minor Mass and the cantatas. The cantatas are in general emotionally vivid, striking in their immanence. In this they represent the apotheosis of Baroque opera. Recitative and aria, which could be so stilted as a means of representing a conventional drama, are ideal bearers of a psychodrama of the soul, well-suited to conveying tensions between head and heart, action and reflection. In contrast to the emotional distance that Bach’s works can have, and far from the profound sense of abstraction that allowed Bach to fail to specify instrumentation in the Art of Fugue, the cantatas bring before the listener with often overwhelming power the inner workings of a soul in relationship with God.

But the price of emotional immediacy, of greater immanence, is being culturally situated to a higher degree. When Bach prepared fresh manuscripts of some of his greatest works late in his life, presumably as a sign that he saw them as the primary testaments to his accomplishment as a composer, the St. Matthew Passion was the sole representative of the German-

language sacred works. There would have been little reason for him to believe that his cantatas would be studied or performed extensively in the future. And we do indeed need to cross significant cultural barriers when we strive today to apprehend the cantatas. At the most basic level we need to understand the language—either by knowing German or by following a translation—and we need to get used to a highly idiosyncratic musical language. The more deeply we are drawn in, the greater investments we make, as we broaden knowledge of theology and music theory to include 17th- and 18th-century Lutheranism and issues in the history of music theory.

I find that these costly investments pay off richly. I love the instrumental music, and the B Minor Mass is among the glories of Western music, but it is the German-language sacred music that most powerfully challenges and encourages my faith, that most strongly spurs me on to love and good deeds. If I allow this valuation to color my perspective on Bach, then I must wonder if he was called to a particularly close imitation of the Man of Sorrows. Underappreciated by those he served, he would render his deepest, most lasting service to God’s people in the creation of those works seemingly surest to be swept away by the ravages of time and changing fashion.

But entertaining this picture of Bach raises the question of the extent to which he might have understood and accepted such a calling. If he indeed curtailed work when he failed to receive the recognition and reward that he saw as his due, could we then see him as an 18th-century Jonah, attempting with limited success to stray from the path chosen for him? Could his late works be seen as a misguided attempt to gain transcendence and leave something of lasting value? Put most pointedly, did Bach have too much regard for worldly acclaim and not enough trust that God could bring lasting fruit from his work? At a historical level these questions are speculative and ultimately unanswerable, but they are not thereby rendered trivial. Indeed, they have an uncomfortable resonance for all of us who would put our work at the service of God’s kingdom.

Books discussed in this Essay:

Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Norton, 2000).

Malcolm Boyd, Bach (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

Calvin R. Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach (Eerdmans, 2000).

Richard Stokes, trans., J. S. Bach: The Complete Church and Secular Cantatas (Scarecrow Press, 2000).

Eric Chafe, Analyzing Bach Cantatas (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000)

John Ito is a doctoral candidate in music theory at Columbia University.

1. Robert L. Marshall, “In Search of Bach,” The New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000.

2. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, eds., The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. Rev. and expanded by Christoph Wolff (Norton, 1998).

3. Gerhard Herz, Essays on J. S. Bach (UMI Research Press, 1985).

4. Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

5. Jaroslav Pelikan, Bach Among the Theologians (Fortress Press, 1986).

6. The ease of reading is not helped by the most clear-cut error in the book; the discussion of the hymn “Durch Adams Fall” on pp. 89-91 makes sense only if a passage from a music treatise is applied to the melody of Example 4.4 and the discussion linking the passage to Example 4.3 is ignored.

7. John Ito, review of Eric Chafe, Analyzing Bach Cantatas. Current Musicology, Vol. 70 (2002), pp. 141-157.

8. Eric Chafe, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Univ. of California Press, 1991).

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

Arnold Schoenberg’s Journeyby Allen ShawnFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002272 pp.; $26

Reading Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey reminded me of an anecdote Oscar Levant gave about Schoenberg in his Memoirs of an Amnesiac:

Once he was humming an unhummable theme with unnegotiable leaps between intervals which were in his usual atonal style. He turned to his wife and asked, “What is that?” She hesitated, stammered, and helplessly admitted that she couldn’t identify it. “That is the main theme from the piece I dedicated to you,” he explained sternly. That was quite a responsibility. The piece cannot be hummed unless you’re a freak. But Mrs. Schoenberg was embarrassed.

High modernist art was notorious for its power to intimidate, and no modern master—not even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake—was more intimidating to his audience than the Austrian composer and painter Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). After throwing down his first gauntlet with atonal composition, where a piece has no central key, Schoenberg founded serialism, where a piece’s melody is limited to the sequences of notes in a fixed “row” (usually twelve). The result upset listeners’ expectations and left many baffled and disturbed, others downright contemptuous. (As Shawn notes, concertgoers at Schoenberg premieres were known to call for the composer to be shot or jeer to the point of making singers cry.) And yet Schoenberg, like Joyce, adamantly insisted that his revolutionary work was really quite accessible. “One must listen to it in the same manner as to every other kind of music, forget the theories, the twelve-tone method, the dissonances, etc., and, I would add, if possible the author,” Schoenberg wrote in a letter.

Today the era of high modernism has receded into history. How does Schoenberg sound? Allen Shawn wants us to set aside our preconceptions and listen. All too often, he says, we are swayed by statements like Leonard Bernstein’s: “The trouble is that the new musical ‘rules’ of Schoenberg are not apparently based on innate awareness, on the intuition of tonal relationships.” Bernstein used Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto as an example of 12-tone writing that nevertheless “exists somehow in a tonal universe where it’s accessible to us in all its warmth and charm.” Shawn takes Bernstein as assuming that absence of “warmth” and “charm” implies the lack of “an essential aspect of what makes music music.” Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey combines biography with examination of Schoenberg’s key works, dedicated to revealing the accessibility lying beneath the unfamiliar surface of his style.

I took the book as an occasion to test Shawn’s claim. I put myself in the position of a concertgoer contemporary with Schoenberg, listening over two months to recordings of 20 of his pieces in chronological order. I listened to each recording at least twice. Although I have found that I need as many as seven listens before I truly “get” most classical pieces, I did not afford Schoenberg’s this many—because Shawn’s thesis is properly that the music communicates more immediately than this. Moreover, repetitive sampling of full-length, high-fidelity recordings is a luxury of modern technology, unavailable in Schoenberg’s time.

My particular musical training is fairly well-suited to appraising work which mostly appeared before the 1930s—when classical music was more central to the public experience, the default reference of “Do you like music?” was taken to be classical, and more people played piano because mechanical recording was in its infancy. I play piano and cello, have sung in choirs and local productions of musicals and operas, and have the “coffeetable” familiarity with classical music typical of middle-class people before the rock era. But I know only shreds of music theory, such that my reception of a piece of classical music is filtered through a lightly informed kind of gut intuition. Like most such people, I find that my affection for classical music attenuates after the Late Romantic period. I’d rather hear Beethoven over Bartok, and must admit having been somewhat biased against engaging Schoenberg by just the cranky New York Times articles over the years that Shawn bemoans.

Dutifully purging myself of the expectation of catchy melodies and comfy chord resolutions, I tried to receive this work as a “new language” entirely, just as I would a spoken language in my career as a linguist. Yet I’m afraid that as interesting as John McWhorter’s Journey was, in the end this listener ended up feeling more like Gertrud Schoenberg than like Shawn.

One of Shawn’s main contentions is that Schoenberg’s abrupt shifts from one key to another are less random lurches than truncated renditions of transitions that tonal music spells out chord by chord. Shawn feels that the listener’s task is simply to get used to processing these abbreviations, just as we do grammatical contractions like don’t for does not. An analogy might be the famous poster depicting a sequence of head shots of Marilyn Monroe with various facial expressions over a minute or so: we spontaneously “fill in” the transitions from one shot to another to make a mental filmstrip.

In itself, this “filling in” is hardly beyond ordinary listeners. Bebop jazz abbreviates conventional harmonic progressions, and has attracted legions of aficionados who now hear the older harmonic style as plodding and “corny.” But that adjustment was a lesser one: bebop consists mainly of short phrases repeated often, and relies heavily on set harmonic sequences that recur from song to song. Schoenberg’s melodies and harmonic sequences are less immediately identifiable or infectious, and recur in such distorted states that even smoking out these veiled restatements is a key task of musicological analysis.

I am not bad at detecting “Marilyn” transitions in music when the bar is set lower. Stephen Sondheim caps the Johanna trio in Sweeney Todd with a queer, reedy chord in the winds that always struck a college friend of mine as startlingly unmotivated in relation to the key. I recognized it on second hearing as a vastly distorted version of a good old-fashioned tonic conclusion, which would have sounded more natural if Sondheim had built up to it through various inversions, but which lends a pleasant tang when simply inserted point blank. But Schoenberg’s music largely flummoxed my abilities in this vein, and I venture that only a music scholar would be up to the task with anything less than a good dozen close listens to any given piece. I fear that Shawn, musically gifted to the point of cottoning to Schoenberg as a lad and professionally trained in music besides, may have rather generous expectations of the less gifted and tutored ear.

In Schoenberg’s 12-tone period, there is a particular problem with sameness of atmosphere. Most of these pieces sound like a fragile soul undergoing acute mental torment—more minor than major, lots of tense diminished chords à la the “cliff-hanging” chords used by pianists accompanying a silent movie, lots of crashing discord. The impression is bracing at first, but I found it less so as it occurred in piece after piece. My sparse musicological training may lead me to be missing something, but does atonality or a 12-tone template require, or even merely encourage, a frantic, desperate tone? I presume that atonality and serialism could theoretically be founded on major chords as well as minor, for example.

This avoidance of the major confounds one even in Schoenberg’s earlier atonal pieces. The opening chords of the third of the Three Pieces for Piano sound precisely like a child banging on the keyboard with all his might. In the nominally Romantic poem cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg asks us to read passion in chords that sound like a perfect evocation of nausea. This is a lot to ask of lay listeners outside his own head.

But there are exceptions to this Sturm und Drang feel in his work (the weirdly gorgeous Five Pieces for Orchestra, for instance), confirming that this affect is not inherent to atonality or serialism in themselves. I suspect that Schoenberg’s chordal preferences were partly a matter of the glummish, prickly temperament that Shawn so deftly limns between the musical explorations. But this means that perhaps Schoenberg’s personal nature may present as much a barrier between us and his music as do the limitations of our ears.

Shawn, like other serialism fans, might regard my skeptical conclusions as a tad philistine. Giving the conventional argument that we have no scientific grounds for assuming that tonal music is somehow primally appealing, he proposes an analogy to herb doctors’ ignorance of the biochemical mechanisms that could lend them further powers (where popular taste for tonal music = folk medicine). But the analogy strikes me as off. Our ignorance of the neural reasons for why Eine Kleine Nachtmusik goes better with brunch than Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet hardly entails that opening our ears would make Schoenberg-and-scones ordinary. After all, regardless of our familiarity with biochemistry, we still use aloe as a balm but break out from poison oak. The possibility remains open that there is indeed only so far that the untrained human ear can go in processing harmonies as euphonious.

Shawn does mention that undergraduates he exposes to Schoenberg’s music are often quite taken. But this may not be so surprising. People raised in the rock era listen more for rhythm than melody or harmony, and are more accustomed to dissonance and outright “noise” than their grandparents were. Much of later Schoenberg is based on spiky rhythms and relentless astringence. Naturally many youngsters, suckled on hip-hop and the like, will respond more positively to the overall feel than a concertgoer of the early 20th century suckled on tonal classical music, parlor ballads, and marches. But Schoenberg did not write his music to be cherished as a mere “groove.” Are these kids enjoying the sound as music or as texture?

In that vein, as texture the Schoenberg sound is actually not as unfamiliar to us moderns as it was to those who encountered it new. Atonality and serialism have been commonly used in film scores—the late string quartets or Variations for Orchestra remind one of, for example, Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchco*ck films. But I’m not sure that this is equivalent to our now hearing Beethoven as normal while listeners in his day often found his work unpleasantly dense in comparison to the tranparency of Mozart. Am I alone in wondering just who buys those cds of Vertigo‘s music to listen to in the car? We are used to Schoenbergian music as a background element linked to dramatic action, but this is different from the focused engagement Schoenberg sought from us, as well as from our relationship to most music that touches our hearts.

As much as I enjoyed Shawn’s book, my ultimate verdict on Schoenberg’s music is that Bernstein was right. “Can his music be said to be harder to follow than the paintings of the cubists or, for that matter, the plays of Shakespeare?” Shawn asks. I would frankly answer yes, intrigued though I was at the start of my journey by the prospect of coming to the opposite conclusion. Schoenberg saw his music as a natural outcome of the evolution of Western music and hoped it would be the supreme musical language of the next 100 years. But I see it as a rarefied intellectual trick, whose substantial appreciation requires a degree of sheer work that only an élite few are ever likely to embark upon.

I might add that for those inclined to do that work, Shawn’s book is a great place to start: he is a fine teacher. Yet ideally a second edition would be released with a cd in place of the musical examples. Even music readers may be winded by the cited passages. Schoenberg’s music is usually so quirky and dense that I, capable of a passable rendition of a Mozart or Beethoven sonata, often could not follow the examples. A cd would allow Shawn to make the same points with the music itself—I got much more from the book by having the recordings alongside.

Although I hate to admit it, Schoenberg’s first masterwork, Verklärte Nacht, a Brahmsian string sextet that Shawn notes “pleases even those who dislike the rest of Schoenberg’s music,” was indeed one of my favorites. The First Chamber Symphony was fresh and pleasant. In the atonal phase, the Three Pieces for Piano are desultory yet gripping and the Five Pieces for Orchestra were actually beautiful; moving on to the serialist period, the sonic warp and woof of the Serenade is grandly memorable. But then all of these last three come in bite-sized bits that make them easier to digest in spite of their distant air. The Variations for Orchestra and the Fourth String Quartet, longer-lined serial pieces, were diverting in their angry density, pleasurable in the sense that nagging a loose tooth is.

For most of the pieces I listened to, cognac struck me as a comparison. There’s something sublime in its woody bitterness—but how much can you drink at a time? Few would choose to take it over meals on a regular basis, and even fewer would propose that it become mankind’s main drink. One is content to have it sitting on the shelf to break out at those certain times, which is precisely how I feel about my new Schoenberg collection. But with all due respect to Herr Schoenberg (and heartfelt empathy with his wife), though I have spent two months marinating in those discs, don’t ask me to hum anything from them beyond Verklärte Nacht.

John H. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author most recently of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Times Books).

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

Benjamin Franklinby Edmund S. MorganYale Univ. Press, 2002368 pp.; $24.95

Edmund Morgan is arguably the finest living American historian, an adornment to the tradition that includes Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, Charles Beard, and Perry Miller. Published when Morgan was 86, Benjamin Franklin is his latest attempt to interpret the early history of the country, and it has received the accolades that one would expect—but that do not, it seems to me, critically attend to what Morgan has done.

Morgan has always liked the moderates in the North American colonies. The Puritan Dilemma (1958), his account of John Winthrop, defends an ethic of responsibility over one of ultimate ends. The Gentle Puritan, a Life of Ezra Stiles (1962) raised an authoritative voice in favor of Stiles over one of his adversaries, Jonathan Edwards, in an era dominated by those who favored high Calvinism. Among his many scholarly talents, Morgan is a compelling biographer. He has mastered clear expository prose that conveys complex matters in an intelligible form. In this book the greatest moderate, Franklin, gets his greatest advocate.

The biography passes over Franklin’s early life, about which we know almost nothing except what he tells us in his Autobiography, moving quickly to that later period for which we have an extensive record: Franklin’s own writings and the civic experience of Philadelphia, the colonies, and the Empire. Morgan focuses on the range of Franklin’s interests and his curiosity about the world. He has substantial accounts of Franklin’s satirical writings, which evidence his interest—always perceptive, often Swiftian, occasionally moralizing—in the cultures around him. While Morgan also lucidly describes the scientific ideas that brought Franklin renown in the Western world, he observes that in Franklin’s own hierarchy of interests, usefulness was the chief criterion of merit. And because the greatest usefulness came about through involvement in a polity, politics—and, indeed, international politics—took precedence over one’s personal life, over one’s duties as a private citizen or a writerly public intellectual, or over the work of the scientist. Thus, Morgan concentrates on Franklin’s career in making the Revolution and the peace that followed. Here, the importance of these events for Franklin, and Morgan’s gifts as an elucidator of political ideas and practical policies, contribute most to the substantial value of the book.

Perhaps because of his age, Morgan has limited himself to using an advance copy of the CD-ROM on which all of Franklin’s writings appear. This electronic production will soon be available under the auspices of Yale University Press, its Papers of Benjamin Franklin, and the Packard Humanities Institute. Morgan says that in writing this biography he has not read “much else, and therefore [the book is] pretty one-sided.”

There is some unnecessary modesty here. No one knows the 18th-century sources better than Morgan, and the fact that he does not cite them does not mean that he is unaware of the interpretative disputes in the secondary literature on which he touches, or the documents on which they are based. What is important is that Morgan does intend mainly to tell us what Franklin seems like to him, and to have this appraisal pass as critical history. It does not fully pass.

Let me begin with a small example and generalize from it. Morgan tells us that Franklin’s marriage was “loving and happy” and that his “affection for his family” was much like that “of any good father or husband”; he was “an averagely good family man.” Morgan also relates the facts of Franklin’s family life. His son William was born in 1729 or 1730, but we do not know who William’s mother was, and Franklin tells us nothing about her. (His “lechery” was later used against him in a political campaign.) In 1730, he married Deborah Rogers, and made a family with the boy and two children born to the second union. In 1757 he left for London on his first diplomatic mission as a colonial agent; Deborah was unwilling to make the trip, and Benjamin could never persuade her to join him. She was a “plain Joan” and might have felt ill at ease in the circles in which Franklin was traveling— and, Morgan adds, would perhaps have made him feel ill at ease as well. Franklin was away for four years, sailing back to Philadelphia in 1762. Then he left again in 1764, and lingered in London even after the settlement of his work in 1767-1768. Benjamin and Deborah continued to exchange affectionate letters; there is no evidence of infidelity but, Morgan adds, Franklin’s taste for female companionship must make us wonder. (Morgan’s concern for infidelity is exclusively with the husband and not the wife.) Benjamin did not return for his daughter’s wedding in 1767. In 1774, Deborah died, and having not seen her in ten years, he did not go back at her death. Franklin “endure[d]” it, but what was more painful to him, allows Morgan, was the destruction of the imperial community. A few months after learning of her death he journeyed from London to Philadelphia, but the conflicting loyalties of the Revolution were such that “his beloved son” suffered “ultimate rejection” because he remained a Tory. In his old age in the United States Franklin enjoyed the remains of his family and grandchildren.

Morgan and I may have different standards of what constitutes an “average” family man or “good” father and husband. But this is a minor issue. The real nub of the problem is that Morgan chooses not to see that he is dealing with someone whose familial connections are peripheral to his life, trivial. He likes Franklin and, as a friend would, overlooks certain aspects of Franklin’s personality, gives them short shrift. Friends are allowed to do this; when historians do it, they miss an opportunity to further their explanations. Historians have to be crueler than friends.

We can best see the limits of Morgan’s approach in his more general treatment of Franklin’s sense of himself, especially Franklin’s own famous discussion in his Autobiography of his youthful scheme to obtain moral perfection by adhering to the actions demanded in a check list of virtues. Commentators have scoured this passage for clues to Franklin’s character, and some have argued, persuasively if not compellingly, that the passage is so peculiar as to intimate that Franklin is writing with an only semi-serious didactic purpose, or even putting us on. Morgan does not take up this issue, but rather stresses that Franklin’s virtues are centered around utility; they are designed to make an individual happy and, indirectly, to make him useful to others. As I have said, the author finds this latter characteristic almost definitive of Franklin, and argues that it finally makes plain why public service was more important to him than family, the printing and publishing business, and scientific experimentation.

Franklin’s “arduous project” to achieve perfection is uncommon because it is concerned with behavior; there is no inner life or structure of intent that morality is about. Indeed, in acknowledging that his plan to become perfect failed, Franklin notes that his scheme was flawed because he made many errors. He confesses that he was at best able to achieve the appearance of living up to his behavioristic ideals, again implying that the moral life consists solely in external arrangements.

Over and over scholars have stressed this aspect of Franklin’s persona. In laying his writings before us, Morgan rightly points out the many brilliant lengthy jokes that his subject published throughout his writing career. In making points Franklin often printed hoaxes under a pseudonym —many of which were taken seriously—or anonymously penned some of his serious proposals. Morgan reminds us that in 1773 Franklin even anonymously commended one of his own recent pamphlets in the literary battles over Parliament’s actions that preceded the Revolution. Finally, Morgan recalls that the man was no orator, but preferred to influence individuals and let others do the talking to assembled politicians or in meetings of the populous.

From this evidence many have concluded that Franklin wanted to hide his self from others and to convince people that the publicly visible was all that counted. In fact, this evaluation is consistent with Morgan’s appreciation of public affairs as being essential to grasping Franklin, and this dimension of Franklin’s character makes Morgan assert in a couple of places that he can only “guess” about what is going on inside Franklin, whatever affection he has for what Franklin does. We see in Franklin a personality type that has been one of the glories of American statesmen from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt. But he does not have the virtues of a John Adams, a Washington, or a Madison, or those private virtues of those who elevate family. Franklin emphasized the situational, the calculating. The idea is to negotiate the shoals of the life of a polity in the manner of a captain intent on keeping a ship afloat, and not to worry much about whether one is following a book of navigational rules.

In a laudatory review of Morgan’s book, Gordon Wood writes that the biography describes Franklin much as he would like to have been described. But if this is true, something has gone wrong, for everyone estimates himself more highly than others do. Morgan tells us repeatedly of his regret at being born too late to have missed Franklin’s “radiant presence” and “personal magnetism.” This biography, Morgan says, displays “the pleasures of getting to know Franklin” and is designed to show that he is worth spending time with. It is “a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing.”

The wise historical theorist, R.G. Collingwood, tells us that the historian must put his sources “to the torture.” For Morgan, Franklin’s writings are rather a simulacrum for having a long talk with a friend; in his search for understanding, he does not subject Franklin to the scrutiny that a historian should. We need not judge Franklin badly on that account, nor should we so judge his 21st-century friend. But we should recognize that Benjamin Franklin is not quite critical history.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).

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

In the late 1950s, Chaim Potok was scholar in residence at a suburban synagogue outside Philadelphia. He was charming and charismatic and identifiably brilliant. “On the side,” Stephen Fried writes in The New Rabbi, “he was working on his first novel (which was never published but allowed him to learn how to write a novel) and was completing course work for a ph.d. at Penn in philosophy. When he finished his term as scholar-in-residence, he was offered three excellent pulpits, but he was ambivalent about continuing his rabbinate.” Potok’s wife asked him what he most wanted to do with his life, and Chaim answered that he wanted to write. The senior rabbi at his synagogue quietly gave Potok two thousand dollars from his discretionary fund so he and his wife could go to Israel for a year. There, Potok finished his doctoral dissertation and also wrote The Chosen. The story of two young Jews struggling with their religious obligations in the years after World War II, The Chosen is a classic American novel. It is not quite as good as the best Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth, but it belongs on the same shelf. And so Potok never worked at a synagogue again. He wrote books for the rest of his life.

Chaim Potok is only a minor figure in the The New Rabbi, mentioned in passing because the synagogue whose rabbi was so generous with him, Har Zion, is the setting for Stephen Fried’s book. But in a sense, Potok is Fried’s real subject: the rabbi that could have been.

Anyone with religious friends knows at least one or two of them who simply must become clergy: they are so bright, their faith so inspiring, that their absence from the pulpit somehow indicts God. Why do they insist on other careers? Some, like Potok, hear another calling. Some seek higher pay or more prestige. Maybe they have no stomach for congregational politics. Some find the clerisy intellectually beneath them: seminaries have become less demanding, loosening their language requirements and replacing courses in Scripture with pastoral counseling or other therapeutic disciplines. One kind and learned friend of mine, now studying to be a physician, left Jewish Theological Seminary because he found that the professors taught to the weakest students rather than challenging the brightest. The curriculum discouraged the kind of rough-edged brilliance he was capable of. “At JTS,” one rabbi had warned him, “they circumcise everything that sticks out.”

It may be that the good old days weren’t always good; plenty of rabbis and ministers were always, as the elderly Jew might say, from hunger. But matters are, if anything, getting worse. Several recent books have documented the slide among Christian ministers. Thomas Reeves’ The Empty Church (Free Press, 1996) lays bare the problems in mainline denominations; Betrayal (Little, Brown, 2002), by the staff of The Boston Globe, is a painful, brutal read, both for its depiction of the current priesthood and for how it may discourage future vocations. Along those lines, Donald Cozzens’ The Changing Face of the Priesthood (Liturgical Press, 2000) delivers more bad news. Jews do not yet have such a book, one forcing them to confront their troubled rabbinate. But The New Rabbi, while not a broad survey, is an intriguing case study that raises the same pointed questions in measured tones.

In the late 1990s, magazine writer Stephen Fried was in need of a good rabbi. Returning to religion to cope with his father’s death, he began to daven, or pray, at Har Zion, a thriving shul in Philadelphia where for three generations middle-class Jews have worshipped, socialized, and brought their children for religious training. At the time, Har Zion was beginning the search for a new rabbi. Gerald Wolpe, a scholar and brilliant preacher, was retiring after 25 years. Sensing that the search to replace Wolpe would be contentious, Fried knew he had found a good story.

The rabbi search, as Fried vividly describes it, is clogged by the factions and intrigue we expect from all church and synagogue committees. Working from his own observations—and from a key informant on the committee—Fried has crafted a vivid and funny book. As the search committee rejects applicant after applicant, deeming them all inferior goods, Fried never allows us to lose sight of either the gravity or the comedy. Fried has fun writing about the Har Zion congregants, but he never condescends to them. When they look bad, one senses that it is their own fault (as when they reject one applicant because he wears his yarmulke at a goofy angle). Choosing a new spiritual leader may be a weighty matter, but it can turn adults into real babies.

To be fair, Rabbi Wolpe set a high standard, and not just for longevity. A precocious student at New York University, Wolpe was only 16 years old when he was at JTS. Wolpe knew poetry, Wolpe knew Renaissance history. He knew Bible—well. When assistant rabbi Jacob Herber becomes the interim rabbi, the contrast is unmistakable. “In sermons,” one worshipper tells Fried, “Wolpe would quote from Browning, and Jacob quotes from Sports Illustrated.”

But the search committee cannot find anyone it likes better, so at last it offers the senior rabbi position to Herber. He’s not brilliant, but he is genuine. He seems like the New York Rangers fan that he is (which is one reason he is so popular with the children at the synagogue). I have seen Herber preach, and I can attest that he seems contemporary and comfortable, like an easy chair. Wolpe was musty, erudite, and serious—an upright chair, upholstered in leather.

Whether the Rabbi Herbers of the world betoken decline is not a simple question. Wolpe, like so many rabbis of his generation, was neither approachable nor very pastoral. He was uncomfortable paying hospital visits. His role was to teach to the synagogue—not just about religion, but about the world. He came from a tradition in which the rabbi was likely to be the most educated man around, a university graduate speaking every Saturday to an audience of merchants and civil servants. In such a climate, the congregation craved the ringing authority and didactic certainty of a wise voice—and Wolpe’s deep timbre, with its broad Boston vowels, was perfectly suited to deliver truth every Saturday morning. Tasks like comforting the sick, providing marital counseling, and organizing a strong youth group lagged in importance. The rabbi’s job was to know.

Contrast that role with the job description offered by Moshe Tutnauer, a professional interim rabbi who shows up at Har Zion after Wolpe leaves as a kind of a hired big brother for Rabbi Herber. “I don’t give sermons anymore,” Tutnauer tells Fried, “because I don’t know more than those people. So I teach Torah. In the day of Simon Greenberg [a prewar Har Zion rabbi], when much of the congregation was smart but not educated, you developed a rabbi who interpreted The New York Times for the congregation. Now the people who write The New York Times are sitting in your congregation, along with two professors of psychology and three doctors of philosophy. What are you gonna tell them? Don’t be a jerk.”

Herber is emphatically not that jerk. Nor is Jill Borodin, who becomes his assistant. They don’t pretend to vast learning. They stand not above the people but beside them, as fellow college graduates, more spiritually inclined than most, with some nuggets of wisdom to dispense. They do not impress the congregation with their erudition. They are unlikely to inspire. But they are also unlikely to intimidate. Old Rabbi Wolpe moved his listeners by delivering an awesome sermon, while Rabbi Herber, we learn in one touching scene, moves them by standing up and sharing his own pain. People cried before Rabbi Wolpe; they cry with Rabbi Herber.

The rabbinate, in other words, has shrunk, not in numbers but in majesty—another sign of the general leveling in American culture. The most famous Jewish cantors were, in the early part of the century, like opera stars, giving sold-out performances in great halls; now, they often function as songleaders and junior rabbis. Most Americans did not know about Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair, because the president was supposed to be aloof, and the newspapers and radio conspired in a protective silence. Now, United States presidents are expected to pal around with David Letterman. Our democratic impulse has leveled the peaks from which rabbis—and presidents, and professors—once looked down on the rest of us.

Stephen Fried has not written a big, analytic book to explain to us what it means that as American education levels have risen, the clergy’s preeminence has declined. He simply offers a resonant account of that change. He occasionally stumbles along the way—he gets wrong the year of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he misspells the name of the great rabbinic troubadour Shlomo Carlebach—and his writing can be too cute, as when he writes of prayer, “Summertime and the davening is easy.” Yet his humble, hamish wisdom suggests that he might make a good rabbi himself—of the friendlier, late-model variety.

Mark Oppenheimer is the author of God and Counterculture: Religion in Nixon’s America, to be published next year by Yale University Press.

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

Patrons of the New York Film Festival were disappointed last fall when two internationally acclaimed filmmakers did not come to the festival as planned. Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur whose latest film, Ten, is a fascinating and complex critique of the status of women in Iran, was unable to attend because the American government’s new security measures require all visitors from his country to undergo a three-month background check. Upset that his world-renowned colleague was being treated like a potential terrorist, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki—whose The Man Without a Past had become one of the hottest items on the festival circuit after winning the Grand Prix, the Ecumenical Jury Prize and the Best Actress award at Cannes just a few months before—announced that he would not come to New York either. In a faxed statement, he said he was forced to cancel his own trip because “if the present government of the United States of America does not want an Iranian, they will hardly have any use for a Finn, either. We do not even have the oil.”

Kaurismäki’s statement hints at the mix of droll humor and serious sociopolitical concerns that is characteristic of his films. Inspired by the quiet transcendence of Robert Bresson yet also by the poker-faced comedy of Buster Keaton, Kaurismäki’s films are minimalist masterworks in which characters cope with economic hardships and blows to their pride by expressing as little emotion as possible and by speaking in sometimes cryptic phrases, many of which are delivered in a hilariously deadpan style reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch or Hal Hartley. (“Do you mind if I smoke?” asks one character in The Man Without a Past. “Does a tree mourn for a fallen leaf?” comes the peculiar reply.) Thanks to his subtle use of expressive music and bright, colorful visuals, there is also an oddly optimistic quality to Kaurismäki’s tales of life on the margins of society, a quality that sometimes has clear spiritual overtones.

Kaurismäki’s quirky blend of black humor and bleak social realism, with a few sly biblical references thrown in for good measure, is evident in a scene from Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film about a trolley driver and his wife, a maitre d’ at a once-popular restaurant, who lose their jobs and struggle to make ends meet. After several of his attempts to find new work have failed, and after creditors have begun to reclaim his possessions, Lauri (Kari Väänänen) kills time at home by filling out a newspaper puzzle, and he asks his wife, Ilona (Kati Outinen), if she can think of any words that remind her of “needle.”

“Heroin, morphine, haystack,” she replies. Lauri, apparently oblivious to the theme of futility that runs through Ilona’s answer, tells her that none of those words fits. “Camel, seam,” she offers. The last word works, and Lauri turns his attention to the next clue, which concerns a man who came down from a tree; the answer is Zacchaeus.

And so, between the tax collector who gave half of his possessions to the poor and the camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man could enter the kingdom of God, Kaurismäki makes two oblique references to biblical characters whose riches stood in the way of their salvation. The implicit lesson is that Lauri and Ilona should not despair, despite their hardships—if anything, their suffering could bring them closer to God—but the references also stand as a critique of the bankers and other wealthy individuals who remain aloof from the less fortunate.

Drifting Clouds was Kaurismäki’s first film in a projected trilogy on unemployment, and The Man Without a Past, a more than worthy contribution to the ever-popular genre of films about memory loss, is the second. It begins with a man (Markku Peltola) getting off a train in Helsinki and walking to a nearby park, where he falls asleep on a bench and is promptly beaten by three thugs who leave him for dead. The man is taken to a hospital, where he dies in the early hours of the morning.

But then a strange thing happens: once the doctor has left the room, the man sits up straight in his bed and walks to the mirror, where, his face swathed in bandages, he calmly straightens his broken nose. The next time we see the man, he is lying unconscious by a river; we do not know how he got there or why he collapsed again, but this time, he is found by a family living in a cargo container in a shipyard near the docks. When the man, who is listed in the film’s credits only as M, comes around, it turns out he has no memory of his earlier life; and so he begins to create a new life and a new identity for himself with the help of his new neighbors.

The film derives much of its humor from the rules and customs that are a necessary part of the social order yet sometimes seem rather absurd. Some of these rules get in the way of the very empathy that they are supposed to facilitate; because he has no memory, M has no identity, as far as the bureaucracy is concerned, and without an identity, he cannot open a bank account or apply for a job or even for social assistance.

One character, a gruff security guard named Anttila (Sakari Kuosmanen), makes a big show of his position as an enforcer of rules, but he bends them, partly to benefit himself, but also partly out of concern for his fellow human beings. Anttila makes the people who live in the shipyard pay him “rent,” and he insists he will deny them thrice, “like Peter denied Christ at the coal fire,” if the authorities find out about them. (“When can I move in?” asks M after arranging to live in a cargo container of his own. “As soon as I turn my back,” replies Anttila.) But for all his bluster, Anttila ultimately identifies with the people who live under his protection; when the thugs who beat M reappear at the end of the film, Anttila remarks, “They’ve beaten many of us,” and M notes his use of the first person.

The film also shows how simple acts of kindness can reach above and beyond the rules and make life just a bit more bearable, as when a restaurant manager gives M a plate of leftovers. And there is sometimes a reciprocity to this kindness; when an electrician diverts some power to M’s new cargo container, M asks what he owes him, and the electrician replies, “If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me on my back.” Most significantly of all, M befriends the people who work for the local Salvation Army; they give him soup and a change of clothes, and he, in return, begins to court Irma (Outinen again), a lonely Christian soldier who is stunned to realize that a man has noticed her.

M also suggests ways the Army can improve its evangelistic efforts, proposing that the band take up rock & roll to make its message more appealing. “We’ve heard about rock,” says the drummer, as though the existence of such music were a vague and unconfirmed rumor, and although his naïveté is quite unrealistic,1 those who have lived through the Christian music debates of the past few decades will recognize the caution with which the church officials accept M’s advice. When the band is about to play its first pop song, a fairly generic ballad about the lonely hearts of men, the officials Christianize it for the crowd—and justify it to themselves—by explaining that the song demonstrates “the futility of our worldly life without Christ.”

But it isn’t long before the band embraces this new music in a bolder and more enthusiastic way. The next time we see them, at an event that is so popular with the shipyard’s residents that the opportunistic Anttila charges admission, they play a catchy rockabilly tune about facing temptation and turning to God for help in staying on the straight and narrow.

In some ways, M is a classic Christ figure. Not only does he die and come back to life, but his amnesia and subsequent inclusion among the shipyard’s residents could be interpreted as a sort of kenotic incarnation: once M has been emptied of his former life, he accepts his humble position among the marginalized, and he becomes a sort of mysterious outsider who bears witness to the despair of some people even as he brings grace to the lives of others. When M and Irma return home from a day of picking mushrooms in the woods, Irma, warmed by the joy they have found with each other, says, “It’s all Mercy”—a line that evokes the parting words (“All is grace”) of the title character in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, who was himself a Christ figure of sorts.

But it is also possible to see M as a type of Christian, whose death and resurrection symbolize the spiritual renewal available to all who become new creations in Christ. When we finally learn a bit more about M’s life before he lost his memory, we get the sense that he has been redeemed from some of his own faults and given a new lease on life himself. As a Christ figure, M brings grace into people’s lives, but as a Christian figure, he has received it, too. Either way, it’s all grace.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about movies.

1. If any denomination has been slow to keep up with popular culture, the Salvation Army would not be it. One of the first Christian rock bands, the Joystrings, was composed of Sally Ann ministers and had a couple of minor hits on the British charts in 1964.

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

The froggy eyes of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera seemed to bulge out of their sockets, as if all-seeing, and Pablo Picasso’s gaze bored into people with fulminating intensity. There is rich poetry, then, in Picasso having once remarked to Rivera that neither of them could paint eyes the way Frida Kahlo did.

The eyes that Kahlo (1907—1954) painted were often her own. The fiery wife of Rivera imbued her quiet incandescent gaze with the dark denseness of the cosmos, usually in an impassive expression that did little to mask the agony that lay bare on the rest of the canvas. The look in her eyes, nearly contemptuous, embodies the Frida Kahlo story: powerfully defying pain and self-pity before a culture, a fate, and a husband that would otherwise grind her into a mere victim.

This is the story that Frida, co-produced by and starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor (Titus), endeavors to tell. The tension between victimization and overcoming reverberated throughout Kahlo’s life, and the trap before biopic-makers is to err on one side or the other—to portray her as either utterly pathetic or overly triumphant. Frida is self-conscious about the tension but fails to keep it taut.

The film’s depiction of Kahlo’s suffering from a skeleton-fracturing bus accident, from Rivera’s infidelities, and from a miscarriage rises above the level of Spanish-language telenovelas, but not by much; as a result, her moments of overcoming are no more poignant. One doesn’t go to a film about Kahlo’s life without something to cry into, but in the end no handkerchief is necessary. What went wrong?

Key elements for a riveting film are in place: As Kahlo, the heretofore one-dimensional Hayek shows surprising depth and range, projecting both the firestorm and the varied winds of vulnerability in the artist. The script reflects the pointed wit of both Kahlo and Rivera (played with creamy smoothness by Alfred Molina), especially when it draws on things they really said or wrote. The film also goes a fair distance to surface the personal chemistry and artistic bond that made Kahlo and Rivera a compelling couple.

Director Taymor’s forte—elaborate sets that capture the mood of an era—is on display here. She stirs the smokey bohemian air that artists gulped down in Marxism’s heady days, when Mexico City, fresh off a revolution (1910-1917) that produced one of the world’s first socialist constitutions, was second only to Moscow as a hothouse for Red intellectuals.

The director also enjoys playing with the sets, magically inserting Hayek’s Kahlo into the artist’s paintings, or, alternatively, having the paintings come to life. Interposing life and art was, after all, what Kahlo did. Sometimes the transitions from Kahlo’s life to her art are a little bumpy, but Taymor turns the waking world into paintings (and vice versa) with daring and painstaking care, at times with breathtaking effect.

The paintings are beautiful, Hayek is beautiful, the sets are beautiful, and all this beauty is the soft kind to go with the candy-coating on the characters. Even Rivera is beautiful in his own slovenly way, occasionally mean but not as callous and infantile as the Rivera of history. The film can be forgiven for twisting history here and there—Hollywood is allowed to tell stories on its own terms—and for presenting a stylized portrait, a stylized life. But Taymor wants to have fun with the free-wheeling, sassy Frida more than render a tormented life in harsh strokes. Frida has all the bright, tropical colors of a Kahlo painting, but not enough of the gruesome jokes running through them.

The horrific events of her life parade by without disturbing us too much. Frida begins with Kahlo as a teenager, seemingly unhampered by the leg muscles that atrophied from polio when she was younger. At 18 comes the fateful bus accident, in which a trolley car’s iron handrail impales her hip, exiting through her vagin*; graphically yet dreamily depicted here, the accident required a series of painful operations to manage the effects of the damaged spine and pelvis. In a culture where Mary and motherhood are adored, Kahlo’s fractured pelvis and spine frustrated her desire to have children. In the film, her abortion (as a result of her disability) and three miscarriages are scaled down to a single miscarriage, but at least there Taymor pulls no punches visually.

Frida also tones down the estrangement that came with Kahlo’s wedding, when, history tells us, she fled the reception as the groom went on a drunken, pistol-waving rampage. From there her marriage to Rivera degenerated into a series of increasingly hurtful adulteries. The film does not try too hard to build up to the one between Rivera and Kahlo’s sister, which led Frida to remark that she had come close to being “murdered by life.”

A more genuine portrayal of this life would not require more blood; the film distributes its blood artfully enough. Lacking is a harder edge in the players and in their surroundings. Why is it that when Hollywood (Miramax Films Corp., in this case) goes on location in Mexico, we get so little grit and so few sharp edges? Mexican filmmakers are not afraid to serve up dark ambience and raw images in realistic films like Amores Perros, and even the magical-realism romance Like Water for Chocolate evokes not only the heroine’s heartache but her chapped lips. Frida could fit into either of these categories, but often even the blood becomes part of a pretty picture.

Hence Hayek is left with the task of trying to convey Kahlo’s agony in spite of the soft layers of insulation wrapped around its sources. She does evince the artist’s physical and emotional anguish, convincingly, in a few scenes. Other times she only speaks of it in an offhand way, presumably in defiance of it. But it’s hard to take her too seriously when, before her brief affair with Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Bush), she tells the exiled Communist leader that, physically, “everything hurts”—after they’ve just scrambled up one of the pyramids of Teotihuacán.

The film’s soft edge includes a lot of sensual nudity, as per the requisite Hollywood treatment of the bohemian lifestyle. The camera has more interest in Kahlo’s lesbian affairs than in her trysts with men—difficult to say why, but it’s hard to forget how gay-friendly Hollywood has been, lately. Moreover, scenes involving the removal of Kahlo’s casts sometimes prove a tad voyeuristic. Indeed, the immobilizing plaster corset looks like a fashion corset; never has a body cast done more to flatter a woman’s figure.

On the one occasion that showing Kahlo naked would not be gratuitous, though, it doesn’t happen. The trolley car accident that inexplicably separated her from her clothes, leaving her covered by blood and the contents of a bus passenger’s bag of powdered gold, was one of those typically Mexican instances of macabre surrealism that spoke volumes of her fate: a tortured, gilded artist who would boldly bare her soul, along with her blood, to the world. Missed opportunity.

The softness that is most self-defeating, however, takes form in the huggy-bear character of Rivera. To begin to understand why Kahlo and many other women, Mexican and foreign, were drawn to him, it’s important to show his charm, wit, artistic stature, and sensitivity; we can grant Taymor that much. But Frida shies away from portraying the full extent of Rivera’s sexual double standard (he was quick to pull his pistol upon discovering any of Kahlo’s male lovers), his filthiness, his gargantuan corpulence, and his childish rants.

The script doesn’t deny Rivera’s womanizing, but it also takes pains to explain the bohemian milieu, wherein the prevailing Marxist fashion viewed marital fidelity as just so much bourgeois posturing. Thus Frida very nearly excuses not only Rivera but Kahlo for entering into such a marriage, while prettifying its consequences.

The reason for softening Rivera is obvious. The more we hate him, the more we’ll question our heroine for loving him. Rather than showing Rivera in all his monstrosity, and Kahlo in all her monstrosity, and exploring their monstrous obsession with one another, Frida plays it safe and suggests that deep down he’s got a heart of gold. He’s not just sensitive, he’s downright sentimental, shedding tears over Kahlo’s suffering as he gazes on one of her paintings. Sure, he’s got that woman addiction, but what artistic genius doesn’t?

Add to this prettiness a story that goes in a flat line. It barely arcs; there’s no sense of the dark floodwaters gradually rising above Kahlo’s nostrils. She’s betrayed one episode after another, and the supposed overcoming comes in episodic affairs of her own. Frida begins to taste like U.S.-style Mexican food—too sweet, and for all that color just a bit bland. Those otherwise harsh jalapeños are pickled and tame.

All the same, this will probably taste fine to the Frida cult that has emerged since the 1983 publication of Hayden Herrera’s astonishingly thorough Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. The film highlights all the traits that make Kahlo a candidate for deification in our age.

A feminist pioneer in a patriarchal authoritarian culture, Kahlo is a martyr in the struggle to become independent. She flouts sexual mores, with the film hinting at the superiority of lesbianism. (Cunningly constructed to have its cake and eat it too, Frida mixes standard-order sexploitation with Feminist Consciousness-Raising.) Her habitual Tehuan costume announces her pride in her indigenous ancestry, with its connotations of spirituality without religion, though Kahlo was an atheist. She’s an apolitical Communist: her communism, abstracted from much of the history of the 20th century, becomes yet another lifestyle choice. Finally, she’s a secular saint: like the “sacred heart” Christs and Marys of Mexican Catholicism, she is continually ripping open her chest to offer the blood-red organ within.

For a body-piercing generation this may resonate keenly, but Kahlo offers more than an open wound. She also kicks butt. Displaying her unibrow and mustache long before the vogue for pierced lips and tongues, Kahlo created an image of defiant self-possession to which many eagerly conform. Hence the Frida keychains, mugs, and T-shirts to go with the two novels (Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K. and Barbara Mujica’s Frida) published last year, not to mention Carole Maso’s unconventional meditation, Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo.

Nor should we ignore the appearance of the religion of Kahloism, described in its website as being for sexy people with cool clothes “who are not afraid to be themselves in a world that seems to reward conformity.”

Most admirers do not regard her as the one true god, though many women identify with her sufferings on some level. Before the movie screened, I emailed a friend in Spain—not a practicing Kahloist, but a Madrid native in her early 30s who identifies deeply with the artist—and asked her to explain what Kahlo meant to her. She replied with a poem. Among other things, the 69-line poem suggests that Kahlo awakened her to Mexicanism—that which is indigenous, mysterious, and passionate—and gave her a timeless point of connection regarding uniquely female suffering.

With Sonia Castaño Salvador’s permission, I have dared to translate the final verses:

Steles and petroglyphs keep secrets
Like the symbols in Frida’s paintings
Color reproduces those trances of pain
Present are the whites and reds
Hospital sheets
And blood from wounds and scars
In her body and in her womanly cosmos

Beautiful Frida, like a paper kite
I fly with you,
I evoke you, wherever you may be …

Even with its figurative soft focus, Frida will not disappoint those looking for the paradox and passion of Mexicanismo. And it has its say on a feminine ordering of the inner universe.

But what would Kahlo herself have made of this telling of her life? Her dark, level gaze might well see this work as she saw most everything else bearing the usa imprint: just so much superficial posturing. Friends of Kahlo and Rivera recalled them to biographer Herrera as “the sacred monsters.” In a harsher, truer light, the monstrous duo would be portrayed with the severity and integrity that Martin Scorscese drew on in Raging Bull to re-create, and implicitly redeem, the monstrous Jake La Motta. Frida needs to make us wince more. The artist’s ferocious defiance of her destiny would then strike the unsparing blow we expect from her.

Jeff M. Sellers, associate editor of Christianity Today magazine, previously worked as journalist in Mexico and Spain and compiled and translated Folk Wisdom of Mexico: Proverbios y Dichos Mexicanos (Chronicle Books, 1994).

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

Arriving out of the Western desert in a.d. 635, a group of Nestorian Christians, led by the monk Aluoben, entered the Chinese capital of Chang An (modern Xian) and were welcomed by the Tai Zong emperor, founder of the great Tang dynasty. Over the following centuries, their faith spread to cities around China. The earliest Chinese Christians took the first steps in meeting the epic challenge of translating a universal message from a distant Semitic sect into words that could be understood in Europe’s cultural antipodes, the “utter east,” the glory and wonder that was Cathay.

In The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, researcher Martin Palmer introduces us to the Nestorian Christians, as well as the improbable story of how the ancient Chinese church was rediscovered in modern times. Palmer himself played a key role in that rediscovery, which also involved Jesuits, a Taoist priest exploring a cave, a 115-year-old gatekeeping Buddhist nun, and possible Axis spies. (It is hard to read the first part of this book without thinking of Indiana Jones.) In the rest of The Jesus Sutras, Palmer brings the extant texts of the Chinese Nestorians—the famous Nestorian stele uncovered in the early 17th century near Xian, and texts from Dunhuang in Northwest China—together in a poetic English translation. The fascinating blend of theistic and karmic thought that appears in some of these texts, Palmer argues, points toward a synthesis between West and East that can bring needed renewal to the Christian faith.

In 1998, Palmer discovered a pagoda outside of Xian that turned out to be what was left of an ancient church. (The temple where legend says Lao Zi wrote the Tao Te Ching, the hymn to the paradoxical power of gentleness that crowns the Taoist canon, stands just a mile away.) When Palmer and his fellow researchers arrived, the pagoda was being used as a Buddhist temple, and an elderly nun greeted Palmer at the door:

I stood where fourteen hundred years ago Christians had faced east and prayed, and I too prayed. I felt I had finally come home after twenty five years of searching for that home, of never knowing if it did, in fact, exist. Yet here was evidence of a living Tao of Jesus, a once vital practice of Jesus’ teachings in a Taoist context. I wept for joy, for love of my faith, for the gentleness of the Buddhist nun, and because my heart was full to bursting.

As the Jesus sutras show, the Nestorian community began the work not only of translating the gospel into Chinese words but also of relating it to the Chinese philosophical tradition. “[Jesus] found people who were living evil lives and brought them back to the Way of goodness, the True Way” (or tao). “You bring us back to our original nature” (a concept central to the thought of Confucian philosopher Mencius and later Taoists). “The Messiah gave up his body to the wicked ones for the sake of all living beings” (as a bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition aims to save all sentient beings).

As the Nestorian community interacted with other faith communities, later thinkers blended Christianity and Chinese thought in often striking imagery: “Divine Son … Send your raft of salvation to save us from the burning streams!” “Jade-faced one, exalted as the sun and moon!” “World-honored one!” The orthodoxy of the texts waxes and wanes, however:

The Messiah was orbited by the Buddhas and arhats. Looking down he saw the suffering of all that is born, and so he began to teach. … “Peace comes only when you can rest secure in your own place, when your heart and mind rest in God.”

All such evil stems from the first beings, and the disobedience in the fruitful garden. All that lives is affected by the karma of previous lives. God suffered terrible woes so that all should be freed from karma.

Palmer praises this last notion (which finds echoes in some modern New Age and Hindu thought) as a “radical” shift from “classical Western nonreincarnational beliefs.” But the church fathers rejected rebirth because they thought it untrue (Augustine’s arguments on the subject still seem persuasive), not because the idea was unfamiliar or exotic. Nor is reincarnation so central to Chinese thought that denial of the doctrine has often proved an impediment to the gospel.

In terms of social ideals, the first Chinese Christians come across as an attractive and progressive community: vegetarian, nonviolent, treating men and women equally, refusing to own slaves. It may be unfair of Palmer to credit the Jains of India for these innovations, considering traditions in Western Christianity of gospel feminism, pacifism, and (in St. Paul, Gregory of Nyssa, and others) incipient anti-slavery. But it is heartening in any case to note the emphasis the earliest Chinese church put on social compassion.

Striking and poetic, and generally accurate, as Palmer’s translation appears, he occasionally engages in a bit of wishful unorthodoxy. Palmer thinks the Nestorians disbelieved in original sin, for example. He translates the stele as saying God gave Adam and Eve “the original nature of goodness.” An earlier translator read the same phrase as “an excellent disposition”—more stodgy, perhaps, but following the original more carefully. Palmer also thinks the Chinese Nestorians more ecologically sensitive than their Western cousins. Thus, God appointed Adam and Eve “guardians of all creation,” rather than “governors” or “rulers” (although zhen does in fact imply hierarchical rule). Palmer then generously praises the Taoist Christians for a sensitivity toward nature that he himself has interpolated.

Palmer also suggests the Chinese Nestorians can help us overcome the burden of the doctrine of original sin, which he blames on Augustine:

In these Christian sutras from China is the shape or outline of a post-Augustinian theology that the West itself needs in order to be free from the burden of original sin and thus reconfigured to rediscover Christianity.

Ironically, some modern Chinese thinkers have come to the conclusion that what Chinese culture requires from “the Christian spirit” is precisely the teaching of original sin. Yuan Zhimin, a philosopher active in China’s Democracy Movement, has argued that the Christian emphasis on sin provides “the ultimate philosophical base for the establishment of social covenants, checks and balances of power, and the rule of law. … Denial of man’s sin and limitations is the spiritual root of tyranny; our awareness, the beginning of democracy.”1

The Jesus sutras exhibit an attitude toward government that seems to justify Yuan’s critique. One strains to see a hint in these texts of the bold Christian tradition of believers standing up to tyranny, of Justin Martyr (“You can kill us, but you cannot hurt us”), of Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, or Wang Mingdao. Instead: “The Emperor is who he is because of his previous lives which have led to his being placed in this fortunate position.” By contrast, “If someone is seriously ill or handicapped do not mock, because this is a result of karma.” If status is based on the merit of past lives (or lack thereof), what could be more perverse than to disturb the harmony of a hierarchical society by dreams of political equality? It would be a disappointing end to an Indiana Jones movie if, when opened, the Ark of the Covenant visited its wrath, not on tyrants or Nazi goons, but on the damsel in distress, or on low-caste Indian children laboring in mines for (presumable) past-life trangressions.

The Chinese Nestorians were, however, undeniably creative in relating their faith to the language and ideas of their host country. Palmer reasonably contrasts their attitude (and that of the early Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, whom he also admires) with the cultural insensitivity of many Western missions:

The Church had made the great leap— which it has so often failed to do in the more recent past—from missionary Church to truly indigenous Church. … The building of the Da Qin monastery pushed the Church into a serious engagement with Taoism, and consequently with Buddhism and Confucianism.

Reflective and creative engagement with other beliefs is certainly one of the great needs of our day. Neither Western missionaries nor modern Chinese Christians have always related the gospel to the depths of Chinese thought well. By contrast, the free innovation of the Nestorians is often refreshing. Some of their ideas are worth serious reflection, and are often expressed in beautiful language. Still, however skillfully Ricci related his message to ancient Chinese belief about God (Tian or Shang Di), the essence of what the great Jesuit preached was orthodox Christianity. Apart from the supremacy of God and the importance of someone named Jesus, this was not always so during the later eras of Taoist Christianity.

When a religion is introduced into a new culture, syncretism, borrowing images from the foreign tradition and connecting them to native ideas—in the Dalai Lama’s fine phrase, “grafting a sheep’s head on a yak’s body”—is perhaps the most simple and spontaneous creative reaction. As Palmer puts it, later Jesus sutras are often “a fusion of uniquely Christian imagery, Taoist teachings, and Buddhist philosophy.” Contextualization, accurately translating ideas from the living heart of one tradition into the most apt terminology of another while being faithful to both, takes a studied vision or genius, like that of a Justin or a Ricci. The earlier Nestorians often achieve this as well, particularly in the famous Nestorian stele, erected in 781, which seems to me quite orthodox as well as eloquent.

A still rarer insight involves recognizing the work of God within pagan cultures in a way that deepens what is already central in the native tradition. The Sutra of Jesus Christ proclaims (in tactful terms similar to those in which the Tai Zong, and, a thousand years later, the equally great Kang Xi emperor, praised Christianity), “All great teachers such as the Buddhas are moved by this Wind and there is nowhere in the world where this Wind does not reach and move.” Fulfillment theology affirms this truth from within orthodox Christianity. Sources as various as the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, Augustine’s City of God, the medieval Dream of the Rood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and John Farquhar’s remarkable The Crown of Hinduism show how Christian thinkers have mined gospel truth (the “seed of the word” or “redemptive analogies”) from the depths of Jewish, Greek, Roman, German, and Indian cultures.

Are such affinities between gospel and tradition just a matter of good taste or fortune in mixing disparate cultural elements—like a “Korean burrito” at McDonald’s—or is something deeper at work? Augustine believed Providence might sketch a rough draft of redemption within pagan cultures: “There is nothing far-fetched in the belief that among other peoples besides the Jews there existed men to whom this mystery was revealed.”

Thoughtful missionaries and Chinese Christians have described Christianity, at its most orthodox, not as a faith that is inherently alien to Chinese culture, or even as a universal doctrine for which, after a long quest, equivalent terms might be found in Chinese, but rather as the fulfillment, culmination, and synthesis of much that is implicit in Chinese tradition itself. As several Christian scholars have pointed out, for example, in its extended, metaphysical meaning, the term tao carries connotations that are remarkably similiar to those of the Greek logos. I have seen the character carved in stone in front of a new Chinese church, with the opening words of John’s Gospel, in Chinese, beneath: “In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God. … The Tao became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Some Chinese Christians agree that the “founder” of Taoism, Lao Zi, was indeed moved by the Spirit of God. Yuan went so far as to call Lao Zi “a true prophet of God” who “prophesied the coming of Jesus.” To the more cautious scholar Lin Yutang, Jesus and Lao Zi were “brothers at heart” who both “built their kingdoms on poverty of spirit.” But Jesus went further than Lao Zi, by incarnating this teaching in action. For orthodox “Christian Taoists,” the “Tao became flesh,” and through the weakness of the cross, conquered all. By such insights, much that is beautiful in Chinese culture is retroactively drawn up into the redemptive story of the human race.

What place in Chinese theology will Chinese Nestorian teachings then hold? Christians can rejoice in the poetry and kindliness of many of these writings. Chinese can read them and see that the gospel is not a newcomer to China, an “alien teaching” (yang jiao). On the contrary: these texts reveal a Christianity that had assumed elegant Chinese intellectual garb, and was praised by one of the greatest Chinese rulers in the most glorious dynasty of all, while Vikings were launching raids along a partially pagan and barbarian European coastlands.

In theological insight, the Jesus sutras seem to hold a position somewhere between the Gospel of Thomas and the Alexandrian school of Clement and Origen. One need not accept Palmer’s theology to share his enthusiasm for these texts, or to feel gratitude for his work in making them more readily available in English. It is hard not to like Palmer and the creative, mysterious church he champions, though he does so somewhat naïvely, and shows less sympathy with his own tradition than he might. The Jesus Sutras makes a fascinating addition to the library of anyone who is interested in Asian Christianity, missiology, and modern attempts to reconcile East and West—for here is the rough but often promising and inspiring first draft of the Divine Logos in Chinese thought.

David Marshall teaches at Siebold University in Nagasaki, Japan. Among his books are True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills Chinese Culture (Kuai Mu Press) and Jesus and the Religions of Man (Kuai Mu Press).

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

1. Reflections on the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., in Samuel Ling, ed., Soul Searching, God and Democracy, 2nd ed. (China Horizon, 1998), p. 57.

The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare by Ram A. CnaanNew York Univ. Press, 2002328 pp.; $19.50, paper

On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed into law a welfare reform bill known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The bill included a provision sponsored by Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri which sought to ease restrictions on faith-based service organizations receiving government funding. This Charitable Choice provision, as it was called, prompted a flurry of interest in the role that churches could play in assisting people who were on welfare to become self sufficient. During the 2000 presidential election campaign Al Gore and George Bush both spoke favorably about the role that churches were already playing and promised to pass new legislation to assist in their efforts.

Soon after he was elected, President Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and appointed John I. DiIulio, Jr., an outspoken advocate of religiously sponsored service organizations, as its director. Hoping to pass additional legislation favorable to faith-based efforts, the Bush administration praised social ministries and encouraged the public to become more involved in supporting these ministries. While these efforts were sidelined by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, they left many unanswered questions about what churches were actually doing to provide social services.

Ram Cnaan, who teaches in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the first to take up the challenge of systematically conducting research among congregations to find out how they were serving their communities. Through a grant from Partners for Sacred Places, an organization concerned with preserving historic church buildings, Professor Cnaan conducted an extensive study of churches in Philadelphia that indicated the important role they were playing in sponsoring programs to help the needy.

The present book significantly expands that earlier research. It is based on information from approximately 300 congregations, 251 of which are located in the United States and 46 in Ontario, Canada. The congregations are not strictly a representative sample, but were chosen from lists of churches in seven metropolitan areas: New York City, Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Mobile, Houston, and San Francisco. The first wave of research was conducted among historic churches and a second wave included newer churches. A small study was also conducted in Council Grove, Kansas, to provide information about churches in a small town. At each of the churches a member of the research team conducted a three-hour interview in which questions were asked about the congregation’s history, finances, activities, and social programs.

The principal finding is that nearly all the congregations in the study provided some form of social and community service. The most common programs addressed the needs of children, the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Besides formal programs, such as housing projects or neighborhood cleanup activities, churches were involved in a wide range of informal activities, such as pastoral counseling, informal care of the sick or bereaved, referring people to more specialized agencies, and providing space for community groups to meet. Cnaan suggests that were it not for congregations approximately a third of children now in daycare centers would have no place to go, most scouting troops and twelve-step groups would have no place to meet, and large numbers of homeless shelters and soup kitchens would disappear. He also estimates the dollar value of the various services that congregations provide. When volunteer labor is included (at approximately $11 an hour), the average amount per congregation per month is $4,285.78.

Of course congregations vary considerably in how many social programs they sponsor and in the percentage of operating budget devoted to these programs. The primary finding is not surprising. The main factor that determines a congregation’s involvement in social programs is its annual operating budget: congregations with larger budgets have a larger number of social programs and devote a larger proportion of their budget to these programs. What is surprising is that none of the other factors considered, such as number of active members, number of clergy, income of members, or “conservative ideology,” was significantly associated with the number of or financial commitment to social programs once operating budget was taken into account (the study did not include comparisons among denominations).

Of the factors that did not matter, conservative ideology is perhaps the most tantalizing. Some observers have speculated that evangelical churches are more actively involved in their communities than liberal or progressive churches, while other observers have argued just the opposite, and still others have suggested that the question depends on what kind of community involvement is at issue. I would have liked to see this question explored more fully in the book, especially since it was unclear to me, at least, whether conservative ideology was the same thing or different from being evangelical and, in any case, how this might compare with denominational differences.

By considering congregations in close proximity to one another, the study was able to show that particular churches tend to develop niches in the community and fulfill specialized needs within those niches. For instance, one church may have a thriving day care program while another church is better at meeting the needs of the elderly and yet another church may operate a soup kitchen or specialize in hospital visits or providing pastoral counseling. Apparently this usually happens informally rather than through any coordinated effort and the study suggests that better coordination would probably help.

The case study of Council Grove, Kansas, is especially interesting because we know much less about churches in rural areas than we do about urban and suburban churches. Council Grove, once an important point of departure on the Santa Fe trail, is the seat of Morris County, one of the many counties in Kansas that has lost population (from 11,859 in 1930 to 6,104 in 2000) as a result of agricultural decline in the region. Consulting the county’s website, I learned that there were 373 men and 451 women in 1999 whose incomes put them below the official poverty level, that there were 429 people on food stamp assistance, and that there were 823 Medicaid enrollees.

I also learned that there were nine churches in Council Grove. Cnaan’s research team collected information from all of them. All but one were Protestant, and all of these, except one, were affiliated with mainline denominations. Each of the churches developed a ministry that filled a special need in the community. The Christian Church committed itself to youth services, the Berean Baptist Church had a popular Kids Club for younger children, the Congregational Church specialized in helping single mothers with children, and so on. Collectively, the churches operated a thrift shop, a ministry to residents of a local nursing home, and a hospitality coalition. Altogether, the research team found that the churches sponsored 27 different programs which on average benefited 32 congregational members and 182 nonmembers.

The positive picture of church-based social services that we see here has been confirmed in recent nationally representative studies. The National Congregations Survey conducted by Mark Chaves at the University of Arizona among a national sample of more than a thousand congregations found that 74.6 percent had participated in or supported “social service, community development, or neighborhood organizing projects” within the past 12 months (www.thearda.com). Similarly, Faith Communities Today, a report from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research based on a national study of more than 14,000 congregations, concluded that “nearly 85 percent of all U.S. congregations are engaged with soup kitchens or food pantries, emergency shelters and clothing pantries, and with financial help to those in need” (http://fact.hartsem.edu).

With all the good things being done by churches, it may be tempting to see them as the solution to the nation’s need for social services. If so, we should heed what John DiIulio writes in the book’s foreword: “The idea that government can be replaced by religious charities in serving the needy is fanciful at best.” Cnaan argues that the churches should be a quiet partner with government, providing a first line of help for the needy, rather than replacing the public programs that serve as a vital lifeline for lower-income families.

Whether congregations should take money from government for the social programs they sponsor is a harder question. In Chaves’s study, only 3.3 percent of congregations were currently receiving funds from local, state, or federal government. And in a community study of churches I conducted in northeastern Pennsylvania, only about 5 percent of clergy said they were seriously entertaining applying for government funds under the Charitable Choice provision. Most expressed concern that fiscal ties to government would create endless bureaucratic and regulatory entanglements.

In focusing on congregations, though, we miss the important fact that much of what churches do to provide social services is organized through separate 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations. This is sometimes obscured by Cnaan’s emphasis on congregations as service providers, but his data show that churches frequently help to sponsor activities that are administered by independent organizations such as soup kitchens, homeless shelters, or food pantries and by local chapters of such organizations as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services. My research in northeastern Pennsylvania showed that the recipients of these faith-based service organizations were quite different from those who received help directly from congregations: they had lower incomes, lower levels of education, and more varied and more serious needs. The larger 501(c)3 organizations often do receive some of their support from government and are better prepared to deal with the red tape involved.

The other important question that discussions of faith-based social services leave open is the relationship between volunteering to help the needy and engaging in advocacy with and on behalf of the needy. The emphasis on individual responsibility in American religion plays an important role in mobilizing volunteers. But volunteering may also raise awareness of community needs and, when it does, mobilize people to think differently about public policies.

Robert Wuthnow is professor of sociology at Princeton University. He has written and edited many books, including most recently The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism (Univ. of California Press), which he edited with John H. Evans.

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

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