Page 2761 – Christianity Today (2024)

I just saw Finding Nemo. Trusted friends (adults and children alike) told me it is a must-see. But my wife and I still emerged from the theater wondering what, exactly, we had just received for our investment of $15 and two hours of our life.

“To praise, exalt, establish, and defend.” The great Roman Catholic journalist and author G. K. Chesterton, in one of his gem-like short essays, urged all Christians to do these things when they came across worthy literary or artistic expressions. Modern literature, media, and culture contain little that is positive or edifying, said Chesterton. Those that don’t major on the degraded, the corrupt, and the dysfunctional still blow an uncertain trumpet. They haven’t much to offer that can build up audiences.

Chesterton argued that it’s our job as Christians to seek out cultural products that say something worth saying—and then to recommend them to others. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8).

Certainly, Finding Nemo is artistically well done, sweetly humorous, untainted by any of the decadence that so disturbed Chesterton. But the problem my wife and I had with it is this: We’ve seen it all before. It’s the Disney formula. Despite the (tired) theme of love between father and son, in the end it’s just well produced mind-candy. Its message is pasteurized. It does not feed much in us beside the desire to be entertained.

Every time I see such well-meaning but empty movies, I remember Neil Postman’s arresting title: Amusing Ourselves to Death.

OK, yes: I do keep coming back—the media lemming that I am.

It goes something like this: I’m on my way home from work. It’s been a long day. I’m tired. I know five restless kids and an equally tired wife are waiting for me at home. So what do I do? I stop at the Blockbuster and pick up a couple of harmless entertainments. And that evening, a few more hours trickle away as the family relaxes in front of them.

I begin to have sympathy with the Puritans or the medieval monks,with their suspicions of time-wasting merry-making. There must be better things to do with life than this!

To be sure, not everything is bleak in the world of media giants and media outlets. Wal-mart has helped the Veggie Tales’ Jonah video rocket to over 2.7 million in sales (some 25 percent of these have been sold through Wal-mart stores). And they have demonstrated an aggressive enough preference for conservative and Christian media products to make the liberal media cry “censorship.”

But this courageous (though, of course, lucrative) public preference for conservative media on the part of one major retailer is not enough, if the stories we watch and hear never rise above the basic (Jonah) or the sensational (Left Behind). Where are the Christian classics—old and new? Where can we go to find compelling, spirit-lifting stories from the great Christian writers and inspirational biographies from the annals of faith?

Where, indeed. A few suggestions:

The classic BBC Narnia series feels a little clunky, but it is an award-winner that my kids keep coming back to and enjoying. Focus on the Family has done an even better job—though in audio rather than video—with their Radio Theateradaptation of the Narnia books. This is a top-notch audio dramatization hosted by Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham. The series’ adaptation of The Silver Chair well deserved its recent triumph over 600 entrants—many from such major secular players as Random House—for the coveted “Audie Award.” Focus also created the Peabody Award winning audio drama “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Freedom” a few years ago.

Focus on the Family’s other audio titles include Ben-Hur, Silas Marner, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and other Christian-themed classics.

Many Christians went to see Anthony Hopkins play a grief-stricken C. S. Lewis in the Richard Attenborough-directed version of Shadowlands when it first hit the theaters in 1993. But the original BBC TV version of Shadowlands, originally aired in 1985, is a more stirring and more explicitly faith-centered production of the script centering on C. S. Lewis’s marriage to—and subsequent loss of—the American divorcee Joy Davidman.

That version was co-produced by Gateway Films, a company that, in partnership with its video distribution arm, Vision Video, has released a steady stream of screen versions of Christian literary classics and Christian historical dramas. If you are concerned about the quality of entertainment served up by the Hollywood machine and you want to feed on some truly beautiful and substantial film, you need to surf the Vision Video catalogue.

There you will find dramatized biographies of well-known Christian leaders like John Calvin, John Wesley, Francis of Assisi, and, yes, Martin Luther (the 1953 black-and-white classic is still well worth seeing, as is Where Luther Walked, the warm-hearted, quirky romp through Luther’s home turf, accompanied by vignettes from his life, hosted by Luther scholar Roland Bainton). You will also find the inspiring stories of people from church history who may be little more than a name to you—if even that: William Tyndale, George Fox, Hildegard of Bingen, Jan Amos Comenius, and many others.

And there is much more worth seeing in Vision’s extensive catalogue: a film (somewhat clunky, but unique and inspiring) on the birth of missions in the eighteenth-century Moravian community; a film series with accompanying discussion material (there are many of these in Vision’s catalogue) on persecution in the early church; and such silver-screen classics as A Man For All Seasons (on the life of Thomas More—though track down the superior 1966 production rather than the star-studded but lackluster 1988 version if you can) and The Ten Commandments(with Charlton Heston in the role of Moses).

Signs are, the time may be ripe for a new crop of such Christian classics—a crop of the very highest quality, fit to compete against even the slickest Hollywood productions. PBS has realized there is something timeless and good about the story of a Christian hero like Martin Luther—witness the release this Thursday, July 9, of its special on that Reformer. And now a new full-length, faith-based theatrical movie on the life of Martin Luther is slated for limited release across the country this coming September. Hot on its heels (in October) will come a movie about one of Roman Catholicism’s best-loved saints, Therese of Lisieux.

On the Narnia front, audiences have reason to hope for good things from Walden Media’s upcoming adaptation of Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Likely to be a few more years in the making, the movie will get to draw on the talents of director Andrew Adamson, whose Shrek won an Academy Award in the newly formed category Best Animated Feature.

“Narnia was such a vivid and real world to me as a child, as it is to millions of other fans. I share Walden’s excitement in giving those fans an epic theatrical experience worthy of their imaginations, and driving a new generation toward the works of C.S. Lewis,” says Anderson. “Making a film that crosses generations is a far easier task when the source material resonates such themes as truth, loyalty and belief in something greater than yourself.”

These values and others—courage, self-sacrifice, hope, and the battle against the evil without and the evil within—also shine from Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings. I know I’m not the only Christian movie-lover counting the months until the release of the third movie in the trilogy this December.(On Tolkien’s faith in his life and work, see our Issue 78: J. R. R. Tolkien and the featured articles from this issue on our main page at www.christianhistory.net).

With such riches out there, why sit through another viewing of one of the Disney chestnuts—as pleasant and inoffensive as those are? The alternatives mentioned are often as well made as any secular production, and they have so much more to say to us. Let’s not settle for innocuous.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine. More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church’s past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

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We’re not going to stop any presses by declaring that Christianity has suffered serious decline in Europe—the place where apostles preached, and where Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, Barth, and countless other spiritual luminaries called home. Witness, to take just one example, the current sad turmoil in the Anglican Communion between the theological liberals of the statistically stagnant British mother church and their conservative brethren in rapidly growing, vibrant African and Asian dioceses.

Until recently, many Western academics accepted the sociologists’ “secularization thesis,” which asserts that intellectual advance and economic modernization lead people and nations past a need for faith, to a more enlightened and more secular mode of life. Europe’s ongoing and increasing contempt for organized religion has been their prime example, while the growth of Christianity in countries such as Nigeria and China have been dismissed as a primitive stop on the road toward a godless society.

Perhaps no nation more proudly flaunts its secularism than France. The land that launched the millennium of Christendom by crowning Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in 800 has morphed into a staunchly secularist state, opposed to even the most cursory mention of Christianity’s historic influence in the European Union’s recently drafted constitution. Over the years France has exemplified the convergence of academic skepticism and popular unrest that has produced empty church pews across the continent.

But events have thrown the secularization thesis into disrepute—to the point where few now defend it in its original form. At the crux of this intellectual shift is one piece of glaring counter-evidence: the United States of America. American Christianity has survived and thrived despite suffering many of the same factors that have proved so troubling to Europe. Americans have been dragged into modernity by scientific advance, brutalized by modern mechanized warfare, battered by urban squalor, seduced by consumerist materialism, and bombarded by anti-Christian critiques from a secularist media and academic establishment. But through it all, they have clung to faith and resisted the destructive ideologies that so deeply scarred twentieth-century Europe.

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most famous links between France and the United States, illuminated American Christianity’s cultural resilience. During his trip to the United States in 1831, he found a vibrant, flourishing crop of denominations and churches. These, he insisted, “all agreed with each other except about details.” All agreed, too, that “the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state.” Tocqueville claimed that throughout his stay in America, he met “nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.”

While no single factor can exhaustively explain the stark differences between these Western strongholds, the contrast between Europe’s long legacy of government-sponsored religion and America’s historically recent and unique separation of church and state provides one wide window on European Christianity’s decline.

Constantine Launches the Long Era of Church-State Unity

Constantine’s conversion in 312 looms large for the study of church-state relations. During the early church era Tertullian famously said, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” but after Constantine saw his vision at Milvian Bridge the empire that formerly shed Christian blood began conquering behind the cross. Suddenly, Christian faith became a stepping-stone to secular success, and those who yearned to become truedisciples began to feel they could only do so if they first escaped the compromised “Christian” cities into desert caves and monasteries.

Scholars have frequently debated the motivations behind Constantine’s bold actions, including his decision to call the landmark Council of Nicea in 325. Yet whether his motivations were political or spiritual, Constantine set a precedent of political influence over church issues that has been abused by numerous European leaders over the centuries. His successor, Constantius, understood the political expediency of religious power when he petitioned church officials to equate his decisions with God’s commands.

Of course, we would be foolish not to acknowledge how God utilized the Roman Empire’s remarkable territorial reach—and thus the spread of its sponsor faith. Establishment proved fruitful for the church’s evangelistic efforts as the Romans carried Christianity’s banner to the farthest and most barbaric reaches of their vast empire, establishing the foundations of what would later develop into Christendom.

Yet from its inception, Christendom suffered the ill effects of the church’s intimate relationship with the state. While in an environment of open religious competition American Protestant denominations have thrived both in numbers and—often—in spiritual health, European Christianity’s disputes have historically proven bloody and spiritually costly.

Take for example the Great Schism of 1054, when Eastern and Western Christianity became formally divided. The estrangement between the two had been deepening for centuries—and it was as cultural and political in nature as it was theological. Then, to add military insult to ecclesiastical insult, an army of Western Christian Crusaders led by money-hungry Venetian merchants pillaged Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1254, critically weakening that city’s defenses. In the end, the division from the West so weakened the East that they were unable to resist the Muslim invaders who captured Constantinople in 1453. Soon, having breached Christendom’s eastern flank, Muslim armies threatened Christian Europe itself, even to the gates of Vienna.

Rome’s fall, Constantinople’s forsaking, and Christendom’s eventual collapse during the Reformation era’s wars of religion reveal the perils of uniting the church so closely with temporal earthly regimes. Bluntly put, the church that lives by state power, dies by state power—its fortunes are too closely tied to political vicissitudes.

Roots of Europe’s Twentieth-Century Religious Discontent

The French Revolution exemplifies the dangers faced by a church tied to an unpopular government, but France also birthed the Enlightenment criticism that eroded church support from Europe’s educated elites. When Frenchmen renamed the Cathedral of Notre Dame the Temple of Reason in 1793, they expressed distaste for their nation’s Catholic heritage and unswerving faith in the supremacy of human thought. Though Catholicism in France did not die with the Revolution, and the cathedral’s name was later restored, French academics like Voltaire and Rousseau drew upon the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton and others to build a rationalistic worldview, elaborated by later scientists such as Charles Darwin.

As the attack on faith by the intellectual elite continued, Christianity began losing Europe’s working classes en masseduring a series of secular crises, beginning with the urban squalor created by the rapid industrialization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shocked by the tremendous human toll of World War I, Europe’s masses began turning toward other ideologies, especially socialism, which they perceived could speak more directly to their everyday circ*mstances than a seemingly irrelevant state-church.

The most dramatic example of this shift is Russia’s communism; others include Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and Spain. With the world so quickly changing around them, Europeans revolted against static institutions they accused of either causing or failing to minister to their sufferings. In most cases they directed venom toward secular governments, many of which still ruled co-dependently with the established church.

While so many of the European church’s challengers over the years, from rationalism to socialism to New Age religions, have died or lost steam, Europeans have shown little interest in returning to the church. Meanwhile, Americans look across the ocean and wonder what they should learn from Europe’s example. For starters, they can thank God that American churches remain independent of secular authorities.

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Fifty years from now, the summer of 2003 may be known as the time when Americans rediscovered Africa. HIV/AIDS in Botswana, bloody internal warfare in Liberia, and yellowcake uranium from Niger have all appeared on television newscasts and the front pages of newspapers. The overall impression of many Americans is that Africa is a continent of coups and contagion. But in the midst of such tragedy (by no means new to that continent) stands hope—in the form of Christian medical missions.

The modern-day marriage of health-care and Christian evangelism has a relatively unknown history of success. It has saved the lives of individuals, families, and villages, and introduced traditional societies to the transforming power of the gospel and Christian community. It is one reason why an estimated 380 million Christians dwell in Africa’s 56 nations.

A historical—and living—example of this marriage is Harold Paul Adolph, a retired missionary surgeon and the son of a missionary surgeon. During his career, Adolph performed 25,000 operations, mostly overseas, beginning after he completed his m.d. in 1958 at the University of Pennsylvania. Adolph practiced in Ethiopia, Niger, and Panama’s Canal Zone, as well as suburban Chicago. In 1997, the Christian Medical and Dental Society named Adolph as its Missionary of the Year.

But Adolph and his wife Bonnie Jo have not been content to spend their retirement years resting on their laurels at their home in Wisconsin. This year, they have been traveling the United States, raising $1 million to build a new 200-bed missionary hospital in rural south central Ethiopia, a remote region subject to drought, famine, and disease. although the Adolphs don’t have all the funding in place (they’re about $300,000 short), they will be heading back to Ethiopia in a few weeks to help oversee the initial stages of construction.

Adolph’s passion is not just for the missionary hospital. He’s also committed to recruiting a new corps of missionary doctors from the ranks of students at American medical schools. In 1997, Adolph wrote an arresting first-person narrative, “Surgery on the Edge of the Desert” for the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons. The article described in graphic detail 24 hours in the life of a missionary surgeon in Galni, Niger. After publication, dozens of medical schools invited Adolph to speak with students about overseas medical missions. “We see the sad disappearance of the career medical missionary,” Adolph said recently to journalist James Adair. Adolph works closely with Project MedSend, a Christian agency that helps new doctors in debt get into the mission field.

A proud historyIn all of the discussion about Africa’s problems, missions-based health care stands out as one of the evangelical movement’s best examples of holistic ministry. The history of the medical missionary is rich, varied, and touches on all major branches of Christianity. It encompasses such legendary figures as David Livingstone, known more for his famous explorations of South Africa and discovery of Victoria Falls than his bedside manner, and Albert Schweitzer, the son of a Lutheran pastor, author of Quest for the Historical Jesus, founder of a missions hospital in Gabon, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

There are many more contemporary heroes—to mention just two, Helen Roseveare and Paul Brand, who died on July 8 following several weeks in a coma after a fall.

Roseveare, born in the U.K., was profiled in the 1994 book Ambassadors for Christ. She arrived in the Congo in 1953 with Worldwide Evangelistic Crusade and spent much of her working life caring for the sick, administering a hospital, and training Africans to be doctors and health care personnel.

Roseveare shared a commitment common among missionary doctors that the cause of the gospel is paramount. She said, according to writer Lin Johnson, “I want people to be passionately in love with Jesus, so that nothing else counts.”

“I’m a fanatic, if you like, but only because I believe so strongly that nothing counts except knowing your sins have been forgiven by the blood of Jesus.

“We’ve only got this short life to get others to know the same truth.”

although Paul Brand’s clinical work was mostly in India, his impact reaches into Africa and around the world because of his important research on leprosy, which remains a serious health problem in many parts of Africa.

One of Brand’s most powerful contributions to the Christian community arose from his theological reflections on human experience. As a Christian physician, he discovered that the “most problematic aspect of creation [is] the existence of pain.” He was later to write: “God designed the human body so that it is able to survive because of pain.”

The origins of Christian medical missionsThe Bible and early church history link the spread of the gospel to care for the sick and healing. The miraculous healings of lepers, the blind, and the lame in gospel accounts and Peter’s healings in Acts are intimately connected to God’s work of salvation through Jesus Christ.

During a fourth century famine in Turkey, Basil the Great of Cappadocia built a complex of buildings, including a church, a hospice for travelers, and a hospital for the sick. The hospital at Cappadocia is one of the earliest examples in Christian history of a church community dedicating itself to the urgent physical needs as well as the spiritual needs of people.

Sixteen centuries later, this model of ministry still works. “A doctor’s vocation is his medicine, but his real calling is still to win people for Christ,” Harold Adolph said in a 1981 interview for the Billy Graham Center missionary archive.

“When the love of Christ can be demonstrated by fulfillment of a tangible need, you get farther. They’re coming to us with their recognized need; we’re taking care of that and pointing out other needs.”

Timothy C. Morgan is deputy managing editor for Christianity Today.

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Last summer, Newsweek ran a cover story on Americans’ perceptions of heaven and hell. Finishing up the piece, the author quoted a 14-year-old vacation Bible school counselor that heaven is “whatever you dream it.” It may be just one more case of bad journalism, but for a venerable tradition like VBS—established to teach children the Bible and to mature them as Christians—the quote couldn’t have been more embarrassing. Buried in the article as it was, though, the quote seems to have attracted little attention.

Many of our readers won’t need an introduction to VBS. But for those who do, vacation Bible schools are typically offered by churches once every summer, starting usually on a Monday and finishing up that Friday. They center around a single theme, involve kids in games and crafts, and—most importantly—seek to teach biblical truths. Christian youth are encouraged to invite their neighborhood friends who otherwise would never bother with church. In many communities, the week of summer fun is anticipated with rising excitement.

But, as one of our readers recently asked Christian History, how did VBS become so popular, and who was the inspiration behind it?

Unofficially, it’s possible to trace the roots of VBS as far back as the 1870s, when the Methodist Episcopal Church offered summer Sunday school institutes to the general public near Lake Chautauqua, New York. In 1873, Bishop John H. Vincent proposed the movement should include educational and cultural programs, and soon other Christian groups across the country followed suit with their own summer retreats, many of them offering services for children.

Vacation Bible school as we know it today got its start more than 20 years later on New York City’s East Side. Mrs. Walker Aylette Hawes of the Epiphany Baptist Church noted a rapid increase in the number of immigrant children in the slums. In July 1898 she rented the only place available—a saloon—to run a Bible school for six weeks during the summer. Hawes structured her program around worship music, Bible stories and Scripture memorization, games, crafts, drawing, cooking, etc. The school caught on: Hawes was presiding over seven separate schools by the time she retired from her work in 1901.

Dr. Robert Boville, who worked for the Baptist Mission Society, picked up where Hawes left off, and the movement grew to include 17 schools by 1903. Fours years later, schools opened in Philadelphia and Chicago, and in 1911, Boville established the Daily Vacation Bible School Association as a national organization. In 1923, he left to promote VBS internationally and founded the World Association of Vacation Bible Schools.

If Boville is responsible for establishing VBS as a movement, Standard Publishing in Cincinnati takes the credit for popularizing it. The publisher created a full-scale VBS program in 1923, divided it by grade level in 1948, introduced a single-theme concept in 1952, and by 1987, offered more than 120 tools for churches wanting to run a VBS. In 1998, the publisher reported that more than 5 million children attended VBS programs every year.

It’s interesting to note that VBS is not only an American phenomenon. One of many worldwide examples is the VBS pioneered by the South India Bible Seminary. In 1952, the seminary’s staff and students introduced VBS to 75 children in Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu. Four years later, seminary students designed their own course, and in 1961, over 33,000 students enrolled in 100 VBS centers across the country of India. Explosive growth continued through the 1970s, totaling 1,420,000 students by 1980. The Mar Thoma church became so enthusiastic it sponsored a missionary VBS venture into Kuwait in 1984, beginning with 750 students and 60 teachers.

In the 1970s, critics suggested the movement had exhausted its potential. History, it seems, is on the side of VBS.

Steven Gertz is editorial coordinator of Christian History.

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The specter of the “Christian terrorist” presented by the recent capture of accused bomber Eric Rudolph has raised again the old charge of the skeptic: “Why should we be surprised when Christians kill people? They’ve always done so. Church history itself is the best advertisem*nt against the church.”

Christianity’s opponents love to use church-historical examples to “prove” that violence is inherent to the Christian church. The favorites are the Crusades and the Inquisitions. The critics ask: Don’t such violent blots on the church prove Christians have never followed their Lord’s loving, non-violent lead and obeyed the Commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”

In his book The Case for Faith, pastor-apologist Lee Strobel records an interview he conducted with church historian John D. Woodbridge about the Crusades, the Inquisition, and other historical episodes that have provided the church’s enemies with so much fodder. Woodbridge was careful to admit that even genuine Christians seeking to serve their Lord have proved capable of violent acts. But he insisted that this is neither within the spirit nor the practice of Christianity as it has been lived over the two millennia since Christ. Here is a quick summary of his responses, as reported by Strobel.

The Crusades

Strobel sets the scene with an eyewitness description of the First Crusade’s first hours in Jerusalem. There, at the Temple of Solomon, “men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.” Added the triumphant eyewitness, “It was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.”

Of course, to Woodbridge, as to Strobel and to us, such horrors were anything but “just and splendid.” From the first Crusade, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, to the last, in 1291, at least some of the crusaders “thought they were doing something magnificent for Christ.” The goal, after all, was to retrieve the Holy Land from the Muslims, who (it seemed obvious) were enemies of Christ. However, even such high motives did not keep the Crusaders from indulging in far less noble pursuits. Woodbridge reminds us that in one of the most notorious crusades, the Fourth, “the participants didn’t even make it to the Holy Land. They got as far as Constantinople, seized it, and set up their own kingdom. Tremendous bloodshed ensued. Western ‘Christians’ killed Eastern Christians.”

Clearly the Crusades were anything but Christian. From Popes who promised people their salvation if they went on Crusades to transparently bloodthirsty and money-hungry people who used Crusades as an excuse to pillage, these bloody enterprises “made a mockery of the teachings of the Bible and can’t in any way be squared with historic Christian beliefs.”

What, then, are we to conclude? Woodbridge put it like this: “The Crusades … need to be confessed as being totally contrary to the teachings of the one the crusaders were supposedly following. It’s important to remember that it’s not Jesus’ teachings that are at fault here; it’s the actions of those who, for whatever reason, greatly strayed from what he clearly taught: we are to love our enemies.”

The Inquisition

What, then, of the Inquisition? Here we have an undertaking set up with the highest of theological motives: keeping pure the teachings of the church, and preventing innocent people from being led away from the saving gospel of Christ. How could such goals produce such terrible results?

First, the facts: Beginning in 1163, bishops were instructed to discover heresy and act against heretics—especially the group known as the Albigenses. There followed two more “waves” of inquisition—one beginning in Spain in 1472, and one in 1542 that was focused on Calvinist Protestants.

Whatever our opinion of heresy trials as a necessary or effective measure of church discipline (see our previous newsletter on this), it is clear that if there is a “right way” to conduct one, these Inquisitions’ way was not it. Swiftly, these became marked by “secret proceedings, supreme authority vested in the inquisitor, and a complete lack of due process, where the accused didn’t know the names of their accusers, there was no defense attorney, and torture was used to extract confessions. Those who refused to repent were turned over to the government to be burned at the stake.”

What the Inquisition, like many other historical cases of “church brutality,” illustrates is the bloody consequences that ensue when secular powers identify heresy with sedition. In a parallel Protestant case—that of Michael Servetus, tried and executed in Calvin’s Geneva—it was the state who actually put Servetus to the torch. Why? Because the powers-that-be expected and feared that a threat to the church was also a threat to the state. Woodbridge reminds us that throughout the Reformation period, “religion and politics were bound up together,” and that this was often an explosive, bloody mix—not the first and not the last.

The deeper question remains: were events like the Crusades and the Inquisition representative of the history of the Christian churches? Woodbridge thinks that although such events were tragedies that the church can not run away from, “It’s too much of an extrapolation to say that this kind of hateful activity is part of a pattern.” He continues:

“For much of their existence, many Christian churches have been in a minority situation and therefore not even in a position to persecute anyone. In fact, talk about persecution—millions of Christians themselves have been victims of brutal persecution through the ages, continuing to the present day in some places. … there have been apparently more Christian martyrs in the twentieth century than in any other. To this very day, Christians are being killed for their faith around the world.”

Strobel emphasizes Woodbridge’s point with a quotation from Christianity Today editor David Neff: “The typical Christian lives in a developing country, speaks a non-European language, and exists under the constant threat of persecution—of murder, imprisonment, torture, or rape.”

Christians have far more often suffered than perpetrated terror. This does not excuse those who in the past have named Christ’s name but broken God’s Fifth Commandment. But it does put the lie to the skeptic’s image of a church characterized throughout its history by brutal oppression and violence.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

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Hardly any women appear in the current issue of Christian History. Fact is, for most of the church’s 2,000 years, women didn’t do history in an official sense. They did plenty of other things, though, as contemporary historians-male and female-describe in countless new books. Here’s a glance at a few of them to pique your interest:

The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan (Paulist Press, 2001)

As a graduate student in theology, Laura Swan wrestled with some of life’s biggest questions. She began to find answers in the wisdom of ancient ascetics, but something was missing. Written records of the desert monks were easy to find, but references to desert mothers-who may have outnumbered men two to one-lay in shadows, occasionally popping up as footnotes in rare scholarly works. Swan decided to play the sleuth and track them down.

Swan’s subtitle, Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, summarizes the types of information she unearthed. After helpful chapters on desert life and spirituality, Swan presents sayings analogous to those found in Benedicta Ward’s more famous book Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Swan’s running commentary on the sayings gushes a bit, detracting from the impact of the sayings themselves. However, as the glossary at the back of the book demonstrates, Swan anticipates a green audience, and she doesn’t want to lose them.

Stories of lesser known desert mothers, early deaconesses, monastic community leaders follow the sayings. Swan indicates that she has toned down the stories from their original hagiographic form, again seeking to make the material attractive to modern readers. Swan’s edits certainly make the stories more readable, but some credibility is lost; Swan’s simple, declarative sentences give the impression of conveying facts, while the source material often sought primarily to communicate values. Hagiography is a tricky genre, and merely simplifying the prose cannot excise all of the trickiness.

Though Swan can be faulted for imprecision, her enthusiasm for the fruits of her research makes the book appealing as an introduction to the foreign, yet familiar, world of Christian asceticism.

The Legend of Pope Joan by Peter Stanford (Berkley, 2000 [Henry Holt, 1999])

A neglected shrine on a streetcorner in Rome, a suspicious chair tucked away in the Vatican Museum, and references made by some 500 medieval writers (yet dismissed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy as a Protestant plot) all point to one question: Did the church accidentally elect a female pope in the ninth century, only to discover the truth when she gave birth during a procession? Journalist Peter Stanford, intrigued by clues he picked up while on vacation in Italy, had to find out.

Unrestrained by either academic convention or unswerving allegiance to Rome, Stanford turns every stone in his quest for the truth about Joan. He seems to have found every real or alleged reference to her in texts, art, card games, and G.K. Chesterton fiction. Unfortunately for the more conservative reader, he also unearths some dark material, including gender-bending sexuality and Freudian speculations.

Whether or not Joan ever lived, her story has led a long and fascinating life, twisting and turning through Western history. Stanford is an able and entertaining, if sometimes overly flip, guide.

Five Women of the English Reformation by Paul F.M. Zahl (Eerdmans, 2001)

In most accounts, the key elements of Anne Boleyn’s life are her relationship with Henry VIII, her inability to produce a male heir to the English throne, and her execution. But Episcopal minister Paul F.M. Zahl is convinced that she has more to offer: a distinctive, systematic, Reformed theology. He considers Boleyn, Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Jane Grey, and Catherine Willoughby “nursing mothers of the English Reformation.”

Zahl certainly overstates his case. He makes little effort to disentangle the religious, political, social, and even romantic goals of these women (and their friends and enemies), blithely taking them at their words when they claim spiritual motivation. A writer working with source material from the propaganda-rich Reformation era should be much more critical.

Zahl also hangs a lot of theology and interpretation on slender threads of recorded data. Boleyn, for example, left only marginal notes in her favorite books. Zahl assumes that these indicate wholehearted support of the books’ arguments (Zahl quotes the books liberally as if they were Boleyn’s words) and, somehow, significant original thought.

While Zahl cannot convince careful readers that each of his five female subjects contributed mightily to the theology of the English Reformation, he may persuade people to see these women as more than the passive (or pernicious) wives, mistresses, and mothers they are often made out to be. This shift in perspective rightly elevates these remarkable women and might even prompt some interesting scholarship into the nuances of their spirituality.

All of these books are available at our partner store, Christianbook.com.

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History, and can be reached at cheditor@christiantytoday.com.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

On September 29, the

Chicago Union Tribune

ran a letter, discovered by the FBI, that had been written to the September 11 hijackers, emboldening them with promises of paradise in exchange for their suicide attack. Muslims have argued against associating the attacks with Islam, suggesting that the attackers represent a radical fringe divorced from true Islam. Politicians seem to agree. In his speech to a joint session of Congress (and the nation) on September 20, President George W. Bush described the teachings of Islam as “good and peaceful” and said that “those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”

But jihad has a long history in Islam, and Muslims have fought under its banner for centuries. If Christians have put forward the concept of just war as justification for war, jihad, or holy war has underpinned Muslim determination to fight. What exactly is jihad, and how has it been waged in the past? In the fall of 1993, Christian History asked Islamic historian Dr. Hadia Dajani-Shakeel to describe how Muslims viewed the Crusaders and why they responded as they did. Excerpts from her response appear below. Dajani-Shakeel is co-editor of

The Jihad and Its Times

(Michigan, 1991).

In 1095, Pope Urban II staged a massive military invasion of the Muslim East. That invasion and occupation caused the forced expulsion, conversion, or enslavement of the Muslim majority. Only a few cities in Syria remained in Muslim hands, and these became centers for Islamic resistance.

Muslims viewed the Christian settlements as alien and illegitimate, established at the expense of the native population, which had been displaced or massacred. The early Christians were portrayed as ruthless, bloodthirsty, and barbaric.

Furthermore, Muslims considered the loss of Jerusalem, with its Islamic sacred shrines—the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock—as the greatest loss in their history. To profane Muslim shrines was to abuse Islam itself. The bitterness of the Muslims against defilement of their religious places, a bitterness that had been fed throughout the century, erupted in destruction of Christian images and objects when these sacred shrines were recaptured.

Some Muslim scholars interpreted the success of the First Crusade as a divine punishment against Muslims for neglecting their religious duties, and for failing to prosecute a jihad (holy war) in defense of territories God had entrusted to them. Thus, the only way to satisfy God was to fight at two fronts: spiritual (against materialism, oppression, and evil) and political (to liberate Muslim territory from the enemy). Hence when the counter crusade, or jihad, was begun, it was seen as a defensive war.

Sacred shrines, and indeed Jerusalem itself, became the rallying focus for the jihad throughout the 1100s. When Jerusalem was finally recovered by Saladin in 1187, Muslim reaction was vividly described by a witness:

“At the top of the cupola of the Dome of the Rock was a great golden cross. When the Muslims entered the city on Friday, some of them climbed to the top of the cupola to take the cross down. As they reached the top, a great cry went up from the city, and from outside the walls the Muslims cried, “God is greatest!’ in their joy, and the Franks groaned in consternation and grief. So loud and piercing was the cry that the earth almost shook.”

Although the Muslims saw the Crusades as a religious war against Islam, they considered Christians more a political than religious enemy. Thus, when Saladin recovered the Holy Land from Christians, he gave them the choice of living in the area and paying a poll tax, or moving to Christian-held territories. Many Christians migrated to Tyre, Tripoli, Antioch, and Europe.

The descendants of Christians who remained in the East eventually melted into the population of the area. Today signs of the Christian presence remain in the names of some families, in the folk dress of some areas such as Bethlehem, and in stories and proverbs from the area.

Along with archaeological remains, they are the only visible witnesses to the massive military invasion.

* CH issue 40: The Crusades is available at the ChristianityToday.com store.

The online issue archive for Christian History goes as far back as Issue 51 (Heresy in the Early Church). Prior issues are available for purchase in the Christian History Store.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Hal Lindsey (of Late Great Planet Earth fame) recently said, “The Battle of America has begun! So be it!” Evangelist John Hagee told his congregation in San Antonio, Texas, “You can hear the Four Horsem*n riding to Armageddon.” New York minister David Wilkerson preached on September 16, “One network anchor declared, “Think of it, our two symbols of power and prosperity have been smitten in one hour.’ Little did he know, he was quoting Revelations 18:10: “Alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.'”

These would-be prophets could be right, but history is definitely not on their side. Obviously, every other prediction regarding the imminent end of the world has been wrong. That’s why historical insights must be added to the mix of messages currently bombarding us. I excerpted the following from CH issue 61: The End.

Justin Martyr (c. 100-c. 165) and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130-c. 200) spoke of the Millennium as a far-off event they hoped for someday. Its only importance to Christian living was as a reminder of the hope that should guide a Christian’s life. Justin also believed that the faithful departed would rise from the dead and reign with Christ for a thousand years in a rebuilt Jerusalam, but he allowed for other interpretations: “I and many others are of this opinion, and believe that such will take place … but, on the other hand, many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise.”

In City of God, Augustine (354-430) viewed the thousand years of Revelation 20 not as some special future time but “the period beginning with Christ’s first coming,” that is, the age of the Christian church. Throughout this age, the saints reign with Christ—not in the fullness of the coming kingdom prepared for those blessed by God the Father, but “in some other and far inferior way.” This position, often called “amillennial,” became the view of most Christians in the West, including the Reformers, for almost 1,500 years.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) predicted that lay princes would forcibly take away land and riches clergy had amassed, and Christendom would enter an era of millennial prosperity and peace. Though disarmament would entice pagans to attack Christian nations, she believed Christians would eventually win. Ultimately, the Roman emperor would lose almost all authority, and the pope would only rule Rome. (She was wrong about the peace, but not far off regarding the princes and the pope.)

Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202) compared Christendom to Babylon because everyone wanted money, power, and worldly fame. Shortly after 1200, he speculated, two anti-Christian forces, possibly Muslims and heretics, would attack, defeat, and severely persecute Christians. Thus purified, a reforming pope and monastic orders would create a holier world in which people would attain unsurpassed understanding of the hidden meaning of the Scriptures. For an indeterminate period, Christians would dominate the world in peace.

Fifteenth-century Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella nurtured hope of a final crusade to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control. Deterred by a lack of funds, they were attracted by Christopher Columbus’s proposal that finding a shorter route to the fabled wealth of the East would give them upfront financing against the infidel—and prepare for Christ’s coming at Jerusalam.

Columbus (1451-1506), for his part, believed that the world would end in 1656. (How he arrived at that date is a long story, but it involves Joachim of Fiore.) One requirement of the Lord’s return was preaching the gospel “in all the world.” If there were a shortcut to the East by sea, missionaries could be sent there faster. In the Book of Prophecies he assembled, Columbus quoted ancient writers like Augustine and Stoic philosopher Seneca to show how the discovery of the Western islands had been the foretold prelude to God’s final victory. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,” he wrote.

In the Reformation era, Martin Luther reportedly said, “We know no more about eternal life than children in the womb of their mother know about the world they are about to enter.” John Calvin concurred, dismissing the millennial speculations of some of his contemporaries: “Their fiction is too childish either to need or to be worth a refutation. And the Apocalypse [Revelation], from which they undoubtedly drew pretext for their error, does not support them.”

American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) held a completely different view. A postmillennialist, he entertained fervent hopes that God might do something special among the people of New England. Impressed by New England’s spiritual awakening in the early 1740s, he wrote, ” ‘Tis not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture. … And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.” After the Great Awakening, Edwards became more cautious and dated the Millennium (a term he used rarely) somewhere around the year 2000.

Other dates receiving votes for God’s scheduled return include March 21, 1844, and October 22, 1844 (William Miller), the years immediately following 1906 (Anna Hall, William Seymour, and many other early Pentecostals), 1988 (Hal Lindsey), 1992 (the Korean Hyoo-go movement), and 1994 (Harold Camping, president of Family Radio).

I still believe that Bible verses about the end times apply to our lives, though. Especially this one: “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour” (Mt. 25:13).

* CH issue 61: The End is online.

* Articles on prophecy and September 11 can be found here:

Religion Today
Seeking Answers Through Books
Bible Sales Skyrocket Following Attacks

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History, and can be reached at cheditor@christiantytoday.com.

The online issue archive for Christian History goes as far back as Issue 51 (Heresy in the Early Church). Prior issues are available for purchase in the Christian History Store.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Though Americans today demand all sorts of programs and services from the education system, we still expect children to be schooled in the three R’s—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. But many people have forgotten that, until very recently, nearly everyone in this country endorsed a fourth R in education: religion. This week’s PBS documentary “School: The Story of American Public Education” did little to jog their memory.

(Full disclosure: Due to stiff competition from Grand Slam tennis, only part of the four-hour film made it into my living room. Thus much of my information on the film comes from its Web site, listed below.)

“School” divides the history of American education into four historical blocks. The first block spans the years 1770-1890, the Common School era. The next block covers 1900-1950 and examines schools’ response to issues such as urbanization and immigration. The third block celebrates steps toward equality taken between 1950 and 1970, including Brown v. Board of Education, bussing programs, Title IX, and efforts to accommodate disabled students. The last block, 1980 to the present, gets into current debates on academic standards, alternative schools, and vouchers.

Among subjects given little or no treatment are colleges (a high proportion of which began as Christian institutions), church-state educational partnerships throughout the nineteenth-century West, and the 1963 school prayer decision. Of the innovators profiled at the Web site, just two come from religious traditions: Catherine Beecher, whose Calvinist roots (her father was minister Lyman Beecher) are not discussed, and Catholic Archbishop John Joseph Hughes, who merits attention because “his struggles and the fiery debates between Hughes and members of New York’s prominent Protestant establishment helped to set in motion the secularization of American public schools.”

I can think of three reasons for religion’s small role in this drama, not counting a few mostly negative cameos. One, it’s PBS, so what do you expect? Two, by skipping the colonial period and cropping colleges out of the picture, the producers eliminated significant areas of Christian influence. Three, because this is the story of American *public* education, religion isn’t really part of the narrative. But rather than whine about reason one (a popular but overbroad charge), I’ll quibble with the other two.

Starting a documentary on American education at 1770 distorts the story. This framing gives the impression that our education system sprang fully formed from the mind of Thomas Jefferson, and that learning was not pursued before the Revolutionary War. The “School” Web site states, “In the aftermath of the Revolution, a newly independent America came face-to-face with one of its most daunting challenges: how to build a united nation out of 13 colonies with little in common. Many citizens believed that education held the key.”

In fact, several colonies were more than 100 years old in 1770 and had already put serious, though not always well-organized, effort into childhood education. As people of the Word, northern Puritans had been filling their kids’ heads with Scripture and sermons for decades. Southern, mostly Anglican, colonists lagged in literacy, but they did establish some schools and receive teaching missionaries. As a result, by the 1770s, a majority of Americans could read the Bible and the newspaper. The film may regard this minimum standard as barer than a dirt floor, but America was doing just fine by eighteenth-century standards.

Excluding colleges from the film, though a valid editorial choice, also gives a skewed picture because it suggests that Christians cared little for education beyond the level of a basic catechism. Actually, all major colonial colleges except the College of Philadelphia (now Penn) were founded by Christian groups: Harvard by Puritans, William and Mary and King’s College by Anglicans, Yale and Dartmouth by Congregationalists, Princeton by Presbyterians, Brown by Baptists, and Rutgers by Reformed Dutch. Secularization grew as time went on, but Christian influences persisted longer than many people realize. For example, athletic teams at church-founded University of Southern California were proudly called “Methodists” until 1912.

Colonial and college material aside, plenty of religious people and ideas would have appeared in “School” if the producers hadn’t imposed the current definition of “public” education on the past. The story of schools in which religion receives no preferential treatment and all funding comes from secular government agencies would have been a short one indeed, so instead the film highlighted only secular aspects of a much broader narrative.

From the Revolution era to the end of the nineteenth century, Common Schools moved west with the population. Though ostensibly supported with public funds and required by state laws to eschew sectarian instruction (the documentary makes much of this), they needed teachers, administrators, facilities, and other resources that new communities often could not or would not provide.

So churches stepped in. Where public schools existed, ministers served on school boards or worked as superintendents. Christian laywomen took on one-room schoolhouses as mission fields. Some church-state partnerships were even more overt. In 1885 the federal government hired Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson to start schools in Alaska; three years later, short of cash, the government split his salary with his mission board. Common Schools certainly educated citizens to strengthen America’s democracy, as “School” portrays, but no one pretended that was their only function—until recently.

Public and religious education are pretty well delineated today, but to apply current assessments of the fabled “wall of separation” to the era in which that phrase originated, or any era in between, is anachronistic and misleading. The real story of American education includes Puritan piety, missionary teachers, state-funded church schools, devout parents, and instruction in heavenly citizenship. A documentary that misses all of that while arguing, “Contemporary issues cannot be reasonably discussed outside the context of history,” and “To understand where we want to go, we need to first understand how we have come to this point,” deserves the mark, “Needs Improvement.”

* The Web site for “School” can be found here: School: The Story of American Public Education

* Relevant CH back-issues include 13: Jan Amos Comenius (about a 17th-century Brethren bishop with strong ideas on education), 41: American Puritans, and 66: How the West Was Really Won.

* Helpful books on this subject include A History of Christian Education, by James E. Reed and Ronnie Prevost, and Quality with Soul, by Robert Benne. Both are available at our partner store, Christianbook.com.

* Other interesting perspectives on the history of American education can be found at these sites:Education for a Republic

Family And School In Literacy Training & Education

Thomas Jefferson—Icon or Iconoclast?

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History, and can be reached at cheditor@christiantytoday.com.

The online issue archive for Christian History goes as far back as Issue 51 (Heresy in the Early Church). Prior issues are available for purchase in the Christian History Store.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

George Sayer, a pupil and biographer of C.S. “Jack” Lewis, wrote of the intimidating experience of entering the don’s office at Oxford:

“The tutorial was a formal occasion. Wearing a gown, a pupil would stand outside the tutor’s door and wait until the clock struck to before knocking. Jack’s door, like all the doors in New Buildings, was thick, but, through it, one could easily hear the strong, booming voice say, ‘Come in.’ The room was adequately, but rather shabbily, furnished. On one side of the lovely eighteenth-century fireplace in which a coal fire would be burning during cold weather, there was a sofa upon which he sat; on the other side, there was an armchair for the student.”

I thought of this description when I walked into the new Wade Center facility at Wheaton College this week. The center houses Wheaton’s Lewis collection, including his desk, dining table, and (most importantly) wardrobe, so visiting its rooms is probably as close as one can come on this side of the pond to entering by the thick door Sayer described—though the building also features much that Lewis would not recognize.

The Wade Center is not shabbily furnished. Gifts from Mary Wade, daughter of the center’s original patron, Marion E. Wade, and from an anonymous donor assured that the 10,000-square-foot building would be appointed with the latest and finest. All of the tables in the reading room are wired for laptops, and the “smart classroom” has slick audio-visual capabilities as well. Glass in the windows and bookcases blocks UV rays that could damage fragile manuscripts. The carpet is thick, the ceilings are high, the woodwork is dark, and the stonework outside evokes an English manor house, charmingly out of place in the Chicago suburbs.

The Kilby Reading Room best captures a Lewis-like blend of scholarliness and friendliness. Visitors must leave their bags outside, sign in at the front desk, and write only in pencil if they are not taking advantage of the computer hookups. Reading copies of books, letters, transcribed tapes, and dissertations are available, but first editions and originals can only be retrieved from the archives downstairs if a scholar simply must consult them. Yet at the far end of the room, near a bay window, easy chairs await casual readers who wish settle down by the fireplace (where carved lions peek out from below the mantel) and lose themselves in Lewis or one of the other featured authors.

At “Oxbridge,” Lewis surrounded himself with a group of writers and thinkers called the Inklings. He is in good company at the Wade Center as well. Wheaton English Professor Clyde S. Kilby, who started the Wade collection in 1965 with a handful of letters from Lewis, expanded his vision to include six other authors: George MacDonald, who helped to “baptize” Lewis’s imagination; G.K. Chesterton, whose work eroded Lewis’s atheism; Owen Barfield and J.R.R. Tolkien, who influenced his Christian conversion; and Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, literary fellows. These seven authors range across genres (apologetics, biography, detective fiction, drama, fantasy, literary criticism, and more), styles, eras, and denominations, but they do belong together—not just because of their Lewis links, but also because of their potent mix of faith, intelligence, and creativity.

That these authors also belong at Wheaton is in some ways a bolder claim. As critics of Wheaton’s statements on beliefs and behavior love to point out, few if any of the seven Wade Center authors could have taught at Wheaton—Lewis drank, Barfield embraced anthroposophy (a non-evangelical religious philosophy), Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, Williams lacked an advanced degree, and so on. All seven authors hailed from the United Kingdom, and I don’t believe any so much as visited Wheaton. Furthermore, a conservative community where Harry Potter and Halloween spark hot debate might seem an odd place for writers intimate with fauns, hobbits, and Phantastes.

Though there may be people at the college (past or present) who don’t think these mystical, hard-drinking, high-church scribblers deserve a place on Billy Graham’s turf, all of the Wheaton people I know are proud to have the Wade collection. These papers, portraits, and artifacts are genius by association, but they also represent an institutional ideal. On the other side of campus, buildings named after missionary martyrs Jim Elliot and Nate Saint inspire students to commit their lives to serving God through evangelism. The Wade Center can inspire the same level of commitment to serving God through the life of the mind. Lewis would approve.

* The Wade Center’s Web site.

* Our favorite Lewis site, “Into the Wardrobe.”

* CH issue 7 covered Lewis and can be ordered at the ChristianityToday.com store.

* Lewis was also featured in issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the 20th Century. A letter from Sayers to Williams ran in issue 70: Dante.

* Lots of books by all of the Wade Center authors are available at our partner store, Christianbook.com.

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History, and can be reached at cheditor@christiantytoday.com.

The online issue archive for Christian History goes as far back as Issue 51 (Heresy in the Early Church). Prior issues are available for purchase in the Christian History Store.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.