Category Archives: History

Happy Reformation Day!

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Timothy George has an excellent piece on Reformation Day posted as the daily article on First Things—a juxtaposition which, I must confess, delights me no end. I particularly appreciate these paragraphs:

On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire Church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas Aquinas is a treasury of Christian wisdom for faithful believers of all denominations, not simply for Dominicans and Catholics. This point was recognized several weeks ago by Franz-Josef Bode, the Catholic Bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when he preached on Luther at an ecumenical service. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “just how radically Luther puts God at the center.” Luther’s teaching that every human being at every moment of life stands absolutely coram deo—before God, confronted face-to-face by God—led him to confront the major misunderstanding in the church of his day that grace and forgiveness of sins could be bought and sold like wares in the market. “The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word are things that we as the Catholic church today can only underline,” Bode said. The bishop’s views have been echoed by many other Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council as Luther’s teachings, especially his esteem for the Word of God, has come to be appreciated in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago. . . .

Several years ago I was asked to endorse a book by my friend Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? I responded by saying that the Reformation is over only to the extent that it succeeded. In fact, in some measure, the Reformation has succeeded, and more within the Catholic Church than in certain sectors of the Protestant world. The triumph of grace in the theology of Luther was—and still is—in the service of the whole Body of Christ. Luther was not without his warts, and we can hardly imagine him canonized as a saint. (Remember: simul iustus et peccator!) But the question Karl Barth asked about him in 1933 is still worth pondering this Reformation Day: “What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?”

Right on.

A note on fascism

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In the latest Atlantic, in his review of Peter Hart’s book on the Battle of the Somme, Christopher Hitchens uncorks a remarkable anecdote about “the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark”:

As I marched across Parliament Square, semiconsciously falling into step with the military pace of the right-wing half of this right-left collaboration, Clark said to me: “I suppose you have heard people say that I am a bit of a fascist?” We had a whole lunch ahead of us and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot, but something told me he would despise me if I pretended otherwise, so I agreed that this was indeed a thumbnail summary in common use. “That’s all [expletive deleted],” he replied with complete equanimity. “I’m really much more of a Nazi.” This was what Bertie Wooster would have called “a bit of a facer”; I was groping for an apt response when Clark pressed on. “Your fascist is a little middle-class creep who worries about his dividends and rents. The true National Socialist feels that the ruling class has a debt and a tie to the working class. We sent the British workers off to die en masse in the trenches along the Somme, and then we rewarded them with a slump and mass unemployment, and then that led to another war that gutted them again.” For Clark, the lesson of this bloodletting was that a truly national, racial, and patriotic class collaboration was the main thing.

That’s a most interesting comment. It does, I think, capture the difference between Nazism and Communism, between national socialism and international socialism, as the latter is all about class unity and conflict between classes. I also have a sense it might have a certain contemporary application, but I’m not sure what. We do most definitely have a ruling class in this country, though it’s more fluid than it was/is in Great Britain; given that fluidity, they have to declare that they have “a debt and a tie to the working class,” but how many of them (in either party) really believe it?

“A nation fully settled by government”

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Peggy Noonan wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called “There Is No New Frontier” that I’ve been mulling for a while now.  The core of her argument is an analysis of the differing contexts of FDR’s expansion of government in the 1930s and Barack Obama’s efforts to do the same. It’s more of an analogical analysis than a logical one, but I think it holds pretty well:

A big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they’re living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we’re in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn’t claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It’s not virgin territory anymore, it’s crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren’t all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it’s a world America has been to. It isn’t new to us. And we don’t have too many illusions about it.

Her argument rests less on propositions than on metaphor, on the image she invokes; but it’s a powerful image, and if it’s a valid one—which I believe it is—then I think her argument holds. The President and his administration think they have an opportunity to bring about another major expansion of government, and are determined not to let the crisis go to waste (to use Rahm Emanuel’s language)—but the context isn’t what they think it is, and the parallels they think they see with President Roosevelt don’t actually apply, because the popular attitude toward government isn’t the same now as it was then. They’re failing to factor in the reality that those past interventions have had their own effects, and have changed the board in some important ways.

Americans of FDR’s time could be persuaded that government could do a better job and fix all their problems, because it hadn’t really been tried much before. Americans of our time know better. The New Deal has already been tried, and the Great Frontier, and pushed to the point that another president could stand up and declare, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem”; that bell cannot be unrung. While President Obama may well in the end get his government-bloating agenda through, for the powers of the Executive Branch are great, one thing he cannot be is another President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; that opportunity has passed, and ours is a different world.

The imperial history of SW Asia

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courtesy of Maps of War.  If you wanted to be persnickety, you could certainly critique their presentation, but it succeeds in its purpose—it gives you a feel for just how many empires have rolled through what is usually (wrongly) called the Middle East (the map’s focus is more on the Near East, and includes the whole of the broader region of Southwest Asia), and how it’s often served as a crossroads for imperial expansion.

Prayer in the Roman world

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[Jesus said,] “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

—Matthew 6:7-8 (ESV)

This evening, my lovely wife discovered what looks like a fascinating blog, For the Sake of Truth, by a Ph.D. student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary named Josh Mann. I’ll have to explore it a bit to see if I want to add it to the blogroll, but I can already say that the current top post, “How to Pray: Two Ancient Views,” is a keeper.

Commentators generally understand Jesus’ condemnation of “using meaningless repetition” (βατταλογήσητε) and “many words” (τῇ πολυλογίᾳ) as either (1) formulaic and legalistic repetition of intelligible prayers; or (2) pagan magical incantations (probably unintelligible gibberish). I lean heavily toward the first view, not least because of the prevalence of repetitious intelligible prayers carried out in the Roman culture (both private and public).

He then goes on to lay out examples of that (including a remarkable quote from Pliny the Elder), concluding,

It seems that in the Roman view, strict adherence to a formula would obligate the god or goddess to respond in kind.

This, of course, stands in the sharpest of contrast to the view of prayer taught by Jesus:

One should not think to obligate God by some formula. Rather, one ought to pray to God as a dependent child makes request to a Father (Matt 6:9-13). In my view, Jesus gives a model for prayer (rather than a strict formula!), but in any case, he clearly commands that prayer be done with sincerity and humility, recognizing one’s needs and the ability of the Father to provide for such needs. Prayer is no doubt petition at its core, but in Matthew 6, Jesus challenges the crowds regarding the attitudes and motives underlying prayer.

It’s a great post; go read the whole thing.

The invention of the Black Sox

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The common understanding of the Black Sox scandal was fixed in the public mind by Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book Eight Men Out and the subsequent movie adaptation of the same title by John Sayles. As it turns out, that may be a highly unfortunate thing, as an article in Chicago Lawyer magazine by Daniel J. Voelker and Paul A. Duffy reveals. Having gained access to Asinof’s files, the two discovered that his book is not in fact supported by his research; indeed, they’ve concluded that the book is, to a significant degree, fiction.

Those whose reputations seem to have been blackened the worst by Asinof’s fictionalization are the team’s owner, Charles Comiskey, who has been unfairly smeared as a skinflint whose miserliness drove his players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the biggest star among the banned players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who always insisted on his innocence. Given his stellar performance in the Series that year—he led all qualifying hitters, on both teams, in batting average and slugging percentage, finished second in on-base percentage, hit the Series’ only home run, and seems to have played the field well (at least, he didn’t commit a single error)—I’ve always been inclined to believe him. Given the work by Voelker and Duffy, I think I’ve been justified in that.

Here’s hoping this article is the beginning of a new trial for Shoeless Joe, not just in the court of public opinion but also before the Lords of Baseball; and here’s hoping that the result is the clearing of his reputation and his long-overdue inclusion in the Hall of Fame.

It’s not enough to be against sin

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Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, fistless, footless and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.

—Billy Sunday

I live in the home of Billy Sunday. Not literally in his house (that’s a museum), but in his hometown, and his hometown church. People don’t usually associate traveling evangelists with Presbyterianism, yet he was indeed a Presbyterian minister, ordained in 1903; as he explained it, it was because of his wife Nell, a formidable figure in her own right who’s still remembered around here as Ma Sunday. (In fact, in our church’s row of photos of past ministers, hers is first in line.) Billy said of his wife, “She was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic—because I was hot on the trail of Nell.” They were instrumental in the construction of our church building, and there are photos from his ministry in various places around the church; more than that, when his tabernacle by the shores of Winona Lake was torn down in the early 1990s, members of the congregation rescued some of the benches, and they sit in the entrance area of our building.

I’ll be honest, before I came here, I had more of an awareness of Billy Sunday the baseball player (a dangerous baserunner but a poor hitter, he was the man who first occasioned the observation, “You can’t steal first base”) than Billy Sunday the revivalist; I have a strong interest in the history of revivals, but I’ve mostly studied earlier ones, so I hadn’t really read much on his career. Obviously, that has changed, and is changing; even this late on, it’s important to understand the Sundays and their ministry to understand this community. The quote at the top of this post, for instance, is one which I first read on the front of one of the local tourist brochures (when I said his house is a museum, I meant that literally); and I’ve been interested to find some of his messages on YouTube.

In checking out some of his sermons, it’s clear that that quote is completely accurate: Billy Sunday was against sin. He was powerfully and insistently against sin; he painted it in stark colors, described it in no uncertain terms, and called his hearers to repentance, firmly and uncompromisingly. This is not to say he was a Hellfire-and-brimstone preacher—he recognized that trying to scare people into salvation is unbiblical and ineffective—but he didn’t stint talk of Hell, either, and he strove hard to make his hearers feel the badness of their sin and their need to repent.

The thing is, while I hear Sunday preaching hard against sin (most famously, against alcohol; the man preached Prohibition)—while I hear the bad news that tells us of our need for Christ—I don’t hear much of the good news. I don’t hear the gospel of grace. I don’t hear anything about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. All I hear is works righteousness, with repentance held up as the chief work. It could be that this is from an unrepresentative sample of his messages, to be sure, but somehow I don’t think so; and even if that’s the case, it certainly suggests that his preaching wasn’t driven by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather by something else. It suggests that he didn’t really preach grace, he preached moralism and teetotalism.

That’s too bad, for reasons Ray Ortlund’s son Eric laid out well in a recent post titled “Grace or Moralism”:

Except that’s not the right title for this. It’s not this one or that one. It’s grace or nothing; grace or death. What I mean is, I was thinking about a great video I saw recently which talked about how important young men are for churches, and how feckless and wandering most young men are—and it’s true for me too. . . .

But then I thought, What if I were a pastor and I had a 20-something male who was into video games and porn and not much else, and I started to pound him and tell him to get his act together, and become a noble and valorous warrior? (I say that last phrase without any irony whatsoever.) If I were to morally exhort him that way, two results are possible: (1) He would fail to change and improve. (2) He would succeed to change and improve. Both options lead to death.

If #1 happens, shame would be added to sin, and he probably would be inclined to hide from further contact with the church.

If #2 happens, he would turn into a Pharisee. Moral exhortation made outside of the larger controlling context of grace and the gospel, if heeded and acted upon by its audience, produces Pharisees.

Read the whole thing—it’s great—and think about it. This is why Paul says that human rules and regulations “have an appearance of wisdom . . . but . . . lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence”; the most they can do is redirect that indulgence into other channels, which may well be even worse in the end. It’s important to be against sin—too many these days who consider themselves Christians aren’t, and that’s scandalous—but it isn’t enough by itself; we need to be against sin because we’re for Jesus Christ.

Note on the cultural history of Islam

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In defending Islam to the West, it’s common to hold up early Islamic culture as far superior to the Christian cultures of the time for its advances, its supposed tolerance, and so on; the usual implied message is, “Islam isn’t as bad as you think it is, or else it couldn’t have produced all these great things!” The principle is sound—it’s basically the same one articulated by Jesus when he told his disciples, “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Thus you will know them by their fruits.”

The only problem is that the picture we’re usually given is significantly askew from the historical reality. As Robert Spencer put it in Jihad Watch,

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate—not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia—by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

The moon is a harsh mistress

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so said Robert Heinlein; forty years ago today, the human race took the first giant leap toward finding out if he was right.

Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing. . . .

America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I agree with Charles Krauthammer: that’s a crying shame. It marks, I think, a grand failure of vision, imagination, and nerve on the part of this country.

So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington—”stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness—to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

I can’t imagine a better stimulus than to crank up the space program once again; not only would it stimulate the economy by creating lots of new high-paying jobs, it would also stimulate the national spirit. I wasn’t around for the first missions to the moon; I’d love to have a chance to see the new ones.

Someone who was, Joyce over at tallgrassworship, illustrates the very real significance of those missions, posting on her childhood memories of the Apollo 11 landing. I can understand the awe she reflects; even forty years later, watching the videos, it comes through.

Just for fun, here’s a map NASA produced overlaying the Apollo 11 expedition’s exploration of the lunar surface on a baseball diamond (HT: Graham MacAfee):