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The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, by Jürgen Moltmann (HarperCollins, 388 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by A. J. Conyers, professor of religion at Charleston Southern University in South Carolina.

“By their christologies ye shall know them,” I. Howard Marshall once observed. In The Way of Jesus Christ, Jürgen Moltmann echoes Marshall, arguing that Christology should disclose the link between church doctrine and the church’s mission. In the Christology of the ancient creeds as well as in its modern restatements, this link, he says, has been all but lost.

Moltmann’s diagnosis, generally stated, is that both ancient and modern Christologies break asunder what God has joined together. In the ancient context, Moltmann argues that Christians since Constantine have separated messianism from its eschatological meaning and context. Further, the impasses of two-nature Christology—Jesus’ true humanity and true divinity—are seen by Moltmann as resulting from the attempt to draw Christology from a general metaphysics of the world, rather than from the particular history of Jesus himself. Having forgotten the messianic focus on “the last things,” Christology reflected a growing vision of the world as a Christian cosmos with nothing further to expect.

On the other hand, modern Christologies have attempted to see Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of human existence in history. Reducing Christology to history and anthropology, they left behind the idea of the “cosmic Christ” that so energized the thought and the commitment of the early church. Consequently, modern Christianity (especially since the Enlightenment) lost its opportunity to think in terms of Christ’s redeeming all of creation.

These false alternatives of an idealized “christology from above” or a historicized “christology from below” can be overcome, Moltmann believes, with attention to the very matter that occupies us in the Gospels, and that is strangely missing in the creeds—namely, the mission of Jesus Christ expressed in his life among the poor, the dispossessed, and those in bondage to the demonic. The “way of Jesus Christ” discloses God’s creative and redemptive purposes—purposes that point to the consummation of nature and history in eternity.

In many ways, Moltmann’s most distinctive contribution is found in the climactic chapter on “The Cosmic Christ.” Here we see the resolution of his earlier critiques of ancient and modern Christologies. The great crises of our day—including the ecological devastation of the world—have forced us to see that the appropriate answer to the cosmocentric and static Christology of an earlier time is not the anthropocentric Christology that tends toward a “private” religion. Since Christianity has been read as a “historical” and “personal” religion, people in Europe and America have frequently turned to the Asiatic religions of nature to seek answers for the ecological catastrophes as well as “healing for their wounded souls.” Their response, Moltmann says, is based on a misreading of Christianity. He writes:

In its original, biblical form Christianity was by no means personal, anthropocentric and historical in the modern Western sense. It was much more a way and a moving forward, in the discovery of “the always greater Christ” … Christ existent as Jesus of Nazareth … as “the continuity of his people” … as cosmos: Christ semper Maior, Christ always more and more.

Evangelicals will not always be satisfied with Moltmann’s treatment of particulars in Christology. Nor should they be. On the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, for instance, he concedes too much to “Christianity’s cultured despisers,” saying somewhat evasively “it is not a question of gynecology [but of] pneumatology.” At the same time, his response to modern objections to the Resurrection based on the “almighty power of analogy” is telling and will be heartening to orthodox readers.

Readers will also appreciate that here is a serious attempt to link Christology to discipleship. Like that of another German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Moltmann’s theology never stops with abstractions but always becomes a serious call to follow Christ.

Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, by Carlton Sherwood (Regnery Gateway, 709 pp.; $29.95, hardcover). Reviewed by J. Isamu Yamamoto, a free-lance writer in Carol Stream, Illinois, and editor of The Crisis of hom*osexuality (Victor Books/Christianity Today).

On May 18, 1982, Sun Myung Moon was found guilty of tax evasion and conspiracy. He subsequently served 13 months in the Danbury federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Did the U.S. court system prosecute the founder of the Unification Church fairly and justly, or did it conspire with others to persecute this unpopular religious leader?

In Inquisition, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Carlton Sherwood makes no bones about it: The Justice Department, the IRS, powerful politicians, and the press all abused their powers in their relentless pursuit to “get” Sun Myung Moon. In fact, this mammoth book is not so much about whether Moon is innocent or guilty of any crime—though Sherwood himself evidently has high regard for Moon—but about how key American institutions contributed to a “witch hunt” that culminated in Moon being sent to prison.

In order to benefit from the significant work Sherwood has done, two problems in his presentation must be endured. First, he offers a mountain of information, which at times buries the central issue with unnecessary side stories or commentaries. The book would have made its point more effectively if Sherwood had ended with chapter 10, where the reader is left wondering why Moon never skipped the country if he was really guilty. What follows—Sherwood’s favorable biography of Moon, his criticism of deprogrammers and the press, and his historical catalogue of America’s persecution of minorities—only serves to defuse the powderkeg of controversy that he has painstakingly set up.

Few readers will patiently traverse the himalayan slopes of this book. That is unfortunate, since the issue Sherwood wants them to struggle with is important: how the judicial and political system can conspire to victimize an unpopular religious figure.

A more serious flaw in Sherwood’s book is his imbalance in handling the players in the drama. While he paints a respectful portrait of Moon and his followers, he has nothing but contempt for Moon’s critics and alleged persecutors. For example, Sherwood is clearly uncomfortable with the term “Moonies” as applied to members of the Unification Church; yet he refers to Daphne Greene, a leader of an anticult group, as “Daffy” Greene. Although he repeatedly denounces the racial bigotry leveled at Moon and his Asian followers, he furthers his own argument by characterizing Moon’s jurors of Hispanic descent as women who “would kill to protect the family and established religion” because of their race.

Nevertheless, Sherwood did not earn the Pulitzer prize and the Peabody award for nothing. His flip, journalistic style and his investigative skills entertain while they inform, making this massive account less formidable.

What is more important, Sherwood addresses the legal improprieties in Moon’s trial with insight. For instance, why did the Justice Department refuse to allow Takeru Kamiyama, Moon’s friend and codefendant, to have his own interpreter during the grand jury proceedings, but instead forced him to respond through an amateurish interpreter, which led to his perjury conviction? More startling is why Judge Goettel refused to grant Moon’s desire to have a bench trial rather than a trial by jury, given Moon’s negative public profile.

The questions continue to compound, and no matter what one thinks about Moon and his religion or about the slanted perspective of this book, readers must struggle with the judicial actions in Sun Myung Moon’s case. If Moon’s religious liberties were violated, then the religious liberties of all religious leaders are threatened.

Sherwood mentions that some evangelicals, such as Jerry Falwell and Joseph Lowery, entered amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs on behalf of Moon, though they clearly dissociated themselves from the theology of Moon and his church. But he says little else about them, though that does not minimize the importance of Moon’s trial as it relates to Christians.

Inquisition is not just about the trial of Sun Myung Moon; it puts on trial our judicial system in the context of religious liberties. It is our duty to examine the evidence and speak out for justice, not only for ourselves, but for those who believe differently.

The Spiritual Life of Children, by Robert Coles (Houghton Mifflin, 358 pp.; $22.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Ken Steinken, a free-lance writer living in Rapid City, South Dakota.

For over three decades Robert Coles has interviewed children. The Harvard professor of psychiatry spoke with thousands to develop his five-volume Children in Crisis series and his follow-up works, The Moral Life of Children and The Political Life of Children. Through it all he says that he “couldn’t help but be impressed with the constant mention of religious matters.”

Yet when rereading the transcripts of those interviews, he discovered that often he turned the conversations in another direction. Having been trained in psychoanalytic psychiatry, Coles recognized a hesitancy on his part to address religion, which Freud had called “a universal obsessional neurosis.”

“I had to look inward and examine my own assumptions,” admits Coles. He also corresponded with Freud’s daughter, Anna, who encouraged him to go back over his earlier work and look for what he might have missed.

Coles found religion is a resource, rather than an aberration, for children. It allows them to explore and understand the mysteries and meaning of life, and it makes up an aspect of their identities every bit as important as their intellectual, emotional, and physical dimensions. Coles’s research included interviews with over 500 children between the ages of 8 and 12 from the United States, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, and agnostic homes.

Listening to children, Coles learned of their magical and practical blend of faith, which Jesus commends in Mark 10:15 when he says, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” In “nation after nation” boys and girls expressed an interest in Jesus’ miracles. Coles notes, “The stories of Jesus as someone who raised the dead, healed the lame, gave sight to the blind, appeal powerfully to children who have not yet acquired the everyday realism of their elders.”

Coles relies heavily on the words of the children to reveal their own spiritual lives. His selection of transcripts shows that children understand God in many different ways. To some he is very real. An eight-year-old girl from North Carolina told Coles in 1962 of an encounter she had during the desegregation movement. “I was alone, and those [segregationist] people were screaming, and suddenly I saw God smiling, and I smiled. A woman was standing [near the school door], and she shouted at me, ‘Hey, you little nigg*r, what you smiling at?’ I looked right at her face, and I said, ‘At God.’ She looked up at the sky, and then she looked at me, and she didn’t call me any more names.”

To a hospitalized boy of 11, God was essential. Aware he was near death, the boy said of his mother’s round-the-clock bedside vigil, “She says I need her; but I don’t. I’m not kidding! I need God to save me.”

A boy from an agnostic home showed that for a child the concept of God is not easily dismissed. “I don’t know if there is a God, but I’ve wondered what would happen to me if He was real and He knew I wasn’t on His side.”

Though the children see God in a variety of ways, Coles feels they share a common identity as pilgrims who wonder about the nature of their journey and the final destination.

Though the work is readable, it is sometimes rambling in its detailed accounts of conversations with the children. Discovering the significance of what the child has said is often left up to the reader—sometimes a frustrating task for those not trained in psychoanalysis. Yet Coles has dealt with the data according to its merit, not according to preconceived theories. He has declared we are all pilgrims. In so doing he has reclaimed some of the respectability of religion that Freud wrested away.

More than Kindness: A Compassionate Approach to Crisis Childbearing, by Susan Olasky and Marvin Olasky (Crossway Books, 219 pp.; $9.95, paper). Reviewed by Barbara McClatchey, an adoptive mother and a free-lance writer.

What are the unwed mother’s alternatives in an unwanted pregnancy? (a) abortion; (b) giving birth and raising the child alone for 18 (or more) years; (c) marriage; (d) adoption placement.

For prochoice counselors, the choice is either a or b. But if you thought that b, c, and d should all be considered, you would be unusual among prolife counselors. In practice, the prolife counseling that unwed mothers get is almost always geared toward solo birth and childrearing. But is this the best response, or is it an unthinking acceptance of the two alternatives presented by the prochoice movement?

All too often, as with problems of the environment or the needs of abused women, evangelicals and their churches respond only as and when the surrounding culture responds. The response to abortion, however, has been at odds with the culture, and Christians are still feeling their way, trying to come up with a specifically Christian response to the problem. In More than Kindness, Susan and Marvin Olasky try to provide a biblical and historical basis for a response that is family-centered rather than emotional or legal. “Abortion,” they declare, is “the central battle in an arc of conflict concerning definitions of the family and the basic structure of modern society.”

In spite of family planning, more babies are being born to unwed mothers now than in the 1950s, and they are being raised by their single mothers. The biblical standard is sex within marriage and a two-parent family. But Christians, in their zeal to stop abortion, have accepted the modern viewpoint that single-parenting is a reasonable means of dealing with the problem of unwed motherhood.

Prolife counselors expend a great deal of effort to convince girls that they can manage to keep and raise their babies, while mentioning marriage or adoption only as vague possibilities. In fact, historically as well as biblically, single parenting is not the best solution. Various studies have shown that children do better educationally, financially, and socially when raised in a two-parent family. And those women who place their babies for adoption are better off in the same ways. Indeed, even the fathers are more likely to work and to stay out of trouble with the law when they are living with and responsible for a child.

The Olaskys make the following recommendations: Prolife counselors should give more attention to the possibility that even a teenager may be better off getting married than being a single parent. If marriage is not a possibility, then putting the baby up for adoption should be given serious consideration. Finally, Christians in general should change their own actions and attitudes, understanding adoption as at least one biblical solution to the problem (God has adopted us, after all), and working for legislation that makes adoption easier.

When a woman is faced with the choice between abortion and a lifelong commitment to the financial and emotional responsibility of single parenting, she may well decide on abortion as the easier way out. But if she is shown that there are other reasonable alternatives, she may be more readily able to “choose life.”

The Paradise War, by Stephen Lawhead (Lion, 416 pp.; $19.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Katie Andraski, a poet and free-lance writer from Rockford, Illinois.

When I first browsed through Steve Lawhead’s Paradise War, I groaned. Would I read about another perfect world violated by an outside evil and rescued by an outside redemption? Well, yes. Paradise War is about an outside evil disrupting a perfectly balanced world. The evil force is embodied in Simon, born in our world with a silver spoon in his mouth, his nose in the air, and a good dose of noblesse oblige that takes the form of complaints about shoddy fast food. And redemption comes in the form of an outside messiah, incarnated in a clumsy, hardworking American student, Lewis. Both are graduate students at Oxford.

The threatened paradise is the parallel universe Albion, the pagan, pre-Christian Otherworld of the Celts. This is the other mythology of Great Britain, which is more mysterious than the Arthurian romances (which Lawhead covered in his previous trilogy). Unlike W. B. Yeats, who used Celtic mythology extensively in his poetry but didn’t explain much, Lawhead gives us a layman’s guide to the world of the Celts.

Despite its adherence to the fantasy formula, the book has its surprises. The world Lawhead paints is so convincing and enchanting that I experienced a longing like the one described by C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory: “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, … to become part of it.”

It is this entering into beauty that Paradise War is about. The book opens with Simon and Lewis talking about the appearance of an aurochs, a prehistoric ox, in northern Scotland. Simon insists they travel to see it for themselves and then mysteriously disappears. During Simon’s absence, Lewis notices strange occurrences and fears for his sanity until a Celtic scholar offers an explanation: The boundaries between this world and the Otherworld have blurred because something is threatening the existence of the Other-world. Lewis eventually makes his way to Albion, though he worries that his and Simon’s presence might disturb the fabric of that world.

What Lewis and Simon find in the Otherworld is worth exploring. This is the first book in the trilogy, Song of Albion. It is beautifully written, a fast read, but with philosophical depth and intensity. It is the kind of book that gives something back, and it touches the spirit with the assurance there is more to this world than meets the eye.

Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion, by Quentin J. Schultze (Baker, 259 pp.; $16.95, hardcover);American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, edited by Quentin J. Schultze (Zondervan, 382 pp.; $15.95, paper). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, religion writer for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

In 1972 Martin Marty called for “a Christian interpretation of the media world,” but his plea has gone largely unheeded. Evangelicals have spent more time protesting culture’s evils than they have trying to understand it. Now, due in large part to the efforts of Calvin College’s Quentin Schultze, Christians are beginning to pay our media culture serious attention.

Schultze has authored dozens of scholarly articles on mass communications and wrote 1986’s fun and informative Television: Manna from Hollywood? He also edited last year’s American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, a collection of 16 papers presented at a 1988 conference at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

Books based on conferences can be boring and poorly focused, but this volume is impressive in its breadth and insight. Among the highlights are journalist Wes Pippert reviewing the tensions between evangelicals and the secular press; Christian-publishing veteran Stephen Board exploring the history of evangelical periodicals; Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow investigating the relationship between religious television and the privatization of faith; and Calvin’s William Romanowski examining contemporary Christian music.

Also reviewed in this section:

More than Kindness, by Susan Olasky and Marvin Olasky

The Paradise War, by Stephen Lawhead

The Spiritual Life of Children, by Robert Coles

Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, by Carlton Sherwood

The Way of Jesus Christ, by Jürgen Moltmann

These essays show that while evangelicalism has shaped the mass media, these media have also exerted their shaping influence on religion. As Clifford Christians writes in the volume’s concluding essay, the outcome of this interchange has been “disastrous” to the evangelical cause. “While claiming to save the world through mass communication, evangelicals have merely adopted the techniques of the ‘secular’ culture they so deplore.” What emerges from the essays is a portrait of Christians as gullible populists who are so enamored with technology’s charms and so deluded by their own Great Commission rhetoric that they blindly walk into the media wasteland only to produce much commotion and little spiritual fruit.

A Bedeviled Medium

Schultze picks up on this theme in Televangelism and American Culture. If last year’s The Agony of Deceit exposed the theological heresies at the heart of much religious television (CT Books, Oct. 8, 1990, p. 73), Televangelism explores the economic trade-offs and cultural compromises that inherently bedevil a medium whose survival depends on repeat business by millions of nameless viewers.

According to Schultze, the continuing growth of televangelism represents the Christian community’s submission to form over substance and subjective feel-goodism over the harsh truths of the gospel. “Televangelism largely reflects the values, sensibilities, and attitudes of contemporary culture,” he says. And far from advancing the cause of the gospel and saving the lost, the TV preachers bury the gospel in consumerist hype while packaging their homilies and talk shows for the saved—who are the viewers the televangelists depend on for contributions.

Schultze summarizes the mountains of research into religious television, concluding that claims of huge audiences and numerous conversions are grossly exaggerated. And he recounts one of his own research projects. He wrote to a hundred religious broadcasters, requesting financial and doctrinal statements. Few of the broadcasters answered his questions, but they did fill his mailbox with solicitations, publications, and prayer cloths.

Some of Schultze’s claims—such as the claim that televangelism is a major force in both the emergence of the modern megachurch and the trend for some congregations to focus on entertainment value rather than on Christ and historic creeds—are hard to verify. Other thinkers, like cultural critic Neil Postman, view religious broadcasting and other symptoms of “lite” Christianity as symptoms of a much more insidious transformation in the way contemporary people think, believe, and live in a postverbal age.

But Schultze’s concluding chapter should be required reading for every Christian. It provides solid biblical guidelines for calling religious broadcasters to accountability, challenges individual Christians as well as the Christian media to be more critical and selective in their support of religious broadcasters, and calls Christian educators to “address the implications of living in the television age.” Maybe Christian leaders who failed to heed Martin Marty’s challenge nearly two decades ago will hear Schultze’s impassioned plea.

Useless Ideals

Quite frankly, I’m sick to death of ideals. I have so many ideals and I’ve been so frustrated by them, I really don’t care for any more. What I’m looking for is a savior—not someone who will just tell me what I ought to be, but someone who will forgive me for what I am, and then with his very love will enable me to be more than I ever believed I could be. It’s exactly that that Jesus does.

—Bruce Thielemann in “Telltale Tears” (1986 Preaching Today)

Foolish demands?

The things Jesus demands are entirely foolhardy—until you begin to share His view of things. Come to see money not as a passport to luxury but as a dangerous encumbrance, and you will not find it so ridiculous to give to whomever wants to borrow. Realize that your purpose in life is to give His love away, and you will find it easier to refrain from striking back at people who can hurt you.

—John Boykin in The Gospel of Coincidence

A listener’s prayer

God

Grant me to be

silent before you—

that I may hear you;

at rest in you—

that you may work in me;

open to you—

that you may enter;

empty before you—

that you may fill me.

Let me be still

And know you are my God.

Amen.

—Sir Paul Reeves; prayer at the WCC Seventh Assembly in Canberra, Australia

Blessing by trial

No trouble seems pleasant at the time. Yet in God’s economy, it is this pain which brings forth new faith. How often we hear, “I thank God for that hard time; it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Even when we may not find the grace to thank God for our tribulation, we can thank Him for the good that comes from our fire.

—Virginia Law Shell in Good News (Nov.—Dec 1990)

“Behind the times” but not outdated

It can be exalting to belong to a church that is 500 years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.

—Joseph Sobran, quoted by Cal Thomas in an address to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (June 25, 1991)

Knowledge comes from obedience

Never try to explain God until you have obeyed Him. The only bit of God we understand is the bit we have obeyed.

—Oswald Chambers in Run Today’s Race

The American way

Abortion is not some little mistake. Abortion is a reflection of who Americans are: people in the United States are supposed to concentrate on themselves and pursue happiness; thus, they ask themselves, “Why should we bother having children?”

—Stanley Hauerwas interviewed in U.S. Catholic (June 1991)

Forgiven slimeballs

[Robert] Coles is that remarkable thing, a big-deal academic big-shot shrink who doesn’t go eek! when he hears assertions of faith. He seems to believe that guilt is not always neurosis and might even, in some instances, be God’s way of telling you that you’re a slimeball, even if a forgiven slimeball.

—Michael O. Garvey in a review of Robert Coles’s Harvard Diary (Books & Religion, Spring 1991)

The Eternal’s opinion

As I grow older, I care less and less what people think about me and more and more what God thinks of me. I expect to be with him much longer than with you.

—Robert Baker in County Road 13

Every year, Jews celebrate Passover to commemorate their ancestors’ deliverance from Egypt. And Christians join them in giving God credit for that deliverance and the subsequent conquest of Canaan. Nevertheless, we squirm when we think of all the men, women, children, and animals who were killed so that Jacob’s descendants might be liberated and the Promised Land purified.

Every year, when Americans celebrate Independence Day, many use the language of Canaan to credit God with bringing forth a new and different kind of nation on this continent. Yet few talk much about the indigenous peoples who were exterminated or expelled as that new nation expanded.

Every year, Italian-Americans enjoy Columbus Day festivities to honor the great Genoese navigator and celebrate the best of Italian culture. Yet in 1992, 500 years after Columbus first set foot on Hispaniola, it will be more difficult to celebrate his day. For while some are planning big celebrations of the quincentenary (a World’s Fair and the summer Olympics in Spain, for example—and even a possible beatification of Queen Isabella), other groups have been decrying any attempt to celebrate the “invasion” of the Americas.

Listening To The Critics

That invasion, most of us know but tend to forget, resulted directly in the economic rape, enslavement, and death of large numbers of native people. Entire cultures—some of them technically and artistically advanced—were crushed. And, indirectly, the oppression and displacement of millions of native Americans and Africans as well as ecological disasters were made possible.

Thus the National Council of Churches has called not for celebration, but for repentance as the appropriate way to mark the quincentenary. And pop-historian Kirkpatrick Sale has lambasted European culture for its preoccupation with “warring against species.”

One tempting response to this criticism is to dismiss it as knee-jerk, multiculturalist liberalism. Yet, noted the Utne Reader, the early complaints about the Columbian quincentenary were not coming from “the usual progressive publications,” but from “grass-roots cultural organizations.” Besides, a charitable attitude and a willingness to learn is always appropriate. So what do we need to hear?

First, the critics have reminded us that history is written by winners. Contrary to what we learned from our school textbooks, the Americas were not an empty wilderness. Native peoples had “discovered America” long before Columbus. But his arrival did open the door for the displacement of peoples and the destruction of cultures.

It is tempting to say: Our ancestors may have killed off the Indians, but that was then and this is now. But there is a second lesson: The conquistadors are a present reality. Particularly in Latin America, the old feudal system lingers and perpetuates the cultural and economic isolation of the native peoples. A statement made at a 1989 gathering of Andean peoples claimed that a major celebration of the European conquest of the Americas would be “a renewed attempt to cover up the colonization and conquest of a continent by force of arms, so that they can continue justifying the political domination of our peoples and nations.” That is the sort of observation that can be made only by people on the underside of the dominant cultural forces.

A third lesson the critics want us to hear is that in displacing indigenous cultures, we have lost a great deal. Some point especially to the relationship that native Americans had with the natural world, and they suggest that if we had learned from pre-Columbian culture, we would not have deforested, strip-mined, and smogged up our land. They blame an imported Christian (though not biblical) theology for much of what has happened.

Getting The Whole Picture

If we were to stop here, it would be hard to imagine we had anything at all to celebrate in 1992. But we need to ask some important questions.

First, how fairly have the critics represented history? If winners write the official history to justify their continued dominance, surely the losers write a version of history that may be used to justify their agenda.

Some native Americans were culturally advanced, peace loving, and sensitive to the needs of the environment. But there were also cannibals and savages among them, and some who raped the earth and moved on. Some colonizers were driven by avarice and valued human life far less than a doubloon. But others, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, were compelled by concern for both the temporal and the spiritual welfare of the natives.

Second, we need to ask, to what degree do we perpetuate the oppression that began 500 years ago? For most of us, complicity in any continuing oppression of native Americans is largely unconscious. While justice demands that we halt the economic and social marginalization of native Americans, it does not require the pursuit of a wilderness utopia or the wholesale restoration of long-lost lands. (Every system of justice knows of a statute of limitations.)

Journalist Jon Margolis writes, “Arguing about whether the European conquest of America was ‘a good thing’ is a fool’s errand. It was an inevitable thing, its cruelties and its glories both.” Whether or not Columbus had sailed to the lands across the western sea in 1492, someone else would have by 1500 or 1510. At that time, writes Margolis, “only Europeans were dynamic, curious and progressive,” and only Europeans were systematically mapping the world. Thus, we need to ask, just what would we expect of Columbus and those who followed him?

The medieval mentality idealized force in the service of true religion. In that mentality, evangelism meant the expansion of Christian political hegemony. The fifteenth-century Spanish consciousness was growing increasingly nationalistic. Imperialism seems historically inevitable. Since sin is the human condition, it is not amazing that Columbus took his pleasure with native women, shipped slaves home (against Isabella’s orders) when he could not send gold, or imperiously claimed America for the Spanish crown. It is remarkable, however, that Columbus was motivated by a love for God and a desire to finance the rescue of the Holy City from infidel hands. It is remarkable that his sense of divine calling survived years of neglect by Isabella, disease, poverty, a mutiny at sea, and imprisonment and ridicule at home.

Saints-In-The-Making

So how are American Christians to respond to the controversy surrounding the Columbian quincentenary?

There is much to celebrate about the encounter between the Old World and the New World. It was the occasion for profound changes in the course of history. For example, without the lowly potato, imported from America, Europe would have starved. And without the horse, imported from Europe, indigenous American art and religion would never have had time off from survival activities to dream and develop. Without vital exchanges such as these, neither group of peoples could have flourished.

But despite all the physical benefits, there is an underlying spiritual dimension that should make Christians cautious. Margolis calls Columbus “the first real American” because he had to know “what was over the hill.” But, says Margolis, the real question is “whether this kind of person must also inevitably want to own whatever lies over the next hill … so strongly that he is prepared to murder the people living there.”

Perhaps we can understand the discovery/encounter/invasion much the way we relate to the Israelite conquest of Canaan, with its slaughter of infants, women, warriors, and animals. We believe God is Lord of history and no Earth-shaking event happens apart from his will. Nevertheless, we know that the redemption of our planet is not yet fully realized. The consequences of sin continue to attend even divinely ordered events.

The lives of some ministers we have known provide a helpful analogy. As evangelists, they have won souls for Christ; and as fallible humans, they have finagled their finances or committed adultery. This might be called the Gantry Principle of History: Every divinely ordered event takes place in the context of sinful human reality. Columbus’s high goals were not unmixed. Economics and evangelism are not always separable.

As some try to paint Columbus as a villain and others as a hero, let us remember that villains and heroes are the crisply outlined icons of cultures and ideologies. God, however, creates saints out of sinners. The line between saint and sinner is not always distinct. Columbus’s humility, dedication, and sense of destiny are models for us. But his craven acquiescence to his era’s cruelty is not. Cultural movements demand heroes and villains, but our Reformation heritage tells us to expect something else instead: the blurred outline of flesh-and-blood saints-in-the-making.

By David Neff, a third-generation Italian-American who missed being born on Columbus Day by a mere 30 minutes.

As a child, Kay Brigham read Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Columbus, by naval historian Samuel Elliott Morrison, a good friend of her sea-captain father. This early interest in the Italian explorer never left her. As a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Claremont Graduate School, she earned a master’s in Spanish language and history, and later continued her studies at the University of California at Berkeley in romance languages and literature. But as a student of Bible prophecy, Brigham was particularly interested in Columbus’s handwritten Book of Prophecies. Her search took her to Madrid and Seville, where she was able to examine a rare facsimile—complete with rat holes. Her resulting books, Christopher Columbus: His Life and Discovery in the Light of His Prophecies and Christopher Columbus’s Book of Prophecies: Reproduction of the Original Manuscript with English Translation, were recently published by Libros CLIE of Barcelona (available in the U.S. from TSELF of Fort Lauderdale).

At one point Columbus experienced a significant personal crisis. How did that shape his sense of mission?

On his third voyage, Columbus found Hispaniola in chaos. Columbus’s brothers, who were governing the island, had lost all control. A tremendous tension had been created between the colonists and the native Americans. Word got back to Spain about these problems, and they sent over representatives. Columbus, along with his brothers, was shipped back to Spain in chains. This was the most humiliating experience of Columbus’s entire life. He refused to have the chains removed until he had a personal audience with the king and queen. Between the time he was shipped back and his audience with the Spanish crown, he had a lot of time to think, much of it spent in a monastery in Seville.

It was in 1502, at this time of personal crisis, that he put together The Book of Prophecies. The Prophecies is extremely important because it reveals the essence of Columbus. It reveals an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual formation.

The Book of Prophecies seems like a compilation of Scripture and other quotations with few of Columbus’s own words. Did you have to read between the lines to analyze what was going through his mind?

Columbus was a prolific writer, and so we do not have to read between the lines. There is a prefatory letter in the Prophecies addressed to the king and queen of Spain in which he clearly explains his goal in the compilation: to explain his vision of history and his enterprise of the Indies and his role in the scheme of world history.

Also, Columbus was a reader, and books figured much in the formation of his idea of the enterprise of the Indies. Many of his books are conserved in the Cathedral of Seville where we can see his hundreds of marginal annotations and underlinings. We can see there the ideas, philosophies, and theologies that were beginning to influence his mind as early as 1481 when he was only 30 years old. Even then he was thinking of Scriptures that had to do with the restoration of Zion and the recovery of the Holy Land from the infidel. Later, when he asked for his first voyage, he began to link the evangelization of distant lands with the recovery of Jerusalem, the second coming of Christ, and the setting up of the kingdom of our Lord.

What led Columbus to think of himself as one who was specially called by God?

Columbus interpreted the Scriptures in a very direct and personal way. He believed that God had given him the gift of spiritual intelligence, that he was a chosen instrument of God with a divine mission. He was looking for the mines of Solomon because the gold that he would find could be used to finance a crusade to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy of a new heaven and a new earth, to rescue the Holy City from the infidel, and to prepare the way for Messiah. Columbus believed that he was a servant of God like David or John the Baptist.

Messianic figures rarely get much support from the authorities. How is it that Columbus got the support he did?

Columbus would not have been out of place in his messianic thinking. Even the Spanish sovereigns had a policy that was messianic: to bring about a religious unity in Spain. In fact, it was achieved in that fateful year of 1492 with the defeat of the Muslims at Granada and the expulsion of the Jewish community. This all had a messianic fervor behind it.

The Spanish sovereigns were willing to carry out evangelization by force, spreading the Christian religion by whatever means it took. This, of course, is what happened in the New World and is, I think, part of what disturbs many modern historians.

The modern mind does not understand the spirit of the crusade, which was an integral part of the age in which Columbus lived. The crusades were a military movement, and the reconquest of Spain was a history of military campaigns. The Muslim Moors entered Spain in 711 and were not expelled until 1492. There you have eight centuries of warfare. The Bible is also full of stories of conquest—the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, the conquest of Jerusalem by David.

Still, Columbus himself was not a military man, and so I don’t think we need to link him to a military effort that came later with the conquistadors.

But it was as if Columbus opened the door of the New World and greed and cruelty rushed in.

If you look at the history of the world, you see the expression of man’s desire to dominate and control his world as each rising culture displaces the one that preceded it. This was true of the American continent before Columbus came. The Indians that he found had displaced cultures that existed before them, sometimes in a violent manner.

Still, there was a dark side to this encounter. The dark side is that the Indian populations of those islands were nearly decimated. Most scholars point to the diseases that were brought over by the Europeans—influenza, measles, and smallpox—as the prime destroyers of the Indian people. But the colonization was violent, and most historians agree that Columbus was a miserable administrator. He failed during his tenure as governor of Hispaniola. In 1495, Columbus shipped Indians to Spain to be sold as slaves in direct disobedience to Spanish policy. And he began an unjust system of land grants to Spanish colonizers that granted not only the land but the people who lived on the land. This produced many injustices.

What is the bright side?

Recognizing the limitations of all human beings, I still think there’s a lot to admire in Columbus. We can admire his courage in the face of great adversity and deprivation. We can admire his devotion and faith in God. We can admire his entrepreneurship. We can admire his inquiring mind. We can admire his navigational skills. We can also appreciate the bringing together of the two segments of the human race and the new and robust races and cultures that came out of that. We can admire and thank the Lord that the histories of Canada, the United States, and the numerous American republics were initiated. In fact, we can admire the fact that the great missionary movement that issued from this part of the world began with the second voyage of Columbus when he brought with him missionaries to these lands.

Some would have us believe that the New World was a paradise before Columbus came. What was it like?

There was the same greed and violence over here as there was in all the rest of the world. In fact, on Guadeloupe, on the second voyage, Columbus discovered widespread cannibalism. The Carib people would raid the gentler Taino groups in the island, enslave them, and eat them. And later on in Mexico, Cortés, for all his cruelty, was horrified by the human sacrifice that was practiced on a grand scale in the Aztec culture.

Much of the concern over the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival seems not so much over Columbus as a person as it is over difficult aspects of the history that can be dated to that time.

Many groups are exploiting the quincentenary for their particular causes. But I think we should look at history in its own context, and we should present both the good and the bad aspects of what happened. I don’t think any of us are out to extol injustice. But we must not miss the good, the heroic, and the noble, and there was much heroic and noble in the encounter. And that, I think, we should celebrate.

At the end of your book, you call for a renewed vigor in promoting Christianity’s influence around the world in imitation of Columbus. What can we learn from Columbus in this regard?

Christianity is in a precarious position if we don’t proceed in the spirit of Columbus, with his faith in God and his sense of mission. If Christians ever lose this, then we, but for the sovereignty of God, are lost. Only a small part of the known world in Columbus’s day was under Christian influence. And the discovery of America doubled the geographical sphere of that influence. You have to ask, if Columbus had not arrived on these shores, what would have happened to Christianity? I believe God raised up this man to extend the gospel to those regions that had never heard.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

Most of us would readily admit, at least in our more honest moments, that we simply do not pray as we ought. One reason we do not pray as we ought is that we are not convinced that prayer “works.” And we are not convinced that it works partly because we do not understand how it works—especially, how petitionary prayer works.

The question has sparked intense discussion. Some Christians, for example, explain prayer by psychologizing it, using what might be termed an auto-suggestion model. In this view, petitionary prayer does not change or bring a response from God so much as it changes the one who prays. It helps us take self-inventory in the search for purity of heart or patience in life’s trials. Or it helps the one praying bring his or her will into submission to God’s will. But prayer in this view usually stops with the person who prays.

This model misses entirely the Bible’s repeated insistence that in prayer we approach a transcendent God who can and does work in the world, who is moving the world toward his ultimate purposes in Christ. To do so, God enlists our prayers and uses them. Our petitions are not simply self-directed, but they are potentially world-changing petitions that come to the ear of a God who can act in response.

This means that when we pray we lay hold of and release God’s willingness and ability to act in the world he has created. Prayer is, as John Bunyan said, “a sincere, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God has promised, or according to his Word, for the good of the church, with submission in faith to the will of God.”

However, one question still troubles some people. Granted that petitionary prayer releases God’s willingness and ability to act, what is God’s relationship to the world and to the people who pray to him? Many contemporary Christians balk at the picture of a God who sits in heaven, waiting to intervene in the affairs of the world in response to human prayer. Others question the view of prayer (which carries a long and distinguished pedigree) that presupposes an immutable God whose fixed plan is undeterred by human petition.

An answer is found in the future focus of much biblical prayer. In the Bible, petition is often oriented toward God’s kingdom and the unfolding of his purposes. The praying believer beseeches the God of the future that the marks of God’s rule (forgiveness, sustenance, deliverance, and the Spirit’s fullness) become present in the current situation, which is filled with want, need, and insufficiency. Petitionary prayer, in other words, asks God to bring something of the future—God’s future—into the present.

This eschatological orientation suggests some things about God’s sovereignty and omnipotence. He exercises “rulership” over creation from the vantage point of the future consummation of history. The kingdom, God’s perfect order in which his will is fully present, is indeed coming. Insofar as history is moving toward that great day, God is sovereign over present events.

In a similar way, God is omnipotent. While omnipotence literally means the ability to do everything, its theological meaning is God’s competence and commitment to overrule evil for good. God is omnipotent in that evil is no match for him. But the ultimate outworking of God’s no to evil is yet future. The final no will be spoken at the climax of history when the kingdom is fully here.

But even while we are en route to that event, God partially overrules evil. This conviction is reflected in Paul’s statement, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28, NIV). This omnipotence will be fully demonstrated at the consummation of history, when evil is banished from God’s creation. But a foretaste of that can be experienced in every situation. God desires to work in the present, combating the fallenness that characterizes this age.

This understanding of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence provides insight into prayer. Prayer is an eschatological activity, oriented toward the kingdom of God. Adoration is celebrating the greatness of the sovereign God. Confession is acknowledging the fallenness and incompleteness of earthly life, including our own sinfulness, which results in a request for forgiveness. Thanksgiving is pouring out gratitude for the in-breaking of God’s love and the presence of kingdom power in this fallen age. Petition builds on these three elements. It is our crying out for the presence of kingdom power in each new situation. It is also an expression of our deep yearning for the coming of God’s rule in its fullness.

Prayer, then, is oriented toward tangible change—toward results. As believers pray, they begin to see the presence of the kingdom in all areas of life. At the same time, they open their life situations to receive the in-breaking of God’s rule in the present. They open their lives to God’s abilities, which are not bound by the limits of the present. And through prayer, believers help move history toward that day when the kingdom will arrive in its fullness.

This understanding of the working of prayer takes into account a certain understanding of our participation in God’s plan. For while prayer’s effectiveness ultimately has to do with God’s own sovereign decisions, God also uses human action to enact his purposes. Yes, he exercises providential care, ordering the actions of humankind to serve the purposes of the divine plan. But he also invites human beings to participate. To be effective partners, then, believers must have minds and hearts that are alert and attentive to him.

This element of human participation with God’s action means that in prayer the Christian, as David Wells observed, rebels against the status quo.

By means of prayer the believer sifts through the evil and dislocation of the present in order to determine what must be altered if the rule of God is to be made concrete. Petition becomes the expression of a holy discontent with the present, a stubborn unwillingness to leave things as they are. There is a subversive quality to it.

The Bible repeatedly emphasizes our role in the working out of God’s purposes. The death of Jesus came about by the actions of human beings who sought to oppose God’s will, Peter tells the crowd in Acts 2:23, yet their deeds served to further God’s purposes. The same can be said of Christ’s return. World events, including the machinations of greedy and power-hungry leaders, are setting the stage for his return. Similarly, human and divine agencies interact to evangelize the world. God’s will is that the world hear the gospel. But human beings are invited to involve themselves in the completion of history’s goal and “speed its coming” (Matt. 24:14; 2 Pet. 3:11–12).

This cooperative principle lies behind the working of prayer. God wants to act in the world. But in certain areas and at particular times, God’s action will come only in response to prayer. As Norwegian theologian O. Hallesby said, “God has voluntarily made Himself dependent upon our prayers.”

An example of the working out of this principle lies in God’s decision concerning our salvation. God offers reconciliation to all; yet his actual saving action comes only in response to prayer (2 Pet. 3:9; Rom. 10:13). Similarly, God wants to send spiritual renewal, but revival comes only as we pray (e.g., 2 Chron. 7:14).

God invites us to become partners in his purposes, then, by working, evangelizing—and praying. In this way, God gives the kingdom to the world. The great missionary statesman E. Stanley Jones understood this principle. He wrote,

For in prayer you align yourself to the purposes and power of God, and He is able to do things that through you He couldn’t otherwise do. For this is an open universe, where some things are left open, contingent upon our doing them. If we do not do them, they will never be done. So God has left certain things open to prayer—things which will never be done except we pray.

According to the Bible, then, prayer brings results. Prayer works because God has decided to include people in the working out of his purposes for the world. As Christians express through their prayers faith in the loving, powerful One, their vision is redirected and they lay hold of God’s willingness and power to act on behalf of his people and the world. As we cry for God’s kingdom, his glorious reign, which one day will arrive in its fullness, becomes a life-changing part of our present.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.