David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream

A book review of David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

At once a biography of Samuel Champlain (1574-1635) and a history of the founding of colonial New France, Fischer's Champlain's Dream is also in part at least a work in Christian ethics, which points to the difference the application of Christian values can make in the real world.  Champlain's Dream is  a well written, carefully researched, and timely work devoted to an important and fascinating slice of the past, all of the things we expect of Fisher.

As Fischer portrays him, Champlain was a man who was born into violent times and was a soldier, but he became something much more than just a warrior.  He was born into a France that was rent with religious divisions between Catholics and Protestant and himself converted from Protestantism to Catholicism but learned to transcend these divisions.  He lived in a time when politics was as complicated and brutal as ever, and he played the political game when necessary but only in pursuit of his dream for a French colony in North America.  Finally, what Champlain found in the great St. Lawrence River valley was a large set of Indian tribes engaged in constant warfare with each other and weary of that warfare; and he managed to bring a certain degree of peace to the warring tribes for a period of time in pursuit of his dream of a peaceful, prosperous New France

A self-portrait of Champlain

All of this, according to Fischer, grew out of Champlain's Christian faith.  Fischer is careful to keep Champlain in his own time so that he doesn't end up being a seventeenth century version of a modern-day progressive Christian.  Champlain believed in monarchy.  He accepted a hierarchical society as perfectly natural.  He was a patriotic Frenchman.  Still, he wanted Protestants to have a place in New France along side of Catholics.  Perhaps even more remarkably Champlain respected the Indians he worked with, valued much of their cultures, and sought to live with them in a fair and peaceable union that did not lead eventually to their near extermination.  And all of this was because of the way Chaplain interpreted and applied his Christian faith.

It is clear that none of this came easily for Champlain.  He made powerful political enemies and always had to contend with conflicting financial interests that sought to exploit French North America at the expense of his vision.  In New France, he had to contend with the Iroquois, who never made peace with the French, and he was forced to attack them in order to deter their attacks on the colony and on its allied tribes.  On the home front, he had a complicated relationship with his wife, Helene, that never produced any children and ended up with her entering a convent.  At one time, New France was seized by Scottish merchants based in England and Champlain was made a prisoner until he was finally returned to France.  Through it all, however, he persevered in his pursuit of his vision of a peaceful and prosperous New France grounded on Christian principles.  He, for example, promoted exchanges of young people between the French and the Indians so that both sides gained a better appreciation for the cultures of the other.  Many of the French young men because interpreters for the French, not just of Indian languages but also of their ways of life.

In his concluding chapter, Fischer writes,

Many stories have been told about first encounters between American Indians and Europeans.  Few of them are about harmony and peace.  The more one reads of these accounts, the more one learns that something extraordinary happened in New France during the early seventeenth century—something different from what took place in new Spain, New England, and New Netherlands.  Scholars of many nations agree that the founders of New France were able to maintain good relations with American Indians more effectively than any other colonizing power. (p. 527)

Fischer credits those good relations primarily to Samuel Champlain who he characterizes as a man of deep religious faith as well as a member of a group of French humanists who originally formed around King Henri IV.  Champlain himself was close to the king.

One could well argue that New England was just as much a product of the application of Christian beliefs and values as New France, but with an outcome that was very different.  The Indians were pushed into open war, treated with disdain, and eventually the "Indian problem" was solved by their near extermination.  While Fischer points out that there were compassionate English settlers and insensitive settlers among the French, one of his key points is that the differences between the practice of Christianity in New France under Champlain and the practice of the faith in other colonies such as New England led to very different outcomes.  The outcome in New France was more Christ-like.  It was less dualistic and less brutal.  It was less ideological and less destructive.  It was more dialogical and more just and peaceable.

Fischer did not write Champlain's Dream as a work of theological reflection, but much of what he wrote provokes, almost demands that reflection.  But whether or not it is viewed theologically, Fischer's Champlain's Dream is a well-crafted historiographical work. It is a comprehensive study that includes a lengthy literature survey, a set of sixteen appendices on a range of issues and subjects related to Champlain's life and times, and an extensive bibliography.  The book is richly illustrated and contains a good set of maps.  All-in-all, this is an excellent book generally and one that is well worth consideration by students of Christian theology and ethics.

Sigurd Olson, Reflections from the North Country

A book review of Sigurd F. Olson, Reflections from the North Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf,1976).

He disguised the fact well, but in truth Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) was an academic, however much he was best known in his day as a man of the wilderness, especially the northern wilderness of the "boundary waters" of northern Minnesota and western Ontario—the Quetico-Superior country.  He was also an author who wrote a series of popular books on his life experience with the wilderness.  Reflections from the North Country, published in 1976, is one of his last works, and in it readers begin to see more clearly the widely-read academic who over the years had worked out a personal theology wrapped around the idea of an "emergent God," which is a symbol of what humanity aspires for—that which is beyond knowing and definition.

In these reflections, Olson assesses his experience with northern wildernesses, how those experiences shaped him, and what they mean for him and for the whole human race.  It is clear throughout Reflections from the North Country that for Olson life in the wilderness is essentially a spiritual experience.  In the silence and beauty of the wild, Olson discovered a form of meditation that is natural and simple, one that doesn't rely on spiritualistic techniques or the technologies of elaborate forms of meditation.  If Olson had a religion, it was the woods and waters of the North.

The antagonist of Reflections from the North Country is urban, technological, consumer-istic, noisy, self-indulgent, pollution-ridden, and irreverent modern technological society.  Often in theology one describes God by exploring what  God is not, and technological consumer society fulfills that spiritual function for Olson.  What particularly concerns him is the way people live in modern society.  They hurry, pay no attention, are tense and troubled, chase after superficial priorities, and live at a distance from nature and who they really are.  Modern society and its anti-spiritual values are destroying the natural world that we depend upon for everything.

Nature, however, remains a powerful spiritual force that is able to transform the lives of those who are willing to submit themselves to the disciplines of wilderness living, if even only for a few days.  Olson reports how men (never women) who travelled with him on canoe trips invariably began to relax, smile, slow down, and come quietly and happily alive in the course of their time in the wilderness.  The interplay between wilderness as protagonist and modern society as antagonist thus lies at the heart of Reflections from the North Country.  There is little good to be said for society, although it does provide us with the insights into the nature of the wilderness provided by science—and thereby places wilderness in its vast evolutionary setting.  By the same token, there is little that is wrong with the wilderness.  In it is found wisdom, silence, serenity, the discipline of fishing, and good eating.  It is a place of unparalleled beauty; it is where we find meaning in life.  In sum, "Wilderness can be appreciated only by contrast, and solitude understood only when we have been without it." (page 35).

Listening Point, Olson's cabin in the North Woods

Olson expresses a deep appreciation for aboriginal peoples, Eskimos and American Indians.  He admires the way in which they are connected to the wilderness in a subliminal way, which in fact is our common heritage.  The rest of us, however, have lost touch with that deep, hidden place in us that connects us to the wild.  Olson thus poses the central question of his reflections, "...how can [modern man] nurture these desiccated nerve ends of his ancient knowing and make them flower again into a fuller life, with more appreciation of beauty and awareness and the potentialities of our relationships to others?"  His immediate answer: "...by placing ourselves in the proper situation and mood, and willfully recognizing there is something we possess that is normally hidden and lost to the modern mind." (page 24).  In a word, we have to expose ourselves to the wilderness, which for Olson is the Eden we are willfully losing and the Kingdom of God (to mix metaphors) to which we must return.  We have to escape the rat race and attain a "Godlike leisure," which can be done only in the wild places of the Earth (page 31).

Everything that matters is at stake in the interplay of wilderness and the modern, technology-driven world.  If we lose the wild, Olson was convinced, we lose our souls.  The very future of the human race is put at risk.

Being in the wilderness was for Olson a spiritual experience, a mystical encounter.  Quiet time spent watching a sunset, feeding squirrels, caring for the forest's trees and flowers, or just gazing intently at an ants' nest brings us peace.  This was his form of meditation.  He refers in Reflections from the North Country to the "great silence" that he experienced in the wild and to a sense of oneness that at times accompanied it.  Once one has felt these things then, "...comes the search for the ultimate, which only knowledge of the earth, the universe, and man's relationship to it can bring." (page 56).  Olson concludes Reflections from the North Country with a quick dip in the cold, clear waters of theological reflection.  He speaks of listening to the wilderness with our inner senses of seeing and hearing, by which we discover our oneness with God's creation and may even experience communion with God.  We need to understand that Olson's God is not the traditional one preached from church pulpits.  He refers to the "emergent God," a shadowy divine reality that is as much symbol tied to the human spirit and revealed in our contemplative experiences with the wilderness as anything else.  God is our goal and, somehow, also embedded in our human evolution.  Olson believes that one day all of humanity will be united in its knowledge of this God that stands "beyond absurdity."

Twenty-first century readers will find some things about Olson's Reflections from the North Country "quaint" or irritating, depending on the reader.  Writing in the 1970s, Olson does not avoid the use of sexist English.  It is clear at various points, moreover, that his imagined readers were men, and his tone in a few places is even a bit "manful," for want of a better term.  In more recent decades, furthermore, we are striving to think beyond simplistic dualisms, and to a degree Olson's contrast of wilderness and technological society is a rather simplistic dualism.  Urban activists and those who thrive on city living are likely to find his attitudes objectionable and even arrogant.  Olson also has a disdain for religious forms of meditation other than his own quiet contemplation of nature.

That being said, the core of this book is solid.  It calls its readers to value creation and to see themselves as connected to the rapidly disappearing wilderness places of our planet.  Reflections from the North Country is also simply written and without pretension.  For those who love the wild this book is an excellent companion to their wilderness experience, giving that experience deeper meaning by placing it in a cosmic, evolutionary context.  For this audience, Reflections from the North Country is as timely and even as inspiring today as it was for readers forty years ago.  If you love the wild, I highly recommend this book to you.

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For further insights into Olson's spiritual approach to the wilderness, see David Backes, "The Land Beyond the Rim: Sigurd Olson's Wilderness Theology."

Minor, The Spirituality of Mark

A book review of Mitzi Minor, The Spirituality of Mark: Responding to God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

Vast amounts of scholarly attention have been devoted for several decades now to the study of the historical Jesus, which debate has had an impact on attitudes towards the four gospels.  They are often seen as impediments to the discovery of the "real Jesus" and widely viewed with suspicion for the "agendas" their unknown authors brought to their presentation of Christ.

In The Spirituality of Mark, Dr. Mitzi Minor works different ground and brings to the Gospel of Mark a very different perspective.  She trusts the author of the gospel and values it for what it is, a spiritual work of faith in response to what the author took to be God's act in Christ.  Her intent is to mine the gospel for its spiritual insights, which she believes continue to be of value twenty centuries later.  She herself labels this book "an exercise in biblical spirituality" and writes, "I believe Mark offers a profound perspective on what it means to be Christian." (p. 2).

In this book, Minor seeks to link two worlds, the world of biblical scholarship and the world of the personal spirituality, which includes the church.  The Spirituality of Mark is a rewrite of her doctoral dissertation—"The Spirituality of the Gospel of Mark" (Ph.D. dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989)—and it starts out feeling very much like a scholarly work.  The Introduction and Chapter One contain a number of definitions and a description of Minor's methodology, which may not be the best way to begin a work aimed at bringing Mark's spirituality into the present.  While biblical scholars may be reassured by such a beginning, the book starts out as a "slow read" for those more concerned primarily with the gospel's spirituality.  That being said, with Chapter Two the book picks up the pace and ably directs the reader's attention to Mark's spirituality rather than Markan scholarship.

Focusing on eleven key passages, Minor examines each one of them to discover what the author of Mark portrays as authentic and inauthentic spirituality, that is "the way of the Lord" as opposed to "the way of humanity."  Minor believes that Mark intentionally crafted the gospel to make clear the contrast between these two ways, which with careful reading can still discerned today.  In the process, Minor entirely ignores the contemporary search for the historical Jesus.  She understands that the Jesus of Mark is very much "Mark's Jesus," a term she uses regularly.  The author of the gospel was in her estimation a spiritual individual himself and in a sense used Jesus as a vehicle to communicate the author's own sense of spirituality as shaped by the emerging Christian tradition and its understanding of the person of Christ.  Minor is not interested in the Gospel of Mark as historiography but as work of spiritual discernment, a key faith document from the early days of the Christian movement.

As she proceeds through her analysis of each passage, Minor pays attention to important nuances that modern readers of the gospel will miss.  In her analysis of Jesus calming the storm (Mark 4:35-41, pages 41-47), for example, she notes that the language used by Mark's Jesus is that of an exorcism to remove a force of chaos and evil.  It also echoes language from the Hebrew Bible used in reference to God's power over the sea thus associating Jesus with divine power.

Minor's perspective is that of a feminist, progressive Protestant Christian concerned with social justice.  In Mark's Jesus, she sees the spiritual and prophetic sources of her concerns.  He challenged the corrupt temple system of his day and the self-concerned religious leaders that rode that system to personal wealth, power, and prestige.  He also challenged his own disciples who seemed unable to see and hear his call for a radically new, just community that would foreshadow the Kingdom.  They, Minor notes, only wanted to replace who benefitted from the current system (p. 103).  Thus, for Minor, Mark is relevant for its call for a new age, one that is just and inclusive.  The gospel teaches that faith requires sacrifice and it is about service all directed to the end that the Kingdom (she prefers to use the Greek, basileia) comes.

At the same time, The Spirituality of Mark also points clearly to the applicability of Mark's spirituality to the personal life of followers of Jesus.  In her summary of authentic spirituality (pp. 98-101), thus, Minor brings together the many qualities that constitute Mark's spirituality, and most of those qualities are personal ones—admittedly lived out in a community of faith, but still personal.  Her description of authentic (and inauthentic) spirituality according to Mark is not in and of itself new, but what is helpful is the way in which she extracts that description from the gospel.  The Spirituality of Mark takes the reader through a process of discovery, which is well worth the time and effort spent in reading the book.

As a work that straddles the worlds of scholarship and spirituality, there is a bit of an issue concerning the audience The Spirituality of Mark addresses.  It may be a little too general for scholars that is not a serious contribution to the scholarly literature on Mark, and it is a tad too academic for lay readers who are not familiar with New Testament scholarship.  It is worth noting that the book seems to have received little attention, if any,  from reviewers which may be a further indication that it doesn't have a natural audience.  It deserves more attention than it seems to have attracted for the very reason that it does bring biblical scholarship to bear on one of the key issues facing local (mainline) congregations, namely the recovering of a vital spirituality.

In sum, The Spirituality of Mark is a relatively brief, well-written book that is useful for those exploring the meaning of Christian spirituality in its biblical context.  Minor unlocks the ancient meaning of the Gospel without engaging in esoteric jargon.  She treats the text of Mark with respect and clearly admires its author.

Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals

A book review of David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

In just about every sense of the term, David Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals is a good history book.  It is well-researched, clearly written, and consistently to the point.  It makes an important contribution to its field by offering new insights built on a thorough grasp of "the literature" in that field.  This is solid journey-men's history, which demonstrates how the craft should be done.  Admittedly, not everyone is going to pick up this specialist's work, but then it is not written for everyone.  It is written for those who have an interest in subjects and fields related to nineteenth-century Protestant revivalism in the English-speaking world.  For those who do have such an interest, it is a fun and informative read.

Bebbington pursues a number of themes and topics built around the premise that nineteenth-century revivals in Britain, North America, and Australia reflected both local and global elements.  Each was its own event built on local conditions and factors.  By that same token, however, each revival drew on a common international pool of forms, techniques, and ideas.  As the book's subtitle puts it, all of these revivals drew on local and global cultures and pieties.  Bebbington proves his point by describing and analyzing seven specific revivals spanning the years 1841 to 1880 and taking place in the Republic of Texas, England, North Carolina, Scotland, South Australia, and Nova Scotia.

Victorian Religious Revivals begins with two general chapters before it moves on to its seven local portraits.  In Chapter 1, Bebbington provides an introductory overview of nineteenth-century revivals in the English-speaking world, which includes a description of the various patterns of revivals in that era.  The particular patterns he identifies include Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, combined, and "modern" approaches to revivalism.  It should be noted that Bebbington begins Chapter 1 precisely where he should with an overview review of definitions of the terms "revival" and "awakening."  Chapter 2 follows with a review of the literature, which concludes with the author's own perspective.   He writes of revivals that revivals, "...ought to be considered in a global framework and as local events.  When a revival is investigated in its locality, its specific characteristics are open to discovery.  The most important features fall into the categories of culture and piety." (p. 52)

From this base, Bebbington marches through his seven investigations of Victorian revivals beginning in Texas in 1841 and concluding in South Australia in 1880.  Each chapter is a well-written description of the events of the particular revival it recounts followed by detailed analysis, which is sensitive to local factors and concerns but also teases out the larger and more global themes embedded in the particular awakening.  I read this book because one of his seven studies involves a Presbyterian revival that took place in Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, in 1857, which was led by the Rev. Daniel McGilvary, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.  I know McGilvary from my research on the history of the church in Thailand.  He served as a Presbyterian missionary in Siam and then in the northern state of Chiang Mai for over fifty years down to 1911.  In the course of my research, I became familiar with the events in Moore County.  Bebbington's treatment of those events is impressive.  He describes the background to the 1857 revival, the personalities involved, and its particular nature as a classic example of an emotionally restrained, Calvinistic Presbyterian revival.  The McGilvary he describes is recognizably the same Daniel McGilvary who so capably pursued his long missionary career in Southeast Asia.  Bebbington's chapter on the Moore County revival and McGilvary (Chapter 6), in fact,  makes a contribution to the study of Thai church history because it provides important background material locating McGilvary in his own home cultural context.  This is good stuff.

One of the things that is especially helpful in Victorian Religious Revivals is the way in which Bebbington organizes his analyses so that one can actually enumerate factors involved.  In Chapter 8 on an 1875 revival in South Australia, for example, he describes at least seven (by my count) factors in the "spiritual culture of Methodism" (pp. 205-212) that contributed to the revival and then, later on, six (again by my count) elements in the style of that revival (pp. 216-227).  (Bebbington doesn't do the "first, second, third, etc." routine very often, but his clear writing style facilitates identifying elements that can be enumerated).  Through all of his analysis and attention to details, Bebbington never loses sight of his main interpretive framework, which is the interplay of local and global, cultural and religious (generally denominational) forces and factors.  Thus Chapter 9 is even entitled, "The General and the Particular: Baptist Revival in Nova Scotia, 1880."

The book ends, as it must, with a summary chapter that describes the dozen or so (by my count) "reasons for revival" (pp. 263-269) and the roughly six "characteristics of revival" (pp. 269-274).  Bebbington's conclusion (pp. 274-275) to his last chapter could serve as an overview of the book for a review of it.  The final sentence of the book—"Local revivals illustrate global developments."—is itself a good summary of the whole book.

It should also be noted that Victorian Religious Revivals is an academic work and all of the paraphernalia that goes along with such work are present.  There is a very good bibliography, and I was esp. pleased to see real and actual footnotes (rather than endnotes or no notes), something rarely seen anymore.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles.  The maps are not particularly helpful.  They are too narrowly focused on the locality of each revival and very barebones.  For my money, Bebbington dismisses too quickly the leadership role of the clergy in the revivals he describes.  For him, the revivals were marked by a prominent role for the laity (p. 271), which is true but does not necessarily mean as he seems to assume that the clergy did not also play a prominent role.  He himself points to the important role clergy played in the revival(s) in Nova Scotia in 1880 (see pp. 250, 253, 255) without picking up on it as a key theme in his analysis of those events.

Frequently in the reviews I've done for this website, I have observed that the reader of a particular books has to want to read it in order to get through it.  That is most certainly not the case with Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals.  It is a specialist's academic work, and the reader will surely want to read it before buying it (esp. because it is pricey), but having begun the reader will not find it a hardship to continue.  Like all good history, it is a specialist work that does not indulge in the gibberish and jargon that makes so much academic writing unnecessarily difficult to read for a general audience.  Good history clears away all of that so that general audiences can participate fully in the joy of discovering the past.  This book is good history.  Its prose is not flashy but it is well-written, easy to follow, and facilitates the stories Bebbington tells.  If you have even a passing interest in its subject, I highly recommend Victorian Religious Revivals to you.

Lewis, God's Crucible

A book review of David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

In spite of the subtitle, Lewis' history of Muslim Spain (al Andalus) and Catholic Frankland (later Francia and still later France) is about an epic clash of civilizations—or, better, the clash of Islamic civilization with European barbarism.  It is an old-fahioned history that chronicles the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms and the many battles and wars that liter the history of both Islam and Europe.  Only in passing does Lewis point to the profound influence that Andalusian Islamic culture had on the development of Western Europe, and the reader who wants to discover what Europe learned from the Muslim East through Spain should look elsewhere.

In fact, God's Crucible is two histories, Islamic Spain and Christian Europe, that are united only by the immense episodic dislocations caused by their rubbing against each other like two gigantic, restless tectonic plates.  The Muslim East, including a variety of tribes from West Asia and North Africa, and Catholic Europe, also including a variety of peoples, pushed and shoved against each other from the invasion of Spain in 711 until the final eviction of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.  Lewis concentrates on the first three centuries or so of the struggle, and makes a number of important observations in the midst of his chronicle.  He makes it clear, for example, that the Jews were a third presence in this history and, although much smaller in numbers, important actors in their own right.

God's Crucible is also an old-fashioned book in the attitudes it contains about Europe in the era after the fall of Rome.  While revisionist historians have discovered in early medieval Europe a dynamic world that made many advances in learning and technology, for Lewis post-Roman Europe was what previous generations of commentators believed it to be: a barbaric world trapped in the Dark Ages.  He emphasizes repeatedly that in comparison with Andalusian civilization with its great wealth and grand urban centers, Europe east of the Pyrenees was a cultural wasteland, ignorant and violent.  Almost never in this book do the Europeans come out looking good by comparison to the Arabs and other Islamic peoples on the western side of the mountains.  Most notable is the contrast between the way in which Andalusian Muslims and Catholic Europeans treated people of other faiths.  By-and-large, the Muslims were relatively tolerant of at least Judaism and Christianity and left Jews and Catholics to their faith so long as they paid their taxes and remained loyal to their rulers.  Euorpean Catholics behaved in the opposite manner with respect to Islam.  More largely, the Christians contributed little to Andalusia other than their skills at and penchant for war while Muslim Spain made important contributions to the development of Catholic Europe.  Whether or not one wants to go so far as to charge Lewis with harboring a bias that distorts the realities of the past, he certainly leans strongly in the direction of Islamic Spain and away from Catholic Frankland.

Given his pro-Andalusian perspective, Lewis argues that the Christian victory at the famous Battle of Poitiers (732), in fact, did not save Europe from Islam.  Rather it was developments in the Islamic world that conspired to halt the Arab advance into Europe.  He agrees, that is, with Muslim historians of the time who he says rightly blamed "their own internecine preoccupations as the real reason for Christian Europe's survival." (p. 178)  He also speculates that Europe was actually worse off for its victories over its Muslim invaders and their failure to conquer the continent.  Lewis writes, for example, "An ironic intelligence from another planet might have observed that if Carolingian Europeans believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers made their world possible, then it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been preferable."  He continues, "The European shape of things to come was set for dismal centuries following one upon the other until the Commercial Revolution and the Enlightenment molded new contours." (p. 286)

That being said, for the general reader who exercises a healthy caution concerning Lewis' interpretation of past events, God's Crucible is still a helpful book—never mind all of the names, which can become a jumble at times.  He captures the complexity of the events he recounts and shows how various factions on both sides of the Pyrenees played off of each other.  The Muslim invaders of Spain, in particular, turned out to be a patchwork of ethnicities and social groups.  To a degree, he makes the case that Islamic rule of Spain was generally enlightened by the standards of the day, more humane than that later imposed on it after the reconquista by Christian forces.  Charlemagne also comes across well in Lewis' account of events.  But he seems to have been more of an anomaly than anything else, a brief interlude in the darkness as it were.

If not a great book, this is certainly not a "bad" book either.  There are a few nuggets scattered through it as well.  Lewis, for example, describes the work historians as that of being "prophets in reverse" (p. 314) by which he means that historians are able to see the budding of the future in events that the participants in those events simply did not see.  Thus, what was a period of prosperity still contained the seeds of future calamity, a fact clear only with the hindsight of a "reverse prophet."  The point here is that historians benefit from hindsight only to the extent that they carry out their research with due diligence and insightfully.  What they discover is often not obvious even to others in their own time, let alone to those in the era under study.  The true prophet is inspired to see what others do not see, which is not a bad description of the historian's craft at all.

As old-fashioned political and military chronicles of the past go, in sum, God's Crucible is a reasonably good read.  It contains some interesting insights.  It does the historian's task of revising previous accounts.  It exposes the main contours of the past.  And to the degree it is a one-sided account, its bias is reasonably clear and consistent.  It also contributes to an understanding of the history of European learning and science by placing post-Roman Empire cultural developments into their larger regional history.  In that context, the Byzantine Empire lurks on the fringes appearing from time to time as events unfold and trends develop.  This is not a great book, but it is also not a bad one.

Kugel's How to Read the Bible

A book review of James L.Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007).

Have you ever had the privilege of walking along a forest path with a naturalist?  As you walk, the naturalist will point out fascinating plants, evidence of animal life, and many small details that the uninitiated simply don't see.  More than that, the naturalist will see and describe the relationships between living things that make the forest a unique and amazing ecological system, a biosphere.  Kugel is that naturalist.  The Hebrew Bible is his forest, and How to Read the Bible is the path he takes the reader along through the forest.  It is a long path, amounting to 689 pages of text plus 82 pages of endnotes.  It is also a winding one that sometimes almost disappears into the  forest as Kugel regales the reader with interesting little tidbits that don't connect very readily to any larger thread (to mix metaphors).

There is, however, a larger thread, and Kugel takes us into the forest with a larger goal in mind, namely to ask fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of the forest itself.  Modern biblical scholarship has radically transformed our understanding of the Hebrew Bible, which raises painfully complex questions for those who read it as people of faith.  To be sure, Kugel raises these questions only in fits and starts and often enough raises them and then blithely takes up again with  the tour of the forest only many chapters later to suddenly return to those questions.  But he does return to them.  The questions themselves are important ones for Kugel.  He asks them as a practicing Jew for whom the Bible has become problematic.  Where is God, most importantly, in the scriptures if they are "merely" the product of an elaborate, centuries-long, and very human process of editing?

Kugel begins with the observation that over the centuries there have been three layers of interpretation of the Bible (by "Bible," he always means the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament).  They are: (1) the original intent of the stories and other contents of the Bible; (2) later centuries of interpretation that arose partly because original intent was eventually forgotten; and (3) modern scholarly reconstructions of original intent.  Well into his journey through the Bible, it turns out that level one is considerably more complex than we were led to believe at the beginning.  The Hebrew Bible is a patchwork of pieces of text assembled over many centuries by generations of editors who mixed, matched, added to, remixed, rematched, and added still more.  As we go through the book, moreover, we are aware of the fact that in ancient times there were variant readings, which also changed over time.  Kuegel places, for example, all Christian readings of the Old Testament into level two and, at times, shows how they were similar to and differed from Jewish readings.  In modern times, he points out we inherited level two readings as being the right way to read the Bible.

With this framework, Kugel walks us through the Hebrew Bible beginning at one end and going to the other.  Frequently, he introduces the reader to level two (traditional) readings of the text and then goes on to describe level three excavations (scholarly) of the same text.  Sometimes he doesn't.  The fact is that Kugel has assembled a book that displays some of the characteristics of the Bible itself.  He frequently introduces a portion of the Bible, talks about it a bit, and then blithely walks on without a conclusion or any clue as to the importance of that particular portion.  He simply sees a pretty little leaf, stops to admire it, and then off he goes again.  The book is also filled with lengthy quotations from the Bible put there evidently on the assumption that readers are too lazy to go and read the Bible for themselves (he is probably right).  These frequent and lengthy quotations only serve to add to the sense that the book is disjointed and itself "compiled" from many fragments.  Often enough, furthermore, Kugel ignores the title of the book and fails to tell us how to read the individual texts he is talking about.  At other points, however, he illuminates the Bible and provides helpful commentary on both the traditional and scholarly readings of key biblical texts.  He helps Christian readers to understand where their inherited interpretations of the Old Testament stand in relationship to the text and to later Jewish interpretations.

The central thesis of the book is that the traditional assumptions we have inherited concerning the meaning of the Hebrew Bible and the assumptions that scholars bring to that reading are in conflict.  He states, "These assumptions have essentially created two different Bibles, the ancients' and the moderns'." (p. 134)  The "central question of this book" is, "Which way of reading is the right one?" (p. 161)  Thus, the original "etiological narratives" of the Pentateuch, for example, were radically transformed by later generations of interpreters in ancient times.  Those narratives became "moral exampla" and "up-to-date guide[s] for daily life." (p. 362)  Kugel observes that, "the anonymous interpreters of the third and second and first centuries BCE changed utterly the whole character of the Pentateuch...No less formidable however, has been the activity of modern biblical scholars over the last two centuries." (p. 363) The scholars have undone the work of the ancient interpreters and once again made the Pentateuch into a collection of fragments.

In the course of his walk through the Hebrew Bible, Kugel pays particular attention to clues as to how the generations of editors assembled and reassembled the text until it reached its final form.  He also points to insights on various related matters, such as how the ancient Hebrews' understanding of God changed over time, the relationship of the Hebrew text to other ancient texts, the Christian understanding of the Old Testament, and even why Christians retained the Old Testament as a part of their scriptures.

Kugel, in a sense, saves the best to last.  His final chapter, "After Such Knowledge..." (pp. 662-689) brings together his questions and concerns about the impact of modern biblical scholarship on our understanding of the Bible—on his understanding of the Bible.  Modern scholarship has shown that the Bible is fragmented, self-contradictory, and a thoroughly human enterprise.  Modern scholars have "stripped the Bible of much of its special status." (p. 667)  He then comes to a crucial insight, namely that "what makes the Bible biblical is not inherent in its texts, but emerges only when one reads them in a certain way, a way that came into full flower in the closing centuries BCE." (p. 668, italics in the original)  At that time, the Bible began to be treated as wisdom literature, a compendium of divine truths, which in fact is the "real" Bible.  The real Bible, that is, is not found in the original fragments and snippets of which it has been woven.  The real Bible, the canon, is the body of interpretations with which it was read in ancient times long after it had been assembled.  The canon is text and interpretation, not just text.  Kugel closes with observations on what all of this means for Christian fundamentalists, Christian liberals, and Judaism, and at the very end of his reflections he concludes, apparently, that  in spite of the impact of modern scholarship on our understanding of the Bible, he must continue in faith to serve and have faith in the One served.  Those are my words, not his, but they capture I trust the sense he intended.  He admits that he brings us to the end of the tour with more of a whimper than a bang, but there it is, a Jewish biblical scholar's attempt to make the best of the realities of scripture as exposed by modern biblical scholarship.

For those who want to understand the Bible today and/or the challenges the world of science poses for people of faith, this is an excellent book.  Be patient with it.  Enjoy the way it wanders around.  Wait for the important insights.  Your time and patience will be rewarded.