Page 1609 – Christianity Today (2024)

Introduction to Uprising of Goats: A Collection of the Voices of Ten Biblical Women

Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily besets us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.—Hebrews 12:1 (KJV)

Do you see what this means? All these pioneers who blazed the way. All these veterans cheering us on. It means we better get on with it, strip down, start running and never quit.—Hebrews 12:1 (The Message)

I wanted to explore the voices of a few women in the cloud of witnesses—those veterans who went before us.

I decided their voices would be like the goat-hair bolster that Michal, the daughter of Saul and first wife of David, put in David’s bed when her father wanted to kill him. The bolster made it look like David was sleeping there, though he had fled, letting himself down from the window.

I knew the voices of these women weren’t really there—no one had recorded them, or if they had, their words were few. But I wanted a facsimile of what they could have said, as best as could be told by what I read of them in Scripture.

I wanted to look at their predicaments and personalities. I wanted to hear their hopes, angers and disappointments. Michal, for instance, always has been dismissed as someone who mocked David when he danced before the ark. But a different picture emerged when I looked at her life. She raised her sister’s five sons after her death. Later, she saw them hanged by David because their grandfather, Saul, had broken an old covenant with the Gibeonites.

I wanted to walk in the shoes of these women. I wanted to experience what they faced—their triumphs, injustices, failings. It was as if their lives were not complete without ours, as ours was not complete without theirs.

I don’t know why these particular voices came to me, but they did. I heard Dorcas’ voice one afternoon as I worked in my office. Miriam came next. I heard the voices of the four daughters of Philip in my semester of research at Baylor University. I also heard their voices when I traveled to Israel and western Turkey. It seems true that the land holds some sort of record of what happened on it. Or the land carries voices of those who lived upon it. Does not Scripture say, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground”?—Genesis 4:10 (KJV)

Now there was one, Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, and had lived with a husband seven years from her virginity; and this woman was a widow of about eighty-four years, who did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And coming in that instant [when Simeon recognized the child Jesus in the arms of Mary] she gave thanks likewise to the Lord, and spoke of him to all those who looked for redemption in Jerusalem.—Luke 2:36-38

Just before Christmas, the pastor of our church was talking about Simeon and Anna. He said that Anna must have led a lonely life in the temple. He saw her languishing for 84 years. I was working on Anna’s voice at the time. She seemed full of life to me. She couldn’t wait to pray. I wanted to raise my hand and disagree with the pastor.

It [the story of Christ] does not exactly work outward …. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being …. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected.—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

All day I pray until I forget to eat the little raisin cake wrapped in cloth. I pray for the lame, the crippled, and those carried on biers. I pray for the blind, the deaf, the poor, the destitute. If I hear someone crying or pleading with God, I go to them. I tell them of my hope in our God. I pray for the maimed. The leper. The possessed. When I feel the heat of the sun, I fold my head-cloth over my forehead again. Someone has given me another raisin cake wrapped in a cloth. Someone has given me another walking stick. I give to someone who needs it.

I hear a cry above the others. I find the woman, and pray for her. She lost a child, probably taken by herders who come into the city. Maybe one of them had a wife who had no child. Or whose child had died. She pleads: Is there no one to track them into the desert? I sit with her while she grieves.

I pray in the main courtyard of the temple all day. At night, I sleep with other widows in our rooms in the smaller women’s courtyard off the main courtyard. I hear the soldiers passing in the street. I see the flicker of the centurions’ barrel fires. I hear the noise of chariots. What would it be to ride in a chariot with those horses that rumble the streets when they pass? But Scripture is a chariot. I wonder where that foolish thought came from. How pitiful thoughts are—forgotten little cakes wrapped in cloth. I pray for the soldiers. They have duties that keep them from God. I grieve for the world. I offer it my prayers.

Prayer is a longing for the absence of separation.

I hear the olive orchards from the hill—their voices raised in praise. Once, I played there as a girl. Once, I was lost in the orchard when my mother gathered olives after dark—I sat with small animals until my mother called. When I was older, I helped her pick the olives. I helped her press them with the mortar and pestle to make oil for our lamp.

In the daylight, I watched the men shake the olive trees, or hit the branches with poles until the olives fell. The small animals, resting in the shade of the trees, would run. The men left a few olives for the wayfarers. It’s what Scripture instructed them to do.

After dark, I stand in the main courtyard under the moon round as prayer. I pray when I go into the women’s small courtyard to sleep. I pray in my dreams. I dream I am praying. I pray I am dreaming when I hear the noise of trouble in the streets—the crazy ones, the beggars, the robbers. Prayer is silver as an olive orchard wrapped in moonlight.

Be quiet, Anna, someone says.

She’s dreaming again, another widow interrupts. As if we didn’t have enough worries, she stirs them up in her sleep. She invents more sorrows.

Lord—there is war in my thoughts. What must it be for others? The evil one tries to interrupt my prayers. Lord, I have seen into your heavens. Yet I cannot keep my mind there. Hosts after hosts upon hosts. Do we stand with them? Do we stand in your courtyard? In front of your throne? Will you tell us where to go? Will there be someone there to guide us?—When your heaven is turned upside down like fishing boats on the shore.

In the morning, I hear a little flock of goats. A man tries to lead them with a stick. I lead my prayers with my walking stick. Sometimes prayers are unruly. They bleat and make noises. I wrestle with the thoughts that are hard to manage as goats.

Someone puts a fig in my hand. I thank them. I hold the fig up in the air. No beggar takes it. I eat the fig, giving thanks to God.

In the mornings, I hear the priests inside the temple where women cannot go. I hear Simeon enter the courtyard from the street. Each morning, he says he will not see death before he sees the Lord’s Christ, the consolation of Israel. I feel the uprising of air. I ride the chariots of praise—salvation is upon us. Blessed is the Lord of hosts. Holy. Holy. The earth is full of holiness. You have given us your foreshadowings—you came as Melchizedek, as the messenger to Abraham, as the angel who wrestled with Jacob, as the appearance of one sitting on his throne to Isaiah, as the one walking in the furnace with Daniel’s friends. What will you do now?

Lord, my thoughts wander like a flock of goats. What is death? I think sometimes I’m more dead than alive. I’m past the years of dying. Is death passing through an olive orchard—my thoughts catching on the gnarled roots, and I trip? Or are we transformed from goats to new beings in your presence? Do we keep our ears or hooves? No, we are not goats. We are people that act like goats. I feel a goat tongue in my mouth. I nat and bleat. Yet you allow me to stay in your presence.

The Lord’s hosts are in the corners of the courtyard. They stand like olive trees when they blossom with white flowers. They are bright sunlight, but Lord, you are brighter. Grace to you and peace to your Almighty name. Forgive us, Lord. We’re blind to what you are. Or we see less of you than there is to see. Surely you have borne our grief and carried our sorrows. You are wounded for our transgressions and with your stripes we are healed. All prophets promise your coming. Our doors are open. Our houses ready. We have not heard from you since Malachi. Our eyes will see, and we will say, The Lord is magnified from the border of Israel.—Malachi 1:5.

Long ago, my husband was sick. I went to the marketplace and when I returned, he was on the floor. I think he was trying to get to the door. His arms outstretched as if he was trying to reach something. If I had been there, I could have reached it for him. There were times I could hear his heart. He always was out of breath. My mother did not want me to marry him, but she finally agreed because he could provide for us. He was a kind husband.

Was it not the same with my father, Phanuel? He was sick and calling out, and I went to my grandmother’s house because my mother didn’t want me to hear. My father died while I was gone.

What if my father and husband passed through the main courtyard on their way through the Gate of Nicanor into the temple. Would they notice an old woman as someone they had known?

I stumble and fall. What had I tripped on? I don’t see anything. Is it those memories cluttering the way? They should ease with age, but they live no matter how long ago they happened. No one helped me up when I fell. I was glad no one saw, or if they did, they ignored me.

Someone puts my walking stick in my hand. I thank them. It’s the weight of prayer that keeps me off balance—O God. O edge of light. O moving shadows on the wall. O roll of clouds. O birds flying there. O fig tree. Pomegranate. Olive orchard. Anointed olive leaves. O moving hems of the robes of widows praying in the open courtyard. O dust that blows there. O women sweeping in the courtyard. Little flock—your shepherd will arrive with healing in his wings.

For years, the widows lived in a lean-to near the stables. For years, we prayed in the main courtyard of the temple, and at night, returned to the lean-tos near the animals. Finally, a room with straw mattresses was opened in the women’s courtyard. I didn’t want to leave my place with the animals, but there were mites in the stalls. Look at those bites on your face and arms, they said. The soldiers drink at night as they sit by their charcoal fires. What if they try to rob you on the street when you walk from the temple in the dark? I tell them I’m beyond danger. The soldiers know I have nothing to steal but a little raisin cake wrapped in cloth. I’m invisible to them—nothing more than a goat.

I pray until I forget the light of day is past. Sometimes I hear a voice—Go to your room, Anna. The Lord knows you’re faithful. Where was the voice coming from? One of the priests on the way to his room? I turned, but could see no one.

Sometimes I hear voices in the streets—the animals tethered for the sacrifice. The little goats know what will happen, as I know.

I pray for the weak. The suffering. I pray for God’s blessings on his people. The praises pour from me. I can’t hold them back. They keep coming and coming. Blessed is the Lord. The first and the last. And all that is in-between. I praise my Redeemer. The author of our lives. The coming one. You have declared it. I call it out unto you.

I remember when I lined a few pebbles against my mat in the stables. I listened to their voices. I heard them praise the Lord in the night. Their little voices traveled on the wind to the olive orchard. The little stones and olive leaves tried to out-praise one another. They tried to praise as loud as the multitudes I hear from the heavens.

I am caught on earth. I am in between this world and the next, part of one and part of the other. Lord—I feel your approach. When Simeon praises you, my own voice joins his. Are we like the stones and olive leaves? No, we are your people—hidden in every tribe. We wait for you. Are you in your chariot, your horses ready to jar our streets?

I have many prayers. Day and night cannot contain them. Sometimes I taste pomegranates when I pray. Sometimes a raisin cake. Sometimes I’m walking in an olive orchard. I see the silver underside of leaves as stars in the heavens. There is no end to praise.

Diane Glancy is visiting professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. Her most recent book is The Dream of a Broken Field, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2011.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Trends in the study of the Puritans have long functioned as a mirror reflecting broader cultural trends. For George Bancroft in the decades before the Civil War it was the Puritans as heralds of democratic freedom. Progressive historians at the turn of the 20th century treated Puritans as the kind of repressed, mean-spirited, theological bigots that right-thinking Americans were finally learning to live without. In the era dominated by the shocks of Depression, World War, and Cold War, Perry Miller and a host of historians in his train returned to respect the Puritans precisely because of their intellectual rigor, high-mindedness, and lofty moral aspirations. A significant number of evangelical Protestants in the mid-20th century and after have followed the lead of Martyn Lloyd-Jones in finding the specifics of Puritan theology the perfect medicine for a spiritually diseased age. In the 1970s and later, American social historians reflected the culture’s displacement of “hegemonic” ideals by ideals attending to the marginal and the victimized, or by no ideals at all. These historians moved early New England studies away from high theology to explorations of land acquisition, generational conflict, the female life course, Indian wars, economic transactions, and the survival of magic.

If this rough account of correlations between scholarly trends and cultural trends holds, it is intriguing to ask what the fine crop of recent books on the Puritans reveals about our era. Scholarship on Jonathan Edwards, who lived at the very end of the Puritan period, has never been so comprehensive and so sympathetic to Edwards main concerns.[1] Essays in Books & Culture have recently drawn attention to outstanding books by Mark Valeri and David Hall that, while obviously benefiting from the research of social historians and by no means providing simplistic propaganda for the Puritans, nonetheless argue persuasively for their significance in theological as well as social terms.[2]

Now, along with other important studies, comes Michael Winship’s meticulously researched argument for the distinctly “republican” character of early New England.[3] Winship displays considerable respect for Puritan efforts to live up to their name—that is, to purify self, church, and society and so fulfill the incomplete promise of the English Reformation. In particular, the book details the significant achievement of the Puritans in establishing a godly political order in the new world, but also the many reversals, ironies, and unexpected twists that attended that achievement.

Godly Republicanism exploits sources on both sides of the Atlantic to explain what the Puritans accomplished. The achievement arose from their character as the real Protestants of their age. Other Protestants might claim to be following the Bible, but Puritans were positively obsessed with the effort to define the church in truly scriptural terms. This obsession then led on to political consequences flowing naturally from that effort. Winship patiently challenges several ideas long accepted by scholars of 17th-century New England before he is ready to draw his own conclusions:

1. The search for a truly biblical church led New England to practice what can be called “determined” (my word) “puritan congregationalism” (Winship’s phrase).
2. Despite conservative opposition of many kinds in England and radical opposition from Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams in Massachusetts, that ecclesiology was successfully implemented. Moreover, it supported a vigorous religious life, but also great vigor in politics and society, from the founding of Massachusetts in 1629 until King Charles II pulled the original charter of the Bay Colony in 1684.
3. By contrast, this determined form of Puritan congregationalism never succeeded in England, where it was first utterly rejected by Anglican opponents but also turned aside almost as definitely by competing Puritan options, and then was fractured by the radical Christian movements unleashed during the English Civil Wars and the rule of Oliver Cromwell (1642-1660).
4. The determined Puritan congregationalism practiced in New England supported a genuinely Christian form of republican politics, with republicanism defined negatively as constant wariness about the abuse of unchecked power and positively as a belief that the virtue of citizens was the key to the health of a nation.
5. For the long term, the success of “godly republicanism” in 17th-century New England meant that when the colonies began to protest against King George III’s “tyranny” in the 1760s, the republican ideology behind their protests enjoyed a distinctly Christian precedent even as it was also fueled by more secular Enlightenment principles.

Winship engages in quite a bit of densely footnoted inside baseball to defend these conclusions. First, “New England” means primarily the Plymouth colony (founded by “Pilgrims” in 1620), Massachusetts Bay, and New Haven (a separate colony on the north shore of Long Island Sound that existed from 1638 until absorbed into Connecticut in 1662). Connecticut, first settled as a kind of outpost of Massachusetts in the mid-1630s, but where its definite charter of 1662 came from the king and whose churches always leaned a little bit more toward presbyterianism, also counts as “New England” but not quite as purely.

Godly Republicanism directly challenges long-accepted opinion that has denied the general importance of the Plymouth Colony. It was founded by “moderate separates” who had abandoned efforts to reform the episcopal Church of England and whose wanderings had taken them to the Netherlands before they came to America. Their key role, according to Winship, was to display an actually functioning model of a truly scriptural church for the Puritans who arrived in great numbers from 1629, but whose protests against Anglican abuses had never clearly united behind a single alternative for a biblically reformed church life. Thus, Plymouth strongly supported the initial Massachusetts church, founded at Salem in 1629, when it established itself as a “militantly” (my word) Puritan congregation, and then guided succeeding Massachusetts churches toward their determined form of Puritan congregationalism.

Winship also challenges the many accounts of early-modern republicanism that have pictured it as an essentially secular ideology strongly inimical, with its all-out focus on worldly power, to the Puritans’ strict Calvinism. Instead, he argues that the “godly republicanism” of early New England came directly from spiritual sources. The Puritans’ greatest desire was to bring about biblical reform of churches corrupted by abuses of unchecked power. In Massachusetts and New Haven, Puritans also set up a system to ensure that truly virtuous citizens controlled the body politic. This was a scheme whereby the freemen (male citizens) elected the colony’s officials, the sole qualification to be a freeman was church membership, and church membership required a testimony of God’s gracious work in one’s life. Explicitly Christian virtue thus grounded the health of the “commonwealth,” an expressly republican term. Those scholars, including myself, who have described the republicanism of the Revolutionary era as secular may reply that the early Puritan arrangement was soon modified by the Puritans themselves and then completely abrogated when Massachusetts was taken over as a royal colony in 1684.[4] But Winship nonetheless makes a strong case for a definite Christian root to the founding republican principles of the United States.

This re-interpretation of early New England history hinges on careful discrimination among the different varieties of English and American Puritans. Never, one might think, has a scholar made so much of so little. Yet paying close heed to how he describes these Puritan varieties is, in the end, convincing. The following chart, which sets things out as an “invention” in the Ramist logic so beloved by the Puritans, summarizes those distinctions, though it would have clarified Winship’s argument if he himself had provided such a scorecard.

Stuart Anglicans were the monarchs, James I and Charles I, and their bishops who opposed Calvinism, promoted Arminian theology, and moved toward Catholicism in their rituals. To the Puritans they constituted a stupendous barrier to the biblical reforms that the English church so desperately needed.

In Winship’s usage, Puritans were the great promoters of church reform, but who also insisted on maintaining “Christendom,” or the comprehensive church-state unity that had been the European norm for more than a millennium.

Conforming Puritans were willing to live with the Anglican system of bishops if they were free to promote Calvinist theology and biblical preaching.

Presbyterian Puritans wanted to replace the bishops with regional and national synods of godly pastors and lay elders. They expected congregations to aid in selecting pastors, but, once selected, the pastors, acting in presbyteries, were to be the controlling force in promoting godliness. Presbyterian Puritans, closely aligned with Scottish Presbyterians, gained the upper hand in the early years of the English Civil War, during which time they organized the Westminster Assembly that produced the famous Confession and other Presbyterian standards. But these English Presbyterians lost out to the congregational and more radical elements during the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell.

Congregational Puritans sought churches organized by covenants among members, ministers elected by congregations and responsible strictly to those congregations, and (in New England) church membership on the basis of a testimony of God’s saving grace. The goal was to insulate biblically formed congregations from the corrupting abuses of power.

Determined congregational Puritans dominated New England. Winship says they practiced “separation-without-separating” because they claimed to be only reformers of the national church and because they allowed fellowship with godly Puritans who remained in the parishes of the Church of England.

Militant congregational Puritans were those like in the Salem church who refused to offer the Lord’s Supper or baptism to anyone who maintained fellowship with anyone in the Anglican churches.

Moderate separatists were “separating congregationalists” like the great theologian William Ames and also the settlers at Plymouth. They removed themselves completely from the Church of England but still enjoyed fellowship with the Puritans who shared their general theology, especially with the determined congregational Puritans. For example, the governors of Plymouth (William Bradford) and Massachusetts (John Winthrop) maintained cooperative fellowship with each other in New England’s early days.

Radical separates wanted to break with Anglicanism as completely as possible. The most radical of all was Roger Williams, the sweet-tempered thorn in the side of the Massachusetts establishment. He denounced “Christendom” by name as an anti-biblical system, attacked all ties between church and state, and refused any fellowship (even to pray, even with his wife) with anyone who did not both separate from the Church of England and separate from those who did not completely separate from Anglicanism.

This elaborate scheme of distinctions allows Winship to make his final judgments about what the American Puritans did. It also opens a path to speculate on how the revival of scholarship focused on the Christianity of Puritanism might be a sign of hope for our own day.

Winship leaves two carry-away conclusions. First, the early generations of New England deserve great respect. They were deeply committed to the authority of Scripture. They sensed correctly the corrupting potential of unchecked authority in state or church. They made great sacrifices—especially taking on the immense difficulties of immigration to an unknown land—in order to follow their Christian principles. They greatly feared the ever present threat of their own sinfulness. Most of all, their actions were always in their own minds altruistic. Puritans could be harshly repressive to those who resisted their regime, but the Puritan vision of the Kingdom of God on earth was the great thing to be protected, not personal power or wealth or status.

The hope for Christian politics today is that those who advance into the public arena as “godly republicans” might be as serious, as repentant, as principled, as biblically informed, and—above all—as altruistic as the Puritans.

Winship’s second concluding point is that, despite the Puritans’ herculean labors and the luster of their ideals, they failed. In Massachusetts, the perfect reform of church and state was in place by the mid-1630s. John Cotton defined it as “authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity in the church.” It was nothing less, as several other early Puritans proclaimed, than a “new heaven and earth,” or in Winship’s summary, “an unprecedented recovery of New Testament Christianity.”

Yet even in the moment of triumph, things started to crumble. Roger Williams challenged the biblical basis for the Christendom assumptions of the entire New England Way. The clear-eyed Bible-reader Anne Hutchinson charged that the “works” required to build a Puritan social ordered violated the crucial doctrine of “free grace” that grounded all of Puritan theology. In the 1640s, concern began to grow about the increasing numbers of rising adults who, though living upright lives, could not or would not make a profession of saving grace. That problem, which threatened the entire system, became the subject of intense divisiveness for more than a century. In the 1650s, the violent potential of the system broke out when Massachusetts executed four Quakers for returning to the colony after they had been banished. And then in the 1680s, when the dynamics of power shifted in England and Massachusetts lost its charter, which again made voting a function of property, the colony meekly gave up the crucial mechanism that had grounded their entire system.

None of these upsets completely compromised what John Winthrop and the other early Puritans had hoped to accomplish in the new world. Yet all of them spoke to how much easier it was to protest evils in church and society than to translate dedicated personal holiness into a godly political regime. All also spoke to the really difficult problem of getting deeply committed Bible-believers to agree on what Christian politics actually entailed.

The message of hope from such scholarship today is that whatever shape Christian politics now takes, it would benefit by learning from the Puritans. They were indeed heroic spiritual ancestors. But if they—even with unusual purity of heart and unusual dedication for the long haul—could not succeed, then those of us who are weaker in faith and less self-sacrificing in resolution should look first in our politics to cultivating the virtues that even these hardy pioneers sometimes neglected, including modesty, patience, gentleness, kindness, and self-control.

1. See the magisterial studies, both relying on the solid work of many others, by George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale Univ. Press, 2004); and Michael J. McClendon and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).

2. Lauren F. Winner on Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), Books & Culture, Nov/Dec 2010, pp. 27-29; Mark Valeri on David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritans and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2010), Books & Culture, July/Aug 2011, pp. 25, 27.

3. An informative and accessible book of character sketches that reinforces many particulars of Winship’s study was published at about the same time: Francis J. Bremer, First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World (Univ. of New Hampshire Press, 2012).

4. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 53-72.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. The third edition of his book Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity has recently been published by Baker Academic.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Compared with an Indonesian author’s 5,000-plus page biography of Barack Obama, Peter Lillback’s book is relatively modest. George Washington’s Sacred Fire is only 1,179 pages. But then, Lillback isn’t intending a full biography. His goal is primarily to investigate George Washington’s religious beliefs, specifically, to demonstrate that the first president was an orthodox Christian of the low-church, Anglican variety. Published in 2006 to a modest reception, the book’s sales sky-rocketed after the author’s appearance on Glenn Beck’s show, and has been a bestseller since.

At its core, Lillback’s book is an attempted refutation of George Washington & Religion, by Paul Boller, Jr. Boller’s 1963 effort focused—as one would expect in the wake of the Kennedy election and the controversies over school prayer—on Washington as an advocate of religious liberty. “Broadly speaking, of course,” Boller claimed, “Washington can be classified as a Deist.” Lillback quotes this judgment of Boller’s repeatedly (the index, by the way, is not reliable), but he fails to note that Boller also insists Washington should not be lumped with his more heterodox contemporaries, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine; that Washington was “no infidel”; that Washington “had an unquestioning faith in Providence”; that his professions of faith were “no mere rhetorical flourish … designed for public consumption.”

Lillback ignores all this nuance because he’s convinced Boller’s book was a turning point in the national understanding of Washington. Until comparatively recently there was no controversy over Washington’s orthodoxy, Lillback thinks. That changed around the middle of the 20th century, when revisionist scholars began “to tear down the traditional understanding of our nation and its origin.” “The re-creation of George Washington as a Deist,” he adds, “has been considered necessary by secular historians in order to create a secular America.” Boller, it seems obvious to Lillback, was part of this radical secularist conspiracy to write Christian faith out of our history, and now Lillback is determined to correct the record. He does so, he admits, as part of a larger project to “empower, enable, and defend the presence of a strong Judeo-Christian worldview in the ongoing development of our state and national government and our courts.”

Agenda-driven as it is, any quest to really understand who Washington was gets overshadowed by Lillback’s determination to expose “the utter unhistorical depths to which the skeptics must stoop to make Washington into a Deist!” For Lillback, the question is rather simple. Washington grew up in a Christian society; he received a Christian education; he was a moderately faithful church attender and vestryman; he spoke often of “Providence” or “the Divine Architect” or “that Supreme Being”; his relatives, neighbors and acquaintances testified to his piety and prayerfulness; and he said he was a Christian—and we know he prided himself on his candor and virtue, so certainly he wouldn’t have lied.

Along the way Lillback dismisses certain canards tossed at Washington’s orthodoxy: True, he employed odd, Masonic-sounding euphemisms for God, but that’s just how he talked—he was a formal Anglican after all, not a chummy evangelical. He didn’t often mention the name of Jesus, but it’s not true that he never said “Jesus”: he did, once, telling a group of Delaware Indians in 1779, “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.” This shows that Washington did believe in Jesus (not just an abstract Deity), and his “above all” proves he thought nothing more important. That he didn’t use “Jesus” more often is, again, attributable to his Anglican reticence. He knew the Bible well, however, and scattered biblical allusions throughout his writings (Lillback includes a 20-page chart as one of his ten appendices, documenting around 200 examples of such). Yes, he often skipped out of church before communion (and even stopped attending on communion Sundays after a rector called him on it), but he was a very busy man, as a general and then as president. (Lillback devotes three chapters—about 60 pages—to the communion issue.) It’s true that he was a Mason, but the Masons weren’t so unorthodox in those days. On the positive side, authors such as Parson Weems sometimes sent him religious books, which he sometimes thanked them for, demonstrating how much he valued good Christian instruction. And so forth.

There is a point here, though Lillback, being more of a polemicist than a historian, fails to make it very well. Historians have been too eager to divide the colonial world that produced a man such as Washington into zealous Puritans and evangelicals on the one hand, and formal, wealth-and-status-seeking Anglicans on the other; the true religious partisans building a religious utopia and the at-best nominally Christian fox-hunters, plantation-owners, and politicians. But even if Washington’s Virginia church wasn’t exhilarated about revivalist George Whitefield, it did attract the talents of the equally evangelical Devereux Jarrett. It may be that historians have imbibed too much the evangelical critique of 18th-century Anglicanism, and thus lost the ability to see it as a serious religious alternative. Moreover, even the truly unorthodox Jefferson, who brutally redacted his Bible, did actually read it, and he did pray. Not being an evangelical (or being a Mason) in 18th-century Virginia wasn’t tantamount to being completely “secular” in our understanding of the word.

So perhaps Lillback is right, that Washington was a believing, orthodox Christian, only of a sort that we can barely recognize today. But it’s equally plausible that Washington’s determination to force his life into the mold of a classical gentleman extended into his religious life, too. As Gordon Wood has argued, Washington was painfully conscious of the example he set; indeed, says Wood, “Washington judged all his actions by what people might think of them.”[1] He hesitated to accept the presidency because he did not want to appear ambitious for power; at the same time he worried that appearing too disinterested would mark him as ostentatiously virtuous. Obeying the religious customs of the country would have come natural to one so concerned, and if he did, he was far from alone. John Marshall, for example, was also a faithful church-goer, though he only converted late in life.

By evangelical standards, where “the heart” is all-important, such hyper-concern for reputation seems like hypocrisy. But what if you believed that the Supreme Architect had so constructed the world that different classes and temperaments would find him by different means, and that it was important that the leading men of society not disparage the means favored by women and common folk? Lillback is surely right to sum Washington up as someone who “desired to be known as an honest man from Virginia who was loyal to his roots, his family, his church, his country, and his God,” but he seems unaware just how ambiguous a judgment that is.

Washington was a bit of a sphinx, after all, and he cultivated his image as such. He knew that in the America of the 1790s a battle was raging between freethinkers and Deists on the one hand and more conventionally orthodox believers on the other. He also knew the believers were eager to claim him as one of their own. When several dozen Philadelphia clergymen attempted to lure him into a bolder public confession of his Christian faith, he responded by noting only that “religion and morals are the essential pillars of civil society.” Who would disagree? Not the evangelicals. Not the Unitarians, or the Episcopalians, or Congregationalists, no matter how liberal. Few Deists—in America, at least—would argue either.

Lillback believes no one questioned Washington’s orthodoxy until about the era of John Lennon, but questions about Washington’s faith actually began during his lifetime. They sprang up again in the 1830s and ’40s, when Sabbatarians were attempting to push the nation in a more explicitly evangelical direction, and off and on they’ve been asked ever since.

Questions about Washington’s faith arouse peculiar intensity because, many think, if we can only identify him definitively as a secularist or a Bible-believing Christian then it will also be plain that any departure from his stance is a declension—a failure to be truly American. “Is it possible,” Lillback asks, “to preserve America’s ‘sacred fire of liberty’ if we strip the divine from our history and suppress our heroic founders’ the concern for the sacred?” (sic; emphasis his).

Lillback warns the sacred fire of liberty is being overwhelmed by the “wildfire” of “licentiousness,” and he points to the French Revolution as an example of what happens when the “refining fire of faith” is lost: “widespread bloodshed” leaving “devastation and carnage behind.” This is fine as a reiteration of the Federalist platform circa 1800, but one need not be a Kenyan anti-colonialist to note, if only in passing, that “the sacred fire of liberty” Washington declared was a war cry, not St. Paul’s freedom from sin and the curse.

Washington’s “liberty” was fundamentally economic and political: The freedom not to be taxed, the freedom to speculate in western lands (which the British, keen to keep peace with the Indians, had disallowed) and, for later generations following his example, the freedom to take the continent, to own slaves, and so on. Over and over again, “sacred liberty” and “devastation and carnage” have walked hand in hand.

Lillback notes that, as General of the Continental Army, Washington had “a strategic policy to put the enemy in the wrong, so that in the day of battle, heaven’s blessings would favor the just army, since God stood with the righteous.” For Washington, “worship itself became part of the arsenal of the army,” ensuring God’s blessings even “upon the soldiers’ weaponry.” For all his diligence in reading and assembling so many of Washington’s writings, Lilback doesn’t seem aware that the evidence he presents raises serious moral questions, especially for Christian believers. I am not trying to insinuate that Washington should be condemned for not being a pacifist. (I am not a pacifist myself.) I like our freedoms as much as the next American. I probably enjoy more of the world’s prosperity than I otherwise would because I am an American. I like low taxes, and I like representative government. I even like the electoral college. Heck, I’ve “friended” the Department of Defense on Facebook. These are all results of regarding our liberties as sacred. But we only have these things because men like Washington have been willing to shoot other people in the face for them. These are just the facts.

Lillback dedicates his book to “the children of America.” It would be easy to take him at his word, and think this was some kind of a children’s book. He has, in short, provided a primer in American civil religion, a faith that often acknowledges Christ but serves the less gentle masters of economic and political liberty, frequently by far from gentle means.

There are many difficult questions involved as we assess Washington and his legacy, and I don’t mean to imply Washington was always (or obviously) wrong. But Lillback’s book isn’t an invitation to ponder these questions in the light of Christ’s gospel. By insisting that the liberties General Washington fought (and killed) for were and are sacred, and by regarding him as a civil-religious saint, Lillback cuts such questions off. They become, as in Nelly Custis’ telling response to those who would question Washington’s Christianity, “the greatest heresy.”

1. Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press, 2006), p. 43.

John Haas is associate professor of history at Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Was America founded as a Christian nation? To many, the answer is undoubtedly yes. The most aggressive proponent of this position, David Barton, president of WallBuilders, insists that America was and still is a Christian nation. With ease, Barton quotes a wide array of primary sources that seem to point to the obvious conclusion that America’s founders originally intended to establish a Christian nation. In a Fox News interview on The Mike Huckabee Show, for instance, Barton claimed that “of the fifty-six” men who “signed the Declaration [of Independence], twenty-nine actually held seminary degrees” and “more than half of them held Bible school degrees.”[1] Barton uses these historical claims as evidence of America’s Christian origins and then to justify policy positions on a variety of moral and political issues facing the United States.

The actual role that Christianity played in the nation’s founding, however, is more complicated than Barton lets on. While graduates of colonial colleges often did enter the ministry and mandatory Bible courses were typically part of their curriculum, America’s founders did not, in fact, attend seminaries or Bible colleges. The nation’s first seminary, Andover, was not established until 1807, and Bible schools did not come into existence until the late 19th century. To many academic historians, Barton appears to be incredibly ill-informed or dissembling.

Since the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s, many conservative Christians have followed the late Francis Schaeffer’s lead by invoking the faith of America’s founders as evidence of the country’s Christian beginnings. Conservative Christians have then used this belief to criticize the secularization of American culture. Schaeffer’s conviction, however, also prompted a response from evangelical historians. In 1983, Mark A. Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George M. Marsden in The Search for Christian America offered a brief but critical assessment of America’s religious origins. Over the past decade, the debate has moved beyond evangelical circles and become a major political issue in the contemporary culture war.

In Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction, John Fea offers a compelling answer to the question. In many ways, Fea’s work complements Thomas S. Kidd’s recent study, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the America Revolution. Fea sets out to help Christians “see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present.” His analysis may surprise both advocates of Christian nationalism and those who trivialize Christianity’s importance in the founding period.

Fea divides his work into three major sections. The first section provides an overview of the history of the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation.” In the second section, he answers the question, “Was the American Revolution a Christian event?” The final part of the work examines the faith of a number of the nation’s founders.

If the United States was ever a “Christian nation,” it was so during the period between 1789 and 1861, Fea contends. In the book’s first chapter, he reviews how religious, political, and print culture of the early national period reinforced the notion that divine providence had a special plan for the United States. The second chapter examines how industrialization, immigration, and skeptical attacks upon the intellectual credibility of Christianity presented new challenges to the advocates of Christian America. The third chapter summarizes how Christian nationalism adopted different forms between 1925 and 1980. While evangelicals, mainline Protestants, African American Protestants, and Roman Catholics sought to make the United States a Christian country, each espoused a different vision of what such a nation would look like. The fourth chapter offers a detailed analysis of the contemporary defenders of Christian America.

In the book’s second section, Fea assesses the Christian character of the Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay colonies, the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, Protestant preaching during the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the struggle for religious liberty in various states, and the role of religion in the Constitution. While these chapters offer a careful analysis of critical events and important sources in America’s founding, Fea’s examination of the place of religion in the Constitution is particularly rich. Some scholars, like Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, contend that the framers deliberately omitted references to God in the Constitution because they wanted a secular nation. Others, most notably Daniel L. Dreisbach, argue that the framers’ commitment to federalism explains their silence on issues of religion. In the end, Fea follows Dreisbach’s argument. The Constitution was designed to be a frame for a government, not a treatise of the relationship between Christianity and the state. “Yet,” Fea adds, “it is also important to remember that the framers of the Constitution did not exclude God because they wanted to establish a completely secular society devoid of any religion. Rather, they realized that the role of religion and the government should be decided locally, among the individuals who made up the states.”

In the final section, Fea explores the beliefs and behaviors of a number of the nation’s most influential founders, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Witherspoon. Fea’s analysis of George Washington’s faith is especially evenhanded. While Joseph Ellis, for instance, describes Washington as a “lukewarm Episcopalian” and Edwin Gaustad labels him a “cool deist,” advocates of Christian America, such as Peter Lillback, reconstruct Washington as a deeply pious orthodox Trinitarian. Fea analyzes Washington’s faith, church involvement, and commitment to religious freedom as well as his slaveholding. Based upon the evidence, Fea determines that Washington was a soldier and statesman, not a theologian. “Those evangelicals that claim him today,” he concludes, “should realize that Washington would probably not meet the requirements for lay leadership in their own congregations.”

So was America founded as a Christian nation? Instead of a simple yes or no, Fea draws three conclusions about the relationship between Christianity and the American founding. First, those who believe that the United States is a Christian nation “have a good chunk of American history on their side.” Since the 19th century, there have always been believers who have tried to promote the idea that America was and should continue to be a Christian nation. Second, Christianity’s role in the American Revolution was mixed at best. On the one hand, Christianity had little to do directly with the colonial leaders’ response to British taxation between 1765 and 1774. On the other, state constitutions privileged Christianity even if the Constitution itself did not. Third, the faith of the founders was quite varied. Some founders affirmed the central doctrines of historic Christian orthodoxy, while others unambiguously rejected them. An evaluation of the founders’ behavior produces equally mixed results. All the founders, nevertheless, did agree that religion was necessary for sustaining an ordered and virtuous republic.

Fea’s analysis raises historical, theological, and political questions for contemporary advocates of Christian nationalism. To Fea, the central problem that hamstrings populist proponents of Christian America is not that there is little evidence for Protestantism playing an important role in the nation’s founding. Instead, many “well-meaning Christians” are simply pretty lousy historians. In his brief introduction, Fea describes what it means to think historically. He observes that good historians interpret documents in their historical context in order to understand important changes that have taken place over time. They are always attentive to the causality and contingency of events. Finally, historians recognize that the past is complex and thus they avoid over-simplification.

Fea contrasts the craft of the historian with the work of David Barton. Barton insists that he conducts research like a lawyer by just letting “the Founders speak for themselves in accordance with the legal rules of evidence.” But a lawyer uses the past differently than does a historian. According to Fea, “The lawyer cares about the past only to the degree that he or she can use a legal decision in the past to win a case in the present. A lawyer does not reconstruct the past in all its complexity, but rather cherry-picks from the past in order to obtain a positive result for his or her client.”

This failure to understand primary sources within their historical context explains why contemporary Christian nationalists like Barton despise revisionist history, which he defines as a process that “intentionally ignored, distorted, or misportrayed” historical events in order to manipulate public opinion to promote “a specific political agenda or philosophy.” Admittedly, such defenders of Christian America make a good point when they complain that some historians have minimized the influential role that Christianity played in the founding of the country. But their contempt for revisionism, Fea suggests, also helps to account for why they only quote primary source texts. To Barton, it is dangerous to look critically at primary sources in their historical context. In practice, however, this tactic means that primary sources should be taken at their face value. Fea provides an example of Barton’s logic: “If John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence, wrote that God was on the side of the patriots in the American Revolution, then it must be true—a theological certainty—that God was on their side.” Barton’s so-called “best evidence” method actually precludes both the exploration of historical contexts and the evaluation of the theological beliefs of historical figures. Since Joseph Smith, for example, believed he had received a new revelation about the nature and destiny of America, would Barton feel compelled to accept the veracity of Smith’s claims without any misgivings?

Fea also uncovers a critical—and among evangelicals a highly debatable—theological conviction that informs the work of many contemporary defenders of Christian nationalism: a view of history that enables them (so they imply) to know with certainty what God is up to. For instance, when Christopher Columbus’ fleet spotted a flock of birds—a sign that land was near—they landed at San Salvador instead of continuing on their course, which would have likely led them to Florida. In a passage quoted by Fea, D. James Kennedy explains what God was doing: “And to think, if it had not been for the flight of some birds, American would probably have the same culture and religion as that of South and Central America today …. I believe that just as God used a talking donkey to set Balaam straight (Num. 22:21-31), so He used a cloud and a flight of birds to change Columbus’s destination.” Therefore, Kennedy concludes, the hand of God led “Anglo-Saxons and Celtics rather than Spaniards” to become “the dominant force in Europe and in America.”

This reading of history places the United States at the center of the divine drama. But to presume that America is God’s New Israel or that Old Testament passages can be directly applied to the modern United States violates the hermeneutical standards of biblical exegesis. It also contradicts fairly widespread Christian convictions regarding the new covenant established by Jesus Christ, which transcends national boundaries. As Edmund Clowney, the late president of Westminster Seminary, wrote: “The patriotism is misguided that sees the United States or the United Kingdom as a Christian nation composed of God’s elect and entitled to his favour and blessing. Such a claim is patently false, and illegitimate even as an ideal.”[2]

Reformed theologians like Clowney, as well as Christians in other traditions, recognize that the heart of the problem is a very weak doctrine of the church. These Christians believe the new covenant that Christ established distinguishes between the church and the nation. This distinction does not necessitate the secularization of the public square but rather, to use Augustine’s terms, the differentiation of the Kingdom of God from the Kingdom of Man. Advocates of Christian America, however, seem to expect the “City of Man” to do the work of the “City of God.”

A third concern raised by the work of Christian nationalists is political. Advocates of Christian America sometimes appear to use their interpretation of history in order to promote majoritarianism. Fea cites a claim by Gary DeMar that the First Amendment “was not designed to make all religions equal, only to make all Christian denominations (sects) equal in the eyes of the Constitution and the law.” If the free exercise clause only applies to Christians, it is little wonder that many people see the specter of dominionism in the work of some Christian nationalists.

While it may not be the last word on the subject, Fea helps to set the record straight about the role of Christianity in America’s founding period. The book models what it means to do history well. Fea demonstrates a winsome and judicious tone as he unravels the complicated relationship between Christianity and America’s founding. The work might also inspire further reflection upon how Christians in the present, like many in the past, can be responsible citizens and faithful Christians working for the common good in a diverse culture.

1. Barton’s interview is available at youtube.com/watch?v=hfvEe1PZ1kk

2. Edmund Clowney, The Church (InterVarsity Press, 1995), p. 195.

P. C. Kemeny is professor of religion and humanities at Grove City College. He is the editor of Church, State and Public Justice: Five Views (IVP Academic).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I learned something about Larry Woiwode from the cup of coffee he offered me. I had come to his farm and home near Mott, in southwestern North Dakota, interviewing him on the release of the novel Indian Affairs. A gracious host, he asked about coffee.

“Sure.”

He took the grounds, stirred in water boiled on his kitchen stovetop, and handed me the mug.

I got, to my surprise, a gulp of not-yet-settled grounds—think French press without the press. Had I waited a while, I now know, the grounds would have drifted to the bottom. But I guess my eyes widened, for Woiwode chuckled and said, “That’s cowboy coffee.” Pastured horses and acres sown with organic oats surrounded us, and the coffee conjured the ruggedness of the Dakota plains.

Only now, twenty years later, reading his new collection of essays, it occurs to me that I also got a clue to Woiwode’s writing. Words Made Fresh, like his coffee, comes with grit. And while Woiwode can send sentences aloft with elegance, he can also wield words like sharpened farm implements. Out of this collection of his eclectic and sometimes acerbic essays emerges a literary intellectual who roots himself to the soil, a poet who works a farm, a cultural soldier who spreads abroad a vibrant faith and steel-cut Presbyterianism.

Even the book’s title harkens to the Christian faith that grounds Woiwode’s craft. It is “meant to echo the incarnation,” he explains in the preface to the volume. But he is interested in more than thoughts made graphic, words made flesh: “The title also issues an assurance that the following essays, which appeared in a variety of venues over the years, have been revised or reworked and otherwise brought up to date so that the words forming the phrases and sentences and thoughts in the paragraphs ahead have, indeed, been refashioned, made fresh.”

All ten essays in this collection have appeared before, but only a reader with a freakishly broad range could have seen them all in their original iterations: Esquire, for instance, and Image; Chicago Tribune Book World and Washington Post Book World (neither of which still exists, alas), and Books & Culture. While we encounter occasional grumps against liberal and neo-orthodox Christians and especially critics in the secular academy (understandable given the experiences he recounts in his memoir, A Step from Death), Woiwode is exuberant in his praise of his contemporaries John Gardner and John Updike. He frames tributes to Shakespeare and Bob Dylan with wit and resonance.

And the words themselves make this book stand out. Reviewers have long commented on the power of Woiwode’s prose. In these essays he approaches his sentences and syntax with passion. It’s as though he bends over his words—tending to their impact, their subtle rhythm, their ability to jolt or unsettle or lift up.

In “Guns and Peace,” the oft-anthologized essay that opens this volume, he describes an injured deer on a roadside in Wisconsin (where he lived at the time): “Once in the worst of a Wisconsin winter I shot a deer, my only one, while my wife and daughter watched.”

A careful reading of that sentence shows his attention to language. There’s unobtrusive alliteration, for one thing: In a 21-word sentence, I count six “w” words, to say nothing of the echoing “one.” The syllables ring; put together, they’re rhythmically charged. Woiwode wanted his stories, he wrote elsewhere, “to be as compact and direct as poetry as it walked the New Yorker columns in the blue jeans and work shirt of prose,” and the same is true of this essay.

That roadside scene unfolds, indeed, with unsettling sparseness: blood, a gun, a wife and daughter as witnesses (back at the truck, they sit “pale and withdrawn”). The deer, Woiwode explained, “had been hit by a delivery truck along a county road a few miles from where we lived, and one of its rear legs was torn off at the hock. A shattered shin and hoof lay steaming in the red-beaded ice on the road.”

A bloody accident, a mercy killing: unsettling, yes, but what’s the source of the tension that seems to torque every sentence? The narrative shifts unexpectedly. “My wife once said,” Woiwode writes, “she felt I wanted to kill her, a common enough apprehension among married couples, I’m sure, and not restricted to either sex (I know there were times when she wanted to kill me), but perhaps with experience infusing the feeling it became too much to endure.” Such wrestling would lead to a separation from his wife, a reunion, and even the peace alluded to in the essay’s title.

In the decades since that essay’s publication, Woiwode’s profound attention to language has taken on biblical proportions. “We should expect,” he writes, “to give an account, according to a teaching of Jesus, for every idle word that comes out of our mouths. That’s a weighty responsibility for a writer.”

Words never seem disembodied for Woiwode. It’s no accident that he placed the opening scene of that essay in a particular state, where he lived at the time, and a carefully detailed physical location. Which leads to the second thing that strikes me about this collection: The insistent attention to place.

Geography figures prominently throughout Woiwode’s novels, and certainly here in his essays. His “Homeplace, Heaven or Hell?” explores why a writer always has grounding at some address. He registers the literary world’s sometime smugness about certain areas on the map—the implicit dismissal imbedded in the term “regional” when applied to a writer. Woiwode joins good company here. Flannery O’Connor, too, complained about critics who labeled her as a Southern writer, as if to look down upon quirky and less-cultured provinces. But inevitably, she once told a group of writers, “To know oneself is to know one’s region …. When we talk about a writer’s country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him.”

Woiwode, too, takes aim at geographical imperialism: “When canonmeisters label a writer ‘regional,’ they suggest that the writer isn’t in quite the same league as the big boys, equating regionalism with parochialism—an attitude that honors certain areas of the United States (or the world—for that matter) as right and proper, preferable to others—while the rest is regional.”

His return to his native state in 1978, young family in tow (not long after writing the opening essay set in Wisconsin), lies behind some of his keen focus on place. He makes no apology for fiction set in the Midwest or Plains states, even if he does offer a defense: “Indigenous detail,” as he calls it, makes writing real, incarnate: “Universality is compounded of specifics, or we have no referent to relate to.” That very detail, he says, packs down writing “with wider meaning—or universality, as some might say.”

I detect in his defiance what a friend calls a “rebellion of the regional” against élitist urbanite hegemony. In the seemingly off-the-grid Dakota plains, “I had the feeling,” Woiwode writes, “of returning home.” Indeed, he represents the fifth generation of his family to inhabit North Dakota. And he tells the story behind the move: “A denomination we decided to join had one church, we learned, in North Dakota. With a compass I drew a radius of forty miles, using the church as pivot point, and we found a farm within that circle. It was the sort of place we had looked for, in different regions of the country, for seven years, and it was in western North Dakota.” There may be a kind of rustic romanticism in such writing, until one actually has to endure the dailyness, even tedium, of such settings: Woiwode never ceases to draw hard and burnished details from his Plains state topography. If his prose sometimes soars into high atmosphere, it never goes long untethered from place. The scent of soil, the near-blinding shimmer of snow, the clean airiness of a Plains sky seem to orient and ground him.

In all this, Woiwode joins a strong tradition in recent literature. One thinks of the farmer-poet-novelist Wendell Berry cultivating land in Kentucky (and Berry gets appreciative treatment in an essay in Woiwode’s collection). Or Kathleen Norris’ sojourn in nearby South Dakota, leaving behind the heady New York world of poetry. Or Frederick Buechner, who has spent his most of his writing career with pen and legal pads in tiny-town Vermont. For Woiwode, place is more than a plot of land and a house; it allows for a kind of pilgrimage to stability and self-discovery.

The insistent pull of story is the third thing that strikes me about these essays: no wonder the longest essay of the collection focuses on a maestro of storytelling. “Updike’s Sheltered Self” explores Woiwode’s decades of following John Updike as “a contemporary whose work I admire above most others,” unrolling his own story against the backdrop of Updike’s sometimes controversial career, tracing his assimilation of Updike’s novels. The essay, at forty pages, runs longer than his essays on John Gardner, including one that labors to detail the plot turns of Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts. And while long, his appreciative (but not hagiographic) portrait of Updike seems to succeed in a way the essay “Gardner’s Memorial in Real Time” may not. I felt I traced Updike’s corpus through Woiwode’s own pilgrimage through space and time, and the effort was rewarded. (Woiwode even more recently has tried his hand at a story for children, in the charming Plains-tale The Invention of Lefse.)

If words, place, and story have grasped Woiwode and oriented his work, something else has mastered him. To the two categories in the subtitle, “Essays on Literature and Culture,” I would append another: Religion. Time and again this recipient of multiple literary awards and secular honors cannot help coming back to his sturdy Christian faith and steady moral grounding.

You see it as he wrestles, to give one example, with Updike’s penchant for explicit descriptions of coupling: “With [Updike’s novel] Couples, the philosophy of Playboy moved into the hearts of heartland America.” While he doesn’t want to imply Updike started such trends, “I believe,” he writes, “you could say Couples hit the gas on a trend, rather than the clutch or the brake.” (Woiwode, at the same time, bristles at “popular Christian writing of the pietistic, sanitized, untruthful bent; and … the act of dragging a pulpit into fiction.”)

Woiwode finds himself moved by Updike’s confessing of an “unshakable assurance that he will not die,” a conviction rooted in the “truths of Scripture” and “God’s unconditional nature.” For Woiwode, one of the key questions in his analysis is Updike’s relation to the Christian faith and the heritage of historic Christianity, “always a literate and literary religion.”

Ultimately Woiwode sees his own writing not simply as a passion but also as a stubborn call. He still remembers his mentor, renowned New Yorker editor and novelist William Maxwell, saying, “You always know when you’ve finished a good (or great) book, because when you get up from it, you know your life will never be quite the same.” This collection of essays suggests that more than the accolades he’s won, and the lyricism his prose routinely achieves, Woiwode’s humility before the Word made flesh makes him eager for that kind of difference.

Woiwode does not wave his “testimony” furiously in front of the reader. But he’s added something to “Guns and Peace,” the opening essay detailing the deer’s shattered shin and torn-off leg. In the afterword that accompanies the essay reworked for this edition, he tells of changes since that time: “My wife and I reunited and reared our daughter and two more daughters, plus a son, on a ranch in western North Dakota.”

More than just the essays collected here, then, has been made fresh—and new: In his Dakota “incarnation,” he writes, “I own firearms, mainly for predators, especially rabid ones, and I do not cling to them as I cling to the faith that reunited my wife and me and caused our internal lives and the lives of our children to blossom and prosper in peace.”

Timothy Jones is Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina. He is a former editor at Christianity Today and has authored several books, including The Art of Prayer (WaterBrook).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Sometimes we think of modernism in art as a period of great liberation from the constraints of the past, of the triumphant emergence to dominance of secularism and the demise of religion. This cliché overlooks, of course, the unprecedented violence of the 20th century, the horrible deaths of score of millions of people just because of their religious identity—Jews in the Holocaust and Christian martyrs all over the globe. Response to real evil is exceedingly various; many an artist has been driven to outrage or despair, others to self-indulgence and escapism. The recent exhibition at Baylor University of Georges Rouault’s Miserere et Guerre series and Marc Chagall’s Bible series (both made possible through a gracious loan of collections by the Mark Foster Family Foundation) offered an opportunity to reflect on an aspect of modernity so obtrusive that no artist concerned for truth can entirely overlook it: the monstrous fact of human suffering on such a scale.

Rouault’s etchings, which have been called the most powerful single work of Christian art in the 20th century, and Chagall’s etchings of the covenant narratives, often regarded as the high watermark of 20th-century etching overall, were made in war-ravaged France. Rouault did his work from 1914-27; Chagall’s work was begun in 1931-39 and only completed between 1952 and 1956. Anchoring the work of both artists, literally and figuratively, are reflections on the meaning of the Crucifixion of the Suffering Servant for modern man.

Rouault’s images are far too strong to absorb entirely in a single viewing, etched powerfully in dark ink, bordered in black like a funeral notice. Together they capture an overwhelming truth unflinchingly: as Rouault puts it in one of his images, “Man is a wolf to man” (number 37 in the series). Rouault’s Miserere forces us to consider what it is that we have become. “Are we not all convicts?” (6) he asks—and are we not all self-deceived? “Who does not paint on a face?” (8). Who is free from having become, whether in denial or evasion, what Walker Percy has called “a phony self”? “We like to believe we are kings” (9) when in fact we are knaves. The truth is that in our false self-liberation we have made ourselves almost absolutely lonely, “Solitaire en cette vie …” (11). For Rouault, this is the deeper reality about modern man—psychologically, sociologically, and theologically. To show these things is to tell a necessary truth.

Accordingly, in this series by Rouault we see the greatest Catholic painter of the early 20th century effectively acting as a confessor, a priest-artist, analyzing sin and its consequences, showing us how “the wages of sin is death.” Fortunately, this is not all. He also shows us how into the radical alienation of modern humanity Christ still comes, identifying with our disconsolate sorrow and brokenness, standing in our stead, one with us even in our deserved condemnation (18, 21). For Rouault, the only enduring consolation of our broken world is the wounded Christ, who, in the words he borrows from the Suffering Servant poem (Isa. 53), was “wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.” It is no accident that the “Veronica” image from the Franciscan-inspired Stations of the Cross is the envelope structure for his great series, or that the last image of the penitential pilgrimage on which he guides the viewer is captioned by another line from Isaiah 53: “By his stripes we are healed.” This, for Rouault, is the “true image,” the Terrible Beauty in which alone we find redemption.

Marc Chagall is sometimes viewed as an artistic lusus naturae, a brilliant modernist whose work refuses every convenient category: Jewish, yet whose tender crucifixions are an outrage to Jews; a man in whose art the deepest spirit of Hasidism breathes, yet who, after he left his Belarus village, was at best lax in observance; a sometime cubist and quasi-surrealist who rejected both cubism and surrealism; a friend and admirer of Picasso who rejected outright Picasso’s attitude to women and to marriage. There is no denying that his Bible etchings are both textually informed and alert to their own narratives of sorrow as well as the promises of the covenant. Yet his Bible innovates in ways that, like his paintings celebrating marriage and orthodox Jewish life, reveal a deeply personal commitment beyond horror to beauty.

In the terror of the 1930s, as European Jews were struggling to maintain religious identity, when assimilation could seem the only viable option for survival, there were other attempts made by Jewish intellectuals to return the Bible to modern consciousness. One thinks of the brilliant essays of Martin Buber and Franz Rosensweig, for example, as they planned their new translation of the Bible—a translation which was cut off by terrible events. After the hideous revelations of the Holocaust in 1945, for more than a generation many a Jew recoiled from the Bible and the God of the Bible. But Chagall’s Bible is contra, in some ways a visual analogue for the projected translation of Buber and Rosensweig. As with Rouault’s Miserere, this work had been commissioned by the art publisher Ambrose Vollard, a man of impeccable taste and tyrannical practices. When Vollard died in 1939, Chagall was already so depressed by events in Europe that he seemed only too glad to abandon the work (only 66 of the eventual 105 plates had by then been finished). When he then lost his beloved first wife Bella in 1943, his darkness deepened. Only after the war, his return to France, and, especially, his joyous second marriage to Valentine Brodsky (“Vava”) in 1952 was Chagall to take up his work again in earnest. Her encouragement was clearly decisive. Not only did he become extraordinarily prolific, but he returned to the color and hope that had so marked his early work.

That the joyful life must be nourished by participation of the individual in a story larger than his own is everywhere a theme in Chagall. The individual who makes a choice for life, and for others, finds joy in others and thus in life. It was as though Chagall had considered most seriously the choice set forth in Deuteronomy (30:19), and, for his own part, in the face of so much death, chosen life. It is as if “L’chaim” became his motto, his painting a joyously affirmative Mishneh Torah of images.

Chagall’s Bible is also midrash. Instead of ending his series, as one would expect, with Ezra and Nehemiah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, he ends it with a striking image from Ezekiel (105), in which the prophet is commanded to “eat the scroll” (Ezek. 3:1-4). Chagall’s rendition is as literal as could be—much more so, say, than Albrecht Dürer’s plate for the parallel passage in Revelation (10:8-11). The human quality of it, as of all of the plates in the second half of the series especially, is beautifully tender, yet rests on the narrative just as it is given. But it was clearly of the greatest importance to Chagall that he end his series in this way—not chronologically, so to speak, but on a point of hermeneutic and spiritual principle consistent with what he shows as the essential prophetic injunction. The image invokes Hebrew wordplay familiar from Joshua 1:8, where Moses, first of the prophets, charged Joshua that “the book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate on it day and night”; the image of ingesting the word, “ruminating” on it rather than merely reading it over, is reflected in the connection of “mouth” and “meditate.” The verb here invoked is hagah; it recurs in Psalm 1:2, and it implies “chewing the cud” like the clean beasts, effectively living by constant rumination on God’s word. Chagall has a beautiful but otherwise curious day/night painting in which a rabbi in his prayer shawl cradles a Torah scroll, clearly praying. Beside him a white cow, smiling, chews its cud. Between them lies a violin, the typical Hasidic symbol for all the arts. By art, too, Chagall seems to say, one can meditate on the Word. Behind them and over the peacefully sleeping city hovers an angel, suggesting that in the fullness of such reflection the shalom of the city may be restored. This painting is called “Solitude,” but in striking contrast to Rouault’s images of “solitary” figures, represents a solitude in which one who meditates is never alone.

Chagall’s prophetic art is thus a splendid complement to the confessional work of Rouault. Rouault invites us to give up our masks, to accept the identification that Christ’s suffering affords as the “true image” of God’s love for us. Chagall’s work encourages us to choose life, and to nourish ourselves deeply, whether by day or by night, in the Word of the One who bade us to live in the joy of his giving. Each series is striking; when seen together we know how joy is an answer to sorrow, and beauty is made all the more urgent a choice when so much ugliness abounds.

In other arts there are analogues. Phil Ochs, a compatriot of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, turned away from his usual topical and anti-war songs to make an eccentric and mysterious album, Pleasures of the Harbor (1967). He had been away for a year in the UK, taking stock of his life. On the back of the album sleeve is a poem by Ochs describing a profound tension he feels, including his apprehension about returning: “To face the unspoken unguarded thoughts of habitual hearts / A vanguard of electricians a village full of tarts / Who say you must protest, you must protest / It is your diamond duty.”

To which he answers: “Ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.”

Pleasures of the Harbor may be one of the most beautiful albums of all the Vietnam era—hauntingly so; its final cut, “Crucifixion,” is strikingly reminiscent of both Chagall and Rouault.

Ochs’ “true protest” seems to me to be the protest that a great artist best can make, for whom the choice for life and joy is the very essence of artistic affirmation. What Rouault and Chagall, each in his own way, tell us, is that such a choice is grounded in an order of hope far more theological than political, and that when expressed in art, beautifully wrought by a master, it opens us up to the deepest comfort and most nourishing spiritual meditation.

David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University and, since 1996, Guest Professor of Peking University. His volume on Luke in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible was published earlier this year.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

To account for the yearning for beauty that animates so much of Edward Burne-Jones’ highly stylized art, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote a good biography of the artist in 1975, stressed the frightful squalor of his native Birmingham, which, as she says, was “neither policed nor lighted (except in winter) until 1839” and where “dozens of families clung together” in noisome courts and rookeries, “sharing one tap and one privy.” Drunkenness was ubiquitous; and at night, as Carlyle recalled, “the whole region burned like a volcano, spilling fire from a thousand tubes of bricks.” It was to escape this industrialized inferno that the framer’s son who lost his mother when he was six days old became an artist, exchanging these Brummagem horrors for the knights and ladies of mediaeval romance. Blake famously believed that “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Persisting in his own dream-laden folly never made Burne-Jones wise—he was the first to admit his want of wisdom when it came to beautiful women—but it did turn him into a good artist, who knew that his own importunate imagination, not the world’s appointments, must be the source of his deeply personal art. In her superb new biography, Fiona McCarthy, the author of the definitive life of William Morris, captures the richness of the artist and his epoch with enviable verve. No one interested in the English 19th century should pass it up.

Born in 1833, Burne-Jones set his heart from early youth on becoming an Anglican clergyman. He was fascinated by John Henry Newman, the star of the Oxford Movement, about whose influence he would say: “In an age of sofas and cushions, he taught me to be indifferent to comfort; and in an age of materialism, he taught me to venture all on the unseen.” When the young acolyte went up to Exeter College in 1853, “omniscient,” as he said, “in all questions of ecclesiastical rights, state encroachments, church architecture and priestly vestments,” he was disappointed to find that the spirit of Newman had been superseded by a liberalism that wanted nothing to do with the Anglo-Catholics and their via media. Disillusioned, Burne-Jones then met the single most important figure in his life, William Morris, who persuaded him to abandon theology for art.

McCarthy vividly re-creates the great affection that Burne-Jones felt for this indefatigable craftsman, whose respect for the integrity of art left such an abiding influence on his Pre-Raphaelite associates and indeed his age as a whole. For Burne-Jones, Morris was a “rock of defence to us all, and a castle on top of it, and a banner on top of that.” With “Topsy,” as he nicknamed Morris, because of his unruly hair, he shared rooms in Red Lion Square, where the two ambitious artists set about embodying their vision of art not only in painting but in stained glass, tiles, mosaics, embroidery, tapestry, furniture, jewelry, and book illustration. They also made their great discovery of the three books that would have such an abiding influence on their later work: Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851), Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1484), and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1478). Despite their later differences—Burne-Jones never shared his friend’s fondness for Icelandic legend or Socialist rabble-rousing—the two were inspired collaborators. Together with the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another key influence on Burne-Jones, they remade the very conception of art among the philistine English, a conception which stressed not only the beauty but also the utility of art.

Sojourns to Florence, Siena, Rome, and Venice, paid for by the princely largesse of John Ruskin, may have opened Burne-Jones’ eyes to the extent of that philistinism, but they did not supply the underlying catalyst of his art, which, as his son Philip recognized, was much more contemporary:

With all his passionate devotion to the past … he was surely at heart a Modern of the Moderns. Deep, undoubtedly, was the influence which Italian art exercised over him, but … it was in reality with eyes immeasurably different from those of a Florentine in the days of Botticelli that he regarded the ancient world or sought to interpret its legacies. The sadness of expression in his faces … is due, I take it, partly to a certain Celtic melancholy … and partly to the unconscious reflection of the troubled and transitional age in which he lived; an age, it must be remembered, which bore the brunt of the first onslaught of a new and strange materialism upon old and established faiths, leaving its children lonely and wistful at the parting of the ways.

Besides Morris, the other key figure in Burne-Jones’ life was his wife, Georgie, about whom McCarthy is particularly insightful, especially her close bond to Morris, who had his own reasons for regretting a spouse’s infidelity. McCarthy also extols Georgie’s 2-volume life of the artist for its well-researched acuity. Indeed, in calling attention to one of its most moving revelations—”I think I should be a better companion to him if he came back,” Georgie confesses at the end of the book—McCarthy calls attention to one of her own greatest virtues as a biographer: her unflagging, discriminating sympathy.

This great virtue notwithstanding, McCarthy is not always at her best when she discusses the works themselves. On the fascinating Perseus series that Burne-Jones painted for Arthur Balfour, for example, of which Wyndham Lewis thought so highly, she can only say that the theme “gripped his imagination.” Then, again, what might be called the Guardian element in McCarthy gets the better of her when she suggests that the real value of the paintings lies in their being “a critique of contemporary society in all its moral crassness and its lack of responsibility for the environment.” Burne-Jones, in other words, is worth looking at because he is green. Readers looking for a more critical consideration of the work may wish to dip into the catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum’s centennial exhibition, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (1998), edited by Stephen Wildman and John Christian, which includes good commentary on Chant d’Amour (1865), The Annunciation (1876-9), The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-7), Laus Veneris 1873-5), and Briar Rose (1894). Another good book on Burne-Jones’ work is Allen Staley’s The New Painting of the 1860s, recently published by Yale University Press, which shows how the artist’s innovative work in watercolor paved the way for the later oil paintings of the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s. These were the works that made him such a fixture of the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery when they were challenging the hegemony of the Royal Academy. Some thoughtful defense of Burne-Jones as a painter is still in order when the old estimate of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1883) by R.H. Wilenski still hovers about his reputation. Looking at the painting, the popular critic could only see “the silliest possible still-life record of two models posing in fancy dress on a heap of Wardour Street bric-a-brac.” McCarthy hardly mounts the case for the defense effectively when she invokes the admiration felt for the artist by the likes of Pierre Cardin, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Jimmy Page.

Still, and this is a testimony to her considerable biographical skills, as well as to the exuberance of her subject, that she has nothing bright to say about the art does not take away from her portrait of the artist. Throughout the book, McCarthy turns to brilliant account a striking insight from Graham Robertson, a family friend of the painter, who recalled seeing the great man as a boy: “He might have been a priest newly stepped down from the altar, the thunder of great litanies still in his ears, a mystic with spirit but half recalled from the threshold of another and fairer world; but as one gazed in reverence the hieratic calm of the face would be broken by a smile so mischievous, so quaintly malign, as to unfrock the priest at once and transform the mage into the conjurer at a children’s party.” This is the man behind the artist that McCarthy presents with such marvelous fidelity by capturing his abounding charm, his chivalric kindness, his wonderful sense of the ridiculous, and his horror of anyone and everything that smacked of the bumptious.

In her deeply researched life, McCarthy shows us the fastidious aesthete who was driven nearly out of his wits by Mrs. Wilkinson, the bossy charwoman who insisted on mopping his studio when he was trying to work; the would-be lothario who could never find the courage to run off with his enrapturing Greek mistress, Maria Zambaco; the brilliant letter-writer who once told his nephew Rudyard Kipling, apropos his brother-in-law Edward Poynter, the Royal Academician who could not get enough honors: “The Lord has hit Uncle Edward hard for his knighthood. He is an ex-officio member of about every utterly uninteresting society in England and spends his evenings eating with bores.”

The raconteur in Burne-Jones sheds a good deal of light on the artist in him, an aspect of the man which Robertson noticed when he remarked: “wonderfully quick as he was to observe and note passing events of a sad or comic or quaint character, all such material as would be useful to the novelist or the poet, he saw nothing from the pictorial point of view.” Another painter under whom Robertson studied “would come in from a walk full of almost inarticulate delight at the memory of black winter trees fringing the jade-green Serpentine, or of a couple of open oysters lying on a bit of blue paper or of a flower girl’s basket of primroses seen through grey mist on a rainy morning. Burne-Jones would have woven a romance or told an amusing tale about the flower girl, but would not have noticed the primroses; the combination of the silvery oysters and the blue paper would not for a moment have struck him as beautiful; he had not the painter’s eye.” Precisely, but it is his uncanny sense of narrative that gives many of his paintings their distinct allure, especially when the narrative is so suspended as to capture something of the profound mysteriousness of recollected time. The Mill (1870-82) exemplifies this: no dance ever led its viewers a more mystifying dance than this Pre-Raphaelite meditation on the dancers of Lorenzetti and Botticelli.

Henry James once said that Burne-Jones was no “votary of the actual.” This is true, but at the same time he did give actuality to an art that is too often confused with escapism. When he contended that what he meant by a picture was “a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire,” he was calling attention to an extraordinarily real yearning without which art is impossible. Moreover, this shows how the man who began his days desiring to be a priest never entirely abandoned that unworldly calling.

When Burne-Jones’ own story ended at the age of 64 in 1898, Kipling commended the family funeral at Rottingdean, outside Brighton, for including “no mobbing,” “no jabber,” and “no idiotic condolences”; he also left behind this memorable diary entry about the last of the Pre-Raphaelites: “His work was the least part of him. It is him that one wants—the size and the strength and the power and the jests and the God given sympathy of the man.” These are the things that Fiona McCarthy captures with such admirable art in her wonderfully unputdownable biography.

One last point: Harvard has done a splendid job with the illustrations, especially with Burne-Jones’ stained glass windows for Gladstone’s church St. Deiniol, Hawarden, and with the Green Dining Room in the Victoria & Albert, which remains London’s loveliest tea room.

Edward Short is the author of Newman and His Contemporaries and the forthcoming Newman and his Family (Bloomsbury).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“Nobody really realized what they were up against …. We just had a lot of hope, but still you’d be scared to death while you were doing it.” This is the way my father, Byron Sheesley, concluded a 1994 interview with The Daily Star in Oneonta, New York, in which he chronicled just one harrowing mission of his 35 as a B-17 pilot flying over Germany. Scared to death sums it up well. The average crewman was considered to have a one-in-four chance of survival when the standard tour of duty was only 25 missions.

What then was the hope that my father was talking about? Certainly there was some personal element—a gut feeling that you were, somehow, going to make it through. And there was also a national kind of hope, a belief in America and the good intentions of the Allies. And there was a kind of hope that reached beyond the personal and political, beyond atavism and the bonds of nations acting as good neighbors; hope based in a sovereign god. But whatever hope glimmered, it shone in the face of an ominous deadly fear that everything opposite these intimations of faith might at any moment gobble the whole thing up in dark fury.

The tenor of a nation brought fully conscious to the reality of this situation is what Alexander Nemerov explores in To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America. The book served as the catalogue for a 2011 exhibition with the same title, organized by Nemerov, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “To make a world” is an apt title. It invites us to consider a number of worlds open for remaking during the war years of the ’40s: the political and geographic reshaping of the world map, the reshaping of the American homefront during a time of scarcity and anxious waiting, and the reshaping of the arts in the face not only of the horrors of war but also of the expansionist euphoria of the conquerors. It also suggests a “world apart,” a world that must be made in the face of dissolution and chaos.

George Ault (1891-1948) is a fine artist to cite in this world-making. Ault is sometimes associated with artists of the “Precisionist” movement, a group led by painters such as Charles Sheeler, whose conceptually processed observation of nature results in works with an abstract, theoretical, and sometimes symbolic rather than natural appearance. Precisionists start with observation but then produce works that suggest a thorough mental re-sorting of nature, a mechanical, rational comprehension of its secrets—in short, the making of a world. Geometry and some degree of simplification dominate. In Ault’s case we also see touches of Surrealism and Primitivism at work. It is apparent when we look at paintings by George Ault that the world he has painted is a meticulous and orderly reconstruction; a bringing of refined order out of the chaos of experience.

Nemerov builds on this notion of the artist as order-bringer. For Ault, life experience itself was certainly the opposite of order; in fact, a kind of reigning disorder. In 1915, his younger brother killed himself; in 1920, his mother died in a mental hospital. His father died of cancer in 1929. In 1930 and 1931, both of his older brothers also died of suicide. Ault’s first marriage ended in divorce. He moved, with his friend Louise, from New York City to Woodstock in 1937, and married Louise, in 1941. By the time he left New York, he was considered an alcoholic, depressed, and generally embittered. “Chaos” does not seem too extreme a word to describe Ault’s personal life, now set against the backdrop of a world at war. If anyone longed for the palliative order of art, it was George Ault.

Why then do we not see Ault’s work only as the outcome of his own demons, as a product only of his own personal failures and fears? Nemerov seeks to bring Ault into the wider world by presenting his work in the light of a number of American artists of the same time period who made paintings of similar subject matter and, in some instances, used stylistic devices similar to Ault’s. Among the “lights” Nemerov presents are Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Charles Sheeler, Rockwell Kent, Norman Rockwell, and a number of others who are less well known today. Ault is thus seen not as a hermetic recluse (though he was reclusive) but rather as an artist in touch with his times and in touch with the major symbols and metaphors of his day.

But Ault was different, too, and it is in the difference that Nemerov finds the core of his intrigue with George Ault. “To make a world” implies a basic tenet of artistry, that art works are a constructed reality. Recent fascination with this concept of construction in the postmodern sense has detached artists from any essential link to their works and posited them as managers rather than makers of art. We think of artists as having unlimited choice in what they will do in a sort of instant or already created realm of artistic possibilities. There is a sense that nothing can stop them in an incessant and unlimited reshuffling of images and texts which they do not and cannot invent. They constantly modify their stylistic terms with chameleon-like adjustments to changing circ*mstances. Nothing is essential; all connections are superficial accommodations, matters of choice not destiny.

This cannot be said of George Ault. The world that he makes is his world. But it is also our world seen from his position. That Ault chose his style is a highly suspicious notion. It seems rather that Ault’s style is the inescapable sum of all the dire circ*mstances of his own life, of his passions, of his particular absorption of whatever sense he could find in the world around him. It is the sum of his limitations, perhaps of the gracelessness and indelicacy of his own hand, as he endeavored to make a finely ordered world. We are included in that sum, and all in all it is probable that none of us are there by choice.

Nemerov senses this destiny in Ault’s work, especially in five paintings Ault made of a place called Russell’s Corners. Four of the five paintings feature the Corners’ intersection of roads, farm buildings, telephone poles, and electric wires, as much as they can be seen, in the dark of night. The buildings hug the edge of the road in testimony to a time when the road was not paved and such proximity to the slower traffic that traveled on it made sense. Shadows and the buildings that cast them blend together and create interlocking abstract shapes. The whole extending landscape is lost in thick darkness. One light, suspended over the intersection, illuminates what is visible given each painting’s different orientation to the scene. The light reflects from and illumines the things that have been built, but it does not touch the darkness itself. Here Ault’s reclusive diffidence finds its most auspicious moment. He balances the simplified geometry of buildings and poles with the magical way that traces of light travel down the electric and telephone lines. The scene is serene yet haunted.

As a once frequent traveler, often at night, on country roads in upstate New York, I have come upon such places as Russell’s Corners. Illumined by a single light source, the side of an old farm building jumps out of the night and stands dangerously close to the road. The light itself has a tendency to momentarily obscure rather than guide the path it means to light. One pauses and then drives through the intersection before ever grasping the situation itself. But that is not what Ault has done. He has walked to that intersection and studied it methodically. He has observed an order to be found in the mix of blazing light and the thick darkness that surrounds it. And he has made a composition out of the way in which human structures and the unformed inky blackness hold each other in check.

Nemerov wants to find particular meaning in that sole light source in each painting. He posits that it is a Christian light, a kind of devotional candle burning in the darkness. But he also realizes that it is a light as understood by someone for whom God is dead. He suggests that it is a Nietzschean light, a gift of Zarathustra given in disdain for those who receive it. Or perhaps it is the light of Ault himself burning out in pain.

These compositions Nemerov eloquently connects to the civic ambiance of America at war in the 1940s. He gracefully weaves discussion of the art of diverse painters, poets, and filmmakers, some blatantly patriotic, some romantically wistful, some like George Ault himself, peering into the night, into an essay that opens up a widening angle on the visual culture of the decade. Nemerov’s inclination is to champion Ault’s vision above the others, but in discussing them all he illuminates the breadth of American visual response to the war and gives us an intriguing vantage point from which to consider it.

As for my father, he never would have taken to George Ault’s way of picturing America at war. My dad, who found refuge in Norman Rockwell’s sentimental pictures, had faced his version of Ault’s anxiety in the skies over Europe. No doubt he saw both the darkness and the blazing light. He reported, not naming whether in horror or exhaustion, that he vomited after almost every mission.

Joel Sheesley, whose paintings have been widely exhibited, is professor of art at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Netherlandish devotional painting of the 15th and 16th centuries is among the most visually rich and theologically complex developments in the history of art. Artists of the Low Countries, from Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden to Hans Memling and Gerard David, combined the aesthetics of spectacular realism, which only the medium of oil on panel could make possible, with the theology of mystical visions of sacred encounter, encouraged by a religious climate that emphasized the infinite rewards of personal faith. Nevertheless, northern European artists of this period rarely receive acclaim equal to that of their Italian contemporaries. The need for a greater scholarly study of Netherlandish devotional painting is evidenced by the art of Jan Gossart (c. 1478-1532). A contemporary of Albrecht Dürer, who both praised and influenced his work, Gossart represents a compelling example of a painter of devotional works on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.

Although he was acclaimed in his own lifetime, Gossart has largely been relegated to passing references toward the end of Northern Renaissance art surveys. Gossart is best known, to the degree that he is known at all, as a painter of mythological couples, such as Neptune and Amphitrite or Hercules and Deianira. The erotic charge of these paintings delighted Gossart’s courtly patron Philip of Burgundy, who—despite being named Bishop of Utrecht—enjoyed a playboy’s lifestyle. Since nakedness in Netherlandish art had often been associated with religious shame, the brazen sexuality of some of Gossart’s pagan nudes is conspicuous. Nevertheless, an emphasis on the sensuality of his mythological paintings, which only represent about ten percent of his known oeuvre, perpetuates a false portrait of Gossart.

This narrow framing of Gossart’s work was apparent, for example, in the 2010 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled “Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance.” This well-organized exhibition, which also traveled to London’s National Gallery, was accompanied by a gorgeous and hefty catalogue. The shrewd decision to include every known work by Gossart, all reproduced in color and with individual entries, gives this catalogue value beyond its record of the exhibition. At the same time, this catalogue’s secure position as the definitive text on Gossart’s art makes its scholarly omissions all the more significant. As its title, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures, suggests, the catalogue emphasizes Gossart as an artist under the spell of Italian humanism, classism, and libidinousness. What is missing from the essays gathered here, but fully manifest in its vivid images, is the depth of religious passion and the height of sacred vision realized in Gossart’s body of Christian painting.

While his Italianate qualities may have distinguished Gossart from his Netherlandish contemporaries, he remained principally a painter of portraits and religious works. In fact, Gossart transformed several motifs and compositional structures, taken from artists such as David and Dürer, into his own distinct visual language in which there is a dialectic exchange between visual experience and spiritual reality.

Virtually all of Gossart’s known religious paintings address one of three themes: Adam and Eve’s temptation; Mary and the Christ child; and Christ’s passion. Each of these motifs, specifically as Gossart employs them, directly confronts viewers both with the reality of their own sin and with the potential for salvation in Christ. Some of Gossart’s works, such as the Malvagna Triptych (ca. 1513-15), unite two of these subjects. The Malvagna Triptych‘s exterior panels, depicting Adam and Eve’s temptation in Eden, open to a heavenly vision of Mary and the Christ child attended by saints and angels. The fixed and often disassembled state of many Netherlandish altarpieces belies the fact that these works were intended to be physically employed in private and corporate worship. In the best examples of this genre of devotional art, as in the Malvagna Triptych (which has remained intact), the physical movement of these panels (the opening and closing of wings, the dividing and uniting of images, the revelation and concealment of images, the passage from exterior to interior) aims to initiate a spiritual passage of the soul toward an encounter with the sacred.

The Malvagna Triptych‘s visual and theological structure originates in a state of sin. When the exterior panels are closed, we see Adam and Eve standing, pre-fall, naked in Eden. In fact, this work was a collaborative work in which Gossart painted the figures and Gerard David supplied the landscape. (This type of partnership between two master artists was common in Netherlandish art.) Gossart’s Adam and Eve stand, with their arms amorously wrapped around each other, in a pose that suggests the influence of Dürer’s print of the same subject from a series called The Small Passion (1511). If the attributed date for the Malvagna Triptych is accurate, Gossart adapted Dürer’s composition fairly quickly. Art historian Max Friedlander has even wondered if Gossart might have preceded and influenced Dürer. This is unlikely since Dürer’s treatment of Adam misses the theological innovation of Gossart’s composition. In fact, Gossart’s depiction of humanity’s first parents breaks with tradition in at least one significant detail. Following convention, Dürer shows Eve taking fruit from the serpent, while Adam dutifully warns her against this act. Gossart’s Eve already holds a piece of fruit in her hand while Adam reaches for fruit directly from the serpent, confirming his own culpability. In the background, a sword-wielding angel drives them from Eden. The inclusion of Adam and Eve in a devotional altarpiece, as an object in the Mass, establishes a contrast between the sinful eating of the fruit and the sanctified partaking of the host.

The Malvagna Triptych‘s structural and iconographic configuration demonstrates how the liturgical operation of the Netherlandish devotional altarpiece admitted the worshiper, in sight and faith, from corruption to exaltation. When this dimensionally intimate yet visually sumptuous altarpiece is opened, the central panel reveals an exquisite image of Mary and the Christ child. We behold them enthroned in an elaborately painted high gothic architecture surrounded by pudgy Italianate cherubs singing and playing musical instruments. Although Christ and Mary have often been referred to as the second Adam and Eve, the Malvagna Triptych is a rare example of a folding altarpiece that connects them as the exterior and interior subjects. (There is precedent for this iconographic arrangement in Gerard David’s Triptych of the Sedano Family, 1490-95.) The Malvagna Triptych, as a liturgical object to be employed in the Mass of a private chapel, is a medium by which the worshiper may first acknowledge their fallen state in sin and then gain access to paradise’s glory.

The triptych exemplifies how Jan Gossart’s art is theologically and visually rooted in a Netherlandish tradition of devotional art. The development of Netherlandish pietistic art in the 15th century was directly shaped by religious developments in the previous century. The rise of the Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion), articulated by texts such as Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, shifted the worshiper’s attention away from God’s unknowable divinity to Christ’s personhood. Christ’s humility, suffering, resurrection, and ascension were put forward as models for the Christian to contemplate.

The Devotio Moderna‘s emphasis on intimate and inward-oriented spirituality manifested itself in a particular theology of vision. Netherlandish devotional art was governed by a three-stage spiritual conception of vision. This originated with the carnal vision of the viewer/worshiper’s active gazing and seeing. However, the worshiper’s vision was to be focused not on but rather by the image. The image would lead the worshiper inward to an emotional and imaginative state in which they beheld the holy subject. The spiritual reward of this meditation was a spiritual vision of the invisible. The image would be a means by which the worshiper, transported through belief, would enter the presence of the imageless. Thus this process of encountering the sacred moved first from sight to faith and then from faith to transformed sight.

The theological climate in the Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries, which continued to have effect into the 16th century and beyond, led to the development of a particular mode of devotional art. In his 1984 book Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, Sixten Ringbom describes three types of Christian art: didactic narratives, venerated icons, and empathic images. The devotional image is neither viewed, as narratives, nor venerated, as icons. Ringbom notes, “The devotional image belongs to the domain of private piety where it is used as a recipient of prayer and benediction, or as an incentive and aid to meditation which is the preparatory stage for higher level of contemplation, an image-less state of mind where external aids should no longer be needed.” Whereas the icon transports the worshiper spiritually and the narrative image absorbs the viewer pictorially, the devotional image confronts the worshiper. First instilling the worshiper with a sense of repentant passion, the devotional work rewards this piety with entry into the presence of a sacred made imminent.

Specifically applied to Jan Gossart’s art, Ringbom’s distinction of the devotional image from the narrative image and icon is clarifying. While there is less danger in mistaking Gossart’s works for icons, regarding them as failed narratives equally misinterprets them. While Netherlandish art can be narrative, Gossart’s works are generally not. Although Max Friedlander has criticized Gossart for the artist’s limitations as a “storyteller,” I would suggest that other qualities, such as the theological and artistic structure of the work of art as an evocation of sacred presence, might have been more important to Gossart than narrative development. The Devotio Moderna emphasized the spiritual benefits of suffering and self-denial. A conception of the work of art as visual passage from the corporeal to the spiritual are evidenced in both the thematic choices and compositional structures of many of Gossart’s religious works, such as his Saint Jerome Penitent (ca. 1510). This work is the combined exterior panels of a dismantled altarpiece, whose overall size suggests that it may have been intended for private use. Meditating on this image, Gossart moves the worshiper through several stations of penitence.

As visual theology, Gossart’s Saint Jerome Penitent realizes, in its language and composition, a practice of adoration. Starting from the rocky ground at the lower left, our vision is drawn towards Jerome; the artist has even placed a pointed rock in the image’s lower-left corner to direct our visual/spiritual movement. The orientation of the saint’s posture and gaze then redirects us, leftward and upward, toward the crucified Christ. While Jerome is our model, Christ’s suffering is the ultimate and highest point of our devotion. Following a process of elevating devotion the visual passage of this work—from material/stone to meditation/Jerome to faith/Christ—is repentant; we move first in one direction and then another. Saint Jerome Penitent is not illustrative of a religious subject; its structure moves us through the mechanics of belief to realization of greater intimacy with Christ.

A model of piety, Jerome has stripped off the religious formalities of his cardinal’s hat and robe to bare his body and soul before a crucifix attached to a rugged tree. In this discussion of Gossart’s work as devotional art, it is worth specifically noting that it is Jerome’s contemplation of this visible object that ignites a zeal within him. Jerome, as depicted by Gossart, is model of the proper use of visible images/objects in worship. It is through this movement from carnal, to meditative, to spiritual vision that Jerome models the life of faith and temperance that, in the case of this altarpiece, literally opens to a communion with Christ.

Painted in grisaille, Saint Jerome Penitent suggests a world as “seen dimly.” The altarpiece opens (as if this interior image were the reward for our piety) to reveal Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (ca. 1510). This nocturnal scene’s principal source of illumination is a crescent moon, a symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection. (This is both because the phases of the moon may symbolize death and resurrection and because the First Council of Nicaea established that Easter’s date would be set in relationship to the moon’s phases.) In this deeply felt work, we witness the depth of Christ’s “dark night of the soul.” We are visually drawn, between the sleeping disciples, toward Christ. He kneels on the ground but his posture is upright; there is little sense of agony in either his body or face. Christ is absorbed in prayer. For a worshiper intent on imitating Christ by meditating on his passion, Gossart’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane encourages belief.

Gossart’s Christ in prayer is both the object of and model for the Christian’s worship. Christ looks up to a backlit angel, which seems frozen in space. Placed on a rock before Christ is a Eucharistic chalice and wafer. While the angel’s presence can be explained from Scripture, the chalice and wafer are extra-biblical elements which must have been intentionally placed there by Gossart. In fact, their purpose is directly tied to the altarpiece’s liturgical function. These signs of Christ’s body and blood connect this altarpiece with the Mass. Furthermore, that Christ is looking at the chalice and wafer, tangible and visible material, is significant. The implication is that even the Savior, God incarnate, benefited, at least in his humanity, from visual aids that led him to contemplate his own passion. It is hard to think of a stronger defense of devotional art.

Although this work, especially the image of Jerome, suggests some of the sculpture-like qualities that characterize many of his figures, scholars have not agreed if this altarpiece was painted before or after Gossart’s 1508-9 trip to Rome. Perhaps no episode in Jan Gossart’s life and work is more often employed as the prism through which his artistic accomplishment is viewed than his trip to Italy. Gossart spent seven months in Rome as part of Philip of Burgundy’s entourage. This diplomatic mission to Pope Julius II, himself a patron of the arts, allowed Gossart to study and sketch classical and renaissance architecture and sculpture. Being one of the first Netherlandish artists with personal knowledge of classicism brought Gossart fame. Being called “the Apelles of our age” is both praise and a description of Gossart’s attempt to realize modern subjects in the forms of antiquity.

One of Jan Gossart’s most visually resplendent and theologically complex works is Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin (ca. 1520-22). Applying oil painting’s capacity for detailed realism to its maximum effect, Gossart makes the sublime present. The subject of Luke painting a portrait of Mary and Christ had some important precedents in Netherlandish art, particularly van der Weyden’s famous treatment. The popularity of this subject is explained in part by the fact that artists belonged to the Guild of Saint Luke. Representations of Luke painting or drawing an image of the Virgin and Christ were employed to celebrate artists’ social standing as skilled craftsmen and scholars. In one of the greatest artistic treatments of this subject, Gossart breaks with traditional conventions for representing Luke painting the Virgin and Christ, transforming it into a model of piety and vision.

In reinventing this motif, Gossart relocates the site at which this encounter takes place from the secular space of artist’s studio to the sacred realm of the church. Precedent-setting depictions of this subject set the encounter in a domestic or studio space, as if Mary and Christ had come to sit for a portrait. In fact, Gossart had made an early work of Luke, the Virgin, and the Christ child that takes place within a less specifically defined, presumably domestic if not also palacious, setting where they all occupy the same temporal space. However, in his later Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, Gossart depicts the evangelist, situated in an Italianate church, envisioning Mary and Christ.

The specific nature of this vision is Gossart’s second break with other renditions of this subject. He depicts Mary as the Queen of Heaven being crowned by angels, affirming her as an intercessory figure. However, since he is drawing Mary and Christ, it is unusual that Luke is not looking at them. He may not even be seeing them corporally. What we see, with the aid of this work of art, may not be a miraculous and visible apparition of Mary and Christ but rather Luke’s inner vision. In a third departure from previous representations of this subject, Gossart includes an angel guiding Luke’s drawing hand. This angel’s presence evokes representations of the evangelist being inspired by an angelic presence to write his gospel. In fact, Luke’s own gospel may be the book that rests in the lectern’s arched shelf. Perhaps Luke was absorbed with this book when he had the mystical vision. As Luke’s faith has become sight, he has placed the book under the lectern, where it acts as a theological support for his creative act. This direct connection between the writing of the gospel and the drawing of the image is one of several ways in which Gossart defines and defends the theological foundation of his own artistic vocation.

Luke has removed his shoes; he is performing sanctified work on holy ground. This reminds us of Moses before the burning bush. In fact, there is a history in Christian art of associating Mary and the burning bush. However, the association between Moses and Luke is rare. In this case, Gossart placed a sculpted figure of Moses directly above Luke, as if the vertical axis were an Old Testament/New Testament timeline. Moses, who looks like a sculpture come alive, holds the tablet of the Ten Commandments and may even be pointing to the second commandment, the potential prohibition of representational religious art as idolatrous. Having Moses looking down in approval on this event, Gossart transforms him from iconoclast to iconophile.

Gossart’s Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin asserted the claims of religious art at a moment when the Protestant Reformation was rapidly transforming Europe. It is worth noting that Martin Luther, who defended the proper place of the visual arts in worship, appeared at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1522, Andreas Karlstadt convinced the Council of Wittenberg to have all works of art removed from their churches. The first widespread and violent Protestant iconoclasm occurred in Zurich in 1523. The spread of Protestantism across northern Europe dramatically altered the course of art history and, where it was adopted, radically transformed, and often brought an end to, this type of visionary devotional art.

But Gossart’s art is more than an example of Netherlandish art in its final pre-Reformation phase. In the Malvagna Triptych, Saint Jerome Penitent, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, Gossart developed thematic and compositional innovations that directly furthered the purpose of devotional painting. Although his art is not as consistently strong as that of Gerard David or Albrecht Dürer, Gossart did make several distinct, and underappreciated, contributions to the history of Netherlandish devotional art. The richness of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, and the regrettable absence in the catalogue of a greater scholarly treatment of Gossart’s religious art, suggest that his place—as well as that of Netherlandish devotional painting—in the history of Christianity and the visual arts deserves further examination.

Exiting the exhibition and walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Gossart’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane still impressed on my mind, I was struck by Vincent van Gogh’s Cypresses (1889). Painted at a time in his life when Vincent was experiencing a revival of faith, Cypresses, when considered alongside Gossart’s work, evidences an influence of Netherlandish devotional painting that is both pervasive and largely ignored in Vincent’s art. Although neither Christ nor an angel is depicted, Cypresses evokes a spiritual empathy between the twisted form of the trees (which Vincent used a symbol of death) and the crescent moon (which he understood as representing Christ’s resurrection). Both of these motifs also appear in Vincent’s Starry Night, a vision of eternal spiritual communion in the afterlife. If the purpose of Netherlandish devotional art is to move us from temporal sight to personal faith and to transformed vision, Cypresses emblematizes the continuing significance of Netherlandish devotional art, in which the whole world can be seen as an encounter with the sacred.

James Romaine is associate professor of art history at Nyack College and co-founder of the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art. He is the editor of Art as Spiritual Perception: Essays in Honor of E. John Walford, just published by Crossway.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In August of 1978, Ballantine Books, under their Del Rey imprint, published The Way the Future Was, a memoir by science-fiction writer and editor Frederik Pohl (who is still writing today, in his nineties). Here is the way it begins:

When I first encountered science fiction, Herbert Hoover was the President of the United States, a plump, perplexed man who never quite figured out what had gone wrong.

A boy of ten is not without intelligence. It seems to me that then I was about as educable and perceptive as I was ever going to be in my life. What I did lack was knowledge …. My father would be in one place, my mother in another, and me with some relative until they could get it together again. The name of the game was the Great Depression, but I didn't know I was playing it. And at some point in that year of 1930, I came across a magazine named Science Wonder Stories Quarterly, with a picture of a scaly green monster on the cover. I opened it up. The irremediable virus entered my veins.

I would have enjoyed Pohl's book whenever I came across it (and in fact I have read it again a couple of times over the decades since), but the timing of that first reading was particularly right for me. Like Pohl, I had encountered science fiction around the age of ten. For the next several years, I read immense quantities of it, along with many other things. But then there occurred a hiatus. It was as if a switch had been flipped in my teenage brain, and for years I read very little sci-fi.

In my late twenties, I began to read science fiction regularly again, though not nearly as intensively as before, and I had been doing so for a year or more when Pohl's book appeared. I was reading a mix of newly published sci-fi and writers I had missed altogether or hardly taken in the first time around (preeminently, Philip K. Dick) while catching up a bit with books published between the mid-1960s and the late '70s. Pohl sent me back to my first immersion.

I thought of The Way the Future Was when I got my hands on the gorgeous two-volume set published this fall by the Library of America, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe. The first volume, covering 1953-1956, includes Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (the subject of a piece by Philip Jenkins in the January/February 2012 issue of Books & Culture), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, and Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man; the second volume, 1956-1958, includes Robert A. Heinlein's Double Star, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Algis Budrys' Who?, and Fritz Leiber's The Big Time. Except for Leigh Brackett's novel, I read all of these when I was young. The one that made the biggest impression on me, by far, was The Stars My Destination, followed by The Space Merchants. If I were putting together a similar selection, most of my choices would be different, but I can't fault Wolfe's list. (If you are interested in the set, there's a tasty array of supplemental material—images as well as words—at loa.org/sciencefiction, including brief new essays on the nine novels by Michael Dirda, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Nicola Griffith, James Morrow, Tim Powers, Kit Reed, Peter Straub, and Connie Willis.)

How curious it is to contemplate this boxed set, taking its notional space in the Library of America alongside Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, and the endless volumes of Philip Roth. This is the way the future was in American science fiction c. 1953-1958. Now it is the past, an object of curatorial care but also inviting fresh attention. Frederik Pohl devotes some of his warmest pages to his stint as editor of Galaxy magazine. ("I stayed with Galaxy for just about a decade. The pay was miserable. The work was never-ending. It was the best job I ever had.") If Pohl could be summoned for a special-issue encore, it would be nice to have a gathering of essays comparing the way the future was in these nine novels and their contemporaries with the way the future is in a comparable range of sci-fi today.

Science fiction, the critic Darko Suvin has argued, is above all a literature of "cognitive estrangement." It's a resonant phrase, though of course it would also apply to a lot of writing outside sci-fi. We are all at home in this world and yet not at home. When I was a boy, growing up in churches where muted talk about "the end times" was routine though not obsessive, science fiction suggested the possibility that history was stranger than I had been led to believe, that rather than being near the end we might be only in the early chapters, that perhaps our God was too small: we had tried to make him fit in charts and schemes of our own devising.

We should consider this possibility, while not turning it into a warrant for smug certainty (the very thing we are supposed to be seeking to avoid) and an excuse to feel superior to others. Among its many benefits, science fiction—some if it, anyway—can help us to do that, even as it provides delicious escape. And by escaping now and then from the insistent demands of the real, we are better able to grasp the reality of our peculiar situation as strangers in a strange land.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.