Page 3449 – Christianity Today (2024)

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One of the most vexing problems in the early church concerned when to celebrate Easter. The Greek-speaking Eastern church insisted that it had to be on the date of Jesus' resurrection—Nisan 14, the Jewish Passover—regardless of the day of the week. The Western, Latin-speaking church, on the other hand, decreed that it had to be on the day of the resurrection—Sunday—regardless of the date. The Council of Nicaea decided that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday, but the problem did not disappear entirely. Even today, the Eastern Orthodox church, which uses the old Julian calendar, often observes Easter on a different Sunday from the Western church, which uses the Gregorian calendar.

Another significant issue at Nicaea was a proposal for clerical celibacy, probably introduced by Ossius of Cordoba. But this proposal was vigorously opposed by the bachelor Bishop Paphnutius. He urged that "too heavy a yoke ought not to be laid upon the clergy," and that "marriage and married intercourse are of themselves honorable and undefiled." Such a statement coming from a celibate carried the day, and the council stopped all discussion on the matter. (Clerical celibacy was eventually enforced in the 11th century by Pope Gregory VII.)

Twenty formal canons (rules, standards) were also passed at Nicaea. These canons, in contrast to the great theological debates over the person of Christ, are extremely practical rulings—some very minor—on problems in the early church, many of them resulting from the last great persecution of Christians as well as intramural challenges to episcopal authority.

1. Eunuchs may become clergymen, unless their condition was self-imposed.

2. A period of probation is required before converts can hold church office.

3. No woman is to live in the home of unmarried clergy, except for a mother, sister, or aunt.

4. A bishop must be chosen by all colleague bishops, or at least by three in person, the others agreeing by letter.

5. Anyone excommunicated by a given bishop shall not be restored by others, unless the excommunication was unjust. There will be two synods a year in a given province to determine this.

6. The Bishop of Alexandria is in charge of Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis, much as the Bishops of Rome and Antioch have authority in their domains. Any "bishop" opposed to them is no bishop, according to a majority vote of area bishops.

7. Let the Bishop of Aelia [Jerusalem] have the place of honor next after the Metropolitan [the Bishop of Caesarea. Ever since its destruction in A.D. 70, Jerusalem was in decline].

8. Sectarian Cathari [rigorist Novatians who denied forgiveness to those who lapsed in persecution] wishing to return to the church must state in writing that they will pardon the penitential lapsed, their offices remaining the same except where the local bishop remains in charge.

9. Whoever are ordained without examination are deposed if later found guilty.

10. Whoever was ordained but had lapsed [earlier, in persecution] shall be deposed.

11. Those who lapsed in persecution without duress but wish readmission and genuinely repent must undergo a 12-year probation.

12. Those who endured violence, then lapsed, are excommunicated for 10 years, but may be readmitted depending on the degree of their penitence.

13. The dying are to receive the Eucharist, but if they recover [and are not yet communicants], they are to share only in the prayers of the church.

14. If a catechumen has lapsed, he is demoted to hearer status for three years, after which he may pray again with [i.e., rejoin] the catechumens.

15. No bishop, presbyter, or deacon shall "pass from city to city" exercising official authority, but shall be returned to the church in which he was ordained.

16. Any presbyters or deacons who desert their own churches are not to be admitted into another but must be returned to their own parishes. If a bishop ordains anyone belonging to another [church] without the consent of that bishop, the ordination is void.

17. Any clergyman lending his money at interest, such as 1 percent [per month] or 150 percent usury for the loan shall be deposed from office.

18. Deacons are to know the limitations of their rank and not administer the Eucharist to presbyters, nor touch it before them.

19. Paulianists [followers of the heretic, Paul of Samosata] must be rebaptized, and their clergy reordained if blameless or deposed if not. Their deaconesses are laicized.

20. For the sake of uniformity in the church, on the Lord's Day and Pentecost all should pray standing rather than kneeling.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Do this in remembrance of me.” Jesus’ command to his disciples as they ate their last meal together has undergirded Christian worship and theology for more than two millennia. At the original Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples would have partaken of wine from a common cup and unleavened bread. How did portions of Protestantism arrive at the modern practice of receiving grape juice in individual cups and leavened bread?

The early Western church maintained the custom of wine and unleavened bread. The Eastern church soon began to use leavened bread, seeing the leaven as a symbol of new life in Christ. In the West, the unleavened bread became thinner and more stylized until it assumed the form of a thin wafer. By the high Middle Ages, amid growing concerns about reverence toward the bread and wine as Christ’s actual body and blood, the church ceased to offer laity the cup. The Protestant Reformation urged more frequent reception of Communion by the laity “in both kinds” (bread and wine), as well as emphasizing “real” bread. From the 16th until the 19th century, the majority of Protestants communed using wine from a common cup and leavened bread.

Leaders of the 18th-century “evangelical revival” in Britain and America, though concerned about the immoderate use of alcohol, did not see wine, cider, and beer as alcoholic in the same way as distilled spirits (such as gin and brandy). However, in the 19th century, temperance became “teetotalism” or “total abstinence,” moving all alcohol (wine included) into the list of forbidden beverages. Many began to question why a beverage considered dangerous to drink was still used on the Communion table.

Believing both in the authority of Scripture and the scientific proof of alcohol’s poisonous nature, Protestant theologians and exegetes tried to explain the Bible’s positive use of the word wine, not least Jesus’ command to his disciples to remember him by consuming it. Led by biblical commentator Frederic Lees, they theorized that several Hebrew and Greek words used to mean wine in the Bible actually referred to grape juice. Jesus had instituted the Eucharist with the unfermented “fruit of the vine,” whereas the ferment of intoxication represented “the leaven of the Pharisees,” symbolizing corruption and decay.

Motivated by these arguments, Protestant churchgoers and clergy sought a way to make unfermented grape juice. An American Methodist dentist, Thomas Bramwell Welch, and his son Charles were the first to succeed in this on a large scale. Charles Welch was a skilled marketer, and “Welch’s grape juice” became a popular beverage among total abstainers and the replacement for fermented wine on most American Protestant Communion tables (except in Lutheran and Episcopal churches).

Meanwhile, science was teaching new theories about the spread of disease through germs, sweeping late 19th-century America with a hygiene movement. The common cup came under fire. Methodist pastor R. W. Ryan, who owned an individual-cup-making company, led an argument for individual cups in the religious press. Debates raged, but by the early 20th century most Protestants adopted individual Communion cups—originally glass, and designed so as not to resemble whiskey shot glasses. Individual cubes of bread also became common.

In the 1960s and 1970s, liturgical reforms resulting from Vatican II spread from Catholic into Protestant churches, questioning both the grape juice and individual cup practices. Many mainline Protestants have returned to the use of a common cup—which may contain either wine or juice—and a single loaf of bread. Conversely, some marketers to evangelical churches have developed disposable individual Communion cups which contain both wafer and grape juice in separate hermetically sealed compartments.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Tired of just reading about the Arian controversy? Ready to dip into the original letters? Then pick up a copy of J. Stevenson’s A New Eusebius (S.P.C.K., 1957; rev. ed. 1987), a fabulous collection of 319 documents from the early church. You’ll want to pay special attention to Alexander’s encyclical letter warning against the Arian heresy, Arius’s letters to Eusebius of Nicomedia and Alexander, Constantine’s initial letter to Alexander and Arius urging reconciliation, the Canons of Nicaea, Eusebius’s guarded letter to his church in Ceasarea following the council, and Constantine’s denunciation of Arius in his observations of the council as narrated by the church historian Socrates.

Also of interest is Stevenson’s companion volume, Creeds, Councils, and Controversies (Seabury Press, 1966; rev. ed. 1990), which includes excerpts from 236 fourth- and fifth-century documents and follows Athanasius’ battle with Arian emperors like Constantius II until the triumph of Nicene orthodoxy under the emperor Theodosius. Readers will find in this collection such gems as Ossius of Cordoba’s reprimand of Constantius for taking Arius’s side in the matter, contemporary accounts of Athanasius’ exiles, and the Canons of the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Here’s a selective bibliography for those seeking more in-depth study of the Nicene council and its creed:

Stuart Hall, Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church (Eerdmans, 1991)

W. H. C. Frend, The Early Church (Fortress, 1982)

J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (Longmans, 1960; 3rd ed. 1982)

Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale, 2003)

Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy & Tradition (Eerdmans, 1987; rev. ed. 2001)

Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard, 1981)

R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (T. & T. Clark, 1988)

Arianism After Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts , edited by Michel Barnes and D. H. Williams (Edinburgh, 1993)

Encyclopedia of Early Christianity , edited by E. Ferguson (Garland, 1997)

D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Eerdmans, 1999)

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (Doubleday, 2003)

Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism , edited by Christopher R. Seitz (Brazos, 2001)

And just for fun, check out I Believe, an illustrated version of the Nicene Creed by Pauline Baynes, who did the original illustrations for C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2003).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

All John Trever intended to do was to study and photograph the plants of the Holy Land.

But a telephone call on February 18, 1948, changed the young Methodist scholar’s life—and the course of biblical studies—forever. The next day Butrus Sowmy of St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem brought Trever a scroll that the monastery had acquired. Could he identify the manuscript and determine its age?

“Laying the heavy document on my bed, slowly I began to open it. A sheet of leather, containing two columns of text, had become detached from the rest of the document. The linen thread used to bind the sheets together had disintegrated. On the left edge the text was badly blurred by someone who had attempted to re-ink many letters which had been worn away by handling. Obviously this was the end of the scroll. It had been rolled backwards, with the last column on the outside. I continued to unroll another six to eight columns.

“Here was not what I had expected! The script was puzzling to eyes more accustomed to Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica in modern printed Hebrew and a few relatively modern Torah and Esther scrolls. I had expected the identification to be easy, but this scroll was different. It fired my imagination. …

“The form of the script was intriguing, and it was soon apparent that it was the only clue for dating the document. … I went over to my desk and found a box of 2″ x 2″ color slides on the history of the Bible text, and began to thumb through the section on the Hebrew text. . . . The British Museum Torah Codex, I recalled, had been considered one of the oldest extant Hebrew Bible manuscripts. A mere glance at the photograph of it in my magnifier was convincing enough that the manuscript on my bed belonged to a different category and age.” Further study convinced Trever that the scroll probably dated to the first or second century B.C. “My heart began to pound,” he wrote.

Trever copied a few lines from the scroll. Later, he encountered a surprise while checking some of the words in a Hebrew concordance to the Old Testament.

“The next reference showed two occurrences in Isaiah 65:1. With growing expectancy, I hastily turned to it. There word for word, and almost letter for letter, was exactly what I had copied from the manuscript! It was a scroll of Isaiah, without a doubt!” A complete scroll of Isaiah dating from the last centuries prior to the birth of Jesus seemed too good to be true. That would make it a thousand years older than any other Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament currently known.

Over the next eight years, 11 caves along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea would yield more than 800 manuscripts, about a quarter of them copies of Old Testament books. Others would include a vast array of stories about Old Testament figures, hymns and psalms, wisdom poems, biblical commentaries, and books outlining the distinctive practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect that existed prior to, and contemporary with, Jesus. But Trever knew none of that at the time. After photographing the scroll, he sent a set of prints to the eminent American archaeologist William Foxwell Albright.

On March 8, Albright air-mailed this response: “I repeat that in my opinion you have made the greatest MS [manuscript] discovery of modern times—certainly the greatest biblical manuscript find. … What an absolutely incredible find!”

The saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls had begun.

Not bad for a plant enthusiast.

Quotations from John C. Trever, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Personal Account (rev. ed.; Upland, CA: Upland Commercial Printers, 1977). Used with permission.

Reproduced with permission from Gorgias Press (www.gorgiaspress.com).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Anglicanism sometimes seems like a country with a proportional representation system of government that is doomed, Groundhog Day-style, to be forever in an election year. For the last 150 years or more, Anglicans have subdivided into three basic groups. Labels have varied based on time period and nuance, but, for convenience, let’s use Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, and Modernist. As any student of politics knows, three parties means coalitions. As there is no election day, however, Anglican party strength is perpetually being testedevery decision and every appointment can be read as a triumph for one faction or another.

Related to this is another curiosity: most everyone, whether insider or outsider, will tell you that Anglicanism’s notable strengths include tradition and continuity (not to mention unity). Nevertheless, the great rock of traditionalism seems more than most denominations to be forever anxious about what it must do to be relevant in the contemporary world.

There is no more delightful way into this terrain than John Richard Orens’ urbane study of that quixotic Anglican priest of the Victorian age, Stewart Headlam. Headlam’s father had been an Evangelical, but that was the one thing he was not. Everything that he thought was wrong with Anglicanism Headlam attributed to “Manichaean Calvinism.” Never one to do things by halves, he eventually gave institutional expression to this antipathy by founding the Anti-Puritan Leaguea band of convivial polemicists whose members included G.K. Chesterton. Headlam embodied the natural anti-Evangelical coalition, being either a Modernist Anglo-Catholic or an Anglo-Catholic Modernist.

Headlam’s Modernism was informed by such Broad Church classics as Essays and Reviews (1860) and the writings of F. D. Maurice, both of which provoked investigations for heresy. Well-established Modernists adopted Headlam when he was a young curate, but he proved too reckless a freethinker even for them. Headlam taxed his Modernist vicar to the breaking point by preaching universalism and was sent off to the bishop to explain himself.

On the other hand, Headlam was also a keen Anglo-Catholic and had to answer formal charges for introducing such contentious liturgical innovations as kissing the altar and the gospel book, genuflecting, and making the sign of the cross. This made him paradoxically also a guardian of tradition in a way that most Modernists are not. He even went so far as to defend the eminently assailable Athanasian Creed, waggishly retorting to Modernists who complained of its untenable level of philosophical abstraction that it was easier to understanding than the neo-Hegelian thought of T.H. Green which was then the rage.

To top it all off, Headlam was an irrepressible champion of radical politics, slum missions, popular amusem*nts, and people who got in trouble for being irreligious or immoral. His politics included republicanism (a hard sell in Queen Victoria’s England) and socialism. When given the opportunity to preach in Westminster Abbey on Maundy Thursday, 1881, he declared to this high-society congregation that the solution to such social ills as bad housing was “the Christian Communism of the Church of the Carpenter.” Headlam publicly supported the defiantly anti-Christian atheist leader, Charles Bradlaugh, infuriating Anglican leaders by his attempt to recast the self-styled “Iconoclast” as a heroic anonymous Christian. The piece de resistance along these lines came when Headlam, who was a man of independent means, put up 1,250 for Oscar Wilde’s bail and sheltered the writer in his home on his release from prison. Headlam also had a Mr Toad-like obsession with the Music Hall. He founded the Church and Stage Guild in an attempt to remove the stigma of worldliness from chorus linesanother uphill cause among Victorian church people.

The theological links bewildered lesser minds, but the Reverend Stewart Headlam could see quite clearly how devotion to the Virgin Mary must lead on to votes for women, how a logical implication of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was socialism, and how it was a denial of the doctrine of the incarnation to prohibit dancing girls from wearing flesh-colored tights. One can sense the desperation that the church not get left behind in a changing world.

Yale University Press has recently issued a lush, illustrated history of one of Anglicanism’s most iconic buildings and the ministry arising from it, St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London 604-2004, edited by Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint. Anglicans across the globe have felt so strong a common bond with St Paul’s that it used to be referred to as the “parish church of the British Empire.” An essay by John Wolffe evokes the truly national role the cathedral has played in modern times, from the state funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and Winston Churchill, to the wedding in 1981 of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and beyond. When the signing of the armistice ended World War I, Londoners spontaneously came to St Paul’s and insisted that its bemused clergymen conduct a service of thanksgiving. A foreword by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, identifies the cathedral’s spiritual mission as one of harmoniously drawing together “all Christians.”

Nevertheless, Arthur Burns’ superb historical survey of St Paul’s since 1830 reveals that such unifying aspirations have come up against countervailing realities. In the late 1860s, the cathedral began a long period of being controlled by Anglo-Catholics. The dean from 1871, R.W. Church, and his successor from 1890 to 1911, Robert Gregory, were both ex-Evangelicals who had gone high church. When a court declared that the Eucharist could not be celebrated from the eastward position (a liturgical development viewed by its opponents as an effort to make Anglican worship more Roman Catholic), Gregory and Liddon defied the ruling and dared the authorities to prosecute St Paul’s. Militant Evangelicals decided that the cathedral had become the agent of an unsound faction. In 1883, one went so far as to charge the altar during the Easter service, shouting as he ran the rallying cry, “Protestants to the rescue!” This rebellion was thwarted through the expediency of stuffing Dean Gregory’s handkerchief into the mouth of the disgruntled worshipper.

Yet this man’s sentiments, if not his tactics, were widespread. 9,000 people signed a petition against a newly installed altar screen that depicted a breast-feeding Virgin Mary. When, in 1969, a Roman Catholic was allowed to preach at St Paul’s there was a heavy police presence to deal with any possible disturbances. When the archbishop rose to introduce the speaker, he was met with shouts of “traitor.”

The theological links bewildered lesser minds, but the Reverend Stewart Headlam could see quite clearly how devotion to the Virgin Mary must lead on to votes for women, how a logical implication of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was socialism, and how it was a denial of the doctrine of the incarnation to prohibit dancing girls from wearing flesh-colored tights. One can sense the desperation that the church not get left behind in a changing world.

The Bishop of London is pleased to report that the director of the Evangelical Alliance is now a canon of St Paul’s, but that is mere windowdressing. Anglo-Catholics or Modernists or a coalition of the two have maintained control over the cathedral church of London for over 135 years now, and there is no sign of that changing. W.R. Inge, who became dean in 1911, was a decided Modernist with an unfortunate enthusiasm for eugenics and sterilization programs. He was so immune to the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism that he deemed the cathedral’s elaborate liturgy “a criminal waste of time.” He consoled himself that he might be able to use the time to catch up on his reading, but even this modest compensation was thwarted by the peering eyes of the choir. Still the chapter was firmly controlled by Anglo-Catholics, and Inge was therefore unable to implement substantial changes. Other key figures at London’s cathedral personally embodied the Modernist-Anglo-Catholic coalition.

St Paul’s has also witnessed its share of efforts to be relevant, some of them so pathetic that they could make even an American cringe. The 1960s versions of this propensity included everything from the “festival of jazz praise” to a fashion show. Even the building itself was modified to include a son et lumiere, which Burns rather wickedly describes as the architectural equivalent of a lava lamp. Perhaps the nadir was when paratroopers were allowed to practice their descents in front of St Paul’s. The dean was even coaxed into having a go himself. London’s Roman Catholic archbishop made the withering observation that Christ, on the other hand, had managed to resist the temptation to jump from the pinnacle of the temple.

William H. Katerberg’s Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880-1950 is a little marred by a tendency to gravitate toward vague and sweeping theoretical categories. To take a random example, does the rather banal occurrence of an Anglican priest moving from England to Canada really need to be thought of in terms of the relationship between modernity and disembedded identities? That said, this is a well-researched study that has much to say to contemporary Anglicans.

In the period Katerberg covers, Evangelical Anglicans generally had a visceral objection to Anglo-Catholicism, rooted in what they perceived to be core Protestant doctrinal commitments. Evangelicals fought high church liturgical developments tooth and nail, calculating that the gospel itself was at stake. The enemy was “ritualism.” Modernists, however, were often seen as welcome coalition partners: Evangelicals and Liberals together was then in vogue. Their alliance was based on a common revolt against the dead weight of tradition. I suppose one might say that evangelicals are model Modernists in that they excel at having no sense of history.

As ever, some internalized the coalition. In the decades before World War II, numerous Evangelicals referred to themselves as “Liberal Evangelicals.” I have never heard that self-description in my lifetime, although one does now hear what would have sounded strange then, “Catholic Evangelical”and even Evangelicals that prefer “Evangelical Catholic.” You don’t often hear such hybrid appellations when evangelicals from other denominations are introducing themselves; Anglicans, by contrast, seem particularly prone to coalition labels. More recently, Evangelical Anglicans have decided to leave Modernists at the punch bowl and to try a bit of liturgical dancing. Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard an Evangelical accuse someone of “ritualism”?

Evangelical Anglicans ought therefore to reflect upon whether their earlier principled objections to Anglo-Catholic theology and worship were really wrongheaded in toto. Do they have any critique left of “Romanizing tendencies”? That chalk line has not been drawn afresh for so long that they should not be surprised if people start crossing over without even noticing it.

Many wannabe Episcopalians, of course, are shedding the religious identity of the anonymous auditoriums of their parent’s baptistic churches precisely because they want to add to their evangelicalism a more elaborate liturgy and tradition. The price tag is that the Prayer Book they love is being held by numerous Modernists, and has been for a long time. Katerberg goes so far as to argue that the anti-ritualism campaign of Evangelicals “contributed to the liberal-modernist victory in the struggle for supremacy in the Episcopal Church after World War II.” It is invariably bad manners to ask an Evangelical Episcopalian whether he or she is an Anglican or an evangelical first.

So on to a mischievously titled collection of essays by the Church of England college chaplains at the University of Cambridge, Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity, edited by Duncan Dormor, Jack McDonald, and Jeremy Caddick. The meaning of the title is not that Anglicanism is anti-modern but rather that it is relevant (that word again) to the contemporary world. It is not so much an answer as an echo. As Modernists have often been wont to do, the editors specifically disavow the notion that they represent any church party. To start at the beginning, F. D. Maurice, the 19th-century founder of Broad Church Anglicanism (as Modernism was called in his day), always denied that he belonged to any party.

Like the supercilious sectarians in Corinth who claimed “I follow Christ,” Modernists purport to be above the party fray. They are for “comprehensiveness”which, of course, means unity on their terms. The contributors concede that they all represent “an orthodox liberalism”; one might have hoped that orthodoxy could have been the noun. The genre they are consciously aiming at is that of the liberal-edited volume, Essays and Reviews, which once so energized Headlam.

On the positive side, this collection has real verve. Wishy-washy, milk-toast vicars have set so much of the tone in the contemporary Church of England that one cannot help but cheer unapologetic and confident Anglican theology. Who would have thought that such a thing could arise from, of all places, Cambridge University? Jo Bailey Wells’ call to reclaim the wisdom books of the Hebrew Scriptures has a welcome resonance. Ben Quash is right to remind us that the authentic Anglican Church is represented not by the goofy extremes that grab the attention of the national media but rather by the sacrificial acts of being present to ordinary people that are recorded in season and out of season in local newspapers. Jeremy Caddick helpfully argues that Christianity can offer resources in the field of medical ethics that move beyond inadequate rights-based language. (If I may be allowed to extend what I take to be the thrust of his argument: just as J.S. Mill taught us that no one has the right to sell themselves into slavery, the same logic refutes as spurious claims to a “right to die.”)

There is plenty here, however, to rub Evangelicals and anti-Modernist Anglo-Catholics the wrong way. Jack McDonald, in a cheerful piece on evil, informs us that the notion that all people are fallen is “a theodicy for sad*sts and masoch*sts.” It is also rude to ask Anglicans if they have read the Thirty-Nine Articles, but McDonald might want to dust off number nine.

Duncan Dormor makes a plea for the church to affirm cohabitation as an acceptable alternative to marriage. The argument consists of the classic Modernist claim that this is the only way the church can stay relevant in a changing society. Nevertheless, Dormor’s vision of young people finding their soulmates and then settling down to cohabit in mutual love and respect till death do them part is just as quaint and countercultural as the church’s historic stance. “True Love Waits,” we are told, is un-Anglican. Well, if it is time to be prophetic, a larger target, and one closer to home, might have been a culture of dumping old partners in a self-absorbed search for new thrills. If a church that still defends the ideal of traditional marriage is out of touch, what can be said of someone who pretends that a significantly more realistic solution to the current disarray is old-fashioned, lifelong, monogamous fidelity minus the piece of paper?

So where does all this leave Evangelical Anglicans? Is a coalition with Anglo-Catholics the solution? Perhaps, but many Anglo-Catholics are also Modernists, thinning the number of potential co-belligerents yet further. Moreover, if Modernism is truly the enemy, and if Evangelicals really have no critique of Anglo-Catholicism left, then why should people not just convert to Rome, a church that isn’t afraid to be countercultural? On the other hand, the positive side of Anglicanism’s perpetual election year is that the faithful can continually hope: a victory for their party might be just around the corner.

Timothy Larsen, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is associate professor of theology at Wheaton College and the author most recently of Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Baylor Univ. Press).

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Do you ever spare a thought for Philipp Melanchthon? In terms of theological controversy, he saw it all, or most of it. There are many good reasons for spending sympathetic time with him, and sympathy is surely never better warranted than when we attend to his dying hope: “You will be redeemed from sin. And set free from cares and from the fury of theologians.” He conceded the necessity, but denied any delight in theological controversy. The man in whose shadow he has so often stood, Martin Luther, knew that life, justification, and theological thought must all take place coram deo, consciously before God. If there is an area of Christian doctrine where we need equal reminder of what stirred Luther and what saddened Melanchthon, it is that which concerns the atonement.

Earlier essays in this series in Books & Culture have communicated the force of the criticism of a position that has enjoyed much authority in the West, the view that regards atonement primarily in terms of satisfaction and substitution. Richard Mouw has considered the claim that this view, along with others, hallows a pattern of social violence (January/February 2001). Hans Boersma has treated the accusation that penal substitution is a dehistoricizing, individualizing and juridicizing teaching (March/April 2003). Frederica Mathewes-Green has weighed Anselm in the balance, found him wanting, and supported the older Patristic outlook from which he consciously turned aside (March/April 2004). And now a number of essayists have joined issue in what is, overall, an uncompromising and tenacious defense of penal substitution, The Glory of the Atonement, a Festschrift for Roger Nicole. This volume is in three parts, comprising one on the biblical materials, one on historical theology, and a very brief one on “Atonement in the Life of the Christian and the Church.” Keeping in mind what Luther said about the context and what Melanchthon said about the tone of the theological enterprise, it might be as well to get general criticism out of the way and comment that the collection should be read according to just two of the three considerations that moved the editors to put together the essays. The two are: to salute Roger Nicole and to contribute a substantial volume on the atonement. This is achieved, but the third stated consideration should be discounted, or largely so, namely, the resolution to produce a textbook. Why this demurral?

“Textbooks” come in various shapes. Bracketing the question of whether they should always be introductions, the question here is whether this is a textbook on (or largely on) the penal substitutionary view of atonement or on the idea of atonement more generally. Some may suspect that the disjunctive form of the question shelters a presupposition which the volume is trying to dislodge, that is, that penal substitution constitutes just one way of approaching the atonement rather than being its essence. But this is not presupposed. The problem is the balance of the content.

Of the 20 essays, exactly half cover the Old and New Testaments, but only three of these deal with the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible) itself. The first is a linguistic defense of a controversial substitutionary interpretation of Leviticus 17:11. The second is a brief account of atonement in Psalm 51. The last is a discussion of how “bearing guilt” and “carrying sin” in Isaiah 53:11f. relate to the book of Isaiah more widely. These are unquestionably important texts. But will not many a reader come away with the impression that, since editors and essayists are eager to defend penal substitution, the Hebrew Bible must yield only very little that supports it? Does penal substitution, then, belong to the heart of New Testament teaching, while being relatively foreign to the fabric of the Old? Answers to that question may differ. But when we remember, for example, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” can we, in a textbook, avoid surveying covenant theology in the Old Testament?1 Covenant aside, one of the other contributors to the volume makes a methodological plea for an “overarching biblical theology” that seems to cut against what is happening in part 1.2

Part 2 covers Augustine’s preaching, medieval theology, Luther, Calvin, Bavinck and Barth, definite atonement and postmodernity. Without doubting the quality of these contributions, we note that there are no Greek Fathers at one end nor a Schleiermacher, Bushnell, or Forsyth near the other.3 This is not just a case of: “Well, if I had been editing a textbook, I should have included. … ” Supposing we do read “textbook” as (largely) “textbook for the penal substitutionary view.” If so, will not the worrying impression be conveyed or perpetuated that advocates of this view hammer away at the texts and traditions that defend it and fail to cast a sympathetic eye as widely as possible before reiterating their case?4

This said, the fact is that much is well done in this volume to advance the desiderated line of argument. If I select three contributions, it is not in order to make comparisons and suggest that the three have no equals in this volume. It is because they give us good examples of forceful advocacy; despite what I have said about penal substitution, not all the essays focus on it. The first is a characteristically fine essay by Don Carson on the crucial “propitiation” passage in Romans (3:21–26). A subsequent essay by Richard Gaffin deals with “Atonement in the Pauline Corpus,” so the passage from Romans can be considered in its wider context, but without forcing the text in any way, Carson shows how those who want to think biblically about atonement can not avoid what these verses say about Christ’s bearing of wrath on the cross. The second is Bruce McCormack’s essay on Barth. Whatever we make of Barth’s doctrine of God, McCormack well emphasizes the need for a penal substitutionary view to be rooted in a sound trinitarianism, so that we focus less on the action of one person upon another than on the triune God taking into his own life and in our stead the penalty incurred by our sin. The third is Kevin Vanhoozer’s engagement with postmodernity, “Of Guilt, Goats and Gifts.” Using an idiom appropriate to that engagement, he argues that in an excess of justice and love, “God reconciles the world to himself by providing his own Son as a substitute for the exile that should be ours.” These three essays show how the sound deployment of biblical, traditional, and culturally sensitive theological resources exculpate a penal substitutionary view of atonement from some major charges standardly leveled against it.

The main lines of a solid exposition and defense of substitutionary atonement were laid down effectively by James Denney a century ago. In another good essay, this time on “The Atonement in the Life of the Christian,” Jim Packer reminds us of Denney and the forcefulness of his exposition in The Death of Christ.5 This was his principal treatment of the New Testament material, though Denney sketched the outline in compelling relief in his two chapters on the atonement in Studies in Theology.6 Denney was clear that the consequential element highlighted in the biblical treatment of sin was that it draws down on us God’s condemnation. Our sin is borne and our condemnation taken in the death of Christ. This must be carefully understood and unraveled, but the basic theological datum contains the substitutionary notion at its heart. Denney puts things convincingly, though it is certainly right to view sin as a disruptive and disintegrative force wreaking ontological havoc on human beings, life and world. In fact, this is central. Doubtless, we need the Greek Fathers to remind us of this.7 But their insights can not stand without acknowledgement of penal substitution, just as the latter should not stand without giving its full place to sin and salvation in their non-juridical aspects.8 Those not persuaded by Denney on substitution might consult a number of the essays in our Festschrift; those not persuaded by the essays might consult Denney.

How should we harvest any biblical fruit that belongs to the genus: penal and substitutionary understanding of atonement? In three ways, perhaps. Firstly, a trinitarian perspective is vital: atonement is the work of Father and Son, the judgment on our sin borne in one way or another by both persons. Although I give little space here to Robert Sherman’s volume on King, Priest, and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of the Atonement, we should welcome the emphasis portended in both the title and the subtitle of this work. Sherman theologically structures the biblical material by connecting kingship with God as Father and the “Christus Victor” emphasis on the atonement; priesthood with God the Son and the notion of vicarious sacrifice; then, prophecy with exemplarism and God the Spirit. If we do not elaborate on this outline, it is because, despite the embellishment of some conceptual novelty, the basic substance in this book is familiar. Familiarity must not breed contempt, but it is a dissuasive from delving deeper into this contribution in this article.

If we want to track down what Sherman says about penal substitution in particularfor present purposes, not because our theological antennae should pick up nothing elsewe might note that he seeks to do justice as far as is possible to all the biblical motifs and some of the main ones in the theological tradition. But, as the concluding chapter makes clear, his way of affirming penal substitution minimizes the significance of the intertwined issues of judgment, guilt, and condemnation and the associated personal sense of remorse, unworthiness and the need to repent.9 Certainly, such things can be exemplified in a thoroughly unhealthy, indeed a pathological, mode. But our widespread cultural sense of self in the West reinforces the wider human tendency that causes us to resist strenuously any accent on humbling. In general, however, what is most striking and welcome about Sherman’s book is the irenic and pastoral vein in which he writes, as he threads his way through citation and commentary on a mass of biblical texts. Trinity and atonement are thought through together.

Secondly, the relationship of wrath to anger needs further thought. It is certainly true that biblical talk of divine wrath cannot be reduced to the claim that it is an impersonal process, for the language speaks of the reaction of God in his own personal being. And certainly, on the other hand, it is difficult to purify the notion of divine anger from all that is amiss in human angercaprice, resentment, lack of patience, lack of controlthough it is not conclusive simply to note the difficulty. But anger is surely not the component in “wrath” that is particularly pertinent to the atonement. The idea of the Father being angry with the Son indeed remains lodged in much popular evangelical consciousness. In relation to propitiation and the cross, it is the element of divine judgment that comes to the fore in relation to wrath. Cranfield, in a formulation considered by John Stott to be the most careful of them all, wrote that “God … proposed to direct against His own very Self in the person of the Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they [sinners] deserved.10 It is judgment rather than anger that is expressed; act, and not emotion, that is self-directed.

In this connection, Henri Blocher, expounding Calvin in The Glory of the Atonement, does not leave us with a Calvin which convinces. Having earlier quoted Calvin on the “misdeeds that rendered sinners hateful to God,” Blocher remarks that “Calvin is not embarrassed to take up the Augustinian paradox: ‘He loved us and he hated us at the same time.’ ” Calvin seems to consider the difficulty in the paradoxical formulation cleared up in the Augustinian gloss: “He hated in each of us what we had done, and loved what He had done.” But there are serious difficulties here. To use the language of God loving us and hating us at the same time, even if Calvin’s explanation shows how it is coherent, is surely to step outside the world of Scripture and the revelation of God in Christ. In the passage that Blocher quotes from Calvin’s Institutes, Calvin is dealing with our justification. His problem concerns time and history: how can the elect be elect, and so loved, from eternity, yet regarded as objects of a wrath that is temporally expressed on the cross that achieves our reconciliation? If we consult the relevant portion of the Institutes, we find it studded with references to divine “accommodation,” the way biblical language is accommodated to our human capacity.11 So we must all be careful. Still, the problem in Calvin’s account seems to lie in the way that he thinks of God’s enmity towards us.12 If the sacrifice of Christ is inexplicable without reference to wrath and enmity, it is yet not a display of anything which suggests a dialectic of love and hatred in God, a paradox generated by theological perplexity over election and justification. It is judgment that is to the fore. Does the Augustinian formulation not jar and grate, even carefully interpreted as Augustine and Calvin do?13 Henri Blocher deserves our very highest respect as a theologian and scholar, but, in his apparent complicity with Calvin at this point, he will either confirm or create afresh many of the difficulties that people have with penal substitution.

Thirdly and finally, in any advocacy of penal substitution, we need to connect our theology with human experience. Hosea insisted on enduring an unfaithful wife. We can imagine the outcry. She is not paying the penalty for her sin, by being cast off. Who, then, pays it? Does it go unpaid? If “payment” sounds like legalistic moralism, is the alternative a forgiveness which evacuates the moral order of much significance? To which we might respond: the burden of the wife’s sin has fallen on Hosea and, in suffering what he has suffered and restoring her into communionfully appreciating, not light-heartedly waiving, what she has donehe pays the price for sin. A Protestant evangelical of another day, James Orr, could approvingly pull in Bushnell here: “The world is full of the suffering of the innocent for the sins of others. More than this, the world is full of substitutionary, of vicarious, forcesof the voluntary enduring of suffering for the sake of others.” Yet Orr rightly insisted that this does not cover what is distinctive about the substitutionary office of Christ.14 Indeed, read on its own, the statement points to an “exemplarist” approach to atonement, whether or not Bushnell should be read in that way. At any rate, talk of the peculiar penal substitution of the cross will surely gain credibility if it is connected with examples of forms of vicarious sin-bearing in human experience. Indeed, preachers, more or less felicitously, often use such examples illustratively.

In conclusion, we might ask in which direction The Glory of the Atonement, on which I have concentrated, sways us on the question of whether penal substitution is absent, marginal, one element, or the principal element in a Scriptural view of the atonement. For reasons given, it may appear that, taken as a whole, it does not clearly sway us one way or the other. However, I have been able to mention only a few contributions and it seems to me that a fair-minded perusal of the volume will indicate the strength of its overall contention. Regular readers of Books & Culture will know the advantage of bringing in G. K. Chesterton if not for a last, at least for a penultimate, word. Somewhere in one of his Father Brown stories, he has a sentence to this effect: “He belonged to that type of French gendarme who could make mercy appear colder than justice.” It is a superbly evocative line in its own right and perfectly captures what so often goes on when penal substitution is affirmed. Where John has a person and present tense”He is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2.2) we very often have merely a scheme and a past tense: “It [the work of the cross] was the propitiation for our sins.” Dramatic, Christus Victor, exemplarist, and moral influence schemes often succeed where penal substitution often does not, in conveying a lively sense of the greatness of the person of Christ. We need Luther and Melanchthon here as well.15

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1. We may answer in the negative, even if we attend to Hans Boersma?s reminder of John Stek?s article on “?Covenant? Overload in Reformed Theology.”

2. Royce Gruenler, “Atonement in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.” Of course, the New Testament essays often refer back to the Old Testament.

3. Roger Nicole himself adds a “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” which includes a welcome reference to Bushnell.

4. We could expand these considerations, particularly in light of the previous contributions to Books & Culture, to refer to non-engagement with feminist thought.

5. It is important that we consult the edition which Jim Packer uses; the widely used edition by R.V.G. Tasker (Tyndale, 1951) quietly rewords those passages where Denney takes what the editor judged an unacceptable approach to Scripture.

6. J. Denney, Studies in Theology (Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), chapters 5 and 6.

7. It must be allowed that Denney did not do justice to a figure like Athanasius in this respect: see The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation (Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), p. 36ff.

8. I use “non-juridical” loosely here, just as talk of the positively “juridical” in atonement needs careful nuance. Omitting reference to other approaches, such as “exemplarism,” is not a sign that they should be dismissed.

9. Sherman wrongly identifies Anselm?s thought with the notion of propitiation, but rightly points out that Anselm should be exonerated from the charge of holding God to be offended, like a petty feudal lord, because Anselm affirms divine impassibility.

10. C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (T&T Clark, 1975), p. 217; see John Stott, The Cross of Christ (IVP, 1986), p. 134.

11. Institutes II.16.1-4.

12. Yet the standard English translation of the Institutes (Westminster, 1960) has Calvin refer to God as our enemy in II.16.2 and 4 in terms stronger than either the Latin or the French edition necessarily warrants, and it misquotes Romans 5:10 at II.16.2 where Calvin refers to, without quoting, the text. Calvin?s biblical commentary on it notes that “because God hates sin, we are also hated by Him in so far as we are sinners.” The Latin translated “hate,” exosos, is a strong word.

13. Jonathan Edwards remarked in a slightly different context: “It is an exceeding difficult thing to know how far love or hatred are exercised towards persons or actions by all that is before us,” Some Thoughts Concerning Revival in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale University Press) IV.417.

14. James Orr, Sidelights in Doctrine (Marshall, 1909), p. 135.

15. Because, for example, Kevin Vanhoozer and Richard Mouw deal so well with pertinent contemporary questions, I have confined the above discussion of penal substitution within a very traditional framework.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Wherever I turn these days, whatever the ostensible subject, I’m likely to bump into someone editorializing about the evils of George W. Bush and his company of wreckers. The New York Times Book Review asks John Ashbery what book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, has meant the most to him, and on his way to plumping for James Tate he arches his brow: “Democracy is after all what our land is all about, or was until fairly recently.” Ireland’s Abbey Theatre commissions Seamus Heaney to undertake a new version of Sophocles’ Antigone (The Burial at Thebes, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Heaneya reviewer in the Los Angeles Times Book Review tells usremarks that “his translation could have been called ‘An Open Letter to George Bush,'” since “the poet found a ready parallel to the bellicose, intransigent Creon … in the American president.”

Why does the crudity of this surprise me? Maybe in part because one of the principal charges against Bush and all those who voted for him is their allegedly simplistic view of the world. And the “ready parallel” between Creon and George W. Bush is … subtly nuanced?

In 2003, I contributed an essay to a book called Spiritual Perspectives on America’s Role as a Superpower (Skylight Paths). I beg your indulgence to quote from it here:

In the contention over American power and how it should be used, vigorously and often rancorously conducted on talk shows and op-ed pages, in think tanks and policy journals, the matter of a distinctively Christian understanding of the question has hardly been at the forefront, but neither has it been neglected. Indeed, two answers have been heard again and again, two sharply different responses, both of which seem unsatisfactory to me.

The first answer might be called the Way of Renunciation. It is well represented by Daniel Berrigan’s book, Lamentations: From New York to Kabul and Beyond, in which Berrigan reflects on 9/11 and its aftermath in the light of the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. Castigating President Bush and his “war on terror,” equally critical of the church for its complicity with the “warmaking state,” Berrigan calls for “another way,” renouncing “retaliation and revenge” and instead embarking on a national confession of sin.

Many Christian thinkers have agreed. In the final week of 2002, I was in Atlanta for an InterVarsity Grad and Faculty Ministries conference, Following Christ 2002. During that week, the murder of three Christian missionaries in Yemen was reported, with a statement from the U.S. government saying that those responsible would be “hunted down.” It should not be so, said my friend, the systematic theologian Miroslav Volf, one of the plenary speakers at the conference. Hunting down the murderers is not what the martyred missionaries themselves would have wanted: such a response violates the meaning of their witness.

In general, those who argue for the Way of Renunciation believe that the Christian perspective on America’s role as a superpower is painfully clear. Renounce war, renounce power. Resist the evil machinations of the state; repent for the weakness of the church, the failure of Christians to take up the cross. What we are called to do may indeed be difficult, but it is straightforward, without ambiguity.

On the other hand, there is the Way of Realpolitik. It is well represented by Robert Kaplan’s book Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. From this point of view, the radical meditations of a Daniel Berrigan are so peripheral as to be beneath notice. What is dangerous, say the practitioners of Realpolitik, is a more diffuse Christian sentimentality about America and its role in the world. Such sentimentality makes it difficult for America to acknowledge the reality of its own power and exercise it effectively. Ruthlessness, stealth, and cunning are the attributes we need in our leaders, not “Christian” virtues.

Kaplan concedes that some Christians, from Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr, have been political realists, but he misconstrues their engagement with the world: “What all these men were groping for, it seems, was a way to use pagan, public morality to advancealbeit indirectlyprivate, Judeo-Christian morality.” Here, in Kaplan’s unwitting condescension, his genial contempt for religion is all too apparent.

Indeed, in one important respect, the Way of Renunciation and the Way of Realpolitik are in fundamental agreement: Christianity is irrelevant to the messy realities of power. But is this really true?

James Q. Wilson and Edward Banfield began their classic study, City Politics (1966), with the observation that “politics arises out of conflicts, and it consists of the activitiesfor example, reasonable discussion, impassioned oratory, balloting, and street fightingby which conflict is carried on.” This is no less true of international politics than of city politics. In a world darkened by sin, both individual and corporate, conflict takes on a tragic dimension. In working toward a good endor what seems a good endwe often do harm. This is precisely the world as seen in the Bible.

In World War II, to resist the evil of Nazism, we allied ourselves with the Soviet Unionwhich had been Hitler’s ally until Germany launched a surprise invasion. Together with the Russians, we defeated the Nazis, but our alliance led to the subjugation of millions behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern and Central Europe after the war.

Far from being doomed to sentimentality, a Christian understanding of politicsand hence a Christian perspective on America’s role as a superpowermust begin with our fallenness, a condition which results not only in tragedy but also in dark absurdity. And yet we are also human beings created in the very image of God, a little lower than the angels. A squad of American soldiers dropped in Afghanistan or Iraq is at once an emblem of human depravity and of human nobility.

To be Christian Realiststo borrow Niebuhr’s termwe need to learn both from the Way of Renunciation and from the Way of Realpolitik. If we pride ourselves on our realism, we may soon end up rationalizing evil. Such was the case with U.S. policy in Central America under the Reagan Administration. Beware the siren song of Realpolitik, as crooned by Henry Kissinger! But if we pride ourselves on our radical Christian stance, we may abdicate our responsibility to fight the good fight, to make tough choices in a messy, ever-shifting political landscape.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his own reckoning, William Frank Buckley, Jr., is not an introspective man. A few years back, I caught an episode of the Charley Rose Show in which the emotive host tried to get the writer to imagine something he would have done differently, given the chance. Buckley refused to bite, expressing a disinclination most fully articulated in Overdrive, a week-in-the-life “personal documentary” published when the Reagan administration was still young: “I do resist introspection though I can not claim to have ‘guarded’ against it, because even to say that would suppose that the temptation to do so was there, which it isn’t.” If it’s true, he remarked elsewhere, that only the examined life is worth living, then his life has been misspent.

Here, as so often, one envies Buckley’s facility with languages; my designation of him as a big fat liar would sound so much more dignified in French or Spanish. His has been a spectacularly examined life, as Overdrive and its predecessor, Cruising Speed, attest. To conduct such sustained acts of public self-examination, all the while affecting absolute indifference to “introspection,” is a triumph of the Buckley persona. From his playful intellectual jousting on Firing Line, the PBS show he hosted for 37 years, to his witty one-line replies in the “Notes & Asides” column of National Review, the political journal he founded, he has maintained an air of passionate nonchalance, suggesting that he was too busy speechifying, editing his fortnightly magazine, taping his talk show, dabbling in politics, dashing off three columns a week, sailing the globe, and churning out books while skiing in Switzerland to look inward.

But over the last 15 years, as he has gradually pulled back from public life, Buckley has allowed his readers to see past this genial fiction. At his retirement party from the editorship of National Review in 1990, Buckley disclosed, “one month from today, I will set out on a small sailboat from Lisbon, headed toward Barbados via Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde, forty-four hundred miles of decompression at sea, the cradle of God.” This is related in the introduction to Wind Fall: The End of the Affair. And the change was duly noted. Literary man about the globe P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “For the first time in my experience, Mr. Buckley’s prose does not sound young. Not that it sounds old. Rather, his words are autumnal, even mellow.” O’Rourke judged the book to be chock full of, yes, “introspection and sensitivity.”

Buckley retired his hero Blackford Oakes after ten novels, the end of the USSR having narrowed the market for old CIA hands, but decided to keep at it as a novelist. For my money, the best of the post-Cold War pack was 1995’s Brothers No More, a meditation on bravery sharply critical of U.S. actions in Vietnam that led up to the war. Other surprises include The Redhunter, the closest he will ever get to publicly acknowledging McCarthyism was a mistake, and Elvis in the Morning, a sweet set piece about the king and one of his fans. Other major projects included Nearer My God—a mixed bag but, basically, the written form of what would have been a series of Firing Line programs, as applied to the Catholic faith—and a collection of nearly 100 of his speeches.

On almost a one-to-one ratio, the releases of new major projects have coincided with Buckley’s severing another longstanding obligation. The frequency of his syndicated column dropped from thrice to twice a week. He cut Firing Line back to half an hour and then folded in 1999 because he did not “want to die onstage.” The collection of speeches marked the end of his regimen of public oratory. So it should have come as a shock to no one that Bill Buckley’s two offerings in 2004 marked further adjustments. Still, these were doozies.

The first book, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, part of publisher Wiley’s Turning Points series, could have been written by the author of Ecclesiastes after he’d downed a few martinis. Though there is plenty of blame-placing (on JFK, France, and the West in general for capitulating to the Communists over the wall’s construction), the book lacks the old polemicist’s instinct. Reagan’s entreaties to tear the wall down are set in a broader historical context that shows plenty of cracks already formed. There is some humor but no rah-rah cheerleading. The actual physical destruction of the wall occupies less than three pages all told. In sum, it is the work of an old man who has seen beyond the struggles of his youth into the longer run of human affairs, and perhaps beyond. The wall, Buckley notes, was built by men who served a failed empire. Most of them are dead, but then so are the wall’s opponents, now including the most vocal one. And one season gives way to the next.

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography has been widely noticed for the actions that surrounded its release. Though Buckley retired from his magazine in 1990, he retained his ownership in the enterprise and exercised it. In 1997, he fired editor-in-chief John O’Sullivan for, among other things, overdoing the anti-immigration fusillades. Since then, there had been a lot of fevered speculation about the future of the magazine, post-Buckley. This past year, he decided to settle the matter. In June, he gave ownership over to a board of five people, including his son, novelist Christopher Buckley.

His departure was notable in itself, but during an exit interview with a reporter for the New York Times, the elder Buckley let slip that, against the hawkish editorial position of his magazine, he now viewed the recent war with Iraq to have been a mistake. He then amplified this apostasy by praising an antiwar article in The American Conservative, as well as the magazine itself, in his syndicated column.

Then there is the matter of his boat. If there is one thing that Buckley has been more closely associated with than the conservative movement, it is sailing. His voyages have been the subject of several books, and nautical themes figure prominently in his novels. Re-reading Overdrive, I was struck by how he exploited any sliver of spare time at his Stamford, Connecticut, estate to set sail. He writes in Miles Gone By that his father bought him a small sailboat in June 1939. Named Sweet Isolation in deference to Buckley Sr.’s America First-style politics, “It was a torrid affair from the moment I sighted her.” The lasting relationship was with the sea. And now, after more than 60 years of sailing, Buckley has announced that he is putting the latest boat up for sale, never to be replaced. The old mariner expounds:

When you are in the harbor, four congenial people around the table, eating and drinking and conversing, listening to music and smoking cigars, the wind and the hail and the temperature outside faced up to and faced down, in your secure little anchorage—here is a compound of life’s social pleasures in the womb of nature. So that deciding that the time has come to sell [the boat] and forfeit all that, is not lightly taken, bringing to mind a step yet ahead, which is giving up life itself.

So there it is: William F. Buckley, 78, finally packing it in. In recent interviews, he’s dropped broad hints that he’s not long for this vale of tears and so he’s putting things in order. It is, for lack of a more precise term, the twilight of the soul: The old man uses these last moments to watch the sunlight play on the water, from the dock for once, while he thinks on his life and contemplates infinity. At the end of a peripatetic life, he has to be still and examine his own reflection.

And yet, touching as this picture may be, I doubt that it’s entirely accurate. It assumes Buckley was not reflective until recently, but most of his statements on the subject have been delivered with a twinkle in the eye that was all the brighter because the audience failed to get such an easy joke. After his categorical dismissal of introspection in Overdrive, he persisted in asking “Why do I do so much?” Answer: “I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio and the fear of boredom. What is recta ratio? … We know that the term translates to ‘right (rightly) reason(ed),’ and that the Scholastics used it to suggest the intellectual instrument by which men might reason progressively at least to the existence of God, at most to how, under His aegis, they should govern themselves.” And then he ends his account of a particularly busy day thus:

I read something by somebody and, turning off the light, remembered to count on my fingers the five decades of the rosary, a lifelong habit learned in childhood, and remembered about half the time. That half of my life, I like to think, I behave less offensively to my maker than the other half.

While Buckley isn’t likely to be canonized, it’s clear that the faith is woven through the fabric of his life. Observe him, in Overdrive, promising to pray for ailing friends; falling asleep to the decades of the rosary; piling those servants who are Catholic into the station wagon and driving them all to mass on Sunday; fretting the whole time over post-Vatican II reforms and vague calls for social justice in the homily; writing one of his weekly columns about how, really, sermonizing isn’t the point of Catholic worship and so maybe father could keep it short, or, better, skip the homily and jump right to transubstantiation. (Amen.) Look at the long run of his syndicated column and see him rage against pro-choice Catholic Democrats, clerical abusers, attempts by the state to break the confessional seal.

If you want introspection, look no further. Catholics are ordered to take inventory of their grievous sins at least once a year and report to the local confessional to lay it all out there. They are ordered to reflect on their own faults as an article of faith, in order to help effect the sacrament of reconciliation. But this is largely a private affair—between the supplicant, the priest, and their maker—and Buckley should hardly be damned for refusing to come clean about this process. His attempts to cover it up by feigning shallowness rank, at most, as venial sins, which should be some relief as he prepares for the final voyage.

Jeremy Lott is a contributing editor to Books & Culture and the foreign press critic for GetReligion.org.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Two quite different books with similar titles bring economics to the subject of romance and the family. Russell Roberts continues his use of fiction to illustrate economics with The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. He first used this approach in 1994’s The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism (updated in a revised edition in 2000). And in a work of nonfiction, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, University of Massachusetts professor and MacArthur Fellow Nancy Folbre writes about the failure of mainstream economics to address what she considers to be the important issues surrounding families today.

Roberts’ The Invisible Heart has a difficult task. It needs to hold its own as a novel while imparting economic concepts. There is some tension between the two missions. Fiction thrives on plot and character; economics articles, on the other hand, typically emphasize mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of data. To resolve this conflict, Roberts turns to an older tradition of economics: plain writing and clear reasoning. Adam Smith wrote in this style in his masterwork The Wealth of Nations (1776), and even into the late 1940s this remained the approach of most economists. With the rise of formalism after World War II, however, the economics profession turned to less accessible forms of communication. Roberts revives the earlier approach, partially reconciling the gap in form between novels and economics.

As a novel, Roberts’ The Invisible Heart is good but not great. His prose is spare, hisplot has a nice twist, and the story is for the most part believable. Roberts not only writes better than most economists, he writes better than many novelists. There are two main story lines, which ultimately converge. Sam Gordon and Laura Silver are two teachers at an exclusive private school in Washington, D.C. Sam teaches economics; Laura teaches literature. Polar opposites, they are inevitably attracted to each other, and their debates over economics, politics, literature, and everything else fill half the book.

Their courtship, both emotional and intellectual, is rocky: at one point, Sam gets into heated arguments with some of Laura’s family and spoils a dinner party. Laura herself is no straw woman, put in the book merely to be enlightened by the all-knowing economist. She articulates intelligent objections to Sam’s arguments and pushes him to explore the consequences of his views. Hence her eventual acceptance of the legitimacy of some of Sam’s positions is persuasive.

The second plotline concerns a small regulatory agency looking into a potential scandal at a health care corporation. The characters here are less fully developed and the story less convincing. Indeed, I kept wondering why this seemingly unrelated story was included at all. There are great implicit economic lessons in the behavior of the agency, but they seemed unrelated to the story of Sam and Laura. When Roberts pulled the two plots together in a surprising and satisfying way, the purpose became clear. Without spoiling the plot twist for you, let me say it is well handledso that some of what I had supposed to be misjudgment turned out to be evidence of authorial cunning.

Folbre’s The Invisible Heart is a very different book, and not just because it is not a novel. Whereas Roberts wants to takes lessons from cutting-edge economic analysis and present them lucidly and concretely for the general reader, Folbre doesn’t think much of modern economic analysis, period. (She also doesn’t think much of former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, Rush Limbaugh, her father’s employer, Republicans, libertarians, conservatives, rich people, and a host of other unenlightened individuals and groups.) Folbre’s arguments range across a variety of topics (globalization, feminism, housework, taxes, welfare, Social Security, socialism, corporations), but a brief summary of her general argument is contained in the following quote: “Economic theory offers us some indispensable tools for organizing our joint endeavors. That’s why it’s so important to get economics rightto ensure that it includes careful consideration of love, obligation and reciprocity, as well as self-interest.”

Well, not really. A big part of the power of economics is that it can explain a great deal by using a deliberately simplified model of human behavior. Building only from self-interest, economics manages to explain a good deal about individuals’ behavior in firms, families, and bureaucracies. Can it explain everything about human choices? Hardly. But it does what it does very well. It helps to explain why parents sacrifice for their children and why the price of gas goes up when environmental restrictions divide the nation into submarkets. It tells us why the Endangered Species Act makes it harder to save endangered species, and why land trusts are so good at saving land. Rather than adding to its explanatory power, changing this model to include “love, obligation and reciprocity” just turns it to mushand mush is what we get in most of Folbre’s book.

Rather than offering an economic analysis of family issues, Folbre’s book exemplifies the type of argument made by those whose politics cause them to reject free market economics. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a popular form of the argument goes something like this: We can see that central planning failed and that market economies do indeed produce more goods and services than planned economies do. Our quarrel is not with reliance on markets to do some things; we just want to harness the market to better goals than individual greed will produce. By using the power of the market to do good things we’ll have a much nicer society.

We’ve already had this discussion, and Folbre’s side lost. In the 1920s and 1930s, socialist economists debated free market economists over whether the type of limited socialism currently advocated by Folbre was possible. On a variety of fronts the free market advocates (led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, neither of whom merit mention in the index to Folbre’s book) triumphed. (Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom summarizes in a nontechnical manner the arguments against the socialist position.) Now Folbre and other “hyphenated economists” (she’s a feminist-economist; there are “eco-economists” and other subgroups as well) are making arguments not that different from those raised 70 years ago.

Despite its subtitle, then, Folbre’s book is not an economic analysis of family issues. It is a well-written, witty attack on market economics, but one that draws its critique from scattered readings of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page. Perhaps the best analogy would be to The Great Unraveling, a book of collected op-ed columns by the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He’s written a number of important, high quality economics papersbut that’s not what he publishes in the Times. Like Krugman, Folbre relies mostly on quips, ad hominem attacks on opponents, and anecdotes rather than economics.

For example, Folbre introduces a chapter entitled “The Golden Eggs” by summarizing the economic argument against high marginal tax rates as follows: “Conservatives argue that steep taxes on wealth and income penalize hard work, risk-taking, and savingthe very forces that foster economic growth. Their favorite maxim is ‘Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’ ” So far so good: that’s a fair, brief summary. But Folbre’s response to the economic argument is a non sequitur: “I’ve never understood this goose business. It seems as though a bird that lays golden eggs would find it difficult to reproduce itself over time. When King Midas got his wish that everything he touched would be transmuted into gold he accidentally turned his own daughter into a lifeless statue. My main complaint about taxes is that we have to spend more time figuring out how to fill in our 1040 forms than thinking about what we actually pay for.”

If Folbre really doesn’t understand “this goose business,” then she’s not doing much economics. But at other points she clearly does seem to understand economic arguments, which makes it hard to know how to respond to such a passage. The “goose” is a metaphor, as Folbre well knows, and one that encapsulates a simple idea: don’t kill what produces your wealth. Speculating about the reproduction of golden-egg-producing geese doesn’t fit the metaphorindeed, one point of the metaphor is that there aren’t any more such geese.

Folbre’s substantive response to the metaphor’s point that incentives matter for economic activity is to deny that they exist for the rich, although she suggests they are important at lower income levels. She goes so far as to claim that happiness is unaffected by income above a certain level (not specified directly but which, based on other statements in the book, appears to be in the $200,000 range).

Folbre’s response to the goose metaphor exemplifies the book’s general approach. She makes factual assertions, most often supported by citations of other feminist-economists, that contradict basic economic principles and then uses these “facts” to attack those economic principles. She illustrates her arguments with confessional statements about her own life experience and quotes from pop culture icons like John Kenneth Galbraith, British singer Billy Bragg, and ’60s relic Tom Hayden. Her examples of “conservative” arguments are largely drawn from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. When she does cite someone serious, such as Gary Becker, it is from a Business Week column, not his critically important work on the economics of the family. Indeed, Folbre does not provide any serious analysis of the work of Becker or Richard Posner, the preeminent “conservative” economic voices on family issues. She never mentions the extensive empirical evidence, for example, on the devastating economic consequences of the liberalization of divorce laws on womenlargely attributable to the decline in women’s bargaining power that loosening restrictions on divorce caused. This is sloppy work and doesn’t fit the model of good economic analysis, where claims are tested against evidence and the best arguments of contrary positions are examined.1

Even worse is the muddled account of socialism that pervades the book. According to Folbre, Marx has been fundamentally misunderstood. True, his vision was “flawed,” but he “painted a big picture of how ordinary people were trying to redesign their social system and make their own history.” Folbre invokes the Soviet Union and Cuba as models of places that “delivered significant improvements in standards of living” and “vanquished hunger and illiteracy.” Although she assures readers that “I was no fan of Cuban Leninism” and recounts her heroic decision not to travel to Cuba in the 1970s (because of the trip organizers’ requirement that she engage in self-criticism of her bourgeois attirea decision made only after “some soul-searching about the relative importance of dress codes versus meeting people’s basic needs”), she never manages to mention the impact on families of the repression inherent in both those systems. The Soviet and Cuban gulags, the incessant spying, the pressures on family members to turn each other in, and the collective punishment of families of dissidents get not a single mention in this book on families and economic systems. Yet these are not incidental features of otherwise egalitarian economic systems; denial of the dignity of the individual and brutal repression are inherent characteristics of those systems. But what do we learn of their flaws from Folbre? Well, she acknowledges that, as a result of flawed planning, the Soviet Union didn’t produce consumer goodsautomatic dishwashers, for instancethat would improve women’s lives.

For Folbre the real bread-and-butter issues are those that surround gender. That’s why the lack of Soviet dishwashers merits attention while the Soviet lack of freedom does not. “Much of the rage about abortion,” she writes in the same vein, “reflects a larger anxiety about maternal care. According to the so-called pro-life perspective, women shouldn’t have a choice to care or not for a developing fetus.” The pro-life position, she asserts, is really expressing “fear that men simply can’t be altruistic unless women are more so.” Later, she notes that “much of the extreme rhetoric of the antiabortion movement is fueled by enormous anger at the very idea that a woman might decide that her own needs have precedence over those of a potential child.”

The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t accurately represent the position she’s attempting to argue against. Abortion opponents’ “enormous anger” is fueled by their conviction that abortion kills a child, not a potential child. Folbre may disagree about whether a fetus is a child or not, but she is not entitled to misstate the arguments of those with whom she disagrees. To respond to those opponents requires either engaging on the issue of whether a fetus is a child (something about which economics doesn’t have a great deal to say) or conceding that point and then taking on the difficult task of arguing that something else trumps the moral rights of the child. There are people who make such arguments, but Folbre isn’t one.

Folbre’s treatment of abortion is, unfortunately, typical of her approach to contrary positions, particularly those with a moral basis. Perhaps by this point it will come as no surprise that she manages to write over two hundred pages on family values with only one mention of religion: a denunciation of the “worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalism”which, she asserts, is a reaction to “anxiety about the destabilization of traditional patriarchal relationships that have ensured a relatively cheap supply of caregivers.” There is a rich and growing literature on the economics of religion, which brings economic insights to understanding the growth and decline of various denominations, the impacts of religious doctrine on the relative economic success of individuals, and other topics. None of that appears in this book. There are undoubtedly some commonalities between, say, Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism, just as there are some common features to all monotheistic religions. There are also significant differences in doctrine and practice. The level of ignorance of religion that allows Folbre to conclude that Saudi Muslim fundamentalism and American Christian fundamentalism are both really about “the reestablishment of rules that would restrict women’s rights to avoid caregiving” is appalling.

To the extent that this type of “analysis” passes for economics, it does a grave disservice to the advancement of knowledge. Roberts’ novel does a far more sophisticated job of presenting both economic analysis and the criticism of it than Folbre’s nonfiction. Roberts’ fiction opens up a new channel to communicate important insights from economics to a wider audience; Folbre’s polemic will reach only those who already agree with her and are looking for reinforcement of their view that conservatives are all “big fat idiots” who mouth simplistic platitudes. Reading Roberts’ novel would be a good way for Folbre’s readers to confront some serious challenges to their positions, challenges that are sensitive to the concerns non-economists have about the centrality of “greed” and self-interest in the economic way of thinking. Too bad Folbre couldn’t have read Roberts’ book before writing her own.

Andrew P. Morriss is Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

1. For those looking for an introduction to the economic analysis of family issues I recommend the incisive and accessible paper by Robert A. Pollack, “Gary Becker’s Contributions to Family and Household Economics,” a draft version of which is available free at http://depts.washington.edu/crfam/seminarseries01-02/Pollak.pdf (a later version is available for a fee from www.ssrn.com); Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family (Harvard Univ. Press, enlarged edition, 1991); and Richard Posner’s Sex and Reason (Harvard Univ. Press, 1994).

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Few themes in the Bible are as persistent as the call to remember: whether it is God commanding the Israelites never to forget how he brought them out of Egypt, or Jesus telling his followers to eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance of him, or the thief on the cross asking Christ to remember him when he comes into his kingdom, the role that memory plays in shaping our identities and in binding us to each other and to God is integral to the faith.

Memory has also become an increasingly prominent theme at the movies, going back a few years to Memento, an ingenious film noir about a man who has been unable to create new memories ever since he was knocked head-first into a mirror while trying to protect his now-dead wife from a rapist who broke into their house. Despite his condition, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is determined to hunt the murderer down and kill him, so he surrounds himself with notes and Polaroid photos, and he tattoos the most important clues to his very skin. These notes, he says, are more objective, more true, than mere recollection, which can be unreliable.

But the film gives us ample reason to doubt Leonard's claim. Director Chris Nolan arranges the scenes in reverse orderbeginning with the execution of the man Leonard believes is guilty of the crime, and working backwards as Leonard builds his caseand we realize there have been points in Leonard's quest where even he had the nagging suspicion that someone was trying to manipulate him into killing the wrong person. Shadowing all his efforts is the knowledge that his thirst for vengeance may never be satisfied, if he cannot remember that he achieved it; as Leonard himself puts it, "How am I supposed to heal if I cannot feel time?"

Breaking the story into shorter scenes and showing them in reverse order is a brilliant way to put us in Leonard's frame of mind. As each scene begins, he has no idea how he got thereand neither do we. It also underscores the fractured nature of Leonard's identity, and thus, implicitly, of all human identities. In "Memento Mori," the original short story (by Nolan's brother Jonathan) on which the film was based, this theme is made explicit, as the protagonist tells us that all persons are "at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain." He concludes: "Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots."

Interestingly, Saint Augustine might have agreed with this, to a point. In his Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo said it is memory that holds our experiences together, and without his memory, there would not be a single Augustine, who left the hedonism of his youth to devote himself to Christianity, but many Augustines, each one living in the moment without any connection to his past or future. However, Augustine recognized that his own memory was flawed, and so he ultimately appealed to the memory of the transcendent God, who alone has a perfect view of reality, and can thus keep our "scattered selves" united to each other and to him.

Since Memento, the theme of short-term memory loss, and the potential to overcome such fragmentation of the self through bonds of family and friendship, has cropped up in more mainstream films such as Finding Nemo and 50 First Dates. In addition, a striking number of films have also explored the role that memory plays in giving and receiving forgiveness.

Take The Bourne Supremacy, in which Matt Damon reprises his role as Jason Bourne, the amnesia victim who discovered, in The Bourne Identity, that he was, until his memory went blank, a highly trained assassin working for an ultra-shadowy branch of the cia. When last we saw him, that branch had been shut down, and Bourne had turned his back on his former life and settled down to a life "off the grid" with Marie (Franka Potente), a German woman who not only helped him stay one step ahead of his former colleagues but also humanized him, making him less of a killing machine and more of a person. Alas, any chance of a happy-ever-after is ruined when a Russian assassin named Kirill (Karl Urban) begins killing cia operatives and leaving clues behind that point to Bourne. Kirill also tracks Bourne down and tries to kill him, too, to keep the cia chasing a phantombut he kills Marie, instead, and Bourne, who survives the attack, assumes the cia is out to get him again.

Most amnesia movies are ultimately about redemption: someone's slate is wiped clean so that he or she can start afresh. But they are also often about atonementone must retrieve one's memory in order to make right the wrongs of the pastand The Bourne Supremacy is a heartening case in point. As Bourne stalks his former colleagues, he is haunted by resurrected memories of his first assignment, in which he killed an idealistic Russian politician and his wife and made it look like a murder-suicide. Once the nature of these memories becomes clear to him, Bourne sets out to find the couple's orphaned daughter, to confess what he did and to correct the false impression that has tainted her memory of her parents. What's more, Bourne holds back from seeking cold-blooded revenge against his cia bosses because he clings to the memory of Marie, even after she is gone. Thanks to Marie, he is more than just a set of lethal reflexes; he has grown, and may continue to grow, as a moral human being.

The role memory plays in letting go of the past is also central to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman. The film concerns Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who is heartbroken because his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has not only broken up with him but has had all her memories of him erased at a clinic called Lacuna Inc. Joel decides to return the favor by having all of his memories of her erased, too, but as the technicians visit his house and delete his memories one by oneworking backwards, as in MementoJoel is increasingly reminded of all the things he used to like about Clementine. He begins to hope he can save at least one of those memories; but alas, he cannot, and the erasure of Clementine from his mind becomes a moving analogy for the death that awaits us all.

While all this is going on inside Joel's head, the secretary for Lacuna (Kirsten Dunst) shows up at Joel's house and has a bit of a fling with one of the technicians, before throwing herself at one of the others. She says Lacuna is performing a great service, because they give people a chance to "begin again"; she compares it to becoming "pure" like a baby.1 But at the end of the film, she discovers that the boss she has flirted with has actually had an affair with her before, and has deleted her memory of that affair. This bothers her deeply; it seems that, given the chance to "begin again," she was just going to make the same mistakes over and over, instead of learning from them and moving on. So, to get revenge, she writes all of Lacuna's patients to let them know that some of their memories have been deleted, and she sends them the taped interviews in which those patients explained why they wanted their memories erased in the first place.2

These tapes arrive just as Joel and Clementine are getting re-acquainted, and the two seemingly new lovers get a shocking preview of the conflicts and mutually bitter criticisms that await them once they get to know each other again. One of the key questions posed by this film is whether people can get past their knowledge of each other and the hurts they cause each other to forge deeper, even more meaningful relationships, or whether they must always revert to some sort of naïve, innocent, pre-critical state. Clementine's namewhich means "merciful"sounds hopeful enough, but the title of the film alludes to a poem by Alexander Pope, based on the story of Abelard and Eloise, in which Eloise has become a nun yet remains torn between memories of her passion for Abelard and the vows she took before God. The film ends with an image of two people running on a snowy beach, and it loops this image three times before fading to the credits. Is it a sign that Joel and Clementine are doomed to repeat the cycle of meeting, breaking up, and erasing each other from their lives? Or is there an affinity with Hirokazu Koreeda's film After Life, in which eternal happiness is boiled down to a single memory and all else is obliterated?

How will our memories surviveor be transformedwhen we leave this life behind? We don't know. But with Augustine, we can rest assured that in God's perfect but loving memory, our lives will ultimately find their narrative shape.

Peter Chattaway lives in British Columbia and writes about movies.

1. In Adaptation, also written by Kaufman, Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) similarly pines for a return to innocence when she says, "I want to be a baby again. I want to be new."

2. Other recent films in which outside agents manipulate the memories of others include The Final Cut, in which some parents give their unborn children brain implants that will record everything those children see and hear from the moment they are born; The Forgotten, in which an alien tests the family bond by deleting parents' memories of their children; and Code 46, in which a futuristic government erases the memories of those who have broken certain reproductive laws but are to be readmitted into society, while leaving intact the memories of those who become outcasts.

Copyright 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.