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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF C H R I ST I A N L I T E R AT U R E
George Thomas Kurian Editor
James D. Smith III Coeditor
Mark E. Roberts Associate Editor
Sarah Claudine Day Managing Editor
Volume 2: Biographies H–Z
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2010
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by George Thomas Kurian All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-Â�in-Â�Publication Data The encyclopedia of Christian literature / edited by George Thomas Kurian, James D. Smith III ; Mark E. Roberts, associate editor, and Sarah Claudine Day, managing editor. â•…â•…â•… p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-Â�0-Â�8108-Â�6987-Â�5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-Â�0-Â�8108-Â�7283-Â�7 (ebook) 1. Christian literature—Encyclopedias.â•… I. Kurian, George Thomas.â•… II. Smith, James D., 1951– BR117.3.E53 2010 261.5'803—dc22 2009049110 ` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-Â�1992. Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword David Lyle Jeffrey
vii
Preface James D. Smith III
xi
Acknowledgments
xiii xv
Introduction George Thomas Kurian VOLUME 1 Genres and Types of Christian Literature
1
Apocalyptic Literature Apocryphal Literature Apologetics Apostolic Fathers Bible as Literature Biography and Autobiography Children’s Literature Christian Drama Christmas and Christian Festivals Christological Literature Church History Commentaries, Biblical Conversion Literature Creation Literature Creedal and Early Conciliar Literature Devotional Literature English Bible Translations Epistles and Collected Letters Fiction Gender Literature Gospels
3 5 8 12 17 20 25 32 33 36 40 44 47 50 53 57 61 64 69 75 82
— iii —
Contents
iv
Hagiography Hermeneutical Texts Liturgies Media and Periodical Literature Medieval Literature Meditational Prose Missiologies Missions Literature Monastic Literature Mystical Writings Pastoral Instruction The Penitentials as Literature Poetry Prayer Reference Works Sermons and Homilies Social Ethics Songs and Hymns Spiritual Formation and Counsel Systematics Women’s Literature Biographies A–G
87 90 91 95 99 104 105 109 115 119 125 128 131 135 139 143 146 150 153 156 161 165
VOLUME 2 Biographies H–Z
349
Appendix A: Two Thousand Years of Christian Literature: A Representative Timeline Appendix B: The Seventy-Five Greatest Christian Writers Index About the Contributors About the Editors
661 669 671 689 711
Biographies H–Z
H HADEWIJCH OF ANTWERP/BRABANT (mid-Â� thirteenth century).╇ The writings of Hadewijch (fl. mid-Â� thirteenth century near Antwerp) were the subject of little scholarly work or popular reading before 1980, when an anthology of her translated writings in the Classics of Christian Spirituality series opened the eyes of those interested in medieval and women’s spirituality. Before then, Hadewijch’s works seem to have been read only in certain devotional circles, such as the Brethren of the Common Life, and by certain individuals, especially Jan van Ruusbroec (d. 1381). Some of her ideas and images prefigure those of Meister Eckhart. Most of the scant biographical information about Hadewijch has been gleaned from her own writings. She was well educated and familiar with the work of Augustine, William of St. Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Richard of St. Victor. She knew Latin and French and seems to have been particularly influenced by courtly love literature, from which much of her imagery is drawn. Hadewijch’s work prompted some debate during her life, although she was never formally charged with heresy. It is likely that she was also the leader of a community of beguines, and letters attest that she encountered periodic hostility in that role. Hadewijch is generally accepted to have authored thirty-Â� one letters, fourteen prose descriptions of visions, and more than sixty-Â�five poems (forty-Â�five in stanzas and sixteen in couplets), all in medieval Flemish. (Some scholars have attributed some of her poetry to a hypothetical “Hadewijch II.”) She wrote in the vernacular, thereby making her work accessible to the laity. Her prose work is considered some of the earliest vernacular writing in the Low Countries. Hadewijch is more a writer and poet sharing her experiences than a systematic theologian, although she does touch on doctrine in her letters. Many of her foundational
ideas are fairly traditional, such as the notion that humanity was created in the image and likeness of God and thereby possesses an inner grace despite the Fall. This inner essence is God, the ground of all creation, and certain souls can return to God in mystical union. The core of Hadewijch’s mystical thought is Minne (roughly translated “Love,” with all the connotations in Hadewijch’s time as that word has today), and her type of mysticism has been labeled Minnemystik. Minne, which suffuses and sustains the world, functions as both the personification of God Himself and as the human state of loving God. God and soul can only be united in love by the creature’s paradoxical abandonment of Minne in true humility. Such a soul both is God and loves God and is, simply, “God with God.” This “union of indistinction” brings the soul to nothing, in a state of simultaneous abnegation and exaltation. Hadewijch chooses the Song of Songs and chivalric metaphors as the basis for some of her more erotic descriptions of this process. Hadewijch was born to nobility, and a strong sense of social hierarchy is echoed in her writing. For her, the union of God and the soul is only possible for a select few, of which she was one. She wrote much from her personal experience, and her descriptions of her visions and extended ecstasies are remarkably detailed. She yearned for Jesus to come to her but suffered long periods of exile or abandonment. She writes of fruition and want of fruition, of spiritual childhood and maturity, of nobility and wretchedness, of an abyss that calls out to the infinite abyss that is God. Principal Ideas of Hadewijch •â•‡ The human soul is at once wretched and fallen (as heir to Adam’s sin) and noble and exalted (as a child of God).
— 351 —
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Scott Hahn
•â•‡ Minne (love) is both God and loving God, and it is the power that both sustains creation and transforms the soul in union with God. •â•‡ The soul can attain a “union without distinction” with God by embracing complete humility and, paradoxically, sacrificing Minne. •â•‡ The soul experiences tremendous suffering and longing in waiting for its bridegroom, but the ultimate union is intense and passionate. Bibliography The most representative anthology of Hadewijch’s work in Engliah is Hadewijch: The Complete Works, translated by Columba Hart in the Classics of Western Spirituality Series (Paulist Press, 1980). Other translations can be found in Marieke van Baest’s translation of the Poetry of Hadewijch (Leuven: Peeters, 1998) and Elizabeth Petroff ’s Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986), pp. 189–200. The best secondary sources include Paul Mommaers’s Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic (Louvain: Peeters, 2004) and Bernard McGinn’s study in The Flowering of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), pp. 200–222. —Joanne Maguire Robinson
SCOTT HAHN (1957–).╇ American. Scott Walker Hahn was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1957. He became an evangelical Protestant Christian while in high school and was involved in the para-Â�church movement Young Life. He earned a B.A. (1979) from Grove City College, where he triple majored in theology, philosophy, and economics. He then earned an M.Div. (1982) from Gordon-Â� Conwell Theological Seminary and finally completed his Ph.D. (1995) in theology at Marquette University. After studying at Gordon-Â�Conwell, he became a Presbyterian minister and served as associate pastor in Virginia. At the same time that he served as a Presbyterian minister, he taught theology, philosophy, and economics at a Christian high school and taught seminary courses as an assistant professor. Hahn became a high profile intellectual convert to Catholicism when in 1986 he entered the Catholic Church. He currently teaches theology at both Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he is professor of theology and scripture, as well as at St. Vincent Seminary, where he is the Pope Benedict XVI Chair of Biblical Theology and Liturgical Proclamation. Hahn and his wife, Kimberly, have six children and currently reside in Steubenville, Ohio. Hahn is also the president and founder of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, which hosts a popular Web site for the study of the Bible and theology
(www.salvationhistory.com). Hahn has published twenty-Â� eight books, including nine brief scripture commentaries through the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible Series (Ignatius Press). His Rome Sweet Home (Ignatius Press, 1993), which was coauthored with his wife and details their conversion to Catholicism, is a best-Â�seller. He has also published widely in lay Catholic periodicals and has produced numerous CDs containing both popular and academic theology lectures. He has become one of the most popular lay Catholic writers. Kinship by Covenant: The Bible’s Unity One of the areas on which Hahn writes the most is on the notion of the covenant as found in scripture. Hahn’s doctoral dissertation, “Kinship by Covenant: A Biblical Theological Study of Covenant Types and Texts in the Old and New Testaments” (Marquette University, 1995), examined the covenant as a major theme running throughout scripture in both the Old and New Testaments. He has also published scholarly articles examining the covenant in Catholic Biblical Quarterly and in Currents in Biblical Research. A more popular version of this work is Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture (Charis, 1998). Hahn argues that covenants were how families were extended in the ancient Near East and in biblical times. Unlike contracts, covenants brought people who were not previously related into family relationships. God relates to humans by means of covenants. In the Bible the covenant family of God expands from a couple, Adam and Eve, to a family, Noah, to a tribe, Abraham, to a nation, Moses, to a kingdom, David, to an international church, Jesus. Letter and Spirit: Scripture and the Liturgy Hahn’s most recent work deals with the liturgical content and context of scripture. As early as his The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (Doubleday, 1999), Hahn began writing about how to understand the Bible in light of the Catholic liturgy and how to understand the Catholic liturgy in light of the Bible. In one of his most recent works, Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy (Doubleday, 2005), Hahn takes this thought farther. He shows how the books of the Bible were canonized primarily for use in the church’s liturgy, and their use already in the liturgy was one of the primary requirements for canonization. Hahn maintains that much of the content of the Bible deals with liturgical themes: sacrifice and worship of God. Furthermore, Hahn argues that the liturgy is a privileged location for biblical interpretation. It is above all in the liturgy that the faithful encounter scripture as the living word of╯God.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Bibliography Hahn’s works include: Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God. Doubleday, 2001; First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity. Doubleday, 2002; Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession. Doubleday, 2003; Scripture Matters: Essays on Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church. Emmaus Road, 2003; Swear to God: The Promise and Power of the Sacraments. Doubleday, 2004; Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei. Doubleday, 2006; Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith. Doubleday, 2007. On Hahn’s biblical interpretation see Jeffrey Lawrence Morrow, “Evangelical Catholics and Catholic Biblical Scholarship: An Examination of Scott Hahn’s Canonical, Liturgical and Covenantal Biblical Exegesis.” Ph.D. diss., University of Dayton, 2007. —Jeffrey L. Morrow
DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD (1905–1961).╇ Swedish. Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Johkoping, Sweden, in 1905 and died near Ndola, in Zimbabwe in 1961 in a plane crash. The son of the Swedish prime minister during World War I, Hammarskjöld was the secretary-Â�general of the United Nations from 1953 through 1961. After his death the manuscript of his Vagmarken or Markings was discovered among his writings. It was a spiritual diary that he had maintained over the years from 1925. “They were written,” he wrote, “for myself, not for the public, [as part of] my negotiations with myself and with God.” While there are common themes throughout the work, there is no systematic method behind the essays. Rather they reflect various insights and random meditations that bubbled up within him. There are few exact dates. The entries vary in style, content, and length. There are many quotations, reflecting Hammarskjöld’s interest in poetry, the scriptures (especially the Psalms and the gospels), literature, and theology. Many are taken from mystics such as Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Julian of Norwich and poets such as St. John Perse, whose works he had translated into Swedish. His style is heavy, sometimes obscure. Even the briefest entries are written in a type of blank verse, especially haiku. One of them reads: For him who has faith The last miracle Shall be greater than the first
Hammarskjöld’s faith was intensely personal, anchored in intimacy of the self with the divine. While the essays are not organized thematically, there are recurring themes.
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Hammarskjöld’s God was not the God of dogma but of direct encounter. The practice of the presence of God permeates the work. He wrote, “We die on the day our lives cease to be illumined by a steady radiance of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.╯.╯. . It is in union with God that one discovers life itself.╯.╯. . I am the vessel. The draught is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.” Hammarskjöld’s mysticism is clearly Christocentric, a carryover from his Lutheran upbringing. It is Christ who reveals God. It is not Christianity that Hammarskjöld seeks but Christ himself. He sees the suffering of Christ as a clue to an understanding of the nature of all suffering. His references to Christ continually relate to suffering, sacrifice, and the cross. Jesus represents humanity and mysticism at its best. In his association with and compassion for outcasts and sinners, he saw the worth of all persons as well as the paradoxes of the human condition. Jesus’s Passion led Hammarskjöld to another of his abiding concerns: death. “The inaccessible solitude of death” appears as the leitmotif throughout Markings. Death is at once a friend and an enemy, and courage in the face of death is the truest form of courage. Loneliness is another recurring theme. He saw loneliness as a spiritual asset, a “communion” that broadens our vision of reality. Through loneliness one looks for faith, for faith is an escape from loneliness that brings companionship with the divine. “Faith,” he writes, “is not derived from nor created, nor carried by anything except its own reality.” As he reflects on the meaning of life, Hammarskjöld reveals a sense of destiny, although not fatalism. Destiny means recognizing that your life is not your own but belongs to God. Self-Â�centeredness is one of the most destructive forces in life. The sense of destiny enables persons to accept life as a gift and recognize its limitations and the need for humility. He struggles with humility throughout his illustrious career. Several entries contain suggestions for dealing with pride and public acclaim. It is in that sense of limitation and surrender that Hammarskjöld discovered the real meaning of life. It was a way that brought a liberating sense of humility and the experience of the cross. This was his Mystic Way, a sense of the transcendent, the ability to experience God amid the struggles of life. Life is a mystery, “lived in the immediate moment, a stillness in the midst of a cauldron. This mystery is not the result of human efforts; it is a gift from God. We do not seek the Mystic Way; it seeks us.” Markings is a classic of modern Christian spirituality. It is the private spiritual journey of a public individual. One of its brief poems provides a fitting memorial to Hammarskjöld: Alone in his secret growth He found a kinship With all living things.
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Robin Hardy
Bibliography
Lash, Joseph. Dag Hammarskjöld. London: Cassell, 1962. Stolpe, Sven. Dag Hammarskjöld: A Spiritual Portrait. New York: Scribner, 1966. Van Dusen, Henry Pitney. Dag Hammarskjöld: The Statesman and His Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
—George Thomas Kurian
ROBIN HARDY (1955–).╇ American. Robin Hardy was born January 9, 1955, in Fort Worth, Texas, the daughter of John B. Moore and Ruth Eileen Cramer Moore. At age seventeen she was left hard of hearing after an illness. Her 1976 marriage to Stephen Hardy ended in divorce in 2004. Their daughter, Stephanie, is married, with one child. Their son, Glenn, is in the U.S. Navy. After graduation from Baylor University, Hardy worked as an editor for Word Books. Subsequent to her employment, Word published her first three novels. Currently she has published eighteen novels and edited one Christian devotional book. Hardy lives in Dallas, Texas, where she continues to write novels and manages Westford Press. Annals of Lystra and Latter Annals of Lystra Hardy calls her first trilogy Annals of Lystra, composed of The Chataine’s Guardian (Word, 1984), Stone of Help (Word, 1985), and Liberation of Lystra (originally published as High Lord of Lystra; Word, 1986), a parable. On the surface level these tales provide romance and adventure in a fantasy setting reminiscent of medieval times, but underneath the love and courage runs an allegorical strain suggesting the Christian story of redemptive love with the hero a Christ figure. In the second novel, the heroine’s father willingly submits to hanging that she might be freed from the slavery her willfulness has brought her to. The first of the series was runner-up for the Gold Medallion Book Award in 1985. The Latter Annals of Lystra—Nicole of Prie Mer (Westford, 2003), Ares of Westford (Westford, 2004), Prisoners of Hope (Westford, 2005), and Road of Vanishing (Westford, 2006)—return to the kingdom one hundred years later. These fast-Â�moving and emotionally charged tales of loyalty and humility tease of deeper meanings as they depict the struggle between good and evil. The Streiker Trilogy On the romantic surface level Streiker’s Bride (NavPress, 1993) tells of a beautiful but scatterbrained young woman pursued by a tall, dark, handsome billionaire, who wants to give her everything, but she must choose Fletcher Streiker sight unseen. The alert reader experiences an epiphany in recognizing that the Christian life is much like the story of Adair Weiss (who takes a dare) in that the believer must
choose Christ through faith in His character. One day after their marriage, Fletcher leaves Adair, but he has kept a hidden bodyguard always near as he has given her a chance to mature. Streiker the Killdeer (NavPress, 1994), taking place in Hawaii, represents heaven in the trilogy. Streiker’s Morning Sun (NavPress, 1995) takes place in frozen Beaconville as Streiker tries to persuade citizens headed for hell to get on his train when the whistle blows. Hardy calls these works analogies rather than allegories. Other Works Hardy has published six novels in the Sammy Series about a handsome, loveable, but independent detective in the Dallas, Texas, police force. These novels are enjoyable reading but cannot be taken too seriously. Padre (NavPress, 1994), another adventure tale, is set in the Big Bend area of Texas. There seems little of serious intent in this novel, but its sequel, His Strange Ways (Westford, 2007), contains some of Hardy’s finest allegory. Again, as in the Streiker trilogy, the reader sees God at work as Padre finds himself directed by circumstances set up solely for his benefit (though not recognized as such). The novel illustrates Romans 8:28, as all things do ultimately work out for good. Hardy has also edited and annotated W. W. Melton’s Sifted but Saved (Broadman and Holman, Publishers, 2001), a 1925 collection of brief sermons. Hardy says of this book that it “opened my eyes to the integrity, reliability, and timelessness of the Bible, the importance of obedience, the certainty of faith” (http://robinhardy.com/Meditations/ Robin_s_Reading_List/robin_s_reading_list.htm). Conclusion Hardy’s work eschews abstraction to present the Christian message in concrete terms. Hardy deliberately strives for clarity in her work and tells exciting, novel stories. Best of all, the deeper level of her work often leaves the reader with a sense of discovery. Principal Ideas of Robin Hardy •â•‡ Redemptive love provides the most powerful story in the world. •â•‡ God is able to heal real suffering caused by real evil. •â•‡ Even fantasy can realistically depict the human struggle. •â•‡ Pleasing God brings the greatest joy in life. •â•‡ Total belief in God saves us from our fears. •â•‡ To receive the best God has to offer, we must believe in His good intentions toward us and trust Him completely. •â•‡ Ultimate (not necessarily worldly) success, peace, healing, and happiness come from obedience to God.
Adolf von Harnack
•â•‡ God is still in the miracle-Â�performing business. •â•‡ Christians live in a spiritual battleground, but if we understand God’s love, we can resist Satan’s attacks. Bibliography In addition to the works listed above are Sammy: Dallas Detective (Vital Issues Press, 1997), Sammy: Women Troubles (Westford, 2004), Sammy: Working for a Living (Westford, 2004), Sammy: On Vacation (Westford, 2005), Sammy: Little Misunderstandings (Westford, 2006), and Sammy: Ghosts (Westford, 2007). All of Hardy’s books are available from online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Hardy maintains an elaborate, attractive Web site at http://www.robinhardy.com/. —Mimosa Stephenson ADOLF VON HARNACK (1851–1930).╇ German. One of the most controversial and influential German theologians and church historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Harnack was the son of a noted Luther scholar and was educated at Dorpat and Leipzig, where he held his first professorship in 1876. He later held full professorships at Giessen (1879–1886), Marburg (1886–1889), and Berlin (1889–1921). From 1905 to 1921 he also held the prestigious position of director of the Prussian State Library and in 1910 he became president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for furthering learning and science. Harnack is known as one of the great advocates of Protestant liberal theology closely tied to the Ritschlian school that understood the gospel to be an essentially ethical message and to the Tübingen school of historical criticism that approached Christianity as an inherently historical phenomenon. From these two primary commitments, Harnack made important contributions to New Testament studies, Patristics, and to the success of theological liberalism up to the First World War. Harnack’s major works in English include History of Dogma (7 vols., 1894–1899), The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (2 vols., 1904– 1905), The Constitution and Law of the Church in the First Two Centuries (1910), Luke the Physician (1907), The Sayings of Jesus (1908), The Acts of the Apostles (1909), and The Date of the Acts and of the Synoptic Gospels (1911). The historical scholarship demonstrated in these works served both to challenge and define the views of Modern Protestantism, sometimes controversially—as in his forceful restatement of contemporary religion in ethical and practical terms; sometimes more in line with orthodoxy—as in his surprisingly early dating of the synoptic gospels. Harnack’s most distinctive idea was developed throughout his historical studies on the development
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of early Christianity and Christian dogma up through the Reformation. He argued that the dogma of the early church developed under the same historical constraints as it would in any time period and that the influences of contemporary culture, in this case Hellenistic culture, would have profoundly affected this development. He argued that the task therefore of the historical theologian is to apply the historical-Â�critical method in an effort to peel away this “husk” of cultural influence in order to lay bare the “kernel” of the essential gospel message that was preached by the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. This idea was articulated in Harnack’s well-Â�attended lectures published in 1900 under the title Das Wesen des Christentums and translated into English in 1901 as What Is Christianity? Here Harnack identified the permanently valid essence of the gospel message as concerning the kingdom of God, understood ethically rather than supernaturally, and containing the three key aspects of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of humanity, and the commandment of love and the infinite value of the human soul. Although the influence of Harnack’s theology declined with the sobering event of World War I and the critical response of Protestant neo-Â�orthodoxy, his insistence on the historical approach to the study of religion remains an important aspect of theological inquiry. Many continue to follow Harnack in seeking to articulate the eternal message of Jesus in the midst of and in unity with contemporary culture for the purpose of providing a moral foundation for human freedom and responsibility. Principal Ideas of Adolf von Harnack •â•‡ Religion exists to enable us to view history as having meaning and purpose and under the direction of a moral being. •â•‡ Salvation involves a new understanding of reality that flows from the insight that history is meaningful and that God is guiding history to moral ends. •â•‡ The development of early Christianity and Christian dogma result strictly from historical processes best understood through the historical-Â�critical method. •â•‡ The gospel contains something that under differing historical forms is of permanent validity, the kernel as distinct from the husk. •â•‡ The kernel or essence of Christianity consists of Jesus Christ’s message concerning the kingdom of God. •â•‡ The kingdom of God is coming in human history, not apocalyptically but through the gift of insight. •â•‡ There are a universal Fatherhood of God and a brotherhood of humanity that give an infinite value to the human soul.
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Stanley Hauerwas
•â•‡ There is a higher form of righteousness and a command of love, which is the ethical message of the gospel. •â•‡ Love is meant to be expressed in service to others as we work to fit into God’s plan for history in bringing about the kingdom. Bibliography Harnack’s major works available in English include: Essays on the Social Gospel, with Wilhelm Hermann, edited by M. A. Canney, translated by G. M. Craik, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907; History of Dogma (7 vols., 1894–1899), translated by Neil Buchanan, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000; The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (2 vols., 1904–1905), edited and translated by J. Moffatt, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1997; Outlines of the History of Dogma, translated by Edwin Knox Mitchell, Beacon Press, 1957; and What Is Christianity? translated by Thomas B. Saunders with an introduction by Rudolf Bultmann, Fortress Press, 1986. Important secondary literature includes: G. Wayne Glick, The Reality of Christianity: A Study of Adolf von Harnack as Historian and Theologian, Harper and Row, 1967; W. Pauck, Harnack and Troeltsch: Two Historical Theologians, Oxford Press, 1968; Martin Rumscheidt, ed., Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height, Fortress Press, 1991; Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Â�Harnack Correspondence of 1923, Scottish Academic Press, 1972. —Peter Anders STANLEY HAUERWAS (1940–).╇ American. Born July 24, 1940, in Pleasant Grove, Texas, theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most prominent theologians at the turn of the twenty-Â�first century. He is often identified, along with George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, as a postliberal theologian and is most well-Â�known for his revival of virtue theory in ethics, his nonfoundational theology, and for his stance of “Christian nonviolence.” The publication of A Community of Character (1981) pushed him to the forefront of American theology, while the torrent of essays and books that followed have secured his prominence in the field. Among the more noted and influential books are The Peaceable Kingdom, Resident Aliens, and With the Grain of the Universe. Academic Career Hauerwas grew up in Texas, working summers as a bricklayer with his father, Coffee Hauerwas, and attending Pleasant Mound United Methodist Church. After graduating with a BA in philosophy from Southwestern
University in Georgetown, Texas, he attended Yale Divinity School, where he received a BD. He then received an MA and MPhil in philosophy and a PhD in Christian ethics from Yale University. He completed his dissertation, “Moral Character as a Problem for Theological Ethics,” in 1968. After a brief stint at Augustana College, he was hired at Notre Dame in 1970. He left for Duke Divinity School in 1984, where he remains as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics. He has delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen (2000– 2001), being the first Methodist theologian ever to do so. Recently Christianity Today named his Community of Character among the one hundred most important books on religion in the twentieth century, and Time magazine named him Theologian of the Decade. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Holmer, John Howard Yoder, David Burrell, and others, Hauerwas has been consistently nonfoundational in his method. He rejects the abstract, foundational, and theoretical nature of most modern ethics. Rather than trying to build a theory of ethics on neutral philosophical foundations, he attempts to give a Christian theological ethics. Toward that end, Hauerwas has never published a systematic ethics. Instead, he has written essays and articles, most of which have been collected, edited, and published in book format. Theological Development and Publications Hauerwas’s work is nearly impossible to summarize, as his output is voluminous. He has published hundreds of essays and over forty books. However, from the outset, there have been several constants in his work. His theological ethic has always been nonfoundational and centered on the notions of vision and character, as viewed within the Christian narrative. Since midcareer, he has been unflinching in his promotion of Christian nonviolence. And he has always rejected both deontology and teleology; he believes that both theories are underpinned by a misguided Enlightenment rationalism. In A Community of Character (1981), Hauerwas gives a constructive Christian social ethic in which the truth of Christian convictions is inextricably intertwined with the church’s embodiment of those convictions. He warns against the dangers of allying the church to a liberal democratic social system and the corresponding liberal stress on human autonomy. Liberalism, for Hauerwas, distorts the narrative character of Christian virtue. In The Peaceable Kingdom (1983), Hauerwas grounds his approach to nonviolence in the narrative of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which God’s victory came precisely through the rejection of violence. The Christian
Nathaniel Hawthorne
ethic must be informed by this narrative, embodying the kingdom of peace inaugurated by Christ. With the Grain of the Universe (2001) is considered by many to be Hauerwas’s magnum opus. It is the published version of Hauerwas’s Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in 2000–2001. This book sets forth his account of what went wrong with twentieth-Â�century theology and how to get it back on the right course. The book centers on three previous Gifford Lecturers: William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth. For Hauerwas, James and Niebuhr embody what went wrong, while Barth represents the constructive way forward for the church. The thesis of the book is that natural theology is dependent on revelation and tradition; indeed, it cannot be conceived of apart from a full doctrine of God. Hauerwas acknowledges numerous people as influences on his work. Some of them were friends and colleagues, such as John Howard Yoder and David Burrell; others were his teachers at Yale, such as Paul Holmer and Hans Frei; yet others influenced him through their written work, such as Karl Barth and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hauerwas himself has influenced a generation of theologians, and that impact can be seen across denominational lines and across the theological disciplines. It can be seen not only in his influence on his colleagues, such as James Wm. McClendon Jr. and Samuel Wells, but also on former students and younger theologians, such as William T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Fowl, Amy Laura Hall, Brad Kallenberg, M. Therese Lysaught, Mark Thiessen Nation, and Charles Pinches. Bibliography
Hauerwas, Stanley. Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1975. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. ———. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1981. ———. The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by John Berkman and Michael Cartwright. Durham: Duke University, 2001. ———. The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983. ———. Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004. ———. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001. Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens. Nashville: Abingdon, 1989. Jones, L. Gregory, Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell. God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005. Kallenberg, Brad J. Ethics as Grammar: Changing the PostÂ�modern Subject. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2001.
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Nation, Mark Thiessen, and Samuel Wells, eds. Faithfulness and Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.
—Bruce Riley Ashford
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864).╇ American. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born to a prominent Puritan family in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. Hawthorne’s father was a sea captain and descendent of one of the magistrates in the Salem witch trials. His father died while Nathaniel was only four years old. At the age of fourteen, Nathaniel moved with his mother to a farm in Maine. He was educated at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. After fours years of study, he returned to Salem in 1825 and devoted himself to reading and writing. Hawthorne self-Â�published his first novel, Fanshawe, anonymously in 1828 but it was not well received. He later dismissed his early works as inexperienced. His short stories, however, were printed in 1837 (American Stationer’s Company), 1841 (James Munroe and Company), and 1851 (TickÂ� nor and Fields, who also published a second [1852] and third [1853] edition) as Twice-Â�Told Tales and were highly praised and claimed for him immediate distinction. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” are two of his finest stories and regarded among the most outstanding tales in the English language. The late Hyatt H. Waggoner, a specialist on the works of Hawthorne, referred to “Young Goodman Brown” (a story that masterfully reflects the author’s Puritan milieu and the hysteria of the Salem witch trials) as “perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever written.” He worked in the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1840, and in 1841 he was prominent in the planned community of Brook Farm in West Roxburg, Massachusetts. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842 and rented the Old Manse in Concord (a village in which the philosophy of Transcendentalism was dominant). His essay “Old Manse” (1846) is a collection of this contented time. His best-Â�known writing is The Scarlet Letter (1850), which achieved critical acclaim; it is one of the most important works in American literature. Although Hawthorne did not regard himself as a Transcendentalist, he was not completely unaffected by the doctrine. However, as G. B. Loring indicated in his 1850 review of The Scarlet Letter for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, it would be certainly erroneous to seek an underlying Transcendental message against “Unitarian rationalism and Bostonian proprieties” in his novels. The prologue to the work is the short story “The Custom House,” which reflects the bitter feelings toward his dismissal as surveyor with the 1848 election of a Whig president, Zachary Taylor. The Scarlet Letter is
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a romance that chronicles the lives of husband and wife separated by journey to the New World. The book begins with the adulterous relationship between Hester Prynne and the town’s preacher, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the birth of their child, Pearl. Hester is condemned to wear the embroidered scarlet letter A on her chest at all times to symbolize her sin. As a moral and religious commentary, the novel is valued for its portrayal of Puritanism. Some of Hawthorne’s more noteworthy romantic novels include: The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne’s romances demonstrate his tendency to rework and develop his earlier stories or to rely on his own experiences. The House of the Seven Gables is the tale of an evil house, which is cursed throughout the centuries by a man who was accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-Â�century Salem. The Blithedale Romance is based on Hawthorne’s experiences at the utopian Brook Farm and, therefore, differs from the haunting tales of the past. The novel interacts with life issues, such as brotherhood, socialism, and women’s rights, and captivates readers with its tale of idealism, love, politics, and the supernatural. The Marble Faun (or, The Romance of Monte Beni) is set in Rome and based on the author’s observations from his two years in Italy. Hawthorne particularly considered the influence of European culture on American morality. The Marble Faun is a foundational work for later American literature, such as Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Hawthorne is among the most admired and distinct of American writers. He died May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.
(1879; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1967); Terence Martin, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965); Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); and Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889–1976).╇ No philosopher of the twentieth century approaches Heidegger for his influence on Christian thought, and even within strictly philosophical circles, only the influence of Wittgenstein is comparable. Yet paradoxically, and despite his strongly Christian background, it is questionable whether Heidegger considered himself to be a Christian during most of his career. He is also one of the most controversial of contemporary philosophers, not only because of his political past but also because of the continued controversy over whether his work is a breakthrough in nonobjectifying language or, as some of his detractors would claim, an exemplar of obscurantism. Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a small village in a Catholic region of southwest Germany. His father was sexton of the parish Church of St. Martin’s, which during Heidegger’s youth was caught up in the conflict between Roman Catholics and Old Catholics. Heidegger himself was raised within a staunchly Roman Catholic milieu and studied for six years at Jesuit secondary schools in Konstanz and Freiburg. For a time, he was a Jesuit novice, but health issues intervened, and in 1909 he began to pursue simultaneous studies in theology and philosophy at the archdiocesan seminary and at Albert LudBibliography The centenary edition of his complete works—in twenty-Â� wig University, both located in Freiburg. By 1911 he had three volumes—is edited by William Charvat et al. abandoned his plan to enter the priesthood and left the (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963–1994). His seminary to concentrate on philosophy at the University son wrote his first biography: Julian Hawthorne, Nathan- of Freiburg, where he completed his doctoral dissertation iel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: in 1913. He finished his Habilitationsschrift on John Duns James R. Osgood and Company, 1884–1885). Other signif- Scotus in 1915. Teaching as Privatdozent at Freiburg, and icant biographies include: James Mellow, Nathaniel Haw- with two periods of military service during World War I, thorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Heidegger developed his philosophical approach, which Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Oxford was strongly influenced by the phenomenology of E. HusUniversity Press, 1980); and Brenda Wineapple, Haw- serl, while his teaching and research focused on ancient thorne: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2003). Critical studies of Greek philosophy and German Idealism and, increashis works include: Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the ingly, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. By 1919, he had broken with his Catholic background Artist (Albany: State University, 1962); Nida Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca: Cornell University and began considering himself Protestant. In 1923, he was Press, 1976); Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: appointed to a chair as professor at the University of MarMoral History in Hawthorne’s Tales (Cambridge: Harvard burg, where he was identified with Protestant theologians University Press, 1984); Frederick Crews, The Sins of the such as R. Bultmann. It was at Marburg, too, that HeiFathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: degger began the work that in 1927 would be published Oxford University Press, 1966); Henry James, Hawthorne as his early masterpiece, Being and Time. Soon Protestant
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theologians such as Bultmann and Tillich were enthusiastically appropriating the categories of human existence that had been presented phenomenologically in this body of work, seeing them as a powerful medium for articulating the Christian faith in a fresh and timely manner, free from the metaphysical burdens of the past. During the earlier part of this period he continued to think of himself as, in his own words, “a Christian theologian.” But Heidegger’s path of thinking soon began to diverge in a different direction, in part due to readings of Nietzsche and Hölderlin. By the early 1930s, there was increasing talk not of “God” but of “the flight of the gods,” and by 1937 or 1938 he described his entire path of thought as having been a “confrontation with Christianity,” while in his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938) and Mindfulness (1938/1939) he speaks of a “last god,” who is clearly not the God of Christianity, now seemingly dismissed as nihilistic and “onto-Â�theological,” that is, as inextricably bound up with metaphysical concepts and impulses. (It should also be noted that during a ten-Â�month period in 1933 and 1934, Heidegger had been an active member of the Nazi Party, an episode seen by his critics as reflecting negatively on his character and his thought, but which Heidegger justified as an expediency necessary for completing his brief tenure as Rector of Freiburg University, to which he had returned in 1929.) During the remainder of his career, and despite what has seemed to some as a deeply mystical orientation in Heidegger’s later thought as a whole, it is doubtful that he ever reconciled himself with the Christian faith, notwithstanding his continued, decisive influence on theologians such as K. Rahner and J. Macquarrie. On its own, and as mediated by H.-Â�G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s hermeneutics has also had a pronounced influence on theological methodology, and his thought as a whole remains a necessary prerequisite for current work in postmodern theology as well. Recently, Heidegger has also been seen by some as important for understanding the underlying causes of environmental crisis, both in “ecotheology” and in environmental philosophy in general. Principal Ideas of Martin Heidegger •â•‡ Human beings have a unique, temporal mode of being whose finitude ultimately derives from their mortality, that is, their individual awareness of their “ownmost” possibility of dying. •â•‡ Truth has the dynamic quality of an event, rather than a static relation, and entails an uncovering or revealing that engages both what is known and the knower. •â•‡ The world is a matrix or horizon of meaning, rather than an aggregate of substances, and it properly
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contains a dimension of divinity as one of its coordinates. •â•‡ The language of objectification characteristic of modern science is a derivative mode of truth, and objective language is thus less revealing than poetic language. •â•‡ Being itself, and not just our understanding of it, is temporal; it is even legitimate to speak of being as having a “history” (Seinsgeschichte). •â•‡ In the West, the language of presence and revealing has gradually eclipsed the language of absence and hiddenness, eventually leaving no room for a sense that being has an irreducibly mysterious character. In contrast, Heidegger insists that all revealing is only partial, necessarily entailing a correlative concealing, making all truth finite and provisional. •â•‡ The God of much Western philosophy and theology is what Pascal calls “the God of the philosophers” rather than “the God of Abraham and Jacob”—not a deity whom anyone could truly worship, but rather a purely metaphysical entity, and at best just one being among other beings, even if the highest. (Here Heidegger approximates, and perhaps appropriates, the apophatic or “negative” theology of traditional Christian mysticism.) •â•‡ The Western metaphysical goal of a total revealing and absolute presence culminates in modern technology, which poses an extreme danger not only to the earth but to our very nature as human, for it naively overlooks the ontological role of human beings as revealers. Bibliography
Caputo, J. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Foltz, B. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Crisis, and the Metaphysics of Nature, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962. ———. Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), trans. P.╯Emad and K. Maly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ———. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, tr. K. Hoeller, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. ———. Mindfulness, trans. P. Emad and T. Kalary, London: Continuum, 2006. ———. The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. M. Fritsch and J. Gosetti-Â�Ferencei, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Hemming, L. Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice, South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2002.
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Pöggeler, O. Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. D.╯Magurshak and S. Barber, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987. Safranski, R. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Van Buren, J. The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Vedder, B. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to the Gods, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007.
—Bruce Foltz
AMMON HENNACY (1893–1970).╇ Ammon Hennacy, close friend of Dorothy Day and longtime member of the Catholic Worker Movement, was a Christian anarchist, conscientious objector, and tax refuser who drew his inspiration from Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount. Born in Negley, Ohio, he attended three different colleges for a year each before refusing to register for military service in World War I. He served two years in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, much of it in solitary confinement, where he converted to Christianity after reading the Bible repeatedly. After the war, he entered into a commonlaw marriage and had two daughters, whom he helped to support, though his wife left him to follow a cult. During the Great Depression, he worked for a time as a social worker in Minnesota. He refused to register for the draft again in World War II and subsequently decided to refuse to pay any taxes because tax revenue supported the war. In this he deviated from the practice of many other pacifists who argued that it was impractical to refuse payment of taxes. To achieve his goal, he abandoned all regular employment and began to live solely as a migrant laborer earning minimal daily wages that he could collect in cash. He lived at this time in Arizona, where in addition to working as a farm laborer and tending his own garden, he hitchhiked into town to sell copies of the Catholic Worker and picketed nuclear tests and tax offices. From 1953 to 1961 he lived and worked at the Catholic Worker headquarters in New York City, writing for the paper and participating in a series of protests against air raid drills. Dorothy Day published many pieces on her long friendship and working relationship with Ammon, including passages in The Long Loneliness. Every year he fasted publicly to memorialize the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also traveled extensively through the United States, usually by hitchhiking and walking, to speak at churches, universities, and other venues on pacifism, nonpayment of taxes, Christianity, and nonviolence. He formally converted to Catholicism in 1952, though he left the church in 1965 when he
married Joan Thomas. From that point, he called himself a nonchurch Christian. In 1961, Hennacy created the first of a series of Joe Hill houses of hospitality for the poor in Salt Lake City; these were named after the executed labor leader, whom Hennacy considered a martyr. His work from that time on focused on caring for the homeless and picketing to save the lives of convicts sentenced to the death penalty. He closed the last of the Joe Hill houses in 1968 but continued to travel, speak, and write. Hennacy wrote books in addition to the many articles he contributed to antiwar journals and newspapers. He did not believe in copyrighting, so his major books were self-Â�published with no copyright, but with a note to the effect that readers were not permitted to copy quotations from the works of others for which he had obtained permission. Some of his work is now being published by traditional publishing houses. At the end of his life, he was working on The One Man Revolution in America, which was completed with a chapter by his widow. This book reviews the histories of a number of courageous American iconoclasts, politicians, labor leaders, pacifists, and visionaries. His autobiography, The Book of Ammon, first appeared in 1965. The title was suggested to him by one of his daughters. Hennacy’s style captures the essence of the man, who was known to be committed, judgmental, and abrasive. His writings open a door into important aspects of twentieth-Â�century history, including pacifism, nonviolence, the development of labor unions, American radicalism, the history of prisons, and other related phenomena. He died after carrying out a series of exhausting fasts and pickets to save two convicts sentenced to death in Utah. Bibliography
The Book of Ammon. N.p. Hennacy, 1965. The One-�Man Revolution in America. Salt Lake City, Utah. Ammon Hennacy Publications, 1970.
—Thomas Trzyna
CARL F. H. HENRY (1913–2003).╇ American. Carl Henry, a Baptist, is consistently recognized as one of the most significant, if not the most significant, American evangelical theologians of the twentieth century. Henry was born January 22, 1913, in New York City to German immigrants and raised on a Long Island farm. He had little exposure to religion as a child though his mother was Roman Catholic and his father was Lutheran and though he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church as a teenager. Henry dates his conversion experience to June 10, 1933, a time when he had been working as a journalist.
George Herbert
Two years after this event, Henry went to study philosophy at Wheaton College. He later received two doctorates: a Th.D. from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (1942) and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University (1949). After teaching at Northern Baptist Seminary from 1940 to 1947, and while completing his second doctorate, he became the first professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Henry’s influence extended well beyond academic settings. At the request of Billy Graham, whom he had befriended during his time at Wheaton College, Henry left Fuller in 1956 to become the first editor of the popular magazine Christianity Today. This magazine was created as an evangelical alternative to the mainline publication Christian Century. Henry’s influence grew among evangelicals during his twelve years of service and he was a regular contributor to Christianity Today. After resigning from his editorial post in 1968, Henry spent much time lecturing throughout the world and continued his publishing career. Henry’s life’s work can be viewed as an attempt to take Enlightenment epistemology seriously while maintaining the claims of Christian orthodoxy. He sought to preÂ� sent a rational defense of Christian orthodoxy. His work also exhibits Calvinistic/Reformed characteristics. His magnum opus was his six-Â�volume God, Revelation and Authority (1976–1983), which was primarily concerned with the relationship between the doctrines of God and scripture. Its recurring themes include the divine authorship and, on account of this, the authority and inerrancy (i.e., no errors) of scripture, the propositional nature of revelation (i.e., that revelation comes in part through rational ideas and in verbal form), and the indispensable nature of revelation for knowledge of God (and with it the rejection of attempts to construct natural theology apart from revelation). Henry emphasized these themes throughout his career in response to the wider Protestant tradition, which had, in his perspective, forsaken its commitment to divine revelation. While neo-Â�orthodox theologians were also emphasizing the authority of God’s revelation, Henry’s proposal was distinct from this latter movement in that he viewed revelation not only as God’s actions in history but also as God’s speaking in history, by which, he argued, God interprets God’s activity for humanity. Henry was particularly influential in what is known historically as neoevangelicalism, which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s as a response to North American evangelical fundamentalism. In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), Henry chides fundamentalism for its separatist mind-Â�set and the resulting lack of cultural engagement with respect to humanitarian,
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political, and social issues. By contrast, neoevangelicals (a term not used widely today) like Henry sought to maintain conservative and orthodox doctrines while engaging in cultural issues. The latter is exhibited in Henry’s Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (1964). In his writings on social ethics, Henry emphasized that social change must come through the spiritual regeneration of individuals, in contrast to mainline Protestantism, which focused on social activism. It is clear that Henry’s work has been influential in American theology. His reception of six honorary doctorates attests to this influence. Further, in 1977, Time magazine referred to Henry as “the leading theologian” among American evangelicals. His influence was less significant in Europe, though he lectured worldwide. Time will determine how lasting his influence will be. Principal Ideas of Carl Henry •â•‡ Rejection of philosophical and religious empirical knowledge of God. •â•‡ Necessity of divine revelation for knowledge of God. •â•‡ Propositional nature of revelation. •â•‡ The inerrancy and authority of scripture. •â•‡ The continuity of faith and reason. •â•‡ Social justice by means of changing individuals. Bibliography
Grenz, Stanley J., and Roger E. Olson. Twentieth-Â�Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992. Henry, Carl F. H. Confessions of a Theologian. Waco: Word, 1986. ———. Conversations with Carl Henry: Christianity for Today. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1986. Mohler, R. Albert, Jr. “Carl F. H. Henry.” In Theologians of the Baptist Tradition, ed. David S. Dockery and Timothy George, 279–296. Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2001. Patterson, Bob E. Carl F. H. Henry. Waco: Word, 1983. Purdy, Richard A. “Carl F. H. Henry.” In Handbook of Evangelical Theologians, ed. Walter A. Elwell, 260–275. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993.
—Andrew Gabriel
GEORGE HERBERT (1593–1633).╇ British. Born April 3, 1593, in Montgomery, Wales. George Herbert’s father was Richard Herbert, of a prominent English family. His mother, Magdalene, was the patron of John Donne. Though sometimes in the shadow of that metaphysical poet, to whom he has stylistic affinities, George Herbert became one of the greatest religious poets in the English language. The fifth son of ten children, George Herbert at the age of fifteen attended Cambridge, where he became the
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official orator of the university. Headed for a career in politics or at court, he was elected in 1624 to Parliament. In 1630, however, whether as a renunciation of the world or because his patrons fell out of favor at court, Herbert took orders in the Church of England and became a country parson in the small parish of St. Andrew in Bemerton, just outside of Salisbury. Herbert threw himself into the ministry, attending to the spiritual and physical needs of his poor parishioners with a devotion reflected in his book The Country Parson, a treatise on pastoral care. Only three years after he entered the ministry, Herbert, dying of consumption, sent a manuscript to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, the Anglican divine. According to Herbert’s first biographer, Isaak Walton, it included a message that it represented “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.” Herbert added that if Ferrar thought it might be helpful to “any dejected poor soul,” he could publish it. If not, he should simply burn it. What Ferrar read and then published were poems remarkable in their formal craftsmanship, multilayered language, and rich spiritual content. Herbert was one of the great experimenters with poetic forms. He wrote shaped verse—poems that resemble on the printed page altars or wings—but his formal experimentation manifested itself more usually in complex interplays between form and content. Emotional chaos manifests itself in chaotic rhythms and rhymes, but when God breaks in, both spiritual and formal harmony are restored. Herbert also structured his poems around each other, dramatizing the course of the Christian life from the saving work of Christ through the Christian’s baptism and spiritual struggles, until death and reception into heaven. Herbert also turned church architecture—the altar, the lock and key, the floor, the stained-Â�glass windows—into symbols of the Christian life. He entitled his collection of poems The Temple, which amounts to an internalization of the church in the life of a single believer, whose heart is a “Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Herbert’s poetry expresses an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. The poems of honest spiritual desolation alternate with poems of intense joy in the presence of God. Herbert’s verse reflects the dynamics of sin and grace, justification and sanctification, as taught in the Reformation, but he does so in the context of liturgy, sacraments, and churchly piety. This integration of Protestant and Catholic elements reflects the conservative Reformation as known in both Lutheranism and early Anglicanism. But its wide theological range has made Herbert’s poetry appealing to Christians of virtually every tradition.
Bibliography
Charles, A. A Life of George Herbert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Summers, J. H. George Herbert: His Religion and His Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Veith, G. E. Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1958. Wilcox, Helen. The English Poems of George Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
—Gene Edward Veith
HERMAS (first century).╇ Hermas is named as the author and narrator of the Shepherd of Hermas, the longest and in many ways, the most unusual of all the Apostolic Fathers’ writings. Debate continues about the identity and dates of Hermas. Eusebius and Origen identify him with the Hermas named in Romans 16:14. Others place him contemporary with Clement of Rome (ca. 90–100?) because Hermas is told to deliver a record of some visions to (an unidentified) Clement in chapter 8. The Muratorian Canon, an early but incomplete attempt at listing books accepted as inspired, weighs in at this point. Composed in Rome toward the end of the second century, the Canon reports: “The Shepherd was written very recently, in our own time by Hermas, in the city of Rome, when his brother Pius was sitting in the Chair of the Church of Rome” (ca. 140–156). The Shepherd is listed by some as part of the New Testament Apocrypha. It was widely copied and read in the first Christian centuries and considered by a few early local churches and pastors to be inspired. The Shepherd could be described as a moral treatise dressed in the form of apocalyptic literature. The primary theme of the letter is to teach that sin after baptism was not unforgivable, and yet in view of the imminent return of the Son of God, we had better repent today, while there is still time. The titles for this book include: (1) The Shepherd, after the “angel of penance” (or “of repentance” or “conversion,” from the Greek, metanoia) who appears to Hermas as a teacher and guide in the garb of a shepherd; (2) Poimen, its original title (Greek for “shepherd”); (3) the equivalent of poimen in translation (such as, The Pastor); or simply as (4) Hermas. Averaging over one hundred pages in most translations, The Shepherd takes some perseverance to wade through its progression of five Visions, twelve Mandates (or commandments), and ten Parables (or similitudes). In reality, all three parts are presented as visions, with many interpenetrating themes and repetition. These three main divisions may evidence a composite work, written and edited over a course of years by one or more authors. A
John Hick
more recent structure of 114 chapters was added to the text, so that most modern translations use both the three-Â� part and the chapter systems, for easier cross-Â�reference. The work can be further reduced to two main parts, as suggested by the editor in Vision 5. Part 1 consists of Visions 1–4 (chapters 1–24), where an angel appears to Hermas as an elderly woman or “matron,” representing the church. As the revelations progress, she becomes younger, until she is seen as the young bride of Christ. Part 2 (chapters 25–114) introduces the shepherd angel in Vision 5/chapter 25. It contains the Mandates and Parables, with Vision 5 serving as an introduction to the latter. Parable 10 functions as a conclusion. Holmes (201–203) characterizes the literary genres present as: Visions 1–4: “Jewish-Â�Christian apocalypse,” like the book of Revelation; the Commandments: “a typical Jewish-Â�Hellenistic homily”; and the Parables: the style of the apocryphal 1 Enoch. Chapter 36 speaks of “the way of righteousness” and “the way of wickedness,” in a manner similar to the “Two Ways” in two other writings of the Apostolic Fathers, in Didache 1–6 and the Epistle of Barnabas 18–20. The idea in popular piety of everyone having two angels assigned to them, “one of righteousness and one of wickedness,” finds an early expression in this section. We can learn to recognize the promptings of righteous versus wicked angels by their counsels and temptations, using biblical categories of virtues and vices. Principal Ideas in Hermas •â•‡ Although sin is always to be avoided, there is the possibility of repentance, confession, and continual conversion (metanoia) after baptism. •â•‡ Repent from sin while there is time and life. •â•‡ Follow Christ by living a life of consistent moral virtue, made possible by the gospel message of grace and salvation. •â•‡ There are two ways from which to choose. The way of wickedness leads to damnation, and the way of righteousness leads to life with God. Choose life. Bibliography For a list of texts, annotated translations, commentaries, and chapter-Â�length studies of Hermas (many containing helpful bibliographic guides), see the bibliography under “Apostolic Fathers.” Hermas is not included in the Kleist and Staniforth collections. One-volume translations and commentaries include: C. Osiek, Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary. Hermeneia series (Fortress, 1999); and G.╯F. Snyder, The Shepherd of Hermas, Vol. 6 of The Apostolic Fathers, ed. R. M. Grant (Nelson, 1968). —David Brian Warner
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JOHN HICK (1922–).╇ John Hick is a contemporary liberal theologian and philosopher of religion who denies the salvific uniqueness of Christianity and advocates religious pluralism. He is both praised for being intellectually honest and criticized for being virtually pantheistic. Born in Yorkshire, England, he was baptized in the Church of England. Throughout his childhood and midteen years, he found Christianity to be utterly lethargic and unmoving; reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell played a significant role in shaping his largely humanist worldview during this period of his life. Then, at age eighteen, he had a powerful conversion experience: as a student of law at University College, Hull, he became a fundamentalist Christian and a member of the evangelical InterVarsity Fellowship on campus. He moved to Edinburgh University to study philosophy as a preliminary step toward becoming a minister of the Presbyterian Church of England. His spiritual journey took another turn in 1941, the first year of World War II. As a sophomore at Edinburgh, he was called into military service. Based on his interpretation of Christ’s teachings, he refused to participate in war. As a conscientious objector, he was granted noncombat duty; subsequently, he joined the Friends’ (Quakers’) Ambulance Unit, serving in various places, such as London, Edinburgh, Egypt, Italy, and Greece. After the war, he completed his degree at Edinburgh and then moved to Oriel College, Oxford, where he finished his Doctor of Philosophy under H. H. Price’s supervision. Hick’s dissertation, “Faith and Belief,” defended faith as a valid form of knowledge; a revised version was published as a book under the title Faith and Knowledge (1957). After studying for three years at the Presbyterian seminary, Westminster College, Cambridge, he was ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church of England. After serving a rural congregation in England, he taught at Cornell University and at Princeton Theological Seminary. Upon returning to England, he first taught at Cambridge University and then moved to the University of Birmingham as the H. G. Wood Chair of the Theology Department. He is currently an emeritus professor at both the University of Birmingham and the Claremont Graduate University, California; he also serves as a vice president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and of the World Congress of Faiths. It was at Princeton that he openly refuted the exclusivistic truth claims of Christianity; his convictions in religious plurality deepened through his encounters with non-Â�Christian believers in Manchester. Through a number of influential books and lectures, he has promoted religious experience as a valid form of knowledge, the cultural relativity of religion, interfaith dialogue, and what he
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calls believable Christianity. In addition to the aforementioned Faith and Knowledge, he has published a number of books, including Evil and the God of Love (1966; 2nd edition in 1977), a controversial work on theodicy; God and the Universe of Faiths (1973; reissued in 1993), a landmark discussion of world faiths as culturally different paths to salvation; Death and Eternal Life (1976), a work on the afterlife that draws the insights from biology, psychology, parapsychology, sociology, philosophy, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism; and The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (1993), in which the author denies the deity of Jesus. Hick’s works have been translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish. His life story is narrated in John Hick: An Autobiography (2002). Principal Ideas of John Hick •â•‡ Humans are by nature religious, and religious experience constitutes cognitive knowledge. •â•‡ God is epistemologically distant from humans and allows suffering so that they can complete their “soul-Â�making” for salvation. •â•‡ Jesus of Nazareth was not God incarnate but an extraordinarily spiritual man; the historical Jesus did not claim deity. •â•‡ World religions are different but equally valid responses to the ultimate reality. •â•‡ The ultimate goal of all religions is to elevate humanity from an ego-Â�centered life to a life centered in the ultimate Real. •â•‡ Jesus of Nazareth did not teach the traditional concept of an everlasting hell. •â•‡ An afterlife is improbable yet is at least logically possible. Bibliography
Geivett, R. Douglas. Evil and the Evidence for God: The Challenge of John Hick’s Theodicy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hewitt, Harold, Jr., ed. Problems in the Philosophy of Religion: Critical Studies of the Work of John Hick. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Hick, John. Death and Eternal Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. ———. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. ———. Faith and Knowledge: A Modern Introduction to the Problem of Religious Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957. ———. God and the Universe of Faiths: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. 2nd rev. ed. London: Oneworld, 1993. ———. John Hick: An Autobiography. London: Oneworld, 2002.
———. The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.
—John J. Han
HILARY OF POITIERS (ca. 315–ca. 367).╇ France. Although we do not know much for certain about his early life, Hilary was probably born around AD 315 in Poitiers to a distinguished pagan family. He received a good education, married, and had a daughter before he was converted to Christianity. After his baptism as an adult, his model life as a Christian led to his election as bishop of Poitiers around the middle of the fourth century. Hilary’s opposition to the Arianist heresy and its proponents, including the Emperor Constantius, led to his exile in 356. Hilary spent four years in Asia Minor, mostly in Phrygia. While there, Hilary learned Greek and began to study the Greek theologians. His increasingly deep understanding of the Council of Nicaea (325) led him now to see the dangers not only of Arianism’s subordination of the Son to the Father but also of Monarchianism’s denial of any difference between the Father and the Son. He also began to understand the dissatisfaction in the East with the term homoousios (“of one substance”). His attempts to reconcile the Homoiousians in the East, who believed that Father and Son had a similar, but not the same, substance, with opponents of Arianism in the West ultimately came to naught at the Council of Seleucia in 359. He completed two of his most important works, On the Councils and On the Trinity, in exile. Hilary was permitted to return to Gaul in 360 but was not restored to his former position. He continued to oppose the Arian heresy until the end of his life in 367 or 368. Martin of Tours was Hilary’s student. A life of Hilary by Venantius Fortunatus helped to spread his cult in Gaul in the sixth century. Sometimes called the “Athanasius of the West” for his steadfast resistance to Arianism, Hilary was one of the first to introduce the riches of Greek biblical exegesis and trinitarian theology to the Latin West. His most influential treatise is his work in twelve books On the Trinity. Despite the fact that one is begotten and the other is the begetter, the Son and the Father have the same attributes, as does the Holy Spirit, who unites them in love. This is a matter of faith, finally, not logic alone, and Hilary memorably describes his reliance on scripture and the apostles in the last book of On the Trinity: But I cannot describe Him, whose pleas for me I cannot describe. As in the revelation that Thy Only-Â�begotten was born of Thee before times eternal, when we cease to struggle with ambiguities of language and difficulties of thought, the one certainty of His birth remains; so I hold fast in my consciousness the truth that Thy Holy Spirit is
Hildegard von Bingen
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HILDEGARD VON BINGEN (twelfth century).╇ The concept of the Renaissance man, believed to have originated during the sixteenth century with Leonardo da Vinci, actually began centuries before the Renaissance even took place. Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-Â�century nun, astounds modern scholars by her prowess in many fields, including science, music, poetry, and theology. Independent and strong-Â�willed, Hildegard finds her place not only among the most gifted people of her time but also as a scholar who still demands attention today. As a woman in a male-Â�centered world, she did not allow her gender to serve as an impediment to her career. Instead, While On the Trinity is Hilary’s masterpiece, he also she sought to follow the path to which God called her— wrote commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew and the the path of an artist, an innovator, and a leader in her Psalms. In addition, this pioneer of Latin Christianity community. introduced the practice of singing hymns to the Western Anne H. King-Â�Lenzmeier, in her book Hildegard of church after he witnessed in exile their powerful effect Bingen: An Integrated Vision, borrows the musical term in spreading Arian ideas. His own hymns, however, are “polyphony” to describe the many layers that weave quite long and do not lend themselves readily to congre- together to illustrate Hildegard’s life. Lenzmeier claims, gational singing. Hilary was especially concerned with “Like musical polyphony, where one line connects, harchildren and suggested that they might serve as models monizes, and prefaces the next strand, Hildegard’s life is of Christian simplicity and humility. His iconography polyphonic.”1 Each of Hildegard’s talents can be seen as sometimes includes a child and he is the patron saint of separate melodies, capable of standing alone. Neverthehandicapped children. In 1851, Hilary was named Doc- less, when viewed as a whole they fit together seamlessly tor of the Universal Church, by Pope Pius IX. His Feast with a single motif—the glorification of Christ. Day is now January 13 and the spring term at Oxford is During the twelfth century, the tenets of Christianity named for him. permeated every aspect of European life.2 No separation existed between church and state; therefore education, science, and music all fell under the influence of the CathBibliography olic Church. As a result, Hildegard received much of her Editions and Translations of Hilary’s Writings Hilary’s writings in Latin can be found in Patrologia training and support from religious mentors, including Latina, vols. 9 and 10 (1844); Corpus Scriptorum Eccle- her magistra Jutta and the monk Volmar.3 They taught her siasticorum Latinorum 22 (1891) and 65 (1916); Corpus the importance of consistent prayer and the reading of the Christianorum, Series Latina 62 and 62A (1979–1980); Holy Scriptures, vital practices to Hildegard’s education and Sources Chrétiennes 254 and 258 (1978–1979). English and spiritual growth.4 As a true child of her era, Hildegard translations of Hilary’s works appear in Nicene and Post-Â� spent all of her efforts trying to serve the “Living Light.”5 Hildegard’s faith was powerful, yet practical. Although Nicene Church Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 9 (1899). There is a translation of De Trinitate in Fathers of the Church (Wash- often regarded as a mystic, Hildegard never abandoned her sense of duty to her fellowmen for an esoteric superington, D.C., 1954). naturalism. Instead, she claimed to have a “double vision” Books and Articles about Hilary in which she received revelations from God while remainBarnes, T. “Hilary of Poitiers on His Exile,” Vigiliae Christianae ing attentive to her quotidian affairs. She never claimed to 46 (1992): 129–140. have transcended the limits of time and space, and yet she Borchardt, C. F. A. Hilary of Poitiers’ Role in the Arian Struggle. retained a close connection with the supernatural.6 She The Hague, 1966. lived out Christ’s wish: “My prayer is not that you take Burns, P. C. “Hilary of Poitiers’ Road to Béziers: Politics or Relithem out of the world but that you protect them from the gion?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 273–289. 7 Smulders, P. Hilary of Poitiers’ Preface to his Opus Historicum. evil one.” Hildegard carried her “double vision” into her artistic Leiden, 1995. Williams, D. “A Reassessment of the Early Career and Exile of endeavors. Despite her assertion to have had little formal Hilary of Poitiers,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42 (1991): education, her writing style and literary allusions suggest 202–217. otherwise.8 Hildegard formed a perfect blend of music —Carl Springer and lyrics through her beautiful melodic lines as well as from Thee and through Him, although I cannot by my intellect comprehend it.╯.╯.╯. Thy servant John says, indeed, that all things were made through the Son, Who as God the Word was in the beginning, O God, with Thee.╯.╯.╯. With these men, peculiarly Thine elect, I will think in these matters; just as, after their example, I will say nothing beyond my comprehension about Thy Only-Â�begotten, but simply declare that He was born, so also after their example I will not trespass beyond that which human intellect can know about Thy Holy Spirit, but simply declare that He is Thy Spirit. May my lot be no useless strife of words, but the unwavering confession of an unhesitating faith!
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her poetic imagery.9 She saw no need for lyrics and music to be at odds when in her eyes they shared the same purpose—to glorify God. Hildegard’s poetic lyrics could not help but cheer the souls of her audience when she wrote, “This lofty tower, made of the wood of Lebanon and of cypress, is adorned with hyacinths and diamonds, a city that dominates the arts of all other artisans.”10 However, she shifted from poetic to musical images in her seventh vision The Book of Divine Works, where she used musical instruments as metaphors for spiritual virtues: “the flute of holiness, the zither of praise, the organ of humility which is the queen of virtues.” For Hildegard, humans played instruments so that they themselves might become instruments in the hands of God.11 Influenced by the medieval concept of the music of the spheres, Hildegard employed music as an earthly means to approach the celestial harmonies of God. She began to compose around 1140 while she lived in Disibodenberg.12 As a believer in the transcendent nature of music, Hildegard determined to use music as a medium to help people connect with the divine.13 King-Â�Lenzmeier asserts, “Thus music and vision, the auditory and the visual, are closely linked in Hildegard’s perception of the world, possibly experienced simultaneously.”14 Alongside her musical endeavors, Hildegard explored the material world as well. According to Danielle Jacquart, in her article “Hildegarde et la Physiologie de son Temps,” Hildegard was not a “woman of science,” but she did possess an impressive understanding of the physical world for a woman of her time.15 Hildegard’s scientific works covered both medical and botanical subjects, including Liber de plantis, Causae et curae, and Lingua ignota.16 Familiar with the new medicine of the twelfth century, Hildegard interpreted the information in her own way, drawing from both secular and religious perspectives.17 At the time, physiology involved the study of the seven natural things: the four elements, the temperaments, the virtues, the humors, the spirits, the operations, and lastly the solid parts of the body.18 Hildegard took a particular interest in the four elements that compose the human being: two spiritual (fire and air), and two carnal (water and earth). Again, she emphasized the importance of man’s physical and spiritual realities fusing into one.19 Never deviating from her Christian heritage, she viewed all science through the lens of the Genesis account.20 The religious teachings of Hildegard spread far beyond the world of her cloister, for her ambitious spirit prompted her to travel extensively in order to preach the tenets of the Christian faith.21 Having consecrated herself to a contemplative life, it is astounding that she left her convent in order to preach.22 Preceding Luther in her censure of certain church practices, Hildegard possessed no fear in confronting her
fellow members of the clergy when they erred.23 In Cologne, around 1163, Hildegard berated the Cathar heresy, which supported the concept of dualism. (Dualism claims the existence of two gods—the evil god of the material world and the beneficent god of the spiritual world.24 With this approach, Christians must denounce the things of this world in order to follow the true God of the spirit.) Adhering to her principles, Hildegard lived a life in which her material and spiritual inclinations were not divided but united in one ultimate offering to the beneficent God. In describing Hildegard, King-Â�Lenzmeier writes, “She was ignorant yet learned, visionary and practical, cloistered yet worldly wise, a seeker of God’s light and invisible heaven and a firm believer in the goodness of God’s visible creation, vital and sickly, one who composed and sang songs of praise yet was fully capable of rebuking others in God’s name.”25 King-Â�Lenzmeier continues, “She never abandoned one gift for another but instead added it to the whole.╯.╯. . These interlacing melodies made up a polyphonic hymn to the praise of God in the characteristic voice of Hildegard von Bingen.”26 Notes
1. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, xv. 2. Ibid., 1. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Ibid., xv. 6. Ibid., xvii. 7. John 17:15, New International Version. 8. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, 12. 9. Pernoud, Hildegard of Bingen, 132. 10. Ibid., 131. 11. Ibid., 175. 12. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, 17. 13. Ibid., xx. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Jacquart, “Hildegarde et la Physiologie de son Temps,” 121. 16. Ibid., 135. 17. Ibid., 125. 18. Ibid., 126. 19. Ibid., 127. 20. Ibid., 123. 21. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, 20. 22. Pernoud, Hildegard of Bingen, 126. 23. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, 23. 24. Pernoud, Hildegard of Bingen, 147. 25. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Hildegard of Bingen, 23. 26. Ibid., 24.
Bibliography
Bobko, Jane, ed. Vision: The Life and Music of Hildegard von Bingen. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1995.
Hippolytus
Jacquart, Danielle. “Hildegarde et la Physiologie de son Temps.” In Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke. London: The Warburg Institute, 1998. King-Â�Lenzmeier, Anne H. Hildegard of Bingen: An Integrated Vision. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001. Pernoud, Régine. Hildegard of Bingen: Inspired Conscience of the 12th Century. New York: Marlowe, 1998.
—Ashley Peterson
WALTER HILTON (ca. 1343–1396).╇ Walter Hilton was born no later than 1343 in either Lancashire or Derbyshire. It is thought that Hilton was educated at Cambridge University in civil law, the study of which would have preceded study of canon law. In one work, Hilton reveals that he is a solitary who is dissatisfied in his religious vocation. Later, in a letter, Hilton gives a defense of vowed religious life but writes that he is considering joining a religious community yet is hesitant due to uncertainty about his own vocation. It is supposed that Hilton joined the Augustinian Priory at Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire in 1386. He died as a canon of Thurgarton on March 24, 1396. Hilton’s best-Â�known work, The Scale of Perfection, the first comprehensive guide to the spiritual life written in English, is divided into two books written some time apart. Book 1 is addressed to an anchoress and describes the renewal or reforming of the image of God in man, defaced by sin, to likeness of God in Christ. Book 2 refers to a request to learn more about the “image” that has been described in book 1. It leads the reader further on the road to contemplative union with God by discussing the sacraments of baptism and confession, as well as emphasizing the necessity of taking up the cross of Christ. Oftentimes, book 2 takes up a point made in book 1, developing the topic in detail. Book 1 envisages the contemplative life as the domain, in principle, of those vowed to the contemplative religious state, while book 2 sees contemplation as something to which every Christian should aspire, whatever his or her state in life. Throughout, special attention is also given to a theology of grace. The Mixed Life is closely related to the Scale, book 1, but is addressed to a wealthy layman with a family, tenants, and dependents. The work is conceived as complementary to book 1 of the Scale and must have been completed at about the same time, because there are many similarities in both subject matter and expression. The general message of the Mixed Life is to dissuade the reader from trying to copy the life of a vowed religious and encourages the reader instead to use the religious exercises appropriate to his or her state in life to grow in holiness.
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Hilton’s lesser-Â�known English works include Angel’s Song, a short treatise including material that is also akin to the Scale, book 1; The Prickynge of Love, an English translation of the popular Stimulus Amoris, an expanded form of a book of that name by the thirteenth-Â�century Franciscan James of Milan; Eight Chapters on Perfection, found in the book of Master Luis de Fontibus, an Aragonese Franciscan, at Cambridge, presumably part of a larger work that is now lost and shares many similarities with the Scale, book 2; and Qui Habitat, an English commentary on Psalm 90 also with close links to some of the subject matter in book 2 of the Scale. Among Hilton’s Latin writings is On the Image of Sin. Conclusions Concerning Images defends the veneration of images, and On Reading, Intention, Prayer, Meditation, etc. demonstrates Hilton’s concern to uphold the orthodox faith and practice of the church in the face of singularity and a purported “liberty of spirit.” His Letter to Someone Wanting to Renounce the World was written to a lawyer who had experienced a religious awakening after a career of worldliness. The purpose of the letter is to reassure him on certain points while dissuading him from entering the religious life for which he is unfit. Last, On the Usefulness and Prerogatives of Religion, addressed to his Carthusian friend Adam Horsley, is intended to encourage Adam and to give a reasonable defense of religious life in light of contemporary controversies. Humbly, Hilton disclaims any personal experience of the God about whom he writes. For Hilton, the Christian life is based on humility, faith, and complete devotion of service to God. One should not be too strict in one’s ascetic life but think primarily about God and how he will free one from sin. Hilton emphasizes that vocal prayer, whether private or liturgical, must become affective and, in turn, a wordless prayer of the heart. Like most medieval authors, Hilton accepts a fourfold interpretation of the scriptures and is firmly rooted in the Augustinian tradition. Bibliography Critical editions of Hilton’s Latin writings were published in Salzburg by J. P. H. Clark and C. Taylor in 1987. Many of Hilton’s minor works were published in translation in London in 1929 by D. Jones. A critical edition of The Scale of Perfection is promised by the Early English Text Society. The best introduction to Hilton’s life and thought is J. P. H. Clark and R. Dorward, trans., Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection (Paulist Press, 1991). —Greg Peters HIPPOLYTUS (ca. 170–ca. 236).╇ Sketchy information about Hippolytus exists, but from what is known, most
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Charles Hodge
scholars agree on several significant points of his life. Hippolytus was a student of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (modern-Â�day France), sometime before AD 200. Hippolytus lived most of his adult life in Rome, where Origen is said to have heard him preach around 212 to 215. Hippolytus was a presbyter in Rome around the turn of the century and bishop some time later. Some writers and historians say that he was a bishop of Rome (pope), while others say he was bishop of Porto (Portus). There is a Porto at the mouth of the Tiber River, not far from Rome, and a Porto in Arabia, but scholars tend to favor the former. That Hippolytus wrote extensively and often opposed various sects and laxity in the Roman church is not in question. When Callistus (Calixtus) became bishop of Rome, Hippolytus, like Tertullian, was upset by the Roman bishops for their stances on the importance placed on the Roman see and papal infallibility. Hippolytus viewed the bishops as heretical; the church split and elected Hippolytus as the bishop in opposition during the time of bishops Callistus, Urbanus, and Pontianus (217–235). During Emperor Maximin’s persecution of Christians from 235 to 239, both Pontianus (the bishop of Rome) and Hippolytus (the bishop in opposition) were exiled to Sardinia, and both were martyred. Tradition says that Hippolytus was drowned, but whether that occurred in Sardinia or Italy is not certain. Regardless, Hippolytus’s remains were buried on the road to Tivoli (or Via Tiburtina) in 236. This, along with his being revered as a martyr, suggests to some that the schism between Hippolytus and the church at Rome ended before his death. In 1551, a statue of Hippolytus in a chair was unearthed on the road to Tivoli. The top half of the body was gone (and has since been restored), but most of the chair remained. On the back of the chair is a list of works that Hippolytus wrote. Most of his works have disappeared, but some are intact, while others remain only in fragments. Compiling various lists—including what Eusebius says Hippolytus wrote—shows about forty works by Hippolytus, most of which were done between 200 and 235. Out of the forty to forty-Â�three books written by Hippolytus, eight are fairly complete in Greek, twelve have disappeared, and twenty-Â�three are in fragments. About half are interpretations of scripture, either as homilies or commentaries. Other works of Hippolytus have been found in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavic, but very little in Greek. By the end of Hippolytus’s life, Greek was no longer the language the Roman church used anymore; however, Greek was still used in the Christian world in the East, so in the East Hippolytus remained influential longer than in the Western church. Today Hippolytus is viewed as a great theologian of the time. In 1701 a Greek book was printed that included Hippolytus’s book Refutation of All Heresies, but it had been
incorrectly listed as Philophumena by Origen. In 1842, books 4 through 10 were found (a fourteenth-Â�century copy); it too was published as Origen’s. The mistake was corrected and the book reprinted in 1859, correctly listing Hippolytus as the author. This ten-Â�volume work is very important among ante-Â�Nicene works, for its theological content, its insight into controversies and heresies of the Early Church, and for its connection to the apostolic age— Hippolytus was a student of Irenaeus, who was a pupil of Polycarp, who was a disciple of St. John, the Apostle. Besides Refutation of All Heresies, some of Hippolytus’s other works include Apostolic Tradition, which presents procedures on how to perform ordinations, prayers, confirmations, and other church practices. Determination of the Date of Easter is one of the books listed on the chair (statue) and mentioned by Eusebius. On the Blessings of Moses, On the Raising of Lazarus, On Christ and Antichrist, On the Resurrection, and On Good and the Source of Evil are other books by Hippolytus. He also wrote numerous commentaries on various books of the Bible, as well as Against Marcion and Against the Greeks and Plato, two books addressing heresies. Bibliography
After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity, by Bart Ehrman The Christian Theology Reader, edited by Alister E. McGrath A History of Early Christian Literature, by Edgar J. Goodspeed Refutation of All Heresies, by Hippolytus
—Linda Gray
CHARLES HODGE (1797–1878).╇ Charles Hodge was born on December 27, 1797, in Philadelphia to parents Mary Blanchard Hodge and Dr. Hugh Hodge, the latter dying soon after Charles’s birth. After graduating from Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) in 1815, he attended the seminary there, graduating four years later. The following year he began teaching at the seminary, where he spent the remainder of his life, except for the two years (1826 to 1828) when he studied in Paris, Halle, and Berlin. Licensed by Philadelphia Presbytery in 1819, he served a very short time as a pastor and preacher before being appointed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church a professor at Princeton Seminary in 1822. This new role did not end his preaching career; he frequently was a guest preacher and regularly spoke at his home for what became known as his “Sabbath afternoons.” In 1834, Rutgers University awarded him with a Doctor of Divinity degree (D.D.), and in 1864, Washington College conferred on him the Doctor of Literary Letters degree (LL.D.).
Thomas Hooker
Throughout his life, Hodge held to a strong view of scripture’s verbal, plenary inspiration. This did not mean that he viewed the biblical authors’ roles as robotic scribes writing as God dictated, but that the scriptures contain the very words of God, true and timeless. This stance is reflected in his voluminous works and very clearly in his exegetical works: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1835; revised second edition, 1864), Commentary on Ephesians (1856), First Corinthians (1857), and Second Corinthians (1859). He used lower (i.e., grammatical, linguistic) criticism and historical criticism in his exegetical work, and his works are clearly written, straightforward, and logical. In 1825, Hodge began The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, a journal he continued to publish for forty years. During that time he also wrote more than 130 articles for the Princeton Review, and the topics centered on his strong views of the authority of scripture, his adherence to orthodox Christianity, and matters relating to the Presbyterian denomination. Many of these were republished in the volume Essays and Reviews from the Princeton Review (1857) and Discussions in Church Polity (1878). A thorough Calvinist Presbyterian, Hodge was essentially a conservative (i.e., Scottish Common Sense Realism) who was in complete conformity with the Westminster Confession and the Westminster Catechism. Scottish Realism was a reaction to the godlessness and moral skepticism that grew out of Enlightenment philosophies. He was a contemporary of the early critical scholars in Germany and became well acquainted with them while he was studying in Europe. He rejected the skepticism and faithlessness that grew out of much of the historico-Â� critical movement in Germany. Hodge’s book Way of Life (1841) is a popular exposition on Christian faith that defends tenets of orthodox Christianity such as the Bible as God’s word and original sin. Probably his greatest work is his three-Â�volume Systematic Theology (1871–1873), a classic work composed of more than two thousand pages. As an active and prominent member of the Presbyterian denomination, Hodge served as the moderator of the General Assembly in 1846 and helped revise the denomination’s Book of Discipline. His involvement in all things Presbyterian—including his more than half century at Princeton, a Presbyterian seminary—led to his writing The Constitutional History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (1840) and Discussions of Church Polity (1878). While he considered the historical context from which the biblical works came, he was (typical of his time) oblivious to the biases coming from his own historical context. His most egregious fault was in his insistence that scripture did not specifically prohibit owning slaves. By
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1846, though, he became a convinced abolitionist. He also opposed Darwinian evolution, recognizing its tendency toward atheism, but saw no biblical problem with God using forms of evolution in His creation. Toward the end of his life, Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874) as a rebuttal to the controversial theory arising from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published in 1859. In 1872, fifty years after Hodge began teaching at Princeton, the seminary recognized his contributions at a celebration that established a Charles Hodge professorship and was attended by four hundred former students. Hodge left a tremendous legacy through his influence on Princeton Seminary, the more than three thousand ministers and scholars personally taught and his seminal writings, which are still in print. Bibliography
Charles Hodge Revisited by John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead. “Christianity without Christ” by Charles Hodge in Princeton Review http://www.ondoctrine.com/2hoc0103.htm. A Commentary on Romans by Charles Hodge. An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians by Charles Hodge. Systematic Theology, Charles Hodge, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 1993 (reprint of earlier Erdman’s publication). 1 and 2 Corinthians, Charles Hodge, Banner of Truth Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1974. The Book of Revelation: An Exposition of the First Eleven Chapters (originally published as The Spiritual Kingdom) by James Ramsey with an Introduction by Charles Hodge, Banner of Truth Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1998. http://www.bartleby.com/227/0902.html Short article on Hodge from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). VOLUME XVII. Later National Literature, Part II. http://www.theopedia.com/Charles_Hodge http://www.ccel.org/h/hodge/ http://www.tracts.ukgo.com/charles_hodge.htm
—Thomas Gray
THOMAS HOOKER (1586–1647).╇ New England Puritan minister and theologian Thomas Hooker was born in Marfield, Leicesterhire, England. After grammar school at nearby Market Bosworth, in 1604 Hooker matriculated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, but soon transferred to Puritan stronghold Emmanuel, graduating with a BA in 1608 and an MA in 1611. He remained at Emmanuel as tutor, lecturer, and catechist, during which time he feared God’s wrath and felt uncertain about his ability to receive mercy until he experienced a transrational personal conversion. In Cotton Mather’s words, this rendered him “a
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
most Experimental Acquaintance with the Truths of the Gospel” that directed his mature sermons on conversion and the soul’s progress. At Emmanuel, he became enmeshed in a network of influential Puritan scholars and ministers. In 1618 he became rector of St. George’s in Esher, Surrey, and chaplain to the Drake family. There he successfully counseled the spiritually distraught and suicidal Mrs. Joanna Drake, recounted in Jasper Heartwell’s Trodden Down Strength (1647). Hooker married Susannah Garbrand in 1621. Hooker was reprimanded by Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, and in 1625 moved to Chelmsford, Essex, to serve as lecturer and curate at St. Mary’s. He became an outspoken advocate for Puritan Congregationalist ecclesiology and critic of Anglican harassment. He also preached a sermon series outlining preparationist soteriology and held school in his home, with the assistance of John Eliot (later the “Apostle to the Indians” in Massachusetts). Hooker’s first book, The Poor Doubting Christian, appeared in 1629 and proved to be his most popular. Hooker attracted the unfavorable attention of Bishop (later Archbishop) Laud and was summoned to the Court of High Commission in 1630, but chose exile in Holland in 1631. After initial trouble in connecting with an English church in Amsterdam, Hooker briefly met William Ames and assisted John Forbes in the Prinsenhof church, Delft, until 1633 when, after returning briefly to reunite with his family, he migrated with John Cotton and Samuel Stone to New England. Hooker settled in Newtown (later Cambridge) and joined other Essex immigrants in formally founding a Congregationalist church. Hooker quickly became a consultant to Massachusetts Bay leaders, as in the case of Captain Endecott’s controversial removal of the red cross from a naval flag. But Hooker and others in Cambridge were apparently dissatisfied about inadequate farming land and decided to remove to the Connecticut River, establishing themselves at what became Hartford in 1636. Nonetheless, Hooker maintained ties with Massachusetts, returning in August 1637 to comoderate the colony’s first synod and to address the Free Grace (or Antinomian) controversy. Hooker influenced the formation of Connecticut government, beginning with a 1638 election sermon for the drafters of the Fundamental Orders. Hooker declared “the foundation of authority is laid .╯.╯. in the free consent of the people,” an expression that has suggested his democratic leanings. In the early 1640s, Hooker rejected an invitation to the Westminster Assembly but endeavored to influence the proceedings through four books published in the London press in 1645. He undertook an extensive apologia for the New England Way in A Survey of the Summer of Church Discipline (1647).
One of the ablest exponents of preparationist soteriology, Hooker is best remembered for his extensive sermon series on the ordo salutis, or the progress of the Christian soul, in which he challenged and encouraged his audience: The Soules Preparation for Christ; The Soules Humiliation; The Soules Ingrafting into Christ; The Soules Implantation; The Soules Exaltation; et al. He went at much the same subject matter again more expansively in the two volumes of The Application of Redemption and A Comment upon Christ’s Last Prayer. Although committed to the plain style, his sermons are marked by direct, colorful, but familiar figurative language and a knack for sensitively anticipating the objections and doubts in his audience. Perhaps no other early New England Puritan minister so fully encapsulated the various available ministerial roles, from political prophet of jeremiads to apologist for church polity to anatomist of the regenerate soul. Bibliography Hooker’s book publications have a complicated bibliographical history of reprintings, errors, and abridgements; except for a small body of shorter English writings, they have never been given a modern critical republication. Several Hooker titles on the soul’s progress have been reprinted in facsimile form by AMS Press; a few others have been reprinted by small publishers. Sargent Bush’s bibliography is the place to begin, in Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland, 1626–1633, ed. George H. Williams et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 390–425. See also Redemption: Three Sermons (1637–1656) by Thomas Hooker (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1956). Hooker’s biography begins with Cotton Mather’s treatment in Johannes in Eremo (1695), republished in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Modern treatments include: Ball, John H., III, Chronicling the Soul’s Windings: Thomas Hooker and His Morphology of Conversion. Lanham: University Press of America, 1992. Bush, Sargent, Jr. The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Colacurcio, Michael J. Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006. Shuffelton, Frank. Thomas Hooker: 1586–1647. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
—Michael Ditmore
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844–1889).╇ Father Gerard Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, was an adult convert to Catholicism. Unknown and unpublished in his lifetime, he is now considered one of the major English poets.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Although Father Hopkins struggled with loneliness and depression in his last years, he died joyfully in the hope of the resurrection. His dying words were: “I am so happy, I am so happy.” Death would bring him to God, for whose greater glory he had spent his life. Gerard Hopkins (he seldom used his middle name), the eldest of nine children, was born in the London suburb of Stratford, Essex, on July 28, 1844. His parents, high church Anglicans, encouraged their children in artistic pursuits, being artistically accomplished themselves. Hopkins was sensitive and precocious as a child, sketching and writing at a young age. At age ten, he entered Cholmondeley School, Highgate, and proved himself a gifted student. At age nineteen, he entered Balliol College of Oxford University, where his ascetic tendencies surfaced. Notebooks from that time show an earnest young man not only devoutly religious but also poetically gifted and deeply moved by nature. Hopkins’s yearning for holiness brought him in contact with Oxford’s most famous convert, John Henry Newman, whose Apologia pro Vita Sua had moved young Gerard. After receiving instruction from Father Newman, much to Hopkins’s parents’ dismay, the twenty-Â�two-Â�year-Â�old Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Newman himself, on October 21, 1866. Hopkins strove to overcome what he deemed his overly passionate and egoistic desires; he discerned a calling to the priesthood and eventually chose the rigor of the Society of Jesus. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1868. After three years of study and teaching, he was sent to St. Beuno’s College in North Wales for theology. It was during these peaceful years at St. Beuno that Hopkins learned Welsh and studied Welsh poetry. He had already become convinced of the beauty and power of Anglo-Â�Saxon words, preferring them over the softer sounding words of Latin derivation. Later he would add the Welsh poetical device of multiple alliteration and internal rhyming within a line which, when combined with his meticulous word choice, would become integral to his best poetry. It was at this time in Wales, providentially, that Hopkins’s rector expressed a desire for a poem to be written as a memorial to a recent tragedy, the wreck in the Thames of the German ship Deutschland, which had caused the death of most of the passengers, including five exiled nuns. Hopkins, who had been saddened by the disaster, leapt at the chance and thereby broke seven years of self-Â�imposed poetic silence. As part of his ongoing desire for conquest of self, he had burned all his poetry written at both Highgate and Oxford, and “resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” His long dormant talent ignited, the result was Hopkins’s radically innovative poem “The Wreck of
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the Deutschland.” This poem was not well received and was rejected for publication, though today it is considered one of Hopkins’s masterpieces. In it, he used for the first time the technique that he called “sprung rhythm,” the result of his poetical theories gestating in Wales. Though his poetic sensibility blossomed at St. Beuno’s, he did not do well in his theological examinations, the first time he had not performed at the highest level. Nevertheless, he was ordained a priest in 1877 and in that same year wrote eleven of his finest sonnets, including “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring,” “The Starlight Night,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” and his most famous poem, “The Windhover.” This would be his banner year. After ordination, Father Hopkins served four years in various parishes, including work as a missionary in the slums of Liverpool. In 1881–1882, he wrote reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. These notes give insight into his religiosity and bear witness that the Ignatian ideals inform his poetry. Upset by the vice and filth he encountered in Liverpool, he soon returned to London, receiving a church in Oxford. He next taught Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst. It was at the Stonyhurst library that he chanced upon the thought of the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus; Scotus’s ideas of particular form resonated with Hopkins; this would foment into his distinctive theories of “inscape” and “instress” or the “thisness” of objects, cementing in his mind what he had intuited privately. In 1884, he was elected to the chair of Greek at University College, Dublin. Prior to this, Father Hopkins had continued to write poetry (“Spring and Fall”), tinkering with his entirely original meter, rhythm, and lexicon, and to compose sermons. During the unhappy Dublin years, Hopkins began to deteriorate physically. His eyesight was failing, and he was wearied by excessive grading. He was homesick and felt little understood by his peers, as correspondence to his good friend Robert Bridges reveals; his melancholy became nearly oppressive. It was during 1885–1886 that he composed the six sonnets collectively called by Bridges “The Terrible Sonnets,” which chronicle Father Hopkins’s intense mental anguish and spiritual desolation; ironically, these poems display his poetic talents and innovative technique almost to perfection. Yet other poems and writing from the time show that, although he suffered, he never despaired; he remained jubilantly hopeful in Christ. Perhaps because his immunity was compromised, Father Hopkins contracted typhoid fever and succumbed relatively quickly, on June 8, 1889, aged forty-Â� four. Although he had published nothing, he had asked Bridges to be his literary executor; Bridges, who would be Poet Laureate in 1913, proved to be a good choice, for
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Stanley Romaine Hopper
although Bridges did not completely understand the less than typical poetry of his friend, he carefully collected and edited the poems and arranged for their publication in 1918. A second edition in 1930 found a world ready for Hopkins, whose ringing verse was ahead of its time. His fame began to rise and has not abated since. Hopkins’s influence has been enormous and has grown into what can be called a cult. His many distinguished followers include W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, David Jones, and Dylan Thomas. His verse has been set to music and his sonnets are included in most anthologies, taught at universities, and loved by multitudes who continue to be moved by the poet-Â�priest who gave glory to God for dappled-Â�things. Principal Ideas of Gerard Manley Hopkins •â•‡ Hopkins intended for his poetry to be read aloud, for the sound to echo the sense of his words. •â•‡ Sprung rhythm is Hopkins’s complex system of metrics based on the number of stressed syllables in a poetic line, derived partly from Welsh poetry. Hopkins believed sprung rhythm “is the nearest thing to the rhythm of prose .╯.╯. the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one would have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm’s self—and naturalness of expression.” •â•‡ Inscape—the essential aspects of a thing that make it unique and individual, even among others of the same kind; the “thisness” of a thing, the very essence of its nature, which is both integral and typical, “the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing.” •â•‡ Instress is the power that sustains inscape, not perceived itself, since it is the flow of the preserving power of God. •â•‡ Inscape and instress explain Hopkins’s sacramental view of nature, since all God’s creation is “the visible sign of an invisible, intelligent and creative energy.” He tried to capture in poetry the inscape of the natural world, using his sprung rhythm and carefully chosen words. •â•‡ Contemplation of natural beauty can thus be a religious experience when a person perceives the inscape of a beautiful thing and thereby becomes instressed with God, who has created the natural world for mankind, in order to reveal His love. •â•‡ Therefore: “Man is created to praise, revere, and serve God, and by this means save his soul; the other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them in as
far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him” (from the First Principle and Foundation of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius). This is key to understanding both Father Hopkins’s spirituality and poetry. Bibliography Two good biographies of Hopkins are:
Martin, R. B. Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Very Private Life. New York: Putnam, 1991. White, Norman. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Excellent editions of his collected writings:
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works. Edited by Catherine Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. A Hopkins Reader. Edited by John Pick. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1966.
For his collected poetry with a short introduction and biography: Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
For a current sourcebook that offers introductory comments; critical history and interpretations; annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, and critical works; unabridged texts of the twenty-�nine most important poems; cross-�references between documents and sections of the guide; and a bibliography: Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Sourcebook. Edited by Alice Jenkins. Routledge Guides to Literature. New York: Routledge, 2006.
For insightful and orthodox interpretation by a priest of Hopkins’s most important poems, along with a good introduction:
Nichols, Aidan, O.P. Hopkins: Theologian’s Poet. Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2006. Puhl, Louis J., S.J. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A New Translation Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph. Chicago: Loyala Press, 1951.
—Barbara Wyman
STANLEY ROMAINE HOPPER (1907–1991).╇ In many ways, Stanley Romaine Hopper can be considered the father of the religion and literature movement in the United States. Although Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Amos Wilder also played major roles in creating programs that explored the intersections of theology and literature, Hopper launched the first such program in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A poet all of his life—he was working on an epic poem, The Book of Enoch, when he died—Hopper very early in
Susan Howatch
his academic life became interested in the relationship between culture, religion, and poetry. In his early work, Hopper was concerned with the moral isolation of the artist, the spiritual vocation of the poet, and mysticism and poetry. In his later work, primarily in the 1970s, Hopper developed “theopoetics,” a dynamic method that encouraged theologians to engage poetry, rather than simply the static categories of systematic theology, in their interpretation of the sacred. With such an approach, poets could also become theologians because they were revealing the nature of God in their own symbolic manner. Thus, a theologian could fashion poetically interpretive explorations of theological categories—becoming a poet of theology—and a poet could do theology through his or her use of symbolic language that reveals the paradoxes of the divine. This causes theology to become less a scientific endeavor and more a literary one. Always creative, Hopper contributed essays to a number of books and edited several collections of essays that explored topics as diverse as the biblical book of Jeremiah, myth and dream, irony, process philosophy, existentialism, and poets as various as Rilke, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. Born in Fresno, California, in 1907, Hopper studied at the University of Southern California and Boston University. In Boston, he began to write poetry and studied with the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Romanticism with Irving Babbitt, and American literary history with F. O. Matthiessen. He also studied at the University of Zurich with the theologian Emil Brunner and at Oxford with the renowned classics scholar Gilbert Murray. Hopper met the New Critic Cleanth Brooks and T.╯S. Eliot while he was at Oxford, and the three discussed the relationship between culture and poetry. Upon his return from England, he, along with Lynn Harold Hough, launched the Religion and Literature graduate program at Drew University. Hopper was the only delegate to the First Conference on Religion and the Arts at the Ecumenical Institute in Celigny, Switzerland. He chaired the Commission on Literature at the National Council of Churches, and Nathan A. Scott Jr., Amos Wilder, Cleanth Brooks, W.╯H. Auden, and Marianne Moore participated with him on that commission. From 1948 to 1950, Hopper put together a series of lectures on religion and literature that featured poets such as Delmore Schwartz, literary critics such as Kenneth Burke and Philip Rahv, and religious scholars such as Amos Wilder; he edited the lectures and later published them as Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature. In 1960, he delivered forty-Â�six television lectures on religion and literature for CBS’s summer semester. In 1967, Hopper traveled to Japan and began to incorporate the lessons of Zen into his life and writings. Upon his return from Japan, he became Bishop Ledden
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Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, establishing a significant program in religion and the arts there. Hopper’s creative and facile mind and his always groundbreaking writings influenced several generations of scholars working in the area of religion, art, and culture. Bibliography
Hopper, Stanley Romaine. Crisis of Faith. Nashville: Abingdon-Â� Cokesbury, 1944. ———. Why Persimmons and Other Poems: Transformations of Theology in Poetry. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987. Hopper, Stanley Romaine, ed. Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952. Hopper, Stanley Romaine, and David Miller, eds. Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. Hopper, Stanley Romaine, and R. Melvin Keiser. The Way of Transfiguration: Religious Imagination as Theopoiesis. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
SUSAN HOWATCH (1940–).╇ In the 1980s, Susan Howatch commenced a series of novels that retold the history of the Church of England from the late 1930s to 1968. Already a veteran of writing historical fiction and family sagas—her Penmarric (1971) follows the fortunes of the Cornish Penmar family through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Howatch turned her marvelous attention to detail and her eye for historical intrigue to various foibles and fortunes in the Anglican Church. In the novels in the Starbridge series, Howatch effectively follows the exploits of many characters and the story of the developing Anglican Church through multiple points of view. Each of the six books in the series can be read separately from each other, and each is narrated by a different character, although the hero in each book appears in other books in the series. All of the books are set in the diocese of Starbridge, supposedly in the west of England, but they also feature Gothic elements such as monks (the Fordite monks, a fictional Anglican monastic order). The first three books in the series (Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, and Ultimate Prizes) are set in the 1930s and through World War II. The second three books (Scandalous Risks, Mystical Paths, and Absolute Truths) are set in the 1960s. Glamorous Powers, for example, revolves around Jonathan Darrow’s decision to leave the Fordite monastic order to marry and search for a new ministry. The novel’s central conflict arises from Darrow’s use and abuse of his ability to receive mystical visions and to heal. Mystical Paths narrates the story of Nicholas Darrow, Jonathan’s son, whose preordination religious conflicts almost prevent him from taking his ordination.
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Hroswitha of Gandersheim
Born in Surrey, England, Susan Howatch attended Sutton High School. When she was twenty-Â�one, she obtained a law degree from the King’s College in London. In 1964, she moved to the United States, where she began her writing career. She published her first novel, The Dark Shore, in 1965, followed by her family sagas and gothic novels. In 1975, she left the United States, lived for a short time in the Republic of Ireland, and moved back to England in 1980, when she began writing her series devoted to the Church of England. Howatch founded the position of Starbridge Lecturer in Natural Science and Theology in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. Howatch’s imaginative tales of the Church of England offer their own gracious insights into the conflict between faith and humanity that characterizes the religious vocation. Bibliography
Howatch, Susan. Absolute Truths. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Glamorous Powers. New York: Knopf, 1988. ———. Glittering Images. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. Mystical Paths. London: HarperCollins, 1992.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
HROSWITHA OF GANDERSHEIM (ca. 935–ca. 1002). Hroswitha of Gandersheim, also known as Hrosvit, HrostÂ� svit, and Roswitha, was a Christian poet from Gandersheim, located in present-Â�day Lower Saxony, and the first known playwright since antiquity. Although there is debate as to when Hroswitha entered the monastic life, the best evidence suggests that she entered the convent of Gandersheim at a relatively early age and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. Since Gandersheim accepted only persons from noble birth, Hroswitha would have had access to a good education. In fact, her works suggest that she had access to classical and ecclesiastical reading sources. Ann Haight writes that Hroswitha’s “skill in Latin points to many years of training under teachers well versed in Latin prosody. Her knowledge of classical and religious literature is evidence that Gandersheim had a rich collection of manuscripts” (12). Reflected in her works are Virgil, Ovid, Terence, the early Christian writers Prudentius and Venantius Fortunatus, the Roman philosopher Boethius, Scholasticism, Apocryphal literature, and legends of saints. Because she eventually became a canoness of Gandersheim, Hroswitha was afforded the freedom from the more restrictive lifestyle of the Benedictine nuns. As a canoness, she had access to the financial security of her noble upbringing but also to the protection from the limitations of marriage. Works Although it seems that Hroswitha had royal patronage (Otto II), her literary works were not well known in
her lifetime. In fact, her works probably were not disseminated beyond Gandersheim and remained virtually unknown for five hundred years after her death. They began to receive scholarly recognition only when the German humanist Conrade Celetes discovered the Hroswitha codex (Emmeram-Â�Munich Codex dating from the early eleventh century) in the Emmeram monastery in Regensburg in 1493 and published the work in 1501. In 1845, Charles Mangin published Hroswitha’s literary corpus under the title Theatre de Hroswitha, and Marjorie Dana Barlow gave a list of the dates Hroswitha’s plays were performed from 1888 into the twentieth century. The Emmeram-Â�Munich Codex organizes Hroswitha’s corpus chronologically into three books according to genre: book 1 contains her eight legends, book 2 her six plays, and book 3 her two epics. Referring to herself as Clamor Validus Gandersheimes, “the strong voice of Gandersheim,” she initially began her literary output by composing eight legends and saints’ lives in verse; later, she composed what most scholars feel are her most original writings, six dramas (some scholars categorize them as comedies) patterned after the style of the Roman playwright Terence; and her latest writings consist of two narrative poems that give accounts of the reign of Otto the Great and the history of the cloister at Gandersheim. Hroswitha’s first legend, “Maria,” deals with the life of the Virgin and introduces the major theme of chastity, a focus of all her later works. “Ascensio,” the second legend, is an account of Christ’s ascension. In the third legend, the eighth-Â�century Frankish knight Gongolf is the subject of his adulterous wife’s plot to kill him. The fourth legend recounts the martyrdom of Pelagius for his refusal to engage in homosexual relationships with the caliph of Cordoba. In both the fifth and sixth legends, “Basillius” and “Theophilus,” Faustian characters strike a bargain with the devil in which they exchange their souls for worldly wealth. Bishop Basillius and the Virgin Mary intercede respectively for the souls of the two characters. “Dionysius,” the seventh legend, recounts the martyrdom of the first bishop of Paris; “Agnus,” the final legend, praises the saint for her martyrdom and preservation of her virginity. Most scholars consider her cycle of six dramas to be the most original of Hroswitha’s works. The day before his departure on a campaign against the Scythians, Gallicanus, Commander-in-Chief of Constantine’s army, is betrothed to the Emperor Constantine’s daughter, Constance, a consecrated virgin. In danger of being defeated in battle, he is converted to Christianity, is baptized, takes vows of celibacy, and is eventually martyred. The second play, Dulcitius, the name of the executioner in the play, is set in the time of the Diocletian persecutions. Three virgin sisters, Agapes, Chionia, and Hirena, are eventually martyred for their refusal to denounce their faith
Hugh of Saint Victor
and vows of chastity. Callimachus recounts the attempts of a pagan youth to dishonor a young Christian woman, Drusiana. When God grants Drusiana’s prayer for death rather than allow her to be compromised, Callimachus breaks into her tomb intending to profane her corpse, for which he is immediately struck dead. The fourth and fifth plays, Paphnutius and Abraham, examine the themes of fall and redemption. In the former, an anchorite, Paphnutius, converts a prostitute, Thaïs, to Christianity, who then embarks on an ascetic life. In the latter, the hermit Abraham saves Mary, his niece. In her final play, Sapientia, Hroswitha creates three allegorical virgins—Fides (faith), Spes (Hope), and Caritas (Charity)—who choose death rather than have their chastity compromised, thus guaranteeing eternal life in heaven. Hroswitha’s last two works are two epics in verse—Carmen de gestis Oddonis Imperatoris, “Deeds of the Emperor Otto” (also referred to as Gesta Ottonis) and Primordia coenobii Gandeshemensis, “Origins of the Abbey of Gandersheim.” In the Gesta Ottonis, Hroswitha describes Otto the Great as the ideal Christian emperor as well as a descendent of the Hebrew King David. Otto’s queens Edith and Adelheid are portrayed as paradigms of virtue. The Primordia coenobii Gandeshemensis gives an account of the Gandersheim Abbey from its founding to the death of Abbess Christina in 918. Although it has historical value, it is replete with both legendary and exemplary characters similar to those in her six plays. While there has been some scholarly interest in her other works, most current critical attention has focused on Hroswitha’s dramatic cycle, especially on cultural, stylistic, and thematic issues. Among twentieth-Â�century scholars, however, there is a growing interest in problematizing what they see as earlier androcentric interpretations of her plays as well as identifying an underlying protofeminist tendency. Bibliography
Haight, Ann Lyon, ed. Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Her Times, Her Works. New York: Horswitha Club, 1965. Homeyer, Helena, ed. Hrotsvithae Opera (1970). Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schoning, 1972. Ker, William Paton. The Dark Ages. London: Nelson, 1955. Mangin, Charles. Theatre de Hroswitha. Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1845.
—W. Randolph Tate
HUGH OF SAINT VICTOR (end eleventh centuryÂ�–1141). The final twenty years of the life of Hugh of Saint Victor are well documented, evidencing his role as the leading scholar of the influential abbey-Â�school of Saint Victor in Paris. Long-Â�standing controversy, however,
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surrounds the details of the early part of Hugh’s life. Most twelfth-Â�century documents point to a family descent from the counts of Blankenburg in Saxony, while others imply a Flemish origin, and scholars ever since the seventeenth century have been sharply divided on the issue. Jerome Taylor has analyzed the history of this debate in The Origin and Early Life of Hugh of St. Victor: An Evaluation of the Tradition (1957), showing how the advocates of a Flemish connection have seen this as bolstering an association of Hugh with later traditions of Flemish mysticism, while supporters of a Saxon origin, such as the philosopher Leibniz, would emphasize Hugh’s connections with twelfth-Â�century scholasticism. In any case, in one of his few autobiographical comments, Hugh does tell us that a thoughtful person must learn to leave behind nostalgic attachments to any one place, acknowledging that “from boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut” (Didascalicon 3.19, translated by Jerome Taylor [1961], 101). In another passage Hugh gives us an insight into his boyhood scholarly proclivities, as he says, “I dare to affirm before you that I myself never looked down on anything which had to do with education, but that I often learned many things which seemed to others to be a sort of joke or just nonsense,” confessing his passion for learning the names of everything, lining up rhetorical arguments, marking out geometrical proofs on the ground, and noting musical notations with string. “These were boyish pursuits, to be sure, yet not without their utility for me.╯.╯.╯. Learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous” (Didascalicon 6.3, translated by Jerome Taylor, 136–137). By whatever means he came to the Abbey of Saint Victor, Hugh soon turned the institution into one of the foremost centers of learning and of pedagogical innovation in the early twelfth century. In subsequent centuries Hugh’s reputation has undergone a slow but decisive evolution, as has the intellectual history of the Middle Ages. The early view of him, prevalent through the mid-Â�twentieth century, emphasized Hugh’s staunchly traditional orthodoxy, especially in relation to the transgressive intellectuality of Abelard. By early scholars such as Barthélemy Hauréau (Les Oeuvres de Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor: Essai Critique [1886]), Hugh was noted especially for allegorical biblical exegesis and for his short treatises of mystical spirituality, such as “On Meditation” (De Meditatione), “On the Nature of Love” (De Substantia Dilectionis), or “What True Love Is” (Quid Vere Diligendum Sit), featured in such anthologies as Textes Spirituels (1962) or Six Opuscules Spirituels (1969), both edited by Roger Baron, or Selected Spiritual Writings, translated by a Religious of C.S.M.V. (Community of St. Mary the Virgin) (1962). Particularly interesting is
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the strain of “nuptial spirituality” found in a number of these writings, a form of affective piety that emphasizes the potential emotional intimacy between God and the soul as God’s spouse, which sees “God as longing” (Deus desiderans). An extended meditation on this theme is De Arrha Animae (translated as The Soul’s Betrothal-Â�Gift by F. Sherwood Taylor [1945] and as Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul by Kevin Herbert [1956]). Hugh’s mysticism could take a less conventional turn as well, as in his “Exposition on the Celestial Hierarchies” of Dionysius the Pseudo-Â�Areopagite (PL CLXXVII, 923–1154); Hugh, in effect, served as the conduit for Pseudo-Â�Dionysius’s daring “negative theology,” first introduced to medieval Europe by John Scot Erigena, but he anchored it firmly in a biblical and Christocentric theology. Hugh’s orthodoxy was so manifest that later medieval writers referred to him as “another Augustine” (alter Augustinus). Indeed Hugh’s treatise De Tribus Diebus, edited by Dominici Poirel (2002), is an extended Augustinian meditation on the created universe. Hugh follows the principles of biblical exegesis laid down by Augustine in the treatise De Doctrina Christiana, beginning with the semiological premise that while words are signs of things, it is even more important to understand that things are signs of things—the basis for allegorical interpretation of scripture. In his monumental survey Medieval Exegesis (original in French, 1959; English translation, 1998), Henri de Lubac connects Hugh not only with the traditional Augustinian approach to scripture, but with the more extreme allegorizing tendencies associated with Origen. In this earlier mapping of Hugh’s place in cultural history he appears essentially as a traditionalist, as a figure not closely connected to the great intellectual changes about to emerge in the scholastic movement and other aspects of the twelfth-Â�century renaissance. By the mid-Â�twentieth century, however, a new appreciation arose of the crucial intellectual contribution of Hugh of Saint Victor to the new philosophical currents of the later Middle Ages. John Kleinz’s The Theory of Knowledge of Hugh of Saint Victor (1944) definitively removed Hugh from the ranks of fideistic anti-Â�intellectualism, concluding that “from the researches of the past half-Â�century Hugh of Saint Victor emerges as one of the most important and significant figures of the Renaissance of the twelfth century” (xiii–xiv). In his presidential address to the Royal Historical Society in 1970, R. W. Southern delivered a kind of clarion call to reconsider the place in intellectual history of Hugh of Saint Victor (currently still seen as the “dimmest of all the great figures of the twelfth century”), as someone “who had the instincts of a historian and had not yet learned that these instincts were incompatible with those of a scholastic theologian” (“Aspects of the European
Tradition of Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of St Victor and the Idea of Historical Development,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 21 [1971]: 163). David Staines, in an essay on “The Holistic Vision of Hugh of Saint Victor,” concurs, arguing that while Hugh did not compose historical analyses, “yet he brought an historical consciousness to his biblical and theological studies” (in Centre and Labyrinth/Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. [1983]: 151). Moreover, in contrast to Lubac, Beryl Smalley (The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages [1952]) had already emphasized Hugh’s close attention to the literal and historical senses of scripture as the necessary foundations for allegorical interpretation. Following up on Smalley’s suggestions, Grover Zinn has shown, in a close reading of a hitherto neglected hermeneutical treatise, how Hugh manifests “a deeply appreciative and perceptive literal/ historical reading of the text” of both the Old and New Testaments (“Hugh of St. Victor’s De Scripturis et Scriptoribus Sacris as an Accessus Treatise for the Study of the Bible,” Traditio 52 [1997]: 121). Such an appreciation of Hugh’s attentiveness to historical truth has led Rebecca Moore to devote an entire monograph to the thesis that, in his works, Hugh is far more respectful than most of his predecessors and contemporaries of ancient Hebrew history and Hebrew religiosity, for their own sake, and not just for their typological Christian significance (Jews and Christians in the Life and Thought of Hugh of St. Victor [1998]). With respect to his attitude toward Judaism, Hugh was, Moore concludes, both “a Christian of his time” and “a Christian ahead of his time”: he presumed the unique and universal legitimacy of Christianity since the Incarnation, yet he did accept the salvific efficacy of pre-Â�Christian acts of faith and ritual in their own time (104–112). Hugh’s theological magnum opus is the groundbreaking treatise De Sacramentis, translated by Roy Deferrari as Hugh of Saint Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (1951). In this analytic universal history and theodicy Hugh sets forth an inclusive definition of sacrament that includes grace-Â�giving acts and rituals as instituted not only in the era of Christian dispensation but also in the pre-Â�Mosaic time of natural law and in the time of Mosaic written law as well (see book I.xi–xii and book II passim). Hugh sets forth what today would be called a “processual” conception of sacrament that is inclusive in embracing every era of human history yet Christocentric in presupposing a culmination in Christian eschatology. Deferrari argues that this work is “the first complete theological treatise of the mediaeval schools, and it is likewise the most literary of all the many contemporary works dealing with the same subject” (xx).
Hugh of Saint Victor
This humanistic and literary character of Hugh’s work is most dramatically evident in his pedagogically oriented works, most elaborately in his series of treatises on the topic of Noah’s Ark: the two major texts, traditionally titled De Arca Noe morali and De Arca Noe mystica, are edited by Patricii Sicard respectively as De Archa Noe and Libellus de Formatione Arche as volume 1 of the new critical edition of the Opera of Hugo de Santo Victore (2001). The latter treatise is translated by Jessica Weiss as “A Little Book about Constructing Noah’s Ark,” published in The Medieval Craft of Memory, edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan Ziolkowski (2002), 41–70; and the former tract is translated as “Noah’s Ark: I” in Selected Spiritual Writings, translated by a Religious of C.S.M.V. (1962), which also includes a third related tract, De Vanitate Mundi, translated as “Noah’s Ark: III.” Sicard has also produced a thorough textual study, Diagrammes Médiévaux et Exégèse Visuelle: Le Libellus de Formatione Arche de Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor (1993); Carruthers offers an extended analysis of the Libellus (see The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture [1990], 231–239); and Grover Zinn has devoted a series of articles to the ark treatises (see bibliography). What has attracted so much attention recently to Hugh’s treatises on the ark is that while they begin ostensibly as commentary on Genesis 6, it becomes quickly apparent that these are oral lessons for students or novitiates at the Abbey of Saint Victor on the art of constructing what has come to be called a “memory palace.” The idea is to form in one’s mind, under expert guidance, a systematic, increasingly elaborate mental architectonic structure— it could be a building of any kind, but in this case it is Noah’s ark—which then serves as a device for mentally affixing data to be remembered subsequently in a meaningful, organized way. Directly addressing his students, Hugh verbally constructs an image of the ark of almost inconceivable complexity, a verbal architectural drawing, described at once as a planar diagram and as an elevation. To the innumerable structural details of the ark Hugh systematically attaches the facts, as he understands them, of universal human history, biblical and secular; the dynamics of moral and psychological processes; and the structure of the natural world and the cosmos itself—all so that all this information can be conjured up mentally in the students’ recollection of the ark. Hugh was carrying to unprecedented lengths a memory technique known from classical times that has now come to be called “visual exegesis” (for background, see Anna Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis [1978]). The big debate among the scholars of Hugh’s ark treatises is the question of whether there ever was an actual
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drawing of the ark matching Hugh’s description: none of the manuscripts have such an illustration (although other Victorine manuscripts do have complex illustrations of abstract ideas that are a kind of medieval analog to contemporary software programs for “concept mapping”). Carruthers (Book of Memory, and elsewhere) believes that no such drawing ever did or (considering its complexity) could exist on paper. Sicard, however, inclined to believe it might have, essayed a couple of basic drawn reconstructions in Diagrammes Médiévaux (plates 7 and 8), and more recently, to his critical edition of the Ark treatises (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CLXXVI [2001]) he attaches a second volume (CLXXVI A) that consists of a box of eleven fold-Â�out plates that constitute reconstructions of the successive layerings of Hugh’s details about the ark, incorporating both the diachronic and synchronic information Hugh builds into the description (the box of drawings serves as a kind of hard copy of a digital hypertext). Hugh composed a number of other, rather more straightforward, pedagogical works, including further comments on memorization techniques. For younger pupils, he composed a “study-Â�aid” preface to his chronology of biblical history; this preface was published for the first time by William Green as “De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum” (Speculum 18.4 [1943]: 484–493), and translated by Mary Carruthers as “The Best Memory Aids for Learning History,” published both as appendix A in Carruthers’s Book of Memory (1990) and in The Medieval Craft of Memory, edited by Carruthers and Ziolkowski (2002), 32–40. Using the analogy of a money-Â� changer separating coins in a pouch, Hugh instructs the child in techniques for breaking down subject matter into small enough units for recognition and recollection. Other pedagogical works focus on advice on reading, such as De institutione novitiorum (see L’Oeuvre de Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor, vol. 1, ed. D. Poirel, H. Rochais and P.╯Sicard [1997]: 18–114), a work discussed by Ineke van ‘T Â�Spijker in “Model Reading/Saints’ Lives and Literature of Religious Formation in the 11th and 12th Centuries” (in “Scribere sanctorum gesta”/Recueil d’études d’hagiographie médiévale offert à Guy Philippart, ed. Étienne Renard et al. [2005]: 135–156). By far the most influential of all Hugh’s books, from his own time up through the present, is his masterpiece on education, Didascalicon, occurring in over one hundred medieval manuscripts. A critical edition by Charles ButÂ� timer was published in 1939, upon which was based the English translation by Jerome Taylor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts (1961). Hugh’s work is a practical discourse on reading and meditation, the twin sources of advancement in knowledge
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and in character formation. Hugh confronts the contemporary challenge of Platonism as raised by figures such as Abelard and articulates the harmonization of that classical thought with Christian theology, much as Thomas Aquinas would subsequently do with Aristotelianism and Christianity. Hugh distinctively divides philosophy into the categories of theoretical, practical, mechanical, and logical—and he gives unusual prominence to mechanical knowledge, including fabric making, armaments, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics (a sevenfold division that he likens to the standard trivium and quadrivium of the liberal arts). Ivan Illich has produced an extraordinary meditation on Hugh’s treatise, called In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (1993), in which Illich sees Hugh as a pivotal figure on the threshold between the orality of the earlier Middle Ages and the emerging culture of the printed text. Crucially, Illich sees Hugh as teaching his charges the art of reading, rather than of hearing and listening, generating, as we know, the vastly different relationship that can exist between text and subject, rather than between speaker and listener. Silent reading, rather than recitation out loud, is for Illich the definitive sign of this cultural shift, and Hugh’s Didascalicon is a crucial landmark in its rise to ascendancy. The emerging consensus today is that Hugh of Saint Victor is a figure of paramount importance for understanding the renaissance of the twelfth century and even for the emergence of key features of modernism. His near-Â�contemporary Saint Bonaventure paid him perhaps the ultimate tribute in saying that while early church figures like Augustine, Gregory, and Pseudo-Â�Dionysius were masters respectively of Christian dogma, morality, and mysticism and had such distinguished followers as Anselm, Bernard, and Richard of St. Victor, only Hugh was master of all three: “Hugo vero omnia haec” (see Felix Vernet, “Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique [1922]: 7.297). Fittingly, Dante places Bonaventure and Hugh of Saint Victor together in the company of the blessed (Paradiso XII.133). Bibliography The original collected printed edition of Hugh’s work is the Rouen 1648 text, reprinted in Migne’s Patrologia Latina, vols. 175–177 (1854). A new critical edition is currently being published under the general editorship of Patricii Sicard and Dominici Poirel for the series Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (thus far volumes 176, 176 A, and 177 [2001]). A French edition is L’Oeuvre de Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor, under the general editorship of P. Sicard (vol. 1 [1997]; vol. 2 [2000]). In addition to the works cited in the article, mention should also be made of
the following: Damien Van Den Eynde, Essai sur la Succession et la date des Écrits de Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor (1960); Roger Baron, Études sur Hugues de Saint-Â�Victor (1963); and Rudolf Goy, Die Überlieferung der Werke Hugos Von St. Viktor (1976), essential guides to the Hugonian canon; and a series of important articles by Grover Zinn: “Hugh of St. Victor and the Ark of Noah: A New Look,” Church History 40 (1971): 261–272; “Mandala Symbolism and Use in the Mysticism of Hugh of St. Victor,” History of Religions 12.4 (1973): 317–341; “Hugh of St. Victor and the Art of Memory,” Viator 5 (1974): 211–234; “De Gradibus Ascensionum: The Stages of Contemplative Ascent in Two Treatises on Noah’s Ark by Hugh of St. Victor,” Studies in Medieval Culture 5 (1975): 61–79; and “Hugh of St. Victor, Isaiah’s Vision, and De Arca Noe,” in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood (1992): 99–116. —George L. Scheper JAN HUS (ca. 1372–1415).╇ Czech. Hus was born in southern Bohemia and studied at Prague. He became rector of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague and preached there for ten years while teaching in the university. His reforming initiatives garnered criticism from church authorities and eventually he withdrew from Prague when the city was placed under interdict. He appeared before the Council of Constance in 1415, where he was accused of WycÂ� lifism and condemned. He died at the stake. His memory inspired a vibrant popular movement. Many of Hus’s writings appeared in Czech, and their influence has been considerably less than his Latin works. Several collections of Hus’s sermons provide insight into his thinking and theology. His early sermons of 1401– 1403, preserved in manuscripts in the Praemonstratensian Strahov Monastery in Prague, are entirely orthodox in their call for moral reform, as are the Sermones de tempore qui Collecta dicuntur (1404–1405). Later sermons in the Bethlehem Chapel from 1410–1411 begin increasingly to critique the institutional church and its practices. Hus’s last important collection of sermons is his Postil, completed in 1413. The Postil contains sermons on the gospel for each Sunday of the year and essentially is a reworking of his Latin Postil of 1410–1411. While in exile in south Bohemia between 1412 and 1414, Hus wrote a number of books. The Expositions consist of a three-Â�part analysis of the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. Reforming tendencies and a critique of prevailing ecclesiastical practices emerge in these narratives. The Expositions provided instruction for common people on how to pray, what to believe, and the correct manner of keeping God’s commandments. His 1413 treatise On Simony was a calculated
Jan Hus
and forceful attack on the “greatest heresy” of the medieval church. Hus refuted ideas of papal infallibility and rejected the notion that Rome ought to be obeyed in all things. The influence of Wyclif is apparent but Hus cannot be construed as a slavish adherent. Writing in the language of the people and addressing the situation in Bohemia, Hus argued that simony could only be combated with the elimination of clerical wealth and power and a return to apostolic simplicity. His book Dcerka (The Daughter), completed in 1413/1414, is a devotional treatise written for a community of women living together in a house near the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague. The subtitle “how to know the correct way to salvation” indicates its themes. The treatise enjoins readers to know themselves and to take into full account the factors and forces present in this life that serve to detract the faithful from finding salvation. The struggle, which Hus enumerates, is with three principal ancient foes: the world, the flesh, and the devil. Hus encourages the female readers of this book to consider the act and value of repentance, the coming final judgment, and the love of God. As a devotional writing, Dcerka can be compared with the works of Thomas à Kempis, On the Imitation of Christ (1418), Gerard Groote, Following of Christ (fourteenth century), and François de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (1609). De ecclesia represents Hus’s high point in his revolt against absolute papal authority. The work constitutes a systematic statement of the evolving Hussite movement. Hus rejected the essence of medieval sacerdotal ecclesiology, insisting that neither was the pope the head of the church nor the bishops the body of the church. Instead, Christ alone was the head. Popes could be heretical, and to rebel against church error constituted obedience to Christ. Papalism was not a matter of the faith. Hus proposed in De ecclesia that the papacy should be replaced with Christ, hierarchical structures with the predestined, canon law with scripture, and Rome with the Holy Spirit. Most of Hus’s works after 1409 contain increasingly strident theological critiques of the ecclesiastical systems, the papacy, definition of the church, circumstances of
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obedience to ecclesiastical authority, and the abuses of simony and indulgences, all coupled with social concerns. Hus was likewise preoccupied with liturgical reform and renewal and general moral reform. Hus’s writings consistently reflect his conviction of what the essence of the Christian faith is: the centrality of God, the importance of Christian community, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the unavoidable ethical response to the gospel. A brief summary can be located in his The Center of Christian Teaching (1414). The Letters of Jan Hus provide an intimate look at the thought and character of Hus and present a source for understanding the author’s personality as well as his spirit. Among those extant, there are over fifty letters from prison, which have devotional as well as particular historical value. Bibliography
De Vooght, Paul. L’Hérésie de Jean Huss. Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1960. Fudge, Thomas A. “Feel This! Jan Hus and the Preaching of Reformation.” In The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice, vol. 4, ed. David Holeton. Czech Academy of Sciences, 2002. ———. “Infoelix Hus: The Rehabilitation of a Medieval Heretic.” Fides et Historia 30, no. 1 (1998): 57–73. ———. The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia. Ashgate, 1998. Rysanek, Frantisek, ed. Magistri Iohannis Hus, Opera Omnia. 25 vols., Academia, 1959B. Schaff, David S., trans. John Huss, the Church. Scribner’s, 1915. Spinka, Matthew. John Hus: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 1968. ———. John Hus at the Council of Constance. Columbia University Press, 1965. Spinka, Matthew, ed. The Letters of John Hus. Manchester University Press, 1972. ———. On Simony. In Advocates of Reform. Westminster Press, 1953. Werner, Ernst. Jan Hus: Welt und Umwelt eines Prager Frühreformators. Boehlaus, 1991.
—Thomas Fudge
I IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH (ca. 50–ca. 98).╇ According to a disputed church tradition, Ignatius of Antioch first met the public eye when Jesus took him in his arms, in the midst of a gathering of other small children, and blessed him (Mark 9:36).1 Contemporary historians, however, place the birth of Ignatius at a later time, around the middle of the first century AD. Early Christian tradition held that Ignatius, along with his friend Polycarp, was personally tutored at the feet of the beloved apostle John. Ignatius went on to follow Evodius as the third bishop of the church of Antioch in Syria. The fourth-Â�century church historian Eusebius reports that the lives of both Polycarp and Ignatius were both abruptly ended in martyrdom during the wave of persecution that broke out during the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan in the early part of the second century AD.2 The Writings of Ignatius The entire extant literary corpus attributed to Ignatius consists of a series of letters to his friend Polycarp and to a group of congregations dear to him, penned during an arduous journey from Antioch to Rome where he was to be tried and ultimately would be fed to the lions in Caesar’s arena. While debate continues over which letters in a “longer recension” of thirteen letters are genuinely Ignatian, scholars of early Christianity have generally placed confidence in the authenticity of a “middle recension” of the seven letters mentioned by Eusebius, including the personal letter to Polycarp and letters to the Christian congregations in Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, and Smyrna.3 Some Protestant scholars, following the lead of the sixteenth-Â�century reformer John Calvin, have disputed the authenticity of the entire Ignatian corpus, arguing that the letters reflect the ecclesiology of a later era.4
The seven accepted letters of Ignatius are pastoral in tone, thanking the Christian congregations for the many deeds of kindness shown to the bishop during his arduous journey, encouraging them to respect duly established church authorities, warning against disunity and false teaching, and glorifying the privilege of martyrdom. In his letter to Polycarp, Ignatius plays the role of a mentor, encouraging his dear friend to be a patient and loving pastor to his flock, dealing with each challenge as the situation warrants. In a separate letter to the Smyrnean assembly Ignatius counters the popular heresy of docetism, which denied that Jesus had a physical body. In his letter to the Philadelphian congregation, Ignatius urges the people to avoid those who would stir up disharmony and counsels them to honor only one altar, the eucharistic table of the Lord, and one sacrifice, that of Jesus himself. The ceremonies of the old covenant, he contends, were good in their time and place, but the promises and perfections of the gospel are far superior. The Magnesian letter likewise seeks to counter the return to Judaism on the part of some in that congregation, arguing for the superiority of Sunday Lord’s Day observance over the old pattern of Sabbath keeping, since “Christianity did not embrace Judaism, but Judaism Christianity, so that every tongue which believeth might be gathered together to God.”5 The letters to the Trallian and Ephesian congregations urge church members to put themselves in subjection to their local bishops and to the councils of elders that are fitted to the bishop “as strings to a harp.” To encourage church unity, Ignatius recites a summary of early Christian teaching strikingly similar to the Apostles’ Creed that emphasizes the physical birth, life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ignatius contends that whoever does not commune at the established “altar” of the
— 381 —
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Christian church is “devoid of the bread of God.” Ignatius’s letter to the Romans celebrates the privilege of martyrdom, explaining that “I am the wheat of God, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of God.” Christians of all traditions have found the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to be sterling examples of courage and graciousness in the face of hardship and persecution. The letters’ exhortations to Christian love, obedience to authority, and doctrinal harmony have set a high-Â�water mark for church leaders and congregations in subsequent ages. Catholic and orthodox readers in particular have found in the letters support for key components of their historical reconstruction of the history of the ancient church, including the pattern of a single bishop presiding over each congregation and the notion that the church and its sacraments do not exist apart from submission to the duly ordained presiding bishop. Whether one views these letters as authentic productions of the apostolic era or as later attempts to reconstruct early Christian history, they offer a rare window of insight into the problems and priorities of believers in the earliest Christian centuries. The Principal Ideas of Ignatius •â•‡ Members of Christian assemblies should live in harmony, submitting to the leadership of their duly appointed leaders, and particularly to their local bishop. •â•‡ Legitimate Christian sacraments are practiced only under the supervision of the local bishop. •â•‡ Jesus Christ did not merely appear to be human, as advocated by docetism, but actually came, suffered, died, and was resurrected in human flesh. •â•‡ Christian martyrdom is the believer’s supreme act of devotion and a privilege that the followers of Christ should aspire to. Notes
1. Reference for the child tradition. 2. Ecclesiastical History, 3.36. 3. For a fuller discussion of the recensions of the Ignatian corpus, see William R. Schoedel, “Ignatius,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 3, 384–385 (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 4. Critical editions of the Greek texts of the seven letters of Ignatius, together with scholarly English translations, can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. The older Loeb Classical Library volume (Apostolic Fathers [New York: Macmillan, 1912]) was edited and translated by Kirsopp Lake, and a more recent Loeb edition has been edited and translated by Bart Ehrman (The Apostolic Fathers [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003]). Other fine English translations of the Ignatian letters include those of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (The
Ante-�Nicene Fathers [New York: Scribner, 1885]); J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, recently edited and revised by Michael W. Holmes (The Apostolic Fathers [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989]); and Maxwell Staniforth (Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers [New York: Penguin Books, 1987]). 5. This and subsequent quotations from the Ignatian letters from the Roberts and Donaldson translation.
Bibliography
Ehrman, Bart, trans. The Apostolic Fathers. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Holmes, Michael. The Apostolic Fathers. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989. Lake, Krisopp, trans. Apostolic Fathers. Loeb Classical Library. New York: Macmillan, 1912. Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. The Ante-Â�Nicene Fathers. New York: Scribner, 1885. Schaff, Philip, et al., eds. Ante-Â�Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. ———. Nicene and Post-Â�Nicene Fathers. First Series, vol. 9. Chrysostom; Second Series, vol. 1. Eusebius; Second Series, vol. 3, Theodoret. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Schoedel, William R. “Ignatius.” In Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol.╯3, 384–385. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Staniforth, Maxwell. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
—Mark Aaron House
ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA (1491–1556).╇ Founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), mystic, missionary, and defender of the Catholic Church, Ignacio López de Loyola was born into nobility at the family castle of Loyola in the Basque region of northern Spain. Raised in the home of Jan Velasquez de Cuellar, confidant to King Ferdinand, the young Ignatius served as a page in the royal court. After living a rather worldly life in his teenage years, Ignatius joined the army, but in 1521 while defending the borders against the French invasion in the Battle of Pamplona, his dream of a military career was shattered when a cannon crushed his left leg and severely wounded the other. The injury required several painful operations and a lengthy convalescence. While recuperating in the Loyola family castle, Ignatius read Ludolph of Saxony’s The Life of Christ and Jacopo de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. The latter sparked a longing to imitate the spiritual heroism of these spiritual knights and warriors. Ignatius also had a vision of Our Lady and the Holy Child Jesus that brought his conversion to completion. As a result he traveled to the sanctuary of Montserrat, where he relinquished his sword and dagger to the Virgin Mary, abandoned his dreams to be a knight in the service of an earthly king, and took up the standard
William Inge
of the cross to become a soldier for Christ. Ignatius then gave all his worldly possessions to the poor and began a life of begging for food and lodging, spending hours a day in prayer, reading spiritual books, and seeking to excel in love and charitable service. Between March 1522 and February 1523 he spent time in Manresa studying The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. During this time Ignatius lived a life of spiritual poverty, with severe austerity and penitence, and experienced mystical visions. He received his initial revelations for his Spiritual Exercises in 1521 in Loyola and finally published the work in 1541. In 1523 he set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a desire to be a missionary to the Muslims but was rejected by the Franciscans. Founding of the Jesuits Realizing his need for an education to pursue his spiritual goals, Ignatius entered into a rather sporadic learning process between 1524 and 1535 studying in Barcelona, Alcalá, and then at the University at Salamanca, finally earning a master of arts in theology at the University of Paris in March 1534. In Paris he gathered a band of six followers who elected to join him in a vow of poverty and perpetual chastity. One of these original followers was Francis Xavier who eventually became a renowned missionary, taking the gospel to Indonesia, Japan, and the border of China. Their plan was to pursue mission work among the Muslims in and around Jerusalem, but deterred by war, the group decided to place themselves at the disposal of the pope. In 1539 they petitioned for the establishment of a permanent order. The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, received official approval by Pope Paul III in 1540. Ignatius was chosen to be the first superior general of the new order. Because of their religious zeal, the Jesuits were responsible for leading many Protestants back to the Catholic Church. Some have called the founding of the Jesuits the most significant event of the Catholic Reformation. They were also the first official order to be sent out as foreign missionaries by the pope. Ignatius spent his latter years in Rome leading his new and expanding order and writing its Constitutions. At the age of sixty-Â�five, Ignatius contracted Roman fever and died peacefully. Although his Society of Jesus was only sixteen years old when he died, the religious adherents of the order numbered one thousand. The Spanish saint was canonized on May 22, 1622, by Gregory XV, and in 1922 Pius XI officially recognized Ignatius as the patron saint of spiritual exercises. His most important writings are his Letters and the Spiritual Exercises that are still used today as a manual by priests to lead spiritual retreats designed to help Christians develop a closer relationship with God.
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Broderick, James, S.J. The Origin of the Jesuits. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986. Caraman, Philip. Ignatius Loyola: A Biography of the Founder of the Jesuits. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. Cross, F. L., and E. A. Livingstone, eds. “Ignatius Loyola, St.” In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. De Dalmases, Cándido. Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Jesuits: His Life and Work. Translated by Jerome Aixaliá. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985. ———. “Ignatius of Loyola, St.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 7, edited by Berard L. Marthaler. 2nd ed. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003. Ignatius, St. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Translated by Anthony Mottola. New York: Image Books, 1964. Loyola, Ignatius. St. Ignatius’ Own Story as Told to Luis Gonzalez de Carmara: With a Sampling of His Letters. Translated by William J. Young. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1998. Marcuse, Ludwig. Soldier of the Church: The Life of Ignatius Loyola. Translated and edited by Christopher Lazare. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. Meissner, William W., S. J. Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Purcell, Mary. The First Jesuit: St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1981.
—Connie Dawson
WILLIAM INGE (1860–1954).╇ William Ralph Inge was born at Crayke, in North Yorkshire, on June 6, 1860, to the Reverend William Inge (d. 1903), curate of Crayke and later provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and his wife Susanna (d. 1917). The family home was characterized by its adherence to Tractarianism and fervent antimodernism, both of which Inge later rejected. He was educated at Eton, where he became lifelong friends with A. C. Benson, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he gained a number of distinguished academic prizes. After graduation, Inge returned to Eton to teach. In 1888 he was elected a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, where he taught classics and published his first work, Society and Rome under the Caesars (1888). He was ordained deacon in the same year and priest in 1892. Around this time, perhaps influenced by his friend and Hertford colleague, Hastings Rashdall, Inge began to formulate the liberal (or modernist) doctrines that would come to characterize his later writings, including an emphasis on naturalism, personal experience, and mysticism. His 1899 Bampton lectures were published under the title Christian Mysticism, a theme he continued in his Light, Life and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages (1904), Personal Idealism and Mysticism (1906), and Studies of English Mystics (1907).
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In 1905 Inge became vicar of the parish of All Saints’, Ennismore Gardens, in London. Shortly afterward he married Mary Spooner (d. 1949), with whom he had five children. Two years later he returned to Cambridge as Lady Margaret professor of divinity, where he began work on Plotinus, the fourth-Â�century Neoplatonist. Inge’s Gifford lectures, The Philosophy of Plotinus, were published in 1918. This was followed by The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought (1926), which argued for the reappraisal of the Platonic tradition in English Catholic and Protestant theology. In 1911 Inge was appointed dean of St. Paul’s, London. On this amplified stage, his literary accomplishments began to receive wide public notice. Perhaps most notable were his weekly columns in the Evening Standard, which ran between 1921 and 1946 and took up themes far beyond the ordinary confines of theology and church life. A number of these were later published as separate volumes. Inge developed an eclectic—and often eccentric—political and social philosophy, which combined individualism with authoritarianism, promoted the use of contraception, criticized democracy and the rise of the welfare state, and advocated a strange form of eugenics that urged tight governmental regulation of procreation. Ironically, given his adherence to modernism (he served as president of the Modern Churchmen’s Union from 1924 to 1934), he deplored industrialization and criticized the doctrine of progress, a theme he took up in his Romanes lecture of 1920 and his Rede lecture of 1922. Equally ironic was his opposition to the social theology then fashionable in England. Perhaps equally difficult to comprehend was Inge’s attachment to fame and earthly treasure. His writings produced significant royalties, which he invested in various ways. He was showered with honors, including a Bachelor of Divinity and a Doctor of Divinity from Cambridge (1909), he was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (1918) and a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (1930) by the British government, and he received honorary fellowships at several Oxbridge colleges. He was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1921. His friends included many aristocrats and grandees from outside the church. In 1934 Inge retired to a manor house overlooking the Thames at Brightwell, Oxfordshire, where he continued to write and publish. Ambivalent about fascism, he opposed Britain’s entry into World War II, as expressed in several works published between 1939 and 1942. He died at Brightwell on February 26, 1954, and was buried in the village churchyard. Bibliography W. R. Inge, Lay Thoughts of a Dean (1926); James MarÂ� chant, Wit and Wisdom of Dean Inge (1927); W. R. Inge,
More Lay Thoughts of a Dean (1931); W. R. Inge, Vale (1934); W. R. Inge, Our Present Discontents (1938); W. R. Inge, Diary of a Dean (1949); Adam Fox, Dean Inge (1960). —Grayson Carter IRENAEUS (ca. AD 125–ca. 200).╇ Irenaeus was born in Asia Minor and grew up in Smyrna (what is now Izmir in western Turkey). The date of his birth is unknown, but scholars estimate that it was between AD 115 and AD 142. However, it had to be early enough for him to see, hear, and remember Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who died in AD 155, a martyr of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s persecutions. Polycarp had been a disciple of St. John, which places Irenaeus one generation removed from the Apostles. As an adult Irenaeus lived in Lyons in Gaul (France), where he was a priest during a time (the mid to late AD 170s) when the Christian community was severely persecuted under Marcus Aurelius. Many of the clergy within the city were imprisoned and killed. In AD 177 or 178 Irenaeus traveled to Rome, where he met with Pope Eleutherus to discuss Montanism, among other concerns. After returning to Lyons, Irenaeus became bishop of Lyons following the martyrdom of his elderly predecessor, Pothinus. No records exist to place a date for Irenaeus’s death or to provide information about how he died, but it appears to be at the end of the second century or the beginning of the third century. Irenaeus was familiar with the Eastern and Western churches as well as with various heresies and sects of the day, such as Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Montanism. He wrote several volumes against such heresies and was concerned that Christian churches stay true to their beliefs and not be drawn into these heresies and sects. Irenaeus is well known for his focus on orthodoxy, and although he lived more than a century before the Canon and Creed were established, his writings greatly influenced Eusebius, Hippolytus, and other instrumental Christian leaders who followed him. Irenaeus recognized many of the books that later became the New Testament canon: the four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen Pauline letters, 1 John, 1 Peter, and Revelation. He also accepted the Shepherd of Hermas. Irenaeus’s writings reflect what the earliest church considered to be revealed Scripture and as such show a continuous lineage from the Apostles to the accepted Canon. Irenaeus’s chief work, his five volumes titled Refutation of Gnosticism (also called Adversus haereses), exposes Gnostic beliefs and contrasts them to orthodox Christian beliefs. The author also lists the Roman bishops’ line of succession as unbroken and therefore a solid center of orthodox Christianity, important for its evidence that
Isaac the Syrian
Christian beliefs have remained the same since the time of the Apostles. Several Latin copies (of good historical provenance) exist today, and there are some fragments in Syriac and Armenian. No Greek copies exist, but Eusebius quotes Irenaeus in Greek. In Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, mentioned by Eusebius but lost for centuries, was found in 1904. The late-thirteenth-Â�century manuscript containing not only this work but also two volumes of Irenaeus’s Refutation of Gnosticism was discovered in an Armenian church and translated into German and then English. As with the content of Irenaeus’s primary work, this book shows the direct link between Christian beliefs and Scripture, in this case mainly the Old Testament. Other works by Irenaeus exist only as fragments in Eusebius’s writings. “On the Subject of Knowledge” is a treatise against Greeks, “On the Monarchy” (“How God Is Not the Cause of Evil”) is a letter addressed to a Roman priest, “On Schism” is addressed to Blastus, and a book of various pieces is probably a collection of homilies. A few other fragments of Irenaeus’s letters exist in Syriac. Bibliography
After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity, by Bart Ehrman. The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching by St. Irenaeus, translated from the Armenian by Armitage Robinson, http:// www.ccel.org/ccel/irenaeus/demonstr.preaching_preface. html. A History of Early Christian Literature, by Edgar J. Goodspeed. Martyrs Mirror, http://www.homecomers.org/mirror/martyrs 014.htm. New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/.
—Linda Gray
ISAAC THE SYRIAN (seventh century).╇ Isaac the Syrian, also known as Isaac of Nineveh, was born in Qatar during the early seventh century. Almost nothing is known of Isaac’s early life other than that he had acquired a great reputation for holiness and asceticism when he was chosen bishop of Nineveh, perhaps around 670. He resigned his see after five months for unknown reasons. After leaving Nineveh, Isaac went to Beit Huzaye and lived among a group of anchorites. He later lived a solitary life near the monastery of Rabban Shabur, close to the Persian Gulf, where he died. Isaac is the most widely read author of what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Syrian literature (seventh through eighth centuries). His main focus is the ascetic life and the nature of prayer. Isaac recommends extreme solitude, especially before the monk has reached a high degree of holiness. Isaac also stresses the importance of
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fasting, nightly vigils, psalmody, and spiritual reading. Although he calls for strict asceticism, he also argues for flexibility in accordance with the leading of the Holy Spirit. Isaac’s descriptions of the heights of prayer are remarkable. He speaks of the “spiritual sweetness” and “sober inebriation” of prayer by which the soul becomes “luminous” and “translucent.” Because of his thorough and inspiring discussion of spirituality, Isaac has been widely read, especially among Orthodox believers in Greece and Russia. His writings were also influential in the Coptic monastic revival of the twentieth century. The orthodoxy of Isaac’s teachings has been frequently questioned, however. Isaac argues that eventually all individuals (including the demons) will be saved, and he is considered Nestorian by some. Isaac is venerated on January 28 in the East. Isaac’s work is categorized into two main parts, both originally written in Syriac. Part 1 was widely known and available in an Eastern and a Western recension. The Eastern recension is considered the more authoritative and is the only one to have been published. The Western recension, which had been edited to remove references to Nestorian authors, was translated into Greek around 800. This Greek version was subsequently translated into many languages. Part 2 was virtually unknown in the West until recently. It was available in only one manuscript, which was lost after only small parts of it had been published. In 1983, however, Sebastian Brock discovered a second manuscript containing Part 2. Recently a Part 3 has been discovered that has been translated into Italian but not yet edited in the original. Part 1 consists of the chapter “Six Treatises on Spiritual Excellence” and a number of other chapters on the spiritual life. Isaac discusses mortifications and the necessity of isolation and of single-Â�minded devotion to God. He also emphasizes the importance of reading the Bible and other sacred writings. Part 2 consists of forty-Â�one chapters of varying lengths and contains a variety of subject matters. Isaac deals extensively with instructions for and descriptions of the various types of prayer. Another major theme is the love and mercy of God. Within this context Isaac also gives an extended argument for eventual universal salvation. Part 3 consists of fourteen discourses on topics including the ascetic life, stillness, and the nature of spiritual prayer. Principal Thoughts of Isaac the Syrian •â•‡ “The soul that labors in nighttime vigils will gain the eyes of the Cherubim and be given a vision of heaven.” •â•‡ “When you attain the gift of tears, you have left the prison of this earth and set your feet on the path to the New World.”
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in securing the conversion of the Visigoths from Arianism to Catholicism, which scholars practically date to the Third Council of Toledo in 589. This conversion laid the foundation for reconciliation between Spain’s Roman and Gothic peoples, and when Isidore assumed the see upon his brother’s death circa 600, Isidore, like his brother, affirmed Visigothic rule while confirming the authority and institutions of Catholic Christianity. By the time of Isidore’s death in 636, the Byzantines had been expelled from Spain, and a united Hispano-Â�Gothic kingdom and revitalized Catholic Church experienced what some scholars call the Isidorian Renaissance, a period of relative political stability and intellectual, moral, and religious renewal prior to the Islamic conquest of a century later. Bibliography Isidore’s works proved invaluable for transmitting and Part 1, along with a few fragments of Part 2, was edited by Paul Bedjan (Leipzig, 1909) in the original Syriac. Part 2 transforming profane and sacred learning into the gramhas been translated into French by André Louf (Spiritu- matical, exegetical culture of Christian Latinity. His magalité Orientale, 81, Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2003). Chap- num opus is Etymologiarum sive originum (Etymologies, ters 4–41 of Part 2 are available in Syriac and in English or Origins), a work whose purpose is much the same as in the edition of Sebastion Brock (Corpus Scriptorum modern dictionaries, encyclopedias, and thesauri; it has Christianorum Orientalium, 554–555, Peeters, 1995). even been compared to an Internet search engine, and Part 3 has been translated into Italian by Sabino Chialà some have claimed Isidore as the patron saint of the (Bose-Â�Magnano, 2004). Other English translations (Part 1 Internet. While such analogies may seem extravagant, only) include A. J. Wensinck (Koninklijke Akademie van Jacques Fontaine’s characterization of the Etymologies Wetenschappen, 1923; reprint, Sandig, 1969); and Dana as “a cultural memory bank to which westernized Latin Miller (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984; a transla- intelligence and language would come constantly to stock tion of the Greek version). Mary Hansbury (St. Vladimir’s up” (2005, 751) accurately explains why scholars consider Seminary, 1989) also offers a translation of six treatises the work second only to the Bible in the Middle Ages. Consisting of over one thousand manuscript pages and from Part 1. surviving in a staggering number of over a thousand manOn Isaac’s life and thought, see: Alfeyev, Hilarion. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. Cister- uscripts, Etymologies is arranged into twenty books, with cian Publications, 2000. each book representing a topical category through which Brock, Sebastian. The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Isidore explores the etymologies, synonyms, and differLife. Cistercian Publications, 1987. ences of various subtopics associated with each book. The Chialà, Sabino. Dall’ascesi eremitica alla misericordia infinita: first three books are concerned with the seven Liberal Richerce su Isacco di Ninive e la sua fortuna. Leo S. Olschki, Arts, with Books I–II devoted to the trivium (Book I is 2002. about grammar and the parts of speech; Book II is about —Scott Edmund Goins rhetoric and dialectic) and Book III about the quadrivium (mathematics, broken into arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). Subsequent books address hundreds of ISIDORE OF SEVILLE (ca. 560–636).╇ Isidore was topics as diverse as medicine, history, geography, God, probably born in Seville, circa 560, after his Hispano-Â� man, the Church, warfare, agriculture, etc., providing Roman family had left Cartagena when parts of south- virtually everything that his contemporaries might deem ern Spain came under Byzantine control in the previous useful to know. Although Etymologies has secured Isidore’s reputadecade. A key figure bridging late antiquity and the medieval period, he would become one of the most respected tion, his virtuosity is evident in other works of history, authorities of the Middle Ages. Isidore’s brother, Leander, exegesis, and apologetics as well as pastoral, moral, and to whom Pope Gregory the Great dedicated his Moralia, ecclesiastical treatises. His historical works include Histoprepared Isidore for his success as a cleric and writer, riae gothorum vandalorum et sueborum (Histories of the and both men, their brother Fulgentius, and their sister Goths, Vandals, and Suevi), the introduction and concluFlorentina are Saints of the Catholic Church. Preceding sion of which are known as the Laus spaniae and Laus Isidore as bishop of Seville, Leander was instrumental gothorum, respectively, eulogies praising Spain and the •â•‡ “The man who is granted a taste of divine love forgets everything else because of its sweetness, and he has a luminous love of mankind.” •â•‡ “The image of the cross is filled with divine power, and it holds the Shekhina glory of God, even more than did the Ark of the Covenant.” •â•‡ “In the prayer of stillness, the movement of the mind is drowned in inebriation.” •â•‡ “A heart full of compassion has pity for all beings and offers up unceasing prayer even for the reptiles.” •â•‡ “God would not create rational creatures to be delivered to unending torment.”
Isidore of Seville
Gothic people who have inherited the mantle of power previously held by Roman masters; Chronica mundi (Chronicles), a history of the world; and De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men), consisting of thirty-Â�three short ecclesiastical biographies from the fourth through the seventh centuries. Other important works include Differentiae (Differences), a study differentiating between the meaning of words; Synonyma (Synonyms), a grammatical exploration of synonyms and an exposition of sin and conversion; Allegoriae (Allegories), on the significance of biblical names; De numeris (On Numbers), explaining the significance of biblical numbers; Proemia (Introductions to the Books of the Old and New Testament); Quaestiones (Questions), an exegesis of various books of the Bible; De ortu et obitu patrum (On the Lives and Deaths of the Fathers), biographies of eighty-Â�five biblical figures; De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things), on physics and astronomy; Contra judaeos (Against the Jews), a typological reading of the Old Testament as prophetic proof that Jesus was the Messiah; Sententiae (Sentences), a widely circulating moral and pastoral treatise on church doctrine and Christian conduct; De ecclesiasticis officiis (Offices), on the liturgy and the duties of clerics; and Regula monachorum (Monastic Rule), an introduction to monastic life. Principal Ideas of Isidore •â•‡ Etymologies, or the study of word origins, based on the belief that the name of something is essential to understanding its reality. Although hardly scientific or accurate by contemporary standards, Isidore’s lexicological efforts nevertheless clearly shaped medieval perceptions of language. •â•‡ Typological and allegorical exegesis, a standard medieval method of reading the Bible wherein the literal meaning of Old Testament typoi, or types, is understood as prefiguring the history of salvation as they are fulfilled in the New Testament through the person of Christ. •â•‡ Translatio imperii, a medieval commonplace referring to the shifting of authority from Rome to another kingdom, an idea with several precedents but generally attributed to Eusebius, who justified the transferal of power from Rome to Byzantium; its adaptation by Isidore validated the assumption of power by the Visigothic kings. Related to this is translatio studii, the transferral of learning from pagan antiquity to medieval Christianity. •â•‡ Antiheretical apologetics, a major theme in many of Isidore’s works, including Book VIII of Etymologiae; related to this is perhaps the most controversial issue associated with Isidore today, anti-Â�Judaism. Detractors consider Isidore’s dogmatic, anti-Â�Jewish
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statements as evidence of bigotry; defenders argue that the issue is complex, requiring sensitivity to the socioreligious context of Isidore and his audience. These scholars emphasize that at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 Isidore argued against the Visigothic kingdom’s policy of forced conversion of Jews and that his opinions result from standard biblical exegesis that perceives how the Jews, having failed to recognize the Messiah, are differentiated from Christians, who inherited the new covenant through Christ. Bibliography The most accessible and complete edition of Isidore’s Etymologies remains W. M. Lindsay, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, Oxford, 1911, upon which is based the first complete translation of the work into English: Stephen A. Barney et al., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge, 2006. This translation includes an excellent if general introduction to Isidore’s life, times, and works. A more thorough introduction is in the facing-Â�page Spanish edition, also based on Lindsay’s text: Reta J. Oroz and M.-Â�A. Marcos Casquero, Etimologías: edicíon bilingüe, Madrid, 1993. New critical editions of the Etymologies and other Isidorian works have been published and are planned by two prestigious academic presses: Belles Lettres in Paris, through the series Auteurs Latin du Moyen Age, and Brepols in Turnhout, Belgium, through the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina series. Some important recent editions by Brepols include Isidorus Hispalensis: Liber Differentiarum╯II, edited by M. A. Andrés Saenz, Turnhout, 2006; Isidori Hispalensis Chronica, edited by J. C. Martin, Turnhout, 2003; and Isidorus Hispaelensis Sententiae, edited by Paul Crazier, Turnhout, 1998. A useful starting place for exploring the sociohistorical context of Isidore is The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1, c. 500–700, edited by Paul Fouracre, Cambridge, 2005, especially the essay by Jacques Fontaine, “Education and Learning,” 735–759. Fontaine is preeminent among Isidorian scholars, and among his many contributions is the seminal Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique, 2nd ed., Paris, 1983[1959]. Also useful is the collection of essays by J. N. Hillgarth, Visigothic Spain, Byzantium, and the Irish, Variorum Reprints, 1985, especially for tracing Isidore’s influence, and an earlier scholarly anthology, Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, edited by Edward James, Oxford, 1980. Hillgarth’s article “Isidore of Seville,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol. 6, edited by J. R. Strayer, New York, 1985, is a reliable general introduction. Roger Collins, Visigothic Spain, 409–711, Blackwell, 2006, is the most recent history
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of the Hispano-Â�Gothic period. Hillgarth is also the author of two bibliographies, “The Position of Isidorian Studies: A Critical Review of the Literature, 1936–75,” Studi Medievali 24 (1983): 817–905, reprinted in Visigothic Spain, Byzantium, and the Irish, and “Isidorian Studies, 1976– 1985,” Studi Medievali 31 (1990): 925–973; these must be supplemented by the more recent bibliography, “Isidorus Hispalensis,” in The Visigoths in Gaul and Iberia: A Supplemental Bibliography, edited by Alberto Ferreiro, Brill, 2006, 299–409. As is the case with most late ancient and medieval authors, a persistent challenge of evaluating Isidore has been identifying and evaluating his use of pagan and patristic sources. Much Isidorian scholarship has been concerned with such historical source study and with tracing his influence through the transmission of his works throughout the medieval period, but with the availability of so many new scholarly editions, prospects of new
scholarship assessing his value as a literary subject seem promising, something for which the historical and textual scholarship has provided a solid foundation. A difficult yet provocative full-Â�length study of the form and function of the Etymologies is J. Henderson, The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge, 2007, in which Henderson reads the work as an “exegetical sequencing and processing of the topics into a cumulative cosmography” (xi) that is progressively and reflexively theurgical. For a recent study of the themes associated with his Histories, see A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, 2007. On Isidore’s controversial attitudes toward Judaism, see Wolfram Drews, The Unknown Neighbor: The Jew in the Thought of Isidore of Seville, Leiden, 2006, and Albert Batsheva, “Isidore of Seville: His Attitude towards Judaism and His Impact on Early Medieval Canon Law,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80, no. 3/4 (1990): 207–220. —Alan Church
J FRANCIS JAMMES (1868–1938).╇ The French Catholic poet, novelist, essayist, and biographer Francis Jammes was born in Tournay, Haute-Â�Pyrenees, and died in Hasparren, Pyrenees-Â�Atlantique. He lived most of his life in the town of Orthez, where there is now a street named in his honor as well as an organization dedicated to the study and dissemination of his life and work. Jammes lived most of his life in his native town of Orthez, though he traveled to Paris and toured Algeria with André Gide, who was an early advocate of Jammes’s poetry. Jammes was also befriended by Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jammes’s poetry was an early influence on T. S. Eliot. Jammes was brought back to the Catholic faith partially through the efforts of his friend Paul Claudel. While Jammes’s early poetry was received with some éclat in Parisian literary circles, it was also at times mocked and parodied because of its Romantic character. His work is sometimes called naturist because of his return to a type of descriptive verse more popular at the turn of the nineteenth century. Photographs reveal a rotund and rudely dressed giant with a long beard and a thoughtful expression. Those who liked his poetry found it fresh and highly engaging because of its pastoral vision of life, its simplicity, and its rich pictures of rural scenes. Jammes is best known for De l’Angelus de l’Aube à l’Angelus du soir (1898) and Le deuil des primaveres (1901), but his later writings exude dour piety and darkly passionate visions of grief, suffering, and poverty, as in La divine doleur (1928) and Le cruxifix du poète (1934), a series of meditations on the seven last words of Christ with a charge to poets to live up to their Christian responsibilities. Jammes’s autobiographical volumes offer a charming and nuanced picture of life in the Basque region of France at the turn of the twentieth century. He is also known for an odd story about a little rabbit who does not want to
stay in heaven, Le roman du lièvre (1924). This has been revised into a children’s book, though its original message about the importance of accepting death as the price of heaven is presented in a manner that is too probing and complex for a young audience. Jammes married late in life (1907); he and his wife had seven children. After the publication of his first successful books of verse he was able to support himself largely through his writing. At its best, Jammes’s verse can be compared to English Romantic verse for its rich portrayal of nature and to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins for its deep piety and humility, as in a series of poems in which Jammes prays that he may be simple, that he may love God, and that he may be able to go to heaven with the donkeys. André Gide honored Jammes by including many excerpts of his verse in the Anthologie de la poesie française, published by Gallimard in 1949. Bibliography
De l’Angelus de l’Aube à l’Angelus du Soir. Paris, Mercure de France, 1898. Le deuil des primaveres. Paris, Mercure de France, 1901.
—Thomas Trzyna
JEROME (HIERONYMUS) (AD 345–420).╇ Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, most commonly known as Jerome (“Hieronymus” in Latin), was born into a Christian family in Stridon, modern-Â�day Strigova in northern Croatia. The exact date of his birth is not certain, but scholars usually place it between AD 340 and 346. When he was in his late teens, he was sent to Rome to further his education in rhetoric and the sciences, but after initially being distracted by city-Â�oriented temptations, he made a resolution to live a Christian life and was baptized. He
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visited Gaul (modern-Â�day France) before returning home to Stridon. With the death of his parents, his plans to become a monk had to be postponed while he cared for his younger siblings. In AD 374 Jerome moved to the desert southeast of Antioch, during which time he learned Hebrew and Chaldean, studied Scripture, and wrote letters. Five years later he went to Antioch, where he was ordained, and then traveled to Constantinople and Rome, serving as a biblical scholar to Pope Damasus I. In AD 386, after three years in Rome, Jerome returned to monastic life, this time living in one of the many caves near Christ’s birthplace in Bethlehem. Jerome stayed in Bethlehem for the remaining thirty-Â�four years of his life, during which Rome fell to the Goths and Arabs took over the area around where he lived. After Jerome’s death in AD 420, his body was moved to Rome in AD 642, but its exact location has been lost. Jerome’s contributions are primarily his superb language and linguistic skills and his biblical knowledge, all of which enabled him to translate seminal works. Jerome’s greatest literary accomplishment and what he is most famous for is translating the Bible into the Latin Vulgate (meaning “vernacular”), a version of the Bible that served unchallenged until the Reformation. Finally completed in AD 404, this huge undertaking was even more complicated than Jerome had anticipated. Originally assuming that he could translate the Septuagint (a third-Â�century BC translation of Hebrew Scriptures into Greek) into Latin, he soon realized that inconsistencies in copies of the Septuagint posed problems. Consequently, he corrected the Septuagint by retranslating it from Hebrew. Once it was corrected, he could commence with the Latin translation. Jerome also translated other works including Chronicle of Eusebius, Origen’s homilies on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the work of Didymus on the Holy Spirit, and Origen’s works on Luke and the Psalms. Jerome’s recording events, through letters and annals— especially at such a crucial period of ecclesiastical and Western history—has provided for posterity the gift of information. He continued the Chronicle of Eusebius (annals), and although the work is burdened with too much detail, the style served as a model for various annals kept during the Middle Ages. It is Jerome’s letters, however, that provide great insight into historical events. Jerome corresponded with and met theologians, emperors, bishops, and popes, and unlike the chronicle he maintained, his letters show evidence of revision and careful writing. About 120 letters attributed to Jerome are extant. Even in his own lifetime people valued his writings, mostly letters, and committed them to memory or published them.
As a biblical scholar and writer, Jerome wrote exegetical works (e.g., commentaries), revised portions of the Bible, and wrote treatises. Among his treatises are “Treatise on the Preservation of Virginity” (a compilation of letters), a treatise on the Prodigal Son and one on the╯word “hosanna,” a treatise against Helvidius (about the perpetual virginity of Mary), and “Dialogue against╯the Luciferians.” Bibliography
Bettenson, Henry, ed. Documents of the Christian Church. London: Oxford University Press. 1967. Nicene and Post-Â�Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, by Philip Schaff. Saltet, Louis. “St. Jerome.” New Advent: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Roberts Appleton Company. 1910. CD-ROM.
—Linda Gray
JOACHIM OF FIORE (ca. 1135–1202).╇ Joachim is an example of the prophetic figure within Christianity. His name is associated with Joachimism. Born about 1135 in Calabria, possibly part Jewish, he traveled the holy sites as a young man and then entered the Cistercian order, which was relatively new. He set up his own foundation, Fiore (Flora), in 1189. As abbot, he reformed the monastic life along stricter lines and eventually broke with the Order. He died on March 30, 1202. His works only became known posthumously, notably The Eternal Gospel (1247). His writing was copied and taught mainly among Franciscans. Joachimism is a theory of the ages of the Church. The Bible itself is governed by a theory of periodicity, both in content and form. In its form there are the Old and New Testaments. By way of content there are the ages of the Patriarchs, Kings, and Prophets. In the New Testament, Jesus’s life divides into three periods: the hidden years, his ministry, and his Passion. Authoritative and orthodox figures of the early Church applied a notion of periodicity to the age of the Church. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote of the three ages of the Church. Along similar lines, according to Joachim, there are to be three ages of the Church: the ages of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The third age, which he said was imminent, the age of the Holy Spirit, would be an age of spiritual understanding, of the eternal gospel, and of personal mysticism, surpassing the Church’s objectified hierarchy and, some even said, its institutionalized sacramental order. Joachim was condemned by Rome in the next generation, but his works and his ideas inspired hope and enthusiasm, and they have been reiterated in one or another form down through the centuries.
John of Avila
Bibliography
McGinn, Bernard. The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought. London: Macmillan, 1985. Reeves, Marjorie. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. 2nd rev. ed. Stroud: Sutton, 1999.
—Matthew del Nevo
ST. JOHN (ca. AD 5–ca. 100).╇ Despite his monumental influence on early Christianity, little is known about the life of John. Orthodox Christian tradition identifies John the Apostle, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” John the Elder or Presbyter who authored the second and third epistles of John, and the John exiled on Patmos who penned the Apocalyptic Book of Revelation. Many modern scholars assign these roles to separate persons, but certain evidence, most notably the letters of Irenaeus, suggests that a single John filled all of these roles. The witness of Irenaeus is particularly probative because he studied under Polycarp, a disciple of John. John’s parents likely were wealthy. His father Zebedee, a fisherman, owned boats and hired help; his mother Salome followed Jesus through Galilee, gave money to support his ministry, and provided spices for his entombment. His brother James, one of the twelve, was martyred by Herod. As the disciple whom Jesus loved, John, along with Peter and James, was in the inner circle of the disciples. John witnessed the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter, was present during the transfiguration, and accompanied Christ deep into Gethsemane. John even reclined on Jesus’s breast at the passover feast. Christ demonstrates his trust for John at the cross when he commits his own mother into John’s hands; she is thought to have gone with him to Ephesus. His privileged place among the disciples gives John special insight into Christ’s life and ministry, as seen in his powerful and uniquely interpretive gospel. John’s gospel is often called the spiritual gospel. He not only narrates but interprets Christ’s life. John’s prologue is philosophical and poetic. He uses complex light/dark imagery, and he discusses the Holy Spirit and his relationship to Christ. For his unique and piercing insight, tradition symbolizes John with an eagle, which alone among creatures has the capacity to gaze undazzled directly into the sun. A true evangelist, John spoke to the various religious and philosophical groups of his day. In his gospel he appeals to Platonists, Stoics, and Gnostics, all of whom likely had some influence on John’s thought and work. He does not attempt to mask his Jewish background, and the great detail with which he describes Palestine and its culture has led most scholars to agree that John’s gospel, though it probably arose in Asia Minor, could not have
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been authored by a native Ephesian. Sacramental mystery cults, whose devout believed that they received salvation by consuming the flesh of sacrifices, also flourished in John’s day; he may be writing to them in John 6:53: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” After the ascension of Christ, John lived in Ephesus where he ministered and preached until the Roman authorities exiled him to the Isle of Patmos. There he penned the Book of Revelation and ultimately returned to Ephesus. Irenaeus tells us that John lived there into the reign of Emperor Trajan (AD 98–117). Though not in complete agreement, most scholars believe that John died of natural causes in Ephesus. Of the twelve original disciples of Christ, John alone was blessed with old age; Judas Iscariot killed himself, and the other ten died as martyrs for their faith. Bibliography
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bible, 2001. Ellis, E. Earle. The World of St. John. London: Lutterworth Press, and New York: Abingdon Press, 1965. Smalley, Stephen S. John: Evangelist and Interpreter. Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1978. Tidwell, Josiah Blake. John and His Five Books. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1937.
—William Rea Brian
JOHN OF AVILA (1499–1550).╇ John of Avila was born on January 6, 1499 or 1500, in Almodóvar del Campo (in the province of Ciudad Real), Spain, to a wealthy Christian family. His parents, Alfonso de Avila and Catalina Jijón, were the owners of silver mines in Sierra Morena. Their only son studied law at the University of Salamanca from 1513 to 1517 and then studied arts and theology at the University in Alcalá de Hernares. He graduated with a degree in theology in 1520. During the course of his studies, John of Avila mastered Christian theology, analyzed the works of Desiderius Erasmus, and acquired profound theological and spiritual knowledge of the Gospels and the biblical canon. Avila was ordained as a priest in 1526, and he celebrated his first mass in the memory of his parents in Almodóvar del Campo. Avila gave away all his possessions to the poor and devoted his life to spreading the word of God. He was eager to leave for New Spain when Father Fernando Contreras (archbishop of Seville), impressed by Avila’s commitment and ability to preach, commanded him to stay as a missionary in the south of Muslim Spain. Thus, John of Avila became the Apostle of Andalucía.
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In 1532 Avila was accused of heresy and of belonging to the group of Alumbrados (Illuminated), practitioners of a mystical form of Christianity in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Imprisoned for a year in 1533, he wrote Audi, Filia, et vide and Contemptus mundi nuevamente romancado (published by John de Cromberger in 1536). Avila was absolved of all charges against orthodoxy in July 1534 and was sent to preach in Córdoba by the bishop Alvárez de Toledo. In Córdoba, Avila founded the College of St. Pelagio and Asunción for the clergy. John of Avila was a preacher in churches and in the streets. He claimed to follow St. Paul’s ways of preaching and stated that one has to “love God with all his heart” to know how to preach (Torrance, 145). Avila’s failing health forced him to give up his missionary activities. He spent the last years of his life in Montilla, Andalucía, where he died on May 10, 1569, and where the urn containing his ashes remains. Avila was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on September 15, 1894, and was canonized on May 31, 1970, by Paul Pope VI. Among Avila’s disciples were St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of God, and St. Francis Borgia. Avila’s works were collected in Madrid in 1618.
of Avila, one of the first Spanish mystics of the Golden Age, is first and foremost a reformer of the institution of the Catholic Church. Avila’s spiritual program for priests included intensive study of theology, community life, constant prayer, and enrichment of ecclesiastical knowledge.
Major Works A shorter version of Audi, Filia, et vide (Listen, O Daughter) was written in prison and published for the first time (without Avila’s consent) in 1536. It is addressed to his former student, Catholic nun Doña Sancha Carillo. The longer version was published in Madrid in 1557 and is considered to be a masterwork. It is a classical religious treatise on the nature of evil and flesh, the value of Catholic faith, and the importance of prayer, penance, and meditation. It is a practical guide to spiritual life in which hearing the word of God in the scriptures and contemplation of the face of Christ lead to a personal transformation in the community of the Father and Son. It also provides guidelines for aesthetic Christian life. John of Avila wrote about 150 classical spiritual letters, posthumously gathered in Epistolario espiritual para todos los estados (1578). It is a collection of letters written to his friends, to Ignatius of Loyola and St. John of God. Avila was invited as a peritus (expert) to the Council of Trent, the Nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1545 and 1563. He did not attend the council but compiled and sent three memorials: “Reform of Ecclesiastical State,” “Causes and Remedies of Heresies,” and “Treatise on the Priesthood.” These documents provide insight into Avila’s theology and educational philosophy. They set out rhetoric between moral formation through education and the practical regulation of conduct through law together with Avila’s definition of the priesthood in terms of its relationship to the Eucharist. John
—Anna Hamling
Bibliography
Cantera Montenegro, Santiago. “Franciscanismo en el maestro Juan de Avila.” Verdad y Vida: Revista de las Ciencias del Espiritu 54 (1996): 143–152. Coleman, David. “Moral Formation and Social Control in the Catholic Reformation: The Case of San Juan de Avila.” Sixteenth Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies 26(1) (1995): 17–30. Granada, Fray Luis. Vidas del Padre Maestro Juan de Avila. Barcelona: Juan Flores, 1964. Jiménez Duque, Baldomero. “El maestro Juan de Avila.” Arbor: Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 293 (1970): 17–25. John of Avila. Audi, filia, et vide=Listen, O Daughter. New York: Paulist Press, 2006. ———. Epistolario espiritual. Zaragoza: Editorial Ebro, 1965. ———. Obras completas del santo maestro Juan de Avila. Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1970–1971. Torrance, Elizabeth McClure. “Style, Themes and Ideas in the Works of San Juan de Avila.” DAI 41 (1980): A1632.
JOHN OF DAMASCUS (ca. 676–ca. 754/787).╇ John of Damascus, designated by most to be the last of the Greek Church Fathers, was born approximately circa 676 and died circa 754/787. We know next to nothing of his personal biography since in his own writings he reveals hardly anything about himself. The sole biography by John, patriarch of Jerusalem, dates to the tenth century, and because it is written so much later, it gives pause as to the reliability and accuracy of the biographical information. We do know that John was favored by a good education under the tutelage of a renowned teacher named Cosmas. This became John’s stepping stone, socially speaking, that enabled him to become a chief counselor (protosymbulus) in Damascus. His era was one of immense transition on account of the rise of Islam and its rapid conquest of significant portions of what was the Byzantine Empire in the Middle East. The most significant development for him, however, was the outbreak of the Iconoclast controversy precipitated by the emperors Leo III (717–741) and Constantine V (741–775), which placed John at the front and center of controversy with his public impassioned defense of images. During this tumultuous series of events he was ordained to the priesthood. This did not in the least restrain the vendetta that the emperor initiated against John to silence his opposition to the Iconoclasts. The emperor went so far as to
John of the Cross
forge a letter that falsely claimed that John had plans to surrender the city to Leo the Isaurian’s enemies. John became such a popular and formidable force against the Iconoclasts that in 754 at the pseudosynod of Constantinople, which condemned icons, John is mentioned by name as the chief proponent of icons and thus a heretic. If that was not insult enough, he was called a “Manzer” (meaning “bastard”) in the council minutes. Scholars have named John the “First Scholastic” because his literary output was prolific, encyclopedic, systematic, and apologetic. One of his best-Â�known works, which is divided into three parts (Philosophy, Aristotelian Ontology, and Porphyry) is titled Fountain of Wisdom and is a catena of wisdom sayings of the Fathers who preceded him. John wrote an important apologetic against heresy titled Concerning Heresy, which builds upon and borrows from Epiphanius’s Panarion and gathers all the Christian heresies that had surfaced from the very beginning. John’s heresiology contains an additional twenty heresies that had arisen since the time that Epiphanius composed his. The most important is John’s inclusion of Islam, the Ishmaelites, in this compendium of Christian heresies. This work played a major role, even in the Latin West, in shaping Western views of Islam. In the Greek East his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith wielded considerable influence in upholding the Orthodox faith. It is a thorough theological apologetic of the doctrinal fundamentals of the Christian faith. By far his most widely diffused work in all of Christendom is On the Divine Images, Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, a work that has never been superseded in its utterly persuasive unassailable defense of Icons. During the reign of Emperor Leo III, John wrote the treatise at the monastery of St. Sabbas under the rule of the Muslim caliph, who ironically protected him from persecution. He built his defense with the following arguments: Iconoclasm undermines the doctrine of the communion of saints; it attacks the Incarnation because God at long last became “visible”; the Old Testament does not teach a blanket prohibition of images, so it is not therefore idolatry; and Iconoclasm is dangerously tendentious Manichaean and Docetist errors. The treatise was of immense help during the second great outbreak of Iconoclasm in the Protestant Reformation. Pope Leo XIII declared John a doctor of the Church, and he is venerated both in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. His feast day is March 27. Bibliography
Louth, Andrew. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics Series. St. Vladimir’s Press, 2003.
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Sahas, Daniel J. John of Damascus on Islam: The Heresy of the Ishmaelites. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
—Alberto Ferreiro
JOHN OF THE CROSS (1542–1591).╇ John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic, poet, spiritual director, and reformer of the Carmelite order, was born at Fontiveros near Avila. When John was only two years old his father died, leaving his widow impoverished with three sons to raise on her own, John being the youngest. The family finally settled in Medina del Campo, where John attended a school for orphans. After apprenticing in different trades, he found his niche first as an acolyte and sacristan at La Magdalena, an Augustinian convent, and later at a hospital. His diligent work and the care and compassion he showed toward the patients won him the notice of the hospital administrator, who arranged for John to attend a Jesuit college in Medina, where he studied languages and the humanities while continuing his work at the hospital. In 1563 he entered the Carmelite order under the name of Juan de Santo Matía. He then moved to Salamanca for university studies and there received a foundation in biblical studies as well as theology and philosophy. Shortly after ordination to the priesthood in 1567, while giving serious consideration to joining the Carthusian order, John’s plans changed when he met Teresa of Avila, who recruited him to help her reform the Carmelite order. The Carmelites who embraced the reform were called the Discalced (“Barefoot”), while those who resisted it were known as the Calced. John worked with Teresa in the reform for several years, setting up foundations and serving as a spiritual director to many, including Teresa herself. In 1576, however, Calced Carmelites who opposed the reform had John seized and imprisoned. Though soon released through the intervention of a papal nuncio sympathetic to the reform, he was once again kidnapped in 1577 after the death of the nuncio and imprisoned in the Carmelite monastery in Toledo for nine months. There he was beaten publicly, kept in isolated squalor in a tiny dimly lit cell, and provided a meager diet of primarily bread and water. Following a dramatic escape, John resumed his work in the distant Andalusia, establishing monasteries, serving as prior of El Calvario and Los Mártires, establishing a college for the reform at Baeza, and holding several high offices in the Discalced order, which had eventually broken from the original order. After the death of Teresa, John once again became a target, this time from within the Discalced group itself, and was removed from office. Going into relative seclusion in La Peñuela, he fell ill from a painful infection of his leg that eventually spread to his back and elsewhere. Realizing his dire need of medical help, he chose to go to Ubeda, a place
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where he was not known, rather than to Baeza. In Ubeda he suffered from inhospitable treatment at the hands of the ill-Â�tempered head of the monastery but died only after having won the heart of his reluctant benefactor. John of the Cross was canonized a saint in 1762 by Benedict XIII and named a doctor of the Church in 1926 by Pius XI. John is also the patron saint of Spanish poets. John’s nine-Â�month imprisonment in Toledo, though perhaps the darkest period of his life, proved also the most fruitful, for it was during that time that he wrote what some today consider his masterpiece, “The Spiritual Canticle,” a beautiful poem based on the Song of Songs that depicts the mystical love between a soul (undoubtedly his own) and Christ the Bridegroom. Most of John’s writing dates from that time. Its central themes are purgation, illumination, and mystical union with God. In addition to “The Spiritual Canticle,” his major poems are “Living Flame of Love” and “The Dark Night.” His major prose works are commentaries that explain the imagery and theology of his mystical poetry. The Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love are commentaries that bear the same title as the poems they treat, while The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night both comment on the same poem, “The Dark Night.” The poetry of St. John of the Cross—his crowning literary achievement—portrays the agonies and ecstasies of the soul in aspiring to spiritual union with God. It is considered by some to be the ultimate of all mystical poetry. Of John’s many letters only thirty-Â�three are extant, since many were destroyed by their recipients while he was undergoing investigation. The letters are primarily addressed to persons to whom he was providing spiritual guidance. Other writings include maxims and counsels. Bibliography
The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. ICS Publications, 1991. The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church. 3 vols. Translated and edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa. Newman Press, 1964. John of the Cross: Selected Writings. The Classics of Western Spirituality. Edited by Kieran Kavanaugh. Paulist Press, 1987. John Paul II. Faith According to St. John of the Cross. Ignatius Press, 1981. Luévano, Andrés Rafael. Endless Transforming Love: An Interpretation of the Mystical Doctrine of Saint John of the Cross According to the Soul’s Affective Relation and Dynamic Structures. Vacare Deo, 9. Institutum Carmelitanum, 1990. Tavard, George H. Poetry and Contemplation in St. John of the Cross. Ohio University, 1988.
—Sally Jo Shelton
JOHN PAUL II (1920–2005).╇ John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła in Wadowice, Poland, the youngest of three children. He enrolled at the Jagellonian University in Cracow as a student of Polish philology in 1938 as well as joined a theater group that was structured as an informal drama school. In 1939 Nazi occupation forces closed the university, and Wojtyła was forced to do physical labor along with others working at a quarry. At the same time he continued to attend classes in the now clandestine university and write poetry and plays, likewise cofounding and participating in secret performances of the Rhapsodic Theater. In 1942 he entered the underground seminary run by the archbishop of Cracow, Cardinal Adam Sapieha. Wojtyła was ordained shortly after the war ended and was sent to write his doctorate in theology at the Angelicum University in Rome; he completed his doctorate in 1948. He assumed the chair of ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1956. Soon afterward he was nominated auxiliary bishop to the archbishop of Cracow, assuming that position himself in 1963 after having attended the Second Vatican Council the previous year. In 1967 Wojtyła was promoted to the Sacred College of Cardinals, which opened the way to his own surprise election as pope during the conclave of 1978. Of John Paul II’s unprecedented 106 journeys for the papacy outside Italy, the most dramatic remains among his earliest: the 1979 visit to his native Poland, then under communist rule. The trip led to a surge of confidence among his countrymen, culminating in the formation of the Solidarity trade union a year later, a seminal step in the crumbling of the Soviet regime in the entire region a mere decade later. The pope was an outspoken critic of totalitarian ideologies, Western consumerism, poverty, and unjust wars. Criticized by the liberal faithful for his staunch defense of traditional Catholic positions, he also aggravated conservative Catholics with his ecumenical spirit and promotion of dialogue among religions, especially monotheistic ones. Many of his encyclicals and apostolic letters, beginning with Redemptor Hominis (1979), championed the God-Â�given dignity of the human person. Doubtlessly John Paul II’s impact as an outstanding moral authority who had a major historical impact will be considered his primary contribution to humanity; nonetheless, his importance as a Christian writer cannot be overlooked. More accurately, the two are intertwined. During his years at the Angelicum University he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the problem of faith in the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, wherein, as Jerzy Peterkiewicz writes, “the thinker builds on the vision of the poet. This was, in a way, a challenge that Wojtyła had to meet in his verse.” One might add that it was also the challenge that he faced in his plays, where much of his creative energy was initially expressed. The Rhapsodic Theater, which Wojtyła cofounded, developed a
Samuel Johnson
form of expression ideal for the reflective philosophical and religious plays that inspired him and that he authored, not to mention that the theater mounted a defense of PoÂ�lish culture in the face of the Nazi attempt to exterminate it. The circumstances surrounding the performances in wartime conditions resulted in an “unheard scarcity of the means of expression,” which, as Wojtyła reflected on that period, turned it into “a creative experiment.” Ultimately, as Boleslaw Taborski writes, “Wojtyła as a playwright was no one’s debtor but consistently built his own vision of the drama of human existence: the vision of man’s place on earth in the divine plan of creation.” Wojtyła’s experience as an artist likewise influenced his relationship with philosophy and thus inclined him to trust feelings and experience, which led him to favor a phenomenological approach to ethics, with its emphasis on feelings. Indeed, for a man as complex in his art and thought as John Paul II, there is a remarkable degree of integration among his art, thought, public pronouncements, and deeds. This is largely consistent with his Christian vision of the relationship between life and art. In the Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Artists (1999) he writes: “Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.” Bibliography
John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Edited by Vittorio Messori and translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. The Poetry of John Paul II. Roman Triptych. Meditations. Washington, DC: United States Conference of Bishops, 2003. Kupczak, Jarosław, O.P. Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2000. Wojtyła, Karol. The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. Translated with introductions by Boleslaw Taborski. Berkeley: University of California, 1987. ———. Collected Poems. Translated with introduction by Jerzy Peterkiewicz. New York: Random House, 1979.
—Christopher Garbowski
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784).╇ Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, England, in 1709. Born a sickly child, Johnson was christened immediately after birth. Eager to restore their infant’s frail health, Johnson’s parents employed a wet nurse whose milk, it was later discovered, was tubercular. Johnson contracted tuberculosis of the lymph nodes (called scrofula), which spread to his optic nerves, leaving him nearly blind in the left eye while impairing his vision in the right eye. Despite this
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affliction, the young Johnson read voraciously, thanks in part to his father, whose trade as a bookseller availed Johnson of much reading material. Johnson was educated at Oxford (Pembroke College) but left without a degree due to extreme poverty. It was at this point that he began experiencing severe depression, a malady with which he would struggle his entire life. It was also around this time that he read William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, a book that transformed Johnson’s religious apathy into Christian conviction. A few years after Oxford, Johnson moved to London to pursue a writing career. He received recognition for his poem London (1738) and additional fame for his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and for his oriental tale Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), written during the course of one week to pay for his mother’s funeral. However, it was the publication of his dictionary in 1755 (after nine years of work) that turned Johnson into a celebrity. With the aid of six rather underqualified assistants, Johnson created a dictionary that helped standardize the spellings, definitions, and pronunciations of over four thousand English words. It was for this endeavor that he received the nickname “Dictionary Johnson.” In 1762 Johnson received a yearly pension from the king of England in gratitude for his contribution to English learning, a pension that kept Johnson free from poverty for the rest of his life. In addition to lexicography, poetry, and the oriental tale, Johnson excelled in essay writing. In 1750 he started The Rambler, a twice-Â�weekly periodical authored almost entirely by Johnson himself. From 1753 to 1754 he contributed to another periodical called The Adventurer, and from 1758 to 1760 he wrote a series of papers called The Idler. The subjects of these essays are wide ranging, from marriage to skepticism to Christianity. Johnson’s talents as a literary scholar are displayed in his edition of Shakespeare (1765) and in his The Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781), a work that includes short biographies of fifty-Â�two English poets who wrote during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them John Milton and Alexander Pope. Johnson’s fame also rests upon his relationship with James Boswell. In 1763 Johnson, by then well-Â�respected in the literary world, was introduced to the twenty-Â�three-Â� year-Â�old Boswell. For the next eighteen years, Boswell accompanied Johnson whenever possible around London, committing to paper not only their own conversations but Johnson’s discussions with his other friends. The result was Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell’s biography provides an intimate portrait of Johnson’s life and ideas, ideas that thread their way through Johnson’s work. Boswell records, for example, Johnson’s uncompromising Christianity and moral seriousness (in
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article writing in response to world conditions and movements and published a total of twenty-Â�seven books during 1925–1975, roughly one every other year. Many tributaries flow into Jones’s writing: personal experience, disciplines of Scripture immersion and prayer, attentiveness to the Inner Voice of the Holy Spirit, travels around the world, and consistent and judicious use of autobiographical reflection. In the eight thousand pages of his books, Jones is conversational without being casual, personal without being sentimental, and intellectually rigorous without being pedantic. His transparent and winsome approach, emphasizing common humanity, invites persons into a transformational experience of Jesus Christ. Jones communicates thought-Â�out and thoughtful witness to Jesus Christ to a broad religiously pluralistic audience and has unwavering confidence in the self-Â� verifying dynamic of the Christian way. Jones’s masterful use of language and refreshing turn of phrase make him a pleasure to read. Jones wrote in five broad categories in direct response to observed need: evangelistic methods, Bible commenBibliography Bate, W. Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace tary, theological explorations, (auto)biography, and devoJovanovich, 1998. tional resources. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Oxford: Oxford UniJones describes evangelistic practices in India in The versity Press, 1980. Christ of the Indian Road (1925) and Christ at the Round Clifford, James. Young Sam Johnson. New York: McGraw-Â�Hill, Table (1928). He updates his observations in the Indian 1955. context in Along the Indian Road (1939) and sets forth the Piozzi, Hester Lynch. Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson. unique contributions of North American Christianity in Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. The Christ of the American Road (1944). Wain, John. Samuel Johnson. New York: Viking, 1974. Many of Jones’s books are biblical commentary. The —Samuel Joeckel Christ of Every Road (1930) explicates Pentecost. The Christ of the Mount (1931) elucidates Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and 1 John receives attention in Christian MatuE. STANLEY JONES (1884–1973).╇ World missionary rity (1959). In Christ (1961) traces the phrase of the title of and evangelist, the Reverend Dr. E. Stanley Jones (Brother the book within the New Testament, and The ReconstrucStanley), was born in Clarksville, Maryland, and educated tion of the Church (1970) promotes church organization at Asbury College in Kentucky. In 1907 he began work as a on the Antiochan model. Jones’s theological works are eclectic but cohere in the missionary in India under the aegis of the Methodist Mission Board. Early in his work he encountered the indige- person of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God. Jones nous Madras Group, with its emphasis on the centrality of wrestled theologically with human need in Christ and Jesus Christ and experiential theology. Jones interpreted Human Suffering (1933). The emergence of communism the movement to the West in his first book, The Christ of and fascism prompted Jones’s Christ’s Alternative to Comthe Indian Road, which established his reputation as an munism (1935) and showcases his early work on kingdom innovative missionary who presented the person of Jesus of God theology. The Choice before Us (1937) develops Christ unencumbered by Western culture. Jones adopted further Jones’s kingdom of God theology and exposes the and adapted indigenous methods in his work of cross-Â� inherent inadequacies of Nazism, fascism, communism, cultural engagement with the educated classes of India, and capitalism. Is the Kingdom of God Realism? (1940) including roundtable dialogues and retreats (Christian tests Jones’s kingdom of God theology in light of initial ashrams). His notoriety launched him on worldwide economic and social successes of the Soviet Union. Conevangelistic travels and reconciliation efforts that con- version (1959), The Word Became Flesh (1963), and The tinued until his death in 1973. Jones complemented his Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person (1972) estimated sixty thousand public addresses with copious each take up a theological topic in turn. an age of rising unbelief and moral laxity) as well as his fervent prayer life, as evidenced in the posthumously published devotional literature, Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations (1785). Boswell also describes Johnson’s rhetorical and polemical skills as well as his commonsense philosophy, as exemplified in his essays and literary criticism. Johnson’s skepticism concerning fulfillment in this life and the consequent need to turn to eternal concerns (as figured in The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas) are also depicted in Boswell’s biography. In addition, Boswell records Johnson’s darker moments, moments in which Johnson painfully describes his fear of death and uncertainty concerning his own salvation. These dark moments might account for the strain of pessimism in his works, manifested in his critique of facile optimism and skepticism regarding happiness; these dark moments might also explain the urgency of his faith, which he desperately evoked throughout his life to stave off fear and doubt. Johnson died on December 13, 1784, after suffering a stroke.
E. Stanley Jones
Jones’s facility as biographer is evident in Mahatma Gandhi (1948), and he demonstrates his prowess as autobiographer in A Song of Ascents: A Spiritual Autobiography (1968) and his posthumous The Divine Yes (1975). Jones is perhaps best known as a devotional writer, and his prolific output is reflected in the following titles: Victorious Living (1936), Abundant Living (1942), The Way (1946), The Way to Power and Poise (1949), How to Be a Transformed Person (1951), Growing Spiritually (1953), Mastery (1953), and Victory through Surrender (1966). Throughout his books, Jones presents a contextually sensitive interpretation of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God through autobiographical witness. Jones found a medial way—neither destructive nor syncretistic—that respected other traditions but presented unequivocally the essential and unique Jesus Christ. Principal Ideas of E. Stanley Jones •â•‡ Jesus is Lord! •â•‡ Jesus Christ requires no defense; he is self-Â�verifying. •â•‡ The person of Jesus Christ gives specific content to the program of the kingdom of God. •â•‡ The Christian way is the natural way to live; it is written into the constitution of life. •â•‡ The core spiritual discipline is complete surrender to Jesus Christ. •â•‡ Jesus is the message; witness is the means. •â•‡ Effective evangelism presents, interprets, and commends Jesus Christ. •â•‡ Individual gospel and social gospel are symbiotic. •â•‡ The power of the Holy Spirit is of a certain kind: power to witness to Jesus Christ. •â•‡ Christian discipleship is growth in Christlike character. Bibliography Published Books by E. Stanley Jones
Abundant Living. Nashville: Abingdon, 1942. Along the Indian Road. New York: Abingdon, 1939. The Choice before Us. New York: Abingdon, 1937. Christ and Human Suffering. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1933. Christ at the Round Table. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1928. The Christ of the American Road. New York: Abingdon-Â� Cokesbury, 1944. The Christ of Every Road: A Study in Pentecost. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930. The Christ of the Indian Road. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925. The Christ of the Mount: A Working Philosophy of Life. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1931. Christian Maturity. Nashville: Abingdon, 1957. Christ’s Alternative to Communism. New York: Abingdon, 1935.
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Conversion. Nashville: Abingdon, 1959. The Divine Yes. Nashville: Abingdon, 1975. Growing Spiritually. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1953. How to Be a Transformed Person. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1951. In Christ. Nashville: Abingdon, 1961. Is the Kingdom of God Realism? Nashville: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1940. Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1948. Mastery: The Art of Mastering Life. Nashville: Abingdon, 1955. The Reconstruction of the Church—On What Pattern? Nashville: Abingdon, 1970. A Song of Ascents: A Spiritual Autobiography. Nashville: Abingdon, 1968. The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person. Nashville: Abingdon, 1972. Victorious Living. New York: Abingdon, 1936. Victory through Surrender. Nashville: Abingdon, 1966. The Way. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1946. The Way to Power and Poise. New York: Abingdon-Â�Cokesbury, 1949. The Word Became Flesh. Nashville: Abingdon, 1963.
Secondary Literature on Jones Published Books
Deminger, Sigfrid. Evangelist på Indiska Villkor: Stanley Jones och den Indiska Renässansen, 1918–1930. Örebro, Sweden: Libris, 1985. Graham, Stephen A. Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Mission: The Life and Work of E. Stanley Jones. Nashville: Abingdon, 2005. ———. The Totalitarian Kingdom of God: The Political Philosophy of E. Stanley Jones. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. Jäder, Karl. E. Stanley Jones: En Gudsrikets Ambassadör i Modern Tid. Stockholm: Nya, 1954. Martin, Paul A. J. Missionary of the Indian Road: The Theology of Stanley Jones. Bangalore, India: Theological Book Trust, 1996. ———. Walking the Indian Road: The Contribution of E. Stanley Jones to Missionary Theology in India. Cambridge, UK: North Atlantic Missiology Project, 1998. Mathews, Eunice Jones, and James K. Mathews, comps. Selections from E. Stanley Jones: Christ and Human Need. Nashville: Abingdon, 1972. Taylor, Richard W. The Contribution of E. Stanley Jones. Confessing the Faith in India Series 9. Edited by M. M. Thomas and T.╯K. Thomas. Madras, India: Christian Literature Society, 1973.
Articles
Bundy, David. “Song of Ascents: Autobiographical Reflection and the Development of the Mission Theory of E. Stanley Jones.” Missiology 27.4 (1999): 467–73. ———. “The Theology of the Kingdom of God in E. Stanley Jones.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 23.1–2 (1988): 58–80. Codman-Â�Wilson, Mary Lou. “Witness in the Midst of Religious Plurality: The Model of E. Stanley Jones.” In Confident
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Witness—Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America, edited by Craig Van Gelder, 203–218. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Fant, Clyde E., Jr., and William M. Pinson, Jr. “Eli Stanley Jones.” In 20 Centuries of Great Preaching: An Encyclopedia of Preaching, Vol. 9, 306–317. Waco, TX: Word, 1971. Mathews, Eunice Jones, and James K. Mathews. “Remembrances of Dr. and Mrs. E. Stanley Jones.” In Theology and Evangelism in the Wesleyan Heritage, edited by James C. Logan, 183–202. Nashville: Kingswood, 1994. Pickard, William M., Jr. “Evangelism for the Twenty-Â�First Century: The E. Stanley Jones Model.” Transformation 25.1 (1990): 21–26. Swinson, Daniel. “E. Stanley Jones.” In Twentieth-Â�Century Shapers of American Popular Religion, edited by Charles H. Lippy, 202–210. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989. Taylor, Richard W. “The Legacy of E. Stanley Jones.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 6 (July 1982): 102–107.
Dissertations
Johnson, Martin Ross. “The Christian Vision of E. Stanley Jones: Missionary Evangelist, Prophet, and Statesman.” Dissertation, Florida State, 1978. Mark, Charles W. “A Study in the Protestant Christian Approach to the ‘Great Tradition’ of Hinduism—With Special Reference to E. Stanley Jones and P. D. Devanandan.” Dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1988. Pederson, Luke M. “Preacher as Witness: The Homiletical Approach of E. Stanley Jones.” Dissertation, Asbury Theological Seminary, 2007. Thomas, C. Chacko. “The Work and Thought of Eli Stanley Jones with Special Reference to India.” Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1955. Thompson, Kenneth Ralph. “The Ethics of Eli Stanley Jones.” Thesis, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1960.
—Luke M. Pederson
JULIAN OF NORWICH (ca. 1342–ca. 1416).╇ Nothing— including her birth name—is known about the early life of Julian (Juliana) of Norwich, but she was born around 1342 and died sometime after 1416. Julian described herself as devout and desirous of experiencing Christ’s Passion and commented that her mother and priest were with her during her illness, implying that she still lived at home in Norwich, was from a religious and wealthy family, and was not married when she became extremely sick at thirty years old. The revelations she recorded after her illness in 1373 have carved her a place in Medieval Christian literature. According to Julian herself, her revelations came in three forms: physical, mental, and spiritual. She was and is considered a Christian mystic, and even during her life people sought her out for wisdom and spiritual inspiration, including fellow mystic Margery Kempe, who visited her in 1415. After Julian’s revelations she became a
nun, living out the rest of her life as an anchoress (recluse) within the walls of St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England, hence her name Julian of Norwich. Her collection of sixteen spiritual revelations (what she calls “showings”) is known as Revelations of Divine Love, and two versions exist: a long version and a short one. It has traditionally been believed that the shorter version was written first, soon after her spiritual encounters began in May 1373, and the longer version is a second edition, which she wrote years later after having had time to contemplate and interpret her revelations. Three manuscripts of the longer version exist, the earliest dating from the sixteenth century; only one copy of the shorter version is extant. Her writing style reflects that of an educated person, and the descriptions of her spiritual encounters range from very detailed to somewhat obscure. She often employs lists instead of using a narrative style, but in either case she has a generally straightforward style, one intended to recount her experiences. Revelations of Divine Love begins by enumerating the sixteen showings: (1) the crown of thorns; (2) Christ’s discolored face; (3) God as Maker and involved in His creation; (4) the scourging of Christ’s body; (5) Christ conquering Satan; (6) gratitude for God; (7) experiences of delight and woe; (8) Christ’s final agonies and death; (9) divine approval for Christ’s Passion; (10) Christ’s cloven heart; (11) Mary, Christ’s earthly mother; (12) Christ as omnipotent; (13) God’s desire that people acknowledge the great things He has done; (14) the Lord as the foundation of prayer; (15) a release from pain and woe in heaven; and (16) God’s dwelling place in the soul. In the second chapter, Julian explains that long before her illness and showings, she had asked for three gifts from God. The first was a physical sight of Christ’s Passion so that she would better understand all that the Savior suffered. The second was a desire for a grave bodily illness, to the point of death, so that she would be made more pure in God’s sight. The third was for three wounds: contrition, compassion, and sincere longing for God. In the third chapter, Julian recounts her severe illness that lasted three days and nights, at which point a priest was summoned to administer Last Rites. She lay infirmed two more days and nights, wrestling with allowing herself to die and fighting on to live and worship God. She then became paralyzed from the waist down, and the curate was called to sit with her as she died. He brought a crucifix, telling her to gaze upon it. As she did, everything grew dark in her sight except the cross, and her paralysis spread to the upper part of her body. Suddenly all pain and illness were lifted, and Julian was healthy again, although at that point she was still not convinced that she would live.
Justin Martyr
The descriptions and meanings of each of the sixteen revelations begin with chapter 4 and comprise most of the longer version’s eighty-Â�six chapters. As Julian states in chapters 65–66, fifteen of the showings occurred within a five-Â�hour span during her illness, and the last one took place the following night. The last fifteen chapters appear as meditations or devotions on what truths were revealed to her. Julian’s revelations and her insights from them cover several spiritual concepts, but all of them reveal her main message: God is Love. She was a strong believer in the orthodox view of the Trinity and in God’s joy of sacrifice for human sin. Her writings indicate her viewing of God as demonstrating “motherly” love and care and as wanting to draw people toward Himself, to be close to His creatures. She does wrestle with the concept of sin, wondering why God simply does not end it, but she comes to the conclusion that sin is inevitable and that God will restore everything to its rightful place. She also devotes several chapters to prayer, not unexpected for a mystic who spent much of her life praying to God. Overall, Julian of Norwich was an optimist, never wavering from God’s goodness and love. Her optimism is notable especially in the fourteenth century, which witnessed the Black Plague (killing nearly more than a third of Europe’s inhabitants), the Little Ice Age (causing famine), and ecclesiastical and political fights over the papacy (establishing conflicting centers in Rome and Avignon). Bibliography
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. Medieval Writing on Female Spirituality by Elizabeth Spearing. The Treasury of Christian Spiritual Classics by Timothy P. Weber.
—Linda Gray
JUSTIN MARTYR (ca. AD 100–165).╇ Justin Martyr (Justin the Martyr) was probably a Greek born in AD 100 or slightly later in Flavia Neapolis, Samaria, which was Old Testament Shechem, now Nablus in the West Bank. He was well educated in Greek philosophers, especially Plato and the Stoics, and he sought answers to life’s questions through philosophy but found the answers he was seeking in Christianity. That along with witnessing the strength that Christians displayed when faced with false accusations and persecution led him to convert. He became a Christian in Ephesus in western Turkey about AD 133 and later became a Christian teacher, teaching in the Socratic style of asking questions in various towns and marketplaces. By AD 150, he was teaching in Rome but was beheaded, along with six others, in AD 165. Records documenting his martyrdom are reliable.
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Justin was a prolific and important writer for his time and was instrumental in the lives of later Christian writers, such as Eusebius. Justin’s education in Greek philosophy influenced him all of his life. His writings reflect his knowledge of philosophy, and he frequently contrasts it to Christianity as part of his apologetics. He employed both a direct apologetic format as well as a dialogue format, which sets up a way to pose and answer questions. Justin’s writings illustrate a reasoned and logical approach to defending Christians and Christianity, a style that served as a basic model for later writers. Irenaeus, Eusebius, and Justin himself list quite a few writings by Justin, but only three are extant: First Apology, Second Apology, and Dialogue with Trypho. Some scholars conjecture that the first and second apologies were originally a part of the same document, but they are generally treated as two separate works. The First Apology asks the Emperor Antoninus Pius for justice and to investigate the charges falsely brought against Christians. Justin appeals to the emperor’s philosophical and pious character and asks his audience for a fair judgment. Justin refutes the charges that Christians are anti-Â�God; rather, he explains, they believe in just one God, not many. Other charges claimed that they were cannibals because they had communion, were atheists because they did not worship idols, were disloyal to the state because they claimed Jesus as king, and practiced incest because they saw each other as brothers and sisters. Justin refutes each charge, explaining and defending Christian beliefs and practices, and points to Christ as their source by quoting from the Gospel of Matthew. Justin requests that the emperor look at their good deeds and blameless lives as evidence that Christians are not evil and take note of those who turned from their evil ways once they chose to follow Christ. The Second Apology defends Christians who have been imprisoned for their faith. Justin himself was discriminated against and remarked in this book that he expected to be persecuted and even killed, which came true. This second apology also explains the Trinity, the nature and result of evil, man’s freewill, and Christ’s death for salvation, contrasting Christian beliefs to those of Greek philosophers. Justin points to the power of God in whose name demons have been cast out even in Rome. He also comes to the defense of some persecuted Christians and appeals on their behalf to the senate. Dialogue with Trypho is probably the longest Christian work from this time period. Its format is a dialogue between Justin and a Jew named Trypho, and in it Justin explains how Christ fulfilled Jewish prophecies and how he (Justin Martyr) had spent years searching for meaning in 1ife through various teachers and Greek philosophies. Trypho then asks two questions: how Christians
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can justify ignoring the laws of Moses and how Christians can trust a human being (Jesus) for their salvation. Justin’s answers explain orthodox Christian beliefs and help clarify that early Christians believed in the Trinity, the perfection of Christ, and Christ as Savior. Some scholars maintain that Justin viewed the Son as subservient to the Father, but in his works Martyr declares the Son to be the Logos, which he clearly identifies as God. Another important contribution to the understanding of early Christian beliefs is that in his writings, Justin Martyr refers to the Gospels as the “memoirs of the Apostles.” It is significant that he uses the plural for “Gospels,” an early indication of the four Gospels of the New Testament, although he doesn’t specify the number of Gospels. He does quote from all four Gospels, however. Some manuscripts attributed to Justin Martyr but not generally accepted as his include Discourse to the Greeks,
On the Resurrection, and various fragments. Scholars suggest, as evidence that these are not by Justin, that they were written after AD 165, placing them too late for Justinian authorship. Bibliography
The Early Christian Books by William John Ferrar. Fox’s Book of Martyrs. A History of Early Christian Literature by Edgar J. Goodspeed. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/anf01.viii.iii.html. New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08580c.htm. Early Christian Writings, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ justin.html.
—Linda Gray
K TOYOHIKO KAGAWA (1888–1960).╇ Toyohiko Kagawa was born illegitimately to a Buddhist privy councilor at Kobe, Japan, on July 10, 1888. His father died when he was only four years old. A wealthy uncle agreed to provide a home and schooling for Kagawa. Desiring to learn English, he enrolled in a Presbyterian Bible class taught by Harry Myers, an American missionary, and was converted to Christianity. At the age of fifteen, Kagawa was summarily disinherited for revealing his intent to study for the ministry as opposed to attending university to pursue a political career. While living in Toyohashi, a poor fishing village, he emerged as a roadside preacher in 1907. He believed that Christian evangelism must be expressed through social service, which convinced Kagawa to maintain a ministry to the impoverished in the Shinkawa slums of Kobe. He obtained a scholarship from a Christian mission, which allowed him the opportunity to attend the Presbyterian College in Toyko from 1905 to 1908. Kagawa graduated from Kobe Presbyterian Seminary in 1911. During his theological studies, he had nearly died from tuberculosis. His illness served to solidify his commitment to the poor, although his recuperation forced him to depart the slums for a period of time. It was in the slums that Kagawa would be proclaiming a social gospel over fourteen years. In 1912 he founded the first trade union in Japan. He left Japan in 1916 and came to the United States to study at Princeton University from 1914 to 1917. Throughout his years abroad, he earned expenses as a Manhattan butler. Returning to Japan, he resumed life in the slums, and it was there that he finished writing Before the Dawn in 1920 and the Psychology of Poverty. Both works demanded response from the Japanese government to the slum conditions. Responding to the social unrest subsequent to World War I, Kagawa embraced socialism and began emphasizing
the Kingdom of God in an effort to amalgamate the mission of the church and response to current social conditions. In 1918 and 1921 he founded the labor federation and the union among farmers. As a Japanese social reformer, Kagawa led Japanese labor and democratic movements throughout the first half of the twentieth century. He labored to help improve poverty conditions in Japan. He was integral to the suffrage movement and also amendment of the law against trade unions. He wrote his best-Â�known works, Crossing the Deathline and Shooting at the Sun, while in prison in 1921 and 1922. As a pacifist, Kagawa founded the National Anti-Â�War League in 1928. The title of his 1929 work, Love, the Law of Life, indicates what he preached. The cross was the power of love and demanded the willful accept of suffering. The concepts and vernacular of psychoanalysis were employed by Kagawa to communicate the fundamental truths concerning the historical Jesus. He famously stated that “I stand against all learning, all institutions, all governments, all arts, all religions, which reject love. I protest against every so-Â�called church which preaches faith and fails to love. I oppose the politicians who rely on force and know nothing about love. If I have to be arrested for saying this, let me be handcuffed, for I had rather die quickly by the sword than die of thirst in a loveless desert.” Kagawa was convinced that world peace would only be realized through the development of cooperation (“brotherhood economics”). He preached this “love principle in action” throughout the United States in 1931, 1935, and 1941 and published Brotherhood Economics in 1936. During World War II, he participated in several antiwar activities. He was arrested for “violating the military code” by Japanese authorities in 1940. He visited in the United States in 1941 in an attempt to encourage the nation not to engage in war with Japan. Following World War II, he was integral
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to the formation of the Japan Socialist Party. The Nippon Times (January 18, 1947) described Kagawa as the “moving spirit” of Christian witness in Japan. In 1955, five members of the Stortinget (Norwegian Parliament) nominated Kagawa for the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work for reconciliation among nations. Kagawa wrote more than 150 books. His literary works have been compared to Gorky, his piety to St. Francis, and his compassion for the poor to Tolstoy. Kagawa died on April 23, 1960, in Tokyo. Bibliography The majority of Toyohiko’s writings are collected in the twenty-Â�four volumes of Kagawa Toyohiko Zenshu (Tokyo, 1962–1964), which is therefore the primary resource for study. The standard biography is Haruichi Yokoyama, Kagawa Toyohiko Den (Tokyo: Kirisuto Shinbunsha, 1952). A biography that is frequently criticized for its Western evaluation is Charley May Hogue Simon, A Seed Shall Serve: The Story of Toyohiko Kagawa, Spiritual Leader of Modern Japan (New York: Dutton, 1958). Other publications that study his life and work include William Axling, Kagawa (New York: Harper Brothers, 1946); Nobuya Bamba and John F. Howes, eds., Pacifism in Japan: The Christian and Socialist Tradition (VanÂ�couver: University of British Columbia Press, 1978); George B. Bikle Jr., The New Jerusalem: Aspects of Utopianism in the Thought of Kagawa Toyohiko (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976); and Jessie M. Trout, Kagawa, Japanese Prophet: His Witness in Life and Word (New York: Association Press, 1959). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. JULIA SPICHER KASDORF (1962–).╇ United States. When Sleeping Preacher was published in 1992, Julia Spicher Kasdorf could not anticipate how her work might influence the Mennonites about whom she was writing. In fact, she admits, she was nervous about its publication: “I dreaded my book’s reception in the Mennonite community, although it turned out to be warmer than I ever imagined.” Sleeping Preacher, a collection that won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, traces in part Kasdorf ’s journey from a conservative and rural Mennonite upbringing to the far more secular world of New York City, a journey taken by many young Mennonites who leave their insular homes, what they have been told is “the kingdom of God,” for an “outside world” they have often been told to mistrust on biblical grounds. According to Menno Simons in Reply to False Accusations (1552), “The Scriptures teach that there are two opposing princes and two opposing
kingdoms: the one is the Prince of peace; the other the prince of strife.” This two-Â�kingdom theology is foundational for Mennonites. Although Mennonites have long been wary of creative literature for a number of cultural and theological reasons, many in the church embraced Kasdorf as a writer for her people. After Sleeping Preacher’s publication, Kasdorf performed readings at Mennonite gatherings, allowing her, she says, to “remain in connection” with her Mennonite roots while also living as a “kind of exile” from the very community in which she was raised and about which she writes. It is this very duality that often informs Kasdorf ’s writing, not only Sleeping Preacher but also Eve’s Striptease (1998) and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (2001). The latter book is a collection of essays exploring core concepts in Mennonite faith and praxis: martyrdom, the intersection between work and hope, and the geographical rootedness of Mennonites. With The Body and the Book, Kasdorf ’s writing received more critical acclaim, winning the Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association’s Conference on Christianity and Literature. Kasdorf was born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative Amish/Mennonite community. When she was still young, her parents moved from their rural home to the suburbs of Pittsburgh. In interviews, Kasdorf has said that she is “still working out the implications of that departure” in her poetry, trying to mediate between the inward-Â� looking world of Mennonite communities and “the one we live in now,” which is far less insular, far more secular. Despite her childhood move to the suburbs, though, Kasdorf remained tied to her Mennonite roots, both by virtue of attending a Mennonite church in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and by spending summers in the predominantly Mennonite Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, with her Mennonite grandparents. After attending Goshen College, Kasdorf finished her education at New York University, earning her BA, MA, and PhD. In addition to her book publications, Kasdorf ’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, and her poems—in particular “Mennonites”— have appeared in a number of anthologies. “Mennonites” limns the church’s culture, describing those particular aspects of the Mennonites that will be most familiar to members of the church but perhaps less so to anyone else. “We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance,” the poem starts, before narrating the Mennonites’ unique connection with history: with Martyrs Mirror, a hagiography of engravings and stories about Anabaptist martyrs nearly hallowed in Mennonite households; with Catherine the Great, one-Â�time Russian savior
Nikos Kazantzakis
of Mennonites fleeing hostile governments; with U.S. conscientious objectors, condemned to prison for their refusal to fight in America’s wars. Kasdorf ’s poem notes the tension that she, and others like her, have experienced as they move into the Mennonite diaspora, becoming exiles from the communities that raised them. Even in leaving their Mennonite homes, she writes, “we cannot leave the beliefs / or what else would we be?” Although they are no longer part of the Mennonite communities, the foundations of the church yet remain in Kasdorf, as others, whose “voices lift with such force / that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.” Bibliography
Kasdorf, Julia Spicher. The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ———. Eve’s Striptease. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. ———. Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. Telford: Pandora, 2003. ———. Sleeping Preacher. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
—Melanie Springer Mock
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS (1883–1957).╇ Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Iráklion, Crete, in 1883. After completing his secondary school education in 1902, he left the island for Athens, where he studied law. During his undergraduate years, he ventured into creative writing and published his first novel, Serpent and Lily (1906). Enthused by critics’ initial praise, he abruptly left for Paris in 1907. In Paris he encountered numerous philosophers, poets, and artists whose influence would prove enduring. Two of the more significant were Henri Bergson, whose lectures on evolutionary philosophy Kazantzakis audited, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical writings Kazantzakis devoured. Nietzsche inspired the dissertation that Kazantzakis published in 1909 shortly after returning to Crete via Italy. Eager upon his return to introduce and promote the idea that an energetic impulse—the élan vital, or God— drives the world’s creative advance, Kazantzakis lectured on Bergson’s philosophy. In 1914 Kazantzakis made a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, Athos, the axis of Eastern Orthodox monasticism. Surrounded by Athos’s sacred atmosphere and action, he spent forty days in various monasteries reading Bergson’s Creative Evolution, the Buddha’s biography, Nicholas Cabasilas’s The Life in Christ, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and the canonical gospels. During his time on the Holy Mountain, Kazantzakis sensed Christ’s
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living, suffering presence and embraced this religious sentiment, which he then folded into Christ, one of three plays that he wrote in 1915. Kazantzakis spent the next fifteen years traveling Europe, which further fed his literary imagination. While mining lignite in the Peloponnesus around 1917, for example, he encountered the Dionysian workmate George Zorbás, whom Kazantzakis later immortalized in Zorba the Greek (1946). In 1919 he agreed to help the Greek government repatriate several thousand Greeks trapped in the Caucasus, an experience that later served as copy for The Greek Passion (1954), his fictional transfiguration of Christ’s final hours. Passing through Berlin and Vienna in 1922, where he encountered Freudian psychology and read the Buddhist scriptures, he began outlining The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, later published in 1927. The intellectual backbone of Kazantzakis’s literary art, this lyrical essay equates divinity with whatever accelerates the upward and onward movement of spirit in its constant battle with matter. In 1924 Kazantzakis made a pilgrimage to Assisi, a site he would visit repeatedly, eventually expressing his devotion to the Poor Man of God through Saint Francis (1956). Between 1924 and 1929 Kazantzakis also traveled across the Soviet Union, Palestine, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Egypt, and Czechoslovakia. At various points along the way, he completed numerous drafts of the Odyssey, his modern sequel to Homer’s epic, later published in 1938. Throughout his international travels, Kazantzakis never knowingly overlooked events in Greece, especially its civil war in 1949 that inspired his novel The Fratricides (1963). In 1941 during the autumn of his literary career, Kazantzakis explored his commitment to Bergsonian-Â� Nietzschean philosophy through the novel form. As early as 1942 he planned a work about Jesus, but this initial effort—“Christ’s Memoirs”—did not lead to anything concrete until The Last Temptation of Christ, which was published—finally, after much official religious consternationÂ�—in 1955. Kazantzakis’s religious fiction disturbed numerous Christians. In 1953 the Eastern Orthodox Church condemned portions of Freedom or Death and The Last Temptation of Christ even though the latter was unavailable in Greek. In 1954 Pope Pius XII placed The Last Temptation of Christ on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Texts, prompting Kazantzakis to cite Tertullian, the North African father of Latin theology, in his defense. In 1955, after a short illness, Kazantzakis sketched his spiritual autobiography, Report to Greco (1961), and visited the German Lutheran theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. Like Kazantzakis, Schweitzer was an unorthodox yet deeply religious thinker; together,
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they admired the teachings of Jesus, even if they could not affirm Jesus’s uniqueness. A trusted soulmate, Schweitzer nominated Kazantzakis for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he lost by one vote in 1956. Schweitzer was also present when Kazantzakis died at the hospital in Freiburg, Germany, in 1957. Bibliography
Bien, Peter. Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Bien, Peter, and Darren J. N. Middleton, eds. God’s Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996. Dombrowski, Daniel. Kazantzakis and God. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Levitt, Morton P. The Cretan Glance: The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. Middleton, Darren J. N. Broken Hallelujah: Nikos Kazantzakis and Christian Theology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. ———. Novel Theology: Nikos Kazantzakis’s Encounter with Whiteheadian Process Theism. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000. ———, ed. Scandalizing Jesus? Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ Fifty Years On. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Owens, Lewis. Creative Destruction: Nikos Kazantzakis and the Literature of Responsibility. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003.
—Darren J. N. Middleton
MARGERY KEMPE (ca. 1373–after 1439).╇ Margery Kempe, née Brunham, a controversial English mystic given to frequent tears and loud emotional outbursts during worship, is the author of The Book of Margery Kempe, considered by many to be the earliest extant autobiography in the English language. Virtually all that is known of her life comes from this book, which, since she was illiterate, she dictated to clerks, one speculated to have been her eldest son or perhaps his German wife and the other a priest, who though initially skeptical later fully endorsed her story. Born into an influential family in King’s (then Bishop’s) Lynn, a Norfolk port, and married in 1393 to John Kempe, a burgess of somewhat lesser means and influence than her father, who had been a five-Â�time mayor of Lynn, Margery spent the first twenty years of her married life bearing fourteen children and undertaking ultimately unsuccessful business ventures, including brewing and milling. Her first spiritual experience of note occurred after a difficult pregnancy and the birth of her first child. It was while she was suffering from an extended episode
of mental illness (“madness”)—what some today have speculated to be postpartum depression—that she had an apparition of Jesus, who asked her why she had forsaken him as he had not forsaken her. She credits her recovery to that encounter. Apparently spurred by guilt over an unnamed sin, which shame kept her from confessing for many years, and struggling with such bourgeois vices as extravagant spending, inordinate desire for social status, and, at times, lust, she yearned for holiness. Perceiving chastity to be the spiritual ideal, she pleaded with her husband to release her from her conjugal duties so that she could return to a chaste state. When she was forty years old he agreed, and from that time she pursued her quest for spirituality with even greater fervor. One of the first steps that Margery took toward attaining a higher level of spirituality was to seek and eventually obtain ecclesial permission to receive the Eucharist weekly, to select her own confessor, and—more controversially—to wear white as a sign of her retrieved virginity. She sought the counsel and approval of a number of clerics and mystics, most notably Julian of Norwich. Margery’s quest led her to undertake extensive pilgrimages to holy sites in Jerusalem, Rome, Spain, and Germany as well as in England. Besides her loud emotional exhibitions that sometimes annoyed the clergy, her outspokenness in pointing out the sins of her fellow pilgrims had a tendency to alienate them as well. Furthermore, on several occasions she was accused of the heresy of Lollardy and was even questioned by ecclesial officials; in each instance, however, she was vindicated. While copies of a pamphlet describing her book have been available for centuries, the complete manuscript, written from circa 1432 to 1436, was not recovered until 1934. A modernized version was published in 1936, and a Middle English version was published in 1940. The work provides not only a glimpse into a laywoman’s efforts to achieve sanctity in late medieval times but also considerable insight into the workings of the Church and society at that period. The work serves primarily as a memoir of Margery’s spiritual life, emphasizing particularly her mystical experiences. Over the years, she had multiple visions of Jesus in which he gave her specific directives, which she believed had higher authority than those of the Church. During her mystical experiences, she so entered into the events of Jesus’s life that she believed she was there not only in an observatory role but also in an actual participatory role (e.g., assisting Mary as she ministered to her son after his birth and later after the crucifixion). Margery asserts detailed observations of these events including noting that Mary wrapped the crucified body of Christ with the same clothes she had used to swaddle him as an infant.
Johannes Kepler
Margery also claims to have witnessed several Eucharistic miracles. Perhaps most convincing of the authenticity of her love for Christ is that it found expression in her compassion for the sick and unfortunate. She endeavored to minister to the suffering as she would to Christ, praying for them, counseling, and comforting them. Bibliography
Arnold, John, and Katherine J. Lewis. A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe (D. S. Brewer, 2004). The Book of Margery Kempe. Translated by B. A. Windeatt (Viking/Penguin, 1985). The Book of Margery Kempe: An Abridged Translation. Library of Medieval Women. Translation, introduction, and notes by Liz Herbert McAvoy (D. S. Brewer, 2003). Collis, Louise. Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe (Perennial Library, 1983). Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Margery Kempe.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. New Cultural Studies Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). Mueller, Janel M. “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: Female Spirituality, Selfhood, and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe.” In Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, by Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse University Press, 1986).
—Sally Jo Shelton
JOHANNES KEPLER (1571–1630).╇ Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg (Germany). After attending Lutheran seminaries at Adelberg and Maulbronn, he received a royal scholarship to attend the University of Tübingen, where he began studies in theology, philosophy, and mathematics in 1589. There astronomer Michael Maestlin introduced Kepler to Copernicus’s heliocentric theories; Kepler found Copernicus’s explanations so simple that he accepted them immediately as God’s plan for the universe. Although Kepler had planned to be a theologian, the University of Graz offered him the position of chair of mathematics and astronomy in 1594, and he accepted, serving there until 1600. During this time, he formulated a geometric hypothesis on planetary motion, published in 1596 in Mysterium Cosmographicum, that provided logical support for Copernican astronomy. However, staying at Graz would have meant compulsory conversion to Roman Catholicism, so Kepler left for Prague in 1600 to become an assistant to Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Although Brahe was imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, he could not perform the
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mathematical calculations necessary to make sense of his mountains of astronomical data, the most accurate observations prior to the invention of the telescope. After Brahe’s sudden death in 1601, Kepler became imperial mathematician and then district mathematician in Linz from 1611 to 1626 and sorted through the data that Brahe had bequeathed to him. Kepler’s hard work led to the formulation of three laws of planetary motion, published first in Astronomia Nova (1609) and Harmonice Mundi (1619) and then again in Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (1618–1621), the first textbook on Copernican astronomy. Kepler also wrote treatises on optics, explained a supernova discovered in 1604, supported Galileo’s observations, and developed a series of infinitesimals that formed the basis of calculus; Kepler even wrote a novel about space travel (Somnium, published posthumously in 1634). His last scientific work, Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627), contained tables of planetary motion based on Brahe’s data with mean errors within ten feet of actual positions of planets. Exhausted from defending his mother against charges of witchcraft and attempting to collect payment from his later patron, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Kepler died in Regensburg on November 15, 1630. Although much of his work was revolutionary, especially in the realm of optics, Kepler’s greatest achievement was his formulation of laws describing planetary motion: 1.╇The planets follow an elliptical orbit around the sun, which is at one focus of the ellipse. 2.╇The areas described by a planet’s orbit by a straight line connecting the center of the planet and the center of the sun are equal for equal time periods. 3.╇The cube of a planet’s mean distance from the sun divided by the square of its orbital period is a constant. Faith drove his scientific inquiries, however. Kepler firmly believed that anything, from geometric shapes to the motion of the planets, could give insight into the nature of the God who, by virtue of His own reason, created a rational universe and gave man both the ability to reason and the revelation needed to bridge the gaps that human reason alone could not cross. Kepler also had no difficulty reconciling the medieval notion of God as the First Mover with the new Copernican cosmology; just as the sun exerts the force that keeps the planets in their orbits, God actively works in and through creation, keeping the universe in motion and yet ordered. Nor did Kepler reject the music of the spheres, describing the geometrical harmonies created by planetary motion in Harmonice Mundi (MP3 files of which, with German commentary, are available in the Multimedia section of the Kepler Archive Web site, http://www.kepler-Â�archiv.de). Although many of his
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underlying assumptions came from Platonism, he always tried to keep his arguments in line with both the empirical data and his Christian faith. Harmonice Mundi, Kepler’s favorite astronomical work, includes far more than simple astronomy. His hope for the work was nothing short of expounding the plan of creation as he saw it, a plan that he believed God had waited six thousand years for someone to understand and that might take a hundred years more to find acceptance. To make the case for his physical and astronomical theories, Kepler begins by setting forth the geometrical basis for the harmonic proportions in Books I and II, dealing primarily with constructible figures; although he clearly considered this information necessary but background, twentieth-Â� century scholars have hailed this section of the book as containing highly original contributions to pure mathematics. After a brief explication of the arithmetical origins of solid relations, Kepler moves on to explain his understanding of harmony, especially its geometric basis, in Book III. Book IV explores the harmonic proportions in the works of nature, specifically with regard to the origin of astrological aspects (a concept that Kepler attempted to preserve but separate from superstition). Book V explores the celestial harmonies created by the six known planets, incorporating the laws of planetary motion and the harmonic relations between the angular velocities of single planets at perihelion and aphelion and between neighboring pairs of planets. After making the case for these harmonies a posteriori from the empirical data, Kepler shows how the same conclusions could be reached a priori because God intended to use these principles in creating the architecture of the heavens. This theoretical approach both polishes the argument and allows Kepler to predict the eccentricities of the planets’ orbits very accurately, as shown by the application of the third law. Kepler’s work ultimately needed the fine tuning provided by Newton’s law of universal gravitation to fully explain the phenomena he found in Brahe’s observations. Yet in a society torn by political, religious, and scientific upheaval, Kepler provided a vital picture of the balance that could be achieved between reason and faith. His pursuit of God’s active revelation of Himself through nature led Kepler to discoveries that would change scientific inquiry for good. Bibliography The Kepler Archive in Weil der Stadt houses first editions of all of Kepler’s works. The first edition of Kepler’s complete works was the eight-Â�volume Latin Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, edited by Christian Frisch and published in 1871; it includes a 361-Â�page Latin biography with valuable information about Kepler’s mother’s
witchcraft trial. The other standard modern edition of his works and letters, in the original Latin and German, is Gesammelte Werke, edited by Walther von Dyck et al. and published beginning in 1937. The second edition of Max Caspar’s Bibliographia Kepleriana is an extensive bibliography through 1966, and his 1948 Kepler remains the standard biography; although both works were originally published in German, the latter was translated into English and edited by C. Doris Hellman in 1959 and reissued by Dover in 1993 with complete bibliographic notes by Owen Gingerich. A supplement to the Bibliographia Kepleriana covering 1967 to 1975 appears in Kepler: Four Hundred Years, conference proceedings from 1975 edited by Arthur Beer and Peter Beer. —Elizabeth Wolfe SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855).╇ Denmark. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher and Christian thinker, has been called the father of existentialism, the exemplar Protestant subjectivist, and even the father of modern depth-Â�psychology. Kierkegaard lived most of his brief forty-Â�two-year life in Copenhagen, Denmark, where as a child he was profoundly influenced by the anxiety-Â�laden Lutheran piety and rigorous intellectual expectations of his father, Michael Pedersen KierkeÂ� gaard. Inheriting his father’s estate at age twenty-Â�five, Søren Kierkegaard abandoned his aspirations toward the Lutheran pastorate, opting to dedicate his life to writing. Though engaged to the young Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard would never marry, famously breaking the engagement because of an apparent divine injunction, enjoining an undivided focus on God through his work. Writing furiously every evening, Kierkegaard daily walked the streets of Copenhagen. He was known both for his awkward appearance and gait and for his habit of conversing with people from all societal levels. Kierkegaard’s largely solitary life was entangled by two public controversies. His criticism of a popular publication, The Corsair, caused its writers to lampoon and caricature Kierkegaard for six months, driving him into ever greater isolation. The second controversy involved his attack upon the Christendom of the state-Â�endorsed Danish Lutheran Church. Broadening and intensifying his earlier critiques of Danish primate Bishop Mynster from 1854 until his own death in 1855, in this attack Kierkegaard called for the Danish Church’s admission of its departure from true Christianity. Kierkegaard’s Thought Of chief importance among Kierkegaard’s thirty printed volumes, excluding his many handwritten journals, are
Martin Luther King Jr.
Either/Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death, Works of Love, and Practice in Christianity. Kierkegaard wrote many of his works under pseudonyms, thereby bolstering the irony and Socratic indirection needed to awaken his readers to the state of their own existence and “introduce Christianity into Christendom” (Journals and Papers VI, 6317). During Kierkegaard’s time, objectified, rational, and systematized Hegelian philosophy had eradicated the place of the individual, while the Danish Church had become a collectivist endeavor, reducing religion largely to ethics. Kierkegaard defied both by reasserting the primacy of the individual, claiming that “truth is subjectivity” and faith is paradoxically beyond the rational or ethical. At the heart of Kierkegaard’s thought stands “the single individual” whose freedom calls for action amid manifold limitations and possibilities. Thus, Kierkegaard stresses the “offense” of Christianity’s “infinite” demand placed on the individual, who always stands absolutely “before God” and is called out in anxious freedom to become a whole self by making a “leap” beyond the ethical into a faith that is “grounded transparently in God” (The Sickness unto Death, 114, 117). While developing this thesis Kierkegaard describes, chiefly in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the various stages of existence that individuals inhabit. The aesthetic sphere is occupied by those who, living for pleasure or cultured self-Â�gratification, perpetually cultivate new experiences, a “rotation” allowing escape from the dreaded enemy of boredom. The ethical sphere comprises those living by the rule of moral duty, while the final religious sphere includes those who “rest transparently” in God and live by the “absurd” faith that with God “all things are possible” (Fear and Trembling, 75). While some label Kierkegaard the ultimate Protestant individualist, others reply that he defines the individual as a relation to self and God (The Sickness unto Death, 43, 114), whose need for others is “essentially╯.╯.╯.╯rooted in human nature” (Works of Love, 155). Moreover, some contend that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on inwardness and subjectivity make him a thoroughgoing subjectivist and ethical relativist. However, others emphasize KierkeÂ� gaard’s robust commitment to Christian faith, noting the ironic and provisional character of his many pseudonymous works that serve the coherent and explicitly Christian aim of his whole corpus. Bibliography
Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Translated and edited by Howard V.
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Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Either/Or, part I. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. ———. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio. Translated with introduction by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin, 2003. ———. The Point of View: On My Work as an Author; The Point of View for My Work as an Author; Armed Neutrality. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. Practice in Christianity. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. ———. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Â�Climacus. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin, 2004. ———. Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978. ———. Works of Love. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Kirmmse, Bruce H. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Perkins, Robert L., ed. International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vols. 1–21. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984–2004.
—Nathan P. Carson
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1929–1968).╇ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., black orator, essayist, minister, prophet, and civil rights activist of the 1950s-Â�1960s, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and Mrs. Alberta Williams King on January 15, 1929. At age nineteen, King Jr. earned a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College; later he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary and then at Boston University, receiving a doctorate degree in theology in 1955. King married Coretta Scott, who was a civil rights leader until her death in 2006. To this union four children were born: Martin III, Dexter, Yolanda, and Bernice. Promoter of civil rights for African Americans and all people through nonviolence in a turbulent time in American history, Dr. King received a number of awards (before and after his death) in recognition of his contributions to equality, justice, and fair play for all. Some of these awards include the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, the establishment of MLK Day in 1986, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. King is perhaps best known for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, written in August 1963 and delivered at the
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Lincoln Memorial during the civil rights march in Washington, D.C., where King proclaimed, “And when we allow freedom to ring .╯.╯. we will speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’↜” Prior to this speech, King—arrested in protest of an unjust law in Birmingham in April 1963—wrote the highly eloquent, politically charged “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Addressed to fellow Christian ministers, the letter pegs King as an “extremist,” just as Martin Luther and the Apostle Paul were extremists of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The letter outlines King’s four-Â�step nonviolent plan, and in the letter he uses a number of biblical, historical, and philosophical documents to support his claim that Negroes could no longer continue to suffer under the laws of inequality, injustice, and brutality throughout the South as well as the North. Much of King’s writings stem from his strong Christian faith in the God of Agape love. Hence, in order to understand “An Experiment of Love” (1953) and “The Power of Nonviolence” (1957), the audience must grasp the meaning of Agape love. As King illuminates in the latter, Agape “is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.” In the former, King details the characteristics of nonviolent resistance and concludes that there is a higher power of infinite love (Agape) that “works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.” Along with a number of essays, letters, sermons, speeches, and interviews, Dr. King authored five books. Critics have hailed Stride toward Freedom (1958) as the blueprint of the civil rights movement. The Strength to Love (1963) is a collection of King’s sermons, and many of these soulful homilies King preached at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, Georgia. In Why We Can’t Wait (1964), released not long after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, King emphasizes the urgency to end hatred, bigotry, intolerance, and violence in America. In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King seeks to unify the efforts among the black community in particular and the much larger community in general to promote social, political, and economic equality for Negroes. He ends the book with a plea for unity: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.” In The Trumpet of Conscience (1967), King audaciously argues against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and remains an advocate of Agape love, justice, and nonviolence.
Bibliography
”An Experiment of Love” (1953). “I Have a Dream” (1963). “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963). “The Power of Nonviolence” (1957). The Strength to Love (1963). Stride toward Freedom (1958). A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986), edited by James M. Washington. The Trumpet of Conscience (1967). Why We Can’t Wait (1964). Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).
—Mary Alice Trent
KENNETH ESCOTT KIRK (1866–1954).╇ English moral theologian. Apart from a stint in the army during World War I, Kirk spent his life in Oxford, eventually as professor of moral theology and then as bishop. He was an outstanding moral theologian, and his greatest work was the Vision of God. The Vision of God is the published form of the 1928 Bampton Lectures. It is a historical and theological study of the relationship between worship and morality expounding the thesis that the principal task of the believer is to worship. It is not an antinomian work, and it has a place for codes of conduct, but they are subordinate to worship. The book defends the central thesis that worship, as creative abandonment to God, is the ultimate expression of faith. It renews the significance of the beatitude in Matthew 5:8: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Thus, the vision of God replaces formalism, rigorism, and humanism, three terms employed by Kirk as hallmarks of man-Â�centered religion. Formalism is obedience to codified rules and commandments, rigorism prescribes self-Â�denial as a means of attaining sanctity, and humanism relies on ethics and morality as substitutes for faith. These are human ideals that provide a false patina of holiness but deny its substance. They can be more dangerous than nonfaith. Much of the book is devoted to a detailed historical exposition of how Judaic and Hellenistic influences in the early church allowed humanism and rigorism to cloud the teachings of Jesus. The message of Jesus was centered on the revolutionary concept of a Kingdom of God in opposition to the world, not in conjunction with it. By equating Himself with God, Jesus provided a vision of God within a worldly setting. He condemned formal religion that expressed itself only in words and formal pietism. It is Paul more than any other in the first century who defined Christianity solely in reference to Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and broke the hold of Mosaic law on the religious imagination. The Apostle John makes the vision of God a perpetual experience realized through participation in the corporate
Russell Kirk
vision of the church. But soon after John, Christian life was codified into a formal system, partly from the fear of contamination from false doctrines. For example, the Didache (ca. 150) gives a list of prescriptions reducing orthodoxy to orthopraxy. Rabbinical and Pythogorean influences also contributed to the stratification of the faith. These codifications robbed the faith of its dynamism and reduced the free flow of the Holy Spirit within the church. The rise of monasticism within the early Christian tradition illustrates how the fear of the world led to the growth of insularism and isolation. St. Jerome (342–420) was driven to monasticism in reaction to the excesses of Roman society, as was St. Anthony the Great. Gradually the church came to see that the monastic impulse, while good as an individual pursuit of holiness, was a dead end in terms of the corporate life of the church. The church came to promote holiness as an ideal not only for monks but also for the laypeople. The fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries sought to bring the monastic life closer to the life of ordinary Christians and to lay less emphasis on asceticism as the sole means of attaining the vision of God. St. Augustine (354–430) saw the implications of faith for social existence, even though he himself was a monk. His doctrine of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, laid the foundations for a more human Gospel. His major contribution to Christian thought was the doctrine of grace by which salvation is totally unmerited but is a gift of God. This doctrine, later carried over by the Reformers into the canon of Christian theology, has dominated Christian thinking since then. After Augustine, monasticism and grace became two parallel streams that both continued to flow into the estuary of Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas placed reason above mystical piety and thus opened the devotional life to all men. Later, St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) and St. Francis de Sales (1567–1622) brought evangelization as a form of engagement with the unsaved world and as a form of obedience to the Great Commission. Kirk devotes little attention to post-Â�Reformation developments. He distrusts the radical liberty of the Reformers and bemoans the decline of inward discipline in Protestant theology. He points out the predominance of petitionary over adoration prayer in Luther as diminishing a true vision of God. The treatise ends with a plea for a valid vision of God in which worship and discipline are united and in which there is no place for the self. Bibliography
Kirk, Kenneth. Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry. London: Longmans, Green, 1927. ———. Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application. London: Longmans, Green, 1920.
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———. The Threshold of Ethics. London: Skeffington and Son, 1939. ———. The Vision of God. London: Longmans, Green, 1947.
—George Thomas Kurian
RUSSELL KIRK (1918–1994).╇ A native of Michigan, Russell Kirk (October 19, 1918–April 29, 1994) was one of the most important American and Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a historian, a literary biographer, a political biographer, a best-Â�selling novelist, a social critic and essayist, a defender of academic freedom, an economist, an adviser to presidents and presidential candidates, a convert to Roman Catholicism, a Stoic, an Augustinian, a Christian Humanist, a convinced believer in ghosts, a nationally known debater and lecturer, a traditionalist, an environmental conservationist, a justice of the peace, the founder of the post–World War II conservative movement, and, perhaps above all, a truly charitable soul. In short, he was a man of letters and a natural aristocrat, each being rare to nearly extinct in the twentieth century. During his forty-Â�three-Â�year writing career, he touched on numerous topics, and he received accolades from many famous persons including Flannery O’Conner, T. S. Eliot, Ronald Reagan, and Ray Bradbury. In Kirk’s twenty-Â�nine books of politics, history, constitutional law, literature, social criticism, economics, and fiction, the shadow of the French Revolution and the loosening of right-Â� and left-Â�wing ideologies deeply haunted him. Tellingly, Kirk’s most important influence was Edmund Burke, the originator of conservatism in the postmedieval world and the most articulate spokesman against the French Revolution. Like Burke witnessing the destruction of France in the eighteenth century, Kirk surveyed the vast killing fields of the twentieth century and the polarization of the world into ideological camps. Throughout his life, he witnessed the gruesome results of ideological terror in Russia, Italy, Germany, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name only a few. To combat the ideologies of the Left and the Right, Kirk argued that one must first preserve the best of Western and Christian civilization. He expressed this conservatism best in his doctoral thesis, The Conservative Mind, in 1953, and its sequel, A Program for Conservatives, in 1954. Unexpectedly, the former received widespread attention, propelled the thirty-Â�five-Â�year-Â�old Kirk into the national spotlight, and became the basis of the postwar conservative movement. More theological and cultural than political, six tenets formed the conservative mind, including: “Belief in the transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience”; “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence”;
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“Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked”; and “Custom, convention, and old prescription [as] checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.” Second, the conservative must embrace the imaginative faculties of the soul (Kirk drew these ideas from Plato and St. John) and recognize the Logos as the center and culmination of all history. Third, the conservative must understand and, through Grace, cultivate the seven cardinal and Christian virtues, recognizing Love as the true end of life. At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.1
Note
1. Russell Kirk, Programs for Conservatives (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), 18–19.
—Bradley Birzer
JOHN KNOX (d. 1572).╇ The legacy of John Knox is undoubtedly grounded in his instrumental role in the Reformation of Scotland. Along with John Calvin and Theodore Beza, Knox is a key figure in the history of the Reformed movement. His legacy is divisive. His admirers consider him the hero of the Scottish Reformation, while his detractors view him as a heretical fanatic. Both rightly see him as the “Luther of Scotland,” with one side championing the label as a compliment, the other a chief insult. Details of Knox’s early life are sparse, and the few details that are available are disputed, even contradictory. The difficulties begin with dating his birth, since the evidence conflicts. While evidence points to 1505, the range of 1513–1515 is more probable. Not surprisingly, the precise location of his birth is also unknown, but he was born close to Edinburgh, with Giffordgate in Haddington, east of Edinburgh, the most likely location. His college education is disputed: he either attended Glasgow or (more likely) studied at St. Andrews under John Major, a scholastic opposed to Rome.
As for Knox’s role in ecclesial matters, he was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1535 but eventually converted to Protestantism in the early 1540s. The turning point appears to be the execution of George Wishart, someone whom Knox admired greatly. Knox tutored Wishart’s sons and eventually served as Wishart’s bodyguard to protect him from persecution. Eventually Wishart was charged with heresy and burned at the stake by order of Cardinal Beaton. Knox’s first public support of the Reformation came in 1545. This is about the same time that evidence of his activities increases, partly due to his own The History of the Reformation in Scotland. His first sermon as a public protester of Rome was given on Daniel 7 at St. Andrews, where he made comparisons between the pope and the fourth beast. Knox disputed the Roman interpretation of the mass, labeling it an abomination: “one mass was more dangerous to Scotland than an army of ten thousand enemies.” For nineteen months, from the summer of 1547 to 1549, he was a French galley slave, having been captured with other Protestants during a French raid on St. Andrews castle. He endured a lengthy period of voluntary exile from Scotland (fearing arrest there); he lived in England (Cambridge, Berwick, and Newcastle) and traveled throughout continental Europe. The only certainty from his time in Europe is that he lived in Frankfurt and later Geneva as a parish minister before departing for Scotland in 1555. A year later, at the request of his Swiss congregation, he returned to Geneva. He returned to Scotland in May 1559 just before two important events occurred in 1560: the Scots Confession of Faith (written by Knox) was adopted, and the Reformed Protestant religion was ratified as law. It took until 1567 for the Reformed Church of Scotland to be established by Parliament. Knox served ten years (1560–1570) as minister at St. Giles’ in Edinburgh. Second only to Calvin, Knox helped to compose Presbyterian polity that has proved applicable up to the present. Knox was not merely a churchman to his local parish; motivated by ecclesial concerns, he was a force in politics on the national level, and even a cursory understanding of Scotland’s history must account for his influence. He is famous for five rather public conversations or debates with Mary Queen of Scots during her stay at Holyrood Palace. From at least the eighteenth century to the present, a house associated with Knox’s later years has been maintained on the Royal Mile, just down the street from St. Giles’ Cathedral. Although he did not live there during his entire stay in Edinburgh, it is called John Knox’s house. Though his birth date and location are in doubt, details of his death are not. He died on November 24, 1572, in Edinburgh and was buried in the churchyard behind the cathedral. The graveyard has been paved over, but you can
Hendrik Kraemer
still find his burial spot; look for a small rectangular monument inscribed with I K 1572 (representing Iohannes Knox) in parking bay #44 behind St. Giles’ Cathedral. Bibliography
Knox, John. (1994). The Works of John Knox. 6 vols. Edited and compiled by David Laing. Reprint. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Ozment, Steven. (1980). The Age of Reform, 1520–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Reid, W. Stanford. (1974). Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox. New York: Scribner. Ridley, Jasper. (1968). John Knox. New York: Oxford University Press. Schaff, Philip, ed. (1996). The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. 1. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
—Ryan Neal
RONALD KNOX (1888–1957).╇ Born the son of an Anglican bishop in 1888 at Leicestershire, England, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was to become one of England’s most prominent converts to Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth century. Educated at Eton and then at Balliol College, Oxford, Knox was a significant scholar and classicist. He became an Anglican minister in 1912, yet he was drawn to the Anglo-Â�Catholic side of the Anglican faith through the writings of Robert Hugh Benson, a Catholic priest who himself had converted from Anglicanism. Knox converted to Roman Catholicism in 1917, and through his spiritual autobiography, A Spiritual Aeneid, which he began writing as soon as he converted and which was published one year after his conversion, Knox immediately became one of the foremost apologists for the Catholic faith in England. While the young Knox was influenced by the early preconversion writing of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (1908), Knox after his conversion and through his apologetic writing in turn influenced Chesterton, helping him in his own conversion to the Catholic faith in 1922. Knox’s apologetic writings in the 1920s not only influenced Chesterton but had an important effect on a number of other Catholic English authors, including Evelyn Waugh. Waugh wrote the introduction to the first edition of Knox’s Spiritual Aeneid, and at Knox’s request, Waugh wrote the definitive biography of Knox: The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959). Knox’s most famous work of apologetics is his 1927 book The Belief of Catholics in which he directly confronts the challenges to the church and to belief by prominent secular atheists, such as Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells.
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In this work, Knox not only systematically lays out what the Catholic faith is as opposed to what people think it is, but he also argues for the eternal relevance of the Catholic Church and why modern Protestants and atheists ought to accept it as true. Another of Knox’s well-Â�known apologetic works, Difficulties, is partially responsible for the conversion of the prominent English agnostic, Arnold Lunn. Lunn and Knox corresponded with each other, and their correspondence then became the source of the book, which Knox published in 1933. In it, Lunn offered a series of challenges to aspects of Catholic doctrine, to which Knox would then respond. Monsignor Knox served as the chaplain of Catholic students at Oxford University during 1926–1939. During this time, he began to shift his writing away from apologetics, though throughout his life he continued his work in defense of the faith and in belief in the modern age. He enjoyed writing detective stories and joined the Detection Club, whose members included Chesterton and Dorothy╯L. Sayers. In 1939 Knox began a nine-Â�year-Â�long translation of the Holy Bible into English from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. In addition to his English translation, Knox also wrote a three-Â�volume commentary on the New Testament in which he explains at length his translation of certain passages. Though in his final years Knox had shifted more to the work of translating rather than writing, in 1950 he did write one final book of apologetics, Enthusiasm. In it Knox discusses and criticizes emotional religious zeal apart from rational doctrine. He stresses the importance of rational rather than emotional belief and the necessity of having a set creed of belief. He had begun work on an updated version of his 1927 The Belief of Catholics when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer early in 1957. He died on August 24, 1957, and is buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew’s Church in Mells, Somerset. Bibliography
Knox, Ronald. The Belief of Catholics. Ignatius Press, 2000. ———. A Spiritual Aeneid. New edition. Sheed and Ward, 1958. Waugh, Evelyn, Monsignor Ronald Knox. Little, Brown, 1959.
—Helen T. Lasseter
HENDRIK KRAEMER (1888–1965).╇ Hendrik Kraemer was born on May 17, 1888, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. From 1905 to 1909 he studied at the Nederlandse Zendingshooge (a missionary school) in Rotterdam. It was during these years that he encountered prominent Dutch missiologists such as Nicolaus Adriani, J. H. Gunning, and A.╯C.
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Kruyt. In 1907 Kraemer assisted J. H. Oldham, who was visiting the Netherlands to prepare for the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, and this introduced Kraemer to international missiology. His theological development would occur through the influence of Leiden University professors W. Brede Kristensen and Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye, who lectured occasionally at the missionary school. Kristensen influenced Kraemer’s theology of comparative religions, and Chantepie influenced Kraemer in regard to Islam. Eventually, Kraemer would work with Chantepie. Adriani encouraged Kraemer to enroll at Leiden University, and there he studied Indonesian languages during 1911–1912. Islamic scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje supervised Kraemer’s doctoral studies in Oriental languages, cultures, and religions at the university, which he completed in 1921. Kraemer served the Netherlands Bible Society as a missionary to Indonesia during 1922–1937. While serving for the Bible Society, he became an authority concerning Indonesian Islam. He established the Higher Theological School at Jakarta in 1934. During 1937–1947 he was professor of the history and phenomenology of religion at Leiden University. During 1946–1955 he served as the first director of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches at Chąteau de Bossey, Switzerland. He was Fosdick visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary (New York). In 1932 the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry published the liberal report Re-Â�thinking Missions. Kraemer’s most influential work, The Christian Message in a Non-Â� Christian World (1938), was written as a preparatory volume for the Tambaram (Madras) World Missionary Conference on evangelism and influenced missiology extensively from 1938 to 1961. At a time when non-Â� Christian religions were regarded as having some preparatory value in the proclamation of the Christian message, he emphasized discontinuity (“biblical realism” as he termed it) between Christianity and other religions. Kraemer argued that the foundation of Christianity is based upon God’s exclusive self-Â�disclosure in Jesus Christ. Since the Christian message was given by special revelation, it cannot be compared generally to either Christian or non-Â� Christian religious experience. His work reflected the dialectical theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and received intense criticism from liberal and Indian theologians. Kraemer responded to many of the criticisms of his work and presented an apologetic of Christianity as God’s exclusive and unique self-Â�revelation to humanity in Religion and the Christian Faith (1957). However, in this work (and in World Cultures and World Religions: The Coming Dialogue, written in 1960) he no longer used the term “biblical realism” but introduced the term “dialogue.”
Kraemer argued that it is the mandatory responsibility of Christians to encounter the church and world in all aspects and to delight in this obligatory and strenuous task. He referred to questions concerning the “wider and deeper setting” of the mission field as “communication,” which is seen in his work The Communication of the Christian Faith (1956). In response to Mel Hodges, John Nevius, Donald McGavran, and others who had begun calling for the contextualization of indigenous churches, Kraemer wrote From Missionfield to Independent Church: Report on a Decisive Decade in the Growth of Indigenous Churches in Indonesia (1958). He was seeking to develop Christianity in Indonesia from a mission field to an independent church. Why Christianity of All Religions? (1962) articulated an additional apologetic for the Christian faith and also stressed the consistency of his early and later works. He wrote a two-Â�volume study on Islam in 1928 and 1933, which was forbidden by the Indonesian government. Regardless of the criticism of his Islam as Religious and Missionary Problem, written in Dutch in 1938, Kraemer was a genuine scholar in the study of Islam and the history of religions. For instance, he was extended an invitation by Isma’il Ragi A. al Faruqi to write a preface for one of his works. Kraemer demonstrated a profound understanding of the challenges of non-Â�Christian religions and interfaith dialogue for present and future Christian missionary work. Kraemer was also active in church renewal and was instrumental in the revitalization of the Netherlands Reformed Church following World War II by developing a theology of the laity and ecumenical collaboration. In 1958 at Bossey, he published A Theology of the Laity. He died on November 11, 1965, in Driebergen, where he was buried. Bibliography Kraemer supervised the doctoral studies of only one student, A. Th. van Leeuwen, who also wrote his biography: Hendrik Kraemer: Dienaar der Wereldkerk (Amsterdam: W. Ten Have, 1959). For a bibliography of works and missiological study, see Carl F. Hallencreutz, Kraemer towards Tambaram: A Study in Hendrik Kraemer’s Missionary Approach (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1966). Also helpful for a comprehensive list of bibliography, biography, and works of appreciation is Jacques Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, Vol. 2, Bibliography (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1974). Modern studies of Kraemer include Tim S. Perry, Radical Â�Difference: A Defence of Hendrik Kraemer’s Theology of Religions (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,╯2001). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
Hans Küng
HANS KÜNG (1928–).╇ Hans Küng was born in 1928 in the Swiss canton of Lucerne. After earning a licentiate in philosophy in 1951 from the Germanicum in Rome and receiving priestly ordination in 1954, he proceeded to earn a licentiate in theology at the Gregorianum, also in Rome, in 1955 and a doctorate in theology from Paris’s Institut Catholique in 1957. In Küng’s doctoral dissertation, Rechtfertigung: Die Lehre Karl Barths und eine katholische Besinnung, he argued that Barth’s renovated doctrine of justification was not sufficiently incompatible with the doctrine of the Council of Trent to justify division between the Catholic Church and the Protestant bodies of whom Barth’s thinking was representative. This dissertation, whose reasoning underlies the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification signed by leaders of the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, established Küng’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost ecumenical theologians. After being appointed professor of fundamental theology at Tübingen in 1960, Küng published Konzil und Wiedervereinigung, a programmatic work that, to a significant extent, set the agenda for progressive bishops and theologians at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), at which Küng served as a peritus, or expert consultant. In 1966 he published Die Kirche in which he marshaled the results of historical-Â�critical biblical scholarship to formulate a scriptural and egalitarian alternative to the hierarchical and traditional ecclesiology set forth in the third chapter of Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. In 1970, then, at the centenary of the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I and in response to Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical banning artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, Küng published Unfehlbar? Eine Anfrage. In this work, he argued historical and philosophical reasons why a Christian cannot reasonably attribute infallibility to propositions per se. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1973 responded to Küng’s work by publishing the document Mysterium Ecclesiae in which it affirmed the infallibility of propositions constantly taught by the ordinary magisterium or solemnly defined by the pope or an ecumenical council with his consent. In 1974 Küng published his massive work, Christ sein, in which he articulated a purely functional “Christology from below,” which provoked an outcry by its apparent denial of Jesus’s deity. The German Episcopal Conference publicly expressed its disapproval of the Christology of Christ sein in 1975 and again, at greater length, in 1977. Küng published his classic Existiert Gott? in 1978. In 1979 the Vatican withdrew Küng’s authorization to teach Catholic theology, and he accordingly lost his position on the Catholic theological faculty at Tübingen.
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He retained employment at Tübingen, nevertheless, as a professor of ecumenical theology. Throughout the 1980s Küng devoted himself primarily to interreligious dialogue, producing works such as Christentum und Weltreligionen (1984) and Christentum und Chinesische Religion (1988). From 1990 to the present, he has dedicated himself principally to advocating a Weltethos, or global ethic: a minimal code of ethics to which all religions can subscribe, which mandates nonviolence, tolerance, truthfulness, social justice, and equal rights for women and men. Highlights of Küng’s campaign for his Weltethos include his books Projekt Weltethos (1990) and Weltethos für Weltpolitik und Weltwirtschaft (1997) and the endorsement of his program by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in its “Declaration toward a Global Ethic” (1993). Principal Ideas Küng’s most influential ideas are a substantial convergence between Karl Barth’s doctrine of justification and that of the Council of Trent and a Weltethos founded on principles common to all world religions. The significance of the first realization, in light of the Joint Declaration of 1999, is manifest. Küng pioneered in recognizing that the Catholic and Barthian conceptions of justification could differ radically in their emphases, vocabulary, and horizons of thought without substantively diverging to such an extent as to warrant ecclesiastical separation. Küng’s Weltethos constitutes a breakthrough inasmuch as it combines a firm recognition of ethical norms, which transcend the boundaries of the particular religions, with an equally firm acknowledgment of the indispensability of the religions to the grounding of these norms. In his writings on the theme of a Weltethos, moreover, Küng has sketched a broad program for reconciliation between the great religions and for joint action by the religions to realize their common moral vision. Bibliography The Web site of the Stiftung Weltethos, www.weltethos .org, contains an up-Â�to-Â�date, exhaustive bibliography of Hans Küng’s writings along with a comprehensive listing of translations of his works into English and other languages. Among the most helpful works about Küng’s thought and life are Küng’s autobiography through 1968, Erkämpfte Freiheit: Erinnerungen (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2002), and his former assistant Hermann Häring’s Hans Küng: Grenzen durchbrechen (Mainz: Matthias-Â�Grünewald-Â�Verlag, 1998). A documentary record of Küng’s difficulties with the Vatican and the German bishops appears in Der Fall Küng: Eine Dokumentation, edited by Norbert Greinacher and Herbert Haag (Munich: Piper, 1980).
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He also founded and edited his own paper, The Standard (De Standaard), beginning in 1872. Kuyper wrote several thousand editorials for The Standard. Having served in the pastorate, Kuyper became interested in politics, which developed into active involvement in political and theological controversies. He was first elected to the States-Â�General in 1874 and served several terms. Throughout his service, he labored for recognition of private education by the government. He founded the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, which was based upon Reformed (Calvinist) doctrine. As leader in the departure from the state church, he founded the Free Reformed Church in 1886. During this period, Kuyper maintained close association with Herman Bavinck, who previously taught at Kampen Theological Seminary and was a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1898 Kuyper delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary and published (as editor) the Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology the same year. From 1901 to 1905 ABRAHAM KUYPER (1837–1920).╇ Abraham Kuyper he served as Dutch prime minister (at the invitation of was born on October 29, 1837, in the fishing village Queen Wilhelmina) in The Hague. He retired from the of Maassluis, Netherlands. His father, Jan Frederick university in 1908 and from active politics as the “grand Kuyper, was pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church (De old man” of his country in 1913. The most comprehensive statement concerning Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk). His mother, Henriette Huber, was the daughter of a former officer in the Swiss Kuyper’s beliefs regarding the sovereignty of God was the GardeÂ�corps. Kuyper was home-schooled until his father Stone Lectures. Kuyper opposed French “popular sovaccepted a pastorate at Leiden, and then Kuyper attended ereignty” and German “state sovereignty.” As a scholar, a gymnasium school for six years. He enrolled at the Uni- he developed the concept of “sphere sovereignty” (the versity of Leiden in 1855 and graduated with degrees in exercise of divine sovereignty in the church, society, and literature in 1857 and philosophy in 1858. Kuyper con- state) and, as a theologian, sought to implement his idea. tinued his education at the Leiden Divinity School. He Sphere sovereignty demands that the state is to honor completed his doctorate in theology from Leiden in 1862. and maintain various forms of life that develop indepenThroughout his university education, he was influenced dently and are separate from one another in their own by modernist teachings. In 1863 he became a minister of sacred autonomy. Kuyper’s worldview was the applicathe Reformed Church in the small village of Beesd. While tion of the Word of God to every sphere of life. According in Beesd, he married Johanna Hendrik Schaay, a girl from to his famous dictum, “There is not a square inch in the Rotterdam. Kuyper’s ministry in Beesd was among ordi- whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, nary villagers who imparted to him a living faith in Christ. who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’↜” Kuyper Consequently, he abandoned the theological liberalism of was one of the most successful and instructive economic, his university and seminary training and was convinced political, and religious thinkers within the history of the church. In addition to being a Dutch statesman and of the truth of orthodox Calvinism. Kuyper moved to Utrecht in 1867 and accepted a call to theologian of the Netherlands, he is widely recognized ministry in Amsterdam in 1870. During this time he met as an educator, historian, orator, philosopher, and writer. Groen van Prinsterer, who encouraged his intense inter- During his lifetime, Kuyper influenced the Netherlands est in the government recognition of private education. for Jesus Christ tremendously. Kuyper’s writings remain Kuyper believed in the educational responsibility of par- cherished among Reformed churches throughout the ents. Consequently, he became associated with the Anti-Â� world. With great sorrow his beloved wife died, at the age Revolutionary Party, which opposed the hierarchy and of fifty-Â�eight, in 1899. He never remarried and was the role of the king in the Reformed churches. Kuyper began father of eight children. Kuyper died (fell “asleep in his editing The Herald (De Heraut) in 1871, which was written Saviour,” as his tombstone reads) on November 8, 1920, “for a free church and a free church school in a free land.” in The Hague. For sympathetic reflections on Küng’s career and writings, see especially the festschrift for Küng, Neue Horizonte des Glaubens und Denkens: Ein Arbeitsbuch, edited by Hermann Häring and Karl-Â�Josef Kuschel (Munich: Piper, 1993). For more critical perspectives on Küng’s polemic against papal infallibility, his Christology, and his Weltethos, respectively, see Zum Problem Unfehlbarkeit: Antworten auf die Anfrage Hans Küng, edited by Karl Rahner, Quaestiones Disputatae 54 (Freiburg: Herder, 1971); Diskussion über Hans Küngs “Christ sein,” edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Mainz: Matthias-Â� Grünewald-Â�Verlag, 1976); and Gerd Neuhaus, Kein WeltÂ�frieden ohne christlichen Absolutheitsanspruch: Eine religionstheologische Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Küngs “Projekt Weltethos,” Quaestiones Disputatae 175 (FreiÂ� burg: Herder, 1999). —Dennis Jowers
Abraham Kuyper
Bibliography Kuyper’s Christianity and the Class Struggle, translated by Dirk Jellema (1891; reprint, Grand Rapids: Piet Hein, 1950), and Lectures on Calvinism (1898; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1943) are recommended for understanding his worldview in relation to art, life, politics, and scholarship. Kuyper-Â�Bibliografie, 3 vols. (Kampen, 1923, 1929, 1940) by J. C. Rullman lists and summarizes the copious writings of Kuyper. The classic biography is P.╯Kasteel, Abraham Kuyper (Kampen: Kok, 1938), in Dutch. The
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most accessible and common biography is Frank Vandenberg, Abraham Kuyper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960). Modern introductions to Kuyper’s ministry include Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and John Bolt, A Free Church, a Holy Nation: Abraham Kuyper’s American Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
L MARIE-Â�JOSEPH LAGRANGE (1855–1938).╇ Marie-Â� Joseph Lagrange was born Albert Lagrange in Bourg-Â�en-Â� Bresse, France, on March 7, 1855. He died on March 10, 1938. He became a Dominican and was ordained a Catholic priest. He studied numerous ancient languages, philosophy, theology, and the Bible. In 1880, because of anticlerical matters in France, Lagrange and many of his fellow Dominicans were exiled to Spain. Lagrange founded the École biblique, the famous Dominican biblical school, in Jerusalem in 1890. As head of the École biblique, Lagrange also founded and edited the international biblical journal Revue biblique. He was later caught up in the Catholic controversies during the Modernist crisis. In 1907 Pope Saint Pius X issued his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which condemned what the pope labeled Modernism. The Modernist controversy in the Catholic Church officially began with the issuance of Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi and officially ended after the Second Vatican Council, when in 1965 the Oath against Modernism (begun in 1910) was no longer imposed on Catholics. The Modernist controversy focused primarily upon the historicalÂ�-critical study of the Bible and was especially directed against the works of Alfred Loisy. Lagrange was implicated in this controversy not only because he was a personal acquaintance of Loisy (although he criticized in print Loisy’s works) but also because of Lagrange’s own use of the historical-critical method to study the Bible. Lagrange was even removed from his capacity as editor of the Revue biblique, and a number of his works, including a commentary on the Book of Genesis, have to this day not been published. Lagrange was a prolific author. He published over 1,700 books and articles. An early 1943 bibliography of Lagrange’s, which was not exhaustive, included 1,786 of his publications. Most of his works dealt with the Bible, and many explicitly used the historical-critical method.
Biblical Interpretation and Historical Criticism Lagrange is the single individual most responsible for Catholic Bible scholars’ use of the historical-critical method to study scripture. He incorporated a variety of tools to help understand the history behind the biblical texts, from ancient philology, to the study of ancient geography, to archaeology. At the École biblique Lagrange instituted courses dealing with ancient languages like Akkadian and Egyptian, as well as the geography of biblical times and the archaeology of Palestine. Reading the Bible theologically was very important to Lagrange, which can be gauged by his numerous works, but he believed that studying the history behind the biblical texts through the historical-critical method was important in order properly to understand scripture and thereby read scripture theologically. The Bible was written by God, but it was also written by human authors. The divine message was mediated through human language written by human authors of a particular time and place. Therefore, in order to understand God’s communication in scripture, Lagrange believed it was important to understand not only the languages of scripture (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) but also the history behind the texts themselves. Lagrange saw the historical-critical method as an important means of understanding the human aspect of scripture, and thereby gaining access to God’s message. Most of Lagrange’s books and articles deal with the Bible. His Bible commentaries and articles dealing with particular biblical topics attempt to place scripture in its historical context by a close reading of the texts in their original languages and by applying what Lagrange learned through archaeology about the historical background of the time period and region under discussion in scripture. Historical criticism has often been bound up with source criticism, finding hypothetical sources behind
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different biblical texts. Lagrange engaged in these source-Â� critical discussions, but in his writings he focused more on illuminating the biblical texts by placing them in their broader historical contexts rather than merely fragmenting scripture into various hypothetical sources. Bibliography Lagrange’s works on the Bible include: Historical Criticism and the Old Testament. Catholic Truth Society, 1905; The Gospel According to Saint Mark. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1930; Évangile selon Saint Jean. Librairie Lecoffre, 1936; Évangile selon Saint Matthieu. Librairie Lecoffre, 1948; Évangile selon Saint Luc. Librairie Lecoffre, 1948; and La Méthode historique: la critique biblique et l’église. Éditions du Cerf, 1966. Two important biographical works on Lagrange are M.-Â�J. Lagrange, Père Lagrange: Personal Reflections and Memoirs. Paulist Press, 1985, and Bernard Montagnes, The Story of Father Marie-Â�Joseph Lagrange: Founder of Modern Catholic Bible Study. Paulist Press, 2006. —Jeffrey L. Morrow TIM LAHAYE (1926–).╇ American author and minister Timothy F. LaHaye has written some fifty books intended primarily for evangelical laypeople, though some volumes have been focused more on evangelical apologetics for those outside this community; many of his recent works are cowritten projects in which LaHaye conceives and outlines ideas to be fleshed out by partnering authors. If achievement is measured by best-Â�selling status, his biggest success has been the Left Behind series, thirteen “prophetic novels” published over the course of twelve years (1995–2007) by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. These chronicles follow a group of born-Â�again Christians struggling to survive a biblically prophesied apocalypse. Outside of his writing, which he sees as a portion of his calling and pastoral ministry (Mind Siege, 219), LaHaye served as a pastor in San Diego for nearly a quarter of a century and has lobbied increasingly for political, moral, and educational activism among conservative Christians. A graduate of Bob Jones University, Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, and Liberty University, he has several children and grandchildren with his wife, Beverly. Assessment of LaHaye’s work begins and ends with his teaching on biblical prophecy, particularly his advocacy for premillennial, dispensationalist eschatology. In this conception of Christian end-Â�times thought, believers are “raptured” to heaven before the beginning of the Tribulation, a period of intensifying global conflict leading up to Armageddon and the bodily return of the resurrected Jesus Christ; after Christ returns and vanquishes those
serving the Antichrist, the remaining faithful reign with him for an anticipated millennium of peace before God’s kingdom is finally and fully realized on earth as it is in heaven. This view is based on Revelation 19–20, 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12, selected episodes of Daniel, and other texts scattered through the Old and New Testaments. In both his fiction and nonfiction, LaHaye repeatedly insists that this represents the normal, literal reading of scripture—cleverly placing all opposing viewpoints at a disadvantage, as these views are, by implication, somehow unbiblical. The success of his books shows that LaHaye is playing a major role in shaping how other conservative Christians think about interpreting scripture. The controversial question is how positive is this influence. LaHaye’s view certainly represents one biblical option but by no means the only one; dispensationalism is a newcomer in eschatological discussion, beginning with John Nelson Darby in the early 1800s and popularized in the Scofield Bible and Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. LaHaye’s “Pre-Â�Trib Research Center” assembles supportive arguments from the world’s foremost “prophecy experts” (thus disqualifying those excluded as experts!), but the fact remains: to portray this view as historically orthodox is to misrepresent the traditional faith of the church. Also criticized are the ways in which LaHaye’s system has been advanced, especially in fictional media. Some Left Behind features have been highly praised: The Indwelling, the seventh installment, shows startling depth in using Joel 2:28–32 as a programmatic text, resulting in an apocalyptic literary structure. But the novels have been critiqued on charges of sexism; for glorying in violence; for wooden characterization, especially when portraying Christ himself in later novels; for merely imitating secular thrillers, rather than breaking new ground; for an implicit materialism in the novels and their brand-Â�name marketing; for treating Christian faith as secret or insider knowledge; for fear mongering, instead of preaching mercy; and for viewing prophecy monochromatically as history written in advance, without regard for scripture’s rich polyvalence and deep concern for social justice. The political activism noted above is central in Mind Siege, a volume reminiscent of, and indebted to, Francis Schaeffer’s and Charles Colson’s approaches; LaHaye here presses conservatives to confront the moral decline spawned by the rise of secular humanism. LaHaye’s awareness and courage are commendable, though the language—urging America’s silent “pro-Â�moral majority” to “become militant about their morality” (270)—reduces the potential for healthy political and theological dialogue. LaHaye’s long-Â�term impact remains to be seen.
Anne Lamott
Principal Ideas of Tim LaHaye •â•‡ The God of the Bible is loving and merciful and has a wonderful plan for humanity—but biblical prophecy, properly understood, reveals the urgency and finality of his judgment of sin. •â•‡ God’s plan is revealed in scripture, especially through prophecy, which anyone can be taught to read and understand. •â•‡ Prophecy is to be understood as “history written in advance,” and should be read in as literal and straightforward a manner as past history is read. •â•‡ Christian fiction offers a medium for imagining what the return of Christ and the establishment of God’s kingdom might look like—though this scenario and its biblical interpretation methods have elicited heavy criticism. Bibliography Primary Sources
The Merciful God of Prophecy: His Loving Plan for You in the End Times. Nashville: Warner Faith, 2002. Revelation Unveiled. Rev. ed. of Revelation Illustrated and Made Plain. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999. Understanding Bible Prophecy for Yourself (Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library Series). Rev. ed. Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2002.
With Ed Hindson
Global Warning: Are We on the Brink of World War III? Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2007. The Popular Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy: Over 140 Topics from the World’s Foremost Prophecy Experts (Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library Series). Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004.
With Thomas Ice
Charting the End Times: A Visual Guide to Understanding Bible Prophecy (Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library Series). Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2001. The End Times Controversy: The Second Coming under Attack (Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library Series). Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2003.
With Jerry B. Jenkins The Left Behind Series, beginning with Left Behind (October 1995) and concluding with Kingdom Come (April 2007); with three prequels and several related series for adults, children, and teenagers. Are We Living in the End Times? Current Events Foretold in Scripture .╯.╯. and What They Mean. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2000.
With Beverly LaHaye
The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
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With David Noebel
Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium. Nashville: Word, 2000.
Secondary Sources
Dart, John. “↜‘Beam Me Up’ Theology: The Debate over ‘Left Behind.’↜” Christian Century 119.20 (September 25–October 8, 2002): 8–9. DeMar, Gary. End Times Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the Left Behind Theology. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001. Johns, Loren L. “Conceiving Violence: The Apocalypse of John and the Left Behind Series.” Direction 34.2 (Fall 2005): 194–214. Jones, Jim. “LaHaye’s Tribulation: Left Behind Coauthor Challenges Tyndale over Last Disciple.” Christianity Today 49.2 (February 2005): 27. Koester, Craig R. “Revelation and the Left Behind Novels.” Word and World 25.3 (Summer 2005): 274–282. Shuck, Glenn W. “Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels, Identity, and the Internalization Of Evil.” Nova religio 8.2 (November 2004): 48–63.
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
ANNE LAMOTT (1954–).╇ United States. Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith (1999) established Anne Lamott as a writer capable of reaching secular and religious audiences alike. The California-Â�born writer began her career as a novelist, and her early works, including Hard Laughter (1981), Rosie (1983), and Crooked Little Heart (1997), found moderate success. But it was her nonfiction that secured for her a large readership, first Operating Instructions (1993), a journal of her first year as a single mother; then Bird by Bird (1994), a guide to the art of writing; and finally her breakout memoir, Traveling Mercies, a spiritual autobiography that traces Lamott’s conversion to the faith and her new life as a committed Christian still struggling with temptation and sin. Lamott was raised in the San Francisco Bay area by atheist parents, her father a novelist, her mother a housewife turned lawyer. In Traveling Mercies, Lamott describes her early years of skepticism, as well as the influence of religious people who provided for Lamott an entry into faith. After two years at Goucher College in Maryland, Lamott dropped out to pursue a writing career. Over the next few decades, the author plummeted into alcoholism, drug use, and sexual promiscuity, jeopardizing her career as well as her emotional and physical well-Â�being. In Traveling Mercies, Lamott describes her conversion to Christianity: wearied from drugs and alcohol, and an abortion and resultant hemorrhaging, Lamott feels a very real presence of Christ “hunkered down in the corner” of her bedroom. This same presence haunts her for days, she says, like a cat who jumps the window screens, wanting
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to be let in the house. After denying the metaphoric cat entrance, a beleaguered Lamott finally relents and says her own kind of Jesus prayer: “I quit. All right. You can come in.” This pivotal moment, when she accepts Christ into her life, informs the rest of Traveling Mercies, as well as her subsequent memoirs, Plan B and Grace (Eventually). In all three books, Lamott describes with considerable irony the ways faith has influenced her life as a mother, a writer, a friend, a daughter, a liberal activist, a Presbyterian church member and Sunday school teacher. Little in Lamott’s spiritual autobiographical work— Traveling Mercies, Plan B, Grace (Eventually)—appears orthodox, and it is this seeming lack of orthodoxy that has appealed to non-Â�Christian and Christian readers alike. Certainly Lamott’s Christian faith does not seem traditional, nor does the way she expresses that faith: seeing Christ at once as a shadowed ghost standing in her bedroom and then, later, as an obedient and kind figure dressed in a fuzzy black Labrador suit. Still, the narrative structure through which Lamott relates her faith journey does not significantly diverge from what has long been recognized as the conventional pattern of a spiritual autobiography. Lamott’s Traveling Mercies especially follows a linear structure, describing first her preconversion life of sin, then detailing her conversion moment, then narrating her life as a believer. More significantly, Lamott inscribes a life complicated by her continued hope in Christ’s redemptive power and her simultaneous recognition of an unforgiving universe. Her narrative suggests that the Christian journey is not so easy as she might hope but that she remains faithful to God. Some critics have condemned Lamott’s hard language and her unwillingness to cloak reflections about her Christian life within a more “respectable” evangelical rhetoric; others have critiqued her “hard-Â�core” liberalism, claiming Lamott’s writing is full of “cheap shots and liberal pandering.” Still, even those critiquing Lamott’s out-Â�of-Â�mainstream voice note as well the sincerity of her faith and the ways her unapologetic writing about Christianity has become its own kind of evangelicalism. Too, Lamott’s approach to nonfiction has had its influence on the contemporary spiritual memoir, most notably in writers like Donald Miller and Elizabeth Gilbert, who, like Lamott, have assumed a distinctive approach to writing about faith—an approach that does not pander to easy answers or tired religious clichés in narrating lives transformed by God. Bibliography
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. ———. Blue Shoe. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.
———. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. ———. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. ———. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.
—Melanie Springer Mock
WILLIAM LANGLAND (ca. 1330–ca. 1386).╇ With few secondary references contemporary with his life, biographical information about Langland is inferred mostly from scattered references in versions of the only work that consensus still attributes to him, the poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, generally known as Piers Plowman. Langland’s birth date is unknown, but a fifteenth-Â�century manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin, indicates that he was the son of Eustace de la Rokayle. Langland appears to have been born in the early 1330s, either in Worcestershire near Malvern or in Shropshire. His command of the Vulgate and references to the Divine Office indicate that he probably received a monastic education, perhaps at the Benedictine monastery of Great Malvern. The narrator of Passus 5 of the “C-Â�text” version of Piers, in a passage that appears to be autobiographical, states that he lived in London and in the country. If the final lines of Passus 18 of the “B-Â�text” are autobiographical, then Langland was married and had at least one daughter. A manuscript of Piers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford also contains a concluding statement by one John But, who gives a brief statement of Langland’s death. If Langland scholar Edith Rickert was correct in assigning But’s own death to the year 1387, this date would provide a terminus ad quem for Langland’s death. Work The extant texts of Piers Plowman are written in a Midland dialect and exist in at least three versions, called the A-Â�text, the B-Â�text, and the C-Â�text. Scholars continue to debate the authenticity of a fourth text, known as the Z-Â�text. A, 2,567 lines long with a prologue and twelve passus (chapters), has been dated to the 1360s. B is 7,242 lines long, nearly triple the length of A, and contains eight additional passus. Allusions to the Great Schism in Passus 19 in B indicate that the poem was written no earlier than 1378. C, with 7,357 lines, is a slightly longer revision of B and is divided into twenty-Â�two passus. It dates from the last years of Langland’s life. Piers Plowman mixes Middle English alliteration with periodic Latin phrases and sentences in lines of four to five accented syllables; all lines have unstressed feminine endings. Many modern
William Langland
commentators have divided the poem into first and second sections, the so-Â�called Vision and the Vita. Piers Plowman is an allegory that employs the genre of the dream-Â�vision in the tradition of the thirteenth century Roman de la Rose. Beginning with a vision of society vacillating between the Tower of Heaven and the Dungeon of Hell, the first-Â�person narrator (Will) of the series of dreams that compose almost the entire poem protests against vice, as well as political and ecclesiastical corruption amid the Hundred Years War and the Avignon papacy. Although Langland’s criticism of the powerful is fierce, the poet showed himself no naïve populist with his famous portrayal of the ignorant and craven masses as a “route of ratons” in need of a leader as they cower before a menacing cat. Central to Langland’s satire is a protest against mendicant laxity and what he believed to be their substitution of monetary payment for genuine penance in hearing confessions. Piers Plowman also takes aim at the independence from local bishops that the mendicants enjoyed, and the expropriation of national wealth through monetary religious offerings at overseas shrines. Taking note of these themes, historians have debated to what extent Piers reflects late-fourteenth-Â�century English anticlericalism, a period in which popular resentment against priests in the decades after the Black Death eventually culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Of all human vices, Langland gives special attention to avarice, and the first dream presents an allegorical trial in the opening chapters. In this dream, Maid Meed (wealth) successfully bribes church and civic officials as she argues for the benefits of a society in which justice is overlooked in favor of self-Â�interest and monetary exchange. These triumphs of Meed, who hearkens back to the portrayal of the Whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation, are only stinted when the figure of Conscience refuses to marry Meed at the king’s request. Successive protagonists opposing the lure of Meed are “Kynde Wit,” or practical intelligence gained from empirical experience, which in the narrator’s telling is necessary for a virtuous society; Holy Church, a spiritual ideal personified as a beautiful woman; Truth, “the best of all treasures”; and Reason. In his victorious counterargument, Conscience, representing the voice of Langland, insists that economics must be subject to the constraints of reason and retributive justice. The figure of Reason reappears as a model preacher in the narrator’s second dream, inducing repentance in both Will and personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins. At this point Langland introduces the title character and hero of the poem, Piers, who is the model penitent. Throughout the poem, Piers’s practical good works and his commitment to speak religious truth serve as a rebuke to the legalistic distortions of pardoners who pronounce
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absolution on the basis of a single sacramental action. As a plowman, Piers also possesses a commitment to the dignity of manual labor, and his denunciations of both the idle and beggars reflect Langland’s anger at the scarcity of food and labor in England after the Black Death, at a time in which rising wages and urbanization removed many people from agricultural occupations. By contrast with the laborer Piers, the figure of Study introduced in the third dream voices Langland’s criticisms of the speculations of university theologians. Piers’s repeated criticisms of clerics in light of the Vulgate text have led some to see Langland as a forerunner of Luther and sola scriptura, but while Langland denounces clerical misbehavior, nowhere in the poem does he explicitly attack the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself. Langland’s commitment to the medieval church order is further attested in the second section of the poem, the Vita. Will, the narrator, seeks the figures of Do-Â�Well, Do-Â� Better, and Do-Â�Best, who successively represent the lives of the obedient agricultural laborer, the devout preacher, and the conscientious ecclesiastic. Through more dreams Will encounters Haukyn, the flawed personification of the “Active Man,” and learns that “Patient Poverty” and humility lead to Charity. Langland’s elevation of the interior life over one based primarily on outward works is seen in a dream in which Anima (Soul) identifies Piers Plowman as a humble Christ figure, who alone of all people on earth grasps Charity’s importance as the mark of the true saint. Piers’s reappearance leads to an allegorical explanation of the “tree of Charity,” which the laborer-Â� hero identifies for Will as the Trinity itself. The Trinity cannot be grasped through the human intellect, and so in a later dream the figures of Faith and Hope elucidate God’s nature with reference to the gospel, with special reference to the Good Samaritan. Piers Plowman reaches its climax with a debate in hell between the Four Daughters of God, allegorical personification of the virtues in Psalm 84, regarding God’s redemptive plan for humanity. After this debate Christ’s liberation of sinners from the darkness of hell demonstrates a charity that transcends all rational and secular conceptions of justice. The final dreams in Piers Plowman show Piers, Will, and Conscience attempting to live this vision of charity through penitential lives in a world scarred by sin. Principal Ideas of William Langland •â•‡ True contrition and active penitence are necessary for living a Christian life; sacraments of the church are no substitute for them, especially if unaccompanied by genuine conversion. •â•‡ Penance is a lifelong commitment, not a once and for all decision.
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•â•‡ The mission of the church in history has been marred by frequent attachment to wealth at the expense of Christian charity. •â•‡ Human action must be guided by reason and conscience, even though both of these faculties need to be healed by divine grace. •â•‡ Purely intellectual speculation has limits, and it must pay heed to knowledge gained through practical experience. •â•‡ Manual work is dignified and can be a path to sanctity when performed with humility. •â•‡ The final measure of justice and love is found in the saving work of Jesus Christ. Bibliography W. Skeat’s edition of Piers Plowman was for decades the standard text (Clarendon, 1965), but it has been superseded by the parallel-Â�text edition of the A, B, C, and Z texts edited by A. V. C. Schmidt (Longman, 1995). G. Russell and G. Kane have also recently published an edition of the C-Â�text (University of California Press, 1997). The University of Virginia has published the B-Â�text online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/LanPier .html. Translations of the B-Â�text into modern English include those of E. Donaldson (Norton, 1990) and Schmidt (Everyman, 1992). G. Economou has translated the C-Â�text (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). General introductions include J. Alford’s A Companion to Piers Plowman (University of California Press, 1990); J.╯Wittig’s William Langland Revisited (Twayne, 1997); and R. Hanna’s William Langland (Variorum, 1993). Other helpful studies are D. Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (St. Martins, 1975); L. Clopper, Songes of Rechelesnesse: Langland and the Franciscans (University of Michigan Press, 1998); B. Harwood, Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief (University of Toronto Press, 1995); R. Frank, Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation: An Interpretation of Dowel, Dobet and Dobest (Yale University Press, 1957); and H. White, Nature and Salvation in Piers Plowman (D. S. Brewer, 1988). —Christopher Denny AEMILIA LANYER (1569–1645).╇ Aemilia (née Bassano) Lanyer, often considered the first British professional woman writer, is famous for her multipart work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail God, King of the Jews). Conjecture, now mostly dismissed, that she was the “Dark Lady” of William Shakespeare’s sonnets also stirred interest regarding her, because of the 1978 edition of her work by A. L. Rouse. Most of what is known about her life comes through Elizabethan and Jacobean court
astrologer Simon Forman, and uncertainty still exists regarding the details of her biography. Daughter of Baptist Bassano, a Venetian musician in Elizabeth’s I court, and his common-Â�law wife, Margaret Johnson, Aemelia Bassano was believed to have been the Aemilia Baptist christened in 1569 in a suburb of London. Her father died when she was seven years old, leaving her a small dowry and rental income to be divided with her sister when they reached twenty-Â�one or were married, and her mother died when Aemilia was eighteen. Affiliated with court circles because of her late father’s position, Aemilia Bassano gained notoriety from her relationship with Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, Lord HunsÂ� don, Henry Cary, who was forty-Â�five years her senior. Forman calls her the “paramour” of Hunsdon, who supported her lavishly and arranged her marriage to Alphonso Lanyer in 1592, another court musician, presumably because she was pregnant with Hunsdon’s child, Henry. She also had a daughter, Odillya, who died as an infant. Her husband died in 1613, after spending her money and trying unsuccessfully for a knighthood. With little money and a son to support, Aemelia Lanyer encountered the difficulty of a single woman in earning income. Disputes with her husband’s relatives over income from her husband’s grain-Â�weighing patent occupied her through much of her life; she also founded a school in 1617, which she lost over rental disputes in 1619. In 1611, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was published in London. The title page lists the following four sections: “The Passion of Christ,” “Eves Apologie in defence of Women,” “The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem,” and “The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie.” Intrinsic to the work are addresses and references to noble women of her era, for the book begins with nine poems dedicated to them, as well as two to more general readers: “To All Vertuous Ladies in Generall” and “To the Vertuous Reader.” Although the noblewomen are solicited as potential patrons, Lanyer also envisions them as her audience, focusing in the body of her work on the women surrounding Christ and their identification with His suffering. While Lanyer includes poems to Queen Henrietta Maria (the wife of King James I) and the famous poet Mary Sidney Herbert, the most important dedicatee is Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who features prominently at the beginning and ending of the Passion of Christ account. Lanyer had spent some time with Clifford and her daughter at their country estate, Cookham; the setting and its female community become the subject for Lanyer’s country-Â�house poem, The Description of Cookham, which concludes the volume and highlights Clifford’s piety. The work is the first published English poem in the country-Â�house genre, predating Ben Jonson’s
Kenneth Scott Latourette
more famous work To Penshurst by five years. Margaret Clifford’s brother reclaimed the estate, banishing the female inhabitants and inspiring the melancholy valediction in Lanyer’s work. Aemilia Lanyer’s writing focuses on the positive relationship between Christ and women, raising the position of women above the early modern misogyny that she counters. Her readings of the Passion accounts draw from a wealth of already feminized images of Christ’s suffering and of the suffering of the Virgin Mary. She differs from her sources by her more complete and purposeful inclusion of other women within Christ’s passion narrative, the Daughters of Jerusalem, who invite Lanyer’s dedicatees to join in the event. In her account of Eve, she connects the wise advice of Pilate’s wife with the love Eve wished to show Adam in sharing the apple with him. Her connection of Eve and Pilate’s wife is not unique but is developed more fully, with implications in the argument (of Eve’s weakness) that may both defend and negatively stereotype women. Lanyer’s apologetics for females, interwoven with her interpretation of the gospels and the Genesis account of the Fall, create what may be termed the first British female commentary on scripture. She extends the female community created by the writings of the late medieval apologist for women Christine de Pizan to her own period, as Lanyer creates parallels between biblical women and early-seventeenth-Â�century English noblewomen.
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Woods, Susanne. “Anne Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking.” Form and Reform in Renaissance England. Ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. 171–184. ———. “Lanyer and Southwell: A Protestant Woman’s Re-Â�Vision of St. Peter.” Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Â�Stuart Middle Way. Ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 73–86. ———. Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Woods, Susanne, ed. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
—Carol Blessing
KENNETH SCOTT LATOURETTE (1884–1968).╇ Born in Oregon City, Oregon, to a middle-Â�class Baptist family, Latourette was early on encouraged in the two pursuits that characterized his life: faith and learning. As an Orientalist, missiologist, and historian of Christianity’s expansion, he became, according to Norwegian missiologist O. G. Myklebust, “the greatest missionary scholar that America has produced” (The Study of Missions in Theological Education [Oslo: Land og Kirke, 1955], 13). In his autobiography, Beyond the Ranges (Grand Â�Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1967), Latourette describes his religious background as “the conversion experience combined with daffy Scripture reading and memorization, hymn signing and prayer” (4), which was expressed in a Bibliography life given to encouraging the spread of Christianity. EduBennett, Lyn. Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric cated first at the Baptist-Â�affiliated McMinnville (later Linand the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer. Pittsburgh: field) College (B.S., 1904), and then at Yale (B.A., 1906, Duquesne University Press, 2004. M.A. 1907, Ph.D. 1909), he was active in the YMCA and Demers, Patricia. Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern the Yale Foreign Missionary Society. Finishing his Ph.D. England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing: English Renais- in history, he joined briefly the Student Volunteer Movement as a traveling secretary before taking a position at sance Examples. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Grossman, Marshall, ed. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Yale’s missionary school, Yale-Â�in-Â�China, at Changsha. Due to severe amoebic dysentery, he left China after two Canon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. McBride, Kari Boyd, and John C. Ulreich. “Answerable Styles: years and spent over a year recovering in Oregon City. Biblical Poetics and Biblical Politics in the Poetry of Lanyer From 1914 to 1916, he taught history at nearby Reed Coland Milton.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.3 lege and then at Denison University in Ohio from 1916 (2001): 333–354. to 1921. During his time at Denison, he was ordained a McGrath, Lynette. Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Baptist minister. In 1921 he accepted a position at Yale, Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Com- where he taught from 1921 to his retirement in 1953 as pany, 2002. a professor of missions and oriental history. Remaining Phillippy, Patricia. Women, Death and Literature in Post-Â� unmarried, Latourette lived on-Â�campus at the DivinReformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University ity School throughout his Yale career. He maintained a Press, 2002. Rogers, John. “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: pastoral presence by teaching Sunday school and servAemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum.” The Huntington ing as an assistant pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in New Haven, while on campus also leading prayer groups Library Quarterly 63.4 (2000): 435–447. Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Blooming- and Bible Studies, whose participants often affectionately ton: Indiana University Press, 1994. called him “Uncle Ken.”
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Frank Charles Laubach
As an academic, Latourette achieved a worldwide reputation as an apologist and historian of Christian missions whose work displayed “a rare combination of detailed knowledge, sense of reality, and earnest sobriety” (Johannes Verkuyl, Contemporary Missiology: An Introduction [Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1978], 66). Although his greatest attention and perhaps best work was focused on the Far East—in The Development of China (1917) and History of Christian Missions in China (1929)—he is most remembered for his seven-Â�volume History of the Expansion of Christianity, published from 1937 to 1945, and their more detailed companion series, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age: A History of Christianity in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1958–1962). Each of these major works has remained a standard in the fields of missiology and history. His primary thesis was that Christianity had spread “by major pulsations,” as in waves with alternating recessions and advances, with each pulsation “briefer and less marked than the one which preceded it” (History of the Expansion, vol. 7 [New York: Harper, 1945], 494). He returned to this thesis, along with a strong encouragement toward ecumenical mission, in his lectures and public addresses as president of the American Society of Church History and the American Historical Association. For his indefatigable study, he received honorary doctorates from seventeen universities, and in 1938 he was honored with the Order of Jade from the Chinese government. LaÂ�tourette died in 1968 when he was accidentally hit by a car in front of his home in Oregon City. Bibliography In addition to his autobiography, Beyond the Ranges (1967), see William C. Harr, ed., Frontiers of the Christian World Mission since 1938: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Scott Latourette (New York: Harper, 1962), which includes an autobiographical reflection, “My Guided Life”; a biographical essay by Theodore Bachmann; and a complete listing of Latourette’s extensive bibliography. For further biography, see William R. Hogg’s “Kenneth Scott Latourette” in Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994); and William L. Pitts, “Kenneth Scott Latourette” in Baptist History and Heritage (Winter 2002). Latourette’s diaries, correspondence, and manuscripts are housed at the Yale University Library. —Benjamin Fischer FRANK CHARLES LAUBACH (1884–1970).╇ From his earliest literacy efforts among the Islamic Moro population in Mindanao, a mountainous island of the Philippines, it was clear that some aspect of the work of Frank Laubach was groundbreaking. It would prove groundmoving long after. The results had a significant impact on
the world. That Laubach is almost universally referred to by anyone writing on him as “the Apostle to the Illiterates” shows the surprising effectiveness of the methods he pioneered, but even more hints at the steadfast dedication with which he pursued world literacy and, through it, service to those whom he would call “the most bruised people on the planet, the naked, the hungry, the fallen among thieves, the sick, the imprisoned in mind and soul.” Early Life and Missionary Work Frank Charles Laubach was born in Benton, Pennsylvania, in 1884 to Methodist parents. In 1909 Laubach received his bachelor’s from Princeton in sociology. He moved to New York and enrolled in master’s and doctorate work in sociology at Columbia University in 1910. By this time he was certain of the desire to be involved in missionary work directly and so he also enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, finishing in 1913. The same year Laubach received his doctorate, 1915, he was ordained a Congregationalist minister, and he and his wife, Effa, left for the Philippines. They desired to work immediately with the Moros but were advised that the volatile people were best left alone for a time, so the Laubachs took up work in the stable areas of Mindanao. For the next fourteen years, Laubach would plant churches and minister to them. In addition, he was instrumentally involved in founding the Union Theological Seminary of Manila, where he also taught. During this time, he and Effa lost two children, but they had a surviving son, Robert, in 1918. His War against Illiteracy When in 1929 the opportunity to become missionary to the Moros came, Laubach took it swiftly and lived alone for some months while trying to establish relations. When he and a fellow missionary attempted to reduce the Moro language to writing in order to learn it more effectively, they discovered that their efforts had produced a method that could teach the native speakers how to read easily and quickly. The Moros became literate in large numbers. The method that Laubach worked out—using phonetic, syllabic teaching with charts, using “key words” to unlock a language’s other words, and encouraging the learners to become the teachers—began to be noticed by other educational leaders around the world for its successes. Interest only grew as Laubach demonstrated the same results in other countries, all the while fine-Â�tuning his system and methods. It was called “Each One Teach One.” Today this method is still effective and in use around the world by various organizations. Soon Laubach was traveling to multiple countries each year and implementing his system into the local languages. He helped to set up a network of literacy organizations and was a tireless spokesman for adult education everywhere he went well into his twilight years.
William Law
Legacy That Laubach was a great educational innovator is not all to the story. While his missionary emphasis after 1930 became increasingly focused on literacy, he never lost the heart of a minister and a prophet. This side of him is most well known through his 1937 published work Letters by a Modern Mystic, a devotional classic, testified by the eighteen printings of it within his life. It gave a vivid view into Laubach’s own intense spiritual life. It was collected from the letters he wrote to his father while in the early stages of his literacy endeavors with the Moros. He also leveled keen social critiques in many of his books, including What Jesus Had to Say about Money (1966), encouraged social action on the part of Christians foremost in the world in Christian, Save Your World (1969), and published his memoirs in several editions, the last of which was called Forty Years with the Silent Billion (1970), which was published the year of his death. Laubach’s was a voice backed by a life that reached out and stimulated thought, hope, and action in the world around him.
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Born in 1686 in King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire, Law was ordained deacon in his midtwenties and served as a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His hopes of an ecclesiastical career were abruptly curtailed in 1716, when the government demanded oaths of loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy, repudiating the claims of the deposed Stuarts. Believing this immoral, and sympathetic to the Stuarts, Law resigned his fellowship to become chaplain to the family of Edward Gibbon in Putney. Here, Law wrote the book that made him famous: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. A Serious Call is a wake-up call for complacent Christians. What is more absurd, Law asks, than to assume God’s satisfaction with the allegiance of mere church attendance? The very words of our prayers condemn us. God demands all and will not suffer us to domesticate Him to our convenience. Law notes that his contemporaries are expert in all manner of worldly activities while remaining spiritual babies. Thus Mundanus (worldly), skilled in business, still “prays .╯.╯. in that little form of words which his mother used to hear him repeat night and morning.” Law’s account of the “devout and holy life,” though uncompromising, is Bibliography Anderson, Gerald H., Robert T. Coote, Norman A. Horner, and not discouraging. Despite the strenuous demands, he conJames M. Phillips. Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of the veys the possibility and joy of this life. Partly, he achieves Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement. American Soci- this through his style, a firm clarity of language, a tone of ety of Missiology Series, no. 19. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, reasonableness supported by vivid metaphors and lucid 1994. argument. Law’s skillful character sketches give his readers Laubach, Frank C. Christian, Save Your World. Syracuse, NY: recognizable figures that are also abiding spiritual types, Laubach Literacy Inc. New Reader’s Press, 1969. ———. Frank Laubach’s Prayer. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Rev- amusing, attractive, ridiculous, sometimes horrific. He provides, too, a template for the devout life, setting out ell Company, 1964. ———. Letters by a Modern Mystic. Frank C. Laubach Memorial times and themes for prayer, reflection, and consequent action. The details are concrete and precise but accompaEdition. Syracuse, NY: New Readers Press, 1955. ———. Thirty Years with the Silent Billion: Adventuring in Lit- nied with a ready recognition of circumstances as well as eracy. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1960. the need for flexibility, though there is a keen awareness of ———. What Jesus Had to Say about Money. Grand Rapids, MI: our skill in finding excuses for laxity. Zondervan Publishing House, 1966. In the mid-Â�1730s, Law began reading the books of Jacob Mason, David E. Frank C. Laubach: Teacher of Millions. Men Boehme, the German Protestant mystic. Thereafter, most of Achievement Series. Minneapolis, MN: T. S. Denison and of his writings develop his appropriation and interpretaCompany, Inc., 1967. tion of Boehme’s ideas. To many of his contemporaries, Medary, Marjorie. Each One Teach One: Frank Laubach, Friend Boehme’s influence on Law was disastrous, an insanity. to Millions. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954. —Brent Olson Law’s “Behemist” works demand a slower, more ruminative reading than the practical treatises; they are less linear in thought, circle around recurring themes, and introduce some unfamiliar interpretations of creation and the fall. WILLIAM LAW (1686–1761).╇ William Law was one of Despite the hostility they received at the time, these texts, the mostly widely read devotional writers in eighteenth-Â� written mostly after Law had returned to his home village century England. His treatises of practical Christianity of King’s Cliffe, contain some beautiful writing and proremained popular throughout the nineteenth century, vocative spiritual theology. Most controversial, perhaps and though his moral rigor lost him sympathy as Chris- apart from his hermaphroditic Adam, was Law’s rejection tian practice declined among the English middle-Â�classes, of divine “wrath.” God, Law insists, is wholly love, and Law’s uncompromising insistence on the difference faith no shadow of anger can possess his being. In the Bible, must make to living has, more recently, drawn a revival God’s “wrath” refers solely to the hell, terrible and poiof interest. soning, that we loose in ourselves as we reject God’s love.
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Brother Lawrence
Accompanying this interpretation, in The Spirit of Prayer and The Spirit of Love, is a doctrine of redemption as new creation, our remaking in Christ, as we return to the fullness of knowing and imaging God’s love. Principal Ideas of William Law •â•‡ Christian faith demands an uncompromising rejection of the careless, worldly life. •â•‡ The unfaithful life, the life that does not struggle against sin, is fundamentally irrational and self-Â�destructive. •â•‡ God is entirely Love, without wrath or anger. What the Bible names as God’s wrath is the dynamic of wretchedness that follows on refusing the divine love. •â•‡ As the Incarnate Son, Jesus fulfills the human calling, which was betrayed by Adam, and thereby enables our participation, united with him, in God. •â•‡ God’s saving work begins at the very moment of the Fall, with the “Word inspoken” or the “seed of Christ,” planted within us, enabling us to hear the gospel and Christ to be born within us. Bibliography
Gregory, A. P. R. Quenching Hell: An Introduction to the Mystical Theology of William Law. New York: Seabury Press, forthcoming. Law, William. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life; The Spirit of Love. Edited and introduced by Paul Stanford and Austin Warren. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. Walker, A. Keith. William Law: His Life and Work. London: SPCK, 1973.
—Alan P. R. Gregory
BROTHER LAWRENCE (1614–1691).╇ Brother Lawrence, also referred to as Lawrence of the Resurrection, was born in 1614 at Hériménil, a small town near Lorraine, France. Nicolas Herman (his given name until he entered the Order of Discalced Carmelites in 1640) grew up learning Christian principles from his parents, Dominic and Louise. Without the opportunity of a formal education, Nicolas entered the military at the age of eighteen during the destructive Thirty Years’ War. He was wounded during the siege of Rambervillers (1635) and returned to his parents’ home to recuperate. He tried, then abandoned a hermit’s lifestyle, before finally, at the age of twenty-Â�six, entering the Order of Discalced Carmelites (Paris) as a lay brother. He made his solemn profession of vows on August 14, 1642. Over the next forty-Â�nine years he worked, first as a cook, then as a sandal maker, as a part of the Parisian community of over one hundred friars. Mentally sound
and aware up to his last moments, Brother Lawrence died on February 12, 1691. When Lawrence was eighteen, he saw the bare branches of a winter tree but realized that in the spring, the tree would bud, bringing forth new leaves, flowers, and fruit. He was overwhelmed with this vision of the miracle of God’s providence and experienced his first conversion. After joining the Order of Discalced Carmelites, Lawrence experienced a period of deep internal turmoil filled with anxiety, fear, and uncertainty because he realized he was completely unworthy of God’s favor. After some time, he realized that he was distraught because of his love of God and his fear of displeasing Him, so he resolved to bear any suffering God would give him and, paradoxically, in this resolve, he experienced the complete contentment and peace in God that would characterize the rest of his life— his second conversion. Brother Lawrence is best known for “practicing the presence of God.” This practice consists of continually turning one’s mind toward God—to love, adore, and enjoy Him continually in the midst of everything else one does. Whether in the kitchen among the pots and pans, or at daily prayers, Lawrence disciplined himself continually to look to and adore his heavenly Father. In Lawrence’s own words, what matters is renouncing once and for all everything that we recognize does not lead to God in order to become accustomed to a continual conversation with Him, without mystery or finesse. We need only to recognize Him present within us, to speak with Him at every moment, and to ask for His help, so that we will know His will in perplexing events and will be able to carry out those things we clearly see He asks of us, offering them to Him before doing them and thanking Him afterward for completing them. During this continual conversation we are thus taken up in praising, adoring, and ceaselessly loving God for His infinite goodness and perfection (97). Brother Lawrence made ordinary, routine tasks sacred by doing them for the love of God. He said of himself that he was “content even when picking up a straw from the ground for the love of God, seeking Him alone and nothing else, not even His gifts” (91). He made a point to combine his devotion to God with his everyday tasks—not separating the secular from the spiritual. During his lifetime, Brother Lawrence received little acclaim, yet was regularly sought out by religious leaders and others who desired to understand the secret of his contented and joyous life. One of these, Father Joseph de Beaufort, who later became the vicar general to the archbishop of Paris, compiled notes of his conversations with Brother Lawrence that, combined with several letters and spiritual maxims, written by Brother Lawrence, form The Practice of the Presence of God. This small text, published
Madeleine L’Engle
posthumously, has been translated into more than thirteen different languages, including numerous English editions. One of the most comprehensive and scholarly books about Brother Lawrence, his life, work, and writings is Writings and Conversations on the Practice of the Presence of God (1994, Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications), edited by Conrad De Meester, OCD. —Lorelle Jabs
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war. They are accompanied by otherworldly teachers and companions—the trio of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which; the cherubim Proginoskes, singular and yet with such myriad eyes and wings as to be “practically plural”; and Gaudior, the unicorn. Their quests counter the advancing echthroi (Greek: enemies) and other dark forces that seek to void all creation into shadow by nullifying created things both macroscopic (stars, planets, and inhabitants) and microscopic (cellular mitochondria). The dualistic conflict, nonviolent but hard-Â�fought, emphasizes the substantive import of names and loving interrelationships: when named and loved, creatures great and small can rejoin creation’s chorus and scatter the echthroi. L’Engle’s love of language is evident throughout the series, highlighting individual names, using foreign languages to connote otherness (whether exhortative, like Proginoskes and Gaudior, or the deliberately alienating echthroi), and interweaving poetic prose at dramatic intervals. Christian influence is subtle but apparent in L’Engle’s careful use of scripture, where the foolish and the weak (1 Corinthians 1:25–28) answer the most difficult callings, and in her metaphors: in a cosmos where even God has lived incarnate, nonexistence is deeply threatening, and sacrificing one’s existence for another (see John 15:13) becomes the ultimate expression of sacrificial love. L’Engle’s nonfiction conveys many of the same themes of relational love, sorrow, joy, and worship. Two-Â�Part Invention recounts episodes from her family life as flashbacks amid the poignant story of Hugh’s battle with cancer; the book is grouped with three earlier prose volumes as The Crosswicks Journal, named for the couple’s beloved, multigenerational farmhouse. The ties between stories of home life in the “real” world and those that dwell in creational-Â�fantasy timeframes, where space and time are more fluid, are not always obvious, but they remain present nonetheless in L’Engle’s writings.
MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918–2007).╇ Fantasy novelist and poet Madeleine L’Engle (November 29, 1918–September 7, 2007; born in New York City as Madeleine L’Engle Camp) began writing in childhood; the only surviving child of older parents, she grew to love authors like L. M. Montgomery and George MacDonald. L’Engle was raised in Switzerland and at various points along the eastern coast of the United States and spent several years acting and writing in New York after graduating from Smith College. She and actor Hugh Franklin married and moved to Connecticut, where they raised a family, ran a general store, and found time for L’Engle to write. She garnered her first major literary success and the 1963 Newbery Prize (after numerous rejections from publishers) for A Wrinkle in Time, marketed as a book for young adults and followed by multiple sequels and companion novels. Subsequent tales, including the “more directly Christian” A Ring of Endless Light (as described in Bloom’s Women Writers of Children’s Literature, below), have led L’Engle to be classified as a writer only for the young, but the complexity of her books belies such labels, addressing shared love and loss with spiritual depth and rare eloquence. Her poetry has been repeatedly anthologized. She has served as writer-Â�in-Â�residence at New York’s Cathedral of St. John and at Wheaton and other college campuses. L’Engle’s work is as difficult to classify as she is: though Episcopalian, she resists denominational labeling, as it represents a fragmenting of Christian identity. But the series that began with Wrinkle, dubbed “the Wind Trilogy” by one critic for Principal Ideas of Madeleine L’Engle •â•‡ Christian life and creative acts such as writing are its unconventional yet orthodox imagery of the Spirit, may interwoven and mutually influential. be described as theological adventure stories, framed with •â•‡ Writing is a creative and even incarnational act, one science fiction concepts but transpiring within an “incarof listening, with therapeutic potential. national” universe. Many Waters (1986) and An Acceptable •â•‡ Relationships with family and loved ones carry Time (1989) extended this triad. opportunities for sharing love, sorrow, and joy and The original trilogy is as good a locus as any for explorfor offering one another grace. ing L’Engle’s fiction. Meg Murry; her gifted younger •â•‡ Such experiences in chronological time (chronos) brother, Charles Wallace; and her friend-Â�turned-Â� and meditative, imaginative encounters with God’s husband, Calvin O’Keefe, are sent on adventures involvtimeframe (kairos) can produce opportunities to ing daunting tasks: traveling in space-Â�time by “tesseract” heal, nurture, and make whole. to rescue the Murrys’ father; combating Charles Wallace’s •â•‡ Names are vitally important as markers of personal spiritual-Â�somatic illness; and living chapters of others’ identity and relationship to those around us. lives in the past to alter a present on the brink of nuclear
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Denise Levertov
Bibliography Primary Sources
The Small Rain. New York: Vanguard, 1945; repr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. The “Wind Trilogy,” later the “Time Quintet,” listed by date (numbered by internal series order): 1. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Ariel Books/Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962. 2. A Wind in the Door. New York: Crosswicks/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. 4. A Swiftly Tilting Planet. New York: Crosswicks/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. 3. Many Waters. New York: Crosswicks/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. 5. An Acceptable Time. New York: Crosswicks/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. The Other Side of the Sun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. The Crosswicks Journal (via HarperCollins; individual, original publication dates shown); originally published via Crosswicks; Seabury Press; and/or Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1. A Circle of Quiet (1972) 2. The Summer of the Great-Â�Grandmother (1974) 3. The Irrational Season (1977) 4. Two-Â�Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988) With William B. Green, as editors. Spirit and Light: Essays in Historical Theology. New York: Seabury, 1976. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Wheaton Literary Series). Wheaton: Shaw, 1980. And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Wheaton Literary Series). Wheaton: Shaw, 1983. Trailing Clouds of Glory: Spiritual Values in Children’s Literature, anth. Avery Brooke. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985. “Bones.” In Rattling Those Dry Bones: Women Changing the Church, ed. June Steffensen Hagen, 16–25. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1995. Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation (Wheaton Literary Series). Crosswicks, 1997; Reissued ed. Colorado Springs: Shaw (Waterbrook), 2001. Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life (Writers’ Palette), comp. Carole F. Chase. Colorado Springs: Shaw (Waterbrook), 2001. The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L’Engle. Colorado Springs: Shaw (Waterbrook), 2005.
Secondary Sources
Bloom, Harold, ed. Women Writers of Children’s Literature (Women Writers of English and Their Work Series). Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997. Braver, Barbara Leix. “Becoming More Human: An Interview with Madeleine L’Engle.” Christian Century 102.36 (November 20, 1985): 1067–1068.
Hettinga, Donald R. Presenting Madeleine L’Engle (Twayne’s United States Authors Series). Boston: Twayne, 1993. Maddox, Marjorie. “Tesser with Joy.” Other Side 34.2 (March– April 1998): 40–42. Risher, Dee Dee. “Listening to the Story” (Interview with Madeleine L’Engle). Other Side 34.2 (March–April 1998): 36–39. Sennett, James F. “From Narnia to Hogwarts: A Christian Perspective on Fantasy Literature.” Stone-Â�Campbell Journal 7.1 (Spring 2004): 29–56. Webb, Heather. “A Conversation with Madeleine L’Engle.” Mars Hill Review 4 (Winter–Spring 1996): 51–65.
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923–1997).╇ American. Denise Levertov, a prolific American poet of the twentieth century, was interested in religion from an early age but claimed agnosticism most of her adulthood. She grew up in England to a family cloaked in religious belief. Her father, Paul Philip Levertoff, was raised by rigid Jewish parents but abandoned the tenets of Judaism to convert to Anglicanism as a college student. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Â�Jones Levertoff, was born into a Welsh Anglican family, and after her own mother’s death, was raised by Reverend Oliver, a Congregational minister. Consequently, young Denise learned much about both the Anglican doctrines and Jewish history. Levertov was most likely inspired by the spirituality of her parents; however, she rebelled against their beliefs as an adolescent. She thought their Christian teachings were “restrictive and embarrassing,” yet, the poet recounts to Joan Hallisey, she found “the church services were beautiful with their candlelight and music, incense and ceremony and stained glass, and the incomparable King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer” (Hallisey 1998). Though Levertov found little interest in biblical instruction, she was enthralled with the aesthetics of the church. These initial fascinations with that artistic side of Christianity in addition to her parents’ trust in her own independence were probably the most important catalysts for her lifelong spiritual journey. Though Levertov’s Christian conversion did not take place until late in her adulthood, these early spiritual influences play a significant role in her poetry, evidenced in the early book Jacob’s Ladder. The Jewish background of her father’s heritage, especially its connection to mysticism, intrigued Levertov and became vital in her first books of poetry. One of Levertov’s most well-Â�known poems, “Illustrious Ancestors,” as well as other poems throughout this collection, focuses on Levertov’s interest in the Jewish leaders of her heritage, the rich tales of Hasidic mysticism told by her father, and her study of philosopher Martin Buber. As a poet who often concentrated on the importance of “things,” she easily embraced the Hasidic belief that each item in the
Denise Levertov
world embodies God. She explained her affection for this part of her father’s past: “Hasidism has given me since childhood a sense of marvels, of wonder” (Wagner-Martin 1964). Though Levertov was intrigued with the Judeo-Â�Christian traditions she learned about as a child, her spiritual writings were also influenced by her studies. Though she never received a formal education, her poetry demonstrates a wide knowledge of literature, much of which continued to form her later religious beliefs. Various collections of Levertov’s works use the paganism of Greek mythology. Examples of her work, such as “Hymn to Eros” in The Sorrow Dance (1963) and “Holiday” in Candles in Babylon (1978), both of which address the Greek god of passion, reveal her exploration of spiritual beings and worldly desires, while “A Tree Telling of Orpheus” from Relearning the Alphabet (1970), a poem centered on Greek creation myths, compares the pagan ideas of life to music and language. Levertov’s individual study of the transcendent attitude of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also became a milestone in her artistic and spiritual endeavors. Levertov’s affinity for Rilke transformed her current fascination with the power of concrete “things,” an attraction she also shared with writers like William Carlos Williams, into a more careful study of everyday objects and their use in “supernatural poetry,” which, according to Levertov, can “translate the reader too into the heavens and hells that lie about us in all seemingly ordinary objects and experiences” (Levertov 1973). This interest in the spiritual, but not yet Christian, aspects of the world around her also complemented Levertov’s social activism. Even more than for her religious explorations, Levertov is most known, and was often criticized, for her political stances, revealed prominently in much of her writing. From her strong resistance to the Vietnam War during the 1970s to her disappointment in nuclear warfare and capitalism in the 1980s, Levertov was never afraid to use her writing as a political voice, especially in her 1971 collection, To Stay Alive. Her social concerns were in some ways stumbling blocks to her ultimate acceptance of Christianity because of “the global panorama of oppression and violence” (Levertov 1992); however, her commitment to humanitarian efforts also balanced her hopes for a “spiritual evolution” (Brooker 1998), in her personal life and for the world as a whole. Though drawing from many spiritual influences throughout her writing career, Levertov did not put away her agnostic beliefs for Christian ones until 1982. She had often used traditionally Christian forms, such as hymns and masses, in her writing prior to this time, despite her rejection of Christian doctrines; a particular such work, initially a mass written without any religious purpose, was a turning point in her own spiritual beliefs. “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas of Didymus” (Candles in Babylon)
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is a poem dealing with both doubt and belief, a poem whose last movement, “Agnus Dei,” became what Levertov called “an attempt at ‘do-Â�it-Â�yourself theology’ aimed at clarifying [her] own mind on questions of belief ” (Lacey 2003). After being inspired to convert to Catholicism following the completion of “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas of Didymus,” Levertov was focused on her personal spiritual life, believing that “for every believer who is honest with themselves—[conversion is] not a station you pass through and then never lapse” (Gish 178); therefore, for the rest of her life and writing career, Levertov continued to gain personal strength and poetic inspiration from exploring the ideas of others, revealed in the later years of her life through her religious poems. Julian of Norwich, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Jesuit Gerard Manly Hopkins, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton are examples of historical and contemporary Catholic guides of Levertov’s readings, ones she also mentions in her own poetry. Oblique Prayers, Breathing the Water, A Door in the Hive, Evening Train, and Sands of the Well, the five volumes of poetry written after her conversion, continually reveal these and other “mentors,” but most important, they demonstrate Levertov’s ability to both accept faith and continue examining it. Though she spent her life unreservedly exploring various facets of spirituality, ultimately, as she expresses in her poem “The Avowal,” what she desired was the ability to “freefall, and float / into Creator Spirit’s / deep embrace, / knowing no effort earns / that all-Â�surrounding grace” (Levertov 1984). Bibliography
Brooker, Jewel Spears. “A Conversation with Denise Levertov.” Conversations with Denise Levertov. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Gish, Nancy K. “Feminism, Poetry, and the Church.” Conversations with Denise Levertov. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Hallisey, Joan F. “Invocations of Humanity: Denise Levertov’s Poetry of Emotion and Belief.” Conversations with Denise Levertov. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Lacey, Paul A. “Denise Levertov: Testimonies of a Lived Life.” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 243 (Summer 2001): 15. Expanded Academic ASAP. Infotrac. Greenwood High School Library, Greenwood, SC. DISCUS. November 11, 2003. http:web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/462/389/ 4148225/w6/purl. Levertov, Denise. “Great Possessions.” The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. ———. “The Avowal.” Oblique Prayers. New York: New Directions, 1984.
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———. “Work that Enfaiths.” New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992. Wagner-Â�Martin, Linda. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne, 1967.
—April Ficklin
C. S. LEWIS (1898–1963).╇ Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898, Lewis served admirably in World War I, earned formidable academic credentials at Oxford University, became a world-Â�renowned teacher and prolific literary historian and critic first at Oxford and later Cambridge University, and led an amazingly productive career as a Christian apologist, memoirist, essayist, poet, and fantasist. His posthumous popularity continues to grow in the twenty-Â�first century, exceeding even that of his own lifetime. His late-Â�in-Â�life, star-Â�crossed marriage to American poet, Christian convert, and divorcée Joy Davidman Gresham was a cause célèbre in Oxford circles. Lewis’s courtship of Gresham and her battle with cancer became the subject of several popular highly fictionalized scripts—a teleplay, stage play, and Hollywood movie, each entitled Shadowlands. He died quietly yet auspiciously on November 22, 1963, the same day U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lewis, known as “Jack” to friends, was reared in a peculiarly bookish home, one in which the reality he found on the pages of the books within his parents’ extensive library seemed as tangible and meaningful to him as anything that transpired outside their doors. As adolescents, Lewis and his older brother, Warren, were more at home in the world of ideas and books of the past than with the material, technological world of the twentieth century. When the tranquility and sanctity of the Lewis home was shattered beyond repair by the death of his mother, Lewis sought refuge in composing stories and excelling in scholastics. Soon thereafter he became precociously oriented toward the metaphysical and ultimate questions. A sampling of the range and depth of his achievements in criticism, fiction, and apologetics should begin with the first books Lewis published, two volumes of poetry: Spirits in Bondage, published when Lewis was but twenty-Â�three, and his long narrative poem Dymer, published in 1926. Neither were critical successes, convincing the classically trained Lewis that he would never become an accomplished poet given the rise of modernism; subsequently he turned his attention to literary history, specifically the field of medieval and Renaissance literature. Two years after Lewis embraced Christianity, he published his first theological work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, somewhat a parody of but more an homage to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress, which details Lewis’s flight from skepticism to faith in a lively allegory. In 1936, Lewis published the breakthrough work that earned him his reputation as a scholar, The Allegory of Love, a work of high-Â�caliber, original scholarship that revolutionized literary understanding of the function of allegory in medieval literature, particularly Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Between 1939 and 1954, Lewis continued to publish well-Â�received works in criticism and theory. Lewis is best known, however, for his science-Â�fiction and fantasy and his Christian apologetics, two genres that are, in fact, well-Â�integrated and nearly inseparable in his works. In 1936, thanks in part to his robust friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Lewis completed the first book in a science-Â�fiction space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, which introduced the hero Edwin Ransom, a philologist modeled roughly on Tolkien himself. Perelandra, a new version of Paradise Lost set on Venus, followed in 1943, and That Hideous Strength completed the trilogy in 1945; the latter Lewis billed as “a fairy tale for adults,” treating novelistically the themes Lewis had developed in his critique of modern education in The Abolition of Man, published two years earlier. Lewis’s most influential and commercial success, however, is certainly his seven-Â�volume Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from 1950 to 1956, now forming a popular movie series. These popular children’s fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tale centered around Aslan the lion, a Christ figure who creates and rules the supernatural land of Narnia, and the improbable adventures of four undaunted British schoolchildren and their kin who stumble into Narnia through a clothes closet. Lewis’s personal favorite, Till We Have Faces, his last imaginative work, published in 1956, is both a retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth and disguised conversion narrative, but it has yet to achieve the critical recognition he had hoped. Lewis’s reputation as a winsome, articulate proponent of Christianity began with the publication of two important theological works: The Problem of Pain, a defense of pain—and the doctrine of hell—as evidence of an ordered universe, published in 1940; and The Screwtape Letters, an “interception” of a senior devil’s correspondence with a junior devil fighting with “the Enemy,” Christ, over the soul of an unsuspecting believer, published in 1942. Lewis’s wartime radio essays defending and explaining the Christian faith comforted the fearful and wounded and were eventually collected and published in America as Mere Christianity in 1952. In the midst of this prolific output, Lewis took time to write his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy,
George Lindbeck
published in 1955. In the two decades before his death, Lewis published more than eight books that directly or indirectly served him in the task of apologetics, and he is arguably the most important lay Christian writer of the twentieth century. Lewis’s life and work have also been the focus of countless books since his death in 1963, but it must be said that Lewis’s own works remain the most reliable source and insightful interpreter of this original thinker and personality. Lewis’s prodigious learning gave him the opportunity to build a stellar academic career so that he could pursue with a pure heart his real vocation of communicating the gospel in fresh and refreshing ways in multiple genres and for a diversity of audiences. In annual polls of clergy and laity registering the most influential Christian writers in their lives, Lewis remains consistently at the top, and across a wide spectrum of communions, traditions, and denominations. Those who read deeply into Lewis’s canon of work find there a wholesome and engaging mix of vibrant wit, theological sophistication, sage counsel, and arresting metaphor. Lewis always writes out of a profound gratitude to God and proceeds graciously and humbly, identifying with the lost and wayfaring, among whom he once was. As a result, his poetry and prose create an expectancy in readers that lifts their hearts, challenges their worldview, and reminds them of landmark truths they may have forgotten or discarded in the pursuit of their “true country.” Since he has lived this journey himself, he can express this longing compellingly and convincingly, as he does in this passage from his most widely read work of apologetics, Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Selected Bibliography of Lewis Autobiography and Letters
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (2004–2007), ed. by Walter Hooper. 3 vols. A Grief Observed (1961) The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
Science-�Fiction and Fantasy
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), 7 vols. The Great Divorce (1945) Out of the Silent Planet (1938) Perelandra (1943) The Screwtape Letters (1942) That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Â�Tale for Grown-Â�Ups (1945)
Apologetics
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) Mere Christianity (1952)
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Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947) The Problem of Pain (1940)
Secondary Sources
Como, James T., ed. Remembering C. S. Lewis (2005). Downing, David. The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith (2004). ———. Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (1995). Edwards, Bruce L. C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (2007). 4 vols. ———. Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of Narnia (2005). Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works (1998). Glyer, Diana. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007). King, Don. C. S. Lewis: Poet (2004). Martindale, Wayne. Beyond the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell (2005). Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (2005).
—Bruce L. Edwards
GEORGE LINDBECK (1923–).╇ American Lutheran theologian. Professor of historical theology at Yale, George Lindbeck was a delegated observer at the Second Vatican Council, was prominent in ecumenical circles for almost forty years, and is the patriarch of postliberal theology. With the publication of The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Doctrine in a Postliberal Age in 1984, he rose to prominence as a shaper of late-twentieth-Â�century theology. This book and his other books and articles arise from and are driven by his involvement in ecumenical dialogue. Originally, Lindbeck wrote The Nature of Doctrine as a preliminary work for a much larger comparative dogmatics in which he would have dealt comprehensively with the past and present status of the ecumenical agenda and set forth future possibilities for overcoming the divisions between the major Christian traditions. He never published the comparative dogmatics, though, because he observed that most ecumenists were no longer interested in doctrinal matters, but he chose rather to concentrate on social issues. As it was, however, The Nature of Doctrine found a different niche. Theologians, sociologists, and philosophers of religion kept the book at the forefront of theological discussion for the next two decades. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck sets forth his postliberal program by dividing theologians into three camps: the cognitive-Â�propositional, the experiential-Â�expressivist, and the cultural-linguistic. He describes the cognitive-Â� propositional (preliberal) theologians as those who focus on the cognitive claims of a religion and view doctrine as a set of propositions that make truth claims about an objective external reality. The experiential-Â�expressivist (liberal)
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theologians, on the other hand, focus on the experiential aspects of a religion and view doctrines as the expressions of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations. Neither of these models for religion and doctrine was acceptable for Lindbeck’s purposes. Instead, he argued for a cultural-Â�linguistic (postliberal) model. In this view, religion closely resembles a language embedded in a culture, and doctrine functions as the grammar for that language. There are at least four major strands of argument that support Lindbeck’s postliberal program. The epistemological strand argues against both object-Â�centered foundationalism (preliberals) and subject-Â�centered foundationalism (liberals). In the place of such philosophically discredited and theologically unhelpful epistemologies, Lindbeck offers a nonfoundational model in which a religion is a cultural-Â�linguistic framework that shapes all of one’s life and thought; the only “foundation” one has is language embedded in a form of life. In the ecumenical strand of his argument, Lindbeck rejects the preliberal formation, which leaves no room for ecumenism, and the liberal formation, in which doctrinal constancy matters little. Lindbeck appropriates Wittgenstein, Geertz, and others to offer a postliberal model that allows for both doctrinal constancy and ecumenical reconciliation. In the comparative religions strand of his argument, Lindbeck rejects the preliberal model, which focuses on proselytization, and the liberal model, which assumes that all religions are essentially the same, when actually they are not. Instead, he offers a postliberal model, which allows religions to see themselves as different and give theological rationales for their difference, while not seeking to proselytize. In the textual strand of his argument, Lindbeck rejects the preliberal model, which locates religious meaning in extratextual, rationalistic standards, and the liberal model, which locates religious meaning in allegedly universal experiences. Instead, he offers a postliberal model in which religious meaning arises from the communal interpretation of scripture. Lindbeck spent the first ten years of his career teaching medieval philosophy at Yale but later was reassigned to the divinity school. Accordingly his influences were not limited to academic theology but spanned such disciplines as philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology. On the linguistic side of his program, he was influenced by Wittgenstein, while on the cultural side of the program, he resourced Durkheim, Winch, Geertz, Berger, and others. Bibliography
Lindbeck, George A. The Church in a Postliberal Age. Edited by James J. Buckley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. ———. Infallibility. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1972. ———. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984.
Lindbeck, George A., ed. Dialogue on the Way. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1965. Marshall, Bruce D., ed. Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1990. Phillips, Timothy R., and Dennis L. Ockholm, ed., The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996. Weigel, George. “Re-Â�Viewing Vatican II: An Interview with George A. Lindbeck,” First Things 48 (1994): 44–50.
—Bruce Riley Ashford
RAMÓN LLULL (123?–1315).╇ Ramón Llull was born at Palma on the island of Majorca between 1232 or 1236, shortly after Jaime I of Aragón wrested it from the Moors in 1229. He was a descendent of French merchants who had established themselves in Barcelona. His youth was spent in the court of Jaime I, and when Jaime II of Majorca ascended the throne in 1253, Llull was named seneschal. Apocryphal stories about his life at court abound. He was obliged to marry Blanca Picany in 1257 but was so displeased with the arrangement that he is said to have become more immersed in the sensual life of court, exploits worthy of his poetical imitations of the troubadour lyrics popular in his day. Llull’s unarguably profound conversion is attributed alternately to visions of the crucified Lord, which he began to experience in around 1263, or to the shock he felt when, pursuing Ambrosia del Castello, a Genoese lady who had become an object of his affections, he entered the church of St. Eulalia (on horseback and during mass) only to have her expose her cancerous breast to him (another version has her exposing herself to him in her bedchamber). By either tradition, Llull’s spiritual quest and education began in the mid-1260s, and his life of ceaseless and tireless pilgrimage began in 1275. Influenced by the admonitions of a Franciscan sermon, Llull abandoned his previous life, including his estate—and his family, which by then consisted of his wife and two children. From the time his mind turned to Christ, he was obsessed by three ideas: the definitive conquest of the Holy Land, evangelization of Jews and Muslims, and discovering a method that would enable him (and others) to convince Jews and Muslims of the truth of the Christian religion by rational means. The pursuit of these goals led to his many pilgrimages across Europe, North Africa, and the Holy Land as he sought support for his idea for a final Crusade from various European powers, attempted to convince Muslims of the truth of Christ’s divinity by disputation, or worked to establish his method of reasoning in the monasteries and universities of his day. Shortly after his conversion, he went to Barcelona, where he met the former Master-Â�General of the Dominican
Ramón Llull
order, Ramón de Penyafort. Though this famous Dominican agreed with Llull’s goals, he strongly urged him to educate himself before attempting to pursue them. Llull promptly returned to Majorca, where he dedicated himself to study for nine years. According to some sources, Llull learned Arabic from a Moorish slave. Another theory is that he had learned it growing up in Majorca from Moorish slaves at the courts of Jaime I and Jaime II. What is almost certain is that learned sources from whom he could learn Arabic or be directly and formally instructed in Arabic philosophy were not likely at his disposal on the island of Majorca. More likely the learning of those formative years resulted from contact with popular Islam on the island as well as from extracts of the works of Algazel. Llull also steeped himself in Christian learning, the liberal arts as taught in the Middle Ages, and the works of Augustine, Anselm, the Victorines, and St. Francis and Franciscan learning generally. Although his impetus to learn had come from the former head of the Dominican order, Llull eventually became a tertiary Franciscan while in Genoa in 1290. In 1274, or by other accounts in 1275, after his period of intense study, he had a vision on Mt. Randa (near Palma). This vision gave clarity to his developing ideas on the Godhead, and he undertook the task of devising a vast project of his abstract metaphysical model for rationally proving the truths of Christianity. When finally written in 1290, it was originally entitled Art Abreujada d’ Atrobar Veritat, in Catalan, and subsequently appeared in Latin as Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem and comprised a system known in English as the Lullian Art. It consisted of the explanation of his logical “machine” designed to be used in debating with Muslims in order to win them to the Christian faith by the use of reason. This mechanism combined attributes from lists and cross-Â�referencing them via an index. Another method is known as the Lullian Circle. There were various types, depending on the number of circles— concentric paper disks with alphabetical letters or symbols referring the user to his lists of attributes. Rotating the disks generated combinations of ideas, and hence, he asserted, more truth could be obtained about the subject for which the circles had been devised. Since Llull asserted that there was a limited number of fundamental truths in each field of knowledge, placing them on these circles so that every possible combination could be studied would permit one to understand all possible knowledge of any given field. He was particularly interested in applying this logical method to theological propositions, such as the attributes of God. In its reliance on mechanical operations applied to logical derivation of knowledge, it has been viewed as the precursor of computer science. In the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno expanded on the Lullian Circles, as did Gottfried Leibniz in the seventeenth century, renaming the Lullian
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Art the ars combinatoria. Llull also influenced Leibniz’s development of computational theory. In its combinatory aspect, the ars combinatoria appears to owe much to the Kabbalah, and therefore Llull is sometimes credited with “Christianizing” the Kabbalah. True as this may be, it might be as accurate to postulate that Llull’s method applied a similar mathematical and geometrical logic to propositions as did the Kabbalists. Furthermore, their similarities result from the fact that both Kabbalah and Llull’s art were derived in varying ways from older systems, Jewish, Arabic, and even Babylonian, comprising what today many would regard as a divinatory system. Armed with what he and others around him viewed as a powerful weapon for Christendom, his life of constant wandering began at that time, in 1275. He left Majorca to obtain the support for his ambitious art from Jaime II, his longtime patron. A friar appointed by Jaime II approved the work and Llull’s desire to establish a monastery at Miramar, and the following year thirteen Franciscans founded the monastery. Their express purpose was to educate themselves following in Llull’s intellectual footsteps: in the liberal arts, Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldean, Islamic theology, and, of course, Llull’s Art. In 1285, Llull went to Rome, hoping to propose his system to Pope Honorius IV, but having no academic credentials prevented him from obtaining an audience. He next went to Paris, where he succeeded at being licensed by Bertaude de Saint-Â�Denis, a chancellor. In Paris, he entered into conflict with the Latin Averroists but was helped by Philip the Fair of France. Since Philip was Jaime II’s nephew, it was logical for Llull to seek his support. In 1290, during a stay in Genoa, he completed an Arabic translation of his Ars inventiva, then proceeded to Rome, where he entreated Pope Nicholas IV with his first written work advocating a crusade entitled Tractatus de modo convertendi infideles. Even though the Templars and other orders were failing militarily in the Holy Land (Acre fell in May 1291), Llull’s proposal to unite all the crusading orders failed. Llull and others proposed that the Templars and the Knights of the Hospital of St. John be merged and called the Knights of Jerusalem, under a supreme command to be called Rex Bellator. Philip the Fair was strongly in favor of a plan to unite the orders and wanted to be the Rex Bellator, or “war king.” Philip had reasons other than mere ambition or even a desire to be a defender of the faith. Deeply in debt to the Templars, Philip would eventually contrive the famous charges of heresy, sodomy, and black arts against the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon and see to their destruction. For his part, Llull, allied through his patron Jaime II, uncle of Philip, supported the plan to suppress the Templars, but at least for more laudable motives, as he sought only to unite the disparate
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Peter Lombard
crusading orders into one force, effect a general crusade, and conquer the Holy Land. In 1301, having abandoned for a time his advocacy for merging the orders or even calling a new crusade, Llull had met the last grand master of the Knights Templar at Limassol (Cyprus) and obtained his permission for Llull to visit Armenia. As Christians (albeit of a non-Â�Trinitarian sort), they were allied to the Templars in the Holy Land, since they had common cause against the Muslims. By 1309, Llull was again attempting to arouse interest and support from Pope Clement V and the Genoans for another crusade to the Holy Land. He succeeded at convincing his old patron, Jaime II, to attack Almer’a, a venture that ended disastrously for the Christians. Llull’s next years found him in Paris, where he managed to secure the approval for his Art, in spite of the strong opposition of the Averroists. Forty masters of the university approved, as did, unsurprisingly, Philip the Fair and the chancellor, between early in 1310 and late in 1311. Llull also participated in the Ecumenical Council of Vienne during this time, preoccupied with his three great goals: conquering the Holy Land, publishing logical arguments to convert the Muslims, and creating schools for the learning of languages. He succeeded in the last goal because the pope authorized the creation of language chairs in the major universities of Europe. In 1315, at eighty years of age, Llull undertook a last mission to Tunis to convert the Muslims by disputation (a method he had acquired from the Dominicans). He had gone to North Africa in 1293, 1307, and 1313 and barely escaped with his life. Accounts vary about the last attempt. An apocryphal account claims he was martyred by stoning. More likely, he returned to Majorca, where his remains are interred at the convent of St. Francis. Llull is credited with more than 265 works. Hundreds of others are attributed to him, more or less dubiously. In the field of literature, his earliest work, Blanquerna, was a precursor to the mature novelistic genre Cervantes would perfect three centuries later. Blanquerna is still of such major cultural importance to the Catalan people that the nickname for their language is llengua de Llull. From the perspective of nearly a millennium, Llull’s contributions to learning are now far less significant than his contribution to letters. Notwithstanding the logic machines used in his Art, he remains an exemplar case study for those interested in the quest for knowledge through reason, in perseverance against opposition to one’s ideas, and of faith in one’s vision. His admirers in later ages, such as Gottfried Leibniz and Giordano Bruno, as noted earlier, attest to the vitality of his systematic thought. The Lullian Art was condemned in 1376 by Pope Gregory XI and later by Pope Paul IV because it confused reason with faith. Llull eventually regained ground and was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1858.
Among Llull’s hundreds of works, any of which may be read with profit if examined without the prejudice of anachronistic criticism, there are four that stand out. Blanquerna (1283), being a precursor to the modern novel, is a model of medieval Catalan prose and continues to be read by the Catalan people. The main character in Llull’s Llibre de les meravelles or Book of Marvels (1288) has an obviously emblematic name—Felix. He is sent by his father to discover the marvels of the world. The tale is divided into ten chapters in which he encounters God, angels, the heavens, the four elements, plants, the seven metals, animals, mankind, heaven, and hell. Llull’s Arbre de sciència or Tree of Science (1295) serves as a model for the medieval organization of knowledge. There were believed to be three major themes of human thought: the natural world, mankind, and God. The Ars magna generalis ultima or Last Great General Art (1306) is the work in which Llull claims to have delineated in full a foolproof method for learning and organizing one’s knowledge. The work is designed to help one convince infidels (by which he meant Muslims) of the truth of the Christian faith, by reason. Bibliography The most complete collection of Llull’s works, considered to be indispensable, is the eight-Â�volume series Beati Raymundi Lulli opera published in Mainz, 1721–1741. Modern editions of various Lullian works in English may be found online in a freeware version of Ars Magna (http://lullian arts.net) and the Ramon Llull Database, at the University of Barcelona (http://orbita.bib.ub.es/ramon/p.asp). Among the most valuable critical studies in English are: Raymond Lull [sic], First Missionary to the Moslems (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902); Martin Gardner’s Logic Machines and Diagrams (New York: McGraw-Â�Hill, 1958) (2nd edition, 1982); J. N. Hillgarth’s Ramón Llull and Lullism in 14th-Â� Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Frances A. Yates’s Llull and Bruno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); and Mark D. Johnston’s The Spiritual Logic of Ramón Llull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). —Eric Vogt PETER LOMBARD (1095/1100–1161/1164).╇ Peter Lombard—a scholastic theologian and bishop of Paris—was born between 1095 and 1100 in Lumello, near Novara, in poor conditions. His fellow countrymen were subjected to the right and law of the Lombards—hence his name, contracted from “Langobardus.” He received his first education probably from the canons of Novara or Lucca. In order for Lombard to study in France, Otto—the bishop of Lucca—recommended him to Bernard of Clairvaux,
Peter Lombard
who himself wrote a reference letter for him later on to the abbot of canons regular of Saint-Â�Victor—Gilduin—in Paris. According to the letter, his stay was not intended to be long: “per breve tempus usque ad Nativitatem Virginis.” There is no evidence, however, that he ever returned to Italy. From this letter we also know that Lombard studied in Reims, where Bernard provided for his wants and where he could listen to Alberich and Lutolph of Novara lecturing. When in 1134 Lombard came to Paris to the canons of Saint-Â�Victor, he was exposed to the teachings of Hugh of Saint Victor and Abelard; in about ten years, Lombard became, along with the above-Â�mentioned scholars and Gilbert of Poitiers, one of the most renowned theologians of France. His excellence in dialectical style is the most probable reason that the canons of Notre Dame asked him to join them; in fact, they belonged to the Capetian dynasty, and because Lombard did not have any ecclesiastical connections or political patrons in France, it can be assumed that his acceptance in the community was based solely on a “noblesse de robe” principle. In 1145 Lombard became a “magister” at the Cathedral School of Notre Dame, which set a beginning to his ecclesiastical promotion: between 1147 and 1159 he went from subdeacon to bishop. Together with Robert of Melun, Lombard opposed Gilbert’s alleged heresy of the distinction between God and the Godhead and was a cosigner of the conciliary acts against Gilbert pronounced at the Council of Reims in 1148 summoned by the Pope Eugene III. Lombard’s nomination as a bishop on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul in 1159 was suspected of being simony by Walter of Saint-Â�Victor—an Augustinian canon of Paris, who also spread this accusation. The more probable version is that Philip, the younger brother of Louis VII and archdeacon of Notre Dame, having been elected by the canons, declined in favor of Lombard, his teacher. His service time was brief—he died sometime between 1161 and 1164; the exact date is unknown. Since Lombard was succeeded by Maurice of Sully—the builder of the Cathedral of Notre Dame—before his death, rumors have it that he had abdicated, yet any factual ground for this assertion is missing. Lombard’s name is met in the cartulary of Notre Dame of Paris in the years that follow: his house is put up for sale and his original copy of the “Sentences” is passed on by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, to the library of Notre Dame. His tomb in the church of Saint-Â� Marcel in Paris was destroyed during the French Revolution, but a transcription of his epitaph survived. Importance in Scholasticism In the scholarly effervescence of the twelfth-Â�century Renaissance, Lombard’s work stands out as a synthetic and unifying achievement, allowing the theological thought to clearly become aware of its actual standing and thus re-Â�emerge in a fountain of new discussions of intriguing
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theological issues. There are two main points that give a broad characteristic of the spirit of Lombard’s investment. First, his work is distinctive by its compilatory, encyclopedic, and classical character, achieved through its textual and formal perfectness. In this respect, Lombard’s role in medieval scholasticism can rightly be compared to that of Johann Sebastian Bach’s in music or Geoffrey Chaucer’s in English literature. Second, in the twelfth-Â�century scholastic streams of speculation on one hand and authority arguments on the other, Lombard tried to steer the middle course. While relying extensively on the Bible and the fathers, he always allowed reason its due role. Works The works of Lombard are many. The Commentary on the Psalter, written around 1336, was created for Lombard’s private use, but later on he lectured on it at the school and toward the end of his teaching career published it. The aim of the work was to make the reading of the Divine Office more spiritually fruitful. The sources are the glosses of Anselm of Laon and Gilbert of Porreta. We also have his Collectanea or commentary on the epistles of Saint Paul, known under the title Magna Glossatura and written between 1139 and 1141. Its sources are the Sentences of Florus of Lyon and the commentaries of Haimos of Auxerre, Anselm of Laon, and Gilbert of Porreta. Also to be mentioned are the works of Hugh of Saint Victor, Walter of Mortagne, and the anonymous Summa Sententiarum. Both Lombard’s Commentary on the Psalter and Magna Glossatura reached us in a number of manuscripts and represent a compilation of patristic and medieval exegesis. They served as sources for the work for which he is most renowned—The Book of Sentences (Quattuor libri Sententiarum)—which reached its final form between 1155 and 1157. We also have thirty of his sermons, equally extant in a number of manuscripts: they are rather sober, mostly allegorical, and also very systematic in their structure. Most of them are published among the works of Hildebert of Lavardin. Besides the Psalms and the Paul’s writings, Lombard also undoubtedly commented on other biblical books, but these commentaries were never published; however, Peter Comestor and Stephen Langton were acquainted with these writings. 1. The Quattuor Libri Sententiarum The Four Book of Sentences is a compilation of biblical texts and passages of patristic and medieval Christian literature; thematically it covers the entire field of Christian theology and it is in this work that the synthetic thrust of Lombard comes to its full achievement. In an effort to collect commentaries on various theological issues, structuring them systematically and trying to harmonize opposing views, Lombard created a monumental theological edifice of all times. The work represents, in fact, the first formally
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achieved medieval sample of the summa-like theological literature; borrowing extensively from biblical texts, the church fathers, and his contemporaries, Lombard sets here the formal dialectical stage for the later works of Aquinas, Ockham, Bonaventure, and Scotus. a. Origin The Book of Sentences originates from the use of glosses (from Koine Greek γλωσσα glossa, meaning “tongue”— the organ—as well as “language”). A gloss is a note written either in the margins or between the lines of a book (ordinary/interlinear gloss) explaining the text in its original language but sometimes also in another language. Glosses can vary in exhaustiveness and complexity, going from simple marginal notations of words found unclear or convoluted to entire interlinear translations of the original text and cross-Â�references to similar passages. In the case of the Holy Writ and beginning with Jerome, the gloss was a common way of commenting on the biblical text on grammatical, historical, doctrinal, or other points. The Book of Sentences is composed of four volumes, so that hardly more than ten lines of it have been found to be original. But this is precisely what Lombard’s goal was—to create a sort of theological glossary, saving the reader the trouble of consulting many volumes. And although other collections, such as the anonymous Summa Sententiarum or Hugh of Saint Victor’s De Sacramentis, are also assembled texts of Ambrose, Augustine, and Hilary, drawing on Gratian and Ivo of Chartres, Lombard’s work had the greatest success mainly because of its balanced choice of questions and the avoidance of minor controversies and also because of the broad framework it provides to theological and philosophical discussion. The major patristic sources of the work are Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana and texts by Ambrose, Jerome, and Hilary; the Greek Fathers are almost entirely absent, with the exception of John Damascene’s De fide orthodoxa, while the ante-Â�Nicene authors are only occasionally mentioned. The medieval source is Gratian’s Decretum, which dates from about 1140 and bears a close methodological and formal resemblance to the Sentences; some contextual similarities can also be traced. In fact, Gratian, who named his work Concordia Discordantium Canonum, was trying to reach a similar goal in law as Lombard was aiming at in theology: to bring together contradictory canons in a dialectical gloss form, which, in fact, encouraged further commentaries. Further sources of the Sentences include the Summa Sententiarum of Odo of Lucca and the canonical writings of Ivo of Chartres, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Abelard. As to the distinctiones’ form, it goes back not to Lombard but to Alexander of Hales, who made the Sentences his doctrinal textbook in Paris around 1222 to complement
the moral interpretation of scripture, then in vogue, and Richard Fishacre followed Alexander’s example. b. Structure and Doctrine The Book of Sentences is composed of four books—a structure that probably goes back to John Damascene’s De fide orthodoxa. Roughly, the four treated themes are the Trinity, the creation, Christ the Savior, and the sacraments. In more detail, the first book treats God and the Holy Trinity, God’s essence and attributes, predestination, and evil; the second analyzes creation, the work of six days, the angels, the fall, grace, and sin: the third looks at the Incarnation, the Redemption, the virtues, and the Ten Commandments; finally, the fourth considers the sacraments generally, the seven sacraments particularly, and the four last things—death, judgment, hell, and heaven. The work comes from Lombard’s lecturing and reflects its structure; it was, in fact, an open book, allowing the author to insert new sentences depending on reiterated explanations. The doctrinal outline of the work consists in its achieved synthesis of Hugh of Saint Victor’s essentially oikonomia theology and Abelard’s essentially dialectical theology. For Hugh, theology is God’s wisdom that manifests itself in the restoration of creation, and this restoration acquires a sacramental value, because of being extended to the entire history of God’s work in the world. Opposite to this mystical approach, Abelard sought to work out a strictly logically conceptualized, dialectically articulated Trinitarian theology. By harmonizing oikonomia and theologia, Lombard’s Sentences provides a synthetic whole of systematic, redemptory, and practical theology. c. Influence Lombard’s wish in writing the Sentences was to put an end to the innumerable and incessant discussions and disputes of theologians; yet, the result was exactly the opposite—the book produced an even greater cascade of dissensions and rivalries as a reaction. In fact, from the 1220s until the sixteenth century, no other Christian work, except for the Bible itself, was commented on more frequently. Lombard’s Sentences, along with Gratian’s work, remained the chief source of patristic knowledge for many a medieval theologian, and all the great scholastics wrote commentaries on the Sentences. In fact, such a commentary, along with commentaries on the Bible and Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, was a compulsory requirement for every master of theology up to the Renaissance—even Martin Luther still wrote glosses on the Sentences while studying in Erfurt—and the book was part of the examination curriculum. Only after having assimilated these could a student apply for the bachelor’s degree in theology, and each future doctor had to lecture on the material for two years. From a mere
Bernard J. F. Lonergan
exercise in memorization of content, the commentaries evolved later on into sophisticated and highly skilled theological treatises. Also, at first they tended to cover the entire range of Lombard’s questions, but later—from the fourteenth century on—they concentrated on the most controversial theological issues of the time, the main concerns being basically the questions on God and creation. The success of Lombard’s work was by far not immediate: Walter of Saint-Â�Victor as well as Joachim of Flora were among his bitter opponents, bringing his writings to the brink of condemnation. Yet, the Fourth Lateran Council fully rehabilitated Lombard in its second canon. Nevertheless, the work was still criticized by Roger Bacon, for instance, who was upset with an overestimation of a book that was not the Holy Writ. Text Editions The three best editions of The Book of Sentences are considered to be (1) the one found in the commentary of Saint Bonaventure—Opera S. Bonaventurae, Quaracchi, 1885, I–IV, (2) the one of the Franciscans of the College of St. Bonaventura (near Florence), Libri Quattuor Sententiarum (2 vols., 1916), and (3) Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 3rd ed., Ignatius C. Brady, 2 vols. Grottaferrata, 1971–1981. Bibliography
Brown, Stephen F. “Petrus Lombardus” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Herder-Â�Verlag, Freiburg/Brsg., 1998; and “Aristotle’s View on the Eternity of the World according to Peter of Candia,” in: Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern World. Leiden [u.a.], 2007, 371–404. Colish, Marcia L. Peter Lombard (Leiden: Brill, 1994). De Ghellinck, The Book of Sentences in Dublin Review (1910). Hödl, Ludwig, “Petrus Lombardus” in Theologische RealenzyÂ� klopädie, Walter de Gruyer Verlag, vol. 26, 1996, 296–303; and “Lombardus, Petrus” in Biographisch-Â�Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. V (1993), lines 197–202.
—Anna Djintcharadzé
BERNARD J. F. LONERGAN (1904–1984).╇ The Canadian Jesuit priest Bernard J. F. Lonergan developed one of the most intriguing, complex, and difficult systems of theology in late-twentieth-Â�century Catholic theology. The complexity of Lonergan’s writings grows out of his philosophical rigor, his immense learning, and his ability to weave the insights of psychology, philosophy, economics, and science into his larger theological projects. Born in Buckingham, Quebec, Lonergan received a typical Catholic education and entered the Society of Jesus in 1922, where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1936. He received his B.A. in philosophy in 1929 from Heythorp
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College and his S.T.D. (Doctor of Sacred Theology) from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1940. Lonergan’s dissertation, “A Study of the Speculative Development in St. Thomas of Aquin,” demonstrated his concern with various levels of understanding and reason as well as his concern with theological method and the necessity of providing a methodological framework for theological thinking. During his career, Lonergan taught at Loyola College in Montreal (now Concordia University), Regis College in Toronto (now part of the University of Toronto), the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and Boston College. Throughout his work, Lonergan attempted to offer insights into epistemology—the manner in which knowledge can be obtained—and methodology—the manner in which values, understanding, and knowledge can be arranged. Although Lonergan was a prolific author, he is best remembered for two books: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology. When Insight was first published, it was hailed as one of the outstanding achievements of our time, a philosophic classic comparable to David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Lonergan was praised as the finest philosophic thinker of the twentieth century. In Insight, Lonergan develops what he called the “generalized empirical method,” or GEM, by which human knowledge could be understood. Rather than using established rules of logic to try to discover the unchanging essence of human reason and creativity, Lonergan drew on the insights of science to probe the operations of the human mind. According to his generalized empirical method, the human mind reaches understanding through a gathering of data, an establishment of a hypothesis, and a verification of the hypothesis. Lonergan divides human knowing into three levels—experience, understanding, reflection—and demonstrates that the human mind uses such an empirical method to account for both consciousness and the senses. Lonergan would later expand his levels of consciousness to include a fourth level of evaluation and love that supplements these three existing levels. According to Lonergan, his generalized empirical method could be used to help human beings understand what happens in the process of reaching knowledge, evaluating choices, and making decisions. In Method in Theology, Lonergan attempted to provide a methodological framework for theology based on his insights in Insight. The existence of a common method in the sciences encourages investigation and questioning, but the lack of such a common method in philosophy and theology inhibits such progress. Thus, Lonergan proposes that a method in theology be divided into eight functional specialties—research, interpretation, history, dialectic, foundations, doctrines, systematic, and communications—that can provide a common ground on which theological decisions can be made.
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Bernard Lonergan’s insightful theological writings continue to challenge theologians and philosophers to strive for methodological clarity in their writings. Bibliography
Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978. Originally published as Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Longmans, Green and Co. and New York: Philosophical Library, 1957. ———. Method in Theology. New York: The Seabury Press, 1972. ———. A Second Collection. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. ———. A Third Collection. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Tracy, David. The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
MAX LUCADO (1955–).╇ An inspirational author and minister, Max Lucado grew up in the West Texas town of Andrews as the youngest of four children. He attended college at Abilene Christian University, a school affiliated with the Churches of Christ (spiritual descendants of Alexander Campbell). Originally planning to be a lawyer or to become involved in politics, Lucado decided to go into missions. After a graduate degree, Lucado prepared to be a missionary by working in ministry for two years in Miami. During his years there, Lucado developed columns for the church bulletin that eventually became his first book, On the Anvil. After two years in Miami, Lucado and his wife, Denalyn, moved to Brazil to be missionaries. While there Lucado started a church while crafting On the Anvil. Fourteen of the publishers Lucado sent the manuscript to rejected it. Eventually it was published by Tyndale House. The death of Lucado’s father in 1987 brought Lucado and his family, which now included children, back to the United States and San Antonio. In San Antonio, Lucado became the minister for what was then called the Oak Hills Church of Christ (the “of Christ” was eventually dropped). He also continued working on his writing. Lucado’s books were published about one every eight months. In 1992 Lucado began writing children’s books. Sometimes these books related to books he had written for adults. Others were new creations. In 2003 Lucado began a series of books and videos concerning a character he created called Hermie. Hermie, “a common caterpillar,” has appeared in several books and videos including characters voiced by famous actors, such as Tim Conway and Don Knotts. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York City, Lucado’s book Traveling Light made it onto the New York Times’ Bestseller List, the first of his books to do so. A subsequent book, It’s Not about Me, would also
make the list in 2004. In the early twenty-Â�first century, his books, DVDs, and other materials have continued to garner awards not only in Christian publishing but in the secular world as well. Lucado’s popularity and recognition soared. Market research done by his publishing company in 2004 revealed that one in ten Americans had read a book by Max Lucado, and among people living in the United States, Lucado’s name recognition was second only to Billy Graham among spirituality/inspirational authors. A Christianity Today article in 2004 referred to Lucado as “America’s Pastor,” and Reader’s Digest named him “America’s Best Preacher” in its May 2005 issue. Hallmark also began issuing a line of inspirational greeting cards bearing messages from Lucado in the early twenty-Â�first century. All of his accomplishments garnered Lucado a resolution of congratulations in the Texas House of Representatives. At the beginning of the new millennium there were more than forty million Max Lucado books in print in multiple languages throughout the world. His success is founded on his ability to tell stories within his works that evoke emotional experiences in readers that are meant to draw individuals closer to God. His publishing numbers suggest that for millions of people he has accomplished that task. —Todd M. Brenneman LUKE (GK. ΛουκαϚ [LOUKAS]) (first century CE).╇ Nationality unknown. The only occurrences of the name Luke in the New Testament come in Paul’s letters, where Luke is the apostle’s traveling companion and a physician (Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:11; Phlm 24; cf. also 2 Cor 8:18). Some see the same person in Lucius (Rom 16:21) and Lucius of Cyrene (Acts 13:1). The New Testament’s third gospel and the book of Acts are anonymous but are traditionally ascribed to the Luke of Paul’s letters; this traditional Luke is the subject of this article. Apart from competing early church traditions, little is known about him. The two-Â�volume work, referred to as Luke-Â�Acts, suggests an author with a good mastery of Greek language, rhetoric, and culture. If a physician, he probably “belonged to the middle or higher plane of contemporary culture” (Harnack, Luke the Physician, 13). Most consider him a Gentile, though Jewish origin also finds supporters (cf. Paul’s “kinsman” Lucius, Rom 16:21). By at least the sixth century Luke was viewed as a painter, and in Roman Catholic tradition he is the patron saint of painters. Publications The Gospel according to Luke, dated by many to somewhere between 70 and 90 CE, is the longest of the four canonical gospels and probably drew from Mark’s gospel
Martin Luther
and other sources. Lukan authorship of the third gospel (and of the book of Acts) is still the subject of considerable debate among New Testament scholars but will be assumed in this article. The third gospel’s word choice and sentence style give it a more literary ring than most other New Testament documents, and its first four verses sound like the prefaces of other Hellenistic histories. Luke 1:1–4 NRSV Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.
Josephus, Against Apion, Book I.1 In my history of our Antiquities, most excellent Epaphroditus, I have, I think, made sufficiently clear to any who may peruse that work the extreme antiquity of our Jewish race.╯.╯. . Since, however, I observe that a considerable number of persons .╯.╯. discredit the statements in my history╯.╯.╯. , I consider it my duty to devote a brief treatise to all these points; in order at once to .╯.╯. instruct all who desire to know the truth concerning the antiquity of our race.
Among the unique elements of this gospel are the infancy narratives and hymns, the story of the twelve-Â�year-Â�old Jesus in the temple, a large journey narrative (9:51–18:14), and numerous parables and other stories (e.g., prodigal son, Emmaus road disciples), especially stories about persons marginalized in first-Â�century Jewish society (a tax collector Zacchaeus, women, Gentiles). The book of Acts (or the Acts of the Apostles), dated also by many to the last quarter of the first century CE, gives a selective history of the early Jesus movement from the postresurrection appearances (ca. 30 CE) to the imprisonment of the apostle Paul in Rome (61–63 CE?). The work appears to incorporate journal entries, perhaps those of Luke himself (see the “we” sections, such as 16:10–16; 20:6– 15; 21:1–17, passim). Among other things, it testifies both to the unity and to the tensions within the earliest Jesus movement (see especially the contentious Jerusalem meeting in Acts 15). It is also our earliest account of the leadership and geographical spread of the early Christian movement. In addition, Hebrews, the pastoral epistles (1–2 Timothy, Titus), and the story of the “woman caught in adultery” (John 7:53–8:11; found after Luke 21:38 in several Greek manuscripts) have been attributed by a few scholars
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to Luke. Some have also theorized that Luke planned a third volume to follow Acts. Influence on Christian Literature Luke-Â�Acts together constitute 28 percent of the New Testament, making Luke the author of more of the New Testament than either Paul or John. Both the gospel and Acts root early Christianity in secular history (“In the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius,” Luke 3:1 NRSV) and helped to prepare the movement for a longer-Â�term stay on earth (presenting Jesus “as inaugurating a new era in human existence”) (Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, 1.145). The first known Christian history, the book of Acts, spawned a number of later “acts,” such as the Acts of Peter or Acts of Paul (late second century). Luke’s emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in the church and individual Christian lives has been taken up by numerous Christian traditions, as has his special notice of marginalized peoples. Luke’s parable of the prodigal son has been highly influential in Western culture (an errant child who returns to her senses can be termed a “prodigal” without further explanation) as well as in art (Rembrandt’s The Prodigal), literature, and preaching. Nevertheless, Luke’s gospel never rivaled Matthew’s in popularity (except in Marcion’s canon). Bibliography A reconstructed Greek text of the gospel and Acts can be found in Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th ed. (Stuttgart: 1993). Among the many good introductions to the issues of Luke’s identity and authorship of gospel and Acts, see An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond E. Brown (Doubleday, 1997) or the classic presentation of the traditional view in Adolf von Harnack, Luke the Physician (G.╯P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907). For imaginative reconstructions of Luke as a person and author, one could read Graham C. Hunter, Luke, First Century Christian (Harper, 1937) or A. H. N. Green-Â�Armytage, A Portrait of St. Luke (Chicago: 1955). —Kent L. Yinger MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546).╇ German. One of the most voluminous and important writers in the history of Christianity. Luther’s activities and writings helped perpetuate a lasting schism in Latin Christendom and he is often referred to as the father of the Reformation. His significance may be gauged from the fact that during the almost five centuries since his death, more books have been written about him than any other figure in history except Christ. In his time, Luther was a preacher, professor, scholar, translator, political advisor, musician, hymn writer, monk, controversialist, law student, husband,
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father, condemned heretic, theologian, and reformer. His activity was limited mainly to Saxon Germany, but his influence extended much farther. Luther cannot be regarded as a systematic theologian. Clearly he is also an occasional writer, and the context for his work must be understood in order to make intelligible his purpose and position. Some of Luther’s work suffers from problems of transmission. This is true especially of some of the later works. Lectures, sermons, disputations, and Table Talk were recorded by others, reconstructed from notes, or in some cases come from the pen of Luther but at a date and time much removed from the events. Luther’s surviving works comprise 114 volumes in the standard Latin and German edition commonly referred to as the Weimar Ausgabe. In the truncated English edition there are still 55 volumes. Luther’s key ideas are nowhere systematized but are scattered across the huge corpus of his work. Luther denigrated the value of his work by noting he preferred his writings be ignored and scripture read. He could not imagine who would buy such large books, and even if they were purchased, who would read them, and were they to be read, who possibly could benefit. Key ideas advanced by Luther include justification by faith, a theology of the cross, and the priesthood of believers. These emphases caused a “Copernican” revolution in Christian theology. The authority of scripture, the relation between faith and reason, the means and certainty of salvation, and a proper understanding of God are themes of note throughout his literary corpus. Luther’s thought can be accessed through several channels. First, a large body of personal writings is extant. The American edition of Luther’s works includes three volumes of letters, and these are augmented by two volumes of Luther’s Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Letters, edited by Preserved Smith, covering the period up to 1530. Additionally, there are six volumes of material called Table Talk revealing the private thought of Luther. All of this is supplemented by autobiographical reflections throughout his work, especially the Preface to the Complete Edition of Latin Writings (1545). These documents provide context for understanding Luther’s literary remains. In terms of the German Reformation, three treatises of 1520 are seminal: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation sets forth a vision for social and religious renewal led by the princes, since the bishops were unable or unwilling to assume the initiative. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church constitutes a critique of the sacramental system of the Roman Church, while The Freedom of a Christian
examines the liberty of all Christians in Christ to supersede all forms of bondage. Luther’s works are exercises in theological discourse. The Heidelberg Disputation (1518) provides an early articulation of Luther’s theology of the cross. Against Latomus (1521) outlines Luther’s understanding of justification, and his famous riposte to Erasmus, The Bondage of the Will (1525), develops a theory of sin. Lectures on Galatians (1519) reveal an important distinction between law and gospel, while On Monastic Vows (1521) used theology to justify the conclusion that the religious life was not a superior form of Christian faith. Luther stood at the forefront of the eucharistic debates in the 1520s, and his contributions to this aspect of Christian theology are significant. Four volumes in the American edition are devoted to these documents. Much of Luther’s energy was focused in biblical exposition. The first thirty volumes of the American edition are taken up with this, and Luther’s commitment to the Hebrew Bible is apparent with a full twenty volumes of exegesis and application. The production of the German Bible had wide significance. Perhaps the most influential of all Luther’s writings are his catechetical manuals. The Small Catechism (1529) and the Large Catechism (1529) continue to be read and used. His interpretations of Genesis, the Psalms, and Galatians inaugurated sustained theological influence. Some of Luther’s writings are not easy to read. Both the original German and Latin are complex and difficult. Elsewhere he is very plain and simple. However, Luther frequently is entertaining and rewarding, and the importance of his oeuvre cannot be minimized. Bibliography
Bainton, Roland H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Abingdon, 1950. Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. 3 vols. Fortress, 1988–1993. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 114 vols. 1883–1999. Lenker, John Nicholas, ed. Sermons of Martin Luther. 8 vols. Baker, 1988. McKim, Donald K., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. Image, 1990. Pelikan, Jaroslav, ed. Luther’s Works. 55 vols. Concordia/Fortress, 1955–1986. Smith, Preserved, ed. Luther’s Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Letters. 2 vols. 1911–1918.
—Thomas Fudge
M GEORGE MACDONALD (1824–1905).╇ A nineteenth-Â� century Scottish minister and author, well known in his time, George MacDonald has been praised by Madeleine L’Engle as the “father” of modern Christian fantasy authors, such as herself, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis claimed that MacDonald’s Phantastes baptized his imagination. G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien listed The Princess and the Goblin among works that influenced them. MacDonald, though, started from humble origins, born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to George and Helen MacKay MacDonald. His father was a farmer, and MacDonald spent his boyhood in this rural environment, largely under the sway of Calvinism. His childhood was scarred by the death of his mother in 1832, but he had an enduring relationship with his father, who remarried (Margaret McColl) in 1839. He attended the University of Aberdeen, with a brief hiatus cataloging a private estate library to raise money for his education (where he may have developed his love for German Romantic literature), and graduated with a master’s degree in chemistry and physics in 1845. Serving briefly as a tutor in London, MacDonald eventually decided to enroll in Highbury College, a Congregationalist divinity school, from which he graduated in 1850. In the following year, he assumed pastorate of the Congregationalist Church of Arundel, married Louisa Powell (the couple would have five daughters and six sons), and published an English translation of a work by the German writer Novalis. After a difficult couple of years wrestling with a congregation that wanted him to be more Calvinist in his preaching about salvation, he resigned from the pastorate to take up writing full time. He published his first poetry in 1855 and then in 1858 published one of his most enduring works, Phantastes. He received patronage from Lady Byron (the widow of the famous Romantic poet), keeping his family from starving
in those transitional years. Encouraged by F. D. Maurice, he joined the Church of England in 1860. He eventually achieved popular success as a writer of historical fiction, beginning with David Elginbrod (1863) and including Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865). MacDonald mentored Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Dodgson), encouraging him to publish Alice in Wonderland, and was close friends with John Ruskin. He was further acquainted with Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Thackery, Longfellow, Whitman, Emerson, and Twain. (MacDonald’s influence likely encouraged Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.) He made a successful lecture tour of the United States in 1872. In 1877 he received a pension from Queen Victoria. His popularity grew during the 1880s, during which time the family took a second home in Italy (Bordighera) for his health. Whenever he felt that the bills were paid, he could turn back to writing the fantasy stories that he is known for today, but which were not all that popular during his life. After a series of years of poor health and his wife’s death in 1902, he died in 1905. Of MacDonald’s large corpus (including some twenty-Â� nine conventional novels and several books of sermons), there are only a relatively few fantasy works, including three adult novels—Phantastes (1858), The Portent (1864) (which shares much with his realistic novels), and Lilith (1895)—four longer children’s tales—At the Back of the North Wind (1871) (which contrasts a realistic portrait of poverty in London with a fantasy world), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), A Double Story (1874/1875) (also called The Wise Woman or The Lost Princess or Princess Rosamund), and The Princess and Curdie (1883)—and a series of short stories, including “The Golden Key” and “The Light Princess.” The symbolic fantasies for adults have received the highest critical acclaim, belong in the tradition of Piers Plowman and Pilgrim’s Progress, but reflect a
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greater artistic subtlety. Phantastes portrays a young man’s quest through fairyland, made up of a series of dreamlike experiences; it is a spiritual picaresque story. Lilith, his masterpiece, is a much more complex spiritual quest; the narrator this time stumbles into a world where Adam and Eve are in conflict with Lilith, Adam’s supposed first wife (from Kabbalah legend) and embodiment of evil, who yet is given a chance to repent. Overall, MacDonald’s personal theology was sometimes unorthodox, hinting toward universalism in his rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of election and never systematically expressed. A mystic at heart, MacDonald saw God revealed through Jesus, nature, and human existence. Life is a journey to discover more and more about God. Bibliography
Lewis, C. S. George MacDonald. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. MacDonald, George. Fantasy Stories of George Macdonald (4 vols., The Wise Woman, The Golden Key, The Gray Wolf, The Light Princess). Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1980. ———. Lilith. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2000. ———. Phantastes. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1981. ———. The Princess and the Goblin. New York: Puffin, 1997. Reis, Richard H. George MacDonald. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1972.
—Brett Patterson
JOHN GRESHAM MACHEN (1881–1937).╇ John Gresham Machen was born to Arthur Webster and Mary Gresham Machen (a prominent family) in Baltimore on July 28, 1881. He completed undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1901 and at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1905. From 1905 to 1906, he also studied at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen. He taught New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1906 to 1929. He was ordained in 1914 as a Presbyterian minister. From 1918 to 1919, he served as secretary of the YMCA in France. By 1920, he was deeply troubled concerning modernist influence within the Presbyterian Church. He wrote polemical articles and books in defense of conservative (fundamentalist) theology. Machen delivered the James Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary (Virginia) in 1920, which were published the following year as The Origin of Paul’s Religion. Machen answered biblically to critical scholars who falsely claimed that the Apostle Paul distorted the message of Jesus by teaching the resurrection as the foundation of the Christian faith in contrast to His moral teachings. He affirmed that the Epistles of Paul contained the essentials of “historic Christianity.”
On November 3, 1921, Machen delivered an address before the Ruling Elders’ Association of Chester Presbytery, which was subsequently published in the Princeton Theological Review in 1922 under the title “Liberalism or Christianity.” On May 21, 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon at the First Presbyterian Church in New York entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The liberalism of Fosdick was contrasted with such fundamental doctrines as the virgin birth, inspiration of scripture, and the substitutionary death of Christ. The circulation of Fosdick’s sermon culminated in the modernist-Â� fundamentalist controversy. Machen was encouraged to expand his earlier address, which was published as Christianity and Liberalism in 1923. The work is a classic defense of orthodox Christianity. He stressed the importance of biblical teaching and contrasted the teachings of liberalism and orthodoxy regarding fundamental doctrines. In particular, he outlined the fundamental doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, which liberalism denied, and therefore he deemed it a distinct religion. In the summer of 1925, he delivered a series of lectures at the Grove City Bible School, which were published the same year as What Is Faith? Machen addressed fundamental questions concerning the gospel. His textbook on New Testament Greek for Beginners (1927) was a standard for many years and is still widely used in many seminaries. He published The Virgin Birth of Christ in 1930. He demonstrated the lack of contradiction between the genealogies of Matthew and Luke and affirmed the centrality of the virgin birth to the whole New Testament account of Jesus. Machen refuted liberal assertions that the account of Jesus was merely another ancient myth. He devoted his life to defending such fundamentals as the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of scripture, virgin birth of Jesus Christ, substitutionary atonement, and salvific nature of faith. Machen regarded himself as a fundamentalist only in the sense of one who was opposed to liberalism. His radio addresses were published as The Christian Faith in the Modern World (1936) and The Christian View of Man (1937), which articulate his commitment to Calvinism as consistent Christian faith. God Transcendent (1949) is a collection of sermons that includes Machen’s famous address “The Active Obedience of Christ” delivered just weeks prior to his death. In 1933, he opposed the liberal theology of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and established an independent board. In 1935, he was reprimanded by the Presbytery for his opposition to the liberal presence in the Presbyterian Church. On June 11, 1936, he founded the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as an independent denomination with the assistance of a group of professors at Princeton Theological Seminary, who also established
Gabriel Marcel
Westminster Theological Seminary. Machen was professor of New Testament at Westminster from 1929 until his death on January 1, 1937, at Bismarck, North Dakota. He is buried at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. Bibliography Biographical and critical studies include: Terry A. Chrisope, Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881–1915 (Fearn, Ross-Â�shire: Mentor, 2000); Henry W. Coray, J. Gresham Machen: A Silhouette (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1981); D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Stephen╯J. Nichols, J. Gresham Machen: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: P and R Publishing, 2004); and Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. GABRIEL MARCEL (1889–1973).╇ Gabriel Marcel was a philosopher, dramatist, musician, and literary critic. Although he is generally considered the pioneer of Christian, or theistic, existentialism in France, he preferred to identify himself as a “concrete philosopher” whose thinking is based on everyday experience and reality, not abstract ideas. Born in Paris, he lost his mother at the age of four and was raised by his father, an agnostic, and his aunt, a liberal Protestant. In 1907, he earned a licence en philosophie at the Sorbonne. Participating in World War I forced him to confront the tragic nature of human existence and the hollowness of abstract philosophy in explaining such tragedy. After the war, he worked as a writer, secondary teacher, and editor before devoting himself to the study of philosophy. In 1929, at age thirty-Â�nine he converted from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism, which he considered more universal than Protestantism. He was closely associated with some of the prominent thinkers of his day, including Jacques Maritain, Jean-Â�Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas. An extensive traveler, Marcel gave many lectures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen (1949–1950), in which he advocated the need for transcendence in the modern broken world; these lectures were published as The Mystery of Being (two volumes) in 1951. He also discussed the importance of not objectifying fellow humans in his William James Lectures at Harvard University (1951); these talks were published under the title The Existential Background of Human Dignity in 1963.
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As an elected member of the Institute of France, Marcel served in the Academy of Social and Political Sciences. After his death in 1973, the Association Internationale Présence de Gabriel Marcel was established in Paris. The Gabriel Marcel Society, based in the United States, promotes Marcel’s work in English-speaking countries. In addition to the two works mentioned above, Marcel authored a number of philosophical books, including Metaphysical Journal (1927; English translation in 1952), a discussion of the existential problems of human life; Being and Having (1935; English translation in 1965), an existentialist diary addressing the issues of consciousness, ontology, and Christian faith; Homo Viator (1945; English translation in 1951), an analysis of hope; The Philosophy of Existence (1948), a Christian critique of Sartre’s atheistic existentialism; Man against Mass Society (1951; English translation in 1952), a treatise in which the author claims that a technological idea of the universe is incompatible with the idea of a free man; and Presence and Immortality (1959), an existentialist diary. Principal Ideas of Gabriel Marcel •â•‡ Existing precedes living. •â•‡ Life can be understood through direct participation in it, not through philosophical abstractions. •â•‡ The proud man believes in self-Â�sufficiency, thereby disconnecting himself from fellow men. •â•‡ Social alienation can be overcome only when man considers the other person as a subject (“thou”), not as an object (“he,” “she,” or “it”). •â•‡ The technological world prevents the modern man from encountering the mysterious. •â•‡ Although there is no objective way of verifying the existence of God, man can still encounter him by using intuition, creative fidelity, and charity. Bibliography
Cooney, William. 1989. Contributions of Gabriel Marcel to Philosophy: A Collection of Essays. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Gallagher, Kenneth T. 1975. The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. New York: Fordham University Press. Marcel, Gabriel. 1965. Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1951. Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. Trans. Emma Craufurd. London: Gollancz. ———. 1952. Men against Mass Society. Trans. G. S. Fraser. Chicago: H. Regnery. ———. 1952. Metaphysical Journal. Trans. Bernard Wall. Chicago: H. Regnery. ———. 1950. The Mystery of Being. Trans. René Hague. Chicago: H. Regnery. ———. 1948. The Philosophy of Existence. Trans. Manya Harari. London: Harvill Press.
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———. 1967. Presence and Immortality. Trans. Michael A. Machado and Henry J. Koren. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pax, Clyde. 1972. An Existential Approach to God: A Study of Gabriel Marcel. The Hague: Nijhoff.
—John J. Han
JACQUES MARITAIN (1882–1973).╇ Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and political thinker. A prominent neo-Â�Thomist, he applied the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to various social, political, moral, and aesthetic issues of his day. He was also a strong opponent to both the Catholic modernist movement and the religious reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Maritain was born in Paris; his father was a liberal Protestant, and his mother was a committed atheist. He attended the Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne, where he pursued philosophy and the natural sciences. During this period of his life, Maritain was briefly attracted to the philosophies of Spinoza and Bergson. In 1906, through the efforts of the Catholic writer Léon Bloy, he converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. After receiving his agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, he moved to Heidelberg, where he studied the natural sciences. In 1908, he returned to France and began an in-Â�depth study of Thomist thought. From 1914 to 1939, Maritain held a professorship in modern philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris. After serving as the French ambassador to the Vatican from 1945 to 1948, he taught at various institutions in the United States and Canada, including Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame, and Chicago, from 1948 to 1960. He was also one of the drafters of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Maritain is the author of more than sixty books on areas such as Aquinas, epistemology, art, history, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, and moral and political philosophy. In Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge (1932; English translation of the fourth French edition in 1995), for example, he addresses the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, and the knowableness of God. As part of his discussion, Maritain applies Thomistic thought to his analysis of three types of knowledge: scientific knowledge, metaphysical knowledge, and supernatural knowledge. In The Range of Reason (1948; English translation in 1952), the author also differentiates between metaphysical knowledge and scientific or mathematical knowledge. Integral Humanism (1936; English translation in 1968) is Maritain’s work of political philosophy; here the author claims that, in a pluralistic age, secular humanism should be replaced by a
new Christianity that promotes a wholesome humanism. Maritain’s aesthetic theory is addressed in such works as Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays (1930); Art and Poetry (1935; English translation in 1943); and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). Principal Ideas of Jacques Maritain •â•‡ Metaphysics precedes epistemology. •â•‡ Thomistic philosophy is the remedy for agnosticism, naturalism, and individualism. •â•‡ Modern humanism, which originates in the Renaissance, cannot make each individual truly human; only theocentric Christian humanism can. •â•‡ Reason never conflicts with Christian faith; rather, it supports the truth claims of Christianity. •â•‡ Democracy can flourish only when it espouses Christian ideals. •â•‡ Christian art is not church art; rather, it is the art of redeemed humanity that encompasses both the sacred and the profane. •â•‡ Christian faith teaches man that love is worthier than intelligence. •â•‡ Nothing surpasses art and poetry in their power to touch the soul of humanity. Bibliography
Dunaway, John M. 1978. Jacques Maritain. Boston: Twayne. Evans, Joseph W., ed. 1963. Jacques Maritain: The Man and His Achievement. New York: Sheed and Ward. McInerny, Ralph. 1988. Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Maritain, Jacques. 1943. Art and Poetry. Trans. E. de P. Matthews. New York: Philosophical Library. ———. 1930. Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays. Trans. J. F. Scanlan. London: Sheed and Ward. ———. 1953. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1995. Distinguish to Unite, or The Degrees of Knowledge. Trans. Gerald B. Phelan. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1968. Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom. Trans. Joseph W. Evans. New York: Scribner. ———. 1952. The Range of Reason. New York: Scribner.
—John J. Han
ST. MARK (d. ca. 68).╇ St. Mark is the individual typically identified as the author of the Gospel of Mark, the second book in the New Testament. Based on the second century testimony of Papias (according to Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15) and Irenaeus (Haer. 3.1.1), Mark has
Peter Marshall
traditionally been understood as the interpreter of Peter; his gospel records the faithful testimony of the apostle’s preaching in the city of Rome. A link between Peter and Mark is mentioned in 1 Pet 5:13, and many equate this individual with John Mark, the cousin of Barnabas (Col 4:10), the son of Mary (Acts 12:12), who was an on-Â�again off-Â�again companion of Paul (Acts 12:25; 13:13; 15:37–40; 2 Tim 4:11; Phlm 24). More recently, this view has come under scrutiny, as Mark was a particularly common name in the first century and because the reliability of Papias’s testimony has been challenged on a number of fronts. While it is possible that John Mark is the historical figure behind the second gospel, the issue cannot be determined with certainty and may in fact be a moot point. The text of the gospel does not identify the author by name, and the title assigned to the work, the Gospel according to Mark, or in some manuscripts According to Mark, is a second-Â� century designation originating with the early church. Nonetheless, the name Mark remains associated with the second gospel. The Gospel of Mark was overlooked throughout much of the early church, having been viewed as a somewhat inferior and duplicitous text because its content is almost entirely reproduced in the accounts of Matthew and Luke. In the 19th century, interest in the text gained momentum when scholars (e.g., K. Lachmann and H. J. Holtzmann) began to argue that Mark reflected the earliest gospel tradition and was not merely a later summation of the other Synoptics. Today, Markan priority is widely accepted among scholars and, although the relationship between the Synoptics remains an issue of vigorous debate, the Gospel of Mark (composed around AD 70) is generally assumed to be a primary source used by Matthew and Luke. Fascination with the Gospel of Mark has dominated Synoptic studies for the last century and a half. The narrative of Mark’s gospel depicts a variety of episodes that span the baptism of Jesus to the empty tomb. The sixteen chapters are a fast-Â�paced drama that moves relentlessly toward the crucifixion and the climax of the gospel. After the prologue (1:1–13), which orients the reader to important themes and prepares the interpreter for the rest of the gospel, Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee (1:14–15). The first eight chapters focus on Jesus’s calling and interaction with the twelve apostles, the emerging conflict with the religious authorities, and the miraculous deeds Jesus performed on behalf of Jews and Gentiles. Underlying these diverse encounters and confrontations in the first half of the gospel is a central theological question: who is Jesus? The disciples voice a preliminary answer as Jesus and his entourage are en route to the villages around Caesarea Philippi—the so-Â�called watershed moment being Peter’s
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declaration that Jesus is the Christ (8:29). The confession is theologically true, but it becomes immediately clear that the disciples do not fully comprehend the totality of Jesus’s mission (8:31–33). The second half of Mark’s gospel continues to focus on the identity of Jesus with episodes relating the journey to Jerusalem, the crucifixion, and the burial of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God, but one who must suffer and die before being vindicated. The precise point at which Mark’s gospel concludes has been a source of much debate, though the majority of scholars believe the manuscript evidence suggests that the story ends with the women’s fear and flight in 16:8. Mark’s “good news” (1:1) thus concludes on a note of failure, but it is a failure juxtaposed with promise that invites readers to become followers of Jesus and to carry on his boundary-Â�breaking ministry. Bibliography
Black, C. C. Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter. Studies on Personalities of the New Testament. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001. France, R. T. The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Gnilka, J. Das Evangelium nach Markus. 2 vols. Evangelisch-Â� katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 2. Zürich: Benzinger, 1979. Guelich, R. A. Mark 1–8:26. Word Biblical Commentary 34A. Dallas: Word Books, 1989. Hooker, M. D. The Gospel according to Saint Mark. Black’s New Testament Commentaries. London: A and C, 1991. Marcus, J. Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 27. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Moloney, F. J. The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002. Pesch, R. Das Markusevangelium. 2 vols. Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament II 1–2. Freiburg: Herder, 1976–1977.
—Kelly Iverson
PETER MARSHALL (1902–1949).╇ Peter Marshall was a Presbyterian minister and chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Born in Coatbridge (near Glasgow), Scotland, on May 27, 1902, Marshall was reared in a poverty-Â�stricken coal-Â�mining community by his mother and stepfather. From an early age, Marshall enjoyed reading stories about missionaries and decided that one day he would be a missionary to China. To meet the educational requirements, he enrolled in evening classes while working in the mines by day, but his progress was slow. In 1927, when he was about to give up hope, a cousin offered to pay Marshall’s way to America, where he could receive proper ministerial training.
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Martin E. Marty
The twenty-Â�four-Â�year-Â�old landed at Ellis Island in New York, headed to Alabama, and joined a Presbyterian church, which in a short time recommended him as a candidate for the gospel ministry. They sponsored him at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, a regional seminary for the Presbyterians. During this time he served as pastor of Covington Presbyterian Church and then accepted a call at Atlanta’s Westminster Presbyterian Church, where he met Catherine Wood, a student at nearby Agnes Scott College. They were married in 1936 and had one son, Peter John Marshall. The following year, historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., called Marshall to be its senior pastor. He soon established himself as an excellent pulpiteer, spiritual advisor to many U.S. senators and representatives, and as a community leader. Under Marshall’s direction, the church reached out to youths and especially soldiers during World War II. The church grew to overflowing. On June 4, 1947, Marshall was appointed chaplain of the U.S. Senate. The prayers he offered from the dais before the opening of each session were so inspirational that senators arrived early each day to listen to them. Marshall single-Â� handedly transformed the office of U.S. Chaplain into a highly visible and influential post. He remained in the position until his untimely death of a heart attack on January 26, 1949. He was forty-Â�six years old. His body was laid to rest at Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Bladensburg, Maryland. In 1951, Catherine Marshall told her husband’s story in the best-Â�seller A Man Called Peter, which was made into a major motion picture four years later, featuring Richard Todd in the starring role. The production captured the Oscar for best film of 1955. Catherine went on to edit and publish many of her husband’s sermons, poetry, and prayers. This led Catherine to a career as a writer and conference speaker. She wrote over twenty books, including a novel, Christy, based on her mother’s teaching experiences among the poor in the Appalachians, which later was made into a television series. Peter Marshall’s popularity has grown over the years. More than threescore years after his death, his sermons and prayers are as relevant as when he first delivered them. His son, Peter J. Marshall, has digitally restored many of his recorded messages. They can be accessed through the Peter Marshall Ministries in Orleans, Massachusetts. Bibliography
Marshall, Catherine. Mr. Jones Meet the Master. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1949. ———. A Man Called Peter. New York: McGraw-Â�Hill, 1951. ———. John Doe, Disciple. New York: McGraw-Â�Hill, 1963.
—R. Alan Streett
MARTIN E. MARTY (1928–).╇ Martin Emil Marty was born in West Point, Nebraska, the son of a Missouri Synod Lutheran school principal and his energetic wife—from whom Marty claims to have received his prodigious vitality. He undertook pretheological studies at Concordia College in Milwaukee and his first theological studies at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. From there, Marty moved for further education and his first pastoral ministry to Chicago, which would become his longtime home. Graduated from the Lutheran School of Theology and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.) in turn, he was heavily recruited for an academic career but stuck to his commitment to pastoral ministry, being ordained in 1952 and serving parishes in Chicago’s west and northwest suburbs for a decade. He married Elsa Schumacher, with whom he had four children and whom he nursed as she died of cancer in the early 1980s, and later married Harriet Meyer. In 1963, however, having already published several noted books (including The New Shape of American Religion and A Short History of Christianity, which brought him wide attention [both 1959]), he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. He retired from that university at the age of seventy as the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity, having taught mainly in the Divinity School (which he briefly served as associate dean). Marty authored and edited or coedited a book for every year he was a professor and continued his authorial pace in retirement. He has served on the staff of the Christian Century magazine since 1956, writing his popular column, “M.E.M.O.,” for most of that time. He has edited the semimonthly newsletter “Context” since 1969. And he published more than five thousand articles and countless papers, chapters, reviews, and other pieces over his career—ranging from the loftiest academic journals to Reader’s Digest. Of those many books, most surveyed aspects of American church history, including his magnum opus, the multivolume Modern American Religion (1986, 1990, 1996), and his National Book Award winner, Righteous Empire (1970). But some branched out into catechetical works for his Lutheran tradition (such as books on baptism and the Eucharist), biography (notably Martin Luther in the Penguin Lives series, 2004), political ethics, and spiritual theology (notably A Cry of Absence, 1983), and he worked on several collaborative volumes with one of his sons, Micah Marty, a landscape and architectural photographer. Marty’s vast erudition (he was reliably reputed to read a new book every evening), gift for intellectual cartography (his characteristic mode was the sweeping and illuminating categorization of a complex historical phenomenon),
Cotton Mather
and flair for the memorable phrase made him a darling of college speaker series and news media from the late 1950s throughout his retirement. Easily the most quoted religious historian in America, he also was one of its most honored. By 2007 he had received seventy-Â�seven honorary doctorates and a wide range of other awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Chicago Alumni Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, and the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois’s top honor). He also was elected to a number of elite scholarly societies and served as president of the American Society of Church History, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the American Academy of Religion, the last of which named its annual prize for contributing to the public awareness of religion in his honor. Marty’s characteristic concern was to understand and depict religious realities with as much accuracy and civility as possible. Misunderstood at times as pusillanimous or calculating because he rarely engaged in polemics, his overriding concern was to render fair-Â�minded accounts of the nature of religion in America so that his fellow scholars could conduct their own research with better frames of reference, his fellow citizens could understand each other and thus live better together, and his fellow Christians could see clearly the past so as to live more faithfully in the future. Bibliography Martin Marty’s vast bibliography is reduced to a list of published books on his Web site, illuminos.com. —John Stackhouse COTTON MATHER (1663–1728).╇ The New England into which Cotton Mather was born in 1663 and the one he helped shape until his death in 1728 were vastly different places, due in large part to the work of this tireless guardian of the Christian faith. His was an active faith made strong by daily care and due diligence, both of which he learned from his earliest years and taught his followers as his ministry developed. Grandson of John Cotton; son of Increase Mather; husband to Abigail Phillips (d. 1702; had nine children, five of whom died), Elizabeth Hubbard (d. 1713; had six children, four of whom died), and Lydia George (d. 1715 childless, after battling mental illness), this father, preacher, writer, social activist, educator, and thinker has become one of early America’s most significant and often underappreciated personalities. Known more for his involvement in events that culminated in the prosecution of the witches in
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Salem, Massachusetts, Cotton Mather has become so inextricably linked to the trials that little is remembered of the work of this preacher and man of letters. Author of over 450 books, tracts, articles, narratives, and sermons, Cotton Mather was a major figure in one of New England’s most important religious dynasties. Revered by his contemporaries for his intellectual ability, zeal, and passion, Mather was granted admission to Harvard at the age of twelve, having demonstrated a command of classic literature, Greek, and Latin beyond his years. Ordained in 1684, an act that he thought would not happen because of the stammer he developed as a young child, Mather became a pastor in whose life everything was guided by his passion and his faith, and for whom nothing fell outside the purview of that faith. Tireless, sometimes impulsive, often analytically inaccurate, but always sensitive and humane, Mather was led by the passion of his convictions (including his views on the abolition of slavery) to become involved in a number of social, religious, and scientific endeavors. Among his most significant social programs were his work on behalf of quality education for all children and his campaign for inoculations of the residents of Boston against smallpox. Regarding the former, Mather believed that every member of society had a responsibility to ensure that all children were given a quality education because, he believed, the success of the “Holy Commonwealth” and of America as a whole depended on it. As to the latter, Mather worked tirelessly to see that the people’s health needs were met by insisting they be inoculated against the depredation of smallpox. His efforts in this regard met with both public and professional resistance, leading him to urge his congregation to take heed to his message on religious grounds. In a sermon delivered in 1712, Mather pleaded with his hearers to be inoculated: The Practice of .╯.╯. preventing .╯.╯. Smallpox [by] Inoculation has [not] been introduced into our nation, where . . . so many . . . would give Great Sums, to have their Lives insur’d from the dangers of this dreadful Distemper. . . . I cannot but move that it be WARILY proceeded in. (qtd. in Rudolph)
As a result of his interest in other areas of science, Mather was invited to join the prestigious Royal Society, becoming, according to some, the first man of science from the United States. Unfortunately, the memory of Cotton Mather remains tainted by his involvement in the Salem witch trials, a period of his life from which he distanced himself in later years. Though he changed his perspectives on spectral evidence as he aged and turned away from promoting convictions regarding witchcraft, Mather’s legacy remains
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tied to that dark period in the life of Puritan New England. Primarily because the Puritans saw New England as the center of the new kingdom of God on earth, Mather and other Puritan leaders saw any affront to their faith as a direct attack on God and His people. Mather and the rest of the Holy Commonwealth believed they were in the midst of God’s reestablishing His kingdom on earth, and two things seemed obvious to them: the first was that it seemed logical that the devil was bound to dismantle the work of their Lord, and the second was that they had a holy calling to do everything in their power to keep that kingdom intact. The trials must be considered in light of their significance in Puritan New England. Mather’s own account of his meeting with the washer woman at the center of the controversy reflects the complexity of this issue in the Puritan mind. For Mather, though his Christian charity demanded pity for the woman because of what he believed the devil had done to her, the dictates of his office required that he do with her whatever necessary for the protection of the Commonwealth. Christian faith will always be indebted to Cotton Mather for the example he provided of living out one’s faith quietly but passionately in the face of tremendous odds. Unfortunately, the Holy Commonwealth, for which Mather and his contemporaries fought, faded into the obscurity of tradition rather than flourished in the righteousness for which they had so long labored. Bibliography Select Primary Works by Cotton Maher
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions .╯.╯. (1689) The Wonderful Work of God Commemorated (1690) The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion (1692) The Devil in New England (1692) Preparatory Meditations upon the Day of Judgement (1692) The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) Early Religion, Urge in a Sermon (1694) A Pillar of Gratitude .╯.╯. (1700) Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) The Negro Christianized (1706) Corderius Americanus (1708) Theopolis Americana (1710) The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvement (1720) The Last Days of Increase Mather (1724) The Terror of the Lord (1727)
Secondary Works
Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Cotton Mather.” In Major Writers of American Literature, ed. Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. 93–149. ———. “New England Epic: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana.” ELH 33, no. 3 (September 1966): 337–350.
Best, M., D. Neuhauser, and L. Slavin. “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’l inoculate you with this; with a pox to you”: Smallpox Inoculation, Boston, 1721. Qual. Saf. Health Care 2004; 13:82–83. www.qshc.bmj.com (March 7, 2007). De Levie, Dagobert. “Cotton Mather: Theologian and Scientist.” American Quarterly 3, no. 4 (Winter 1951): 362–365. Feidelson, Charles, Jr. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Miller, Perry. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. New York: Anchor Books, 1956. ———. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. Murdock, Kenneth B. Cotton Mather: Selections. New York: Hafner Press, 1926. Rudolph, R., and D. M. Musher. “Inoculation in the Boston Smallpox Epidemic of 1721.” Archives of Internal Medicine 115 (June 1965): 692–696. Schneider, Herbert W. The Puritan Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Press, 1930. Solberg, Winton U. “Science and Religion: Cotton Mather’s ‘Christian Philosopher.’↜” Church History 56, no. 1 (March 1987): 73–92. Stievermann, Ian. “Writing ‘To Conquer All Things’: Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana and the Quandary of Copia [abundant supply, abundance].” Early American Literature 39, no. 2 (2004): 263–297. Werking, Richard H. “↜‘Reformation Is Our Only Preservation’: Cotton Mather and Salem Witchcraft.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 29, no. 2 (April 1972): 281–290. Winship, Michael. P. “↜‘The Most Glorious Church in the World’: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s.” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 1, Anglo-Â�American Puritanisms (January 2000): 71–98.
—Raymond Legg
MATTHEW (first century).╇ The author of the first canonical gospel of the New Testament is traditionally called Matthew, after the name of the tax collector repeatedly mentioned there: called by Jesus to discipleship in Matt. 9:9; hosting and feeding Jesus, his disciples, and many fellow tax collectors and “sinners” in 9:10–13 (possibly through v. 18?); named among the twelve apostles in 10:2–4, with parallels in Mark 3:17–19 and Luke 6:14– 16; and present for the period following Jesus’s ascension, when Matthias is selected to replace Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:12–26). Matthew is alone in connecting his name and profession; Mark 2 and Luke 5 have the tax collector’s (and later, hospitable disciple’s) name as Levi, with further ties to the repentant generosity of Zacchaeus, the wealthy, short tax collector (Luke 19). Matthew also appears briefly in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, suggesting an otherwise undocumented priority in the early church.
François Charles Mauriac
Modern historical scholarship has cast considerable doubt on the identification of the gospel’s author with its taxman; if an eyewitness and participant in Jesus’s ministry, Matthew the apostle would not likely have used so much material from Mark and other synoptic (Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, as three works closely related and best “seen together”) sources. The real author can still be credited with thoughtful compiling, editing, and writing skills but remains known only by his book’s ascribed title. Yet within the world of the gospel’s story, Matthew is himself a character in the narrative, as John appears in the fourth gospel and as Mark and Luke enter the second and Acts, respectively. Discovering more about this character and others within Matthew’s story has been one project of literary or narrative criticism, in which new insights on plot, setting, and character emerge from largely internal evidence. Kingsbury finds in Matthew’s work a polemic portrait, depicting Jesus as Son of God and agent of his kingdom, clashing with antagonists such as demons, Satan, and religious leaders. Piecing together the central elements of this picture can provide details about its borders, including Matthew’s intent in writing and the social setting—likely a Greek-Â�speaking, Jewish Christian community in or near Syrian Antioch, whose members would have been familiar with the Old Testament and with persecution from other Jewish groups—in which he wrote. Other recent, related scholarship has focused on the role played by the Roman Empire in shaping Matthew: the author and his audience would have felt keenly the socioeconomic, political, and theological effects of Rome’s power, and traces of their attempts to negotiate and contest the empire’s claims can be located among the episodes of Jesus’s birth, ministry, and crucifixion. This imperial criticism owes as much to modern politics as it does to those of the ancient world, but it has opened new horizons in Matthean research and reawakened earlier interests, such as the significance of titles (see Carter and Gathercole) as indicators of Matthew’s distinctive Christology and his appropriation of Old Testament material as prophecies fulfilled through the Messiah. Matthew’s story is about Jesus, not himself—among the synoptics, he ascribes the most exalted characteristics and the most honorific responses to his Lord, the Son of God, the Messiah and Christ, the agent inaugurating God’s incoming reign. But titles have also proven important in Matthew’s name: he is canonized in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions and referred to (with Mark, Luke, and John) as one of the four evangelists, in Matthew’s case for his martyr’s death while preaching (traditionally either in Hierapolis of Parthia, or to the south of the Caspian, with his relics held to be in Salerno) in addition to his gospel authorship.
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Matthew’s history of influence is broad, especially evident among his gospel’s first interpreters: Origen, Irenaeus, and others wrote volumes (especially in comparison with Mark, held to be an abridgement of Matthew until the modern research period) on Matthew, which in turn shaped the church’s exegetical and theological development. Principal Ideas of Matthew •â•‡ Jesus of Nazareth is Israel’s long-Â�awaited Messiah (Christ, in Greek), anointed and appointed by God. •â•‡ Many passages of the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures alternatively rendered in Greek as the Septuagint (abbrev. LXX), can be shown to be fulfilled as prophecy in the actions of Christ and in the events of his birth, life, death, and resurrection; Old Testament persons and motifs (Moses, Elijah, torah or law, wilderness) thus take on new importance. •â•‡ Titles such as “Lord,” “Christ,” and “Son of God” indicate the centrality of the suffering, crucified, and risen Messiah to God’s redemptive plan for the earth at large. •â•‡ These titles and certain actions and speeches of Jesus also show elements distinctive to Matthew, such as the preexistent Christ’s involvement in Israel’s history (Matt. 23:37–39). Secondary Bibliography
Carter, Warren. Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (JSNT Sup. Series 204). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000. Gathercole, Simon J. The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. Gundry, R. H. The Use of the Old Testament in St. Matthew’s Gospel. With Special Reference to the Messianic Hope. NovTSup 18. Leiden: Brill, 1967. Kingsbury, Jack Dean. Matthew as Story, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988. Luz, Ulrich. Matthew: A Commentary (3 vols.: Matt. 1–7, 8–20, and 21–28), trans. James E. Crouch, ed. Helmut Koester. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001, 2005, 2007.
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
FRANÇOIS CHARLES MAURIAC (1885–1970).╇ Perhaps the premier French novelist and journalist, winner of the Grand Prize from L’academie française in 1925, elected member of the French Academy in 1933, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, François Mauriac is one of the leading Catholic writers of the twentieth century. Among the four most widely read canonical authors in the French curriculum (the others are Camus, Sartre, and Ionesco), he stands out not so much as an existentialist but as a deeply troubled Christian moralist.
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Mauriac’s work is intensely regional, typically set in his native Bordeaux, where he was born into a family of landed gentry, inclined to a dour, Jansenist brand of piety. Though he was extremely unhappy as a child in a Marianite boarding school, in later life, following his religious conversion in 1928, he took to reading Blaise Pascal and so returned to a form of Jansenist spirituality, even while criticizing its excesses. Despite his opposition to post-Â� Revolutionary secularism of his father’s family and his own political support for the Action Française, notable for its attendant anti-Â�Semitism, from the 1930s onward Mauriac was a notable supporter of the Jewish community. He is thus hard to categorize; his opinions were subject to change, and he had an independent streak; moreover, he incorporates all sides and traditions in the characters of his novels. Though in the 1930s he tended to support right-Â�wing causes he became very active in the French Resistance with his left-Â�leaning clandestine journal, Le Cahier noir, written during German occupation from 1940 to 1945, yet ended his life as a centrist rather that a leftist politically. Thus, despite his enormous success as a novelist and short story writer, not to mention as a journalist with his Bloc-Â�Notes and as an editorial writer for Figaro, he acquired enemies both on the right and the left. His biographer Lacouture says that he may have been “the most widely attacked and vilified Frenchman of the twentieth century.” Mauriac is now regarded as a Catholic novelist, though he preferred to be treated as “a Catholic who writes novels.” In fact, in his early work, from the collection of poems that first brought him notice (Les Mains Jointes, 1909) through several novels of the 1920s until his spiritual crisis and conversion in 1928, carnality and a general ennui characterized his work. His first Catholic novel was Ce qui était perdu (That Which Was Lost) in 1930, though its frankness concerning sexual morality offended many Catholic critics. His novels and other writings after 1930 are another matter. Le Noeud de vipers (Vipers’ Tangle, 1932) is one of the most convincing conversion narratives in all modern fiction. In 1936 he wrote his Life of Jesus, clearly an important step in his own spiritual development. His novel La Pharisienne (Woman of the Pharisees, 1941) is a searching exploration of the misappropriation of piety for the purposes of controlling others. Among his important later prose works of Christian reflection and apologetics are Terres Franciscaines (1950), Paroles Catholiques (Words of Faith, 1954), Le Pain Vivant (1955), The Son of Man (1960, dedicated to his friend Elie Wiesel), Ce que je crois (What I Believe, 1962), and his spiritual autobiography, Nouveaux Mémoires intérieures (The Inner Presence: Recollection of My Spiritual Life, 1968).
Bibliography
Kushnir, Slava. M. Mauriac, journaliste. Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1979. O’Connell, David. François Mauriac Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995. Oeuvres complètes. 12 vols. Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1950–1956.
—David Lyle Jeffrey
JOHN FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE (1805– 1872).╇ Priest and theologian in the Church of England. In the year before his death, John Frederick Denison Maurice remarked, “The desire for Unity has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfying it which men have devised” (Life, I, 41). His own words stand as the best summary of motivation for the many writings and involvements of one of the premiere ecumenical theologians of the contemporary era. Career and Controversies Frederick was the fourth of seven children born into a Unitarian home. His father, Michael, a strong Whig and a dissenting minister, also ran a household academy and had served as an assistant to Joseph Priestly. From the time of the secession of his mother and three elder sisters from Unitarianism to an evangelical Calvinism warmed by Methodist influences, the family was beset with religious tension, and religious matters were discussed through letters. By his own account these were “years of moral confusion and contradiction” for Maurice (Life, I, 21). Among other things, this may be the root of Maurice’s subsequent refusal to join any particular party—high, low, or broad— and his rhetoric against that system in Anglicanism. Maurice went to Cambridge in 1823, making important friendships of later Victorian luminaries through the Apostles’ Club. He took a first class in civil law though not a degree because he was still a dissenter. By 1827 he was in London and embarked on a literary and political career as editor of the Athenaeum while concurrently reading common law at the Inns of Court. At this time he appears as a young radical, very much a “debater of this age” (cf. I Cor. 1:20). Two years later, after the death of Emma, his most beloved and nearest-Â�in-Â�age sibling, he underwent a personal depression coupled with further intellectual crises in the face of continuing familial religious disputes. At the university, Maurice gained from his classics professor, Julius Hare, a careful philological method in the exegesis of texts and a cautiousness with regard to the ability of propositions to comprehend the reality to which they referred. Maurice also acknowledged a major philosophical influence from Coleridge’s organic conception of
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society as opposed to the atomism of Continental positivism or a mechanistic British utilitarianism. From these sources Maurice developed a distinction between “system” and “method” that was vitally important to his own theological methodology: “to me these words seem not only not synonymous, but the greatest contraries imaginable: the one indicating that which is most opposed to life, freedom, variety; and the other that without which they cannot exist” (Kingdom of Christ, I, 238–239). Some commentators find this distinction to be the source of Maurice’s “system phobia,” but he considered himself to be a “digger” rather than a builder (Life, II, 137). Also to be mentioned is the subsequent use for ecumenical methodology to which Maurice put his contemporary J. S. Mill’s dictum that we are more often right in what we affirm rather than what we deny (Wolf et al., 9). Finally, from the Scottish mystic Thomas Erskine, Maurice learned to regard much of what passes for religion in human society as covert atheism (Brose, 42–51). In the aftermath of his depression, Maurice appears to have done a complete volte face: he read for theology at Oxford and by 1834 was ordained to the priesthood. Early in his clerical career, an initial attraction between the leaders of the Oxford Movement and Maurice ended when he criticized the movement in a way indicative of his own developing thought: “Their error, I think, consists in opposing to the spirit of this age the spirit of a former age instead of the ever-Â�living and acting Spirit of God, of which the spirit of each age (as it presents itself to those living in it) is at once the adversary and the parody” (Life, I, 226). Having become part of the establishment, he nevertheless yet took a critical view of it in general terms as well and alienated the ascendant evangelical party in the event. Four years before Marx declared religion to be the opiate of the people, Maurice proclaimed, “We have been dosing our people with religion, when what they want [need] is not this, but the Living God” (Life, I, 369). In 1840 he was appointed professor of English literature and modern history at King’s College, London, to which was added the professorship of theology in 1846. King’s was then the only institution outside the two universities whose certificate in theology for ordinands was accepted by all the bishops of the Church of England. Most of Maurice’s major works date from this time until 1853, when he was dismissed from his professorships after publishing Theological Essays. The principal and council of the college found what Maurice considered a mature statement of his theological views, if not heretical, then at least “calculated to unsettle the minds of the theological students” (Life, II, 191). Yet the Essays were not the only factor contributing to Maurice’s dismissal. His leadership of the Christian
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Socialist movement since 1848 was also a source of scandal. Though laborers and leaders of the cooperative movement found in him a clergyman genuinely concerned for their plight and one who actually listened to them, these very qualities heightened middle-Â� and upper-Â�class suspicion about his activities. Publications such as Politics for the People (1848) and Tracts on Christian Socialism (1850) sealed the misgiving: “[Christian socialism] is the only title which will define our object and will commit us at once to the conflict we must engage sooner or later with the unsocial Christians and the unchristian socialists” (Life, II, 35). Thus, when his theology came into question, the atmosphere was already poisoned. The economic future, however, lay with trade unions rather than cooperation, and in 1854 Maurice took the movement into education by becoming the founder and first principal of the Working Men’s College. With others he was also prominent in the founding of Queen’s College (1856), where he also taught in the cause of women’s education. By 1870 he had joined with Mill and others in support of women’s suffrage. Among controversies marking Maurice’s later career, the most notable was with H. L. Mansel over the latter’s Limits of Religious Thought (Bampton Lectures, 1858). Maurice had previously served in a number of pastoral capacities with chaplaincies at Guy’s Hospital and Lincoln’s Inn. These had given opportunity for sermons and lectures to students of medicine and law. Now he exercised pastoral oversight of congregations such as St. Peter’s, Vere Street, London (1860–1866), and St. Edmund’s, Cambridge. In 1862, he published a massive four-Â�volume Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy and in 1866 was appointed Knightsbridge Professor of Moral and Modern Philosophy at Cambridge. This career capstone may be seen as a kind of vindication in the face of earlier opprobrium. With the Trinitarian blessing as his last words, he died on Easter Monday 1872 surrounded by family members and subsequent general approbation (if not for his theology, then certainly for his character) in obituary notices. Major Theological Contributions Maurice appears to be among those Victorians who never had an unpublished thought. Fully seventy-Â�two books complemented by articles, pamphlets, and editorships compose his bibliography. Any consideration of Maurice’s published work must deal with the question of his complex style. He was perfectly capable of sentences consuming a page of print. The customary exegesis is that his style inevitably results from the habit of dictating his books. Others, however, find the style resultant from Maurice’s “method of personation” that necessitated keeping a number of elements in tension at the same time so as to do justice to each while grasping the whole (J. Coulson, Newman and the Common
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Tradition, 1970). This latter judgment at least holds before scholars the possibility of reward for labor rather than frustration over admittedly difficult reading. Maurice’s works fall into several categories: biblical themes, specific issues or controversies (ecclesial, educational, social, political), ascetical/pastoral theology, ethics/ moral theology, and formal theology. Early on, he also published a novel, Eustace Conway (1834). His Boyle Lectures On the Religions of the World in Relation to Christianity (1846) represent a pioneering work (not least for their then rare charity of attitude) in the history of religions. Most of his books on biblical themes—for example, Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (1851), Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (1852), and The Doctrine of Sacrifice Deduced from the Scriptures (1854)— were either published series of sermons or lectures on specific foundations—for example, The Epistle to the Hebrews (1846), The Epistles of St. John (1857), and Lectures on the Apocalypse (1860). While these works are precritical in the sense of the hermeneutics arising in the nineteenth century, Maurice nevertheless maintained that interpreters “can never have any interest in maintaining any proposition that is physically [scientifically] unsound” (Doctrine of Sacrifice, 117–118). As Alec Vidler observed, “This is really in principle to grant to critical claims and methods all that they require in order to proceed” (Vidler, 144). Maurice’s Warburton Lectures on Hebrews is a strange book with 96 pages of text juxtaposed to a 128-Â�page “Preface.” This preface remains important, however, as it is a timely review of John Henry Newman’s then just-Â� published Essay on the Development of Doctrine. The review reveals Maurice’s agreement with Newman that theology must henceforth be done in the new historical mode, while exhibiting a vastly different criterion on the part of each for making authoritative judgments on theological or ecclesial matters. Such works as Subscription No Bondage (1835), Has the Church or the State the Power to Educate the Nation? (1839), Queen’s College London: Its Objects and Methods (1848), Learning and Working (1855, republished 1968), Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects (1855), and A Few Words on Secular and Denominational Education (1870) address issues of the day as related to the church and education. Insofar as the works enter into controversies, Maurice often exhibited a perspective that neither side of the issue could accept. Often in such works he uttered a refrain, “I doubt not that it will have occurred to many besides myself,” when, ironically, it turned out that his view was unique or, as often proved later, prophetic. In this may be found a clue for understanding his perpetual quest for “originality,” which he considered the opposite of “novelty.” Learning and Working, in any case, remains a classic in adult education.
Related to the above but having a different focus are the works arising from Maurice’s involvement in Christian socialism: Politics for the People (1848), Tracts on Christian Socialism (1850), On the Reformation of Society (1851), and Reasons for Cooperation (1851). While educational themes remained in such works, they found a pointed urgency in the revolutionary events of the time. Several major works remain important for various reasons. The Kingdom of Christ, originally presented in 1838 as a dialogue with a Quaker (in relation to the Beaconite controversy), achieved treatise form by 1842. This seminal work in ecclesiology is Maurice’s attempt to discover through a consideration of ecclesial history whether there is a universal spiritual constitution for humanity as such. Maurice realized earlier than many that Christianity was entering a post-Â�Constantinian situation where the old cultural and intellectual supports no longer obtained. By examining the traditions and religious alternatives stemming from the sixteenth-Â�century reformations (including the Tridentine), he adduces six interrelated signs that such a constitution in Christ exists: baptism, the creeds, the liturgy (forms of worship, especially for daily use), the Eucharist, the (ordained) ministry, and Holy Scripture. In this work, one of Maurice’s basic principles also first appears with greatest clarity, namely, that Christ is not only leader for the body of believers but, in fact, the very head of humanity as such (KC, I, 252–260). One implication of this is that the foundational sign, baptism, is a perpetual witness for inclusivity rather than exclusivity. In regard to Anglicanism, what Maurice had to say about these items forms a ground for the later development by others of the Chicago-Â�Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886–1888) as an ecumenical platform. But generally, the interplay among these elements led Maurice to the exhibition of his method, whereby an initial personal unity holds these elements together and thereby provides “the very voice by which God speaks to his creatures.” On this basis, he asserts, “there arose before me the idea of a Church universal, not built upon any human inventions or human faith, but upon the very nature of God himself ” (KC, I, 17). Some initially dismissed the work as being a long exposition toward a conclusion that the Church of England had been right all along (thus, by implication, justifying Maurice’s own conversion). Maurice was, however, well aware of the failings and apostasies of the historical ecclesial reality considered in general or in the English establishment. He asserted that at any given moment in history the church on any level was perfectly capable of declining into a “world” in the Johannine sense (Theological Essays, 274). Considered judgment over time regards the Kingdom of Christ as not only a pioneering study in ecclesiology but also a major contribution to ecumenical rapprochement
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and, according to its method of understanding unity as a gift, a work of enduring value to ecumenical method. The singularly important place where all these elements adduced by Maurice do, in fact, come into play is worship. Liturgy is thus central not only to Maurice’s ecclesiology, especially as it involves what liturgiologists today call “primary theology.” Here he both used and criticized his own tradition. The critique was to disown the boast of excellence in the Prayer Book tradition while at the same time affirming its only point: “I do not think we are to praise the liturgy, but to use it .╯.╯. when we do not want it for our life we may begin to talk of it as a beautiful composition: thanks be to God, it does not remind us of its own merits when it is bidding us draw nigh to Him” (The Prayer Book, 4–5). Thus neither the Bible as an authority ungrounded in liturgical enactment by the community of faith nor theology as cut loose from an ecclesial context can serve to edify or accomplish their own particular purposes. Maurice addressed the need for theological restatement in the light of the challenge presented to Christianity by the emergent contemporary world in Theological Essays, the work that brought him dismissal from his professorships. Based generally on the outline of the Nicene Creed and originally presented as a series of letters to a new-Â�style Unitarian, it starts with a consideration of God’s love. Here Maurice departed from the evangelical orthodoxy of his day that grounded theology in the fall and sin. The penultimate chapter confirms Maurice’s thoroughgoing Trinitarianism, but the final chapter, “On Eternal Life and Eternal Death,” with its radical restatement of eschatology proved problematical: “here I might stop for the Trinity is, as I believe, the ground on which the Church stands and on which Humanity stands; Prayer and Sacrifice are the means, I believe, whereby the Trinity is made known to us: in the Trinity I find the love for which I have been seeking; in Prayer and Sacrifice I hold that we may become partakers of it. But here I cannot stop” (TE, 302). He went on to indicate that eternity had nothing to do with time or duration whether as a divine quality or in reference to the state of the soul or community. Eternal life was to be in communion with God, eternal death the opposite. He added that he would not speculate on what possibilities there were in the human soul finally to resist the persistent, redeeming love of God (TE, 307, 323). This earned him not only further evangelical ire but, more generally, a suspicion of universalism. But by effectively removing from eternity any note of time extended indefinitely and from eschatology a solely future reference, Maurice challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that held to the necessity of future rewards and punishments both as an inducement for conversion and a moral rein on society. In some ways, Maurice was, of
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course, simply recovering for theology a conception of eternity reflecting that of the early church. On another level, he was a precursor in proclaiming the realized eschatology of a divine order that underlay all the confusions, distortions, and death-Â�dealing orders of the world in any era. In the controversies surrounding the Essays, H. L. Mansel indicated that the issues between Maurice and his opponents would not be resolved until someone dealt with the metaphysical questions concerning the limits of religious thought. This he did in his 1858 Bampton Lectures of that title. One of Mansel’s objects was at once to reassert the moral imperative of Christianity and defend it from an increasingly secularized philosophical critique by a kind of epistemological agnosticism, claiming that revelation disclosed only what could be accommodated by human intelligence rather than anything about divinity per se. Maurice responded with an impassioned cri de coeur in What Is Revelation? (1859) and subsequently a calmer Sequel to What Is Revelation? (1860). His own thought had based everything on the claim that God’s character was being disclosed in human history and for humanity in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Take that away and the system may be saved for the moment, but the heart will have been removed from the gospel. In the event, the issue between Maurice and Mansel was never resolved in their day. Maurice, however, continues to enjoy the greater influence on subsequent theological, ecclesiological, and ecumenical thought. Though Stephen Sykes faults him for his unsystematic approach (The Integrity of Anglicanism, 1978), other theologians as diverse as former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey (The Gospel and the Catholic Church, 1936), H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture, 1951), Schubert Ogden (“The Reformation That We Want,” Anglican Theological Review, October 1972), and David Tracey (Blessed Rage for Order, 1975) have either been directly influenced by Maurice or found him fruitful for their own theological reflections. Bibliography
Brose, Olive J. F. D. Maurice: Rebellious Conformist, 1805–1872. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1971. Christensen, Torben. The Divine Order: A Study of F. D. Maurice’s Theology. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973. Coulson, John. Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Davies, Merlin. An Introduction to the Theology of F. D. Maurice. London: SPCK, 1964. Ketchum, Robert H. Frederick Denison Maurice: An Assessment of His Contributions to Nineteenth-Â�Century English Education. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1975. McClain, Frank. Maurice: Man and Moralist. London: SPCK, 1972.
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Maurice, Frederick. The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice: Chiefly Told in His Own Letters. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884. Morris, Jeremy. F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Petersen, William H. F. D. Maurice as Historian. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1978. Ramsey, Arthur Michael. F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Sokoloff, Nancy B. Revelation as Education in the Thought of F.╯D. Maurice. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1975. Vidler, Alec R. F. D. Maurice and Company. London: SCM Press, 1966. Wolf, William, John Booty, and Owen Thomas. The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Â�Barlow, 1979. Young, David. F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
—William H. Petersen
ST. MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR (580–662).╇ St. Maximus the Confessor was perhaps the greatest theologian, as well as the most important philosopher, within the Byzantine tradition. Always canonical in the Christian East, he is increasingly being acknowledged in the West. Maximus was a Byzantine aristocrat, at one point serving as Head of the Imperial Chancellery in Constantinople under the Emperor Heraclius. In 614, however, he entered the monastery at Chrysopolis, where he became its abbot. Persian offensives and the great siege of Constantinople caused him to flee in 626 to Crete, Cyprus, and eventually to Byzantine North Africa in 630, where he completed some of his most important writing. While there, he was drawn into the Monothelite Controversy, the theological successor to the Monophysite Controversy, which had earlier split the unity of the church by claiming that Christ had only one nature. Conceding the teaching of Chalcedon that affirmed two natures, both divine and human, the monothelites maintained instead that Christ had only one will, a divine will but not a human will, a view then favored by the emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople, who both sought to restore the unity lost in the Monophysite Controversy, and for whom the monothelite view seemed like a promising compromise. Maximus strongly opposed the monothelite view as still undermining the genuine humanity of Christ and entered into a famous debate at Carthage with the former Byzantine patriarch Pyrrhus in 645. Maximus prevailed, convincing even Pyrrhus himself, and went on to Rome in 647, serving as advisor to the Lateran Council of 649, which affirmed Chalcedon against the Monothelites. For this, he was arrested by the emperor, Constans II, and brought to
Constantinople in 653 for a series of interrogations and trials. Refusing to recant, Maximus was cruelly tortured, earning him the designation of “confessor.” According to tradition, the appendages by means of which he had defied the emperor, his tongue and his right hand, were both severed from his body. After this mutilation, he was sent into exile in the Caucasus Mountains, probably in Georgia, but he died soon thereafter, most likely from the wounds that had been inflicted. In the East, Maximus played a role similar to that of Augustine in the West, synthesizing and developing the philosophical and theological wisdom of late antiquity, with the significant difference that Augustine had little access to the rich literature of the Greek patristic tradition. Maximus, in contrast, preserved what was best from the Alexandrians, retrieving important insights of Origen from their problematic context, as well as from the Cappadocians, in addition to drawing on Neo-Â�Platonism, in both its pagan (Proclus) as well as its Christian (St. Dionysius) forms. His influence is apparent throughout the work of both of his most important successors in the Christian East, St. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Gregory Palamas. In the West, he was the principal influence on John Scotus Eriugena, who translated Maximus, although this did not have the effect that might be expected, due to the subsequent neglect of Eriugena’s writings. In the twentieth century, renewed interest has come in part from an important book on Maximus by Hans Urs von Balthasar, upon whose own work Maximus had an important influence. The writings of Maximus are diverse, ranging from spiritual instruction to philosophical analysis. They are also subtle and interconnected and hence resilient to synopsis. His Ambigua brilliantly takes up some of his most important theological and philosophical issues. The MysÂ� taÂ�gogy is one of the most important reflections on liturgical symbolism ever written, and Maximus’s writings on spirituality are granted more pages in the five-Â�volume Philokalia, the great compendium of Byzantine spirituality, than those of any other writer. Principal Ideas of St. Maximus the Confessor At the center of Maximus’s thought is his view of the Incarnation of Christ as the great, pivotal, defining event of the cosmos, “the blessed end on account of which all things were constituted.” In the Incarnation, God and creation, the visible and the invisible, heaven and earth are joined together eternally through the medium of humanity, to whom God has given the vocation of a cosmic priesthood. Theosis, the divinization of the individual person through grace, becomes possible through the union of the divine and human natures, and from this it is clear why
James William McClendon Jr.
Maximus opposed the monothelite heresy with such vigor. For if Christ was not fully human, having a divine will but no human will, then the union of God and humanity was incomplete and not fully efficacious. The Incarnation also brings to perfection the very metaphysical structure of reality, since the eternal Logos incarnate in Christ is already present, partially but genuinely, in every being that is (not only every person, but each leaf and twig, every stone and every flower), each of whom has its own unrepeatable logos, all uniquely mirroring the Word of God and articulating a singular relation to Him. These logoi can be known noetically through the practice of natural contemplation (theoria physikē), a spiritual “seeing” of the logoi of creation made possible by purification (katharsis) of the soul, which leads the soul to the divine Logos that they each express, a process that is itself a step along the way to cosmic theosis, the final union of creator and creation. Bibliography
Allen, P., and N. Bronwen, eds. (2002), Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradshaw, D. (2004), Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maximus the Confessor (1955), The Ascetic Life, The Four Centuries on Charity, tr. P. Sherwood, New York: The Newman Press. ——— (n.d.), The Disputation with Pyrrhus of Our Father among the Saints, tr. J. Farrell, South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press. ——— (1981), “Four Hundred Texts on Love,” “Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God,” “Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice,” “On the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. II, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, K. Ware, London: Faber and Faber. ——— (1985), Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, tr. G. Berthold, New York: Paulist Press. ——— (1996), Maximus the Confessor, ed. and intro. A. Louth, London: Routledge. ——— (2003), On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings, tr. P. Blowers and R. Wilken, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Nichols, A. (1993), Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship, Edinburgh: T and T Clark. Thunberg, L. (1995), Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, Chicago: Open Court. Von Balthasar, H. (2003), Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, tr. B. Daley, S.J., San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
—Bruce Foltz
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JAMES WILLIAM MCCLENDON JR. (1924–2000). Baptist theologian, author, and pastor, McClendon was born on March 6, 1924, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and died October 30, 2000, in Altadena, California. McClendon is one of the most widely known Baptist theologians of the last half of the twentieth century. He was a professor of theology at various institutions, including a twelve-Â� year tenure at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He is well known for his Christian pacifism and for his close working relationship with other theologians, such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. He published several books, including a three-Â�volume Systematic Theology. Much of his writing has appeared in anthologies, such as Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People and Ties That Bind: Together in the Baptist Vision. Academic Career McClendon was born into mixed denominational heritage, as his father was Methodist and his mother was Baptist. He received a B.A. from the University of Texas (Austin) in 1947. He continued his studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he married his first wife, Marie Miles, in 1949, and received his B.D. in 1950. Throughout his time of study, he served churches in both Texas and Louisiana. After completing his B.D., he received a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1952 and a Th.D. from Southwestern in 1953. McClendon taught at GGBTS from 1954 to 1966, at which time he left to teach at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution. While at the University of San Francisco, McClendon led a group of faculty in publicizing a joint letter to President Lyndon Johnson, urging him to withdraw from the war in Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, he was removed from his teaching post at the University of San Francisco and took successive visiting professor assignments at Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, and Goucher College. In 1971, he took a teaching position at the Graduate Theological Union, Church Divinity School, Berkeley, California, and remained there until 1990. He finished out his career at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was Distinguished Scholar in Residence, until his death in 2000. He was survived by his second wife, Nancey Murphy, a professor of philosophy and theology at Fuller Seminary, and two children from his first marriage, James William III and Thomas Vernon. Theological Development and Publications During his time at Golden Gate, McClendon began to develop the conviction that violence is not an option for a Christian. Early in his career, he was influenced by the
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Anabaptists and by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, the reading of which he said was a transformative experience. Later in his career, his friendship with Stanley Hauerwas was formative, as well as his reading of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. McClendon is known for his books Biography as Theology, Systematic Theology, and Understanding Religious Convictions. In Biography as Theology, he showed that a person’s theology is inextricably intertwined with his life and that there is no better way to learn Christian convictions than by analyzing the lives of exemplary people. In Understanding Religious Convictions, he attempts to show how Christian convictions can be considered true while, on the one hand, avoiding the modernist quest for certainty and, on the other hand, avoiding relativism. His Systematic Theology was divided into three volumes: Ethics, Doctrine, and Witness. In Ethics, he attempted to show that Christian actions lead to peace. In Doctrine, he builds the entire volume around the resurrection of Christ and how this renews the world. He argues that the Christian Church must center on Christ, and therefore on the God of peace, if it is to be a Christian Church at all. In Witness, he argues that a Baptist theology of culture acknowledges the need to engage its surroundings while avoiding sectarianism on the one hand and worldliness on the other. Equal to the influence of the Anabaptists, however, is the influence of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on McClendon’s theology. McClendon thought that Wittgenstein’s “non-Â�foundational” method was exemplary for Christian theology and he creatively appropriated Wittgenstein’s insights throughout his work. Illustrative of McClendon’s Wittgensteinian nonfoundationalism is his Systematic Theology, which does not include a traditional section on prolegomena. Instead, it ends with a section on theological method, which includes two chapters on Wittgenstein. McClendon is one of the few distinctively Baptist theologians in the twentieth century to have been read widely in the academy at large. He is known for his Christian pacifism, his nonfoundational theology, and his attempts to overcome the crippling effects of modernity. McClendon’s work has been resourced in increasingly more theological proposals, particularly among evangelical and postliberal theologians. Bibliography
Broadway, Mike, ed. “Festschrift for James William McClendon, Jr.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 5–130. Hauerwas, Stanley, Nancey C. Murphy, and Mark Nation. Theology without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future
of Theological Truth: A Festschrift to Honor James William McClendon, Jr. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994. McClendon, James William, Jr. Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 1974. ———. “The Concept of Authority: A Baptist View.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 16 (1989): 101–107. ———. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1986–2000. McClendon, James William, Jr., and Brad Kallenberg. “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Christian in Philosophy.” Scottish Journal of Philosophy 51, no. 2 (1998): 131–161. McClendon, James William, Jr., and James. M. Smith. Convictions. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994.
—Bruce Riley Ashford
JOSH MCDOWELL (1939–).╇ The Christian apologist Joslin “Josh” McDowell was born in Union City, Michigan, on August 17, 1939. McDowell describes his family life as a typical “religious” environment. Many evangelicals understand this comment to mean that his community displayed a cultural familiarity of Christianity but lacked a personal acceptance of faith in Jesus or an application of the faith to daily life. Upon entering Kellogg College in Michigan, McDowell identified himself as an atheist and sought to begin a political career in politics through legal studies. McDowell’s father was an abusive alcoholic, which contributed to young McDowell’s poor self-Â�esteem. As a first-Â�year student McDowell noticed a group of cheerful and outgoing students. When he asked what was different about them they responded by attributing their joy to having Jesus in their lives. McDowell initially dismissed their claims as nonsense but later accepted a challenge by this group of Christians to intellectually examine the claims of Christianity. During his research to discredit the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus, McDowell discovered compelling historical evidence for the reliability of the Bible and the source of the Christian faith: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. McDowell writes, “In my attempt to refute Christianity, I made some startling observations about the resurrection, the testimony of history, for example. I had no idea there was so much positive historical, literary and legal testimony supporting the factuality of Christ’s resurrection.” His research eventually led to his book The Resurrection Factor, which examines the available historical evidence and eliminates each possible human explanation for the disappearance of Jesus’s body from the tomb, such as the popular swoon theory or stolen body explanation. McDowell was born again on December 19, 1959, at 8:30 p.m. when he prayed to invite Jesus Christ into his life. He subsequently enrolled in Wheaton College, Illinois, to
Donald Anderson McGavran
complete his undergraduate degree, then continued on to Talbot Theological Seminary earning his Master of Divinity degree. In 1964 McDowell joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. Since that time McDowell has traveled extensively speaking in various popular and academic settings to promote a better understanding of the Christian faith. His book, More Than a Carpenter, which became a best-Â�seller, is a simple review of the gospel accounts detailing the claims Jesus made regarding his divinity. By addressing questions about scientific and historical evidence, the validity of the Bible, and proofs of the resurrection, McDowell builds a case that makes the reader face the logical trilemma as to whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord as he claimed. McDowell is frequently critiqued for attempting to differentiate what he sees as true faith, which he describes in the terms “having a personal relationship with Christ,” from religion, which is defined as human attempts to know God. Critics charge that the basic technique is to overÂ�simplify and present a false dichotomy that sidesteps central understandings of Christianity and disagreements among the various denominations. McDowell writes, “Christianity is not a religion. Religion is when human beings try to work their way to God through good works; Christianity is God coming to men and women through Jesus Christ to offer a relationship with himself.” Yet in many ways Josh McDowell has been a trendsetter in modern apologetics, moving from historical defenses to tackle modern issues of morality and explore the avenues of fiction to present the Christian worldview in a new and vital way. McDowell has coauthored more than seventy-Â� seven books. He has spoken on more than 650 university and college campuses to more than 7 million people in 75 countries during the last 25 years.
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that country and later returned to serve as a missionary with the United Christian Missionary Society (Disciples of Christ) (1923–1955). He was educated in a liberal theological tradition of his day (Ph.D. Columbia) but later embraced a conservative evangelical theology, which he believed was the only foundation that would lead to the discipling of all the nations. Though McGavran was involved in many activities when serving in India, he came to believe that the supreme task of missions was evangelism that resulted in the multiplication of churches (church growth) among all people groups. In 1961, McGavran returned to the States to begin the Institute of Church Growth at the Northwest Christian College in Oregon, and four years later he became the founding dean of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He served at Fuller until his retirement in the 1980s. As an American educator, McGavran placed priority on evangelical theology, the application of the social sciences to understanding why and how churches grow, and the need for accurate research and the use of statistics and case studies to understand the growth and decline of churches. McGavran published numerous articles and books addressing mission theology, theory, and principles, methods, and strategies of church growth.
Principal Ideas of Donald Anderson McGavran •â•‡ God desires church growth. •â•‡ Missionary practice must be founded on a conservative evangelical theology of mission. •â•‡ Evangelism should result in the new believers becoming responsible church members (church growth). •â•‡ The supreme task of the church is the multiplication of churches among the unreached peoples of the world. Bibliography •â•‡ Priority should be placed on reaching the receptive Works by Josh McDowell More Than a Carpenter, Tyndale House Publishers, 1977. people groups with the gospel. The Resurrection Factor, Thomas Nelson, 1988. •â•‡ Missionaries should primarily work to plant Vote of Intolerance, Tyndale House Publishers, 1998. homogeneous unit churches. Why Wait? What You Need to Know about the Teen Sexuality •â•‡ People like to become Christians without crossing Crisis, Thomas Nelson, 1994. racial, linguistic, or class barriers. should evangelize and train people in •â•‡ Missionaries On Josh McDowell their contexts rather than extracting people from Joe Musser, A Skeptic’s Quest, Thomas Nelson, 1984. their social environments using a mission station —Biff Rocha methodology. •â•‡ Social research assists the church by providing accountability for church growth and a better understanding of what God is doing to grow His DONALD ANDERSON MCGAVRAN (1897–1990). church. United States. McGavran was one of the most influential •â•‡ Principles, methods, and strategies should be used missiologists of the twentieth century. Born as a third-Â� to grow churches. generation missionary in India, McGavran was raised in
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With the publication of The Bridges of God (1955), he became the father of the contemporary Church Growth Movement. Written at a time when the mission-Â�station approach to missionary activity was commonplace, this book addressed the theological, social, and practical elements of how peoples become Christians. McGavran believed that the biblical and ethical means of global evangelization was to occur not by extracting people from their social contexts but rather by discipling them among their “kith and kin.” Missionaries should primarily work to see receptive groups of people come to faith (people movements) rather than practicing a Christianization by abstraction, whereby individuals are reached and removed from their social networks. According to McGavran, God sovereignly established social networks (i.e., bridges) in people’s lives for the gospel to travel naturally across as the means to making disciples. For missionaries to erect any barriers (i.e., cultural, linguistic, class) that would hinder the natural and rapid dissemination of the gospel across such “bridges” was understood as a detriment to the growth of the Church and resulted in unhealthy churches. McGavran published How Churches Grow: New Frontiers of Missions (1959) when the influence of colonialism and theological debate negatively impacted the missionary work of the church. Advocating that “persuading men to become disciples of Christ, and responsible members of His Church, is beyond doubt a chief part of mission, and will continue so” (184), this work addressed population factors, general factors, methods, and organization in church growth. When mission was understood by many as something other than the propagation of the Christian faith, McGavran advocated that God expects the church to grow primarily through conversion growth that leads to responsible church membership. McGavran produced his magnum opus in 1970 entitled Understanding Church Growth. This work represented his most mature thinking regarding church growth theology, theory, principles, methods, and strategy. Effective Evangelism: A Theological Mandate (1988) was his last book. Because he believed the term “church growth” was already being redefined as something other than evangelism resulting in responsible church membership, McGavran began using the words “effective evangelism.” Here McGavran traced his theological journey while examining the strengths and limitation of the curricula found in theological institutions in the area of evangelism. His diagnosis was contemporary theological education was based on an outdated model that would not adequately prepare students for missionary work in the twenty-Â�first century. His prescription called for significant revisions to the curricula for the sake of equipping leaders to disciple the nations.
Bibliography McGavran, Donald A. The Bridges of God (New York: Friendship Press, 1955); How Churches Grow: New Frontiers in Mission (New York: Friendship Press, 1959); Church Growth and Christian Mission (New York and London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965); Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970); Effective Evangelism: A Theological Mandate (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1988); Moreau, A. Scott, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books and UK: Paternoster Press, 2000); Rainer, Thom. S. The Book of Church Growth: History, Theology, and Principles (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1993); Towns, Elmer L. ed., Evangelism and Church Growth: A Practical Encyclopedia (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1995). —J. D. Payne AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON (1890–1944).╇ “Sister Aimee,” an evangelist active in the 1920s and 1930s who founded the Foursquare Church, was born in Ontario, Canada, on October 9, 1890. Although she was raised with strong Christian beliefs, she became an avowed agnostic as a teenager. When she met Robert James Semple, a Pentecostal missionary from Ireland, at a revival meeting (at her father’s request), it led to her conversion and their marriage in 1908. During an evangelistic tour to China, both contracted dysentery and Robert died. Aimee recovered and gave birth to a daughter, after which she returned to the United States. After a short recuperation, Semple joined her mother in working for the Salvation Army, in New York, where she met her second husband, Harold Stewart McPherson, an accountant. They were married in May 1912. After the birth of her son, a year later, McPherson suffered from poor health once again. From her sickbed she recommitted herself to God’s plan for her, and her health improved. Thereafter, she began evangelizing and holding tent revivals, beginning on the East Coast and then traveling to other parts of the country as her popularity increased and offers came for her to speak. Her husband soon tired of her absences and in 1918 filed for divorce, citing abandonment. It was granted in 1921. McPherson spent another year as an itinerant Pentecostal preacher before settling in Los Angeles, where she built a large, domed church in the Echo Park section. Dedicated on January 1, 1923, Angelus Temple could seat 5,300 people, and McPherson filled it three times each day, seven days a week. The church evolved into a denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, noted for its community services during the Great Depression.
Mechthild of Magdeburg
McPherson was active in creating soup kitchens, free clinics, and other charitable activities; with the outbreak of World War II, she became involved in war bond rallies. Though McPherson avoided the term “Pentecostalism” during her career, it heavily influenced her faith and her services, which included speaking in tongues and faith healing. She also continued to be strongly influenced by the Salvation Army, calling her satellite churches “lighthouses” and the parent church the “Salvation Navy.” The weekly Foursquare Crusader and the monthly Bible Call spread the word. McPherson was the first woman to preach a radio sermon and, with the inauguration of KFSG (now KXOL) on February 6, 1924, the first woman granted a broadcast license. On May 18, 1926, McPherson went to Ocean Park Beach with her secretary to go swimming and disappeared. It was generally assumed at the time that she had drowned. Then on June 23, McPherson stumbled out of the Mexican desert, claiming to have been kidnapped and held for ransom. A grand jury was convened, where evidence contradicted her story, but the district attorney failed to prosecute, citing lack of evidence. McPherson continued her ministry but fell out of favor with the press and became involved in power struggles for the church with her mother and daughter, which brought on a nervous breakdown in 1930. In September 1931, McPherson married actor and musician David Hutton. It caused a backlash in the church, where tenets of Foursquare Gospel barred remarriages while the previous spouse was still alive. McPherson and Hutton divorced in March 1934. On September 27, 1944, shortly after giving a sermon, she was found dead in her hotel room in Oakland, California, of an overdose of prescription barbiturates. It is generally believed the overdose was accidental. The Foursquare Gospel Church, whose leadership was assumed by McPherson’s son, Rolf, for forty-Â�four years after her death, continues worldwide with over 2 million members, over 90 percent of whom are outside the United States. Aside from hundreds of sermons and radio scripts, McPherson authored five books—which novelist and essayist John Updike categorizes as “breathlessly candid memoirs” of a life that combined “old-Â�time religion” and twentieth-Â�century American marketing. They include Lost and Restored: The Second Coming of Christ (1921); The Service of the King (1927); This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons, and Writings (1923); and Give Me My Own God (1936). A final memoir, The Story of My Life, was published by International Correspondents’ Publications in 1951. Foursquare Publications occasionally makes these books available in new printings. —Kirk Bjornsgaard
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MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG (ca. 1207–ca. 1282). Mechthild of Magdeburg was born into a noble family near Magdeburg (in present-Â�day Saxony-Â�Anhalt in north-Â� central Germany). At the age of twelve she felt called by the Holy Spirit to a religious life. Around 1230 she entered a beguinage in Magdeburg, where she adopted an ascetic but uncloistered lifestyle and cared for the poor and the sick. In 1250, with the encouragement and support of her confessor, the Dominican Henry of Halle, Mechthild began to write down what God had revealed to her; over the course of two decades she completed books 1 through 6 of her only work, The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende Licht der Gottheit). Around 1270 Mechthild entered the nearby convent at Helfta, where a strong intellectual and pious current prevailed, attested to by the mystical writings of its residents at the time, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude (the Great) of Helfta. Frail and with failing eyesight, Mechthild of Magdeburg dictated book 7 of The Flowing Light during her final years in the cloistered environment of Helfta. Mechthild recorded The Flowing Light of the Godhead in her native Low German. A Latin translation of books 1 through 6 was completed shortly after her death, and in the fourteenth century the entire text was translated into High German, a South German dialect distinct from that of northern Germany. Subsequently the original version of Mechthild’s text was lost. Mechthild’s prose frequently is interspersed with dialogues and poems; the resulting mixture is unique in visionary literature of the period. The thematic focus of The Flowing Light is the Bride’s (or Soul’s) relationship with Christ, her Beloved. In characterizing the experience of mystical love, Mechthild employs language from the Song of Songs and recalls the tradition of bridal mysticism found in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. She draws on topoi and images associated with German courtly love (Minnesang), for example, the courtly titles accorded the personifications of the Soul and Love (Book I 1) and the adaptation of the messenger’s song (Botenlied) (Book VII 61). Mechthild’s language, intensely personal and full of evocative and occasionally erotic images, is powerful throughout the work, although the tone becomes more muted, especially in book 7. References to the sensual nature of the love relationship with the divine abound, and she often employs stylistic devices, such as repetition, that heighten the emotional impact, as in book 1 when the Soul praises God: “O you pouring God in your gift! / O you flowing God in your love! / O you burning God in your desire! / O you melting God in the union with your beloved! / O you resting God on my breasts! / Without you I cannot exist” (Tobin, Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 48). Mechthild frequently
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uses images involving liquids and light (as in the title of the work) that reinforce the ultimately seamless connection between the lovers. Her relationship with Christ is mutually desired and results in mutual benefit: He loves her because His nature is love, and through His love she becomes purer, more beautiful, and holier here on earth. Mechthild records her revelations and visions as she experiences them, without explanation or interpretation and often in dialogue form; hers is not a speculative mysticism of intellect and reason, but rather a mysticism grounded in the humanity of Christ and the primacy of the individual’s relationship with Him. Claiming that it is God Himself who speaks the words revealed in her visions, she can do nothing other than record them, serving as the medium through which the divine voice is revealed. One of only a few medieval religious women writers whose work has been preserved, the author of a distinctive and thought-Â�provoking text, and an authoritative literary voice, Mechthild has become one of the best-Â�known women of the Middle Ages. Bibliography The Latin version of the text is found in Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mechtildianae, Vol. 2: Sororis Mechtildis Lux Divinitatis (Oudin, 1877). The edition of the German manuscript in Einsiedeln, published by Father Gall Morel (Manz, 1869, reprint, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963, 1976, and 1980), has been superseded by Hans Neumann’s two-Â�volume edition of text and commentary, prepared with assistance from Gisela Vollmann-Â�Profe (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, Artemis, 1990 and 1993). Margot Schmidt produced a Modern German translation for the series Mystik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1956; second edition, Frommann-Â�Holzboog, 1995). An English translation by Christiane Mesch Galvani titled Mechthild von Magdeburg. Flowing Light of the Divinity, based on the Morel edition and edited by Susan Clark (Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 72B, Garland), was published in 1991. In 1998 Frank Tobin produced an English translation based on the Neumann edition for the Classics of Western Spirituality series. Major examinations of Mechthild’s work are: Grete Lüers, Die Sprache der deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters im Werke der Mechthild von Magdeburg, E. Reinhardt, 1926; Kurt Ruh, “Mechthild von Magdeburg,” Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik. Vol. II: Frauenmystik und Franziskanische Mystik der Frühzeit, Beck, 1993, 245–292; Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, University of Notre Dame, 1995; Bernard McGinn, “Three Great Beguine Mystics: Mechthild of Magdeburg,” The Flowering of Mysticism. Men and Women in the New
Mysticism (1200–1350), Crossroad, 1998, 222–244; Frank Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes, Camden House, 1995; Elizabeth A. Andersen, The Voices of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Peter Lang, 2000; Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. —Debra L. Stoudt PHILIPP MELANCHTHON (1497–1560).╇ Philipp Melanchthon was a key Reformation figure, often working closely with Martin Luther. The “Preceptor of Germany” was born to Georg and Barbara Reuter Schwarzerd on February 16, 1497. Precocious, he completed his B.A. at Heidelberg at age fourteen and his M.A. (Tübingen)╯at sixteen; he was appointed to a Greek professorial post at Wittenberg at only twenty-Â�one, when recommended by great-Â�uncle Johann Reuchlin, who also suggested the change from Schwarzerd to the Greek equivalent, reflecting humanism’s reawakening of interest in classical languages. Credited with primary authorship of the Augsburg Confession and the supplementary Apology, Melanchthon was a thoroughly capable writer and teacher, though his ability to work toward compromise was sometimes perceived as a lack of assertiveness—and support for allies— in leadership and diplomacy. He corresponded with fellow humanists (such as Erasmus) and Reformers (John Calvin, Thomas Müntzer), England’s Henry VIII, France’s Francis I, as well as with close friend (and later biographer) Joachim Camerarius. Melanchthon died April 19, 1560, surviving Luther by fourteen difficult years. Melanchthon’s publishing began with his studies of ancient classical linguistics and literature, including an annotated edition of the comic playwright Terence and a widely used volume on Greek grammar; his later work became the paramount example in employing Greco-Â� Roman rhetoric for biblical interpretation, especially in the appreciation of Paul’s epistolary style. He owed his skill in rhetorical analysis in part to his patron-Â�professors—and in part to his own practice, as he began to teach at such a young age. Ad fontes (“to the sources”), the call of Renaissance humanism, was taken up biblically throughout Reformation Europe, but Melanchthon went further in pointing to an inspired discipline: “Led by the (Holy) Spirit and with the support of the service to human disciplines one may reach the sacra, i.e. one may come to an understanding of the Holy Scripture” (quoted in Classen, 109–110). Like Luther, Müntzer and other Reformers, Melanchthon valued the reading of scripture as authoritative revelation of God’s character and will; this view is evident in his oft-Â�used comment that “every theologian and faithful interpreter of the heavenly doctrine must be first a
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linguist, then a dialectician, and finally a witness” (quoted in Richard, 138, and elsewhere). His legacy as an exegete also emphasizes the use of scripture in teaching. The handbooks he wrote for the study of biblical and pagan authors alike were intended to be normative, never merely descriptive guides. In theological work, Melanchthon’s selections of doctrinal topics and categories have influenced later generations of pastors and teachers: the form and function of subsequent German catechisms relay his attention to the biblical texts (so Wengert, Law and Gospel), while a study of the index to the Book of Concord (1580; see Kolb) displays the dominance of his theological methods in the Wittenberg Reformation’s second-Â�generation thought, twenty years after Melanchthon’s death. Reformation scholarship is only beginning to appreciate Melanchthon’s exegetical and ecclesiological legacy. Seldom listed among the likes of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, he does receive some attention in Lutheran contexts (Augsburg Press; Lutheran Quarterly); conference proceedings (Maag, below) celebrating the quincentennial of his birth demonstrated Melanchthon’s enduring impact across denominational and national boundaries, including his influential friendships. His conversations were not always so conciliatory, extending to disputes with Erasmus, Francesco Stancari, and Andreas Osiander, while John Agricola pressed him on the purpose of the law, with attendant charges of antinomianism and Roman influence. These debates facilitate the charting of Melanchthon’s thought, as do his conflicts with the Anabaptists: while Luther evidently remained distant from the controversy, Melanchthon added four anti-Â�Anabaptist pamphlets—the latest at the request of patron Philip of Hesse—to the strong wording of the Augsburg Confession. Though polemical in tone, these contain attempts at social stability through biblically grounded ethics, especially necessary following the standoff and subsequent slaughter at Münster in 1535. Mennonite-Â�Lutheran dialogue thus offers another promising, if surprising, context for assessing Melanchthon. Principal Ideas and Contributions •â•‡ Systematized Lutheran thought, enhancing biblical and theological instruction •â•‡ Assisted Luther in translating the Bible into German •â•‡ Addressed Lutheran thought—and his own—to difficult subjects, such as the Eucharist and free will •â•‡ Integrated a humanist approach to classical studies with biblical texts. Bibliography
Aland, Kurt. Four Reformers: Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli, trans. James L. Schaff. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1979. Classen, Carl Joachim. Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament. WUNT 128. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000.
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Kolb, Robert. “Melanchthonian Method as a Guide to Reading Confessions of Faith: The Index of the Book of Concord and Late Reformation Learning.” Church History 72.3 (September 2003): 504–524. Maag, Karin, ed. Melanchthon in Europe: His Work and Influence beyond Wittenberg (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Â�Reformation Thought Series). Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1999. Meijering, E. P. Melanchthon and Patristic Thought: The Doctrines of Christ and Grace, the Trinity and the Creation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983. Melanchthon, Philip. A Melanchthon Reader (American University Studies Series VII: Theology and Religion, Vol. 41), trans. Ralph Keen. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. ———. “Whether Christian Princes Are Obligated to Apply Physical Punishment and the Sword against the Unchristian Sect of the Anabaptists” (1536), trans. Leonard Gross. Mennonite Quarterly Review 76.3 (July 2002): 315–335. Richard, James William. Philip Melanchthon: The Protestant Preceptor of Germany, 1497–1560 (Heroes of the Reformation Series). New York: Putnam, 1898. Rogness, Michael. Philip Melanchthon: Reformer without Honor. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969. Roth, John D. “A Historical and Theological Context for Mennonite-Â�Lutheran Dialogue.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 76.3 (July 2002): 263–276. Wengert, Timothy J. Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997.
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
THOMAS MERTON (1915–1968).╇ In 1915, Thomas Merton was born in southern France to Owen and Ruth Merton. His father was a painter from New Zealand, and his mother was an American from New York. Three years later while in the United States, a brother was born, and when Thomas was six, their mother died from cancer. After that, Thomas primarily lived with his maternal grandparents in Long Island but did travel to Bermuda and Europe with his father on painting trips. They lived in France for two years, which was a trying experience for Thomas, and then in England, where they were when his father died. Owen’s death, just before Thomas’s sixteenth birthday, left Thomas and his brother orphans. Thomas stayed in England under the care of his father’s wealthy friend. Being alone had a significant effect—both positive and negative—on Merton. He had felt abandoned since his mother died, and he had lacked a steady home for years. But being alone in Europe afforded him opportunity to meander through ancient churches in England, France, and Italy, where he began to realize that what he sought
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might be provided through the cross of Christ. His spiritual search was put on halt, however, during his reckless year at Cambridge University, at which time he neglected his studies, drank too much, and fathered a child. Sent back to New York by his father’s friend, Merton lived with his grandparents and attended Columbia, where he was strongly influenced by his literature professor and others who became lifelong friends. He believed that God’s grace placed him among such people and led him to read Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, both spiritual autobiographies. Years of loneliness, his spiritual quest, and his eventual commitment to Catholicism comprise Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948. He was only thirty-Â� three when it was published, a young age for writing one’s autobiography; however, it was an immediate success and has resonated with readers for decades. The book, now a classic Christian work, was almost never written. At twenty-Â�six, Merton had entered Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist (Cistercian) monastery in Kentucky, after having given up all earthly belongings and even his writing, which he dearly loved. However, a few years later his abbot encouraged him to resume writing, a task he continued for the rest of his life. He became a voluminous writer of not only books, but also letters and journals. A major theme in many of his works is spirituality and solitude and what it means to live a contemplative life. At one point, he doubted his ability to live a solitary and quiet life as a monk, but he found the experience liberating. Years later he even moved from the main monastery to live in a more isolated location, a cinder block shed in the woods. Merton liked monasticism and living a solitary life, for they provided an opportunity to retreat from the distracting busyness of everyday life. A contemplative life allows the Christian to be alone with God, to become honest with God and self, and to discover one’s real identity. As a Christian mystic, he encouraged a life of contemplation for all Christians, not just monks. Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude, published in 1956, talks about living a spiritual life in solitude, away from the hectic life in the world. He describes the interior world of a contemplative life and the value that reflection can bring. New Seeds of Contemplation explains what contemplation is and is not and how solitude is not the same as being alone. Contemplation is a way to become more alive and attuned to God, something to strive for, both spiritually and intellectually. Merton, himself, wrestled with fame and how to reconcile his public life with the contemplative life he sought but realized that God had placed him in a position to communicate with others. Another theme in his works is how individuals live and work not in isolation but in a community of others. This
does not contradict Merton’s views of solitude or discount a monastic life but rather supports the belief that people have a responsibility for the welfare of others. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander deals with this seeming dichotomy. Thomas Merton actively wrote about justice issues such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and his opposition to the Vietnam War. He also opposed the potential use of nuclear weapons, and at the height of the Cold War—the early 1960s—he began writing letters and distributing copies to get around the abbot’s prohibition of publishing works on this topic. Merton’s later works often deal with ecumenical themes. Having developed an interest in other religions— Eastern religions and especially Buddhism—he read extensively and corresponded with monks and religious leaders worldwide. Mystics and Zen Masters examines other religions (for example, Russian Orthodox, Shakers, Buddhism) to find common ground and understand how different cultures seek communion with the spiritual. Zen and the Birds of Appetite is a collection of writing about Asian concepts of spiritual themes. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, published posthumously, is a combination of meditations and a travelogue of the last weeks of his life as he visited India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. As a monk, he reflects on spiritual matters of the sights/sites he encountered and the religious leaders he met. Merton made this trip to Bangkok to speak at a conference, and shortly after speaking, he was accidentally electrocuted in his room on December 10, 1968. Merton has more than sixty published works, many having been collected and edited posthumously, such as When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature, A Book of Hours, and A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. He kept a journal for decades, recording his thoughts on his reading and on life; The Sign of Jonas is a collection of his early journals that Merton edited himself. He corresponded with many people worldwide, including monks, authors, and followers. His nearly 15,000 letters are collected and published in five volumes and represent his correspondence with more than 2,000 people. He also wrote poetry, and The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton was published in 1946. Merton’s manuscripts, letters, journals, and other belongings are held at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. Bibliography Merton and Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice by James Harford (2006); Signs of Peace: The Interfaith Letters of Thomas Merton (Cold War Letters) by Thomas Merton and William Apel (2007); Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision by
Czesław Miłosz
Lawrence S. Cunningham; Praying with Thomas Merton by Wayne Simsic; Encounters with Merton by Henri Nouwen. —Linda Gray ALICE MEYNELL (1847–1922).╇ Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell was born on October 11, 1847, in London, but spent most of her childhood in Italy. Her father, Thomas Thompson, loved literature and was a close friend of Charles Dickens, while her mother, Christiana Weller, was a painter and a pianist of note. Her home schooling inspired Alice Thompson to try her hand at writing poetry in her adolescence. Some of her early poems were shown to John Ruskin, another family friend, who would later praise Meynell’s work as “the finest things I’ve seen or felt in modern verse.” She cultivated her “rhyming faculty” out of a deep conviction that women, no less than men, should devote themselves to intellectual work. These sincere feminist views, expressed when she was seventeen, would later appear in her journalistic and creative writing and undergo a maturing process in the light of her faith. In the poem “St. Catherine of Siena” (1902), for example, man is asked to offer “the service of his knee” so woman can accede to the “Vote.” Alice took the momentous step of becoming a Catholic while she was recuperating from poor health at Malvern in the spring of 1868. Her increasing awareness of the palpable reality of sin kindled the idea of returning to what she later described as “the hard old common path of submission and self-Â�discipline,” and eventually led her to see Rome as the guardian of the universal moral law. “Voluntary obedience,” in her view, constituted the force of literature, politics, and religion. Like “The Young Neophyte” (1875), the title character of one of her best lyrics, Alice Thompson accordingly pledged to God the “hidden wheat” of her life and art. Her vision of restoring the Catholic tradition to the mainstream of English letters began to be realized in 1877 when she married Wilfrid Meynell, a young and dynamic journalist. Merry England was launched under his editorship in 1883, and in the twelve years of its existence, the monthly magazine exerted a profound influence on Catholic culture. In addition to taking care of a rapidly growing family that would be blessed with eight children, Alice Meynell worked tirelessly by her husband’s side, performing tasks essential to sustaining various projects of this kind that gave impetus to the Catholic Literary Revival. Widely recognized as the central figure of the movement, she attracted many of the literati of the period, such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Francis Thompson, to her drawing-Â�room gatherings. Her literary stature can be measured by the fact that she was nominated twice for the office of poet laureate during her lifetime.
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Idolized as a domestic angel, saint, and muse by her contemporaries, Meynell acknowledged her leadership role obliquely in her most popular poem, “The Shepherdess” (1895). The female figure appearing there translates the biblical trope of Christ tending his flock into the poet’s guardianship of the imagination. Meynell applied the Christological analogy directly to herself in one of her last poems, “The Poet and His Book” (1923). Although an admirer of the aesthetes, she disavowed their creed of “art for art’s sake” in favor of an incarnational poetics. For her, as for the stranger faced with the mystery of Eucharistic worship in “The Unknown God” (1913), images are shadows that point beyond themselves to the Real Presence. Similarly, in “The Veneration of Images” (1902), the crucified Lord is represented as an “everyday” linguistic symbol that invites the reader to dialogue with an unspoken Word. “The poet’s imageries are noble ways,” as Meynell put it in “The Courts” (1913), “Approaches to a plot, an open shrine,” that is, in short, a figure of the epiphany. Bibliography The editions of Alice Meynell’s prose and poetry referred to are the following:
Meynell, Alice. Essays. Centenary Edition. The Newman Bookshop, 1947. ———. The Poems of Alice Meynell. Complete Edition. McÂ�Clelland and Stewart, 1923.
Lives of Meynell include:
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981. Meynell, Viola. Alice Meynell—A Memoir. Jonathan Cape, 1929.
Critical studies include:
Alexander, Calvert, SJ. The Catholic Literary Revival. The Bruce Publishing Company, 1935. Gray, F. Elizabeth. “Catholicism and Ideal Womanhood in Fin-Â� de-Â�Siècle Women’s Poetry,” English Literature in Transition 50, no. 1 (2007): 50–72. Tuell, Anne Kimball. Mrs Meynell and Her Literary Generation. E. P. Dutton, 1925.
—Dominic Manganiello
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ (1911–2003).╇ Czesław Miłosz was born in the Lithuanian village of Szetejnie to a Polish gentry family. As an engineer, his father traveled with his family all over Russia during World War I. After the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the family returned to Szetejnie where the remainder of Miłosz’s childhood was rather idyllic, inspiring his future poetry and prose and directly recalled in the 1955 novel Issa Valley. He attended school and the university in Wilno, now Vilnius. He received a Catholic education but turned away from religion for a number of years. In 1931, while still a university student,
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he cofounded a literary group called Żagary; on account of the members’ bleak political outlook and symbolism it was dubbed the school of “catastrophists.” The same year Miłosz visited Paris, where he came under the influence of a distant cousin, Oscar Milosz, a French-Â�Lithuanian writer. In 1934 he worked for the Polish Radio in Wilno but was soon transferred to Warsaw because of his leftist sympathies and willingness to allow Jews to broadcast. After the outbreak of World War II, Miłosz spent some time in Wilno until the Soviets invaded Lithuania, after which he clandestinely journeyed to Warsaw, where he remained for the duration of the war, witnessing, among others, both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of a year later. The first event elicited the poems “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” and “Campo dei Fiore,” while the failure of the second uprising influenced his move away from the catastrophism of his youth toward a more philosophical outlook. Among others, religious themes occurred in his poetry at this juncture, such as the poems on the theological virtues, “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Love,” which are contained in his 1945 collection, Ocalenie (Rescue). For a time after the war, Miłosz worked for the new communist authorities, eventually using his position and connections to escape to France in 1950. There, capitalizing on his firsthand insights of the communist regime, he wrote the penetrating study on totalitarian ideology The Captive Mind (1953). The book gained him a measure of international notoriety, simultaneously turning the country’s dominant leftist elite against him, forcing him to move to the United States, where he taught Slavic literature at Berkeley from 1960 until his retirement. He continued to write poetry and essays in Polish, and his first collection of selected poems was translated in 1973. Several years later he was awarded the Neustadt International Literary Prize, and subsequently the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Miłosz spent the last years of his life in postcommunist Poland. Considering the dramatic turns in the poet’s life, Miłosz’s confession of faith expressed to Cynthia L. Haven becomes understandable: “I believe in God out of gratitude—because I am still alive, and through an extraordinary set of circumstances” (189). Yet his poetry and writings record how this faith was tested by his sensibilities and the intellectual currents of his day. In his book of essays The Land of Ulro (1977) he first addresses the impact of science on the religious imagination. Another challenge came from his perception heightened by his long-Â�standing propensity toward natural science, that the “Natural Creation” was cruel. His various religious concerns, alternating between doubt and belief, present throughout his mature oeuvre, culminate in his last
volume of poetry, Second Space (2004), which includes “Treatise on Theology.” Besides poetic and prose treatments of religious topics, in the 1970s and 1980s Miłosz also translated a number of books from the Old Testament, including the entire book of Psalms, as well as St. Mark’s Gospel, from the original languages into Polish. Aleksander Fiut considers Miłosz a champion of Christian revelation because the poet “opposes the reduction of the individual to a passive, tragicomic puppet, of language to gibberish, and of imagination to the contemplation of waning moments.” Bibliography
Faggen, Robert, ed. Striving toward Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Fiut, Aleksander, ed. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Haven, Cynthia L., ed. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Miłosz, Czesław. New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. ———. Visions from San Francisco Bay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
—Christopher Garbowski
JOHN MILTON (1608–1674).╇ John Milton, one of the greatest poets and essayists of the English language, was born in London on December 9, 1608. His father, also John Milton, was a prosperous scrivener, composer of madrigals, and convert from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism. Little is known of his mother, Sara, except from the poet himself that she was devout and charitable. In addition to private tutoring, Milton received formal education at St. Paul’s grammar school, where he studied languages, literature, and philosophy. He composed poems in Latin and Greek and wrote English psalms during his adolescence. With the intention of becoming a priest-Â�poet like John Donne and George Herbert, Milton entered Christ’s College at Cambridge University when he was sixteen. During his seven years at Cambridge, Milton completed Baccalaureate and Master of Arts degrees, and his interest in the ministry faded as his poetic activity increased. His earliest poem with a Christian theme, the hymn On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1629), was composed during his later years at Cambridge. Two major works, his pastoral elegy Lycidas and his dramatic mask Comus, were published in 1637. The fusion of classical literature and mythology with Christian themes that dominates his later works was already present in these early poems. His tour of Europe in 1638 and 1639, including several months in
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Florence, contributed to his knowledge of literature, art, philosophy, and theology. After the English Civil War began in 1642, Milton published several pamphlets in which he championed republicanism and reform of the Protestant Church in England. Among the most significant are The Reason of Church-Â� Government (1642), attacking the corrupt hierarchy of the Anglican clergy; Areopagitica (1643), arguing against government censorship and for freedom of the press; and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (two editions, 1643–1644), asserting incompatibility as valid grounds for divorce, reflecting Milton’s own unhappy marriage to Mary Powell in 1642. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton became actively involved in the Commonwealth government, serving as Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary for Foreign Languages until 1659. These were difficult years for Milton personally. He had suffered from poor eyesight from childhood, and by 1652 his blindness, probably due to glaucoma, became complete; for the remainder of his life he dictated his writings to various amanuenses. Also in 1652, Milton’s wife, Mary, died after giving birth to their third daughter, and their only son died six weeks later. His second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock, apparently a happier union, ended after little more than a year when she died and their infant daughter died in 1658. During this period, Milton began compiling a prose theological treatise, written in Latin and entitled De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), not published until 1825. Divided into two books—“Of the Knowledge of God” and “Of the Worship of God”—De Doctrina reflects Milton’s study of both the Old and New Testaments and his conclusions concerning Christ’s teachings in the scriptures as a revelation of the divine. Milton provides the theological foundations for his epic poems. Most significantly, he rejects the Calvinist belief in predestination, arguing that God gives his creatures freedom of will and choice. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Milton was arrested and imprisoned for several weeks before being pardoned. Retiring from political life, Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in 1663 and devoted himself to his greatest poetic achievement, the epic Paradise Lost. As the epic narrator Milton reveals his ambitious plan to surpass the achievements of the classical epic poets. The poem was published in 1667 in ten books and in twelve books in the revised 1674 edition. At the beginning of books 1, 3, 7, and 9, Milton invokes not only the aid of the poetic muse but also that of the Holy Spirit, indicating his conviction that he was divinely inspired. The dramatic action begins in medias res when Satan and his fellow rebel angels awake in Hell following their defeat in the war in Heaven. In book 2 they plot their
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revenge. Book 3 shifts the scene to Heaven, where the Father and the Son discuss the fate of man, and here Milton distinguishes between divine foreknowledge and predestination, since the Father asserts that man has free will to stand or fall. The Son offers himself as ransom for man. In book 4, Adam and Eve are introduced in Paradise as Satan watches them. The archangel Raphael arrives in book 5 to warn Adam and Eve against succumbing to Satan’s temptation, narrating in book 6 the events of the war in Heaven and in book 7 describing the creation of the world. Adam recounts his creation in book 8. The climax comes in book 9, when, deceived by Satan, Eve eats the forbidden fruit, and Adam decides to fall with her. In book 10, the Son sentences them to death but promises that Satan will be crushed by their descendent, a foreshadowing of his own redemption of man. In book 11 the archangel Michael gives Adam a prophecy of the history of the world. Michael escorts Adam and Eve from Paradise in book 12. Milton’s second briefer epic Paradise Regained, published in 1671, focuses on the temptation of the incarnated Jesus by Satan in the desert. Milton views the moment when the second Adam withstands the temptation as his triumph over sin and death, prior to his Crucifixion and Resurrection. In Milton’s final major work, the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes, also published in 1671, the Old Testament hero is at the end of his story, old and blind like the poet and enchained but still strong enough to bring down the temple of the Philistines. Milton died in London on November 9 or 10, 1674, a month before his sixty-Â�sixth birthday, as a result of an attack of gout. He was buried in the church of St. Giles Cripplegate, London, where a stone in the floor near the altar rail marks his place of rest. Bibliography The standard edition by Frank Allen Patterson of The Works of John Milton was published in twenty volumes by Columbia University Press (1931–1940). The Complete Prose Works of John Milton was published in eight volumes by Yale University Press (general editor Don M. Wolfe; revised edition, 1953–1982). Other significant editions include Merritt Y. Hughes’s John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Odyssey Press, 1957; revised edition, 2003); The Complete Poems of John Milton, edited by John T. Shawcross (Anchor, revised edition 1971); and The Riverside Milton, edited by Roy Flannagan (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Among the many biographies of Milton are The Life of John Milton by his nephew Edward Phillips (1694); James Holly Handford’s John Milton, Englishman (Crown Publishers, 1949); William Riley Parker’s Milton: A Biography (two volumes; Clarendon Press, 1968); The Life of John Milton by A. N. Wilson (Oxford University
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Press, 1983); and most recently Barbara K. Lewalski’s The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Critical commentary on Milton’s poetry and prose is vast, spanning more than four hundred years. Valuable resources include A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, general editor Merritt Y. Hughes (four volumes; Columbia University Press, 1970–1975; volumes on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes are forthcoming from Duquesne University Press); and A Milton Encyclopedia, general editor William B. Hunter Jr. (nine volumes; Bucknell University Press, 1978–1983). Notable critical studies of Milton’s Christian theological doctrines are C. A. Patrides’s Milton and the Christian Tradition (Clarendon Press, 1966); William Empson’s Milton’s God (revised edition; Cambridge University Press, 1981); Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (second edition; Harvard University Press, 2003); and Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology by W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson (University of Utah Press, 1973). —Claudia M. Champagne MARCUS MINUCIUS FELIX (d. ca. 250).╇ Not much is known of Marcus Minucius Felix, who was born in the latter half of the second century in North Africa, was converted to Christianity as an adult and was a lawyer by trade. Nor is he a major figure in the Patristic pantheon, yet his investment in classical and Christian literature is much more important than might seem at first glance. In fact, in addition to being the first Latin apology, Minucius’s work “Octavius” can be considered the key literary link between the pagan and the Christian Roman culture. The “Octavius” can be viewed as a teleological, formal, and contextual replica and in a way a resolution of Cicero’s “De natura deorum,” which itself is the utmost stoical, yet skeptically inquisitive reaction to the existential crisis of the fading republic. Therefore, in order to grasp Minucius’s role more lucidly, we need to delve into historical preconditions of his thought, seeing first what the Ciceronian concern was in the religious, cultural, and philosophical context of the republic. Main Social Aspects of the Republic The struggle for republican values, rash expansion, and thus the importance of military values are the main features of the republican period. One of the consequences of this hegemony is a cultural investment through the imported slaves who translated Greek literature into Latin and can thus be considered as forerunners of Latin classicism. Although excessive expansion and militarization led to a lack of inner control and economic collapse, we can witness a cultural efflorescence throughout the general
instability as an attempt to respond to an existential crisis. Main characters in this line include Cicero, Caesar, Catullus, and Lucretius. Main Philosophical Aspects At the same time, philosophy is considered to be doctrina adventicia (imported doctrine) in Rome, even otium graecum (idle talk of Greeks). The interest for it rises around the beginning of the Middle Republic (287–133 BC) through contacts with the Hellenic world and through Macedonian wars, also because of the contextual and ritual dryness of the politicized Roman religion awakening the quest to fill the existential gaps by such philosophies as Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism. Because the political Roman conscience valued universality rather than the absolute and valued steadiness rather than eternity, religious, cultural, and philosophical content was but selectively assimilated according to these preferences to be then put into rhetorical flourish—the Roman art par excellence—as in a crucible, in order to produce convictions. The later Republic, sinking in a general mood of spiritual indifference that affected especially the middle class, saw Stoicism arise as a “secular religion” because of its dogmatic malleability and moral imperatives, and so we can say that the demand for philosophy in Rome can almost exclusively be owed to survival instinct. Cicero Now Cicero, deeply involved in politics, a nostalgic republican struggling against corruption within the government (zeal that finally led to his assassination), dearly cherished the Republic and hoped to raise it from the ashes of corruption. When defending his cause, he believed in the authority of arguments alone rather than in any preconceived theories or ideologies. With this bold feature he can justly be considered as an amateur, existential philosopher who sets the tradition of the literary and argumentative style of the Latin Fathers of the Church, where we have to deal mainly with rhetorical speech spiced with philosophy, but with no strict philosophical inquiry. Cicero believed in literature as a means to bail out the Republic, since he thought literary art would fill its spiritual vacuum; he, therefore, undertook the task of translating the pieces of Greek heritage into Latin, thus becoming a carver of this language that suffered severely from conceptual poverty. Many potential translators were scared away by this latter factor, among others Seneca and Lucretius, who couldn’t avoid neologisms while trying to be just to the Platonic and Aristotelian ontology. Structure and Meaning of the “De natura deorum” Along with “De divinitate” Cicero’s “De natura deorum” is an argumentative synthesis of the theology of the time. It
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has three books and three speakers; the first book contains an apology in favor of Epicureanism as well as its critique. The second book is an apology for Stoicism, while the third one is an extensive critique of the latter and finally an adoption of the skeptical view. Thus, the skeptical attitude is the most sensible spiritual alternative in the general exhaustion, the only valid proof being that nothing can be proved. When one finishes reading the work, one has quite an empty feeling, as though right in the middle of a play finally coming to a head, the curtain would suddenly go down and the public told to leave. One almost wants to grasp a pen and quickly jot down a happy end. And this is what Minucius did, as will be seen in a while. It can be said that Cicero, who puts himself between Stoicism and skepticism, is the Roman prototype par excellence: a pragmatist steeped in stoic tenseness subordinating all realities to the interest of the state; a pragmatist, however, whose practical sense backs up in front of the inscrutableness of the question of God that cannot be “conquered” in a usual way, a pragmatist who finally gives in, facing a big question mark. Main Aspects of the Christian Upheaval in All Respects The main traits of the political frame of the first century AD are monarchial stability and restricted freedom, while the new Christian religion acquires, because of its pretension to universality, a still stronger imperialistic gait. The young Christian community faced a double challenge: it had to parry against pagan and Jewish accusations as well as deal with its own internal problems of canonical, historical, moral, and organizational order. Main reasons for the contempt for Christianity coming from educated Romans were literary insufficiency and lack of tradition, since what a Roman primarily was interested in was formal and linguistic beauty of written works, rather than their content. The dry style of Christian authors, on the contrary, was to a certain extent a means to emphasize precisely the importance of the content. Tasks Early Christianity Faced Thus, among numerous issues that early Christianity had to deal with, there were an important literary and a conceptual problem. To be able to initiate a dialog with educated pagans, thus staving off a common accusation of being a religion for peasant louts, Christianity needed to develop a language of concepts that would enable those used to graceful Hellenic poetry and prose to accept the Christian content. We witness a particular metaphysical and philosophical poverty in the Christian West during the first centuries of Christianity due, among other reasons, to the fact that Latin Patristics had a delay of some hundred years compared to the Greek, and we also have no mystical convexity
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of the content as far as up until the fourth century. We can assume that a wish to emphasize the content made authors like Tertullian throw the Hellenic ballast overboard. Also, most of what was known as philosophy to the Latin Church Fathers was some odds and ends of sound philosophy in Gnostic disguise, a factor that could have been the cause of reticence toward philosophical conceptualization and language. Because of this commonly spread literary roughness and shallowness of Christian literature in the West, where we also have a bigger language gap between the bilingual aristocracy and a monolingual lower class, Julian the Apostate, for instance, forbade Christians to teach Roman classics, challenging them to defend Matthew and Luke against pagan classics. This led to several attempts to rewrite the gospels in the style of Homeric epic, Platonic dialogues, Attic tragedies, and Pindaric odes. Forerunners of this movement were the Hellenic Jews, having tried to pour the Bible in more acceptable literary forms. We can say that while Christian literature in the East manifests a remarkable conceptual and formal maturity, it remains a lower-class reading matter in the West, the Latin classics being the paragon of perfection. This is also the reason why Greek apologists couldn’t have any major success in the West. Minucius Felix and His “Octavius” Considering this cultural background, Minucius faced much the same problem as Cicero: find an adequate form to pass on the heritage, this time the Christian one, to his fellow compatriots. He, therefore, writes the first Latin apology addressed to educated pagans, where he consciously avoids any citations from the Bible, uses argumentative force alone, and has a very beautiful Latin. There is some confusion as to the sources of the work; four hypotheses are common. Either Cicero’s “De natura deorum” or Tertullian’s “Apologeticum” are suggested and there is a priority problem between the two. Some argue that both Tertullian and Minucius have a lost common source and finally Minucius is said to be a compiler of disparate elements. The “De natura deorum” is, however, more likely to be the source, because there are more than fifty places of evident similarities between the two works and because Tertullian’s attitude toward philosophy is in direct opposition to that of Minucius, who ranks among the “sophophile” Christian authors. Structure and Meaning of “Octavius” “Octavius” was written in memory of a deceased friend of Minucius, and it has two parts and two speakers, while Minucius himself, apart from some irrelevant remarks, takes on the role of a tacit listener. In the first part the pagan speaker argues against the Christian faith, using argumentative patterns similar to the “De natura deorum,”
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and in the second part the highly educated and knowledgeable Christian staves off the attack, which makes the pagan turn away from his mistakes. The character of the main pagan accusations is fourfold. First we have the epistemological aspect, since faith is considered by Christians as a claim against the respected universal skepticism. Second, there is a traditional aspect: Christians don’t seem to respect the religion of the fathers. Third, we have the ethical dimension, as Christians are being accused to have rotten moral habits reflected in their rituals. Finally, the cultural argument—Christians are ill-Â� chanced, uneducated louts finding support in naïve faith. The dialogue of “Octavius” is vigorous, laconic, and dense: the very form of it seems to challenge the common clichés, the pagan being rude and primitive while the Christian mild and refined. In terms of conceptual density, we can say that, although the general “common sense” argumentation is well concatenated, the work doesn’t operate within any precise systematical philosophical frame, nor does it try to draw parallels or juxtapose the Christian theology and ontology with any existing religious or philosophical theories. In this respect, we have the main common trait linking “Octavius” to the “De natura deorum” in that philosophy in both cases is being reduced to mere logic jazzed up with rhetorical gimmicks. This creates a positive attitude to philosophy as a setting for a free-Â�thinking, dynamic, and creative amateurism on one hand; on the other hand, however, the lack of a strict inquiry makes the philosophical value of the work quite low. The main philosophical insight, however, achieved by “Octavius” precisely because of such a suprasystematic argumentative approach, is that it definitely breaks with the rough and univocal style of Tertullian. In fact, it does away with the boundary between philosophy as an independent system of thought and the universal truth; according to Minucius, Christians should be genuine philosophers and genuine philosophers Christians. In the following literature “Octavius” is cited by three authors: by Lactantius, who in “Institutiones divinae” extols Minucius’s apologetic gifts; by Jerome in “De viris illustribus,” who because of difference in style doubts that Minucius was the author of two other works, “De fato” and “Contra mathematicos”; and finally by Eucherius, bishop of Lyon, who praises Minucius’s rhetorical flourish in one of his letters. The conclusion is that in comparing “De natura deorum” and “Octavius,” we can see a formal and a contextual continuity: besides numerous argumentative copies, the main point is that Cicero leads his readers to skepticism— a sensitive position to the truth—while Minucius starts off with skepticism in order to overcome the torment of the doubt of his predecessor.
Furthermore, it can be stated that both Cicero and Minucius had a similar goal, since they responded to the existential need of their time by passing on a certain heritage: by making the Greek literary tradition digestible to the educated Romans, Cicero created a formal and material frame for Minucius, who made Christianity accessible to Roman aristocracy. The “De natura deorum” and “Octavius” can thus be seen as two parts of a single work: a desperate question and its optimistic answer. Biliography
Albrecht, Michael von, Geschichte der römischen Literatur, vol. I-Â�II München 1994. Altaner, Berthold, and Alfred Stuiber, Patrologie, Freiburg-Â� Basel-Vienna, 1978. André, Jean-Â�Marie, La philosophie à Rome, Presses universitaires de France, 1977. Axelson, Bertil, Das Prioritätsproblem Tertullian—Minucius Felix, Lund, 1941. Beaujeu, Jean, Minucius Felix, Octavius, Paris, 1974. Bischofberger, Otto, “Vom alten zum neuen Heidentum—eine religionsgeschichtliche Hinführung” in: Das neue Heidentum, Freiburg, 1996. Clarke, G. W., The Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix, New York, 1974. Dumézil, Géorges, La religion romaine archaique, Paris, 1974. Fischer, J. A., Die apostolischen Väter, Darmstadt, 1964. Gerlach, Wolfgang, and Karl Bayer, M. Tulli Ciceronis De Natura Deorum, Darmstadt, 1978. Goar, R. J., Cicero and the State Religion, Amsterdam, 1978. Krause, W., Die Stellung der frühchristlichen Autoren zur heidnischen Literatur, Vienna, 1958. Latte, Kurt, Römische Religionsgeschichte, Munich, 1960. Lévy, Carlos, “Cicero Academicus (Recherches sur les Académiques et sur la philosophie cicéronienne)” in: Collection de l’École française de Rome, Rome, 1992. Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity, London, 1956. Préaux, J. G., À propos du De fato de Minucius Felix, Latomus 9, 1950. Walsch, P. G., Introduction to “The nature of the gods,” Oxford, 1997.
—Anna Djintcharadzé
JÜRGEN MOLTMANN (1926–).╇ Jürgen Moltmann is one of the most influential theologians in contemporary theology. Born April 8, 1926, in Hamburg, Germany, Moltmann grew up wanting to pursue studies in science and math. World War II altered this pursuit: he was a prisoner of war from 1945 to 1948 in Belgium and then later in Scotland and England, where he was introduced to biblical studies, ethics, and theology. Upon returning to West Germany in April 1948, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study theology. After being a pastor for five
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years in Bremen he embarked on a career in the academy: he taught at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal and then at Bonn University before accepting the prestigious position of professor of systematic theology at Tübingen University, a post he held from 1967 to 1994, until his retirement as professor emeritus. Moltmann’s ecclesial background is Reformed, but he intentionally deals with issues pertaining to all Christians. He has published an immense amount of material; an entire book has been devoted to the bibliography of Moltmann and secondary literature related to him (Wakefield, 2002). His writings can be divided into two groups: the early trilogy and the “contributions.” His first three programmatic works compose the trilogy: Theology of Hope (1967), The Crucified God (1974), and The Church in the Power of the Spirit (1977). The second group comprises six “systematic contributions to theology”: The Trinity and the Kingdom (1981), God in Creation (1985), The Way of Jesus Christ (1990), The Spirit of Life (1992), The Coming of God (1996), and Experiences in Theology (2000). The English translation of his autobiography A Broad Place: An Autobiography (2008). His writing (especially the earlier material) has an uninhibited quality. It is clear that he was unsatisfied with many of the questions and answers regarding an array of issues: the importance of history, the role of eschatology, the church’s ethical responsibility, and the lack of Trinitarian understanding in theology. This is only a partial list of topics that Moltmann attends to in his publications. Due, in part, to his wide-Â�ranging interests, scholars have identified a variety of doctrines as the center of Moltmann’s theology (see Wakefield 2002, 295–316). While virtually every major doctrine has been posited, the doctrine that is determinative for his project, from beginning to end, is hope (Neal, forthcoming). Hope is the horizon for all of human history, for creation, and for God to establish his kingdom when “all will be all in all.” To best understand how his doctrine of hope functions in his project, one must understand the weight he gives to the cross and resurrection, set in an eschatological frame. Moltmann is a key member of the generation following Barth; he sought to “move beyond” Barth’s work by focusing on eschatology and, more specifically, placing it at the center of theology. Eschatology is not the end point to theology but rather its beginning. Admittedly, this view does not sound very distinct presently, but this is due partially to his project’s influence. Especially in his early work, he reacted strongly to elements of Barth’s project, especially the dialectic of time and eternity, which Moltmann feared emptied eschatology of its vital meaning. He replaced Barth’s dialectic with another: the dialectical pattern of cross and resurrection has been, from the beginning,
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fundamental to his work. In short, the cross equals death and the present conditions of the world, while the resurrection equals life and the future, which is God’s nature. His first programmatic work, Theology of Hope, dealt with the importance of the resurrection of Jesus and the relationship it had with history, revelation, hope, and the future. In the late 1960s he turned to the cross of Christ and subsequently published The Crucified God, which explored the meaning and importance of Jesus’s death for God. As his writing ventured into many new areas, at the core he grounded his arguments in the revelation of God in the event of the cross and resurrection. This dialectical pattern, which provides hope to all, is fundamental to his approach to ecclesiology, the Trinity, creation, Christology, pneumatology, and eschatology. Moltmann’s reworking of vital Christian doctrines looms large over the contemporary landscape of Christian theology. List of References
Bauckham, Richard. (1995). The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann. Edinburgh: T and T Clark. Moltmann, Jürgen. (1967). Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Translated by James W. Leitch. London: SCM. ———. (1974). The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. London: SCM. ———. (1996). The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Neal, Ryan A. (Forthcoming). Theology as Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of Jürgen Moltmann’s Doctrine of Hope, Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Wakefield, James L. (2002). Jürgen Moltmann: A Research Bibliography. ATLA Bibliography Series. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
—Ryan Neal
LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY (1874–1942).╇ The renowned Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery was highly popular from the start. With the publication of Anne of Green Gables in 1908, a best-Â�seller, contemporary author Mark Twain commended her for having created “the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”1 Her children’s and domestic novels have been translated into seventeen languages and continue to attract the national and international reading public. Yoshiko Akamatsu discusses the popularity of Anne of Green Gables in postwar Japan, and Barbara Wachowicz discusses the impact of Montgomery in Poland, where as Elizabeth Epperly also notes, in the Second World War copies of Anne of the Island were issued to Polish soldiers to take to the front with them, and Mary Rubio speaks of the subversive political power of the musical production
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of The Blue Castle in Poland during the 1980s.2 Literary critics responded to her work with enthusiasm between 1908 and 1920, followed by silence with academe’s focus on modernism and dismissal of popular culture, and rediscovered her in the 1970s, particularly with feminist critical interest in marginalized voices since the 1980s. Prominent Canadian authors have spoken of Montgomery’s influence on them, including Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Jean Little, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart. Critics Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly regard the Prince Edward Island author as one who has had a formative influence in shaping and conveying Canadian culture.3 Moreover, as many critics recognize, the Christian vision of this Scottish-Â�Presbyterian author is central both to her fiction and to her personal vision. Notably, L. M. Montgomery’s Christian vision is complex. A study of her Christian vision must take into account both the theological doubts and hopes she articulated in her life writings as well as the consistent vision of faith, challenged by doubt, that she depicts in her fiction. In her private letters and journals, she frequently rejected major tenets of the Christian faith, such as the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of atonement, and the doctrine of hell, and she wrestled with growing doubt. At the same time, she thought of herself as a Christian, aspired to fulfill Christ’s teachings, believed the church to be “the greatest power for good in the world,” longed to understand what was at the core of early Christian faith, and was active in the church as the wife of a Presbyterian minister, Ewen Macdonald.4 Montgomery critics show an array of readings of the author’s Christian vision. Edith Katherine Smith reasons that the author may be viewed as “a passionate Puritan” who “lived between uneasy opposites,” between what Montgomery herself identified as “the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience” where “neither is strong enough wholly to control the other.”5 Frank Davey argues for an ironic reading of faith as mere youthful optimism. Shirley Foster and Judy Simons read Anne of Green Gables as a Romantic vision of redemption from the theological brutality of Puritanism. Margaret Anne Doody regards this novel as Montgomery’s move away from her Presbyterian and Calvinist faith toward a “feminine religion” emphasizing transcendence “within Nature.” Epperly argues that her work illustrates the choice “to believe in harmony and joy.” Deirdre Kessler notes “a numinous, profoundly spiritual dimension” in her work. Rosemary Ross Johnston observes that her work is grounded in “the coherence of the underframing impulse” of Christian spirituality. Gavin White invites the reader to consider the overall Christian orthodoxy of what Montgomery herself sometimes regarded as unorthodox. Mary Rubio argues that Montgomery is a subversive religious writer who “remains a thinking and judging Presbyterian
to the core, always studying herself and the wider human society to see how it might be improved.” Monika Hilder argues that the conflicted author offers in her fiction, as reflected also in her articulated hope in her life-Â�writing, a dream of orthodox Christian faith, “a sincere experiment in faith.” L. M. Montgomery’s work may be read as a work of “recovery” in which she critiques her legalistic socioÂ�religious culture in order to restore a truer portrait of Christian grace. She achieves this by recovering features of the Christian faith like humility and childlike wonder that in Western thinking are frequently gendered as “feminine” but have strong links with the Puritan vision of the “child of grace.” She critiques the commodification of children in capitalist frameworks. Montgomery creates a feminist theology that restores imagination and aesthetics as valid ways of knowing, celebrates nature as a means to spiritual experience, and honors the child and the “childlike.” In this she imagines God as “the ultimate kindred spirit.”6 Montgomery’s fiction indicates a rich exploration of Christianity. In the Anne books, Anne turns to heartfelt prayers as naturally as breathing. Readers, for example, follow Anne’s spiritual development from alienation to vivid, engaged faith. Early on, Anne insists on “feeling” her prayers and ponders aloud to Marilla an embedded admonishment to the culture: “Saying one’s prayers isn’t exactly the same thing as praying.”7 Language pointing to belief in God’s sovereignty, such as Anne’s conclusion, “I suppose Providence knows best,” Gilbert’s admonition to “trust in Providence,” or Captain Jim’s speaking of God as “a good Captain” who “gives His sailing orders .╯.╯. on a sea that ain’t mapped out on any airthly chart,” is embedded in the psyche of her world.8 Faith is the continuous thread in the tapestry, as children read the Bible in public school and the housekeeper Susan Baker devotedly reads her nightly chapter.9 Judgmental narrow-Â�mindedness is critiqued, for instance, in the narrator’s wry observation in The Blue Castle that “Valancy had long ago decided that she would rather offend God than Aunt Wellington, because God might forgive her but Aunt Wellington never would.” Moreover, in Montgomery’s stories, characters freely explore religious doubt. In Rainbow Valley, Ellen West muses, “I could have made a better world myself.” In Emily of New Moon, Emily describes Ilse as “very curious about God although she doesnt [sic] believe in Him most of the time and doesnt [sic] like to talk about Him but still wants to find out about Him.” In contrast to the religious condemnation in her society, Montgomery shows a merciful view of spiritual ignorance and human weakness that is grounded in the confidence of a knowable, loving God. As Anne assures her daughter, Nan, of God’s unconditional and infinite love, “God is ever and ever so much kinder than we are. And He knows so much better than we do what is good to give.” And as the dying Douglas
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Starr asserts in Emily of New Moon, death is a “door” into a greater experience of “the universe [which] is full of love.”10 L. M. Montgomery’s literary contributions offer a rich field of inquiry into turn-Â�of-Â�the-Â�century Canadian Presbyterianism as well as ongoing discourse about Puritanism, the Bible, perceptions of children, gender, Romanticism, Christian pantheism, ethics, imagination, feminist theology, and literature and religion. Notes
1. Montgomery, Green Gables Letters, 80. 2. Akamatsu, “Japanese Readings of Anne of Green Gables”; Wachowicz, “L. M. Montgomery: At Home in Poland”; Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Â�Grass, 3; Rubio, “Subverting the Trite,” 33–34. 3. Waterston, Kindling Spirit, 19, 22, 24; Gammel and Epperly, L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, 3–13; Atwood, “Reflection Piece—Revisiting Anne,” 222–226; Rubio, “Anne of Green Gables,” 67; Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Â�Grass, 4. 4. Montgomery, Green Gables Letters, 35, 67, 88; The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, 2:371–372, 3:33–34, 3:182–183, 3:238, 3:67, 1:196, 1:223, 1:307, 2:153, 3:133, 4:232, 5:41. 5. Smith, “Lucy Maud Montgomery: Passionate Puritan,” 4; Montgomery, The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, 1:213. 6. Davey, “The Hard-Â�Won Power of Canadian Womanhood,” 180–181; Foster and Simons, “L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables”; Doody, “Introduction,” 23; Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Â�Grass, 35; Kessler, “L. M. Montgomery and the Creation of Prince Edward Island,” 234; Johnston, “↜‘Reaching beyond the Word,’↜” 8; White, “The Religious Thought of L. M. Montgomery,” 87; Rubio, “L. M. Montgomery: Scottish-Â�Presbyterian Agency in Canadian Culture,” 100–101; Hilder, “The Ethos of Nurture: Revisiting Domesticity in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables”; “Imagining the Ultimate Kindred Spirit”; “↜‘That Unholy Tendency to Laughter.’↜” 7. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 51, 76. 8. Montgomery, Anne of the Windy Poplars, 15; Anne of Avonlea, 171; Anne’s House of Dreams, 53, 201. 9. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea, 32; Anne of Ingleside, 77. 10. Montgomery, The Blue Castle, 6; Rainbow Valley, 151; Emily of New Moon, 158; Anne of Ingleside, 151; Emily of New Moon, 17, 10.
Bibliography
Akamatsu, Yoshiko. “Japanese Readings of Anne of Green Gables.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 201–212. Atwood, Margaret. “Reflection Piece—Revisiting Anne.” In L.╯M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 222–226. Davey, Frank. “The Hard-Â�Won Power of Canadian Womanhood: Reading Anne of Green Gables Today.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and
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Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 163–182. Doody, Margaret Anne. “Introduction.” The Annotated Anne of Green Gables. Ed. Wendy E. Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, Mary E. Doody Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 9–34. Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins. The Fragrance of Sweet-Â�Grass: L. M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. “L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables.” In What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Â�Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls. Ed. Shirley Foster and Judy Simons. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. 149–171. Gammel, Irene, and Elizabeth Epperly, eds. “Introduction.” L.╯M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 3–13. Hilder, Monika B. “The Ethos of Nurture: Revisiting Domesticity in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.” In L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: A Children’s Classic at 100. Ed. Holly Virginia Blackford. Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, forthcoming. ———. “Imagining the Ultimate Kindred Spirit: The Feminist Theological Vision of L. M. Montgomery.” In Feminist Theology with a Canadian Accent: Canadian Perspectives on Contextual Feminist Theology. Ed. Mary Ann Beavis with Elaine Guillemin and Barbara Pell. Novalis, forthcoming. ———. “↜‘That Unholy Tendency to Laughter’: L. M. Montgomery’s Iconoclastic Affirmation of Faith in Anne of Green Gables.” Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 113–114 (Spring–Summer 2004): 34–55. Johnston, Rosemary Ross. “↜‘Reaching beyond the Word’: Religious Themes as ‘Deep Structure’ in the ‘Anne’ Books of L. M. Montgomery.” Canadian Children’s Literature 23, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 7–18. Kessler, Deirdre. “L. M. Montgomery and the Creation of Prince Edward Island.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 229–234. Montgomery, L. M. 1909. Anne of Avonlea. Toronto: Seal, 1984. ———. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Toronto: Seal, 1996. ———. Anne of Ingleside. 1939. Toronto: Seal, 1983. ———. Anne of the Island. 1915. Toronto: Seal, 1987. ———. Anne of the Windy Poplars. 1936. Toronto: Seal, 1983. ———. Anne’s House of Dreams. 1917. Toronto: Seal, 1983. ———. The Blue Castle. 1926. Toronto: Seal, 1988. ———. Emily of New Moon. 1923. Toronto: Seal, 1992. ———. The Green Gables Letters: From L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber. 1905–1909. Ed. Wilfrid Eggleston. 1960. Ottawa: Borealis, 2001. ———. Rainbow Valley. 1919. Toronto: Seal, 1996. ———. The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Volume I (1889–1910); Volume II (1910–1921); Volume III (1921–1929); Volume IV (1929–1935); Volume V (1935–1942). Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2004. Rubio, Mary. “Anne of Green Gables: The Architect of Adolescence.” In Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L. M.
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Hannah More
Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Ed. Mavis Reimer. Lanham, MD: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 1992. 65–82. ———. “L. M. Montgomery: Scottish-Â�Presbyterian Agency in Canadian Culture.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 89–105. ———. “Subverting the Trite: L. M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own.’↜” Canadian Children’s Literature 65 (1992): 6–39. Smith, Edith Katherine. “Lucy Maud Montgomery: Passionate Puritan.” In The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album. Compiled by Kevin McCabe. Ed. Alexandra Heilbron. Toronto: FitzÂ� henry and Whiteside, 1999. 3–7. Wachowicz, Barbara. “L. M. Montgomery: At Home in Poland.” Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 46 (1987): 7–36. Waterston, Elizabeth. Kindling Spirit: L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. White, Gavin. “The Religious Thought of L. M. Montgomery.” In Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery. Ed. Mary Henley Rubio. Guelph: Canadian Children’s Press, 1994. 84–88.
—Monika Hilder
HANNAH MORE (1745–1833).╇ Despite humble beginnings as the daughter of a village schoolmaster, Hannah More rose to become one of the most prominent women in England during her time. Her career took many forms, from educator to bluestocking and socialite, poet and playwright to political activist to social and moral reformer. She was the fourth of five daughters born to Jacob and Mary More in 1745. The More daughters were educated well in order to become teachers, and it was as a young teacher at her sister’s school that she composed her first play, The Search after Happiness (1762). Her interest in the stage took her to London in 1773, where she was introduced to such notables in the literary scene as David Garrick, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and the Bluestockings. She wrote several dramas as well as poems and ballads that launched her to celebrity status, but she became disillusioned with the stage, the fashionable world, and the fame she had gained. During this period of disillusionment, More, who had always been a committed Christian, came under the influence of Evangelicalism, or “Vital Religion,” for which she was to become its most significant spokeswoman. She saw her literary talents as a calling that she could use for the promotion of the gospel. In particular, her friends convinced her to take on two important causes: the abolition of slavery and the reformation of manners. More joined forces with William Wilberforce, campaigning for his parliamentary bill to end slavery. In January 1788 she wrote
“Slavery, A Poem” to correspond to his introduction of the bill in Parliament. More’s own acceptance among the fashionable world, her friends agreed, gave her a great advantage toward their conversion to Vital Religion. To this end, she also wrote two books that critiqued the religion of the upper class as superficial and worldly. More also wrote several conduct books aimed at the education and responsibilities of women, arguing that since the purpose of education should be the formation of a virtuous character, women should be educated equally as men. In addition to her calling to the fashionable world, More’s work also brought her among the lower classes, especially the rural poor in the area called the Mendips, where she set up twelve Sunday schools that gave children instruction in reading and religion, as well as evening schools for adults and women’s clubs that provided a network of support for women. More’s efforts among the poor also took a political turn during the years of the French Revolution when tensions in England also threatened to erupt into revolution, and she wrote Village Politics (1792) to counteract the influence of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. More’s success with Village Politics spurred her on to found the Cheap Repository (1795–1798), which published a series of tracts aimed at reforming the lower classes and inculcating patriotic, industrious, temperate, and moral lives. In her later life, she retired from the active, public life but continued to write books for the development of Christian character. She died at age eighty-Â�eight in 1833. The legacy of Hannah More’s life is difficult to assess. Although she was certainly one of the most prolific and popular writers of her day, her literary legacy has not survived as prevailing literary tastes and politics changed. However, what has survived is the legacy of her works. Her work with the abolitionists helped to begin a worldwide rejection of slavery. More’s pioneering work in the Sunday schools not only brought identifiable changes to the entire Mendips region but also became part of a larger movement toward universal education, as well the predominant method of religious education for children. More’s work in the Cheap Repository Tracts led the way for the formation of the Religious Tract Society. In fact, it can be argued that tremendous zeal and untiring work of evangelicals like Hannah More did much to turn the religious tide of the nineteenth century and to produce the character of the Victorian age. Bibliography Primary Texts by Hannah More
The Search after Happiness: A Pastoral Drama. London, 1773. The Inflexible Captive: A Tragedy. London, 1774. Sir Eldred of the Bower and The Bleeding Rock: Two Legendary Tales. Dublin, 1776.
Thomas More
Ode to Dragon, Mr. Garrick’s House Dog at Hampton. London, 1777. Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies. London, 1777. Percy: A Tragedy. London, 1778. The Fatal Falsehood: A Tragedy. London, 1779. Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible. To which is added, Sensibility, a Poem. London, 1782. Florio: A Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies; and The Bas Bleu; or, Conversation: Two Poems. Dublin, 1786. Slavery: A Poem. London, 1788. Thoughts of the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society. London, 1788. Bishop Bonner’s Ghost. Twickenham, 1789. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World by One of the Laity. London, 1791. Village Politics Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen and Day Labourers in Great Britain, by Will Chip, a Country Carpenter. London, 1793. Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, made in the National Convention of France on the Subjects of Religion and Public Education. London, 1793. Cheap Repository Tracts Published during the Year 1795. London and Bath, 1797. Cheap Repository Tracts Published during the Year 1796. London and Bath, 1797. Cheap Repository Tracts, Entertaining Moral and Religious. London, 1798. Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts. London, 1798. Cheap Repository Tracts for Sunday Reading. London, 1798. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols. London, 1799. The Works of Hannah More in Eight Volumes: Including Several Pieces Never before Published, 8 vols. London, 1801. “The White Slave Trade,” Christian Observer 3 (March 1804), 151–154. Hints toward Forming the Character of a Young Princess, 2 vols. London, 1805. Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits .╯.╯. Religion and Morals, 2 vols. London, 1808. Practical Piety; or, The Influence of Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of the Life, 2 vols. London, 1811. Christian Morals, 2 vols. London, 1813. An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St. Paul, 2 vols. London, 1815. The Works of Hannah More: A New Edition, 18 vols. London, 1818. Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic. London, 1819. The Twelfth of August; or, The Feast of Freedom. London, 1819. Cheap Repository Tracts Suited to the Present Times. London, 1819. Bible Rhymes on the Names of All the Books of the Old and New Testament with Allusions to Some of the Principal Incidents and Characters. London, 1821.
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The Spirit of Prayer by Hannah More. Selected and compiled by her from various portions exclusively on the subject in her published volumes. London, 1825. The Works of Hannah More, with Editions and Corrections, 11 vols. London, 1830. Letters of Hannah More to Zachery Macaulay, Esq., containing Notices of Lord Macaulay’s Youth, ed. Arthur Roberts. London, 1860.
Selected Secondary Sources
Bradley, Ian. The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah More. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Jones, M. G. Hannah More. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Skedd, S. J. “More, Hannah (1745–1833).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
—Jamie Crouse
THOMAS MORE (1478–1535).╇ Thomas More, also known as Sir Thomas More, was an English scholar, statesman, and martyr. Born in London, More considered becoming a monk but decided to serve Christ as a married man and professional. As a successful lawyer and politician, he gained a reputation for being fair and efficient. Eventually, More rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, the highest rank in the land underneath the king. More hailed the coronation of King Henry VIII by writing Latin poetry that brought him to the king’s attention. The two found accord in their interest in pagan literature and their sometimes severe opposition to the Lutheran Reformation. Eventually, More, a devout Roman Catholic, fell out of favor with King Henry VIII, who wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. When Henry VIII eventually detached England from the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church and divorced Catherine, he also jailed More for not supporting these actions. More’s legal skills protected him from execution until a former co-Â� worker betrayed him with false testimony. On the execution gallows, he declared himself “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” Influence A friendship with the Dutch priest Erasmus resulted in mutual admiration and encouragement of writing projects. Erasmus, dubbing More “England’s only genius,” often lamented More’s legal work taking up time that could be spent writing. Probably, More influenced Erasmus toward his lifework of biblical scholarship.
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G. Campbell Morgan
Through years of correspondence, the two exchanged ideas and critiques of their literary endeavors. In their correspondence, they referred to Utopia as “nowhere,” the literal meaning. Years later, taking the message literally, liberals have claimed More as their spokesman, with the Kremlin creating a Thomas More room in his honor. However, the body of More’s work indicates that he meant Utopia only as a satire, not an expression of his convictions. In 1520, More helped Henry VIII write his anti-Â� Lutheran work, which earned Henry the title “Defender of the Faith.” Works Two of More’s oft-Â�repeated words, merry and conscious, accurately enlighten us to the character and values of this prolific writer. Early in life, More applied his Greek knowledge to New Testament study. He then applied this knowledge and his legal prowess to polemic writings, refuting contemporaries such as Martin Luther and William Tyndale and showing his devotion to Roman Catholicism. His Latin poems show the original, experimental spirit of his writing. More’s most famous work is Utopia, written in Latin between 1515 and 1516. By 1750, the book had been published in 44 editions with translations into German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish. The first book decries the increasing immorality within Europe; the second depicts a fictitious land with religious tolerance, common property, and the rule of reason. During his year of imprisonment, More wrote A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Written in colloquial English and intended to comfort his family, the book confirms More’s devotion to Christianity, reveals a softened opposition to Lutheran beliefs, and shows his ability to glean biblical truths from pagan literature. The dialogue form reveals his interest in classics, while the religious discussions and reasoning make this a Renaissance work. Bibliography The Yale edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More (15 volumes) includes letters he wrote with charcoal to his daughter while he was in prison. For his correspondence with Erasmus, see Erasmi Epistolae by P. S. Allen. A Man for All Seasons, stage play and movie, depicts More as religiously tolerant; however, until his time in prison, he remained intolerant of faiths other than Catholicism. —Jadell Forman G. CAMPBELL MORGAN (1863–1945).╇ Famed Bible expository preacher, G. Campbell Morgan was born and
raised in Gloucestershire, England, in a pastor’s home that was first Baptist and then later Plymouth Brethren. Morgan always saw himself as interdenominational, never as nondenominational. In his twenties, feeling called to ministry, he sought ordination by the Methodists, was rejected, and turned to the Congregationalists. He was ordained in 1890, and the pattern of having both settled and itinerant ministries emerged early. From 1889 to 1901 he held four pastorates; then from 1901 to 1904 he worked for the Northfield Bible Conference (founded by D. L. Moody) as a Bible lecturer. His most influential pastoral ministries were at Westminster Chapel, London, 1904– 1917 and 1933–1945, where he achieved fame as a Bible expositor, particularly noted for his Friday night Bible classes. The years from 1919 to 1932 were spent mostly as a Bible lecturer in the United States and Canada, with a pastorate in Philadelphia included in the final three years of that time. Along with his other commitments, he occasionally held posts at Bible colleges in both England and the United States. Morgan received a basic education but did not attend college and had no formal theological training. A person of high intelligence and a committed self-Â�learner, he read extensively and gave himself especially to serious study of the Bible. In addition to the publication of volumes of his sermons, Morgan authored fifty books, many of them examples of his expository style. In contrast to the topical and single-Â�text preaching of his era, Morgan typically worked his way through whole Bible books. He began his study with firsthand work on the text and followed by consulting all the scholarly aids available. When preaching, he used a brief, from which he spoke extemporaneously. Morgan used a four-Â�step process in his Bible exposition principles. The first, “survey,” the repeated reading of a Bible book until one gets an impression of what the book is about, was followed by “condense,” thinking about the sequence of texts in the book and the outline of main points that it yielded. Next, “expand” takes the condense method and applies it to smaller segments of the book at hand, yielding a fuller outline. Finally, “dissect,” the logical extension of “expand,” leads to knowledge of the text in its details, reaching a minimum (and preachable) division of the subject matter. In all of this Morgan used a context principle, arguing that the need for seeing a passage in both its immediate context and its wider biblical context was crucial in gaining knowledge of the text under consideration. Morgan’s theology was that of a conservative evangelical, ecumenical in outlook within that broad category. He contributed to The Fundamentals (1910–1915). He accepted the Bible as the authoritative word of God, inerrant in the original autographs. While he had appreciation
John R. Mott
for the Authorized Version, the Bible translation that he preferred was the Revised Version (1881/1885). Inherent in his conviction about the Bible’s authority was his belief that the Bible has a relationship with the human condition; therefore, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the expositor’s—and preacher’s—task is to connect biblical teaching with that condition. While compatible with the revivalism that figured so prominently in his lifetime, Morgan did not personally conduct revival meetings and did not have every-Â�week evangelistic services for his congregations. His chief theological emphasis in preaching and writing was on Christology. Premillennialism and dispensationalism rounded out his basic theology. His extensive labors in both North America and Great Britain and his published works made him one of the most famous preachers in the English-Â�speaking world in the first half of the twentieth century. References
Morgan, G. Campbell. The Analysed Bible. 10 volumes. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907. Morgan, Jill. A Man of the Word: Life of G. Campbell Morgan. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1951. Wagner, Don M. The Expository Method of G. Campbell Morgan. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1952.
—William Travis
JOHN R. MOTT (1865–1955).╇ United States. Ecumenical leader and statesman John Mott was born in Livingston Manor, New York, on May 25, 1865, but raised from infancy in Postville, Iowa. Mott was active in the Methodist Episcopal Church as a youth. At age sixteen, he enrolled in the Methodist Upper Iowa College, where he developed into a distinguished orator and attended Methodist class meetings. Mott later enrolled in Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At Cornell, Mott attended an address by J. E. K. Studd, brother of one of the famous “Cambridge Seven,” who devoted their lives to foreign missions. At the meeting, Mott experienced a “second conversion” that shifted his plans from a career in law to a life devoted to worldwide ecumenical missions advocacy. At Cornell, Mott organized and led the Student Volunteer Movement and the World Student Christian Federation, an organization that helped to bring unity among Christian youth groups. Mott was the president of the local YMCA during his junior year. He later served as a national secretary of the YMCA between 1888 and 1915. Mott devoted his life to worldwide service and leadership in numerous missionary and ecumenical organizations. He played prominent roles at the Edinburgh Missionary Conference (1910), chaired the continuation
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committee of the conference, helped pioneer the efforts of the Faith and Order and Life and Work movements, and laid the groundwork for the eventual formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948. The World Council of Churches named Mott an honorary president in recognition of his ecumenical labors. Mott traveled extensively and received numerous honors and awards from nations and prominent universities. His work with the global community and humanitarian efforts among prisoners of war and orphanages earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. Other awards included France’s Legion of Honor and the Distinguished Service Medal in America. Mott was a traveling evangelist to the end, as Hopkins’s exhaustive biography explains. Memorial services around the world—including Orlando, New York, London, and Geneva—observed Mott’s death on January 31, 1955. Although he was a lifelong Methodist, Mott was buried at the National Cathedral in Washington. Nearly all of Mott’s books as well as the six-Â�volume collection of his writings focus on aspects of Christian leadership, ecumenism, evangelism, missions, youth, and the realities of a global society. Although Mott was a strong religious leader, he remained a layperson throughout his life. In Liberating the Lay Forces of Christianity (1932), Mott explains that “the most vital and fruitful periods in the history of the Christian Church have been those in which laymen have most vividly realized and most earnestly sought to discharge their responsibility to propagate the Christian faith” (1). Mott argued that the call to worldwide evangelism requires all Christians to join together in a common task. The difference between laity and the priesthood is one of degree, not kind: “Both are avowed followers of Christ with a common objective—to extend the sway of Christ over the lives and relationships of men” (8). Mott’s The Future Leadership of the Church (1908) illustrates his devotion to young people. He maintains that Christianity needs the best and brightest young people to enter into ministry, especially those of “strength of personality,” “sound physical constitution,” “mental power,” and all those “with hearts aflame with the passion of the Cross and ready to stake everything on their cause” (11). In Methodists United for Action (1939), Mott argued that the movement for unity within American Methodism was indicative of the larger mission of Christianity throughout the world: “Methodist reunion, great as it is, is not enough. Time passes. While we delay the world crumbles. If there be among Methodist leaders any who in this day question whether the Church should throw itself with abandon into this ecumenical movement, and so place its resources at the service of the larger world Christian community, let them heed these words of Christ, His only authentic words outside the four Gospels, ‘It is more
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Malcolm Muggeridge
blessed to give than to receive’↜” (115–116). John Mott’s life and writings give ample testimony to the power of this high calling. Bibliography Primary Literature
Mott, John R. Addresses and Papers. 6 vols. New York: Association Press, 1946–1947. ———. Confronting Young Men with the Living Christ. New York: Association Press, 1923. ———. The Evangelization of the World in This Generation. New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1901. ———. The Future Leadership of the Church. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909. ———. Liberating the Lay Forces of Christianity. The Ayer Lectures for 1931. New York: Macmillan, 1932. ———. Methodists United for Action. Nashville: Department of Education and Promotion, Board of Missions, Methodist Church, 1939.
Secondary Literature
Fisher, Galen M. John R. Mott: Architect of Cooperation and Unity. New York: Association, 1952. Hopkins, C. Howard. John R. Mott, 1865–1955: A Biography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979. Mackie, Robert C., et al. Layman Extraordinary: John R. Mott 1865–1955. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965. Mathews, B. John R. Mott, World Citizen. New York: Harper, 1934.
—Jeffrey W. Barbeau
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (1903–1990).╇ Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the most well-Â�known journalists of the twentieth century though today he has faded into near obscurity. His career as a communicator for over half a century cast him in the roles of prolific writer of a variety of materials (including novels, plays, biographies, diaries, reportage, book reviews, and memoirs), teacher, gossip columnist, editor, filmmaker, social commentator, television host, radio broadcaster, iconoclast, pundit, controversialist, and above all unlikely Christian convert and apologist. Muggeridge was born in Croydon, South London; his father was a Labor politician and active socialist who influenced Malcolm’s thinking in his early years. He attended Selhurst grammar school and Selwyn College, Cambridge, where friends first exposed him to Christian thought. He graduated in 1924 and from there took a teaching position at Union Christian College near Madras, India, where he remained for two years (1925–1927). His stay there was cut short by an argument with the principal and marked the beginning of a restless career in which he held a variety
of positions. In 1927 he married Katherine “Kitty” Rosalind, with whom he had three sons and a daughter; they remained happily married until his death and, indeed, she was one of the mainstays of his otherwise frequently turbulent life. He taught English at Cairo University from 1927 to 1930 and in the 1930s acted as Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, quarreling with the owners on his return because they considered his coverage too anticommunist. In 1939 Muggeridge enlisted, later becoming a major in the British Intelligence Corps, and was transferred to MI6. He was demobilized in 1946 and became a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from 1946 to 1947. He was deputy editor for the Daily Telegraph from 1950 to 1952 and managing editor of the influential magazine Punch from 1953 to his resignation in 1957, and regularly acted as a presenter for BBC’s Panorama from 1953 to 1960. Over the years he interviewed many major authors of his day, from Waugh to Wodehouse, and enjoyed sparring with opponents such as William F. Buckley Jr. To the surprise of many, Muggeridge abandoned agnosticism and became a Christian, publishing Jesus Rediscovered in 1969, which became a best-Â�seller. He was influenced by Pascal, Bonhoeffer, Tolstoy, Augustine, and Blake, among others. His spiritual odyssey brought him from strong socialist views to embrace Christianity, coming to see Christ as the Savior for mankind: “As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone, he would not; Incarnate, he could and did” (Jesus 1975). Muggeridge explained of his conversion: “It is the Cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.” He began taking strong positions on moral issues and became known affectionately as St. Mugg to his friends. Perhaps the greatest influence on Muggeridge was Mother Teresa. In Something Beautiful for God, Muggeridge renders a stirring tribute to Mother Teresa, in whose ministry he became interested after conducting a BBC interview with her that moved him to travel to Calcutta to make a television program of her work, which moved him to consider Christianity more fully. He described her as “someone for whom the world is nothing and the service of Christ everything; someone reborn out of servitude to the ego and the flesh, and into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (31). When he became a Roman Catholic in 1982, it was largely due to her influence. Muggeridge was known for his cynicism, iconoclastic wit, and realism; also for a streak of vanity and self-Â� indulgence, which he consciously renounced at the age of sixty. He was unafraid to talk of death, joking that in keeping with his broadcast career, at the end of his life he might simply hear a celestial voice from on high proclaiming
Henry Melchior Muhlenberg
the single word “cut” (Twentieth-Century Testimony). The thought of leaving this world filled him with hope rather than fear: “In the graveyard, the dust settles; in the City of God, eternity begins.” He delighted in making a trip to the Holy Land and finally died of bronchopneumonia after a long decline, thus ending what he described as his twentieth-Â�century pilgrimage. Muggeridge’s life spanned the length of the twentieth century, which he chronicled with his characteristic humor, courage, and energy, and in the end this brilliant socialist turned Christian apologist marveled at how his lifelong search for meaning finally led him to embrace the Christian faith: “I feel as though all my life I’ve been looking for an alternative scene; for the face behind the cotton wool, the flesh beneath the wax, the light beyond the arc lights, time beyond the ticking of the clocks .╯.╯. for a destiny beyond history. How extraordinary that I should have found it, not in flying up to the sun like Icarus, but in God coming down to me in the Incarnation.” A literary society was founded in his name in 2003 dedicated to publishing his work, and so in some ways his influence continues into the twenty-Â�first century. Principal Ideas of Malcolm Muggeridge •â•‡ Man’s purpose on earth is to seek God and, having found Him, to love Him and join in His purposes for His creation. •â•‡ Humility is the most important virtue and, indeed, the condition of all virtue. •â•‡ Seeking after the world’s pleasures, passions, and power is ultimately a waste of time and a distraction from our divine call and purpose. •â•‡ The idea of human progress is a fallacy; we are not making life better and better and cannot create heaven on earth. •â•‡ Contrary to the popular view of modern society, education is not the path to Paradise. •â•‡ Suffering is an integral part of the human condition, and the cross has made its enormous impression on history because that is its message. •â•‡ There is a greater reality behind the workings of the everyday world, and Christ in His mercy brings that world down to us. •â•‡ It is sometimes necessary, and even admirable, to swim against the tide of public opinion in defense of one’s faith and beliefs. •â•‡ We cannot ignore the claims of Christ—Jesus was God, or he was nothing. Bibliography
Muggeridge Ancient and Modern, BBC 1967. Jesus Rediscovered, London: Fontana, 1969.
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Something Beautiful for God, London: Collins, 1971. Chronicles of Wasted Time, 1973 (2 vol. autobiography). Jesus, the Man Who Lives, 1975. Christ and the Media, 1977 (reflects his social and spiritual concerns). Things Past, 1978 (chronological anthology of short stories and political/social commentary). A Twentieth-�Century Testimony, New York: Thomas Nelson, 1978. Like It Was, 1981 (an edition of his diaries). Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth-�Century Pilgrim, 1988.
Modern biographies include:
Ingrams, Richard, Muggeridge: The Biography, London: Harper Collins, 1995. Kuhne, Cecil, ed., Seeing through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, Ignatius Press, 2005 (collection of articles, speeches, sermons, and interviews). Wolfe, Gregory, Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995.
—M. Lee Alexander
HENRY MELCHIOR MUHLENBERG (1711–1787). Henry Muhlenberg was born on September 6, 1711, in Einbeck, Hanover, Germany, the son of Nicholas Muhlenberg, a local burgher, brewer, and cobbler, and his wife, Anna. He was educated at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, where he was influenced by Lutheran Pietism. After being ordained in the Lutheran Church in 1739, he served for a time at the church at Grosshennersdorf, in Saxony. When Muhlenberg’s patron was compelled to reduce his stipend, however, he began to look elsewhere for employment. Consequently, in 1742, he (along with a number of other Lutheran pastors) was sent by Gothilf August Francke, who had succeeded his father as leader of the Pietist mission center at Halle, to work among the scattered Lutheran immigrants in colonial Pennsylvania. At the time, Pennsylvania was perhaps the most religiously diverse gathering in Christian history, with immigrants and religious refugees drawn from numerous parts of northern, central, and eastern Europe—Quakers, Lutherans, and Anglicans, as well as settlers from the various Reformed and Anabaptist traditions. During the previous decade, large numbers of German immigrants had arrived in Pennsylvania, some Lutheran, some Reformed. A number of Dutch and Swedish Lutherans had also immigrated to the same region. In addition to Muhlenberg’s principal role as pastor to the Lutheran congregations in Philadelphia, New Hanover, and New Providence, he quickly set about gathering (and then organizing) the often self-Â�reliant, isolated, and highly diverse (that is, ethnically, ecclesiastically, theologically, linguistically, and politically) immigrants into a united visible body. In fact,
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he proved uniquely qualified for providing much-Â�needed leadership to these disparate groups living on the American frontier. Consequently, Muhlenberg is often credited—justifiably—with being the founder, or patriarch, of American Lutheranism. In August 1748, Muhlenberg presided over a gathering of six German Lutheran pastors and laymen (representing ten different congregations) in Philadelphia, out of which formed the Pennsylvania Ministerium—the first example of synodical government in American Lutheranism. A common liturgy for use in the various colonies was also agreed upon. In the following years, Muhlenberg traveled extensively by horse or boat throughout Pennsylvania and the other colonies, planting new congregations and building up existing ones; he also (in the Halle tradition) developed an extensive correspondence with pastors and church leaders throughout America. By 1771, Muhlenberg could report the existence of eighty-Â�one Lutheran congregations in and around Pennsylvania. Many others had been established in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, New York, and beyond. The Pennsylvania Ministerium remained at the center of American Lutheran government until 1781, when a new constitution, the first American Lutheran hymnal, and a new organizational structure for the church were agreed upon. Muhlenberg advanced a traditional form of Lutheranism in America, though one influenced on a number of levels by Pietism. One of his most notable achievements was the establishment of a clear sense of Lutheran denominational unity and identity, and, in so doing, countering the appeal of Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians. In 1745, he married Anna Weiser, with whom he had eleven children. Several of their children became prominent Americans. Muhlenberg died (and was buried) at Trappe, Pennsylvania, in October 1787. Bibliography M. Stoever, Memoir of the Life and Times of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1856); W. Germann, Autobiography of H. M. Muhlenberg, D.D., up to the Year 1743 (1881); William Mann, The Life and Times of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1887); William Frick, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, “Patriarch” of the Lutheran Church in America (1902); Margaret Seebach, An Eagle of the Wilderness: Henry Muhlenberg (1924); Theodore Tappert, “Henry Melchior Muhlenberg and the American Revolution,” Church History 11, no. 4 (December 1942): 284–301; Henry Muhlenberg, The Journals of Henry Muhlenberg, translated by Theodore Tappert and John Doberstein, 3 vols. (1942– 1958); Paul Wallace, The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania (1950); Leonard Riforgiato, Missionary of Moderation: Henry Melchior Muhlenberg and the Lutheran Church in
English America (1980); John Kleiner, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg—The Roots of 250 Years of Organized Lutheranism in North America (1998). —Grayson Carter GEORGE MÜLLER (1805–1898).╇ “Mr. Müller,” the Bristol Evening News stated after his death, “occupied a unique position among the philanthropists of the nineteenth century. In an age of agnosticism and materialism, he put to a practical test theories about which many men were content to hold profitless controversy.” Müller’s renown as a philanthropist, pastor, church leader, and writer rested on the radical step he took in 1830 when he and his new wife, Mary, decided they would rely on God to supply all of their material needs simply through prayer. This “practical test” eventually gained him global recognition because he applied the theory beyond his own family to his various ministry endeavors that would eventually include supporting 2,000 orphans, the Scriptural Knowledge Institute for Home and Abroad, and even foreign missionaries. More significantly, Muller recorded the details of his test in his most influential work, A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, Written by Himself. Born on September 27, 1805, in Kroppenstadt, Prussia, to a tax collector, Müller experience a youth marked by habitual dishonesty, drunkenness, “gross immortality,” theft, and time in jail. When he was fourteen, his mother died, but he continued to live a dissolute lifestyle. Despite Müller’s lack of spiritual-mindedness his father sent him to study for the Lutheran ministry at the University of Halle, with the goal of securing him a good living through an appointment in the state church. However, late in 1825, after accepting an invitation from a classmate to attend a prayer meeting, Müller experienced a spiritual conversion and abandoned his former ways. After completion of his studies at Halle, professor Friedrich August Tholuck recommended Müller become a missionary. After obtaining an exemption from Prussian military service, Müller traveled to London in early 1829 where he prepared for service with the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. However, by 1830 Müller sought a separation from the society and soon accepted a pastoral position in Teignmouth. On October 7, 1830, he married his first wife, Mary Groves (1796–1870), who was the sister of Anthony Norris Groves, an early member of the Plymouth Brethren and a missionary who also invoked prayer alone to meet his financial needs. The Müllers’ only child to survive infancy was a daughter, Lydia (1832–1890). In 1832 Müller and his ministry partner, Henry Craik, accepted a joint appointment to serve as pastors of Gideon Chapel in Bristol. They would remain partners in ministry
Edgar Young Mullins
until Craik’s death in 1866. Müller also became the leader of the Open Brethren after John Nelson Darby permanently divided the Plymouth Brethren in 1848. Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1861. Müller’s inspiration for establishing an orphan home was based on the Orphan-Â�House in Halle, founded in the eighteenth century by August Hermann Franke. Müller also intended, as he recorded in his Narrative, that “the first and primary object of the work was, (and still is:) that God might be magnified by the fact, that the orphans under my care are provided, with all they need, only by prayer and faith.” The orphan homes attracted the attention of Charles H. Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, Dwight L. Moody, Thomas Barnardo, J. Hudson Taylor, and even Charles Dickens. After four decades of successfully relying on prayer and faith in God to provide the means to feed, clothe, and house the orphans, Müller engaged in a series of preaching tours from 1875 to 1892, with his second wife, Susannah Grace Sangar (1821–1894), that took them to Europe, North America, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, India, and East Asia. Müller died in his bedroom at Orphan House No. 3, Ashley Down, Bristol, on March 10, 1898. A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, Written by Himself is an ongoing diary of his life, a financial ledger, and a spiritual autobiography of how God directed and provided for Müller. The work records how answers to prayer reveal the ongoing faithfulness of God in the minutest details of everyday life but is also intended to challenge, encourage, and promote confidence among Christians. Continually expanded from part 1, published in 1837, A Narrative eventually reached a total of six parts or books, which were republished in multiple editions and in multivolume sets. The Life of Trust (1860) is a version of A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller that was edited by Heman Lincoln Wayland and given an introduction by his father, Baptist reformer and the fourth president of Brown University, Francis Wayland. The Life of Trust was the most popular version of A Narrative in the United States because Wayland included a table of contents, discernable chapters with titles, and informational headers, all of which were absent from versions published by Müller in Great Britain. As A Narrative was expanded and updated The Life of Trust was also revised. This version of the Narrative reached a broad spectrum of American society and was even read by Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Jehovah Magnified: Addresses (1876) and Counsel to Christians (1878, 5th ed. 1887) are lesser known works that include sermons, addresses, and other miscellaneous writings by Müller.
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Bibliography A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, Written by Himself is available in a two-Â�volume set that also includes Jehovah Magnified: Addresses, from Dust and Ashes Publications, 2003. Biographical accounts of Müller’s life include: In Memoriam: An Account of the Death and Funeral Services of the Late Mr. George Müller, S. W. Partridge, no date; Arthur T. Pierson, George Müller of Bristol, Pickering and Inglis, 1899; Nancy Garton, George Müller and His Orphans, Fleming H. Revell, 1963; Roger Steer, George Müller: Delighted in God! Harold Shaw Publishers, 1981; and Carol Purves, From Prussia with Love: The George Müller Story, Day One, 2005. —Darin Lenz EDGAR YOUNG MULLINS (1860–1928).╇ One of the most significant Baptist theologians and arguably the most influential Southern Baptist theologian, Mullins was born in Mississippi to Seth Granberry and Cornelia Mullins. His father was a Baptist minister. The family moved to Texas in 1869. Mullins graduated from Texas A&M in 1879, preparing for a law career, but a revival meeting in Dallas that led to his baptism (by his father) in 1880 led him to seminary. He graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, Kentucky) in 1885 and became pastor of Harrodsburg Baptist Church (Kentucky). In 1886 he married Isla May Hawley; the couple would later have two sons, who both died young. In 1888 Mullins became pastor of Lee Street Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. Then after a brief time with the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, he became pastor of Newton Centre Baptist Church (near Boston) in 1895. In 1899 he became president, and professor of theology, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a position he held until his death. The school grew under his leadership and moved in 1926 from downtown Louisville to its current location. He exerted much influence on the Southern Baptist Convention, serving as its president from 1921 to 1924. A man with an irenic spirit, he offered a moderate path for Baptists through several formative debates. Baptist origins invoked both Calvinist and Anabaptist traditions, often at odds with one another, and Mullins argued for a moderate Calvinism. Coming to Southern Seminary after William H. Whitsitt was forced to resign his presidency because he taught that Baptists first appeared in England in the 1600s, Mullins faced Landmark Baptists, who claimed an unbroken line of tradition back to the disciples. Diplomatically, Mullins acknowledged some similarity among the selected groups but fundamentally trusted in historical scholarship. By the beginning of the twentieth century, historical-critical readings of the Bible
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had grown in American seminaries, and Fundamentalists this new scholarship which threw doubt on the authority of the Bible. Mullins acknowledged the validity of this new scholarship but also affirmed the unique place of the Bible. Though wary of creedalism, he chaired the committee that in 1925 modified the New Hampshire Confession (adding statements that draw from Mullins’s Baptist Beliefs) to form the first version of The Baptist Faith and Message, the Southern Baptist Convention’s first formal confession of faith. Possessing an ecumenical spirit, he worked with American Baptists and National Baptists and served as president of the Baptist World Alliance from 1923 to 1928. While serving as Southern Seminary’s president, Mullins was a prolific writer. The Axioms of Religion (1908) is perhaps his most well-Â�known work, later revised by another important Southern Baptist theologian, Herschel H. Hobbs. This book advances Baptist theology in the description of six axioms: the theological (God is sovereign), the religious (all persons have equal access to God), the ecclesiastical (all believers have equal privileges in the church), the moral (responsibility arises from the soul’s freedom to respond to God), the religiocivic (a free church in a free state), and the social (love your neighbor as yourself). The Christian Religion and Its Doctrinal Expression (1917) is his systematic theology. Aware of William James and Friedrich Schleiermacher and influenced by southern revivalism, Mullins emphasized the role of religious experience. Yet Mullins also emphatically claims the centrality of Christ and the revelation of the Bible. His other works include Why Is Christianity True? (1905), Baptist Beliefs (1912), Freedom and Authority in Religion (1913), the sermon collection The Life in Christ (1917), and Christianity at the Crossroads (1924), his response to the Fundamentalist-Â�Modernist debate. Bibliography
Humphreys, Fisher. “E. Y. Mullins.” In Baptist Theologians, ed. Timothy George and David Dockery. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990. McBeth, H. Leon. The Baptist Heritage. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987. Mullins, E. Y. The Axioms of Religion. Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1997. ———. The Christian Religion in Its Doctrinal Expression. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000.
—Brett Patterson
IRIS MURDOCH (1919–1999).╇ Great Britain. Iris Murdoch was a novelist, philosopher, literary critic, playwright, and poet. Her writings are characterized by rich
ethical-Â�philosophical themes, character development, and a return to the Greek philosophical notion of the good. She has been influential for many Christian writers including Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, David Tracy, and Charles Taylor. Life Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919. A precocious child, she was educated in various progressive schools in London before continuing her education at the University of Oxford, where she studied classics, ancient history, and philosophy. While at Oxford, Iris Murdoch was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1948 she became a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. Murdoch’s first published work was a critical study of the philosopher Jean-Â�Paul Sartre entitled Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). The following year she began her literary career as a novelist with the publication of her first novel, Under the Net (1954), which was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English-Â�language novels of the twentieth century. These two works began a vast, productive writing career, which saw Murdoch publish five philosophical works, twenty-Â� six novels, six plays, and two collections of poetry. In 1956 she met and married John Bayley, professor of English literature at Oxford. In 1987, Iris Murdoch was named a dame of the British Empire. At the end of her life, she suffered from Alzheimer’s. Iris Murdoch died in 1999. Her life was portrayed in the film Iris (2001). The film was based on John Bayley’s memoirs of his wife, An Elegy for Iris (1999). Novels Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-Â�six novels over the span of forty-Â�one years. Her novels are complex stories that often involve issues of morality and the conflict between good and evil. Her writing is strongly influenced by the writings of Plato, Sigmund Freud, Simone Weil, Jean-Â�Paul Sartre, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Marcel Proust. A selection of her various novels reveal Murdoch’s fascination with religion, psychology, and morality. Iris Murdoch’s debut novel, Under the Net (1954), includes as its protagonist the Sartrean hero Jack Donaghue. The Bell (1958), among Murdoch’s most successful novels, depicts an Anglican religious community in Gloucestershire. A Severed Head (1961) analyzes Freudian theories about male sexuality and desire. She once again used the Anglican Church as subject matter in her depiction of the Anglican priest Carel Fisher, who engages in devil worship in The Time of the Angels (1965). Murdoch received the prestigious Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a novel about the power
Iris Murdoch
of love and loss that featured a retired director-Â�playwright who is consumed by jealousy upon meeting his estranged ex-Â�lover after several decades apart from her. The Good Apprentice (1985) is an allegory of the battle between good and evil. Her last novel was Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), a psychological thriller. Other Writings Among Iris Murdoch’s various other publications are philosophical and critical studies, plays, and collections of poetry. Her philosophy, concerned with morality, religion, and virtue, includes a study of Sartre, The Sovereignty of the Good (1967), The Fire and the Sun (1977), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), and Existentialists and Mystics (1997). Two of her most important philosophical works concerning religion and morality are Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and The Sovereignty of the Good. A main source for understanding Murdoch’s views on religion is her work Metaphysics, in which she understands religion as a philosophical system that helps
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us understand our world and our place in it. In The Sovereignty of the Good Murdoch attempts to reinstate moral philosophy as a unifying framework for philosophy. She emphasizes external authority, a Platonic conception of the good, and the exercise of virtues. Iris Murdoch’s plays included A Severed Head (1964), The Italian Girl (1969), The Three Arrows and the Servants and the Snow (1973), The Servants (1980), Acastos (1986), and The Black Prince (1987). Her two collections of poetry were The Year of Birds (1978) and Poems by Iris Murdoch (1997). Bibliography
Antonaccio, Maria, and William Schwiker, eds. Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Bayley, John. Iris: A Memoir. London: Duckworth, 1998. Conradi, P. J. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Todd, Richard. Iris Murdoch. London: Methuen, 1984.
—John Thompson
N CLYDE NARRAMORE (1916–).╇ Dr. Clyde M. Narramore was born in 1916. In the early 1950s he and his wife Ruth founded the Narramore Christian Foundation, a Christian mental health ministry. Dr. Narramore is a licensed psychologist, a nationally known speaker, an author, and a pioneer in the field of Christian psychology. His radio broadcast, Psychology for Living, was aired nationally for many years. He is the author of twenty-Â�seven books and more than fifty booklets on topics dealing with everyday problems. He was the founding president of the Rosemead School of Psychology. In Dr. Narramore’s speaking and writing he has emphasized certain basic principles intended for pastors and others engaged in Christian counseling. The following are a few: •â•‡ Behavior Is Caused: People don’t just happen to feel or act the way they do; their behavior is caused. Certain influences have been active in an individual’s past to produce current behaviors that, as another has said, “are the fruit of a deeper root.” •â•‡ Causes of Behavior Can Be Multiple: Problems rarely have only one cause. Several or many conditions, experiences, and genetic factors usually combine to cause a person to act the way he or she does. The effective counselor will consider all causes that combine to produce maladjustment. •â•‡ Physical Causes: The Bible says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That is, people are very complex, and many things can go wrong with one’s physical functioning that can affect behavior. A counselor needs to allow for physical causes and make referrals to medical specialists. •â•‡ Spiritual Causes: People are also spiritual beings with spiritual requirements that need to be met for
sound mental health. To fully live, an individual not only needs to know Christ personally but also needs to devote his life to Christ and live in harmony with God’s Word. •â•‡ God and Satan: The effective counselor needs to help clients understand God and how He, through His Holy Spirit, can help one in his or her daily living. The counselee also needs to understand Satan and how he operates to keep people in bondage. •â•‡ Psychological Causes: Beginning at birth a child has basic emotional needs such as a sense of belonging, knowing he or she is loved, and feeling relatively free from fear and guilt. These and other emotional needs help a person become well adjusted, without which one can readily develop various maladaptive behaviors. •â•‡ Professional Training: A person who is problemladen can readily gain understanding and encouragement when a counselor listens attentively and makes a few reasonable suggestions. Serious problems, however, require serious diagnosis and treatment. A poorly trained counselor may not realize his incompetency; consequently, he should have as much training as possible. •â•‡ Counseling Is a Process, Not a Lecture: A troubled person may want a quick fix. A poorly trained counselor may want to tell a person what’s wrong and what to do, but effective counseling is a process that takes time and usually requires many sessions. •â•‡ Tests: As in medicine and other professions, the results of standardized tests can be very constructive in counseling. They provide quick, reliable insights about a person. When the findings of several tests are combined, they can point to certain conditions as well as a guide to procedures in counseling.
— 483 —
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•â•‡ Talking: When a counselee is given the opportunity to talk openly and honestly, he or she will often gain valuable insights. Sharing in this manner helps to relieve fear, pressure, pain, and frustration. The effective counselor will encourage the client to talk so that he or she can explore his feelings, get to the root causes of his or her problem, and become ready to receive help. —Dick Innes JOHN MASON NEALE (1818–1866).╇ John Mason Neale was born in London in 1818. His father, Reverend Cornelius Neale, an evangelical Anglican priest, died when John Mason Neale was five years old. Neale entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1836, graduated in 1840, was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1841, and became a priest in 1842, the year he married Sarah Norman Webster. His first position was in Sussex, but lung problems forced him to resign. He lived for three years in the Madeira Islands in the Atlantic, off the coast of Africa. Returning to Sussex in 1845, he became Warden of Sackville College, an institution founded in 1609 for the care of the aged destitute. Neale remained there until his death. Despite his outwardly uneventful life, Neale was one of the most important Anglican writers of the nineteenth century, helping to propel the Oxford Movement associated with John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey into new areas. Neale also became famous for the numerous hymns he translated from ancient Latin and Greek sources, and he was instrumental in bringing the Anglican Church into contact with Eastern Orthodoxy, especially the Russian Church. Another major contribution by Neale to the Anglican Church was the formation of the Community of St. Margaret, an Anglican sisterhood dedicated to the care of the poor. Neale’s connection to the Oxford Movement was indirect. Not one of the main figures, he influenced the nineteenth-Â�century recovery of medieval piety and ecclesiology in Anglicanism primarily through his writings on church architecture and aesthetics. In 1839 he helped form the Cambridge Camden Society, which later became the Ecclesiological Society. Through various articles and books and in his own practices, Neale fought for the Victorian Gothic renewal, claiming that the doctrinal and spiritual renewal that the Oxford Movement initiated needed to be matched in the material life of the Church. For instance, Neale was an ardent foe of the enclosed rented pews that had come into use, allowing wealthier families to remain isolated from the rest of the congregation. Unfortunately for Neale, not all Anglican clergy appreciated this neomedieval impulse, and Neale’s own
bishop inhibited him. Neale was unable to preside over the Eucharist during 1847–1860. Though kept from discharging his duties fully as a priest, he nevertheless kept writing, influencing the efforts of Victorian England to salvage and renovate many old churches. The translation of ancient hymns probably accounts for the larger part of Neale’s fame today. Three hymns in particular have made their way beyond the Anglican Church into the standard Christmas carol list: “Good King WenÂ� ceslas,” “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” Yet Neale translated dozens of hymns and published several collections of hymns in his own lifetime, bringing back into the light many ancient Latin and Greek hymns of the ancient church. Because of his interest in rescuing the rich patrimony of the early church, a patrimony that some felt had become obscured by the cultural Protestantism dominating the Established church, Neale translated more than old hymns. He translated liturgical and devotional works of the Orthodox Church, such as the Liturgy of John Chrysostom, and he communicated with the Metropolitan of Moscow as well as with the Orthodox chaplain of the Russian embassy in London. One of Neale’s most important books was his History of the Holy Eastern Church, and he also wrote several novels set in the Byzantine Empire. These include The Quay of the Disoscuri (1859), The Sea-Â�Tigers: A Tale of Medieval Nestorianism (1860), and Lucia’s Marriage: Or, the Lions of Wady-Â�Araba (1871). Neale could be considered more of an Anglo-Â�Orthodox than an Anglo-Â�Catholic, and at his funeral the senior clergymen were Orthodox. —William Jenkins WATCHMAN NEE (1903–1972).╇ Watchman Nee was born in Swatow but grew up in Foochow (the provincial capital of Fukien) in mainland China. He was converted through the preaching of female evangelist Dora Yu in a local Methodist church in 1920. Yu then encouraged him to contact Miss Margaret E. Barber (1878–1930), a former Anglican missionary who was now working independently. Barber, in turn, introduced him to Quietist literature by Madame Guyon; eschatological works by George Hawkins Pember, Robert Govett, and David Morrieson Panton; and Holiness/Keswick books by (and about) Jessie Penn-Â�Lewis, T. Austin-Â�Sparks, Andrew Murray, F. B. Meyer, Otto Stockmayer, and Charles G. Finney. Somewhat hesitatingly, Miss Barber also introduced Nee to Plymouth Brethren authors such as John Nelson Darby and C. A. Coates. These authors appealed to Nee, who contacted a publisher in London to get more literature along these lines. In accordance with Brethren ecclesiology, Nee started a house group in Shanghai in 1927
John Henry Newman
whose sole purpose was to “worship God together in the breaking of bread.” In early 1928 they were able to secure rented locations on Wen Teh Li, a small street turning east off Hardoon Road. In 1930 Nee met Charles R. Barlow, who represented the Raven-Â�Taylor faction of the Exclusive (Plymouth) Brethren. Barlow was instrumental in creating a delegation of eight individuals from Britain, the United States, and Australia who arrived in Shanghai in 1932. They were soon convinced that nothing of a theological or moral nature hindered them from “breaking the bread” together and having spiritual fellowship. One year later, Nee was invited to visit “the churches” in England, the United States, and Canada. During his visit in England, he secretly attended a meeting and participated in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in T. Austin-Â�Sparks’s church in London. After the Brethren learned that Nee had fellowshipped with believers outside of their own tradition, he was denounced for associating with “sectarianism, clericalism and other evils of which we need not speak.” After two years of correspondence between the Brethren and the Shanghai believers, there came a formal schism in 1935. However, Nee’s fascination for Brethren ecclesiology remained unchanged. He particularly valued their view that a town or village should have one church, not several. In 1938 Nee’s book Kung-Â�tso Ti Tsai-Â�ssu (Rethinking the Work) appeared. Here Nee distinguished between “the church” and “the work.” The former was autonomous and self-Â�supporting and served as a local expression of the Kingdom of God within a certain geographical area. “The work,” on the contrary, was coordinated by Nee (and some of his colaborers) who trained “apostles” to do pioneer work and establish new congregations. An abbreviated version of the book was translated into English in 1939 with the title Concerning Our Missions. An American version appeared many years later as The Normal Christian Church Life. Nee’s influence grew due to his many books and church planting efforts. Just prior to the communist takeover in 1949 there were some one thousand churches in China under his leadership. Nee’s influence was also felt outside mainland China. In 1931 he sent Simon Meek (and later Lukas Wu) to the Philippines. And in 1937 co-Â�workers K. H. Weigh and Faithful Luke started a church in Hong Kong. While Luke eventually left for Singapore to pioneer a church there, Weigh was assisted by another of Nee’s co-Â�workers, James Chen. A church was also established in Taiwan in 1947. Witness Lee was sent to join the work there in 1949. The church in Taiwan grew from a few hundred members to at least twenty thousand by 1955. In 1952 Nee was arrested by the communists and accused of “imperialist intrigue and espionage, counter-Â� revolutionary activities hostile to government policy,
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financial irregularity, and gross licentiousness.” After eighteen years in a Shanghai jail, Nee was moved to an open prison. He died two years later. Nee’s lasting legacy is his many books and pamphlets. Only one of these, The Spiritual Man, was actually authored by him. His other publications are transcripts from his oral preaching and teaching. —Geir Lie JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801–1890).╇ British. The Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman ranks among the towering Christian figures of the nineteenth century. His massive literary corpus reveals the unique talents of a gifted writer, editor, preacher, theologian, educator, and philosopher. Newman was born to John Newman, a London banker, and Jemima Fourdrinier in London, England, on February 21, 1801. He boarded at Ealing in 1808 and, under the influence of Walter Mayers, converted to evangelical Anglicanism in 1816. Newman began studies at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1817. He received a prestigious fellowship to attend Oriel College, Oxford, in 1822, and came under the influence of Edward Hawkins, whose tutelage began to shake Newman’s evangelical mind-Â�set. In June 1824 Newman was ordained a deacon and the following year was made a full clergyman. He served as vicar of St. Mary’s (Oxford’s University Church) in 1828. His youthful evangelicalism and brief foray into liberalism eventually succumbed to High Church Anglicanism, especially due to his vast reading in church history and the early Church Fathers. Newman’s first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), presages many of the historical and theological interests that permeate his subsequent writings. John Keble’s Assize Sermon (July 14, 1833), protesting state control of the Church of England, led to the formation of the Oxford Movement. Newman wrote many of the Tracts for the Times that the Oxford theologians produced, and some of his shorter writings developed into larger works that gained national attention. In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) Newman traces a “Via Media” (“Middle Way”) between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838) reformulate the doctrine at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. But Newman’s Tract 90 pushed the Oxford Movement to the brink: both the University of Oxford and numerous bishops censured his brazen conciliation of the Thirty-Â�Nine Articles with Roman Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church received John Henry Newman on October 9, 1845. Shortly thereafter, he published one of the foremost examinations of the historical development of Christian teaching. Newman’s An Essay on the
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Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) marks the culmination of years of reflection, preaching, and writing on the question of doctrinal change. He originally set out to clarify and substantiate the apostolicity of Anglicanism but ended up converting to Rome. Newman was ordained in 1847. The events of Newman’s conversion were, not surprisingly, part of a very public spectacle. He was once a leading Oxford clergyman but now established the Oratory in Birmingham as a center for converts to Roman Catholicism (1848) and briefly served as rector of the Catholic University of Dublin (1854–1858). These experiences led Newman to defend the place of theology in modern universities in one of his most enduring publications, The Idea of a University (appearing in numerous revised editions from 1852). He continued to attract controversy. He briefly edited The Rambler in 1858, but his essay “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859) led to growing suspicion of Newman by ultramontanists (including the pope) who favored the centralization of church authority in the office of the pope. Charles Kingsley’s attacks on Newman’s character led to one of the great spiritual autobiographies in Christian history, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s Apologia was a detailed examination of his religious pilgrimage from evangelicalism to Tractarianism to Roman Catholicism. The work vindicated Newman’s actions through the tumultuous Oxford years and restored his reputation in many circles. Newman’s years as a Roman Catholic writer were equally productive. He wrote works of fiction (Loss and Gain [1848]), poems (Dream of Gerontius [1866]), treatises on the authority and inspiration of the Bible, and a major work of philosophical theology on the relationship between faith and reason (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent [1870]). In 1879 Pope Leo XIII named Newman a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Newman died on August╯11, 1890, in Birmingham, England. Today, Newman continues to be the subject of extensive scholarly and popular study. The secondary literature on Newman is extensive and includes numerous biographies and scholarly monographs. His works are now available in critical editions, in foreign languages, and through numerous online sources. Popular devotion to Newman’s life and spirituality led Pope John Paul II to declare Newman “venerable” in 1991. Bibliography Primary Literature
Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro Vita Sua. Edited by Martin J. Svaglic. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1967. ———. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Edited by I. T. Ker. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1985. ———. The Idea of a University. Edited by I. T. Ker. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1976.
———. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Edited by Charles Stephen Dessain et al. 31 vols. London: Thomas Nelson, 1961–1972; Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973–1984. ———. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. Edited by Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. Edited by John Coulson. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961. ———. The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Biblical Inspiration and on Infallibility. Edited by J. Derek Holmes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1979.
Secondary Literature
Dessain, Charles Stephen. John Henry Newman. London: Thomas Nelson, 1966. Gilley, Sheridan. Newman and His Age. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990. Ker, Ian. John Henry Newman: A Biography. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1988. Martin, Brian. John Henry Newman: His Life and Work. London: Chatto and Windus, 1982. Misner, Paul. Papacy and Development: Newman and the Primacy of the Pope. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Seynaeve, J. Cardinal Newman’s Doctrine of Holy Scripture According to His Published Works and Previously Unedited Manuscripts. Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1953. Ward, Wilfrid. The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1912.
—Jeffrey W. Barbeau
SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642–1727).╇ When the Great Plague hit England (1665–1666), fear caused the closure of many establishments, including Cambridge University. This closure sent one young student back to his Lincolnshire country home. Twenty-Â�three-Â�year-Â�old Isaac Newton, who had just received his Bachelor of Arts in 1665 after being elected a scholar of Trinity, found himself in the intellectual isolation of his family home of Woolsthorpe. During the following eighteen months, young Isaac formulated principles and theories that one day would change the world. His solitary contemplation produced the foundations of the work for which he would become famous: the methods of differential and integral calculus (which he called the method of fluxions), the theory of light and color (optics), and perhaps his greatest achievement, the work in physics and celestial mechanics that led to his theory of universal gravitation. From this early work came the Optiks (1607) and the Principia (1687). Isaac Newton spent his life in three locations: Lincolnshire, Cambridge, and London. The man who compared himself as a scientist to a boy playing with pebbles on the seashore never saw the sea. He was born a premature infant at the manor of his father, a yeoman farmer who had
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died three months before. His mother, Hannah, remarried when Isaac was three and left him with his grandmother until her second husband’s death in 1653. This early abandonment by his mother may be the key to understanding Newton’s neurotic adult personality. Two years later Isaac was sent to the Free Grammar School in nearby Grantham to live with the local apothecary and to receive his education from the school master, Henry Stokes. Isaac gained a solid education and embarked on a course of self-Â�instruction from the available books. His work in the apothecary shop spawned his interest in alchemy. At age seventeen, Isaac returned home to manage the estate. Soon it was evident that he was more suited to books than farming, and his family decided that he should enter university. In 1661 he went to Cambridge as a subsizar. Although undistinguished as a scholar, his abilities gained him the attention of Isaac Barrow, the Lucasian chair of mathematics. Newton took his degree without distinction in 1665 when the Great Plague broke, sending him home. Cambridge reopened in 1667; Isaac returned and was elected a minor fellow at Trinity. He became a senior fellow in 1668, after taking his MA. In 1669 the twenty-Â�six-Â� year-Â�old succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian professor. The position allowed Newton to organize and publish the results of his optical experiments conducted during the╯plague years at home, and in 1672 he was elected to the Royal Society. In the following years as Newton’s reputation grew, he was embroiled in controversy with other scientists over his work, particularly Hooke, Leibnitz, and Flamsteed. Isaac’s squabble with Robert Hooke in an angry exchange of letters established a pattern in Newton’s dealings with criticism from fellow scientists. The fighting forced the codification of his findings for publication so that he might claim them as his own. In 1684 Newton revealed his discovery of elliptical orbits to Edmond Halley that precipitated the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the most influential book ever published in the history of science. The Principia established Newton as one of the greatest of all physical scientists. Newton’s work with light and motion was not all that had occupied him. Voluminous manuscripts show that he invested time and energy studying the Bible and theology along with his experiments in alchemy. Many of his theological manuscripts, lying hidden from the public, were auctioned in 1936. These manuscripts plus his book on prophecy posthumously published, Observations upon the Prophecies, reveal that Newton turned his intellect upon biblical exegesis in his characteristic single-Â�minded pursuit for truth. He became convinced that the scriptures, and therefore Christianity, were corrupted in the fourth and fifth centuries. Intense study of the Church Fathers
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and ancient biblical texts brought him to the conclusion that many of the Church doctrines were irrational and superstitious. Great controversy remains over Newton’s exact religious beliefs, but it is a matter of record that he could not accept the idea of the Trinity because he did not understand it; he sided with Arius against Athanasius. Newton’s rationalism, therefore, was reflected in his biblical studies. The mind that unlocked the secrets of the universe could not find a satisfactory explanation to the Trinitarian mystery. Newton’s passion was attempting to reconcile the Book of Nature with the Book of Scripture, to find mathematical proof in a type of Pythagoreanism that claimed a universal harmony for all created things; thus, his seemingly disparate fields of study are unified. Newton’s aim was to understand and explain the whole scheme of the world in which motion and light were only a part of a greater truth. However, many of his beliefs were incompatible with the tenets of the Church of England. Newton knew that he must take Holy Orders to remain at Trinity; in good conscience he could not do so. He prepared to sever his ties to Cambridge in 1673. Newton’s refusal of ordination would have upset many who would not have accepted his religious conclusions with equanimity (being proclaimed a heretic was still a punishable crime). Thanks perhaps to Barrow’s intercession, a royal decree came in the nick of time, exempting the famous Lucasian professor from Holy Orders. After the publication of the Principia, Newton became involved in public life. In 1689 he was elected to Parliament and befriended John Locke, with whom he corresponded regarding religion. After recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1693 (possibly caused by exposure to mercury in alchemy experiments), Newton sought a new position in London. In 1696 he was appointed warden of the Mint and in 1699 its master, a lucrative position that brought power and success. He was elected president of the Royal Society after the death of Hooke and reelected every year until his own death. In 1704 Newton published his second great work, the Optiks. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1708, the first scientist given this honor. Newton died in 1727 after refusing the final sacrament. He was given a state funeral with pomp and circumstance and is buried in Westminster Abbey. Isaac Newton, the abandoned fatherless child, was recorded laughing only once and enjoyed no lasting human relationship. He despised controversy and could be petty but was generous with his money. He lived a Puritanical life of cataloging many things, including his own sins. He believed in a God who created and ordered all the universe in perfect harmony, a God who participated in human affairs. But Newton, possibly the greatest biblical scholar of his time, who perceived and then named properties of nature—mass,
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example of the evangelical Anglican middle way: a Methodist who rejected Wesley’s perfectionism, a Calvinist who rejected the Genevan rigidity of some Baptists, a self-Â� described “middle-Â�man” who wanted only to be known as a “scriptural preacher.” Particularly during the 1780s, driven by remorse for the misery he had inflicted on dozens of Africans even after his conversion and deterBibliography No collected works of Isaac Newton exist, but see Isaac mined to make his repentance active, Newton cooperated Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 7 vols., fully with the reforming legislative efforts of his friend edited by Herbert W. Turnbull, John F. Scott, A. Rupert and protégé William Wilberforce, willingly offering the Hall, and Laura Tilling (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- story of his own brutality as a slave trader, both in testimony before the Privy Council and in his 1788 pamphlet sity Press, 1959–1977). For insight into Newton’s religion: J. E. McGuire and Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, as evidence in supMartin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s port of England’s abolition of slavery. Newton’s ministry and message of active repentance are summed up in what Trinity Notebook (Cambridge University Press, 1983). A very accessible recent biography is James Gleick, one of his friends called his “grand point”: “to break a hard heart, and to heal a broken heart.”1 Isaac Newton (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003). The authoritative scientific biography is Richard S. John Newton was born on July 24, 1725, in Wapping, Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- London, the only child of John Newton, master mariner sity Press, 1980). in the Mediterranean trade, and Elizabeth Scatliffe NewA concise short biography is E. N. da Costa Andrade, ton, a pious Dissenter who devoted her life to her son’s Sir Isaac Newton (New York: Macmillan, 1954). education. According to Newton, his mother steeped For excellent insight into Isaac Newton the man, see his young mind in “Scripture, catechisms, hymns, and John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and poems”; taught him to read English books by the age of Robin Wilson, Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His four; and introduced him to Latin studies at the age of Life and Works (New York: Oxford University Press, six. From his earliest days she expressed her hope that he 1988). For Newton’s scientific masterpieces, see Isaac might one day receive a ministerial vocation. Elizabeth Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Newton died in 1732 during one of her husband’s voyages. Philosophy, translated by Bernard Cohen and Anne Whit- Newton’s father soon remarried and sent his son to boardman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and ing school in Essex, where young John became an accomIsaac Newton, Optiks, Foreword by Albert Einstein (New plished reader of Latin classics. York: Dover, 1995). Newton’s formal education ended when he was eleven —Barbara Wyman and his father took him to sea on the first of a series of voyages during which he says he read Lord Shaftesbury and “learned to curse and blaspheme,” alternating between JOHN NEWTON (1725–1807).╇ John Newton’s iconic folly and tepid remorse. In 1742 Newton’s father decided story of his dramatic transformation from licentious, blas- to settle his son in business, sending him first to Kent on phemous slave trader to abolitionist minister and writer of a three-Â�day business errand, to be followed by a passage such beloved hymns as “Amazing Grace” is widely known to Jamaica to spend “some years” under the care and tuteamong evangelical Christians. Less familiar is his role lage of a Liverpool merchant friend. The three-Â�day errand as friend and adviser to Whitefield, Wesley, Venn, Wil- in Kent turned into a three-Â�week visit when young Newberforce, and others who were central to the eighteenth-Â� ton fell madly in love “almost at the first sight” with Mary century revivals that changed England’s ecclesiastical and “Polly” Catlett, thirteen years old, a distant relative and social landscape in the wave of conversions and reform daughter of one of his mother’s closest friends. Knowing movements they produced there. Both Newton’s clear but that marriage was out of the question for the time being moderate theology and his memorable hymns began to and that the ship for Jamaica had already sailed, Newton have a global impact even in his lifetime as the missionary had to deal with an angry father and his own heart’s “dark movement he helped to foster took their simple, forceful fire” of romantic frustration. truths from England to the rest of the world. This plain-Â� During the Anglo-Â�French tensions of the early 1740s spoken man of principle who chose to avoid theological Newton was impressed into service aboard HMS Harcontroversy and partisan politics of all kinds managed to wich. His father’s influence led to Newton’s appointment gain almost universal trust and respect as a quintessential as midshipman, but Newton found navy life morally and gravity, velocity—could not accept the Trinity. The man and his religion remain enigmatic. Newton’s importance in history, however, is secure. As his tomb proclaims: “Let Mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great an Ornament to the Human Race.”
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spiritually ruinous. He lost his quarterdeck status when the Harwich was ordered to the East Indies in December 1744; Newton made a reckless trip to Kent to see Polly one last time. Stripped of his position, beaten, and abandoned by friends, Newton considered suicide, and only his love of Polly restrained him. The day before the fleet’s departure from Madeira, divine Providence changed Newton’s life course. A friend awakened him by cutting down the hammock in which he was sleeping just in time for Newton to volunteer for transfer to a slaving ship bound for the Guinea coast. On this voyage, Newton writes, he became a “willing slave of every evil.” When the ship had its full human cargo and was ready to sail for the West Indies, Newton announced that he would remain in Sierra Leone on the sandy island known as the Plantanes realizing his dream of making a fortune in the slave business, working in the meantime with an established trader who liked him and the trader’s aristocratic African concubine who did not, especially when he became desperately ill. Newton subsisted on roots and on handouts from shackled slaves who pitied him. When Newton complained, his employer took him along on his slaving expeditions, keeping him chained on deck for hours at a time with little food and no shelter. Newton wrote later that by the time they returned to the Plantanes, his was the defiant spirit of a tiger broken by hunger, not of the prodigal broken by repentance, adding that during the year he spent with this couple his only comfort was a volume of Euclidean mathematics. February 1747 brought Newton’s second dramatic experience of Providential intervention. Now working for another Plantanes-Â�based trader, Newton had written his father pleading for help, and his father had commissioned the master of the Greyhound, a vessel in the African trade, to rescue him. Just when this captain had given up on finding Newton and was sailing on along the coast, one of Newton’s friends happened to see the ship and signaled it with a smoky fire just as it was going out of sight. Taken on board and thus rescued at the last moment, Newton soon earned notoriety as a blasphemous modern Jonah who brought a curse on any vessel that transported him, but a calamitous storm on the ship’s way home brought Newton to a long-Â�avoided spiritual turning point. On March 1, 1748, Newton thoughtlessly picked up Stanhope’s translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ “to pass away the time” and found his conscience haunted by the question, “what if these things should be true?” The next day as the storm broke over the ship, Newton prayed an inarticulate prayer of terror but not yet of repentance. As he took his turns at the pumps and the helm, one question occupied his mind: how does one come to belief? The storm gradually played itself out,
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but the shattered ship drifted west, away from land, the twelve surviving crew members living on half a salted cod divided among them each day, until the wind shifted and the vessel finally made landfall in Ireland a month after the storm. Newton had begun his return to God, though he writes that he was then an active seeker rather than a believer, convinced that the Gospel is truth and sorry for his gross sins but unable to embrace that conviction in a heartfelt way and apprehend his innate sinfulness. Newton wrote to his father from Londonderry, where the ship was being refitted, to let him know that he was still alive, and his father, newly appointed governor of York Fort in Hudson’s Bay, consented to his son’s marriage and offered to take him to Canada. Newton delayed his stay in Ireland and never saw his father again. Newton wrote to Polly to “put the question,” and she promised to wait for him while he made another voyage to Sierra Leone as first mate on the slave ship Brownlow. Newton writes that on this journey he initially forgot most of his moral resolutions until a violent fever brought him to himself, and for the first time he “was enabled to hope and believe in a crucified Saviour” and experienced deliverance from the weight of his sins, a conversion that brought no remorse about his involvement in the slave trade, however. On February 1, 1750, back home again, Newton married Polly after waiting more than seven years. In the summer of 1750 Newton began another slaving expedition, this time as master of the Duke of Argyle. He treated his crew humanely and officiated at the services he required them to attend twice each Sunday of the voyage. He wrote to Polly two or three times a week; resumed his study of Latin, modern classics, and Scripture; and found shipboard life conducive to the practice of contemplative Christianity. Throughout this voyage and the next, as master of the African, Newton felt no scruples about slave trading, seeing it as the work marked out for him by Providence, though he admits to his horror at slavery’s brutal accoutrements and his prayer that in God’s own time he would receive a more humane calling, one that would keep him in regular communion with other Christians, perhaps a reflection of his new friendship with Alexander Clunie, whom he met when the African called at St. Kitts. Clunie, a fellow ship master and believer, convinced Newton of the importance of the fellowship of believers and of his security in the covenant of grace. In 1790 their long-Â� term friendship ultimately resulted in the publication of The Christian Correspondent, a collection of letters they had exchanged over the years. A sudden physical collapse prevented Newton from undertaking a fourth slaving voyage, but in 1755 he began work as surveyor of tides in Liverpool, inspecting import cargoes and checking for smuggled goods. This position
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gave him time to preach on occasion and to establish himself as a lay leader among the evangelicals of the Liverpool and West Yorkshire region with the friendly support of George Whitefield, John Wesley, Henry Venn, and others. Polly encouraged him to explore ordination, and Newton did so, always within the Church of England, believing that while the easier path of ministry in a Dissenter church might allow him to be useful—an important watchword for Newton—it would also limit his credibility and effectiveness. Finally in 1764, after years of rejected applications for ordination, Newton was proposed for curacy at Olney, Buckinghamshire, thanks to the intervention of two powerful evangelicals, the Earl of Dartmouth and the wealthy merchant John Thornton. Newton was ordained as deacon that same year and as priest in 1765. During his sixteen-Â�year incumbency at Olney he demonstrated his great gift for spiritual and emotional empathy as well as sound biblical teaching, ministering most notably to the troubled poet William Cowper, with whom he collaborated on what came to be called the Olney hymns, and to the Reverend Thomas Scott, a fiercely antievangelical Socinian when Newton first met him. Newton patiently and gently won Scott over, and Scott eventually succeeded him at Olney. Some in Olney resisted Newton’s ministry, however, and in 1779 John Thornton presented Newton to the ministry at St. Mary Woolnoth, London, an appointment that was debated in the House of Lords and resolved in Thornton’s favor. Newton preached his first sermon there in December of that year, soon establishing the routine of preaching twice on Sunday and presenting a “lecture” on Wednesday morning. His particular concern at St. Mary Woolnoth was the spiritual indifference of his wealthy congregation, but his counsel was also essential to William Wilberforce’s work for the abolitionist cause in the 1780s, as it was Newton who convinced Wilberforce of his calling to redemptive usefulness in English politics rather than to a preaching ministry. By all accounts, Newton himself was not a great preacher, but his empathetic spirit made him an extremely effective pastor, and St. Mary Woolnoth grew under his leadership, attracting large numbers of regular members as well as visitors. In 1783 Newton established a discussion circle of leading evangelical clergy and laity that came to be known as the Eclectic Society and ultimately gave birth to both the Church Missionary Society and the Christian Observer magazine. Newton remained active in the ministry of St. Mary Woolnoth for the rest of his life, continuing to preach until the year before his death despite his failing eyesight, hearing, and memory, famously asking, “What! Shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?” Polly died in 1790 after a battle with breast cancer. Newton followed
her in death on December 21, 1807, and was buried next to Polly in a vault below St. Mary Woolnoth, where their bodies remained until excavations for the London Underground forced their exhumation. Husband and wife were reinterred at Olney in 1893. Some Principal Ideas, Themes, and Images of John Newton •â•‡ Divine grace secures the Christian as God’s adopted child forever; sin breaks the Christian’s communion with God but not that eternal union. •â•‡ God intends human beings to experience three births: by nature we enter this world, by grace we enter the fullness of spiritual light and life, and by death we enter into glory. •â•‡ The importance of true excellence and usefulness: useful knowledge, useful ministry, useful Christian lives. Grace should never be presumed upon to excuse slovenliness or mediocrity of any kind. •â•‡ God’s Providential ordering of individual lives, often dramatically, is in ways that those individuals may recognize only in retrospect. Christians must beware, however, since powerful temptation may present itself as a “providential opening.” •â•‡ The Christian’s gradual growth in grace and in Scriptural understanding: we are given the key to unlock single drawers at a time but never all the keys needed to unlock the whole cabinet of truth at once. •â•‡ True religion always involves both head and heart. It does not consist of the obvious habits of piety but instead is the believer’s continual affirmation of the divine nature and renewed determination to serve God, a habit of recollection that “turns every thing to gold.” •â•‡ Genuine saints always know that they are in fact great sinners. Note
1. Robert Cecil, in John Newton, The Life of John Newton, Written by Himself, with Continuation by the Rev. Richard Cecil, To Which Are Added, the Olney Hymns, in Three Books (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1853), 199.
Selected Bibliographic Resources for Newton’s Life and Work Newton himself was a prolific writer, and his books still make useful, fascinating reading, including An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton, Communicated in a Series of Letters to the Rev. Mr. Haweis, Rector of Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire, and by Him (at the Request of Friends) Now Made
Nicholas of Cusa
Public (London, 1764), and Cardiphonia (1783). Some of Newton’s works are available in the form of nineteenth-Â� century compilations and interpretations, such as John Newton and Richard Cecil, The Life of John Newton, Written by Himself, with Continuation by the Rev. Richard Cecil. To Which Are Added, the Olney Hymns, in Three Books, Christian’s Fireside Library, Vol. 11 (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1853), and Josiah Bull, John Newton of Olney and St. Mary Woolnoth (1868; published again in 1998 by Banner of Truth as But Now I See). Recent critical biographies include John Pollock’s Amazing Grace (1981; published again in 2000 by Kingsway as Newton the Liberator); William E. Phipps, Amazing Grace in John Newton: Slave-Â�Ship Captain, Hymn-Â�writer, and Abolitionist (Mercer University Press, 2001); Steve Turner, Amazing Grace: John Newton, Slavery, and the World’s Most Enduring Song (2003; Oxford: Lion, 2005); and Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (Crossway Books, 2007). Principal locations for Newton-Â�related archival material include the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney, Buckinghamshire; the Princeton University Libraries in New Jersey; and the University of Birmingham Library. —Stephen Woolsey NICHOLAS OF CUSA (1401–1464).╇ Born Nikolaus Krebs in the village of Kues (hence Nicholas Cusanus or of Cues), Germany, on the Mosel River, Cusanus is considered one of the intellectual giants of his era. There is some question as to whether he is to be considered a philosopher thinking in Christian terms or a theologian viewing faith and doctrine through philosophical (primarily Neoplatonist) lenses. Cusanus was simultaneously a leader in the Roman Catholic Church who sought reconciliation with the Hussites as well as with the Eastern Orthodox Church, a politician who desired the reform of the empire, and a theologian whose ideas brought together the mystical Neoplatonism of especially Pseudo-Â�Dionysius the Areopagite (to whom he repeatedly refers as “great”) with St. Augustine and Eckhart. Cusanus studied at Heidelberg, Padua, and then Cologne, where he became a doctor of canon law and was befriended by his professor, Cardinal Cesarini. Here Cusanus also became acquainted with the writings of the philosopher and mystic Ramón Llull. Ordained a priest in 1430, Cusanus served in Koblenz and worked for reconciliation of the Roman Catholic Church with the Hussite movement and for the reform of church and empire. Initially a proponent of the Conciliar movement (in his first major work, De Concordantia Catholica, 1433, he stressed the importance of the councils for maintaining harmony in the church and the authority of universal councils even over the pope), Cusanus became a staunch
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defender of papal authority. He became disenchanted with the Council of Basel for failing to achieve reconciliation with the Greek Church. After throwing his support behind the papal authority, he was appointed papal legate for reunion to Constantinople in 1437 and acted as legal counsel for the pope in various European Diets in the 1440s. He was made a cardinal in 1448 and in 1450 was appointed bishop of Brixen in 1450 and papal legate for the German-Â�speaking lands. Zealous for reform of church and state in the Dolomites, he was ousted by Duke Sigismund and returned to Rome, where in 1459 Cusanus was named vicar-Â�general with the task of reforming and governing Rome and the patrimony of St. Peter. He also founded the Cusanusstift, a home for the care of thirty-Â� three elderly men, which has been expanded and exists to this day. Upon his return to Brixen he was soon captured and imprisoned by Sigismund. Following his release he returned to Rome and served the rest of his life as head of the College of Cardinals. Cusanus died in Todi in 1464. Cusanus’s work represents a distillation of Neoplatonism in theological terms and can be considered as much mystical theology as doctrinal theology. His main influences (see above as well as Proclus and St. Bonaventure) were mystical theologians. His chief works are De Quaerendo Deum (1445); Idiotae Libri (1450), in which he and a layperson discuss how to attain wisdom, De Visione Dei (1453), which is intended to facilitate contemplation; De non Aliud (1462), in which he, not unlike Eckhart, tried to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian notions of God; and De Apice (1463–1464), a final summary. They reveal a sense of the unity of all things that transcends comprehension via reason and in which all division and categorization are, as it were, dissolved. Cusanus’s chief work, De Docta Ignorantia (finished in 1440), expressed this in such emphatic terms that he was accused of pantheism. This work was concerned with whether it is possible to know God. A true Renaissance man, Cusanus was a student of mathematics, history (rejecting the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine and the False Decretals), astronomy, and physics, and in 1451 he invented lenses to correct for near-Â�sightedness. Two works in particular reflect Cusanus’s central concerns. In De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance) he asserts that knowledge comes through intellectual grasp of the desired object, through comparison. But if the object (in this case God) is infinite and absolute there is no gradation. Learned ignorance is knowing that we cannot understand what is absolute. Awareness that all absolutes (e.g., absolute maximum and absolute minimum) are contained in God—the “coincidence of opposites”— cannot be attained through speculation and logic but only by intuition.
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The Vision of God or the Icon is a follow-Â�up to Cusanus’s Learned Ignorance, in response to a request from the monks of Tegernsee for a method of meditation. A central theme is present: while creatures are utterly dependent on God for their characteristics, God contains in unity all these various characteristics. Sight, for example, exists in God perfectly and absolutely and at the same time is one with God’s being, loving, knowing, and working. Cusanus begins by reflecting not on the person’s vision of God but instead on God’s vision of the person. God looks at, or “sees,” persons at all times. Cusanus uses the image of a portrait, or icon, whose eyes follow the person wherever the person may go to represent God’s unending looking at—and knowing and loving and working in—each person. At the same time, God’s vision of the person opens God to be seen by the person. It is this mutual gaze that fulfills the longing of both God and the person for the person to be whole. Cusanus hastens to assert that in this mutual gaze the person may come to know God’s face not by sight or intellect but by a sort of mystical intuition, a “cloud, darkness, or ignorance” (picking up on De Docta Ignorantia). Cusanus continues the theme of ignorance by depicting God in paradise behind a wall of human knowledge erected when humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge. This human knowledge is based on the idea that in paradise, in God, apparent contradictions (such as something being one thing and not that thing at the same time) coincide. Cusanus uses the portrait as an example: the eyes appear to move but, of course, do not. As the eyes appear to move but do not, so does God enter into history while being eternal. This sort of difference or contradiction, as with all contradictions, exists only outside the wall of paradise. The door in the wall is the contemplative’s mystical experience in which the contradictory experiences of going in and going out are experienced as the same thing. Cusanus ends the treatise by asserting from Scripture that the ecstatic experience of seeing God face to face (which he has not experienced) within the paradise of noncontradiction is possible (only) via contemplation. Bibliography
Bellitto, Christopher M., Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, eds. Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004. Hopkins, Jasper. Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa. 2 vols. Minneapolis: Banning, 2001. ———. A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Banning, 1986. Hoye, William J. Die mystische Theologie des Nicholaus Cusanus. Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2004. Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings. Classics of Western Spirituality. Translated and introduced by H. Lawrence Bond. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997.
Watts, Pauline Moffitt. Nicholaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth-�Century Vision of Man. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982.
—Gary Sattler
NICHOLAS OF MYRA (ca. 270–345/352).╇ Nicholas was a bishop who was recognized as a saint after his death. He was born in Patara of Lycia, a province of Asia Minor, in the end of the third century and died in Myra of Lycia in 345 or 352. Although he is one of the most popular saints in the Eastern as well as the Western Church, there is scarcely anything historically certain about him except that he was bishop of Myra in the fourth century. According to various traditions, he was ordained a presbyter at an early age by his uncle, Archbishop Nicholas. Nicholas of Myra was well known as an almsgiver and a pastor who took special care of the orphans from the early years of his ministry. Later he was elected bishop of Myra. He was imprisoned around 305 during the persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian. He participated in the First Ecumenical Synod, convened in Nicaea by Constantine the Great against the heresy of Arianism. However, there are doubts regarding Nicholas’s presence in the synod, since his name is not mentioned in any of the old lists of bishops who attended. He died in Myra and was buried in a basilica dedicated to his memory. In 1087 his relics were abducted and brought to Bari by crusaders of the First Crusade. The cult of his veneration has been very popular in Asia Minor since the 4th century as well as in Italy after the transfer of his relics to Bari. It is also popular in Russia and many other places that consider him their patron saint. His name is associated with many miracles, and he is widely known as “the Wonderworker.” Some of the miracles reportedly performed in the sea and for the benefit of mariners may have been attributed to him wrongly. They probably emanate from the life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, a saint who founded a coenobium near Myra around the fifth century. He remained rather unknown because around the tenth century his cult was engulfed by the cult of Nicholas of Myra. The latter’s representations in art are as varied as his alleged miracles. He is depicted either alone or performing miracles and always wearing the insignia of a bishop. Nicholas became a symbol of anonymous gift-Â�giving because of many miracles attributed to him. In Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (where he is known as Sinterklass), people have the custom of making him the secret purveyor of gifts to children on December 6, the day on which the Church celebrates his feast. In the United States and elsewhere St. Nicholas has become identified with Santa Claus, who distributes gifts to
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and Nicodemos and first published in Venice in 1782. As a leader in the revival of hesychasm, Nicodemos strove to assemble a work that would both revive the study of the Orthodox fathers and strongly emphasize the practice of mental prayer. In his introduction to the work, Nicodemos comments that the work acts as a “mystical school of the prayer of the heart” and is “the instrument itself of deification.” The Unseen Warfare is Nicodemos’s reworking and annotation of Lorenzo Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat. Scupoli Bibliography was an Italian Roman Catholic priest who first published Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: his text in 1589 but expanded it in 1599. Nicodemos used Biography of a Legend. Chicago and London: University of the 1599 edition, along with Scupoli’s The Path to Paradise, Chicago Press, 1978. to compose a work intended for an Orthodox audience. Mehcin, Colette. Saint Nicholas: Fêtes et traditions populaires Nicodemos removed references to purgatory and added d’hier et aujourd’hui. Paris: Berger-Â�Levrault, 1978. a discussion on the use of monologistic prayer, such as Peterson, Nancy. The Life of Saint Nicholas in Byzantine Art. the Jesus Prayer of the hesychasts. Originally edited by Turin: Bottega d’ Erasmo, 1983. Synaxaristes, Le Synaxaire: Vie des Saintes de l’Église Orthodoxe. the Jesuit Giovanni Pinamonti, the Spiritual Exercises was Translated and edited by Hieromonk Macarios of Simonos-Â� expanded by Nicodemos from 30 pages to over 650 pages. In thirty-Â�four meditations, Nicodemos addresses such Petras, vol. 2: Thessaloniki: Perivoli tis Panagias, 1988. —Sotiros Vlavianos topics as the nature of man, God’s love, and Christology. As in other works, Nicodemos argues for frequent communion. In A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, Nicodemos NICODEMOS OF THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1749– offers an original understanding of the spiritual life. Writ1809).╇ Nicodemus was born on the island of Naxos in ten while Nicodemos was in self-Â�exile off the coast of Mt. 1749 to Anthony and Anastasia Kallivourtsis, a prosper- Athos, the book is a response to Bishop Ierotheos of Eurious family who provided him with a good education. On pos, Nicodemos’s cousin. In twelve chapters, Nicodemos Naxos in 1773–1774 Nicodemos met three monks from addresses how one is to go about guarding the five senses, Mount Athos who placed him in contact with Macarius of the imagination, the mind, and the heart. As a reformer during the hesychastic revival, NicoCorinth, whom Nicodemus visited on the island of Hydra. Highly influenced by this meeting, Nicodemus settled on demos earned the scorn of those opposed to the movethe Holy Mountain in 1775 at the Dionysiou monastery, ment. In 1805, in an effort to assert the theological remaining there until his death. His life was preoccupied orthodoxy of himself and other like-Â�minded reformers, with the task of attempting to renew the spiritual life of the Nicodemos wrote the Confession of Faith. In it he affirms Orthodox Christian Church by authoring, translating, and/ his belief in the creeds and accepts the seven sacraments or editing 109 texts. He died on July 14 or 15, 1809, and was and the seven ecumenical councils. He further affirms that he is in complete agreement with the teaching of declared a saint on May 31, 1955. His feast day is July 14. Nicodemos was a hymnographer, hagiographer, bibli- the apostles, local councils, and the fathers and canons cal commentator, canonist, liturgiologist, and spiritual of the church. In the Rudder, Nicodemos collected all of theologian. He was a conservative theologian who hoped the canons of the church into one book for the use of the to revive the practice of frequent communion (see his On clergy and laity. This demonstrates Nicodemos’s profound the Frequency of Holy Communion) and sacramental con- respect for the tradition of the church as well as his care fession (see his Manual of Confession), though he was not for all Orthodox people. Throughout his many works Nicodemos remained a narrow-minded or obscurantist, having a firm grasp of ancient philosophy and modern science. He was known proponent of mental prayer, especially the Jesus Prayer; as an editor and a translator, and his most important frequent communion; respect for Orthodox Christian traworks are the Philokalia, Unseen Warfare, Spiritual Exer- dition; and full participation in the liturgical life of the cises, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, Confession of Faith, church. Nicodemos’s legacy reveals a man of profound learning, humility, and faithfulness to the Christian traand the Rudder. The Philokalia is a collection of ascetic and mystical dition. As a spiritual theologian, he advocates attending texts taken from thirty-Â�six writers from the fourth to the to one’s inner self through examination and discernment fifteenth centuries. It was edited by Macarios of Corinth while practicing a moderate form of asceticism. children on Christmas Eve. In Germany some elements of this tradition can be traced back to the German god Wodan (Odin). By the name of “Nicholas of Myra” is also known a rhetorician who was born in Myra around 430 and died after 491. He studied in Athens and belonged to the School of Gaza. He was a teacher of rhetoric in Constantinople, and there is no evidence that he was a Christian. His only surviving work is Progymnasmata.
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Bibliography The best introductions to the life and thought of Nicodemos are G. S. Bebis, “Introduction,” in Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain: A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (Paulist Press, 1989), and E. Citterio, “Nicodemo Agiorita,” in C.╯G. Conticello and V. Conticello, eds., La Théologie byzantine et sa tradition II (Brepols, 2002). A popular introduction is C. Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). —Greg Peters HELMUT RICHARD NIEBUHR (1884–1962).╇ One of the most important twentieth-Â�century Christian ethicists, Helmut Richard Niebuhr was part of a theologically oriented family reminiscent of the Great Cappodocians. His elder brother by two years, Reinhold Niebuhr, achieved notoriety in the United States in the middle of the century as a Christian theologian, and his sister Hulda became a professor of Christian education at Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary. Richard grew up in Missouri, and his father, Gustav Niebuhr, a German Evangelical Synod pastor, instructed his sons early in theology. His mother, Lydia Hosto Niebuhr, the daughter of an Evangelical pastor, encouraged her children in music and literature. Richard, like his brother, went to their denominational schools Elmhurst College (1908–1912) and Eden Theological Seminary (1912–1915) in St. Louis. He was ordained in 1916 and served a short term as pastor in Saint Louis. He took graduate courses at Washington University, Columbia University, and Union Theological Seminary. In 1919 he took a teaching position at Eden, continuing studies at Washington University and the University of Chicago, where he made an important connection to G. H. Mead, a pragmatist philosopher. In 1920 Niebuhr married Florence Marie Mittendorf, and the couple would later have two children, Cynthia and Richard Reinhold (who inherited the theological mantle). The elder Reinhold left to pursue doctoral studies at Yale (1922–1924). Subsequently, he came back to Elmhurst College to serve as its president until 1927, when he returned to Eden to be academic dean. The year 1930 presented the opportunity for a sabbatical in Europe, notably Germany. In 1932 he accepted an invitation from Yale Divinity School to teach Christian ethics. He served there for more than thirty years and influenced a number of students, including Paul Ramsey, Hans Frei, and James Gustafson, and indirectly influenced the next generation’s postliberal school (George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, etc.). Niebuhr’s dissertation was on Troeltsch, whose influence can be seen in perhaps his most known work, Christ and Culture (1951), which analyzes five types of responses
to the question of how the church should relate to the world. Niebuhr’s theological reflections began with a sociological analysis of church communities. In The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), Niebuhr characterized denominationalism as the church’s sinful compromise to exterior economic, social, and political forces, but his fear that such study was incomplete led to the more theologically oriented study The Kingdom of God in America (1937). His later work sought to blend the perspectives of these works. Niebuhr offered one of the most creative theological critiques of modern historicism. He consistently argued that remembrance of God’s sovereignty should be the unifying and guiding theme in any theological project. In the central The Meaning of Revelation (1941), Niebuhr emphasizes the rootedness of human, including Christian, thought within the languages and traditions of particular historical communities, calling us to see that not to confess one’s contingencies is to move into a form of idolatry. Niebuhr also argues that a misunderstanding of historicism has undermined Christian confidence in the doctrine of revelation because of the widespread and faulty assumptions in our society that revelation cannot be both history and God, both nature and God, and both a past event and a present relationship. Niebuhr, instead, argued that revelation is an ongoing relationship with a God who works within the history, with the story of Israel, Jesus, and the church. Christians confess God’s sovereignty over created order (of space and time) and yet give witness to how God has entered into that order to bring about the reconciliation of humanity and all creation. Niebuhr cogently applied such insights to the Christian moral life, most systematically in the posthumously published The Responsible Self (1963), where he argued that we should learn to respond to God’s prior activity in the world, acknowledging our own limitations and contingencies, even in our reception of revelation, rather than pretending that we are the source of our lives, actions, and future. Response, however, depends upon how we interpret the world, and we learn how to interpret the world rightly through membership in the community that God has been building through Christ. However, Niebuhr argues in the posthumously published Faith on Earth (1989), since our lives are dominated by idolatries and broken faiths, we need to learn how to trust, to have community with God and with others. Christ must repair the brokenness, teach us to place God at the center of our lives (“radical monotheism”), and show us how to live in such a way that we learn to trust and to be loyal both to God and to other people. The church was important to Niebuhr’s theology, but much of his description has been overlooked because it appeared in articles and lectures that were never systematically pulled together. Niebuhr
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portrays the church as the community that with the help of the Spirit follows Christ’s example and worships God the Father, acknowledges its own limitations and contingencies before God’s sovereignty, and seeks to share God’s gifts of mercy, love, and peace with others. Bibliography
Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1975 [1951]. ———. Faith on Earth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. ———. Kingdom of God in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988 [1937]. ———. Meaning of Revelation. New York: Collier Books, 1960 [1941]. ———. Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry. New York: Harper, 1956. ———. Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1970 [1960]. ———. The Responsible Self. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. ———. Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929. ———. Theology, History, and Culture. Edited by William Stacy Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
—Brett Patterson
REINHOLD NIEBUHR (1892–1971).╇ Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was born to German immigrant parents in Wright City, Missouri. The son of a pastor, Niebuhr attended Eden Theological Seminary followed by Yale for his BD (1914) and his MA (1915). Following graduation, he led Bethel Evangelical Church of Detroit until 1928, becoming deeply involved in labor causes and social causes. Upon his departing Detroit to teach at Union Theological Seminary in 1928, he became instrumental in establishing Christian organizations around this theme, including the Fellowship of Socialist Christians (1931). Niebuhr’s first major theological shift was away from classical liberalism around 1932. Recognizing that any religious ethic advocating sacrifice was incompatible with a political system that advocated rights, articulating this most clearly in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), he began to criticize liberal Protestantism for not taking seriously the suffering of the world. As Langdon Gilkey has argued, there was no transcendence for Niebuhr unrelated to historical existence. But since any group—ecclesial or political—compromised the possibility of an individual having a pure morality, it is impossible, Niebuhr argued, for Christian faith to be exercised in terms of the “pure ethics” of Jesus. It is from this presupposition that Christian Realism, Niebuhr’s most important theological contribution, emerged.
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Niebuhr’s departure from the pacifism common to the Social Gospel is indicative of this new movement in his thinking, which emphasized in part the active engagement in social issues on the terms of the social issue. As he articulates in his 1938–1940 Gifford Lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man, any pure access to the New Testament ideals of love and hope has been tainted by sin and thus must be articulated in the pursuit of harmony with God, oneself, and one’s neighbor. At the center of this stands the atonement, which exemplifies God’s judgment upon acts of defiance to the law of life and love that underlies the universe. Sin, destroyed in principle but not in fact in Christ, is addressed by a social life perched between tyranny and anarchy. Optimism, which characterized political liberalism, was a foreign attribute to be purged from Christian thinking. While freedom remains the highest goal of political organization for Niebuhr, the pursuit of freedom must be chastened by social governances if that which human transcendence points us toward—namely, freedom—is to be actualized. The resulting political philosophy, outlined further in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), emphasized democratic process via media compromise. Other political processes (Marxism, Communisim) are identified as erring largely due to their political naïveté. Viewing democratic process as part of divine providence to prevent further violence in the wake of World War II, Niebuhr advocated for democracy as the best available solution and the best hope for global justice. The Union for Democratic Action (UDA) was founded in 1940 by Niebuhr toward this end. Lest Niebuhr be read as an establishment thinker, however, it should be noted that his support of the democratic process was highly critical of unjust practices that resulted in a democracy of theory but in practice suppressed the ability of citizens to participate in and benefit from the produced freedom of democracies. Further Reading See Richard Fox’s Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, Robin W. Lovin’s Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, and Langdon Gilkey’s On Niebuhr. —Myles Werntz KATHLEEN NORRIS (1947–).╇ Kathleen Norris was born on July 27, 1947, in Washington, D.C., and was reared in Lemmon, South Dakota, and Honolulu, Hawaii. She attended Bennington College in Vermont and after graduation moved to New York City to work. While there, she became acquainted with Andy Warhol, Erica Jong, and other arts and literary personalities. She also met her future
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husband, poet David Dwyer. When in 1974 Norris’s grandmother died, she and Dwyer traveled to South Dakota to settle her estate, intending only a brief stay, but ended up moving into her grandmother’s homestead and living in Lemmon permanently. Now also having a home in Hawaii, Norris continues to write poetry and books and travels frequently for speaking engagements and leading writing workshops, including writer-Â�in-Â�residence programs. Norris is an active writer who reflects on life, religious language, theological doctrine, and God’s perplexing relationship with people. For her, God is very personal, so her theological musings involve personal memories and experiences but never automatic acceptance of the spiritual without self-Â�examination. She does not fear exposing her spiritual doubts to her readers as she seeks a more contemplative life that not only acknowledges the sanctity of life but also celebrates it. A large number of Norris’s works are poetry, and she finds herself attracted to and influenced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Not long after graduating from college, Norris published her first collection of poems titled Falling Off (1971), which won the Big Table Poetry Series Younger Poets award. In 1981 her second book of poetry, The Middle of the World, was published. These volumes were followed by How I Came to Drink My Grandmother’s Piano (1989), The Year of Common Things (1990), Little Girls in Church (1995), and Journey: New and Selected Poems, 1969–1999 (2001). Being very conscious of words and how some have been cheapened by overuse, she avoids using religious jargon. Her skilled use of language and her grappling with common human struggles make her poems accessible, real, and insightful. Because Norris’s personal spiritual quest seems to have come into focus as her writing reveals each stage, several of her books weave her personal and spiritual experiences together. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993) recounts her rediscovery of religion as she relocates to her grandmother’s home in Lemmon, South Dakota. The geography of the plains and becoming reacquainted with the town and its inhabitants contribute to her slow but steady progress toward reconciliation to God and the Christian faith. She notes, however, that it is now her faith, not just that of her grandmother. The sparse population of western South Dakota, the isolation, and the emptiness of the land offer a quiet setting of solitude reminiscent of early Christian hermits who sought lives removed from the distractions of the world. Norris’s contemplative approach to God and a personal faith took a step toward monasticism when, seeking an opportunity to mature spiritually, she spent months in a Benedictine monastery. This experience developed into her book The Cloister Walk (1996). She also became an
oblate, a layperson who takes some of the monastic vows. These two acts enabled her to experience and come to appreciate Roman Catholic practices, saints, and feast days even though she herself is a married Protestant woman. This seemingly odd paradox placed her in a position to contemplate both personal and communal acts of worship. Her appreciation of Catholic tradition also led her to write a children’s book on St. Benedict and his sister titled The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica (2001). Because words, theology, and a personal spiritual life are never far from the forefront of Norris’s mind, she wrote Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998). As an author and poet deeply sensitized to words and their meanings, Norris was keenly aware of the religious vocabulary she encountered (she uses the term “bombarded with”) when she returned to the church after a twenty-Â�year absence. Each chapter of Amazing Grace tackles a word from Christianity’s lexicon that she feels may alienate others not comfortable within the walls of a church. She informally conveys the theological concepts relating to each word (e.g., “revelation,” “angels,” “theology,” “creeds”) by providing metaphors, imagery, and experiences from her life, ones that she hopes will enable readers to feel at ease. Norris is never far removed from her books and personally invests herself into each one, both as author and character within the book. As she invites the reader inside her world, she automatically employs autobiographical elements. The Virgin of Bennington (2001), however, is clearly an autobiography, one that recounts her college and postcollege years during the 1960s and early 1970s when she worked as an assistant to Betty Kray, an arts administrator employed by the American Academy of Poets. At this point in Norris’s life, she was not searching for a deeper spiritual walk but instead was discovering herself as a person and a poet. Bibliography Works by Kathleen Norris Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
The Cloister Walk Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica The Virgin of Bennington “What I Took Home from the Cloister.” U.S. Catholic 62(10) (October 1997): 8.
Works about Kathleen Norris
“The Lord’s Lexicon.” Book review by Michael Milburn, April╯5, 1998. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/05/reviews/ 980405.05milburt.html. “Kathleen Norris.” Biography Resource Center, Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.
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“Who Cares? Author Kathleen Norris on Sloth” by John M. Buchanan. Christian Century 120(1) (January 11, 2003): 3. “Place of the Spirit: Bestselling Author Kathleen Norris Explores the Unexpected Satisfactions of Monastic Life” by Emily Mitchell. People Weekly 46(16) (October 14, 1996): 77. “Interview: Kathleen Norris” by Donna Seaman. Booklist.
which were later published as The Inner Voice of Love (A Journey through Anguish to Freedom). During his lifetime Nouwen was the author of more than thirty devotional works, many of which continue to be widely read and treasured today. Examples are The Wounded Healer, Can You Drink the Cup?, and The Return of the Prodigal Son, based on Rembrandt’s work. The details of his Christian walk became the basis for his most enduring writing.
HENRI NOUWEN (1932–1996).╇ Henri Nouwen was born in January 1932 in the town of Nijkerk in the Netherlands. Despite the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, Nouwen had a relatively untroubled childhood. From his earliest years he wanted to become a priest, and he later studied to this end at Rijsenburg Seminary near Driebergen. Having completed these initial studies in philosophy and theology, he was ordained in July 1957. He then went on to take the unusual step of studying psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, continuing his studies in this area for three years at the Menniger Institute in Topeka, Kansas. His first academic position was at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught psychology from 1966 until 1968. This is where his writing career began in earnest. After a few years teaching back in the Netherlands, he took up a position as lecturer in pastoral theology at Yale University, continuing to teach there until June 1981. During the substantial sabbaticals that he enjoyed at Yale, The Genesee Diary (1976) and several other of his significant works were written. After some formative travels in South America, Nouwen was invited to teach liberation theology at Harvard Divinity School, where he remained for three years until the summer of 1985. Throughout these years in an academic setting, Nouwen struggled to find a strong sense of vocation. In 1983, however, he visited the L’Arche community in Trosly and began to discover among the disabled people there the deeper sense of purpose that he had long sought. This search is recounted in The Road to Daybreak. It was during this period that he developed his now famous concept of downward mobility, a Christlike understanding at odds with the aspirations of many in the Western world. In December 1985 Nouwen received a call to join the Daybreak L’Arche community in Toronto, Canada. Nouwen’s desire to see Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was achieved in July 1986 when he visited Saint Petersburg. In August 1986 Nouwen became part of the Daybreak community and remained there until his death in 1996. He experienced a personal crisis at the end of his first year at Daybreak, and during his recuperation from this period of physical and emotional exhaustion he wrote his “spiritual imperatives,”
Principal Ideas of Henri Nouwen •â•‡ The notion of downward mobility, that to serve God effectively we must follow the humble, self-Â�effacing example of Jesus Christ. •â•‡ The importance of prayer and the devotional life. •â•‡ The ministry of absence, that in the midst of pain and hardship God’s grace can be found. •â•‡ An appropriate understanding of spiritual passivity, or dependence on God, is needed by the Christian believer. •â•‡ That the suffering in the heart of the Christian believer can become the basis of service to others.
—Linda Gray
Bibliography
De Vinck, Christopher, ed. Nouwen Then (Personal Reflections on Henri Nouwen). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999. Hernandez, Wil. Henri Nouwen: A Spirituality of Imperfection. New York: Paulist Press, 2006. La Noue, Deidre. The Spiritual Legacy of Henri Nouwen. New York: Continuum, 2001. Nouwen, Henri. Can You Drink the Cup? Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, 1996. ———. The Inner Voice of Love. New York: Doubleday, 1996. ———. The Return of the Prodigal Son. New York: Doubleday, 1992. ———. The Wounded Healer. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
—Peter Stiles
ANDERS NYGREN (1890–1978).╇ Anders Nygren, Swedish theologian, philosopher of religion, and bishop of Lund, is best known to the English-Â�speaking world for his classic study of Christian love, Agape and Eros. Nygren, along with his teacher Gustaf Aulén and colleague Ragnar Bring, developed the Lundensian school of theology, named after the school in which they taught, the University of Lund. These thinkers attempted to revive theology as a constructive and historically relevant discipline. For Nygren, theology must remain independent from speculative metaphysics, on the one hand, and rationalist science, on the other. Religion—and thus theology—has to be interpreted and legitimated within its own epistemological sphere. Nygren developed and employed the methodology of motif study, the exposition of foundational
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concepts that serve to define the meanings and the contours of a particular religion. Nygren pursued this methodology in his philosophical and theological studies of the essence of Christianity. Nygren’s use of the method required a focused distinction on the independence of religion as a valid sphere of human life and a clear delineation between philosophy and theology as disciplines of study. Nygren’s application of his method to Christianity resulted in the conclusion that the central motif of Christianity, without which it would not be Christianity, is its distinctive concept of eternal life, visible most centrally in the life and work of Jesus Christ as the Agape of God. On the Epistemological Independence of Religion Philosophy and theology after Immanuel Kant were forced to deal with the problem of the relationship between faith and reason in ways that sometimes led, for some, to the subjugation of faith to reason or, for others, to the suppression of reason to faith. Nygren’s creative proposal regarding the relative autonomy of theology and science, or religion and rationality, was to establish religion as an independent sphere of validity and meaning.1 The meaning of religion does not depend upon the contributions or validations of science. Religion does not need science (or higher criticism) to extract its meaning from its shell or to legitimate its value.2 Religion is one valid form of life; science is another. This is not to say, however, that the spheres should never overlap or that religion can avoid the questions and contributions of science. In The Essence of Christianity, Nygren’s attempt to discover and elucidate the core of the Christian faith, he suggests that religions in general are responses to the eternal, or the “life of the spirit.”3 For Nygren, four questions must be raised in order to discuss the “life of the spirit”: the question of truth, the ethical question, the aesthetic question, and the religious question. Truth is the realm of science, ethics is the realm of law, and aesthetics is the realm of art. Each of these elements depends in some way upon the existence of the eternal, but religion is uniquely the sphere of the eternal breaking into and transforming temporal human life. Religion is the articulated response of humanity to the presence of the eternal. Religion continues to exist, Nygren says, not because it is useful for other disciplines but because it deals with questions that confound the others.4 On the Relation between Philosophy of Religion and Theology For Nygren, philosophy of religion and theology both have as their purview the field of religion, or humanity’s response to the eternal, but each has different aims. In his magnum opus, Meaning and Method, Nygren puts
forward a prolegomenon to the philosophy of religion in which he attempts to extricate the discipline from its tendency to morph into metaphysics.5 For Nygren, a responsible philosophy of religion must employ a rigorous analytical study of the structure and content of the religions so as to understand each of them in comparison to the others. Both philosophy of religion and theology attempt to clarify and elucidate the concepts of a religion within their context, thus enabling a proper understanding of their meanings.6 Philosophy, however, is an inherently descriptive discipline. The task of theology is to elucidate the fundamental concepts of a religion in its own historical context through a process that Nygren calls “motif research.” Theology, utilizing this process, can be both objective and normative to the extent that it elucidates the meaning of a religion within its own context and in light of its own presuppositions by comparing fundamental motifs to the “factual material” resident within a particular religion.7 On the Possibility of Locating the Center of Christianity Religions are responses to the eternal. Christianity has its own particular, distinctive response to the questions raised by the eternal, which Nygren identifies Christologically. In the Essence of Christianity, Nygren acknowledged the difficulty of recognizing that which is permanent and transcendent within the historical, dynamic reality of the Christian religion. One cannot simply extract the “kernel” of Christianity from its “husk” by applying historical or scientific criticism to its sacred text. Rather, one must search for the permanent element of Christianity within the various historical contexts in which it emerges and develops. Nygren’s search led him to conclude that the only permanent element of Christianity is its dynamic, changing character: It is “the amazing vitality whereby Christianity is enabled in every new age and situation to present an aspect which supplies just what the new conditions demand” and “its unceasing capacity for creating new historical forms, whereby it makes contact with life as it is lived at every point.”8 Because Christianity did not originate as a series of propositions but rather as a response to the life-Â�giving power of a person, the essence of Christianity has to be located in Christ. The meaning of Christianity lies in Christ and the Christ-Â�event.9 One finds there, Nygren explains, reconciliation, forgiveness, and atonement.10 In short, one finds the eternal breaking in as Agape. The search for the essence of Christianity bears further fruit in Nygren’s work Agape and Eros (published in two volumes in 1930–1936) in which he arrives at the definition of Christian love as the spontaneous, unearned gift of
Anders Nygren
God.11 For Nygren, Christianity stands apart from other religions in its conception of love as Agape. Whereas Eros is characterized by preference and reward-Â�motivation, Agape is characterized by a freely given spontaneous action from which the only motive is God’s own nature. God loves because he is love, not because of anything lovable in the beloved. The duty of the Christian is to love by allowing God’s love, given freely by grace, to flow through him or her to others. The starting point for ethics, then, is social fellowship, or “man in his relation to God and to his fellow-Â�men,” rather than “eudaemonia,” or the question of “the good.”12 In Nygren’s perspective, he was moving the theology of Christian love from an “egocentric” to a “theocentric” position.13 The stated contrast between divine and human love, however, has been criticized as undermining the value and potentiality of temporal human love as a universally accessible creative potentiality. Notes
1. See also The Philosophy and Theology of Anders Nygren, edited by Charles W. Kegley (Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970). 2. Anders Nygren, Essence of Christianity, translated by Philip╯S. Watson (London: Epworth Press, 1960), 26–27. 3. Ibid., 22.
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4. Ibid., 26–27. 5. See Nygren’s From Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of Religion and a Scientific Theology, translated by Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Essence, 19. 9. Ibid., 49–50. 10. Ibid., 55. 11. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, rev. ed., translated by Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953). 12. Ibid., 45. 13. Ibid., 46.
Bibliography
Kegley, Charles W., ed. The Philosophy and Theology of Anders Nygren. Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Rev. ed. Translated by Philip S. Watson. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953. ———. Essence of Christianity. Translated by Philip S. Watson. London: Epworth, 1960. ———. Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of Religion and a Scientific Theology. Translated by Philip╯S. Watson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.
—Kyle Roberts
O FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925–1964).╇ Flannery O’Connor was the author of two novels, more than thirty short stories, several reviews and commentaries, and an important body of critical essays that address questions regarding the role of religion and art and the vocation of the artist in society. O’Connor was born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, to Edward Francis O’Connor Jr. and Regina Cline. Flannery O’Connor graduated with a degree in social sciences from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville in 1945 and received a scholarship for the prestigious writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA in 1947. She spent the next few years at the Yaddo writer’s colony in New York and stayed at the home of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald in Connecticut. In 1950 O’Connor suffered her first attack of lupus (which killed her father in 1941) and was forced to move back home with her mother to Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, where together they raised a variety of fowl, including peacocks. O’Connor traveled and lectured extensively throughout the United States despite her frail health. At home in Andalusia, she strived to maintain a regimented writing schedule in which she was constantly revising her short stories and writing letters to publishers and friends. O’Connor died from complications of her disease on August 3, 1964. O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952 and tells the tragic story of Hazel Motes, a self-Â� proclaimed prophet and founder of “The Church of Christ without Christ.” O’Connor published a collection of her short stories titled A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories in 1955, and a second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published after her death in 1965. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), tells the story of a young Francis Tarwater, who violently resists his destiny as a prophet but who nonetheless finds
himself fulfilling his vocation. Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s good friend and literary executor, edited a collection of O’Connor’s lectures and essays titled Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969) and gathered much of her extensive correspondence in The Habit of Being: Letters (1979). O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for her Collected Stories in 1972, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is an annual commemoration of her achievement in and contribution to the short story form. O’Connor’s literary legacy is still gaining currency as scholars continue to understand her frequently misinterpreted and often disturbing works of fiction as art that is deeply infused with a Catholic understanding of grace, nature, and the sacraments. O’Connor’s fiction and prose reveal an author whose theological framework is profoundly influenced by the writings of Thomas Aquinas and who saw all of nature as an expression of Grace but who was also thoroughly committed to ensuring that her art was never merely at the service of her religion. O’Connor was wary of being labeled a “Catholic writer” for fear of being associated with the more popular didactic Catholic novels of her day, which she rejected as sentimentalism, but also because she felt that such categories tended to diminish the potential for communicating the deep mysteries inherent to both religion and art. In her essays and personal letters, O’Connor describes the tremendous sense of vocational responsibility that she felt toward helping her audience understand themselves and their culture as accurately as possible, even if that meant shocking their sensibilities or disturbing their notions of propriety and normative social behavior. O’Connor is famous for using misfits and criminals as the prophetic voices that speak out to a self-Â�righteous, complacent, and often racist culture of a predominantly Protestant South,
— 501 —
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Origen
continued to teach, write, and travel. During this time, he focused on writing biblical commentaries. As he wrote and traveled extensively (such as to Athens and Arabia) he became famous, even preaching at the request of the emperor’s mother. Under Emperor Maximinus (r. 235–238) Origen was persecuted, and some scholars believe that he fled to Cappadocia for two years. Around 249–250 during Emperor Decian’s reign, Origen was imprisoned and tortured, but despite his age and hardships, he still managed to write letters and stay strong in his faith. Although Emperor Decias (d. 251) preceded Origen in death, Origen Some Suggested Readings Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Knoxville: University never completely recovered from his mistreatment, and he of Tennessee Press, 2002. died in Tyr (modern-Â�day Lebanon) in 254. Getz, Lorine M. Flannery O’Connor, Literary Theologian: The Origen contributed an extraordinary number of writHabits and Discipline of Being. Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, ings, including numerous commentaries, sermons, letOntario: E. Mellen, 1999. ters, apologies (defending the faith), and translations of Montgomery, Marion. Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O’Connor, Old Testament books. Not only are these works worthy on St. Thomas, and the Limits of Art. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, their own merit, but they also give insight into the second-Â� 2006. church’s understanding of what comprised the century Simpson, Melissa. Flannery O’Connor: A Biography. Westport, New Testament. Origen considered the following works CT: Greenwood, 2005. to be a part of the New Testament: the four Gospels, fourWood, Ralph C. Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Â�haunted teen Pauline letters (including Hebrews but questioning South. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. —Daniel Train Pauline authorship), Timothy, Titus, Acts, 1 Peter, 1 John, and Revelation. Books accepted by some, but that Origen questioned, were James, 2 and 3 John, Jude, 2 Peter, BarnORIGEN (185–254).╇ Most of what is known of Origen’s abas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. Origen’s own writings fall into five categories: translalife is what Eusebius recorded in his Ecclesiastical History; nearly the entire sixth book is devoted to Origen. Both tions, exegetical works, theology and doctrine, apologetOrigen and Eusebius spent time in Caesarea—although ics, and letters. In terms of translations, Origen compiled a generation apart—and both worked with the famous side-Â�by-Â�side translations of the Old Testament in Greek, library there. Eusebius, who respected Origen’s work and Hebrew, the Septuagint (a Hebrew-Â�to-Â�Greek translation had access to Origen’s own copy of Hexapla, which was done in 250 BC), and three other languages. Origen put in that library, used some of Origen’s writings as models all six together in parallel format. Only one copy of it for his own works. Pamphilus was both Origen’s student existed, and his student Pamphilus put it in a library to and Eusebius’s teacher, further connecting the two famous Origen in Caesarea. Jerome used this side-Â�by-Â�side translation at the end of the fourth century, and Paul of Tella Christian writers of the Early Church. According to Eusebius, Origen was born to Chris- (a Syrian bishop) used it to translate the Septuagint into tian parents in Alexandria, Egypt, in AD 185. In 202 his Syriac. Origen’s book was probably destroyed in 638 when father, Leonides, was martyred under Emperor Severus in the Saracens overtook Caesarea. The second category is exegetical works, such as serthe same persecution that drove Clement out of Alexandria. For a while Origen wrote and sold manuscripts and mons and Scriptural interpretations. These include served as head of a religious school in Alexandria, previ- numerous homilies and expository sermons on the Old Testament (about 444 of them) and on some of the works ously headed by Clement. Origen also traveled extensively, to Rome where he heard now included in the New Testament (about 130 of them). Hippolytus preach, to Arabia, and to Caesarea (in modern-Â� More than two dozen were written on each of the followday Israel) where he spent two years. In 217 he returned ing biblical books: Numbers, Joshua, Matthew, and Acts. to Alexandria for thirteen years, a time referred to as “the Approximately three dozen were written on Isaiah, Jersecond Alexandrian period.” In 230 he went to Greece via emiah, and Luke. None of these were written down until Caesarea where he was ordained. His ordination angered Origen was about sixty years old. Today only 21 exist in the bishop of Alexandria, who declared that Origen was no Greek, and only 186 exist in Latin. Also in this category are commentaries. Origen wrote longer welcome to preach and live in Alexandria. In 232 Origen moved to Caesarea, where he contin- 25 commentaries on the Minor Prophets, 32 on John, 15 ued to study and preach. He founded a school there and each on Romans and Galatians, and many others. Jerome and nearly every one of her stories contains, according to O’Connor, a moment in which grace enters in, often in the most painful, tragic, and disturbing ways. For O’Connor, these acts of violence are never gratuitous but rather are always possible moments of a deep and mysterious redemption. Despite her use of the grotesque, O’Connor’s stories are full of a comedic irony and demonstrate an acute sense for regional dialect that endears to her audience even the most wretched of her characters.
James Orr
said that Origen wrote 291 commentaries, but only 16 survive in Greek. However, numerous fragments of his works are extant. The third category is theological and doctrinal books. Origen wrote On the Resurrection (two volumes) and On First Principles (four volumes), the latter of which is considered his greatest work. Both of these works show the influence of Greek thinkers, and like Clement of Alexandria, Origen tried to merge Christian and Greek thinking. Only a few Greek fragments of each of these works remain, some in Latin and some in Slavonic. Within this third group are miscellanies (scrapbooks) comprising ten volumes similar to those of Clement, of which only a few fragments remain. Origen also wrote two practical books on doctrine. The fourth category is books of apologetics. Origen wrote one main work, Against Celsius, in 246–248 that exists in Greek. It is a reply to a pagan named Celsius sixty years earlier who had attacked Christianity in his work True Discourse. True Discourse no longer exists, but its content is clear through Origen’s response. Origen wrote several other apologetic works, but they are relatively minor. The fifth category is letters. Origen wrote hundreds of letters, and it is said that Eusebius collected one hundred of them into a group, and Pamphilus, Origen’s student, was largely responsible for putting the works in the library in Caesarea. Origen’s legacy is his hundreds of written works and his influence on countless Christian leaders and writers after him. He supported Church tradition, orthodoxy, and authority, and he believed that biblical interpretation needed to be done in light of historical Christian views and interpretations. Bibliography
After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity, by Bart Ehrman. A History of Early Christian Literature, by Edgar J. Goodspeed. New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/. “Roman Persecution of the Early Church,” http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/persecution-Â�russell.html.
—Linda Gray
JAMES ORR (1844–1913).╇ James Orr was born on April 11, 1844, in Glasgow, Scotland, and died in 1913. Although his father was an engineer, a common vocation in Glasgow that placed Orr and his family within the lower middle classes of Victorian Scotland, he was orphaned at an early age and was forced to work at the local university. The young Orr was introduced to Evangelicalism through the YMCA and came into contact with the United Presbyterian faith in Sydney Place Church, pastored by John Ker, in his hometown of Glasgow.
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Education and Profession Ker encouraged Orr in his faith and later prompted him to attend Glasgow University to study arts, emphasizing mental philosophy. He enrolled there in 1865 in hopes of going into Christian ministry and graduated in 1870 with first-Â�class honors. While at the University of Glasgow he won the Ferguson Scholarship, which afforded him with the ability to pursue two further years of advanced study at the university of his choice. He preferred to continue his studies at Glasgow, where from 1870 to 1872 he received theological training under John Cairns and John Caird at the Divinity Hall of the University. Orr was awarded his bachelor of divinity degree there in 1872, after which he completed his studies at the United Presbyterian Divinity Hall. After a number of years in pastoral ministry, he returned to school to receive his doctorate of divinity from the University of Glasgow in 1885. In 1873 Orr began his career as a pastor at East Bank United Presbyterian Church on the border of the town of Hawick. Orr’s ministry began at a time in the Scottish Presbyterian history when the Westminster Confession was being questioned by some of its members, which led Scottish Presbyterian authorities to enforce its standards more strictly. Later in his career (in 1891) he was appointed professor of church history at the Theological College of the United Presbyterian Church. The Contribution and Legacy of James Orr Orr’s first major publication was based upon his Kerr Lectures, which he delivered in 1891 and published in 1893 under the title The Christian View of God and the World (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1893), establishing Orr as a first-Â�rate theologian. The work is philosophical, theological, and apologetic in nature, defending the cogency of the Christian worldview as expressed through some of its central doctrines. In 1898 Orr further exercised his theological-Â�philosophical skills in his book-Â�length critique of Albert Ritschl’s theology titled The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (London: Hodder and Stoughton). Many of Orr’s criticisms of Ritschl were not original, but they were abundant and quickly popularized. In 1901 Orr continued his apologetic against Ritschlian theology with the publication of The Progress of Dogma (London: Hodder and Stoughton), which responded to Adolf von Harnack’s application of the Ritschlian denunciation of metaphysics to historical theology. Orr was also an avid and competent critic of the documentary hypothesis of Graf and Wellhausen in his The Problem of the Old Testament (London: Scribner, 1906) and a defender of the Orthodox belief in the resurrection in The Resurrection of Jesus (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908). Orr was not only concerned with defending the Scripture, he also concerned himself with reflecting upon its nature as divine
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revelation in Revelation and Inspiration (New York: Scribner, 1910). Orr’s interest in developing a more positive theology is also reflected in his attempt to unite Christian theology to the contemporary science of his day. Unlike the current Evangelical theological landscape, some of the most conservative thinkers of Orr’s day were open to the possibility of integrating evolutionary theory with Christian theology (e.g., many among the Old Princeton School of Theology). Orr explored this possibility in God’s Image in Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905). As this representative sample of his works reveals, James Orr left behind a powerful legacy of defending Evangelical Christianity against its liberal and antisupernaturalistic critics and developing a theology that addressed some of its most central questions. Bibliography
Scrogie, Glen G. A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988.
—Andrew Pitts
RUDOLF OTTO (1869–1937).╇ In the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) founded the comparative study of religions. In numerous books, ranging from The Origin and Growth of Religion (1878) and Natural Religion (1888) to the monumental fifty-Â�volume Sacred Books of the East, which he edited, Müller fashioned a methodological and theoretical approach to the world’s religions that presented religion as a foundational facet of human nature. Thus religion, once viewed simply as a repository of faith, could now be examined scientifically, and all religions could be understood as offering significant revelations to their followers regarding deities, individual redemption, and hope for the future. Müller’s writings, combined with the writings of liberal theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768– 1834), presented a new challenge to orthodox Christianity by asserting that every religion offered an equally legitimate path to salvation. More important, though, the confluence of such forces offered theologians creative ways to think about the nature of God, the holy, Christ, salvation, and eschatology. In his book The Idea of the Holy (published in 1917 and never out of print), Rudolf Otto offered a fresh perspective on the nature of God in terms that would heavily influence later generations of theologians and scholars of comparative religions. Otto captured the immediacy of religious experience and the extrarational nature of such experience in his definition of religion as the numen mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In short, religion involved an experience of the numinous, the holy (or God), that was terrifying—in the sense of inspiring awe and worship—and fascinating. Religion, according to
Otto, cannot be reduced simply to rational categories but always involves an overpowering feeling of awe, mystery, and wonder in the face of the pure holiness of God that one confronts, much like Moses confronted Yahweh in the burning bush in Exodus. Later theologians and philosophers such as Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, C. S. Lewis, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Â�Georg Gadamer acknowledged their debt to Otto. Otto was born in 1869 in Pienne, near Hanover, where his father owned a malt factory. In 1882 his family moved to Hildesheim, where his father died. Otto attended the Gymnasium Andreanum there and in 1888 entered the University of Erlangen to study theology. In 1891 Otto left Erlangen and enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where his own theological study was influenced by the theological faculty’s emphasis on the study of history. One year later, in 1892, Otto wrote his dissertation on the Holy Spirit in Martin Luther’s thought; in 1895 Otto wrote his habilitation on Kant’s idea of religion. Otto received his license to teach and taught not only systematic theology but also the history and philosophy of religion. He became a professor of systematic theology at the University of Marburg, where he remained for the rest of his life. Otto traveled extensively to Asia and Africa as part of his interest in other religions, and in 1924 he delivered the Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, on “mysticism east and west,” which he later published as a book. Otto retired in 1929 and died in 1937 in Marburg. His major works continue to be seminal writings in the study of religion. Bibliography
Gooch, Todd. The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1923. ———. Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism. New York: Macmillan, 1932.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
FULTON OURSLER (1893–1952).╇ Charles Fulton Oursler was born in Baltimore in 1893. Raised as a Baptist, he spent much of his life as a self-Â�described agnostic until his 1943 conversion to Roman Catholicism. He was a prolific author of magazine articles, plays for the stage and screen, novels, detective stories (under the pseudonym of Anthony Abbot), and syndicated columns. His literary significance is twofold. First, Oursler edited many of the most popular American magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, including Liberty (1931–1942) and Reader’s Digest
John Owen
(1944–1952). The most prominent writers and politicians of the day regularly contributed to these periodicals at his invitation, but one of the more influential pieces, “Alcoholics and God,” was written in 1939 by a lesser-Â�known author, Morris Markey. Alcoholics Anonymous owes much of its early success to the publicity gained by this article, and Oursler would later serve on its Board of Trustees. Oursler’s wife, Grace Perkins Oursler, was also active as a writer and as editor of the religious monthly Guideposts, with Norman Vincent Peale. Second, Oursler was a best-Â�selling author of religious fiction and nonfiction. A trip to the Middle East in 1935 resulted in a travelogue, A Skeptic in the Holy Land (1936), but also marked the beginning of a slow transformation that culminated in his conversion eight years later. In his autobiography, he described the process of writing The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949) as integral to this decision, although he only intended “to restate the ethics of Christianity in the simplest possible terms” by narrating the story of Jesus in an engaging manner (459). The novel topped best-Â�seller lists for months and was made into a popular radio play as well as a major motion picture in 1965. Two successful sequels followed: The Greatest Book Ever Written (1951), a retelling of several stories from the Old Testament, and The Greatest Faith Ever Known (1953), a retelling of events in the New Testament that was completed by his daughter April Oursler Armstrong.
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miles from Oxford, ensconced within the Reformed wing of the Church of England. The Owen children knew the importance of their Bible readings and prayers, and John knew from an early age to offer prayers for both his family and his country. What developed for Owen during his childhood was the notion that England needed to fulfill its calling from God, to complete the Reformation. At around the age of ten, Owen began attending grammar school in Oxford in preparation for enrollment at Oxford University. His father chose to enroll Owen in Queen’s College in 1628 largely because its provost appeared to be a Puritan. When Owen was just twelve years of age, it was clear that he was a prodigious reader and a serious student, and although he took up a variety of athletic pursuits while at the university, he never allowed them to interfere with his studies. It was while participating in formal disputations at the university that Owen’s ability to think through his positions from a variety of perspectives and then argue for them in a logical and convincing fashion became evident. As a Puritan at Oxford, Owen learned to listen to the positions of his opponents during debates before he moved to identify and detail their errors. It is these skills, the examining of issues from a variety of angles and the highlighting of his opponents’ errors, among others, that are easily identifiable in his writings.
A National Figure In the early 1640s Owen moved to London and completed his movement into the Puritan camp while listening to an unnamed country preacher substituting for the noted Presbyterian Edmund Calamy at his Aldermanbury Church. In 1643 Owen published his first book, A Display of Arminianism, in which he defended the idea of predestination against that of free will. It was a polemical piece, designed to announce Owen’s intellectual arrival and, in the process, earn him attention and a clerical living from a sympathetic patron. Steeped as he was in Augustinian JOHN OWEN (1616–1683).╇ Modern historiography learning, Owen positioned Arminianism as a new incarrecognizes the English minister and theologian John nation of Pelagianism through a careful use of AristoteOwen as the leading Independent scholar in seventeenth-Â� lian logic and wrote as a pastor who was attempting to aid century England whose impact upon the course of Puri- his flock in identifying the heresy within its midst. A Distan and English history was immense and continues into play of Arminianism caused the Parliamentary Committee the modern era because of his large literary output. The on Religion to offer Owen the pastorate of Fordham, in Reverend Henry Owen welcomed his second son, John, Essex, and from there he began to emerge as a national into the world during 1616 while he served as the vicar figure. From Fordham, in 1644, Owen published The Duty of Stadham (modern-Â�day Stadhampton) in Oxfordshire. There are in many writings of John Owen few if any spe- of Pastors and People Distinguished in which he offered cific references to his siblings or parents because of his Christians directions for living a godly life and endorsed overriding emphasis upon defending orthodox Reformed a presbyterian form of church polity, although his underthinking in England. Nevertheless, it is evident that his standing of church government changed in short sucearliest years were relatively ordinary as both he and four cession, as he became a congregationalist. It was while siblings grew to adulthood in Stadham, a town only five ministering in Essex that Owen came to the attention of Bibliography The Greatest Story Ever Told (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949); Why I Know There Is a God (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950); Oursler’s autobiography, Behold This Dreamer! An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), was completed after his death by his son Fulton Oursler Jr. —Patrick Gray
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Lord Fairfax, Henry Ireton, and finally Oliver Cromwell. As they began their political and military ascension in English life, Owen marched alongside them and became a national theological figure. Owen’s confirmation as a national figure occurred on January 31, 1649, when, given the act of regicide committed only one day earlier, Parliament’s January fast day sermon became a crucial event. The parliamentary leaders invited Owen, now firmly an Independent, to preach because he supported Parliament in the English Civil War. Owen’s sermon to Parliament, Righteous Zeal Encouraged by Divine Protection, remains a source of debate among his biographers, as they argue whether or not it actually endorses and/or justifies the execution of Charles I. Interestingly, after the Restoration, the damning and burning of Righteous Zeal Encouraged by Divine Protection was the only public repudiation of Owen by the Restoration authorities. An indication of the carefulness with which Owen always chose his words, even during heightened moments of emotion such as the days surrounding regicide, he sought to persuade others through logical thinking and not to personally assault the character of his intellectual opponents. Reformed Theologian Owen’s enduring importance to Christian literature is not, however, found in either his early writings or in the publication of his parliamentary sermons. It is rooted instead in his understanding of the Holy Spirit and perspective upon the end times. He was thoroughly trinitarian in his theology, and his eschatology defined his explanations of how one was to live her or his Christianity. Owen’s Pneumatologia: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit, in significant detail explains the role of the Holy Spirit in Christian life. It is not an easy read—indeed, Owen’s biographers nearly always mention that the scholastic detail of his writings limits his accessibility—and so modern publishers continually publish abbreviated portions of this treatise. What Owen did present, however, was a comprehensive explanation of why the Trinity exists and how it allowed for the completion of God’s plans. To this end, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is another of Owen’s classic works, perhaps his masterpiece, a polemical work that demands that the reader think seriously about the redemptive nature of the Trinity and the idea of limited atonement. Owen opposed the idea of universal redemption because he believed that it was unscriptural. As he did in The Death of Death, in The Doctrine of the Saints’ Perseverance he deliberately defended Reformed theology from Arminianism because he believed that any drift toward it was a return to Archbishop Laud’s England, a place where,
Owen believed, churches did not serve God’s mission but instead provided false hope to people by allowing them to focus upon their own desires and not those of God. Combined, these writings had their roots in Owen’s understanding that the return of Jesus was dependent upon the Saints answering their callings from God and, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, persevering in said calls. Post-Â�Restoration After the Restoration, in 1663 Owen received an opportunity to relocate to New England. Offered the pastorate of First Church, Boston, for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, he remained in England. Staying in England and remaining loyal to his pastorate and Reformed thinking explains much about Owen’s view of his calling. He saw himself foremost as God’s servant to the Saints within whose midst he stood. Nevertheless, Owen’s writings resonated in New England because it was there that congregational Puritanism flourished. His defense of Reformed theology, his explanations of how the Holy Spirit allowed for a fuller Christian experience, and his example of the Puritan life all combined to make him a popular and closely read author in North America. Steeped in classical learning, Owen was England’s dominant seventeenth-Â� century theologian. More importantly, both he and his writings remain crucial to any understanding of Reformed thinking in the English-Â�speaking world. Bibliography
Ferguson, Sinclair B. John Owen on the Christian Life. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987. Griffiths, Steve. Redeem the Time: Sin in the Writings of John Owen. Fearn, Ross-Â�shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2001. Lloyd, R. Glynne. John Owen: Commonwealth Puritan. Pontypridd, Wales: Modern Welsh Publications, 1972. Oliver, Robert W., ed. John Owen: The Man and His Theology. Phillipsburg, NJ: P and R Publishing, 2002. Owen, John. A Complete Collection of the Sermons of the Reverend and Learned John Owen, D.D. London, 1721. ———. The Oxford Orations of Dr. John Owen. Edited by Peter Toon. Callington, Cornwall, UK: Gospel Communication, 1971. Spence, Alan J. “John Owen and Trinitarian Agency.” Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1990): 157–173. Toon, Peter. God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen. Exeter: Paternoster, 1971. ———, ed. The Correspondence of John Owen (1616–1683): With an Account of His Life and Work. Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 1970. Trueman, Carl R. The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology. Carlisle, Cumbria, UK: Paternoster, 1998.
—Alan Bearman
P J. I. PACKER (1926–).╇ James Innell Packer was born to James and Dorothy Packer in Gloucester, England, on July 22, 1926. Packer earned his bachelor’s (1948), master’s (1952), and doctoral (1954) degrees (in classics and theology) from Oxford University. Packer was converted to Christianity at a meeting of the Oxford Christian Union. He made a personal commitment to Christ approximately one hundred feet from where George Whitefield did the same in 1735. In 1952, the Church of England ordained him. From 1953 to 1955, he served as curate at St. John’s Church in Harborne, Birmingham. Subsequently he became senior tutor at Tyndale Hall in Bristol from 1955 to 1961. He then served as librarian (1961–1962) and warden (1962–1969) of Latimer House in Oxford. Having returned to Bristol in 1970, he became principal of Tyndale Hall, and when Tyndale Hall merged with two other evangelical colleges to become Trinity College, he served as associate principal from 1972 to 1979. In 1979, after twenty-Â�seven years of preaching and teaching in England, he accepted a professorate in systematic and historical theology at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. In 1989, he was installed as the first Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology. As a consequence of Packer’s presence, Regent experienced phenomenal growth and became a major center of theological education. In 1996, he became the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology. Among the “Twenty-Â�five Most Influential Evangelicals,” Time magazine referred to Packer as “a doctrinal Solomon” within evangelicalism, who has been active in “mediating debates on everything from a particular Bible translation to the acceptability of free-Â�flowing Pentecostal spirituality,” and therefore integral to unifying the evangelical community. In a tribute to Packer in the September 16, 1996, Christianity Today, Mark A. Noll commended his “ability to address immensely important subjects in crisp,
succinct sentences,” which is “one of the reasons why, as both author and speaker, he has played such an important role among American evangelicals for four decades.” Packer has certainly influenced American evangelicalism preeminently. He has preached and lectured widely in England and the United States. In addition to serving as executive editor of Christianity Today, he is a regular contributor to a variety of theological journals. It is through his writing that Packer has exerted the most influence on Christianity. His first book, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God (1958), was a critique of fundamentalism and restatement of evangelical principles and reaffirmation of biblical authority. His introductory essay to a 1958 reprint of John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ is a remarkable defense of the substitutionary atonement. Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1961) is a classic work that correlates genuine human responsibility with empowerment by the sovereignty of God. Knowing God (1973) is his seminal work. As an outline of conservative Christian theology, it has delighted several denominations for its doctrinal summary. Beyond the Battle for the Bible (1980) was a careful restatement of the doctrine of scripture. Packer’s contribution to Evangelicals and Catholics Together (1995) was surprising among evangelicals and has garnered him much criticism. Packer was general editor of the English Standard Version Bible, published in 2001 by Crossway. The majority of Packer’s works were written in response to critical issues of the time. His sensitivity to contemporary issues, however, has not diminished the relevance of his works. Packer is Anglican and evangelical and is within the Reformed and Puritan tradition. His defense of biblical inerrancy was evident as a signatory of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. Packer provided leaderÂ�ship throughout the ten-Â�year period (1978–1987)
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in which the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy held summits and congresses. He was one of the signatories of the Call to Renewal in 1995, which was intended to disassociate evangelicalism from the Christian Right. Packer loves classical jazz. He and his wife, Kit (Mullet), have three children and many pets. Bibliography J. I. Packer: A Biography (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997) by Alister E. McGrath is the only hagiographic work. McGrath’s work is not an instant classic but is generally regarded as an initial biography introducing the thought and influence of Packer. —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. GREGORY PALAMAS (1296–1359).╇ Gregory Palamas—Byzantine monk, theologian, and archbishop of Thessalonica—was one of the eminent theologians in the Orthodox tradition and the culmination of Greek patristic thought. Born in 1296 in Constantinople, Gregory was only seven when his father passed away. Gregory was able to continue his education due to his noble family’s close acquaintance with the court of Emperor Andronicus II. At age twenty he entered the monastic life along with the rest of his immediate family, joining the community of the Great Larva on Mount Athos. In 1326 he was ordained into the priesthood, and in 1347 he was elected archbishop of Thessalonica. He died in 1359 and was declared a saint as well as “Doctor of grace” by the Synod of Constantinople in 1368. Gregory spent his life as both a practitioner and defender of the views of Hesychasm, a school of thought and practice dedicated to contemplation and constant prayer. Hesychia, meaning “stillness” or “quietude,” was used in monastic writings as early as the fourth century. Gregory’s hesychasm is a reinterpretation of earlier Neoplatonic monastic writers such as Evagrius of Pontus and Pseudo-Â�Dionysius. Whereas Evagrius sought to free the mind from the body and unite it to God through “mental prayer,” mature hesychasm teaches a holistic form of body prayer that includes breathing techniques and postures that seek to allow the monk to gaze inward and achieve the vision of God’s light. Gregory’s early writings focus on hagiography and spirituality. His first work was the Life of Saint Peter the Athonite, and his second was his famous “sermon,” recently published in English as “On the Entry of the Mother of God into the Holy of Holies.” His best-Â�known writings were polemical in nature and arose out of the Barlaamite controversy. Barlaam the Calabrian was a Greek Italian philosopher and monk who wrote commentaries on
Pseudo-Â�Dionysius. Barlaam denied that any direct knowledge of the divine or the Trinity was accessible to the human mind. He was vehemently opposed to hesychasts’ belief that the body as well as the mind is transfigured and therefore contributes to our knowledge of God. Gregory responded to Barlaam with his three-Â�part work, In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, or simply, The Triads. Two councils held in Constantinople in 1341 officially rebuked Barlaam and supported Palamas, whose theology became dominant for several centuries. Palamas’s most important contribution is his theological anthropology and his understanding of the nature of God. While many of Palamas’s hesychast predecessors articulated a Neoplatonic anthropology that downplayed the value of the body and the material realm, thinkers like Barlaam believed that the created mind was limited to such an extent that no positive knowledge of God was possible. In response to both of these streams, Palamas articulated an anthropology that was rooted in the canonical sources of the Christian tradition. In short, his Christocentric anthropology understood both the body and the soul as made in the image of God and therefore able to participate in the divine life of the Trinity through divinization. Palamas’s understanding of the nature of God is based on a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. The divine essence is God as he is in himself; God as the utterly transcendent creator of the universe. The divine energies, on the other hand, are the uncreated and real presence of God in the world; these are how God manifests himself to his creatures. Thus God is unknowable in his Essence, but fully revealed in his Energies which the Christian can experience and participate in through spiritual purification and unceasing prayer. Palamite theology was largely ignored in the West until the twentieth century, when Catholic theologians denounced it along basically Thomistic lines. Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff introduced a sympathetic articulation of Palamas’s thought to the West, which has significantly increased constructive dialogue between East and West and promises to impact global Christianity indefinitely. Bibliography
Lossky, Vladimir. 1997. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Meyendorff, John. 1974. St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. ———. 1998. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Palamas, Gregory. 2005. Mary the Mother of God: Sermons by Saint Gregory Palamas. Edited by Christopher Veniamin. South Canaan, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing.
Wolfhart Pannenberg
———. 1983. The Triads. The Classics of Western Spirituality. Edited with an introduction by John Meyendorff, translated by Nicholas Gendle. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
—Paul Carron
PHOEBE PALMER (1807–1874).╇ Born December 17, 1807, in New York City, Phoebe Worrall became a popular lay Methodist holiness leader in the mid-Â�1800s. In 1827 she married physician and lay Methodist evangelist Walter Palmer. In spite of the death of several of her children at a young age, she persevered in a life of faith and holiness. In 1835 Phoebe’s sister, Sarah Lankford, began having weekly prayer meetings with Methodist women. Two years later, Phoebe became the leader of the meetings, known as the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness. In 1839 men began attending the meetings, including Methodist bishops, theologians, and ministers. Accepting invitations from churches, conferences, and camp meetings, the Palmers became itinerant preachers. Phoebe Palmer is regarded by many scholars and Christian leaders as one of the most influential Christian women of the nineteenth century. She wrote extensively on faith, especially in a collection of writings first published in 1848 entitled Faith and Its Effects. Her teachings on faith and sanctification were developed from eighteenth-Â�century Methodist leaders. She popularized the second blessing experience of entire sanctification with the terminology “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Palmer played a significant role in advancing the Wesleyan concept of holiness worldwide. She wrote several books, including The Way of Holiness (1843), a foundational book in the Holiness movement. The great preacher of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, T. DeWitt Talmage, praised her as the “Columbus of the Higher Life.” The Palmers became catalysts for revival in North America and Great Britain, especially known for stirring the great “laymen’s revival” of 1857–1859. Through meetings they held in Canada in the summer and fall of 1857, more than two thousand were converted. News about the Canadian revivals and the Palmers’ encouragement of lay ministry spread like wildfire into New York, beginning with noon prayer meetings for businessmen, then launching a nationwide revival. Phoebe was hailed as a “female Charles Finney,” with estimates that more than 25,000 people came to Christ through her ministry. She become one of the most outstanding woman ministers of her day, advancing the causes of lay leadership, women’s rights, and opportunity for women to serve in ministry. Her book The Promise of the Father (1859) presented a scriptural rationale for women in ministry. Christian leaders significantly influenced by Phoebe Palmer included B. T. Roberts, founder of the Free
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Methodist Church; Thomas Upham, Congregational professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and early psychologist; and Episcopalian medical doctor and faith healing leader Charles Cullis, all who received the sanctifying baptism in the Spirit through her ministry. Hannah Whitall Smith and her classic book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life show evidences of influence by Palmer. A. B. Simpson, founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, adapted Palmer’s teaching on positive confession, modifying her terminology “professing the blessing.” Evangelist Dwight L. Moody adapted her revival practices. Others influenced through Palmer’s speaking and writing were Methodist social activist Frances Willard, Salvation Army cofounder Catherine Booth, and Christian Holiness Association founder John Iskip. Palmer led the Methodist Ladies’ Home Missionary Society in founding the Five Points Mission in a slum area of New York City in 1850. The Palmers’ daughter, Phoebe Palmer Knapp, wrote many hymn tunes, including the melody to “Blessed Assurance,” the famed hymn by Fanny Crosby. Palmer edited the journal The Guide to Holiness from 1864 until her death. Her writings include Entire Devotion to God (1845), Faith and Its Effects (1848), and a collection of The Devotional Writings of Phoebe Palmer (Garland Press, 1985). Biographical writings on Palmer include Harold E. Raser, Phoebe Palmer: Her Life and Thought (Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), and Charles Edward White, The Beauty of Holiness (Francis Asbury Press, 1986). —Paul King WOLFHART PANNENBERG (1928–).╇ Wolfhart Pannenberg is one of the most important systematic theologians of the twentieth century. He was born in 1928 into a middle-Â�class family; little else of his early years is noteworthy for understanding his theology. From 1948 to 1953 he was educated at three different universities: he started his philosophical education at Göttingen, from 1948 to 1949, under Nicolai Hartmann; he continued his training at Basel in 1950, where he was influenced by Karl Jaspers and Karl Barth; finally, from 1951 to 1953 he became increasingly interested in the philosophy of history under Karl Löwith and Hans von Campenhausen at Heidelberg. He taught at Mainz and Bonn, and, most notably, until his retirement, he was professor of systematic theology at the University of Munich from 1968. Though Pannenberg is Lutheran, his most important work for ecclesiology is his ecumenical engagement: he participated in the Lutheran–Â�Roman Catholic dialogue for decades and served on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, which published
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Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (Paper no. 111), an essential document for ecumenical efforts. His most important and original work involves four areas: (1) the role of history and reason as they pertain to theological truth; (2) the importance of the doctrine of God; (3) Christological method; (4) and the centrality of eschatology. After his doctoral work, on John Duns Scotus’s view of election, he turned to the importance of revelation, cowriting Revelation as History, which aimed to bring God’s historical revelation back into consideration for theological importance. This move was intended to overcome dialectical theology’s sharp distinction between time and eternity (a view associated with Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann). Pannenberg has continuously insisted that reality is a unity and, furthermore, reality is most readily linked to history. Thus, history has a unity and all of human history is leading to the time when God will show that he is lord of creation, history, time, and eternity. In Pannenberg’s work this process and result is the kingdom of God, which will be revealed fully in the eschaton. Indeed, the kingdom of God is arguably the central theme to all of Pannenberg’s work and picks up all of the major threads of his project: eschatology, history, Christology, and the doctrine of God. Trained in Old Testament studies by Gerhard von Rad, the preeminent scholar at the time, Pannenberg takes Israel’s experience as vital to understanding divine revelation and ontology. More specifically, God can be known precisely where and when he interacts with the Israelites, as found in the biblical record. More important, Pannenberg is convinced that God’s historical interaction is the ground of understanding the doctrine of God. This leads him, perhaps, to the most contentious issue in his work: the nature of the resurrection of Jesus. Against many in contemporary theology, Pannenberg insists that the resurrection is, and indeed must be, a historical event that can be investigated like any other. He ultimately argues that the resurrection is a reasonable truth claim and can be held rationally. He is most famously, perhaps, linked to his Christological method: “from below,” by which he intends to inspect Jesus’s life and ministry and then move to his divinity, with the overall result of identifying Jesus as the Messiah. This approach shows that he is merely following his own criteria: the unity of history is the ultimate horizon of Christian theology. His entire project is framed by his view that eschatology needs to be central to the theological enterprise, and the fact that this may not sound remarkable at present is due, in part, to the impact of his wide-Â�ranging theology. Current theology cannot be written well without referencing or interacting with Pannenberg. The comprehensive nature of his project looms large over present
theological discussions around the world in all segments of Christian doctrine. Bibliography
Grenz, Stanley. (2005). Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. (1968). Jesus—God and Man. Translated by L. Wilkens and D. Priebe. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. ———. (1991–1998). Systematic Theology, 3 volumes. Translated by G. W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991–1998. Pannenberg, Wolfhart, ed. (1968) Revelation as History. Translated by D. Granskou and E. Quinn. Second edition. London: Sheed and Ward.
—Ryan Neal
BLAISE PASCAL (1623–1662).╇ Blaise Pascal was born to Étienne Pascal (a French lawyer and amateur mathematician) and Antoinette Begon at Clermont, Auvergne, France, on June 19, 1623. His mother died when he was only three years old. In 1631, the Pascal family settled in Paris. He studied grammar, Latin, Spanish, and mathematics under the tutelage of his father. Pascal demonstrated tremendous ability in mathematics and science. At the age of twelve, he wrote a treatise on the communication of sounds. At the age of fourteen, he began accompanying his father to weekly meetings with Mersenne and other French geometricians; these meetings eventually led to the formation of the French Academy. He wrote another treatise, prior to the age of sixteen, which was published as “Essay on Conic Sections” in February 1640; this work was highly reviewed by the mathematicians of Paris. At the age of nineteen, Pascal invented the first arithmetical machine, called the “Pascaline,” which he greatly improved eight years later. His correspondence with Pierre de Fermant, a French lawyer and government official, has credited him with articulating the foundation for the modern theory of probability. He discovered properties of the cycloid and applied Cavalieri’s calculus of indivisibles, which resulted in an advance of differential calculus. He wrote Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids in 1653, which increased knowledge of atmospheric pressure as a complete outline of a system of hydrostatics. The events of 1646 were momentous in his life. His father injured his leg and was made to stay in his house for recovery. Two members of the Jansenists attended to his father, which, in 1651, influenced both Pascal and his sister Jacqueline to embrace their religious beliefs. When his father died the same year, Jacqueline became a nun at the convent at Port Royal. Pascal apparently lived a life
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that was dissipated and independent of religious beliefs from 1652 to 1654. His Discours sur les passions de l’amour is an account of this period and evidences the influence of his friend the Duc de Roannez on him. On November 23, 1654, however, he nearly lost his life due to an accident with his horse carriage, and this event led to his conversion to Christianity. From January 1656 until March 1657, he began publishing anonymous works on religious matters, entitled Provincial Letters, which were in defense of his noted Jansenist friend Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits, who was on trial at the University of Paris. Provincial Letters is as much satirical as logical argument written to persuade readers of the justice of Arnauld’s cause and the injustice of the Jesuit charges against him. His magnum opus in philosophy and religious thought is Pensées, which is a series of fragments containing Pascal’s thoughts on human suffering and the existence of God. The collection of miscellaneous personal jottings was published posthumously by Port Royal in 1670 as an incomplete edition, entitled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets. Pensées contains the famous “Pascal’s wager,” whose logic affirms the rationality of belief in God: “If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.” The general intent of Pensées is to challenge skepticism concerning metaphysical questions. One aspect of Pascal’s apologetic methodology in Pensées was the development of an argument for the veracity of Christianity in relation to the nature of humanity. He argued that the biblical doctrines of creation (that is, man’s greatness) and the fall of humanity (that is, man’s wretchedness) more reasonably explain human behavior and experience. According to Pascal, the greatness and wretchedness of humanity are evident to such an extent that the true religion must be informative concerning these great principles of the human condition. Only Christianity accurately explains the greatness and wretchedness of humanity, which is proof of its truthfulness. Sickly for much of his youth and of poor health throughout his life, Pascal died in Paris on August 19, 1662.
Catechesis and Conversion in the Pensées by David Wetsel (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1994); Pascal and Theology by Jan Miel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Pascal et Montaigne: Étude des réminiscences des Essais dans l’œuvre de Pascal by Bernard Croquette (Genève: Droz, 1974); Pascal’s “Provincial Letters” by Walter E. Rex (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977); Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s “Pensées” by Nicholas Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Portraits of Thought: Knowledge, Methods, and Styles in Pascal by Buford Norman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988). See biographies by Alban J. Krailsheimer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980); Hugh M. Davidson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983); and Marvin O’Connell, whose biography is the most commendable and readable. —Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
Bibliography Important works for the study of Pascal’s thought include: Blaise Pascal: The Genius of His Thought by Roger Hazelton (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974); Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s “Pensées” by Sara E. Melzer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Les Pensées de Pascal by Jean Mesnard (Paris: Sedes, 1976); Pascal: The Emergence of Genius by Emile Cailliet (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961); Pascal and Disbelief:
General Contribution Paterson’s impressive body of work for children includes nonfiction, such as Justice for All People (1973); historical fiction, such as Bread and Roses, Too (2006); contemporary fiction, such as The Same Stuff as Stars (2002); short story collections, such as A Midnight Clear: Stories for the Christmas Season, 1995; translations, such as The Crane Wife, 1981; and, for beginning readers, such as the “Marvin” series. She has also written many essays and speeches
KATHERINE WOMELDORF PATERSON (1932–). Katherine (Womeldorf) Paterson was born on October 31, 1932, in Qing Jiang, China, one of five children of Presbyterian missionary parents George and Mary (Goetchius) Womeldorf. The family was evacuated twice from China due to war, finally remaining permanently in the southeastern United States but continuing to move frequently. Paterson earned an undergraduate degree from King’s College in Tennessee and two master’s degrees, one from Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Virginia and another from Union Theological Seminary in New York. She served as a missionary in Japan before marrying her husband, John Paterson, a Presbyterian minister. Paterson began her writing career with nonfiction religious education materials, such as the book Who Am I? (1966), which drew on her background in Christian education. She began writing fiction for children in 1973 with The Sign of the Chrysanthemum, a historical novel set in twelfth-Â�century Japan, and has now become “a prolific, popular author who is considered among the most accomplished of contemporary writers for the young” (Something about the Author 133–136).
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for adults, of which The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children (2001) is a recent collection. Paterson’s work has garnered enormous critical acclaim. She has twice been honored with the most prestigious American award for children’s literature, the Newbery Medal, for Bridge to Terabithia (1978) and Jacob Have I Loved (1981). One book, The Great Gilly Hopkins (1979), won not only a Newbery Honor but also a Christopher Award and a National Book Award. Paterson received an additional National Book Award for The Master Puppeteer (1977). Paterson has also been recognized with several lifetime achievement awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and a Library of Congress Living Legend designation. Themes in Writings Paterson says on her Web site, “I am Christian, so that conviction will pervade the book even when I make no conscious effort to teach or preach. Grace and hope will inform everything I write” (www.terabithia.com). Indeed, Christian themes are evident in all of Paterson’s writing. Hope is especially prevalent, and this is usually hope in a difficult situation. For example, Gilly in The Great Gilly Hopkins is a foster child who has never known a real home. When she is finally placed in the foster care of the amazing Maime Trotter, she no sooner begins to trust in love than she is sent back to the natural family that had abandoned her. Nevertheless, she has been changed by her time with Trotter and is now sturdy enough to handle her difficult life. Gilly also represents another of Paterson’s themes, the necessity for personal growth and responsibility. This often takes the mythological form of the quest for the parent. In Jip, His Story (1996), for example, Jip’s search for his identity eventually leads to his slave mother and slave-Â�owning father. Jip comes to realize that while his father is evil, his quest has left him mature enough to make his way in the world even with this knowledge. As Gary Schmidt points out, while Paterson does not usually employ the conventional happy ending, she always has “endings that point toward grace” (Schmidt, Katherine Paterson, 1994, 19). Jip and Gilly also illustrate a third prominent theme in Paterson’s writing, the theme of peace through social justice, especially justice for the poor and for girls. Rebels for the Heavenly Kingdom (1983), for example, looks at the complex ideologies of war. Lyddie (1991), a novel about a mill girl in 1840s Massachusetts, addresses child labor issues. The King’s Equal (1992) tackles the theme of gender equity in picture book format. In addition to these general Christian themes, Paterson’s work also contains many overt references to Christianity. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the title of
her award-Â�wining book about sibling rivalry, Jacob Have I Loved. In addition, ideas about the nature of God are contained in Bridge to Terabithia, Preacher’s Boy (1999), and many others. Frequently, Paterson weaves in verses from the Bible, or she includes portions of well-Â�known hymns. In the hands of this master storyteller, these religious dimensions become integral pieces of the book, causing children to ponder these issues carefully. As Harold Bloom said, “Most of her work for children both presents compelling plots and deals with subtle issues of faith and mystery” (Bloom, Women Writers of Children’s Literature, 1998, 115). Most Important Works One of Paterson’s trademarks is the willingness to deal truthfully with incredibly difficult topics. Two of her most widely read and highly decorated books both exhibit this. In Bridge to Terabithia, Paterson examines the issue of the death of a child, and in Jacob Have I Loved, she confronts sibling rivalry and the puzzling idea of a God who has favorites. Bridge to Terabithia tells the story of two misfit fifth graders, Jesse and Leslie, who find friendship with each other and create a magical kingdom named Terabithia. This kingdom can be reached only by swinging over a creek on a rope. When this rope breaks and Leslie dies, Jesse is left to deal with his grief and make meaning from it. In Bridge to Terabithia, Paterson deftly weaves in multiple themes, including friendship, bullying, self-Â� acceptance, grief, and the importance of passing your wisdom on to others. She fearlessly introduces very difficult concepts about the nature of God and faith, the relationship of religion to God, and the conditions for salvation. The beauty of Paterson’s writing is that she does all of this in a nondidactic way that is still comprehensible to her ten-Â�year-Â�old intended reader. Jacob Have I Loved is perhaps Paterson’s most complex novel. The title is taken from Romans 9:13, which says, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated,” and the book follows the sibling rivalry between twins growing up during World War II on a small island in Chesapeake Bay. Sara Louise, the older twin, who feels she is passed over in favor of her fragile and talented younger sister, must come to grips with the favoritism she has essentially created herself. To further complicate her efforts, she is hindered by a venomous grandmother who uses Bible verses to wound those around her. Eventually, Sara Louise matures enough to begin her own life rather than allowing envy of her sister’s life to cripple her. As a midwife to a poor mountain community, Sara Louise gains critical insight into her own beginnings as she delivers twins and struggles to save the life of the younger, weaker twin. This leads to the further
St. Paul
insight that a benevolent God’s hand has been evident during her whole journey in preparing her for the life she is to lead. Complex and difficult ideas handled truthfully are again evident in this book. Paterson’s fearless asking of hard questions and her consistent refusal to provide easy answers have earned her both praise and criticism. But as Paterson said in an interview in Theology Today, “My job is to tell the best, the truest story that I can tell. It is the reader’s privilege to choose what she or he will learn from reading the book” (“Why Do You Write for Children?” Theology Today 56 [2004]: 570). Bibliography
Edwards, Eden. Children’s Books and Their Creators: Katherine Paterson. Edited by Anita Silvey. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Nelson, Dean. “Braving the Awful Truth.” Science and Spirit 16, no. 5 (2005): 66–70. Paterson, John, and Katherine Paterson. Images of God. New York: Clarion, 1998. Paterson, Katherine. Come Sing, Jimmy Jo. New York: Puffin, 1985. ———. The Day of the Pelican. New York: Clarion, 2009. ———. Flip-Â�Flop Girl. New York: Dutton, 1994. ———. Of Nightingales That Weep. New York: HarperTrophy, 1974. ———. Park’s Quest. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Plume, 1995. Quarles, Heather, and Suzanne M. Wolfe. “A Conversation with Katherine Paterson.” Image: Journal of the Arts and Religion 13 (1996): 49–63. Smedman, M. Sarah, and Joel D. Chaston (eds). The Fiction of Katherine Paterson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2003. Sutton, Roger. “An Interview with Katherine Paterson.” Horn Book Magazine 77 (2001): 689–700.
—Sheryl O’Sullivan
ST. PAUL (d. ca. 67).╇ We know from St. Paul himself that he was born at Tarsus in Cilicia, his father was a Roman citizen, and his family was attached to the traditions and observances of Pharisaic Judaism. Belonging to the tribe of Benjamin he was given the name of Saul, possibly in memory of the first king of Israel, and as a Roman citizen he also bore the name of Paul. Trained in his youth as a tentmaker, Paul was sent while still very young to Jerusalem, where he received an education at the school of Gamaliel. From that time it is very difficult to trace a chronology of his life until he takes an active part in the martyrdom of Stephen as recorded in Acts 7:58–60. Three accounts are given in Acts describing the pivotal event of
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conversion in Paul’s life (9:1–19, 22:3–21, 26:9–23). Here he meets the risen Lord on the road to Damascus and is changed from one on his way to persecute the church to one who would become the church’s greatest apostle. The approximately twenty-Â�five-Â�year period of Paul’s apostolic career comprised three great missionary journeys that spread the Christian faith west from Jerusalem all the way to Rome and possibly beyond. The churches that were planted and nurtured by Paul during this time also became the recipients of a written correspondence that took the form of public letters. These letters reflect the epistolary genre of the Greco-Â�Roman world, and although they may appear to be personal correspondence, they are actually short theological treatises intended for a larger readership. Indeed, Paul’s letters were meant to be circulated beyond the stated recipients as they were copied, collected, and ultimately formed into the New Testament canon by the end of the fourth century. The earliest explicit references to a collection of letters by Paul are found in other early Christian letter collections, such as 2 Peter 3:15–16, where reference is made to “all” of Paul’s letters, or Ignatius of Antioch, who tells the Ephesians that Paul mentions them in every letter. However they were circulated, the epistles of St. Paul reveal a remarkable human being who was dedicated and resolved; was encouraging and nurturing but also honest in his reactions, which were sometimes angry and harsh; wrote with both compassion and intellectual rigor and subtlety; and above all possessed a deep and passionate commitment to God, Jesus Christ, and his own missionary calling. Together the epistles of St. Paul constitute one of history’s most remarkable personal contributions to religious thought and practice. Of the twenty-Â�seven books that make up the literature of the New Testament, thirteen are attributed to Paul, and approximately half of Acts deals with Paul’s life and works. Thus, about half of the New Testament stems from Paul and the people whom he influenced. Of the thirteen epistles attributed to Paul, only seven claim general acceptance as being entirely authentic (dictated by Paul himself). These constitute the best source of information on Paul’s life and thought, and in probable chronological order include: 1╯Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Romans, and Philemon, which is much more difficult to date. The epistles less widely accepted as authentically Pauline include Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. The literature of St. Paul vividly describes a universe with multiple levels that are filled with spiritual beings. There are regions below the earth (Phil. 2:10), “the third heaven” or “Paradise” (2 Cor. 12:1–4), and beings Paul calls angels, principalities, rulers, powers, and demons (Rom. 8:38; 1 Cor. 15:24). He also identifies the leader
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of the forces of evil, called both “Satan” (1 Cor. 5:5; 7:5) and “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4). The richness of this supernaturalism comes to a climax with Paul’s discussion of the God of Israel, who at the right time will send his Son to defeat the powers of darkness (1 Cor. 15:24–26; Phil. 2:9–11). The richness of Pauline literature is also exemplified in the unique way in which he writes about Jesus. As in his preaching ministry, the primary focus of Paul’s epistles is the death, resurrection, and lordship of Jesus—and the meaning of our faith in Jesus as granting us a share in his life. Writing to the Galatians, he recalled that he had “placarded” the crucified Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:1) before their eyes, and writing to the Corinthians he recalled that he had known nothing among them “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul uses “Christ” both as a title in reference to Jesus and also as if it were Jesus’s proper name, a new and widespread usage for which he was responsible. Furthermore, Paul makes free use of the title “Son of God” in reference to Jesus, as in Romans 1:1–6 where he states that God declared Jesus to be Son of God by raising him from the dead. In Paul’s writing this is explicitly espousing an ontological Christology in which Jesus Christ’s deity is viewed as a fact of revelation (rather than as a conclusion drawn from his messianic functions). For Paul, Jesus Christ is revealed to be the supreme and unique creator, telos and sustainer of all things, the embodiment of the fullness of deity, and the sole reconciling mediator between God and humanity (Col. 1:15–23; 1 Tim. 2:5). Yet, this preexistent Christ is also the human Jesus who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness,” who was a descendant of David, a man “born of a woman,” and who had a physical body (Phil. 2:6–11; Rom. 1:3; Gal. 4:4; Col. 1:22). The tension between these two positions is not fully worked out by Paul, and the long debate between divergent interpretations marked early Christianity until the fifth century with the church’s ecumenical confession that Jesus Christ was both entirely divine and entirely human. The grand vision of the redemption of the created order shows the depth of Paul’s belief in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and in the distinctive cosmic importance of his son, Jesus Christ. The death of Jesus Christ is discussed by St. Paul both in terms of ancient sacrificial theology, where Jesus’s death was a substitution for others and thereby freed believers from sin and guilt (Rom. 3:23–25), and in baptismal terms, where those who are baptized into Christ are baptized into his death and thus they escape the power of sin (e.g., Romans 6). In the first case, Jesus dies so that the believers will not have to experience themselves the divine punishment for their sins. In the second, he dies so that the believers may die with him
and consequently live with him as “new creatures” (2 Cor. 5:17). The physical creation will be redeemed as well from its “bondage to decay” when Christ returns to defeat all of his enemies, including death and all the remaining forces of sin, finally turning creation over to God, so that God would be “all and all” (1 Cor. 15:20–28; Rom. 8:18–25). Pauline literature also presents a uniquely beautiful vision of the Christian life as a life of faith lived out in the power of the Spirit, before God and in light of the promises of Christ made known in the message of the gospel. Paul made “faith” one of the great Christian words, using it throughout his writings many times as a noun, verb, and adjective. The forensic language of “righteousness by faith” and “justification by faith” employed by Paul in Romans and Galatians is augmented by the almost mystical language of the believer’s faithful union with Christ: “in Christ you are children of God through faith”; those baptized into Christ have “clothed themselves with Christ”; and finally, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:24–29). This unity of believers as the body of Christ is at the heart of Paul’s conception of the church as individuals being transformed in loving community from which will flow true worship, witness, and good works as “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22). Paul has been venerated as a saint, apostle, and martyr throughout most of the church from the time of his death. Though not always fully comprehended and properly applied, his ideas have been received by believers as the authoritative interpretation of the message of Jesus Christ for humanity. Especially during times that witnessed a resurgence of Pauline theology in Christian history—such as in the explosive role Paul’s Epistle to the Romans played in the life and work of Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Karl Barth—the power of his teaching is unmistakable. It is Paul’s message of the loving and reconciling forgiveness of God manifested in Jesus Christ for the liberation and transformation of the world that continues to speak today. Bibliography For analysis of Paul’s literary genre and style, see Charles╯B. Cousar, The Letters of Paul, Abingdon, 1996; William╯G. Doty, Letters in Primitive Christianity, Fortress, 1988; Jerome Murphy-Â�O’Connor, Paul the Letter-Â�Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills, Liturgical, 1995; Calvin╯J. Roetzel, The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, Westminster John Knox, 1998; and Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Â�Roman Antiquity, Westminster, 1989. On the life and theology of Paul, see F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, Eerdmans, 1993; James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Eerdmans, 1998;
Norman Vincent Peale
Victor Paul Furnish, Theology and Ethics in Paul, Abingdon, 1982; Leander Keck, Paul and His Letters, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, Augsburg Fortress, 1988; Jerome Murphy-Â� O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life, Oxford, 1998; Hermann Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology; Eerdmans, 1992; E. P. Sanders, Paul, Oxford, 2001; D.╯E.╯H. Whiteley, The Theology of St. Paul, Fortress, 1964; and J. A. Ziesler, Pauline Christianity, rev. ed., Oxford, 1990. —Peter Anders NORMAN VINCENT PEALE (1898–1993).╇ Norman Vincent Peale was a Protestant preacher, author, and most notably, progenitor of the theory of positive thinking. Born in Bowersville, Ohio, on May 31, 1898, educated at Ohio Wesleyan University and Boston University School of Theology, Peale was ordained in the Methodist church of his youth but switched his affiliation to the Reformed Church in America in 1932. He spent fifty-Â�two years as pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Peale also founded the Peale Center, the Positive Thinking Foundation, and Guideposts Publications, all to promote his theories of positive thinking as life’s guiding force. With educator Kenneth Beebe, Peale founded the Horatio Alger Association, which—in the spirit of the nineteenthcentury dime novels—recognizes and honors Americans who overcome difficulties and achieve success. Peale’s radio program, The Art of Living, began in 1935 and ran for fifty-Â�four years. Under the sponsorship of the National Council of Churches, he began a television program soon after World War II. He also helped found and edited Guideposts, the nondenominational magazine of inspirational stories, and wrote some twenty books. The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952, was and remains his most widely read work. It stayed on the New York Times best-Â�seller list for 186 consecutive weeks and at this writing has sold 7 million copies (per Amazon.com) and has been translated into several languages. Some of his other popular works included The Art of Living, A Guide to Confident Living, The Tough-Â�Minded Optimist, and Inspiring Messages for Daily Living. In his books, Peale explained positive thinking as a three-Â�step process of repeated self-Â�hypnosis that leads to attaining God’s power for constructive use while eliminating or avoiding all negativity in life. Peale equated positive thinking with “simply a series of practical and workable techniques for living a successful life.” His techniques can be summarized as a constant repetition of affirmations that implant suggestions into the unconscious and positively affect one’s outlook. According to Peale, the conscious will, self-Â�knowledge, self-Â�determination, courage, and intelligence are insufficient for a successful life. The
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rejection of self, according to Peale, leads to attainment of God’s power. Peale went so far as to say that prayer is insufficient—that for prayer to work the subject has to use his techniques. Though Peale lacked any mental health credentials— and while mental health experts occasionally dismissed his theories as self-Â�hypnosis (autosuggestion)—Peale insisted that those who learned and used his techniques would conquer almost any adversity. Peale’s works also came under criticism from theologians, scholars, and politicians, some of whom suggested that he was a con man and fraud and that The Power of Positive Thinking is based on anecdotes that cannot be substantiated (as most of the experts and many of the testimonials Peale uses to support his philosophy are unnamed or not sourced). Perhaps the most substantial critic of Peale was psychologist Albert Ellis— founder of cognitive therapy—who compared Peale’s techniques to hypnotism and claimed that repeated use of his techniques could lead to mental health problems. However, Peale had his supporters as well, the most famous of which was the Reverend Billy Graham, who in 1966 told a National Council of Churches meeting that “I don’t know of anyone who had done more for the kingdom of God than Norman and Ruth Peale, or have meant any more in my life for the encouragement they have given me.” His major books include the following, in their current configurations: The Power of Positive Thinking, Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (August 1, 1996). Guide to Confident Living, Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (September 1, 1996). Six Attitudes for Winners, Tyndale House Publishers; May 1, 1990. Positive Thinking Every Day: An Inspiration for Each Day of the Year, Fireside; December 6, 1993. Positive Imaging, Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (September 1, 1996). You Can If You Think You Can, Fireside Books; August 26, 1987. Thought Conditioners, Foundation for Christians; Reprint edition (December 1, 1989). In God We Trust: A Positive Faith for Troubled Times, Thomas Nelson Inc.; Reprint edition (November 1, 1995). Norman Vincent Peale’s Treasury of Courage and Confidence, Doubleday; June 1970. My Favorite Hymns and the Stories behind Them, HarperCollins; 1st edition (September 1, 1994). The Power of Positive Thinking for Young People, Random House Children’s Books (A Division of Random House Group); December 31, 1955.
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The Amazing Results of Positive Thinking, Fireside; Fireside edition (March 12, 2003). Stay Alive All Your Life, Fawcett Books; Reissue edition (August 1, 1996). Bibliography
Murphy, R. C. “Think Right: Reverend Peale’s Panacea.” Nation, May 7, 1955, 398–400. The official Web site of Norman Vincent Peale http://norman vincentpeale.wwwhubs.com/. Peale, Norman Vincent. The Power of Positive Thinking. Fawcett World Library, Crest Book R608, 1966.
—Kirk Bjornsgaard
CHARLES PIERRE PÉGUY (1873–1914).╇ Charles Péguy was born on January 7, 1873, in Orléans to Désiré and Cécile Péguy, members of the poor working class. Désiré, a cabinet maker, died when Charles was still an infant, and Cécile repaired chairs to make ends meet. Charles attended grammar school in Orléans. A scholarship enabled him to attend the local lycée, where he excelled in his studies. After earning a baccalaureate in 1891, Péguy volunteered for a year of military service. Passing his entrance examination on the third attempt, in 1894 he enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to study philosophy. Although he earned his licentiate, Péguy withdrew from the École Normale and abandoned his preparations for a university post. What filled the void left by Péguy’s change in plans was a commitment to socialism, which he believed to be the solution to the problems of poverty with which his childhood had made him familiar. Concomitant with this political conviction was his decisive rejection of Roman Catholicism and Christianity. Returning to Orléans from Paris, he founded a socialist study group and also began to write articles for the Revue socialiste. He married Charlotte Baudouin, the sister of a close friend, in October 1897; the couple had four children. During the Dreyfus trials that split the French nation along ideological lines, Péguy ardently supported the Dreyfusard cause, publishing articles in La Revue blanche defending Dreyfus and engaging in street brawls with opponents of the Jewish army officer. Years later he summarized the Dreyfus case in Notre jeunesse (1910). During this same period in the 1890s, however, Péguy turned back to the medieval era for inspiration in writing Jeanne d’Arc, a commercial failure. This dramatic trilogy was dedicated to martyrs for a universal socialist republic. Having returned to Paris and opened a bookstore, Péguy left the socialists after they voted to centralize control of the
socialist press in 1899. The following year he commenced publication of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine (Fortnightly Notebooks). For the next fifteen years, the Cahiers published several of the foremost writers in France, along with Péguy’s own contributions. In the succeeding years, Péguy’s earlier socialism was colored by his increasing nationalistic fervor. During an illness in 1908, he confessed his private reconciliation with the Catholic Church to a friend. No definitive record indicates that Péguy ever attended a Catholic liturgy after this event, however, and his marriage outside the church to a woman who was not religious made his situation difficult in this regard. Instead, he channeled his patriotic religious faith into verse. Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910) was followed by Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1911), Mystère des Saints Innocents (1912), and Ève (1913). At the start of World War I, Péguy joined an infantry unit as a lieutenant. On September 5, 1914, he was killed in action near Villeroy on the opening day of the first Battle of the Marne. Work Péguy’s complex appropriation of Joan of Arc is clearly on display in his first major work, Jeanne d’Arc. The long play, over 750 pages in the first published version, replicates the characters in detail but is not primarily concerned with a historical reenactment. Instead, Péguy downplays the story’s external dramatic aspects and directs his verse onto a psychological plane with emphasis on soliloquies. Moreover, his stage directions include incessant commands for silent pauses between many passages, inviting a meditative response from a reader rather than an audience, for Jeanne d’Arc was far too long to be staged regularly. Of the many essays Péguy wrote for the Cahiers, a handful are particularly noteworthy. A 1901 article, “De la grippe,” sets out Péguy’s anger at the traditional Christian doctrine of hell, which he describes as “an unnatural piece of fantasy.” Péguy contrasted this exclusivity with what he had come to call “the harmonious city,” which he had already explicated in an 1898 dialogue entitled Marcel. For Péguy, harmony was the supreme eschatological achievement, to be accomplished by socialism and human creativity. The 1905 essay “Les suppliants parallèles” was written after the massacre of over one hundred demonstrators in St. Petersburg. Here Péguy begins the piece with two parallel columns of text, one a petition to the czar on behalf of the demonstrators and the other a priest’s supplication to Oedipus from Sophocles. For Péguy the supplicant, whether an ancient Greek priest or a member of the Russian proletariat, is the one who is the master. The supplicant, not the supplicated, is the one who
Jaroslav Pelikan
represents the gods by magnifying the misfortunes dealt by the gods; the very destitution of the supplicant is paradoxically the source of his power. Though he was not yet reconciled to Christianity at this time, the emphasis on the value of suffering foreshadowed Péguy’s later religious conversion. “Notre jeunesse” looks back on the Dreyfus case after this conversion and reflects the bitterness Péguy harbored toward his former socialist allies who had used their political power to suppress Catholic schools and religious orders. Here Péguy bemoaned the attack against the heroic mystique of the pro-Â�Dreyfus Republicans, now reinterpreted as a religious movement of Christian origin, by a “modern world” of intellectuals with no belief, devotion, or sacrifice. Mystère de la charité returns to Péguy’s attack on the traditional Christian doctrine of hell, moving Joan of Arc’s battle against the English into an eschatological key. Here Joan is not simply a French patriot but a young peasant woman who is convinced of her own guilt, willing to be abandoned by God if it will ransom the damned. This commitment to undergo a suffering comparable to Christ’s on the cross is what provides Joan with the strength to resist the demands of her ecclesiastical judges. Péguy’s insistence on the importance of the collective salvation of humanity grows out of his socialism. Le Porche de mystère de la deuxième vertu (The Entrance of the Second Virtue’s Mystery) is a meditation on hope, again fused with socialist overtones. Péguy attacked the idea of a God who only foresees human destinies from above without standing in solidarity with people. In representing hope as a small girl leading her two older sisters—faith and charity—by the hand, Péguy insists that the future is central to Christian belief. Christian hope, embodied in characters from Mary to the heroic French woodcutter, always looks forward and is the most agreeable of the three virtues to God. The model for such hope is the God who became vulnerable in the world through the incarnation of Christ. God’s anxious vulnerability is manifested in the hope God has for the flock Christ shepherds. The dialogue between Joan and her companion Madame Gervaise in Le Mystère des saints innocents again raises the issue of reciprocity between God and humanity. God is faced with the problem of honoring human free will, only to find that when this freedom is abused human salvation is at risk. God complains, “If I support him too much, he is no longer free / And if I do not support him enough, he falls.” Ève, Péguy’s longest poem, written in some four thousand lines of alexandrine verse, is a monologue in which Jesus speaks to the mother of the human race about the human condition before and after original sin.
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Principal Ideas of Charles Péguy •â•‡ Christianity and socialism are both distinguished from bourgeois ideology by their emphasis on the collective welfare of humanity. •â•‡ Traditional Christian ideas on hell and damnation reflect an individualistic ethos that is not faithful to the nature of God. •â•‡ Life necessarily involves suffering, and neither political change nor Christian life can escape this reality. •â•‡ If accepted in faith and humility, suffering brings one closer to the divine. •â•‡ The inevitability of human progress is an illusion; modern secularization has not brought about progress but a petty narrowing of human concern. •â•‡ With the incarnation of Christ God has freely chosen to become vulnerable in the world and to stand in solidarity with people. •â•‡ Hope in the face of an uncertain future is inextricable from Christian discipleship; Christian hope is based on the hope God has that people freely accept the salvation God has offered them. Bibliography Péguy’s complete prose works are in three volumes edited by R. Burac (Gallimard, 1987). The complete poems are in one volume (Gallimard, 1975). English translations of Péguy’s writing include The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, and Other Poems, trans. A. Dru (Harper, 1956); The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, trans. J. Green (Pantheon, 1950); and The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, trans. D. Schindler Jr. (Continuum, 2005). Ann and Julian Green have translated selections from Péguy’s work in the anthologies Men and Saints: Prose and Poetry (Pantheon, 1944); God Speaks (Pantheon, 1945); and Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry (Pantheon, 1948). A. Dru has also translated two of Peguy’s late essays (Notre jeunesse and Clio) in Temporal and Eternal (Liberty, 2001). General introductions are Péguy by S. Fraisse (Seuil, 1979); and Péguy by R. Rolland (Edito-Â�Service, 1972). Helpful studies are represented with La Religion de Péguy, by P. Duployé (Klincksieck, 1965); Péguy devant Dieu, by B. Guyon (de Brouwer, 1974); Charles Péguy: The Pursuit of Salvation, by Y. Servais (Newman, 1953); and Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity, by M. Villiers (Greenwood, 1975). —Christopher Denny JAROSLAV PELIKAN (1923–2006).╇ Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born December 17, 1923, in Akron, Ohio, to parents of Eastern European origin: his father, a Lutheran
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Jaroslav Pelikan
pastor, emigrated from what was then Czechoslovakia; his mother, a schoolteacher, was born in Serbia. Pelikan’s grandfather was the first bishop of the Slovak Lutheran Church in America. As a boy he learned four Slavonic languages and German, later learning Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin. In 1946, Pelikan earned a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, was ordained into the Lutheran church, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, married Sylvia Burica, and began his teaching career at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He returned to Concordia where he taught until his first book, From Luther to Kierkegaard (1950), caught the attention of the University of Chicago. After he had spent twelve years in Chicago—fast becoming the foremost scholar of Christian intellectual history—Yale Divinity School invited him to join their faculty. In 1972 he was named Sterling Professor of History and soon afterward became the dean of Yale Graduate School. Pelikan was a founding chair of the Council of Scholars for the Library of Congress, a board member for the Smithsonian Institute and the American Philosophical Society, and an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1992, he gave the distinguished Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, published in 1995 as Christianity and Classical Culture. In 1996, after Pelikan retired from Yale, President Bill Clinton appointed him to serve on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Pelikan also served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2003–2004 as chair of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Over his long and illustrious career, Pelikan received numerous awards and medals, as well as some forty-Â� two honorary degrees. In 2004, the Library of Congress awarded him the John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the field of humanities). He shared this $1 million award with French philosopher Paul Ricouer, donating his half to St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York. While most historians choose a particular area in which to specialize, Pelikan managed to become an authority on the whole of Christian history. He wrote more than thirty books, including the five-Â�volume series The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971– 1989). This is a chronological study of doctrine in which he discusses how the Christian tradition is expressed through teaching and worship within a community rather than through the writings of specific theologians. He wrote widely on Martin Luther, editing twenty-Â�two volumes of translations of Luther’s works, and produced books on Mary, St. Augustine, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet Pelikan managed to reach beyond the academic community to a more popular audience with
his Jesus through the Centuries (1985) and later The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries (1997). He also wrote in areas concerning music with Bach among the Theologians (1985), in law with Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (2004), and in literature with Faust the Theologian (1995). His book, Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures through the Ages (2005), discussed how various faith traditions interpret the Holy Scriptures, concluding with the idea that “Christians and Jews need each other in an effort to understand the sacred text they share.” Because of his Eastern European background, Pelikan was able to demonstrate a deep and sympathetic comprehension of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox traditions (in 1998, in keeping with his Slovakian and Serbian heritage, he and his wife joined the Orthodox Church in America). His goal as a historian was to prepare the way for a better future through a better understanding of the past, always distinguishing between tradition as the “living voice of the dead” and traditionalism as the “dead voice of the living.” Pelikan is quoted as saying in one of his last lectures: “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen, nothing else matters.” Bibliography
Acts (2006) Bach among the Theologians (1986) The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 volumes (1973–1990) Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (1993) Confessor between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj (1990) Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (2003) Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (1969) Divine Rhetoric: The Sermon on the Mount as Message and as Model in Augustine, Chrysostom, and Luther (2000) The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church (1989) Faust the Theologian (1995) The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (1992) The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries (1997) Imago Dei (1990) Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (2004) Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1985) The Light of the World: A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought (1962) Martin Luther’s works, multiple volumes (1955–1969) Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (2005 paperback) Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (1996)
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many of the “spiritual manifestations” in his meetings had been inspired by demons. Penn-Â�Lewis was equally critical toward the emerging Pentecostal movement. Her initial skepticism may be attributed to earlier Holiness pamphlets authored by Hannah Whitall Smith and others. These writings expressed concern regarding the “next revival” to succeed the Holiness movement, asserting that it might be characterized by demonic infiltration. It is no wonder that many Pentecostals felt that Penn-Â�Lewis’s book War on the Saints, coauthored by Evan Roberts, reflected a polemical stand against Pentecostalism itself. The two authors had alleg—Patricia Anders edly “included evidence, supplied from contacts all over Europe, of counterfeit signs, visions, voices and spiritual exercises.” This was in addition to Roberts’s own “mixed JESSIE PENN-Â�LEWIS (1861–1927).╇ Penn-Â�Lewis was experiences [1904–1905] which had by now been examborn in Neath, South Wales, and grew up in a Calvinist ined and sifted.” Many reacted negatively toward the conMethodist preacher’s family. She was married in her late troversial book with the subtitle “A Textbook for Believers teens. At age twenty-Â�one, Penn-Â�Lewis moved to Rich- on the Work of Deceiving Spirits among the Children of mond (Surrey), where she and her husband soon were God.” The authors also claimed that Christians could be drawn to the Anglican Holy Trinity Church pastored by “possessed” by demons. After Penn-Â�Lewis’s relationship with the Life of Faith Evan H. Hopkins. Through Rev. Hopkins, Penn-Lewis was soon intro- magazine was severed, she published her own Overduced to Keswick teachings. She was a regular attendant comer magazine in 1909. She also initiated independent of the yearly Keswick Conventions and was asked to min- conferences. Penn-Â�Lewis was widely read as a devotional writer. ister in 1899, albeit only in ladies’ meetings. She became instrumental in the initiation of a Welsh convention along Many of her publications were translated into other lanKeswick lines located in Llandrindod Wells beginning in guages. Her main message was Christ’s crucifixion and its application to the believer’s Christian walk. This empha1903. Her ministerial career at Keswick, however, was short-Â� sis was reflected in several of her book titles, including lived, as even Hopkins considered her teachings “too sub- Message of the Cross (1898) and The Cross of Calvary jective.” Ironically, it was in the Hopkins household that and Its Message (1903). In Soul and Spirit, Penn-Â�Lewis Penn-Â�Lewis had been introduced to Quietist literature. unfolded her trichotomous anthropology, leaning in part Her subjective bent was obviously patterned after the on Andrew Murray and George Hawkins Pember. In French mystic Madame Guyon, to whom she admitted The Magna Carta of Christian Women (1919), she challenged male supremacy in church and society. This book owing “a great deal.” Penn-Â�Lewis held a remarkable correspondence with appeared immediately after the British electorate had church leaders both within the United Kingdom and acknowledged the right of all women to vote and to enter abroad. In 1904, she contributed her first article to the into public office. —Geir Lie Keswick journal Life of Faith. Three weeks later she announced in another article that “God is sweeping the southern hills and valleys of Wales with an old-Â�time WALKER PERCY (1916–1990).╇ United States. Walker revival.” Penn-Â�Lewis took more than an active interest in the Percy was a Catholic, philosophically oriented novelist from Welsh revival. After the physical and mental breakdown the American South, whose work is part of the twentieth-Â� of chief revivalist Evan Roberts in 1906, he moved in with century Catholic Renascence, which also included Flanthe Penn-Â�Lewis household in Leicester. Roberts remained nery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Graham Greene, Evelyn with them for several years. Not many knew that he was Waugh, and Dorothy Day. Born in 1916 in Birmingham, “unable to stand or walk for almost a twelvemonth.” Alabama, to a family of established southern gentry, Percy Rumors that Roberts was held back against his will in the would eventually have his initial career path in medicine Penn-Â�Lewis household were inaccurate. However, Penn-Â� cropped short in 1941 through contraction of tuberculosis. Lewis managed to convince the young revivalist that During his three-Â�year sanatorium recovery (1942–1945), Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspectives (1986) The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary (1988) The Reformation of the Bible: The Bible of the Reformation (1996) The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959) Sacred Writings: Buddhism—The Dhammapada (1987) Sacred Writings: Hinduism—The Rig Veda (1992) Sacred Writings: Islam—The Qur’an (1992) The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought (1990) What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (1998) Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures through the Ages (2005)
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Frank E. Peretti
Percy encountered writers who challenged his exclusively scientific worldview, ignited his writing aspirations, and influenced his eventual (1947) conversion to the Catholic faith. These writers, whose fingerprints mark Percy’s novels, include Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, the French existentialists, Augustine, and Aquinas. Having left medicine and inheriting his “Uncle Will’s” large estate, Percy married Mary “Bunt” Bernice Townsend in 1946 and took up the writing life, producing most of his work from their home in Covington, Louisiana. After two failed novels, Percy’s The Moviegoer won him the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, launching his writing career. From 1962 to 1987 Percy wrote five additional novels: The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). After a life of writing, including numerous philosophical essays and two nonfictional volumes, Percy died at his Covington home on May 10, 1990, surrounded by family and friends. Thought and Fiction Throughout his work, the critique of post-Â�Enlightenment anthropology, together with the formulation of a new “Theory of Man,” is Percy’s central concern (Percy, Message, 10). He argues that on the one hand, “scientific humanism” has persuaded people that they are merely material organisms, while on the other, Western consciousness retains the Judeo-Â�Christian notion that humans possess a “soul,” “freedom,” and dignity (9, 20). Percy contends that in the present age, these models of human selfhood “are incoherent and go off in different directions” (19), leaving people “lost in the cosmos”—adrift between material organism and immaterial soul, between beast and angel—as sundered, anesthetized strangers to themselves. Robbed of coherent self-Â�knowledge, people are enshrouded in the “modern malaise,” a pathological fragmentation and alienation of selfhood (19). Indeed, Percy believed this malaise lurked behind both his father’s and grandfather’s suicide and his own temptation to the same. A particularly modern expression of universal sin, this malaise is “the great suck of self ” (Percy, The Second Coming, 14), which isolates people from sacramental creation, from others, and from God. Thus Percy begins his novels— each a unique blend of comedic satire, cultural critique, existentialist strains, and philosophical richness—with “a man in a predicament” who wallows in the “everydayness” of the malaise, a “death-Â�in-Â�life” that launches him as a wayfaring pilgrim in search of meaning. For Percy, the object of his characters’ search is a divine “message of love from across the seas” (Percy, Message, 146), which emerges in the natural landscapes, in the despairing search itself, in flashes of sacramental wholeness, in the palpable existence of sin,
and ultimately in the “gift” of communion with other wayfaring pilgrims, which may be “a sign of a giver” (Percy, The Second Coming, 360). For Percy’s characters, the malaise propels the search, sacramental signs in creation illumine the eternal, and relational communion opens the possibility of recovering wholeness in the embrace of love’s message. Having pinpointed the malaise of fractured selfhood, Percy offers a vision of the self made whole before God. Thus does Percy’s character, Tom More, capture this vision: “Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-Â�beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker, waiter and watcher” (Percy, Love in the Ruins, 360). Bibliography
Elie, Paul. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. ———. More Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Luschei, Martin. The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy’s Diagnosis of the Malaise. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Percy, Walker. Lancelot. New York: Avon Books, 1977. ———. The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966. ———. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Â�Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983. ———. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World. New York: Dell, 1971. ———. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975. ———. The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961; Reprint, 1980. ———. The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ———. Signposts in a Strange Land. Edited by Patrick Samway S.J. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Noonday Press, 1991. ———. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987. Pridgen, Allen. Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Press, 2000. Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
—Nathan P. Carson
FRANK E. PERETTI (1951–).╇ Canadian. Frank Peretti is a contemporary novelist whose most well-Â�known novels primarily focus on the theme of spiritual warfare. This
Frank E. Peretti
interest in the demonic stems in part from his background as a minister in the Assemblies of God. Born in Canada and raised in Seattle, Peretti lives with his wife in northern Idaho. His hobbies include carpentry, banjo making, sculpturing, bicycling and hiking, and flying. After graduating from high school, Peretti played the banjo, toured with a local bluegrass group, and started a small Christian music ministry. He then studied English, screen writing, and film at UCLA. Until 1983, he helped his father pastor an Assembly of God church. He then worked in construction jobs and began writing his first spiritual warfare book, This Present Darkness (1986). Although the book began with rejections and then slow sales, word of mouth helped it rise to Bookstore Journal’s best-Â�seller list, and it appeared there monthly for eight years. It is now considered among the classic novels of the Christian thriller genre. It is credited for spearheading the strong interest in “spiritual warfare” novels and the rise in popularity of Christian fiction. Peretti began writing full time, publishing the companion book, Piercing the Darkness, in 1989. The Prophet followed in 1992 but was not as popular as the other two books. Novels To develop his writing skills, Peretti began working with secular publishers and editors. The Oath (1995), which focuses on a bargain a Washington logging town makes with a dark force, received the 1996 ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for Best Fiction and has sold 860,000 copies. In 1999, Peretti published The Visitation, in which an eastern Washington town is visited by a man who claims to be the reincarnated Jesus. It was number one on the CBA Fiction Bestseller list for four months. The Wounded Spirit (2000), his first nonfiction book, is an autobiographical account of his painful childhood struggles with disfigurement and became a best-Â�seller. No More Victims (2001) describes the struggle against bullies. Books and Other Media In 2006, Peretti and coauthor Ted Dekker published House, which incorporates both horror and the spiritual themes of his first novels and has also been turned into a film. Peretti has written two book series for younger audiences. The Cooper Kids Adventure Series is targeted to preteenagers and includes eight books: The Tombs of Anak (1987) The Door in the Dragon’s Throat (1990) Escape from the Island of Aquarius (1990) Trapped at the Bottom of the Sea (1990) The Secret of the Desert Stone (1996) The Deadly Curse of Toco-Â�Rey (1996)
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The Legend of Annie Murphy (1997) Flying Blind (1998). The Veritas Project, aimed at teens, includes Hangman’s Curse (2001) and Nightmare Academy (2002). Twentieth Century Fox released on film both Hangman’s Curse, in which Peretti plays an eccentric professor, and The Visitation. Peretti has also released two Visual Bible for Kids videos and an audiocassette series called Wild and Wacky Totally True Bible Stories. He plays the role of Mr. Henry, an inventor and substitute Sunday school teacher. The novella Tilly (1988), which centers on the theme of abortion, was originally written as a radio drama for Focus on the Family (1986) and made into a short film by Love Life America in 2002. Monster (2005) tells of a real monster and raises issues about evolution and survival of the fittest. Peretti is currently working on film versions of both Monster and The Oath. Reviews Peretti’s novels for adults have been analyzed from both a literary and theological perspective. Christian book reviewers generally consider Peretti’s novels “entertaining stories with complex interwoven plots” and fast-Â�paced, engaging supernatural thrillers. His novels are especially popular with Charismatic and Pentecostal churches because of his focus on spiritual warfare, and his novels are also taught in college courses. This Present Darkness, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies, has been one of Peretti’s most influential novels, impacting Christian ideas about spiritual warfare and the New Age movement. Some critics classify his novels as belonging in the “horror” genre in the vein of Stephen King. Literary criticism includes stereotypical characters, redundancy, poor grammar, and stilted dialogue. Some have expressed concerns about the simplistic dualistic worldview, unbiblical theology about spiritual warfare, lack of emphasis on God’s sovereignty, forced apologetics, unreliable portrayal of New Age ideas, and the influence of animism, Zoroastrian, and mystery religion myths. With more than 12 million novels in print, Frank Peretti has been described as “nothing short of a publishing phenomenon” and “America’s hottest Christian novelist.” He has been credited with making evangelical Christian thrillers a mainstream publishing genre. Sources Frank Peretti Official Web site: http://www.frankperetti .com/ Frank Peretti Books, Biography, and Fan Forum: http:// bblmedia.com/frank_peretti.html —Martha Sammons
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John M. Perkins
JOHN M. PERKINS (1930–).╇ John M. Perkins, born in the rural town of New Hebron, Mississippi, in 1930, spent his early years in poverty. His mother died seven months after his birth and his father went away around the same time, leaving John and his four siblings to be raised by his grandmother and various other relatives. From an early age, Perkins experienced many forms of oppression. These reached a climax in 1946 when John’s older brother, Clyde, was shot and killed by the New Hebron town marshal. After his brother’s death, Perkins left Mississippi vowing never to return. He headed instead for California, where he got a job at the Union Pacific Foundry and, for the first time in his life, experienced material success. Perkins married Vera Mae Buckley in 1951 and, after his two-Â�year term in the military, they returned to California to begin their family. In California Perkins began his quest for answers to life’s questions by exploring various religious cults along with reading the Bible and studying the Apostle Paul. In the fall of 1957, Perkins committed his life to Christ, and, as with everything else, he pursued his new love with a passion, actively participating in Bible studies, evangelism, and so forth. Following God’s call, Perkins moved his family back to rural Mississippi in 1960, eventually settling in the town of Mendenhall. Here, Perkins devoted himself to meeting the needs—spiritual, social, and economic—of the black community. Over the next several years, Perkins’s ministry grew from vacation Bible schools and Child Evangelism Fellowship to include the Berean Bible Church, Voice of Calvary Ministries, and a Bible Institute. In addition to evangelism, he engaged in civic and social matters by starting economic cooperatives, leading efforts to increase black voter registration, and participating in economic boycotts as well as protest marches aimed at securing equal rights for blacks. Everything he did was anchored in his faith, which proved essential when, in 1970, Perkins was beaten—nearly to death—by white law-Â�enforcement officers. With God’s help, he chose to respond with forgiveness instead of hatred and expanded his evangelistic ministries to include white as well as black communities. Over the next two decades, Perkins addressed the needs of inner-Â�city families in Jackson, Mississippi, and founded the Harambee Christian Family Center in California while he developed his strategy for Christian Community Development (CCD). In 1989 Perkins brought together Christian leaders from around the nation to found the Christian Community Development Association. This organization is committed to demonstrating Christ’s love in America’s urban communities at a grassroots personal level through a three-Â�part strategy of relocation (moving to live among the poor), reconciliation (to God and to one another), and redistribution (the natural sharing of
resources in the community that results in empowering the poor). Perkins, more than any other Christian leader, has made significant progress in raising awareness of the need for racial reconciliation in the church and among Christians. Today, Perkins is an international speaker, teacher, and author of numerous books. In two of his early books, Let Justice Roll Down (1976, Glendale, CA: G/L Regal Books) and A Quiet Revolution: The Christian Response to Human Need, a Strategy for Today (1976, Waco, TX: Word Books), Perkins tells the story of his personal life and life of faith. In With Justice for All (1982, Ventura, CA: Regal Books), he describes his work with the urban poor of Jackson, Mississippi, and lays out his strategy for Christian Community Development. He develops the theme of CCD in Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development (1993, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books) and Resurrecting Hope (1995, John M. Perkins with Jo Kadlecek, Ventura, CA: Regal Books). He goes on to provide examples of CCD at work in Restoring At-Â�Risk Communities: Doing It Together and Doing It Right (1995, edited by John M. Perkins, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books). Additional books by Perkins include He’s My Brother: A Black Activist and a Former Klansman Tell Their Stories (1994, John Perkins and Thomas A. Tarrants III with David Wimbish, Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books), A Time to Heal: John Perkins, Community Development, and Racial Reconciliation (1997), and A Call to Wholistic Ministry (1980, St. Louis, MO: Baker Books). In addition, Perkins has written chapters in numerous other books and has served on numerous boards, including World Vision, Prison Fellowship, and Spring Arbor College. One book, John Perkins: Land Where My Father Died (1987, by Gordon D. Aeschliman, Ventura, CA: Regal Books) and numerous articles have been written about Perkins’s life and work. —Lorelle Jabs EUGENE PETERSON (1932–).╇ Eugene Peterson links his work as a pastor and a spiritual writer to the grounding and formative experiences of his youth in Kalispell, Montana. With a father who was a butcher and a mother who served as a Pentecostal minister, Peterson claims that his earliest perceptions of the Christian life were forged by his encounters with the people of that small town while they purchased meat, received a pastoral visitation, or attended to the details of life. To these experiences he credits the narrative style of his writing and his vision of the pastoral and the spiritual life as one of steadily and faithfully drawing attention to the presence of God in the everyday. Peterson left Montana to attend Seattle Pacific University. After graduation, he moved to New York where he
Francis Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca]
earned a Bachelor of Sacred Theology at Biblical Seminary (renamed New York Theological Seminary) and he pursued ordination in the United Presbyterian Church, USA. He then completed an MA in Semitic languages from Johns Hopkins University. In 1962, Peterson accepted a call to plant Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. He and his wife, Jan, served Christ Our King for twenty-Â�nine years before Eugene began teaching, first at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and later at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. After Peterson retired from Regent in 1998, he and Jan returned to his parents’ home near Kalispell. As a writer, Peterson has been concerned with Christian formation and the pastoral vocation. He is best known for The Message, in which he translated the Old and New Testaments into the language of the ordinary American. Through this creative use of language, he hoped to highlight the presence of God in everyday life and to draw people into the story of God’s action. In his pastoral writings, Peterson has redefined the work of the pastor as one who nurtures spiritual growth and builds Christian community. He argues that many contemporary approaches to pastoring are adverse to this work because they are consumer-driven, they build themselves around individuals or programs, or they lose touch with the creativity, the joy, and the mystery of participating in God’s work in the world. By articulating this alternate vision of the pastoral vocation as intrinsically spiritual and relational, Peterson’s work has influenced the shape of pastoral theology in North America. His writings on Christian spirituality have further demonstrated his pastoral vision. He defines Christian spirituality as the living of the Christian life with others. Against views of spirituality that are elitist or other-Â� worldly, he argues that Christian spirituality is ordinary and develops through the grounded experiences of the everyday. He reminds Christians that, in contrast with spiritualities that are consumeristic or self-Â�centered, spirituality is primarily about God—participating in God’s works and God’s ways as revealed in Jesus Christ. Through this alternate vision, expressed in stories, in reflections on scripture, and in translation work, Peterson has stood as a prophetic voice within the North American context, calling people to a Christian spirituality that is faithful to the ways of Christ. Bibliography A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (1980); Run with the Horses (1983); Traveling Light (1988); Reversed Thunder (1988); Answering God (1991); Where Your Treasure Is (1993); Like Dew Your Youth (1994); Subversive Spirituality (1994); Take and Read (1995); Leap Over a Wall (1997);
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1 and 2 Samuel—Westminster Bible Companion (1999); Psalms: Prayers of the Heart (2000); The Wisdom of Each Other (2001); The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (2002); Sidewalks in the Kingdom (coauthored with Eric Jacobsen) (2003); Epiphanies (coauthored with Emilie Griffin) (2003); Water My Soul (coauthored with Luci Shaw) (2003); The Christmas Troll (2005); Eat This Book (2006); Living the Resurrection (2006); Living the Message (2007); The Invitation (2007); The Passionate Journey (coÂ�authored with Marty Bullis) (2007); Conversations (2007). Pastoral Theology Series: Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (1980); The Contemplative Pastor (1980); Under the Unpredictable Plant (1980); Working the Angles (1987); The Unnecessary Pastor (coauthored with Marva Dawn) (2000). Praying with the Bible Series. Spiritual Theology Series: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (2005); The Jesus Way (2007). —Stephanie Mar Smith FRANCIS PETRARCH [FRANCESCO PETRARCA] (1304–1374).╇ Along with Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch towers as one of the most influential writers of the era that brought Italy into the first light of the Renaissance. He is alternately termed the Father of the Renaissance and the Father of Humanism. Life Born to a successful and well-Â�connected merchant family, Petrarch was born in Arezzo on July 20, 1304. His father had strong connections to Pope Clement V. The family moved briefly to Incisa, near Florence, before following the papal court to Avignon. Although Petrarch wished to pursue a career in the church, his father demanded that he study law and sent him to Montpellier (1316–1320) and Bologna (1320– 1326). His father’s death in 1323, though, gave Petrarch more freedom to pursue his love of Latin literature. Petrarch relished collecting ancient manuscripts. His first successful literary work, Africa, was about Scipio Africanus, the legendary Roman general. The popularity of this work and other translations brought him great fame, including his status as the poet laureate (1341), an ancient office that was resurrected for his sake by both Paris (which he declined) and Rome (which he accepted). Petrarch’s status with the church prevented him from marrying, but he did have two children: Giovanni (b. 1337 in Avignon, d. 1361) and Francesca (b. 1343 in Vaucluse). In 1368 or so, Petrarch and his family moved to Padua, where he spent the final years of his life in contemplative retirement. He died on July 19, 1374, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.
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J. B. (John Bertram) Phillips
Works Petrarch was an early champion of vernacular Italian as acceptable for literary works, and he is still heralded as something of an originator of the language. By the sixteenth century, Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio were held out as the exemplars of Italian, in much the same way as a century later Shakespeare was viewed as the embodiment of the English language. Ironically, the bulk of Petrarch’s prolific writing was actually in Latin, not Italian, and included De Vita Solitaria (“On the Solitary Life”), De Viris Illustribus (“On Famous Men”), De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (“On the Remedies for Both Kinds of Fortune”), and Secretum (“Secrets”). Equally popular were the various collections of letters he published (some of which were contrived, with Cicero and Virgil as recipients). Petrarch’s Italian works, however, are his most enduring and included a wide variety of poetic formats. The Trionfi (“Triumphs”), for example, is a masterful but unfinished allegory in terza rima. The genre that is synonymous with Petrarch is the sonnet, the fourteen-Â�line form that contained two essential parts: an eight-Â�line octave followed by a six-Â�line sestet. So interlinked is his name with this format that the terms “Italian sonnet” and “Petrarchan sonnet” may be used almost interchangeably. The primary publication of these sonnets was in the Rime Sparse (also called Il Canzoniere), a collection of poems written to describe the arc of his relationship with his beloved “Laura.” While the exact identity of Laura is not genuinely known, the details of Petrarch’s infatuation are: he first saw her on Good Friday (April 6) 1327, he was forced to admire her from afar, and she died of the plague, ironically, on Good Friday (also April 6) 1348. At her death, Laura’s image was frozen into that of an idealized beloved, a saintly woman in whose wake Petrarch was forced to live out the remainder of his years in contemplation of what it meant to have loved. The tone of the sonnets was changed by the fact that an actual love affair was prevented, first by moral restrictions and then by her death. Rather than the plaintive pleading of some of his contemporaries, who followed in the tradition of Catullus’s Lesbia poems, Petrarch’s sonnets reflect a transcendent epiphany that everything in this world leads inexorably to decay: love in the human realm always leads to sorrow. Philosophical and Literary Legacy Petrarch is often called the Father of the Renaissance because of his role in altering the way that intellectuals viewed the world. His role in the rise of a national language is inseparable from the rise of nation states and from the
rise of national perspectives that trumped the older, more static worldview of the medieval Catholic Church. More significant, though, is his philosophical impact. While his Latin treatises are no longer influential, their impact on Western philosophy cannot be understated. In many ways, Petrarch is the Father of Humanism, which shifted from a vertical, heaven-Â�focused perspective to a more horizontal, human-Â�focused outlook. A better term for his philosophy, perhaps, is Christian humanism, for Petrarch’s belief was thoroughly grounded in his theological framework. He argued that humanity is the pinnacle of God’s creative act in this world and is, therefore, worthy of study and exploration as a means to understanding the creator. For him the intellectual life was completely devotional: its purpose was to cultivate a deeper faith in and relationship with God. Petrarch spawned a multitude of imitators, notably the English sonneteers who reached their zenith in the sonnet craze of the 1590s, including Henry Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and, notably, William Shakespeare. Petrarch, Spenser, and Shakespeare are the three dominant masters of the sonnet genre, which enthralled love poetry for the better part of four centuries. Bibliography
Bishop, Morris. Petrarch and His World. New York: Associate Faculty, 1963. Cook, James Wyatt. Petrarch’s Songbook. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Foster, Kenelm. Petrarch: Poet and Humanist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Hainesworth, Peter. Petrarch the Poet: An Introduction to the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. Oxford: Routledge, 1988. Mann, Nicholas. Petrarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Petrarca, Fransceco. Petrarch in English. Translated by Thomas╯P. Roche. New York: Penguin, 2005. Whitfield, J. H. Petrarch and the Renascence. London: Haskell House, 1966. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1961.
—Gene Fant
J. B. (JOHN BERTRAM) PHILLIPS (1906–1982).╇ Evangelical Anglican minister, writer, and broadcaster J. B. Phillips translated parts of the New Testament during World War II, publishing the whole in 1958 as The New Testament for Today. He made scripture come alive for multitudes and pioneered a half-Â�century of idiomatic English translation of scripture that culminated in Eugene Peterson’s end-Â�of-Â�century full-Â�Bible paraphrase The Message. His translation praised by none other than C. S. Lewis, Phillips
J. B. (John Bertram) Phillips
was expected by many to succeed Lewis as a popular apologist for traditional Christianity. While Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small revealed his gift for apologetics, a debilitating, long battle with depression contributed to his never fully assuming Lewis’s mantle. But his literary output, including ministry through a vast personal correspondence to fellow sufferers, and his distinctive apologetic strategy merit fresh study and appreciation today. Phillips was born on September 16, 1906, to Philip William and Emily Maud (Powell) Phillips and attended Emanuel School in London; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he received the M.A. with second-Â�class honors in classics; and Ridley Hall, also at Cambridge, where he studied theology for a year. On April 19, 1939, he married Vera May Jones, a dance teacher, with whom he had a daughter, Jennifer (Mrs. R. A. Croft). From the start of his ministry in 1930 at St. John’s, Penge, in southeast London, his perfectionism, instilled in childhood by his father, shadowed him, initiating a fifty-Â� year battle with psychological disturbance and depression that ended only at his death. Until publication in 1984 of J. B. Phillips: The Wounded Healer, authored jointly by his widow and longtime friend Edwin Robertson, few knew of his lengthy struggle. Even his posthumously published autobiography, The Price of Success, minimized this battle. Our knowledge today elevates his accomplishments in Christian communications—in the parish, in print (with translations into eight or more languages), and over the radio—to the remarkable. He began translating the Bible in 1941 while leading a parish youth club. Phillips would end daily meetings by reading briefly from Paul’s letters in the Authorized Version. Youths would listen politely but comprehend little. Long excited by the Greek text, Phillips began translating Colossians for his youths. He succeeded immediately: youths not only comprehended what they heard but also discovered ancient scripture to be relevant, a response echoed by many thousands of other readers of Phillips’s translations. After polishing Colossians, Phillips sent it in 1943 to C. S. Lewis, who replied that reading it “was like seeing a familiar picture after it’s been cleaned.” Lewis encouraged him to translate all the New Testament letters, then helped the unknown minister find a publisher, suggested the title that Phillips was wise enough to choose—Letters to Young Churches—and contributed its preface. Upon its release in 1947, Phillips’s vocations as translator and writer were simultaneously launched and confirmed. Counting editions of his Bible translations (including four Old Testament prophets), Phillips authored over twenty books, which together have sold in the millions. He describes several of them:
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Is God at Home? (1957) is a collection of tracts printed together. The Church under the Cross (1956), written for the Church Missionary Society, explains some of the difficulties of spreading the Gospel throughout the world. Appointment with God (1954) is about Holy Communion, largely a reproduction of a Lenten series of lectures. When God Was Man (1954) is based on a series of broadcasts on the significance of God becoming Man in Jesus Christ. Your God Is Too Small (1952) I especially recommend: it attempts to get rid of outworn or outgrown concepts of the Almighty, and New Testament Christianity (1956) tries to explain the message of the New Testament in today’s language. God Our Contemporary (1960) was an attempt made, after a good deal of research and consultation, to re-Â�establish a sense of the living God in the modern world. Ring of Truth (1967) is my personal testimony to the historic reliability of the New Testament, and in particular the resurrection of Jesus. A Man Called Jesus (1959) is a series of plays written for the British Broadcasting Corp., but used fairly widely in schools and youth groups.
Other titles include Making Men Whole (1952); Plain Christianity (1954); St. Luke’s Life of Christ (1956); Good News (1963); For This Day: Three-Â�Hundred-Â�Sixty-Â�Five Meditations (1974; Denis Duncan, ed.; Through the Year with J. B. Phillips in England); Peter’s Portrait of Jesus (1976); The Newborn Christian (1978); and his autobiography, The Price of Success (1984). Phillips stood in the Evangelical tradition of Anglicanism, having participated for several years in the Cambridge Inter-Â�Collegiate Christian Union and the Keswick Higher Life movement. Yet as a translator familiar with the challenges of rendering words and thoughts from one language into another, he distanced himself from the fundamentalist doctrine of the verbal, plenary inspiration of scripture. At the same time, he affirmed orthodox views of the deity of Christ and His bodily resurrection and expressed anger toward the faith-Â�corroding effects of radical biblical criticism that denied the historicity of the saving events the New Testament records, including the miracles of Jesus. Phillips’s skill as a communicator with his contemporaries shines through not only his translations but also his apologetic strategy. Your God Is Too Small begins with criticism—showing the error or inadequacy of prominent misconceptions of God. Then it turns to construction, and hypothesizes, just as a contemporary scientist might, what God might be like were he to come on the scene in first-Â� century Palestine. The correspondence between Phillips’s conjecture and the gospel record is uncanny and, because not contrived, often persuasive to readers. His taking seriously his contemporary audience—hearers and readers— and the message of the ancient scripture and faith resulted in his being not only an exemplary translator and teacher but also, finally, a skilled evangelist, whose experience of
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sorrow endowed his communications with a winsome compassion that helps explain his wide influence. For Further Reading
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. Document Number: H1000078072. Accessed October 12, 2007. Phillips, J. B. The Price of Success: An Autobiography. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1984. Phillips, Vera, and Edwin Robertson. J. B. Phillips: The Wounded Healer. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984. Robertson, E(dwin) H. “J. B. Phillips: Translator.” Expository Times 95, no. 10 (July 1984): 300–304.
—Mark Roberts
ALVIN PLANTINGA (1932–).╇ Alvin Plantinga is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Plantinga earned his B.A. at Calvin College and his Ph.D. at Yale University. At Calvin, Plantinga began thinking about philosophy from an explicitly Christian perspective; this was counter to the positivist and rationalist presuppositions of the time. At Yale, Plantinga learned metaphysics in the expansive but undisciplined tradition of idealism. While teaching at Wayne State University with some of the brightest young philosophers of the day, Plantinga and his colleagues honed the analytic style of philosophy that attended to precise but careful argumentation and clarification of key terms. He returned to teach at Calvin College for twenty years before taking up a chair at Notre Dame. In 1978 Plantinga cofounded the Society of Christian Philosophers, which would grow to over one thousand members. In 1980 Time magazine hailed Plantinga as “the leading philosopher of God” in an article on the renaissance of Christian philosophy. Plantinga would use the analytic methods to defend the rationality of belief in God. He is most famous for the ontological argument for the existence of God, the free will defense, Reformed epistemology, and the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The ontological argument for the existence of God traces its origins to Anselm who argued that God, who by definition has every perfection (and so the perfection of existence), must therefore exist. Plantinga’s version of the argument, drawing on developments in modal logic (the logic of the possible and the necessary), is not susceptible to the╯criticisms of Anselm’s arguments. The free will defense is a response to the claim, popular since the time of Hume, that God and evil are incompatible. If there is evil, there could not be a God; since there is evil, God does not exist. The free will defense assumes that it is possible for God to create human beings that are
free in the sense that their actions are uncaused—no antecedent state of affairs can cause or coerce free actions. If God can create a free being, it must be possible for God to create such a being who chooses freely to bring about evil, which means it is possible for God and evil to coexist. The free will defense has achieved something fairly rare in philosophy: widespread consensus that it works. The most intriguing recent development in matters of faith and reason is the so-Â�called “Reformed epistemology,” which holds that one can rationally believe in God without the support of evidence. Belief in God is properly basic: a rational, foundational belief that one reasons from and not to. Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism develops the thought that evolutionary naturalism can account only for the survival value of our beliefs and not the truth of our beliefs. Theism, of the Christian-Â�Jewish-Â� Muslim variety, however, has the resources to adequately account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties. While the theist can consistently maintain the reliability of her cognitive faculties, the naturalist-Â�evolutionist can do so only on pain of irrationality. —Kelly James Clark PLOTINUS (ca. 205–270).╇ Plotinus was a Greek philosopher and is considered the father of Neoplatonism. More is known of Plotinus than of most ancient philosophers due to his disciple Porphyry’s diligent editing of his master’s work, which included a autobiography, The Life of Plotinus. Life In The Life of Plotinus (hereafter referred to as Life) Porphyry wrote that Plotinus was sixty-Â�six years old when he died in 270, thus putting his birth around 205. While Porphyry provides much biographical information about him, Plotinus himself was quite reserved about his own life. In his works, Plotinus never discusses his family, childhood, or place and date of birth. Eunapis reported that Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt, but we cannot be sure if he was a Greek rather than a member of a Hellenized Egyptian family. According to Porphyry, Plotinus took up his vocation as a philosopher at the age of twenty-Â� seven or twenty-Â�eight, traveling to Alexandria to study. In Alexandria, Plotinus encountered Ammonius, who was to become his mentor. He spent the next eleven years in Alexandria dedicating himself to the study of Persian and Indian philosophy. During this time he decided to join the Imperial Army of Gordian III as it marched to Persia. This military campaign was a great failure and Plotinus found himself abandoned in a hostile land. Only with great
Polycarp
effort was he able to make his way back to Antioch and then Rome, where he was to remain until his death. There he wrote his great masterpiece The Enneads. Writings According to Porphyry, Plotinus lectured on the philosophy of his teacher Ammonius for the first ten years in Rome. He wrote nothing himself. After this period, Plotinus began to write out a succession of essays. These essays were later edited by Porphyry (according to Porphyry, Plotinus could not edit them himself due to his poor eyesight) and arranged into six groups of nine each (hence the title Enneads, the Greek word for nine). Plotinus’s concept of the “One” dominates the makeup of the Enneads. In the Enneads, Plotinus wrote that there is a supreme, totally transcendent One, undivided, without multiplicity, and beyond all categories of being. He identified the One with Plato’s conception of the Good (Enneads I.6.9). Plotinus denies that this One is personal or self-Â� aware (V.6.6). Rather, the One is the dunamis (miraculous power) without which nothing could exist (III.8.10). For Plotinus, it was impossible for the One to be Being or a Creator God (V.6.3). The One is the source from which being derives, the goal to which it strives to return. The One is the perfect source of the world. All of creation emanates from the One in succeeding stages of lesser and lesser perfection. The first emanation is the Nous, similar to the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus. It is the first will toward the Good. Below the Nous is the third emanation, the Soul. The Nous comprises the world of Forms, thus multiplicity is introduced into the universe. The Soul is divided in two, higher and lower. The higher Soul transcends materiality; the lower Soul (or Nature) is the soul of the phenomenal world. All individual souls are emanations from the lower Soul. For Plotinus, matter in itself, unilluminated by form, is darkness or nonbeing, and as such it is evil. Influence In the ancient world, Plotinus’s thought was used as a philosophical foundation for both paganism and Christianity. Pagans used Plotinus as a means of defense against Christianity (e.g., Porphyry in Adversus Christianos and Eunapius in The Lives of the Sophists). However, many Christians were also influenced by Plotinus, most notably Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Augustine. Particularly, Plotinus’s conception of the One influenced Christian discussions of the Trinity (e.g., Augustine in De Trinitate). Plotinus’s influence was not limited to the ancient world but continued into the seventeenth and twentieth centuries through the works of the Cambridge Platonists, W. B. Yeats, Kathleen Raine, and American integral theorist Ken Wilber.
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Bibliography
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Ed. Floyd P. Gerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 4th ed. Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 2003. O’Meara, Dominic. Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Plotinus. Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin, 1991. Porphyry. On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Works in Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by Their Students. Ed. Mark Edwards. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Rist, John. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Plotinus, the Road to Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
—John Thompson
POLYCARP (ca. 69–ca. 156).╇ Polycarp served as Bishop of Smyrna (modern-Â�day Izmir in western Turkey). According to his own words just before his death, Polycarp had been following Christ for eighty-Â�six years, making him a lifelong Christian. As an Apostolic Father, he must have known one of the original twelve apostles, and according to Irenaeus, that apostle was John. Under the rule of Antoninus Pius, Polycarp was burned alive for not recanting his faith. Polycarp worked with Ignatius, compiling and preserving his letters, and Ignatius’s letter to Polycarp reflects their friendship and mutual respect. Ignatius, Polycarp’s elder, remarks on Polycarp’s strong and abiding faith and his godly qualities. Polycarp, in turn, mentored Irenaeus. From writings such as Irenaeus’s, it appears that Polycarp wrote several letters to early churches, but only the letter to the Philippian church remains. Some scholars believe that the Philippian letter (written approximately AD 110) may have originally been two letters—chapters 1–9 and 10–14—the latter section perhaps having served as a cover letter to accompany the Ignatian letters requested by the Philippian church. Chapters 10–14 are in Latin only, except for chapter 13, which also appears in Greek in Eusebius’s writings. The earlier chapters appear in Greek as well as in Latin. Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians Typical of New Testament letters and many early Christian letters being circulated at the time, Polycarp begins by praising the letter’s recipients for their faith and support. He encourages them to follow God’s commandments and
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reminds them that Paul strengthened them via a letter when he was unable to be with them. Polycarp urges them to teach virtuous behavior and live blameless lives by following God’s principles, and he commands church leaders to avoid unfairness and greed and to be slow to judge and kind in passing judgment. He warns them against false doctrines, urging them to stand fast and hold Christ as the model of perfect living. In grieving a former Philippian church leader who strayed from living a Christian life, Polycarp encourages the church to show grace and patience. Polycarp closes the letter with a personal note and a comment about circulating Ignatius’s letters so they may edify early Christians. The Martyrdom of Polycarp The letter recording Polycarp’s martyrdom is from the church at Smyrna, where Polycarp served, and was written by several writers (the letter uses “we”) at the request of other Christians seeking a report of Polycarp’s last days. At the end of the letter, the writers explain that they have transcribed this record from earlier eyewitness accounts, including that of Irenaeus. The Martyrdom of Polycarp (existing in six Greek texts and a Latin version) acknowledges many Christian martyrs and recounts Polycarp’s death and events leading up to it. These deaths are viewed as noble, part of God’s plan, yet admittedly gruesome, as many were ripped apart by wild animals or viciously beaten. The main purpose of the letter, however, is to describe the last days of Polycarp’s life, his dignified death, and how his fate mirrored that of Jesus—betrayal, innocence, being placed on a donkey, being stabbed during execution, and even the name of an accuser, Herod. When word reached Polycarp that he was being sought, he reluctantly left the city to stay with friends and pray for churches everywhere, but in a vision he saw a burning pillow, foreshadowing his own martyrdom. He moved on to another location, but two youths betrayed him when threatened with torture. Instead of fleeing, Polycarp announced, “Let God’s will be done,” and then requested time for prayer before being led away. Those around him, including his captors, were impressed by his age, honorable demeanor, and calmness. The tumult in the stadium where he was brought and the taunts and threats did not persuade Polycarp to renounce Christ and declare other Christians to be infidels. Instead, with a sweep of his hand toward his accusers and people in the stadium, Polycarp declared, “Away with the infidels!” and restated his Christian beliefs firmly and confidently. The crowd built a pyre and bound his hands after Polycarp insisted he would not need to be nailed to the post. His last words were a prayer thanking and praising God. Eyewitnesses to his death relate that instead of his body
burning and turning to ash, the flames bellowed around him like a ship’s sails in the wind so that he turned golden like baked bread. When someone stabbed him to ensure his death, Polycarp’s blood extinguished the fire. Fearing a new object of worship, Herod’s father convinced the governor not to allow Christians at Smyrna to bury Polycarp, so a centurion put his body on the fire again. The writers of this account later claimed his bones, putting them “in a fitting place.” The letter, noting Polycarp as the twelfth martyr in Smyrna, states its mission of recounting Polycarp’s death— as requested—is now finished. The writers close the letter with a benediction, well wishes to the recipients, and a request to send the letter on to other Christian groups. Bibliography
Bacchus, Francis Joseph. “St. Polycarp.” New Advent: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. CD-ROM. Ehrman, Bart. After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———, ed. The Apostolic Fathers: I Clement, II Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Didache. Vol. I. Loeb Classical Library. 2003 Holmes, Michael, ed. The Apostolic Fathers. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. 1989. Louth, Andrew. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. London: Penguin, 1987.
—Linda Gray
ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744).╇ Alexander Pope is the exemplary poet of the early eighteenth century, and his work is a classic expression of the period’s literary values: wit, argument, focused energy, clarity, precision, and vivacity. Pope’s heroic couplets, the principal form of his verse, achieve great variety of emotion and mood as well as intellectual complexity and subtlety. His genres are the pastoral, mock-Â�epic, philosophical essay, poetic epistle, elegy, and satire. Pope’s homage to his friend John Gay applies also to himself: “Form’d to delight at once and lash the age.” Born in 1688, Pope was raised a Roman Catholic, an allegiance he maintained throughout his life. Pope’s Christianity was of a liberal cast: tolerant, with an emphasis on moral virtue, and valuing reason. Even so, his Catholicism was a target for attack by his literary and political enemies. Excluded from most professions by his religion and by crippling ill health, Pope made his career from poetry and the translation of Homer, the latter securing him a modest fortune. His first collected works, published in 1717, included “An Essay on Criticism,” his mock-Â�epic “The Rape of the Lock,” and “Windsor Forest,” with its closing vision of universal peace, when “Seas but join the Regions they divide.” “Eloise to Abelard,” a new poem, voices the
Marguerite Porete
painful collision of secular with sacred love and the miseries of a heart thus constrained: Eve’n here, where frozen chastity retires Love finds an altar for forbidden fires. I ought to grieve but cannot what I ought; I mourn the lover, not lament the fault.
Pope completed the first version of his satirical masterpiece, The Dunciad, in 1728. By 1743, The Dunciad had grown to four books, brilliantly mocking literary and philosophical pretension. Pope concludes with a horrific vision of cultural entropy: Art after Art goes out, and all is Night .╯.╯. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! Thy dread empire, CHAOS! is restored.
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of The Dunciad and a series of imitations of the poet Horace. Pope died in May 1744. Bibliography
Davis, Herbert, ed. Pope: Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Fairer, David. The Poetry of Alexander Pope. London: Penguin, 1989. Rogers, Pat, ed. Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 1998.
—Alan P. R. Gregory
MARGUERITE PORETE (d. 1310).╇ Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those Who Only Remain in Will and Desire of Love (written ca. 1290) was the catalyst for her execution as a relapsed heretic on The Dunciad is a work of considerable courage, and June╯1, 1310, in the Place de Grève in Paris. The Mirror of Pope bore the cost of his satire in years of ferocious Simple Souls subsequently survived in obscurity as a specattacks, many of which fastened on his physical deformi- ulative text attributed to various male authors. Scholarship ties as well as his Catholicism. on this work began after 1946, when Romana Guarnieri In The Essay on Man, finished in 1735, Pope turned into connected the text to its true author. Porete wrote or dicthe quieter waters of a long philosophical poem. He inter- tated the original in Old French, although the text is also prets humanity by way of our relation to the universe, to extant in Latin, Italian, and Middle English manuscripts, our own selves, to society, and, finally, to our prospects for a testament to the popularity and endurance of her ideas. happiness. The guiding principle, “the universal Cause acts Porete was a wandering Beguine from Hainault in Belto one end, but acts by various laws,” warns of the dangers gium. She stirred up controversy with the public dissemiof measuring the whole by the part, also a theme of Pope’s nation of her ideas and was consequently associated with literary theory in the early “An Essay on Criticism.” Human several other marginal groups. Church authorities were pride is ruinous and blinding because it judges God’s cre- wary of her because she was not cloistered, had taken ation by the partiality of self-Â�interest. Similarly, we are not no formal vows, and wrote in the vernacular tongue, to pit reason against passion, or self-Â�love against social, but thereby making her esoteric ideas accessible outside the recognize that their common working is the condition of church hierarchy. Moreover, Porete audaciously claims happiness. The same passions that her authority comes from God, not from the church, the pope, or any earthly power. See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; The Mirror of Simple Souls is an unsystematic and Ev’n avarice, prudence; sloth, philosophy. sometimes convoluted exploration of how the soul can Human beings should direct their energies to self-Â� attain union with God even while embodied. The text is in understanding, not theological speculation: the form of an extended conversation primarily involving the allegorical characters of Love, Soul, and Reason. The Know then, thyself, presume not God to scan; text describes a seven-Â�stage path of increasing perfection The proper study of Mankind is Man. culminating in annihilation, in which the soul “becomes In this world, Pope argues, God shows us as much as what God is” even while embodied. The foundations for this doctrine of annihilation are we need to know, enough for a religion of virtue, not rooted in a distinctive mix of Neoplatonic cosmology and disputation. ideas about Adam’s fall and Christ’s redemption. Porete For Modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight; posits two cycles of created life lived by two types of souls He cannot be wrong whose life is in the right. within the embrace of two churches, one earthly and Pope also expounded his moral philosophy in the guided by reason, one spiritual and guided by love. For Epistle to Burlington (1731), which contains his views on Porete, all human souls are descended both from the Tringardening, and the epistles to Bathurst (1733) and Dr. ity and from Adam. All things are thus both eternal (by Arbuthnot (1735). Pope’s final works include an expansion way of the virtual existence of the soul in the Trinity and
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the Trinity in the soul) and made (by way of creation in time). All creation will pass through the mundane cycle of fall, redemption, and return within the arms of what she calls “Holy Church the Little.” Certain souls by virtue of an inborn nature can return to the original state of nothingness, to a precreational, everlasting union without distinction by casting off willing, knowing, and having and by embracing wretchedness. One consequence of this system is the marginalization of the earthly church. Porete dismisses that the notion that closeness to God depends on the mediation of the church, imitation of Christ, or the merit of increasing likeness to God. For Porete, the soul becomes close to God not through ascetic and sacramental practices but by recognizing its true nature as both most wretched and most noble. Fifteen propositions from The Mirror of Simple Souls were taken out of context and used as the basis for burning Porete at the stake. Porete accepted this worldly defeat peacefully, thereby upholding the central doctrines she espoused in The Mirror of Simple Souls: the importance of spiritual lineage and nobility, the temporality of the created world, and the permanence of the soul’s union with God due to the soul’s virtual existence in the Trinity and the transformation of love. Principal Ideas of Marguerite Porete •â•‡ All souls pass through the mundane path of earthly redemption, but some “simple” noble souls can attain complete annihilation in God, a state of not-Â� willing, not-Â�having, and not-Â�knowing even while embodied. •â•‡ An uncreated part of the soul that dwells in the Trinity persists within the soul of the human creature even after the Fall, and it is this capacity that enables union without distinction. •â•‡ The soul who attains union with God does not do so through the sacraments or devotional practices. •â•‡ There are two churches: Holy Church the Little (the earthly church, comprising all souls and guided by reason) and Holy Church the Great (guided by love, and the ultimate home for simple souls). References and Further Reading Porete’s Mirror can be read in both Old French and Latin in Margaretae Porete. Speculum simplicium animarum, edited by Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen in the Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis series 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986). There are two English translations, one by Ellen Babinsky in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1993) and one by Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant, Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture, volume 6 (Notre Dame,
IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1999). Useful secondary studies include Bernard McGinn’s work in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 153–265; and Joanne Maguire Robinson’s Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). —Joanne Maguire Robinson EUGENIA PRICE (1916–1996).╇ Eugenia Price was born June 22, 1916, in Charleston, West Virginia, the daughter of Walter Wesley Price and his wife, Anna Davidson, and died May 28, 1996. She is buried in Christ Churchyard, Frederica, St. Simons Island, Georgia, close to the setting of her novels. After graduating from high school at age fifteen, she studied at Ohio University, Northwestern Dental School in Evanston, Illinois, and the University of Chicago but never took a degree. From 1939 to 1944 she wrote scripts for Joyce Jordan, M.D. and in 1945 established Eugenia Price Productions, a radio and television production company producing daytime serials. In 1949, her friend Ellen Riley led her to accept Jesus Christ as her savior, a story she told in her best nonfiction book, The Burden Is Light (Zondervan, 1955). In 1950 she began writing, producing, and directing for WGN the radio scripts for Unshackled, a radio drama telling true stories of men and women whose lives turned around after they accepted Jesus Christ as their savior at the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. This successful program (still replayed) led to her career as a radio host on “Visits with Genie” and as an inspirational speaker. Then Zondervan Publishing House asked for a book, which became Discoveries (1953). Price continued writing nonfiction until on a 1961 trip with her friend Joyce Blackburn she visited St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. She eventually built a home there and retold stories of its history in two fictional trilogies. For the remainder of her writing career, she interspersed fictional treatments of coastal Georgia and northern Florida with nonfiction books on living the Christian life. Her forty Christian books were stunningly successful in the Christian market. With Joyce Blackburn, who lived with her on St. Simons, she established the Eugenia Price– Joyce Blackburn Foundation to provide support for studying, writing, and charity. Nonfiction Price wrote twenty-Â�six nonfiction works: autobiography; encouragement for successful Christian living, noting that gratitude erases bitterness in A Woman’s Choice (Zondervan, 1962), acknowledging in The Wider Place (Zondervan, 1966) that “all our measurements of the meaning of life come out wrong unless they begin at the one fixed point—God
Eugenia Price
himself ” (206), and assuring that God is committed to us in What Really Matters (Doubleday, 1983); comment on biblical passages, the best of which is the devotional book Share My Pleasant Stones (Zondervan, 1958); retold Bible stories, most memorably Beloved World (Zondervan, 1961), which readably makes the Bible a connected story; and two books to draw teens closer to God. Fiction Price spent three years interviewing old residents of St. Simons Island, uncovering history about Anson Greene Phelps Dodge and his two wives, Ellen Ada Phelps Dodge, who died in India of cholera on their honeymoon, and Anna Deborah Gould, who after his death took care of the orphanage he founded, to tell their story in The Beloved Invader (Lippincott, 1965). Two more novels complete the St. Simons trilogy, followed by the Florida trilogy, the Savannah Quartet, and the Georgia trilogy. Price’s last novel, The Waiting Time (Doubleday, 1997), was published posthumously. All are romantic historical fiction, most treating the antebellum South and problematically dealing with slavery. Price has main characters in one work appear as minor characters in another, endearing her characters to her readers, but, though she handles metaphor well, she overuses adjectives and struggles with structure. Conclusion Price’s work is still enjoyable reading as she describes the successful Christian life as accessible and tells good stories. However, her nonfiction seems dated because of her stance on women’s roles and her fiction because of her inability to solve the problem of supposedly sympathetic protagonists who own and justify their owning slaves. Probably the nonfiction will be read more in the future than the fiction, for The Burden Is Light is surely a Christian classic. Principal Ideas of Eugenia Price •â•‡ God sees the big picture and His love is greater than we can comprehend, but it is a strong love, not allowing us to remain in our unhealthy ways. •â•‡ God showed us Himself in Jesus Christ. •â•‡ Our faith is in a person, Jesus Christ.
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•â•‡ God is committed to us. •â•‡ Friendship with God is more important than service. •â•‡ Gratitude erases bitterness. •â•‡ Freedom comes only from obeying God. •â•‡ Peace can only come through redemption of individual human lives. •â•‡ Suffering can be creatively redeemed. Bibliography The nonfiction works are too numerous to list, but, in addition to those listed above, notable are Woman to Woman (Zondervan, 1959), Strictly Personal (Zondervan, 1960), The Unique World of Women in Bible Times and Now (Zondervan, 1969), St. Simons Memoir (Lippincott, 1978), and Diary of a Novel (Lippincot & Crowell, 1980). In addition to the novels listed above are New Moon Rising (Lippincott, 1969) and Lighthouse (Lippincott, 1971), the other two in the St. Simons Trilogy; The Florida Trilogy: Don Juan McQueen (Lippincott, 1974), Maria (Lippincott, 1977), and Margaret’s Story (Lippincott, 1980); The Savannah Quartet: Savannah (Doubleday, 1983), To See Your Face Again (Doubleday, 1985), Before the Darkness Falls (Doubleday, 1987), and Stranger in Savannah (Doubleday, 1989); the Georgia Trilogy: Bright Captivity (Doubleday, 1991), Where Shadows Go (Doubleday, 1993), and Beauty from Ashes (Doubleday, 1995). Many of Price’s works are still in print, some in paperback editions, and all are available at such sites as abe.com. Savannah, Don Juan McQueen, Lighthouse, Margaret’s Story, and Maria are certainly well worth reading. Mary Bray Wheeler’s Eugenia Price’s South: A Guide to the People and Places of Her Beloved Region (Longstreet Press, 1993) serves as a guidebook for those devoted readers who wish to find the places discussed in the novels. Price’s papers, letters, and manuscripts are housed at Boston University’s Mugar Library. Contemporary Authors Online (Gale, 2003) has a brief article on her life and a list of her works except Find Out for Yourself (Zondervan, 1963), a book of counsel for teens, and The Waiting Time (Doubleday, 1997), which was published after Price’s death. —Mimosa Stephenson
R KARL RAHNER (1904–1984).╇ Karl Rahner was born on March 5, 1904, in Freiburg-Â�im-Â�Breisgau, Germany. Following his brother Hugo, later a distinguished church historian, Rahner entered the Society of Jesus in 1922. In 1934 he commenced doctoral studies in philosophy at Freiburg, where he attended the seminars of Martin Heidegger, one of Rahner’s primary philosophical influences. In 1936, then, Rahner joined the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck, from which he received his theological doctorate (1936) and habilitation (1937). When the Nazi authorities suppressed the faculty in 1939, Rahner took up a post at Vienna’s Pastoral Institute, where he coauthored the Wiener Memorandum (1942), a defense of liberalizing trends in German Catholic theology. In 1939, moreover, Rahner published his philosophical dissertation, Geist in Welt. In this work Rahner advanced several theses that permeate his later theology, for example, that being, insofar as it possesses actuality, is knowing and that an athematic Vorgriff (“pregrasp”) toward being supplies human beings with the horizon wherein they perceive the world. Rahner followed Geist in Welt with Hörer des Wortes (1941) in which, besides advocating the basic ideas of Geist in Welt, he attempted to prove human nature to be oriented to fulfillment through a historical revelation. In 1948 Rahner returned to Innsbruck, where he remained until 1964. During this period he published primarily essays, which began to appear in book form in 1954 with the publication of the first volume of his Schriften zur Theologie. This series would eventually run to sixteen volumes. During these years, Rahner also served as editor of the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, to which he contributed numerous articles, and as coeditor of the theological encyclopedia Sacramentum Mundi, to which he likewise contributed extensively. He coauthored a theological
dictionary, moreover, with Herbert Vorgrimler. Rahner’s lexicon and encyclopedia articles are invaluable to students because they supply brief and lucid introductions to central themes in Rahner’s thought. After serving as a peritus, or expert consultant, at Vatican II (1962–1966), teaching briefly at Munich (1964– 1966), and joining the theological faculty at Münster in 1967, Rahner retired in 1971. In 1974 his magnum opus, Grundkurs des Glaubens, appeared. This work constitutes a virtual summa of Rahner’s theology. Between 1974 and his death (1984), Rahner continued to compose essays and published several volumes of interviews. Principal Ideas Rahner’s most influential ideas are those of the supernatural existential, the anonymous Christian, and evolutionary Christology. The supernatural existential constitutes an incipient grace, which God grants everyone, by virtue of which everyone unthematically, but genuinely, desires fulfillment through the beatific vision. This conception enabled theologians to integrate the theology of grace and philosophical anthropology without imperiling the gratuity of the supernatural order by suggesting that persons in the state of pure nature require the beatific vision for their fulfillment. Through the supernatural existential, Rahner argued, God elevates humanity above the state of pure nature, which has never actually existed. One can be an anonymous Christian, someone who accepts Christianity unwittingly, Rahner maintained, because of transcendental revelation, that is, a supernatural horizon, identical with God, that everyone possesses and that overlaps the Vorgriff’s natural horizon. All objects of objective consciousness, including Scripture and Heilsgeschichte, are objectifications of transcendental revelation through which one indirectly and unthematically accepts
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or rejects it. Persons become anonymous Christians, Rahner held, by accepting transcendental revelation through non-Â�Christian objectifications. According to Rahner’s evolutionary Christology, Jesus is the first perfect realization of divine self-Â�communication to creatures; as such, he constitutes a sign that the process of divine self-Â�communication has become irreversible. Jesus is not the efficient but rather the final cause of human salvation, that is, the ultimate exemplar of what salvation imparts. This Christology is evolutionary in that it portrays the Incarnation as a nonmiraculous product of divine self-Â�communication, which Rahner identifies as the driving force behind evolution. Critics Rahner’s foremost critics are Johann-Â�Baptist Metz, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and George Lindbeck. In his Cordula oder der Ernstfall (1966), Balthasar castigates Rahner for blurring the distinction between Christianity and mere humanism. In his Zur Theologie der Welt (1968), Metz criticizes Rahner’s theology as individualistic and apolitical. In his The Nature of Doctrine, finally, Lindbeck censures Rahner for treating all religions as objectifications of one transcendental revelation rather than respecting their cultural-Â�linguistic distinctiveness. This criticism notwithstanding, Rahner’s ideas remain influential in ecumenical theology. Bibliography The definitive edition of Rahner’s works is the Sämtliche Werke, edited by Karl Lehmann et al. (Freiburg: Herder, 1995–), nineteen of whose thirty-Â�two projected volumes have been published. Geist in Welt, Hörer des Wortes, Grundkurs des Glaubens, numerous essays from the Schriften zur Theologie, and all of Rahner’s lexicon and encyclopedia articles appear in the already-Â�published volumes. One can find complete lists of Rahner’s works organized chronologically and topically, tables of contents of all published volumes of the Sämtliche Werke, and an exhaustive bibliography of secondary literature about Rahner from 1938 until the present at http://www.ub.uni-Â� freiburg.de/referate/04/rahner/rahnerma.htm. This material is updated almost daily. English translations of most of Rahner’s works are readily available. The Schriften zur Theologie’s sixteen volumes appear in English as twenty-Â�three volumes of Theological Investigations, translated by Cornelius Ernst et al. (London: DLT, 1961–1992). William V. Dych renders Geist in Welt into English as Spirit in the World, 2nd ed., edited by Johann-Â�Baptist Metz (New York: Herder, 1968). Hörer des Wortes appears in English as Hearer of the Word, translated by Joseph Donceel and edited by Andrew Tallon
(New York: Continuum, 1994). Rahner and Vorgrimler’s lexicon is translated as Theological Dictionary, translated by Richard Strachan and edited by Cornelius Ernst (New York: Herder, 1965), and all of Rahner’s Sacramentum Mundi articles appear in this encyclopedia’s English version. For a guide to primary and secondary Rahner literature in English, see C. J. Pedley, “An English Bibliographical Aid to Karl Rahner,” Heythrop Journal 25 (1984): 319–365. For a detailed guide to the Theological Investigations, see Daniel T. Pekarski, Abstracts of Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations 1–23 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003). Among the best introductions to Rahner are Herbert Vorgrimler’s Understanding Karl Rahner (New York: Crossroad, 1986) and the Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, edited by Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For more sophisticated surveys of Rahner’s thought, see Klaus Fischer, Der Mensch als Geheimnis: Die Anthropologie Karl Rahners, Ökumenische Forschungen 2.5 (Freiburg: Herder, 1974), and Willibald Sandler, Bekehrung des Denkens: Karl Rahners Anthropologie und Soteriologie als formal-Â�offenes System in triadischer Perspective (Frankfurt-Â�am-Â�Main: Peter Lang, 1996). —Dennis Jowers PANDITA RAMABAI SARASVATI (1858–1922). Indian. Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati (Dongre Medhavi, full married name) was a pioneer for social reform, women’s rights, and Christianity in India. An exceptional linguist, scholar, author, speaker, educator, reformer, and Bible translator, Ramabai challenged traditional values and social norms in the East and West. A devoted patriot as well as a devoted Christian, she was committed to retaining her Indian heritage, maintaining allegiance to India rather than the British Crown. Unlikely Upbringing Ramabai was born on April 23, 1858, to Brahman Sanskrit scholar Anata Shastri, who practiced orthodox adherence to Hindu belief, excluding his distinct advocacy for educating women and providing them access to the Hindu Scriptures. Despite the pervasive systemic pressure that relegated women to lives of servitude and abuse, he taught his child-Â�bride Sanskrit and educated his children. Ramabai demonstrated a proclivity for ancient Sanskrit as well as other areas of study. Considered a child prodigy, she could recite by memory eighteen thousand verses— about half the Bible—of the Bhagavata Purana (one of the Puranas, or texts of Hindu literature). After experiencing financial hardship, the family submitted to a life
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of wandering, recorded in her book Famine Experiences. Ramabai reveals her family’s ill-Â�preparedness for secular work and unwillingness to succumb to manual labor due to their pride of caste and higher education. Her memoirs of those years expose her disillusionment with Hinduism. Ramabai and her brother wandered to Calcutta in 1878 where she was discovered, at age twenty, by the Pandits, or scholars, quickly becoming a public phenomenon, honored with the titles “Pandita” (wise person) and “Saraswati” (goddess of learning or eloquence). By 1882 she was sought after as a scholar and public speaker, partnering with social reformers in speaking to young women about education, the atrocity of child-Â�marriage, and the many practices enslaving and devaluing females. A Life of Liberty Ramabai’s growing dissatisfaction with the sacred texts she had mastered drove her to champion women’s rights and search for salvation beyond the confines of her Hindu heritage. Ramabai married Bapu Bipen Benhari Das Medhavi, a lawyer and teacher, who joined Ramabai in her study of Western philosophy and practice. After reading a copy of The Gospel of Luke, she declared faith in Jesus Christ amid opposition from her husband and reformers who idealized her as a victor of the Indian cause. Ramabai sought to retain her culture even while embracing her newfound faith. After less than eighteen months of marriage Ramabai’s husband died, leaving her a widow and single mother to daughter Manorama. Ramabai repudiated the isolation and low status branding widows in India by continuing her career in academia and activism, becoming the first woman to speak at the Indian National Social Conference in 1889. A Legacy of Freedom Ramabai accepted offers to study and teach in England and America, where she gleaned a broader perspective on global Christianity. In The High Caste Hindu Woman, Ramabai speaks out about the devastating effects of child-Â� marriage and the abuses cast upon child-Â�widows as well as mistreatment undergirded by Hinduism and oppressive patriarchy. By inviting the international community into knowledge of Indian inequity and her call for reform, she was able to broaden her moral and financial support base. As a result her first school, Sharada Sadan (House of Learning), was established in Pune, India, in 1890. Eventually, in the village of Khedgaon, a revisioned school opened, broader in scope and with a new name, Mukti, an Indian term denoting freedom and salvation. This word became the epitome of Ramabai’s life quest and findings in Christianity as well as the legacy she longed to offer oppressed people, especially women and children.
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Ramabai herself frequently dressed up as a sannyasini (a female mendicant) and traveled throughout the region on foot rescuing girls (and occasionally boys) from servitude and prostitution. Although it was an established Christian school, Mukti purposefully preserved Indian culture. Empowered with freedoms and opportunities unavailable elsewhere, graduates entered an array of fields as teachers, Bible women, and widely pursued wives, some even traveling to America to become medical doctors. In A Testimony, Ramabai shares the progression of her own faith journey as her faith transitioned from intellectual belief to an emotional and spiritual internalization of the Gospel. Additionally, she proclaims the reality that “No caste, no sex, no work, and no man was able to be depended upon to get salvation, this everlasting life, but God gave it freely to any one and every one who believed on His Son Whom He sent.” Pandita Ramabai died in 1922 shortly after finishing the Marathi translation of the Bible. In her own quest for Mukti, she realized that Christianity was no replacement religion for Hinduism but that it involves a life-Â�giving relationship with the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, in whom true freedom is discovered. Bibliography
Curtis, A. Kenneth, and Daniel Graves, eds. Great Women in Christian History. Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 2004. Frykenberg, Robert Eric. “Setting the Captives Free.” Christian History and Biography 94 (2007): 17–18. Miller, Basil. Pandita Ramabai: India’s Christian Pilgrim. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1949. Ramabai Sarasvati, Pandita. The High Caste Hindu Woman. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2007. ———. Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States. Translated and edited by Meera Kosambi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. A Testimony. 9th ed. Kedgaon, Poona District, India: Ramabai Mukti Mission, 1968. White, Keith. “Jesus Was Her Guru.” Christian History and Biography 87 (2005): 12–18.
—Kimberly Dawsey-Â�Richardson
BERNARD L. RAMM (1916–1992).╇ American. Bernard Ramm was an evangelical Baptist theologian and apologist. Born August 1, 1916, in Butte, Montana, he became a Christian two months before starting his university studies. Ramm studied at the University of Washington, the Eastern Baptist Seminary, and the University of Southern California, where he received his PhD in 1950, having written a dissertation in philosophy of science. Ramm later spent a sabbatical year (1957–1958) studying in Basel, Switzerland, with Karl Barth, whose influence is evident throughout Ramm’s writings. Ramm was a pastor during
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1942–1944 and began teaching in 1943. The majority of his academic career was as a faculty member of the American Baptist Seminary of the West (1959–1974, 1978–1986). Rather than convincing someone to become a Christian, Ramm felt that the goal of apologetics was to encourage people to be open to hearing the Gospel, at which point the Holy Spirit would verify it. As demonstrated in his Protestant Christian Evidences (1953), Ramm’s preferred apologetic method in his earlier writings was that of evidentialism. That is, he presented “facts” or evidences in favor of the Christian faith, such as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy or Jesus’s resurrection, that could hypothetically be verified by anyone. Ramm proposed that these evidences and the inner witness of the Spirit worked together to assure Christians of the truth of their beliefs (e.g., The God Who Makes a Difference, 1972). Although an apologetic dimension remained throughout Ramm’s later writings, he moved away from evidentialism because, following Karl Barth, he felt that appealing to an authority outside of the Word of God to establish the truth of the Word of God was to make the former greater than the latter. Ramm is considered a key player in what is historically known as the neo-Â�evangelical movement. Responding to fundamentalist evangelicals, Ramm argued that fundamentalists had not adequately responded to the Enlightenment. On the other hand, in his theology of sin titled Offense to Reason (1985), it is clear that Ramm believed that the Enlightenment had been overly optimistic about the human situation. In After Fundamentalism (1983), Ramm offers Karl Barth’s method as a guide to addressing his perceived shortcomings of fundamentalism. Unlike fundamentalists, Ramm was convinced that the truth of science and the Bible were compatible. In The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954) Ramm defended this position and discussed specific issues in astronomy, geology, and biology. In Ramm’s Protestant Biblical Interpretation (3rd rev. ed., 1980) and throughout his writings, one finds Ramm’s emphasis that revelation as found in Scripture comes in cultural forms and literary genres that are not meant to be scientific in a contemporary fashion. So, for example, Ramm rejected a “literal” reading of Genesis and with it a literal twenty-Â� four-Â�hour, six-Â�day creation theory. He did not, however, fully embrace theistic evolution, preferring to speak of progressive creationism. In The Pattern of Authority (1957, republished as The Pattern of Religious Authority), The Witness of the Spirit (1959), and Special Revelation and the Word of God (1961), Ramm expressed his position on the authority of Scripture for theology. Ultimately authority lay in divine revelation, particularly Jesus Christ. Ramm affirmed the inerrancy of Scripture in a nonrestrictive sense and understood the
inspiration of Scripture to pertain to the ideas of Scripture, not individual words. In contrast to fundamentalism, which emphasized the text of Scripture itself as revelation, Ramm stressed the instrumental role of Scripture as the Spirit-Â�inspired witness to Christ. Ramm also expressed the importance of historical theology. Thus in his writings on evangelicalism, contemporary theology, systematic-Â�theological issues, and general historical theology, Ramm said that historical theology oriented students, as it would give them a sense of where they were and where they had come from. Next to Carl Henry, Ramm is probably the second-Â� most influential twentieth-Â�century evangelical theologian. Ramm’s influence is demonstrated by the authors who engage his theology in Perspectives on Theology in the Contemporary World: Essays in Honor of Bernard Ramm (1990, also published as volume 17.4 of the journal Perspectives in Religious Studies), edited by Stanley J. Grenz. Time will determine how lasting Ramm’s influence will be. Principal Ideas of Bernard Ramm •â•‡ Inner witness of the Holy Spirit •â•‡ Neo-Â�evangelicalism •â•‡ Progressive creationism •â•‡ Continuity of science and Christianity •â•‡ Biblical authority Bibliography
Day, Alan. “Bernard L. Ramm.” In Baptist Theologians, edited by David S. Dockery and Timothy George. Nashville: Broadman Holman, 1989. Grenz, Stanley J., and Roger E. Olson. Twentieth-Â�century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992. Hearn, Walter. “An Interview with Bernard Ramm and Alta Ramm.” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 31 (September 1979): 179–186. Ramm, Bernard L. An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1985. ———. The Evangelical Heritage. Waco: Word, 1973. ———. The God Who Makes a Difference: A Christian Appeal to Reason. Waco: Word, 1972. VanHoozer, Kevin J. “Bernard Ramm.” In Handbook of Evangelical Theologians, edited by Walter A. Elwell, 290–306. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993.
—Andrew Gabriel
RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR (d. 1173).╇ The twelfth century, a period of political and ecclesiastical turmoil, is regarded as a turning point in spirituality of the Middle Ages. Many of the ideas that would be identified with later medieval spirituality were formulated during this time.
Richard of St. Victor
The Monastery of St. Victor, founded in 1108, attracted many scholars and became a center of learning; it was the seed from which the University of Paris would grow. Richard of St. Victor played an important role in these developments. Little is known of Richard’s early life. He was a native of Scotland, but the date and place of his birth are not recorded. He entered St. Victor presumably as a young man and took his vows under the first abbot of the new community. Thanks to the leading intellect of the first generation of scholars, Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1110–1141), what is now called the Victorine method was developed. It combined a program of biblical study, theological investigation, and disciplined contemplation, all within the context of shared communal life based on the liturgical cycle. Hugh of St. Victor died before Richard professed, but Richard was the capable heir to Hugh’s ideal. As Richard studied and began elaborating on Hugh’s principles, he was named subprior of the monastery in 1159 and then in 1162 the prior, the post that he would hold until his death in 1173. He studied prodigiously and wrote prolifically. His works can be classified as dogmatic, mystical, and exegetical. His reputation is based on his three greatest works: De Trinitate, a theological work, and Benjamin Major or Mystical Ark and Benjamin Minor or Twelve Patriarchs, his acclaimed works on mysticism. As a scholar, Richard was more interested in theology than in the philosophy that engaged his predecessor, Hugh. Richard regarded purely secular learning as suspect and believed that only study that led to God was worthwhile. Those interested in learning as an end in itself were considered “neglectors of conscience” by Richard. He did, however, participate in the dialectical methods of inquiry introduced by Abelard and taught that one should always seek to comprehend by reason what one holds by faith. Although Richard is best known for his spiritual writing, his work on the Trinity is well regarded. In this he seems to have been influenced by both St. Augustine and St. Anselm; it is considered an intermediate step between St. Augustine’s De Trinitate and St. Thomas Aquinas’s syntheses. Richard emphasizes the persons of the Trinity and the nature of divine love as is shown in the mutual love among the Three persons. From this study of the Trinitarian relationship, Richard would influence the development of the communal life within the monastery. Whereas Benedictines and Cistercians considered spiritual development to be a solitary affair between God and the monk, the Victorines, with Richard as a leader, were equally concerned with the relationship between the monks within the monastery and their mutual care of one another. This then was the fruit of Richard’s understanding of the Trinitarian relationship. Richard’s work on the Trinity, however, is overshadowed by his much more influential works on mysticism.
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For Richard, the goal of Christian perfection is contemplation. He was the first contemplative to consider the psychological nature of the mystical states and then to compose treatises with the intent of instructing others in the practice of contemplation. The Mystical Ark is his complex treatment of contemplation. This work presents Richard’s famous six degrees, or kinds, of contemplation in which he analyzes and classifies contemplation by reason of its objects and by reason of its origins. Richard taught that advancement in contemplation was contingent upon proper preparation, which included ascetical practices and the cultivation of virtue. By providing definitions of the various mystical states, he emphasized a systematic approach to contemplation, de-Â�emphasizing personal experience. This use of reason in analyzing spiritual life was to become synonymous with Victorine spirituality. Another hallmark of Victorine mysticism used to great effect by Richard is the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Thus, the title Benjamin Minor, or the Twelve Patriarchs, refers to Psalm 68 and the twelve sons of Jacob, his two wives, and their handmaids. Richard uses the personalities of these characters as metaphor, personifying various virtues and vices. Rachel represents reason, Leah charity, and so forth. In Benjamin Major is found Richard’s typological interpretation of the Ark of the Covenant as described in Exodus 25. Ultimately, for Richard, the intended culmination of all the disciplines was self-Â� knowledge: one must love and sanctify himself to become virtuous. The proper interior disposition is the foundation of right action. Richard’s contribution to the science of mysticism was celebrated during the Middle Ages. Dante places him in Paradiso (11:132), proclaiming him “in contemplation more than human,” and St. Bonaventure considered him a master. Unfortunately, for a time, Richard was eclipsed by the fame of those, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who came after him. Richard is now considered a major spiritual writer of his time whose influence can be traced in The Cloud of Unknowing; Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection; the works of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Denys the Carthusian, and Harphius; and, in Spain, Bernardino de Laredo, St. Teresa of Avila, and Hugh of Balma. Principal Ideas of Richard of St. Victor •â•‡ Love “by definition, is directed toward another. Therefore, love cannot exist where there is not a plurality of persons” (De Trinitate 3). This is Richard’s famous Trinitarian insight. Richard believed that three persons are necessary for charity: love must be given as well as received and then accordingly shared in the community for the fullest expression of charity as a reflection of the nature of divine perfection.
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Paul Ricoeur
•â•‡ Contemplation is neither thinking nor meditating but “the free, more penetrating gaze of a mind, suspended with wonder concerning manifestations of wisdom” and an “adhering with wonder to the object that brings joy” (Mystical Ark 1:4). •â•‡ Self-Â�knowledge is necessary for spiritual progress; one must know himself, his flaws and strengths, in order to have rectitude of intention leading to right action. Mental and mystical activity are linked. •â•‡ Mortification of the imagination is essential for spiritual progress, that is, silencing the wrong type of imagination, wandering and illicit thoughts, that subvert the mind. •â•‡ A reordering of thought and inner intention is necessary for detachment to be effected. This allows the proper type of imagination, which links the external world by means of reason to the invisible world, to function so that one can progress toward God. •â•‡ Virtue is properly ordered and moderated affection; a virtue carried to excess can become vice. •â•‡ The interior life ordered toward God is marked by goodness, charity, happiness, and sharing love. Service to others must be the fruit of contemplation. Bibliography An excellent introduction and translation is Richard of St. Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, edited and translated by Grove A. Zinn, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
Bynum, Caroline W. “The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century: A New Approach.” Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1973): 3–24. Chatillon, Jean, ed. “L’Edit d’Alexandre ou les trois processions.” In Richard de Saint-Â�Victor, Sermons et opuscules spirituels inédits, Vol. 1. Bruges, 1951. Illanes, Jose Luis, and Joseph Ignasi Saranyana. Historia de la Teologia. Madrid: Biblioteca de Auctore Cristianos, 2002. Kirchberger, Clair. De Trinitate: texte critique avec introduction, notes et tables. London, 1957. Migne, J. P., ed. Patrologiae latinae, Vol. 196. Paris, 1855. Underhill, Evelyn. The Mystics of the Church. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002.
—Barbara Wyman
PAUL RICOEUR (1913–2005).╇ Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on February 17, 1913, to devout Protestants, Jules and Florentine (Favre) Ricoeur, in Valence, France. His mother died while he was an infant, and his father (an English professor at the lycée in St. Brieuc) died a couple of years later in World War I in the Battle of the
Marne. Paul and his sister, Anne, were raised in Rennes by their grandparents and an aunt. He began studying philosophy in 1930, and in 1934 he extended his study at the Sorbonne and became familiar with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. At the Sorbonne, Ricoeur met religious existentialist Gabriel Marcel, who was his intellectual inspiration. In 1935 Ricoeur married his childhood friend, Simone Lejas, with whom he raised five children. He was drafted into the French army during World War II. In 1940 his unit was captured, and Ricoeur was in German prison camps for five years. Throughout his capture, he began translating (from German to French) the transcendental idealism of Edmund Husserl’s Ideen I and cowriting a book with his friend and fellow prisoner, Mikel Dufrenne, concerning Karl Jaspers, who converted as a psychologist to religious philosophy. Ricoeur also engaged himself in comparative study of Marcel and Jaspers. Marcel, Husserl, and Jaspers were highly influential throughout Ricoeur’s writing in the 1950s. Following the war, Ricoeur taught for three years in secondary education. During this time he also held a research post until 1948 with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. From 1948 to 1956 he was lecturer in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. In 1950 he received his doctoral degree on the basis of two theses: his minor thesis was the translation of Husserl, and his major thesis was “Le Voluntaire et l’Involuntaire” (“Voluntary and Involuntary”), which would become the first volume of his Philosophy of the Will. Ricoeur left Strasbourg in 1956 and accepted a position as chair of general philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1965 he was appointed professor at the newly founded University of Nanterre and remained until 1980, when he reached the mandatory retirement age. In 1967 he succeeded Paul Tillich as the John Nuveen professor of philosophical theology at the University of Chicago, where he taught until 1992. Ricoeur died at Chtenay-Â�Malabry (near Paris) on May 20, 2005. In several of his writings, he reflected upon birth and death as events not for self but for others. Ricoeur is regarded as one of the most distinguished spokesmen of philosophical hermeneutics. He has written many works concerning issues in hermeneutics of importance to philosophy and theology. His primary works include Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophie du mystère et philosophie du paradoxe (Paris: Temps Present, 1948); Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), also published as Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966); Histoire et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1955), also published as History and Truth, translated by Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965); L’homme faillible (Paris: Aubier, 1960),
Albrecht Ritschl
also published as Fallible Man (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965); Le symbolisme du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1960), also published as The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), also published as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); Le conflit des interprétations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), also published as The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Interpretations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974); La métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), also published as The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Â�Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Temps et récit, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985), also published as Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988); Du texte à l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1986), also published as From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Soi-Â� même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), also published as Oneself as Another, translated Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lectures I: Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Lectures II: La Contrée des philosophes (Paris: Seuil, 1992); and Lectures III: Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Bibliography For biography, see Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (New York: Routledge, 2002). For study of Ricoeur’s work, see his own Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For other resources, see Patrick L. Bourgeois and Frank Schalow, Traces of Understanding: A Profile of Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990); Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Don Ihde, Hermeneutical Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen, The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); David╯E. Klemm, The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Charles E. Reagan, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979); John B. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Press, 1981); Henry Isaac Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); and David Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur (New York: Routledge, 1991). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. ALBRECHT RITSCHL (1822–1889).╇ Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl was born on March 25, 1822, in Berlin and died at Göttingen in 1889. His father was a bishop of the Prussian Reformed Union Church, meaning that he came from a prominent family with substantial ecclesiastical influence. Education and Profession Ritschl was educated in several significant universities including the universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Halle, and Tübingen. Two especially important influences in his education were Karl Nitszch, a disciple of Schleiermacher, at Bonn and the great New Testament scholar Ferdinand Baur at Tübingen while Ritschl was studying for his doctorate. Upon completion of his doctoral studies Ritschl returned to the University of Bonn, where he was hired as Privat-Â�Dozent in 1846. In 1852 he was promoted to extraordinary professor of Evangelical Theology, and in 1859 he became an ordinary professor. The Contribution and Legacy of Albrecht Ritschl Baur’s influence is clearly seen in Ritschl’s dissertation, supervised by Baur and published under the title Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium Lucas (Tübingen: Osiander, 1846) in which Ritschl defended the thesis that the Gnostic Gospel of Marcion was the underlying literary source for Luke’s Gospel. Ritschl’s work was a typical production of Tübingen during Baur’s era, applying the Hegelian dialectical model to the study of early Christianity. Ritschl shortly moved away from his early interest in New Testament studies and began to devote his attention to historical theology. His move away from biblical criticism also marked an abandoning of his acceptance of Baur’s historical method and his original contentions concerning Luke. This change is significantly represented in the second edition of Ritschl’s dissertation, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1857). His first theologically oriented set of publications, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (Bonn: Adolph Marcus), was a multivolume work on the history and theology of justification and reconciliation, with the first volume being published in 1870 and the final volume being published in 1874. This was a milestone publication in Ritschl’s career and underwent
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Oral Roberts
substantial revisions in 1888, just before his death. It thoroughly addressed questions of theological method and the integration of philosophy and theology, questions further explored in Theologie und Metaphysik (Bonn: Adolf Marcus, 1881). The theology that Ritschl develops in these works is built around two central foci: the religious experience of redemption and the mandate of the kingdom of God. The overarching emphases of his work include an insistence on the separation between philosophy—especially metaphysics—and theology and a move away from the theoretical to the existential and ethical dimensions of theology. Building out of Kantian notions, as James Orr has shown, the rationale driving this assumption is that it is impossible to arrive at a “scientific knowledge of God” through the use of human reason. Therefore, the function and focus of theology becomes pragmatic, ethical, and experiential rather than doctrinal, descriptive, and theoretical. The aim of theology is not to apprehend a “scientific knowledge,” which is impossible, but a “religious knowledge,” which is manifested at the ethical level. Ritschl follows Schleiermacher in emphasizing the subjective need of the individual for the redemption of Jesus Christ. The reformation thinkers were correct, therefore, in placing justification by faith at the center of Protestant Christianity, according to Ritschl. However, justification by faith should not be understood as belief in a doctrinal system or divine revelation but instead must be conceived in strictly practical-Â�moral terms. Ritschl’s nonmetaphysical theology has implications for his formulation of theology proper and Christology as well. Since the metaphysical dimensions of theology are unknowable, so also are God’s metaphysical attributes such as necessity, omnipresence, omniscience, and so forth. The divine nature of the Christ is also denied. In addition to these key theological developments, Ritschl sharply criticized German Pietism in his three-Â�volume Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn: Adolf Marcus, 1880–1886). Ritschl’s work initially received criticism from all angles since it did not fit into any of the available theological categories of German Protestantism, but it slowly developed a following that eventually would set the trajectory for nineteenth-Â�century Protestant German theology, making Albrecht Ritschl one of Protestant Christianity’s most dominant theological influences. Bibliography
Mueller, David L. An Introduction to the Theology of Albrecht Ritschl. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969. Richmond, James. Ritschl: A Reappraisal; A Study in Systematic Theology. London: Collins, 1978. Ritschl, Albrecht. The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine. Translated by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1900.
———. Three Essays. Translated by Philip Hefner. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972.
—Andrew Pitts
ORAL ROBERTS (1918–2009).╇ Oral Roberts was a healing evangelist and educator especially influential within Pentecostal and Charismatic circles in the United States. The son of a Pentecostal Holiness preacher, Roberts personally encountered divine healing for the first time at age seventeen. Stricken with tuberculosis, he attended a tent meeting conducted by an evangelist and divine healer. Roberts would later indicate that before reaching the meeting, God told him that he would be healed and then go on to minister healing to others as well. Following this healing, Roberts was soon ordained within the Pentecostal Holiness Church and eventually pastored various churches within the denomination until 1947. In 1947 Roberts quit the pastorate and began to lead healing services conducted in tents. Stressing God’s desire to provide salvation, healing, and prosperity to every individual, Roberts soon published his own ministry magazine, Healing Waters. Based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Roberts also ventured beyond radio (which he had been utilizing since the 1940s) and launched his first television series in 1954. The TV broadcasts brought a new level of visibility to both Roberts and to the healing ministries associated with Pentecostalism and would continue to be a significant component of his ministry. As his national prominence grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Roberts began to place less of an emphasis on the ministry of divine healing and established relationships with non-Â�Pentecostals. For example, in 1966 Carl F. H. Henry and Billy Graham invited Roberts to attend the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Roberts also officially joined the United Methodist Church in 1968 in an effort to expand his outreach and influence the burgeoning Charismatic movement in mainline Protestant denominations. Though Roberts sought to maintain his ties with Pentecostal circles and claimed that his fundamental theology had not changed, the move initially strained his relationship with many Pentecostals. Concerned with the perpetuation of his ministry into future generations, Roberts also envisioned the formation of a Charismatic university during the 1960s. Established in 1965, Oral Roberts University eventually included graduate schools such as the School of Medicine that opened in 1978. Roberts also constructed the City of Faith, completed in 1981, that consisted of a Christian hospital and medical research center dedicated to the explicit combination of supernatural and medical forms of healing. (Both the medical school and the City of Faith would eventually close
Richard Rolle
in 1989 due to financial difficulties.) By 1993 Roberts’s son, Richard Roberts, took over the presidency of the university. Oral Roberts died on December 15, 2009. In many respects, Roberts’s life and ministry reflect the growth and influence of the Pentecostal-Â�Charismatic movement in the United States during the twentieth century. Though frequently criticized by outsiders for his methods and claims to divine guidance, Roberts had a profound influence on the development and perception of the Pentecostal-Â�Charismatic movement during the latter half of the twentieth century. Further Reading
Harrell, David E. Oral Roberts: An American Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. McCoy, Michael R. “Oral Roberts.” In Twentieth-Â�Century Shapers of American Popular Religion, edited by Charles H. Lippy. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Roberts, Oral. Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry. Nashville: Nelson, 1995.
—Joseph W. Williams
RICHARD ROLLE (1290?–1349?).╇ Much of Richard Rolle’s biographical information is contained in the Officium and Miracula, which were a part of the unsuccessful bid to canonize him. Details of his life have been in scholarly question, but he almost certainly was born sometime in the years between 1290 and 1300 in Yorkshire and died, according to tradition, on Michaelmas Day in 1348 or 1349. He attended Oxford University, steeping himself in scriptural study rather than the classics, and left early without taking a degree. There is evidence that he also studied in Paris. Rejecting what he saw as the flaws in secular learning and its dangers, he felt called to the vocation of a hermit. He early on found a place in the household of John de Dalton, who provided him with a cell within his household and a proper habit for a hermit, since Rolle’s first habit was made from two of his sister’s garments with the addition of his father’s rain hood. During the time that Rolle was in Dalton’s household, he probably began to develop mystical understanding and practices that he later related in his writings. Rolle’s writings reveal a proficiency in both Latin and English, with what were probably different audiences in mind. His Middle English texts have been identified in modern times as outstanding examples of fourteenth-Â� century English prose. He is considered a writer who certainly influenced English prose writing, and the popularity of his writing led to its survival in numerous manuscripts. Rolle’s writings developed a series of principles that are typical of his Christian mysticism. First, he developed the
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idea that mystical experience occurs when the hermit is at rest, seated, most frequently in a church or chapel space alone. He tells us in Incendium Amoris that in resting, the soul is made wise. In this situation, he experiences a unity with God achieved through love, especially love connected with the power of the name of Jesus. Rolle’s unity with God in love is achieved through three experiences described in Incendium Amoris in the Middle English, “In heet, in songe, in suetnes” (Misyn, 33), and, in the Latin, in calor, the experience of God as warmth, a kind of spiritual and physical experience of God’s presence; canor, an auditory sensation that he expresses as bringing heavenly sound into his mind; and dulcor, the experience of an inner sweetness. The mystic who, in the midst of this experience, feels all three sensations simultaneously is a rare soul and must avoid celebrity and fame, as they put him at risk of losing the mystic experience. In his The Form of Living, a tract addressed to women, and, in some manuscripts, to “Margarete,” possibly Margaret Kirkby, Rolle speaks of three levels of love that those who devote their lives to Christ must develop sequentially: “insuperabile,” a kind of love in which “no thynge that is contrarie to Goddis loue may ouercum hit”; “inseparabil,” a love in which the heart, the mind, and the strength of God’s lover are perfectly attached to Christ; and “synguler,” a love in which Christ is the center of one’s life, and living is to experience the sweetness of that unity (Ogilvie-Â�Thomson, 16). Although Rolle’s texts sometimes exhibit misogynistic elements found elsewhere in medieval literature, some of his critique of women is concerned with the weakness of men as well as his own experience of temptation. In other places, he is clearly a respected and even beloved spiritual adviser to women. A marked feature of Rolle as a Christian writer is his continued dedication to the name of Jesus and his insistence on that name to sustain the Christian, both Christians with mystical practices and those who simply want to know and love God. Bibliography
Allen, Hope Emily, ed. English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole. St. Clairs Shore, MI: Scholarly Press, 1971. ———, ed. Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle Hermit of Hampole and Materials for His Biography. New York: D. C. Heath, 1927. Allen, Rosamund S., ed. Richard Rolle: The English Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Arnould, E. J. F. The Melos Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Connolly, Margaret. Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God. Oxford, UK: EETS, 1993. Heseltime, G. C., ed. Selected Works of Richard Rolle Hermit. London: Longmans, Green, 1930.
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Christina Rossetti
Hodgson, Phyllis. Three 14th-Â�Century English Mystics. London: Longmans, Green, 1967. Misyn, Richard, ed. The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life or the Rule of Living the First Englisht in 1435, from the De Incendio Amoris, the Second in 1434, from the De Emendacione Vitae. London: EETS, 1896. Ogilvie-Â�Thomson, S. J. Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse. Oxford, UK: EETS, 1988. Perry, George G., ed. English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle de Hampole Edited from Robert Thornton’s MS. in the Library of Lincoln Cathedral. London: EETS, 1866, 1921. Woolley, Reginald Maxwell, ed. The Officium and Miracula of Richard Rolle of Hampole. New York: Macmillan, 1919.
—Susan Jones
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830–1894).╇ Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in London on December 5, 1830, to Gabriel and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti, artistic and intellectually cultivated parents who eagerly shared their poetic and intellectual gifts with their children. Christina was the youngest child of four. Her older sister, Maria Francesca, was joined by two brothers, Dante Gabriel, later a celebrated artist himself, and William Michael. Christina, like her brother Gabriel, was sensitive and strong-Â�willed, given to displays of temper but ultimately cooperative. Her youth was spent in a happy and secure family, and her literary talents were supported to the point that her maternal grandfather privately published Christina’s poems when she was seventeen. She was engaged at age eighteen but broke it off when her suitor reverted to Roman Catholicism, and later in her thirties she declined a proposal of marriage when she found that the gentleman was not a Christian. Christina spent her mature years living a retiring life writing, caring for her relatives, and to some extent participating in the social circle of her brother Dante Gabriel, whose friends included Whistler, Swinburne, and Lewis Carroll. Recurring illnesses, alternately diagnosed as heart ailments or tuberculosis, troubled Christina throughout her adulthood. Her artistic sensitivity combined with her High Anglican beliefs to make her acutely aware of her own moral state and anxious to grow closer to God. Much of her poetry and prose is influenced by her tendency to draw moral and theological lessons from her experiences. Christina’s first collection of poems, titled Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published in 1862 and was a literary success. The title poem is considered one of her finest works, mixing themes of Christlike sacrifice, sisterly love, and the incompleteness of erotic satisfaction with the sensuous imagery favored by the Pre-Â�Raphaelite school of poets. Because of the first book’s commercial success, her brother Dante Gabriel urged her to publish a
second work, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, that appeared in 1866. This collection was not as well received as the first but continues the themes presented in her first collection, most notably those dealing with the mutability of human love, renunciation, and betrayed expectations. “The Prince’s Progress” describes a prince’s quest to find the beautiful princess who waits patiently for her beloved but who ultimately dies before he reaches her. Distracted and delayed on his journey by sensual delights and false loves, the prince arrives to hear “you loitered on the road too long / you trifled at the gate.” This poem, with its dreamlike atmosphere and secluded heroine, contains much that echoes the work of other Victorian and Romantic poets, notably Tennyson and Byron. Taken together, Christina’s two collections of poetry published in the 1870s generally comprise her most well-Â�regarded and influential works. Only the “Monna Innominata” sonnets published in 1881 rival her earlier poetic works in quality. In 1871 Christina contacted Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that weakened her already weak physical constitution. She continued to write and in 1872 published an illustrated children’s book, Sing-Â�Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, that became a favorite of nineteenth-Â�century children’s literature. Perhaps partly because of her increasing infirmity her thoughts turned increasingly to devotional topics. After 1875 she was deeply involved with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an Anglican mission agency for which she wrote several prose works including Seek and Find (1879), Called to Be Saints (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1893). During this time she continued to write poetry and in 1881 published A Pageant and Other Poems. This volume was roundly praised by critics, especially for its collection of sonnets. Rossetti’s influence on the evolution of Christian thought in her time may be most potent in the area of renewed fervor that is characteristic of the evangelical movement and Tractarianism in England. Her poetry and other writings combine the ardent love of a passionate personality with intellectual acumen. The lifeless formality of Anglicanism attacked by Wesley and later by Keble in his sermon on National Apostasy was equally repugnant to a poet who had been immersed in Dante from her youth and whose intense appreciation of sensuous beauty coexisted with impulses of self-Â�renunciation reminiscent of St. Augustine. Her poetic talents, nationally recognized to the extent that she was under consideration to succeed Tennyson as poet laureate, gave passionate expression to the human desire for love in a fallen world and its relation to the desire for God. Such desires, expressed in a multiplicity of human lives, were intensely present in Victorian England despite a focus on material progress and the
Rosemary Radford Ruether
presence of economic inequities. Rossetti’s contribution imbued the literary life of her time with a distinctively feminine genius whose preoccupation with heavenly life and the inevitable suffering anterior to it matched the mood of a nation. Principal Ideas •â•‡ Betrayed expectations in human love point to Divine love. •â•‡ The renunciation of eros is a means of more fully embracing agape. •â•‡ Vanitas Mundi, or the fleeting and unsatisfactory nature of earthly life compared to heaven. •â•‡ The natural world’s beauty is a reflection and reminder of divine beauty. •â•‡ In a fallen world human love is fraught with pain and fragility. List of Selected Works
Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1881. The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1893. Goblin Market and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1862. New Poems. London: Macmillan, 1896. A Pageant and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1881. The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1866. Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1879. Sing-Â�Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book. London: Routledge, 1872.
Bibliography
Crump, Rebecca W., ed. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. 3 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, 1986, 1990. D’Amico, Diane. Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Harrison, Anthony. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Kent, David. The Achievement of Christina Rossetti. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Packer, Lona M. Christina Rossetti. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.
—Joseph McCleary
ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER (1936–).╇ Rosemary Radford Ruether was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on November 2, 1936. Her Catholic mother and Episcopalian father raised her in Georgetown. Ruether is
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married to Herman J. Ruether, professor of political science and Asian studies. She has three grown children and two grandchildren. Ruether received her BA in religion and philosophy from Scripps College (1958), MA in ancient history from Claremont Graduate School (1960), and PhD in classics and patristics from Claremont Graduate School (1965). Since 1982, she has received numerous honorary doctorates in humane letters. Ruether is an emerita professor of feminist theology at the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union in addition to emerita professor of applied theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. She has distinguished herself as a Roman Catholic activist, scholar, and teacher. Ruether is a board member of Catholics for a Free Choice. She is commended particularly for her pioneering work in Christian feminist theology, and it is as such that she is an international speaker and teacher. Ruether became involved in the religious feminist movement through the civil rights movement and the Delta Ministry, first in Mississippi and then in Washington, D.C. At civil rights meetings, she represented the interconnected structures of class, gender, and race as creating various differences, which differs from feminist theologians, such as Mary Daly, who have not contributed a critique of class and race but focus on gender issues. While teaching at Howard University (1965–1976), Ruether began interacting with the developing literature of black liberation theology and understood that gender issues had to be stimulated by African American women within their own community. Her feminist theology became developed in course work and conversations with female faculty and students at Harvard. Various religious groups encouraged her in antiwar activities and peace activism. As Ruether was invited by women to speak on gender issues, she mentored them in legitimizing their concerns and ideas. She has dialogued with and encouraged many women within the Palestinian community (particularly by assisting the work of Jean Zaru) and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. As a feminist theologian, she has written prolifically; her study of religious faith has been praised for inquiry into the domination of nature, ecology, hierarchy, interfaith relations, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, racism, sexism, and social justice. Her primary interest, however, is the globalization and contextualization of feminist theology. She is also active with ecofeminists, such as Heather Eaton and Ivone Gebara. Ruether is the author or editor of thirty-Â�six books and more than six hundred articles. Several of her early works, such as The Church against Itself (Herder and Herder, 1967), critiqued the doctrine of Catholicism. Ruether published two major anthologies addressing feminist issues and historical periods: Religion and Sexism: Images
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Rufinus of Aquileia
of Women in the Judaeo-Â�Christian Tradition (1974) and Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Tradition (1978), with Eleanor McLaughlin. Ruether’s most notable books include Sexism and God-Â� Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Beacon, 1983, 1993), a classic work of systematic feminist theology; The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Â� Palestinian Conflict (with Herman J. Ruether) (Harper and Row, 1989); and In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writings (Harpers, 1995). Since each of her publications represents a particular community, she would likely not consider any work as being more important than the other. Her most recent works include Goddesses and the Divine Feminine in Western Religious Thought (University of California Press, 2005); Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and World Religions (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005); and Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky, 2004). She recently collaborated with Rosemary Skinner Keller as editor of the multivolume Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America (Indiana University Press, 2006). Ruether has contributed to more than one hundred book symposia and writes regularly for such journals as the National Catholic Reporter and Sojourner. Her publications could reasonably form the foundation for a feminist religious studies curriculum. Bibliography For an autobiographical essay, see “Beginnings: An Intellectual Autobiography,” in Journeys: The Impact of Personal Experience on Religious Thought, edited by Gregory Baum (New York: Paulist Press, 1975). For an introduction to Ruether’s work, see Steven Bouma-Â�Prediger, The Greening of Theology: The Ecological Models of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joseph Sittler, and Jürgen Moltmann (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), and Mary Hembrow Snyder, Christology of Rosemary Radford Ruether: A Critical Introduction (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Â�Third Publications, 1988). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. RUFINUS OF AQUILEIA (ca. 345–411).╇ Tyrannius Rufinus was born circa 345 at Concordia near Aquileia. He studied in Rome (ca. 358–368), where he first met Jerome, and then spent time at a monastery in Aquileia and was baptized there around 370. By 373 Rufinus headed to Egypt to visit the desert monks, who were soon impacted by Arian persecution after the death of Athanasius. Despite the persecution, Rufinus was able to remain in the region until 380, studying in Alexandria under Didymus the Blind and acquiring a taste for Origen. Moving on to Jerusalem, Rufinus teamed with Melania the Elder to found a pair of
monastic communities on the Mount of Olives by 381 and was later ordained a priest. After two decades of the monastic life and initial conflict with Jerome over Origen, Rufinus returned to Rome in 397 and launched his career as a translator. He soon made his way back to Aquileia (in 399) but progressively moved south (likely in the company of Melania the Younger) as the Goths pushed into Italy while his translations and writings flourished. His travels took him to Pinetum near Terracina and then ended in Sicily, where he died around 410 or 411. Conflict with Jerome During their school days in Rome, Rufinus and Jerome forged a friendship that extended to their residence at the monastery in Aquileia and beyond, when they met up again in Palestine (after Jerome settled in Bethlehem in 386). Both were admirers of Origen, primarily for his detailed textual work on the Scriptures. However, when the rampage against Origenism started in 395, Jerome renounced Origen in favor of his own orthodoxy and sided with Epiphanius, while Rufinus held his ground and sided with Bishop John of Jerusalem. Thus, a bitter rivalry was born. Shortly before Rufinus returned to Rome in 397, he and Jerome reconciled, but the quarrel reignited in a matter of months with Rufinus’s publication of Pamphilus’s apology for Origen. In his subsequent translation of Origen’s On First Principles, Rufinus carefully edited out what he deemed heterodox interpolations and labeled Jerome an admirer of Origen. Jerome lashed out with a rival translation, unabridged, to let Origen’s heresy speak for itself. Rufinus responded with an apology for his work, which Jerome countered with one of his own. No public reply by Rufinus followed other than his ongoing translations of Origen, but Jerome and his circle of friends in Rome continued their campaign against Rufinus with the result that until recent times, history has largely sided with Jerome. Translations and Original Works Rufinus is best known for his translations, particularly of Origen (including commentaries on Romans and the Song of Songs and homilies on a few Psalms and the majority of the Pentateuch), most of which were carried out during his later years after his return to Aquileia. Other translations include The History of the Egyptian Monks; works by Basil the Great (Asceticon, Homilies), Gregory of Nazianzus (Orations), Evagrius Ponticus (Sentences), and Eusebius (Church History, accompanied by two additional books to update it through the time of Theodosius I); and works falsely attributed to Clement of Rome (Letter to James, Recognitions), Origen (as Adamantius; Dialogue on the True Faith), and Sixtus II (Sentences of Sextus). Rufinus’s translations were often free and adapted to the needs of his Latin audience;
Jan van Ruysbroeck
he admitted in his prefaces that his work was as much interpretation as translation. His style, though, has left him open to accusations of interpolation and inaccuracy, and scholarly opinion on the quality and reliability of his work continues to fluctuate. Rufinus also undertook a handful of original writings, including his apologies in the Origenist controversy, a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, and an allegorical exegesis of Genesis 49 (Benediction of the Patriarchs). While he is known to have written a number of letters, these are no longer extant. Bibliography Editions: Opera, edited by M. Simonetti, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 20 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1961); Historia monachorum sive De vita sanctorum patrum, edited by E. Schulz-Â�Flügel, Patristische Texte und Studien 34 (New York: W. De Gruyter, 1990); A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, translated by J. N. D. Kelly, Ancient Christian Writers 20 (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1955). Life and works: T. Christensen, Rufinus of Aquileia and the Historia Ecclesiastica, Lib. VIII–IX, of Eusebius (Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske videnskabernes selskab, 1989); G. Fedalto, Rufino di Concordia (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1990); J. Gribomont, “Rufinus of Aquileia,” in Vol. 4 of Patrology, edited by A. Di Berardino, translated by P. Solari (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1995), 247–254; C. P. Hammond (Bammel), Der Römerbrieftext des Rufin und seine Origenes-Â�Übersetzung (Freiburg: Herder, 1985); idem, “The Last Ten Years of Rufinus’ Life and the Date of His Move South from Aquileia,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 28 (1977): 372–429; F.╯X. Murphy, Rufinus of Aquileia (345–411) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945); M. M. Wagner, Rufinus, the Translator (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945). —Amy M. Donaldson JAN VAN RUYSBROECK (1293–1381).╇ Jan van Ruysbroeck was born humbly in the small village of Ruysbroeck (near Brussels) in 1293 and died on December 2, 1381, at the Augustinian monastery of Groenendael (where he served as prior). His feast is celebrated traditionally on the anniversary of his death. There is scant information regarding his parents. He left home at the age of eleven to live with his uncle, Jan Hinckaert, a priest and minor canon of the collegiate church of St. Gudula at Brussels. Hinckaert and another canon, Francis van Coudenberg, provided Ruysbroeck with a religious education, which included considerable training in philosophy and theology. Ruysbroeck also attended schools in the city. His mother, who was known as a kindly woman and devout toward her son, joined him some years later in Brussels. They lived in a béguinage.
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Shortly after his mother’s death, Ruysbroeck, at the age of twenty-Â�four, was ordained priest of St. Gudula, where he served from 1317 to 1343. He wrote treatises against a particular woman named Biomardinne of the Brethren of the Free Spirit who was proclaiming controversial teachings, primarily through use of popular pamphlets. The later writings of Ruysbroeck evidence both direct and indirect references to teachings and practices deemed heretical. Ruysbroeck did not title his writings; therefore, the designations are only translations that were used originally by early commentators. His first work, The Kingdom of the Lovers of God, demonstrates the influence of the Brabantine mystic, Sister Hadewijch, who believed that the relationship between the soul and God was similar to a lover and the beloved. Possibly as a result of the controversy with Biomardinne, Ruysbroeck retired to Groenendael in 1343. In 1349 two other canons joined him in his hermitage, and together they founded the Augustinian abbey. With the exception of his first work, Ruysbroeck completed the entirety of his writings in Groenendael. His writings were intended for his fellow Augustinians but were circulated widely as Latin translations. Ruysbroeck attracted many visitors from afar and was a tremendous influence upon Gerard Groote, Johannes Tauler, and other mystics. Ruysbroeck is regarded as a forerunner of the Brethren of the Common Life. Influenced by Meister Eckhart’s writings and familiar with some of the Friends of God, Ruysbroeck influenced the mystical movement in Holland. His systematic compendium of belief, however, differed from the more introspective character of Eckhart. The extant mystical treatises of Ruysbroeck are classics among Flemish manuscripts and mysticism. The best known of his treatises is The Spiritual Espousals (ca. 1335), which is highly regarded as his magnum opus. The mystics referred to spiritual espousals as the mystical union of love between the soul and God. The work is subdivided into three parts: active life (via purgativa), interior life (via illuminativa), and contemplative life (via unitiva). Throughout the work, Ruysbroeck developed his understanding of the Trinity and provided a guide for the soul searching for God. The last part in particular was intended to guide the inward and righteous lover into a superessential contemplation into the “God-Â�seeing life.” Ruysbroeck reminded his readers: “This essential unity of our spirit in God, exists not in itself, but abides in God, and it flows forth from God, and it depends on God, and it reverts into God as into its eternal cause, and accordingly, it neither parts from God nor will it ever do so.” Jean Gerson condemned Ruysbroeck’s works as inconsistent with Roman Catholicism, since he believed that Ruysbroeck was communicating that the soul becomes so absorbed into God that the being of man is none other than divine.
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The criticism by Gerson may have elicited the intervention of Pope Benedict XII, as distinction from God is stressed in a latter work. The Sparkling Stone states that the holy life is both active (human) and contemplative (divine). “And thus we live wholly in God, where we possess our blessedness; and we live wholly in ourselves, where we exercise ourselves in love toward God.” The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love is an account of the holy life. The path of sanctification is achieved in seven steps: conformity with God’s will, voluntary poverty, purity of soul and body, humility and her four daughter-Â�virtues, striving after God’s honor in the inner life, the contemplative life in its first moment of union with the Trinity, and the contemplative life in its second moment of union, or annihilation into the essence of God. Ruysbroeck is one of the most noteworthy of contemplatives of the Middle Ages. The cult of Ruysbroeck, which is prevalent among Roman Catholics of Northern Europe, was confirmed by Pope Pius X in 1908, the year of Ruysbroeck’s beatification. Bibliography The authoritative Latin translation of Ruysbroeck’s work is that of Laurentius Surius, D Joannis Rusbrochii Opera Omnia (Cologne, 1552), which is far from being perfect and complete. Henry Pomerius wrote a biography in Latin, which the internal evidence seems to indicate as
being written approximately fifty years after Ruysbroeck’s death and appears to be based upon an earlier work by John van Schoonhoven, which has since been nonextant. English translations of Ruysbroeck’s works include The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, translated by F. Sherwood Taylor (Westminster: Darce, 1943); The Adornment of Spiritual Marriage; The Sparkling Stone; The Book of the Supreme Truth, translated by C. A. Wynschenk and edited by Evelyn Underhill and J. M. Watkins (London: J. M. Dent, 1916); The Spiritual Espousals, translated by Eric Colledge (London: Faber and Faber, 1952); and John Ruusbroec: The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works, translated by J. A. Wiseman (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985). Evelyn Underhill, Ruysbroeck (London: G. Bell, 1915), is one of the better biographical studies. Important works for the study of Ruysbroeck include Stephanus Axters, The Spirituality of the Old Low Countries, translated by Donald Attwater (London: Blackfriars, 1954); Paul Mommaers, The Land Within: The Process of Possessing and Being Possessed by God according to the Mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck, translated by David N. Smith (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1975); and Paul Mommaers and Norbert de Paepe, eds., Jan van Ruusbroec: The Sources, Content, and Sequels of His Mysticism (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1984). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr.
S DOROTHY L. SAYERS (1893–1957).╇ Born in Oxford, England, Dorothy L. Sayers is a well-Â�known Christian writer and translator who befriended C. S. Lewis and J.╯R.╯R. Tolkien. She was the daughter of an Anglican minister. Sayers studied medieval literature at Oxford and was one of the first women to graduate from there in 1915, and she did so with honors, and by 1920, Sayers had earned a master’s degree. Although she was a prolific writer, critics claim that she will always be best known for her mystery series of short stories and novels set between World War I and World War II. Sayers was convinced that serious writers should write daily and cultivate their talent as they are developing their craft. Lord Peter Wimsey, the wealthy scholar and protagonist in her mystery series, is introduced in Whose Body in 1923, a novel that sets the backdrop for the series, including Clouds of Witness in 1926, Unnatural Death in 1927, Strong Poison in 1930, The Five Red Herrings in 1931, The Nine Tailors in 1934, Gaudy Night in 1935, and Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937, among others in this mystery collection. Influenced by her Christian faith, Sayers did not shy away from discussions about religion, the Holy Trinity, or the Christian doctrine, as in “Toward a Christian Aesthetics,” “The Dogma Is the Drama,” or “Creative Mind,” all essays in her book Christian Letters to a Post-Â�Christian World: A Selection of Essays. In Creed or Chaos? And Other Essays in Popular Theology, Sayers composes seven essays, dealing with incarnation and the seven deadly sins. In her play The Zeal of Thy House, Sayers engages her audience in the creative imagination, the role of the Trinity, and the doctrine of incarnation. Like the previous listed works, The Mind of the Maker expounds on the nature of the Trinity, its impact in the creative process in humans, and the role that free will plays in all of this.
In her personal life, Sayers had a few failed relationships with the likes of John Cournos and Bill White, the latter with whom she conceived a child. Dorothy fled her homestead in order to keep her pregnancy a secret from her parents. After the child (John Anthony) was born in 1924, Sayers directed the care of the child to her relatives Amy and Ivy Shrimpton, but Sayer continued to provide financial support for John Anthony. She later married Oswald Arthur Fleming, a Scottish journalist and divorcé with two children. The marriage ended with the death of Fleming in 1950, and Sayers followed in 1957. Bibliography
Burger, Harmon, and Margaret Harmon. An Annotated Guide to the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Garland, 1977. Dale, Alzina Stone, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration. New York: Walker, 1993. ———. Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers. Grand Rapids, MI: Williams B. Eerdmans, 1978. Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul. New York: St. Martin Press, 1993. Sayers, Dorothy. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Harper Collins, 1987.
—Mary Alice Trent
FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER (1912–1984).╇ Presbyterian clergyman and apologeticist Francis August Schaeffer (January 30, 1912–May 15, 1984) wrote on many theological and philosophical topics, primarily as an advocate for a conservative, evangelical ethos, or worldview. Influenced by the work of John Calvin and trained at Philadelphia’s Westminster Theological Seminary, he defended his ideology against arguments of secular humanism, laying the groundwork for the Christian Right in the United States
— 547 —
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Francis A. Schaeffer
even as he worked in Switzerland to establish L’Abri (the shelter), the international community devoted to sharing in study and worship. Principal among Schaeffer’s works are the triad of Escape from Reason, analyzing modernity’s thought-Â�trends; The God Who Is There, an apologetic for God’s existence and his relevance to a culture of isolating despair; and He Is There and He Is Not Silent, positing revealed truth in scripture on epistemological, metaphysical, and moral grounds. These three are included in the first of Schaeffer’s five-Â�volume Complete Works (Crossway, 1982), a set that categorizes his publications as “A Christian View” of philosophy and culture, the Bible as truth, spirituality, the church, and the West (containing Schaeffer’s responses to bioethical and political issues). Complete works are seldom that: a collection of his letters and a study of Romans 1–8 were published posthumously. Material from his numerous sermons and lecture tours, together with the film series and group-Â�study formats designed to complement his books, furnishes his bibliography still further. Throughout his life and work, Schaeffer sought to write in an accessible style, with illustrations and glossaries intended for readers both inside and outside the church and the academy. Schaeffer’s impact is evident among the conservative Christian authors whom he inspired to political activism, including Tim LaHaye. Schaeffer’s volume How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture provided Charles Colson and Schaeffer scholar Nancy Pearcey with a point of departure for their 1999 postmodern and “post-Â�Christian” follow-Â�up volume, How Now Shall We Live? His political views, while influential, have also left him open to criticism on several points. A Christian Manifesto (1981) responds to earlier humanist and communist declarations, proclaiming the window of opportunity for Christian activism opened in the United States by the conservative shift of the 1980 elections. Such immediate relevance, however, gives way to rapid obsolescence (what applied to the twentieth century may not apply to the twenty-Â�first); Schaeffer’s consideration of civil disobedience to encroaching federal power fails to consider the possibility of a state that cloaks its encroachment in Christian language; and he defines his position chiefly by opposition to secular humanism, offering no practical Christian alternatives. This last point has been made frequently by Schaeffer’s critics, but they in turn may miss the significance of his unwritten response: at L’Abri, the community itself is intended to serve as a living alternative to secular humanist thought. As Schaeffer says in The God Who Is There: “The final apologetic, along with the rational, logical defence and presentation, is what the world sees in the individual Christian and in our corporate
relationships together” (152, citing John 17:21; compare Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s work). As with many individuals in this encyclopedia, a single bio-Â�bibliographical entry fails to provide a complete picture of the subject; any study of Schaeffer must acknowledge the importance of his wife, Edith (née Seville). The two have written together, notably in Everybody Can Know, a series of meditations on biblical texts drawn primarily from Luke; Edith is also the cofounder of L’Abri. The Schaeffers relocated to Switzerland in 1948 and opened their home in Huémoz as a place of fellowship in 1955; some fifty years later, L’Abri Fellowship International (www.labri.org/) has additional residential study centers in England, Holland, Korea, Sweden, British Columbia, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, with satellite resource centers in Australia and Germany. These communities continue to express Schaeffer’s main concerns during his life: showing understanding and compassion to sinners, as sinners making Christian truth the basis for shared Christian love and hope. Principal Ideas of Francis A. Schaeffer •â•‡ The priority of common grace •â•‡ The historical reliability of the Bible and the natural and supernatural events it portrays •â•‡ The objective truth of Christianity, rationally defensible and open to honest questions •â•‡ The deadly realism of sin, the dehumanizing effects of anarchy, and the erosion of compassion and loss of the sense of bearing the divine image effected by the rise of secular humanism •â•‡ The need for responsible Christian activism in the political sphere •â•‡ The use of force, when required, as a necessary outworking of protective Christian love Bibliography Primary Sources
Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981. ———. Escape from Reason. London: Inter-Â�Varsity Fellowship, 1968. ———. The God Who Is There: Speaking Historic Christianity into the Twentieth Century. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968. ———. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976. ———. Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. ———. No Little People; Sixteen Sermons for the Twentieth Century. Downers Grove: L’Abri Fellowship and IVP, 1974. Schaeffer, Francis A., with Vladimir Bukovsky and James Hitchcock. “The Secular Humanist World View Versus the
Philip Schaff
Christian World View and Biblical Perspectives on Military Preparedness.” In Who Is for Peace? Nashville: Nelson, 1983. pp. 11–31. Schaeffer, Francis A., with Edith Schaeffer. Everybody Can Know. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1973.
Secondary Sources
Burson, Scott R., and Jerry L. Walls. C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the Most Influential Apologists. Downers Grove: IVP, 2006. Dennis, Lane T., ed. Francis A. Schaeffer: Portraits of the Man and His Work. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1986. Follis, Bryan A. Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer. Wheaton, IL: Good News (Crossway), 2006. McGrath, Alister E., ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Parkhurst, L. G. Francis and Edith Schaeffer (Women and Men of Faith Series). Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996. Ruegsegger, Ronald W., ed. Reflections on Francis Schaeffer. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986. Schaeffer, Edith. A Celebration of Marriage: Hopes and Realities. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994.
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
PHILIP SCHAFF (1819–1893).╇ Philip Schaff (January╯1, 1819–October 20, 1893) was an American religious scholar born in Switzerland and educated in Germany. Generally considered a church historian, Schaff produced work that was wide-Â�ranging and reflected a strong and abiding dedication to ecumenism. Schaff was born in Chur in the canton of Garubündten. He received his early education there before attending academy at Kornthal in Württemberg (1834). Kornthal marked the beginning of Schaff ’s German education, to which he credited formative spiritual development. Schaff attended gymnasium at Stuttgart (1835–1837) and the universities of Tübingen (1837–1839), Halle (1839–1840), and Berlin (1840–1841). After receiving his Licentiate in theology from Berlin, Schaff became a tutor and a privatdozent (lecturer). In 1843 Schaff was called to the seminary of the German Reformed Church in the United States in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. While the opportunity was regarded primarily as a one-Â�sided mission to bear the best of German theology to America, this view faded as Schaff adopted America as his home. Rather, Schaff promoted mutual understanding through a life of travel, correspondence with people of diverse theology and geography, and works such as Amerika (1854) and Germany: Its Universities, Theology, and Religion (1857). The Principle of Protestantism (1845), Schaff ’s inaugural lecture, was a foundational work for Mercersburg Theology. In this text, as well as the journals Der Deutsche
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Kirchenfreund and The Mercersburg Review and works such as What Is Church History? (1846), History of the Apostolic Church (1853), and the multivolume History of the Christian Church (1858–1892), Schaff developed a philosophy of church history as an organic, developmental process toward consummation in Christ according to God’s promise and activity. Using a Hegelian model, Schaff saw the Reformation asserting subjectivity and freedom in antithesis to objectivity and authority. But these Protestant principles occasioned the errors of rationalism and sectarianism thus setting the stage for a synthesis Schaff called “Evangelical Catholicism.” In addition to his philosophy of church history, Schaff promoted the development of church history as a discipline. He advocated a modern, theological science free from prejudices—professional, yet distinct from secular history as a social science. Later in life (1888), Schaff founded the American Society of Church History to reflect this view and to promote Christian unity. A two-Â�year leave of absence preceded Schaff ’s resignation from Mercersburg (1865). Relocating to New York City, Schaff worked for the New York Sabbath Committee (1863–1870) and Union Theological Seminary (1870– 1893). From this period emerge noteworthy activities as a biblical scholar. From 1864 Schaff edited an American edition of Johann Lange’s Commentary; the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis was founded in his study (1880); and Schaff served as president of the American committee for the revision of the King James Bible (1872–1884). In this latter capacity Schaff not only enlisted scholars and supervised work but also wrote a number of related texts and influenced both the nature of the American contribution and the committee’s multidenominational composition. As an ecumenist Schaff is further noted for his leadership in the Evangelical Alliance (1867–1893), organizing its New York world meeting in 1873. Other notable works are the three-Â�volume Creeds of Christendom (1877), an American edition (1882–1884) of Johann Herzog’s Realencyclopädie known in its final edition as The New Schaff-Â�Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (12 vols., 1908–1914), and the two fourteen-Â�volume series of Nicene and Post-Â�Nicene Fathers (1886–1900). Bibliography
Bowden, Henry. A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Pranger, Gary K. Philip Schaff (1819–1893): Portrait of an Immigrant Theologian. Swiss American Historical Society Publications, Volume 11. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Schaff, David S. The Life of Philip Schaff, in part autobiographical. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897.
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Schaff, Philip. Philip Schaff: Historian and Ambassador of the Universal Church, Selected Writings. Edited by Klaus Penzel. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1991. ———. The Principle of Protestantism. Edited by Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker. Lancaster Series on the Mercersburg Theology, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004. Shriver, George. Philip Schaff: Christian Scholar and Ecumenical Prophet. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987.
—Craig Clarkson
FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING (1775–1854).╇ F. W. J. Schelling is one of the most significant German philosophers of the nineteenth century; his writings on nature, art, and religion have exercised enormous influence. In philosophy, Schelling’s early thought forms a crucial stage in the development of post-Â�Kantian German Idealism from the Subjective Idealism of J. G. Fichte to the Absolute Idealism G. W. F. Hegel, while his later thought serves as a bridge between Idealism and the various post-Â�Idealistic philosophies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Martin Heidegger. Schelling is one of the most important figures of German Romanticism, and his influence on literature has been great, both on Romantics such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, and Heinrich Heine, and in England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, as well as to a lesser extent the later Weimar Classicism of Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Schelling’s later philosophy is highly religious in character, insisting on the centrality of the Christian revelation for philosophy, which alienated some of his philosophical contemporaries but influenced many subsequent theologians, Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, including Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Schelling was born in 1775, the son of a learned Lutheran pastor, in Württemberg. A child prodigy, Schelling entered Tübingen Theological Seminary at age fifteen, where he studied theology, philology, and classical philosophy, devoting himself primarily to philosophy after encountering the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At Tübingen, he roomed with G.╯W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, and the three became close friends. Schelling’s first publication, an exposition of Fichte’s philosophy, led to his becoming famous overnight in German philosophical circles, and in 1798, at age twenty-Â�three, Schelling was called to a professorship of philosophy at Jena, where Fichte was also a professor, and which along with nearby Weimar—home of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller—was at the center of German intellectual life. Schelling’s philosophical efforts increasingly focused on the idea of a Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie), which was to give an account of how the subjectivity (consciousness) central to Idealism could recognize a real (nonideal) other outside of consciousness (Nature). Schelling argued that Art could be understood as the perfect union of Freedom (consciousness) and Necessity (Nature) and, thus, could serve to reconcile man with Nature. Art thus realizes, at the level of the sensuous, what philosophy aims to realize at the level of thought. Schelling’s thought was well received by Goethe, with whom he became close, and particularly by the German Romantics, who found his mentor Fichte’s thought cold, intellectualistic, and sterile. Schelling was able to arrange a lecturership for his friend Hegel at Jena, and the two worked together for several years until the 1807 publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit led to a permanent breach between the two; in the Phenomenology, Hegel had leveled a criticism of Schelling’s philosophy as mystical and founded on the intellectual intuition of the unity of all things, which Hegel derisively described as “the night in which all cows are black.” The year 1809 saw two momentous events in Schelling’s life: the death of his beloved wife, Caroline, which left him personally devastated, and the publication of his single greatest work, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (the FreiheitsÂ� schrift). The reception of the Freiheitsschrift was muted and by this time Hegel had become the dominant philosopher in Germany, a status that he held until his death. Disheartened, Schelling all but ceased to publish for the remaining forty-Â�five years of his life. During this time, Schelling devoted himself to a major philosophical-Â� poetic work called The Ages of the World (die Weltalter), which was never completed, but which, published posthumously, remains of great philosophical interest. Also of significance is the posthumously published philosophical novella Clara, which is a literary presentation of Schelling’s thinking on the connection between the natural world and the spiritual world. Hegel’s death in 1831 left a philosophical void, and in 1841, Schelling, now sixty-Â�five, was appointed to Hegel’s former chair at the University of Berlin. It was widely understood that Schelling had been called to Berlin to directly challenge the still-Â�dominant Hegelianism, and very great expectations were placed on the now aged philosopher. Schelling’s Berlin lectures, characterized by Karl Jaspers as “the last great event of the German university,” were attended by some of the leading intellectual figures of the day, including Kierkegaard, Engels, Feuerbach, Mikhail Bakunin, LeoÂ�pold von Ranke, and Jakob Burckhardt. Schelling’s lectures presented a powerful critique of “Negative Philosophy,” as he now
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
termed Idealism, and advocated a new Positive Philosophy, which would ground all Idealistic concepts, especially those of God and freedom, in Existence and the Real, and thereby address the Christian Revelation as a reality rather than a mere conceptual possibility. For Schelling, philosophy must “grasp Christianity as that which is truly universal╯.╯.╯.╯as the very foundation of the world” without inappropriately rationalizing the Christian message, as Hegel had done. Schelling vigorously rejected Hegel’s attempt to subordinate art and religion to philosophy and, while never compromising his view on the importance of reason and philosophy, emphasized the ultimate irreducibility of human freedom and the world to reason and, thus, insisted on the autonomy of art and religion from philosophy. Principal Ideas of F. W. J. Schelling •â•‡ Philosophy is entirely a work of freedom, or Spirit, which opposes necessity, or Nature, in order to reconcile Spirit and Nature in a higher unity. Philosophy must above all strive to grasp and bring about the unity of Nature and Spirit. •â•‡ The work of art is the union of conscious, free activity and unconscious, natural activity, and so the specific nature of the artistic genius is to reconcile freedom and necessity, man and nature, in the work of art. •â•‡ The essence of the human being is freedom, and philosophy must give an account of the radical character of this freedom, not merely as a formal concept, but a real and vital conception of freedom as the possibility of evil. •â•‡ God contains the ground of His own being, but this ground of God within God is understood as a dark principle, which must remain dark precisely because it exists only as the ground of God within God, and thus can be distinguished from God as light, reason, Spirit, and person. Human being is also rooted in the dark ground of God within God, which as ground allows the finite human being to be as light, Spirit, and person—and thus the image of God—but also allows the possibility of the self-Â�assertive will of the ground to strive to be for itself and no longer merely the ground, that is, the possibility of evil. •â•‡ God is a life, not a concept, which requires us to grasp God’s eternal being as somehow temporal, because a life must develop. God is the one who says “I am who I was, I was who I will be, I will be who I am.” Only this time of God’s life allows us to understand the Christian teaching that the ages of the world are structured according to an absolute beginning, an absolutely singular event, and a final end.
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Bibliography
Schelling, F. W. J. (2000), The Ages of the World, trans. Jason Wirth, Albany: State University of New York Press. ——— (2002), Clara, or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp, Albany: State University of New York Press. ——— (2007), The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews, Albany: State University of New York Press. ——— (2006), Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, Albany: State University of New York Press. ——— (1977), Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation), ed. M. Frank, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——— (1978), System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bowie, Andrew (1993), Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, London: Routledge. Brown, Robert F. (January 1990), “Resources in Schelling for New Directions in Theology,” Idealistic Studies 20, no. 1. Frank, Manfred (1975), Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin (1985), Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Athens: Ohio University Press. Hirsch, E. D. (1960), Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Laughland, John (2007), Schelling versus Hegel, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. O’meara, Thomas F. (1982), Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Snow, Dale E. (1996), Schelling and the End of Idealism, Albany: State University of New York Press. Tilliette, Xavier (1970), Schelling, Une Philosophie en devenir, Two Volumes, Paris: Vrin.
—John Kress
FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST SCHLEIERMACHER (1768–1834).╇ F. D. E. Schleiermacher was born in BresÂ� lau in 1768 and, although the son of a Reformed army chaplain, he was educated in Moravian schools after his parents converted to the Herrnhuter Brethren. After attending the university of Halle and working as a private tutor, Schleiermacher was ordained to the ministry in 1794 and appointed Reformed preacher at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. He became immersed in the excitement and turmoil of the intellectual, social, and political life at the turn of the century that represented for German educated society the climax of the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment. This Age of Reason was both summed up and transcended by the philosophies of Kant and Spinoza, whose works SchleierÂ�macher eagerly engaged as a student. It was also
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met, especially in literary circles, with protest from the flowering movement of Romanticism, to which SchleierÂ� macher was particularly drawn in Berlin through his friendship with the poet Friedrich Schlegel. These intellectual interests, as well as his political and social commitments, were the subjects of a notable writing, teaching, and preaching ministry first as pastor in the Pomeranian town of Stolpe (1802–1804), then as university preacher and professor of theology in Halle (1804–1807), and finally as pastor of Trinity Church and dean of the theological faculty at the newly founded University of Berlin (commencing in 1810). Often referred to as the father of modern theology, Schleiermacher gave German Protestant thought a distinct impulse and direction for the nineteenth century and either influenced or anticipated much in what later came to be called liberal Protestantism, both in Germany and beyond. He preached every Sunday, and he also gradually took up in his university lectures and academic writing almost every branch of theology and philosophy. Among Schleiermacher’s most important works in these disciplines were: On the Highest Good (1789), On What Gives Value to Life (1792–1793), and On Freedom (1790–1793), all of which mounted a thorough attack on Kant’s ethical theory; Spinozism and Brief Presentation of the Spinozistic System (1793–1794), in which he embraced a modified form of Spinozist monism; Christmas Eve (1806), a literary work that explored the meaning of Christian love by depicting a German family’s celebration of Christmas Eve; Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811) set out a view of theology as a unified whole in three main divisions: philosophical, historical, and practical; On the Different Methods of Translation (1813), a very important work in translation theory; and the manuscripts of his lectures on hermeneutics given frequently between 1805 and 1833, which were translated into English in 1977 and published with the title Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. During this time he also lectured on the life of Jesus, inaugurating an important genre of literature on this subject in the nineteenth century as well. The most important and widely read of SchleiermaÂ�cher’s works remains his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1799 (revised editions: 1806, 1821, the latter including significant “explanations,” and 1831). This work sought to save religion in the eyes of its cultured despisers by arguing that religion is not merely a philosophy, abstract metaphysical thought, natural science, adherence to dogma, aesthetics, nor even morality. Rather, religion is a distinct feeling of dependence, or “a sense and taste for the infinite,” and religious piety the contemplation of the “immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.” The book earned
Schleiermacher a national reputation, drawing attention from young Protestant theologians and Romantic thinkers alike. The theological principles initially set out in the Speeches were expanded and more precisely stated in Schleiermacher’s massive and equally important work Christian Faith (1821–1822, revised edition 1830). Based on his dogmatics lectures, this book constituted the most systematic, large-Â�scale treatment of Protestant doctrine since John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion three centuries earlier. Schleiermacher’s location of religion in inward, emotional feeling or sensibility was instrumental in initiating a shift of theological interest to the experiential, psychological, or “subjective” dimensions of religion that came to define much of modern Protestant thought. Although Schleiermacher’s theology and theological method would come under profound criticism from twentieth-Â�century theologians following the lead of Karl Barth, his focus on the importance of dogmatics, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the place of the Christian church among the religions, and the role of human experience, as well as his hermeneutical insights, remained of value for modern and contemporary Christianity. Principal Ideas of F. D. E. Schleiermacher •â•‡ True piety is neither a knowing nor a doing, but a feeling, or immediate self-Â�consciousness of our absolute dependence, which is our relation to God. •â•‡ This feeling of absolute dependence is a universal element of life. •â•‡ Redemption consists of the inward transformation of the self from God-Â�forgetfulness to God-Â� consciousness in which the sense of absolute dependence predominates over all else. •â•‡ Christianity is essentially distinguished from other religions by the fact that everything in it is related to the redemption accomplished by the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. •â•‡ The distinctiveness of Jesus lay in his own perfect God-Â�consciousness, and his redeeming work consists in the impartation of his God-Â� consciousness to the believer. •â•‡ Religion and theology are essentially communal, just as humanity is inherently social. •â•‡ Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech. •â•‡ The subject matter of theology is not, directly, the divine reality itself but always the human, religious consciousness of the divine presence in which all things exist and cohere. •â•‡ Hermeneutics is strictly the art of understanding verbal communication, and should be a universal discipline that applies equally to all subjects.
Charles Monroe Schulz
Bibliography The two most important works of Schleiermacher are On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), translated and edited by Richard Crouter, Cambridge University Press, 1996; and The Christian Faith (1821–1822), translated into English from the second German edition by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, T and T Clark, 1989. Other important works include Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, translated by T. Tice, John Knox Press, 1967; Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, translated by T. Tice, John Knox Press, 1966; The Life of Jesus, translated by S. Maclean Gilmour and edited by J.╯C. Verheyden, Fortress Press, 1975; and Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, translated by J. Duke and J. Forstman, Scholars Press, 1977. Of the many critical works on the life and thought of Schleiermacher, see Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923–1924, edited by Dietrich Ritschl and translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Eerdmans Publishers, 1982; Richard B. Brandt, The Philosophy of SchleierÂ�macher, Greenwood Press, 1971; C. W. Christian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hendrickson Publishers, 1979; Friedrich Schleiermacher: Pioneer of Modern Theology, edited by Keith W. Clements, Fortress Press, 1991; B.╯A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology, Fortress Press, 1984; H.╯R. Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth, Nisbet and Co., 1947; Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, translated by John Wallhausser, Fortress Press, 1973. —Peter Anders CHARLES MONROE SCHULZ (1922–2000).╇ Schulz is arguably the most famous cartoonist in American history. Not many are aware, though, of the deep influence of his Christian connections on the Peanuts strips, films, and television specials. An only child, Schulz was born to Carl and Dena Halverson Schulz. His father was a German immigrant barber; the family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. His uncle nicknamed him “Sparky” after a cartoon-Â�strip character (Sparkplug in Barney Google). He was a sensitive child and thrilled when a kindergarten teacher recognized his drawing talent, telling him that someday he would be an artist. Though excelling at his studies in elementary school (to the point of skipping two semesters), he faltered in high school, experiencing failures that would later characterize his Charlie Brown. He published his first sketch (a drawing of his black-Â�and-Â�white dog Spike) in 1937 in a newspaper comic feature of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. After graduating from high school in 1940, he took a correspondence course in cartooning. Soon he faced one of the darkest moments in his life, when his mother
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died of cancer and he was immediately drafted into the U. S. Army to serve in World War II in 1943. He felt that his survival of the war was an act of God’s providence; he returned to St. Paul in 1945, lettering comic pages for the Catholic publication Timeless Topix and teaching for Art Instruction, Inc. He then created a weekly cartoon, Li’l Folks, for St. Paul’s Pioneer Press (1947–1949). When the paper would not give him a raise, he took his ideas to United Features Syndicate in New York, who eventually started publishing a Peanuts daily strip on October 2, 1950. The next April, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, and living in Minneapolis, they would have three daughters and two sons. The year 1952 saw the first anthology published by Rinehart, and 1955 saw Schulz awarded the Reuben by the National Cartoonists Society. In 1958 the Schulz family made a major move to California at Joyce’s request. Two years later Hallmark released the first greeting cards with Peanuts characters. In 1963 his denominational school Anderson College (Indiana) awarded him an honorary LHD. A Charlie Brown Christmas (animated by Bill Melendez and scored by Vince Guaraldi) won both the Emmy and Peabody awards in 1965. In 1966 his family’s house burned to the ground (and so did Snoopy’s doghouse in the strip). You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown opened off-Â�Broadway in 1967 and would become one of the most frequently performed musicals in American history. As more and more papers picked up Peanuts, Schulz’s fame grew. He and Joyce divorced in 1972. He met (at the ice rink he owned near his Santa Rosa studio) and married Jean Forsyth in 1973. Numerous more awards and honors were given to him and his work over the following decades, including another Reuben in 1964 and a lifetime achievement award in 2000 (posthumously). By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Peanuts, more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries published his strip. Because of cancer, he announced his retirement in December 1999. He died the evening before his last strip was published on February 13, 2000. His cartoons are being posthumously published together in the multivolume work The Complete Peanuts. The exploits of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and company, particularly resident theologian Linus, who memorably relates the birth of Jesus in A Charlie Brown Christmas, have drawn the attention of a number of Christians. Robert Short’s books The Gospel According to Peanuts (1964), The Parables of Peanuts (1968), and Short Meditations on the Bible and Peanuts (1990) have certainly made the case for connecting the strips with Calvinist doctrine. Schulz himself wanted to be much more subtle in preaching, though he was still direct in references to the Bible. He was raised a nominal Lutheran, and it was not until after the most traumatic time in his life (his mother’s death and his experiences in World War II) that he sought out
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the church. While in Minneapolis, he regularly attended (teaching Sunday school and lay preaching) a Church of God congregation. The move to California saw him and his family attending a Methodist church for about a decade before drifting away; later in life he sometimes looked more agnostic (joking he might have become a secular humanist) in his questioning whether we could be certain about the nature of the universe, but he never officially left the Church of God, and he continued to make biblical references in his cartoons. In 1989 he also published I Take My Religion Seriously (1989), a collection of cartoons portraying teenagers wrestling with Protestant church culture. One cannot read very far in the Peanuts collection, with its meditations on failure and friendship, without finding truths that resonate with a basic Christian worldview. Bibliography
Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Charles M. Schulz: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Johnson, Rheta Grimsley. Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz (second revised edition). Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel’s, 1995. Schulz, Charles. The Complete Peanuts. Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2004–.
—Brett Patterson
ALBERT SCHWEITZER (1875–1965).╇ French, German. Albert Schweitzer was one of the foremost spiritual and ethical figures of the twentieth century. Schweitzer determined to study and teach until he was thirty, thereafter devoting his life in service to humanity. He earned doctorates in theology and philosophy, then applied to the Paris Mission Society as a missionary to Africa. Turned down twice on account of controversy over his books, Schweitzer earned a third doctorate, becoming a medical doctor. He spent more than fifty years in Gabon, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. His literary output covers many topics: philosophy, ethics, theology, biblical studies, music, medicine, biography, autobiography, history, and spirituality. Aspects of Schweitzer’s life can be gleaned from his autobiographical writings, especially On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1921), Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924), More from the Primeval Forest (1931), The Forest Hospital at Lambarene (1931), Out of My Life and Thought (1931), and African Notebook (1938). Religious and theological works include The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (1901), The Problem of the Lord’s Supper (1901), The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), Paul and His Interpreters (1911), Christianity and the Religions of the World (1923), The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1931), and the posthumous
The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity (1968). On philosophy and ethics, notable titles include Die Religionsphilosophie Kants (1899), The Philosophy of Civilization (1923), and Indian Thought and Its Development (1934). On music, he wrote J. S. Bach, 2 volumes (1905), and on medicine he penned The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (1913). Schweitzer’s God was one of ethics rather than dogmatics. “I need no churches, no dogma, and maybe no name; I believe that action in life itself is religion, and this is what gives it harmony.” Schweitzer taught that the pursuit of the Christian ideal was a worthwhile aim for any person. Desiring to fulfill the commandments of Jesus, he found the place for his profession of faith: Lambarene, which he termed an “outpost of the Kingdom of God.” Extant sermons reveal stress on the Ten Commandments, morals, and parables of Jesus but little attention to dogmatics. Schweitzer reduced Christianity to an ethical imperative. In The Mystery of the Kingdom of God SchweitÂ�zer concluded Jesus was wrong in his expectations about the end of the world but correct in his ethics. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle argues that Christians could literally become members of the body of Christ by being in Christ through mystical death and resurrection. The beginning of all spiritual life is fearless belief in truth and its open confession. He exerted profound and lasting influence on twentieth-Â� century Jesus scholarship. The Quest of the Historical Jesus surveys the scope of Jesus scholarship for the previous two hundred years and was so decisive that further quests for the historical Jesus were ended for half a century. Quest was possibly the greatest book on Jesus in the twentieth century. Schweitzer argued that Jesus expected the end of the world and that the kingdom of God was an eschatological topic. Jesus self-Â�consciously considered himself the means whereby the world and history reached consummation. When Christ’s words in Matthew 10:23 failed, Schweitzer argues that Jesus, believing himself to be the eschatological Son of Man, took steps to bring about his own death, thinking this would inaugurate the new age. Jesus was mistaken. Schweitzer did not regard these errors as undermining Christianity. He drew a clear line between historical research and theology. The truthfulness of the Christian faith rests not on the historical Jesus but in the present experience of Christ as living reality. “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old .╯.╯. to those who obey him, he will reveal himself .╯.╯. and as an inexpressible mystery they shall learn in their own experience who he is.” According to Schweitzer, it is quite improper to dismiss scholarship because it does not correspond with orthodoxy. The historical Jesus is not recoverable, cannot be modernized, and cannot be detached from his own time. Jesus Christ is a stranger and an enigma to our time.
C. I. Scofield
Schweitzer developed an ethic called “reverence for life.” A person is ethical only when life is sacred—plant, animal, and human—and when that person is devoted to all life in need of help. This made him an advocate of peace, an opponent of war, and a firm supporter of nuclear disarmament. A Place for Revelation: Sermons on Reverence for Life (1988), Reverence for Life (1966), and The Teaching of Reverence for Life (1965) lay out his concerns. His writings directed myth into ethics and his life demonstrates that there can be ethics without eschatology. Bibliography
Bahr, Hans Walter, ed., Albert Schweitzer Letters 1905–1965, Macmillan, 1992. Brabazon, James, Albert Schweitzer: A Biography, 2nd ed., Syracuse University Press, 2000. Byers, Jeannette Q., ed., Brothers in Spirit: The Correspondence of Albert Schweitzer and William Larimer Mellon, Jr., Syracuse University Press, 1996. Joy, Charles R., ed., Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Beacon, 1947. Marshall, George, Schweitzer: A Biography, 2nd ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Meyer, Marvin, ed., Reverence for Life: The Ethics of Albert Schweitzer for the Twenty-Â�first Century, Syracuse University Press, 2002. Schweitzer Miller, Rhena, ed., The Albert Schweitzer–Â�Helene Bresslau Letters 1902–1912, Syracuse University Press, 2003.
—Thomas Fudge
C. I. SCOFIELD (1843–1921).╇ Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was born on August 19, 1843, in Lenawee, Michigan. He moved to Tennessee sometime after his birth, where he spent his youth. After serving in the Civil War for the Confederacy, and having been awarded the Confederate Cross of Honor for his actions at Antietam, Scofield moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where, in 1866, he married Leontine Cerre and became a lawyer. After relocating to Atchison, Kansas, Scofield was asked to join the law firm of John J. Ingalls and was then elected to the Kansas state legislature, serving from 1871 to 1873. President Grant appointed Scofield the U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas, making him the youngest such attorney in the country at the time. He served in this capacity for seven months, after which time he resigned under a cloud of suspicion that he had abused his position, although this was never proven and no charges were ever brought. In 1879, Scofield and his wife separated as Scofield battled an alcohol problem. During this difficult period of his life, Scofield was confronted by a friend, Thomas McPheeters, on why he was not a Christian. Scofield experienced a conversion experience and was then brought
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under the teaching of James H. Brookes, a Presbyterian pastor and Bible teacher in St. Louis. Brookes taught Scofield the importance of understanding the practical nature of scripture and of instilling in himself an appreciation for the literal interpretation of scripture. Brookes was committed to a dispensational premillennial interpretation of the Bible, and, over the next few years, Scofield set off on a thorough study of the scriptures, noting with care cross-Â� references and developing a reading of the scriptures that was itself a thoroughly dispensational understanding of the biblical story. In 1882, Scofield was asked to become the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Dallas, Texas. During this time of pastoral ministry, as well as during his involvement with the Bible conferences that were springing up across the Northeast, Scofield became convinced of the need to educate laypersons in biblical literacy, which meant an accessible way to present the teachings of premillennial dispensationalism. His first publication, written in 1888, was called Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth. This work was crucial in popularizing dispensational premillennialism and was the forerunner of the work that would become Scofield’s most influential literary achievement, the Scofield Reference Bible. Another of Scofield’s interests was the missionary movement. He had a relationship with Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, and was influenced to found a mission with laymen from his church that would seek to reach Central America. Central American Mission was founded in 1890. Around the turn of the century, Scofield turned his attention to the system of biblical reading that would become the Scofield Reference Bible. In this work, Scofield presents with great care the dispensational understanding of biblical history. In this work, Scofield presents the history of the biblical story as being composed of seven dispensations, with which human beings are called to faith in a divine revelation that is specific to that dispensation. The enduring influence of Scofield has been not only in the conscious advancement of dispensational theology but also in the fact that innumerable readers have purchased the SRB unaware of the dispensational system that it outlines. As such, Scofield’s work is undoubtedly the key text in the spread and popularization of premillennial dispensational theology that has marked twentieth-Â� century evangelicalism. Scofield heavily influenced Lewis Sperry Chafer, who inherited Scofield’s pastorate in 1923, two years after Scofield’s death in 1921. Chafer went on to found the Evangelical Theology College in Dallas, which would become Dallas Theological Seminary, the primary evangelical seminary dedicated to the advancement of the premillennial dispensational understanding of the Bible.
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The Scofield Reference Bible has had a lasting impact on American Christianity and continues to be published and purchased nearly one hundred years after its initial publication. Selected Bibliography
BeVier, William A. “C. I. Scofield: Dedicated and Determined.” Fundamentalist Journal 2, no. 9 (October 1983): 37–39. Canfield, Joseph M. The Incredible Scofield and His Book. Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1988. Crutchfield, Larry V. “C. I. Scofield.” In Twentieth-Â�Century Shapers of American Popular Religion. Westport, CO: Greenwood, 1989, 371–381. Eisenblätter, Winfried Helmut. “The Scofield Bible: A Challenge from Fundamentalism.” Southwestern Journal of Theology 28, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 45–48. Raysor, Kay L. “C. I. Scofield.” Fundamentalist Journal 8, no. 10 (November 1989): 31–35. Spencer, Stephen R. “Scofield, C(yrus) I. (1845–1921).” In Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998, 610–615. Trumbull, Charles G. The Life Story of C. I. Scofield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1920.
—Joel Lawrence
NATHAN A. SCOTT JR. (1925–2006).╇ Along with Stanley Romaine Hopper at Drew University, Preston Roberts and Nathan A. Scott Jr. at the University of Chicago established the emerging interdisciplinary field that became known variously as religion and literature, theology and literature, or Christianity and literature. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, theologians found themselves looking to the literature of the post–World War II period for articulate expressions of theological themes such as despair, alienation, redemption, and revelation. Drawing primarily on Paul Tillich’s theology of culture—which defined religion as the substance of culture and culture as the form of religion—Scott eloquently explored the crisis of faith in modern literature, the climate of faith in Kafka, Camus, and Bellow, and the themes of alienation and reconciliation in modern plays, poetry, and novels. Scott taught several generations of students that a dialogue with the literary imagination of the age would provide rich rewards for Christian theology by offering a deepening awareness of itself and the time in which it finds itself. In one of his most eloquent and astute observations, Scott pointed out that the sense that the anchoring center of life is broken and that the world is abandoned and adrift is a basic premise underlying most of our literature. Born in Cleveland in 1925 and reared in Detroit, Scott entered his undergraduate program at the University of Michigan at the age of sixteen. Three years later he
graduated and entered Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He obtained a B.D. from Union in 1946. In 1949, Scott earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he studied with Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jacques Barzun. Scott’s distinguished teaching career began at Virginia Union University when he became the dean of the chapel there in 1946. From 1948 to 1955, Scott taught humanities at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he also served as director of the General Education Program in the Humanities. In 1955, Scott moved to the University of Chicago and taught there until 1977. In 1972, he became the Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology and Literature and held a concurrent appointment as Professor of English in the Division of Humanities. In 1977, Scott joined the faculty of the University of Virginia and held the Commonwealth Chair in Religious Studies and served as the William R. Kenan Professor in Religious Studies. In 1980, Scott was appointed chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He and his wife, Charlotte, a business professor, were hired simultaneously as the first black tenured professors at the University of Virginia. Scott was a Kent Fellow of the Society for Values in Higher Education, a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. A prolific author, Scott wrote seventeen books, edited nine, and published hundreds of articles and reviews. Scott’s numerous writings attempted to understand the Christian revelation for a rational understanding of the world and humans’ experience of that world. Scott elegantly and eloquently sought to discover new points of dialogue between theology and literature. His numerous essays not only engage in close readings of Kafka, Orwell, Lawrence, Camus, Beckett, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, or Flannery O’Connor but also seek to illuminate the ways that certain genres offer theological insights or the manner in which the nature of a certain period style of literature generates theological insights. Scott’s wide-Â�ranging interests, his literary eloquence, and his prodding teaching method launched an entire generation of scholars into the uncharted waters of theology and literature, where they could learn, with his guidance, to navigate the shoals and arrive safely at new and spectacular shores. Bibliography
Gerhart, Mary, and Anthony C. Yu, eds. Morphologies of Faith: Essays in Religion and Culture in Honor of Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
John Duns Scotus
———. Negative Capability: Studies in the New Religion and Literature Situation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. ———. The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. ———. Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature. New York: King’s Crown Press of Columbia University Press, 1952. Scott, Nathan A., Jr., ed. The Climate of Faith in Modern Literature. New York: The Seabury Press, 1964.
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
JOHN DUNS SCOTUS (1266–1308).╇ Scotland. John Duns Scotus was a medieval Franciscan monk, philosopher, and theologian who generally opposed the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. He argued that faith is more an exercise of will than of reason. His thought became referred to as Scotism. Scotism is the assertion that the conclusions of theology are in conflict with the conclusions of philosophy. Life Scotus was born in 1266. Some scholars argue that he was born in Duns Borders, Scotland, while others claim Ireland. He was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England, in 1291. He studied and taught at Paris from 1293 to 1297 as well as posts at Oxford and Cambridge. Around 1297 he was expelled from the University of Paris. In 1307, he traveled to Cologne, Germany, where he died in 1308. Scotus is considered one of the most important Franciscan theologians of the medieval period. He came out of the Old Franciscan School, which included, among others, St. Bonaventure. He is buried in the church of the Minorities in Cologne. He was made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in 1993. Writings Scotus’s writings are numerous. A complete edition of his writings was published in 1639 by Wadding at Lyons. Besides these printed works are several commentaries on various books of scripture. His published works deal with grammatical, scientific, theological, and philosophical subjects. The principal work of Scotus is the Opus Oxoniense, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. It is primarily a theological work, but it contains various philosophical treatises through which his whole system of philosophy might be derived. System of Philosophy The fundamental principles of Scotus’s philosophical and theological teaching are his idea of being and his
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distinctio formalis. Scotus’s idea of being followed Aristotle in asserting that the subject matter of metaphysics is “being qua being.” For Scotus, being in general was the object of the intellect. Scotus argued that being itself, as well as its attributes (i.e., “one,” “true,” “good”), was a transcendental. God alone is absolute being since he alone is absolute without any potentiality for becoming other than what he is. According to Scotus, all creatures are material composed of both potentiality and actuality, thus the same “primary material” is the foundation of all, therefore all things have a common basis. This univocal view of being implied the denial of any real distinction between essence and existence. Scotus’s distinctio formalis is the distinction made by the intellect alone as opposed to the distinctio rationis tantum, or that which exists in reality. A thing is “formally distinct” when it is such in essence and in concept that it can be thought of by itself. Thus the distinctio formalis is a method of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing (e.g., soul and body). System of Theology Scotus was an Augustinian theologian. He is usually associated with voluntarism, the tendency to emphasize God’s will, and human freedom. The two most important aspects of Scotus’s theology are his opposition to Thomas Aquinas and his defense of the immaculate conception of Mary. Scotus was in opposition to the work of Thomas Aquinas. The main difference between Aquinas’s theology and Scotus’s is that Scotus believed certain predicates may be applied univocally to God and creatures, whereas Aquinas insisted that this is impossible; only analogical predication can be employed. According to Aquinas, analogical predication is when a word as applied to God has a meaning different from, although related to, the meaning of that same word as applied to creatures. Scotus became referred to as the “Marian Doctor” due to his defense of the Immaculate Conception. Contrary to much of the faculty at the University of Paris, Scotus, citing Anselm of Canterbury’s principle, “God could do it, it was appropriate, therefore he did it,” argued that Mary was in need of redemption like all of humanity, but through the merits of the crucifixion given to her in advance, she was conceived without the stain of original sin. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception became official Roman Catholic dogma in 1854. Bibliography
Cross, Richard. Duns Scotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Williams, Thomas. The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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William Shakespeare
Christian symbolism. Shakespeare was baptized soon after birth, but at issue is whether or not he was a true believer and if so whether his leaning was Protestant or Catholic. Under Queen Mary (1553–1558), England was Roman Catholic, but Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603) returned England to the Protestantism of their father, King Henry VIII (1491–1547). Shakespeare’s older sister, Joan, was baptized —John Thompson Catholic, but he was baptized Protestant. Evidence within the plays is inconclusive, as Hamlet illustrates: the ghost of King Hamlet is suffering in Purgatory as his sins are being WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616).╇ William purged away, but young Prince Hamlet has been a student Shakespeare was baptized April 26, 1564 (traditionally his at Wittenberg, a Protestant university. The plays of the birth date is assumed to be April 23), in Stratford upon seventeenth century’s first decade suggest that something Avon, Warwickshire, in England, the son of John Shake- spiritual happened to Shakespeare; for the dire tragedies speare and his wife, Mary Arden. At age eighteen he mar- stemming from fratricide, jealousy, pride, and ambition of ried twenty-Â�six-Â�year-Â�old Anne Hathaway, who gave birth the first years turn into the romances where reconciliation, to their first child, Susanna, six months later (May 1583). forgiveness, and even resurrection dominate the concluTwo years later Anne Hathaway bore Shakespeare twins, sions. However, even from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Hamnet and Judith, but Hamnet died in 1596. Sometime work, grace and mercy abound. In perhaps the earliest play, around 1590 Shakespeare was in London, first as an actor, A Comedy of Errors, a family is reunited after twenty years as attested by Robert Greene’s comment about “Shake-Â� or more and the father is forgiven a debt he cannot pay. scene” in 1592, and later a playwright. During the 1590s In all of the comedies restoration occurs and one can even he composed the perennially romantic tragedy Romeo argue that in a bleak tragedy such as King Lear the protagoand Juliet, as well as the history plays Richard III; Henry nist learns his error and thus benefits from his pain. In a IV, Part I (which introduces Falstaff); and Henry V. Dur- Christian world, pain is instructive rather than being siming this period he wrote the great comedies The Taming ply torment as “all things work together for good.” of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Conclusion Twelfth Night. Beginning around 1600 he wrote the trag- Shakespeare, the Western world’s greatest poet and masedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Between ter of dramatic structure, wrote with and in a culture 1608 and 1612, when he left London to retire in Stratford, saturated with Christian tradition. He shows such depth he composed four romances, which focus on forgiveness of understanding of human nature that psychologists and restoration, the greatest of which are The Winter’s Tale analyze his characters. Living in an age that saw little use and The Tempest. All in all we have 38 plays, 154 sonnets, in educating women, he draws smart women who are and 4 narrative poems, which, while full of brilliant rheto- able to take charge of a tumultuous situation and bring ric, pale before the achievement of the plays and sonnets. order to it. His plays, which have all been filmed, have Shakespeare bought one of the finest houses in Stratford remained entertaining favorites, both on the stage and and settled down with his wife before dying April 23, 1616. in reading, for the four hundred years since he penned No descendants were left after a granddaughter died. In them. His work rises far above that of any other writer 1623 Shakespeare’s friends John Heminges and Henry we have, leading a Christian to believe he was inspired Condell gathered his plays and published the First Folio, by God. containing thirty-Â�six plays. Eighteen of the plays we have Principal Ideas of William Shakespeare are found only in this edition. •â•‡ God is a given for an ordered, civilized society. •â•‡ A monarchy should provide stability and continuity Question of Christianity in a society, but rebellion and civil war bring Because Shakespeare mostly retold old stories rather than destruction. baring his own psyche or telling his own life story (as many •â•‡ The universe exhibits a moral order. contemporary writers do), it is impossible to say definitively •â•‡ Pride, jealousy, ambition, revenge, and lust, sins of what his beliefs were, and it is clearly an error to insist the the spirit, destroy human beings. words of a character express Shakespeare’s own beliefs. Cer•â•‡ The inability to see the reality behind the appearance tainly his work affirms the value of the individual, upholds leads to ruin as people are often deliberately monarchy, espouses traditional moral values, assumes an deceitful. at least nominal Christian society, and employs pervasive Wolter, Allan B. Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. ———. The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Wolter, Allan B., and Felix Alluntis. John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1975.
Luci Shaw
•â•‡ Grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration are possible in human relationships. •â•‡ The family should be a unit where persons find support, but all too often it is a battleground of envy, pride, and deceit. •â•‡ Women are intelligent and capable human beings who often provide leadership in their societies. •â•‡ It’s important to marry and procreate so that persons may leave copies of themselves behind, as life is short and mortality is certain. Bibliography As entire libraries, the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., for example, are devoted to Shakespeare’s work, only the barest suggestions can be made here. An excellent edition with insightful introductions and notes, including biography, is David Bevington’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 5th ed., published by Longman, 2004. An old but useful book for beginners is Maurice Cheney’s How to Read Shakespeare, McGraw-Â�Hill, 1971, and Bevington in 2006 published How to Read a Shakespeare Play, Blackwell, introducing six of the greatest plays to beginners. Peter Milward in Shakespeare’s Religious Background argues that Shakespeare was an underground Catholic. Roy Battenhouse’s Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, Indiana University Press, 1994, presents excerpts from a wide variety of Christian readings, many of them superb. Another collection, printed lectures by eminent Shakespearean scholars (such as Bevington, Battenhouse, and John D. Cox) from a conference at Wheaton College, is E. Beatrice Batson, ed., Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition, Edwin Mellen, 1994. John D. Cox in a review essay, “Was Shakespeare a Christian, and If So, What Kind of Christian Was He?” Christianity and Literature 55, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 539–566, gives a cogent analysis of the current discussion of the issue, presenting the arguments and including copious bibliography on the subject. —Mimosa Stephenson LUCI SHAW (1928–).╇ Luci Shaw was born in 1928. The daughter of a missionary surgeon who had worked in the Solomon Islands for many years, she lived in England, Australia, and Canada before moving to the United States to study. She graduated, magna cum laude, from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1953, with a major in English literature and a minor in New Testament Greek. After marrying Harold Shaw, she became senior editor, and later president, of Harold Shaw Publishers in Illinois. Amid the busyness of being a mother of five children, Shaw continued to write verse, which appeared over many years in numerous journals. Her first collection of poetry, Listen to the Green, was published in 1971. This
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and subsequent collections reveal her personal reliance on discovering the divine in the natural world and in the familiar aspects of domestic life. An acute but sensitive observer of her surroundings, the clarity, precision, and keen sense of reverential wonder in her verse brought her critical acclaim from the beginning of her writing career. In January 1986, Harold Shaw died of cancer, and this began some challenging years of readjustment for Luci. During the darkest days of Harold’s illness and death and her bereavement, Luci maintained her usual practice of keeping a journal, recording her daily experiences and responses. In 1989 these regular entries were edited and published as God in the Dark: Through Grief and Beyond. This frank and moving account of that testing period of her life (from mid-Â�1984 until mid-Â�1987) has been recognized as a classic in the field of spiritual autobiography. Since Harold’s death, Luci’s work has continued to grow and gain momentum, reflecting her multifaceted life. The title poem of the collection Writing the River (1994) is a good example. Based on a journal entry from November 1989, it captures so poignantly the pain that recent events in her life had created for her. With the sound of the rain-Â� swollen Beaver Creek providing the backdrop for her sleep, she dreams that she is a salmon working my way up the valley, grazed by rocks. I am living a creek, writing a river. Downstream, a trace of my blood feeds the Sound.
In recent years Shaw has extended her writing to include more spiritually oriented material. She has collaborated with Madeleine L’Engle in some of these ventures. In 1991, Shaw married John Hoyte, and they now live in Bellingham, Washington. Shaw continues her association with Regent College, Vancouver, as board member and writer in residence, and her involvement in many worthwhile literary and philanthropic enterprises, such as board membership, since its inception, of IMAGE: A Journal of Religion and the Arts. Principal Ideas of Luci Shaw •â•‡ God’s presence is in evidence throughout the natural world. This incarnational quality makes the reader of her work attentive to the constant promise of spiritual insight. •â•‡ Close observation of the nuanced nature of everyday life frequently reveals spiritual truths and analogies. •â•‡ There is a rewarding nature of the poetic exploration of biblical subjects and themes. For example, during her writing career, Shaw has written ten poems on the Annunciation. •â•‡ It is important to live courageously and take opportunities as they present themselves. She also extols the virtues of spiritual friendship.
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Fulton Sheen
Bibliography Luci Shaw’s collections of verse are Listen to the Green, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1971; The Secret Trees, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1976; The Sighting, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1981; Postcard from the Shore, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1985; Polishing the Petoskey Stone, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1990; Writing the River, Pinon Press/Regent College Publishing, 1994; The Angles of Light, Shaw Books, 2000; The Green Earth, William B. Eerdmans, 2002; Water Lines (New and Selected Poems), William B. Eerdmans, 2003; and Accompanied by Angels (Poems of the Incarnation), William B. Eerdmans, 2006. In addition she edited A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1984. Her devotional works are God in the Dark: Through Grief and Beyond, Zondervan Publishing House, 1989; Water My Soul: Cultivating the Interior Life, Zondervan Publishing House, 1998; and The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure, Intervarsity Press, 2005. With Madeleine L’Engle she wrote Friends for the Journey, Regent College Publishing; WinterSong: Seasonal Readings, Regent College Publishing; and A Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends, Augsburg Fortress, 1999. She has also edited a festschrift, The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, Shaw Books, 1999. Her most recent publications are What the Light Was Like, WordFarm, 2006, and The Genesis of It All, Paraclete Press, 2006 (for children). —Peter Stiles FULTON SHEEN (1895–1979).╇ Fulton Sheen was born in El Paso, Illinois, in 1895 to a large family of meager means. From an early age he desired to be a priest so that he could help others. He was ordained in 1919 for the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois. The bishop of Peoria, Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, saw something special in Sheen that told him Sheen was destined for greatness in the church. Spalding supported Sheen in his seminary studies and aided him when he attended Louvain University in Belgium, where Sheen eventually won a doctorate and the honor of teaching there. Sheen was the first American to be invited for the highest distinction, the agrégé en Philosophie, a “super doctorate.” He became a professor of philosophy at Catholic University of America and taught for twenty-Â�five years. In 1951 Sheen was consecrated in Rome as auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese of New York. Recognized as a great man of vitality and humor, Sheen wrote two syndicated weekly newspaper columns and multiple articles and accepted invitations to lecture and preach throughout the country. Sheen was considered an intellectual giant in touch with the most current cultural trends; he was a persuasive and charming communicator,
harnessing emerging media for the gospel. Sheen gained worldwide fame as a radio host, a television persona, and as a Christian author. Sheen first gained national recognition as an outstanding speaker based on his 1930s radio program The Catholic Hour. By the late 1950s his Life Is Worth Living television show was reaching 30 million people a week. Against the advice of advisors and television managers, Sheen delivered his televised talks in the full regalia of his rank as bishop. The set was a simple blackboard and Sheen used no note or cue cards; his mastery of the topic and presentation displayed intelligence, charm, and humor while offering theological truth and hope to millions of viewers, Catholic and Protestant alike. Sheen’s bibliography reads like a library catalog because Sheen averaged authoring more than one book a year. It is noteworthy that much of his published writing was drawn from lectures or academic conference papers; as a result his books have a conversational tone to them. His language is clear; the principles are never academic abstractions but are rather constantly expounded with real-Â�life illustrations. Many commentators have found similarity between Sheen’s style and Jesus’s own teaching, which used parables. Sheen’s main purpose was not merely to inform or even inspire; rather his primary purpose was clearly theological, to make Jesus Christ better known by the millions he touched through modern media. Bishop Sheen saw the Virgin Mary not as an obstacle to ecumenism but as a unifying force. In The World’s First Love Sheen writes about Mary in a way that combines a deep devotion with a keen knowledge of history, philosophy, and theology. Mary’s sincere life is portrayed as a never failing source of wisdom and assistance. Illustrating the Catholic adage “there is no such thing as Marian doctrine” (claiming that teachings concerning Mary illustrate truths about Christ or his church), Sheen considers Mary’s life a model for the struggles common to humanity. Sheen writes, “It is remarkable how Mary begins her Magnificat with her personal experiences and soon passes on to identify herself with the whole human race. She looks ahead and sees what the effect of the birth of her Son will be to the world, how it will improve the whole condition of human life, how it will free the oppressed, feed the hungry, and assist the helpless.” As a bishop Sheen attended all of the sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). He served as the bishop of Rochester, New York, from 1966 to 1969, when Pope Paul VI elevated him to an archbishop. As a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus, Archbishop Sheen delivered the keynote address at the Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention in 1970 and again in 1975. He died in New York City on December 9, 1979. In 2002 the Diocese of Peoria officially opened his cause for canonization.
Charles M. Sheldon
Bibliography Among his many works are:
Life of Christ, McGraw Hill, 1958. Those Mysterious Priests, Lumen Christi Press, 1979. Three to Get Married, Scepter, 1996. The World’s First Love, McGraw Hill, 1952.
Biographies of Sheen
Reeves, Thomas C., America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen, Encounter Books, 2002. Rodriguez, Janel, Meet Fulton Sheen: Beloved Preacher and Teacher of the Word, Servant Publications, 2006. Sheen, Fulton, Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography, Doubleday, 1980.
—Biff Rocha
CHARLES M. SHELDON (1857–1946).╇ Charles Monroe Sheldon, a Congregationalist pastor, social reformer, and author of likely the best-Â�selling novel of the nineteenth century, In His Steps (1897), was born in Wellsville, New York, the son of a Congregationalist minister. His family moved around a great deal in his youth, settling finally in the Dakota territory as home missionary superintendents. Sheldon spent five years eking out a living on the prairie with his family against the background of wars between American Indians and U.S. soldiers, even watching Custer’s army depart for their last stand. As a youth, Sheldon was a voracious reader and began penning stories on winter nights, regularly submitting them to magazines such as Youth’s Companion. Educated at Phillips Academy, Brown College, and Andover Theological Seminary, he supported himself through school by taking custodial jobs and writing stories. He entered the ministry after graduation, serving for two years in Waterbury, Vermont, before moving to Topeka, Kansas, to pastor Central Congregational Church. He married Mary (May) Merriam in 1891 and the couple had one son, Merriam Ward Sheldon, in 1897. As a pastor, Sheldon sought to infuse his congregation with the values of practical Christianity, that is, an idealistic, optimistic social gospel. In the mid-Â�1890s, seeking to boost low evening service attendance, Sheldon began reading “Sermon stories” to his parishioners, each installment ending at a crucial moment in a larger narrative. The sermon stories were designed to demonstrate what practical Christianity would look like if lived out in various life situations and to prompt readers toward taking seriously the Christ they claimed to follow. Sheldon’s sermon stories packed the church, and most of them took on a second life as published works, the most famous of these being In His Steps. The novel is the story of the town of Raymond and the church members radically changed by taking the question
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“What Would Jesus Do?” as the sole guide for a year’s conduct. The question prompts the pastor Henry Maxwell to preach against liquor, to be involved in the world outside his middle-Â� and upper-Â�class congregation, and to work for church unity. It moves the editor of the Daily News, Ed Norman, to reform its advertising and content; inspires gifted singer Rachel Winslow to give up the lure of opera fame to sing in religious meetings for the red-Â� light district of the town; and encourages wealthy heiress Virginia Page to build better living spaces for the poor of the city. Because the original serial production of the work was not copyrighted, the book was launched into print by as many as sixteen publishers within the first year. In His Steps sold millions of copies, has never been out of print, has been translated into dozens of languages, and, in the 1990s, experienced a significant comeback, prompting the WWJD movement and the commercial ubiquity of associated paraphernalia. In 1900, the prominence of the newspaper subtheme in In His Steps led the Topeka Daily Capital to offer the paper to Sheldon for a week to implement a Christian newspaper experiment. Under Sheldon, the paper radically altered advertising policies, trimmed excessively sensational coverage, and raised money and awareness for India famine relief. During Sheldon’s week, the paper’s usual 11,223 circulation skyrocketed to 362,684. Sheldon wrote profusely, producing more than thirty social gospel novels as well as countless articles, pamphlets, and sermons. He had a voluminous correspondence both within his congregation and with the larger audience for his work. In his retirement, he edited The Christian Herald. Yet Sheldon was also fundamentally committed to real, active social change. He advocated for racial integration and worked with “Exodusters”—former slaves from Tennessee who had settled on the outskirts of Topeka—to establish kindergartens; offer vocational training, musical programs, and a library; and provide a range of social services and village improvements. He was a dedicated prohibitionist and lectured on the subject in the United States as well as in England, Australia, and New Zealand. He worked for gender equality, class reconciliation, Sabbath-Â�keeping, vegetarianism, pacifism, better treatment of workers, premarital health testing and counseling, and a host of other social and ecclesiastical causes. Though Sheldon’s social gospel and even Christian socialist leanings were fairly evident from his writings, he refused to take sides in the large-Â�scale public debates between fundamentalists and modernists that dominated the early twentieth century, arguing that Jesus would not do such things. He considered himself an “untheological” Christian, committed primarily to action rather than reflection. His works are remembered neither for their
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Thomas Shepard
particular literary quality nor for their theological weight, but they are undeniably significant in having brought awareness of the relationship between devout, pious faith and social issues to millions of readers. Bibliography Selected Works by Sheldon Richard Bruce, or The Life That Now Is, Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-Â�school and Publishing Society, 1892; Robert Hardy’s Seven Days, Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-Â�school and Publishing Society, 1893; The Crucifixion of Phillip Strong, Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1894; His Brother’s Keeper, Boston: Congregational Sunday-Â�School and Publishing Society, 1896; In His Steps, Chicago: Advance Publication Co, 1897; Malcolm Kirk, Chicago: The Church Press, 1898; John King’s Question Class, Chicago: Advance Publishing Co., 1899; The Redemption of Freetown, Chicago: Advance, 1899; Born to Serve, Chicago: Advance Publishing Co, 1900; The Heart of the World: A Story of Christian Socialism, New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1905; All the World, New York: George H. Doran, 1918; In His Steps To-Â�Day, New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921; In His Steps Today, Elgin, IL: David C. Cook, 1928; Charles M. Sheldon: His Life Story, New York, George H. Doran, 1925. He Is Here, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931. Secondary Works
Boyer, Paul S. “In His Steps: A Reappraisal.” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 60–78. Ferré, John. A Social Gospel for Millions: The Religious Bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Jackson, Gregory S. “↜‘What Would Jesus Do?’ Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel.” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 641–661. Miller, Timothy. Following In His Steps: A Biography of Charles M. Sheldon. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Smith, Michael Ray. The Jesus Newspaper. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002.
—Tiffany Kriner
THOMAS SHEPARD (1605–1649).╇ New England Puritan clergyman Thomas Shepard was born in what he called “the profane, ignorant town of Towcester,” Northamptonshire, England. Orphaned by age ten, he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a pensioner in 1620. There he experienced behavioral and spiritual trials—running with “lewd and loose company” in “gambling and bowling and drinking,” neglectful of prayer, beset by temptation and doubt—but was encouraged by Richard Rogers’s The
Practice of Christianity and the preaching of John Preson, who became Emmanuel’s master in 1622. Shepard devoted himself to daily meditation and earnest prayer, especially to see and feel the loathsomeness of his sinful, helpless self. Despite experiencing conversion, he continued to struggle with continued sin and a faltering sense of assurance, setting a pattern of expectation and anxiety that would mark his later theology and preaching. Shepard received his BA in 1624. In 1626, he moved to the house of Thomas Weld, then vicar at Terline, Essex, and became acquainted with Thomas Hooker in nearby Chelmsford. After receiving his MA in 1627, Shepard was ordained (an act he later denounced as “sinful”) and undertook a three-Â�year lectureship at Earls Colne, near Coggeshall, Essex. But in December 1630 Archbishop Laud accused him of nonconformity and silenced and threatened him in regard to undertaking further public priestly tasks. Six months later, Laud ordered Shepard to depart Earls Colne; later, he narrowly escaped arrest by a pursuivant for the High Commission. Shepard next became chaplain to the Darley family in Buttercrambe, Yorkshire, where he met and married Margaret Touteville in 1632. Shepard was then called to preach at Heddon, Northumberland, but was soon forbidden to preach publicly, whereupon he preached as an itinerant and in private houses. Meanwhile, Shepard considered the examples of other ministers who had migrated to New England under Laud’s pressure and he determined to follow suit. After a failed start, he arrived in October 1635 and settled at Cambridge (then Newtown) just as Hooker departed for Connecticut. Shepard gathered his own church at Cambridge in 1636 and served there until his death in 1649. Shepard became one of the principal architects of the New England Way of nonseparating congregationalism, both in ecclesiology and soteriology. The Free Grace (or Antinomian) Controversy, 1636–1638, began with Shepard confronting Boston teacher Cotton over his theology of conversion. As the controversy progressed, Shepard continued to press his point, consulting with Governor Winthrop, organizing and hosting the colony’s first synod in 1637, later hosting the civil trials, and reporting against Anne Hutchinson at her civil and church trials. He commented on the foundations of the controversy more obliquely in a lengthy sermon series posthumously published as The Parable of the Ten Virgins (1660). As a consequence of Cambridge’s orthodoxy, Harvard College (and later the colony’s first printing press) was established there. Shepard’s considerable literary output was limited also exclusively to sermons and commenced with The Sincere Convert (1641) and its sequel, The Sound Believer (1645).
Ronald James Sider
The former came from auditors’ notes; filled with fervid, pointed imagery, these sermons aim to impress on the audience’s emotions the terrors and horrors of being unregenerate, compounded by the miniscule number of the elect. The Sound Believer offers the solace of regeneration, delineated through ten stages of conversion: conviction, compunction, humiliation, faith, justification, reconciliation, adoption, sanctification, audience, and glorification. Of Shepard’s many other publications, attention might be drawn to Theses Sabbaticae and to his contributions to John Eliot’s Indian mission. Shepard is now remembered for unpublished writings. His spiritual autobiography, composed for his son Thomas probably in 1646, is a significant and moving early example of that genre; similarly, the one surviving volume of his spiritual journals (for 1640–1644) reflects the vicissitudes of Puritan spiritual experience, from continued doubt and anxiety over unworthiness, to literal self-Â�questioning, to moments of certainty and insight. Finally, Shepard transcribed several dozen faith relations by prospective applicants to the Cambridge church, which provide important insight into early American popular religious belief and expression. Bibliography Most of Shepard’s publications were collected in a uniform edition by John A. Albro, The Works of Thomas Shepard, 3 vols. (1853, rpt. 1967). His involvement in the Free Grace Controversy is reflected in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (ed. David D. Hall, 2nd ed., Duke University Press, 1990). But for Shepard’s more private, practical side, see God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (ed. Michael McGiffert, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), which contains Shepard’s autobiography and a sampling of his spiritual journal and of testimonies from the Cambridge church. The complete collection of church testimonies is contained in Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (ed. George Selement and Bruce C. Wooley, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 58 [1981]) and Mary Rhinelander McCarl’s “Thomas Shepard’s Record of Relations of Religious Experience, 1648–1649” (William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 48 [1991]: 432–466). For critical discussions of Shepard, see: Cohen, Charles Lloyd. God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. Oxford University Press, 1986. Colacurcio, Michael J. Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans. University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Werge, Thomas. Thomas Shepard. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Winship, Michael P. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
—Michael Ditmore
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RONALD JAMES SIDER (1939–).╇ Ronald James Sider (born 1939, Stevensville, Ontario) is Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry, and Public Policy at Palmer Seminary, where he also directs the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy. Sider’s early years of ministry were spent with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship until 1968, when he joined the faculty of Messiah College’s urban center in Philadelphia, a site developed to address the challenges of urbanization and globalization of American society. Since then his focus has been to stimulate Christians to care about the plight of the poor and other marginalized groups, a concern that led him to establish Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) in 1978 and in 1986 a political action committee, Justlife, whose agenda was projustice, antiabortion, and propeace. Sider also serves as publisher and regular contributor of ESA’s PRISM magazine and is contributing editor for Christianity Today and Sojourners. In 1973 Sider brought together forty evangelical leaders, who wrote the “Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.” The expressed concerns of this document have been those repeated in Sider’s books and articles: the defense of the social and economic rights of the poor and otherwise oppressed; entrenched racism in North America; poverty; military escalation; misdistribution of the world’s resources; and oppression of women. A self-Â�identified evangelical claiming both the Mennonite and Wesleyan traditions, Sider has been a popular speaker around the world and a prolific writer. Perhaps his most recognized book is Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which sold 350,000 copies and made Christianity Today’s list of the one hundred most influential twentieth-Â�century books. Though criticized by the Christian right as an agent of liberal social activism and promoting liberation theology, Sider consistently has maintained evangelism as essential in achieving social change as “nothing so transforms the self-Â�identity, self-Â�worth and initiative of a poor oppressed person as a personal living relationship with God in Christ” (Just Generosity, 11). In contrast to many on the Christian right wing, Sider has argued strongly that a biblically informed agenda cannot be characterized by uncritical patriotism and one-Â� issue politics. Like the biblical prophets, he argues that the combination of a one-Â�sided political agenda and Christians’ disgraceful and scandalous failure to practice their beliefs should lead the church to honest confession of its failure to endorse a biblically balanced agenda in which discussions of the sanctity of human life also include the themes of famine, AIDS, capital punishment, and more. Working to develop a biblical framework consistent with social analysis, his goal has been to create a holistic vision and effective comprehensive agenda for reducing poverty.
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Henryk Adam Alexander Pius Sienkiewicz
While a common criticism of evangelical approaches to social concerns is the inability to understand factors beyond the individualized dimensions of sin, Sider has consistently called attention to the structural and economic factors that keep marginalized groups oppressed. Following the “Charitable Choice” provision of the 1996 federal welfare reform law, Sider has emerged as a strong proponent of faith-Â�based partnership with the government in responding to persistent social problems. Bibliography
Guthrie, Stan. “The Evangelical Scandal: Ron Sider Says the Movement Is Riddled with Hypocrisy, and That It’s Time for Serious Change.” Christianity Today, April 2005, 70–73. Hall, Charles F. “The Christian Left: Who Are They and How Are They Different from the Christian Right?” Review of Religious Research 39, no. 1 (September 1997): 27–45. Sider, Ronald J. Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. ———. The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just like the Rest of the World? Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005. ———. “A Select Bibliography of Ronald J. Sider’s Published Work and Additional Vitae.” Direction 35, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 305–315. Sider, Ronald J., ed. The Chicago Declaration. Thanksgiving Workshop on Evangelicals and Social Concern, Chicago, 1973. Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1974.
—Kent Eaton
HENRYK ADAM ALEXANDER PIUS SIENKIEWICZ (1846–1916).╇ One of the greatest Polish Catholic writers and essayists, Henryk Sienkiewicz gained international recognition for his historical novel Quo Vadis? (1896) set in Rome under the Emperor Nero. Sienkiewicz was born on May 5, 1846, in Wola OkrÂ� zejska (a Russian part of Poland) to an impoverished but patriotic family. After a high school education, Sienkiewicz entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Warsaw in 1867, transferred to the Department of History and Literature, but never graduated. He left for the United States in February 1876 to work as a correspondent for the Polish Press (Gazeta Polska) but subsequently returned to Poland in 1879. After the success of Quo Vadis? he received the Oblegork estate (near Kielce) in 1900 as a national gift for his literary and patriotic contributions to Polish society. In 1905 Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Quo Vadis? He died on November 15, 1916, in Vevey, Switzerland. His ashes were brought back to Poland and were interred in the crypt of St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw. Sienkiewicz’s monument, a gift to Warsaw from the Porczynscy
family, was unveiled in Warsaw’s Lazienki Royal Park on May╯5, 2000. Major works Sienkiewicz’s strong patriotism and his understanding of history are clearly reflected in his works. He wrote many historical novels: Ogniem in Mieczem (1884; With Fire and Sword), Potop (1886; The Deluge), Pan Wolodyjowski (1888; Pan Michal), Krzyzacy (1900; The Knights of the Cross), Na polu chwaly (1906; On the Field of Glory), Wiry (1906; Whirlpools), and W pustyni i w puszczy (1912; In Desert and Wilderness). He also wrote psychological novelsÂ�: Bez Dogmatu (1891; Without Dogma) and Rodzina Â�Polanieckich (1894; Children of the Soil). His most successful short stories include: “Janko Muzykant” (1879; “Yanko, the Musician”), “Latarnik” (1882; “The Lighthouse Keeper”), and “Bartek Zwyciezca” (1882; “Bartek the Conqueror”). Jeremiah Curtin, his American translator, was responsible for bringing him to an international audience. Sienkiewicz is internationally recognized for his book Quo Vadis? an instant best-Â�seller in the United States in 1896. The novel sold 600,000 copies in the first 18 months and Sienkiewicz generated wide interest as a writer. Quo Vadis? was translated into forty-Â�eight languages and published in fifty countries. It inspired production of a Hollywood film version in 1951 starring Peter Ustinov and a Polish production in 2001. The novel and the film present the cultural and intellectual splendor of Rome during the first century AD, where early Christians suffered persecution at the hands of collective pagan Rome. Quo Vadis? is the story of an early Christian community in Rome of the time of Nero, Roman emperor AD 54–68. Sienkiewicz believed there was an analogy between the dissolute and moral chaos of the pre-Â�Christian era and his own epoch. The title of the book was apparently chosen when Sienkiewicz and his friend, the Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki, visited a small chapel in Rome and saw the inscription Quo Vadis? (Where are you going?), a phrase from the Bible (John 16:5), but whose most famous use is in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter. It derives from an early Christian legend according to which the Apostle Peter was confronted by a vision of Christ as he was leaving Rome. When Peter asked the Lord where He was going, Christ indicated He was coming to Rome to be crucified. The role of St. Peter, Christ’s appointed shepherd, is emphasized in the novel, which ends with Nero’s death and the author’s words: “Nero passed on .╯.╯. but the Basilica of Peter still stands on the Vatican Hill and rules over the city and the world” (Quo Vadis? 275). The revival of interest in Quo Vadis? coincides with renewed interest in the history of Christianity in post-Â�1980
Menno Simons
Poland. The Polish pope John Paul II, the collapse of communism, and the inclusion of Poland in the European Union coincide with Sienkiewicz’s original plot. The novel was also intended to be a metaphor for Poland’s fight against the Prussian and Russian Empires that occupied Poland at that time. The Christians represented Poland, and Nero and the Romans represented Tsar Alexander III and Bismarck. Sienkiewicz novels were criticized for the lack of historical accuracy and for their theatrical aspect but praised for their rich and vivid characters and narrative power. In Poland, Sienkiewicz is known for the wealth of his historical novels and short stories, but internationally he is best known and recognized for one universal work on early Christianity. Bibliography
Daniels, Roy. “Sienkiewicz Revisited.” In The Tradition of Polish Ideals: Essays in History and Literature, ed. W. J. Stankiewicz. London: Orbis, 1981, 166–187. Giergielewicz, Mieczyslaw. Henryk Sienkiewicz. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1968. Krzyzanowski, Jerzy. “Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy in America.” Polish Review 41 (1996): 337–349. Markiewicz. Henryk. “Wspolzawodnicy Sienkiewicza.” Ruch Literacki 18 (1977): 27–40. Okon, Waldemar. “Henryk Sienkiewicz, obrazy i Quo Vadis.” Roczniki Humanistyczne 46 (1988): 15–64. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. Dziela. 60 vols. Ed. Julian Krzyzanowski. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1947–1955. ———. Quo Vadis? New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993. Szonert, Ewa. “Nowe prace o Sienkiewiczu.” Kierunki 14 (1969): 8–10.
—Anna Hamling
MENNO SIMONS (1496–1561).╇ Menno Simons was an important Anabaptist leader from the Dutch province of Friesland. He joined the Anabaptist movement after questioning Catholic doctrines on the sacraments during his time as a priest. In the year following his ordination in 1524, the doctrine of transubstantiation began to trouble him. He hesitated to consult scripture on this matter, perhaps fearing his findings would cause him to leave the church as Martin Luther and other Reformers did. After two years of struggle, he studied the scriptures and determined that transubstantiation was not a biblically founded doctrine. Simons continued to serve in the Catholic Church, but the question of infant baptism ultimately led him away from it. Finding no satisfactory precedent for infant baptism in scripture, the Church Fathers, or Luther’s work, among other sources, Simons embraced
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the Anabaptist practice of believer’s baptism, baptizing adults who can make a conscious profession of faith, as the correct, biblical view of baptism. In another five years’ time, Menno Simons took leave of his parish, joining the Anabaptists in 1536. Simons quickly became an elder in the Anabaptist Church and assumed a leadership role. As early as 1540, some Anabaptists began to call themselves the Mennists or Mennonites. However, others were not as willing to accept this former Catholic priest, which led Simons to write his Meditation on the Twenty-Â�fifth Psalm (1537), a confession that describes his early life as one in service to the devil and expresses his fervent desire to follow only the Word of God. Simons provided Dutch Anabaptists with much needed leadership and encouragement during a tumultuous time when revolutionary leaders were turning Anabaptists away from their original principles. Perhaps the most important work Simons produced on this account was the Foundation to Christian Doctrine (1539–1540; revised 1558). This text reveals scriptural foundations for the beliefs and practices of Anabaptists. Other works of this nature include Christian Baptism (1539), which provides justification for the practice of believer’s baptism; Confession of the Triune God (1550), which gives a simple statement of the tri-Â�unity of God as Father, Son, and Spirit; and A Brief Confession on the Incarnation (1544), the most controversial of all Simons’s works. In an attempt to emphasize that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was sinless, he rejects the point that Jesus was begotten of Mary and claims that Jesus became human in Mary, not of Mary. This view of the incarnation was accepted by the Dutch Mennonites but was later rejected. In addition, Simons wrote a number of works pleading for the cessation of persecution against Anabaptists and encouraging those who were suffering. These works include Confession of the Distressed Christians (1552), Defense to All Theologians (1552), and The Cross of the Saints (1554). Research on the work and thought of Menno Simons continues today. His ideas are currently being employed in discussions on a variety of topics, including political theory, biotechnology, and children. Several editions of his complete works exist; however, a critical edition of all his writings has not yet been published. Bibliography
Klassen, Walter, and William E. Keeney. No Other Foundation: Commemorative Essays on Menno Simons. North Newton, KA: Bethel College, 1962. Krahn, Cornelius, and Cornelius J. Dyck. “Menno Simons (1496–1561).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia
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Albert Benjamin Simpson
Online. 1989. http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/ M4636ME.html. Simons, Menno. The Complete Writings of Menno Simons. Translated by Leonard Verduin. Edited by J. C. Wenger. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1986. Voolstra, Sjouke. Menno Simons: His Image and Message. North Newton, KA: Bethel College, 1997.
—Yolanda J. Robles
ALBERT BENJAMIN SIMPSON (1843–1919).╇ Founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Albert Benjamin Simpson served as a pastor and evangelist and was also influential in the divine healing movement within the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Raised in a Presbyterian home, Simpson attended Knox College in Toronto, Ontario, and was eventually ordained within the Presbyterian Church. He served as a pastor at three different churches from 1865 to 1881 in Hamilton, Ontario, Louisville, Kentucky, and New York City and eventually developed a strong interest in both missions and divine healing. In 1881, he himself experienced healing of a heart condition. Simpson’s congregation in New York (the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church), however, resisted these emphases. Two years after accepting this pastorate in 1879, Simpson resigned. Afterward, he established the Gospel Tabernacle Church (an independent church) and focused his energies on mission work in the city. Eventually, Simpson also founded both the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, which would merge in 1897 into the Christian and Missionary Alliance. In his teaching and writings, Simpson stressed a “Fourfold Gospel” focused on Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. Simpson rejected dispensationalist claims that the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit (such as healing) ended during the apostolic age of Jesus’s disciples, and many of his ideas and emphases reflected the influence of the Keswick Higher Life Movement. Simpson taught that all individuals should experience a baptism in the Holy Spirit, subsequent to salvation, which spurred believers to a life of deeper holiness and also prepared them for service to the church. Committed to a premillennial reading of the Bible that looked for the imminent return of Jesus to the earth, Simpson was convinced that God was restoring the power and witness of the early church just prior to the Second Coming of Christ. In addition, Simpson also provided leadership for the divine healing movement among evangelicals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, insisting that Jesus’s death and resurrection made healing available to all believers in this life.
Many of Simpson’s emphases foreshadowed the teachings of early Pentecostals at the turn of the twentieth century, and a number of individuals associated with Simpson and the Christian and Missionary Alliance eventually left the organization and joined Pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God. Despite the strong similarities between the two groups, Simpson never accepted Pentecostals’ teachings regarding speaking in tongues as the “initial evidence” of baptism in the Holy Spirit, and at times he criticized various excesses that he associated with Pentecostal groups. Simpson remained active in ministry and leadership within the Christian and Missionary Alliance into the twentieth century, publishing seventy books, editing a weekly magazine, and speaking in numerous venues until his death in 1919. Further Reading
Evearitt, Daniel J. Body and Soul: Evangelism and the Social Concern of A. B. Simpson. Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1994. Nienkirchen, Charles. A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement: A Study in Continuity, Crisis, and Change. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992. Thompson, A. E. A. B. Simpson: His Life and Work. Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 2001.
—Joseph W. Williams
HANNAH WHITALL SMITH (1832–1911). Hannah Whitall was born in 1832 in Philadelphia, daughter of John Mickle and Mary Tatum Whitall, heirs of the Whitall-Â�Tatum glass company. She married Robert Pearsall Smith in 1851. Both from Quaker background, they were converted in the revival of 1857–1858. In 1875 Hannah and her husband were at the pinnacle of their ministry after a succession of difficult trials. Robert suffered two nervous breakdowns a few years earlier but recovered and had become a world-Â� renowned evangelist. Hannah had weathered not only her husband’s illnesses but also the death of three of her children. She emerged as an overcomer, publishing her classic and popular book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, on complete surrender to the will of God, which has sold more than a million copies. Hannah maintained that the Christian’s secret of a happy life was a “life of faith,” of abiding in Christ. She did not define happiness in the usual popular sense, but as “inward rest and outward victory.” Robert finished a greatly thriving evangelistic tour in Europe. Hannah met him in Brighton, England, together with Presbyterian Higher Life leader William Boardman and others, to establish a deeper life convention called the Brighton Convention for the Promotion of Christian
Vladimir Solovyev
Holiness, which would become known as the Keswick holiness movement. In the midst of this conference, Robert was accused of indiscretions with a young woman, which created a scandal and destroyed his ministry. He fell into deep depression (probably a bipolar disorder) and lost a large measure of his faith. Hannah and Robert’s three grown children, influenced by their father’s loss of faith, became skeptical in their faith. One of their daughters, much to Hannah’s sadness, married the famed atheist Bertrand Russell. Holding out hope for their restoration, Hannah leaned toward universalism. Hannah’s secret of a happy Christian life was deeply tried again and again, and she went through periods of depression, but she recovered again and again and continued to maintain her buoyant faith. Hannah learned detachment from the world and abandonment of self from classic evangelical mystics like Madame Guyon and Fenelon. She taught principles of faith confession similar to those of Phoebe Palmer. As a Quaker, Hannah followed the typical Quaker practice of listening for the inner voice of God but also cautioning need for discernment against trusting the inner voice rather than scripture. She went on to write seventeen other books, stressing faith, hope, and encouragement, including Everyday Religion (1893), Child Culture or the Science of Motherhood (1894), The Unselfishness of God (1902), and The God of All Comfort (1906). Frank, the Record of a Happy Life was a biographical sketch of her son who promoted a revival at Princeton and met an untimely death. Elisabeth Elliot praised Hannah’s writings as practical and timelessly relevant. The Smiths were not only catalysts for the Keswick movement but also the German Inner City Movement and the Fellowship Movement of the German and Swiss Lutheran and Reformed churches. Hannah became one of the first presidents of the Pennsylvania Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the first national superintendent of its division of evangelism. She was also a friend of social activist Frances Willard and Lady Somerset, leader of the British temperance movement. Smith died in 1911 near Oxford. Biographies of her life include Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family (London: Victor Gollance, 1980), and Marie Henry, Hannah Whitall Smith (1984). —Paul King VLADIMIR SOLOVYEV (1853–1900).╇ With a short life nearly spanning the volatile half-Â�century between Russia’s Golden and Silver Ages, Solovyev (Sol-Â�o-Â�VYOV) himself is much more than a transitional figure. He was a theosophical poet, and his vision and gentle crypticism inspired the rather more forced circumlocutions of the later Symbolists;
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more significant, he was considered the greatest Russian philosopher of the century by Nicolai Berdyaev; more grand still, Hans Urs von Balthasar suggested that he was “second only to Thomas Aquinas as the greatest artist of order and organization in the history of thought.”1 At eighteen years of age, Solovyev had already passed in and out of socialism, nihilism, and idealism via the works of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann. At twenty-Â�five, having already published several books, including the first installment of a masterpiece of original philosophy called The Critique of Abstract Principles, he delivered the first of his Lectures on the Divine Humanity, the St. Petersburg speeches for which he became famous. A major cultural event during their three-Â�year run, these meetings were attended at times by both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. A significant facet of Solovyev’s immortality lies in the well-Â�substantiated hypothesis that two of Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers (Alyosha and Ivan) were inspired by the philosopher. The decade of the 1880s brought a decline in Solovyev’s popularity in Russia, especially as he began developing an ecclesiology that advocated both a type of theocracy and a recognition of papal authority. The final decade of his life saw the publication of a revision of this ecclesiology (published in French), a brilliant and sweeping moral philosophy, and, his final publication, an enticingly odd fictional dialogue concluding with “a short story of the Antichrist.” The central biographical detail of his life was, taking his own word for it, the mystical vision of the Lady Sophia that appeared to him three times, most famously in the British Library in the summer of 1875. Of her final appearance he wrote, You gazed at me, like the first rays Of the universal day of creation.2
The figure of Sophia appears throughout his writings in various forms: a dramatic interlocutor, a metaphysical unveiling, or a celestial vision like his own. More generally, however, there is throughout his works an implicit “sophianicity,” or generative and transcendent unity. One could in fact say that Solovyev has but one great idea: “Truth is the existing all-Â�one.”3 This all-Â�one is, first and foremost, a unity of all potential being with the divine actuality and eternally determines itself as the all and reclaims itself as the one in a triune rhythm. Secondarily, the being of the world has divine unity as its own telos, though only in humanity can the potential for unity become progressively realized. Epistemology is thus formally preceded by speculative ontology; the latter is itself, though, founded in theology, in which the great truth of the humanity of God and the divinity of the human is made known: “Christianity alone of all religions presents
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn
perfect man, in which the fullness of divinity resides corporeally, with perfect God.”4 This ontology installs within both nature and culture an order in which the eternal grace of the One flows to each stratum below, the higher mediating unity to the lower and the lower particularizing and materializing the unity of the higher. Nations, for instance, are only good insofar as they generalize the particularity of families and clans toward a more universal good. Beyond nations, the good finds its ultimate expression in the church, where the many local and regional goods are gathered into one expressive community of divine humanity. Accordingly, the error of modernity is not in critique as such, but in the abstraction of critique from the divine-Â� human whole. The intellectual desire for universal knowledge, like the politicoeconomic desire for universal peace, is a clue to the yearning of the all for the one, and any ethical, sociopolitical, or intellectual system that lays claims to autonomous universality in effect aborts this desire in advance. This is precisely the great threat to all of being: that it will foreclose on itself prior to finding its perfection in Sophia, which is to say in the generative outflow of the triune God. Principal Ideas of Vladimir Solovyev •â•‡ God created the world out of delight in his own being. •â•‡ The multitude coexists harmoniously in the simplicity of God’s eternal being. •â•‡ Sophia, the personified character of God, is the form and telos of all creation. •â•‡ Humanity, the pinnacle of creation, is created for the active reception of the divine. •â•‡ The proper order of principles is a hierarchical one in which the less universal is subordinate to the more, but without denying the subordinate’s own essence as a localization of the universal. •â•‡ Critical philosophy errs not in its desire for the testing of principles but in its assumption that its own principles are autonomously rational. •â•‡ The universal church is the ultimate expression of panhumanity. •â•‡ Christendom must arrive through persuasion, never through coercion. Notes
1. Von Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 284. 2. From “Tri svidaniia” [“Three Meetings”], quoted and translated by Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 113. 3. Solovyev, Kritika otvlechennykh nachal (Critique of Abstract Principles), 692. 4. “Three Speeches in Memory of Dostoevsky” in Solovyev, The Heart of Reality, 17.
Bibliography
Allen, Paul M. Vladimir Soloviev: Russian Mystic. Lindisfarne Books, 2007. Hart, David Bentley. Foreword in The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy. Ed. Boris Jakim. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005. Solovyev, V. S. Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia (The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge). SSVS I:250–407. ———. The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics. Ed. Vladimir Wozniuk. University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. ———. The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy. Ed. Boris Jakim. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005. ———. Kritika otvlechennykh nachal (The Critique of Abstract Principles), in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Ed. Losev and Gulyga, I:581–756. ———. Lectures on Divine Humanity. Ed. Boris Jakim. Lindisfarne Books, 1995. ———. The Meaning of Love, revised edition. Lindisfarne Books, 1995. ———. Russia and the Universal Church. Geoffrey Bles—Centenary Press, 1948. ———. War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Â�Christ. Lindisfarne Books, 1990. Sutton, Jonathan. The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards a Reassessment. Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Valliere, Paul. Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000. Van Den Bercken, Wil, Manon De Courten, and Evert Van Der Zweerde. Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist: Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solov’ev Conference Held at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Peeters, 2001. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. “Soloviev.” The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, pp. 279–352. Ignatius Press, 1986.
—Anthony Baker
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN (1918–2008).╇ Alexander Solzhenitsyn (born in southern Russia in 1918) enrolled at Rostov-Â�on-Â�Don University in 1936, where he majored in mathematics and physics. In 1939 he also undertook a course at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (MIFLI). In 1940 he married Natalia Reshetovskaya. He joined the Russian army in October 1941 and was twice decorated for valor. It was during military service that his anti-Â�Stalinist sentiments attracted attention, and he was arrested in 1943. Thus began his periods of imprisonment in forced-Â�labor camps. During these eight years, Solzhenitsyn gradually rejected the Marxism that he had formally embraced. His eight-Â�year sentence ended in 1953, and he was exiled to
Nil Sorsky
a village in Kazakhstan. In these imprisonment years he vigorously pursued his writing career. In 1956 his exile was revoked and he moved to Russia, resuming life near Moscow. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962 and became an instant success, both within and outside of Russia. Despite conflict with the Soviet Writers’ Union and the KGB, throughout this time he kept working on major works such as The Gulag Archipelago, The Cancer Ward, and The First Circle. Solzhenitsyn returned to world prominence and controversy in 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His ongoing writing career and expression of views that were unacceptable to the Soviet establishment resulted in his exile to West Germany in February 1974. Solzhenitsyn met with a mixed reception in the West, and as his views became known more widely, he was caricatured as less liberal than others wanted him to be. In some places he received a chilly, even hostile response. In 1975, he and his family took up residence in Cavendish, Vermont. During this happier interval of his life, engagements and honors included Harvard’s Commencement Address in 1978 and the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983. In the late 1980s, Solzhenitsyn witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union from afar and prepared himself for his return to Russia. In 1991, The Red Wheel was published. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in May 1994. Although he received a triumphant reception, this enthusiasm soon declined, as Russia attempted to move forward from the bleak period that his work represented. Nevertheless, he continued writing and appearing on radio and television, and in 2006 a television series of The First Circle was produced. Solzhenitsyn’s significant contribution to literature that depicts the trials and triumphs of the persecuted is now widely recognized. Principal Ideas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn •â•‡ Recognition of a higher power to which the artist (writer) submits “as a humble apprentice” •â•‡ The powerful impact of literature on its audience because of the manner in which it transcends any purely rationalistic depiction of the nature of the world •â•‡ A reinforcement of the Dostoevskyan conclusion that beauty, rightly understood, has the capacity to save the world •â•‡ The importance of literature as a means of transcending sociocultural divisions and thus providing reconciliation •â•‡ Many human calamities derive from the fact that mankind has forgotten God
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Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Modern Critical Views), Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia, 2001. Ericson, Edward E., Jr., Solzhenitsyn, The Moral Vision, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1980. Ericson, Edward E., Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney. The Solzhenitsyn Reader (New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005), ISI Books, Wilmington, DE, 2006. Thomas, D. M., Alexander Solzhenitsyn (A Century in His Life), St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
—Peter Stiles
NIL SORSKY (ca. 1433–1508).╇ Very little of Nil’s life is known with certainty. Scholars estimate that he was born around 1433 into the upper class Maikov family and educated in Moscow. He was tonsured as a monk at the Kirillo-Â�Belozersky monastery, founded in 1427 in northern Russia. From there he likely traveled to Constantinople, then on to Mount Athos, which was experiencing a great flourishing of hesychastic spirituality, centered on the Jesus Prayer. After his stay on Athos, he returned to the Kirillo-Â�Belozersky monastery, perhaps via Palestine and other parts of the Christian East. Upon his return, in imitation of monastic life on Mt. Athos, he founded a small community of monks who lived in a skete, that is, individual cells located around a central church where the monks would come together for a common liturgy. The focus of Nil’s skete was continual mental prayer and study of the Orthodox Christian tradition. Nil remained in this skete until his death on May 7, 1508. The extant works of Nil Sorsky include The Tradition (Predanie), his earliest attempt at a written rule for his disciples and a very simplified form of the life that he practiced on Mount Athos; The Monastic Rule (Ustav), an extended ascetical treatise on what he calls “mental activity”; four letters offering guidance and direction to fellow monks; and a Last Will and Testament. In The Tradition, Nil begins by humbly asserting that he is not fully worthy to write a rule for his disciples and fellow “hermits.” Nil insists that the monks should work in their own cells, supported by their own work but open to accepting alms from the faithful. The monks are not to leave their cells but may accept visitors who come seeking to learn from the more virtuous and experienced monks. On the matter of diet, Nil allows the monks to take what each one needs for himself and does not legislate uniformity for the community, as long as everyone avoids “satiety and gluttony.” Finally, as on Mt. Athos, there are to be no women allowed into the skete nor are female animals allowed. Nil’s Monastic Rule is a much-Â�enlarged expansion of the thoughts found in The Tradition. Nil begins by
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Robert Southwell
immediately discussing the topic of “mental activity” or interior prayer. This surely establishes the purpose of his skete as being a center for the attainment of stillness and uninterrupted prayer. For Nil, this is the consensus of the fathers of the Orthodox Christian tradition: “In this matter the Fathers hand down the statement from the Apostles that, if I pray only with my tongue or lips, but my spirit is not praying, it is my voice praying while my mind is fruitless. But if I pray with my spirit, I also pray with my mind.” After emphasizing a monk’s need for a spiritual father, Nil devotes the remainder of this text to discussing how a monk is to be victorious in the battle with his flesh as he cultivates the virtues and the gift of tears. Nil’s spirituality is typical of his time and experiences. He advocates detachment from the flesh, and, by extension, the world through the guidance of a spiritual father and fidelity in monastic life. He favors monastic life in a skete above that of a cenobitic monastery as long as one’s primary focus is on attainment of uninterrupted, mental prayer. All activity of a monk is ordered to facilitate this achievement. Nil sums up his spirituality in The Rule as follows: “Full activity in our chosen way of life should consist in this, that always and in every detail, in every undertaking, in soul and body, word and deed and thought, as far as there is in us the strength, to remain in the work of God, with God, and in God.” Bibliography A critical edition of Sorsky’s The Tradition, The Monastic Rule and Last Will and Testament was prepared by M.╯S. Borovkova-Â�Maikova and published in St. Petersburg in 1912. There is no critical edition of his letters, which are only available in a manuscript of the Lenin Library of Moscow. The best studies of Sorsky are G. A. Maloney, Nil Sorsky: The Complete Writings (Paulist Press, 2003) and F. von Lilienfeld, Nil Sorskij und seine Schriften (Berlin, 1963). —Greg Peters ROBERT SOUTHWELL (1561–1595).╇ Robert Southwell was perhaps the most outstanding Catholic poet and prose writer of the Elizabethan age. He exemplifies the literature of the counter-Â�Reformation and it is impossible to read him without re-creating an age when writers were also martyrs and polemicists. The recent resurgence of interest in Southwell is a sign of greater attention among literary critics to the interaction between Renaissance politics and religion. Southwell also represents the best of medieval Jesuit spirituality in which literary imagination was deeply engaged in death and martyrdom. Austere in his language and luxuriant in his imagination and uncompromising in his religious beliefs and fealty to the church,
Southwell manifested in his literary works, both poetry and prose, the rare calling of literature as a mission. His writings were driven by his beliefs rather than the other way around and his piety has defied deconstruction even in the secular age that has followed him. Even as writers were moving away from religious subjects in the age of backlash from medieval piety, the Jesuits were moving in the opposite direction. The Spiritual Exercises practiced by the Jesuits engaged in imaginative visualization as a means of increasing spiritual ardor. An intense fusion of didacticism and emotion, characteristic of Jesuit poetry, is evident in Southwell’s longest poem, “St. Peter’s Complaint,” an account of St. Peter’s contrition and remorse over his denial of Christ. It is similar to Luigi Tansilko’s “Le Legrime de San Pietro,” which introduced the genre of “Tears Poetry.” Southwell himself invented the poetic device known as Prososopoeia, in which named characters make long speeches in the course of their progress from sin to salvation. Southwell also had a prose ministry, where he served as a polemicist and apologist. His letter to his father urging him to return to the “true, that is, the Catholic Church” circulated widely in manuscript and enhanced his image among Catholics. His petition “Humble Supplication to Her Majesty” in December 1591 could not be presented to the queen but was circulated widely and may have led to his arrest in 1592. It was eventually printed in 1600 after Southwell’s death. The harrowing descriptions in the “Humble Supplication” of the torments undergone by Catholic prisoners have the dual effect of evoking pity and celebrating courage. Similarly, Southwell’s An Epistle of Comfort composed for his patron Philip Howard is a brilliant exposition of the paradox of martyrdom. One of Southwell’s last works, The Triumphs over Death, also composed for the Earl of Arundel, is a manual for martyrs. Southwell also had a pastoral ministry, which comes through in his Short Rule of Good Life. Because he was an unwelcome pariah in his own native country, Southwell identified himself more with Catholic Europe. He traveled to the English College in Douai and remained on the continent for several years, translating Italian texts into English. Southwell’s fondness for aphoristic and proverbial coinages and metaphors was clearly derived from his European contacts and influenced later religious writers like John Donne. Southwell’s rigorous brand of piety, based on Christ’s Passion, appealed to Protestants as well and bore fruit in the Calivinist John Bourchier’s writings. His most anthologized poem, “The Burning Babe,” has a transformative vision that is not limited to Catholics. The potential universality of Southwell is borne out by his contemporary reception. Many Protestant writers
John Lancaster Spalding
invoked his style even when not endorsing his beliefs. He profoundly influenced early religious poetry in seventeenth-�century England, particularly in the case of George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. His acceptance in the English literary canon has been fitful but his place in Catholic religious literature has never been questioned. Bibliography
Brownlow, F. W. Robert Southwell. New York, 1996. MacDonald, James H. The Poems and Prose Writings of Robert Southwell, S. J., A Bibliographical Study. Oxford, 1937. Pilarz, Scott. Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595. Aldershott, 2004. White, Helen C. Tudor Book of Saints and Martyrs. Madison, 1963.
—George Thomas Kurian
JOHN LANCASTER SPALDING (1840–1916).╇ Recognized by many as one of the most influential Catholic intellectuals of the nineteenth century, John Lancaster Spalding was born June 2, 1840, in Lebanon, Kentucky. He was consecrated as the first bishop of Peoria in 1877. On January 6, 1905, he was stricken with paralysis, and he resigned in 1908; he continued to live in the bishop’s residence until his eventual death in 1916. While criticized as a distant or absentee pastor, Spalding possessed the most formal education of all his fellow bishops. He was an eloquent speaker, charming persuader, and elite socialite. Spalding labored earnestly in the cause of Irish colonization in the West and in the Temperance Movement. Furthermore, he ranks high among the most progressive educators of the country. Nephew of the famous Martin Spalding, Archbishop of Baltimore, the highest see or office of the American Catholic Church, John Lancaster Spalding was born into privilege as the son of the union of two of the wealthiest of American Catholic families. His father, Richard Martin Spalding, was a descendent of the Spaldings who had emigrated from Lincolnshire, England to Maryland in the seventeenth century, and his mother, Mary Jane Lancaster, was of the colonial Maryland Lancasters who began to settle Kentucky in 1788. John Spalding had all the advantages that cultivation, wealth, and fine family traditions could give him. He was groomed by his uncle for a position of leadership in the American Church. Under the influence of his uncle, young Spalding began to study for the priesthood. Martin Spalding established the American College at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where John Spalding received his S.T.B. degree in 1862 and his S.T.L. degree in 1864. When he returned to the United States at
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the end of the Civil War in 1865, he received appointment as a rector at the cathedral in Louisville, where he ran into conflicts with his superior, Bishop William McCloskey. Spalding requested an undesirable position as pastor of the parish of St. Augustine to escape episcopal oversight. In 1866 his uncle arranged for him to receive a significant honor attending the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore as a peritus, or theological expert. His attendance at the council gave him national recognition within the American hierarchy. The death of his uncle provided for Spalding an opportune moment to travel to New York City to live rather autonomously while writing his uncle’s biography, The Life of the Most Rev. Martin J. Spalding. Consecrated a bishop on May 1, 1877, Spalding moved to the Diocese of Peoria. Attending the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 as a bishop, Spalding came with a pet project not on the council’s agenda; he desired to create a Catholic university. Spalding delegated much of his assigned work at the council, such as creating the new national catechism, to others so that he could persuade his fellow bishops to approve the creation of the school. After romancing the young heiress Mary Gwendoline Caldwell, he convinced her to donate one-Â�third of her inheritance, $300,000, to finance the prospective university. Spalding was invited to give a sermon at the Mass for the council and used that opportunity to deliver a speech, where he set forth the case for higher education. Spalding’s vision opened its doors in 1888 as the Catholic University of America located in Washington, D.C. Spalding fancied himself a poet. America and Other Poems (1885) and The Poet’s Praise (1887) were published by the bishop under the pseudonym Henry Hamilton, a named derived from his grandmother Henrietta Hamilton Spalding. Later poetic works were translations, Songs Chiefly from the German (1895) and God and the Soul (1901). In the declining years of his life, Spalding’s niece Marybelle asked him what he missed the most. The bishop responded, “My ability to go before an audience and take them into the hollow of my hand and into my thoughts, and wield them as I would.” Bibliography Works by John Lancaster Spalding
The Life of the Most Rev. Martin J. Spalding, CPA Publishing, 1873. The Religious Mission of the Irish People and Catholic Colonization, Catholic Publishing Society, 1880. University Education Considered in Its Bearings on the Higher Education of Priests, John Murphy, 1884.
Books Concerning John Lancaster Spalding
Barger, Robert, John Lancaster Spalding Catholic Educator and Social Emissary, Garland Publishing, 1988.
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Henthorne, Mary E., “The Career of the Right Reverend John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Peoria,” diss., University of Illinois, 1930. Sweeney, David Francis, O.F.M., The Life of John Lancaster Spalding, First Bishop of Peoria, 1840–1916, Herder and Herder, 1966.
—Biff Rocha
PHILIP JACOB SPENER (1635–1705).╇ Sometimes considered the father of German Pietism, Spener was born in Alsace to Lutheran parents who had embraced Arndtian spirituality, and he attended the University of Strassburg. Following his studies he made the typical travels, during which he met Jean de Labadie in Geneva, a Reformed preacher with a mystical bent. Spener returned to Strassburg, where he was ordained and completed his doctoral studies. In 1666 he was called to Frankfurt as senior minister. Dissatisfied with the state of the church, Spener began a program of reform that reflected the Pietistic concerns of Arndt, the Puritans, and others. He called for more use of scripture in preaching and study, an increased activity on the part of the laity, a greater emphasis on good works, a more prominent place for piety in the training (and lives) of clergy, and a more spiritually oriented preaching. In 1675 he published his program in a booklet, Pia Desideria, at first awakening enthusiasm and then resistance from both clergy and academics who feared a loss of authority and the danger of separatism rising from the spread of small groups. Spener himself recognized, and wrote a condemnation of, the possibility of separatist groups within the churches. In 1686 Spener went to Dresden as the court preacher to Elector Johann Georg III of Saxony. While there he met August Hermann Francke, who subsequently, with Spener’s assistance, became the leading figure in German Pietism. In 1691 he went to Berlin as provost and counselor of the Consistory of the Lutheran Church and preacher at St. Nicholas Church. He died in 1705, a staunch defender of Pietism to the end. Spener was not a polemicist but rather a sort of evangelist. His writings, few of which have been translated into English, are not intended to enter the current theological debates, but rather to encourage personal and corporate piety, which consisted of a conversion experience, or rebirth, which led to heartfelt love of God and an equally sincere love of neighbor. He had a direct influence on Francke, both personally and professionally, and on Zinzendorf, of whom he was godfather, and indirectly on John Wesley, who underwent his “strangely warmed” experience among the Moravians.
Spener is best known for his Pia Desideria (Pious Desires), published in 1675. He reacted to what he saw as a church “afflicted with distress and sickness.” Written originally as an introduction to a volume of Arndt’s sermons, Pia Desideria was his response to the problems he perceived throughout society, in the ruling class, the teaching class (clergy), and the working class. He saw all three classes of society as self-Â�seeking, with the civil authorities and clergy in particular setting bad examples for the “common people,” and criticized the authorities for supporting religion as a way of maintaining power and the clergy for being more concerned with personal comfort, precise doctrine, and attacking other confessions than with leading, and encouraging their flocks to lead, godly lives. Spener saw the concern with being doctrinally meticulous as a distraction from focusing on life with God. He, along with others of a pietistic ilk, emphasized that the exercise of outward Christianity can be dangerous, in that people come to rely on what Heinrich Müller called “the four dumb idols of the church”—the baptismal font, the pulpit, the confessional, and the altar—for their salvation rather than on Christ. Christians of all stripes must repent of these conditions and change their lives and the life of the church. This must be done in love and in the “hope for better times for the church.” In order to reach these better times, Spener suggests six things. 1. Scripture should be used more extensively, especially in the home, and in small groups in which questions could be raised, personal applications sought, and God glorified. 2. The laity should be encouraged to assume, other than preaching and the sacraments, the duties of the clergy such as leading Bible studies, visiting, correcting, and praying with one another, including the clergy. 3. Faith should be understood as more than accepting sound doctrine; it also, and especially, consists of acts of love for one’s neighbor arising from good motives. 4. Pastors in particular must refrain from harsh polemic against other Christians, disagreeing, if they must, in “the holy love of God.” If Christians live as they ought, the unity of the Church will be advanced. 5. If the clergy are to play their proper—and leading— role in the reform of the Church, their education must be reformed as well. Universities (which were responsible for the education of ministers) must be more concerned with producing clergy who are earnest Christians rather than academics who are more concerned with prestige and promotion
Edmund Spenser
than with holiness. Professors should be godly men as well and should function more like mentors, knowing and guiding their students. 6. Practical theology should be emphasized in the training of clergy, with an emphasis on preaching that is intended to edify the hearers and facilitate their growth in Christ. Pia Desideria reveals Spener’s hope for the Church rooted in his faith that in the end God will make all things well and that scripture illumined by the Holy Spirit is central to the transformation of individuals, who in turn will transform the Church and the world. Bibliography
Brown, Dale. Understanding Pietism. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1978. Spener, Philip Jacob. Pia Desideria. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964. Stein, James K. Philipp Jakob Spener: Pietist Patriarch. Chicago: Covenant Press, 1986. Stoeffler, F. Ernest. The Rise of Evangelical Pietism. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965.
—Gary Sattler
EDMUND SPENSER (ca. 1552–1599).╇ British. Although overshadowed in history by the more dramatic art of William Shakespeare and the more “dashing” biographies of his friends Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser belongs with Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth in the inner circle of English nondramatic poets. Because of his stylistic sophistication and the melody of his verse, Spenser has been called “the Poets’ Poet.” C. S. Lewis, however, argued that such a title unfairly downplayed Spenser’s religious ideas and moral content. Spenser’s greatest work, the unfinished but monumental epic romance The Faerie Queene, ranks with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the greatest Christian allegories in literary history. Born in London, Spenser attended the renowned Merchant Taylors School under the legendary Christian Humanist schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster. In 1569, Spenser entered Cambridge, where he distinguished himself, especially in his poetry. His first published works were primarily translations from Petrarch and others, included in a staunchly Protestant, anti-Â�Catholic anthology. After university, he became the secretary to the bishop of Rochester, during which time he probably composed most of his first great work, The Sheapheardes Calendar (1579), dedicated to Sidney, the central figure of a group of Renaissance intellectuals/artists. Sidney’s spirited apology for poetry, The Defense of Poesy, dared to challenge, on moral grounds,
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the powerful antitheatrical and anti-Â�imaginative elements within the Puritan wing of the Church of England. Similarly, Spenser attempted to integrate a moderate Puritanism (meaning essentially Reformed Protestantism) into poetry still informed by classical “pagan” authors as those of the Catholic Middle Ages. In The Shepheardes Calendar, Spenser used Roman models (especially Virgil) to create a new English pastoral poetry featuring the convention of intelligent, sensitive shepherds singing their dialogues about life, love, politics, religion, and the problems at court. In his twelve eclogues, one for each month, Spenser experimented with a variety of meters and vocabularies, as well as the use of deliberately archaic language (to sound “medieval,” for example). Both Sidney and, later, poet Ben Jonson complained about this practice (leading Jonson to say Spenser “wrote no language”). In 1579, Spenser was employed by the courtly Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, hoping to be sent to Europe on diplomatic missions. When Leicester fell into disfavor with Queen Elizabeth, destroying Spenser’s hopes for patronage, he accepted an appointment as secretary to Lord Gray, the Deputy of Ireland (1580). Since then, Spenser’s name has been linked, unfortunately for his reputation, with English colonialism in Ireland. There he spent most of his adult life, ostensibly working in a series of colonial administrative positions, but, more specifically, working on his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene. At Raleigh’s urging, Spenser visited London in 1589 to preÂ�sent his poem to the Queen (to whom it was dedicated). He was received with some favor at the court, and, in 1590, published the first three books. In 1594, Spenser married his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, whom he celebrated in the 1595 dual publication of Amoretti (eighty-Â�eight love sonnets) and Epithalamion (a classically inspired but Christian-Â�informed celebration of marriage). The Elizabethan Age was the highpoint of the “sonnet craze” in English literature, and Spenser belongs with Shakespeare and Sidney at the very top. There is, perhaps, no lovelier, more winsome integration of human and divine love than Spenser’s sonnet 68, which links the love of God shown in the resurrection to the Christian practice of human love. It opens with the Christian worshiper addressing the risen Lord (“Most glorious Lord of life that on this day, / Didst make thy triumph over death and sin”) and concludes with the poet addressing his beloved (“So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, / Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught”). Also in 1595, Spenser published Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, an autobiographical pastoral satire based on Spenser’s mixed feelings about his visits to court. Winter 1595–1596, Spenser was again in London, arranging the
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publication of the six-Â�book The Faerie Queene (still only half its projected length). He returned to Ireland but was shortly made to flee by Tyrone’s Rebellion, during which his home in Cork was burned to the ground. By 1599, he was dead, having spent his final days in London. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near his beloved Chaucer, whom he had called “the well of English undefiled.” According to tradition, Spenser’s hearse was attended by poets throwing their lamenting poems and the pens that wrote them into his tomb. His monument in Poets’ Corner, erected in 1620, names him the “Prince of Poets in His Time.” Stylistically, Spenser was a master of experimentation and a musician with words. Later poets admired his “enchanting,” “magical,” “dreamy,” “misty” (such adjectives abound) scenes and sentences. His inventive language and verse forms put off some readers, but his influence has been deeply felt, especially by the later Romantic poets. His unique Spenserian stanza (eight traditionally rhyming ten-Â�syllable lines followed by a ninth of twelve syllables) proved especially popular with Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Spenser has also given his name to the Spenserian School of poetry, an early-seventeenth-Â�century group who admired and imitated his lyricism, pastoral subject matter, and allegorical themes. The Achievement of The Faerie Queene Spenser’s greatness is usually gauged on the basis of The Faerie Queene, his great allegorical epic romance. Spenser brought his concerns with England and his Protestant convictions to the epic, adopting a form, allegory, which had been previously identified with the Roman Catholic tradition. The Faerie Queene also reflects Spenser’s moral earnestness, influenced by his biblical faith, contemporary religious controversies, and, ironically, the great pagan poet of gravitas, Virgil. Milton called him “sage and serious Spenser.” Anticipating Milton’s Paradise Lost, Spenser attempted to weave the spiritual, the moral, the political, and even the erotic (romantic) into the same narrative. Like many Protestant intellectuals of his age, Spenser was, to some degree, a Platonist, believing that beauty (including poetry) reflects the higher beauty of God, a kind of ladder of ascent to that highest good and highest beauty. Spenser portrays questing knights pursuing their own visions of the good (and often of beauty and love represented by various feminine characters), who, by doing so, are also serving the Fairy Queen. Allegorically, they are serving the Creator by pursuing his higher love and beauty revealed in the world. By depicting knights engaged in the battle for good over evil, he comments on many of the religious, historical, and political problems of his day as challenges to be overcome by faith and virtue. By casting such material into traditional romance and
epic conventions, he asserts poetry’s role as an instrument of moral, religious, and political good. In fact, each of the six books of The Faerie Queene is in a sense a description of a particular virtue and/or the method of acquiring that virtue. Clearly influenced by Reformation controversies, book 1 concerns holiness, embodied in the Redcrosse Knight. In book 3, Spenser famously creates a feminine warrior, Britomart, the knight of chastity. Book 5, the most obviously political, alludes to very specific historical incidents between Elizabeth and other European nations. Book 6, the book of courtesy, concludes with a famous vision of the dance of the Graces by which the poet depicts grace as a constant movement of giving, receiving, and giving again. Although The Faerie Queene may be unfinished, this vision of the necessity and value of grace may be interpreted as a “final word” of sorts on the religious, moral, and social issues with which Spenser is concerned. Spenser’s reception has been mixed. Most of his audience members since the eighteenth century have appreciated his stylistic sophistication, his narrative imagination, and his lyricism. Just as many have struggled with his morality. C. S. Lewis in his landmark Allegory of Love began a rehabilitation of both aspects of Spenser’s genius. Lewis celebrated Spenser as, for all his moral seriousness, a poet of love and beauty and pleasure but all within a larger created order of heavenly love, beauty, and pleasure, without which such natural values easily turn “demonic.” Bibliography Works by Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579); The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3 (1590); Complaints (1591); Daphnaïda (1591); Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595); Colin Clouts Comes Home Again (1595); Astrophel (1595); The Faerie Queene, Books 1–6, 2 vols. (1596); Fowre Hymnes (1596); Prothalamion (1596); A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1598); The Faerie Queene, Books 1–6 with the fragment of Book 7 called “Mutabilitie Cantos” (1609). Books on Spenser
Alpers, Paul J. The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (1967, reissued 1982). Bernard, John D. Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1989). Ellrodt, Robert. Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (1960, reprinted 1978). Greenlaw, Edwin. The Works of Edmund Spenser (2002). Hadfield, Andrew. The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (2001). Judson, Alexander C. The Life of Edmund Spenser (1945, reissued 1966). King, John N. Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990).
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Nelson, William. The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1963, reprinted 1978). Renwick, W. L. Edmund Spenser: An Essay on Renaissance Poetry (1925, reissued 1964). Whitaker, Virgil K. The Religious Basis of Spenser’s Thought (1950, reissued 1966).
—Joe Ricke
R. C. SPROUL (1939–).╇ R. C. (Robert Charles) Sproul, born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is an American Protestant theologian and a minister of the Presbyterian Church in America. Sproul currently serves as the Senior Minister of Preaching and Teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida. He received his B.A. from Westminster College, his M.Div. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and his Drs. from the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1971, Sproul founded Ligonier Ministries (www.ligonier.org), an international Christian education organization based in Orlando, Florida, that serves to equip Christians to articulate what they believe and why they believe it. From 1977 to 1983 Sproul served on the executive committee of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and in 1980 published a commentary on the council’s defining document—the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In 1994, Ligonier Ministries initiated “Renewing Your Mind,” a daily syndicated radio broadcast featuring Sproul’s teaching that applies the truths of historic Christianity to pertinent issues facing contemporary believers. Sproul also served as the general editor of The Reformation Study Bible (Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2008), formerly released as the New Geneva Study Bible. The Writings of R. C. Sproul Sproul has published over seventy books and numerous articles focusing on a variety of themes related to Christian theology. Many of Sproul’s books contain expositions of Christian theology for popular audiences and address difficult questions related to the Bible and theology. Several of his most recent books, part of a “Crucial Questions” series by Reformation Trust, have titles framed in the form of the theological and practical questions the books address: Does Prayer Change Things? Can I Know God’s Will? How Should I Live in This World? Can I Trust the Bible? and Who Is Jesus? (All five titles were released in 2009 by Reformation Trust Publishing, a subsidiary of Ligonier Ministries.) Sproul approaches the topics of Christian theology from a distinctively Reformed perspective grounded in the understanding of the Bible reflected in such prominent Protestant reformers as John Calvin and Martin Luther.
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Addressing popular theological and cultural issues under discussion among American evangelicals, Sproul seeks to illuminate ways in which the theology of the Reformation can shed light and provide resolution to the vexing questions of the day. What Is Reformed Theology? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005) provides a shorthand introduction to the essence of the theology of the sixteenth-Â�century Protestant reformers. Faith Alone (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995) expounds the central evangelical doctrine of justification by faith, while Scripture Alone (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2005) presents a series of previously published articles unfolding the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura and explaining the formulations of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The Truth of the Cross (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2007) explains the Christian doctrine of the atonement of Christ from a Reformed perspective and argues for its necessity for salvation. The Invisible Hand (Dallas, TX: Word, 1996) examines the doctrine of divine providence using biblical and personal examples. Several of Sproul’s books address issues related to the defense of the Christian faith. His Defending the Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003) offers a basic introduction to the study and practice of Christian apologetics. In Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), Sproul and coauthors John Gerstner and Arthur Lindsley defend the use of evidence in Christian defense against those who advocate an exclusively presuppositional or a priori approach to apologetics. Reason to Believe (Grand Â�Rapids: Zondervan, 1982) provides a number of responses to common objections to Christian faith such as alleged biblical contradictions, evangelical exclusivism, and religious hypocrisy. Lifeviews (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1986) seeks to provide a guide for understanding the prevailing attitudes and ideas that shape our culture. Not a Chance (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) debunks the philosophical notions of time and chance that underlie the cosmological theories of modern science. If There Is a God, Why Are There Atheists? (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, forthcoming) explores atheism from a psychological and motivational perspective. A number of Sproul’s books probe the practical and devotional side of Christian theology. The Soul’s Quest for God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1994) draws from examples in biblical and church history to instruct people in how to satisfy their hunger for communion with God. Sproul’s The Holiness of God (rev. and exp. ed., Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1998) and Chosen by God (Servant Publications, 2004) present restatements of classical reformed teaching related to the doctrine of God, while Pleasing God (Tyndale House, 1994, out of print; republication pending) gives direction to the faithful in how to live a life that wins God’s approval. Five Things Every Christian Needs to Grow (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation
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Trust, rev. 2008) addresses the essentials of Christian nurture for young believers seeking maturity in the faith. Can I Know God’s Will? (Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 1999) offers guidance to Christians faced with difficult decisions in life. The Prayer of the Lord (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009) examines Jesus’s model prayer as a practical guide for followers of Christ today. The Intimate Marriage (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1993) offers biblically based advice to couples preparing for wedlock. Despite his predominantly theological and academic focus, Sproul has sprinkled his literary output with a number of fictional books that use story and allegory to communicate religious themes. Johnny Come Home (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1984), republished in 1988 under the title Thy Brother’s Keeper (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth and Hyatt), tells the story of two men who choose dramatically different paths for their lives. The King without a Shadow (P&R, 2000) uses a fictional story about a boy and his dog to teach children about God’s holiness. The Priest with Dirty Clothes (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1997), Sproul’s second children’s book, weaves a tail of a filthy priest who is cleansed by a great prince. The Lightlings (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2006) uses allegory to capture the essence of biblical redemption for children, while The Prince’s Poison Cup (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2008) helps children grasp the Christian teaching of the atonement. As Sproul has focused his energies in recent years on pastoral ministry, some of his most recent publications reflect the fruit of his work in expository preaching. His volume on Romans (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), the first in the St. Andrews Expositional Commentary series, contains over fifty sermons delivered at St. Andrew’s Chapel between October 2005 and April 2007 on Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. Sproul’s forthcoming volume in the same series, John (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust) explores the major themes of the fourth gospel. An earlier commentary, Ephesians (Ross-Â�shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus, 1994) examined issues raised by the Apostle Paul as he dealt with the first-Â�century church at Ephesus. The Principal Ideas of R. C. Sproul •â•‡ The God of the Old and New Testaments is the one, true, living God, who is absolutely holy in his character. •â•‡ The Bible, consisting of the Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God and is the only infallible guide for what Christians believe and how they are to live. •â•‡ Classical Christian theology, particularly as it reached its highest point of maturity in the Protestant Reformation, reflects the most accurate
understanding of the character of God and of the world he has made. •â•‡ The central focus of the Bible is Jesus Christ and the work of redemption he accomplished to reconcile lost humans to a right relationship with God. •â•‡ The Christian faith contains the most consistent framework from which to understand the world, its origins, and the presence and purpose of humankind. •â•‡ Empowered by the Holy Spirit and carefully following the Bible’s teachings, contemporary Christians are enabled to please God, make sense of their world, and live in harmony with God’s purposes for his creation and for them as individuals. Selected Bibliography of Works by R. C. Sproul
Abortion: A Rational Look at an Emotional Issue. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1990. Can I Know God’s Will? Crucial Questions Series. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009. Can I Trust the Bible? Crucial Questions Series. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009. Chosen by God. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1994. Classical Apologetics. With John Gerstner and Arthur Lindsley. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984. The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts That Shaped Our World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000. Defending Your Faith: An Introduction to Apologetics. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003. Does Prayer Change Things? Crucial Questions Series. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009. Essential Truths of the Christian Faith. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 1992. Explaining Inerrancy: A Commentary. Oakland, CA: International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1980. Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995. Five Things Every Christian Needs to Grow. Rev. & exp. ed. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2008. The Glory of Christ. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003. God’s Will and the Christian. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1984. Gospel of God: An Exposition of Romans. Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 1999. The Holiness of God. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1985. How Should I Live in This World? Crucial Questions Series. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009. If There Is a God, Why Are There Atheists? A Surprising Look at the Psychology of Atheism. Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 1997. The Intimate Marriage: A Practical Guide to Building a Great Marriage. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003. The Invisible Hand: Do All Things Really Work for Good? Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003. John. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust.
St. Edith Stein
Knowing Scripture. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1977; rev. ed., 2008. Lifeviews. Grand Rapids: Revell, 1986. Loved by God. Nashville: W. Publishing Group, 2001. The Mystery of the Holy Spirit. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1990. Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994. The Prayer of the Lord. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009. The Prince’s Poison Cup. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2008. The Purpose of God: An Exposition of Ephesians. Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2002. Reason to Believe: A Response to Common Objections to Christianity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982. Renewing Your Mind: Basic Christian Beliefs You Need to Know. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998. Romans. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009. Scripture Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2005. The Soul’s Quest for God: Satisfying the Hunger for Spiritual Communion with God. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003. A Taste of Heaven. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2006. The Truth of the Cross. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2007. What Is Reformed Theology? Understanding The Basics. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005. Who Is Jesus? Crucial Questions Series. Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009.
—Mark House
CHARLES SPURGEON (1834–1892).╇ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who became known as the “Prince of Preachers” of the nineteenth century, was born in 1834. He became renowned as a Baptist pastor for his preaching, writing, and life of faith. A preacher named Richard Knill prophesied over Spurgeon when he was ten years old that he would become a great preacher, speaking to multitudes. In his youth he read about the martyrs, the Puritans, and John Bunyan and studied Greek, Latin, and philosophy. He was converted in a Methodist chapel in January 1850 and baptized by immersion the following May. In October 1851 he became a Baptist pastor and in 1854 was called to pastor the historic New Park Street Chapel. By the age of twenty-Â�two he had become the most popular preacher in his time. In 1856 he founded a Pastors’ College, through which he trained nearly one thousand ministers. The childhood prophecy was fulfilled as he pastored Metropolitan Tabernacle, which became one of the earliest megachurches of six thousand members and his ministry impacted thousands of Christian leaders through his sermons for more than a century. A thoroughÂ�going Calvinist with little patience for Arminianism, he considered himself one of the last of the
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Puritans and was greatly influenced by Augustine, Calvin, and John Owen, John Bunyan, and other Puritans. He amassed a personal library of thirty thousand volumes. Spurgeon maintained close friendship with his older mentors George Müller and Hudson Taylor. They promoted one another’s ministries through prayer, financial giving, personal support, and involvement. His impact has continued through the twentieth century and into the twenty-Â�first. Spurgeon set up orphanages and a Pastors’ College using the same faith principles as Müller. He maintained an active ministry of prayer, which included healing of thousands, even while sick himself with gout and Bright’s disease. He overcame recurring spells of depression and chronic pain, sometimes being out of the pulpit and ministry for months at a time. Spurgeon died in 1892 at the age of fifty-Â�seven. Russell Conwell, the Baptist pastor and theologian who founded Temple University (and what was later to become Gordon-Â�Conwell Theological Seminary) wrote the first official biography of Spurgeon’s life in 1892, entitled Life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon: The World’s Great Preacher. A more recent comprehensive over eight-Â�hundred-Â�page biography has been compiled by Lewis Drummond, entitled Spurgeon: Prince of Preachers (1992). Spurgeon’s decades of 3,500 sermons are compiled in the six-Â�volume New Park Street Pulpit and the sixty-Â�three-Â�volume Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit. Scripture expositions have included The Treasury of the Bible and The Treasury of David, containing expositions, illustrations, quotes, and homiletical hints. Spurgeon’s Lectures to His Students contains addresses to the students of his Pastors’ College at Metropolitan Tabernacle. His writings have been published and excerpted perhaps more than any other preacher. Devotional compilations of his writings include Morning by Morning, Evening by Evening, One Thousand Devotional Thoughts, and Faith’s Checkbook. Emerald Books has published edited versions of several of Spurgeon’s works with updated language, including What the Holy Spirit Does in a Believer’s Life (1993), The Triumph of Faith in a Believer’s Life (1994), The Power of Prayer in a Believer’s Life (1993), and Spiritual Warfare in a Believer’s Life (1993). German pastor and theologian Helmut Thielicke was reported to have counseled, “Sell all the books you have and buy Spurgeon.” American evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry considers Spurgeon as “one of evangelical Christianity’s immortals.” —Paul King ST. EDITH STEIN (1891–1942).╇ Edith Stein, the youngest of seven siblings, was born in Breslau, Prussia, on
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Caroline Emelia Stephen
October 12, 1891, the Feast of the Atonement (Yom Kippur), to Siegfried and Auguste Stein. Edith’s childhood, as detailed in her Life in a Jewish Family (trans. J. Koeppel), was characterized by simplicity, frugality, hard work at home and school, joyful family gatherings, and the observance of Jewish prescriptions and holidays. After graduating from the gymnasium in Breslau in 1911, Stein studied at the University of Breslau (1911–1913) and at the University of Göttingen (1913–1915) under the direction of “The Master,” Edmund Husserl. She interrupted her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross nurse at the war front. In 1916, Stein completed her dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (trans. W. Stein) with highest honors at the University of Freiburg. From 1916 to 1918, Stein assisted Husserl in preparing volume 2 of his Ideen. Between 1918 and 1922, she wrote a thesis, On the Philosophy of Psychology (trans. M. C. Baseheart and M. Sawicki), in support of her unsuccessful application for habilitation at the University of Göttingen. In January 1, 1922, Stein was baptized and received into the Catholic Church, after having read the Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in July 1921. Between 1923 and 1932, she taught at the Teachers College of the Dominican Sisters in Speyer, practicing a dedicated life of prayer, service, and study. She lectured in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on the education and spiritual formation of women. (See Stein’s Essays on Woman [trans. F.╯M. Oben].) Her “Attempt to Contrast Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas” was included in a 1929 festschrift edited by Martin Heidegger. Her translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones de Veritate appeared in 1931, followed shortly by the publication of her Potenz und Akt (1931–1932), through which she sought habilitation at the University of Freiburg. In 1932–1933, she was docent at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster. Barred as a Jew from teaching after Hitler’s rise to power, Stein entered the Carmelite cloister in Cologne on October 14, 1933, transferring to the Carmel in Echt, Holland, in 1940. Officers arrested Edith and her sister Rosa in Echt on August 2, 1942. Taken by train to Auschwitz, they died in the gas chambers at Birkenau on August 9. Edith Stein was canonized as a saint on October 11, 1998. In Carmel, Stein composed pious writings (collected in The Hidden Life, trans. W. Stein), as well as scientific studies: Finite and Eternal Being (1936, trans. K. Reinhardt), “Ways to Know God: The ‘Symbolic Theology’ of Dionysius the Areopagite and Its Objective Presuppositions” (1940–1941, trans. W. Redmond, in Science and Faith), and, finally, The Science of the Cross (trans. J. Koeppel), a study of St. John of the Cross. These last works mark a return to themes originally sounded in On the Problem
of Empathy. Stein’s own empathic nature is evident in her Self-Â�Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942 (trans. J. Koeppel), personal memoirs (Life in a Jewish Family), literary criticism, and ethical identification with the biblical Queen Esther, who risked her life for her Jewish people. Bibliography Eighteen volumes of Edith Steins Werke, edited by L. Gelber, R. Leuven, and M. Linssen (Freiburg: Herder) have appeared since 1950. Ten volumes of Edith Stein’s collected works have been published in English translation by the Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington, D.C., since 1986.
Berkman, Joyce Avrech, ed. Contemplating Edith Stein. University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Graef, Hilda. The Scholar and the Cross: The Life and Works of Edith Stein. Longmans, Green, 1955. Haney, Kathleen, ed. Edith Stein: Phenomenologist and Theologian. Special issue of Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 41.3 (2006).
—Ann W. Astell
CAROLINE EMELIA STEPHEN (1834–1909).╇ Caroline Emelia Stephen, born on December 8, 1834, was notable for a number of reasons. Her connections were impressive: she was the unmarried daughter of Sir James Stephen (the noted Under-Â�Secretary for the Colonies in 1836–1847), the sister of Leslie Stephen (author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), sister-Â�in-Â�law to Minny Thackeray Stephen and Anny Thackeray Ritchie (daughters of William Makepeace Thackeray), and aunt to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Her grandfather, also Sir James Stephen, wrote the legislation that ended slavery in England. Known as a Quaker mystic, she is credited with bringing about the revival of the Society of Friends in the latter part of the nineteenth century through writings about her conversion. Raised as an evangelical associated with the Clapham Sect, she converted later in life when she attended a Quaker meeting and felt herself drawn to the silence and, through the silence, to God, feeling that the words of the Anglican Church no longer spoke to her. Her book Quaker Strongholds (1890) articulates the Friends’ view of God as Light and Inner Voice; other books, such as Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Radiance (1908) further explain her sense that God is available to all who are open to the inner silence, not just to a select few in a church. Stephen was a complicated woman, defying many expectations of a typical Victorian woman. She wrote and published articles on things such as “Thoughtfulness in Dress,” exhorting young women to pay attention to the
John Stott
color, size, shape, convenience, and economy of dressing. She disbelieved in women’s colleges, thinking that women could not possibly wish to be forced to learn as men did; she changed her mind on this subject when her niece, Katherine Stephen, became principal at Newnham College. She wrote vigorously against the women’s suffrage movement, believing that asking women to vote would divide their attention from their proper domestic duties and that voting would cause disharmony in the home when couples disagreed about candidates or issues. As it was, she believed, a woman’s job was gently to exert influence at home to get the husband to do what she believed was morally proper. She decried the institution of sisterhoods in The Service of the Poor (1871), insisting that women could make excellent nurses without being motivated by religion and that religious associations or sisterhoods were undesirable when they required the renouncement of family and social ties, and especially when they asked women to live against the laws of nature by withdrawing from masculine society. One of her more controversial assertions was that Christians are not called to help the poor, but to help everyone, and that the poor have no special rights to be representatives of Christ on earth, and that when Jesus commanded charity, he meant charity for all, including the poor, but not excluding others. Fiercely anti–Â�Roman Catholic (repelled by religious authority and the sacraments, among other things) and firmly ensconced in her position as a member of the upper class (she wrote an article on how to be a proper mistress to the servants), Stephen still urged tolerance toward all, and in her way, did much toward suggesting that understanding each other is paramount to participating in God’s kingdom. She died in Cambridge on April 7, 1909. —Kathleen Heininge JOHN STOTT (1921–).╇ John Robert Walmsley Stott was born to Sir Arnold and Lady Stott at London in 1921. He was educated at Rugby School, where he was head boy, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a double first in French and theology and was elected a senior scholar. Although he was confirmed in the Anglican Church in 1936, Stott was spiritually restless. He was converted to Christ through an evangelistic lecture from Eric Nash to the Christian Union at Rugby School on February 13, 1938. He completed his pastoral training at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, in 1944. Following his ordination in 1945, he became curate of All Souls, Langham Place, London (West End). Having maintained an outstanding ministry of evangelical preaching and influence, he was later made rector in 1950. His ministry there extended from
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1945 to 1975, culminating in his appointment as rector emeritus. From 1959 to 1991, he was a royal chaplain. Since 1991, he had served as Extra Chaplain to the Queen. He was the principal drafter of the Lausanne Covenant, which was the consequence of the International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974. Stott was the first director (and subsequently became the president) of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, which he founded in 1982 to “help Christians engage biblically, rigorously and promptly with contemporary issues.” In 1983, he received his doctorate in divinity from Lambeth. Stott is widely recognized as an Anglican leader and author. As a conference speaker (in accordance with the Langham Partnership), he has made his ministry effective internationally. Stott has written approximately fifty books, which have been sold in the millions and in many different languages. Basic Christianity (1958) was Stott’s introduction to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. In this work, which has been translated into more than fifty languages, the author articulated an apologetic for the claims of Christianity and defined the practical application of those fundamentals in the daily life of the Christian. Stott’s presidential address at the InterVarsity Fellowship Annual Conference was published as Your Mind Matters (1972), which is an explanation of the priority of the mind in the Christian life. His Issues Facing Christians Today (1984) and The Contemporary Christian (1992) explored his extensive passion in applying the Bible to the present. As it defended the doctrine of penal substitution, The Cross of Christ (1986) is generally thought to be the most important work of Stott’s. His study resulted in the conclusion that Old Testament doctrine regarding sacrifice and New Testament doctrine concerning the application of the death of Christ obliged Christians to affirm the cross as a substitutionary punishment for the sinner. The Birds Our Teachers (1999), which is copiously illustrated with full-Â�color photographs taken by Stott himself throughout his international travels, reveals his passion for bird watching and photography. Why I Am a Christian (2004) provided reasons for being a Christian by articulating a comprehensible and convincing statement of the theological foundation for his own faith. Stott gave illustrations from the transformed lives of other well-Â�known Christians, in addition to an apologetic of the claims of Christ in scripture and how only God can fully satisfy the needs of humanity. His latest work, The Living Church (2007), is the consequence of over sixty years in pastoral ministry and application of biblical teaching to the contemporary context. He has published eight expositional volumes in his New Testament commentary series, The Bible Speaks Today (published by InterVarsity).
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
In 2005, he was named among Time’s “100 Most Influential People.” Stott is readily identifiable as one of the most influential people of Christianity. Although he has been offered opportunities as an academic and bishop, Stott has remained committed to a broader calling of equipping church leaders internationally. Stott never married but confessed to two occasions in which he could have. He maintains a strong relationship to All Souls Church, serving as rector emeritus for more than thirty years. Having fulfilled his last speaking engagement at the Keswick Convention, he has been retired from public ministry since July 2007. Bibliography His biography is published as John Stott: The Making of a Leader, Volume 1: A Biography: The Early Years (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999) and John Stott: A Global Ministry, Volume 2: A Biography: The Latter Years (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity 2001) by Timothy Dudley-Â�Scott. —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811–1896).╇ United States. Primarily known as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe was also a pioneer of American local color realism whose writing explored faith and doubt, Christian domestic ideals, and Protestant social responsibility. Born into a family of preachers, Stowe felt called to preach a gospel of identification with a suffering Savior and an ethic of response to human needs. Since her gender barred her from ordination, Stowe found her pulpit in writing. Formative Influences Stowe is best understood in the context of her extraordinary family. The Reverend Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) and several of his eleven children rose to national prominence in the nineteenth century as shapers of American Protestant culture. Like other second generation Beechers, Harriet rejected her father’s Calvinistic revivalism, embracing a religion grounded in Christ’s love and centered on human sympathy. An initial conversion in her early teens was followed by a second conversion experience in 1842, which Stowe saw as a baptism in the Spirit. In the early 1830s Harriet and her sister Catherine Beecher (1800–1878) moved with their father to Cincinnati, where Harriet taught in Catherine’s Western Female Institute. During the Cincinnati years Harriet married Calvin Stowe and gave birth to six of their seven children. She began to publish, pioneering the use of dialect in regional sketches for newspapers and periodicals and collaborating with Catherine on Primary Geography for
Children (1833). In Cincinnati, Stowe also learned firsthand about the human cost of slavery. Antislavery Writing The Stowes returned to New England shortly after the death of their youngest son, Charley. Agonizing over her loss as she read abolitionist tracts and slave narratives, Stowe identified with black families torn apart by slavery. The result was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialized in The National Era from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852), a deeply felt depiction of the moral wrongs of slavery and the power of Christian love. The novel became an international best-Â�seller but was harshly criticized. In response, Stowe scrambled to provide documentary support in a Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) and adapted the novel for the stage as The Christian Slave (1855). Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains controversial, with James Baldwin and others criticizing its paternalism, racial stereotyping, and simplistic solutions to complex problems. In Dred (1856), Stowe displays a more complex understanding of slavery, using both black and white narrators to revise the idyllic southern plantation novel. While Uncle Tom’s Cabin uses biblical typology to create a world of villains and Christian heroes, Dred depicts division within Christian culture as scripture provides some characters with a gospel of forgiveness and others with a prophetic call to action. Later Novels and Christian Moral Responsibility By the 1850s Stowe was openly critical of clergymen, often embodying positive Christian values in female and black characters. In the early 1860s Stowe quietly became an Episcopalian, a denomination Oldtown Folks (1869) depicts as “a nice old motherly church.” As America headed toward war, Stowe turned to domestic settings in the New England of her mother’s youth and to her own travels. In The Minister’s Wooing (1859) Stowe counters salvation anxiety with a theology of love. Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), the story of an intelligent Christian girl growing up in a limiting society, has been compared to Jane Eyre. Oldtown Folks (1869) and Poganuc People (1878) reflect the centrality of faith in New England experience. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854) blends travel advice with wry perspectives on culture, initiating the theme of the naïve American’s “fall” into European culture later made famous by Mark Twain and Henry James. Stowe embodies her conflicted Protestant responses to European Catholicism in her historical romance, Agnes of Sorento (1862). Stowe consistently urged a Christian response to contemporary issues, including spiritualism, domestic ideals, and women’s rights. While Stowe supported women’s suffrage, she focused more on women’s moral influence. The
Blessed Henry Suso
American Woman’s Home (1869), written with Catherine, envisions homemaking as a Christian vocation. Stowe’s controversial Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) and satirical My Wife and I (1870–1871) address Victorian debates over marriage and free love. Her late works, including Woman in Sacred History (1874) and Footsteps of the Master (1877), show her call to preach undimmed as she uses fictional techniques to depict biblical women and essays to address religious topics. In an era when women writers and Christian convictions played an influential role in national culture, Stowe addressed important theological and social questions in a maternal voice that blended humor, sentiment, and moral fervor. The qualities that made her writing powerful for contemporaries hurt her with later readers, who often dismiss her as sentimental or propagandistic. Latetwentieth-Â�century scholarship on Stowe has initiated a renewed appreciation of her influence on Protestant popular culture in nineteenth-Â�century America.
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2000 [1856]) provides an excellent overview of Stowe’s response to slavery. —Linda Mills Woolsey
SADHU SUNDAR SINGH (1889–1929?). While Thomas is the apostle most associated with India, the most prominent Christian of Indian birth, Sundar Singh, more closely mirrors the life of the Apostle Paul. Born in 1889 into a devoutly religious family, Singh pleased his parents by becoming well-Â�versed in the Sikh and Hindu religions. His mother’s death, however, threw the studious young man into a spiritual crisis. A planned suicide was averted only by a personal visitation by Jesus, in which Singh received the peace he previously lacked. Though fulfilling his late mother’s wishes to become a sadhu, Singh’s pursuit of Jesus Christ and adoption of a life of holiness and asceticism permanently alienated him from his family. Like Paul, Singh spent most of his life traveling. He made three significant missionary journeys beyond southern Asia, including China, Malaysia, and Japan in 1919; Australia, England, and Bibliography There is no collected edition of Stowe’s work, but her the United States in 1920; and Europe in 1922. Though well received in his travels, Singh was neither a novels are available in modern editions and reprints. Joan╯D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New spellbinding speaker nor a prolific author. His speech and York: Oxford University Press, 1994) is a helpful full-Â� his writings aroused criticism from theological scholars scale biography that examines Stowe in relation to ideals for their brevity and simplicity. Singh’s legacy, however, of womanhood, parlor literature, and the Beecher drive was based on neither theological correctness nor sciento be shapers of Protestant civilization. One of the first tific awareness but rather in a life of simple obedience to biographies is Charles Edward Stowe’s Life of Harriet the One who replaced his suicidal despair with everlasting Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals peace. Singh’s simple way produced persecution in the East, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889). For understanding the Beecher legacy in American Protestantism, Mil- caused criticism in the West, and triggered faith among ton╯A. Rugoff ’s The Beechers: An American Family in the thousands. “He was a sadhu with a difference .╯.╯. he had Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) no home, no possessions. He belonged to the road, sharis essential. Jean Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Mar- ing the suffering of his people, eating with those who gave golis’s The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on him shelter, and telling all who would listen of the love of Women’s Rights and Women’s Sphere (Chapel Hill: Uni- God” (Richard Foster, Devotional Classics, 1989). If Sadhu Sundar Singh’s conversion and life mirrored versity of North Carolina Press, 1988) and Barbara A. White’s The Beecher Sisters (New Haven: Yale University the life of Paul, so did his death. Paul’s final days in Rome Press, 2003) provide thoughtful and detailed discussions remain a mystery. As for Singh, he was last seen climbing of Harriet’s place among the Beecher women and their a mountain toward Tibet, from whence he disappeared. —Morgan Thomas Ridington contribution to American culture. Elizabeth Ammons, ed., Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: G.╯K. Hall, 1980) and Alice C. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford University Press, BLESSED HENRY SUSO (ca. 1295–1366).╇ Henry 1969) remain good starting points for studying Stowe. Suso (Heinrich Seuse) was born in or near Constance in Hedrick’s “Introductory Note” to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s southern Germany; he entered the Dominican commuThe Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine nity there at the age of thirteen. Around 1324 he began (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001[1862]) offers some the studium generale in Cologne, where he studied with helpful insights into Stowe’s New England local color Meister Eckhart. Upon completion of his studies, Suso writing, and Robert S. Levine’s “Introduction” to Dred: returned to Constance, serving first as lector and later A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (New York: Penguin, as prior. After undergoing a religious experience around
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Blessed Henry Suso
1335, he adopted a life of asceticism and meditation and assumed the spiritual guidance of religious women at nearby convents. As a result of conflict between Emperor Louis and Pope John XXII, Suso was forced into exile. Around 1348 he was transferred to the Dominican house in Ulm, where he remained until his death. He continued as spiritual adviser to women in various religious communities and to the Friends of God, an informal group of pious men and women on the Upper Rhine. In his final years the Dominican edited the Exemplar, the authorized version of his most significant German works. Along with Meister Eckhart and John Tauler, Suso is numbered among the most noteworthy German mystics of the fourteenth century. His renown derives from his writing style rather than his theology. Due to his literary role as Servant of Eternal Wisdom and because of the lyrical language and love imagery he employs in his writings, Suso is identified with the tradition of German courtly love (Minnesang). The Dominican’s oeuvre consists of autobiographical, devotional, epistolary, and homiletic works. Four key texts comprise the Exemplar: the Life of the Servant (Seuses Leben or Vita), the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit), the Little Book of Truth (Büchlein der Wahrheit), and the Little Book of Letters (Briefbüchlein). In addition, he is the author of the Clock of Wisdom (Horologium sapientiae), an expanded version of the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom and his only Latin work; the Great Book of Letters (Das große Briefbuch); two sermons of accepted authenticity; and possibly the Little Book of Love (Minnebüchlein). Although described as the first autobiography in German, the Life of the Servant presumably had at least two authors. The Dominican nun Elsbeth Stagel recorded most of part 1, recounting conversations with Suso, her confessor and friend; Suso based much of part 2 on his own letters. The Life chronicles the Dominican’s spiritual progress as the Servant of Eternal Wisdom and offers advice to others on how renunciation, suffering, and ascetic exercises lead to the attainment of blessedness and perfection. Because the servant’s life is characterized as exemplary, the work often is regarded as (auto)hagiography. In the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom the figure of Eternal Wisdom guides the Servant Suso toward reflection on the Passion and the Crucifixion. The work concludes with the Hundred Meditations on the sufferings of Christ, intended for daily use by readers. Replete with sensual imagery, the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom edifies those who seek Christ through contemplation; until the end of the fifteenth century it remained the most popular devotional manual in the German language. Chronologically the earliest work in the Exemplar, the Little Book of Truth exhibits scholastic influence and
defends some of Meister Eckhart’s teachings, although the author distances himself from his teacher’s formulations. In a dialogue with Suso the Disciple, Eternal Truth reveals how an individual should strive for inner detachment (abandonment of the self) and true discernment of God, which lead to union with God. The contents of the Little Book of Letters were written to Suso’s spiritual children, primarily Elsbeth Stagel, to offer practical advice and encouragement in their spiritual life. The letters are homiletic in structure and style. Through his personal and poetic writing, Suso instructed and inspired those in his spiritual care to a more profound and intimate relationship with God. Bibliography Karl Bihlmeyer published a German edition of the Exemplar: Heinrich Seuse. Deutsche Schriften, Kohlhammer, 1907, reprint, Minerva, 1961; an English translation by Frank Tobin appeared in the Classics of Western Spirituality Series in 1989: Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons. In 1977 Pius Künzle published an edition of the Horologium sapientiae, Universitätsverlag; Edmund Colledge produced an English translation: Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, Catholic University of America Press, 1994. In honor of the six-hundredth anniversary of Suso’s death, Ephrem M. Filthaut edited a collection of essays, Heinrich Seuse. Studien zum 600. Todestag, 1366–1966, Albertus Magnus, 1966. In 1994 a second collection appeared: Rüdiger Blumrich and Philipp Kaiser, eds., Heinrich Seuses Philosophia spiritualis: Quellen, Konzept, Formen und Rezeption, Reichert. Significant discussions of Suso’s life and works can be found in: James M. Clark, The Great German Mystics. Eckhart, Tauler and Suso, Blackwell, 1949, reprint, Russell and Russell, 1970; Frank Tobin, “Coming to Terms with Meister Eckhart: Suso’s Buch der Wahrheit,” Semper idem et novus. Festschrift for Frank Banta, ed. Francis G. Gentry, Kümmerle, 1988, 321–344; Kurt Ruh, “Heinrich Seuse,” Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik. Vol. III: Die Mystik des deutschen Predigerordens und ihre Grundlegung durch die Hochscholastik, Beck, 1996, 415–475; Jeffrey╯F. Hamburger, “The Use of Images in the Pastoral Care of Nuns: The Case of Heinrich Suso and the Dominicans,” The Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 20–46; Alois M. Haas and Kurt Ruh, “Seuse, Heinrich OP,” Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., de Gruyter, 1992, Vol. 8, 1109– 1129; Alois╯M. Haas, Kunst rechter Gelassenheit: Themen und Schwerpunkte von Heinrich Seuses Mystik, Peter Lang, 1995; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Medieval Self-Â�Fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in Seuse’s Exemplar,” Christ among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order
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labeled him one of the top twelve preachers in the nation in 1997. In 2002, readers of Leadership journal named him as one of the two most effective current preachers in the nation. Swindoll has received recognition through four honorary doctorate degrees given in appreciation of his ministry contributions. Shortly after returning to DTS as the fourth president (1994–2001), Swindoll also returned to what he called his CHARLES R. “CHUCK” SWINDOLL (1934–).╇ “first love,” which is preaching. He became instrumenCharles╯R. “Chuck” Swindoll (born October 18, 1934) is tal in the founding of Stonebriar Community Church in known as one of the most popular radio ministers of the an upscale community in Frisco, Texas, in 1998. In this last quarter century, pastor of well-Â�known large churches, former farm community north of Dallas, such was the and as former president, now chancellor, of Dallas Theo- reputation of Swindoll that Christianity Today published logical Seminary, three roles that he continues to carry an article entitled “Swindoll Starts Instant Megachurch” out. Born in El Campo, Texas, Swindoll had a spiritual as the church almost instantaneously grew to two thouexperience while serving as a U.S. Marine in Okinawa sand members. When Swindoll left DTS’s presidency to that he understood to be a call to vocational ministry. This become the seminary’s chancellor in 2001, two of the led him to enroll in Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) seminary’s most significant theological developments in in 1959 from which he graduated with honors in 1963. all of its history were already clearly in process. First, the As a student he was recognized with awards in homilet- progressive movement away from dispensation theology ics and Christian education and was named as the out- and terminology was evident. In the words of Swindoll, standing graduate by the faculty. Following ordination the term “dispensations” was “a scare word”; he went on that same year, Swindoll served shortly in three churches to acknowledge that “dispensationalism” would not be “a before arriving at First Evangelical Free Church in Fuller- big part of our marquee” as the school identified itself in ton, California, where he served from 1971 to 1994. The the future (Maudlin 1993). Shortly thereafter dispensagrowth of this church and his syndicated radio program tional theology had “moved in the background” (Elkridge propelled him into becoming recognized as an evangelical 2002). Second, he oversaw the development of an ever-Â� increasing welcoming attitude toward the Pentecostal and celebrity during these years. His radio ministry, Insight for Living, began in 1979, Charismatic expressions of evangelicalism. growing out of the early successes of the broadcast of his sermons on the radio in 1977 while serving as pastor in Bibliography Fullerton. According to Insight, a ministry that is cur- “Best of the Best: Leadership Readers Choose Two as Today’s Most Effective Preachers.” Leadership 23, no. 1 (2002): 48. rently led by his wife, Cynthia, who serves as president Dallas Theological Seminary. “A Brief History.” http://www.dts and chief executive officer, Swindoll’s popular expository .edu/about/arichtradition/abriefhistory/. Accessed Septempreaching reaches 2,100 outlets around the world and is ber 11, 2007. translated into multiple foreign languages. Web and podElkridge, Larry. “Southwestern’s Predicament.” Christianity casting have increased the organization’s audience as well Today, May 21, 2002, 44–45. as need for support staff, which currently numbers 125 Insight for Living. “Charles R. Swindoll.” http://www.insight employees. That it calls itself one of the “leading radio .org/site/PageServer?pagename=IFL_aboutChuck. Accessed programs in Christian broadcasting” would appear to be September 1, 2007. confirmed by the National Religious Broadcasters, who Maudlin, Michael G. “Dallas’s New Dispensation.” Christianity named Insight its program of the year in 1994. This was Today, October 25, 1993, 14–15. the first of three awards given to Swindoll’s ministry by —Kent Eaton the association. The popular style of Swindoll on the radio has led to his wide appeal as an admired Christian author who has been given many awards by the Evangelical Press SYMEON (949–1022).╇ Symeon was a monk, recognized Association. Starting with You and Your Child in 1977, as a saint after his death. He was born in 949 in Galatia he has gone on to write more than fifty books, most of of Paphlagonia and died in 1022 near Constantinople. which grew out of his preparation of sermons. Swindoll’s He is known as “the New Theologian.” In manuscripts celebrity in the pulpit was acknowledged in 1988 by the he is also mentioned as “the new,” “the theologian,” “the Religious Heritage of America, which named him “Cler- new and theologian.” He came from a noble family and gyman of the Year.” Likewise Truett Theological Seminary was educated in Constantinople. He was groomed for a of Preachers, ed. Kent Emery Jr. and Joseph P. Wawrykow, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, 430–461; and Bernard McGinn, “Henry Suso’s Spiritual Philosophy,” The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500), Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005, 195–239. —Debra L. Stoudt
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life in politics, but when he was twenty-Â�seven years old, he was accepted as a novice in the Monastery of Stoudio under the guidance of Symeon the Pious (the Eulabes). Later he moved to the Monastery of Saint Mamas, where he was tonsured a monk, ordained a priest, and elected as the abbot. Around 996–998 he faced a serious rebellion at his monastery and he was obliged by the ecclesiastical authorities to abandon it. He was exiled to a small town called Paloukiton, near Chrysoupolis, where he founded the Monastery of Saint Marina. A few years later Patriarch Sergios recalled him to Constantinople and offered him a bishop’s see. Symeon refused and continued living as a spiritual guide of the faithful and a writer until his death. His disciple Nicetas Stethatos wrote a biography thirty years after Symeon’s death, which is the main source of information about his life and teaching. Nicetas also preserved most of Symeon’s writings. Many of Symeon’s writings have been preserved to this day. Some of them are: The Discourses (Catechetical Sermons), The Hymns of Divine Love, The Practical and Theological Chapters, The Theological Treatises, The Ethical Treatises, two works with the title Thanksgiving (Eucharist), and five Letters. The most important of his works are his thirty-Â�four Discourses, which were composed while he was the abbot at the Monastery of Saint Mamas. They were preached as monastic “catecheses” to the audience of monks during the Matins service. They do not follow a systematic order of themes. Various concepts such as repentance, detachment, renunciation, mystical prayer, tears, Christ as light, works of mercy and other virtues, remembrance of death, passionlessness, faith, and contemplation are often touched and analyzed.
His second most significant work is The Hymns of Divine Love. These are fifty-Â�eight texts set to poetic meters and rhymes. Their content is nonsystematic and similar to the Discourses but given in a completely different language and style. Some of the hymns deal with Symeon’s own mystical experiences and personal love toward Christ. The visions mentioned in the Discourses are here described in a more fervent language, which makes the text more lively and experiential. Symeon is the first among Eastern Christian writers to open up his inner spiritual experience of Christ and the Holy Trinity to a reading audience in such a way. Symeon’s teaching about the ability of charismatic, nonordained monks to forgive sins brought him into conflict with the hierarchy of the church and caused his exile. Also noteworthy is his emphasis on a return to the essence or the spirit of the early Orthodox Church, as opposed to a mere dependence on the outward forms of the church’s life. Bibliography
Hatzopoulos, Athanasios. Two Outstanding Cases in Byzantine Spirituality: The Macarian Homilies and St. Symeon the New Theologian, Analecta Blatadon 54, Thessalonica: 1991. Krivocheine, Basil. Dans La Lumière du Christ: Saint Symeon Le Nouveau Théologien: Vie, Spiritualité, Doctrine, Chevetogne: 1980. Maloney, George. The Mystic of Fire and Light: St. Symeon the New Theologian, Danville: Dimensions Books, 1984. Turner, H. J. M. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Spiritual Fatherhood, Leiden: Brill, 1990. Volker, W. Praxis und Theoria bei Symeon dem Neuen Theologen, Wiesbaden: 1974.
—Sotiros Vlavianos
T TORQUATO TASSO (1544–1595).╇ The most representative poet, dramatist, and literary theorist of the late Italian Renaissance, Torquato Tasso captured the spirit of the Counter-Â�Reformation in his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Freed), which celebrates Godfrey de Bouillon and the First Crusade. Tasso was born in Sorrento, near Naples, in 1544. At the age of eight he followed into exile his father, the courtier and man-Â�of-Â�letters Bernardo Tasso. He never saw his mother again. Tasso was educated by Jesuits in Naples and at the court of Urbino. He later studied law at the university at Padua, but from an early age he dedicated himself to literature; he composed the poem Rinaldo and early cantos of his epic poem on the Crusades during his teen years. In 1570 he entered the service of Cardinal Louis d’Este in Ferrara. The Catholic victory at Lepanto in that year inspired him to resume work on his epic. In 1572 he became the court poet for Duke Alphonso II at Ferrara, where his predecessors Boiardo and Ariosto had earlier composed romances and epics. Tasso’s pastoral play Aminta was performed there the following summer, a work that would influence Shakespeare, Milton, and additional Renaissance writers. He completed the first version of Gerusalemme liberata shortly thereafter; the poem circulated in manuscript and was partially printed as Goffredo (1580) the year before its full publication. The knight Goffredo battles Muslim defenders in Gerusalemme liberata, and his identification with classical figures such as Agamemnon and Julius Caesar emphasizes his heroic authority. The critic David Quint has analyzed the poem’s political allegory, suggesting that Goffredo “finds himself fighting on two fronts”—he must also maintain unity among his Christian allies. Episodes such as Rinaldo’s defection and Argillano’s rebellion reflect the Catholic Church’s struggle to contain heresy and uphold the true faith. Thus Goffredo is also a pontifical hero, assisted
by apostles and elected by peers under the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Recently the critic Sergio Zatti has argued for a more subversive, imaginative sympathy underneath the poem’s crusading, consolidating veneer. Generally Tasso’s poem represents, along with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a supreme Christian assumption of classical, pagan epic poetry. Although an English Puritan, Milton nevertheless commended the poetic example of his Italian Catholic peer elsewhere in his work. Tasso’s indulgence in court life led to emotional and religious crises in the 1570s and 1580s. An outburst at court in 1577 caused his confinement; he soon escaped, wandered through Italy, and upon his return to Ferrara two years later suffered another breakdown. This time he was hospitalized for several years. Upon his release in 1586 he relocated to the Gonzaga court at Mantua, where he wrote the sordid tragedy Re Torrismondo. After further wandering, he settled in Rome at the Monastery of San Onofrio. Tasso showed late in his career an increased severity, inspired by a persecution complex (he invited inquisitors to censor his earlier writings). He revised his great Christian epic as Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered) (1593). Less lyrical and more militant, this revision has never been as well received by readers. Tasso remained productive till the end of his life, publishing a collection of more than a thousand shorter poems; his treatise Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), an early, influential statement on literary neoclassicism; and a long poem on the opening of Genesis, Il mondo creato. Just before Pope Clement VIII was to bestow Tasso the poet’s laurel, Tasso died at San Onofrio, where a monument to him remains to this day. His restlessness, insanity, and incarceration inspired later Romantic and Symbolist poets such as Byron, Goethe, and Baudelaire. Sigmund Freud discusses him in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Despite this modern emphasis, he
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best symbolizes a renewed Catholicism, whereby epic becomes the mode of the Church Militant. Bibliography For Tasso’s original texts, see Opere, edited by Bruno Maier in five volumes (Milan, 1964). The Gerusalemme liberata was first published in 1581, and today several translations are worth consulting: Jerusalem Delivered, an English prose version translated by Ralph Nash (Detroit, 1987); Jerusalem Delivered, an edition in verse by Anthony╯M. Esolen (Baltimore, 2000); and various editions of the still vigorous Renaissance English version by Edward Fairfax. For Tasso’s literary criticism, see Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory by Lawrence Rhu. Various editions and studies of Tasso’s Aminta are also available. Three collections of proceedings from recent congresses on Tasso (two in 1996, one in 2000) reflect well the present state of criticism. The most useful studies include:
Ardissino, Erminia. Aspra tragedia: poesia e sacro in Torquato Tasso. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1996. Benfell, V. Stanley. “Tasso’s God: Narrative Authority in the Gerusalemme Liberata.” Modern Philology 97, no. 2 (1999): 173–194. Brand, C. P. Torquato Tasso. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Giampieri, Giampiero. Battesimo di Clorinda: eros e religiosità in Torquato Tasso. Fucecchio: Edizioni dell’Erba, 1995. Lewis, C. S. “Tasso.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. 111–120. Looney, Dennis. Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Zatti, Sergio. Ombra del Tasso: epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. ———. The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso. Ed. Dennis Looney. Trans. Dally Hill with Dennis Looney. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
—Brett Foster
TATIAN (120–180/190).╇ Best known for his harmony of the four gospels (Diatessaron), Tatian is usually remembered in the Western Church (but not in all portions of the Eastern Church) as a Christian apologist turned heretic. He was born in Assyria (or Syria) ca. 120 CE and came to Rome, where he adopted the Christian way through reading “barbarian writings” (Jewish Scripture, Or 29:1). There he became a student of Justin Martyr, after whose death (ca. 163–167) he returned to his birthplace in 172 CE. Almost nothing is known of his later life in Syria (d.╯ca. 180–190).
Works Tatian “left a great many books” (Eusebius HE iv.29), of which only one, Oration to the Greeks, is extant. 1. Oration to the Greeks [λόγοϚ πρὸϚ ἝλληναϚ] The date and place of this Greek composition are disputed: (a) in Rome between 150–172, or (b) outside of Rome following Justin’s martyrdom (172–180). The text is preserved in three Greek manuscripts dating from the eleventh to twelfth centuries; critical Greek editions have been produced by Whittaker (1982) and Marcovich (1995), and numerous English translations are available (Whittaker, 1982). Tatian’s writing has been termed sprightly, intemperate, vigorous, satirical, and “a showpiece of Asianic rhetoric” (Edwards, “Tatian,” ABD 6.335). The use of the Greek optative mood, rare in his day, along with rhetorical questions, antitheses, and chiasms, gives the work a literary flavor. The Oration consists of forty-Â�two chapters (under twenty pages in Ryland’s ANF translation) and is a sharp attack on Greek culture, especially its art, philosophy, and literature, even arguing that the Greeks had borrowed from Moses. You Greeks are the sort of people whose words are fluent, but whose ideas are bizarre. (14.1) So it is clear .╯.╯. that Moses is older than heroes, cities, demons. We should believe one who has priority in time in preference to Greeks who learned his doctrines at second hand. (40.1)
Whereas many patristic writers sought some reconciliation between Hellenistic and Christian philosophy, Tatian sees here a battle line. The Oration is also important for revealing many details of ancient culture, such as sculpture. 2. Diatessaron [Gk. τὸ διὰ τεσσάρων εὐαγγέλιον (“the gospel through four”)] Although Tatian is best known for this harmony of the four gospels, no manuscript of the entire text in its original language (Greek or Syriac) has survived. Only one small Greek fragment of fourteen lines from the mid-Â�second century has been uncovered. The Diatessaron was the preferred form of the gospels in the Syrian church until Bishop Rabbula of Edessa (411–435) ordered its replacement by the four gospels of the Syriac Peshitta. Our lack of manuscript evidence is due largely to Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus (423–457), whose visit to Syria in the fifth century resulted in the destruction of all two hundred known manuscripts of the Diatessaron. Nevertheless, it continued to be disseminated as far as China to the east and England (or Iceland) to the west. John Hus apparently utilized it shortly prior to the time of the Reformation. No new instances of this genre (harmonia evangelica) occurred until the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, when many
John Tauler
were produced. In modern times the gospel synopsis has largely replaced the harmony. Modern reconstructions and translations of the Diatessaron are based on translations in other languages (Arabic, Latin, Armenian, Dutch), translations of these translations (Old German, Latin), a commentary on the Diatessaron by Ephraem the Syrian (d. 373), and scattered comments by other authors. The Diatessaron is important for reconstructing the original New Testament text and versions, as well as for understanding the development of the New Testament canon. It also gives insight into the character of early Christianity, particularly ascetic tendencies in Syria as illustrated by the following. •â•‡ Rather than “the women who had followed” Jesus from Galilee (Matt 27:55), the Diatessaron speaks of “the wives of those who had followed” him, perhaps to avoid slander over Jesus traveling with unmarried women. •â•‡ Joseph is not called “Mary’s husband” (Matt 1:16) but simply “a just man.” •â•‡ Anna, the prophetess, was married not seven years (Luke 2:36), but seven days. •â•‡ The allegation that Jesus was a “glutton and winebibber” (Matt 11:19) is omitted. Although some evidence may suggest Tatian’s use of a fifth source (e.g., Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Hebrews), the Diatessaron presents a highly skillful interweaving of the four canonical gospels, eliminating duplications and contradictions and harmonizing parallels. The Diatessaron quotes approximately 75 percent of the total verses in the gospels and omits the remaining 25 percent. Or, put another way, it retains •â•‡ 96 percent of John •â•‡ 76 percent of Matthew •â•‡ 66 percent of Luke •â•‡ 50 percent of Mark An excerpt illustrates this skillful interweaving. and in that hour one of them hasted, and took a sponge, and filled it with that vinegar, and fastened it on a reed (Matt 27:48), and brought it near his mouth (John 19:29) to give him a drink (Matt 27:48, Mark 15:36). And when Jesus had taken that vinegar, he said, Everything is finished (John 19:30). But the rest said, Let be, that we may see whether Elijah cometh to save him (Matt 27:49). And Jesus said, My Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and said, My Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:46). He said that, and bowed his head, and gave up his spirit (John 19:30).
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The following writings of Tatian are mentioned in ancient sources, but no manuscripts have been discovered. 3. On Animals: Mentioned in Oration 15.2, it apparently seeks to show that fallen humanity is not superior to the animals. 4. On Demons: Mentioned in Oration 16; contents unknown. 5. On Perfection According to the Savior: Mentioned with fragmentary citation by Clem. Alex. Miscellanies iii.81, it interprets the antiascetic 1 Cor 7:3–6 in an Encratite direction. 6. Problems: Mentioned by Tatian’s former pupil, Rhodo, according to Eusebius (HE iv.13), apparently to explain problematic passages in scripture. 7. Against Those Who Have Discussed Divine Things (?): Mentioned in Oration 40 as a future work (completed?). 8. Chronicon (?): Mentioned by Rufinus (Church History vi.11), but may have been confused with the chronological chapters of the Oration. Bibliography
Hogg, H. W., trans. “The Diatessaron of Tatian.” 33–138. The Ante-Nicene Fathers: writings of the fathers down to A.D. 325, Vol. 9. 4th ed. Allan Menzies, ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004. Hunt, Emily J. Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian. New York: Routledge, 2003. Petersen, William L. Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship. Vigiliae Christianae Supp. 25. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Ryland, J. E., trans. “Tatian’s Address to the Greeks.” 59–83. The Ante-Nicene Fathers: writings of the fathers down to A.D. 325, Vol. 2. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004. Whittaker, Molly. Tatian, ORATIO AD GRAECOS and Fragments. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
—Kent L. Yinger
JOHN TAULER (ca. 1300–1361).╇ John (or Johannes) Tauler was born around 1300 in Strasbourg, a flourishing medieval city with a population of about twenty thousand. Little is known about Tauler’s family and early life; he appears to have come from a well-Â�to-Â�do background, and it is known that he had at least one sibling, a sister who was a Dominican nun and who was present at his death in 1361 at the Dominican nunnery in Undis. Tauler’s life spanned a turbulent time in Europe, marked by upheaval caused by the Avignon papacy, as well as the destruction of multiple outbreaks of the plague. Tauler was influenced by the greatest of the late medieval German mystics, Meister Eckhart, and it seems likely, although it cannot be known for sure,
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that the two had a personal relationship. It is certainly the case that Eckhart stands as a crucial influence on Tauler’s own brand of mystical theology. Eckhart made a visit to the Dominicans in Strasbourg in 1314, and Tauler began his training in the Order of Preachers shortly after this visit. His training would have been typical for his day, including a thorough knowledge of Peter Lombard’s sentences, through which he became familiar with Augustine. Upon completion of his training, Tauler took up the mantle of the Dominicans, becoming a preacher and preaching regularly in the seven Dominican nunneries and smaller beguines in and around Strasbourg. In addition, Tauler traveled extensively around the Germanic regions of Europe, including journeys to Basle, Nuremburg, and Cologne, and also traveled to Holland, where he likely visited the noted mystic John von Ruusbroec (Ruysbroeck). Tauler devoted himself and his preaching to the mystical nature of Christian life and thought. He was associated with Henry Suso, another disciple of Eckhart’s, and was a prominent leader of a religious movement called “the Friends of God.” This movement, which was centered in Bavaria, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, was made up of persons from all social classes and included burghers, monks, nuns, bankers, and even royalty. The Friends of God sought inner connection with God in the midst of trying social circumstances, and Tauler’s preaching became a key influence on the Friends’ pursuit for this inner sanctuary. Together, Tauler and Suso became two means through which the teaching of Eckhart was disseminated. Given the fact that Eckhart died in Avignon under the charge of heresy, it would have been difficult to pass on his theology in the form that he had developed. Because of this, Tauler and Suso developed Eckhart’s theology in new ways, becoming themselves mystical masters. Tauler’s literary corpus consists of a collection of vernacular sermons, many of which have a practical bent, that focuses him on exposition of everyday morality and purity of heart in the pursuit of mystical communion with God. Indeed, for Tauler, the mystical states themselves are the result of living in moral purity, and as such, are not the highest experiences to be sought. Tauler adopts many of Eckhart’s themes, incorporating them with his own pastoral style. Among these themes are detachment and the birth of the divine in the human soul. In line with the pastoral nature of Tauler’s sermons, he warns against idle speculation, instead focusing his listeners on the nature of Christian living. He especially encourages his listeners to passively accept the will of God and not to resist suffering but to accept it as from the hand of God. The emphasis on the inward soul became an influence on later German theology, perhaps most importantly on Luther’s theological development. The young Luther read Tauler and admired the simplicity of his devotion to God.
Selected Bibliography
Bennett, Charles Wesley. “John Tauler and His Theology.” Methodist Review 51 (January 1869): 45–62. Blamires, David. “Johannes Tauler (Circa 1300–1361).” In German Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation 1280–1580. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997, 281–286. Kieckhefer, Richard. “John Tauler.” In Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984, 259–272. ———. “Role of Christ in Tauler’s Spirituality.” Downside Review 96 (July 1978): 176–191. Ritchie, B. M. “Preaching and Pastoral Care in John Tauler.” In Contemporary Reflections on the Medieval Christian Tradition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974, 3–18. Smith, Cyprian, and Oliver Davies. “The Rhineland Mystics.” In Study of Spirituality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 315–320. Tauler, Johannes. Johannes Tauler: Sermons. Classics of Western Spirituality. Translated by Maria Shrady. New York, Paulist Press, 1985. Tompkins, DeLoss M. “The Friends of God.” Methodist Review 85 (July 1903): 571–578. Winkworth, Susanna, and Charles Kingsley. The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler of Strasbourg: With Twenty-Â�five of His Sermons. Kessinger Publishing, 2006.
—Joel Lawrence
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR (1951–).╇ North American. Recognized as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-Â�speaking world by Baylor University, Barbara Brown Taylor (b. September 21, 1951), an Episcopal priest since 1984, is also an acclaimed lecturer, an author of numerous books, a professor at Piedmont College, and an adjunct professor at Columbia Theological Seminary. Additionally, she is an editor-Â�at-Â�large and frequent contributor to the Christian Century. Reared mostly in the Midwest in a family with two sisters, Taylor experienced a profound awareness of divine presence during her childhood, especially in the midst of nature. It was this experience that formed the foundation for Taylor’s later faith and ministry. Not raised in the church, she did not have the language of faith that church structure provides, but she did have deeply felt and deeply moving experiences about God. A religion major in college (B.A. in religion, Emory University, 1973), she continued to feed her curiosity of God, an interest propelling her to seminary (M.Div., Yale Divinity School, 1976). Eventually she was ordained in the Episcopal Church, drawn, she said, not by the beliefs particularly but by the opportunity to behold others, to spread the love of God. After serving a large urban church in Atlanta, Georgia, for nine years and a rural church in Clarkesville, Georgia, for five, where despite rapid congregational growth
Edward Taylor
she felt “compassion fatigue,” Taylor made the painful but necessary decision to leave parish ministry. The account of this transition is the subject of her most recent book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). Exchanging the pulpit for the classroom, Taylor’s shift exemplifies one of her recurrent themes: ministry occurs in the ordinary, much as God’s grace and presence are revealed in the mundane. Other books—some essays, some sermon collections— include The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Westminster John Knox, 2004), Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cowley, 2000), Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (Cowley, 2000), Home by Another Way (Cowley, 1999), and When God Is Silent (Cowley, 1998). Taylor recently wrote, “Narrative is not a choice I make when it comes time to tell the truth; it is the way that truth comes to me—not in crisp propositions but in messy tales of encounters between people and people, between people and creation, between people and the Divine” (www .barbarabrowntaylor.com). It is this narrative honesty that grasps her readers and invites them also to bask in the messiness of difficult questions, the untidiness and uneasiness of few answers, and the endless journey of faith punctuated with doubt. Her writing often strives to strike a middle chord between progressive and conservative Christians. While she is sometimes frustrated by those who idolize the written Word, she also labors to maintain relevance for orthodox ideas, such as sin, that others may be quick to dismiss. In the midst of the too frequent face-Â�off between Christians over social issues such as homosexuality, Taylor offers her wisdom, the surprising potential of shared ground. “If it is true,” she writes, “that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common?” (Leaving Church, 111). Barbara Brown Taylor’s work should not be missed especially by those who find Joan Chittister, Anne Lamott, or David James Duncan engaging writers offering honest and witty reflections on contemporary spirituality. Bibliography
”The Derelict Cross.” In Best Christian Writing 2002. Ed. John Wilson. HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. “Famine in the Land.” In Just Preaching: Prophetic Voices for Economic Justice. Ed. André Resner Jr. Challace Press, 2003. “Friends of the Disciples.” In Preaching in the New Millennium: Celebrating the Tercentennial of Yale University. Ed. Frederick╯J. Streets. Yale University Press, 2005. “The Snake Savior.” In Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from a “Great Towering Church.” Ed. William H. Willimon. Duke University Press, 2005.
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“The Weekly Wrestling Match.” In What’s the Matter with Preaching Today? Ed. Mike Graves. Westminster John Knox, 2004.
—Kendra Weddle Irons
EDWARD TAYLOR (ca. 1642–1729).╇ Edward Taylor was born the son of a farmer at Leicestershire, England, approximately 1642. While living in England, he worked as a schoolteacher. He sympathized with the Puritans and eventually emigrated to America in 1688, following the Great Ejection. He was admitted to Harvard with advanced standing by Increase Mather, the president of the college, to study divinity, and he graduated in 1671. From the time of his graduation until his death, Taylor served as a conservative Congregational minister in the trading port and frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts. Ministering in a town continually threatened by American Indian aggression, he demonstrated himself to be a man of profound intellect, persistence, rigor, and solemnity. Taylor did not write poetry for publication; rather, he wrote reflectively of spiritual devotion and experience. Consequently, his poems are replete with ideas expressed through typology. His poetry expresses a sincere piousness, experienced through study and meditation on biblical truths. He would customarily write a poem prior to each Lord’s Supper. He would challenge his congregation to “meditate upon the feast: its causes, its nature, its guests, its dainties, its reason and end, and its benefits, etc.” Taylor believed participation in the Lord’s Supper demanded a “gospel wedden garment.” Expounding on Matthew 22:1– 14, he condemned those who deny the “sanctifying work of the spirit upon the soul.” He would develop this theme considerably in response to the liberal church reformer Solomon Stoddard. Taylor also elaborated about consideration of Old Testament rituals in the worship of the Lord, which he believed typified New Testament sacraments. He bound two volumes of his poetry but forbade his family from publishing his works. Deposited in the Yale University library for more than two centuries, his poems were examined by Thomas H. Johnson and published posthumously for the first time in 1939. The publication of Taylor’s poems distinguished him almost immediately not only as the foremost poet of colonial America but also as an outstanding writer within the entirety of American literature. God’s Determinations and Preparatory Meditations are similar to English metaphysical poets. God’s Determinations is a collection of thirty-Â�five poems, which were likely completed in 1680; it was devoted to the doctrine of election in the Christian’s life and also to standards for church membership. His poetry demonstrates thorough agreement with Calvinist beliefs of his time. The poems were structured primarily as six-Â�line stanzas of
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iambic pentameter, with the last two lines as a couplet that provide the meaning. The poetic method in God’s Determinations collaborates to depict those present at the Last Judgment. Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations were written from 1682 to 1725, in the age of Dryden and Pope, and reflect the poet’s own self-Â�examination through psalms or praise written prior to administering the Lord’s Supper to his congregation. Typical of these meditations is the development of an exhortation based on a biblical text. His ministry and poetry were exceptionally inseparable. Taylor should be understood as an American Puritan poet who reflected devotedly on complete mystical union with Christ. His devotional poems were among the earliest written in America. The emotion and imagery reveal the influence of Crashaw, Donne, and Herbert. The extended metaphors of his famous short lyrical poem “Â�Huswifery”—images of spinning and weaving—were a primary feature of his didactic verse (in addition to images of feasts, gardens, metallurgy, warfare, and writing). Taylor wrote deeply affective and intimate poems, such as “Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” in response to personal concerns. He also wrote several verse elegies. Due to the domestic imagery, literary critics frequently compare his poems with those of Anne Bradstreet, but predominant in all Taylor’s poems is a metaphysical quality. His first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, made him the father of eight children. When Elizabeth died in 1689, he remarried in 1692. His second wife, Ruth Wyllys, bore him six children. He died June 24, 1729, at Westfield, Massachusetts. Bibliography The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (New York: Rockland Editions, 1939), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, is a selection of poems, a biographical sketch, critical introduction, and notes. The Poems of Edward Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), edited by Donald E. Stanford, is a comprehensive edition, including the complete text of the “Meditations” (Johnson included only 29 of the entire 217 “Meditations”). The following critical works are important: Norman S. Grabo, Edward Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961); Donald E. Stanford, Edward Taylor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965); and William J. Scheik, The Will and the Word: The Poetry of Edward Taylor (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974). —Ron J. Bigalke Jr. JEREMY TAYLOR (1613–1667).╇ British. Jeremy Taylor was a high church theologian and devotional writer whose works influenced generations of Christians. Born on August 15, 1613, in Cambridge, England, Taylor was educated at the Perse Grammar School in Cambridge, attended
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, and later was named a fellow of Caius College. Ordained in 1633, Taylor gained the favor of the prominent archbishop William Laud after lecturing at St. Paul’s in London. Under Laud’s patronage, Taylor’s influence steadily increased. In 1635, he became a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and served as chaplain to Laud and King Charles╯I. In March 1638, Taylor was named rector at Uppingham in the diocese of London. Taylor’s high church views led some to believe that he harbored Roman Catholic sympathies. He denied these charges and famously preached, at Laud’s request, a Gunpowder Plot sermon on November 5, 1638. Taylor’s politically charged sermon linked the Roman Catholics to treason and labeled recusants “mischievous” to the kingdom. He married Phoebe Landisdale on May 27, 1639. As chaplain to Charles, Taylor was with the Royalist Army during the English Civil War and imprisoned in 1645 (the same year that Laud was executed). Taylor found relief from the political and religious difficulties that entangled him in England by moving to Wales. As private chaplain to Richard Vaughan, second Earl of Carbery, Taylor wrote a series of influential theological and devotional treatises at Golden Grove. The first, The Liberty of Prophesying, is widely regarded as Taylor’s most important theological work. Read in the light of the English Civil War, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647) is a plea for toleration and a more liberal stance on religious differences. Religion was the source of violent conflict in England, and Taylor’s efforts to ground Christian faith on reason and the teachings of the creed proved challenging, yet popular. After publishing The Great Exemplar (1649), a practical work based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, Taylor wrote two of his most well-Â�known books: The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying (1651). These volumes remain two of the most popular theological works of the period. In Holy Living, Taylor’s instructions on the life of sobriety, justice, and true religion call Christians to pursue prayer, devotion, and repentance as a way of life. His discussion of the use of time inspired the founders of the Methodist movement, John and Charles Wesley, to attend to the activities of each hour of the day. In Holy Dying, a work that intimates the passing of Taylor’s wife (“both your Lordship and my self have lately seen and felt such sorrows of death”), Taylor explains that “it is a great art to die well .╯.╯. and he that prepares not for death before his last sickness, is like him that begins to study philosophy when he is going to dispute publicly in the faculty” (5, 6). Taylor’s rejection of deathbed repentance caused particular controversy in one of his most notorious works, Unum Necessarium (1655), which departed from traditional Christian teachings on original sin and articulated Pelagian views of the human will.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Restoration led to renewed opportunities for Taylor. He was consecrated Bishop of Down and Connor on January 27, 1661, and named vice-Â�chancellor of the University of Dublin. He also served as the administrator of the small diocese of Dromore. During the final years of his life, Taylor remained a prolific writer, continuing to attack controversial theological topics. He wrote extensively on the importance of the sacraments in The Worthy Communicant (1660), on moral theology in Doctor Dubitantium, of the Rule of Conscience (1660), and against both Roman Catholics and Presbyterians in A Dissuasive from Popery (1664). Taylor died in Lisburn, Ireland, on August 13, 1667. Numerous biographies of Taylor have appeared through the years, beginning with George Rust’s respected funeral sermon (reprinted in the Heber-Â�Eden edition of Taylor’s works). Other distinguished commentators on Taylor’s writings include S. T. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, and Farrar in the nineteenth century. While Taylor’s religious discipline and Carolinian prose style may be inaccessible to some twenty-Â�first-Â�century readers, his theology and practical reflections on the holy life will remain relevant for years to come. Bibliography Primary Literature
Taylor, Jeremy. Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ed. P. G. Stanwood. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. ———. Jeremy Taylor: Selected Works. Ed. Thomas K. Carroll. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1990. ———. The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, D.D. with a Life of the Author. Ed. Reginald Heber and Charles Page Eden. 10 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longmans, Roberts and Green, 1847–1852.
Secondary Literature
Boone-�Porter, Harry. Jeremy Taylor, Liturgist. London: SPCK, 1979. Gathorne-�Hardy, Robert. A Bibliography of the Writings of Jeremy Taylor to 1700. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1971. Huntley, Frank L. Jeremy Taylor and the Great Rebellion: A Study of His Mind and Temper in Controversy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. McAdoo, H. R. The Eucharistic Theology of Jeremy Taylor Today. Norwich: Canterbury, 1988. Stranks, Charles J. The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor. London: SPCK, 1952.
—Jeffrey W. Barbeau
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN (1881–1955).╇ Teilhard’s training as a Jesuit provided him with the thoughtful stimulation to pursue his devotion both to scientific investigation and to cultivation of a deep life of prayer. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born on May 1, 1881, to
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Emmanuel and Berthe-Â�Adele Teilhard de Chardin. While both of his parents were of distinguished lineages, it is noteworthy that his mother was the great-Â�grandniece of Voltaire. When Teilhard entered Notre Dame de Mongre thirty miles north of Lyons, at twelve years of age, his quiet and diligent nature was already well formed. During his years at boarding school, he developed an appreciation for Catholic mysticism largely influenced by his reading of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. He entered the Society of Jesus novitiate in 1899. There he further developed an ascetic piety and was encouraged by his superiors to pursue science as a legitimate route to drawing nearer to God. In 1905 he was sent to do his teaching internship at the College of St. Francis in Cairo, Egypt. For the next three years Teilhard’s scientific inclinations were developed through adventures into Cairo’s countryside collecting fossils from Egypt’s past. He corresponded with other scientists, resulting in his first published article, “A Week in Fayoum,” in 1907. Between 1912 and 1915 Teilhard continued his studies in paleontology. In addition, he joined accomplished paleontologists Father Hugo Obermaier, Jean Boussac, and Abbé Breuil in their excavations in the caves of southern France. With the outbreak of World War I, Teilhard began his assignment in the infantry of the French Army as a stretcher bearer with the North African Zouaves in January 1915. For nearly four years Teilhard’s regiment fought in bloody trench battles experiencing some of the most brutal fighting at the Marne and Epres in 1915, Nieuport in 1916, Verdun in 1917, and Chateau Thierry in 1918. Teilhard himself was active in every engagement, for which he eventually was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. Teilhard took his final vows in the Society of Jesus in May 1918. After the war, Teilhard returned to Jersey for a recuperative period in 1919, became a professor of geology in 1920 at the Catholic Institute of Paris, and then completed his doctoral degree in geology at the Sorbonne in 1922. During this time Teilhard wrote his profoundly prayerful piece entitled The Spiritual Power of Matter. The Jesuit Superior encouraged Teilhard to continue his studies in natural science, so on April 1, 1923, Teilhard set sail for geological expeditions in China. In 1930 at ChouÂ� koutien, Teilhard played a major role in the discovery of Sinanthropus, better known as “Peking Man,” one of the earliest hominids. Teilhard wrote The Divine Milieu; this mystical treatise was dedicated to articulating his understanding of evolution and human nature. As a result of his writings and extensive fieldwork, Teilhard became recognized as one of the world’s foremost geologists. In The Phenomenon of Man, written in May 1940, he creatively situates the emergence of mankind as the unifying premise of the evolutionary process. If the cosmic
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process has meaning, direction, a goal, it must have a definite terminus toward which it is advancing. Such a synthesis can take place only via an intelligent designer, around which the consciousness of the whole humanity will finally crystallize. In other words, the evolutionary lines must peak; when they do they will converge in Christ. Christ is the meeting point of the humanity and divinity, of the natural and supernatural, and of science and revelation. This pinnacle of evolution Teilhard calls the “Omega Point.” The Phenomenon of Man’s presentation of the fourfold sequence of the creation process exemplifies an academic integration of theology and science. Because much of Teilhard’s research and writing is investigative and speculative, the church has been wary of how it might be misused by others, particularly in regard to its theological implications. Therefore the Vatican issued a monitum, or warning, on Teilhard’s work. The monitum is neither a condemnation nor an act of censorship; rather, it warns against an uncritical acceptance by any reader of the ideas being considered. In December 1951 he accepted a research position as a fellow of the Wenner-Â�Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955. Bibliography Among Teilhard’s works are:
The Phenomenon of Man, Harper and Row, 1959. The Divine Milieu, Harper and Row, 1960. Letters from a Traveler, Harper and Row, 1962. Hymn of the Universe, Harper and Row, 1965. Christianity and Evolution, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.
Works on Teilhard:
Henri de Lubac, Teilhard De Chardin: The Man and His Meaning, New American Library, 1967. Ursula King, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin, Orbis, 1998. Robert Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1967.
—Biff Rocha
CORRIE TEN BOOM (1892–1983).╇ Cornelia Ten Boom was born in a Dutch Reformed home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1892. Trained as an apprentice, in 1922 she became the first female watchmaker licensed in the Netherlands. In 1923 she was one of the organizers of the first girls’ club, later known as the Triangle Club. It was banned in 1940 when the Nazis invaded Holland. In 1942, her family had joined the Dutch underground, hiding refugees and rescuing many Jews from the Nazis. The Ten Boom family was arrested in February 1944 and sent to various concentration camps and ultimately to Ravensbrück camp, where Corrie’s sister Betsie died. Corrie was
released in December 1944 through a clerical error, while other women her age were soon killed. Having a sense of God’s sovereign hand in her life, following World War II, Corrie returned to Holland, establishing rehabilitation centers, speaking itinerantly in more than sixty countries, and writing numerous books. Ten Boom is best known for her book The Hiding Place (1971), in which she told the story of her family hiding Jews during World War II. Considered among the one hundred Christian books that most influenced the twentieth century, the book was produced as a film of the same name by World Wide Pictures in 1975. From the royalties, she established Christians Incorporated, supporting multiracial missionaries. Her writing and speaking emphasized the gospel, especially forgiveness. In Tramp for the Lord (1974), she shares the incident of being approached by one of the former Ravensbrück camp guards after she had spoken in Germany in 1947. Though hesitant to forgive him, through prayer she found the grace to do so. She also ministered to those abused by the Nazis, bringing emotional healing through the love of Christ. Honored by the State of Israel for aiding Jewish people, Ten Boom was proclaimed a member of the Righteous among the Nations in December 1967 and was invited to plant a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles at the Yad Vashem, near Jerusalem. She was also knighted by the Queen of Holland in recognition of her work during the war. Her writings included daily devotionals, such as Each New Day (1977) and This Day Is the Lord’s (1979), with brief reflections, guidance, scripture readings, and prayers. Historical and biographical works include Father Ten Boom, God’s Man (1978) and In My Father’s House: The Years before the Hiding Place (1976), which focuses on the years leading up to World War II and the events of The Hiding Place. She writes about German prisons and prisoners in A Prisoner and Yet (1954) and Corrie Ten Boom’s Prison Letters (1975). In her writings, she shares personal experiences, relating them to spiritual matters and deeper Christian living themes, such as abiding in Christ, victorious Christian living, and dying to self. In Defeated Enemies (1970), out of the depth of her own spiritual experiences, Ten Boom deals with harassment by Satan and demonic forces, sharing that the victory has been already won and the enemy has been defeated in God’s timeless eternity. Not Good If Detached (1957) presents the secret of “abiding in Christ” as discovered in the difficulties of life, in total dependence on him, and in a consistent daily walk. Other writings of Ten Boom include: Amazing Love (1959), Plenty for Everyone (1967), Marching Orders for the End Battle (1969), He Sets the Captives Free (1977), He
Teresa of Avila
Cares, He Comforts (1977), Prayers and Promises for Every Day (1977), Don’t Wrestle, Just Nestle, Not I, But Christ, Jesus Is Victor, Common Sense Not Needed, and Clippings from My Notebook (1982), a collections of sayings and writings. She died in the United States on April 15, 1983, on her ninety-Â�first birthday. —Paul King TERESA OF AVILA (1515–1582).╇ In an age of reformation, Teresa of Avila worked from within the Catholic Church as a great reformer and mystic who would eventually be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was born in Avila, Spain, on March 28, 1515, to a pious father, Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda and his second wife, Beatirz. Teresa was a beautiful and outgoing child. She grew into a charming, witty, and affectionate young lady. As she began her teen years Teresa took an interest in boys, read romance novels, and chatted with girlfriends. She became convinced that she was a horrible sinner. Amid the normal drama of adolescence, her mother died. Depressed and lonely, Teresa appealed to the Virgin Mary to be a mother to her. Prudently, seeing his daughter’s need of female guidance, her father entrusted her to the care of the Augustinian nuns in 1531. Discerning she had a vocation, Teresa entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in Avila on November 2, 1535. Her early years were marked by ill health; the substandard medical treatments that she received only worsened her condition. She once fell into a coma so acute that she was thought to be dead. Her physical infirmities were accompanied by internal doubts. By practicing contemplative prayer Teresa entered into a mystical relationship with Christ. Those around her observed that at times Teresa would receive visions, enter spiritual ecstasy, or begin to levitate. Teresa’s great work of reform began with herself. She made a vow always to follow her community’s rule to the best of her ability. Her vivid sense of the presence of God drew other women to her life. Thus, from 1560 until her death, Teresa struggled to reform monasticism by developing the Discalced or shoeless Carmelites. To be shoeless symbolized identification with the poor, an adoption of a simple life of humility and service. In 1562 she opened a monastery in Avila, over much opposition in the town and from the older monastery. She met another Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, whom she convinced to extend the reforming spirit to the male side of the Carmelite Order. The night Teresa died, the church switched the calendar by which civilization records time from the ancient Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian calendar; thus the date of her death is recorded as either October 4 or 15,
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1582. Pope Paul V declared her blessed on April 24, 1614, and in 1622 Pope Gregory XV canonized Teresa a Saint. Theresian Mysticism is known for its sense of reality and for its passion for Christ. Teresa wrote and revised her autobiography in reluctant obedience to her confessor. Her autobiography covers her life from her childhood until 1562, just twenty years before her death. It is divided into three sections with the first discussing her youth, the second dealing with prayer, and the third section giving examples of her many mystical experiences. When explaining mystical prayer, Teresa depicts different stages of prayer in metaphorical terms of water to cultivate a garden. In 1566 she penned Meditations on the Canticle, in which she employs the Song of Songs as a basic text for her own spiritual development. She demonstrates that sexual language is appropriate for explaining the love between the soul and Christ, since the sexual union in marriage is an exchange of persons and as a sacrament is a reenactment of a sacred covenant. Her explanation of the soul’s intimate union with God served as the inspiration for Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa incorporating one of her visions where a seraphim drove a fiery golden lance into her heart. Teresa wrote Way of Perfection around 1565 as a model for her nuns of how inward change is expressed outwardly in practical acts of love and service. Developing her notion of the practice of prayer, Teresa uses the Our Father as a vehicle for teaching about mental prayer. Written in 1577, her Interior Castle centers around a dominant metaphor of the Christian soul as a crystal palace made radiantly beautiful by the indwelling Trinity at its center. Through contemplative prayer one gets the castle in order, moving one room at a time toward the innermost chamber. But the experience of drawing closer to God is not limited to self-Â�knowledge; rather, deeper intimacy provokes love for others. Bibliography Teresa’s writings in English translation go by many different titles. These are her major works:
The Book of My Life (autobiography), translated by Mirabai Starr, New Seeds Books, 2007. Book of the Foundations, translated by John Dalton, Baker, 1893. Perfection, edited by Henry L. Carrigan, Paraclete Press, 2000. Way of Interior Castle, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, Paulist Press, 1979.
Works on Teresa:
Dubay, Thomas, Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel, On Prayer, Ignatius Press, 1989. du Boulay, Shirley, Teresa of Avila: An Extraordinary Life, Blue Bridge, 2004. Weber, Alison, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, Princeton University Press, 1996.
—Biff Rocha
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Tertullian
TERTULLIAN (ca. 150–unknown).╇ Tertullian was born Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus to a Roman centurion sometime in the mid-Â�second century, and the circumstances revolving around his death are unknown. He was born in Carthage, in northern Africa, and scholars list his probable dates of birth ranging from AD 145 to AD 160. He was born into a family of some standing, his father being a Roman centurion and able to educate his children, perhaps even in Rome. Tertullian knew Latin, Greek, classical rhetoric, and Roman law, and evidence seems to suggest that he practiced law in some degree. He grew up pagan, becoming a Christian in his late thirties (AD 185–195), and although theories abound as to his conversion—such as being moved by witnessing public executions of Christians—his works do not reveal what led him to Christianity. Immediately after converting, though, he began putting his rhetorical skills toward writing Christian works, mostly persuasive in nature, and by AD 197, Tertullian had written five books, among them To the Martyrs, To the Heathen, and Apologeticus. As a prolific writer of approximately forty-Â�three works (thirty-Â�one extant and all in Latin), Tertullian covered a wide range of religious topics. Heavily influencing later Christian writers, including Jerome and St. Augustine of Hippo, and recognized as the first Christian writer to write in Latin instead of solely in Greek, he is often called the Father of Latin theology. Characteristics of his writings include the use of classical rhetorical elements and style of the day, as well as sarcasm and a sharp wit. His strong language reveals his intense feelings about numerous theological and social issues. Tertullian often wrote apologetics in defense of beliefs (Christianity and later Montanism). Although he never developed a systematic theology, he wrote many doctrinal works, including On the Flesh of Christ, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, On the Soul, and Against Praxeas. His best-Â�known work countering heresies and sects threatening to split the church is On Prescription of Heretics, in which he traces Christian beliefs from the apostles through bishops as proof of their validity and charges heretics with misusing scripture to support their false beliefs. However, perhaps the most significant aspect of this work is that Tertullian adopts the Roman legal system’s practice of prescription, which disallows the opposition from presenting their case, because heretics reject scripture and thus scripture applies only to Christians. Two of his early works—To the Heathen and Apologeticus—as well as a later work—Against Praxeas—are three of Tertullian’s most famous and enduring works. To the Heathen (Ad Nationes), in two volumes, refutes charges of incest, infanticide, and disloyalty to the emperor that were being made against Christians—along with charges of
causing natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. He also returns some of the same charges to the pagans by claiming that they actually rebelled against their emperors and had been known to kill their young children by exposing them to the elements. Apologeticus is similar to Ad Nationes but is addressed to Roman officials; thus the tone is more formal, reflecting the reserved demeanor appropriate for his intended audience. Writing in the style of the Greek apologies and classical rhetoric, Tertullian appeals to reason by pointing out the lack of witnesses because there was no wrongdoing to witness. He argues for changing the law and not mistreating Christians and remarks that persecution strengthens Christianity. He then preÂ� sents a logical and well-Â�reasoned defense of the faith and explains Christian practices, such as prayer and charity. Against Praxeas counters an anti-Â�Trinitarian belief that God and the Son are the same and that God himself was the Incarnation. Some scholars question whether Praxeas was a person, which is implied by Tertullian’s treatise, or if the name reflects some segment of the Catholic Church at the time. Several works are on what Tertullian considered proper Christian behavior. Works on these subjects include On Idolatry, On Veiling Virgins, On the Adornment of Women, On Patience, On Prayer, On Modesty, and On Repentance. Between AD 198 and 202 he wrote twelve works, including To His Wife (which is against women remarrying), On Idolatry, Against Marcion, and Against the Jews. Holding to asceticism, he argued for women to dress modestly, wear veils, and not adorn themselves, and for these and similar stances as well as statements about women (e.g., the woman Eve opened the way for Satan to cause man to fall) have earned him the reputation of a misogynist. He saw theatrical performances and Roman games as violent, immoral, and pagan and argued for Christians not to participate in these and similar activities. In 202, Emperor Severus announced an edict against becoming a Christian. In the five years following this, Tertullian became attracted to the Montanists, especially to their morality, asceticism, and spiritual focus. Rather strict and unbending in his views of proper behavior, he was concerned about what he viewed as the increasing relaxation of behavior and morals in the Roman Church and increasing interest in political aspects. Tertullian appeared to try to merge Montanist views—including accepting new prophecies, which the Catholic Church opposed—with Christian views and thus produced several works, including On Ecstasy (seven volumes about Montanism), On the Hope of the Faithful, On Paradise, and Exhortation to Chastity. However, the theological gulf between Catholicism and Montanism widened, which resulted in his siding with Montanists on believing some
Thérèse of Lisieux
sins could not be forgiven. Tertullian left the church (or was asked to leave) sometime between 207 and 212 with other Montanists and began writing against Catholics. Between 208 and 213 he wrote a new book against Marcion, as well as Against the Followers of Apelle (a Marcionite), On the Cloak (he wore cloaks, not togas), On Flight in Persecution, On the Flesh of Christ, On the Testimony of the Soul, On the Resurrection, To Scapula (an apology), and Scorpiace. Using the metaphor of a scorpion, this last book warned people against the sting of heresy. Bibliography
Bettenson, Henry, ed. Documents of the Christian Church. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Chapman, John. “Tertullian.” New Advent: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. CD-ROM. Christian Classics Ethereal Library http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/anf03.iv.ii.html?highlight=biography#highlight. Ehrman, Bart. After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. A History of Early Christian Literature by Edgar J Goodspeed. McGrath, Alister, ed. The Christian Theology Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1995. “Rhetoric and Tertullian’s De virginibus velandis” Vigiliae christianae by Geoffrey D. Dunn. “The Tertullian Project,” http://www.tertullian.org.
—Linda Gray
THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX (1873–1897). Thérèse of Lisieux was born in Alençon in Normandy, France, in 1873 and died in Lisieux in 1897. She was a Carmelite nun who was canonized a saint in 1925, only twenty-Â�eight years after her death. Originally named Marie-Â�Françoise-Â�Thérèse Martin, she was the last of nine children born to Louis Martin and Zélie Martin, a watchmaker and a lacemaker who were highly esteemed for their piety. Of the five Martin children to survive infancy, all were daughters who eventually entered the religious life, including four at the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Though the sheltered darling of the family, her father’s “little Queen,” Thérèse suffered, first at the age of four from the death of her mother and, later, from the loss of her beloved older sister Pauline, whom she considered a second mother, when that sister left home to enter the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Suddenly stricken with a mysterious illness and bedridden for several weeks, she reports that her recovery began when she saw a statue of Mary smile. Much of Thérèse’s education was acquired at home, with her sisters as her tutors, as she did not thrive in the local Benedictine school, which she attended for about five years. She was also overly sensitive and given to
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false guilt (“scruples”) until she experienced a “conversion” at the age of thirteen in which she instantaneously overcame her childish foibles and began making remarkable progress on her journey to sanctity. Determined to enter the Carmelite convent at Lisieux by the age of fifteen, she traveled to Rome with her father, where she boldly broke protocol to fall at Pope Leo XIII’s feet, her hands upon his knees, to implore him to grant her desire to enter the convent. In spite of an initial refusal on the part of local ecclesial authorities, she was eventually allowed to enter the convent not long before her sixteenth birthday. Known also as the Little Flower and as Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, Thérèse is loved for her writings, including letters, poems, prayers, plays, and particularly an autobiography, originally published as L’histoire d’un âme (The Story of a Soul) in 1898. One of the most popular of all spiritual autobiographies, it was written at the direction of the convent superior. Her letters were written primarily to members of her family, while her plays were written for convent celebrations. Although her writing is considered overly sentimental by some, her descriptions of convent life are realistic portrayals of the everyday trials and conflicts inevitable in such a confined society. Her writings’ appeal lies in their high readability, their portrayal of Catholic piety in the nineteenth century, and their theological content. Thérèse advocates a spirituality known as the “Little Way,” by which, through love, surrender, trust, and joyful obedience in the small, seemingly trivial things, sanctity becomes accessible to the many, not just to the religious elite. She advocates “spiritual childhood,” which she herself exemplified by offering herself to the Child Jesus as a toy ball totally at his disposal. Rather than being legalistically scrupulous, she did not worry when she fell asleep during her prayers as she envisioned herself falling in the arms of the heavenly Father who understood her weaknesses. She held tenaciously to her faith in the midst of the doubts that shrouded the last years of her life as she faced the ravages of tuberculosis in the midst of the harsh privations of convent life. She is remembered by the Catholic faithful for her promise that after her death she would let fall “a shower of roses” from heaven. Thérèse was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997, one of only three women to date to be granted that title. She, along with Joan of Arc, is a patron saint of France, and, along with Francis Xavier, patron saint of missionaries. Bibliography Works by Thérèse of Lisieux
General Correspondence. Edited by John Clarke. 2 vols. (Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1982).
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Thomas à Kempis
Besides holding to the virtues esteemed by the entire community, monks usually taught, trained novices, copied and translated books for use in the community and beyond, and lived a more contemplative life. As a cleric, Thomas made copies of the Bible and altar books, wrote treatises on living virtuously, lived a cloistered and contemplative life, and served as the chronicler for Mount St. Agnes until shortly before his death in 1471. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were plagued Other Works by conflict in the Catholic Church—with rival popes in Ahern, Patrick V., Maurice Bellière, and Thérèse of Lisieux. Rome and Avignon as well as clergy who were not servMaurice and Thérèse: The Story of a Love (Doubleday, 1998). ing out of faith but rather out of greed and opportunity. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Some families paid for relatives to be given clergy status Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity (Ignatius Press, 1992). and a parish, and many clergy were guilty of misconduct. Johnson, Vernon. Spiritual Childhood: A Study of St. Teresa’s Also, an extremely scholastic movement had emerged Teaching (Sheed and Ward, 1954). —Sally Jo Shelton that argued over theological minutiae, leaving the average layperson of the time disenchanted by religion and uninvolved in the church. It was a reaction to such ecclesiastical corruption and religiosity that prompted Brethren and THOMAS À KEMPIS (ca. 1379–1471).╇ Thomas à monks like Thomas à Kempis to seek a more simplistic Kempis (his surname was Haemerken) was born in Kem- life honoring God and imitating Christ’s life on earth; pen in the Netherlands in 1379 or 1380. His mother was they recognized how far removed the church was from a teacher and his father may have worked with metal, a the early church. His writings reflect his focus on Jesus, common profession in Kempen and one fitting a family especially Christ’s love, humility, and teaching; His sufferwith the last name of “little hammer.” Thomas’s brother, ing on the Cross; and the mystery of redemption. These John, was fourteen years older and already had joined a themes appear throughout Thomas’s abundant writings small group of monks (known as “Brothers of the Com- and most certainly in his most famous literary work, The mon Life” and also called “The New Devotion”) when Imitation of Christ. Although some scholars have questioned Thomas à Thomas was sent to a Brethren school in nearby Deventer, where his older brother had been. There he studied under Kempis as the author of Imitation of Christ, he is generFlorentius Radewyn—the successor to founder Gerard ally considered the one who wrote this classic work. The Groote and one of the leaders of the movement. Thomas book first appeared in 1418 but without an author being learned Latin and the Bible, becoming an accomplished credited. In 1441, the book was reissued along with nine copyist. At the age of twenty, he went to live with John at treatises, this time with Thomas’s signature. After the the Brothers’ monastery (by then associated with Augus- invention of movable type and the printing press in the tinians) at Mount St. Agnes, near Zwolle, and began a six-Â� mid-Â�fifteenth century, the first printed version of the book year novitiate, joined the order, and studied another eight came out in 1472 in Augsburg. From its first appearance, the book was a success. years to become a priest. The Imitation of Christ is composed of four books, each Not all of the people following the Brothers of the Comhighlighting a particular theme. Book 1 encourages the mon Life lived in a cloistered community; many lived in their own housing and did not take vows. But in either reader to move away from valuing worldly interests and situation, they rejected worldly possessions, worked for a instead to overcome selfish desires and learn how to be living, pooled their earnings, and accepted a life of poverty humble. Getting to know one’s true being is a step in realand chastity. A primary aim was to live virtuous lives like izing that God’s grace, not human wisdom, transforms a those of first-Â�century Christians as much as possible for person’s life and that recognizing one’s sins begins a protheir fourteenth-Â�and fifteenth-Â�century lives. The Brothers cess of learning about Christ’s redemptive power. Book of the Common Life sought to combine scholarship and 2 reveals the benefits of Christian values put forth in the devotion and thus established schools that became well Bible, such as the higher value of eternal things and not respected throughout what is now Holland and Germany. judging others. He explains that Christ is the only way to For Thomas à Kempis, life at Mount St. Agnes monas- God and that being reunited with God is worth the efforts tery, where he lived for the remaining seventy-Â�one years to overcome selfish and worldly ways. Book 3 provides of his life, was one of living out the goals of the Brethren. advice on how to free oneself from the world’s snares and The Poetry of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1996). The Prayers of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: The Act of Oblation. Edited by Guy Gaucher, and Aletheia Kane (ICS Publications, 1997). St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations. Translated by John Clarke (ICS Publications, 1977). The Story of a Soul: A New Translation. Edited by Robert J. Edmonson. Living Library (Paraclete Press, 2006).
R. S. Thomas
how to learn to cultivate a more virtuous way of living. In this longest section of the book, Thomas also cautions the Christian against thinking that following Christ exempts the follower from pitfalls and discouragements. Book 4 focuses on Holy Communion as the most important sacrament, as a continual reminder of Christ’s sacrifice, and as an act of worship. Thomas à Kempis also wrote hymns, biographies (of Gerard Groote and Florentius Radewyn), spiritual treatises (e.g., On True Compunction of Heart, On Solitude and Silence, On the Discipline of the Cloister, De Fideli Dispensatore), and sermons and meditations (e.g., The Incarnation and Life of Our Lord, Sermons to Novices, Prayer and Meditations on the Life of Christ). Other works include Spiritual Exercises, The Garden of Roses, The Elevation of the Mind, and The Soliloquy of the Soul. At Thomas à Kempis’s death, he was buried in the eastern cloister of Mount St. Agnes, where he had spent more than seventy years. During the Reformation, the monastery was destroyed, and approximately 200 years later, his body was located and moved to St. Michael’s Church in nearby Zwolle, Holland. —Linda Gray R. S. THOMAS (1913–2000).╇ Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff, Wales, on March 29, 1913, and graduated from the University of Wales in 1935. He was ordained in the Church of Wales in 1937 and, in 1942, became rector of the parish of Manafon in Montgomeryshire (Powys). His first publication, The Stones of the Field (1946), used the symbol of the country peasant toiling in an unforgiving landscape to explore how modern people struggle to believe in God’s goodness. The poet-Â�priest’s challenge of mediating the church’s teachings to his workaday congregation also surfaced in Thomas’s second volume of verse, An Acre of Land (1952). A satirical poem for four voices, The Minister (1953), was heard on the BBC Welsh Home Service in May 1952. Here Thomas introduced his readers to the trials and tribulations of a Nonconformist pastor chosen to lead a chapel in the Welsh hills; this poem questioned the Free Church’s approach to nature and lamented religion’s trivialization. Three years later Thomas released Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems 1942–1954 (1955), which featured selections from his previous volumes as well as nineteen new poems, and the original work upheld the troubling notion that God coagulates life’s light and dark impulses within Godself. At this early stage in his career, Thomas believed he had failed in his attempt to articulate the religious sense in the quotidian; this said, landscape commanded his spiritual attention and he promoted himself as an avowedly Welsh theologian-Â�in-Â�verse.
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Thirty-Â�six new poems appeared in Poetry for Supper (1958), which captured Thomas’s struggle to speak about God meaningfully and to understand his vocational formation clearly. A new theme, divine absence or hiddenness, emerged in these writings also. Two years after the Royal Society of Literature presented Thomas with the 1959 Heinemann Award, Tares (1961) came out, and this collection described the gratuitous suffering(s) in country life that Thomas longed to address; the harsh way of life lived by Iago Prytherch, his fictional Welsh farmer, posed fresh challenges to the poet in this volume. Thomas’s indebtedness to his imagined peasant appeared in The Bread of Truth (1963) also. Here, as elsewhere, the poet’s main struggle involved mediating the religious sense, or, finding an instructive as well as sincere vocabulary of faith for common people, and he considered this struggle both priestly and poetic. Thomas was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1964. Thirty-Â�five new poems then appeared in Pietà (1966), which tackled irony in relation to God and divine providence, followed one year later by the move to become vicar of Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron, on the tip of the Llyn Peninsula. Not That He Brought Flowers (1968) upheld a questioning faith’s value, even as it underlined the experience of having one’s doubts and inquiries met with divine silence. The Welsh Arts Council awarded Thomas its Major Prize for contributions to the literature of Wales in the same year. The 1970s witnessed considerable productivity on Thomas’s part. He published H’m (1972), Young and Old (1972), Selected Poems: 1946–1968 (1973), What Is a Welshman? (1974), Laboratories of the Spirit (1975), Abercuawg (1976), The Way of It (1977), and Frequencies (1978). These poems, for children as well as adults, addressed such diverse topics as nationalism and dislike of the English; the need to ground faith in everyday living; the problem of pain and suffering; the task of waiting on God; the quest for the deus absconditus and the value of the via negativa in theology as well as spirituality. Thomas retired from the priesthood in 1978. Additional collections appeared in the next twenty years, volumes such as Between Here and Now (1981); Later Poems: 1972–1982 (1983); Ingrowing Thoughts (1985); Neb (1985), an autobiography written in Welsh and in the third person; Experimenting with an Amen (1986); Welsh Airs (1987); The Echoes Return Slow (1988); Counterpoint (1990); Mass for Hard Times (1992); No Truce with the Furies (1995); and a collection of prose writings, Autobiographies (1997). A final volume, Residues (2002), appeared posthumously. Such prolific work, which moved away from pastoral concerns and into new metaphysical territory, invited comparisons between Thomas and George Herbert, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. In 1996, Thomas was nominated for the Nobel Prize for
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Francis Thompson
Literature. He died on September 25, 2000. A recent biographer, drawing on anecdotes provided by the poet’s son, Gwydion, recognizes Thomas’s function as the troubling conscience of a nation, but the biography often problematizes his personality, seeing him as misanthropic. Bibliography
Anstey, Sandra, editor. Critical Writings on R. S. Thomas. BridgÂ� end: Poetry Wales Press, 1982. Davies, Damian Walford, editor. Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R. S. Thomas. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. Dyson, A. E. Yeats, Eliot and R. S. Thomas: Riding the Echo. London: Macmillan, 1981. McGill, William J. Poets’ Meeting: George Herbert, R. S. Thomas, and the Argument with God. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Merchant, W. Moelwyn. R. S. Thomas. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979. Morgan, Barry. Strangely Orthodox: R. S. Thomas and His Poetry of Faith. Ceredigion, Wales: Gomer Press, 2006. Phillips, D. Z. R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God: Meaning and Mediation in the Poetry of R. S. Thomas. London: Macmillan, 1986. Rogers, Byron. The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.╯S. Thomas. London: Aurum Press, 2006.
—Darren J. N. Middleton
FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859–1907).╇ Francis Thompson was born December 18, 1859, in a prosperous neighborhood in Preston, Lancashire, into a devout Catholic family. He died November 13, 1907, in London, probably from consumption or beriÂ�beri, complicated by a long struggle with opium addiction. At his death he weighed a scant seventy pounds, and fewer than a dozen mourners attended his burial service. Thompson’s life was dictated by a series of disappointments, the greatest of which, in his own mind, was his failure to live up to his poetic potential. He had a personality—dreamy, absentminded, with no sense of time and place—ill-Â�equipped to deal with middle-Â�class Victorian life. His indolence resulted in failure after seven years studying to become a priest, followed by six years of medical study, ending with an addiction to opium and three unsuccessful attempts at the medical exams. Thompson lived for the next three years on the streets of London, becoming destitute, spending nights hailing cabs and selling matches, sleeping in homeless shelters or in the open. He was helped for a short time by a kind shoemaker, and later, like De Quincey, he was rescued by a young prostitute who cared for him for several months before the event that changed his life. A year earlier Thompson had sent several manuscripts to Wilfrid Meynell, editor of Merry England. The
manuscripts were mislaid until, upon rediscovering them, Meynell attempted to contact Thompson. By that time, Thompson had abandoned the return address and all hope of publication. Meynell published one of the poems, hoping the poet would respond, and a friend of Thompson’s saw the poem. From that time until the end of Thompson’s life, Wilfrid Meynell and his wife, the poet Alice Meynell, became Thompson’s constant material and emotional support. Merry England became an outlet for his poetry and prose, devoting an entire issue in April 1891 to his biography of St. John Baptist de la Salle. During his last twenty years, Thompson, struggling to manage his opium addiction, alternated between intense work and periods of recovery at monastic communities in Storrington, Pantasaph, and Crawford. Relationships with three significant women in his adult life—Alice Meynell, Maggie Brien, and Katie King—ended in further disappointments. After 1898, though he continued to write poems in his notebooks and was commissioned to write occasional poems for the Diamond Jubilee and at the deaths of Queen Victoria and Cecil Rhodes, his last years were spent writing reviews and a biography of St. Ignatius Loyola, published after his death. In August 1907, his health broken, he went to the estate of Wilfrid Blunt in a last attempt at recovery. At the beginning of November he was taken to the Catholic Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London, where he died. Ideas Though Thompson was considered a greater Crashaw by his friend and fellow poet Coventry Patmore, early reviewers complained of his tortured sentences and his linguistic excesses. Often compared stylistically to the Metaphysical Poets, and especially to fellow Catholic poet G. M. Hopkins, Thompson developed a distinctively incarnational approach, seen especially in the single poem for which he is best known, “The Hound of Heaven.” Thompson’s Romantic sensibility ran deep, but, though his imagery shows the influence not only of the Romantics but also of his wide reading in mythology and Eastern philosophy, he remains orthodox in his religious outlook. In “The Hound of Heaven” he concludes that “Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth.” And on leaving Storrington in 1890, where he had outlined the poem, Thompson wrote in his notebook, “After the Return to Nature, the Return to God. Wordsworth was the poet of the one, I would be the poet of the other” (Brigid M. Boardman, Between Heaven and Charing Cross, 1988). In the ode “To the English Martyrs” and the monograph “Health and Holiness,” both published in 1905, he articulated a theology of suffering. Wilfrid Meynell and Father Terrence J. Connelly edited early editions of Thompson’s works, and Everard Meynell
Paul Johannes Tillich
wrote an early biography. Brigid M. Boardman’s 1988 biography, Between Heaven and Charing Cross, offers a reappraisal of the negative twentieth-Â�century treatment of Thompson. The Francis Thompson Collection is housed at Boston College Library. A secondary collection resides in the Harris Library, Preston. Bibliography
Boardman, Brigid M. Between Heaven and Charing Cross: The Life of Francis Thompson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Connolly, Terence L., S.J., ed. The Poems of Francis Thompson. New York, 1932. Meynell, Everard. The Life of Francis Thompson. London: Burns and Oates, 1913. Meynell, Wilfrid, ed. Works of Francis Thompson. 3 volumes, London, 1913. Reid, J. C. Francis Thompson: Man and Poet. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1959. Thompson, Francis. The Life of Blessed John Baptist de la Salle. London, 1891. ———. New Poems. London, 1897. ———. Poems. London, 1893. ———. Saint Ignatius Loyola, ed. John H. Pollen, S.J., London, 1909. Walsh, John Evangelist. Strange Harp, Strange Symphony: The Life of Francis Thompson. New York: Hawthorne, 1967. Walsh, John Evangelist, ed. The Letters of Francis Thompson. New York: Hawthorne, 1969.
—Gary Guinn
PAUL JOHANNES TILLICH (1886–1965). Paul Tillich was born in Starzeddel, Germany, in 1886. Educated at the universities of Berlin, Tübingen, Halle, and then Breslau, he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1911. The following year he became an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. After four years serving as an army chaplain during World War I (1914–1918), Tillich went on to teach theology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Leipzig, as well as philosophy at Frankfurt. In 1933, Tillich’s opposition to the Nazi party resulted in his dismissal from a full professorship at Frankfurt. He left Germany thereafter for the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1940. Shortly after his arrival to America, Tillich began teaching at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. In 1955, he left Union Theological Seminary for Harvard. This was followed in 1962 by his acceptance of the Nuveen Chair of Theology at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. As one of the most influential and controversial theologians of the twentieth century, Tillich has been both heavily criticized for his radical approach to Christianity and highly esteemed for his creative and insightful synthesis of
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religion and culture. A self-Â�professed Christian-Â�humanist, Tillich had a philosophical theology that attempts to awaken each of us to new depths of being for the sake of overcoming our estrangement from the infinite (God). To this end, Tillich returns time and again through his many works to key questions concerning the nature of religious experience (and revelation) and to the problems of religious language and knowledge. His chief work, the three-Â�volume Systematic Theology, is a unique combination of Protestant theology and existential philosophy. Elaborating on many of the basic insights of Systematic Theology, his most widely read books have been The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith. The main arguments in these texts rely on a notion of “participation” according to which God is not an object or thing to be known or not known but the “Ground of Being” in which we all participate through faith. The degree to which our faith is authentic becomes clearer when we begin to answer pressing life questions through Christian theology. To do so, however, requires a particular method of “correlation” that entwines the demands of pressing existential questions and the (re)interpretation of religious symbols. In this way our Christian faith is explained by virtue of questions arising from human existence and theological responses arising from divine revelation. Tillich’s system relies heavily on the nature of religious symbols. Through them, he argues, we may be awakened to fresh and moving interpretations of life and being and begin to overcome our estrangement. We must, however, guard against literalizing or demonizing our language. Tillich’s doctrine, the “Protestant Principle,” maintains that we cannot have absolute claims about God, for we cannot speak of or know God literally and objectively. We must live by faith. For Tillich, the concept of God symbolizes all being and existence as an expression of our “ultimate concern,” for it is the “power of being.” Religious symbols do not bring a subject or individual into contact with an independent object or entity but allow us to participate in new depths of being. Symbols therefore allow experiences in which we commit ourselves to that which is truly ultimate (God), for whatever concerns us ultimately determines our being or nonbeing. Faith, then, is either a state of being ultimately concerned and committed to what alone is ultimate or concerned with something finite and therefore idolatrous. For Tillich, if we are to have a genuine faith we must find the truth of living (religious) symbols. Principal Ideas of Paul Tillich •â•‡ The “correlation” method is the means by which our existential questions find resolution from the (re) interpretation of Christian revelation.
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Miriam Toews
•â•‡ God is not a being but is the “Ground of Being,” or “Being Itself.” •â•‡ Through the “Protestant Principle” we live our lives and are justified by our faith, not through absolute and literal truths. •â•‡ Faith is a state of being ultimately concerned. •â•‡ Religious symbols are means through which we participate in our ultimate commitment. Bibliography Primary Sources
Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. ———. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1957. ———. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963.
Secondary Sources
Adams, James L., Wilhelm Pauck, and Roger L. Shinn, eds. The Thought of Paul Tillich. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Kegley, Charles W., and Robert W. Bretall, eds. The Theology of Paul Tillich. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Kelsey, David H. The Fabric of Paul Tillich’s Theology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
—Jason C. Robinson
MIRIAM TOEWS (1964–).╇ Canada. Nomi Nickel, the young protagonist in Miriam Toews’s award-Â�winning novel A Complicated Kindness, finds her life crumbling around her: Nomi’s older sister, Tash, escapes the seemingly oppressive small Mennonite town in which the Nickel family lives, and then her mother follows, ostensibly to search for Tash. The sixteen-Â�year-Â�old Nomi is left to ramble through an empty house, and a stolid town, with her emotionally complex father. A Complicated Kindness has been described by several critics as a Mennonite Catcher in the Rye, the angst-Â�ridden Nomi as unmoored in her inexplicable world as Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is in his. More than a teenage bildungsroman, though, A Complicated Kindness explores the destructive consequences religious fundamentalism can have on a child, on a family, and by extension, on a community. Toews herself grew up in a town heavily influenced by Mennonite fundamentalism. She was raised in Steinbach, Manitoba, a predominantly Mennonite community that informs Toews’s creation of Nomi’s small town in A Complicated Kindness. In a 2004 interview, Toews described her home life as being “reasonably liberal” and “tolerant,” but she believed that “the community at large was different.” Conservative Mennonites in Steinbach, as elsewhere, attempted to apply a literal reading of scripture and the edicts of their sixteenth-Â�century leader, Menno Simons, to
the complexities of modern life, and as a result, Mennonites often developed a long list of restrictions conscribing their day-Â�to-Â�day existences. According to Toews, “the whole idea of a soft-Â�topped car was considered frivolous, vain and worldly,” as was having “harvest gold appliances .╯.╯. if you were serious about your religion, you would have a white fridge.” A Complicated Kindness examines, in part, the ways this religious legalism in a community like Steinbach can erode any sense of religious belief, though not of hope. Toews’s novel received critical acclaim for its portrayal of Nomi’s own hope in the kindness of her father and her community, despite the concurrent complexities of the same. The novel was given several Canadian awards, including the Governor’s General Award in 2005 and the 2005 Canadian Booksellers Book of the Year Award; it was also short-listed for the Giller Prize. This was not the first of Toews’s works both to explore the often difficult nature of a Mennonite upbringing and to receive critical notice for that exploration. Her 2001 memoir, Swing Low: A Life, narrates the story of her father’s depression and subsequent suicide at age sixty. Apart from the prologue and epilogue, the text is written from Mel Toews’s point of view and describes the father’s attempt to hide his mental illness from a Mennonite community he assumed suspicious of anything less than perfection. His belief in the Mennonite impulse toward “work and hope” masks well his illness, at least to the outside world if not to his family, who must quietly contend with his desperation and exhaustion at home. Swing Low was awarded Manitoba’s McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in 2000. Toews received degrees from the University of Manitoba in film studies and the University of King’s College in journalism. Her work has appeared on National Public Radio and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as in a number of periodicals. In 2007, her career took a new turn, as she was cast in the movie Silent Light! directed by Carlos Reygadas and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Reygadas had read A Complicated Kindness but was more drawn to the picture of Toews on its cover, figuring she was perfect in the role of Esther, a Mennonite woman whose farmer husband commits adultery. Ultimately, the movie explores ground similar to Toews’s books: spiritual crises among conservative Mennonites and the many ways a religiously fundamental community can have adverse, and sometimes devastating, effects on the individuals of which that community is composed. While at least one critic has termed Toews’s work “derivative” of her predecessors Salinger and Nabokov, her consistently probing writing has secured for her a solid reputation as one of Canadian’s finest contemporary novelists—and, perhaps more surprising, she has found
J. R. R. Tolkien
favor in the Mennonite literary community, if not in the broader Mennonite community itself. Bibliography
Toews, Miriam. A Boy of Good Breeding. Toronto, Ontario: Vintage Canada, 1998. ———. A Complicated Kindness. Toronto, Ontario: Vintage Canada, 2004. ———. Summer of My Amazing Luck. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone Press, 1996. ———. Swing Low: A Life. Toronto, Ontario: Vintage Canada, 2000.
—Melanie Springer Mock
JOHN TOLAND (1670–1722).╇ Deistic writer. Born into a Roman Catholic household in Ireland, Toland became a Protestant at age sixteen. He entered the University of Glasgow in 1687 and later studied for two years at Leyden in the Netherlands. In 1694 and 1695 he was at Oxford, and there he wrote his most influential work, Christianity Not Mysterious (published in 1696). Toland’s career after this was very checkered. Condemned by the Irish Parliament in 1697 and his book burned, Toland fled back to England and thereafter was in several places for short periods both in England and on the continent. Often impecunious, reputed to have an exaggerated view of himself, together with the controversial nature of several of his writings meant Toland was dependent on titled and wealthy persons for occasional work. Among his noteworthy later writings are A Life of Milton in 1698; the 1701 Anglia Libera, a defense of the British Act of Succession of that year; the Letters to Serena in 1704 addressed to Prussian Queen Sophie Charlotte; Nazarenus (1718), a work on the Ebionites; the 1720 Tetradymus, which contains essays on the natural explanation of biblical miracles; and Pantheisticon (1720), a pagan imitation or parody of Christian liturgy. It is Christianity Not Mysterious that has fixed later opinion on the importance of Toland. Originally seen as the first of three essays, Christianity Not Mysterious attempted to prove that true religion must be reasonable and intelligible. It was to be followed by an essay demonstrating that Christianity met these two criteria and a third work showing that Christianity was divinely revealed. Though Toland did not write the second and third, most of what would have been in them was either already present or implied in the first. In the initial section of Christianity Not Mysterious Toland defined reason as that which provides certitude and a God-Â�given quality in human beings; thus, reason provides access to truth. Even though some persons do
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wrong or deny truth, the fault is with them, or perhaps in how arguments were presented; the truths of reason are available to all. Why then a need for revelation? Because it provides a greater certitude, though it too follows the canons of reason—revelation is a republication of the religion of nature; the doctrines of Christianity are not contrary to it. Reason is not less from God than revelation, an assumption some of Toland’s successors saw as making revelation superfluous. In the third section, Toland attempts to show that there is nothing mysterious, or above reason, in Christianity. At most, what was once not known is now known or can be known; reason will lead us to all we need to understand. He refused to defer to authorities, from the Church Fathers on; only reason is needed. Faith was not trusting in things unseen but persuasion built on solid reasons. Even though miracle exceeds human power, it must itself be possible in the natural order and intelligible, an approach that defines out-of-existence miracles as commonly understood. Superstitions, Toland says, with their attendant mystery, have been a bane in church life, virtually all of them deriving from Judaism or pagan Rome or folktales. Finally, the authority of the Bible, like all revelation, must be tested by reason. Since God is the author of both reason and revelation, they cannot contradict one another, and therefore we should expect no mystery in the Bible. Toland viewed himself as a loyal member of the Church of England, but he willingly attacked theologians and ecclesiastics. Like Locke, though without accepting all of Locke’s ideas, he saw the reasonableness of Christianity. Toland’s stress on the role of reason in religion made him an important link to the relatively short-Â�lived Deism movement in the eighteenth century. References
Cragg, G. R. From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought within the Church of England 1660 to 1700. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Sullivan, Robert E. John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Toland, John. Christianity Not Mysterious. New York: Garland, 1978.
—William G. Travis
J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1892–1973).╇ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, one of the literary world’s foremost practitioners and defenders of the genre of fantasy, was born January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Son of Arthur and Mabel Tolkien, his father a transplanted Englishman serving as manager of the Bank of Africa, the young Tolkien
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had significant health problems in the South African climate, while his mother suffered bouts of severe homesickness for her homeland. In February 1896, during an extended visit to Birmingham, England, on which Arthur hoped to join them, Tolkien, his mother, and his younger brother, Hilary, learned the sad news that Arthur had succumbed to a hemorrhage, the fatal aftermath of his encounter with rheumatic fever. Tolkien and his brother thus spent the rest of their youth in England, raised by their mother as devout Catholics, until her own death in 1904 when he was twelve years old. As the wards of the parish priest, Father Morgan, the Tolkien brothers were well provided for and given good schooling, and Tolkien was well prepared for college entrance, precociously interested in and talented in the study of language, a foreshadowing of his love for ancient tongues, alphabets, and mapmaking that would leaven his imagination later for both scholarship and fantasy writing. Though first placed with an aunt, Tolkien later lived at a boarding house for orphans, and at the age of sixteen he met and fell in love with Edith Bratt, who would be the love of his life, marrying her after eight years of on-Â�and-Â�off courtship at twenty-Â�four. Tolkien was enrolled at Oxford and earned first-Â�class honors in English language and literature. In June 1916, married only three months, Tolkien embarked for France as a Second Lieutenant in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers and there endured horrific battles in which most of his battalion were killed. In November, he returned to England with trench fever, recuperating in Yorkshire as he began to draft the work that would later be published, albeit posthumously, as The Silmarillion. During his schooling in Oxford, Tolkien emerged as a gifted philologist, literally a “lover of words,” but, professionally, a leading light in a field in which one is immersed in the origins of ancient words and their cultural impact, embedded in the myths and stories that bear their message to the future. Fascinated by Icelandic, Norse, and Gothic mythology, Tolkien discovered the imaginative resources that would undergird his own fantasy world of Middle-Â� Earth. After a short stint as a freelance tutor, then as a faculty member at Leeds University, Tolkien accepted the prestigious position as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Â�Saxon at Merton College, Oxford, in 1925 that would eventually lead him a year later into an encounter and lifelong friendship with literary soul mate C. S. Lewis. Lewis had completed his own Oxford degrees in the early 1920s, first in philosophy, then literature; and he then accepted a fellowship as Tutor of English Literature in Magdalen College at Oxford in 1925. When their paths crossed in May 1926, it was clear that they had a great deal in common: in fact, literarily, everything; spiritually, however, it was a different story. Tolkien, the devout Christian,
was puzzled by Lewis’s wayward journey away from faith yet toward myth. It was Tolkien’s genius to recognize that the bridge back to Christianity for Lewis entailed an encounter with Christ as the “true myth,” that the incarnation was simultaneously of mythological proportion yet historical facthood. Lewis unequivocally credits Tolkien for leading him to this conclusion in his autobiography of his conversion in Surprised by Joy. Their common Christian worldview and dynamic interest in mythopoeia—both the creation and critical appreciation of myth and fairy tale—gave impetus to their own prolific scholarly and creative careers and birth to the informal literary society known as the Inklings that continues in the twenty-Â�first century to enthrall readers around the world. The Inklings writers group met together weekly between 1933 and 1949 and produced some of the twentieth century’s most popular and enduring works of fantasy, science fiction, and “supernatural thrillers.” Membership, which included Tolkien, Lewis, and various colleagues from Oxford, as well as family and friends, read aloud from their works-Â�in-Â�progress over pints of stout and equal parts uproarious laughter and earnest criticism, producing an astonishing number of works over a period of sixteen years and creating a legacy that continues to influence the world of genre fiction. It was TolÂ� kien who produced the group’s nickname, referring to the label as “a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-Â�formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” Tolkien’s renown as an Anglo-Â�Saxon scholar—translating and publishing critical works on such major texts as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Pearl— was his primary career accomplishment through the 1940s. While Lewis’s and Tolkien’s animated excursions into the lands of fantasy helped produce Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), which introduced audiences to Middle-Â�Earth and the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien’s unparalleled masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, remained out of the public eye and unpublished until the early 1950s. Tolkien openly credited Lewis with helping him overcome his perfectionism, which had held the would-Â�be trilogy captive for more than twenty years as he belabored minutiae: elven languages, individual character histories, the geography of all place-Â�names, all precious to TolÂ� kien’s sense of propriety and thoroughness but beyond the attention span and interest of a vast majority of even the most sympathetic readers. Lewis convinced Tolkien to let go—and to give the world his great gift of his mythological masterpiece as is. Like Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings addresses the “homesickness” we feel for our “true country,” believing that what motivates humankind is a
Leo Tolstoy
longing to know that there is a homeland where we truly belong, an “everland” (not a “neverland”) that calls to us in the midst of confusion and doubt, a world that we can see “if the eyes of our hearts are enlightened.” This is what Lewis is getting at in publishing this early review of TolÂ� kien’s The Hobbit: To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone.
In a later review of the newly published Lord of the Rings, Lewis capsuled its achievement: “it rediscovers reality” by making of this world a myth; “the value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which had been hidden by the veil of familiarity.” Tolkien’s secret was discovering that in the realm of the fantastic—within mythic landscapes, vistas, perspectives— we can get beyond “the veil of familiarity” that keeps us from seeing even our world clearly: one is not restricted by what he or she knows of the “real world,” its colors, shapes, creatures, languages, predicaments. Characters such as Frodo, Gandalf, Gimli, Aragorn, and Sam Gamgee and the journey they take as “the Fellowship,” exemplify the spiritual dilemmas to be faced and the “ordinary virtues” to be possessed to conquer evil. These are the traits Tolkien identified with “the humble Englishman,” indeed, any humble, peace-Â�loving human being who rises to the occasion when his or her home is under attack. The author of fantasy can use the known but also invent still more—thus intermixing the familiar and the fanciful to create a “secondary” world that envelops and surpasses both. Tolkien’s growing canon, which includes now formerly unpublished works edited and promoted by his son Christopher, continues to inspire the rehabilitation and expansion of the genres of fantasy and science fiction well beyond the contours of his own century. While Tolkien lived to see the adoration for and brisk sales of his Hobbit and Lord of the Rings before his death in 1973, he would not have been able to fathom the worldwide affection that has accompanied and extended his legacy into the twenty-Â� first century with the acclaim attending the movies made of his works. Bibliography Selected Author Bibliography
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) The Hobbit (1937) Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981) The Lord of the Rings (omnibus) (1968)
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The Return of the King (1955) The Silmarillion (1977) The Two Towers (1954)
Secondary Sources
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. (1978). ———. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977). Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (2003). Duriez, Colin, and David Porter. The Inklings Handbook (2001). Fliger, Verlyn. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983). Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War (2003). Glyer, Diana. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005). Shippey, Tom, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien (2003).
—Bruce L. Edwards
LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910).╇ The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at his family’s estate about eighty miles south of Moscow. Although he died in 1910 at Astapovo, the estate, Yasnaya Polyana, bears his grave and is now a museum of the site where he wrote the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In addition to his novels, Tolstoy wrote plays, short stories, essays, and religious writings. While his essays and religious writings have at times garnered more astonishment than praise, Tolstoy’s fiction has been celebrated for its technique of ostranenie (defamiliarization), for its depictions of tensions between free will and historical determinism, and for stretching the boundaries of genre. The term “defamiliarization,” coined by Russian literary theorist and critic Viktor ShklovÂ�sky in his 1917 article “Art as Technique,” refers to the way in which Tolstoy at times describes objects and events without naming them. Tolstoy’s writing thus replicates the initial appearance of events such as opera performances, describing them from the perspective of someone who is witnessing such an event for the first time, rendering them fresh, if not absurd, to the reader. Considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-Â�century realism and known as an epic novel, War and Peace depicts the lives of five main fictional characters in Russia during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. With over five hundred characters, the novel is remarkable for its detailed character descriptions that extend even to the thoughts of certain animals. Thematically, the novel exposes the tension between individual happiness and the impersonal agendas of nations. Critics of the novel have held that Tolstoy sacrifices historical accuracy for the purposes of representing events from his own Providentialist perspective.
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Whereas Tolstoy’s tendency to interject long commentaries on social issues into the narrative has frustrated certain critics, others hold that this commentary adds historical context to the novel, contributing to its grandeur and masterfully extending the limits of the novel genre. The shorter novel, Anna Karenina, depicts the lives of two main characters, Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin, alternating between the story of Anna’s tragic, adulterous love affair and the story of Levin’s maturation and quest for happiness. Of his two most famous novels, criticism has recognized Anna Karenina as the more focused and characteristic of the novel genre. In Tolstoy’s later life, however, he denounced both of these novels as failed art. After his religious crisis described in his autobiographical 1879 work My Confession, his writings expressed his newly found religious beliefs. These beliefs proved attractive to a number of his readers, and eventually, Tolstoy founded a religious commune at his estate. Nearly always at odds with the institutions of the church and with traditional Christianity (the Russian church excommunicated him), Tolstoy’s unusual take on Christianity continues to spark debate as to whether Tolstoy’s religion, known as Tolstoyanism, can even be considered Christian. With time, Tolstoy’s religious views became unbearable to his family, driving his wife to hysteria. On the night of October 28, 1910, Tolstoy left his home, only to fall deathly ill in the train. On November 8, 1910, he died in the train station of Astapovo. Bibliography
Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Bloom, Harold, ed. Leo Tolstoy. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Greenwood, E. B., ed. Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1974. Jones, Malcolm, ed. New Essays on Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Knowles, A. V., ed. Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge and K. Paul, 1978.
—Jason Andrew Lewallen
PAUL TOURNIER (1898–1986).╇ Swiss physician noted for his melding of medical knowledge, psychology, and religion, to create a “medicine of the person.” Tournier was born in May 1898 into a Geneva Calvinist pastor’s home and was orphaned when just a child. His family had a history of physical and emotional problems and Tournier was himself affected by shyness and loneliness. He graduated from the University of Geneva Medical School in 1923 and entered private practice five years
later. Married in 1924, he and his wife, Nelly Bouvier, had two sons and a marriage that lasted for fifty years. In 1932, influence from the Oxford Group, founded in the 1920s by Frank Buchman, changed Tournier’s view of Christianity from a nominal Calvinism to a more personal and dynamic faith. Tournier applied to his own medical practice Buchman’s emphases on four absolutes (purity, unselfishness, honesty, love) and on meditation and on sharing with others. Though he left the Oxford Group in 1946 over changes in its emphases, Tournier took with him the general principles, and in 1947 he and several others founded what came to be called the Bossey Group, whose annual meetings were intended to counter what they felt were the excessive specialization and the depersonalization of the patient present in medical treatment at the time. Of the more than twenty books written by Tournier, his first one, The Healing of Persons (1940/Eng. tr. 1965), laid the groundwork for his method of treating the whole person, and his best known and probably most influential book, The Meaning of Persons (1955/1957), captured his central ideas. Though anecdotal and unsystematic in his writings, Tournier painted a picture of human nature that is generally clear. Each human being is whole, made up of two aspects. The natural “personage” is body, psyche (emotions, imagination), and mind, those parts of us we reveal to the world; each of these can influence the others and all can be observed and studied by science. The supernatural “person” is the center of personal existence and decision making, hidden and elusive, fully known only to God. Individual differences originate in the inborn temperament of each person. Tournier initially used the classical fourfold schema—choleric, melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic—but later saw two basic temperaments, with shades of difference in the two: strong (optimistic, aggressive, etc.) and weak (doubtful, contemplative, etc.). A further overlay of these is seen in his belief that men and women have different temperaments. In addition to makeup and temperament, persons are formed by the natural events of life, from social influences to conscious and unconscious choice, and by the supernatural events, pleas for self-Â�denial, generosity, and love. Emphasis on the natural or the supernatural can lead to two different gospels, the gospel of psychology calling for the pursuit of ambition and self-Â�realization, and the gospel of religion calling for self-Â�denial and service to others. Tournier argued that both gospels are right and both affect behavior. Eclectic in his theology, influenced as he was by pietism, evangelicalism, neo-Â�orthodoxy, and ecumenism and particularly by three of his contemporaries, Barth, Brunner, and Buber, Tournier held to the biblical view that salvation came through Christ’s atoning death on the cross and
David Tracy
his resurrection. Unlike most evangelicals, however, he held to universalism in salvation. Tournier developed an international reputation and was particularly influential in North America. Often seen by others as a psychiatrist, Tournier always protested he was only a physician. But this misunderstanding derived from how Tournier engaged in medical practice. His greatest contribution was his integration of psychology and Christianity in the context of physician and patient. The heart of the relationship was dialogue: the reciprocal dialogue between patient and physician (or one person with other persons) and the dialogue with God. References
Collins, Gary R. The Christian Psychology of Paul Tournier. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973. Houde, K. A. “The Christian Personality Theory of Paul Tournier.” Doctoral dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, Graduate School of Psychology, 1990. Peaston, Monroe. Personal Living: An Introduction to Paul Tournier. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
—William G. Travis
A. W. TOZER (1897–1963).╇ Born in 1897 in Pennsylvania, Aiden Wilson Tozer was converted at the age of seventeen by a lay preacher at a street meeting. He attended the Methodist church and was baptized in the Church of the Brethren before becoming ordained with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). He served as a pastor for forty-Â�four years in Stonewood and Morgantown, West Virginia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; and Toronto, Ontario. A prolific writer, he became editor of Alliance Life for thirteen years. He served as vice president of the C&MA (1946–1950) but declined the presidency of the denomination. His writings and teachings have had an immense impact on the lives of thousands of Christians. His classic The Pursuit of God (1948), urging being passionate for God Himself, has sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. It was chosen by Christianity Today readers as one of the top 10 most spiritually influential books. Though he attended high school only one day, Tozer was awarded two honorary doctorates, educating himself through avid reading of theological and classical Christian works. A man of deep worship, he frequently prayed on his face for hours. Known as a twentieth-Â�century prophet and “the conscience of evangelicalism” for his incisive writing to issues of the times, he preached and wrote on timely and timeless truths, including the attributes of God, disciplines of the Christian life, shallowness and compromise in Christian faith, depth of worship, prayer, contemplation of God, faith, practical holiness, and the Spirit-Â�filled life. He
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influenced many great Christian leaders, including Wilbur M. Smith, Warren Wiersbe, and Leonard Ravenhill, and provided counsel for leaders such as Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Catherine Marshall, and Billy Graham. Considered a mystic, Tozer read deeply of many of the ancient Christian mystics, such as Julian of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Jean-Â�Nicolas Grou, Brother Lawrence, Thomas à Kempis, Bernard of Claivaux, François Fenelon, Madame Guyon, Henry Scougal, Faber, Tersteegen, and many others. He corresponded with Trappist monk Thomas Merton. He compiled The Christian Book of Mystical Verse (1963) and referenced Thomas Upham, professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. He was also influenced by Pietist and early Methodist leaders as well. While most of his forty-Â�plus books are later compilations of his editorials and sermons, he authored nine books in his lifetime, including biographies of C&MA founder A.╯B. Simpson, entitled Wingspread (1943), and C&MA missionary statesman Robert Jaffray, entitled Let My People Go (1947), as well as The Divine Conquest (1950), The Root of the Righteous (1955), Keys to the Deeper Life (1957), Born after Midnight (1959), and Of God and Men (1960). The Knowledge of the Holy (1961), on the attributes of God, is often considered his crowning work. He died in 1963 in the midst of an active ministry. Other popular books by Tozer include Faith beyond Reason, Jesus, Author of Our Faith, and Worship: The Missing Jewel. Devotional compilations of his writings include The Best of A. W. Tozer, Renewed Day by Day, and The Pursuit of God: A Thirty-Â�one Day Experience. Biographies of Tozer include: David J. Fant, A. W. Tozer: A Twentieth-Â� Century Prophet, and James L. Snyder, In Pursuit of God: The Life of A. W. Tozer. His message and ministry can be summed up by his words in the preface of The Pursuit of God: “Within this hour of all-Â�but-Â�universal darkness one cheering gleam appears.╯.╯. . there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities.╯.╯. . They are athirst for God and will not be satisfied until they have drunk deep at the fountain of Living Water.” —Paul King DAVID TRACY (1939–). American Catholic theologian. Professor of theology and philosophy of religion at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Tracy synthesized the insights he gleaned from philosophy, literary criticism, biblical studies, and world religions into an integrated whole. He claims Augustine, Newman, Kierkegaard, and Lonergan as the major influences on his work, but he draws on Kyoto Mahayana Buddhism, Derrida,
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Deleuze, Ricoeur, Wittgenstein, Pseudo-Â�Dionysius, and Eckhart as well. While teaching at Chicago, he also served as the chaplain and preached weekly from the lectionary. In 1977, he was elected president of the Catholic Theological Society. In 1975, Tracy published Blessed Rage for Order, which was an example of what he calls fundamental theology, wherein he promotes a correlation of Christianity and common life. For Tracy, Christians must be faithful both to God and to contemporary thought. Therefore, they must be faithful not only to the Christian texts but also to common human experience and language. By interpreting Christian texts, theologians may be faithful to God and to the particularity of the Christian faith, but they must also be faithful to contemporary thought and life through the phenomenological uncovering of common human experience. Tracy’s second major work, The Analogical Imagination (1981), is an exercise in fundamental and systematic theology. He attempts to reconcile the Christian need for particularity with the desire for broader appeal. He argued that theology must interact with the academy, the church, and society as a whole. In order to mediate truth to these three distinct audiences, he recommends that the systematic theologian begin by interpreting the “classics” of his religious tradition. Religious classics are similar to works of art, except that they speak to the whole of human existence, whereas art generally is limited to particular areas of existence. For Christians, the primary classic is the person and work of Jesus Christ. After interpreting Christ, the supreme Christian classic, the theologian must next connect his message to the human condition, and should do so by way of analogy. After The Analogical Imagination, Tracy intended to write a practical theology to follow up his fundamental and systematic treatises. But his third major work, Plurality and Ambiguity (1987), turned out to be another exercise in method. In the book, he points out the various factors that can disrupt a theologian’s attempts at theology: disruptions caused by differences in theory and method, as well as by the fragmentation and confusion caused by language itself. In other words, Tracy is now concerned primarily with postmodernity, its emphasis on the different and the other, and how theologians should think about such matters. In his fourth book, Dialogue with the Other (1990), Tracy follows up with a treatment of how to deal with postmodernity, otherness, and plurality. Bibliography
Sanks, T. Howland. “David Tracy’s Theological Project: An Overview and Some Implications.” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 698–727.
Tracy, David. The Analogical Imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1981. ———. Blessed Rage for Order. New York: Seabury, 1975. ———. “Defending the Character of Public Theology: How My Mind Has Changed; 18th in a Series.” Christian Century 98 (1981): 350–356. ———. Dialogue with the Other. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990. ———. Plurality and Ambiguity. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. ———. “Presidential Address: The Catholic Analogical Imagination,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 32 (1977): 234–244.
—Bruce Riley Ashford
THOMAS TRAHERNE (1637–1674). Thomas Traherne was an Anglican priest and theologian, generally considered to have been the last of the English Metaphysical Poets, following such illustrious figures as Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. He was also a notable mystic and an original thinker whose evocative reflections on the relations between God, nature, and humanity now seem to be particularly appealing in an age of ecological crisis and perplexity. Born in Herefordshire, perhaps the son of a shoemaker, Traherne graduated with a BA from Brasenose College of Oxford University in 1656, was ordained in 1660, and in 1661 was awarded an MA at Oxford. He served as rector of a small parish church in Credenhill, near his native Hereford, beginning in 1657. He also served from 1669 to 1672 as private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Charles II, with pastoral duties in the Teddington parish near London. He died in 1674, while in residence at the Bridgeman household, with his last will providing generously for the poor. During his short and quiet life, his literary work was largely unknown, his only publication being a scholarly and polemical treatise of 1673, Roman Forgeries, which is critical of certain Roman Catholic theological claims. His Christian Ethicks: The Way to Blessedness was published posthumously in 1675. Here, Traherne first develops his important theme of “felicity” or happiness, undertaking to correct Hobbes’s “great mistake in that arrogant Leviathan,” which errs not because it emphasizes self-Â�preservation but because it “imprisons” our love for ourselves by making it “inconsistent with charity towards others.” Traherne argues to the contrary that self-Â� love intrinsically inclines toward the love of others, for it is not at all the isolated self that we desire to preserve but only the self in love with what is other than itself: not the self-Â�enclosed self, but the transitive self, the self in love. Moreover, through the proper enjoyment of what we love, we can come to an “enjoyment of God by way of gratitude,” whose culmination is what he calls “godliness” or
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“godlikeness,” and which bears a resemblance to Eastern Orthodox teachings concerning theosis. His Thanksgivings was published anonymously in 1699 as A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation. Traherne’s current celebrity, however, dates from the discovery by William Brooke, in the bargain bins of two London bookstores during the winter of 1896–1897, of Traherne’s poems and, even more important, his Centuries of Meditations, where themes treated earlier in the Ethicks now appear with great poetic and mystical power, as Traherne expounds what he calls the “Profitable Wonders” of creation: You never Enjoy the world aright, till you see how a Sand Exhibiteth the Wisdom and Power of God.╯.╯. . Your Enjoyment of the World is never right till every Morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your fathers Palace: and look upon the Skies and the Earth and the Air, as Celestial Joys.╯.╯. . You never Enjoy the World aright, till the Sea it self floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the Stars: and perceive your self to be the Sole heir of the whole World. (2002, p. 3ff.)
A later discovery (Select Meditations) was made at a Birmingham bookshop in 1964, and yet again, in 1981 and 1987, more manuscripts were discovered, one of them (Commentaries of Heaven) having been some years earlier rescued intact from a trash pile, with its leather covers already on fire. These lately found works, and especially the Centuries, are widely regarded as representing Traherne’s greatest achievements and his poetic and spiritual legacy, so that the reputation he now enjoys is fairly recent. The discovery and editing of newly found writings has continued into the twenty-Â�first century. Traherne’s many modern admirers include Thomas Merton, as well as C. S. Lewis, who extolled the Meditations as “almost the most beautiful book in English.” Principal Ideas of Thomas Traherne The ethical egoism of Thomas Hobbes, so foundational for modern thought, can best be refuted not by calls to altruism but by simply looking carefully at the very nature of self-Â�love itself. For the self that we love is necessarily a self-Â�in-Â�love, and thus we must at the same time love the objects that the self loves if we are to love the loving self. Furthermore, when we examine our love of the world, and especially our love of created nature, we find that the more fully and truly we enjoy and celebrate the objects of our love, the more we discover at the same time that the world is a gift, intended for us to enjoy and love, and thus the more this enjoyment itself becomes an act of gratitude to the creator whose love for humanity is revealed in the abundantly lovable world He has offered us. “The very End for which GOD made the World was that He might Manifest His Lov” (2002, p. 13).
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Therefore, our enjoyment of the world, if it is properly pursued and rightly understood, is itself an act of worship, our loving response to God’s loving gift. As put by Traherne, “It was His Wisdom made you Need the Sun. It was His Goodness made you need the Sea.╯.╯. . You are as Prone to lov, as the Sun is to shine.╯.╯. . The Whole World ministers to you as the Theatre of your Lov.╯.╯. . So [God] is Lov mingling with our Lov as flame with flame.╯.╯. . That God should give us soe Divine a Power! To Transfigure all Things, and be Delighted!” (2002, pp. 8, 14, 84f). Finally, if it is authentically exercised, this enjoyment of the world must be ultimately intersubjective and communal: “Yet further, you never Enjoy the World aright, till you so lov the Beauty of Enjoying it, that you are Covetous and Earnest to Persuade others to Enjoy it” (2002, p. 5). Bibliography
Dowell, G. (1990). Enjoying the World: The Rediscovery of Thomas Traherne. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse. Inge, D. (2004). “A Poet Comes Home: Thomas Traherne, Theologian in a New Century,” Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2004. Traherne, T. (1989) Landscapes of Glory: Daily Readings with Thomas Traherne, ed. A. M. Allchin. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. ———. (2002) Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose, ed. D. Inge. London: SPCK. ———. (1962) The Way to Blessedness: Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks, ed. M. Bottrall. London: The Faith Press.
—Bruce Foltz
D. ELTON TRUEBLOOD (1900–1994).╇ Quaker writer, philosopher, professor, and theologian Elton Trueblood, born December 12, 1900, on a small farm near Indianola, Iowa, could trace his ancestry back to one of the earliest Quaker families of America. The fourth of five children raised in a devout Quaker family in a supportive Quaker community, Trueblood internalized their work ethic, piety, and discipline. He graduated in 1922 from William Penn College in Oskaloosa, Iowa, distinguishing himself as both a scholar and a debater. He attended graduate school at Brown University, Hartford Theological Seminary, and Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1934 at Johns Hopkins University. Trueblood gravitated naturally to academic life and was an instructor at two Quaker institutions: Guilford College in North Carolina and Haverford College in Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1935 he was chaplain of Harvard followed by a prestigious appointment as chaplain of Stanford University, which would situate Trueblood so that he could launch a career of public service and eventual literary success. Due to the financial stability and public visibility provided by
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Stanford, Trueblood soon began a ministry enhanced by friendships formed with distinguished people who were welcomed as guests in the Trueblood home. These guests included the Herbert Hoovers, among others. Trueblood and his wife, Pauline Goodenow, whom he had met while at William Penn College and married in 1924, had four children. His reflections on the importance of family and fatherhood were founded on his own experience; he realized the importance of being available to his children and adjusted his public career accordingly. Pauline was integral to his ministry. In 1945, he answered an inner call to a ministry centered on writing and speaking; he gave up his tenured professorship at Stanford to serve Earlham College, a small Quaker liberal arts institution in Richmond, Indiana. The years Trueblood spent at Earlham were his most productive, the college prospering along with its most famous professor. Trueblood was instrumental in founding the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, a Quaker seminary, which flourishes today. In the early 1950s, Trueblood became a personal advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Trueblood’s title was Director of Religious Information at the U.S. Information Agency, a post created for him. He had gained an international perspective on religion as a representative to the World Council of Churches, an organization that he helped form. In 1954, Time magazine profiled him in this capacity. A major personal setback occurred in 1955 with the death of Trueblood’s wife, Pauline, from a brain tumor. He became a widower with young children at the same time he was moving to Washington to work with the USIA. Trueblood later married Virginia Hodgin, a widow with two children of her own, who had become his secretary in 1950. Virginia, as was the case with Pauline, was both wife and partner in his ministry. Trueblood retired from Earlham College in 1966 and became an advisor to President Richard M. Nixon, giving the invocation at the 1972 Republican National Convention. He remained associated with Earlham College until his death, building a retirement home on the campus where he lived till 1988. During these years, he continued to write and minister to those around him, entertaining and encouraging the scores of folks who found their way to his home. Virginia died in 1984. In 1988, Trueblood moved back to the Philadelphia area to be near his children. He spent the remainder of his life at Meadowood, a retirement home near Norristown. Even in retirement, he continued to work and organize, starting a weekly prayer meeting and inviting guest speakers. The personal discipline learned as a boy in Iowa served him throughout his life, allowing him the productivity for which he is known. Each day of his long life was divided into intervals of meditation, writing, exercise, and family time. Trueblood died on December 20, 1994; his obituary appeared in the New York Times and Christianity Today.
Elton Trueblood wrote thirty-Â�three books, the most celebrated being The Predicament of Modern Man, in which he lamented the “power-Â�culture” of modern society and its deleterious effect on the soul of men who were floundering in a world increasingly devoid of religious faith. Trueblood’s most important books in the field of philosophy of religion are The Logic of Belief and Philosophy of Religion. He also wrote an acclaimed book on Abraham Lincoln’s Christianity entitled Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish. One of his most popular books was The Humor of Christ, in which he sought “to challenge the conventualized picture of Christ who never laughed.” Other important books include: Alternative to Futility, Foundations of Reconstruction, Signs of Hope, The Idea of a College, The People Called Quakers, The Incendiary Fellowship, The Trustworthiness of Religious Experience, and A Place to Stand. One of his final books was his autobiography, While It Is Day, which tells of his own personal journey in a life fully informed by Quakerism. Perhaps the most lasting contribution made by Elton Trueblood was his founding in 1949 of the Yokefellow movement, the idea for which he believed was divinely inspired during a train ride when he read Matthew 11:25 in a new light. On the basis of a growing awareness of the need for a grassroots spiritual renewal to combat what he saw as superficiality in the way many Christians practiced their faith, Trueblood believed that Christians could transform the world by working for society both from within and outside the church. He envisioned this fellowship as small disciplined ecumenical groups of Christians who would yoke together with Christ to change the world in ordinary life, nourishing each other along the path by a shared plan of spirituality. These groups would encourage personal spiritual growth as well as active Christian witness and ministry. This led to the establishment of Yokefellow retreat houses across America and throughout the world. The movement spawned a special ministry to prisons, which split off to become the Yokefellow Prison Ministry, currently based in Pennsylvania. The Yokefellow Fellowship remains an active, ecumenical Christian ministry, actively forming Christians in the faith as envisioned by their founder, D. Elton Trueblood. Principal Ideas of D. Elton Trueblood Deep faith and rigorous intellect require each other; faith and reason are not contradictory. “We cannot revive the faith by argument, but we might catch the imagination of puzzled men and women by an exhibition of a Christian fellowship so intensely alive that every thoughtful person would be forced to respect it.” There should be three legs on the stool of life. Leg one: the experience of inner vitality that comes through a life of prayer. Leg two: the experience of outer action in which a
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Christian carries on a healing ministry to both individuals and social institutions. Leg three: the experience of careful thinking by which the credibility of an entire lifestyle may be supported. Christians are called to pray, think, serve. By these means others will be attracted to a life in Christ. To grow spiritually, a Christian must engage in a disciplined way of life. He must (1) Read the Bible every day using a plan, (2) Pray every day, (3) Attend the worship of God every Sunday letting only serious reasons interfere, (4) Give proportionately of his income to the Lord’s work, (5) Engage in some definite service for the Lord, (6) Be unapologetic in witnessing to what the Lord is doing in one’s life, (7) Read and study Christian books and magazine. (This is the foundation of the Yokefellow Fellowship, which all members must agree to follow.) Nonviolence should be central to human relationships and international policy. If a government does not practice peaceful relations with its neighbors, then it will be faced with a choice among evils in times of crisis. “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” “One of the major symptoms of our spiritual decline is the relative absence of joy.” “Any alleged Christianity which fails to express itself in cheerfulness, at some point, is clearly spurious. The Christian is cheerful, not because he is blind to injustice and suffering, but because he is convinced that these, in the light of divine sovereignty, are never ultimate.” Bibliography
There is only one biography of D. Elton Trueblood: James R. Newby, Elton Trueblood: Believer, Teacher, and Friend (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990). Dr. Trueblood’s autobiography: Elton Trueblood, While It Is Day: An Autobiography (Richmond, IN: Yokefellow Press, 1974). Elton Trueblood published thirty-Â�three books, a bibliography of which can be found in James Newby’s biography. Trueblood’s writing has been anthologized: James R. Newby, editor, The Best of Elton Trueblood: An Anthology (Nashville: Impact Books, 1978).
—Barbara Wyman
SOJOURNER TRUTH (1797–1883).╇ Named Isabella Baumfree by her parents, Elizabeth and James Baumfree, Sojourner Truth was born a slave in Ulster County, New York. Sold at the age of nine, Isabella, who spoke only Dutch up to this age, was separated from her birth family and later was forced to learn English by her new slave owners. By 1810, Isabella had been sold four times to four different families in New York. Around 1817, Isabella became a freed woman, and it was during this time that she had a spiritual conversion and was inspired to preach. By 1827, she began preaching
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in the Methodist Church and soon earned her reputation as a gifted evangelist and visionary. On June 1, 1843, Isabella changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and a year later she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts—a group founded on the platform of antislavery, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. During her short tenure there, she worked with Frederick Douglass and Williams Lloyd Garrison. In 1850 Truth published her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. In the narrative, Truth recounted her fond memories with her family of origin and her religious instruction. She also recalled the pain of being sold multiple times, which resulted in the separation from her family. Along with these experiences, she chronicled her memories of marriage and motherhood. Later, she remembered her religious awakening and her call to become an evangelist and women’s rights advocate. In 1851, Truth spoke before the audience at the Women’s Right Convention in Akron, Ohio, and presented one of her most well-Â�known speeches, namely “Speech at Akron Convention.” In the speech, Truth, hovering over six feet in stature, asserted herself at the podium, “Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’n’t I a woman .╯.╯. when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a’n’t I a woman?” In the “Speech at the New York City Convention,” Truth paralleled the fate of the women of her day to that of Queen Esther and her people in the Old Testament, and like Esther, Truth lobbied for equality and fair play for women. Truth commenced the speech by saying that she was born in the state of New York, had been a slave in the state of New York, and was now a freed woman in New York. Truth argued that women of New York, as well as other states, unlike Esther, were not asking for half of the kingdom but their rights as citizens of the United States. Truth died in 1883 at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, after more than forty years of public service as an evangelist and activist for equality for women and blacks. Bibliography
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth “Sojourner Truth.” Call and Response. Ed. Patricia Liggins Hill “Speech at Akron Convention” “Speech at the New York City Convention”
—Mary Alice Trent
DESMOND TUTU (1931–).╇ Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a religious leader, antiapartheid activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
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On October 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, South Africa, Desmond Tutu was born, sickly from birth yet optimistic throughout life. His father’s teaching job at a Methodist school provided the family with a three-Â�room house without electricity. Even so, Tutu recalls his childhood there as being fun and fulfilling. Tutu’s sisters said he was their mother’s favorite child. He hoped to emulate her gentleness and compassion, especially in “taking the side of whoever was having the worst of an argument” (Allen, p. 22). Tutu grew up in South Africa under apartheid, the white-Â� minority rule that discriminated against the black majority. He had good and bad experiences with both white and black people, which gave him a moderate perspective. Tutu credits missionaries for his education and sense of worth. An avid reader and diligent student, he excelled in school and debate. As an adult, he frequently quoted his father: “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument.” After a bout of tuberculosis at age fourteen, Tutu wanted to become a doctor, but the family couldn’t afford the medical college fees. So, he chose education instead. At college, he was sympathetic to difficulties of both the white minority as well as the black majority; it was however, the mistreatment of blacks that prompted Tutu to leave his teaching career and enter the clergy. His boyhood temper and willfulness turned into righteous indignation. Fed up with the discrimination against blacks, Tutu left his teaching career and entered the clergy. Ordained in 1961, he became a leader in the Anglican Church in South Africa. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a nonviolent leader and spokesman within the antiapartheid movement. For this, he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Later he became Archbishop of Capetown. In 1995, President Nelson Mandela appointed Tutu head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a body investigating atrocities on all sides of the apartheid conflict. Influence As a minister and spokesman, he led people politically, socially, and spiritually. Through the labor-Â�intensive,
highly emotional, and political process of heading the TRC, Tutu exhibited tenacity, optimism, conviction, and ingenuity. His ability to see both dignity and disgrace in both the whites and blacks made him unique and credible. Tutu’s insistence on both truth and forgiveness within the reconciliation process illustrates the effectiveness of these Christian principles within political and social realms. Under his leadership, many people chose the path of forgiveness over the path of litigation. To some, this showed that God-Â�given dignity is more efficient than a lawyer-Â�fought victory. To others, this showed a lack of justice. Had it not been for his fame as a Nobel Laureate, Tutu might have been imprisoned for his outspokenness against the apartheid system. Several times, the South African government limited his freedom but never arrested him. Later, he gained a serious listening from leaders of other fractured nations such as Ireland. Through his proven track record, Tutu and the process of reconciliation gained legitimacy as an option for resolving national conflicts. Works Most of Tutu’s books are collections of speeches he has made, letters he has written, and sermons he has given. However, he wrote No Future without Forgiveness, a book that chronicles both the efforts of the TRC and Tutu’s passion for this process. In this book, Tutu tells the story behind the commission. Bibliography John Allen, a South African journalist, reported on Desmond Tutu for thirty years and worked with him as director of communications for the TRC. His book Rabble Rouser for Peace: The Authorized Biography of Desmond Tutu (New York: Free Press, 2006) recounts circumstances and happenings that show how Tutu became a man of character and action. —Jadell Forman
U EVELYN UNDERHILL [MRS. HUBERT STUART MOORE] (1875–1941). English. The contemporaries of Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) valued her as a scholar and a spiritual guide. Her friend T.╯S. Eliot believed that her call to contemplation met her generation’s deepest spiritual need. Balancing intense spiritual experience with modern awareness of questions posed by biblical criticism and psychology, Underhill was a productive author, publishing 39 books and more than 350 articles and introductions. Her writing, speaking, and retreat work fostered spiritual renewal in England between World War I and World War II, expanded the role of laywomen in the church, and promoted ecumenical dialogue. Underhill was one of the first female Anglican retreat conductors, the first woman invited to address Church of England clergy, and one of the first women university lecturers in theology. While remaining deeply Anglo-Â�Catholic, she contributed to modern Anglicanism’s willingness to learn from other theological traditions. Early Influences and Writings Underhill was educated at home and then at private school and King’s College. From a nominally Anglican family, she was confirmed in the Church of England at age fifteen. By her late teens she was an agnostic and dreamed of being a writer. Her first book was a playful collection of verse, A Bar-Â�Lamb’s Ballad Book (1902), and her interest in medieval legends resulted in The Miracles of Our Lady St. Mary (1905). Her quest for supernatural knowledge sparked a brief association with Arthur Machen and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Underhill’s short stories, novels, and verse were inspired by Neoplatonic philosophy, mysticism, Arthurian legends, Roman Catholicism, and romantic love. Her novels The Gray World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The
Column of Dust (1909) depict modern spiritual quests. While only the last has a female protagonist, female characters have a profound impact on each quest. In the latter two, sacrifice is crucial to spiritual fulfillment. Though well received, the novels were soon overshadowed by her work on mysticism. Conversion and Christian Quest Travel in Italy was crucial to Underhill’s conversion, deepening her sense of spiritual possibility and her attraction to Roman Catholicism. By 1907, visionary experience turned Underhill to Christian theism. In that year, she married a childhood friend, Hubert Stuart Moore, and a papal encyclical against modernism coupled with Moore’s anticlericalism prevented her from becoming a Roman Catholic. Spiritually homeless, Underhill worked on Mysticism (1911). This work, which established her scholarly reputation, looks at mysticism broadly, using historical and psychological perspectives to understand the hunger for love that connects human beings with God. Mysticism inspired Friedrich von Hügel’s correspondence with Underhill, and he became her spiritual director. Von Hügel convinced Underhill of the historicity of Christianity, the centrality of Christ, and her need for the institutional church. From 1911 to 1921 Underhill struggled spiritually, working out her questions through biographical studies and editions of mystics, spiritual meditations under the pseudonym of John Cordelier (The Path of Eternal Wisdom [1911] and The Spiral Way [1912]), two books of verse (Immanence [1912] and Theophanies [1916]), and books on mysticism and spiritual life. The Mystic Way (1913) was the first to treat Christian mysticism as distinct. The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (1921) begins her shift from academic study of mysticism to disciplined practice.
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Anglican Commitment and Spiritual Growth Finally accepting Anglicanism as Catholic, Underhill joined the Church of England in 1921. She continued to explore the spiritual life with a new emphasis on the Cross as heroic mysticism gave way to a quieter model of self-Â� giving. But her sense that God wants to break through to human beings, meeting them in their world and calling them to active love, remained constant. By the 1920s Underhill was in demand as a speaker and retreat conductor, and she became The Spectator’s religious editor in 1929. She continued to offer spiritual counsel, with The Golden Sequence (1932) and Mixed Pasture (1933), personal and pastoral reflections on the challenges of giving priority to the spiritual life in the modern world. Underhill’s growing sacramentalism culminated in Worship (1936), her most ecumenical recognition of the value of corporate worship in sustaining the life of the spirit. Pacificism and Spiritual Legacy In the 1930s Underhill, who worked in naval intelligence during World War I, became a pacifist. Military virtues addressed in the preface to Practical Mysticism (1913) gave way to sacrificial understanding of the mystic way in The Golden Sequence (1932) and The School of Charity (1934). She joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, writing The Church and War (1940); addressing war as rooted in sin, fear, and failure of trust in God; and urging Christians to pray for their enemies and work for reconciliation. Despite failing health, Underhill continued her ministry through letters and occasional publications until her death at Hampstead on June 15, 1941. As a pioneering scholar of mysticism, she grounded her work in extensive reading, but it was not highly technical. She remains best known as a devotional writer and interpreter of the spiritual life for lay readers. Some scholars see her as outdated—a last vestige of the Oxford movement or a voice of Edwardian sensibilities—but her work continues to speak to readers wrestling with the challenge of the spiritual life in the modern world. Bibliography There is no collected edition of Underhill’s works. Among the anthologies of her work available, one of the most helpful is Evelyn Underhill: Modern Guide to the Ancient Quest for the Holy, edited by Dana Greene (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). The articles and excerpts are arranged in chronological order from the 1907 “Defence of Magic” to the 1940 “The Church and War.” Charles Williams, The Letters of Evelyn Underhill (New York: Longmans, Green, 1943), includes an introductory essay that reflects on Underhill’s writing. The Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill, edited by Lucy
Menzies (New York: Longmans, Green, 1946), and Margaret Cropper, Life of Evelyn Underhill (New York: Harper, 1958), contain primary documents useful to understanding Underhill’s personality and spiritual development. Among the biographies, Greene’s Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), is an excellent starting point for understanding Underhill’s life and work. Also helpful are Christopher J. R. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): An Introduction to Her Life and Writings (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975), and Ann Loades, Evelyn Underhill (London: Fount/Harper Collins, 1997). For Anglican perspectives on Underhill, see A. M. Allchin, “Evelyn Underhill and Anglican Spirituality,” and Michael Ramsey, “The Mysticism of Evelyn Underhill,” in Evelyn Underhill: Anglican Mystic (Oxford: SLG Press, 1996), 15–36 and 5–14. An Anthology of the Love of God, edited by Lumsden Barkway and Lucy Menzies (1953; reprint, Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Â� Barlow, 1976), contains a few of Underhill’s poems. —Linda Mills Woolsey JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009).╇ John Updike was an American writer who published twenty-Â�seven novels, thirteen collections of short stories, eight books of poems, ten essay collections, and six children’s books. Best known for his work as a novelist, Updike’s crowning achievement is his five-volume Rabbit series, which document the life, from age eighteen to his death, of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Two of that series (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit at Rest) each won a Pulitzer Prize, and taken together the series comprises the most comprehensive imaginative depiction extant of American social life in the second half of the twentieth century. Updike’s interest in religion takes two broad forms in his novels. One of these, well captured in the Rabbit novels, relentlessly if cheerfully documents the quotidian data of life in the service of a sustained meditation on human finitude. Updike explores for the reader the inevitable fact of death and the way that this fact colors every life in every aspect—even if we are oblivious to it. Rabbit Angstrom’s life ends, in an important sense, when his high school basketball career ends; all the rest is effectively a prequel to the Main Event, his death. Yet Rabbit’s life is far from joyless, even if Updike’s famous characterization of America as “a vast conspiracy to make us happy” is deeply tinged with double meaning. A cheerful if steadfast poet of desperation known and unknown, Updike in these novels affords the reader a sustained commentary on the apparently real but ultimately illusory blandishments that comprise materialist American life. In this he enacts imaginatively the full dimensions of Paul Tillich’s
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conception of “ultimate concern” and the inevitable disappointment, leading resolutely to despair, that ensues when the human’s chosen object of such concern—and there are so many such material objects in Updike’s world—is revealed to be anything but transcendent. The second form of Updike’s interest in religion is his extended theological commentary on the Puritan heritage in America. In this form, the chosen progenitor is Nathaniel Hawthorne. Updike rewrites in three novels the Puritan sensibility that Hawthorne portrayed in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Whereas for Hawthorne the sexual is implicit, seen only in its effective aftermath, for Updike the sexual is rendered explicit and is depicted as the inevitable progenitor and keynote to our human failings. The theme is announced, and most daringly developed, in A Month of Sundays (1975), whose narrator, the “priapic” Reverend Tom Marshfield, has been sent by his bishop to a desert sanatorium for clergymen who are “dysfunctional.” Marshfield’s specific dysfunction is sexual and is documented by Marshfield as extending from his days as a seminarian to his most recent congregational assignment, and potentially beyond. Married to a Chillingworth, while away from his wife at the sanatorium Marshfield seeks to bed a Ms. Prynne who is employed there. Updike’s depiction of Marshfield’s “dysfunction” ironizes Hawthorne in two important respects. First, the implicit sexuality of the earlier novelist is rendered graphically explicit. As such it becomes—literally and figuratively—prosaic, if inevitable. In this it is a synecdoche for a post-Â�Puritan understanding of sin. Second, the “cure” provided by the sanatorium—social ostracism coupled with regulation
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of behavior—proves as powerless in Updike’s rendering to effect human change as it is decisively powerful in Hawthorne. Bewilderment replaces shame as the central human condition, and original sin, which Updike insistently links with the sexual, is more idiosyncratic and more subtly tenacious than Hawthorne’s depiction. In two later novels, Roger’s Version (1986) and S. (1988), Updike elaborates in different ways the link he proposes between sin and sexuality and carries forward the allusions to Hawthorne through the respective narrative viewpoints of Roger Chillingworth and Hester Prynne. If in the Rabbit novels Updike explores the vagaries of Tillich’s concept of “ultimate concern,” in his rewritings of Hawthorne he may be seen to be exploring the claims of Søren Kierkegaard concerning the implications for faith of the human capacity to self-Â�deception. Put differently, Updike seems to want to suggest of the Puritans what Kierkegaard suggested of Hegel, namely that a too-Â� confident invocation of the Spirit at the heart of life can ignore what we know all too well: our own fundamental capacities for self-Â�puzzlement and self-Â�delusion. As is evidenced in his criticism, Updike knew both these theologians, as well as Karl Barth, exceptionally thoroughly. On this reading, then, Updike the novelist might be regarded as a cartographer of the theological imagination: he explores in detail the implications of regnant theological ideas, mapping in plots of extenuating circumstances how the human sensibility does and does not engage with, and reflect upon, such ideas. —Richard A. Rosengarten
V CORNELIUS VAN TIL (1895–1987).╇ Cornelius Van Til (nicknamed “Kees”) was born in Grootegast, the Netherlands, the sixth child of eight in a family of dairy farmers. The Van Tils moved to the United States in 1905. Being pious Calvinists (they belonged to the Afscheiding party that had rejected the doctrine of the presumptive regeneration of baptized children), they joined a Christian Reformed Church congregation. Cornelius was the first in his family to receive a higher education. He entered Calvin Preparatory School in 1914, graduated from Calvin College, and then began Calvin Seminary in 1921. After only one year Van Til decided to transfer to Princeton, where he could study simultaneously at the seminary and the university. Van Til’s exceptional academic abilities earned him two prizes (for papers written in 1923 and 1924) at the seminary and a graduate fellowship at the university. He earned the ThM in systematic theology from the seminary in 1925—the same year he married his longtime sweetheart Rena Klooster (d. 1978)—and the PhD in philosophy from the university in 1927 for a dissertation titled “God and the Absolute” (under A. A. Bowman [1883–1936]). Princeton Theological Seminary, under the leadership of John Gresham Machen, had become the center of the scholarly defense of orthodox Christianity in the theological and ecclesiastical battles of the time. Only a year after Van Til was ordained in a rural Christian Reformed Church in Michigan (he transferred to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church when it was established in 1936), he was convinced by Machen to come back and teach apologetics at the seminary. A year later, in 1929, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States decided to reorganize its last resolutely conservative seminary (Princeton) so that it would represent a wide variety of viewpoints. Though he was offered the
chair of apologetics, Van Til resigned and returned to Michigan. During that summer his wife gave birth to their only child, Earl. Van Til was eventually convinced to join Machen and a few other Princeton professors in establishing Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Van Til taught there until his retirement in 1975. He was a prolific writer throughout his career. Van Til achieved a true reformation of Christian apologetics by building critically upon the apologetical insights of Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer (1801–1876) and Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), the philosophical developments of the Amsterdam school (Herman Dooyeweerd [1894–1977], D. H. T. Vollenhoven [1892–1978], Hendrik G. Stoker [1899–1993]), the “Old Princeton” theological tradition of Charles Hodge (1797–1878) and B. B. Warfield (1851–1921), the penetrating and wide-Â�ranging Reformed theology of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), and especially the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949). The polemical context for Van Til’s work was primarily post-Â� Kantian philosophy (particularly Idealism, Kierkegaard, and Personalism), Protestant and Catholic theological modernism, and neo-Â�Orthodoxy. Van Til was also involved in various debates with the other schools of apologetics and his fellow evangelical and Reformed thinkers. The starting point of Van Til’s thought is the self-Â� existing and self-Â�contained absolute Person of the Triune God infallibly revealed in the Bible. The Creator-Â�creature distinction is radical, the latter depending absolutely on the former in all things. This chasm is bridged by God’s free self-Â�revelation and gracious covenanting. God has eternally foreordained and is sovereignly ruling over world history from creation to consummation, and therefore the existence and meaning of every single fact is produced by God’s wise design. There are therefore no brute facts, for all reality is exhaustively preinterpreted.
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Since mankind was made in God’s image and likeness, the creature’s epistemic and rational faculties are analogical to the Maker’s. This enables us to truly know God, ourselves, and the world although in a derivative and therefore qualitatively and quantitatively limited manner. True knowledge can be obtained when one “is thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Even before the fall, Adam was dependent on God’s special revelation to interpret all natural revelation. After he sinned, this dependency became even more absolute on account of the noetic effect of sin: although man inescapably encounters God’s revelation and therefore “knows” God, he systematically “suppresses” this knowledge and therefore does not know God at all at the same time. The human mind needs to be re-Â�created by the Spirit working through God’s special revelation in Scripture. This means that humankind is divided by a strict antiÂ� thesis between (fallen) covenant-Â�breakers and (redeemed) covenant-Â�keepers, including in the realm of knowledge. And yet both sides are able to communicate and collaborate in the realms of society, culture, and science because they share the same created humanity and world while being surrounded by God’s general revelation and common grace. Many evangelical apologists and Christian thinkers have been influenced by Van Til and his students, although in various degrees. This includes Gordon Clark and Edward J. Carnell, who were in sharp disagreement with Van Til’s conception of God’s incomprehensibility; Francis Schaeffer and John M. Frame, whose methods use transcendental arguments in an evidentialist framework; Rousas J. Rushdoony and Greg L. Bahnsen, two pillars of the theonomic movement whose ethical theory runs contrary to their master’s notions of common grace and eschatology; and William Edgar and K. Scott Oliphint, who continue the Vantillian tradition at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia). In fact, Frame describes Van Til’s contributions to Christian thought as comparable in magnitude to those of Immanuel Kant in non-Â�Christian philosophy. Because presuppositional apologetics is not limited to a rigid method or a set of arguments but instead is concerned with the foundations of human thought, it is very adaptable and can be applied in very different fields: the arts, politics, ethics, philosophy, counseling, evangelism, mercy ministry, hermeneutics, theology, etc. Its radical critique of modernism anticipated many of the best insights of postmodernism while avoiding its pitfalls. As such, it is probably more relevant and effective for the defense and proclamation of the Christian faith today than it ever was. References and Suggested Readings
Bahnsen, G. L. (1996). Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith. Texarkana: Covenant Media Foundation.
———. (1998). Van Til’s Apologetics: Readings and Analysis. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Campbell-Â�Jack, W. C., and G. McGrath, eds. (2006). New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Carson, D. A. (1996). The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Frame, J. M. (1976). Van Til the Theologian. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Geehan, E. R., ed. (1980). Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Oliphint, K. S., and L. G. Tipton, eds. (2007). Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Pratt, R. L. (1979). Every Thought Captive: A Study Manual for the Defense of Christian Truth. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. Van Til, C. (2003). Christian Apologetics. 2nd ed. Edited by William Edgar. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. ———. (1967). The Defense of the Faith. 3rd ed. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed. ———. (n.d.). Why I Believe in God. Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications. Vos, G. (1948). Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments. Carlisle: Banner of Truth Trust. Westminster Theological Journal 34(2): 1972. White, W. (1979). Van Til: Defender of the Faith. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
—Flavien Pardigon
HENRY VAUGHAN (1621–1695).╇ Henry Vaughan was born in Newton by the river Usk in southeastern Wales. His parents were of the gentry class, his father a younger son of the Vaughans of Tretower Court, who, along with the Herbert earls of Pembroke and the Somerset dynasty, were one of the magnate families of Wales, tracing its ancestry back to Agincourt. Though well connected, Henry Vaughan’s patrimony was meager due to his father’s debts. Henry was the older twin brother of Thomas Vaughan, the hermeticist. As the eldest, Henry was destined for a career in law, but the outbreak of the English Civil War and the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth interrupted this plan. Instead, he later took up the practice of medicine as his profession. He fought in at least one battle on the king’s side. He married twice (1646 and 1655), fathering four children with each wife. Henry Vaughan’s identification with a river in Wales is important in several ways. For his second book of poetry he chose the title Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk; compare Shakespeare’s “The Swan of Avon”), by which some contemporaries referred to him. He also styled himself a “Silurist,” a term referring to the Silures tribe
Henry Vaughan
of antiquity who inhabited Vaughan’s region of Wales and who resisted Roman conquest. Both names signal a learned and proud attachment to his native history and environment. His twin brother Thomas claimed to be bilingual in Welsh and English, and Henry Vaughan must have been also. These Welsh contexts chiefly matter with regard to Vaughan’s nature poetry. The Usk Valley contains a green plain, a river, and, beyond them, the Brecon Beacons, mountains offering vistas of horizon upon horizon. The night skies are filled with stars, and the bright daylight is set aglow by a film of clouds. All of these he observed carefully in his poetry and transmuted with spiritual significance. His poetic career began in a secular mode: Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646) and Olor Iscanus (1651; dedication dated 1647) contain amatory poems, Horatian celebrations of leisure and retirement, verse invitations to friends, elegies for fallen comrades, and translations of classical writers in the style of the Cavalier poets or “sons of Ben” (Jonson) and the metaphysical love lyrics of John Donne. Vaughan was reborn as a poet (recounted in the poem “Mount of Olives [II]”), and probably as a person, following these early publications. He lived in turbulent times, and as an ardent Royalist and loyal Anglican, he (and his peers) experienced the persecution of the Puritan state. Parish living was denied to his brother and to minister-Â� friends, churches were sacked and closed, and Vaughan’s appointment as law clerk to the chief justice was ended in 1645. He had no job, no degree, no prospects. On top of that, his beloved younger brother William died in 1648, and his king was executed in 1649, crushing Henry’s spirits. He found solace in the poetry of his distant cousin George Herbert, and from that point Vaughan became the devotional poet for which he is justly celebrated. His chief devotional work, Silex Scintillans (Flashing Flint), subtitled Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, appeared in two editions, the first in 1650 and the second, expanded, in 1655. The title alludes to the emblem used as a frontispiece for the first edition: a heart of stone pierced by iron tools representing a divine thunderbolt sparks a fire; two tears or drops of blood also fall from the heart. The biblical stony heart of sinful man is thus symbolically made flesh by the blows of Providence and is drawn as fire toward the heavens. The subtitle is an exact copy of Herbert’s The Temple. The influence of Herbert cannot be underestimated. In the 1654 Preface to Silex Scintillans Vaughan claimed to be a “convert” of “the blessed man” and of his “holy life and verse.” In between these two editions of devotional poetry, Vaughan published a devotional manual, The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652) and Flores Solitudinis
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(1654), containing translations of works by Jesuit authors with titles such as “Of Temperance and Patience,” “Of Life and Death,” “The World Contemned,” and “Primitive Holiness, Set Forth in the Life of Paulinus,” the last being an important theme in Silex Scintillans. In The Mount of Olives, Vaughan dispenses advice on various ascetic and devotional practices, particularly night watches, imitating Christ who “continued all night in prayer, sometimes in a Mountain apart, sometimes amongst the wild beasts, and sometimes in solitary places.” This was Vaughan’s own usual practice: nighttime afforded opportunities of solitude, inward silence, mystery, and excitement that were most receptive to sensing the Divine Presence. Vaughan sought the mystic’s union with God, although, regrettably, he may never have achieved it. Nevertheless, his poetry is filled with the attempts (e.g., “Love-Â�Sick”). His treatment of topics such as childhood, primitive holiness, hermetic sympathies in nature, death, and eternity in his sacred poems are means by which he explored a connection to the divine. Like his contemporary and fellow border poet Thomas Traherne, Vaughan took literally the injunction to receive the kingdom of God as a little child. Spiritual progress meant retreating to the original innocence of childhood: Happy those early days when I Shined in my Angel-Â�infancy .╯.╯. .╯.╯. .╯.╯. . When on some gilded cloud, or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity. (“The Retreat,” 1–2, 11–14)
A carnal conscience came later, but before that even his “fleshly dress” felt “Bright shoots of everlastingness” (19–20). Vaughan’s child is very close to Eden, and the childhood poems and images seek to instill awe for those grace-Â�filled times. However, that state of innocence, though desired, is unattainable a second time: I cannot reach it; and my striving eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity. Were now that chronicle alive, Those white designs that children drive, And the thoughts of each harmless hour, With their content too in my power, Quickly would I make my path even, And by merely playing go to Heaven. (“Child-Â�hood,” 1–8)
We are left here to “study” childhood and seek its virtues as the “narrow way” imposed on adulthood (39, 44). Similarly, the Bible represents for Vaughan a period of primitive simplicity and purity. Theophanies abound due to the people of God’s proximity to the Garden of Eden before humanity became degenerate. The patriarchs were
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thousands of years nearer to heaven than contemporary believers are: In Abraham’s tent the winged guests (O how familiar then was heaven!) Eat, drink, discourse, sit down, and rest Until the cool, and shady even. (“Religion,” 13–16)
The simple style and present tense of these lines express the childlike immediacy of the divine encounter: “I see in each shade that there grows / An angel talking with a man” (1–2). The Bible itself is alive, and its “most searching ray” shines “into my soul” and offers Vaughan transcendent experience. While some religious radicals of his day accorded their “revelations” a status above the Bible, Vaughan’s close readings brought it, and him, to life (to the Holy Bible). Vaughan loved the language and images of hermeticism and alchemy: correspondence, union, affinity, sympathy, attraction, magnetism, influence, emanation, reciprocity, desire. Whether describing union with deceased loved ones, nature, or the supernatural, Vaughan believed that there is telepathic sympathy flowing between everything. An elegy for his brother asserts that “Sure, there’s a tie of bodies!” And “Cock-Â�Crowing” affirms that the rooster has as much influence on the sun rising as the sun does on the rooster crowing. “The Star” analogizes the courtship of God and the soul. The celestial light is attracted to a “beauty here below” and gives a “wink” and “smile”; “there’s in it a restless, pure desire” for something on earth that pulls it like a magnet, “As beauteous shapes, we know not why, / Command and guide the eye” (1, 3, 17, 23–24). This hermetic inclination is the reverse of the modern mechanistic worldview of the universe. Vaughan is justly celebrated as the “poet of light” par excellence, a talent that figures most brilliantly in his poetic visions of eternity. “I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright” (“The World,” 1–3). The departed saints are “Stars of mighty use,” “shining spires,” and “pillar-Â�fires” whose “twinkling ray” guides the earthly pilgrim. The familiar line “Bright shoots of everlastingness” doubles as an image of “shoots” of light (such as shooting stars) as well as the green shoots of spring. In “Midnight,” light scintillates against a dark background: What emanations, Quick vibrations, And bright stirs are there? .╯.╯. .╯.╯. .╯.╯. . O what bright quickness, Active brightness, And celestial flows. (11–13, 27–29)
These night-Â�sky light shows themselves “mingle” the “fiery-Â�liquid light” (18) of Heaven. “They Are All Gone into the World of Light” contrasts the next world with this one. “Like stars upon some gloomy grove” the saints above walk in an “air of glory, / Whose light doth trample on my days” (9–10). But the vision of hope is contained in the image of a soul as a star in a tomb: “when the hand that locked her up, gives room, / She’ll shine through all the sphere” (31–32). Only thirty-Â�five when he published Silex Scintillans, Vaughan lived another forty years but, remarkably, did not produce any more poetry. He published prose translations of two hermetical treatises in 1655 and 1657, and in 1678 he published Thalia Redivia, which gathers together uncollected secular poems dating to the 1640s as well as some of his brother’s work. These odds and ends also include nineteen sacred poems, presumably dating to the period of Silex Scintillans but withheld from it for political or artistic reasons. The several sides of Henry Vaughan—Silurist, Welsh gentleman, and man of God—all coalesce on his gravestone. Translated, it reads in part “Henry Vaughan, Silurist” followed by his dates, degree, and coat of arms and then “an unprofitable servant and the chief of sinners here I lie. Glory to God and may He have mercy.” The humble, devotional poet of literary history has the last word. Bibliography The standard editions are The Works of Henry Vaughan, edited by L. C. Martin (1957), and Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, edited by Alan Rudrum (rev. ed., 1983). The standard biography is F. E. Hutchison, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (1947). I owe a substantial debt to the critical insights of Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (1995). —William Gentrup FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL (1852–1925).╇ Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) was an Austrian-Â�born British Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and religious writer who strove to harmonize theological dogma with modern science. He is known as one of the two most influential Catholic thinkers of his day, the other being John Henry Newman. Von Hügel supported Roman Catholic Modernism—a movement that was denounced in a papal encyclical in 1907—but was not as vocal as other Modernist scholars such as Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, and Maurice Blondel. Von Hügel remained a loyal supporter of the Church and the papacy, and he never expressed questions on the fundamental teachings of the Church.
Friedrich von Hügel
Von Hügel was born in Florence, Italy, where his father was the Austrian ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; his mother, a Scot, was a convert to Catholicism. At the age of fifteen, Friedrich von Hügel moved with his family to England, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1873 he married Lady Mary Herbert, a Catholic, with whom he had three daughters. He founded the London Society for the Study of Religion in 1905. He remained an Austrian citizen until December 1914, when he became a naturalized Briton. He is famous for serving as a spiritual counselor for the Anglo-Â�Catholic Evelyn Underhill, who under his guidance shifted her focus from an intellectual and mystical Christian life to a life more focused on actualizing faith among the poor. A lay Catholic scholar, von Hügel neither earned a university degree nor held an academic post; in recognition of his scholarly achievements, however, the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctor of divinity degree in 1920. Von Hügel is chiefly known for his extensive personal letters in which he offered spiritual guidance: Selected Letters, 1896–1924 (1928), Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a Niece (1955), and The Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Norman Kemp Smith (1981). Additionally, he wrote several important theological works, including The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (1908), Eternal Life: A Study of Its Implications and Applications (1913), Essays & Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (1921–1926), The Life of Prayer (1929), and The Reality of God, Religion & Agnosticism; Being the Literary Remains of Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1931). Among all of the titles listed above, The Mystical Element of Religion is von Hügel’s most renowned work. Comprising two volumes, it offers a historical case study of the medieval mystic St. Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) as well as a study of the philosophy of Catholic mysticism
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in general. According to the author, religion consists of three components: the Petrine, Pauline, and Johannine elements, which correspond to the institutional/historical side, the intellectual side, and the mystical/emotional side of the faith, respectively. Principal Ideas of Friedrich von Hügel •â•‡ A well-Â�balanced faith comprises three elements: the ecclesiastical, the intellectual, and the mystical. •â•‡ A spiritually mature person actualizes divine grace through Christ-Â�centered devotions and acts of compassion and mercy; an unmistakable mark of spiritual growth is joyfulness. •â•‡ Catholic doctrine should accommodate contemporary scientific and historical knowledge; theologians should use scientific and historical knowledge in analyzing the Bible. •â•‡ Experiential knowledge comes from a union with the Transcendent—the wholly other or the infinite—regardless of cultures and religions. Bibliography
Barmann, Lawrence F. 1972. Baron Friedrich Von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leonard, Ellen M. 1997. Creative Tension: The Spiritual Legacy of Friedrich von Hügel. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. Von Hügel, Baron Friedrich. 1955. Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a Niece. Edited by Gwendolen Greene. Chicago: H. Regnery. ———. 1981. The Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Norman Kemp Smith. Edited by Lawrence F. Barmann. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 1923. The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends. New York: E. P. Dutton.
—John J. Han
W CHARLES PETER WAGNER (1930–).╇ United States. Born in New York, Wagner was educated at Rutgers University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the University of Southern California, and served as a missionary in Bolivia for sixteen years. He is one of the most influential American missiologists with more than sixty books to his credit, a teaching career that has exposed thousands of students to church-Â�growth principles, and the honor of being the founding president of the North American Society for Church Growth (now American Society for Church Growth). Though the appellation “father of the contemporary Church Growth Movement” rightly belongs to Donald Anderson McGavran, Wagner has been labeled “father of the American Church Growth Movement” (Moreau). In 1971 he became a full-Â�time faculty member in the school of World Missions at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The years 1981–1988 have been labeled “The Wagner Era,” whereby his leadership and influence kept the Church Growth Movement at the forefront of evangelical Christianity (Rainer). Because Wagner is such a prolific and diverse writer, it is very difficult to narrow one’s discussion of his works to a single article. For example, he has written about church health in Your Church Can be Healthy (1979) and How to Have a Healing Ministry without Making Your Church Sick (1988); church planting in Church Planting for a Greater Harvest (1990); church-Â�growth strategy in Frontiers in Missionary Strategy (1971) and Strategies for Church Growth (1989); Third Wave in Signs and Wonders Today (1987) and The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit (1988); and leadership in Leading Your Church to Growth (1984). He has published in the area of prayer and spiritual warfare in Warfare Prayer (1992), Prayer Shield (1992), Breaking Strongholds in Your City (1993), and Churches That
Pray (1993). He has produced a three-Â�volume commentary on the book of Acts: Spreading the Fire (volume 1, 1994), Lighting the World (volume 2, 1995), and Blazing the Way (volume 3, 1995). Some of his recent works include interest in church leaders: Pastors and Prophets: Protocol for Healthy Churches (2000), Apostles and Prophets: The Foundation of the Church (2000), Churchquake: The Explosive Dynamics of the New Apostolic Revolution (2000), and Apostles Today (2007). Two of Wagner’s best-Â�selling books include Your Church Can Grow (1976) and Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow (1979), with the former addressing several church-Â�growth principles and the latter identifying twenty-Â�seven spiritual gifts and discussing how the church can identify and use those gifts for growth. Some of Wagner’s most significant works have not been his best sellers. Our Kind of People: The Ethical Dimensions of Church Growth in America (1979) addresses the Church Growth Movement’s most controversial principle, the homogeneous unit. Wagner began to be identified as the spokesperson for the Church Growth Movement in 1981 with the publication of Church Growth and the Whole Gospel: A Biblical Mandate (Rainer). In this work he offers a biblical, missiological, and pragmatic apologia for church-Â�growth principles while responding to the movement’s critics. Strategies for Church Growth (1987) addresses church-Â�growth theology, the necessary components for good strategy, and Wagner’s church-Â�growth hermeneutic. Principal Ideas of Charles Peter Wagner •â•‡ The Bible is the absolute foundation for theology, but a phenomenological hermeneutic is to be used that is open to revising theological conclusions in light of what is learned through experience.
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•â•‡ God desires growth for His Church primarily through conversion growth (evangelism that results in responsible church membership). •â•‡ Priority must be given to evangelism. •â•‡ Within biblical parameters, God wants the Church to choose the most effective and efficient means to reach unbelievers with the gospel and incorporate them into Church membership (consecrated pragmatism). •â•‡ Leadership is a critical component to church growth. •â•‡ Missionaries and churches should primarily work among receptive homogeneous units of peoples when doing evangelism. •â•‡ Social scientific research can be used to identify barriers to church growth and assist in strategy development. •â•‡ Churches should multiply their small groups and plant other churches. •â•‡ Spiritual gifts must be identified and used for church growth. •â•‡ Churches should evaluate their ministries in light of conversion growth. Bibliography Works by Wagner: Your Church Can Grow: Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1976); Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1979); Strategies for Church Growth: Tools for Effective Mission and Evangelism (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1989). Works about Wagner: A. Scott Moreau, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books; and UK: Paternoster Press, 2000); Thom S. Rainer, The Book of Church Growth: History, Theology, and Principles (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1993); Elmer L. Towns, ed., Evangelism and Church Growth: A Practical Encyclopedia (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1995). —J. D. Payne
LEWIS WALLACE (1827–1905).╇ Lew Wallace was born in Brookville, Indiana, in 1827. Best known as the author of Ben-Â�Hur: A Tale of the Christ, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a soldier and statesman. After fighting in the Mexican War (1846–1847), Wallace was elected to the Indiana state senate in 1856 and served in that post until the outbreak of the U. S. Civil War. He quickly rose to the rank of major general in the Union Army but was widely criticized for mistakes that nearly led to a Union defeat at
the Battle of Shiloh. He participated in the court-Â�martial proceedings after the war that led to the convictions of conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination as well as of Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison camp. Appointments as governor of the New Mexico Territory (1878–1881) and as U.S. minster to Turkey (1881–1885) temporarily interrupted his postwar career as a lecturer and writer of plays and historical novels. Wallace sporadically attended Methodist churches throughout his life yet reported having no strong religious sentiments before Ben-Â�Hur. While he had long been fascinated by the story of the Magi in the Gospel of Matthew, a chance meeting on a train with Robert G. Ingersoll, famed orator and “Great Agnostic,” became the impetus for the longer tale he would eventually write. The conversation with Ingersoll alerted Wallace to his own ignorance about the historical-Â�cultural setting for the birth of Christianity. Researching and writing the book, he would later claim, produced “a conviction amounting to absolute belief in God and the divinity of Christ” (McKee, 167). The result of his labor is frequently hailed as the best-Â�selling novel of the nineteenth century. It inspired a wildly popular Broadway production at the turn of the century and has been made into a motion picture several times. (The 1959 production won eleven Academy Awards.) Insofar as Jesus appears as a character only rarely in the novel, its subtitle is somewhat misleading. Judah Ben-Â�Hur, a Jewish nobleman, is the central character. His friendship and rivalry with Messala, a Roman, drives the twisting plot that takes Judah from a provincial palace to prison, and from service in a Roman galley to victory as a chariot driver in the novel’s most famous scene. When Judah encounters Jesus later in the novel, he hopes that Jesus is the one who will deliver Israel from imperial oppression but remains a follower even when the crucifixion makes clear that Jesus is a very different type of messiah. The success of Ben-Â�Hur revealed a demand among the public for inspirational adventure stories with broadly Christian sensibilities (e.g., Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis?) and also helped to erode clerical opposition to popular literature, theater, and film. Bibliography Works by Wallace: The Fair God (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873); Ben-Â�Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880); Lew Wallace: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1906). Works about Wallace: Irving McKee, “Ben-Â�Hur” Wallace: The Life of General Lew Wallace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947). —Patrick Gray
Walter of Saint-Victor
ANDREW F. WALLS (1928–).╇ It is common knowledge now that Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted southward, to Africa or Asia and away from Europe or North America. Andrew Walls deserves a great deal of the credit for bringing this shift to scholarly attention. His great reputation, due to the essays he has written and especially to the students he has mentored as a faculty member on three continents, will no doubt continue to increase as the shift that he identified grows in strength. After studying patristic Christianity at Oxford, Walls moved in 1957 to Sierra Leone for an academic position, and a few years later to Nigeria. During his years in Africa, Walls underwent a sort of conversion that gave a new direction to his scholarship and the insight that will probably become the core of his legacy. The experience of the early Church—his academic specialty—was in many ways the same as the experience of the twentieth-Â�century African Church, and the former could be better understood in light of the latter. Walls was able to see in the form of West African Christianity the distinctive, complex, and destabilizing cross-Â�cultural process that unifies Christian history in all its diverse stages but that was obscured by the waning, though still dominating, cultural and political power of Christianity in the West. Christianity, as Walls came to see it, is founded upon the Incarnation, by which God becomes present in the confines of cultural specificity. Just as God fully entered human nature, individuals who become Christians both remain what they were (culturally) and fully enter their new, Christian identity. This is how Walls understands Christian conversion, and what he both experienced in Africa and read about the early Church was the struggle of Christians to convert and reconfigure their indigenous beliefs and practices in the light of their new knowledge of Christ. Returning to his Scots homeland in 1966, Walls began teaching at the University of Aberdeen, where he established the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Â� Western World (CSCNWW), which was subsequently moved to the University of Edinburgh. In his retirement, he continues in his role as director emeritus of the Â�CSCNWW, as well as traveling the world as a lay Methodist preacher and as a teacher and mentor of missionaries and scholars. Walls has not published a monograph, but at the urging of his students he has collected thirty-Â�four of his essays into two collections: The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996), and The Cross-Â�Cultural Process in Christian History (Orbis, 2002). These essays, concise and colorful, are characterized by breadth of learning in theology, Church history (both African and Western, both ancient and modern), as well as religious studies
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and anthropology. Walls always stresses that ancient and modern missionaries have, both by their work and by their theorizing about it, made vital contributions to the disciplines of theology and anthropology. He makes an impassioned plea for the education of ministers and missionaries, and indeed of all Christians, to take into account the shift in Christianity’s center. —Stephen Ney WALTER OF SAINT-Â�VICTOR (d. ca. 1180).╇ The biographical details that have reached us on Walter are scarce: a mystic philosopher and theologian, and an Augustinian canon in Paris, he succeeded Richard of Saint-Â�Victor as a prior about 1175 and must have died around 1180. He is mostly known for his vehement, à la Tertullian, polemic against the dialectical method and its doctrinal and spiritual implications in theology. His work, written about 1179 and known as “Contra quatros labyrinthos Franciae,” attacks four prominent dialecticians at the time: Abelard, Gilbert of Porreta, Peter Lombard, and Peter of Poitiers. Despite these measures, four years after the publication of the polemic, Peter of Poitiers was promoted by the pope to the position of chancellor of the diocese of Paris, and a little later Peter Lombard was commonly recognized as a leading theologian. Walter also wrote about twenty sermons in which none of either Hugonian or Richard’s spirituality is exhibited, but rather an ordinary piety. Content of the “Contra quatros labyrinthos Franciae” Walter calls dialecticians “new heretics” who “inspired by Aristotle, interpret the ineffable mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation with scholastic levity.” The gimmick, so Walter believed, consisted especially in covering one’s own errors by the authority of others and thus putting oneself on the safe side as to the accusation of heresy. Walter gives special attention to Peter Lombard, who is for him so artfully convoluted in his constant citations of the Fathers that not even Catholic Christians can recognize their own creed. In particular, both Walter and John of Cornwall opposed Lombard’s Christological nihilianism, according to which one could allegedly infer that Christ either was devoid of human person—his humanity is then not an “aliquid”—or else His humanity is but an accident to His divinity. As both inferences would pose problems with respect to the hypostatic union, this doctrine was, in fact, declared a heresy by the Third Lateran Council in 1179, without, however, any ensuing condemnation of Lombard, the former bishop of Paris. Walter also generally chastises philosophy: it is for him a scapegoat of all doctrinal misgivings throughout the
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history of Christianity. Philosophers are the ones who produce heresies, both old and new; they are similar to jesters and their arguments are like labyrinths and spiderwebs. Dialectic versus Mysticism As inappropriate as this baffling criticism of dialectic might seem, it is not totally groundless, since, as it is commonly known, the scholastic tradition and method have not always been without aberrance. Besides Abelard’s sophistries and Gilbert’s linguistic and logical analysis, to which the notion of philosophy was being commonly reduced, the Aristotelian methodology gradually but surely pervaded the schools at the expense of the previous neo-Â�Platonic and Augustinian tradition, making quite ill at ease many a believing thinker, such as, for example, John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, who was indignant over the conceptual formalism of scholasticism, or Godfrey of Saint-Â�Victor. In fact, the school of Saint-Â�Victor itself was born out of the desire to counterbalance the lopsidedness of Abelard’s dialectic; toward the last quarter of the twelfth century, Saint-Â�Victor was not one of the existing schools, but rather an alternative to them, striving to harmonize, in a sort of Augustinian and Anselmian way, faith with knowledge and mystic with speculation. However, it must be acknowledged that especially during Richard’s being prior, this antischolastic trend ultimately led the school to stagnation, staying as it were aloof not only from the production of summae as a methodology, but also from any new sources and methods in general, which made it impossible for it to respond to the practical needs of ever-Â� growing knowledge. This, again, led to the progressing tension within the school between learning and spiritual life. Yet, the very initial mood of mystical vision of the heart coupled with rational contemplation was precisely what attracted Godfrey, for instance, to Saint-Â�Victor, although he might not quite have been aware of its exacerbating climate prior to settling there; having become weary of unfruitful disputations in a secular academic setting, he sought to flee from the “turbulent rivers of dialectic” to the calm of lectio divina. For Godfrey, “stultum dialectica facit insanire” (Dialectic makes a fool demented); as he explains in his Fons philosophiae—his autobiographical poem— dialectic can be used safely only in the hands of wise men, yet dialecticians fail to provide wisdom to the students, splitting hairs instead. We can thus see that Walter was not the only one to criticize dialecticians; rather it is his way of doing so that came to be, unfortunately, shattering instead of constructive. While Godfrey adopted a rather tactful and moderate pace in his criticism, Walter, who succeeded Richard as a prior just about the time Godfrey had finished his autobiography, was scalding in his attack, and not only on
dialectic, but also on the entire program of Saint-�Victor, labeling arts, for instance, as enemies and not handmaidens of theology. In such circumstances it is no wonder that Godfrey could not maintain his position as head of the school and was forced to leave. He returned later on, however, but not as head, and his first departure can be considered as an end to the beautiful florilege-�tradition of Saint-�Victor, with Walter giving it the coup de grace. To conclude, it can be said that the holistic harmony between faith and reason has seldom been achieved throughout the history of Christianity; human perception of God has constantly wavered between an attempt of a thorough conceptualization of His reality on the one hand and the denial to human reason to apprehend it on the other. This historical fact might suggest how challenging a task it remains for human beings to realize within themselves the full beauty of their divine origin. Bibliography
Baur, Ferdinand Christian. Die Christliche Kirche des Mittelalters in den Hauptmomenten ihrer Entwicklung, pp. 306–312. Tübingen, 1861. ———. Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte. Oxford University, 1858. Colish, Marcia L. “Christological Nihilianism in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century.” In Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, vol. 63, pp. 146–155. 1996. Ferruolo, Stephen C. The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215, pp. 40–43. Stanford University Press, 1985. Grover, Zinn. “Walter of Saint-Â�Victor.” In Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, p. 971. Routledge, 1995. Turner, William. “Walter of Saint-Â�Victor.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGraw-Â�Hill, 1967–1996.
—Anna Djintcharadzé
CARL FERDINAND WILHELM WALTHER (1811– 1887).╇ Germany and America. Born in 1811 in Saxony into a Lutheran pastor’s family, Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther graduated from the “Latin School” in Schneeberg in 1829, attended the University of Leipzig, and was ordained in 1837. Falling under the influence of the writings of Martin Luther, Walther rejected the rationalism common in many ecclesiastical circles of his time and became deeply committed to reviving confessional, orthodox Lutheranism. Under the leadership of a Dresden pastor named Martin Stephan, some eight hundred emigrants, including Walther, left for America in five ships. The exiles settled in Perry County, Missouri, in 1839. After Stephan left the initial Lutheran settlement under the clouds of personal scandal, Walther quickly filled the leadership vacuum. An ardent proponent of
Walter Wangerin Jr.
parochial education, he helped to start a log cabin school in Altenburg, which eventually became Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He served as president of the seminary until his death. In 1841 he became pastor of the first Lutheran church in St. Louis. While not physically prepossessing, Walther was endowed with boundless energy and impressive persuasive abilities. He helped to organize the Missouri Synod in 1847 and served as its president until 1850 and then again from 1864 to 1878. Walther eagerly sought out opportunities to find common ground with other evangelical American Lutherans. He played a key role in organizing the Synodical Conference (an alliance with the Wisconsin Synod) in 1872. Walther was that rarest of things, an effective ecclesiastical administrator who was neither pushy nor bland. Even in his doctrinal treatises one senses exactly what it was about Walther that drew so many to him: not his rhetorical gifts and strong personality alone, but his passionate dedication to the Gospel. Like Luther before him, Walther had a conversion experience: “After he had read the letter, he felt that he suddenly had been placed in heaven out of hell.╯.╯. . Stephan had shown him that the repentance taught by the law, which he sought, had already long taken place; that he was missing absolutely nothing other than the faith in Christ” (Suelflow, 353). Walther shared Luther’s conviction that the doctrine of justification by faith was the central doctrine of Christianity. “So far as making the doctrine of justification the focus of all our pastoral work is concerned,” he declared, “it will no doubt want to claim us as its students forever” (Suelflow, 155). Although he was a prolific and influential writer on a wide variety of issues, including those surrounding the doctrines of church and ministry, Walther’s best-Â�known work is probably “The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel,” a series of twenty-Â�five evening lectures he delivered over the course of fourteen months. In them he speaks of the predominance of the Gospel over the Law: “True, we have to preach the law, only, however, as a preparation for the Gospel. The ultimate aim in our preaching of the Law must be to preach the Gospel.╯.╯. . When you preach, do not be stingy with the Gospel; bring its consolations to all, even to the greatest sinners. When they are terrified by the wrath of God and hell, they are fully prepared to receive the Gospel. True, this goes against our reason; we think it strange that such knaves are to be comforted immediately; we imagine that they ought to be made to suffer much greater agony in their conscience. Fanatics adopt the method in dealing with alarmed sinners; but a genuine Bible theologian resolves to preach the Gospel and faith in Jesus Christ to a person whom God has prepared for such preaching by His Law” (Suelflow, 161–162).
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Although Walther turned down the offer of an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Göttingen in 1855, he was not altogether immune to adulation and later accepted an honorary degree from Capital Seminary. His influence on North American Lutheranism was so extensive that he was sometimes referred to as “the Luther of America,” although he insisted that he was only “Luther’s archivist.” Walther’s death in 1887 was marked with four separate funeral services and a two-Â�mile-Â�long funeral procession. His body is buried in a splendid mausoleum in Concordia Cemetery in St. Louis. Bibliography Editions and Translations of Walther’s Works Walther wrote a number of books in German that were published in his lifetime by Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis. Two of his best-Â�known works are: Church and Ministry, trans. J. T. Mueller (St. Louis, 1987); and The Proper Distinction between the Law and the Gospel: 39 Evening Lectures, trans. W. H. T. Dau (St. Louis, 1929). See also Selected Writings of C. F. W. Walther, ed. A. Suelflow, 6 vols. (St. Louis, 1981); and Walther Speaks to the Church: Selected Letters, ed. C. S. Meyer (St. Louis, 1973). Books about Walther
Dau, W. H. T., and Th. Engelder. Walther and the Church. St. Louis, 1938. Forster, W. O. Zion on the Mississippi: The Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri, 1839–1841. St. Louis, 1953. Polack, W. G. The Story of C. F. W. Walther. St. Louis, 1935. Spitz, L. W., Sr. The Life of Dr. C. F. W. Walther. St. Louis, 1961. Suelflow, A. Servant of the Word: The Life and Ministry of C. F. W. Walther. St. Louis, 2000.
—Carl P. E. Springer
WALTER WANGERIN JR. (1944–).╇ American. Walter Wangerin Jr. was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 13, 1944, the eldest of seven children and fourth in a line of Lutheran pastors. He grew up in Chicago; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Edmonton, Alberta; and Milwaukee. He married Ruthanne (“Thanne”) Bohlmann in 1968, and raised four children. He was educated at Concordia Senior College (B.A., 1966), Miami University (Ohio; M.A., 1968; doctoral studies, ABD), Concordia Seminary, and Christ Seminary (M.Div., 1976), and received an honorary doctorate from Valparaiso University (1986). He was instructor in English literature at the University of Evansville (Indiana) from 1970 to 1974. After being ordained a Lutheran minister (ELCA) in 1976, he served as pastor of the black inner-Â�city Grace Church in Evansville from 1977 to 1985.
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He left the pastorate to continue writing full time. He is writer-Â�in-Â�residence at Valparaiso University (Valparaiso, Indiana), where he was appointed Jochum University Professor of English in 1991. He was the host of Lutheran Vespers (ELCA radio ministry) from 1994 to 2005. He is a member and former president of the Chrysostom Society, a network of Christian writers. Authorial influences on his spirituality and writing include Dostoyevsky, St. John of the Cross, and KierkeÂ� gaard. Maurice Sendak and Hans Christian Andersen inspired his conviction that great children’s literature must acknowledge evil, for “children have already encountered it but do not know what to do about it.” Wangerin’s childhood, parenthood, and pastoral life provided fertile soil for his stories, which have influenced a generation of pastors and writers, as well as children of all ages. Works Wangerin is best known for his first novel, The Book of the Dun Cow (Harper and Row, 1978), which won the New York Times’ Best Children’s Book of the Year and the National Book Award (1980). A bestiary fable, it depicts a community led by the proud but priestly rooster, Chauntecleer, battling against Wyrm, the subterranean embodiment of evil. Its sequel, The Book of Sorrows (Harper and Row, 1985), takes the external struggle inward as the animals face their own sinfulness. His other novels include The Crying for a Vision (Simon and Schuster, 1994), about a Lakota tribe suffering the effects of its chief ’s pride, and the innocent youth whose self-Â�sacrifice brings restoration; Saint Julian (HarperÂ� SanFrancisco, 2003), a medieval “saint’s tale” representing Wangerin’s vocational ministerial “life in whole”; and three highly acclaimed novelized biblical narratives (Zondervan): The Book of God (1996), Paul: A Novel (2000), and Jesus: A Novel (2005). His short stories and essays are collected in: Ragman and Other Cries of Faith (Harper and Row, 1984); Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace (Harper and Row, 1988); The Manger Is Empty (Harper and Row, 1989); Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? (Zondervan, 1993); and In the Days of the Angels (Waterbrook Press, 2000). In Swallowing the Golden Stone (Augsburg Fortress, 2001), some of his best children’s stories are interspersed with his reflections on writing. The Orphean Passages (Harper and Row, 1986), about the stages of faith and the need to come to the end of one’s own resources in order to experience God, alternates between Greek myth, a contemporary retelling thereof based on Wangerin’s pastoral ministry, and biblical/theological meditations. Wangerin’s other nonfiction includes As for Me and My House: Crafting Your Marriage to Last (Thomas Nelson, 1987); Mourning into Dancing (Zondervan, 1992), a creative/theological treatment of grief and loss; and Whole Prayer (Zondervan, 1998). He has also published a book of poetry, A Miniature Cathedral and
Other Poems (Harper and Row, 1987); several liturgical dramas; devotional works; five of the Arch Books series for children; and articles and book reviews in many periodicals, including regular columns in the Evansville Press and The Lutheran (1988–2000). Themes The major recurring themes in Wangerin’s writing are the self-Â�sacrificial love and forgiveness necessary for redemption. He often uses unfamiliar settings to make these themes universal. In Dun Cow, the dog Mundo Cani offers himself to save the remnants of his community. In Book of Sorrows, Chauntecleer pays the ultimate sacrifice, but it is only his forgiveness by Ferric Coyote that stops the cycle of revenge and brings renewed hope. Other Christ-Â�figures include Moves Walking in The Crying for a Vision, and Branta and Ragman in short stories. Wangerin’s characters always have the power to choose against evil, though some make the wrong choice. He doesn’t whitewash the reality of evil, and thus transcends stereotypical moralistic Christian fiction. Another significant theme is the power of words to make things happen. Chauntecleer’s “canonical crows” bring order and comfort to his Coop. Wangerin often uses Latin as the mystical language of verbal potency. Even in his fantasy fiction, Wangerin observes a covenant with his readers never to make the natural unnatural to accommodate plot, nor abuse the power of words, but to speak the truth in love in order to edify. Bibliography The only full-Â�length study of Wangerin’s work to date is Dianne R. Portfleet’s Shaping Our Lives with Words of Power: A Study of the Major Works of Walt Wangerin, Jr. (Greenleaf-Â�Witcop Press, 1996). Articles analyzing his books include Virginia Stem Owens’s “Walter Wangerin and the Cosmic Equation: Myth and Children’s Literature” (Christian Century, December 14, 1994); and Warren Rubel’s review essay, “Winding Downward to a Disturbing Sense of Grace” (Valparaiso University). Interviews and essays in which Wangerin discusses his writing at length include “Hans Christian Andersen: Shaping the Child’s Universe,” in More than Words: Contemporary Writers on the Works That Shaped Them, compiled by Philip Yancey (Baker, 2002); “Hope Grows Best in the Garden of Despair,” in Indelible Ink, edited by Scott Larsen (WaterBrook Press, 2003); and “Glory into Glory,” in Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-Â�One Writers Speak about Their Writing and Their Faith, edited by Jennifer L. Holberg (Eerdmans, 2006). —Rosie Perera METROPOLITAN KALLISTOS WARE (1934–).╇ Metropolitan Kallistos Ware was born Timothy Ware in Bath,
B. B. Warfield
Somerset, England, on September 11, 1934. Raised an Anglican, he chanced upon a Russian Orthodox church in London when he was seventeen. The experience struck him. Shortly thereafter he began studies at Oxford University, where he became personally acquainted with some of the leading Orthodox Christian scholars of the twentieth century, including Nicholas Zernov and Vladimir Lossky. He participated in the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, an organization for Anglicans and Orthodox in England, and in 1958 he was formally received into the Orthodox Church. In 1966 he was ordained a priest and tonsured a monk, changing his name to Kallistos. That same year he became a lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford, a position he held until his retirement in 2001. He has trained numerous students, among them Rowan Williams, the present archbishop of Canterbury. Kallistos was consecrated bishop of Diokleia in 1982 and raised to the rank of metropolitan by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2007. Since his retirement from Oxford, Kallistos has remained a visible leader in the Orthodox world. He was instrumental in the founding of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge University, and he has been an avid proponent of dialogue between the Orthodox and Anglican communities. He has also supported Orthodox involvement in the World Council of Churches and numerous lay initiatives throughout the world, including Touchstone magazine and the Society for the Study of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. Major Works The overarching goal of all Kallistos’s work has been to make the theological, spiritual, and liturgical vision of Orthodox Christianity accessible to the English-Â�speaking world. His most important work remains his groundbreaking 1963 book The Orthodox Church. While it introduces no new ideas or methods, The Orthodox Church is significant in that it serves as a readable summary of the history, theology, and practices of the Orthodox Church. When first published, it was one of the only books dealing with Orthodoxy in the English language. A sequel, The Orthodox Way (1979, with revisions), introduces the reader to Orthodox spirituality as an outgrowth of the central theological tenets of the Church. Kallistos has also written numerous articles on diverse religious topics. In 2000 St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press began a major undertaking to publish a multivolume collection of these essays. One volume, The Inner Kingdom, has been published thus far, and future volumes are forthcoming. When completed, the collection will serve as the best bibliographical reference for nearly all of Kallistos’s work. In addition to his own works, Kallistos has distinguished himself as a translator of important Orthodox writings into English. Working with G. E. H. Palmer and
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Philip Sherrard, he has published English translations of the first four (of five) volumes of the Philokalia, a collection of Eastern Orthodox spiritual texts written in Greek from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. The writings focus on hesychasm, the monastic practice of spiritual watchfulness, and the Jesus Prayer. In addition to translating spiritual writings, Kallistos cotranslated (with Mother Maria) into English two central Orthodox liturgical texts, the Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion. Key Themes The central theme dominating the work of Kallistos Ware is God’s love for humankind. He develops this theme by exploring the relationship between God and humanity as it relates to the spiritual life. The controlling hermeneutic he uses in all his writings is the place of tradition in the Church, seeing tradition as active and organic as opposed to static and repetitious. For Kallistos, tradition is simply the living apostolic faith. The Church Fathers, councils, icons, canon laws, and all other aspects of the faith are nothing more than an outgrowth of this apostolic inheritance. Moreover, he sees the Church as an extension of the Incarnation and a reflection of the Holy Trinity. He considers worship, particularly Eucharistic worship, as the foundation of the Church from which doctrine and discipline cannot be separated. In all his theology, the sacramental principle prevails: “The Church is above all else a Eucharistic organism, which becomes itself when celebrating the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper ‘until He comes again’↜” (Ware, The Inner Kingdom, 17). Select Bibliography
The Orthodox Church, 2nd ed. (Pelican, 1993). The Orthodox Way (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995). The Inner Kingdom: Collected Works, Vol. 1 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000).
For a complete bibliography of the writings of Kallistos up to 2003, see J. Behr, A. Louth, and D. Conomos, Abba: The Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West: Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos Ware (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). —Matthew Alamese
B. B. WARFIELD (1851–1921).╇ Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, more commonly known as B. B. Warfield, was born in the town of Grasmere, just outside of Lexington, Kentucky, on November 5, 1851, and died after a long career of biblical scholarship on February 16, 1921. Education and Call to Ministry The young Warfield was initially fascinated by the physical sciences—showing an interest in and acceptance of Darwinian evolution, for which he was later sharply
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criticized—and excelled in the study of the sciences during his time at Princeton University, which he attended from 1868 to 1871. After graduating, Warfield attended the University of Edinburgh and later the University of Heidelberg, where he studied science, beginning in 1872. While studying science in Europe, he began to feel called into ministry and wrote his family of his decision to become a Presbyterian minister. His previous association with Princeton University made its seminary the obvious choice for his ministry training, and he studied theology there from 1873 to 1876. After traveling back to Europe to pursue further studies at the University of Leipzig, WarÂ�field accepted a Presbyterian pastorate position in Baltimore, Maryland. Profession and Contribution to Scholarship Warfield’s first teaching position was at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where he taught New Testament language and literature. During his tenure of nine years there, he was ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church and appointed a full professorship. His time at Western College was extremely productive. He began teaching there in 1878, and by 1880 the quality and extent of his publications led the College of New Jersey to grant him a Doctor of Divinity degree. Between 1880 and 1886 he published an additional impressive sixty publications, mostly dealing with the latest critical methodologies. Upon the death of A. A. Hodge, successor of his father, Charles Hodge, Warfield was called to fill the New Testament chair at Princeton Seminary, where he remained until his death in 1921. While at Princeton, he published on a wide range of issues in biblical studies and systematic theology. Warfield’s Legacy and Contribution The legacy of Warfield is undoubtedly embedded in the great mass of theological literature that he was able to produce during his lifetime, almost always with a view to defending the orthodox Presbyterian faith. Kerr concisely catalogs the magnitude of his literary achievements: Of his printed and published work, there are ten large, and I mean large, volumes of posthumously selected and edited articles known as the Oxford edition as well as two volumes of additional essays put together by John E. Meeter, plus two volumes of handwritten scrapbooks and fifteen volumes of Opuscula (1880–1918), collected and bound by Warfield himself. He also wrote a major work on the textual criticism of the New Testament, which went through nine editions; published three volumes of sermons; several commentaries; and a significant investigation of popular religious movements, Counterfeit Miracles. (Kerr)
And this is not to mention numerous articles for dictionaries and encyclopedias, various editorials, reviews,
contributions to the Princeton Quarterly, and so on. Perhaps his most enduring and often discussed contribution is his detailed analysis of the doctrine of inspiration. This key emphasis of his career is reflected in two volumes of collected essays by Warfield: Revelation and Inspiration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); and The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948). His earlier work, however, focused on the area of textual criticism, and he made a number of contributions in this area during the initial stages of his career that attracted the attention of many of his colleagues to him as a rising scholar. B. B. Warfield stood as one of the last in the line of the Old Princeton Theologians, who left behind a legacy of Old Presbyterian theology and strong Calvinism, the use of common sense realism and natural theology in their apologetic methodology, and a passion for defending the authority and inerrancy of the╯Bible. Bibliography
Bamberg, Stanley W. “Our Image of Warfield Must Go.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34 (1991): 229–241. Craig, Samuel G. “Benjamin B. Warfield.” In Biblical and Theological Studies, by B. B. Warfield. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1986. Kerr, Thomson Hugh. “Warfield: The Person behind the Theology.” In Annie Kinkead Warfield Lecture for 1982, ed. William╯O. Harris. 1995. Meeter, John E., and Roger Nicole. A Bibliography of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1974.
—Andrew Pitts
SUSAN BOGERT WARNER (1819–1885).╇ Susan Warner, an American evangelical novelist, was born in New York on July 11, 1819. Her mother, Anna, died when Warner was six. Her father, Henry, a successful lawyer, raised his two daughters in a wealthy Manhattan setting. Warner loved to read and had tutors in Latin, French, Italian, grammar, history, and geography. In 1838, however, financial losses forced the Warners to move to Constitution Island, near West Point, New York. An old farmhouse became their permanent home. As a young woman, Warner felt keenly the loss of fine clothes and social gatherings. In 1840–1841 Warner gave her full devotion to Christ. As her sister, Anna, explains, Warner desired “something that should stand, though the whole world went to pieces” (Susan Warner, 200–201). Both sisters became devout members of the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church, pastored by Thomas Skinner, a New School minister and founder of Union Theological Seminary. The two sisters avidly read the Bible, attended multiple church classes,
Richard (Rick) Warren
and even went door-Â�to-Â�door to distribute tracts. More than religious activity, they sought a deep, spiritual life that rested on Christ alone. They said of themselves that they were Puritan both by belief and by descent, tracing their lineage to the New England Puritans. Literary Works In 1850, under the pen name Elizabeth Wetherell, Warner published her first and most famous novel, The Wide, Wide World, which quickly became a best-Â�seller worldwide, and was translated into four languages. Critics praised her skillful depiction of rural American life and her realistic Christian characters. Warner followed this debut with another success, Queechy (1852). Since her father never regained his money, she continued to write to earn a living, producing thirty books. Although many of her titles went into multiple editions, Warner did not profit from them, having sold her rights with her manuscripts. Her financial need meant that she could not wait for royalties. In her novels, Warner often portrays young heroines struggling to mature and to live out the Bible’s teachings in the face of difficulties, such as loss of family members, economic hardship, and social pressures. Warner emphasized that people must learn to love God above all else and to submit to His will, even if doing so is painful. She distinguished true Christianity from church-Â�going, family tradition, natural innocence, and moral duties. Her Christian themes changed the negative perceptions of the novel as a literary form among those of her class. Although Charles Kingsley and Edith Wharton satirized Warner, her admirers included Vincent Van Gogh and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Warner influenced generations of readers, initiating conversions and providing guidance for others, as archived letters attest. Further, her plot structure and approaches to morality, emotion, manners, and female psychology shaped the development of the domestic or sentimental novel, a dominant genre in the American nineteenth century. Warner’s direct influence can be seen in popular authors like Louisa May Alcott and Maria Cummins, and children’s author Martha Finley. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literary critics rejected Warner’s didacticism and considered her work merely “sentimental,” without literary value. In the later twentieth century, feminist scholars like Helen Papashvily, Nina Baym, and Jane Tompkins rediscovered Warner and recognized her influence on American culture and fiction. Warner’s Calvinist beliefs, however, put her at odds with the anti-Â�Calvinist orientation of what historians have called the “feminization” of American culture.
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Later Life Warner also coauthored three novels and eighteen children’s books with her sister, Anna. The hymn “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” written by Anna, first appeared in their novel Say and Seal (1860). In the 1860s Warner moved into Methodist circles, and in 1875 she started Bible studies for the West Point cadets. The cadets deeply appreciated these meetings and remained in correspondence with the Warners for years. On March 17, 1885, Susan Warner died on Constitution Island, two weeks after a stroke. By special permission of the government, she was buried at West Point. Bibliography Anna Warner wrote the first biography on Warner: Susan Warner, published in New York by G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1909. Other biographical works include: Baker, Mabel. Light in the Morning. New York: The Constitution Island Association Press, 1978. Foster, Edward Halsey. Susan and Anna Warner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, [1978]. Stokes, Olivia Egleston Phelps. Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925.
For literary studies of Warner, see:
Kim, Sharon. “Puritan Realism: The Wide, Wide World and Robinson Crusoe.” American Literature 75 (December 2003): 783–811. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
—Sharon Kim
RICHARD (RICK) WARREN (1954–).╇ Richard (Rick) Warren is founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church, a “megachurch” in Lake Forest, California. Trained in Southern Baptist tradition and with a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary, Warren describes a calling from God to begin a new church in the late 1970s. His popularity and increasing activism on global-Â�warming and HIV/ AIDS-Â�pandemic issues have triggered criticism, especially from conservatives who see his causes as indicative of a liberal political outlook, but these critiques have been tempered by his wife Elizabeth (“Kay”)’s passion for fighting the pandemic, as well as by growing awareness of the magnitude of both problems. Though he had produced earlier books on church growth and Bible study technique, Warren owes much of his status to the success of The Purpose-Driven Life (2002; 25 million copies in English sold as of December 2006). Warren’s chapters are short, designed to fit into busy daily schedules, and capped with alliterative personal study applications (a “point to ponder,” a “question to consider,”
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etc.). His simple thematic presentation overlaps five divine purposes, corresponding to components of the Christian life as Warren conceives it: •â•‡ You were planned for God’s pleasure (worship). •â•‡ You were formed for God’s family (fellowship). •â•‡ You were created to become like Christ (discipleship). •â•‡ You were shaped for serving God (ministry). •â•‡ You were made for a mission (evangelism). Seeking commitment to nationwide “40 Days of Purpose” campaigns, the book’s marketing showcases a relatively new phenomenon in Christian literature in which a book title becomes a brand name, featuring Purpose Driven® journals, workbooks, daily-Â�inspirational booklets, youth ministry guides, and even desktop memory-Â� verse holders. The success of Warren’s book launched the Purpose Driven organization, created to encourage church growth in January 2005 during the book’s best-Â� selling zenith, but later downsized and reincorporated into Saddleback’s staff. A second initiative, PEACE (Planting churches, Equipping leaders, Assisting the poor, Caring for the sick, Educating the next generation), continues as a global, missional project. Warren’s work has evoked critical praise and blame on theological and literary counts. Backing up the sales figures are responses from the first waves of readers, testifying to moments of conversion, recommitment, intrachurch or communal revival, and other transformative changes experienced as a result of The PurposeDriven Life program. One writer credited Warren with a mission-Â�minded retooling of evangelical doctrine (see Froese, 155–156). Author Bruce Wilkinson’s pre-Â� publication review even draws parallels to Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest. But other replies have highlighted overly simplistic, self-Â�help-Â�genre structuring and language; exegetical methods that seem to rely on proof-Â�texting from multiple biblical translations and paraphrases; emphases on Christlikeness having more to do with character formation than with the Jesus of the Gospels, and on evangelism at the expense of establishing justice for the marginalized (later answered in part through PEACE); neglect of human sinfulness, repentance, and the atonement; and an oversimplification of the purposes God has for individual Christian lives and the criteria for “successful” (connoting a business mentality, with little room for alternative or dissenting visions) church ministry. Attempts to assess Warren’s legacy also meet with advantages and challenges. The scale of Purpose-Driven’s program is so vast that copies of Warren’s books are easily found, and his impact is so recent that most secondary
literature is internet-Â�accessible. But history can be remarkably nearsighted, so researchers should ask themselves some important questions: How does a decade of fame near the dawn of the Information Age compare to conventional print readership? At what point can a literary work be justifiably likened to works with an established history of cherished use (are parallels too facile, or perhaps premature)? Is there any such thing as an “instant classic”; if so, what constitutes this designation, and will Warren’s books continue to meet that definition? These questions should not be taken as further criticism; they merely reflect degrees of caution required when evaluating larger-Â�than-Â�life figures in recent history. Principal Ideas •â•‡ Christian life is distilled into five aspects of divine purpose for each believing person: worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry, and evangelism. •â•‡ The corporate life of the church is essential for every aspect of Christian life. •â•‡ Vision, purpose, covenant and commitment are keywords for change, both at the individual and corporate/church level. •â•‡ Programs proven effective in one church setting can be readily transferred to others. •â•‡ Personal and small-Â�group Bible study is vital to discovering and fulfilling God’s purpose, though the interpretive methods involved are not always clearly defined. Bibliography Primary Sources
The Purpose-Â�Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Message and Mission. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995. Personal Bible Study Methods: 12 Ways to Study the Bible on Your Own. Lake Forest, CA: Pastors.com, 1997; reprinted as Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods: Twelve Ways You Can Unlock God’s Word. Grand Rapids: Zondervan/HarperÂ� Collins, 2006. The Purpose-Â�Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002. God’s Answers to Life’s Difficult Questions. Living with Purpose Series. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006. God’s Power to Change Your Life. Living with Purpose Series. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006.
Secondary Sources
Byassee, Jason. “Re-Â�Purposed: What Is a Church for?” Christian Century 121.5 (March 9, 2004): 28–32. Froese, Vic. “The Purpose-Â�Driven Life: A Review Essay.” Direction 35.1 (Spring 2006): 154–161. Greenberg, Brad A. “Painful Decline: Saddleback Church Assumes Purpose Driven, Scales Back Programs.” Christianity Today 50.12 (December 2006): 15.
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Johnston, Thomas P. “Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life (2003) and Erasmus’ Enchiridion (1503): Comparing Approaches in Apologetic Evangelism.” Trinity Journal 25.2 (Fall 2004): 157–185. Morgan, Timothy C. “Purpose Driven in Rwanda: Rick Warren’s Sweeping Plan to Defeat Poverty.” Christianity Today 49.10 (October 2005): 32–36. Sheler, Jeff. Prophet of Purpose: The Rick Warren Story. New York: Doubleday, forthcoming (projected 2009).
—Matthew Forrest Lowe
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856–1915).╇ Booker T. Washington—whose middle name was Taliaferro—was born into slavery to a black mother and a white slave-Â� owner father in Franklin County, Virginia, on April 5, 1856, and he became a freedman after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. He is considered one of the most influential African American writers, educators, and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In terms of his formal training, Washington majored in education at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later named Hampton University), receiving an honorary master of arts degree from Harvard University in 1896 and an honorary doctorate degree from Dartmouth College in 1901. Washington is probably best known for his support of vocational training over academic training; hence, in 1881 he became the first president of the Tuskegee Institute (later named Tuskegee University) in Alabama, a trade school of sorts. Washington was not opposed to professional or academic training, but he observed a greater need to equip newly freed blacks, who would have had little formal academic training, for work in the overwhelmingly agricultural society of the time. Washington remained president until his death in 1915. Another well-Â�known contemporary of Washington’s day, W. E. B. DuBois, favored a liberal education over an industrial education, but both DuBois and Washington were seen as prominent leaders in the post– Civil War African American community. Washington forged three successful personal unions over his lifetime. Fannie N. Smith, a native of West Virginia, was his first wife and bore him one daughter, Portia M. Washington. Fannie died in 1884. His second wife, Olivia A. Davidson, a native of Ohio, became vice president at Tuskegee, where she and Washington met. Olivia and Washington had two sons: Booker T. Jr. and Ernest Davidson. Olivia died in 1889. His third wife, Margaret James Murray, born in Mississippi, had no children with Washington; Margaret died in 1925, some ten years after her husband. Washington’s name is perhaps synonymous with his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in 1901. In the autobiography Washington expresses an ambiguous view
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of the “school of slavery.” On the one hand, he admits that American slavery embodies the inhumane, cruel treatment of Europeans toward Africans. On the other hand, Washington believed that God would allow African slaves to triumph over the circumstances of slavery in America. In the post–Civil War era and beyond, Washington was hopeful that some Africans would return to Africa as missionaries to evangelize other Africans. The seventeen-Â� chapter autobiography covers Washington’s experiences before and after Emancipation, his work at Tuskegee, his views on education and religion, and his encounters with a number of acquaintances, including his wives. Bibliography
Liggins Hill, Patricia. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African-American Tradition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1998. Mansfield, Stephen. Then Darkness Fled. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing, Inc., 1999. Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Thornbrough, Emma Lou, ed. Booker T. Washington. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1969. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Doubleday, 1901.
—Mary Alice Trent
ISAAC WATTS (1674–1748).╇ The son of a Dissenting (Nonconformist) schoolmaster who, like John Bunyan, served two prison terms for his convictions, and a Huguenot-Â�descended mother who brought him as an infant to sit vigil before the prison in which his father was confined, Isaac Watts was all of his life a confirmed bearer of the Puritan tradition as it was championed by men such as John Owen, Joseph Caryl, and Isaac Chauncy, son of the early Harvard president. A prodigious student, he learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French as a child, but could not be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge because of religious exclusion. His formal education thus was concluded in the Dissenters’ academy of Nicholas Rowe, from which he matriculated at the age of nineteen. After a few more years of tutoring and personal study he became pastor to the famous Mark Lane Chapel, the leading Nonconformist congregation in London. Watts’s health was always poor. He never married, and for the last thirty-Â�six years of his life he was enabled both in his pastoral duties and his writings by the generosity of Sir Thomas Abney, lord mayor of London, and Lady Abney, who provided lodgings for him in their home. There he had access to a magnificent library and tranquility to use it.
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Watts is best known today for his hymns. His first volume (1707) includes “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past.” But in his own time he was a highly regarded poet. His Horae Lyricae (1706) was much praised by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who included Watts in his Lives of the Poets (1781), and Watts’s Divine Songs (1715), hymns for children, places him among the earliest of self-Â� conscious children’s writers in English. But in the eighteenth century Watts was also a very popular writer of accessible lay theology, educational textbooks, meditations, sermons, and an important book on educational theory. Dr. Johnson said of this last volume, his Improvement of the Mind (1741), that “whoever has the care of instructing others may be charged with deficiency in his duty if this book is not recommended.” Among his philosophical works, Philosophical Essays (1733) remains interesting, and his treatise on Logick (1724) was in use as a textbook in the universities long after his death. His psychological treatise, The Doctrine of the Passions (1729), and its spiritual counterpart, Discourses of the Love of God, and Its Influence on All the Passions (1729), were also widely read. Watts was himself a master of English diction, oratorically eloquent and a fine prose stylist, and from early on, despite his own polyglot formation, he argued: “Let all the foreign tongues alone / ’Til you can spell and read your own” (The Art of Reading and Writing English, 1721). His admirable practice of this principle made even his scientific texts, such as his First Principles of Astronomy and Geography (1726), accessible and entertaining. Among his religious works, his Catechisms (1730), Scripture History (1732), and The World to Come (1738), a book about heaven, are no longer read (a pity in the case of the last of these). One of his last efforts was a work of spiritual psychology, finished by his friend Philip Doddridge, entitled The Rise and Progress of the Soul (1745); now associated exclusively with Doddridge, it is one of the great works of spiritual writing from the eighteenth century.
father favored Alec, and this fact moved the younger son to consciously separate himself from both his father and brother, declaring later in life that his two guiding deities were his nurse and his mother. After a childhood marked by literary activity and more than a normal degree of boyish cruelty, Waugh attended Oxford, where he drank heavily and met his contemporaries from the aristocratic class. After leaving the university with a third-Â�class degree, Waugh tried a number of jobs before settling into the life of a writer. His first marriage to Evelyn Gardener ended in divorce and was later annulled to make way for his second marriage to Laura Herbert in 1937. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930, the spiritual culmination of his serious thinking and experience of life, was met by some consternation in Anglican England, but seemed not unprecedented in light of similar conversions by such intellectuals as Chesterton and Newman. Before his death in 1966 Waugh had authored more than a dozen novels, two biographies, one autobiographical account, assorted travel books, and numerous essays, stories, and letters. A gifted stylist with a classically trained ear for the cadences of English prose, Waugh bent his penetrating gaze on people he met and observed in his wartime experiences and his many travels. His literary talent combined with his firm Christian faith to produce works featuring satire, humor, insight, and elegant prose that often rises to the level of poetry. Brideshead Revisited, his best-Â�known and most financially successful novel, chronicles the workings of grace in an aristocratic lapsed-Â�Catholic family. In it he explores the painful effects of sin as imperfect human beings struggle to find happiness while God seeks to find them. Other notable works include Edmund Campion, a prize-Â�winning biographical sketch of the sixteenth-Â�century Jesuit martyr and scholar whose sanctity inspired many conversions; Helena, a historical novel on the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine into which Waugh put many of his mature Christian ideas, and a book he considered to be his best; and The Loved One, a satire of the American funeral industry that also implicitly critiques the modern understanding of the four last things, Death, Judgment, Bibliography Fountain, David G. Isaac Watts Remembered. Worthing: Henry Heaven and Hell. Walter, 1974. The inspiration for much of Waugh’s writing is found in Gibbons, Thomas. Memoirs of Isaac Watts. London, 1780. the varied terrain of his own life. The Sword of Honor tril—David Jeffrey ogy (Men At Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender) contains much that is autobiographical in novelized form, exploring the disillusionment brought EVELYN WAUGH (1903–1966).╇ Evelyn Arthur St. on by World War II and its cataclysmic destruction of John Waugh was born in London in 1903, the middle-Â� Europe. Waugh’s military experience included action in class son of the noted publisher and editor Arthur the Mediterranean and North Africa. The Ordeal of GilWaugh and his wife, Catherine (Raban) Waugh. His only bert Pinfold displays Waugh’s comic talent directed at his sibling, a brother, Alec, was five years his senior. Waugh’s own hapless travels under the influence of overly potent
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medications. Scoop, a novel inspired by Waugh’s short career in Fleet Street, satirizes the journalistic profession and proved to be both popular and profitable. Waugh’s life coincided with fundamental change in his nation and his church. The tragic effects of two world wars, a rising urban middle class, an increasingly marginalized aristocracy, and the Second Vatican Council all contributed to his sense of dislocation. His fundamentally comedic sense of life, both in the historical and more colloquial sense of the word, informs his writing and makes his response to his times one of satirical criticism combined with the perspective sub specie aeternitatis. This combination accounts for his popularity with and influence upon both American and English audiences. Each audience took what appealed to them and left what did not. Religious conservatives saw excess satirized, while proponents of social change saw fresh impetus to act, and both Protestants and Catholics found reason to mend what was lacking, whether ritualism without interior life, authoritarianism empty of charity, or self-Â�seeking under the cloak of religion. Waugh’s influence on the evolution of Christian thought in his own time and place amounts to that of a talented writer who spoke in a distinctive and elegant voice to the drama of sin and redemption viewed by a fundamentally melancholic temperament. His unmatched command of the English language, highly distinctive style, and universal themes make this influence a lasting one. Principal Ideas •â•‡ Modern England is living on the capital of a Christianity no longer believed. •â•‡ Egalitarianism is a leveling force destructive to the appreciation and production of great art. •â•‡ Local variety and distinctiveness are being lost to crass economic forces. •â•‡ Man’s need for redemption and the unpredictable workings of God’s grace are central themes in literary art. •â•‡ The real meaning of history eludes its participants and is known fully only to God. •â•‡ Modernism in religion enshrines the subjective at the expense of doctrine and fatally weakens man’s ability to serve God. •â•‡ The struggle to maintain and spread civilization is continually threatened by barbarism. •â•‡ Each person has one task, a vocation, that God invites him to accomplish in life. •â•‡ The Catholic church is properly about bringing everyone into the household of God. •â•‡ The varieties of human love are rungs on the ladder leading to divine love.
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List of Selected Works
Sword of Honour. London: Chapman and Hall, 1966. A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography. London: Chapman and Hall, 1964. Unconditional Surrender. London: Chapman and Hall, 1961. Ronald Knox. London: Chapman and Hall, 1959. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece. London: Chapman and Hall, 1957. Officers and Gentlemen. London: Chapman and Hall, 1955. Love among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future. London: Chapman and Hall, 1953. Men at Arms. London: Chapman and Hall, 1952. Helena. London: Chapman and Hall, 1950. The Loved One: An Anglo-Â�American Tragedy. London: Chapman and Hall, 1948. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. London: Chapman and Hall, 1945. Put Out More Flags. London: Chapman and Hall, 1942. Scoop: A Novel about Journalists. London: Chapman and Hall, 1938. Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr. London: Longman’s, Green, 1935. A Handful of Dust. London: Chapman and Hall, 1934. Black Mischief. London: Chapman and Hall, 1932. Vile Bodies. London: Chapman and Hall, 1930. Rossetti: His Life and Works. London: Duckworth, 1928.
Bibliography The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Research Center has the largest collection of Waugh’s manuscripts and correspondence. It includes manuscripts of all major works as well as personal journals covering more than forty years of his life. Biographies include:
Hastings, Selina. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Â� Stevenson, 1994. Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1998. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903–1939. London: Dent, 1986. ———. Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City, 1939–1966. London: Dent, 1992.
—Joseph McCleary
VALENTIN WEIGEL (1533–1588).╇ Germany. A German Lutheran pastor who spent his entire career in the Saxon town of Zschopau and who published only one work before his death, Valentin Weigel has enjoyed a certain amount of notoriety ever since. Born in 1533 in Grossenhain, Weigel attended the school of St. Afra in Meissen and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the university at Leipzig. He also studied theology at the University of Wittenberg, where he probably also taught. In 1567 he was ordained and installed as pastor of the City Church in Zschopau. Married with three children,
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his career as a Lutheran minister was unremarkable. His orthodoxy was questioned once on the basis of his sermons, but he was exonerated. In 1576 his only publication to appear in his lifetime, a funeral sermon, was printed. Weigel signed the Formula of Concord (1577), the doctrinal statement that helped to define orthodox Lutheranism and to unify the Lutheran Church. Following his death in 1588, Weigel’s writings began to circulate and proved to be especially popular during the second decade of the seventeenth century, when thirty-Â�six editions of his works appeared (eighteen of these were published in 1618, just as the Thirty Years’ War was beginning). Weigel’s subjective Lutheran theology focuses on the spirit instead of the letter of the scriptures, and his spiritualism fits into the larger traditions of German mystical thought. He was influenced, especially early on, by the thought of Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and the German Theology. His earlier efforts include Know Yourself and On the Blessed Life, both written in the early 1570s. Two later treatises, On the Place of the World and The Golden Grasp, are quite speculative in nature. According to Weigel, even though God is outside of all creatures, he is also “in all and through all, namely through his word, laws, spirit, etc.” It follows that “it is vain to search for God from without, here or there, as the Antichrist binds God’s kingdom to certain people, nations, places, customs and ceremonies” (Valentin Weigel, 121). Weigel rejects the claims of anyone, including Lutherans, that God is revealed only externally and not also within human beings. Referring to Luther as “a more recent pope,” Weigel rejects the idea of clerical mediation: “The priest should not be placed between the believer and divine forgiveness as the pope and Luther do. For God establishes no representative, and Christ needs no bishopric, no regent, to stand in his place and forgive sins. He remains alone the highest of priests over the faithful” (Ozment, 227–228). Weigel was a forerunner of Lutheran Pietism and influenced Johann Arndt and possibly also Jakob Boehme. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his works were rediscovered by students of mysticism, most notably Rudolf Steiner. There is considerable controversy about how best to distinguish the authentic writings of Weigel from the Weigeliana that circulated under his name. One of the most oft debated of these is an explication of the first chapters of Genesis under his name. Weigel was popular among dissenters in England and Holland, and his works were known to Leibniz and perhaps also Lessing. Critics of Weigel have varied widely in their descriptions of his orthodoxy. Some have described him as unobjectionably Lutheran, while others have characterized him as pantheistic and heretical. It may be best to describe Weigel as a Lutheran heretic, who remained
deeply devoted to both Scripture and Luther, but who was also deeply critical of the ecclesiastical institution that he served until his death. In his final work, the Dialogue on the Nature of Christianity (1584), Weigel suggests a possible interpretation of his subscription to the Formula of Concord: “But I have not thereby sworn an oath to the books of men. My signature is rather a pledge to remain faithful and never deviate from the writings of the prophets and apostles” (Ozment, 243). Regardless of how one characterizes Weigel’s Lutheranism, it is clear that he was reluctant to publish his most controversial views in his lifetime, probably for fear of risking his clerical career, and it is in this respect that he may be judged to have strayed farthest from the example of Luther. Bibliography Editions and Translations of Valentin Weigel’s Works A critical edition of Weigel’s complete writings was begun in the 1960s with Sämtliche Schriften, ed. W.-Â�E. Peuckert, W. Zeller, A. Ehrentreich, and H. Pfefferl (Stuttgart-Â�Bad Canstatt, 1962ff.). The latter has undertaken a new edition of all of Weigel’s works under the auspices of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Mainz. See also S. Wollgast’s edition of selected works of Weigel in Ausgewählte Werke (Stuttgart, 1962ff.). There is a modern English translation of some of Weigel’s writings by A. Weeks, Valentin Weigel: Selected Spiritual Writings (New York, 2003). Books and Articles about Valentin Weigel
Maier, H. Der mystische Spiritualismus Valentin Weigels. Gütersloh, 1926. Ozment, S. Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century, chapter 8. New Haven, 1973. Pfefferl, H. “Das neue Bild Valentin Weigels—Ketzer oder Kirchenmann?” Jahrbuch für deutsche Kirchengeschichte 18 (1993–1994): 67–79. Steiner, R. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. Trans. Karl╯E. Zimmer. Edgewood, 1960. Weeks, A. Valentin Weigel: German Religious Dissenter, Speculative Theorist, and Advocate of Tolerance. Albany, 2000.
—Carl P. E. Springer
SIMONE WEIL (1909–1943).╇ Simone Weil was born February 3, 1909, in Paris as the second child of Selma and Bernard Weil. Early on she attained the certitude that truth could be found by anyone who unremittingly searched for it. Thus her whole life as a philosophy teacher, as a writer, and even as an industrial worker in 1934–1935 was shaped by this search for and service to truth. Politically active, she wrote petitions and articles, standing up for pacifism (until 1939) and against colonialism, and got involved in trade unions; she was attracted to
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Marxism before criticizing it ruthlessly. In 1932 she visited Germany to analyze its political situation, and in August 1936 she joined the international militia on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War until, two weeks later, she accidentally hurt herself. A convinced agnostic, she was taken by surprise in November 1938 when “Christ came down and took [her]” while she was reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love (III).” This unexpected encounter had been preceded by different events, such as her falling down on her knees in the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi in 1937, or her attendance of the liturgy during Holy Week at Solesmes in 1938, when “the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into [her] being once and for all.” When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 she escaped with her parents to Marseilles, where she became involved in the Resistance. She met the Dominican priest Père Perrin, with whom she discussed religious issues and the possibility of baptism. In 1941 she decided with her friend, the Catholic thinker Gustave Thibon, to learn the “Our Father” in Greek; each time she recited it with perfect attention she would have a mystical experience during which her spirit would be transported “to a sphere outside space .╯.╯. [which] the infinity of infinity fills from end to end with silence.” These experiences are reflected in her allegorical prose-Â�poem “Prologue” (intended as a preface to her writings) and her poem “La Porte.” In July 1942 she came with her parents to New York before joining the Free French Government in London in December 1942. She hoped to be sent on a no-Â�return mission to France, but was asked instead to analyze projects for post-Â�war France. In April 1943 she broke down and died in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on August 24 from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and exhaustion. A friend, Simone Dietz, claims to have baptized Weil on her deathbed, but her accounts diverge as to where and when the event took place. Writings The main bulk of Weil’s work was published posthumously. First came La Pesanteur et la grace (1947–1948), a selection from her notebooks made by Thibon; this made her more widely known as an important writer comparable in her paradoxical and classical style to Pascal. In L’Enracinement (1949) she emphasizes the sacredness and spiritual needs of the person, among them the need for╯roots. In Attente de Dieu (1950) Perrin assembled Weil’s letters to him and five of her essays, among them her famous articles on suffering (“L’Amour de Dieu et le malheur”) and on the implicit love of God (“Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu”). Her notes and essays on Greek literature and
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philosophy appeared in Intuitions préchrétiennes (1951) and in La Source grecque (1953). In the latter she claims that Plato was a mystic (“Dieu dans Platon”) and describes force as the main protagonist in The Iliad (“L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”). Her American and English notebooks from 1942–1943 were published in La Connaissance surnaturelle (1950), while her previous notebooks appeared as Cahiers in three volumes (1951–1956). She raised her objections to Catholicism in some letters from 1942–1943 (for instance Lettre à un religieux, 1951). La Condition ouvrière (1951) contains her articles and letters on the workers’ issue, as well as the diary she kept during her industrial experience. Her articles criticizing Marxism are collected in Oppression et liberté (1955). Écrits historiques et politiques (1960) includes articles and letters on historical and political issues, among them her scathing critique of Hitler, comparing his policies to those of the Romans, and also her appreciation of Occitan culture as the last vehicle of the Platonic heritage. Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (1957) assembles the texts she wrote for the Free French Government as well as her last letters. Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu (1962) includes essays and letters on religious questions. Principal Ideas of Simone Weil •â•‡ Amour implicite/implicit Love: means loving God indirectly through love of one’s neighbor, of the “world’s order,” of religious practices, of the moral law, and through friendship. In hindsight Weil realized that she had already committed herself unknowingly to accomplish God’s will in her agnostic days. •â•‡ Attente/Waiting is key to intellectual and spiritual life, for it means waiting, like the faithful servant in the gospel, for the revelation of truth and, ultimately, of God. •â•‡ Attention is the focus with which one should gaze at a mystery or paradox until greater clarity is reached. Ultimately, it leads to prayer. •â•‡ Décréation is God’s self-Â�denial inherent to the act of creation through which He allows other beings to exist. Christ’s Passion is the continuation of décréation. In return, human beings should die to themselves. •â•‡ Enracinement/the need for roots is the person’s spiritual need for her native culture grafted on the supernatural. •â•‡ Fate in Greek tragedy is not an external force, but the immanent consequence of sin which, handed on through generations, can only be neutralized by an être pur—an innocent scapegoat.
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Julius Wellhausen
of Georg Heinrich August Ewald. He was also awarded a D.D. honoris causa from Göttingen in 1874. In 1872 Wellhausen was appointed to the theological faculty of Greifswald as professor ordinarius of theology. However, he was forced to resign his position in 1882 because of his critical analysis of the literary traditions of the Bible. Upon leaving Greifswald, Wellhausen was appointed to the philosophical faculty of the University of Halle, where he taught for three years (1882–1885) as professor of Semitic languages. In 1885 Wellhausen became professor of Semitics at the University of Marburg, and in 1892 he left the university to return to Göttingen, where he taught until 1913. He adopted a scientific approach to the study of the Old Testament and to the history of Israel, which brought him much criticism from biblical scholars in Europe and America. Wellhausen is best known for his literary-Â�critical analysis of the history of Israel and the composition of the Pentateuch. Wellhausen brought together the various positions in Bibliography Since 1988 Gallimard has brought out seven of the six- the history of Pentateuchal criticism that had been developed teen volumes of Weil’s Œuvres complètes. Many of Weil’s by Abraham Kuenen and Karl Heinrich Graf and others. writings have been translated into English, though the Wellhausen advanced the view that the Priestly source did essays are often assembled differently than in the French not represent the earliest literary unit of the Pentateuch but editions. Jacques Cabaud’s L’Expérience vécue de Simone belonged to the later stage of its formation and that it was Weil (1957), the first major biography, appeared in an composed during the exile in Babylon. His research states improved version as Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love the whole critical argument about the four sources in the (1964), followed by that of Weil’s friend, Simone Pètre- Pentateuch and gives a coherent form to the discussion. ment’s La Vie de Simone Weil (1973; Simone Weil: A Life, Wellhausen argues that in the final composition of the Pen1976). Perrin and Thibon coauthored the book Simone tateuch, the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), and the DeuteroWeil telle que nous l’avons connue (1967; Simone Weil as nomic (D) sources are older than the Priestly (P) source. He We Knew Her, 2003). Since 1978 the French Simone Weil accepted W. M. L. de Wette’s proposal that the Deuterosociety has been publishing a quarterly, the Cahiers Sim- nomic legislation was developed as the result of the Josianic one Weil, investigating Weil’s thought and life. Emmanuel reformation in 622 BCE and that the Hexateuch achieved Gabellieri’s Être et don (2003) is probably the most in-Â� its final form in the days of Ezra. Wellhausen believed that depth analysis of Weil’s philosophy, though Miklos Vetö’s the Priestly source and the book of Chronicles served as the La Métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil (1971; The Reli- primary sources for the history of post-Â�exilic Judaism. Later on in his career, in an effort to develop a better gious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, 1994) is still valuable. —Marie Meaney understanding of the religion of pre-Â�exilic Israel, Wellhausen began studying early Islamic history. In his study of Arabian history and religion, Wellhausen employed a JULIUS WELLHAUSEN (1844–1918).╇ Julius Wellhau- critical analysis of the sources, the same method he had sen was a German biblical scholar and Orientalist whose used in his study of the Old Testament. In his later years, after devoting several years to Islamic critical research in the Old and New Testaments made a lasting impact on biblical studies. Wellhausen was the studies, Wellhausen dedicated himself to the study of the son of August Wellhausen, a Lutheran clergyman. He was New Testament. His studies of the Synoptic Gospels and born on May 17, 1844, at Hameln on the Weser, Westpha- the Acts of the Apostles were not as influential as his studlia, and died on January 7, 1918, in Göttingen. Wellhau- ies of the Old Testament. His view of the priority of Mark sen is considered to be the founder of the modern school over Q was not accepted by the scholarly community. of biblical criticism. He graduated from the Lyceum in Wellhausen published works on the gospels of Matthew, Hanover in 1862 and in that year began his study in the- Mark, and Luke and on the book of Acts. Some of Wellhausen’s most important works include ology and Semitics at the University of Göttingen, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1870 under the tutelage De gentibus et familiis Judaeis (1870); Der Text der Bucher •â•‡ Force is the power reigning in an unredeemed world over oppressor and oppressed alike, which only grace and a redeemer can overcome. •â•‡ Gros animal is the Platonic “Great beast,” that social entity, ruled by opinion and neglectful of truth, which is swayed by passions fostered by demagogues. •â•‡ Malheur is a form of affliction (which includes a social dimension) so great that it breaks the person for good, such as industrial oppression, the modern form of slavery. •â•‡ Mysticism is the same in all cultures, and Weil discovered its seminal traces in Greek philosophy and tragedy. •â•‡ Pesanteur/Gravity is the power dragging human beings downward in moral life and which only the upward thrust of grace can defeat.
Charles Wesley
Samuelis untersucht (1871); Die Phariseer und Sadducäer (1874); Geschichte Israels (1878), republished as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1882; English translation, 1885); Muhammed in Medina (1882); Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments (1889); Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (1894); Reste arabischen Heidentums (1887); Medina vor dem Islam (1889); Prolegomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islam (1889); Die religiös-Â�politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam (1901); Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902); Das Evangelium Marcii, übersetzt und erklärt (1903); Das Evangelium Mattäi (1904); Das Evangelium Lucae (1904); and Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (1905). A detailed bibliography of Wellhausen’s work was published in Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Alttestamentliche Wissenchaft 27 (1914): 351–368.
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thousands of others who gathered in open-Â�air settings, sometimes enduring violent persecution. Wesley married Sarah (Sally) Gwynne and settled in Bristol in 1749. Tragically, the couple lost five children in childbirth or infancy, but three others survived well into adulthood (Charles Jr., Sarah, and Samuel). Wesley later moved his family to London, where he died on March 29, 1788. Charles Wesley’s hymns are his greatest contribution to Christian history. He published more than 4,400 hymns and left more than 3,000 others in manuscript at his death. His experience of conversion marks a vocational watershed in his life. On the first anniversary of his London experience, Wesley penned one of his greatest hymns, “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” The hymn proclaims many of the hallmark themes of Wesleyan theology: “O for a thousand tongues to sing / My great Redeemer’s praise, / The glories of my God and King, / The triumphs of his grace!” The titles of other Bibliography Irwin, A. “The Significance of Julius Wellhausen.” Journal of hymns exemplify some of the lasting images in his works: Bible and Religion 12 (1944): 160–173. “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “Jesus, Lover of My Knight, Douglas A., ed. “Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegom- Soul,” “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” and “Hark! the ena of Israel.” Semeia 25 (1983). Herald Angels Sing.” Although his most famous hymnRudolph, Kurt. Wellhausen als Arabist. Berlin: Akademie-Â� book was a joint production with John, A Collection of Verlag, 1983. Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780), —Claude F. Mariottini Wesley also published many other volumes, including Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749), Hymns for Times of Trouble and Persecution (1744), Short Hymns on Select CHARLES WESLEY (1707–1788).╇ Britain. Born in Passages of the Holy Scriptures (1762), and Hymns for the Epworth, Lincolnshire, on December 18, 1707, Charles Nation (1781). He devoted numerous hymn collections Wesley was the son of Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, to liturgical celebrations of the Church of England, such and Susanna Annesley, daughter of a dissenting minister. as Hymns on the Lord’s Supper (1745), which includes 166 Wesley attended Westminster School from 1716 and was songs on the Eucharist. Wesley’s hymns and poems alike elected to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1726 (his brother exhibit a strong reliance on Scripture and English literJohn was a fellow of Lincoln College). Under the influ- ature. His theology closely mirrors that of his brother ence of his brother and the writings of Thomas à Kempis, (with important distinctions), including acceptance Jeremy Taylor, and William Law, Wesley founded the of the basic tenets of Arminianism, universal redemp“Holy Club,” a group that initially met intermittently tion founded on the work of Christ, holiness rooted in with John and a few friends. By 1732 the association was empowerment by the Holy Spirit, and Christian perfeca formal society (the “Methodists”) meeting regularly tion as fullness of love. Wesley remained devoted to the under John’s leadership. Wesley earned his B.A. in 1730 Church of England throughout his life and famously and became a fellow of Christ Church, Oxford (M.A., opposed John’s ordination of ministers for the American 1733). In September 1735, on successive weeks, he was colonies, exclaiming “Wesley his hands on Coke hath ordained a deacon and a priest of the Church of England laid, / but who laid hands on him?” The tercentenary of in order to assist John on a missionary journey to Geor- Wesley’s birth has renewed interest in the life and congia. Due to poor health and a strained relationship with tribution of Charles Wesley, and numerous journal and the colonists, Wesley returned to England after only five book publications have recently appeared. The memorial months of service. In London, following weeks of long- plaque outside Wesley Chapel, London, provides a lasting for a deeper experience of the grace of God, Wesley ing reminder of the literary legacy of Charles Wesley: “As felt “a strange palpitation of heart” on Whitsunday, May a Christian Poet he stood unrivalled; / And his hymns 21, 1738. This “conversion” preceded his brother’s expe- will convey instruction and consolation, / To the faithful rience of Christian assurance by three days. After this in Christ Jesus, / As long as the English language shall be event, Wesley continued to preach both to prisoners and understood.”
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John Wesley
Bibliography Primary Literature
Baker, Frank. Charles Wesley as Revealed in His Letters. Madison: Charles Wesley Society, 1995. Beckerlegge, Oliver, and S. T. Kimbrough, eds. The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley. 3 vols. Nashville: Kingswood, 1988–1992. Newport, Kenneth G. C. The Sermons of Charles Wesley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tyson, John. Charles Wesley: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Secondary Literature
Baker, Frank. Charles Wesley’s Verse: An Introduction. London: Epworth, 1988. Gill, Frederick C. Charles Wesley, the First Methodist. New York: Abingdon, 1964. Kimbrough, S. T., Jr., ed. Charles Wesley, Poet and Theologian. Nashville: Kingswood, 1992. Newport, Kenneth G. C., and Ted A. Campbell, eds. Charles Wesley: Life, Literature, and Legacy. London: Epworth, 2007. Rattenbury, J. E. The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns. London: Epworth, 1941. Tabraham, Barrie W. Brother Charles. Exploring Methodism. Werrington: Epworth, 2003. Tyson, John. Charles Wesley on Sanctification: A Biographical and Theological Study. Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury, 1986.
—Jeffrey W. Barbeau
JOHN WESLEY (1703–1791).╇ Britain. John Wesley’s prodigious literary output reflects his status as one of the greatest evangelists, theologians, and organizational leaders in the history of Christianity. Born June 17, 1703, in Epworth, Lincolnshire, he was the son of Samuel Wesley, the rector of a Church of England parish. His mother, Susanna (Annesley) Wesley, educated him at home until he began studying at Charterhouse School in January 1714. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, on scholarship in January 1720, where he began to read works of “practical divinity,” including Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. In 1726 Wesley was elected fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He lectured on the Greek New Testament and took an M.A. in February 1727. After ordination in 1728, Wesley briefly assisted his father in the ministry at Epworth before returning to Oxford in 1729. He exhibited his promising leadership abilities by facilitating the small “holy club” that gathered around him and his brother Charles at Oxford. The group pursued a deeper Christian life through charitable works in prisons and orphanages, participation in the sacrament, regular prayer, and extensive biblical study.
The next stage of Wesley’s life centers around his brief missionary work in Georgia. He went with hopes of converting the Native Americans but left wondering about the state of his own faith. The voyage to Georgia led to his first encounter with the Moravians, whose faith in difficult circumstances contrasted sharply with the fear that Wesley felt for his own life. In Georgia, Wesley’s advocacy of sharp discipline mixed awkwardly with a failed relationship with Sophy Hopkey, and he abruptly returned to England on December 22, 1737, after charges were filed against him for his handling of these matters. In London, the influence of the Moravians and Peter Böhler led to one of the most storied events of Wesley’s life: the Aldersgate “conversion” experience of May 24, 1738. Wesley later explained that while reading Luther’s preface to the Book of Romans, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” The experience brought a deeper awareness of God’s grace in Wesley’s life. The deeper faith that Aldersgate stirred, field preaching in Bristol at the request of George Whitefield in 1739 solidified. Wesley spent the rest of his life guiding the Methodists: he built the first Methodist meeting places in Bristol and London (the New Room and Foundery), assigned and recruited numerous lay preachers to travel across Britain, and developed the small groups—class meetings and bands—that reinforced the discipline and commitment of Methodists throughout the connection. Although Wesley never left the Church of England, he implicitly separated the Methodists by forming the Deed of Declaration in February 1784 and ordaining Thomas Coke to serve with Francis Asbury as “Superintendents” of the Methodists in America. Wesley died in London on March 2, 1791. John Wesley devoted much of his life to building the Methodist movement through a wide assortment of books, hymnals, and other print literature. Some of his most significant early works include Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion (1742, 1743), Sermons on Several Occasions (1746), A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists (1748), and A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766). These works allowed Wesley to establish the basic history and theology of the Methodists while countering his critics. Wesley believed in the importance of education, and many of his writings were abridged editions of Christian classics. In the fifty-Â�volume Christian Library (1749–1755), Wesley set out to educate Methodist preachers and laity about the history of Christian belief and practice through “extracts from, and abridgements of, the choicest pieces of practical divinity which have been published in the English tongue.” The projected thirty-Â�five-volume, critical edition of his works (the “Bicentennial Edition”), and the numerous studies of John
Susanna Wesley
Wesley’s life, theology, and influence that appear each year indicate that his influence remains strong more than two hundred years after his death. Bibliography Primary Literature
Wesley, John. The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. Ed. Reginald W. Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater. 35 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1988– . ———. A Christian Library. 50 vols. Bristol: Felix Farley, 1749–1755.
Secondary Literature
Baker, Frank. John Wesley and the Church of England. New ed. London: Epworth, 2000. Collins, Kenneth J. The Scripture Way of Salvation: The Heart of John Wesley’s Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 1997. Heitzenrater, Richard P. The Elusive Mr. Wesley. 2nd ed. Nashville: Abingdon, 2003. ———. Wesley and the People Called Methodists. Nashville: Abingdon, 1995. Maddox, Randy L. Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology. Nashville: Kingswood, 1994. Outler, Albert C. John Wesley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Rack, Henry D. Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. London: Epworth, 1992. Tuttle, Robert G., Jr. John Wesley: His Life and Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.
—Jeffrey W. Barbeau
SUSANNA WESLEY (1669–1742).╇ Britain. Buried in London’s Bunhill Fields, the dissenters’ cemetery, Susanna Wesley was, to be sure, a dissenter in her own right as well as a faithful and pragmatic Christian. Born in 1669 to a Presbyterian Nonconformist preacher father and mother about whom little is known, she was the youngest daughter of a large family. Married in 1688 to Samuel Wesley, also from a family of dissenters, she and her husband nevertheless made their home in the Church of England, moving away from their Nonconformist heritage. Still, theirs was not a trouble-Â�free life. Their challenges included financial instability caused in part by Samuel Wesley’s ineffectiveness with money, his wife’s recurrent bouts with illness (no doubt somewhat attributable to her bearing nineteen children), a major fire that destroyed much of their rectory in 1709, and marital discord derived in part from Susanna Wesley’s independent spirit and her husband’s frequent absences. One account is illustrative of Wesley’s “conscientious insubordination” (Wallace, Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, 11). During one of Samuel’s absences—this time he was serving as a delegate to the Church of England’s
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convocation in London—Wesley decided to hold evening services in the rectory. Her resolution to host worship in her home emerged out of a sense of spiritual duty to her family first, and then to the larger parish. After reading about Danish missionaries to the East Indies, Wesley wrote in her journal: “At last it came into my mind though I am not a man, nor a minister of the gospel, .╯.╯. I might do somewhat more than I do.╯.╯. . I might pray more for the people, and speak with more warmth to those with whom I have an opportunity of conversing. However, I resolved to begin with my own children.” Upon hearing of his wife’s move, Samuel wrote two letters instructing her to forego this practice. Wesley’s wise and wry insistence is evident in her reply. She responded, “If you do after all think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me any more than you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity of doing good to souls, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Often called the Mother of Methodism because she was the mother of John Wesley, Wesley’s educating role in the lives of her children is prominently noted by early biographers. To be sure, Wesley ensured that her children were educated. Yet, by her example of reading scripture and printed sermons during the winter of 1711–1712, she became a model of a woman functioning as a pastor. Most concur that Methodism’s initial openness to women ministers stems in no small part from her ministry. Wesley’s written documents consist of letters, personal journals, and other various pieces, and the best source in which to access them is Charles Wallace’s edited volume. Most of her extant letters were written to family members between 1702 and 1741. Journal entries, 255 in all, written from 1709 to 1727, are also available. Additionally, Wallace’s text includes five essays that Wesley penned on various subjects. For example, she explored the Apostles’ Creed in one and an exposition of the Ten Commandments in another. Perhaps of most interest is a pamphlet (anonymously published in 1741) that she wrote against George Whitefield, one-Â�time friend and a colleague of John’s whose revivalist work and Calvinist theology were widespread in England and America. The ready availability of Wesley’s writings is surely of great value to those interested in Methodist, feminist, or revivalist studies. Bibliography
Baker, Frank. “Susanna Wesley: Puritan, Parent, Pastor, Protagonist, Pattern.” In Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition, 2:112–131. Edited by
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John Greenleaf Whittier
Rosemary Skinner Keller, Louise L. Queen, and Hilah F. Thomas. Nashville: Abingdon, 1982. Hart, Elizabeth. “Susanna Wesley and Her Editors.” Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 48.6 (1992): 202–209; 49.1 (February 1993): 1–10. Wallace, Charles I., Jr. “↜‘Some Stated Employment of Your Mind’: Reading, Writing, and Religion in the Life of Susanna Wesley.” Church History 58 (1989): 354–366. ———. “Susanna Wesley’s Spirituality: The Freedom of a Christian Woman.” Methodist History 22.3 (1984): 158–173. Wesley, Susanna. Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings. Edited by Charles Wallace Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
—Kendra Weddle Irons
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807–1892).╇ Known as the Quaker poet, Whittier was born on his family’s 120-Â�year-Â�old farmstead in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His early life was spent on the family farm. Whittier’s formal education was limited to intermittent attendance at one of the local schools and only a year at the Haverhill Academy. It was there that Whittier was introduced to the poetry of Robert Burns. Burns’s poetry, along with the New England landscape, his love for colonial legends and folk tales, and the family’s Quaker beliefs (including pacifism, individual social responsibility, simple living, and equality) seeded Whittier’s literary, journalistic, and political careers. Whittier worked as a farmer, cobbler, teacher, newspaper editor, and state representative, serving in the Massachusetts state legislature in 1834–1835. Poetry, however, remained his vocation. Whittier’s first poem was published, at the urgings of his sister, in William Lloyd Garrison’s Newburyport Free Press in 1826. This publication kindled Whittier’s fiery and complex friendship with the burgeoning abolitionist editor—a friendship that would last until the emancipation of the slaves and beyond. Whittier delivered his first antislavery poem, “To William Lloyd Garrison” (1833), at the convention that formed the American Anti-Â�Slavery Society, to which he later served as secretary. Shortly following with the prose tract Justice and Expediency (1833), Whittier wrote more than one hundred poems in support of immediate emancipation of the slaves and warnings of an inevitable war between the states. These were collected in Voices of Freedom (1846), Songs of Labor (1850), and In War Time (1864). Many more poems were published in such abolitionist newspapers as Garrison’s The Liberator. In the 1888 edition of his completed poetical works, Whittier categorized his poetry under the following headings: Narrative and Legendary, Nature, Personal, Occasional, Anti-Â�slavery, Songs of Labor and Reform, Poems Subjective and Reminiscent, and Religious. Almost one
hundred poems have been used as hymns, including “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” and “Immortal Love, Forever Full.” The power of Whittier’s poetry stems from his undying commitment to praising God, commemorating the lives of common Quakers, and fighting for the freedom of the slaves. Although critics and historians focus on Whittier’s popular ballads, such as “Cassandra Southwick”; narrative poems, such as “Barbara Fritchie”; religious intimations, such as “The Eternal Goodness”; and the widely popular winter idyll “Snow-Â�bound,” it was the years between 1835 and 1865 that produced Whittier’s most significant and religiously fueled work. Whittier’s popularity quickly waned after the poet’s death in 1892. Since then, critics have dismissed Whittier’s poetry for its didacticism and moralizing, while also labeling his “sentimental” abolitionist poetry as mere propaganda. Recently, however, it has become clear that these criticisms were due more to changing literary tastes and the advent of modernism. In an apologia to the 1888 Riverside edition of his collected works, Whittier defends his antislavery poems: “Of their defects from an artistic point of view it is not necessary to speak .╯.╯. they were protests, alarm signals, trumpet-Â�calls to action, words wrung from the writer’s heart, forged at white heat.” Whittier remains a stellar example of how to fuse Christian activism and poetic practice. Principal Ideas: Quakerism in Whittier’s poetry •â•‡ All are called to have a personal relationship with the living Jesus. •â•‡ Each person contains an inner light (Jesus Christ) that empowers individual believers. •â•‡ Silence allows God to speak to the individual heart. •â•‡ All people are created equal—no one should be set apart above another. •â•‡ Believers are to practice the presence of God in all activity. This leads to social reform. •â•‡ The Peace Testimony affirms the Quakers’ opposition to war and violence. Bibliography Biographies S. T. Pickard (1894); W. S. Kennedy (1895); Lewis Gaston Leary (1962); and Edgar Wagenknecht (1967). Modern criticism: J. B. Pickard’s Memorabilia of JGW (1968); Jayne╯K. Kribbs’s Critical Essays on JGW (1980). Collections and Selections Completed Poetical Works: The Cambridge Edition (1888, 1894); Robert Penn Warren’s The Poetry of JGW: An Appraisal and a Selection (1971); and W. F. Jolliff ’s The Poetry of JGW: A Reader’s Edition (2000). —Jacob Stratman
Amos Niven Wilder
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE (1759–1833).╇ William Wilberforce was born into the wealthy merchant community of Hull, Yorkshire. A career politician, statesman, and evangelical leader, he devoted his life to “the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (Robert and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, vol. 1 [Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1838], 65). His dedication to these causes made Wilberforce the most prominent representative of evangelicalism during his lifetime. Educated at Cambridge (1776–1781), Wilberforce deÂ�-Â� cided to pursue politics, and at twenty-Â�one, while still at university, he was elected to the House of Commons for Hull, beginning a political career that lasted more than forty years. In 1785, having become MP for Yorkshire the year before, he experienced a conversion to the “religion of the heart” that he had encountered as a child through his Methodist relatives William and Hannah Wilberforce, and their friend John Newton. He considered quitting politics and entering ministry, but encouraged by evangelical friends and by his friend and future prime minister William Pitt, he determined to remain within the sphere of government. In 1787 abolitionists Sir Charles and Lady Middleton, and Thomas Clarkson, urged Wilberforce to approach Parliament with a resolution to abolish the slave trade. His first speech against the trade came in 1789 and was grounded on bipartisan principles of Christianity (The Speech of William Wilberforce .╯.╯. [on] the Abolition of the Slave Trade). In 1791 Wilberforce unsuccessfully presented the first bill for the abolition of the slave trade. It was not until 1807 and the passing of the Slave Trade Act, after twenty years and the defeat of more than ten legislative measures, that Wilberforce saw the success of his cause. From 1807 until his retirement in 1825, he continued the fight against slavery by attacking the institution itself. Despite popular support, his legislative efforts encountered strong opposition from merchant lobbyists. Just as his Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807) had rallied support for the end of the trade, so his Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (1823) called a “Christian nation” to consistency of profession with action. On July 26, 1833, three days before his death, the Slavery Abolition Act ended slavery in British domains. Equally pursuing the “reformation of manners,” Wilberforce collaborated on social reform bills with other evangelical MPs, known as the “Saints.” Another group of influential evangelicals based around his residence at Clapham Common became known as the “Clapham Sect.” In their individual spheres, each strove to bring the Gospel into prominence and effect a moral shift in society. Among the cooperative efforts of Wilberforce, Charles Simeon, John
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Venn, Hannah More, Henry Thornton, and others were the establishment of the Christian Observer; the ex-Â�slave colony Sierra Leone; the Society for the Suppression of Vice; the Bible Society; the Church Missionary Society; and the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor. Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians .╯.╯. Contrasted with Real Christianity (1787) became the best-Â�selling religious book in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a critique of rationalist religion and an exposition of practical theology, it functioned as a textbook for evangelicalism and instantly secured for Wilberforce a spiritual authority unprecedented for a layman. Bibliography A recent edition of A Practical View is edited by Kevin Belmonte (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996). For Wilberforce in his context, see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Hyman, 1989). Biographies include: The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (1838), by his sons Robert and Samuel Wilberforce; and recently Kevin Belmonte, Hero for Humanity: A Biography of William Wilberforce (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2002). —Benjamin Fischer AMOS NIVEN WILDER (1895–1993).╇ The elder brother of playwright Thornton Wilder, Amos Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to a Presbyterian mother and a father who worked at the American consulate in China. Wilder attended Oberlin College, but his college career was interrupted by World War I. He served in the American Ambulance Field Service, and his first book, Battle Retrospect (1923), deals with his war experiences. After returning from the war, Wilder resumed his education and graduated from Yale in 1920. He became intensely interested in the study of the New Testament during a brief stint as secretary to Albert Schweitzer at Oxford. In 1924 Wilder was ordained as a minister and served as the pastor of the Congregational Church in North Conway, New Hampshire, until 1928, when he began doctoral studies in New Testament at Yale. He also did graduate study at Harvard Divinity School. Upon completing his doctoral work, he began teaching at Andover Newton Seminary (1933–1943), moved from there to the University of Chicago (1943–1954), and closed out his career teaching New Testament interpretation at Harvard Divinity School (1954–1963) as the Hollis Professor of Divinity. Wilder’s work spanned several fields and numerous interests. As a pastor, Wilder was always concerned with making the symbols, words, and literature of the New Testament accessible to individuals. As a scholar, poet, and pastor, Wilder drew upon many and varied resources to
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David R. Wilkerson
New York City in February 1958 and began his street ministry to underprivileged inner-Â�city youth. He became well known for his work with drug addicts and street gangs in the 1950s and 1960s. He cowrote a book with John and Elizabeth Sherrill about his experiences titled The Cross and the Switchblade in 1963. It included the story of gang member Nicky Cruz’s decision to become a Christian, and the book became a best seller, with more than fifty thousand copies sold in more than thirty languages. In 1970 the book was made into a Hollywood movie starring Pat Boone as Wilkerson and Erik Estrada as Nicky Cruz. The Cross and the Switchblade was included as one of the one hundred most important Christian books of the twentieth century. Out of this ministry Wilkerson established Teen Challenge, a biblically based drug abuse rehabilitation ministry with more than 414 centers worldwide. In 1974 Wilkerson published The Vision, based on a prophetic vision he received during the summer of 1973. The vision consisted of five tragic calamities occurring in the future in the United States. Given first as a sermon and later published as a book, the vision predicted economic recession, natural disasters like earthquakes, increases in pornography and homosexuality, and a persecution of the Church. Wilkerson has continued to publish prophetic books predicting economic disasters, food shortages, rising crime, and ultimately, destruction of the United States. He is critical of the Church, and in particular, the churches of the Western nations. Bibliography Wilder, Amos Niven. The Bible and the Literary Critic. MinneWilkerson has also published numerous books that apolis: Fortress Press, 1991. offer pastoral care and counsel. In Parents on Trial (1967) ———. Early Christian Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- he gives advice to parents on how to raise children, offerversity Press, 1964. ing guidelines, suggestions, and even warnings through ———. Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition. New York: learning from the mistakes of others. In The Untapped Scribner, 1951. Generation (1971) he provides a sourcebook for pastors, ———. Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. PhilChristian workers, and laymen for how to reach and adelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. —Henry L. Carrigan Jr. counsel the troubled generation of the 1960s and 1970s. In Sipping Saints (1978) he addresses the dangers and pitfalls of Christians with a permissive attitude toward drinking DAVID R. WILKERSON (1931–).╇ David Wilkerson was and who engage in social drinking. In I’m Not Mad at God born on May 19, 1931, in Hammond, Indiana. He is a well-Â� (1969), Wilkerson addresses a number of issues both spirknown American evangelist and the author of more than itual and practical in a devotional manner. Today, Wilkerson pastors a church in New York’s Times thirty books, including his most famous, The Cross and the Switchblade, as well as The Vision, Revival on Broad- Square. The Times Square Church, started in 1989, is misway, Hungry for More of Jesus, Have You Felt like Giving Up sions focused and a virtual microcosm of New York City, Lately?, and The New Covenant Unveiled. His writings can comprising nearly eight thousand people representing be placed in three categories: autobiographical, prophetic, more than one hundred nationalities worshiping under one roof. and pastoral. Wilkerson served as pastor in small churches in Scottdale and Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania. In 1957 he saw a pho- Bibliography tograph in Life magazine of seven New York City teenagers www.davidwilkerson.org who had been charged with murder. Moved with compas- Wilkerson, David. The Vision. Old Tappan, NJ: Revell Company, sion and feeling led by the Holy Spirit, Wilkerson went to 1974. explore the depth of the message of the New Testament. His experience in the war exposed him to the destructive tendencies of humanity, while the biblical story provided a message of hope that transcended the despair of his time. Wilder’s creative insights enabled him to connect eschatology and ethics, the Bible and literature in ways that other New Testament critics of the time were unable to do because of their focus on the existential limits of human experience. In Early Christian Rhetoric, for example, Wilder situates his reflections by using contemporary literary criticism and hermeneutics and by focusing on myth and symbol rather than by focusing closely on the texts themselves. Wilder then ranges widely over literature from the Greek epics to T. S. Eliot’s poetry in his quest to demonstrate the lively character of biblical language in the modern age. For Wilder, myth and symbol speak to the wider expressions of human society and can move religious communities to more dynamic expressions of faith. In addition to his interdisciplinary studies of the Bible and literature, Wilder wrote a little book on his brother’s work (Thornton Wilder and His Public) and was working on an autobiographical sketch of his wartime experiences, Armageddon Revisited, when he died. Along with Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Stanley Romaine Hopper, Amos Wilder was tremendously influential in establishing methods for exploring the lively relationships between religion and literature.
Dallas Willard
Wilkerson, David, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill. The Cross and the Switchblade. New York: Random House, 1963.
—Constance Rice
DALLAS WILLARD (1935–).╇ Theologian and philosopher Dallas Albert Willard was born on September 4, 1935, in Buffalo, Missouri. An internationally renowned scholar, he is respected as one of the most brilliant minds in contemporary Christianity—some even consider him the C. S. Lewis of the United States. He holds undergraduate degrees in psychology, philosophy, and religion, and a Ph.D. in philosophy with a minor in the history of science. In the 1950s he served as a Southern Baptist minister, yet without planning to, he ended up in academia. The Lord revealed to Willard, “Now if you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you; but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you” (Dallas Willard, “My Journey to and beyond Tenure in a Secular University,” 2003). Willard began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1960, then accepted his ongoing tenure as a professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in 1965. He has served as director of the School of Philosophy (1982–1985), and has received awards for his excellence as a faculty member. He currently teaches, as an adjunct professor, at evangelical seminaries in southern California, and he has also held visiting appointments at UCLA (1969) and the University of Colorado (1984). Willard is also a longtime friend, mentor, and ministry partner with Richard J. Foster; he serves on his Renovaré ministry team Foster founded. A best-Â�selling writer, Willard has authored 8 books and contributed to countless others; he has written more than 100 articles in the areas of philosophy and Christian faith. When asked about the focus of his life’s work Willard remarked, “The strongest impression on my mind has always been the person and teachings of Jesus Christ.╯.╯.╯. I’ve never moved away from knowing Him and making him known” (Interview by Hope McPherson, “Going Deeper,” 2000). The study of realism provided a bridge between Willard’s faith and philosophy. He found in the Bible, especially in the life and teachings of Jesus, answers to the “great questions of life.” In the field of philosophy, Willard’s writings focus on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl—he has also translated Husserl’s early writings from German into English. He also writes in such areas as epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and logic. In the area of Christian spirituality and spiritual formation, Willard spent more than a decade on a groundbreaking trilogy. First came In Search of Guidance: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (1984; republished under the title Hearing God in 1999), in which he places intimacy with God at the heart of prayer.
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In his second book of the trilogy, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (1988), Willard establishes a “biblical and theoretical framework” for practicing classical spiritual disciplines, which he divides into categories of abstinence and engagement. He reveals how Christian disciplines are critical to receiving and fully entering into the new life of salvation and grace through Jesus Christ. His final work in the trilogy, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998), explores the Good News and its meaning for human life. The “heart of the gospel”—discipleship to Jesus Christ—grounds human beings in reality and orients them to the “Kingdom of the Heavens.” Willard focuses on the theme of the availability of God’s kingdom as clarified by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. This book was named Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in 1999, and ranked number eighteen on the magazine’s 2006 list of the “Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals.” In Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (2002) Willard examines the six basic aspects of a human life (thought, feeling, will—spirit or heart, body, social context, soul) and details how spiritual formation in Christ must focus on all of them, not just the will. The goal is that Christ’s character will naturally flow out of his followers in every dimension of life (for example, they will become people who can actually bless those who curse them, just as He did). Willard’s insights garnered him the Christianity Today Book Award for Spirituality in 2003, and his treatment of the six human dimensions inspired the thematic section titles in the journal Conversations. (Willard serves as an editorial consultant.) The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006) is a compilation of Willard’s teachings and writings about apprenticeship to Jesus, our Master and Teacher. This is a wonderful introduction to the essential themes of Willard’s own life and work. His most revent work, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (2009), clarifies what true knowledge is and why it is so critical in the life of contemporary Christians. The “disappearance of moral knowledge” in the modern world is touched on, here; this topic will be covered in depth in his forthcoming book. Dallas Willard has influenced countless pastors and leaders. His writings are already in the realm of Christian classics, and they provide a rich, Christocentric legacy for future generations. Bibliography
Scheller, Christine A. “A Divine Conspirator.” Christianity Today. Vol. 50, Issue 9 (September 2006): 44–48.
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Frances Willard [Elizabeth Caroline]
Willard, Dallas. “Conversation with Dallas Willard about Renovation of the Heart.” Interview by Lynda Graybeal-Â�Smith. Perspective (Renovaré Newsletter). Vol. 12, no. 4 (October 2002): 3–5. ———. “Going Deeper.” Interview by Hope McPherson. Response (Winter 2000). http://ww.spu.edu/depts/uc/response/win2k/ going_deep.html ———. The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. ———. “Kingdom Living.” Interview by Andy Peck. Christianity and Renewal (May 2002). http://www.dwillard.org/articles/ artview.asp?artID=92 ———. “My Journey to and beyond Tenure in a Secular University.” Faculty Forum Luncheon Remarks at C. S. Lewis Foundation Summer Conference, University of San Diego, June 21, 2003. http://www.dwillard.org/biography/tenure.asp Willard, Dallas, et al. “Fly on the Wall: A Conversation about Authentic Transformation among Dallas Willard, Larry Crabb, and John Ortberg.” Conversations. Vol. 1 (Spring 2003): 28–39.
—Natalie Hendrickson
FRANCES WILLARD [ELIZABETH CAROLINE] (1839–1898).╇ American. Among the most respected women of the nineteenth century stands Frances Willard, a tireless temperance leader whose broad social vision and Christian feminism helped shape the landscape of American reform and the nature of Christian relationships. Willard gave her life to innumerable causes around her, rallying women everywhere into action. Her exceptional command as an orator complemented her literary works and strategic leadership. Life Frances Willard was born on September 28, 1839, in Churchville, New York, but spent most of her childhood growing up on the frontier in Wisconsin Territory. Willard attended the Congregationalists’ Milwaukee Female College before transferring to Northwestern Female Seminary, where she graduated valedictorian in 1859. From 1860 to 1868 Willard devoted herself to the education of others, holding a number of teaching posts. From 1868 to 1870 she traveled to Europe, Egypt, Turkey, and Palestine. Her experiences and observations of female inequity and inopportunity overseas drove Willard to become increasingly committed to women’s equality and higher education. After serving as dean of women students and English professor at Northwestern University in 1874, her professional life as an educator waned as she became devoted to the temperance cause. Temperance and Beyond Willard found a calling among the army of women who opposed the abuses of alcohol. She joined the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in its fight against liquor trafficking and saloon activity. Willard became secretary in 1874 for the Illinois branches, charged with organizing and building the union. Her masterful command of oration and literary expertise made her an invaluable asset. By 1879 Willard was elected president of the WCTU, holding the position until her death in 1898. Willard helped spread WCTU interests to broader social concerns, including women’s suffrage, prison reform, peace and arbitration, labor movements, feminism, and Christian socialism, and she helped to develop cooperative kitchens and kindergartens. The WCTU became the largest temperance organization and women’s organization in the United States. Willard created the World WCTU and served as its president from 1891 until her death. Frances Willard was the first woman to be recognized by Congress and honored in the National Statuary Hall Collection in 1905. Literary Mark Willard’s personal writings and published works offer a close look at her personal development and work to further the equality of women. Unlike some of her feminist contemporaries who derived their ideals from philosophical reasoning, Willard’s egalitarian goals were grounded in Christian ethics. In her personal journal, Writing Out My Heart (1868), Willard resolves her commitment to the “cause of woman”: “my object in life is clearer than ever before. What I can do in large and little ways, by influence, by pen, by observation, for woman, in all Christian ways, that, I will do. And may God help me!” (266). In her 1892 article “The Woman’s Cause Is Man’s,” published in the reform journal Arena, she charges women to transform all aspects of American life by yielding power for the good. Willard viewed female equality as a necessity for a renewed society, and she developed a concept of womanhood in which women could emerge as powerful leaders in living up to Christian ideals. Perhaps her most known work is Woman in the Pulpit, in which she defends a woman’s right to preach and presents a compelling case for female ordination. Willard argues her position through scriptural exegesis, critiquing traditional theology, evaluating women’s diverse roles in Scripture, and demonstrating Christ’s elevation and commissioning of women for service, thereby empowering them as witnesses to his life, death, and resurrection. Grieved by women’s exclusion from the pulpit in her own Methodist denomination—a change that would not transpire for another half century—Willard came to understand male and female relationships as coequal and interdependent— not just complementary partners, but Christian advocates sharing private and public spheres of labor and influence. Willard also chronicles her experience of learning to ride
William of Ockham
a bike in How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, in which she connects the independence of cycling to women’s wider quest for self-Â�sufficiency within community. Willard used every opportunity to network, educate, and empower women for the sake of the gospel, society, and themselves. Bibliography
Bordin, Ruth. Frances Willard: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Gifford, Carolyn De Swarte. “The Woman’s Cause Is Man’s? Frances Willard and the Social Gospel.” In Gender and the Social Gospel, edited by Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, 21–34. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Liefeld, Walter, and Ruth A. Tucker. Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing Co., 1987. Willard, Frances. Woman in the Pulpit. Reprinted, Washington, DC: Zenger Publishing Co., 1978. ———. “The Woman’s Cause Is Man’s.” The Arena 5, no. 30 (May 1892): 712–725. ———. Writing Out My Heart: Selections from the Journal of Frances E. Willard, 1855–96, edited by Carolyn De Swarte Gifford. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Additional books by Frances Willard include: Do Everything: A Handbook for the World’s White Ribboners; Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle: Reflections of an Influential Nineteenth Century Woman; How to Win: A Book for Girls; Nineteen Beautiful Years; Woman and Temperance: The Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. —Kim Dawsey-Â�Richardson
WILLIAM OF OCKHAM (1300–1349).╇ Great Britain. William of Ockham (sometimes spelled Occam) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher. Along with Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, he is considered one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the center of many of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. The fourteenth-Â�century philosophical system known as nominalism is commonly attributed to him. Life Ockham was born near the village of Guildford in Surrey County, England, but little else is known about his early life. He began his studies at the University of Oxford, where he became a Franciscan friar and taught philosophy and theology until 1324. In 1324 his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences was condemned as unorthodox by a synod of bishops and theologians in England, and he
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was ordered to go to Avignon, France, to defend himself before the papal court. One of the reasons for Ockham’s condemnation was his support for a group of radical Franciscans who wished to return to Francis of Assisi’s ideal of poverty. Fearing imprisonment, Ockham fled Avignon in 1328. He took refuge at the court of King Louis of Bavaria in Munich, Germany. Ockham was excommunicated for leaving Avignon, but his philosophy was never condemned. He spent the remainder of his life writing about political issues. In 1342 he became the leader of a small band of Franciscan dissidents living in exile with Louis IV. Ockham died in 1349 in Munich, Germany. Writings William of Ockham is best known for the development of nominalism and for the development of the nominalist principle commonly referred to as “Ockham’s Razor.” Nominalism is the radical denial of the reality of universals such that they are reduced to mere sounds invented by humans to describe similarities of individual things. A “universal” is a quality or characteristic attributed to several individual things. In other words, nominalists hold that universals are mere concepts with no objective reality apart from their existence in the mind of the individual. His nominalism had far-Â�reaching effects on theology. First, it separated faith and reason and tended toward fideism, or thinking grounded primarily in faith, over and against reason as the basis for Christian faith. Ockham believed that only one truth of God could be determined through reason—that God exists. Second, Ockham’s writing emphasizes God’s will over nature and reason. Ockham is best known outside the theological world for his maxim, which is commonly referred to as Ockham’s Razor. This maxim states, “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Although this is not a direct quote of Ockhams, it is a formal summation of his statement “to employ a number of principles when it is possible to use a few is a waste of time.” The razor “shaves off ” unnecessary entities in any logical dilemma. Suppose, for example, that I return home and find my curtains severely shredded and torn from the window and my cat asleep nearby. I would not immediately conclude that a burglar attempted to break into my house through the window. The cat suffices to explain the damage without positing any other entity, such as the burglar. Although never intended by Ockham to be employed as such, in the modern era Ockham’s Razor has been used to eliminate the supernatural from view. Political Theory William of Ockham is increasingly recognized as making an important contribution to Western political theory.
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Charles Williams
First, he was one of the earliest medieval authors to advocate a form of church-Â�state separation and was important in the development of the notion of property rights. Second, his writings are important for the development of a conception of limited responsible government. Third, William of Ockham’s views on monarchial accountability in his Dialogues assisted in the emergence of liberal democratic ideologies. Bibliography
Adams, Marilyn McCord. William of Ockham. 2 vols. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. Boehner, Philotheus, ed. William of Ockham: Philosophical Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990. Carre, Meyrick. Realists and Nominalists. London: Oxford University Press, 1946. Fairweather, Eugene, ed. A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982. Kaye, Sharon, and Robert Martin. On Ockham. Belmont: Wads� worth, 2001. McGrade, A. S. The Political Thought of William of Ockham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Spade, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ockham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
—John Thompson
CHARLES WILLIAMS (1886–1945). Born Charles Walter Stansby Williams in London on September 20, 1886, Charles Williams spent his entire life as a city dweller. Not surprisingly, “the image of the city,” as the title of one of his essays renders it, forms one of many reference points for his unique blend of Christian theology and literature. Unable to complete a degree from University College, London, due to family financial difficulties, Williams joined Oxford University Press as a reader in 1908. He worked for the firm for the rest of his life, eventually assuming responsibility as one of its most valued reviewers and editors. In 1917 Williams married Florence Conway, whom he nicknamed “Michal,” after King David’s wife. She and Charles had one son, Michael. At the outbreak of World War II, Oxford University Press removed its London offices to Amen House in Oxford. Williams followed, and it was there that he met and befriended C. S. Lewis, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and other members of the famous “Inklings” set. It was during these years that Williams also produced some of his most enduring work as an author and thinker. Because of his prolific and diverse output, it is difficult to classify Williams as a writer. In addition to scores of literary reviews and articles, he was a literary critic, novelist, biographer, poet, playwright, anthologist, essayist, and amateur theologian. Moreover, as an editor he supervised
the first major English translation of the works of Søren Kierkegaard. His most significant works of literary criticism include The English Poetic Mind (1930), Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (1933), and The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943). The latter inspired Dorothy Sayers’s own work on Dante. Of his seven novels, which he called “psychological thrillers” but which better fit the genre of “supernaturalist” fiction, The Place of the Lion (1931) and Descent into Hell (1937) are thought to be his best. Of his several plays, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936) has been compared to T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as one of the outstanding Christian verse dramas of the twentieth century. Although Williams published several collections of verse during his lifetime, his greatest achievement was his Arthuriad, a cycle of poems that recapitulates the myth of Arthur as a Christian drama. He completed two sequences of the three he had planned, Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). During the last years of his life, Williams turned his attention to theology specifically, producing two books of note, He Came Down from Heaven (1938) and Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939). It is from these short works, from his study in Dante, and from his Arthurian cycle especially that Williams’s distinctive theo-Â�poetic sensitivity finds its greatest concentration and insight. Christian Thought on Theology and Literature Williams never formulated a system of thought for his understanding of Christian theology and its relationship to literature, in advance of a theological poetics. He did, however, put forward certain prominent ideas that recur throughout his critical reflections, which in turn find expression in his artistic works. Among these is what he referred to generally as the “way, or ways, of images,” by which he meant, in its theological construal, the material manifestation of the divine in the world, including (potentially) works of the imagination. Building on his understanding of the Incarnation—or “the in-Â�Godding of Man” in Christ, as he put it—Williams affirmed that all of reality, including material reality, has now been gathered into the divine. So, he writes, “It is a result of the Incarnation that opened all potentialities of the knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven in and through matter”; “allowing to matter,” he continues, “a significance and power which (of all the religions and philosophies) only Christianity has affirmed” (He Came Down from Heaven, 101, 106). From this general assertion, Williams distinguished two modes of the way(s) of images. The one he called the “way of affirmation,” which sees images of diverse kinds as vehicles for meaning, the other the “way of rejection,” which admits the ultimate inadequacy of images to fully
Augusta Evans Wilson
comprehend the divine. Taken together, recognition of these modes led Williams famously to adopt the maxim, “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou,” as an account of human ways of knowing God and of revealing God. Viewing the way of the affirmation of images as the peculiar province of poets and artists, Williams sought to enact through his own imaginative writings his distinct christological vision. Expressed throughout his novels and verse dramas, it was in his Arthurian poetry, which Williams considered his magnum opus, that he attempted in art the accumulation of his theo-Â�poetic ideas and insight. In addition to a prolonged treatment of the way of images, here Williams elaborates other prominent themes of his Christian vision, such as “co-Â�inherence,” or the interrelatedness of all things by virtue of the Incarnation, as well as “the way of exchange” and the “doctrine of substitutionary love,” derivative of the “acts of Messias” whose own sacrifice established a pattern of redemptive love for humanity. Here, too, he developed an approach to theology inspired by Dante especially, whose treatment of human eros as an image of divine caritas through the “figure of Beatrice” evolved in Williams’s thought into what he called a “Romantic Theology.” One moment from the Arthuriad captures both the aim and impulse of the whole, indicating how Williams believed his Christian recovery of the Arthurian myth offered a fresh statement to his own “post-Â�Christian” audiences. When his protagonist Taliessin, the “king’s poet,” experiences a vision of the Imperial city Byzantium he is, the poem tells us, “caught by a pulse of truth in the image.” It was by such force of Williams’s art that his friend C. S. Lewis declared his “Arthuriana” a “book of wisdom .╯.╯. unequalled in modern imaginative literature” (Arthurian Torso, 375). Williams died before completing the cycle but left a legacy of critical thought and literature remarkable for its originality. The Christian habit of mind reflected in his mingling of theology and art earned him the title “poet of theology,” given him by biographer and critic Glen Cavaliero. Indeed, for all the diversity of his writing, it was for his poetry that Williams most wanted to be remembered. The epitaph on his gravestone in Oxford captures this aspiration, reading simply, “Charles Williams, poet.” Bibliography Primary Sources Apart from his novels, most of Williams’s work is out of print, but can still be found in various editions. As a starting point for further reading, the following are recommended works: The English Poetic Mind (1930, criticism). The Place of the Lion (1931, novel).
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Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind (1933, criticism). Descent into Hell (1937, novel). He Came Down from Heaven (1938, theology). Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939, theology). The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943, criticism). The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). Collected Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). Taliessin through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, Arthurian Torso (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974; reprint 1980; the most complete edition of the Arthurian cycle, with commentary by both Williams and C. S. Lewis).
Secondary Sources and Criticism
Cavaliero, Glen. Charles Williams: Poet of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983). Hadfield, Alice Mary. An Introduction to Charles Williams (London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1959). Lewis, C. S., ed. Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966; reprint 1974). Mahan, David C. Poetry as Public Theology: Poetic Witness in the Work of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (Pickwick Books, forthcoming).
—David Mahan
AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON (1835–1909). Augusta Jane Evans was already a well-Â�established novelist by the time she arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to campaign for the state’s secession. But during the Civil War she found herself even more famous because of her third novel, Macaria (1864), which was banned above the Mason-Â�Dixon Line due to its pro-Â�Confederate content. After the war, her St. Elmo (1866) outsold any novel to date, including Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her life nearly coincided with Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), as she became the most beloved and well-Â�known American author of the century. Unfortunately most of today’s students rarely hear of her works, much less read them, even though academic scholarship continues to be interested in her through theses, dissertations, journal articles, and conference presentations. Her books should be of special value to Christians because of their strong evangelical and evangelistic messages conveyed through a transom of intellectual rigor. There are very few novels that have been written, besides hers and those of C. S. Lewis, that intellectually grapple with the existence of God and conclude with an irrefutable faith in His love and mercy shown especially through the crucifixion and resurrection of His son, Jesus Christ. When her family lived in Texas and she was only fifteen, Augusta wrote and published her first novel, Inez: A Tale of the Alamo. It begins with “There is the bell for prayers,
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Florry; are you ready?” Her cousin, Mary Irving, is the speaker. Through Mary, Evans articulates the pitfalls of Catholicism as she saw them. Also, Evans draws upon the Gothic convention of the evil, conniving priest who pits a father against his daughter and whose mission is only to gain the family’s wealth at the end of the father’s life. More refreshing, however, are Evans’s evangelical arguments that religion and ritual do not suffice and that one needs no other mediator to God than Jesus Christ. Florence will venture from the faith, but from Mary’s unswerving example of single-Â�minded devotion to the Lord and her intellectual arguments, she (and hopefully the reader) is initiated into a full knowledge of Christianity. This paradigm continues in most of Evans’s other eight books. There will always be one genuine Christian who loves a friend or a relative and might even be in love with someone who is an intellectual atheist, deist, agnostic, or follower of some other popular nineteenth-Â�century philosophy, such as positivism or pantheism. By an unwavering walk with Christ, the Christian loves the nonbeliever, models Christ’s behavior, and often has to suffer because of his or her faith by surrendering desire for the loved one. These Christian heroes and heroines refuse to marry nonbelievers. Absolute obedience to God drives their lives. Besides their witness, what makes Evans’s novels unique and valuable for today’s readers is that her Christians are intellectually astute and can go head to toe with cerebral nonbelievers. Yes, ultimately the surrender to God will come through a leap of faith; however, the leap is not mindless. The Christian, like Evans, is a well-Â�read intellectual whose knowledge and logic do not sabotage his or her faith. Instead, they are gifts to be used to lead others who are intellectual to Christ. Evans herself went through a spiritual struggle as a young woman, but once resolved, she was a believer for the rest of her life. At the age of thirty-Â�three she married wealthy neighbor and longtime friend Lorenzo Madison Wilson, her senior by twenty-Â�seven years, at which time she joined the St. Francis Street Methodist Church in Mobile. She was a member of the church and its choir for the next twenty-Â�five years. She worked on the board of the Protestant Orphanage for fifty years, bequeathed a huge sum to the YMCA in Mobile, and, with her husband, helped to start a nonsectarian hospital now known as Mobile Infirmary. Upon her husband’s death, she contributed enough money to build a new ward for the hospital. Aside from these documented good works, her truest calling was to tell the truth about Christ in her novels, and only on Judgment Day will she learn how many people came to know Christ because of her gifted writing. Augusta Evans Wilson is buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile. Her funeral drew the largest numbers of any in that city.
Bibliography Books by Augusta Evans Wilson
Inez; A Tale of the Alamo. New York: Harper, 1855. Beulah. 1859. New York: A. L. Burt Co., n.d. Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice. 1864. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d. St. Elmo. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1866. Vashti; or, Until Death Us Do Part. 1869. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1889. Infelice. 1875. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1889. At the Mercy of Tiberius. New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1887. A Speckled Bird. New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1902. Devota; “J’y Suis, J’y Reste.” New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1907.
Recommended Reading on Augusta Evans Wilson
Faust, Drew Gilpin. “Introduction: A War Story for Confederate Women.” In Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, by Augusta Jane Evans, xiii–xxvi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Fidler, William Perry. Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835–1909: A Biography. University: University of Alabama Press, 1951. Roberts, Diane. Introduction to St. Elmo, by Augusta Jane Evans, v–xxiii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Sexton, Rebecca Grant. A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Sofer, Naomi Z. “‘I Dedicate Myself Unreservedly to Art’: Augusta Jane Evans and Southern Art: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Â�Century Women Writers.” In Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Â� Century Women Writers, 65–104. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.
—Brenda Ayres
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889–1951). Austria. Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who contributed much to twentieth-Â�century continental philosophy. His works were important in the foundations of logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language. Life Born in Vienna to Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein, Ludwig was the youngest of eight children in a prodigious intellectual family. In his early education Ludwig Wittgenstein showed an interest in physics. This led him to take up the study of mechanical engineering in Berlin in 1906. He then went to the Victoria University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering. While in Manchester, Wittgenstein became interested in the foundation of mathematics after reading Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. In the summer of 1911 Wittgenstein, on the advice of Gottlob Frege, decided to attend the University of Cambridge to study under Russell. At
John Woolman
Cambridge Wittgenstein began work on the foundations of logic and mathematical logic under Russell and G. E. Moore. Although he enjoyed Cambridge, Wittgenstein felt that his best work would come from working outside the academy. To this end he relocated to the remote village of Skjolden, Norway, in 1913. While there he began work on his Tractatus Logico-Â�Philosophicus. When World War I began the next year, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian army. During his service he continued his work in philosophy, which led to the completion and publishing of the Tractatus Logico-Â�Philosophicus in 1922. This was the only book on philosophy Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. Having thus, in his opinion, solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein became an elementary school teacher in rural Austria. However, realizing that he had more work to do in philosophy, he returned to Cambridge in 1929 to teach at Trinity College. After G. E. Moore’s resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein was appointed to the chair in philosophy at Cambridge. During the brief interlude of World War II, Wittgenstein served as a hospital porter in Guy’s Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle. After the war he returned to teaching but resigned his professorship in 1947 to concentrate on writing. By 1949 he had finished what was to later become his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously). Wittgenstein spent the last two years of his life in Vienna, the United States, Oxford, and Cambridge. He continued working until two days before his death. His work from these last years was published as On Certainty. Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer in Cambridge in 1951. His last words were, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Work In the Tractatus Logico-Â�Philosophicus, Wittgenstein argues that all positive inquiry falls into the domain of one of╯the empirical sciences and has consigned philosophy to the╯clarification of what can meaningfully be said. With the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had reached the limits on what could be expressed within philosophy and rendered the remainder as either nonsensical or inexpressible. With this idea he summed up the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus, 157). During his time as a university teacher at Cambridge, however, Wittgenstein began to doubt the finality of his results. He became sensitive to the context of ideas, language, meaning, and expression. He now thought it mistaken to search for invariant forms or rules of expression. In his later work Wittgenstein argues that sentences are meaningful within the rules of a particular “language game,” but each game is nothing more than a part of language, and the various parts do not share a common essence but only a “family resemblance.” His
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work now centered on discovering the implicit rules in various language games. This work was published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations. While the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations are considered his most important works, many other of his writings have been published since his death, including On Certainty; Culture and Value; Remarks on Colour; Zettel; Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief; and The Blue and Brown Books. Influence Wittgenstein has had a major influence on Christian thinkers. Among those thinkers are Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon, Brad Kallenberg, Herbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, David Burell, Rowan Williams, Kevin Vanhoozer, Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Victor Preller. These writers draw upon the later Wittgenstein to discuss topics as diverse as ethics, theology, politics and religion, and ecclesiology. Bibliography
Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker. New York: Ecco, 2001. Glock, Hans-Â�Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Grayling, A. C. Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Malcom, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. Monk, Ray. The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. ———. How to Read Wittgenstein. New York: Norton, 2005. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Â�Philosophicus. Trans. D.╯F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1961. ———. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963.
—John Thompson
JOHN WOOLMAN (1720–1772).╇ It would undoubtedly surprise John Woolman that few other Quaker writers have been as enduring for their spiritual autobiographies. His reputation rests essentially on his posthumously published Journal (1774) and a handful of usually appended essays on social and economic justice, only three of which were published during his lifetime. Woolman was born on his family’s farm near Mount Holly, a colonial New Jersey town twenty miles from Philadelphia. He was the fourth of thirteen children born into a moderately prosperous Quaker family within a farming community settled by Quakers six years before the founding of Pennsylvania. Attending the local Friends village school, Woolman worked on his father’s farm until at twenty he hired out as a clerk and bookkeeper for a local dry goods merchant. Moving to town, Woolman eventually apprenticed as a
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tailor with his employer. By the time he was twenty-Â�three he had set himself up independently, eventually including in his tailoring some “selling trimmings for garments” and “cloths and linens,” until at length he felt the need to curtail his growing business, as it was an impingement on Quaker simplicity. Marrying at twenty-Â�nine “a well inclined” young local Quaker woman, Sarah Ellis, he fathered two children, only one of whom survived infancy. At twenty-Â�three Woolman undertook the first of many extensive traveling visits to Friends Meetings throughout the colonies. He particularly spoke in opposition to slave keeping by members of the Society; called for the refusal to pay taxes supporting war, urging Friends not to compromise their traditional pacifism; and inveighed against injustice toward the Indians and others marginalized by prevailing colonial economic and political assumptions. Woolman warned prophetically of the connection between oppression and expedient economic practices creating a materialistically driven society blinded to the “true ministry” of Christ. His ability to articulate Quaker moral and ethical concerns led him to publish his first essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754), which became a rallying point for the increasing efforts among Friends in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and elsewhere to officially censure the slave trade, eventually making slave ownership a disownable offense for members. His last mission journey led him to sail for England to “labour” with Friends there regarding issues of spiritual and moral import. He continued speaking against slavery and the evils attendant on the pursuit of material “superfluities” as opposed to moderate sufficiency. Visiting large and small Quaker Meetings throughout England, he arrived at York in early fall and was stricken with smallpox; he died there on October 7, 1772, and was buried in the Friends cemetery at Bishophill. Woolman’s Journal charts his psychological, moral, and spiritual journey as revealed through an interpretative response to the theological and social values expressed in his Quaker heritage. He felt that Friends generally had settled into an outward formalism that lacked the inward vitality that had given spiritual birth and apocalyptic dynamism to the Society’s seventeenth-Â�century founders. Early in his Journal he sets down a perception of “true religion” that will sustain and confirm his lifelong efforts to “live under the cross” and follow his perceived “openings of Truth”: [I] was early convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart doth love and reverence God the Creator and learn to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures; that as the mind was moved on an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible being, on the same principle it was moved to
love him in all his manifestations in the visible world; that as by his breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal and sensitive creatures, to say we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by his life, or by life derived from him, was a contradiction in itself.
Bibliography
Barbour, Hugh, and Arthur O. Roberts. Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973. Heller, Mike, ed. The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2003. Moulton, Phillips P., ed. The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989. Sox, David. John Woolman: Quintessential Quaker, 1720–1772. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1999.
—Ed Higgins
NICHOLAS THOMAS WRIGHT (1948–).╇ N. T. Wright has published widely on the New Testament and early Judaism. He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He has held academic positions at Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill Universities. His full-Â�time ministry appointments include Dean of Lichfield (1994–1999); Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey (2000–2003); and Bishop of Durham (2003–). His writings include the widely acclaimed multivolume Christian Origins and the Question of God and his more accessible works Simply Christian, The Challenge of Jesus, and a New Testament commentary series for lay readers. His career, a skilled balance between the church and the academy, has primarily contributed to postmodern studies in Jesus and Paul. Many have viewed Wright as a champion of doctrinal portraits of Christ against the tide of heretical, historical Jesus scholars (particularly those of the Jesus Seminar). Though this description is too simplistic, Wright does seek to show that a serious engagement with history does not undermine the Church’s proclamation about Jesus; instead it strengthens our understanding of God’s movement in history, first through Israel and subsequently through the Church. Wright has seriously engaged the work of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Wright, though, also seeks to challenge Christians today who have not engaged the roots of Christianity in first-Â�century Jewish culture to confront distortions in their theology that originate from not grounding Christian thought in this setting. Christian Origins and the Question of God begins with The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1; 1992), which argues that early Christian preaching drew from Israel’s worldview (praxis, symbols, and stories), particularly the central concept of covenant and evolving metaphoric understandings of the Temple and Torah, to show that Israel’s hope
John Wyclif
had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus and the Victory of God (Volume 2; 1996) offers a more direct response to the so-Â�called “third quest” for the historical Jesus by affirming Jesus’s connections to first-Â�century Judaism but also by arguing that Jesus’s preaching about the Kingdom of God gives life to the Church’s ministry. The Resurrection of the Son of God (Volume 3; 2003) traces the evolving understanding of resurrection from its Jewish origins in the concepts of exile and restoration to the early Christian belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Wright has also written widely on Paul: a doctoral dissertation on Paul’s letter to the Romans, a commentary on Colossians and Philemon, and a monograph on Paul’s view of Christ and the law. Because of this work, he is associated with a movement known as “The New Perspective on Paul,” a phrase first coined by James D. G. Dunn. It should be noted that the New Perspective is not a homogenous group. For Wright, it began in the 1960s when he became confounded with the standard interpretations of Paul regarding the role of law for justification. One side (traditionally associated with Lutheran theology and exegesis) argues that Paul’s critique of Israel and the law in Galatians is central and fundamental and essentially governs whatever else may be said, even more positive remarks, especially found in Romans. The other side (which has been the standard Reformed interpretation) gives greater weight to Romans, which has a relatively positive view of the law, but in so doing necessarily decreases the weight of Galatians. Dissatisfied, Wright sought for a way to make sense of both texts, indeed all Pauline material, without attempting to subvert one text in favor of another. To accomplish this, Wright argues that when Paul speaks of justification in Romans and Galatians, he is critiquing Judaism by insisting on the covenantal unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ. With this lens, when Wright reads both Galatians and Romans (and all Pauline material) he does not find incongruence, but rather coherence and clarity in understanding Paul’s theology regarding Judaism, which is rooted in Paul’s understanding of covenant. To be sure, Wright’s claims have not convinced all, but as with those towering figures that came before him (especially Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, W. D. Davies, and E. P. Sanders), one must deal with his central thesis and claims in order to understand the current state of Pauline theology. Bibliography
Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992. ———. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996. ———. What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
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———. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003. ———. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005.
—Brett Patterson
JOHN WYCLIF (ca. 1320–1384).╇ English. Very little is known of John Wyclif ’s early life. He studied at Oxford and secured academic and ecclesiastical appointments, becoming a brilliant scholar, leading philosopher, and compelling teacher. His nationalistic, progovernment view that civil government should seize the property of immoral clerics contributed to animosity between English rulers and Rome. Developing ideas on lordship, Wyclif ’s theories of dominion suggest that under certain conditions the state could seize ecclesiastical property. The influence of Marsiglio of Padua and Richard FitzRalph is clear. Wyclif ’s interest in lordship is developed in his Determinatio (1374); De dominio divino (1375); and De civili dominio (1376). Raging philosophical debates of the times shaped his views. He railed against clerical immorality and increasingly became antipapal. In 1377 Wyclif was condemned by Pope Gregory XI, who issued a list of Wyclif ’s errors. Protection from John of Gaunt and Joan, widow of the Black Prince, spared him from any serious prosecution. His De veritate sacrae scripturae (1378) argues for absolute superiority of the Bible over theology and scholasticism. This was not sola scriptura. The Fathers, canon law, and the Scholastics were valid but only to the extent that they conformed to Scripture. Postilla super totam bibliam was completed in the early 1370s and was Wyclif ’s attempt at a commentary on the entire Bible. The surviving portions are pedestrian. His treatise De eucharistia (1380) cost Wyclif much. In 1382 the so-Â�called “Earthquake Synod” convened at Blackfriars in London under the auspices of Archbishop Courtney; twenty-Â�four Wyclifite articles were declared heretical. Wyclif avoided excommunication and remained unmolested at Lutterworth. His prolific works fall into two categories: philosophical and theological. He rejected the papal office in his De potestate papae (1379) and later referred to Gregory XI as horrendus diabolus. For Wyclif the church was the congregatio omnium predestinorum; those who had been elected to salvation—ordinary people. This idea was developed in his De ecclesia (1379). He denied transubstantiation (as a natural consequence of his realist leanings) and advanced the theory of remanence. It was this posture that attracted the most severe condemnation. His attack on the Eucharist in 1380 cost him the support of John of Gaunt. Wyclif subsequently was expelled from Oxford. His writings
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reflect later medieval ideas, especially on such topics as grace, righteousness, and meritorious suffering. Wyclif admits positive value inherent in good deeds, but how this relates to justification and its causes is unclear. Nevertheless, he is adamant on the sufficiency of Christ and the comparative uselessness of human effort. In his thoroughly orthodox De Trinitate (ca. 1370), Wyclif presents a realist argument for the doctrine. In chapter 1 he deals with truth, arguing that truth exists apart from things and nothing should be believed apart from the truth that it signifies. Therefore, faith itself may be regarded as an intellectual force that has truth as its object. Between 1374 and 1382 Wyclif wrote a series of treatises on simony. Wyclif ’s condemnation of the practice was based on his concept of dominion, and he argues that the church has an obligation to its spiritual message and mission and has no right to temporal power or possessions. His De Simonia (1380) characterizes simony as theft and illegitimate religious trafficking. There are several important teachings and themes in Wyclif ’s writings. Human law is valid only to the extent that it is based upon divine law. The Bible, rather than the Church, must be the supreme arbiter of truth. The papal office should be rejected. Wealth should be distributed by secular powers, and all things should be held in common (Tractatus de civili dominio). His late writings treat the recurring themes of simony, apostasy, and blasphemy. His De apostasia (1380) links heresy with moral failure and vice. Neither transubstantiation nor indulgences have merit, and Wyclif encouraged the abolition of religious orders. Only those in a state of grace may exercise dominion. Consequently, a delinquent church cannot hold temporal
power, and the ministry of evil priests is invalid. Since the clergy have forfeited authority by virtue of sin, the laity might withhold tithes. Wyclif defined the church as consisting of persons confessing faith and truth. His ideas contained the seeds of social and religious revolution. However, there is a considerable gap between rhetoric and reality in Wyclif. While he strenuously denounced simony and absenteeism, Wyclif himself was an absentee parish priest. Moreover, his reform program appears seriously naive. Could a corrupt church be reformed by an equally corrupt aristocracy? He seems not to have appreciated the dilemma. These issues aside, his writings exerted considerable intellectual influence in fifteenth-Â�century Bohemia. However, Wyclif ’s influence in the evolution of Christian thought is overrated. Bibliography
Evans, G. R. John Wyclif: Myth and Reality. Intervarsity, 2005. Ghosh, Kantik. The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kenny, Anthony, ed. Wyclif in His Times. Oxford University Press, 1986. McVeigh, Terrence, trans. John Wyclif: On Simony. Fordham University Press, 1992. Thomson, Williell R., ed. The Latin Writings of John Wyclif: An Annotated Catalog. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983. Workman, Herbert B. John Wycliffe: A Study of the English Medieval Church. 2 vols. Clarendon Press, 1926.
The Works of Wyclif are voluminous. Between 1883 and 1922 the now defunct Wyclif Society published at least thirty-Â�six volumes. —Thomas Fudge
Y EDWIN M. YAMAUCHI (1937–).╇ Edwin Masao Yamauchi was born in Hawaii in 1937. He was raised nominally Buddhist and in high school became an evangelical Protestant Christian. He earned a BA in Hebrew and Hellenistics from Shelton College (1960) and an MA (1962) and PhD (1964) from Brandeis University in Mediterranean studies. Yamauchi studied twenty-Â�two languages including Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Egyptian, Italian, Latin, Minoan Linear A, Minoan Linear B, Russian, and Ugaritic. He also participated in archaeological excavations in Israel. Cyrus H. Gordon, the Jewish scholar of the Bible, Mediterranean and ancient Near East, directed Yamauchi’s doctoral work. Yamauchi’s doctoral dissertation, “Mandaic Incantation Texts,” considered magic incantation texts written on clay bowls in the Mandaic dialect of Aramaic, which is used by the Mandaean Gnostics found in Iran and Iraq. After completing his doctoral work, Yamauchi taught in the History Department of Rutgers University. In 1969 he began teaching in the History Department of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, from which he eventually retired in 2005. At Miami, Yamauchi directed master’s theses and doctoral dissertations examining such diverse topics as Gnosticism, ancient Rome, and Egyptology. He taught courses in ancient languages including Greek, Coptic, and Syriac, and he taught courses spanning the wide field of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean history, including ancient Egypt and Africa, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. While at both Rutgers and Miami, Yamauchi served as an adviser to the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. At Miami University, Yamauchi cofounded the Oxford Bible Fellowship, where he serves as an elder. In 2006 he served as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Yamauchi is one of the more prolific evangelical Bible scholars in the United States. He has over 430 publications, including 17 books, and continues to publish more. His scholarly articles have appeared
in evangelical venues such as the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and Westminster Theological Journal, but he has also published widely in the mainstream scholarly world, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Biblical Literature, Church History, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Pre-Â�Christian Gnosticism? One area for which Yamauchi is especially well known is Gnostic studies. Rudolf Bultmann has argued for a pre-Â� Christian Gnosticism that influenced the New Testament. Yamauchi has been one of the primary scholars of Gnosticism who demonstrated Bultmann’s claims to be untenable. In his many works regarding Gnosticism, including Mandaic Incantation Texts (American Oriental Society, 1967), Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins (Harvard University Press, 1970), and Pre-Â�Christian Gnosticism? (Eerdmans, 1973), Yamauchi has shown that Gnosticism has its roots in Judaism, from which it derives its cosmology; in Greco-Â� Roman traditions, from which it derives its anthropology; and in Christianity, from which it derives its soteriology. Biblical Archaeology Another area in which Yamauchi has been prolific is in biblical archaeology. His works on biblical archaeology include The Stones and the Scriptures (Lippincott, 1972), The Archaeology of New Testament Cities in Western Asia Minor (Baker Book House, 1980), and Persia and the Bible (Baker Book House, 1990). In his works on archaeology, Yamauchi shows how archaeological discoveries support and validate the historical trustworthiness of Scripture and also how they illuminate the historical background to Scripture, helping readers better understand biblical
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passages in their ancient historical context. He shows how, time and again, the archaeological and historical record supports what is recorded in Scripture when there is available evidence with which to compare the biblical texts. At the same time, Yamauchi shows how the absence of archaeological and other external historical evidence is not evidence of absence, precisely because of the extremely fragmentary nature of archaeological remains. Yamauchi’s historical work has primarily investigated the biblical works of Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel. Bibliography Yamauchi’s publications include Composition and Corroboration in Classical and Biblical Studies (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1966); Greece and Babylon (Baker Book House, 1967); The Scriptures and Archaeology (Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1980); Foes from the Northern Frontier (Baker Book House, 1982); “The Current State of Old Testament Historiography,” in Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography in Its Near Eastern Context, edited by A. R. Millard, James K. Hoffmeier, and David W. Baker (Eisenbrauns, 1994); “Jesus Outside the New Testament,” in Jesus under Fire, edited by Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Zondervan, 1995); and Africa and the Bible (Baker Academic, 2004). Biographical works on Yamauchi include Edwin M. Yamauchi, “An Ancient Historian’s View of Christianity,” in Professors Who Believe, edited by Paul╯M. Anderson (InterVarsity Press, 1998); and Kenneth╯R. Calvert, “Edwin M. Yamauchi,” in The Light of Discovery: Studies in Honor of Edwin M. Yamauchi, edited by John D. Wineland (Pickwick, 2007). —Jeffrey L. Morrow PHILIP YANCEY (1949–).╇ Philip Yancey, a prolific evangelical author, draws intensely from personal life experience in his writings. They are written in a popular style yet reflect the depth and clear thinking of a writer such as C. S. Lewis. The popularity of Yancey’s books has resulted in international sales of more than fourteen million copies. His books are translated into twenty-Â�five different languages and have an audience of both conservative and liberal Christians, among others. Two of his books, The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing about Grace? won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association “Christian Book of the Year Award” in 1996 and 1998, respectively. Yancey’s early faith formation was in a strict fundamentalist church. The church had a heart for people in need, so young Yancey saw evidence of great Christian charity from an early age. At the same time, the church gave witness to imbedded racism and peculiar views on prayer
and health. Yancey’s father came down with polio in 1950. Church leaders suggested that he rely on faith and prayer rather than accept medical treatment, which likely caused his untimely death almost immediately thereafter. Yancey’s writing has grown out of a long life of reading in reaction to some of the faith teaching he had received. Reading broadly, he began to recognize the limited and false teachings he was receiving in church. This discovery led him to a life of frustration and anger with Christianity as he had understood it. A lot of his writing reflects a love of God along with a sense of alienation from some traditional religion. Yancey’s own discoveries in reading and writing have reformulated his faith and that of many of his readers. He doesn’t write with the confidence of the easily converted Christian but instead writes with the experience and skepticism of one who has seen the failure of people who profess to love a perfect God. As such, his writings retain great appeal for people who are questioning their own faith backgrounds or particular issues of faith. Early on, the worst thing the church did was give me a misconception of what God was like. I’ve been trying to overcome that ever since. But now the blinds are open, and I realize that part of my purpose as a writer is to open the blinds and make sense of the world for others.1
The titles of Yancey’s books clearly show the nature of the writer and his spiritual struggles. His books, to this date, are •â•‡ The Bible Jesus Read •â•‡ Church: Why Bother? •â•‡ Disappointment with God •â•‡ Fearfully and Wonderfully Made •â•‡ The Gift of Pain •â•‡ In His Image •â•‡ The Jesus I Never Knew •â•‡ Meet the Bible •â•‡ Reaching for the Invisible God •â•‡ Rumors of Another World •â•‡ Student Bible •â•‡ What’s So Amazing about Grace? Note
1. Interview by Edward Gilbreath, “Today’s Christian,” Christianity Today, 2006.
—Thomas Gray
JOHN HOWARD YODER (1927–1997).╇ Yoder is the most influential twentieth-Â�century Mennonite theologian; he advanced understandings of biblical studies, Christian social ethics, ecumenism, and pacifism. He was born in
John Howard Yoder
Ohio in 1927 to Howard and Ethel Good Yoder and grew up in a large family and under the influence of Oak Grove Mennonite Church, a more progressive branch of Amish Mennonites, so that he did not feel the need to rebel against that tradition. Cramming a four-Â�year program into two years, Yoder graduated from Goshen College, where he came under the influence of Harold S. Bender in 1947 and went to France in 1949 as part of the Mennonite Central Committee’s post–World War II ministry to orphaned/ refugee children, beginning part-Â�time studies at the University of Basel in 1950. In 1952 he married Anne Marie Guth, who worked at one of the children’s homes that Yoder oversaw; the couple would later have seven children. In 1954 they moved to Basel so that Yoder could become a full-Â�time student, and he completed doctoral studies in 1957 with a thesis in Anabaptist origins. He studied under Karl Barth and submitted a critique of Barth’s understanding of pacifism to Barth the night before defending his dissertation. Returning to the United States, Yoder eventually began to work for the Mennonite Board of Missions; he began his teaching career with a one-Â�year appointment at Goshen in 1958 and then a part-Â�time position the next year at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries. He soon after published The Christian Witness to the State (1964). In 1965 he went to full-Â�time teaching and part-Â�time work with the missions board. He began to teach part-Â�time in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana) in 1967. A sabbatical year in Israel at Tantur Institute in 1976 assisted in his biblical interpretation, and another in Argentina in 1970 brought his thought into conversation with liberation theology. He served as president of the Mennonite seminary from 1970 to 1973. At this time he published Karl Barth and the Problem of War (1970), Nevertheless (1971), The Original Revolution (1971), and his most influential work, The Politics of Jesus (1972). In 1977 he became full-Â�time at Notre Dame (keeping connections to the Mennonite seminary); the last two decades of his life were spent teaching there and publishing additional works, including The Priestly Kingdom (1984), The Royal Priesthood (1994), and For the Nations (1997). He made a lasting friendship with Stanley Hauerwas, a colleague at Notre Dame for about seven years who has claimed that Yoder convinced him to become a pacifist. Yoder served as president of the Society of Christian Ethics in 1988. He died in South Bend, Indiana, in 1997. Several works have been published posthumously, including Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method (2002) and The Jewish-Â� Christian Schism Revisited (2003). Yoder primarily wrote essays targeted at specific topics and situations; he had no designs on a systematic work.
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Known for his simplicity and humility, Yoder did not seek public notoriety, but his writings show academic care and have had lasting influence, helped by the efforts of Hauerwas (and his doctoral students) to increase Yoder’s readership. Yoder critiqued his own tradition, calling it back to its Anabaptist roots and more importantly to the calling of Jesus Christ. Yoder worked in ecumenical and peace efforts and argued the case of pacifism against the just-Â� war tradition, espoused by Reinhold Niebuhr and others. The Politics of Jesus argued from biblical texts (crucially the Gospel of Luke and Revelation) that the Church was to be a distinct community from the world around it and that following Jesus means becoming part of a unique social ethic/politics that organizes around forgiveness, nonviolent witness, and an eschatological hope in the coming of God’s kingdom (counter to the ways Protestant liberals had been portraying Jesus). Yoder sees this view coordinating with the creeds of Nicea and Chalcedon. In his subsequent The Priestly Kingdom and The Royal Priesthood, he refines his arguments against a Constantinian Christendom understanding of Christianity, affirming that Christians need to reclaim their “minority” status (a note that strikes a chord in a postmodern setting), as we see witnessed in the tradition of the radical reformation. Yet he does not see this affirmation as a withdrawing from the world (discipleship requires engagement), and he does not see this call as sectarian but rather as an ecumenical one for all Christians. For the Nations reiterates that the Church does not reject the world in retreat but instead seeks to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ. Bibliography
Nation, Mark Thiessen. “John H. Yoder, Ecumenical Neo-Â� Anabaptist: A Biographical Sketch.” In The Wisdom of the Cross, edited by Stanley Hauerwas, Harry Huebner, Chris╯K. Huebner, and Mark Thiessen Nation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Yoder, John Howard. For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991. ———. Nevertheless: The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1992. ———. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992 [1972]. ———. Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2002. ———. The Priestly Kingdom. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. ———. The Royal Priesthood. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994.
—Brett Patterson
Z NICHOLAS LUDWIG, COUNT VON ZINZENDORF (1700–1760).╇ Zinzendorf was the founder of the Renewed Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Church. Born in Dresden, Germany, to Pietist parents, he was Philipp Jacob Spener’s godson and attended school at Francke’s Adelspaedagogium at Halle during 1710–1716 and went on to study law and theology at Wittenberg. Traveling throughout Europe, Zinzendorf made friendships with Protestant and Catholics alike. He purchased an estate at Berthelsdorf and in 1722 opened it as a refuge to persecuted Moravian, or Bohemian, Brethren who established a village called Herrnhut. Giving up public life as legal counsel to the Saxon court in Dresden in 1727, Zinzendorf and his wife moved to Herrnhut, which became a center for missionary activity throughout the West Indies, North America, Russia, Africa, and elsewhere. Following Francke’s example, Zinzendorf set up a print shop and published tracts, a weekly newsletter, and a book of hymns. Here, too, the Losungen, or daily watchwords, were first published, which have been published without interruption since 1731 and are now read throughout the world. Zinzendorf was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1735 and consecrated a bishop in the Moravian Church in 1737, after which he traveled to America and throughout Europe founding, visiting, and encouraging Moravian communities. His ecumenical spirit, concern for Christian community, and Christocentric emphasis on a “religion of the heart” played a significant role in what he hoped would be a renewal of Christianity from within the various Protestant confessions. Without abandoning his pietistic leanings toward heartfelt devotion, spiritual edification, missions, and evangelization and concern for the poor and needy, Zinzendorf stayed close to the Lutheran Church and its theology despite occasional criticism from Lutheran orthodox theologians. Believing that a simple
faith in Christ can transcend confessional boundaries and disputes and hoping to inspire Catholics as well as Protestants, he had Arndt’s True Christianity edited and translated into French. Zinzendorf died at Herrnhut in 1760. Zinzendorf, his writings, and his followers deeply influenced John Wesley and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Zinzendorf ’s Nine Public Lectures on Important Subjects in Religion contains central elements of his religious thought and thus essentials of his concern for the renewal of the Christian Church. At the core is an emphasis on sincere and heartfelt faith. His first two lectures treat the Lord’s Prayer. Zinzendorf asserts that to pray sincerely is to invite the living God to become directly involved in the believer’s life. To pray as an unbeliever, insincerely or casually, is to invite the judgment of God. Our task is to worship and believe, not to speculate about theological mysteries that cannot be comprehended and that are the concern mainly of people who are not truly Christians. Jesus’s use of the term “Father” is a bold and straightforward claim that God is first and foremost our father and thus is to be treated with the love and respect due to a father. That God’s kingdom might come, and his will be done, the Church Militant must be aggressive in love and evangelization, carrying the Gospel to all, and must have the inspiration of God in order to do this. The bread we request is Christ’s body and blood. The sins for which we ask forgiveness are sins of omission; we have not done and been all that we could have for the sake of God and his kingdom. Thus, we should extend this same patience toward others who have failed us. The temptation of which Christ speaks is not temptation per se but rather a depth of temptation that might overwhelm us. And finally, the evil from which we need to be delivered is the pride and works of righteousness that are the devil’s snare. The point of preaching, Zinzendorf asserts in lecture three, is not a particular form of conversion but rather
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an invitation to behold the beauty of the crucified Bridegroom that, in itself, is sufficiently moving. Faith and love are virtually the same thing, for faith is prompted by an experience of Christ. Whether faith is prompted by suffering (which all people experience), by an experience of the Savior, or simply by one’s wish to believe because “I delight in it,” faith is a response of love. “So easy it is to be saved.” In his fifth lecture, on what makes one “blessedly happy,” Zinzendorf contrasts a faith based on evidence, such as miracles, with one rooted in a saving experience of Christ. One’s status as a child of God, not the ability to do signs and wonders, is the source of blessed happiness. This new identity is a gift of the Holy Spirit, not the result of preaching or studying or anything else. Zinzendorf ’s next lecture celebrates the very existence of the person. All souls “are designed for salvation,” yet people have the freedom to reject this gracious offer. It is quite simple: Christ is present and the person responds. Anything else is unnecessary and even counterproductive. Concerns about “how” one should receive Christ and human pride in desiring to contribute to one’s salvation only get in the way of this uncomplicated and remarkable experience. Lecture seven again reveals the simplicity of Zinzendorf ’s vision of Christianity. Christ’s question “Do you love me?” is the central matter. It transcends logic, speculation, and doctrinal precision. Love cannot be coerced or convinced. On the one hand we cannot come to Christ without the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and on the other we must choose to surrender to these promptings. It is unnecessary to trouble ourselves, or others, with the mechanics of salvation; rather, we need only yield to him. This is what constitutes the “essential Christian.” If we all do this, all the denominations will be united. The next lecture emphasizes the profoundly interpersonal nature of Christianity. An upright Christian is not one who is concerned primarily with keeping rules and regulations, embracing particular confessional positions and avoiding sin, but rather one who embraces the Christ who is present in all circumstances. Finally, Zinzendorf reaffirms the presence of Christ to all people. It is the ever-Â�present Christ—not Scripture, cleverness, or any external thing—who is both indispensable and the sole source of comfort. It is our failure to hold on to the Savior that is the source of distress and our disunity. Through faith and love we enter into and remain one with him. There is no better place to be than in the arms of the Christ who knows us through and through. Throughout his lectures, as elsewhere, simplicity of faith, deep trust in and love for Christ, and the God-Â� inspired desire to invite others to Christ are central.
Crucial as well are one’s emotions: remorse over one’s life and Christ’s crucifixion, and joy over one’s salvation, a joy “transcending everything which a person can encounter in the rest of life; it is a felt salvation” (Lecture two). Bibliography
Freeman, Arthur J. An Ecumenical Theology of the Heart: The Theology of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church in America, 1998. Kinkel, Gary Steven. Our Dear Mother the Spirit: An Investigation of Count Zinzendorf ’s Theology and Praxis. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. Meyer, Dietrich, and Paul Peucker, eds. Graf ohne Grenzen: Leben und Werk von Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf. Herrnhut: Comenius-Â�Buchhandlung, 2000. Weinlick, John R. Count Zinzendorf: The Story of His Life and Leadership in the Renewed Moravian Church. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church in America, 1984. Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von. A Collection of Sermons from Zinzendorf ’s Pennsylvania Journey, 1741–42. Edited by Craig╯D. Atwood, translated by Julie Tomberlin Weber. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church of America, 2002. ———. Nine Public Lectures on Important Subjects in Religion, Preached in Fetter Lane Chapel in London in the Year 1746. Edited and translated by George W. Forell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1973; paperback, 1998.
—Gary Sattler
ULRICH ZWINGLI (1484–1531).╇ Zwingli was the founder of the Reformed tradition and of Protestantism in Switzerland. Born on January 1, 1484, in Wildhaus, Switzerland, he studied at Bern, Basel, and Vienna, receiving the BA in 1504 and MA in 1506 from Basel. He was ordained a priest and served in Glarus for ten years. Here he immersed himself in the Greek New Testament and the church fathers. His service as chaplain for Swiss mercenaries led him to reject the idea of young Swiss men dying for the pope. While serving as priest in Einsiedeln (1516) Zwingli began to attack the sale of indulgences, the abuses of pilgrimages, etc. In 1518 he was called to serve as Leutprediger (people’s preacher) at the Grossmünster of Zürich. Preaching through the Gospels, Zwingli became increasingly critical of Roman Catholic practices, and when in 1522 several townspeople broke the Lenten fast by eating sausages, he supported them. He also published Archeteles in which he asserted that the Gospel (i.e., Scripture) was the only “touchstone” for faith and practice. In 1523 he wrote his 67 Theses asserting the centrality of the Gospel and denouncing any practices not affirmed in the New Testament (including the Mass as sacrifice, the absolute authority of the pope, pilgrimages, monastic orders,
Ulrich Zwingli
and clerical celibacy). The City Council affirmed his ideas, and Zürich began its shift to the Reformation. By 1525 the Latin Mass had been replaced by a German Eucharist, and the altar was replaced by a table. Images, icons, statues, etc., were removed from churches; monasteries were secularized; and organs were nailed shut. Also in 1525 Zwingli published his Commentary on True and False Religion in which he laid out the fundamentals of Reformed Protestantism. His reforms, including a challenge to infant baptism, gained a strong following, but when he returned to supporting infant baptism in 1525, the Anabaptist (Swiss Brethren) movement was spawned in reaction. Zwingli also clashed with Luther over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, and the two finally broke completely at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529. The reforms in Zürich and surrounding cantons aggravated tensions with the Roman Catholic cantons, and when war broke out in 1531, Zwingli was killed in battle at Kappel. Zwingli’s 67 Theses and his Commentary, The Shepherd, and numerous polemic writings on specific topics such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Providence reflect his humanistic tendencies. His views on the Eucharist in particular influenced Reformed theology, Anabaptist theology, and subsequent Baptist and Puritan thinking. The church was made up of all the elect (the invisible church) and of all who claimed to be Christian (the visible church). Typical Reformed themes, found in Calvin as well, in Zwingli’s thought are the sovereignty of God, the centrality of the covenant between God and God’s people, and the adoption of biblical morality by Christian individuals and societies. In The Shepherd, a sermon preached in 1523 during the second Zürich Disputation to politicians and pastors, lays out the essentials for being a good pastor. Primary is the need to remind people of their great need for salvation, of their inability to attain it for themselves, and that it is given to them through Jesus Christ. Zwingli reminds the clergy that they are to live lives of sacrifice and obedience that are consonant with the high calling of God and that to fail to do so is to be a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Such a life is possible if one remains close to Christ and is guided by the Holy Spirit. Drawing examples from the Old Testament, Zwingli asserts that the shepherd must not only be a living example but must also lead the fight against individual and social evils, even to the point of death. His oft-Â�quoted aphorism is taken from The Shepherd: “Not to fear is the armor.” As Zürich was essentially a theocracy, Zwingli’s words were directed to all citizens, albeit with particular importance for clergy and councilmen. He concludes by putting all these claims within a guiding framework of love, comparing love to the carpenter’s ruler by
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which all work is measured and guided. If the shepherd is concerned more with personal gain than with fulfilling one’s duties to Christ and society out of faith, hope, and love, then all is in vain. Two years later Zwingli brought out Commentary on True and False Religion, in which he examined the practices of the Church in light of Scripture. Written in a few months, here he distinguishes sharply between true religion, which is based entirely on Scripture, and false religion, which is based on tradition and human reason. True religion is rooted in God’s revelation, which humanity cannot grasp on its own. God’s existence may be evident to all, but God’s nature is known only through revelation. God is absolute and sovereign and, although the source of all, is separate from creation. As humanity knows God only by faith, so does it know itself only by revelation as well, which is problematic since humanity does not wish to know of its utter depravity. “The whole life of the Christian, therefore, is repentance.” The Spirit of God enables one to truly see oneself, receive God’s grace, and turn to a new way of living. Rejecting both Catholic and Lutheran ideas regarding the sacraments (the Lord’s Supper and baptism), Zwingli asserts that they are “signs and ceremonials” that act as public oaths of intent and acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is essential, water baptism is not. It does not convey grace, but is a symbol of God’s forgiveness and pardon, and a sign of the covenant community into which the infant is received. In rejecting both the Catholic and Lutheran doctrines of the Real Presence, Zwingli claims that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial, a time of thanksgiving (Eucharist) and communion with one another in worship and praise. In and of themselves the sacraments have no power. Zwingli rejects many traditional rites and ceremonies, placing preaching in the very center of worship. Prayer is to be personal, sincere, and without an eye to personal gain or as a “good work.” As regards church and state, they have the same concerns and responsibilities: the well-Â�being of neighbor. To finish, Zwingli reiterates that it is crucial to have faith in God and to know oneself. This will lead to faith in Christ and a renewed commitment to neighbor. Here again Zwingli’s couplet of faith and (moral) action is repeated, as he emphasizes not only the centrality of faith and love but also righteousness as well. Bibliography
Furcha, E. J., and H. Wayne Pipkin. The Work of Huldrych Zwingli After Five Hundred Years. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984. Gäbler, Ulrich. Huldrych Zwingli: His Life and Work. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1999 (reprint of 1986 edition).
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Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002. Potter, G. R. Zwingli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Stephens, W. P. Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought. New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1994.
Zwingli, Ulrich. Commentary on True and False Religion. Edited by Samuel M. Jackson and Clarence N. Heller. Durham: Labyrinth, 1981 (reprint of 1929 edition). ——— On Providence and Other Writings. Edited by Samuel M. Jackson. Durham: Labyrinth, 1983 (reprint of 1922 edition).
—Gary Sattler
Appendix A Two Thousand Years of Christian Literature: A Representative Timeline
ca. 50–90: The Apostolic Era writings: Four Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Epistles, Apocalypse ca. 96: First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians ca. second century: The Didache or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles; Odes of Solomon as early Christian songbook; The Gospel of Thomas; Address of Tatian to the Greeks; Epistle by Barnabas; Theophilus to Autolycus; Epistle by Diognetus ca. 107: Seven Epistles by Ignatius of Antioch ca. 124: Apology by Aristides ca. 130: The Shepherd of Hermas ca. 135: Epistle to the Philippians by Polycarp of Smyrna ca. 150: First Apology and Second Apology by Justin Martyr ca. 177: Apology and On the Resurrection by Athenogoras ca. 180: Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs ca. 188: Against Heresies by Irenaeus 190: Instructor and Miscellanies by Clement of Alexandria ca. 197: Apology, On the Lord’s Prayer, and On Baptism by Tertullian ca. third century: Instructions in Favor of Christian Discipline by Commodianus; Fragments by Dionysius the Great third century: Biblical Chronology by Julius Africanus ca. 200: The Stromata by Clement of Alexandria; Octavius by Minucius Felix; Demonstration of Apostolic Teaching by Irenaeus ca. 203: Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas ca. 206: Two letters To My Wife and treatise On the Soul by Tertullian ca. 217: The Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus ca. 220: On First Principles by Origen 238: Oration and Panegyric Addressed to Origen by Gregory Thaumaturgus 240: Commentary on the Song of Songs by Origen ca. 240–270: Declaration of Faith by Gregory Thaumaturgus ca. 246–249: Against Celsus by Origen 249: Dress of Virgins by Cyprian of Carthage ca. 251: On the Unity of the Catholic Church by Cyprian ca. fourth century: On the Trinity by Hilary of Poitiers
304–313: Divine Institutes by Lactantius ca. 318: Incarnation of the Word of God by Athanasius 324: Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius Pamphili ca. 347: Catechetical Lectures by Cyril 357: Life of Antony by Athanasius; Letters by Basil of Caesarea 358–364: The Longer Rules and The Shorter Rules by Basil ca. 360: Hymns by Ephraem the Syrian 360: Discourses against the Arians by Athanasius 364: Against Eunomius by Athanasius; Treatise on the Mysteries by Hilary of Poitiers 370–419: Pastoral Epistles by Jerome 375: Treatise on the Holy Spirit by Basil ca. 377: Panarion by Epiphanius of Salamis 379: On the Christian Faith by Ambrose ca. 380: Five Theological Orations by Gregory Nazianzus 380: Lord’s Prayer by Gregory of Nyssa 381: Discourses on the Priesthood by John Chrysostom 386: Epistle XXI: To the Most Clement Emperor and Most Blessed Augustus by Ambrose; Sermo Contra Auxentium by Ambrose 391: De Magistro by Augustine of Hippo 392: De Viris Illustribus by Jerome 395: Homilies on the Statutes by John Chrysostom ca. 395: On the Duties of the Clergy by Ambrose; The Great Catechism by Gregory of Nyssa ca. 397: Confessions by Augustine 398: Homilies by John Chrysostom 399: Dialogues by Sulpicius Severus late fourth century: Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer by Evagrius Ponticus 400: First Catechetical Instruction by Augustine ca. 400–428: On the Trinity by Augustine 404: A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed by Rufinus of Aquileia 405: Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate appears ca. 410: The Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus ca. 413–426: The City of God by Augustine
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Appendix A
417: Seven Books of History against the Pagans by Paulus Orosius 419: Institutes of Monastic Life by John Cassian 420: Letters by Jerome 421: Faith, Hope and Charity by Augustine; Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love by Augustine 430: Enarrations on the Psalms by Augustine 434: The Commonitory by Vincent of Lerins ca. 444: Dialogues by Theodoret of Cyrus 449: Tome of Leo by Pope Leo I 450: Call of All Nations by Prosper of Aquitaine mid-fifth century: Writings by Patrick ca. 451: The Bazaar of Heraclides by Nestorius ca. 500: Mystical Theology by Dionysius the PseudoAreopagite; Contemplative Life by Julianus Pomerius; Divine Names by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite 524: On the Holy Trinity by Boethius; On the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius ca. 528: Rule of Benedict by Benedict of Nursia 575–594: History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours ca. 590: Pastoral Care by Gregory the Great 593: Dialogues by Gregory 630: Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville; Ascetic Life by Maximus the Confessor ca. 640: Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus 731: Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation by Bede 742: Fountain of Wisdom by John of Damascus 794: Concerning Rhetoric and Virtue by Alcuin 830s: Two treatises, De Corpore et Sanguine Dominii, by Radbertus and Ratramnus 850s: Translation and commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius by John Scotus Eriugena 857: De Praedestinatione by Hincmar of Reims 910: Foundation Charter of Cluny 990: Homilies by Ælfric eleventh century: Practical and Theological Chapters by Symeon the New Theologian ca. 1030: Spiritual Life by Peter Damian 1062–1066: Book of Proverbs by Otloh of St. Emmeram 1076: Monologion by Anselm of Canterbury 1077–1078: Proslogion by Anselm 1080: Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini by Lanfranc 1098: Cur Deus Homo by Anselm ca. twelfth century: Know Thyself by Peter Abelard 1122: Sic et Non by Peter Abelard 1125: Noah’s Ark by Hugh of St. Victor 1126: On the Necessity of Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux 1127: Treatise Concerning the Pursuit of Learning by Hugh of St. Victor 1128: Meditations of William of St. Thierry 1129–1135: On the Steps of Humility and Pride by Bernard 1133: Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul by Hugh of St. Victor 1135: Historia Calamitatum by Peter Abelard 1139–1178: Decretum Gratiani by Johannes Gratian
1143: Two Cities by Otto of Freising; Mirror of Charity by Aelred of Rielvaulx 1150: Spiritual Friendship by Aelred; Book of Sentences by Peter Lombard 1153: Letters by Bernard of Clairvaux 1159: Policraticus and Metalogicon by John of Salisbury ca. 1160: Benjamin Minor and Benjamin Major by Richard of St. Victor 1195: De Contemptu Mundi by Pope Innocent III 1197: De Sacro Altaris Mysterio by Pope Innocent III 1202: Treatise of the Four Gospels by Joachim of Fiore 1235–1259: Chronica Majora by Matthew Paris 1240: Summa de Creaturis by Albert the Great 1245–1260: Summa Universae Theologiae by Alexander of Hales 1250: Three Ways by Bonaventure ca. 1250: Retracing the Arts to Theology by Bonaventure 1254–1256: On Being and Essence by Thomas Aquinas 1256–1259: De Veritate by Thomas Aquinas 1258–1260: Summa Contra Gentiles by Thomas Aquinas 1259: Journey of the Mind to God by Bonaventure 1265: Flowing Light of the Godhead by Mechthild of Magdeburg 1265–1267: On the Power of God by Thomas Aquinas 1265–1274: Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas 1266–1269: On Spiritual Creatures by Thomas Aquinas 1268: On Free Choice by Thomas Aquinas; Opus Majus by Roger Bacon 1269: On the Soul by Thomas Aquinas 1269–1272: On the Virtues in General by Thomas Aquinas 1300: De Primo Principio by John Duns Scotus ca. 1300–1327: Sermons and Treatises by Johannes Eckhart 1302: Opus Oxoniense by John Duns Scotus 1302–1304: Ordinatio: Oxford Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard by John Duns Scotus 1303: De Potestate Regia et Papali by John of Paris 1313: De Monarchia by Dante Alighieri ca. 1320: Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 1322: Little Flowers of St. Francis (author unknown) 1324: De Corpore Christi by William of Ockham 1327: Treatises and Sermons by Johann Eckhart 1330: Meditations on the Life of Christ by Bonaventure; Little Book of Eternal Wisdom by Blessed Henry Suso; Sermons by John Tauler 1343: Fire of Love by Richard Rolle ca. 1346: Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage by Jan van Ruysbroeck ca. 1350: Theologia Germanica (author unknown) 1350: Sparkling Stone by Jan van Ruysbroeck 1357: The Lay Folks’ Catechism by John Thoresby of York 1367: On His Own Ignorance by Petrarch 1370: Dialogue of Catherine of Siena 1382: Trialogus by John Wyclif 1393: Revelations of Divine Love by Lady Julian of Norwich ca. 1395: Following of Christ by Gerard Groote
Appendix A
1395: Cloud of Unknowing (author unknown); Drawing the Little Ones to Christ by Jean Gerson 1409: On Ecclesiastical Unity by Jean Gerson 1413: Treatise on the Church by John Hus 1418: Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis 1436: Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe 1440: On Learned Ignorance by Nicholas of Cusa 1453: Vision of God by Nicholas of Cusa 1494: Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton 1503: Enchiridion Militis Christiani by Desiderius Erasmus 1507: Commentary on the Summa Theologica by Cajetan 1511: In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus 1516: Paraclesis by Desiderius Erasmus 1520: An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation by Martin Luther; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church by Martin Luther; A Treatise on Christian Liberty by Martin Luther 1520s: Lutheran laywoman Argula von Grumbach’s pamphlets, poems, and letters 1521: Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum by Philipp Melanchthon 1525: Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther 1527: Third Spiritual Alphabet by Francisco de Osuna; Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession 1530s: The Only Way by Bartolomé de las Casas 1531: On the Errors of the Trinity by Michael Servetus 1534: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation by Thomas More 1536: Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin; A Short and Clear Exposition of the Christian Faith by Ulrich Zwingli 1539: Foundation of Christian Doctrine by Menno Simons 1544: Necessity of Reforming the Church by John Calvin 1548: Dialogue between the Soul and the Body by Catherine of Genoa; Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius Loyola 1549: A Disputation of the Sacrament of the Eucharist by Peter Martyr Vermigli; the first Anglican Book of Common Prayer 1549–1551: The Decades by Johann Heinrich Bullinger 1550: A Defense of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament by Thomas Cranmer 1557: Treatise on the Passion by Thomas More 1559–1575: The Magdeburg Centuries by Matthias Flaccius 1562: Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Teresa of Avila 1575: Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso 1577: De Regno Christi by Martin Bucer 1582: A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Any by Robert Browne 1583: Way of Perfection by Teresa of Avila 1583–1585: Names of Christ by Fray Luis Ponce de Leo 1587: The Dark Night of the Soul and Ascent of Mount Carmel by John of the Cross; History of the Reformation in Scotland by John Knox (published 1644) 1588: Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila 1589: A Treatise of Excommunication by Thomas Erastus
663
1594–1662: Treatise on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker 1606: True Christianity by Johann Arndt 1608: Declaration of Sentiments by Jacobus Arminius; Rule of Perfection by Benedict Canfield 1609: Introduction to the Devout Life and On the Love of God by Francis de Sales; Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by John Gerard 1613: Treatise on Laws by Francisco Suarez 1616: Love of God by Francis de Sales 1622: Truth of the Christian Religion by Hugo Grotius 1623–1682: Way to Christ by Jakob Boehme 1624: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne 1630: Of Conscience, Its Power and Cases by William Ames 1633: Temple by George Herbert 1637–1662: Cursus Theologicus by John of St. Thomas 1641: Spirit of St. Francis de Sales by Jean Pierre Camus 1642: Religio Medici by Thomas Browne 1644: Bloody Tenet of Persecution by Roger Williams; Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven by John Cotton; Lex Rex by Samuel Rutherford 1645: De Religione Laici by Edward Herbert, First Lord of Cherbury 1648: Foundations of Freedom by John Lilburne; Preces Privatae by Lancelot Andrewes 1650: Rule and Exercise of Holy Living and Holy Dying by Jeremy Taylor; Saints’ Everlasting Rest by Richard Baxter; The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America by Anne Bradstreet 1652: Carmen Deo Nostro by Richard Crashaw; A Priest to the Temple by George Herbert 1656: The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter 1657: Didacta Magna by Johannes Amos Cornelius ca. 1660: Letters and Speeches by Oliver Cromwell (published 1845) 1660: Ductor Dubitantium by Jeremy Taylor 1665: A Christian Directory by Richard Baxter 1666: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan 1667: Paradise Lost by John Milton 1670: Pensées by Blaise Pascal 1674: Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit by John Owen; Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth by Nicholas Malebranche 1675: Pia Desideria by Philipp Jakob Spener 1678: An Apology for the True Christian Divinity by Robert Barclay; True Intellectual System of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth 1678–1684: Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan 1681: Discourse on Universal History by Jacques Benigne Bossuet 1682: Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock 1685: A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer by Madame Guyon 1687: Hind and the Panther by John Dryden
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Appendix A
1692: Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman) 1694: Journal of George Fox by George Fox 1695: Reasonableness of Christianity by John Locke 1696: Christianity Not Mysterious by John Toland 1699: Nonpartisan History of the Church and Heresy by Gottfried Arnold 1702: Magnalia Christi Americana by Cotton Mather 1704: Christian Perfection by François Fenelon 1712: Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity by Samuel Clarke 1726: Autobiography by Margaret Mary Alcoque 1728: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law 1730: Christianity as Old as the Creation by Matthew Tindal 1736: Analogy of Religion by Joseph Butler 1738–1747: Journals by George Whitefield 1739: Journal by John Wesley 1742–1787: Journals by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg 1743: Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England by Charles Chauncey 1746: A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards 1748: Nine Public Lectures by Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf 1749: Diary of David Brainerd by David Brainerd 1750: Glories of Mary by Alphonsus Mary de Liguori; Two Discourses on Universal History by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot 1754: Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards 1758: Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended by Jonathan Edwards 1762: Creed of a Savoyard Priest by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1766: Plain Account of Christian Perfection by John Wesley 1774: Journal of John Woolman by John Woolman 1779: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume 1789 and 1794: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake 1790s: Early Theological Writings by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (published posthumously) 1793: Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant; System of Doctrines by Samuel Hopkins 1797: Real Christianity by William Wilberforce 1799: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher 1802: Natural Theology by William Paley 1807: Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1811: Practical Piety by Hannah More 1817–1823: Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion by Félicité Robert de Lamennais 1819: Unitarian Christianity by William Ellery Channing 1821: Journal of Francis Asbury by Francis Asbury; Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg by Joseph Marie de Maistre; Christian Faith by Friedrich Schleiermacher 1825: Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1828: Lectures on the Philosophy of Life by Friedrich von Schlegel
1832: Symbolism by Johann Adam Mohler 1833: On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man by Thomas Chalmers 1835: Lectures on Revivals of Religion by Charles Grandison Finney; Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss 1838: Divinity School Address by Ralph Waldo Emerson; Kingdom of Christ by Frederick Denison Maurice 1839: Christian System by Alexander Campbell; History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ by Isaac August Dorner 1841: Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach; The Transient and Permanent in Christianity by Theodore Parker 1843: Way of Holiness by Phoebe Palmer 1845: An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Cardinal Newman 1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Søren Kierkegaard 1847: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing by Søren Kierkegaard 1848: Christian Discourses by Søren Kierkegaard 1849: Christian Dogmatics by Hans Lassen Martensen; God in Christ by Horace Bushnell 1850: Training in Christianity by Søren Kierkegaard 1851: Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism by Juan Donoso Cortes 1852: Works of Lyman Beecher by Lyman Beecher; Women of Christianity by Julia Kavanagh; Idea of a University by John Henry Cardinal Newman 1854: Attack on Christendom by Søren Kierkegaard; Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum by Heinrich Joseph Dominicus Denzinger 1856: Nature of the Atonement by John McLeod Campbell 1860: Christian Nurture by Horace Bushnell 1861: Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade; Hymns Ancient and Modern 1863: Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan 1864: Apologia pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman; Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Louis Veuillot 1865: Ecce Homo by John Robert Seeley; An Eirenicon by Edward Pusey; Mysteries of Christianity by Matthias Joseph Scheeben 1869: John Ploughman’s Talks by Charles Haddon Spurgeon 1870: Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith; Colloquia Peripatetica by John Duncan; A Grammar of Assent by John Henry Cardinal Newman 1870–1874: Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation by Albrecht Ritschl 1871–1873: Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge 1873: Literature and Dogma by Matthew Arnold 1874: History of the Councils by Karl Joseph von Hefele 1875: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy 1877: Lectures on Preaching by Phillips Brooks 1878: Lectures on Godmanhood by Vladimir Solovyev 1879: Aeterni Patris by Pope Leo XIII
Appendix A
1880: ”Grand Inquisitor” (in The Brothers Karamazov) by Fyodor Dostoevsky 1882: What I Believe by Leo Tolstoy 1884: Way of a Pilgrim (author unknown) 1885: Evolution and Religion by Henry Ward Beecher; Immortale Dei by Pope Leo XIII 1886: Systematic Theology by Augustus Hopkins Strong 1886–1891: History of the Catholic Church in the United States by John Dawson Gilmary Shea 1888: A Study of Religion by James Martineau; Woman in the Pulpit by Frances Willard 1891: Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII 1893: L’Action by Maurice Blondel; Hound of Heaven and Other Poems by Francis Thompson 1894: Ascent of Man by Henry Drummond 1895: En Route by Joris-Karl Huysmans 1896: In His Steps by Charles Monroe Sheldon; Poems by Ernest Dowson 1897: Woman Who Was Poor by Leon Bloy 1898: The Christian Pastor by Washington Gladden 1899: Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge; Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux; Practical Christianity by Rufus Matthew Jones 1900: What Is Christianity? by Adolf von Harnack 1901: Philosophy of Religion by Harald Hoffding; Graces of Interior Prayer by R. P. Augustine Poulain 1902: Gospel and the Church by Alfred Loisy; Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc; Varieties of Religious Experience by William James 1906: Christian Theology in Outline by William Adams Brown; A Much Abused Letter by George Tyrrell; Double Search: Studies in Atonement and Prayer by Rufus Jones; Parish Life in Medieval England by Francis Aidan Cardinal Gasquet; Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer 1907: History of Freedom by John Emerich Dalberg Acton 1908: Personalism by Borden Parker Bowne; Orthodoxy by Gilbert Keith Chesterton; Mystical Element of Religion by Friedrich John, Baron von Hugel 1909: Our Calling by Einar Billing; Person and Place of Jesus Christ by Peter Taylor Forsyth; Religious A Priori by Ernst Troeltsch; Scofield Reference Bible appears 1910: The Fundamentals begin publication; ultimately ninety essays 1911: Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill 1912: Meaning of God in Human Experience by William Ernst Hocking; Social Teaching of Christian Churches by Ernst Troeltsch; Saint Francis of Assisi by Johannes Jorgensen; War with the Saints by Jessie Penn-Lewis 1913: Problem of Christianity by Josiah Royce 1917: Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto; Theology for the Social Gospel by Walter Rauschenbusch 1918: Plan of Salvation by Benjamin B. Warfield; Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1919: Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth; Theology as an Empirical Science by Douglas Clyde Macintosh
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1920: Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain; Intellectual Life by Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges 1921: On the Eternal in Man by Max Scheler 1923: Christianity and Liberalism by John Gresham Machen; Faith of the Christian Church by Gustaf Aulén; Poems by Alice Meynell 1924: Love, the Law of Life by Toyohiko Kagawa; Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam; St. Francis of Assisi by Gilbert Keith Chesterton 1925: Everlasting Man by Gilbert Keith Chesterton; How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles by Frank Bartleman; God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy by Fulton J. Sheen; A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist by Dom Anscar Vonier 1926: Religion in the Making by Alfred North Whitehead 1927: Freedom and the Spirit by Nicholas Berdyaev; Selected Letters by Friedrich von Hügel 1927–1928: Philosophical Theology by Frederick Robert Tennant 1928: Christ and Society by Charles Gore; History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages by Ludwig von Pastor 1929: Progress and Religion by Christopher Dawson; Autobiography of Johannes Jorgensen by Johannes Jorgensen; Christian Education of Youth by Pope Pius XI 1930: Casti Connubi by Pope Pius XI; Christus Victor by Gustaf Aulén; Faith of a Moralist by Alfred Edward Taylor 1930, 1936: Agape and Eros by Anders Nygren 1931: Destiny of Man by Nikolai Berdyaev; Quadragesimo Anno by Pope Pius XI; Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson; Growth of the Idea of God by Shailer Mathews; Lectures on Calvinism by Abraham Kuyper; Out of My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer; Natural and the Supernatural by John Wood Oman; Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum by Kenneth E. Kirk 1932: Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth; Making of Europe by Christopher Dawson; Degrees of Knowledge by Jacques Maritain; Divine Imperative by Emil Brunner; Two Sources of Morality and Religion by Henri Bergson 1933: Living God by Nathan Söderblom; Liturgy and Personality by Dietrich von Hildebrand 1934: Nature, Man and God by William Temple 1935: Being and Having by Gabriel Marcel; Jesus the Lord by Karl Heim; Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh; Parables of the Kingdom by Charles Harold Dodd 1936: A New Critique of Theoretical Thought by Herman Dooyeweerd; True Humanism by Jacques Maritain; The Good News—Yesterday and Today by Josef Andreas Jungmann; Worship by Evelyn Underhill; Essence of Spiritual Religion by D. Elton Trueblood 1937: Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson; The Lord by Romano Guardini; Catholicism by Henry de Lubac; Mit Brennender Sorge by Pope Pius XI; Philosophical Bases of Theism by George Dawes Hicks; Wisdom of God by Sergei Bulgakov; Letters by a Modern Mystic by Frank C. Laubach
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Appendix A
1938: Christian Message in a Non-Christian World by Hendrik Kraemer; Church and State by Luigi Sturzo; If by Amy Wilson Carmichael 1939: Idea of a Christian Society by T. S. Eliot; Descent of a Dove by Charles Williams 1940: Philosophy of Religion by Edgar Sheffield Brightman; Origin of the Jesuits by James Brodrick; Monastic Order in England by Dom David Knowles 1941: Christian Doctrine by J. S. Whale; Church of the Word Incarnate by Charles Journet; Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly; The Meaning of Revelation by H. Richard Niebuhr 1941, 1945: Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr 1942: Prayer by George Arthur Buttrick; Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis 1943: Basic Verities by Charles Péguy; Divino Afflante Spiritu by Pope Pius XII; School of Prayer by Olive Wyon; Mystical Body of Christ by Pope Pius XII 1944: Heart of Man by Gerald Vann 1945: Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel 1946: Christ and Time by Oscar Cullmann; Character of Man by Emmanuel Mounier; Theology and Sanity by Francis Joseph Sheed; Idea of Christ in the Gospels by George Santayana; Source of Human Good by Henry Nelson Wieman 1946, 1950, 1960: Dogmatics by Emil Brunner 1947: The Mind and Heart of Love by Martin Cyril D’Arcy; Human Destiny by Pierre Lecomte de Nouy; Mediator Dei by Pope Pius XII; Growth or Decline? The Church Today by Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard 1948: Divine Relativity by Charles Hartshorne; The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton; Meaning of Man by Jean Mouroux; World of Silence by Max Picard; Transformation in Christ by Dietrich von Hildebrand; God Was in Christ by Donald M. Baillie; Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer 1948–1953: Theology of the New Testament by Rudolf Bultmann 1949: Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Mass of the Roman Rite by Josef Adres Jungmann; Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton; Peace of Soul by Fulton J. Sheen; Faith and History by Reinhold Niebuhr; God’s Grace and Man’s Hope by Daniel Day Williams; Living Word by Gustaf Wingren; Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman 1950: Basic Christian Ethics by Paul Ramsey; Enthusiasm by Ronald Knox; End of Time by Josef Pieper; Mystery of Being by Gabriel Marcel; Waiting for God by Simone Weil 1951: Anxiety and the Christian by Hans Urs von Balthasar; Ascent to Truth by Thomas Merton; Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr; Christian Understanding of God by Nels F. S. Ferré; Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Peter Anthony Bertocci; Meaning of Holiness by Louis Lavelle 1951, 1957: Systematic Theology by Paul Tillich 1952: Time and Eternity by Walter T. Stace; Saint Francis Xavier by James Brodrick; The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
1953: Natural Religion and Christian Theology by Charles E. Raven; Lord of History by Jean Daniélou; Sun and the Umbrella by Nels F. S. Ferre 1954: Christ of Faith by Karl Adam; Jesus and His Times by Henri Daniel-Rops; Manner Is Ordinary by John LaFarge 1955: Liturgical Piety by Louis Bouyer; On Listening to Another by Douglas V. Steere; Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Christian Theology: An Ecumenical Approach by Walter Marshall Horton; The Secret of Happiness by Billy Graham 1956: Science, Religion and Christianity by Hans Urs von Balthasar; Discovery of God by Henri de Lubac; TwoEdged Sword by John L. Mckenzie; Prison Meditations by Father Alfred Delp; Act and Being by Michele Federico Sciacca 1957: Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Seat of Wisdom by Louis Bouyer; Meeting of Love and Knowledge by Martin Cyril D’Arcy; Insight by Bernard J. F. Lonergan; The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee; On the Theology of Death by Karl Rahner; Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Faith and Knowledge by John Hick; Reality of Faith by Friedrich Gogarten 1958: Christianity and Paradox by Ronald W. Hepburn; Christian Humanism by Louis Bouyer; Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot by Elisabeth Elliot; Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith by Albert Donndeyne; Humanity of Christ by Romano Guardini; Christianity and the State by John Coleman Bennett; Commentary on Galatians by Ragnar Bring 1959: Nature of Faith by Gerhard Ebeling; Our Experience of God by H. D. Lewis; God in Modern Philosophy by James╯D. Collins; Death and Immortality by Michele Federico Sciacca; Great Women of the Christian Faith by Edith Deen 1960: Hollow Universe by Charles De Koninck; The Philosopher and Theology by Etienne Gilson; Moral Philosophy by Jacques Maritain; We Hold These Truths by John Courtney Murray; Out of the Depths by Anton Boisen 1961: Come, Let Us Worship by Godfrey L. Diekmann; Mater et Magistra by Pope John XXIII; The Council, Reform and Reunion by Hans Küng 1962: The Church by Pope Paul VI; Belief and Faith by Josef Pieper; New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton; The Radical Reformation by George Huntston Williams 1963: Pacem in Terris by Pope John XXIII 1964: Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld; Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.; Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C. S. Lewis; The Orthodox Church by Timothy (Kallistos) Ware; They Speak with Other Tongues by John╯L. Sherrill; Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Vatican II 1966: Silence by Shusaku Endo; Healing Gifts of the Spirit by Agnes White Sanford 1970: Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom; Prayer and Modern Man by Jacques Ellul 1971: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
Appendix A
1972: Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell 1974: A Serious Call to a Contemplative Lifestyle by E. Glenn Hinson; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 1975: Reaching Out by Henri J. M. Nouwen 1976: The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation by Morton T. Kelsey 1978: Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster 1979: Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics by Raimundo Panikkar 1980: Centering Prayer by Basil Pennington 1981: Intended for Pleasure by Ed and Gaye Wheat 1982: Self-Esteem: The New Reformation by Robert A. Schuller 1983: We Drink from Our Own Wells by Gustavo Gutiérrez; Hope and Suffering: Sermons and Speeches by Desmond Tutu; The Story of Christianity (2 vols.) by Justo Gonzalez 1984: Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus; Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian by James W. Fowler 1985: No Wonder They Call Him the Savior by Max Lucado; Jesus through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan; Worship Is a Verb by Robert Webber 1986: Praying the Psalms by Walter Brueggemann; Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist by John Piper; Power Evangelism by John Wimber; The Blessing by Gary Smalley and John Trent 1987: The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy; Brendan by Frederick Buechner; Daughters of the Church by Ruth A. Tucker and Walter Liefeld; This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti 1988: The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard; A Season in the West by Piers Paul Read 1989: The Man in the Mirror by Patrick M. Morley 1990: The Translation of Babel by Scott Cairns; Redemptoris Missio by Pope John Paul II; Experiencing God by Henry╯T. Blackaby and Claude V. King; Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey 1991: Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen; Wild Hope: Crises Facing the Human Community by Tom Sine; Prayer and Temperament by Chester P. Michael 1992: The Contemporary Christian by John Stott; The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen 1993: Released from Bondage by Neil Anderson 1994: When God Whispers Your Name by Max Lucado; The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll; The Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper edited by Al Janssen 1995: Left Behind (Series) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins; The Oath by Frank Peretti 1996: The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris; In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike; Bread for the Journey by Henri J. M. Nouwen; The Missionary Movement in Christian History by
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Andrew Walls; God and Other Famous Liberals by Forrest Church; Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf 1997: Seasons of Grace by Mark Noll; Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham by Billy Graham; The Stream & the Sapphire by Denise Levertov; Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala; By the Renewing of Your Minds by Ellen Charry; Rosie by Anne Lamott 1998: The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel; Women and Redemption: A Theological History by Rosemary Ruether; Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life by Simon Chan 1999: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott; Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine Pohl 2000: Paul by Walter Wangerin Jr.; Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction by Jeanette Bakke; God of the Possible by Gregory A. Boyd; 100 Christian Books That Changed the Century by William and Randy Petersen; The Child in Christian Thought edited by Marcia Bunge 2001: Conformed to His Image by Kenneth Boa 2002: The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins; The PurposeDriven Life by Rick Warren 2003: The Emergent Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations by Dan Kimball 2004: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; The Gift of Being Yourself by David G. Benner 2005: When Faiths Collide by Martin Marty; Turn: Remembering Our Foundations by Max Lucado; Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene H. Peterson 2006: Exploring Protestant Traditions by W. David Buschart; Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton; Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church; Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected by Scott Cairns; The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins 2007: How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind by Thomas Oden; Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity by Amos Yong; Christian Theology (4th ed.) by Alister McGrath; Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity by Lamin Sanneh 2008: Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch; Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice 2009: Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Willard
—George Thomas Kurian and James D. Smith III
Appendix B The Seventy-Five Greatest Christian Writers
Dante Alighieri: Italian poet, author of the epic Divine Comedy Anselm of Canterbury: Medieval theologian; Monologion, Why God Became Human Apostle John: Wrote the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Revelation Apostle Paul: Wrote more than half of the New Testament Thomas Aquinas: Prince of theologians who wrote Summa Theologica Augustine of Hippo: Wrote Confessions, the first Christian autobiography Gregory Barhebraeus: Syriac scholar and Patriarch; first Christian chronology Karl Barth: Great theologian of the twentieth century, wrote Dogmatic Theology Nikolai Berdyaev: Russian theologian who wrote The Destiny of Man Bernard of Clairvaux: Abbot who exemplified medieval devotion in prose and poetry Bridget of Sweden: Fourteenth-century visionary; Celestial Revelations, Fifteen Odes Brother Lawrence: Author of the Practice of the Presence of God Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Prominent Victorian poet; The Cry of the Children, Aurora Leigh Emil Brunner: Swiss theologian, author of Christianity and Civilization Sergei Bulgakov: Russian theologian who developed Sophiology John Bunyan: English Puritan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress John Calvin: Founded Reformed tradition; Institutes of the Christian Religion Catherine of Siena: Medieval mystic; Dialogues and letters G. K. Chesterton: Catholic essayist, defender of orthodoxy in masterly prose John Chrysostom: Patristic preacher, author, and liturgist; On the Priesthood William Cowper: Master of religious poetry; cowrote Olney Hymns
Fanny Crosby: Overcame blindness, wrote more than one thousand hymns Christopher Dawson: Catholic historian, author of Formation of Christendom John Donne: English metaphysical poet known for his religious imagery Fyodor Dostoevsky: Novels such as Brothers Karamazov mirrored Orthodox Russia John Dryden: English poet, playwright, and critic; The Hind and the Panther Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet and novelist who wrote on the dilemmas of faith Shusaku Endo: Japanese Catholic novelist; Silence, The Samurai Ephrem the Syrian: ”Sweet Lyre of the Holy Spirit”; early Syriac hymns Eusebius of Caesarea: Fourth-century author; first Church History, Life of Constantine Etienne Gilson: French Thomist philosopher noted for his medieval studies Gregory the Great: Late-sixth-century pope; wrote Pastoral Care and Moralia on Job Madame Guyon: French mystic; A Short and Easy Method of Prayer Hildegaard of Bingen: Medieval intellectual and visionary; Scivias, Ordo Virtutum Gerard Manley Hopkins: English Catholic poet; wrote Wreck of the Deutschland Isidore of Seville: Spanish author; the first Christian encyclopedist Jerome: Church Father and translator of the Bible; wrote the Vulgate John of Damascus: Last of the great Eastern Fathers; On the Orthodox Faith John of the Cross: Spanish mystic, doctor of the church; Dark Night of the Soul Julian of Norwich: Late medieval mystic; Revelations of Divine Love
— 669 —
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Appendix B
Søren Kierkegaard: Father of existentialism who wrote Fear and Trembling Martin Luther King Jr.: Civil rights leader; Stride toward Freedom, Strength to Love, Letters Bartolomé de las Casas: Spanish priest-activist; History of the Indies, The Only Way William Law: Anglican clergyman; Call to a Devout and Holy Life Clive Staples Lewis: Multiple genres; Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Narnia Luke the Evangelist: Wrote the Third Gospel and Acts of the Apostles Martin Luther: Reformer whose texts and hymns shaped Protestantism Jacques Maritain: Catholic writer who wrote Degrees of Knowledge, True Humanism François Mauriac: Prolific French Catholic novelist; won the Nobel Prize in 1952 Hannah More: Eighteenth-century literate; Sacred Dramas, Village Politics Gregory of Nazianzus: Orthodox Trinitarian Church Father; Five Theological Orations John Henry Newman: Catholic whose Apologia pro Vita Sua is a classic memoir Henri Nouwen: Dutch priest; Wounded Healer, Return of the Prodigal Son Flannery O’Connor: American novelist, author of Christhaunted stories; Wise Blood Origen of Alexandria: Greek Father, apologist, and theologian; De Principiis Phoebe Palmer: A founder of the Holiness Movement; Guide to Holiness Blaise Pascal: French mathematical genius who wrote Pensées Marilynne Robinson: American novelist and reviewer; Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize Christina Rossetti: British poet; Goblin Market, Remember, In the Bleak Midwinter
Jan van Ruysbroeck: Dutch mystic, founder of Devotio Moderna; The Sparkling Stone Dorothy Sayers: English mystery writer; translated The Divine Comedy Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Nobel Prize–winning novelist as the voice of Russia’s oppressed Philip Jakob Spener: Founder of Pietism and author of Pia Desideria John Stott: Anglican churchman; Basic Christianity, The Lausanne Covenant Harriet Beecher Stowe: American novelist and reformer; Uncle Tom’s Cabin Symeon the New Theologian: Orthodox hesychastic thinker who died in 1022; Hymns of Divine Love Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Paleontologist and original thinker; The Phenomenon of Man Teresa of Avila: Carmelite leader; Interior Castle and autobiography Térèse of Lisieux: Modern “Little Flower”; Letters and Spiritual Counsels Tertullian of Carthage: Called the Founder of Latin Theology; Apology, On Baptism Thomas à Kempis: German mystic whose fame rests on his Imitation of Christ Paul Tillich: German American theologian; Systematic Theology John R. R. Tolkien: English Catholic writer; The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings John Wesley: Founder of Methodism; Notes on the NT, Sermons, Journals Frances Willard: Social reformer; Women and Temperance, Glimpses of Fifty Years
—George Thomas Kurian and James D. Smith III
Index
1 Clement (Clement of Rome), 13, 92, 256–57 67 Theses (Zwingli), 658–59 Abbot Suger, 117 Abelard, Peter, 117, 167–68, 623, 624 Acosta, José De, 110 Acts, book of, 9, 47–48, 84, 137; dating of, 439; influence of, 439 Acts of Andrew, 6 Acts of John, 6, 7 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 7, 8, 161 Acts of Peter, 7 Acts of Thomas, 7 Adam of Brement, 42 Adversus haereses (Against Heresies [Irenaeus]), 38, 48, 384–85 Ælfric, 168–69 Aeneid (Virgil), 103 Aesop, 25 Africa (Petrarch), 523 Against Praxeas (Tertullian), 594 Alan of Lille, 144 Albaugh, Gaylord P., 95 Albright, William Foxwell, 170–71 Alcott, Louisa May, 79 Alexander, Francis, 132 Alexander, James, 151 Alexander, James W., 330 Alfred of Rievaulx, 169–70; major works of, 170 Allen, Roland, 113, 171–73; principal ideas of, 172 Alopen, 173 Amalarius, 102 Ambrose of Milan, 92, 125, 153, 175–76 Ambrosiaster, 45 American Revolutionary War, 49 Ames, William, 370 Anabaptists, 148 The Analogical Imagination (Tracy), 606 anamnesis, 94 Ancient Christian Commentary, 47 Anderson, Rufus, 113
Andreas, 101 Andrews, Lancelot, 176–77 Angela of Foligno, 177–78; principal ideas of, 178 Anglicanism, 49 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 603, 604 Annales ecclesiastici (Baronius), 200–201 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), 80, 469, 470 Anselm of Canterbury, 10, 39, 178–79, 526; principal ideas of, 178 Anselm of Laon, 45 Answers in Genesis, 97 Anthony of Egypt, 115–16 Anthony of Padua, 144 Antoninus Pius, 399 Apess, William, 179–80 Aphrahat (the Persian Sage), 180–81 Apocalypse of Paul, 8 The Apocalyptic Imagination (Collins), 3 apocalyptic literature, 3–5; archetypes in, 4–5; cosmic scope of, 3–4; definition of, 3; eschatological nature of, 4; function of, 5; Jewish, 3; origins of in times of oppression, 5 apocryphal literature, 5–8; Acts of Paul, Peter, and Thomas, 7; apocalypses, 8; apocryphal Acts, 7; epistles, 8; nativity accounts, 6; noncanonical gospels, 6; passion accounts, 6; pseudo-Clementines, 8; recent discoveries, 6–7 apologetics, 8–12; arguments for the existence of God, 10–11; definition of, 8; early Christian/New Testament, 9 “Apologeticum” (Tertullian), 467 Apologeticus (Tertullian), 594 Apology of Quadratus (Quadratus), 15 Apostles’ Creed, 48 Apostolic Fathers, 12–16 Aquinas, Thomas, 10, 39, 44, 45, 48, 75, 147, 148, 157, 181–84, 216; and the design argument, 10–11; education of, 181–82; on the metaphysics of being, 182–83; on natural law, 182–83 Arianism, 344 Aristides, 9 Aristotle, 157, 196 Arius, 38, 54, 311
— 671 —
672
Index
Arminius, Jacob, 184–85 Arndt, Johann, 185–86 Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem (Llull), 433 The Art of Divine Meditation (Hall), 104 The Art of Preaching (Alan of Lille), 144 Arthuriad (Williams), 646, 647 Asbury, Francis, 186–87 Ascension of Paul, 8 Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 187–88 Askew, Anne, 163 Astell, Mary, 188–89 Athanasius, 38, 88, 189–90 atheism, scientific, 12 Athenagorus, 9, 190–91 Auden, W. H., 134 Augustine of Hippo, 10, 22, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44–45, 59, 92, 100, 120, 147, 191–93, 409; letters of, 65; rhetoric of, 144 Aulén, Gustaf, 193–94; principal ideas of, 193 Aune, David, 143 Austin, Charles, 95 autobiography. See biography and autobiography Autobiography (Franklin), 22 The Axioms of Religion (Mullins), 480 Bacon, Francis, 195–96 Bacon, Margaret Hope, 77 Bacon, Roger, 196; works of, 196–97 Bahnsen, Greg L., 616 Baillie, John, 197–98; works of, 198 Bain, Robert, 79 Baldwin, James, 580 The Banner, 97 baptism, 13, 48 Barber, Margaret E., 484 Barclay, William, 46, 198–99; influence of, 198–99; works of, 199 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 152 Barhebraeus, Gregory, 199; works of, 199–200 Barlow, Charles R., 485 Barlow, Marjorie Dana, 374 Barnabas, 15, 48, 445 Barnhouse, Donald, 97 Baronius, Cesare, 200–201 Barth, Christoph, 53n1 Barth, Edna, 34 Barth, Karl, 66, 158, 202–3, 217, 227 Basil the Great, 45, 65, 92, 203–4, 343–44; as bishop, 204; conversion and monastic life of, 204 Bates, Carl, 341 Baur, F. C., 43, 539 Bavinck, Herman, 414 Baxter, Richard, 105, 127, 204–5 Bay Psalm Book (trans. Cotton), 265 Bayley, John, 480 Bea, Augustin Cardinal, 205–6; on biblical interpretation, 206; on Christian ecumenism, 206 Beauvoir, Simone de, 79
Becker, Carl, 43 Bede. See Venerable Bede Beecher, Lyman, 145 Behe, Michael, 12 Bell, L. Nelson, 96 Belloc, Hilaire, 207–8 Benedict XV (pope), 114 Benedict XVI (pope), 37–38, 208–9; on biblical interpretation, 209; on sacred liturgy, 209 Benedictines, 117–18 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Wallace), 622 Beowulf, 101 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 210 Berkhof, Louis, 158 Berkouwer, G. C., 158 Bernanos, Georges, 210–11 Bernard of Clairvaux, 65, 103, 117, 120–21, 144, 150, 151, 211–13; published works of, 212 Bernardino da Siena, 102 Berry, Wendell, 134 Bethge, Eberhard, 218 Betts, Doris, 213–14 Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, 288 Bible, the, 69–70; authority of, 474–75; devotional passages of, 58; as metanarrative, 70; unity of, 352 See also Bible, the, as literature; English Bible translations Bible, the, as literature, 17–20; concept of, 19; as a literary anthology, 17; literature as human experience, 17–18; as source of hymns, 152–53 A Biblical Theology of Missions (Peters), 111 Bingham, Millicent Todd, 288 biography and autobiography, 20–23; emergence of modern biography, 21; importance of documentation to, 20 The Birth of the Messiah (Brown), 33 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 76 Blake, William, 133, 214 Blessed Rage for Order (Tracy), 606 Bliss, Philip P., 152 The Blue Castle (Montgomery), 470 Boccaccio, 99, 103 Boehme, Jacob, 214–15 Boer, Henry R., 111 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 100, 215–16 Boniface, 65 Boniface VIII (pope), 275 Bontemps, Arna, 134 Book of Angela (Angela of Foligno), 177 The Book of Christ (Arndt), 185 The Book of the City of Ladies (de Pisan), 76 The Book of Conscience (Arndt), 185 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 42 The Book of Nature (Arndt), 185 The Book of Scripture (Arndt), 185 The Book of Sentences (Lombard), 157, 435–36; editions of, 437; influence of, 436–37; origin of, 436; structure and doctrine of, 436 The Book of Showings (Julian of Norwich), 121–22
Index
Booke of Margery Kempe, 22 Booth, Catherine, 127, 163 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 148, 217–18; execution of by the Nazis, 218 Borobio, Dionisio, 130 Borromeo, Federigo, 127 Bosch, David J., 111 Boso, 39 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 218–20 Boswell, James, 22, 395–96 Bounds, E. M., 220–21 Bourgeois, Louis, 151 Boyle, Elizabeth, 573 Bozarth, Alla Renee, 77 Bradbury, William, 152 Bradford, William, 221 Bradstreet, Anne, 133, 221–22 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 632 Bridges, Robert, 371 The Bridges of God (McGavran), 458 Brontë, Anne, 79, 222–24; principal ideas of, 223; works of, 223 Brontë, Charlotte, 79 Brookes, James H., 555 Brooks, Cleanth, 373 Brooks, Terry, 52 Brother Lawrence, 426–27 Brothers of Christian Schools, 282 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 296 Brown, Raymond, 33, 47 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 79, 134, 201–2; early work of, 202; formative influences on, 201; marriage and mature work of, 202 Browning, Robert, 79, 134, 224 Bruce, Frederick Fyvie, 224–25 Brueggemann, Walter, 52, 225–26; influence of James Muilenburg on, 225–26 Brunner, Emil, 226–27; quarrel of with Karl Barth concerning the nature of grace, 227 Bucer, Martin, 93, 155, 227–28 Buchman, Frank, 604 Buechner, Frederick, 228–29; historical fiction of, 229; importance of the arts to, 228; memoirs and autobiographical works of, 228 Bulgakov, Sergei, 229–30 Bullinger, Johann, 230 Bultmann, Rudolf Karl, 46, 358, 359 Bunyan, John, 22, 25–26, 59, 71, 133, 231–32 Burke, J. M., 114 Bushnell, Horace, 232–33 Butler, Joseph, 11 Buttimer, Charles, 377 Caedmon, 100, 132 Cairns, Scott, 235–37; critical reception of, 236; sacramental poetics of, 235–36; spiritual pilgrimage of, 235 Callistus, 368 Calvin, John, 11, 46, 93, 127, 148, 151, 158, 159, 184, 237–38
673
Camerarius, Joachim, 460 Campbell, Alexander, 238–39 Cantar de mio Cid, 101 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 103, 132, 249 Carey, William, 22, 106, 113, 145, 239–40 Carmelites (Discalced Carmelites), 393, 426 Carmen Paschale (Sedulius), 132 Carmichael, Alexander, 132 Carmichael, Amy, 163, 240–41 Carmina Gaedelica (A. Carmichael), 132 Carnell, Edward J., 616 Carroll, Lewis, 26 Cartledge-Hayes, Mary Jo, 77, 78 Carver, William Owen, 111 Cary, Henry, 422 Cassian, John, 116, 129, 153, 241–42, 312; principal ideas of, 241; view of sin as a malady, 154 Cassiodorus, 42 Cather, Willa, 242–43 Catherine of Genoa, 243–46; conversion and religious crisis of, 244; critical response to her work, 245; cult of, 245; deathbed experience of, 244–45; difficulty in establishing the canon of her work, 243–44; poor health of, 244 Catherine of Sienna, 65, 89, 121, 162, 246–47 Catholic Homilies (Ælfric), 168, 169 Catholic Missions: Four Great Encyclicals (Burke), 114 Catlett, Mary, 488, 489, 490 Catullus, 99 Cavalcanti, Guido, 103 The Celestial Hierarchies (Pseudo-Dionysius), 100–101 Cerularius, Michael, 55 Chadwick, Owen, 219 Chafer, Lewis Sperry, 159, 555 Chalcidius, 100 Chambers, Oswald, 247–48, 630 Chanson de Roland, 101 Charisma, 98 Charles II (king of England), 296, 325 Charles of Valois, 275 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 100, 103, 132, 248–50, 574; major poetic works of, 248–49; principal ideas of, 249–50 Chesterton, G. K., 11, 72, 134, 201, 250–51; principal ideas of, 251 Child, Lydia Maria, 76, 79 children’s literature, 25–34; and alternate media, 30; adventure stories, 28; animal stories, 27–28; Christian fantasy, 28–29; controversies concerning, 31; definition of, 25; development of, 25; didactic literature, 26–27; during the American Civil War, 27; early classics of, 25–26; fantasies and fables, 28; illustration in, 28; mid-twentieth-century, 28, 29; new trends in, 31; picture books, 30–31; post-1960s, 29–30; in the Victorian era, 27 China: Its Spiritual Needs and Claims (J. H. Taylor), 113 Ching-Ching, 251–52 Chittister, Joan, 252 Christ and Satan (Cynewulf), 100 Christian Baptist, 238–39
674
Index
Christian Century, 96, 361, 588 Christian drama, 32–33 The Christian Faith (Schleiermacher), 158, 159 Christian Herald, 97–98 Christian History, 95 Christian Life, 98 The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (Kraemer), 412 Christian Origins and the Question of God (Wright), 650–51 Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), 78 Christianity, 10, 12, 344, 365, 381, 456, 567–68, 572, 606, 623; diversity of, 154; early Christian community, 467; locating the center of, 498–99; in the New World, 49; spread of in Ireland, 153–54; tasks faced by early Christianity, 467 Christianity Not Mysterious (Toland), 601 Christianity Today, 96–97, 98, 361 Christians, 42, 579, 606 Christina of Markyate, 89 Christmas, and Christian festivals, 33–36 Christological literature, 36–40; in biblical commentaries, 37–38; in catechetical literature, 38–39; in sermons and meditations, 39–40; in the struggles for orthodoxy (writings against heretics), 38 Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), 51, 52, 53n4 Church Dogmatics (K. Barth), 158, 159, 203 Church Growth Movement, 458 church history, 40–44 Cicero, 100, 153, 466, 468 The City of God (Augustine), 10, 41, 59, 70, 147, 192 Clare, John, 133 Clark, Gordon, 616 Classics of Christian Missions (Dubose), 110 Claudel, Paul, 254; Christian influences on his writing, 254; works of, 254 Clement of Alexandria, 7, 75, 92, 100, 119, 150, 254–55; works of, 255 Clement of Rome, 8, 13, 256–57 Clement V (pope), 434 Clement VIII (pope), 201 Clemo, Jack, 257–58; principal ideas of, 258; works of, 257–58 Climacus, John, 258–59; principal ideas of, 259 The Cloud of Unknowing, 121 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 133, 259–60 Collins, John, 3, 5 The Color Purple (A. Walker), 79 Colson, Charles Wendell, 261–62, 418; works of, 261–62 A Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 558 Comenius, John Amos, 262–63 Comestor, Peter, 45, 435 commentaries, biblical, 44–47; in ancient times, 44–45; of Calvin and Luther, 46; in the Middle Ages, 45; in the Renaissance, 45–46 Commentary on Romans (Abelard), 167 Commentary on True and False Religion (Zwingli), 659 A Community of Character (Hauerwas), 356 A Complicated Kindness (Toews), 600 Concerning the Ministry (Luther), 127 Concilio, Januarius Vincenzo de, 279–80
The Conferences (Cassian), 116 The Confession of the Second Council of Lyons, 55 Confessions (Augustine), 22, 36, 70, 120, 192 Confirmation, rite of, 48 Congar, Yves, 263–64 Conn, Joann Wolski, 78 The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 100, 216 Constantine, 10, 87, 147 Constantine V (emperor), 392 The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Vatican II), 93 “Contra quatros labyrinthos Franciae” (Walter of SaintVictor), 623–24 Contreras, Fernando, 391 conversion literature, 47–50; biblical; 47–48; contemporary perspectives on, 49–50; late Roman to the sixteenth century, 48–49; in the Post-Apostolic Era, 48; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 49 Conwell, Russell, 577 Cornelius, 48 Corsi, Giovanni, 317, 318 Cotton, John, 264–65, 370 Council of Chalcedon, 54 Council of Ephesus, 54 Council of Florence, 55 Coverdale, Miles, 61 Cowman, Lettie, 265–66 Cowper, William, 133, 266–67, 490 Craik, Henry, 478–79 Cranmer, Thomas, 93, 228 Crashaw, Richard, 133 The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (Lerner), 76 creation literature, 50–53; and biblical theology, 53; and canonical wisdom literature, 51; difference of from creationscience literature, 52–53; in fantasy literature, 51–52; semantic and etymological legacy of, 52; and the theme of reconciliation, 51 creedal and conciliar literature, 53–56; after the rise of Protestantism, 55; in the age of ecumenism and transdenominationalism, 55–56; of the Ecumenical Councils, 54; from the Great Schism to the sixteenth century, 54–55; in the Post-Apostolic Era, 53–54 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 295 Cromwell, Oliver, 325 Crosby, Fanny, 152, 267–68; as the “hymn queen,” 268; major themes in her hymns, 267–68 The Cross and the Switchblade (Wilkerson), 642 Crüger, Johann, 151, 329 Cruz, Sor Juana de la, 76 Cullmann, Oscar, 268–69 Cyprian of Carthage, 64–65, 92, 269–70; martyrdom of, 270 Cyril of Alexandria, 38, 54, 65, 270–71; literary contributions of, 271 Cyril of Jerusalem, 92 Dahl, Nils, 47 Dallen, James, 130 Daly, Mary, 77, 78
Damian, St. Peter, 273–74; principal ideas of, 274 Daniel, book of, 4 Daniélou, Jean, 274–75; as peritus at the Second Vatican Council, 275 Dante Alighieri, 103, 132, 275–77; principal ideas of, 276–77; works of, 276 Danvers Statement, 78 Darby, John Nelson, 418 The Dark Night of the Soul (St. John of the Cross), 122 Darrow, Jonathan, 373 Darrow, Nicholas, 373 Daughters of Sarah, 78 David, Deidre, 201 David Copperfield (Dickens), 20 Dawkins, Richard, 12 The Dawn Treader (Lewis), 52 Dawson, Christopher, 277–78; on the dangers of nationalism, 277–78; on the rise and meaning of culture, 277 Day, Dorothy, 278–79, 360; principal ideas of, 279 De Docta Ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa), 491 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 376 De Fuga (Gregory Nazianzus), 126 “De natura deorum” (Cicero), 466–67 De officiis (Cicero), 153 De Sacramentis (Hugh of St. Victor), 376 de Sales, St. Francis, 104, 286–87, 409; principal ideas of, 287 De Universo (Maurus), 99 The Death of the Messiah (Brown), 33 Decamerone (Boccaccio), 103 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 43 Decrees of Lateran IV, 154 Deen, Edith, 78 Deferrari, Roy, 376 Defoe, Daniel, 26, 71 Deism/Deists, 11 Dembski, William, 12 Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching (Irenaeus), 385 Demonstrations (Aphrahat), 180–81 Descartes, René, 10 design argument. See intelligent design devotional literature, 57–60; authorship of, 59; devotional passages in the Bible, 58; different media used for, 58–59; genre and form of, 59; themes of, 59–60 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Donne), 104, 294 The Dialogue (Catherine of Sienna), 246, 247 Dialogue with Trypho (Justin Martyr), 399–400 Diatessaron (Tatian), 586–87 Dickens, Charles, 20, 27 Dickinson, Austin, 288 Dickinson, Emily, 77, 79, 134, 288–90; mental health of, 288–89; view of God in her poetry, 289 Dickinson, Lavinia, 288 Dickinson, Susan, 288 Didache, 13, 48, 54, 92, 147 Didascalicon (Hugh of St. Victor), 377–78 Dillard, Annie, 290–91; interpretation of her work, 291; works of, 291 Diognetus, 9
Index
675
Dionysius the Areopagite, 120, 292–93, 376; principal ideas of, 292–93 Divina Commedia (Dante), 103, 276; Neoplatonism in the Paradiso, 276; organization of the Inferno, 276 Divine Breathings, or a Pious Thirsting after Christ in One Hundred Pathetical Meditations, 104, 105 Dix, Gregory, 92 Dobson, James, 98 Docetism/Docetists, 14 Dodd, Charles Harold, 293–94 Donne, John, 59, 104, 122, 133, 245, 294–95, 570; association of with the metaphysical poets, 294; sermons of, 294 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Milhailovich, 295–96, 567 Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), 133 Drake, Joanna, 370 drama. See Christian drama Dryden, John, 296–97 Dubose, Francis M., 110 Dubus, Andre, 297–98; principal ideas of, 298 Duff, Alexander, 107 Dunbar, Paul Nelson, 134 Early Christian Rhetoric (Wilder), 642 Eastern Orthodoxy, 56, 144 Ebeling, Gerhard, 44 Ecclesiastical History (Eusebius), 502 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Venerable Bede), 206–7 Eck, John, 65 Eckhart, Johannes (Meister Eckhart), 144, 299–300, 345, 581, 582, 588 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Frei), 326 Ecumenical Councils, 54 Edgar, William, 616 Edict of Milan (Constantine), 41 Edwards, Jonathan, 300–301 Edwards, O. C., 145 Egeria, 92, 162 Eliot, George, 79 Eliot, John, 370 Eliot, T. S., 134, 301–2, 327, 373; conversion of, 301–2; early poems of, 301; legacy of, 302; as a playwright, 302 Elisabeth of Schonau, 302–4; principal ideas of, 303 Elizondo, Virgilio, 304; and the “mestizaje” concept, 304 Elliot, Elisabeth, 304–5 Ellul, Jacques, 305–6 Emmeram-Munich Codex, 374 Emmerich, Anne Catherine, 58 Endo, Shusaku, 306–8; as the “Japanese Graham Greene,” 306–7 English Bible translations, 61–64; dynamic equivalence translators, 63; formal versus colloquial language, 63–64; the Geneva Bible, 61–62; the Great Bible, 61; King James Version (KJV), 62; late Victorian, 62; modern translations, 62; of the sixteenth century, 61–62; summary of, 62; two primary genres of, 62–63 Enlightenment, the, 11 Enneads (Plotinus), 527 An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (Carey), 106
676
Index
Ephrem the Syrian, 308–9; principal ideas of, 309 Epiphanius, 5, 7 Epistle of the Apostles, 8 The Epistle of Barnabas, 15, 48 The Epistle to Diognetus, 15–16, 146 Epistle to the Ephesians (Ignatius), 14 The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (Polycarp), 14 epistles and collected letters, 64–68, 381–82; as Christian literature, 66–67; in the early Christian and patristic periods, 64–65; in the mediaeval and Reformation periods, 65; in the post-Reformation period, 65–66 Erasmus, Desiderius, 43, 61, 309–10, 391, 473 Erickson, Millard, 158 Erigena, John Scot, 376 Eriugena, John Scottus, 310–11 Erskine, Thomas, 451 Escrivá, St. Josemaría, 89, 274 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman), 485–86 Essays (F. Bacon), 195 Eternity, 97 Ethics (Aristotle), 276 Etymologiarum sive originum (Isidore of Seville), 386 Eucherius, 468 Eudoxia, 253 Eusebius Pamphili, 5–6, 10, 15, 42, 204, 255, 311–12, 399, 502–3; and the Arian controversy, 311–12; categories of his work, 502–3; persecution of, 502 Evagoras, 21 Evagrius Ponticus of Antioch, 42, 116, 153, 312–13; principal ideas of, 312–13 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus (EEWC), 78 Evangelical Press Association, 97 Evangelische Missionslehre (Warneck), 107 Explication of the Maxims of the Saints (Fénelon), 315 The Faerie Queen (Spenser), 132, 573, 574; literary achievement of, 574 feminism. See gender literature Fénelon, François de la Mothe, 315–16 Ferrar, Nicholas, 362 Ferré, Nels F. S., 316–17; academic career of, 316; theology of, 316–17 Ficino, Marsilio, 284, 317–19 fiction, 69–73; and allegory, 71; metanarratives, 70; oral narratives, 70 Finger, Reta Haltemann, 78 Finney, Charles Grandison, 49–50, 145, 319–20 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, 78, 147 First Apology (Justin Martyr), 399 First Council of Constantinople, 54 First Council of Nicea, 54 First Vatican Council, 55 Fitzgerald, Benedict, 58 Flacius (Matthias Flacius Illyricus), 320–21; scholarly writings of, 320; theological controversies concerning, 320 Florensky, Pavel Alexandrovich, 321–22; principal ideas of, 321–22
Focus on the Family, 98 Focus on the Family, 98 Forbes, John, 370 Ford, David, 90 form criticism, 82 The Form of Living (Rolle), 541 Forsyth, Peter Taylor, 322–23 Fortunatus, 131, 150 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 145, 323, 442 Foster, Richard J., 323–24, 643; principal ideas of, 324 Fount of Wisdom (John of Damascus), 157 Four Quartets (Eliot), 302 Fourth Lateran Council, 126, 130 Fox, George, 324–25; principal ideas of, 325 Fox, Margaret Askew Fell, 163, 325–26 Foxe, John, 42 Frame, John M., 616 Francke, August Hermann, 572 Frank, Joseph, 295 Franklin, Benjamin, 22 Franklin, Ralph W., 288 Frege, Gottlob, 648 Frei, Hans, 326–27 From Shadow to Promise (Preus), 44 Frost, Robert, 134 Fry, Christopher, 327–28; on the comic view of Christian life, 327 Fulgentius, 99 Fuller, Andrew, 106 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 90, 359 Gandhi, Mohandas, 285 Gelasius (pope), 5, 7 gender literature, 75–82, 89; autobiographies of women, 77–78; biblical discussions of gender, 75; creative literature, 78–79; misogyny among Christian writers, 75–76; periodicals, 78; scholarly works of, 78 Genevan Psalter (Bourgeois), 151 Gerhardt, Paul, 151, 329–31; principal ideas of, 330 German Pietism, 572 Gerson, Jean, 126, 331–32, 545–46 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 585 Gibbon, Edward, 43 Gibson, Mel, 58 “The Gift of God” (Luther), 144 Gilbert of Hoyland, 333–34; teaching of, 333–34 Gilbert of Porreta, 623 Gilby, Thomas, 159–60 Gilkey, Langdon, 334–35 Gilson, Étienne, 335–36; principal ideas of, 336 Gladden, Washington, 127, 336–37 A Global View of Christian Missions: From Pentecost to the Present (Kane), 112 Glossa Ordinaria, 45 Gnosticism, 7, 653 God, 5, 41, 42, 90, 332, 514, 517, 654; arguments for the existence of, 10–11, 526; as “beyond substance,” 216; God’s
love, 212–13, 332; revelation of, 226–27; unity with, 529, 545; and the work of creation, 50–51 God, Revelation and Authority (C. Henry), 361 Godden, Margaret Rumer, 337–38; principal ideas of, 337–38 Godfrey of Saint-Victor, 624 God’s Determinations (E. Taylor), 589–90 God’s World News, 98 Golden Legend (da Voragine), 89, 102 Gomar, Franz, 184 Gomes, Peter, 146 Gonzalez, Justo Luis, 338–39; academic career of, 339; theological contributions of, 339 Gordon, S. D., 339–40 Gospel of Eve, 7 Gospel of Judas, 6–7 Gospel of Mark, 7 Gospel of Matthias, 6 Gospel of Peter, 6 Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, 6 Gospel of Thomas, 6 Gospels, the, 21–22, 82–86; genre of, 82; methods of studying, 82–83; Synoptic Gospels, 82–83, 86. See also John, Gospel of; Luke, Gospel of; Mark, Gospel of; Matthew, Gospel of Gottwald, Norman K., 340–41 Goudge, Elizabeth, 79 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Bunyan), 232 Graham, Billy, 96, 145, 146, 341–42, 540 Gratian, 126 Graul, Karl, 107 Grave Counsels (Greenham), 104 Great Awakening, 49, 106 Great Catechism, 38 Great Commission, 106, 113 Great Preachers, 146 The Greatest Story Ever Told (F. Oursler), 504 Green, William, 377 Greene, Graham, 342–43 Greenham, Richard, 104 Gregory the Great (pope), 40–41, 114, 120, 126 Gregory Nazianzus, 126, 204, 343–44, 390; theological contributions of, 344 Gregory of Nyssa, 22, 38, 39, 120, 144, 147 Gregory of Tours, 44, 87, 101 Gregory VII (pope), 65 Gregory X (pope), 182 Gregory XI (pope), 65 Gregory XIII (pope), 201 Grey, Jane, 163 Griesbach, J. J., 83 Griesbach Hypothesis, 83 Grimke, Angelina, 76 Grimke, Sarah, 76 Groote, Gerard, 344–45 Groves, Anthony Norris, 478 Groves, Mary, 478 Grumbach, Argula von, 162, 163 Gundry, Patricia, 78 Gushee, David, 52
Index
677
Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 345–46; academic career of, 345; and liberation theology, 346 Guyon, Jeanne de la Mothe, 346–47 Hadewijch of Antwerp, 121, 351–52, 545; principal ideas of, 351–52 hagiography, 87–90; ascetic hagiography, 88; and the concept of sainthood, 87; and martyrdom, 87–88; in the Middle Ages, 88; women authors of, 89 Hahn, Scott, 352–53; on the Bible’s unity, 352; on scripture and the liturgy, 352 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne, 301 Hale, Emily, 301 Hall, Donald, 134 Hall, Joseph, 104 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 353–54 Hardy, Robin, 354–55; Annals of Lystra trilogy, 354; miscellaneous works of, 354; principal ideas of, 354–55; Streiker trilogy, 354 Hare, Julius, 450 Harmonice Mundi (Kepler), 405–6 Harnack, Adolf von, 112, 355–56; principal ideas of, 355–56 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 134 Haskins, Susan, 78 Hauerwas, Stanley, 149, 356–57; academic career of, 356; theological development of, 356–57 Hauréau, Barthélemy, 375 Haven, Cynthia L., 464 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 357–58 Hay, John, 134 Hayward, John, 105 Heartwell, Jasper, 370 Heidegger, Martin, 358–60; principal ideas of, 359 Hennacy, Ammon, 360 Henry, Carl F. H., 97, 148–49, 158, 360–61, 540, 577 Henry, Matthew, 46 Henry VIII (king of England), 473 Herbert, Christopher, 107 Herbert, George, 127, 133, 361–62 Hermann of Wied, 228 Hermas, 362–63; principal ideas of, 363 hermeneutical texts, 90 Hermes Trismegistus, 284, 317 Herodotus, 21 Herriot, James, 29–30 Heurnius, Justus, 110 Heyward, Du Bose, 80 Hick, John, 363–64; principal ideas of, 364 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 76, 134, 288 Hilary of Poitiers, 364–65 Hildegard of Bingen, 76, 89, 121, 144, 162, 365–67; “double vision” of, 365; musical endeavors of, 365–66 Hill, Geoffrey, 134 Hillenbrand, Rainer, 330 Hilton, Walter, 121, 367 The Hind and the Panther (Dryden), 297 Hippolytus, 5, 138, 367–68 Hirscher, J. B., 107
678
Index
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Venerable Bede), 41 Historia Scholastica (Comestor), 436 A History of Christian Missions (Neill), 112 A History of Christian Thought (Gonzalez), 338 The History of Preaching (Edwards), 145 History of the Synoptic Tradition (Bultmann), 231 The Hobbit (Tolkien), 29, 602 Hobbs, Herschel H., 480 Hodge, Charles, 158, 368–69 Holland, Josiah, 134 Holy Dying (Jeremy Taylor), 590 Holy Spirit, the, 48, 55, 94, 409; role of in conversion, 47 Homer, 101 Homily Concerning the Statues (Chrysostom), 144 Hooke, Robert, 487 Hooker, Morna, 47 Hooker, Thomas, 369–70 Hoornbeeck, Johannes, 106, 110 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 59, 134, 370–72, 598; principal ideas of, 372 Hopkins, John, 151 Hopper, Stanley Romaine, 372–73, 642 “The Hound of Teaven” (Thompson), 598 Howatch, Susan, 373–74 Hroswitha of Gandersheim, 374–75; works of, 374–75 Hügel, Friedrich Baron von, 243, 245–46, 618–19; letters of, 619; principal works of, 619 Hugh of St. Victor, 45, 375–78; and the construction of a “memory palace,” 377; pedagogical works of, 377; treatises on Noah’s ark, 377 Hughes, Langston, 134 Hume, David, 11 Hus, Jan, 127, 378–79 hymns. See songs and hymns The Identity of Christ (Frei), 326–27 Ignatius of Antioch, 14, 54, 92, 381–82; letters of, 381–82; principal ideas of, 382 Ignatius of Loyola, 104, 122, 382–83, 409; and the founding of the Jesuits, 383 Illich, Ivan, 378 The Imitation of Christ (Thomas à Kempis), 104, 154, 345, 383, 596–97 In His Steps (Sheldon), 561 Infancy Gospel of Thomas, 6 Inge, William, 383–84 Innocent I (pope), 253 Innocent II (pope), 211 Innocent III (pope), 55, 154 Innocent VIII (pope), 283 The Institutes (Cassian), 116 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 127, 158, 159, 237, 552 Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (David), 201 intelligent design, 10–11; defense of, 12; refutation of, 11 International Critical Commentary, 46 Interpreter’s Bible, 46
Introduction to the Devout Life (de Sales), 104, 286 Irenaeus, 5, 37, 38, 48, 138, 384–85, 399 Irish Penitentials, 153–54 Isaac the Syrian, 385–86; principal ideas of, 385–86 Isidore of Seville, 386–88; principal ideas of, 387 Isocrates, 21 Jakes, T. D., 146 James I (king of Scotland), 105 James II (king of England), 296–97, 325 James, William, 50 Jammes, Francis, 389 Japinga, Lynn, 78 Jeanne d’Arc (Péguy), 516 Jenkins, Jerry, 418 Jerome (Hieronymous), 42, 92, 99, 100, 389–90, 468, 502; conflict with Rufinus of Aquileia, 544 Jerusalem Council, 48 Jesuits, 383, 570 Jesus Christ, 21, 41, 94, 136, 143, 149, 445, 514; as fictionalized in Ben-Hur, 622; incarnation of, 4, 79, 623; as the Logos, 9–10, 37 Jesus of Nazareth (Benedict XVI), 37–38 Joachim of Fiore, 43, 390–91; on the three ages of the church, 390 John. See St. John John, Gospel of, 85–86, 137 John XXII (pope), 182, 582 John XXIII (pope), 56, 149, 275 John of Avila, 391–92; works of, 392 John Chrysostom, 45, 92, 93, 126, 144, 162, 252–53; exile of, 253; principal ideas of, 253 John of Damascus, 38, 150, 157, 392–93 John of Gaunt, 651 John Paul II (pope), 253, 394–95 John of Salisbury, 624 Johnson, Elizabeth, 78 Johnson, James Weldon, 134, 152 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 71, 395–96 Johnson, Thomas H., 288, 589 Johnston, Britt, 77 Jolley, Steven W., 149 Jones, E. Stanley, 396–98; principal ideas of, 397 Jonson, Ben, 573 Joseph, 6 Josephus, 21 Journal (Woolman), 650 Jubilee (M. Walker), 79 Judaism, 381 Judas Didymus Thomas, 6 Julian the Apostate, 467 Julian of Norwich, 76, 121, 398–99 Jung, C. G., 155 Justin Martyr, 9–10, 48, 54, 92, 399–400 Kagawa, Toyohiko, 401–2 Kane, J. Herbert, 112
Index
Kant, Immanuel, 11, 156 Kasdorf, Julia Spicher, 402–3 Kavanagh, Julia, 163 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 403–4 Keller, Rosemary Skinner, 77 Kempe, Margery, 121, 162, 398, 404–5 Ken, Thomas, 152 Kenyon, Jane, 134 Kepler, Johannes, 405–6; formulation of the laws of planetary motion, 405 Kierkegaard, Søren, 39, 406–7; summation of his philosophical thought, 406–7 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 66, 145–46, 182, 407–8 King Lear (Shakespeare), 558 The Kingdom of Christ (Maurice), 452–53 The Kingdom of the Lovers of God (van Ruysbroeck), 545 King-Lenzmeier, Anne H., 365, 366 Kirk, Kenneth Escott, 408–9 Kirk, Russell, 409–10 Kleinz, John, 376 Knights of the Hospital of St. John, 433 Knox, John, 93, 410–11 Knox, Ronald, 411 Kraemer, Hendrik, 411–12 Küng, Hans, 413–14; principal ideas of, 413 Kuyper, Abraham, 158, 414–15; and the concept of “sphere sovereignty,” 414 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 280–82; contributions of to educational theory, 281–82; founding of the Brothers of Christian Schools, 282; works of, 282 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, 417–18; biblical interpretation and historical criticism of, 417–18 LaHaye, Beverly, 78, 418 LaHaye, Tim, 418–19; principal ideas of, 419 Lamott, Anne, 419–20 Langland, William, 103, 420–22; principal ideas of, 421–22; works of, 420–21 Langton, Stephen, 45, 435, 436 Lanyer, Amelia, 76, 422–23 Larcom, Lucy, 79 Late Great Planet Earth (Lindsey), 41, 418 Latourette, Kenneth Scott, 106, 112, 423–24 Laubach, Frank Charles, 424; legacy of, 425; missionary work of, 424; war of against illiteracy, 424 Law, William, 11, 425–26; principal ideas of, 426 Lawrence. See Brother Lawrence Lawrence, D. H., 79, 134 Le porche de mystère de la deuxième vertu (Péguy), 517 Lee, Robert G., 145 legalism, 5 Legatus (St. Gertrude), 332 L’Engle, Madeleine, 52, 79–80, 426–427, 441; principal ideas of, 427 Leo the Great (pope), 42, 65 Leo III (emperor), 392 Leo XIII (pope), 280
679
Leόn, Fray Luis de, 282–83 Lerner, Gerda, 76 Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 58 Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions (Piper), 112 Letter to Flora (Ptolemy), 153 Levertov, Denise, 428–30; influence of Judaism and Christianity on, 428–29; political activism of, 429 Lewis, C. S., 11, 21, 22–23, 28–29, 51–52, 66, 69, 72, 79, 250, 430–31, 441, 524–25, 647; on Edmund Spenser’s poetry, 573; friendship with Tolkien, 430, 602; opinion of The Lord of the Rings, 603; poetry of, 430; science fiction of, 430 L’Heureux, Henri, 281 Liber officialus (Amalarius), 102 liberation theology, 346 The Liberty of Prophesying (Jeremy Taylor), 590 Liefeld, Walter, 77 Life of Anthony (Athanasius), 116, 189–90 A Life of Jesus (Endo), 307 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 22, 71, 395–96 Life of Moses (Gregory of Nyssa), 120 Life of Moses (Philo), 82 The Life of Plotinus (Plotinus), 526–27 Life of St. Macrina (Gregory of Nyssa), 162 Liguori, Alphonse de, 173–75; literary output of, 174 Liminsky, N. I., 107 Lindbeck, George, 431–32 Lindsell, Harold, 97 Lindsey, Hal, 41, 418 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Lewis), 29, 51 Lippy, Charles H., 96 Lischer, Richard, 144 literature, 17–18; as an art form, 18; literary genres, 18; use of rhetoric and the resources of language in, 18–19 liturgies, 91–94, 352; ancient, 91, 92; essential forms of, 92; the Lesser Doxology, 91; and resourcement, 93–94; study of, 91–92; twentieth-century influences on, 92 Liturgies of the Western Church (B. Thompson), 92 The Lives of the Noble Caesars (Suetonius), 21, 82 Lives of the Saints (Ælfric), 168–69 Livingstone, David, 22 Llull, Ramόn, 432–34; activity of during the Crusades, 433–34; conversion of, 432; Lullian Art and Lullian Circle systems, 433; mission to convert Muslims to Christianity, 432, 434; visions of, 432, 433 Locke, John, 11, 487 Lombard, Peter, 45, 126, 157, 434–37, 588, 623; importance of to scholasticism, 435; works of, 435 Lonergan, Bernard J. F., 437–38 Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 328 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 29, 602–3 Lotz, Anne Graham, 146 Louis XIV (king of France), 219, 315 Loving God (Colson), 261 Lubac, Henri de, 284–85 Lucado, Max, 30, 438 Ludolph of Saxony, 382
680
Index
Luke, Gospel of, 84–85, 137, 438–39; dating of, 438; influence of, 439 Lull, Raymond, 105, 110, 114 Luther, Martin, 11, 39, 46, 127, 148, 151, 203, 439–40; letters of, 65; sermons of, 144; works of, 440 Lyte, Henry F., 152 Mabillon, Jean, 117–18 MacDonald, George, 79, 441–42; works of, 441–42 MacDonald, Walt, 134 MacHaffie, Barbara, 77 Machen, John Gresham, 442–43 Macquarrie, John, 78, 359 Macrina, 162 Macrobius, 100 magazines. See periodicals Maier, Paul, 34 Mallory, Thomas, 22, 101 The Man Who Died (D. H. Lawrence), 79 Mangin, Charles, 374 Mansel, H. L., 453 Marcel, Gabriel, 443–44; principal ideas of, 444 Marcellus of Ancyra, 312 Marcus Aurelius, 9 Marcus Minucius Felix, 466–68; on the republic and philosophy, 466 Marguerite Porete, 121 Maritain, Jacques, 444 Mark, Gospel of, 83, 84, 137, 444–45 Markings (Hammarsjköld), 353 Marlowe, Christopher, 133 Marshall, Peter, 445–46 Marty, Martin E., 145, 446–47 The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 14, 88, 137 martyrs, 41–42, 87–88 Mary, 6, 54; apocalyptic literature concerning, 8 Mary Magdalene, 78, 102 Mather, Cotton, 369–40, 447–48 Matthew, Gospel of, 83–84, 137, 447–48 Mauriac, François Charles, 449–50 Maurice, John Frederick Denison, 450–54; controversies concerning, 450–51; theological contributions of, 451–53 Maurus, Rabanus, 99 May, Gerald, 155 McCarthy, Joseph, 341 McClendon, James William, Jr., 455–56; academic career of, 455; theological concepts developed by, 455–56 McDowell, Josh, 456–57 McGavran, Donald A., 107, 114, 457–58; principal ideas of, 457 McGrath, A. M., 77 McGrath, Alister, 12 McLaughlin, Eleanor, 77 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 458–59 Mead, Sidney, 44 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 121, 459–60 medieval literature, 99–104, 114; biblical cycle plays, 102; Christian mystical writings, 120–22; grand narrative, 103;
lives of saints, 101–2; lyric poetry, 103; medieval drama, 102; monastic literature, 116–17; penitential literature, 129– 30; romances and epics, 101; seminal works of the Middle Ages, 100–101; sermons, 144; songs and hymns, 150–51 meditational prose, 104–5 Meditations and Vows (Hall), 105 Meister Eckhart. See Eckhart, Johannes Melanchthon, Philip, 127, 158, 460–61; legacy of, 461 Mere Christianity (Lewis), 11, 250 Merry England, 463, 598 Merton, Thomas, 118, 122, 461–63, 605; spiritual search of, 462; works of, 462 The Message (Phillips), 524–25 Metaforalis (Fulgentius), 99 Meyer, F. B., 145 Meynell, Alice, 463, 598 Meynell, Wilfrid, 463, 598 Miles, Margaret R., 59, 60 Mill, J. S., 451 The Millennial Harbinger, 239 Miller, Calvin, 52 Millet, Kate, 79 Miłosz, Czesław, 463–64 Milton, John, 79, 133, 464–66, 585 Ministry in America, 127–28 A Mirror for the Church (D. Wilson), 143 The Mirror of Simple Souls (Porete), 529, 530 misogyny, 75–76, 89 missiologies, 105–9, 110; academic aspects of missiology 107; confessional variations concerning, 109; historical development of, 105–8; issues concerning, 108–9; scholarly periodicals, 107 Mission Handbook, 108 missions literature, 109–15; Catholic mission theology, 112; introductory texts, 110–11; literary issues concerning, 110; missiology, 110; missionary autobiography and biography, 114–15; Orthodox missions theology, 112; principles and methods of Catholic mission literature, 114; principles and methods of Orthodox mission literature, 114; principles and methods of Protestant mission literature, 113–14; Protestant history of, 112; Protestant mission theology, 111–12 Missions in the Plan of the Ages (Carver), 111 Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey, 78 Moltman-Wendel, Elizabeth, 78 Moltmann, Jürgen, 66, 468–69 monastic literature, 115–19; formative monastic literature, 115–16; in the medieval period, 116–17; in the modern period, 117–18 The Monastic Rule (Sorsky), 569–70 monasticism, 147–48, 409. See also monastic literature Monologion (Anselm of Canterbury), 178 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 188 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 80, 469–72; Christian vision of, 470; exploration of Christianity in her fiction, 470–71 A Month of Sundays (Updike), 613 Moody, Dwight L., 145, 509 Moore, G. E., 649
Index
Moravians (Unitas Fratrum), 148, 152 More, Hannah, 472–73 More, Thomas, 473–74; influence of, 473–74; works of, 474 Morgan, G. Campbell, 474–75 Morgan, Marabel, 78 Mort, John, 72 Morte d’Arthur, 22, 101 Mother Teresa, 89, 476 Mott, James, 76 Mott, John R., 475–76 Mott, Lucretia, 76, 77 The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (Vaughn), 617 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 476–77; principal ideas of, 477 Muhlenberg, Henry Melchior, 477–78 Muilenburg, James, 225–26 Müller, George, 478–79 Müller, Heinrich, 572 Mullins, Edgar Young, 479–80 Murdoch, Iris, 480–81; fiction of, 480–81; nonfiction of, 481 Murray, Pauli, 77 My Utmost for His Highest (Chambers), 248, 630 Myklebust, Olav Guttorm, 112 Myra, Harold, 97 Myrc, John, 126–27 Mystère de la charité (Péguy), 517 Mystical Element in Religion (von Hügel), 245–46, 619 mystical writings, 119–23; early Christian, 119–20; early modern to modern, 122–23; medieval Christian, 120–22 Nag Hammadi, 7 Naming the Whirlwind (Gilkey), 335 Narramore, Clyde, 483–84 narrative criticism, 83 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Truth), 609 National Council of Churches, Commission on Literature, 373 nationalism, 277–78 natural law, 45 The Nature of Doctrine (Lindbeck), 431–32 Neale, John Mason, 150, 484 Nee, Watchman, 484–85; influence of, 485 Neill, Steven, 112 Neri, Philip, 200 Nevius, John L., 113 New Testament, 37, 50 Newman, John Henry, 66, 485–86 Newsom, Carol A., 78 Newton, Isaac, 486–88; involvement of in public life, 487; theological works of, 487 Newton, John, 488–91; ministerial career of, 490; principal ideas of, 490; service of in the navy, 488–89; as a slave trader, 489 Nicene Creed, 54 Niceta of Remesiana, 150 Nicholas of Cusa, 491–92 Nicholas of Lyra, 45 Nicholas of Myra, 492–93; identification of with Santa Claus, 492–93; miracles performed by, 492
681
Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain, 493–94 Nicolai, Philip, 151 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 149, 217, 494–95 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 149, 217, 495 Nine Public Lectures on Important Subjects in Religion (Zinzendorf), 657–58 Nitszch, Karl, 539 No Man Is an Island (Merton), 118 Norris, Kathleen, 495–97; as a poet, 496; spiritual quest of in her writing, 496 Nouwen, Henri, 128, 497; principal ideas of, 497 Novum Organum (F. Bacon), 195 N-Town Cycle, 102 Nyel, Adrien, 281 Nygren, Anders, 497–99; on the epistemological independence of religion, 498; on locating the center of Christianity, 498–99; on the relation between the philosophy of religion and theology, 498 O’Connor, Flannery, 72, 501–2; legacy of, 501; works of, 501 “Octavius” (Marcus Minucius Felix), 466; structure and meaning of, 467–68 Oden, Thomas, 159 Odyssey (Homer), 101 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradstreet), 221 Oke, Janette, 30 Olasky, Marvin, 98 Old Testament, 50 Oliphint, K. Scott, 616 Olympias, 162 On the Collaboration of the Church and the World, 78 On the Dignity of Man (Pico della Mirandola), 284 On First Principles (Origen), 157, 544 On the Holy Spirit (Basil the Great), 204 On the Incarnation of the Word (Athanasius), 38, 189 On Loving God (Bernard of Clairvaux), 212 On Nature (Eriugena), 310–11 On the Nature and Practise of Repentance (Perkins), 130 On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians (De Acosta), 110 On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (Schleiermacher), 552 On Simony (Hus), 378–79 On the Spirit and the Letter (Augustine), 44–45 On the Trinity (Hilary of Poitiers), 364–65 On the True Care of Souls (Bucer), 155 On the Various Levels of Ministers of the Gospel as They Have Been Instituted by the Lord (Savaria), 106 Opus Dei, 89, 274 Opus majus (R. Bacon), 196–97 Oration to the Greeks (Tatian), 586 Orations against the Arians (Athanasius), 38, 189 Order of Knights Templar, 211, 433, 434 Ordo Romanus Primus, 93 Origen, 8, 54, 92, 100, 119, 143, 157, 343, 368, 502–3, 544 Orr, James, 503–4, 540; legacy of, 503–4 The Orthodox Church (Ware), 627 The Orthodox Way (Ware), 627
682
Index
Osborne, John, 328 Otto, Rudolf, 504 Our Daily Bread, 97 Oursler, Fulton, 504–5 Oursler, Grace Perkins, 505 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis), 52 Ovid, 99, 104 Owen, John, 505–6; as a national figure, 505–5; postRestoration work of, 506; reformed theology of, 506 Owen, Robert, 239 Oxford Group, 604 Pachomius, 116 Packer, J. I., 507–8 Paedagogus (Clement of Alexandria), 255 Pagano, Thomas, 173 Pagels, Elaine, 76 Palamas, Gregory, 508–9 Paley, William, 12 Palladius, 312 Palmer, G. E. H., 627 Palmer, Phoebe, 163, 509; influence of, 509 Pamphilus, 502, 544 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 66, 509–10 Papias of Hierapolis, 14, 445 The Parables of the Kingdom (Dodd), 293 Paradise Lost (Milton), 79, 465, 585 Paradise Regained (Milton), 465 Pascal, Blaise, 510–11 The Passion of the Christ (2004), 58 The Passover Plot (Schoenfield), 10 pastoral instruction, 125–28 Paterson, Katherine Womeldorf, 511–13; contributions of, 511–12; themes of, 512; works of, 512–13 Patmore, Coventry, 598 Paul, 9, 12, 33, 38, 48, 57, 136, 439, 442, 513–15; letters (epistles) of, 125, 137, 513; literature of, 513–14; patristic commentators on, 45; sermons of, 143; writing of concerning Jesus Christ, 514; Paul of Tella, 502 Paul VI (pope), 183, 208 Paula, 161 Paulus Orosius, 42 The Peaceable Kingdom (Hauerwas), 356–57 Peale, Norman Vincent, 145, 505, 515–16 Peck, Scott, 155 Péguy, Charles Pierre, 516–17; principal ideas of, 517; works of, 516–17 Pelagius, 45 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 517–19 penitential literature, 128–31; Cassian’s influence on, 129; Catholic, 130; Irish/Celtic, 128–29; in the Middle Ages, 129–30 Penn-Lewis, Jessie, 519 Pentecost and Missions (Boer), 111 Penyafort, Ramόn de, 433 Percy, Walker, 72, 519–20; philosophy of in his fiction, 520
Peretti, Frank, 30, 520–21; book reviews, 521; books for younger readers, 521; novels of, 521 periodicals, 95–99, 225; Christian influence in newspapers, 96; consolidation and diversification of evangelical magazine publishers, 98; demise of general interest evangelical magazines, 97–98; early American newspapers and magazines, 95–96; publications for conservative Protestants, 96 Perkins, John M., 522 Perkins, William, 46, 130 Perpetua, 89, 161 Peter, 6, 39, 48, 445 Peter the Chanter, 45 Peter of Poitiers, 623 Peters, George W., 111 Peterson, Eugene, 291, 522–23 Peterson, John, 200 Petrarch, Francis (Francesco Petrarca), 523–24; philosophical and literary legacy of, 524; works of, 524 Pew, J. Howard, 96 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 79 The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard de Chardin), 591–92 Phillips, J. B., 63, 524–26; works of, 526 Philo, 82, 119 Philokalia (Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain), 493, 627 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (I. Newton), 487 Photius, 54 Pia desideria (Spener), 572, 573 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 283–84 Piers Plowman (Langland), 103, 132, 420–21 Pilate, presentation of in nonbiblical works, 6 The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 25–26, 59, 71, 133, 232 The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (Florensky), 321 Piper, John, 111–12 Pisan, Chrsitine de, 76 Pitra, Jean-Baptiste-François, 118 Pitter, Ruth, 134 Pius VI (pope), 275 Pius IX (pope), 118 Pius X (pope), 417 Platina, 317 Plantinga, Alvin, 10, 11–12, 526 Plato, 100, 119, 146 Platonism, 120, 284, 318, 574 Plea for the Christians (Athenagoras), 190–91 Plotinus, 119, 526–27; influence of, 527; works of, 527 Plurality and Ambiguity (Tracy), 606 Plutarch, 21, 82 poetry, 131–35; historical overview of, 131–32; and personal faith, 131 The Politics of Jesus (Yoder), 149 Polycarp of Smyrna, 13, 14, 41, 54, 137, 527–28; letter to the Philippians, 527–28; martyrdom of, 528 Pontianus, 368 Ponticus, 116 Poor Knights of Christ, 433 Pope, Alexander, 528–29 Porete, Marguerite, 529–30; principal ideas of, 530
Index
Porphyry, 10 Pound, Ezra, 301 prayer, 135–38; blessing and benediction, 136; character of prayer within various genres, 137–38; confessional, 136–37; of lament, 137; major voices of, 135; petition and intercession, 136; of praise, 136; thanksgiving prayer, 136; types of, 135–36 Preces Privatae (Andrews), 176 Prelandra (Lewis), 52 Preparatory Meditations (E. Taylor), 589, 590 Preus, James, 44 Price, Eugenia, 550–51; fiction of, 531; nonfiction works of, 530–31 A Priest to the Temple, or the Country Parson (G. Herbert), 127 Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 10 prophecy, Hebrew, 5 Proslogion (Anselm of Canterbury), 178 Protestant Reformation, 44, 93, 213; sermons of, 144–45; women writers during, 162–63 Protestantism, 44; Protestant mission theology, 111–12 ProtoGospel of James, 6 Protreptikos (Clement of Alexandria), 255 Prudentius, 102, 103, 131, 150 Psalms, book of, 58 Pseudo-Dionysius, 100–101, 376 psychomachia (“holy war of the soul”), 60 Psychomachia (Prudentius), 102 Puritans, 49 The Purpose-Driven Life (R. Warren), 629–30 Quadratus, 15 Quakers, 325 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Schweitzer), 554 Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz), 564–65 Radewyns, Florence, 345 Rahner, Karl, 157, 359, 533–34; critics of, 534; principal ideas of, 533–34 Raleigh, Walter, 573 Ralph of Laon, 45 Ramabai, Pandita, 163, 163–64 Ramm, Bernard L., 535–36 Ramsey, William M., 7 rationalism, 11, 43 Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, 346. See also Benedict XVI (pope) Raymond of Peñaforte, 130, 249 Reaping the Whirlwind (Gilkey), 335 Recollections (Gladden), 336 redaction criticism, 83 reference works, 139–42; early Christian, 140–41; modern Christian, 141–42; types of, 139–40 Reformation. See Protestant Reformation The Reformed Pastor (Baxter), 127 Regula Pastoralis (Gregory the Great), 126 Relevant Media Group, 98 Remonstrance (Arminius), 184–85 Renaissance, the, 43
683
Republic (Plato), 119, 146 Resurrection, the, 41 Retracing the Arts to Theology (St. Bonaventure), 102 Revelation, 3, 4 Revelation of Peter, 8 Revelations of Divine Love (Julian of Norwich), 398–99 Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), 33 Ricci, Matteo, 251 Richard of St. Victor, 536–38; influence of Anselm and Augustine on, 537; influential works of on mysticism, 537; principal ideas of, 537–38 Richardson, Samuel, 71 Ricouer, Paul, 90, 538–39; works of on hermeneutics, 538–39 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 133, 260 Ringe, Sharon H., 78 Rinkart, Martin, 151 Ritschl, Albrecht, 539–40; education and profession of, 539; legacy of, 539–40 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 26 Roethke, Theodore, 134 Rolle, Richard, 541–42 Roman Catholicism, 44, 49, 56, 149, 335, 365; missionary activity of, 107; position of on gender roles, 78 Roman Martyrology (Baronius), 201 Roman de la Rose (de Meun and de Lorris), 103, 421 Roman de Thebes (Statius), 101 Roman de Troie (de St. Maur), 101 Romano-Germanic Pontifical, 130 Rossetti, Christina, 134, 542–43; principal ideas of, 543 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 134 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 77, 78, 543–44; feminist activism of, 543; works of, 543–44 Ruffin, Bernard, 268 Rufinus of Aquileia, 42, 544–45; conflict of with Jerome, 544; translations and original works of, 544–45 Rule of Benedict, 154, 209–10 Rushdoony, Rousas J., 616 Russell, Bertrand, 648–49 Ruysbroeck, Jan van, 344, 345–46, 588 saints, 87, 88; cult of, 88; in the Middle Ages, 88 The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Baxter), 105 Salem Communications, 98 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Lanyer), 422 The Samurai (Endo), 307 Sanctuarie of a Troubled Soule (Hayward), 105 Sandhaas, Kari, 78 Sangster, William, 145 Sarapion, 92 Sarasvati, Pandita Ramabai, 534–35; as a child prodigy, 534–35; declaration of faith in Jesus, 535; legacy of, 535 Saravia, Hadrianus, 106 Savonarola, 144 Sayers, Dorothy, 77, 164, 547 Scanzoni, Letha Dawson, 78 Schaeffer, Francis, 11, 418, 547–49, 616; impact of among conservative Christian activists, 548; principal ideas of, 548
684
Index
Schaff, Philip, 56, 549–50 Schelling, F. W. J., 260, 550–51; critique of “Negative Philosophy” in the famous Berlin lectures, 550–51; principal ideas of, 551 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 158, 551–53; principal ideas of, 552 scholasticism, 157, 435 Schulz, Charles Monroe, 553–54 Schweitzer, Albert, 554–55 Scofield, C. I., 555–56 Scofield Reference Bible (Scofield), 418, 555–56 Scott, Nathan A., Jr., 556–57, 642 Scott, Thomas, 490 Scotus, John Duns, 11, 371, 557–58; philosophical system of, 557; theological system of, 557; works of, 557 Scriptum Principale (R. Bacon), 196 Scupoli, Lorenzo, 493 Second Apology (Justin Martyr), 399 Second Council of Constantinople, 54, 344 Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (Clement of Rome), 13–14 Second Vatican Council, 56, 130 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 79 Sedulius, 131–32 Seeds of Contemplation (Merton), 118 Serapion, 6 A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Law), 425 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Astell), 188 sermons and homilies, 143–46, 294; of the early church fathers, 143–44; in the media age, 145–46; of Paul, 143 The Service of the Poor (Stephen), 579 The Seven Storey Mountain (Merton), 118, 462 Shakespeare, William, 79, 132–33, 558–59; principal ideas of, 558–59; questions concerning his Christian beliefs, 558 The Shape of the Liturgy (Dix), 92 Shaw, Luci, 559–60; principal ideas of, 559–60 Sheen, Fulton J., 145, 560–61; television shows of, 560 Sheldon, Charles M., 561–62 Shepard, Thomas, 562–63 The Shepherd (Zwingli), 659 Shepherd of Hermas, 3, 4, 14–15, 54, 153; organization of, 362–63; prayers in, 138 Sherrard, Philip, 627 Sherrill, Elizabeth, 642 Sherrill, John, 642 Sider, Ronald James, 563 Sidney, Philip, 573 Simons, Menno, 144–45 Simpson, A. B., 509 Sic and Non (Abelard), 117, 167 Sienkiewicz, Henryk Adam Alexander Pius, 564–65; major works of, 564–65 Silence (Endo), 307 Silmarillion (Tolkien), 52, 602 Silverman, Kenneth, 20 Simons, Menno, 565–66 Simpson, Albert Benjamin, 566
Singh, Sadhu Sundar, 581 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 101 Sir Orfeo, 104 Six Books On the Priesthood (John Chrysostom), 126 Six Days of Creation (Basil the Great), 45 Sixtus II (pope), 270 slavery, 147 Sleeping Preacher (Kasdorf), 402 Smalley, Beryl, 44, 45, 376 Smart, Christopher, 133 Smith, Hannah Whitall, 566–67 Smith, Morton, 7 Smith, Pamela, 291 social ethics, 146–49; Calvinist (Reformed) social ethics, 148; dissent from the medieval social ethic, 147–48; during the Reformation, 148; during the reign of Constantine, 147; of early Christianity, 146–47; Just War Theory, 147; and the medieval synthesis, 147; Roman Catholic, 149; twentiethcentury Protestant ethics, 148–49 Socrates, 21, 42 Solomon, 64 Solovyev, Vladimir, 567–68; principal ideas of, 568 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 568–69; principal ideas of, 569 Songs of Experience (Blake), 214 songs and hymns, 150–53; American song, 152; of early Christianity, 150; of the English Reformation, 151–52; Gospel music, 152; of the Middle Ages, 150–51; of the Protestant Reformation (Luther and Calvin), 151; recent developments in, 152–53; of the Roman Mass, 151 Songs of Innocence (Blake), 133, 214 Sorsky, Nil, 569–70 source criticism, 82–83 Southern, R. W., 376 Southwell, Robert, 570–71 Sozomen, 42 Spalding, John Lancaster, 571–72 Speare, Elizabeth George, 80 Spener, Philip Jacob, 572–73 Spenser, Edmund, 132, 573–75 The Spiritual Espousals (van Ruysbroeck), 545 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola), 104, 122, 371 spiritual formation and counsel, 153–56; during the Enlightenment and into modernity, 155; during the Middle Ages, 154; during the Reformation, 154–55; imperial phase of, 153–54; in Judaism and early Christianity, 153 The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder Her (Allen), 113 Sproul, R. C., 575–77; principal ideas of, 576; works of, 575–76 Spurgeon, Charles, 145, 577 St. Ambrose, 120 St. Benedict, 116, 209–10 St. Bonaventure, 102, 121, 216–17; influence of Augustine on, 217; works of, 217 St. Clare of Assisi, 121, 147 St. Francis of Assisi, 33, 41, 121, 132, 144, 147, 151 St. Gertrude the Great of Helfta, 332–33; principal ideas of, 333 St. Guthlac, 101–2
Index
St. John, 13, 20, 391, 408–9 St. John of the Cross, 122, 393–94 St. Luke, 438–39 St. Mark, 444–45 St. Matthew, 448–49; principal ideas of, 449 St. Maur, Benoit de, 101 St. Maximus the Confessor, 454–55; principal ideas of, 454–55 St. Patrick, 33 St. Stephen, 137 Staines, David, 376 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 77 Star Trek, 52 Stassen, Glen, 52 Stein, Edith, 577–78 Stephen, Emelia Caroline, 578–79 Stephen I (pope), 269, 270 Sternhold, Thomas, 151 Stewart, James S., 145 Stone, Samuel, 370 Stott, John, 579–80 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 71, 76, 164, 580–81; antislavery writing of, 580; formative influences on, 580; later novels and the theme of Christian moral responsibility, 580–81 Strang Communications Group, 98 Stromata (Clement of Alexandria), 255 The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Smalley), 44 Suetonius, 21, 82 Suger. See Abbot Suger Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 39, 157, 182; style of, 159–60 Supernatural (de Lubac), 285 Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Lewis), 22–23, 602 Suso, Henry, 581–83, 588 Swidler, Arlene, 78 Swidler, Leonard, 75, 78 Swindoll, Charles R., 583 Swing Low: A Life (Toews), 600 Symeon, 583–84 Syncletica, 161–62 Systematic Theology (Finney), 319 Systematic Theology (Tillich), 158, 599 systematics, 156–60; in America, 158–59; contemporary systematics, 159–60; in the early and medieval church, 157; legacy of the Reformation concerning, 158; literary analysis in, 159; in the modern era, 158 Tanakh, the, 50 Tasso, Torquato, 585 Tatian, 586–87; works of, 586–87 Tauler, John, 582, 587–88 Taylor, Barbara Brown, 588–89 Taylor, Edward, 133, 589–90 Taylor, Gardner Calvin, 146 Taylor, James Hudson, 22, 113 Taylor, Jeremy, 590–91 Taylor, Jerome, 375, 377 The Teacher (Clement of Alexandria), 153 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 591–92
685
Ten Boom, Corrie, 592–93 Teresa of Avila, 89, 122, 162, 393, 594 Tertullian, 48, 70, 92, 99, 368, 467, 594–95; attraction of to the Montanists, 594–95 Thalia (Arius), 189 Thebiad (Statius), 101 Thecla, 161 Theodora, 162 Theodore the Studite, 38 Theodoret, 42 Theodulph of Orleans, 150 Theological Essays (Maurice), 453 A Theology of Liberation (Gutiérrez), 346 Theophilus, 253 The Theory of Knowledge of Hugh of Saint Victor (Kleinz), 376 Thérèse of Lisieux, 89, 122, 211, 595–96 Timaeus (Plato), 100 Third Council of Constantinople, 54 Thiselton, Anthony, 90 Thomas à Kempis, 104, 154, 309–10, 345, 596–97; works of, 310 Thomas, R. S., 134, 597–98 Thompson, Brad, 92 Thompson, Francis, 598–99; principal ideas of, 598 Thoresby, John, 126 Thornton, John, 490 Thucydides, 21 Tillich, Paul, 158, 359, 599, 612–13; principal ideas of, 599–600 Tippett, A. R., 111 To the Heathen (Tertullian), 594 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 288 Toews, Miriam, 600–601 Toland, John, 601 Tolkien, J. R. R., 11, 28–29, 52, 72, 79, 441, 601–3; friendship with C. S. Lewis, 430, 602; renown of as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, 602 Tolstoy, Leo, 567, 603–4 Torah, the, 146 Tournier, Paul, 604–5 Tozier, A. W., 605 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 649 Tracy, David, 605–6 The Tradition (Sorsky), 569 Traherne, Thomas, 133, 606–7, 617; principal ideas of, 607 Transforming Missions: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Bosch), 111 transubstantiation, 55 Treatise on the Resurrection of the Body (Athenagoras), 191 The Tribes of Yahweh (Gottwald), 340 Troeltsch, Ernst, 148, 494 Troyes, Chrétien de, 100 True Christianity (Arndt), 185 Trueblood, D. Elton, 607–9; principal ideas of, 608–9; works of, 608 Truth, Sojourner, 76, 163, 609 Tucker, Ruth, 77, 164 Tutu, Desmond, 609–10; influence of, 610; works of, 610
686 Twain, Mark, 79 Two Letters Addressed to Virgins, 8 The Two Towers (Tolkien), 52 Tynan, Kenneth, 328 Unamuno, Miguel de, 287–88; works of, 287–88 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 71, 164, 580 Underhill, Evelyn, 611–12; commitment to Anglicanism, 612; conversion of, 611; early works of, 611; legacy of, 612 Understanding Church Growth (McGavran), 114 The Universal Word (Ferré), 316 Updike, John, 612–13 Urbanus, 368 Utopia (T. More), 474 Valdes, Peter, 148 Valentinian, 38 Valentinians, 38 Valla, Lorenzo, 43 Van Leeuwen, Mary Stewart, 78 Van Til, Cornelius, 11, 615–16 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 50 Vasari, Giorgio, 22 Vasto, Giuseppe Lanza del, 285–86 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vaughn, Henry, 133, 616–18; as the “poet of light,” 619; as a “Silurist,” 616–18; view of the Bible, 617–18 Venerable Bede, 41, 44, 100, 206–7 Venn, Henry, 106–7 Ventadorn, Bernard de, 103 Verdict Theology in Missionary Theory (Tippett), 111 Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), 57–58 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 76 Virgil, 101, 104 Vision of God (K. Kirk), 408–9 The Vision of God or the Icon (Nicholas of Cusa), 492 Voetius, Gisbertus, 106, 110 Vogler, Christopher, 72 Voragine, Jacapo da, 89, 382 Wahlberg, Rachel Conrad, 78 Waldensians, 148 Wagner, Charles Peter, 621–22; principal ideas of, 621–22 Walker, Alice, 79 Walker, Cheryl, 79 Walker, Margaret, 79 Wallace, Lewis, 622 Walls, Andrew F., 623 Walter of Saint-Victor, 623–24; content of the “Contra quatros labyrinthos Franciae,” 623–24; criticism of philosophy, 623–24; on dialectic versus mysticism, 624 Walther, Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm, 624–25 Walton, Isaak, 362 Wangerin, Walter, 625–26; major themes of his writing, 626; works of, 626 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 603–4
Index Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos, 626–27; major themes of, 627; works of, 627 Warfield, B. B., 627–28; call of to ministry, 627–28; contributions to scholarship, 628; legacy of, 628 Warneck, Gustav, 107, 112 Warner, Marina, 78 Warner, Susan Bogert, 79, 628–29; works of, 629 Warnfield, Paulus, 42 Warren, Rick, 629–31; principal ideas of, 631 Warren, Max, 107 Washington, Booker T., 631 The Waste Land (Eliot), 301 Waters, Ken, 97 Watts, Isaac, 26, 152, 631–32 Waugh, Evelyn, 632–33; principal ideas of, 633 Weigel, Valentin, 633–34; subjective Lutheran philosophy of, 634 Weil, Simone, 122, 634–36; principal ideas of, 635–36; works of, 635 Weiser, Francis, 34 Wellhausen, Julius, 636–37 Wesley, Charles, 152, 590, 637–38 Wesley, John, 46, 66, 127, 145, 152, 329, 590, 638–39 Wesley, Susanna, 163, 639–40 Whitman, Walt, 133 Whitsitt, William H., 479 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 640 Wilberforce, William, 641 Wilbur, Richard, 134 Wilder, Amos Niven, 641–42 Wilder, Thornton, 79 Wiley, Orton, 159 Wilkerson, David R., 642–43 Willard, Dallas, 643–44 Willard, Frances, 163, 644–45; works of, 644–45 William of Ockham, 11, 645–46; “Ockham’s razor” explained, 645; political theory of, 645–46; works of, 645 Williams, Charles, 327, 646–47; on theology and literature, 646–47 Wilson, Augusta Evans, 647–48 Wilson, David Dunn, 143 Winkworth, Catherine, 330 Winter, Ralph, 107–8 With the Grain of the Universe (Hauerwas), 357 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 648–49; works of, 649 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 76 Woman in the Pulpit (F. Willard), 644 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 163 women’s literature, 161–64; of the Middle Ages, 162; of the modern era, 163–64; New Testament and early Christian writers, 161–62 Wonderful Fool (Endo), 308 Woolf, Virginia, 77 Woolman, John, 649–50 World, 98 World Council of Churches, 50 World Council on Faith and Order, 56
Index
Wright, N. T., 47, 650–51 Wycliffe, John, 144, 378, 651–52; condemnation of simony, 652; rejection of the papacy and transubstantiation, 651
Yancey, Philip, 654 Yinan Zhang, 44 Yoder, John Howard, 149, 654–55
Xerxes, 47
Zahm, John A., 280 Zinn, Grover, 376 Zinzendorf, Nicholas Ludwig von, 106, 657–58 Zwingli, Ulrich, 93, 658–60
Yamauchi, Edwin M., 653–54; on pre-Christian Gnosticism, 653; work of in biblical archaeology, 653–54
687
About the Contributors
Dale Ahlquist is president of the American Chesterton Society, publisher of Gilbert Magazine, author of G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense and Common Sense 101: Lessons from G. K. Chesterton, and associate editor of the Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Ahlquist has lectured at universities all over the world and is a Fellow of the Veritas Worldview Institute at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. He received a BA from Carleton College and an MA from Hamline University. M. Lee Alexander (PhD, Indiana University) teaches in the English department at the College of William and Mary. Her courses include an Inklings class, creative writing, detective fiction, and a history of the book course called Preserving American Arts and Letters. She also teaches English as a Second Language in the graduate program. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Observatory (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and is in the process of writing a children’s book, Elspeth and the Observatory. She resides in Williamsburg, Virginia. Joann Furlow Allen is assistant professor of English at Oral Roberts University. She has published and presented on topics related to modern and contemporary women of color. Her focus is on Latina women, their current cultural issues, and their shared indigenous heritage. Scholarly emphasis has been on female historical, religious, and mythological figures. She has a BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MA and a PhD from the University of Tulsa. Her dissertation subject was contemporary Latina writer Sandra Cisneros. Phyllis Alsdurf is an associate professor of English and the director of the Johnson Center for Journalism and Communication at Bethel University in St. Paul. She
holds a PhD in journalism, with an emphasis on media and religion, and a master’s degrees in humanities and journalism. She was a contributor to Religion, Media, and the Marketplace, edited by Lynn Schofield Clark (Rutgers, 2007), and Understanding Evangelical Media: The Changing Face of Christian Communication, edited by Quentin J. Schultze and Robert H. Woods Jr. (InverVarsity, 2008). Alsdurf has edited and written for a variety of religious publications and is the coauthor with her husband James Alsdurf of Battered into Submission (InterVarsity, 1989). Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation magazine and teaches part-time at Gordon College. She is also engaged in various writing projects, and her publications and presentations have included short stories and articles as well as academic papers in Victorian and modern English literature. She holds a BA in English from the University of Southern California and an MA in English Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Peter D. Anders teaches theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His interests are in systematic and historical theology, particularly methodology, the doctrine of Holy Scripture, modern theology and culture, and the theologies of John Calvin and Karl Barth. Anders serves as a contributing scholar to Modern Reformation and is also involved in adult Christian education. He has earned MA degrees in theology at Wheaton Graduate School and Yale Divinity School and is currently completing a Doctor of Philosophy degree in theology at the University of Oxford. Bruce Riley Ashford is dean of the college at Southeastern, a research fellow for the L. Russ Bush Center for
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690
About the Contributors
Faith╯& Culture, and associate professor of philosophy and intercultural studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Ann W. Astell is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, where she was appointed in 2007 after serving as professor of English and chair of medieval studies at Purdue University. She is the author of six books on medieval literature and spirituality, including The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (1990); Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (1994); and, most recently, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (2006). She is also the editor or coeditor of four volumes on topics related to historical Christian spirituality. Craig D. Atwood is director of admissions at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he also teaches theology and Moravian studies. He is the author of Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius and Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem, among other works. He served as a professor, college chaplain, and pastor before assuming his current duties. He received his PhD in historical theology from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1995. Brenda Ayres is a full professor and member of the graduate faculty at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she teaches Victorian literature. Most of her publications are in nineteenth-century English literature, which include fifty to sixty articles plus these book publications: Miss Gusta: Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, or, the Victorian Mobilian; The Emperor’s Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney’s Magic Kingdom; Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers; Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change; and Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels: The Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Ayres has worked with Pickering and Chatto in editing and notating several out-of-print novels. These include a four-volume series, The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, as well as Jessie Fothergill’s Kith and Kin. Jeffrey Bain-Conkin is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation studies the religious practices of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in nineteenth-century Louisville, Kentucky. Anthony D. Baker is assistant professor of systematic theology at the Seminary of the Southwest. His academic interests include Russian Orthodoxy, political theology, Ressourcement, Radical Orthodoxy, Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the English Holiness Tradition, and theological metaphysics. Baker has published articles
in Modern Theology, Political Theology, and other journals and collections. He is currently writing Diagonal Advance: A New Account of Christian Perfection, a critical engagement with the idea of perfection in the history of Christian thought. He earned a BA and an MA from Olivet Nazarene University and a PhD from the University of Virginia. Jeffrey W. Barbeau is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and an expert on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Publications include Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and (as editor) Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum (Peeters, 2006) along with many journal articles, contributions to books, and book reviews. Current projects include a global history of Wesleyan pneumatologies and study of the unpublished theological writings of Sara Coleridge. His BA is from Oral Roberts University, with an MA from Old Dominion University and an MA and PhD from Marquette University. Joe E. Barnhart, PhD, is professor of philosophy and religion studies at the University of North Texas in Denton. He has authored articles in such journals as Harvard Theological Review, The Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, and The Pluralist and several books (four coauthored), including The Study of Religion and Its Meaning; The New Birth: A Naturalistic View of Religious Conversion with Mary Ann Barnhart; and a novel, Trust and Treachery, with L. Kraeger. Joe Barnhart is a past president of the Southwest Division of the American Academy of Religion and a frequent speaker and interviewee regarding churchstate separation. Alan Bearman teaches history at Washburn University, where he is now also serving as the interim dean of libraries. A native of London, England, he has a PhD in history from Kansas State University along with undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky and Murray State University. He is a specialist in the history of Christianity and early American history. Michelle M. Beauclair is associate professor of French at Seattle Pacific University. She teaches undergraduate French language, literature, and civilization courses in addition to Francophone literature, film, and culture courses. She completed her BSLA degree in French from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and her MA and PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin– Madison. She is the author of Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, and the Legacy of Mourning and the editor of The Francophone World: Cultural Issues and Perspectives.
About the Contributors
Ron J. Bigalke Jr. (BS, Moody Bible Institute; MApol, Columbia Evangelical Seminary; MDiv [with honors], Luther Rice University; MTS, PhD, Tyndale Theological Seminary; PhD [ABD], University of Pretoria) is director of Eternal Ministries, Inc., approved by Biblical Ministries Worldwide, and editor of the Journal of Dispensational Theology. Having served in Christian ministry for more than a decade, he is a frequent author and lecturer. His current work is concentrated on apologetics, biblical studies, ecclesiastical literature and thought, historiography, and theology. As an educator, he has served as a Bible institute, college, and seminary professor and a Christian school administrator and teacher. He is a member of several Christian professional societies. Bradley J. Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College, Michigan. Birzer earned his BA from the University of Notre Dame (1990) and his PhD from Indiana University–Bloomington (1999). He is the author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (2003), the coeditor of The American Democrat and Other Political Writings by James Fenimore Cooper (2000), and the coauthor of The American West (2002). He is also the author of the forthcoming intellectual biography of an American founding father, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Â�Carroll (February 2010). Kirk Bjornsgaard was acquisitions editor for regional studies at the University of Oklahoma Press. His BA was from Bard College, and his career spanned newspaper journalism, public relations, radio news broadcasting, book publishing, and fiction writing, expressed most recently in the novel Confessions of a Former Rock Queen. Carol Blessing is chair of the literature, journalism, and modern languages department and professor of literature at Point Loma Nazarene University, where she teaches medieval through seventeenth-century British literature, women writers, and literary theory. Recent publications include “Speaking Out: Feminist Theology and Women’s Proclamation in the Wesleyan Tradition,” cowritten with Lisa Bernal, PhD, in Being Feminist, Being Christian (Palgrave, 2006); “Queen Elizabeth I as Deborah the Queen: Exceptional Women of Power,” in Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I (Palgrave, 2007); and “↜‘Most Blessed Daughters of Jerusalem’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and Elizabethan and Jacobean Bible Commentary,” in the Ben Jonson Journal (Winter 2008). Blessing received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside.
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Jamie Blosser is a professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. He holds a PhD in historical theology from The Catholic University of America, where his thesis was on the theological anthropology of Origen of Alexandria. He regularly offers courses in church history, Pauline letters and ecclesiology. His main interest is patristics, especially Origen and St. Augustine of Hippo. Todd M. Brenneman is a PhD candidate in the department of religion at Florida State University. William Rea Brian currently studies mathematics, philosophy, and Greek as his concentrations in the University Scholars program, an interdisciplinary honors curriculum at Baylor University. In 2006 he interned at Fermilab, a national center for high-energy physics research in Batavia, Illinois, and he works with the youth of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Waco, Texas. Mark P. Buechsel is an assistant professor of English and German at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was born as an American-German dual national in the German city of Wetzlar. Growing up in the Evangelical Free Church of Germany, he learned to treasure the hymns of Paul Gerhardt, which he learned by heart already in early childhood and which have been dear companions to him throughout his life. He moved to the United States as a senior in high school and eventually received his MA in German literature from Washington University in St. Louis and his PhD in religion and literature from Baylor University. Henry Carrigan Jr. is assistant director and senior director at Northwestern University Press. He has written about books and readings for a number of publications including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Washington Post Book World, and the Charlotte Observer. He writes regularly about religion, literary criticism, and fiction for Publishers Weekly, the Library Journal, and ForeWord, and he has edited eight volumes of Christian classics for Paraclete Press. Carrigan also writes for Christianity and Literature. He is currently at work on the notes for a new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Paul Carron is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Baylor University. His dissertation focuses on the freedom-Â�relevant conditions for moral responsibility, with particular emphasis on the thought of Harry Frankfurt and Søren Kierkegaard. Carron received his master of divinity from George W. Truett Theological Seminary and is a lecturer in the honors college at Baylor University.
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About the Contributors
Nathan Carson is a PhD student in philosophy at Baylor University. He holds two master’s degrees from Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia): New Testament studies and interdisciplinary studies (theology and literature). His interests focus on Dante, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky and on the twentieth-century Catholic novelists Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Graham Greene. Carson is currently working on wisdom and moral education in the ethics of Plato and Aristotle and applying their insights to contemporary issues in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Throughout, his interests include advancing our understanding of the intersection between moral philosophy and literature in the task of moral education. Grayson Carter is associate professor of church history at Fuller Theological Seminary. Previously, he taught at Brasenose College, Oxford, and at Methodist University in North Carolina. His current writing includes C. S. Lewis and the church, evangelicals and literature in the eighteenth century, a revision of his Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c. 1800–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2001), and a critical edition of the diary of a nineteenth-century Oxford academic. Carter also serves as general editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the New Westminster Dictionary of Church History, the Encyclopedia of Protestantism, Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, and The Anglican Catholic. Claudia M. Champagne is associate professor of English and English program coordinator at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans. During her professional career, she has published articles on Renaissance British literature, especially Spenser and Milton. Her book review of Nigel Smith’s Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? appears in the Autumn 2009 issue of Christianity & Literature. She is currently serving as south-central regional director on the national board of the Conference on Christianity and Literature. She received her PhD and MA from Tulane University and her BA from Loyola University, both in New Orleans. A. P. Church is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Brownsville. He earned his BA and MA from Arizona State University and his PhD in 1996 from the University of Washington, where he specialized in medieval literature and classical and medieval rhetoric. He has published and presented articles on the transmission of classical rhetoric in medieval literary culture and the application of progymnasmata, the preliminary
exercises of the ancient schools of rhetoric, in contemporary pedagogy. Kelly James Clark is professor of philosophy at Calvin College, where he specializes in philosophy of religion, epistemology, and Chinese philosophy. He has authored Philosophers Who Believe; When Faith Is Not Enough; I Believe in God, the Father Almighty; The Story of Ethics: Human Nature and Human Fulfillment, and other books. He has written numerous scholarly articles and book reviews and presented many papers at scholarly and professional meetings. Daniel Colvin, PhD, is professor of English at Western Illinois University. He has published numerous articles on Shakespeare, Donne, and other early modern writers and has edited Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for the Interactive Shakespeare Project. Charles J. Conniry Jr. is vice president and dean of George Fox Seminary. He served for ten years as director of the doctoral programs at George Fox Seminary. Prior to that he was lead faculty for Bethel University’s program in adult education and faculty mentor in Bethel’s doctor of ministry program. He also served for sixteen years in pastoral ministry. He is the author of two books, Soaring in the Spirit: Rediscovering Mystery in the Christian Life and Christianity in a Postmodern World: A Theological Analysis. He received his PhD in theology from Fuller Seminary and his MDiv from Bethel Seminary. Paul J. Contino is professor of great books at Pepperdine University. With his wife, Maire Mullins, he serves as coeditor of the journal Christianity and Literature. With Susan Felch, he edited and introduced Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His work on Dostoevsky has appeared in Studies in the Novel, Renascence, and Augustine and Literature (Lexington, 2006). Other of Contino’s work has appeared in Religion and the Arts, Comparative Literature Studies, the Cresset, Commonweal, America, the Christian Century, Image, and Religion and Literature. Jamie S. Crouse is a PhD candidate in English literature at Baylor University. She is working on a dissertation titled “Enlarging the Sphere of Religious Poetry: The Rise of Victorian Women’s Religious Verse.” Her research interests include the intersection of religion and literature in the nineteenth century. She has published articles on such figures as Margaret Fuller, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Emily Brontë. Crouse holds an MA from Mississippi College and a BA from Belhaven College.
About the Contributors
Laurie A. Dashnau is associate professor of English at Houghton College. She received her PhD in composition and rhetoric from Miami University of Ohio in 1996. The title of her dissertation is Rhetorics of Gender: Christian Traditionalists, Biblical Feminists, and Promise Keepers. Kimberly C. Dawsey-Richardson has served in full-time ministry since 2004 at Fletcher Hills Presbyterian Church in El Cajon, California, and is certified, ready to receive an ordained call as minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Her ministry experience in multigenerational Christian Education has been informed by her appreciation and study of church history, with emphasis in the early church and medieval monasticism. She has enjoyed assisting as a guest lecturer at Bethel Seminary in church history courses. She received her MDiv from Bethel Seminary, San Diego, and her BA from the University of California, Davis. Connie J. Dawson is a PhD student in renewal studies at Regent University. She holds an MA in theology and an MDiv from Asia Pacific Theological Seminary, Baguio City, Philippines. Christopher Denny is an assistant professor in the department of theology and religious studies at St. John’s University in New York City. His recent scholarly publications include articles in Horizons, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Logos, and Vatican II: Forty Years Later (Orbis, 2006). Along with Christopher McMahon, Denny is the coeditor of Finding Salvation in Christ: Essays on Christ and Soteriology in Honor of William Loewe (Wipf and Stock, forthcoming in 2010). His current research articulates ways that imaginative literature and non-Christian scriptures can revise Christian theological anthropology and historiography. He received his PhD in theology and religious studies from the Catholic University of America in 2004. Michael G. Ditmore is professor of English and director of American Studies at Pepperdine University. His interests include autobiography and early American literature. He has published on the New England church relation requirement, Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Ashbridge, and Jonathan Edwards. Ditmore received his MA and PhD from the University of Texas–Austin and his BA from Austin College. Anna Djintcharadzé specializes in epistemology, Neoplatonism in the medieval tradition (spirituality and logic of the twelfth-century Renaissance and the Franciscan School of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), and
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German Idealism. Her scope of competence also includes the history of religions and philosophies of ancient Rome, early church history, phenomenology, Russian philosophy, and metaphysics of quantum theory. Skilled in Latin paleography, she is a translator/editor, as well as a proofreader of translations/transcriptions of medieval Latin manuscripts for critical editions. She has taught various philosophy courses and is currently completing her PhD joint dissertation at the Sorbonne and at Boston College. She received her MA from the Hochschule für Philosophie in Munich and her BA from the Institut de Formation Théologique de Montréal (Lateran University). Amy M. Donaldson is a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame in the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity program. Her dissertation relates to New Testament textual criticism practiced by the church fathers. Donald F. Duclow is professor of philosophy at GwyneddMercy College, Gwynedd Valley, Pennsylvania. His publications on the Christian Neoplatonic tradition include Masters of Learned Ignorance: Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus (Ashgate, 2006). Marsha L. Dutton is professor of medieval literature and director of graduate studies at Ohio University, Athens. She has published extensively on the English Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx. She is the editor of the Companion to Aelred, forthcoming from Brill Academic Publishers, and of the new volume of Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, forthcoming from Cistercian Publications. She is currently completing the critical edition of the works of another English Cistercian abbot, Gilbert of Hoyland, to be published in Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis. Dutton is the associate editor of Cistercian Studies Quarterly and secretary of the publication board of Cistercian Publications. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and her BA and MAT from the University of Kansas. Kent A. Eaton lives in McPherson, Kansas, with his wife, Vickie, where he serves as vice president for academic affairs and professor of culture at McPherson College. He previously served at Fresno Pacific University, Bethel Seminary San Diego, and El Instituto Bíblico y Seminario de España. He is a graduate of Texas Christian University, Dallas Seminary, Universidad de Barcelona, and the University of Wales at Lampeter. His research and writing interests have centered on the Church in Spain, especially the impact of Victorian missionaries on the Spanish Protestant Church. Additionally, he has served on the board of several nonprofits in the social service sector.
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About the Contributors
Bruce L. Edwards is professor of English and African studies and associate vice president for academic technology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he has served since earning his PhD in literature and rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. He has his MA from Kansas State University (1979) and his BA from the Missouri University of Science and Technology (1975). He has served as a C. S. Lewis Foundation Fellow at the Kilns in Oxford, England (2004); a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999–2000); a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. (1989–1990); and the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988). Heather Murray Elkins, PhD, is professor of worship, preaching and the arts at Drew Theological School. She is convener for liturgical studies at Drew University, a program founded by Bard Thompson. Her professional career began with teaching on the Navajo reservation, and she has served as a UMC pastor, a truck stop chaplain, a university chaplain, and an academic dean. Her recent books, The Holy Stuff of Life and Wising Up (coedited with Kathy Black), draw on her study of traditional liturgies, the arts, and ritual studies. Her forthcoming book, Altaring the World, deals with preaching. Gene C. Fant Jr. holds graduate degrees in literature (PhD, University of Southern Mississippi), biblical languages, writing, and educational leadership. Currently he serves as professor of English and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. Widely published in journals related to literature, Christianity, education, and worldview, he also is a contributing blogger at First Things and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His most recent book is God as Author: Toward a Biblical Approach to Literary Narrative (B & H Academic), and his next book will be on the liberal arts in a Christian context. Alberto Ferreiro, PhD, is professor of European history at Seattle Pacific University. He has published and edited seven books and more than sixty-five articles in patristics and medieval studies in prestigious journals such as Church History, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the Harvard Theological Review, Vigiliae Christianae, Studia monastica, and Zeitschrift für Antikes und Christentum, among others, and in proceedings of major conferences. His books include Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions (Brill, 2005) and The Visigoths in Gaul and Iberia (Update): A Supplemental Bibliography, 2004–2006 (Brill, 2008). He was a Fulbright Dissertation Fellow in Barcelona-Madrid for 1983–1984. He founded
and directs the study-abroad program Centro Fray Luis de León at the University of Salamanca. April Ficklin is currently an adjunct English instructor for Southern Wesleyan University’s Adult and Graduate Services. She is also utilizing her study and application of literacy strategies as a member of Clemson University’s Center for Excellence in Adolescent Literacy and Learning’s leadership team and by coauthoring a book chapter on assessment. She has led and co-led multiple professional development workshops on literacy in Anderson School District One as well as the South Carolina Fall Writing Conference. Prior to teaching at the university level, Ficklin taught various levels of high school English and writing and earned her master’s degree in English from Clemson University. Benjamin Fischer is the managing editor of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth Century Contexts at the University of Notre Dame and professor of English at Bethel College. His dissertation examines the role of missionary writings from China in the context of British imperialism and the evangelical ascendance in nineteenth-century Britain. He has been active both as a missionary and as a student of mission history. Bruce Foltz is professor of philosophy and director of the senior honors program at Eckerd College, a Presbyterian liberal arts college in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he has taught since 1986. He has also taught at Penn State, Villanova, and St. Joseph’s Universities as well the University of Dallas, and he served regularly as visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Studies at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His publications (books, edited volumes, articles, and translations) have been in the areas of contemporary continental philosophy, environmental philosophy, and Byzantine and Russian philosophy. He has founded or cofounded three professional societies, and his writings have been translated into Greek, Arabic, and Portuguese. Jadell Forman is a writer with publishing and marketing experience in both technical and trade markets. Often translating technical information for the wider audience, she has written or ghostwritten hundreds of pieces ranging from science features to personality profiles. Her primary writing interests include memoir, spiritual formation, and nature conservation. She earned her MA in education with a curriculum emphasis and her BA in communications from Oral Roberts University. Brett Foster is completing a study of English encounters with Renaissance Rome. His articles and reviews
About the Contributors
have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of British Studies, Modern Philology, Renaissance Quarterly, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Shakespeare Bulletin and in the collections The Sacred and Profane in Renaissance Literature and Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman. He teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Wheaton College. Ryan Freeburn is chairman of the department of history at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, where he teaches a variety of history courses covering topics from the ancient to the modern world. His research interests include the twelfth-century Renaissance, monasticism, and medieval church reform movements. He has focused especially on the writings of Hugh of Amiens, a twelfth-century Cluniac abbot and archbishop of Rouen. Freeburn received his PhD and MLitt in mediaeval history from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and his BA from Hillsdale College. Thomas A. Fudge is director of the Hewitt Research Foundation in Washington. He holds a PhD in history from Cambridge University and a PhD in theology from Otago University in New Zealand. He has taught at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon; at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; and in the Texas prison system. He is the author of several books including Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia; The Crusade against Heretics in Bohemia, 1418–1437; The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia; Christianity without the Cross: A History of Salvation in Oneness Pentecostalism; Daniel Warner and the Paradox of Religious Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America; and a forthcoming study of the social implications of medieval heresy. Andrew Gabriel serves as an adjunct professor with Emmanuel Bible College and Tyndale Seminary and has also taught as McMaster Divinity College. In addition, he serves as the assistant pastor at Peoples Church in Hamilton, Ontario. Andrew recently completed his PhD dissertation at McMaster Divinity College. He has previously published in the disciplines of Christian theology and the New Testament. Christopher Garbowski is associate professor at the Institute of English at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland. His special interest is narrative art and values. He has written several books: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue Series (1996), Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of JRR Tolkien (2000), and Pursuits of Happiness: The American Dream, Civil Society, Religion and Popular
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Culture (2008). Recently he has coedited an interdisciplinary book on the thought of Charles Taylor. Among others, Garbowski has also contributed articles and reviews to Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, the Journal of Religion and Film, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. Alberto L. García has been professor of theology and director of the lay ministry program at Concordia University Wisconsin since 1992. Previously he served two pastorates and taught at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and at Florida International University. He is the author of eight books and more than forty theological articles. He received a BA from Florida Atlantic University, an MDiv from Concordia Theology Seminary, and a ThM and PhD from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Christopher E. Garrett is assistant professor of English and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oklahoma City University. His research interests include seventeenth-century meditational prose, John Bunyan, and C. S. Lewis. Garrett received his PhD from Texas A&M University, his MA from Oregon State University, and his BA from Brigham Young University. William Gentrup has a PhD in Renaissance English literature from Arizona State University, and his teaching and research interests include Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible in literature, and literary approaches to the Bible. He has been assistant director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies since 1991. He contributed the chapters “Exodus through Deuteronomy” and “Isaiah” to the Complete Literary Guide to the Bible and several entries to the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. He has also edited Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods and coedited, with J. Brink, Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice. Gentrup was a founding editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal. Scott Goins is professor of classics and director of the Honors College at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His research interests include epic poetry and late antiquity. He has published articles on Boethius, Virgil, and other authors. He has also authored The Vulgate Old Testament Reader (Gorgias Press) and (with colleague Barbara Wyman) an Ignatius Critical Edition of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (forthcoming, Ignatius Press). Currently, Goins serves as an editorial contributor on religion for ECCB: The Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography. He received his PhD and MA from Florida State University and his BA from the University of Tennessee.
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About the Contributors
Linda Gray is a professor at Oral Roberts University, where she has taught writing, linguistics, and early Christian literature since the mid-1980s. She has a BA in linguistics from California State University–Fullerton, an MA in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and an EdD in English education from Vanderbilt University. She has lived and studied in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has published in Religion, Culture, Curriculum and Diversity in 21st Century America and College Faith, among other publications. She also has presented numerous papers at professional conferences, such as Christianity and Literature, and serves on the editorial board for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for Christians in Higher Education, an online journal. Patrick Gray is associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He received his PhD in religion from Emory University. Previously he has taught at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Seigakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Godly Fear: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Greco-Roman Critiques of Superstition (2003). He is the coeditor of three other books on the Bible, the history of biblical interpretation, and Hellenistic philosophy. Thomas W. Gray, BMus, MDiv, DMin, DD, currently serves as copastor at Kirk of the Hills, an evangelical Presbyterian church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Prior to his ministry there, which began in 1982, Tom served as a pastor in Monrovia, California, and Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a leader in the New Wineskins Movement of Presbyterian Churches, many of which cut ties with the PCUSA over biblical and doctrinal issues in 2006. His earlier work in church music continues, as he has performed internationally on the harpsichord and as a bass soloist. He is also an avid amateur astrophotographer. He is married to Dr. Linda C. Gray, professor of English at Oral Roberts University. Alan Gregory taught historical and systematic theology and served as director of academic studies at Salisbury and Wells Theological College, England, before coming for doctoral studies to Emory University in the late 1980s. He earned his PhD in historical theology, specializing in romanticism and the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Gregory authored Moving Gnomes by Midnight, a volume of sermons, and Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination in addition to being a contributor to the Oxford Guide to Romanticism and Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion. He has complemented his teaching and research with service in several parochial ministries in Britain and in Atlanta, Georgia.
Gary M. Guinn is distinguished professor of English at John Brown University. He has directed the honors scholars program and currently directs Giving Voice: A Festival of Writing and the Arts. His fiction and poetry have appeared in the Mid-America Poetry Review, Poesia, Ghoti, the Bryant Literary Review, and Carve Magazine, among others, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His novel A Late Flooding Thaw was published in 2005 by Moon Lake Publishing Company. He received his MA and PhD from the University of Arkansas in nineteenth-century British literature and his BSE from John Brown University. Mimi Haddad is president of Christians for Biblical Equality. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado and Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary (summa cum laude). She holds a PhD in historical theology from the University of Durham, England. She has written numerous articles and has contributed to seven books. Haddad is an editor and a contributing author of Global Voices on Biblical Equality: Women and Men Serving Together in the Church. She is an adjunct professor at North Park Theological Seminary and Bethel University. Haddad and her husband live in a mixed-income housing development committed to creating financial stability in Minneapolis. Anna Hamling has taught Spanish, Russian, and Polish language, culture, and literature in Europe, Latin America, and Canada. Her PhD dissertation Introducción a un estudio comparativo entre Miguel de Unamuno y León Tolstói was published by Editorial Pliegos in Madrid in 2001. The focus of her study is on the comparative nature of the religious essays of Unamuno and Tolstoy. Hamling has published numerous articles on Unamuno and Tolstoy in Spanish, Russian, English, and Polish in numerous international journals. Recently she has been contributing to the Encyclopedia of Latin American Women Writers, The Literary Encyclopedia, and World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia. She has been an acting director of the Spanish program for the last six years at the University of New Brunswick. John J. Han is professor of English and creative writing and chair of the Humanities Division at Missouri Baptist University. Dozens of his critical essays have appeared in journals such as Literature and Belief, the Steinbeck Review, Steinbeck Studies, Kansas English, Mark Twain Studies (Japan), the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and the Journal of Humanities (Korea). In addition, he has published approximately seventy reference entries for a variety of compendiums. He is the author of a poetry volume titled Little Guy Haiku: Life with Bailey,
About the Contributors
a Maltese (PublishAmerica, 2009). Han earned his MA from Kansas State University and his PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Larry D. Harwood is associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He has published articles on Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, Hegel, postmodernism, religious satire, aesthetics, and teaching philosophy and has authored short stories published in Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature; The Dead Mule: A Journal of Southern Literature; VerbSap; Branchwood Journal; Southern Gothic; and the Houston Literary Review. In the spring of 2008 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in the Program in Theory of Literature, Faculty of Letters. He received his PhD from Marquette University and his MA from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Thomas Head is professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research has focused on topics related to the cult of saints and the Peace of God. Head is the author of Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). He is also the editor of Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (Routledge, 2001) and other volumes. Kathleen Heininge is assistant professor of English at George Fox University in Oregon, teaching British, Irish, and world literature and women’s studies. Past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies–West, she primarily researches twentieth-century Irish drama. Her book Buffoonery in Irish Drama: Staging Twentieth-Â� Century Post-Colonial Stereotypes was published in 2009. She has also published on Frank McGuinness, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Stembridge, and the Irish Renaissance and is currently writing a play on Virginia Woolf and Caroline Stephen. Heininge received her PhD from the University of California at Davis and her BA and MA from California State University at Hayward (now CSU East Bay). Natalie Hendrickson is the director of supervised ministry and student assessment at Bethel Seminary San Diego. Ed Higgins is professor of writing and literature at George Fox University. He teaches creative writing and literature and is a poet, a fiction writer, and an essayist with a wide range of writing publications. Teaching specialties and scholarly interests include fiction writing, ancient world literature, science fiction, Quaker journals, and the contemporary novel. He is also a part-time farmer who draws
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much of his writing inspiration from his back-to-the-land experiences. He earned his PhD in literature and religion from Union Graduate Institute in Cincinnati in 1992. His MA in English (1966) is from California State University, Fullerton, and his BA in English (1965) is from LaVerne University. Monika B. Hilder is associate professor of English at Trinity Western University. She specializes in children’s literature and fantasy literature, and her research interests include literature as moral education, imaginative education, gender criticism, and literature and spirituality, with a focus on George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and L. M. Montgomery. Hilder received the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal for Academic Excellence from Simon Fraser University (Faculty of Education) for her doctoral dissertation, “Educating the Moral Imagination: The Fantasy Literature of George MacÂ�Donald, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L’Engle.” Recent publications include articles and chapters on C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L. M. Montgomery, and moral education. Susan E. Hill is associate professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa, where she teaches courses that focus on the intersections between religion and culture, particularly around questions of personal and bodily identity. She has published articles on the authors George Eliot and Willa Cather, on the history of gluttony and the fat body in Western culture, and on pedagogy. She received her PhD in religion and literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School and her BA from Macalester College. Jason Gary Horn is professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia. He received his PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his BA from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He has taught at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and has been teaching at Gordon College since 1997. He has published three books: Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self (1996), Mark Twain: A Descriptive Guide to Biographical Sources (1999), and American Literary History: An Annotated Guide (2002). Mark A. House is professor of biblical studies and registrar of the New Geneva Theological Seminary in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He received the PhD from Fuller Theological Seminary. After serving in pastoral ministry in southern California for twenty-five years, he worked as an editor of academic books for Hendrickson Publishers in Peabody, Massachusetts. There he edited an expanded edition of The Greek New Testament by Westcott and Hort,
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About the Contributors
expanded and contributed a new chapter to The Text of the New Testament by Harold Greenlee, and edited the Compact Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. Andrea Ivanov-Craig, PhD, is associate professor in Â�English at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. She teaches a variety of courses at the undergraduate level, such as survey courses in American and world literatures and film and literature. She has published on the films of Mae West, the short fiction of Dorothy Parker, and the short fiction of Andre Dubus. Two long-standing areas of interest for Ivanov-Craig have been feminist theory in film and literature and, on the other end of the spectrum, the work of Dubus. Ivanov-Craig is currently working on a book project on Dubus’s fiction and essays. Lorelle B. Jabs is associate professor in the department of communication and journalism at Seattle Pacific University. Her professional career has been broad, including working for several years as an industrial engineer before pursuing a doctorate emphasizing organizational communication. She has traveled widely and published several articles on conflict management and peacemaking in Karamoja, Uganda. She received her PhD from the University of Washington as a Vigfusson fellow and her BS and MS from Oregon State University. David Lyle Jeffrey (PhD, Princeton; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) is distinguished professor of literature and humanities at Baylor University, professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Ottawa, guest professor at Peking University (Beijing), and honorary professor at the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing). His books include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992), The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975), Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984), People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996), The Bible and the University (C. Stephen Evans, coauthor, 2007), and, with Greg Maillet, Christianity and Literature: A Philosophical Approach to Literary Criticism (forthcoming, 2010), among others. Jeffrey’s articles have appeared in Chinese as well as Western academic journals. William Jenkins is associate professor of English at Crichton College. His professional interests include the intersections of religion, film, and literature, and he has published articles on religion, literature, and film regarding such topics as the aesthetics of Jesus films and the Faust figure in film. He received his PhD from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Samuel Joeckel is associate professor of English and honors professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University. His articles on a wide range of topics—Samuel Johnson, disability studies, C. S. Lewis, postmodernism, and Christian higher educationÂ�—appear in Christianity and Literature, the Christian Scholar’s Review, Mythlore, Christian Higher Education, and the Kentucky Review. Joeckel is the chief editor of The Christian College Phenomenon: Inside America’s Fastest Growing Institutions of Higher Learning (Abilene Christian University Press). He received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University, his MA from Baylor University, and his BA from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. Susan E. Jones is associate professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where she also serves as coordinator of General Education. She is on the editorial board of Florida English, the journal of the Florida College English Association. Her publications have included articles on Jane Austen in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and on the diaries of Leonard Thompson, a New England leader in Atenea. Jones’s PhD is from the University of Florida, her MA from Stetson University, and her BA from the University of New Hampshire. Dennis W. Jowers is associate professor of theology & apologetics at Faith Evangelical Seminary in Tacoma, Washington. He holds an AB in Philosophy from the University of Chicago (1999) and an MTh (2001) and PhD (2004) in systematic theology from the University of Edinburgh. Besides authoring The Trinitarian Axiom of Karl Rahner: The Economic Trinity Is the Immanent Trinity and Vice Versa (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2006) and coauthoring with Wayne House Reasons for Our Hope: An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, forthcoming), Jowers has published articles in various journals, including the Scottish Journal of Theology, the Thomist, and the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Lori Kanitz is assistant professor of English at Oral Roberts University. Her research interests include metaphor, metaphorical language in science, aesthetics, and interdisciplinary studies in theology and the arts. She serves as the university’s director of writing programs and director of Writing across the Curriculum. She is currently a PhD student at St. Andrews University in Scotland and is writing a dissertation on Jewish mysticism in Annie Dillard’s narrative nonfiction. Kanitz received an MA from the University of Durham, England, and a BA from the University of Oklahoma.
About the Contributors
Sharon Kim is associate professor of English at Judson University, Illinois. A graduate of Yale University, where she became a committed Christian, she specializes in late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century American literature. Her essays have appeared in Jonathan Edwards at Home and Abroad, American Literature, Studies in the Novel, and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is currently completing a book on literary epiphany. Brett Knowles is director of academic resources at the Sydney College of Divinity. He was formerly senior teaching fellow in church history in the department of theology and religious studies, University of Otago, and has research interests in New Zealand Pentecostalism. He has published a history of the New Life Churches of New Zealand as well. Tiffany Eberle Kriner is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, where she teaches American literature, global literature, and writing. She received her BA from Messiah College and her MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; she did a postdoctoral fellowship with the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Particularly interested in the intersection of eschatology and literature, she has published articles on the twentiethcentury poets Denise Levertov and Lucille Clifton. Catherine Clark Kroeger is adjunct associate professor of classical and ministry studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She holds a PhD in classical studies from the University of Minnesota. Kroeger is the founder and former president of Christians for Biblical Equality. Paul Joseph LaChance is assistant professor at the College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, New Jersey. His dissertation is titled “Theology in Boethius,” and he has published articles on Boethius, Augustine, and Patristic Christology. Helen Lasseter is visiting assistant professor of English literature at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where she has worked since receiving her PhD from Baylor University in 2006. She earned her master’s degree in American studies and her bachelor’s degree in political philosophy from the University of Dallas. Joel Lawrence is assistant professor of theology at Bethel Seminary St. Paul. He researched Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology of sanctification for his doctorate at Jesus College, Cambridge. Previous studies were in church history, with an emphasis in medieval contemplative theology. Lawrence’s research interests include the connection between prayer and theological method, theological
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ethics, revelation and epistemology, and the connection between theology and the church. He holds a BA from Texas A&M University, a ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary, and an MPhil and a PhD from Cambridge University. Raymond Legg is professor of English at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. He has published on rhetoric and composition and has expertise in African American literature, American literature, and film studies and popular culture. He holds the BA (Northeastern Illinois University), the MA (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga), the MDiv (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), and the DA (Middle Tennessee State University). Darin D. Lenz is assistant professor of history at Northwest University, Kirkland, Washington. His major field of study is the history of Christianity since the Reformation. He has published in academic journals and encyclopedias in his area of specialization. He is currently completing a PhD dissertation on George Müller under the direction of university distinguished professor Robert D. Linder at Kansas State University. Lenz received his BA in English from California State University, Bakersfield; an MA in theological studies from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary; and an MA in history from Villanova University. Jason Lewallen is a PhD candidate in French at Stanford University, where he is studying theology and twentiethcentury French literature. He completed his MA in comparative literature in 2007 at Dartmouth College, where he wrote a master’s thesis on James Joyce and Georges Bernanos. Other research interests include seventeenthcentury theater, film studies, and literary theory. Geir Lie is a Norwegian researcher, founder, and former editor of Refleks (2002–2009), a bilingual journal of academic articles on Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism. Through his REFLEKS-Publishing Lie also published ten books (2003–2009), most of these in Norwegian. He has authored more than thirty articles on Holiness, Pentecostal and charismatic individuals, some of which have been published in Pneuma, the Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, the Cyberjournal of Pentecostal-Charismatic Research, the Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies, and the Brethren Historical Review. In addition to his book E. W. Kenyon: Cult Founder or Evangelical Minister? he is the author of a bibliography of Plymouth Brethren, Holiness, Pentecostal, and charismatic literature in Norwegian and also of a dictionary of Norwegian Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism.
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About the Contributors
Eliyahu (Ilya) Lizorkin is a lecturer in Jewish and biblical studies at Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary and Haifa Theological Institute in Israel. He holds the MDiv from the Reformed Theological Seminary and the MPhil and DPhil from Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He was a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2008–2009). Additional studies include PhD seminars at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton Theological Seminary (USA). Matthew Forrest Lowe is a graduate of the University of Rochester and a PhD candidate at McMaster Divinity College (Hamilton, Ontario), where he also serves as archivist at the Canadian Baptist Archives. While assembling his dissertation on the Roman Empire’s impact on Paul’s soteriology, Matt has published related work in Literature & Theology, the Princeton Theological Review, and the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity & Judaism and in volumes from Brill and Eerdmans on political theology, biblical theology, and the New Testament’s classical and imperial background. David Mahan serves as the president of the Rivendell Institute at Yale University. He received his BA from Miami (Ohio) in history, his MAR in religion and literature from Yale Divinity School, and his PhD in divinity from the University of Cambridge. His dissertation on poetry and theology has been published as An Unexpected Light: Theology and Witness in the Poetry & Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, Princeton Theological Monographs Series, 2009). He has published other essays on these poets and continues to write and teach on Â�twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology and literature. He and his wife Karen and their children reside in Hamden, Connecticut. Dominic Manganiello (BA, McGill; DPhil, Oxford) is professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Joyce’s Politics (1980) and T. S. Eliot and Dante (1989) and coauthor of Rethinking the Future of the University (1998). Although he has written extensively on canonical modern authors and the culture of modernism, his recent work has also focused on a group of writers that includes, among others, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy╯L. SayersÂ�, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh and their return to the Middle Ages as a quest to locate the roots of Western culture. His current book-length project, Making Dante New, accordingly examines the nature of the high-level reception that twentieth-century writers accorded The Divine Comedy.
Claude Mariottini is professor of the Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. He received his PhD at the Southern Baptist Seminary and has done additional graduate work at the Graduate Theological Union. He was born in Brazil and has served as pastor of churches in California, Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois. Mariottini has published more than two hundred articles and book reviews in English, Spanish, and Russian. He has written commentaries on Deuteronomy, 1╯and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles and has contributed to The Anchor Bible Dictionary, The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, and many other publications. Louis Markos (PhD, University of Michigan), professor in English and honors and a scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. He is the author of Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World; From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics; and Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age. He also authored two lecture series with the Teaching Company (The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis and Plato to PostÂ� modernism). Apologetics for the 21st Century and The Eye of the Beholder: How to See the World like a Romantic Poet are forthcoming in 2010. Timothy G. McAlpine is associate professor of English and serves as Humanities and Fine Arts Division chair at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky. His teaching career includes work in literature, composition, and English as a second language in both the United States and Japan, where he coauthored (with Toshiyuki Suzuki) the textbook Writing Basic Literature Papers. In addition to his doctoral dissertation on William CowÂ� per’s poetry (Reframing the 1782 Satires of William Cowper), McAlpine has also presented conference papers on Cowper, John Dryden, and Frances Burney. McAlpine received his MA and PhD from Purdue University and his BA from Westmont College. Markus McDowell has taught religion at Pepperdine University and Westmont College. Marie Cebaud Meaney is currently an Arthur J. Ennis Fellow at Villanova University. She received her doctorate in French literature from Oxford University and wrote her thesis on Simone Weil. Meaney obtained from the same institution an MPhil in European Literature, an MPhil in Philosophy from the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, and a DEUG from the Sorbonne,
About the Contributors
Paris. Her book Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretation of Ancient Greek Texts was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. Kay B. Meyers is professor of English and codirector of the honors program at Oral Roberts University. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth-century American and British literature, Christian women writers, and literary theory. She has published numerous articles and reviews and has made presentations at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the College English Association, and the American Literature Association. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for Christians in Higher Education. She received her PhD from the University of Tulsa and her BA and MA from the University of Oklahoma. Darren J. N. Middleton is professor of religion at Texas Christian University (TCU), Fort Worth. Born and raised in England, he has published seven books, including Mother Tongue Theologies: Poets, Novelists, Non-Western Christianity (2009), and he recently received one of TCU’s highest honors, the AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Distinguished Achievement as a Creative Teacher and Scholar. He is currently working on a book about the internationalization of the Rastafari movement. Melanie Springer Mock is associate professor of English and department chair at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon. Her essays have appeared in Christian Feminism Today, Literary Mama, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Adoptive Families, and Brain, Child, among other places. Her book Writing Peace: The Unheard Voices of Great War Mennonite Objectors was published by Cascadia in 2003. Jeff Morrow is assistant professor at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University and a senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He earned his BA in comparative religion and classical Greek from Miami University and his MA and PhD in theology from the University of Dayton. His research area of focus is the history of biblical interpretation. He has articles in print and forthcoming from such journals as the Scottish Journal of Theology, New Blackfriars, and the Evangelical Review of Theology. Matthew F. Namee (BA, Wichita State) is an independent historian of American Orthodox Christianity. He specializes in the history of Orthodoxy in America from the
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mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. He is the associate director of the Society for Orthodox Christian History in the Americas and operates the society’s Web site, OrthodoxHistory.org. He hosts the American Orthodox History podcast on Ancient Faith Radio and has lectured at numerous conferences. He authored the peer-reviewed article “Father Raphael Morgan: America’s First Black Orthodox Priest” in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly (2009) and is coauthor of Wichita’s Lebanese Heritage (Arcadia, 2010). Ryan A. Neal is assistant professor of Christian studies at Anderson University, South Carolina. His research interests include Christology, soteriology, and eschatology. He is the author of numerous publications on Jürgen Moltmann, including the book Theology as Hope (Princeton Theological Monograph Series). He received his PhD and MTh in systematic theology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and his MDiv from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. James Arne Nestingen began work in the history of biblical interpretation at the University of Toronto, writing a dissertation on Romans 10:4 as a historical, exegetical, and theological problem. A subsequent article, “Major Trends in the Interpretation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans” published in Word and World, provides an overview of major schools that have developed since the Reformation. Following a doctorate at the Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto, Nestingen taught for three decades at the Luther Seminary in St. Paul. In retirement, he teaches Internet courses for the Institute of Lutheran Theology, which has offices in Brookings, South Dakota. Matthew del Nevo is a senior lecturer and head of the Department of Christian Spirituality at the Broken Bay Institute in Sydney, Australia, a Catholic diocesan theological college and a campus of Sydney College of Divinity. He mainly writes philosophical theology, and his most recent work is in the areas of Christian spirituality and theological aesthetics. John G. Newman is assistant professor of linguistics in the English department of the University of Texas at Brownsville. He began his academic career in the late 1980s, and he has been employed by universities in Poland and China as well as the United States. His recent publications focus on medieval English noun morphology and modern English Latinate borrowings. He is the author of The Spread of the s-Plural Formative in Old and Middle English Nouns (Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, 2008).
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About the Contributors
He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Warsaw (Poland) and his MS and BA degrees from Western Washington University.
criticism. More recent books include On Human Bondage (a history of addictions) and Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography.
Stephen Ney is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research interests are mostly in missiology, African literatures, postcolonial theory, and non-Western educational history. His dissertation, to be completed in 2010, deals with the implications of Christian missions and British colonialism for the eventual development of literary writing in southwestern Nigeria.
Brett Chandler Patterson earned his degrees at Furman University, Duke University, and the University of Virginia. His interests are particularly in the field of narrative theology and ethics, having drawn from the religion and literature tradition of Nathan Scott (and Paul Tillich) and╯the narrative ethics tradition of Stanley Hauerwas (and H. Richard Niebuhr). Patterson has a particular love for discussions that bring literature and drama into dialogue with theology and ethics. His recent studies have focused on the works of MacDonald, Tolkien, Lewis, Wolfe, and Card as well as the intersection of theology and popular culture.
Michael O’Laughlin, ThD, is a spiritual director and professional linguist living in Carlisle, Massachusetts. He holds degrees in theology from Oxford University and Harvard University. He has written primarily about Evagrius Ponticus and Henri Nouwen, including Henri Nouwen: His Life and Vision and God’s Beloved: A Spiritual Biography of Henri Nouwen. Brent Olson studied poetry at Western Washington University and theology at Bethel Seminary. He grew up with the Cascade Mountains and Puget Sound in Washington state. Sheryl O’Sullivan is a professor of English at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California, where she teaches courses in children’s and adolescent literature. Her doctorate is in education, and her publications often focus on topics pertaining to children’s literature, schooling, and moral development. Flavien Pardigon is currently at Association Francophone Européenne de Théologiens Evangeliques. He was born and raised in southern France and received his LTh and MTh from the Faculté Libre de Théologie Reformée in Aix-en-Provence and his PhD in historical and theological studies from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, Flavien’s ministry is to train and disciple church leaders in the developing world. He is married with three children. Douglas Lane Patey is Sophia Smith professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1979 in the English department as well as in the college’s programs in linguistics and the history of science. A student of the eighteenth century by training, he is the author of Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age and essays on Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Hegel, and the development of literary
J. D. Payne serves with the North American Mission Board and as an associate professor of church planting and evangelism at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His ministry experience involves serving as a pastor of churches and with several church-planting teams in the United States. He is also the author of Missional House Churches: Reaching Our Communities with the Gospel; The Barnabas Factors: Eight Essential Practices of Church Planting Team Members; and Discovering Church Planting: An Introduction to the Whats, Whys, and Hows of Global Church Planting. He is also the founder of the Web-based resource NorthAmericanMissions.org. He received his PhD and MDiv from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and his BA from the University of Kentucky. Luke Molberg Pederson is senior pastor of West Hills Covenant Church, Portland, Oregon. His work in Jesus’s name exhibits an enduring commitment to prayer and evangelism, care for the earth, and social justice. Academic interests include chronic pain as a genre of pastoral care, the experience of immigrant churches, and the life and legacy of E. Stanley Jones. Pederson earned his DMin at Asbury Theological Seminary and his MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary and spent one year in residence at his denominational school, North Park Theological Seminary. He has studied abroad in Norway and Iran and was instrumental in establishing Mission Moldova, a partnership of help and hope. Rosie Perera is a freelance writer, teacher, conference speaker, lay preacher, photographer, film producer, and computer consultant. She is a regular columnist for Comment and has published articles in Ethix and Direction. She blogs for Iambic Admonit, Space for God, and Faith & Technology. Her writing focuses on the relationships
About the Contributors
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among faith, technology, and the arts. Her prior career was in software engineering. She received a master’s degree in Christian studies from Regent College and an ScB from Brown University.
Teaching and the historical development of moral doctrine, with special interest in peacemaking and issues of conscience and reconciliation. She has written and lectured extensively on the life and impact of Dorothy Day.
Greg Peters is assistant professor of medieval and spiritual theology in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. He is also visiting assistant professor of church history at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin and adjunct assistant professor of monastic studies at St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota. His main research interests are the history of monasticism and spirituality, primarily in the medieval period. He is the author of Peter of Damascus: Byzantine Monk and Spiritual Theologian and is currently writing a book titled Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of Religious Life. He received his PhD from the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.
Andrew W. Pitts has earned degrees in theology and biblical studies and is currently pursuing a PhD in the New Testament. He has authored and coauthored several essays and articles in peer-reviewed academic literature.
William H. Petersen is emeritus dean and professor of ecclesiastical and ecumenical history, Bexley Hall, Columbus, Ohio. Seminary has been the primary venue of his career, but he has also served parishes. He is a member of the Anglican International Liturgical Conference, founder of the Advent Project Seminar in the North American Academy of Liturgy, and past president of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, and he continues service on the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission. He received his PhD from the Graduate Theological Union, his MDiv (also DD) from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and his BA from Grinnell College. Ashley R. Peterson is currently a French graduate teaching assistant at the University of Kansas. She graduated from Baylor University with a bachelor’s of music in 2007 and spent the following year teaching English in Paris as a Fulbright fellow. May 2008 she received the Ted Johnson Interrelations of the Humanities and the Arts Award, for which she researched the relationship between French authors and French composers, particularly within crossgenre works including Molière’s comédie-ballets and Â�Ravel’s fantaisie lyrique. Peterson helps lead the University of Kentucky’s chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, seeking to promote Christian scholarship within a public educational institution. Margaret Pfeil is assistant professor of moral theology and a fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, from which she holds BA and PhD degrees. She also is a member of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend, Indiana. Her research has explored Catholic Social
J. Kristian Pratt is professor of religion at Spartanburg Methodist College. His research interests include religion in America and Baptist history, with particular emphasis on Landmark Baptists. Anne West Ramirez is associate professor of English and the Literature/Humanities Group leader at Neumann University, Aston, Pennsylvania, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature, Shakespeare, literature for children and adolescents, and several introductory courses in literature, research, and writing. She received degrees from Ithaca College, SUNY Binghamton, and more recently Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation explored Emily Dickinson’s affinities with the Bible and numerous other writers. Ramirez’s interdisciplinary interests in literature, women’s studies, and religion are reflected in four academic articles, ten academic presentations, and more than forty other articles and book reviews. Constance L. Rice is associate professor of English at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington. She teaches literature and writing, including American literature, freshmen writing courses, rhetoric and persuasion, faith in contemporary film, faith in contemporary literature, Christian classics, Romantic literature, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She is a C. S. Lewis scholar with presentations at conferences on Lewis and in various journal publications. She has studied Lewis at Oxford University and the Bodleian Library. She received her MA from Tennessee State University and received one BA from California State College and another BA from Trinity Bible College. Joe Ricke is professor of English and director of the Honors Program at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. He received his PhD from Rice University and his BA from Nyack College. His scholarly work and teaching have primarily been on medieval literature, Renaissance literature, drama, and the relationship of Christianity to literature. He is also an actor and director, having directed several of the plays of William Shakespeare as well as his own adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone.
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About the Contributors
Kyle Roberts is assistant professor of systematic theology at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2006. He has contributed several chapters to KierkeÂ�gaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources (Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, University of Copenhagen) on the Bible as a source for Kierkegaard’s theology and Kierkegaard’s influence on modern theology. Roberts has presented numerous papers on theological hermeneutics, theological method, and Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy at various conferences, including the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the International Kierkegaard Conference. Michelle Voss Roberts teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She received her PhD in theological studies from Emory University (2006), her MTS from the Candler School of Theology (2002), and her BA from Calvin College (1998). She has served as cochair of the Comparative Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion and is the author of several articles in comparative theology. Her book Dualities: A Theology of Difference, forthcoming from Westminster John Knox Press in 2011, features the theologies of medieval women mystics in the Hindu and Christian traditions. Jason C. Robinson is assistant professor of philosophy and contemporary studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, in Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on hermeneutics and the dialogue between the natural and human sciences. His most recent work is a volume coedited with Jay Lampert, Philosophical Apprenticeships: Contemporary Continental Philosophy in Canada. Robinson received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 2009. Joanne Maguire Robinson has taught in the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte since 1996. She holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls” (2001). Yolanda J. Robles is a doctoral student in the department of English at Baylor University. Her concentration is religion and literature with a specialty in nineteenthcentury literary criticism. Under the direction of Dr. Stephen Prickett, she is working on a dissertation that examines the interconnections between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Julius Hare, a little-known participant in
the Broad Church movement and supporter of German scholarship. Biff Rocha is assistant professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. His area of interest is in religious communication and the American Catholic experience. He earned his first MA degree in speech communication and rhetoric from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His degrees in theology come from the University of Dayton, where he is currently completing his dissertation on the Baltimore catechism. Richard A. Rosengarten is dean and associate professor of religion and literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Leland Ryken is professor of English at Wheaton College, where he has taught since 1968. He has published three dozen books on such topics as the Bible as literature, English Bible translation, the Puritans, work and leisure, the arts in Christian perspective, and specific literary authors and works. He was educated at Central College and the University of Oregon. Martha C. Sammons is professor of English at Wright State University, where she has taught since 1975. Her publications include War of the Fantasy Worlds: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien on Art and Imagination; Document Design for Writers; The Longman Guide to Style and Writing on the Internet; A Guide through Narnia: Revised and Expanded Edition; “A Far-Off Country”: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’ Fantasy Fiction; and “A Better Country”: The Worlds of Religious Fantasy and Science Fiction. She has also written articles on both fantasy fiction and teaching with technology. Gary Sattler, DTh, PsyD, is a Presbyterian minister, pastoral counselor, and research psychoanalyst. He teaches the history of Christian spirituality in the DMin program at Fuller Theological Seminary and is affiliate professor of church history and pastoral care at Northern Theological Seminary. George L. Scheper (AB, Duke University; PhD, Princeton University) is coordinator of humanities and professor emeritus at Community College of Baltimore County; faculty associate of Advanced Academic Programs of Johns Hopkins University; and frequent lecturer for Smithsonian Associates. He has directed fifteen National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for college faculty on Mesoamerican and Native American studies in
About the Contributors
Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Canada and is author of the bio-critical study Michael Innes and articles on cultural studies in PMLA, Religion and the Arts, the New England Quarterly, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, the Encyclopedia of Religion, the Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, and the anthologies The Rhetoric of Vision and The Conscience of Humankind. Glen G. Scorgie (PhD, University of St. Andrews) has been professor of theology at Bethel Seminary San Diego since 1996. Previously he served as academic vice president of North American Baptist College in Edmonton, Alberta, and is a past president of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association. His writings include A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr; (coeditor) The Challenge of Bible Translation; The Journey Back to Eden: Restoring the Creator’s Design for Women and Men; and A Little Guide to Christian Spirituality. Currently he is general editor for a dictionary of Christian spirituality to be published by Zondervan. He has lectured throughout Asia and now assists in the ministries of a Chinese church in San Diego. Sally Jo Shelton is a librarian and assistant professor at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she serves as the library faculty facilitator. She taught theological research in the Oral Roberts University School of Theology & Missions for three years. Previous publications include book reviews for Pneuma. She received an MA in systematic theology from Oral Roberts University in 2004 and an MLIS from the University of Oklahoma in 1995. By the end of the autumn 2009 semester, she will have completed course work toward a PhD in theology at Regent University, Virginia Beach, Virginia, where she was the Dooner Scholar from 2007 to 2009. Her current research is focused on theological anthropology and soteriology from a pneumatological perspective. Randall Smith is associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He received a BA in chemistry from Cornell College and an MA in theology from the University of Dallas. He completed his dissertation on the relationship between the Old Law and the Natural Law in the thought of Thomas Aquinas at the University of Notre Dame in 1998, working under the direction of professors Ralph McInerny and David Solomon. Smith’s written work includes articles on both the Natural Law and the cardinal and theological virtues. He is currently at work on a reader of classic texts in the Natural Law tradition.
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Stephanie Mar Smith is visiting assistant professor of theology at Whitworth University. She holds a master’s degree in Christian studies from Regent College in Vancouver and a PhD in theology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She has published several articles on theology and ethics and is the author of a forthcoming book, Theological Theories of Justice. Carl P. E. Springer is professor of classics and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Springer has written extensively on the Christian Latin poets of late antiquity, especially Sedulius, and is currently completing a book on Martin Luther’s use of Aesop’s fables. Springer received a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Belgium and served as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Springer earned his MA in biblical languages and his PhD in classics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. John G. Stackhouse Jr. holds the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Chair of Theology and Culture at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of seven books, the editor of four more, and the author of more than five hundred articles and reviews in the history, philosophy, sociology, and theology of Christianity and in the study of religion. He received his BA from Queen’s University at Kingston, Canada; his MA from the Wheaton College Graduate School; and his PhD from the University of Chicago. Glen Harold Stassen is Lewis Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary. He has authored Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context with David Gushee, which Christianity Today awarded “Best Book of 2004 in Theology or Ethics.” Stassen published Living the Sermon on the Mount (Jossey-Bass, 2006), Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace (Westminster John Knox, 1992), Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim, 1998/2004/2008), and Authentic Transformation: A New Vision for Christ and Culture (Abingdon, 1996) with D. M. Yeager and John Howard Yoder, and he has edited The War of the Lamb, by John Howard Yoder (Brazos, 2009). Mimosa Summers Stephenson holds a PhD in English (major Victorian literature) from Texas Technological College, which she attended with a National Defense Fellowship. After eight years at Hong Kong Baptist College and William Jewell College, she has taught thirty-six years at the University of Texas at Brownsville. From August 2000 to July 2001 she served as a Fulbright lecturer at
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About the Contributors
Xiamen University in the People’s Republic of China. In 1992 she was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Outstanding Teaching Award of the University of Texas System. She has published in such journals as the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Studies in Scottish Literature, and Studies in American Humor. Pascha A. Stevenson is currently an adjunct professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, from which she earned her PhD in literature. Her chief area of professional inquiry is in contemporary American ethnic literature, with a view to the ways that ethics and religion inform the reading and writing of literary prose. Her recent publications can be found in the Ethnic Studies Review, the Journal of Caribbean Studies, Women’s Studies, and Frontiers, among others. She also writes and publishes creative nonfiction, for which she received a national award in 2008. Peter Stiles is director of International and Professional Activities and a Senior English Teacher at Trinity Grammar School in Sydney, Australia. He is also a part-time lecturer in education at the Wesley Institute, Sydney. He holds a doctorate in literature and theology from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and organizes conferences in this interdisciplinary area. Peter Stiles has had poems, articles, and reviews published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. He is the Australian representative for the Conference on Christianity and Literature (USA). Debra L. Stoudt is professor of German and associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her scholarly publications focus on the lives and works of the medieval German male and female mystics as well as on the relationship between magic and medicine in the Middle Ages. She coedited (with Jacqueline Hamesse, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, and Anne T. Thayer) Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University. Stoudt earned her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her BS from West Chester University. Jacob Stratman is assistant professor of English and coordinator of Freshman Summer Reading at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. His primary literary research interest is American reform literature, and he has written articles on John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stratman earned his PhD from Marquette University. Mark L. Strauss (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of the New Testament at Bethel Seminary San Diego. He is the author or editor of various books, including
“Mark” in The Expositors Bible Commentary (rev. ed.; Zondervan, 2010), Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels (Zondervan, 2007), How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth (with Gordon Fee; Zondervan, 2007), The Essential Bible Companion (with John Walton; 2006), “Luke” in the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Background Commentary (Zondervan, 1999), Distorting Scripture? The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy (InterVarsity, 1998), and The Davidic Messiah in Luke-Acts (Sheffield, 1996). He has an active preaching ministry in the San Diego area, where he lives with his wife and three children. R. Alan Streett holds the W. A. Criswell Chair of Expositor Preaching at Criswell College in Dallas and serves as editor of the Criswell Theological Review. He is the author of Effective Invitation (Kregel, 2004) and the “Twisted Scriptures” section of the Apologetics Study Bible (Broadman and Holman, 2007). Steven Studebaker, PhD (Marquette University), holds the Howard and Shirley Bentall Chair in Evangelical Thought and is assistant professor of systematic and historical theology at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, Ontario. He is an active member in the Society for Pentecostal Studies and the editor of Defining Issues in Pentecostalism: Classical and Emergent and the author of Jonathan Edwards’ Social Augustinian Trinitarianism in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives and of several articles on Pentecostal theology. He is ordained with the Assemblies of God. Hidemi Takahashi is currently associate professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. His publications have been mainly in the field of Syriac studies and include Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Books of Mineralogy and Meteorology (Brill, 2004) and Barhebraeus: A BioBibliography (Gorgias Press, 2005). He holds degrees in classical and Oriental studies from the universities of St. Andrews (MA), Tokyo (MLitt), and Frankfurt (Dr Phil). W. Randolph Tate is professor of humanities at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, where he has taught for twenty-five years. His publications include Reading Mark from the Outside: Eco and Iser Leave Their Marks; Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach; Interpreting the Bible: A Handbook of Terms and Methods; and a number of journal articles. He received his PhD from Florida State University, his MDiv from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, and his BS from Georgia Southern University.
About the Contributors
Daniel M. Train is a PhD candidate in the religion and literature program within the English department at Baylor University. His dissertation focuses on Flannery O’Connor’s exegetical practices and the hermeneutical implications that those may suggest for readers of her fiction. He has presented papers on the role of vision in O’Connor’s and Walker Percy’s fiction and on ways that Simone Weil’s pedagogy can inform current practices in rhetoric and composition courses. Train received his MA in English from Baylor University and a BA in Humanities from Biola University in California. William G. Travis is professor emeritus of church history at Bethel Seminary, where he has taught since 1978. Previously, he taught at The King’s College in New York (1968–1978). He holds the BA (Gordon College), the BD (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary), the STM (Boston University School of Theology), and the PhD (New York University). He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the American Church History Society. He has coauthored four books: two of annotated bibliography on the history of American evangelicalism, one on world religions, and a devotional work centered on the divine attributes. He has written several scholarly essays and many scholarly presentations. Within American church history generally, he is interested in historical theology, revivalism, and the church’s relating to culture. Mary Alice Trent is professor of English at Oral Roberts University, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. She holds a PhD in rhetoric and composition, with areas in linguistics, early American literature, and nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her memberships include National Council of Teachers of English; Conference on College Composition and Communication; Modern Language Association; Conference on College Composition and Communication Black Caucus; College English Association; Council on Christian Colleges and Universities; Phi Kappa Phi; and Sigma Tau Delta. Her distinctions include Oxford Round Table Scholar and UMC Crusade Scholar. Books published are The Language of Diversity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Ethics in the 21st Century (Longman, 2005), and Religion, Culture, Curriculum, and Diversity in 21st Century America (University Press of America, 2007) along with scholarly journal articles and poetry publications. Thomas Trzyna is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. He formerly taught at the Ohio State University and received his degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington. His
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recent books have focused on issues related to international education, comparative religion, and peace studies. Henk Vigeveno is professor of homiletics at Bethel Seminary, San Diego. An ordained Presbyterian minister (PCUSA), he has served numerous pastorates in New Jersey and southern California and authored seventeen books. He is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary. Sotirios Vlavianos is a student of law and a graduate student of theology at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a BA in theology from the department of theology of the Aristotelian University and a master of theology (ThM) from Holy Cross School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. Eric W. Vogt, PhD, teaches all levels of Spanish language, including composition and conversation at Seattle Pacific University. In literature, he teaches Spanish Golden Age literature (Renaissance and Baroque peninsular literature), the Latin American Capstone Seminar (Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad being the primary text), and translation, technical and literary. His published research expresses this geographical and historical range. In addition, he is certified by the American Translators Association as a technical translator and is active in this guild. Blake Walter is the director of the Brimson Grow Library and director of academic administration at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois. His career as a theological librarian spans twenty years and includes positions at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the JKM Library in Chicago. As a theological librarian, he enjoys the work of connecting books and people for the greater good of the church. He has an MLIS from Rosary College and a BA from Wheaton College. Patricia A. Ward is professor emerita of French and comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. She has also served in faculty positions at the State University of New York at Albany and the Pennsylvania State University and as dean of Arts and Sciences at Wheaton College. Her books include Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and Their Readers (Baylor University Press, 2009). David B. Warner is president emeritus of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy (a Catholic liberal arts college in Ontario, Canada) and a senior fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He earned his PhD in theology
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About the Contributors
and religious studies from Maryvale Institute, England, in collaboration with Greyfriars, University of Oxford. Warner retired in 2009, due to a relapse of myeloma cancer, after thirty years of teaching and academic administration in all levels of Christian education in five countries. A native of northern California, he and his wife live in Virginia, where he continues his research in the areas of biblical theology, the theology and renewal of Catholic education, the life and thought of John Henry Newman, church history, and patristic literature. Kendra Weddle Irons taught for six and a half years in the religious studies department at George Fox University, where she was granted tenure in the spring of 2009. Having recently moved to Texas, she continues her research centering on Christianity in America, women in Christianity, and Methodism. Her first book, Preaching on the Plains: Methodist Women Preachers in Kansas, 1920–1956, was published in April 2007. Weddle Irons received her PhD in religion from Baylor University in Waco, Texas; her MA in theological studies from Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky; and her BA in religion/philosophy from Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. Myles Werntz is a PhD candidate in theology at Baylor University who writes on war and peace in the Christian tradition, ecclesiology, and contemporary theology. Michael Westmoreland-White, PhD, is a former soldier converted to gospel nonviolence and academic theologian turned peace activist, author, and peace educator. Mel R. Wilhoit is professor of music at Bryan College in Tennessee. He holds the DMA from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the MM from Mankato State University, and the BS in music from Bob Jones University. Wilhoit’s studies have focused on American and European music traditions, particularly church hymnody and congregational song. A recognized contributor to the journal The Hymn, he has also written for The New Century Hymnal Companion and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Joseph Williams received his PhD in American religion from Florida State University and currently serves as an adjunct faculty member in the religion department at Florida State University and at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. He is also the coeditor of H-Pentecostalism, associated with H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
Elizabeth G. Wolfe currently works on the editorial team at Baylor University Press and has tutored in the Writing Center and taught freshman composition. She joined the English religion and literature PhD program in 2004, specializing in medieval literature and theology; her dissertation is tentatively titled “Poetics of Holiness: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Pearl Poet.” Other interests include Thomas Aquinas, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, and she has contributed articles on Bernard of Clairvaux and Fanny J. Crosby to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization. Wolfe is a 2003 magna cum laude graduate from Baylor, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and German. Linda Mills Woolsey is professor of English literature and associate academic dean at Houghton College, Houghton, New York, where she is also a member of the Honors Program faculty. She received her PhD in nineteenth-century studies from Drew University and an MA in English literature from SUNY, Binghamton. She has published articles and presented papers on Romantic narrative, the religious essay, Anglo-Welsh poetry, and Appalachian literature. She has received the Sears-Roebuck Award for Excellence in Teaching and Campus Leadership, has participated in the CCCU Executive Leadership Development Institute and the Calvin Summer Seminars program, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Barbara H. Wyman is instructor of Latin and English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her professional career centers on Latin, promoting its study in the university and in the community to encourage appreciation for the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Academically, she focuses on Boethius, George Herbert, and John Henry Newman. Her publications include (with colleague Scott Goins) a translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, forthcoming from Ignatius Press (an Ignatius Critical Edition) and articles in scholarly journals, including “Boethian Influence and Imagery in the Poetry of George Herbert,” Studies in Philology 97 (Winter 2000). A mother of two, she is married to Bruce Wyman, MSU professor. She received her MA and MFA from MSU. Kent L. Yinger is associate professor of the New Testament at George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland (Oregon). His professional career includes mission service (Europe/Germany) and administration of advanced theological programs (PhD, ThM). He is active in biblical studies professional guilds and in publications in the field of Pauline literature and theology. Yinger received his PhD from the University of Sheffield, the MDiv from
About the Contributors
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and the BA from Wheaton College. Mark and Louise Zwick are the founders of Casa Juan Diego, the Houston Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, where they have spent many years receiving immigrants and refugees and especially the sick and injured. They are editors of the newspaper Houston Catholic Worker/Â�Trabajador Católico and the authors of the book
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The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, published by Paulist Press. Their forthcoming book is Can the Works of Mercy Be Illegal? Stories from the Underside of the Immigration Debate, also to be published by Paulist. Mark received his master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago, and Louise received a master’s of library science from the University of California at Berkeley.
About the Editors
George Thomas Kurian is the president of the Encyclopedia Society and the editor of sixty books, including twenty-seven encyclopedias. Among them are the World Christian Encyclopedia (2 vols., Oxford University Press, 2000), the Dictionary of Christianity (Thomas Nelson, 2001), and the Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (4 vols., Blackwell, 2008). James D. Smith III ([email protected]) is associate professor of church history at Bethel Seminary (San Diego) and frequently lecturer in theology & religious studies at the University of San Diego. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and recently taught at Daystar University, Nairobi, Kenya. An ordained minister, he has pastored churches in Boston, Minneapolis, and San Diego. Among recent publications, he has coedited The Fabric of Early Christianity (with Philip Sellew) and The Subjective Eye (with Richard Valentasis), and forthcoming is the Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (with Glen Scorgie). Smith is an editorial adviser to Christian History & Biography. He received the ThD and ThM from Harvard University, the MDiv from Bethel Seminary, and the AB from San Diego State University.
Mark E. Roberts is associate professor at Oral Roberts University, where he directs the Holy Spirit Research Center and teaches the New Testament as an adjunct to the Graduate School of Theology. He also edits publications such as this encyclopedia and publishes works pertinent to Pentecostal-charismatic studies through Word & Spirit Press. He attended Palomar College (San Marcos, California) and Jackson College of Ministries (Mississippi) and received a BA from Mississippi College, an MA from Ohio State University, and an MA and PhD from Vanderbilt University. Sarah Claudine Day is managing editor of the Encyclopedia Society. She has worked on a number of multi�volume reference works including, most recently, Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, Encyclopedia of Political Science (5 vols.), Encyclopedia of the Democratic Party (2 vols.), and Encyclopedia of the Republican Party (2 vols.). She is a graduate of Vassar College and lives in Rochester, New╯York.
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