A menacing, muscled man strides into the ring, wearing a black t-shirt.  On the back in large white letters it reads:  DRINK BEER.  On the front:   F&CK FEAR.  The letter “U” is a skull, but looks so much like a “U” that you hardly notice.  The man in the shirt is the hero to millions of kids.  His name is Steve Austin.

Fans hold up signs in the auditorium that say “Austin 3:16.”  Get the reference?  At NFL games, you’ll often see a sign in the crowd that say “John 3:16″, which refers to one of the holiest verses in the Bible:  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in Him would not perish, but have life everlasting.”   “Austin 3:16″ is a deliberate mocking of that verse.

This man is bad and that’s what his young fans love about him.  This is a dark world where he’s the hero.  There are no good guys here.  Good guys are sissies.  Even the women in this world are macho — loud and brassy and vulgar and mean — and of course they’re as sexually attired as the medium will allow.

Welcome to the brave new world of Linda McMahon’s WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) empire.  She and her steroidally-inflated husband Vince have taken an essentially harmless small-time business — inherited from Vince’s father in 1980 — and have turned it into something infinitely more violent, darker, edgier, and much more sexual.  It is now an international business worth billions.

If you think of the WWE as harmless entertainment, you probably haven’t seen it much lately.  You probably have an education and a job.  Perhaps it makes you think of Hulk Hogan or Jesse “The Body” Ventura — or maybe even of Chief Jay Strongbow, Killer Kowalski, and Ivan “Polish Power” Putzki.  But that innocent world was a child’s nursery rhyme compared to the sexualized evil of the WWE today.   Most of the vulgarity and vileness cannot be described here, but a visit to youtube can give you some idea of how depraved it’s gotten.   Make sure you hide the kids; and yet the McMahon’s have aimed their poison at kids deliberately, knowing the future profits that are at stake.

Anyone who longs for a Frank Capra-style, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington America filled with goodness and Judeo-Christian values should understand that the McMahons are your bitterest enemies.  They are to American family values what the Gulf Oil Spill is to the Louisiana shellfish industry.  Compared to Linda and Vince McMahon, Hugh Hefner is a gentleman and Jerry Springer is a Mickey Mouse huckster.  And the McMahon’s have been so wildly successful at corrupting American youth that they are currently worth half a billion dollars.

But what do the McMahons plan to do with the wealth they have made corrupting our kids and grandkids?

How about buying a U.S. Senate seat?

That is precisely what is happening.   If you live in Connecticut, you know this is no joke.  But in case you missed it, read Rich Lowry’s column from a few weeks ago here… Or Ann Coulter’s column here…

But could Connecticut Republicans ever accept someone like Linda McMahon as their representative in the Senate?   Surely the party of conservative family values would never countenance such a thing!

Unless the GOP was so extremely hungry to score a win — maybe even to win the Senate back — that they were willing to look the other way.   Unless they were absolutely desperate…

Flash back to Europe in the early 1930s.   The German economy was in free fall.  People were jobless and starving and the shame and humiliation of Germany’s loss in World War One was unbearable.  Germans had never been more desperate to turn things around.

So when a vulgar Austrian rabble-rouser offered them an opportunity to get back on top — to get back at their enemies and to be proud again — it was difficult to turn down.  They had no idea of what he really stood for, and it was difficult for them to care very much, since they so badly wanted to succeed again.  But if Hitler could pull them out of their current straits, they would overlook his character flaws.  After all, once they were back on top they could always get rid of him.

People who sell their souls to the devil never realize what they are doing at the time.  But one man did see.  His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer was a pastor who stood up to Hitler and who was murdered by the Nazis in 1945.  He saw what Germany was up against.  And he knew that there was nothing more dangerous and more tempting than success.  If you offered people success when they were desperate, as Hitler had done, it would be very difficult to persuade them to take a noble stand for what was right.  Success was addictive.  Bonhoeffer tried desperately to warn the German people against Hitler.  In many ways he was a prophetic voice, trying to get Germans to see that they were marching toward a cliff and that their ultimate end would be far worse than they could have imagined.

Needless to say, Bonhoeffer did not succeed, and Germany is still paying the price, eight decades later.  But can Bonhoeffer’s warning be a warning to us in America today?

Will Americans learn from the lessons of the past?  Let’s face it:  the desperation of the GOP to win a Senate seat in Connecticut is shocking and ugly.   No one who cares about America should let it stand.  Certainly no self-proclaimed conservative should stand for it, and certainly no one who dares call himself a Christian should stand for it.  Now is the time to speak up.

But as of today, most Connecticut voters have no idea of what’s really going on.   That’s because Connecticut’s cynical GOP leaders love McMahon’s money and her willingness to spend it.  And they love the fact that she can win.   The key is to keep Connecticut voters in the dark about  who she really is and what she represents.   So far they’ve been successful — and the primary is on August 9th.  Very few people even know that Rob Simmons is on the ballot against McMahon, and that they can vote for him and avoid unmitigated disaster.

Here’s the bottom line:  the August 9th primary in Connecticut is nothing less than a referendum on the soul of the Republican Party.   If the GOP will elect someone as self-servingly immoral as Linda McMahon in order to win, they will pay bitterly and dearly in the years ahead.  They will deserve what they get and they will have no one to blame but themselves.

Just as Germans regret the terrible Faustian bargain they in 1933, the GOP of 2010 will, too.  If we believe this is the way to win, we will lose everything.  May God help us to make the right decision.

END
___________

Eric Metaxas is the author of the New York Times best-seller Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy — A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich.   For more information, visit www.ericmetaxas.com.

I’m delighted that my friend Eric Metaxas has penned this volume on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The English-speaking public needs to know far more than it does about his thought as well as his life.  When I became a Christian in college, Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship was one of the first books I read, followed not long afterwards by Life Together. I still think the second book is perhaps the finest single volume I have ever read on the character of Christian community, but it was the first book that set me on a life-long journey to understand the meaning of grace.

I now realize how impossible it is to understand Bonhoeffer’s Nachfolge without becoming acquainted with the shocking capitulation of the German church to Hitler in the 1930s. How could the “church of Luther,” that great teacher of the gospel, have come to this?  The answer was that the gospel, summed up by Bonhoeffer as costly grace, had been lost. On the one hand, the church had become marked by formalism. Formalism meant going to church, hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it didn’t really matter much how you lived. Bonhoeffer’s name for this was cheap grace. On the other hand, you had legalism, or salvation by law and good works.  Legalism meant God loves you because you have pulled yourself together and lived a good, disciplined life.  Both of these impulses made it possible for Hitler to come to power.  Formalists may have seen things in Germany that bothered them, but they did not see any need to sacrifice their safety to stand up to them.  Legalists were more likely to have the Pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies.

Germany had lost hold of the brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded:  “we are saved by faith alone, but not by faith which is alone.”  That is, we are saved by grace, not by anything we do, but if we have truly understood and believed the gospel, it will change what we do and how we live.  Much of the German church understood ‘grace’ as abstract acceptance — “God forgives; that’s his job.”  But the grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others.  So anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life.  That’s the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace.  Costly grace changes you from the inside out.  Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.

This lapse couldn’t happen to us, today, surely?  Certainly it could.  We still have a lot of legalism and moralism in our churches.  In reaction to that, many Christians want to talk only about God’s love and acceptance.  Many of them don’t like talking about Jesus’ death on the cross to take divine wrath and justice.  Some even call this “divine child abuse.”  All this might run the risk of falling into the belief in “cheap grace” — a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just loves and accepts us.  That will never change anyone’s life.  So it looks like we still need to listen to Bonhoeffer and others who go deep in discussing the nature of the gospel.

END

If you can stay, I’ll begin by telling you about the night talkshow host Dick Cavett and I went to see Mickey Rooney perform. This is not a joke. 

[To continue click here.  To download this essay as a pdf file, click here.

Um, what’s the Aramaic word for “retraction”?

Predictably, the condemnations have been thundering. But let’s be honest. It’s incredibly tempting to look for immediate answers to tragedies. Why them and not me? Did someone cause it? We want to know.

Of course there is never a simple answer. If God were in the business of punishing sin in obvious ways, NBC President Jeff Zucker would have been struck by lightning weeks ago — perhaps more than once. But it rarely works out like that. Bad people seem to thrive. In the Psalms, King David even asks: “Why do the wicked prosper?” And King David didn’t even know about Jeff Zucker.

But let me say something truly shocking myself. I’m usually willing to give Pat Robertson a pass when he says things he shouldn’t. That’s because for every wacky, regrettable thing he says he does a hundred thousand non-wacky good things that you’ll never hear about on television.

Operation Blessing, which is the humanitarian arm of CBN, does so much good around the world it would make your head spin — not literally, just to be clear. They’re in Haiti this very minute, showing the love of Jesus by feeding the hungry and helping the suffering. But don’t worry: other than now, you’ll never hear about it. You’ll only hear about when Pat says something unpleasant.

Just recently, President Obama and the First Lady were willing to give Harry Reid a pass for his “light-skinned negro” comments, preferring to focus on his good deeds, which they felt outweighed the ugly gaffe. So too I would rather look at Robertson’s decades-long record of giving aid to the poor and destitute around the world.

But back to the goofy gaffe for just one more moment… In his comment, Pat was referring to the slave rebels who founded Haiti and who, during a voodoo ceremony made a pact with the devil, slaughtered a black pig, and generally did not behave like they were attending a Presbyterian church service.

It’s impossible to say if this is historically accurate, but most people would agree that if it is, starting a nation this way might not be the best approach.  Is it so crazy to suggest that praying for the blessings of almighty God would be a safer bet?  Still, there’s something about bringing this up when tragedy strikes that doesn’t sit right with most people.  And it just so happens that Jesus himself had something to say about it.

In Luke Chapter 13, Jesus is asked about a recent tragedy in which Pontius Pilate murdered a group of Galilean Jews.  Jesus says: “Do you think that these Galileans were more sinful than all Galileans because they suffered these things? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”

In other words, no, they didn’t die because they were more guilty than you. Period. And by the way, instead of thinking about how sinful those people were, why don’t you think about your own sins? Thinking about the sins of others give us a nice warm feeling of moral superiority. But thinking about our own sins is a humbling experience, which is generally way less fun.

In case his audience didn’t get the point, Jesus referenced another recent tragedy, when a tower fell and killed eighteen people in Siloam.  Again he asks: “Do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?” And again he answers his own question: “By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”

What could be clearer? Jesus tells us to worry about our own sins. In another passage of the New Testament he tells us to worry about the plank of lumber in our own eye before we worry about the speck of dust in someone else’s.

So it’s tempting and natural to want to understand what causes tragedy, but we have to be careful not to point our fingers at the sins of others. By the way, we might want to think about that when we are tempted to point our fingers at Pat Robertson. I’m just saying.

—

Eric Metaxas is the author of the just-released Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (but were afraid to ask): THE JESUS EDITION” published by Regal Books.

Did he say Janet Napolitano was the love child of Susan Sontag and Elmer Fudd?   Did he label the POTUS a “long-legged Mack Daddy”?   Did he say that Adam Lambert was making him reconsider his position on Sharia Law?   Those things would have been offensive — but he didn’t say any of them!

Then what did he say?  Well, what he said was pretty bad, so if you are reading this aloud with kids around, you might want to tell them to go play with their Wii for a few minutes…  Okay, are they out of the room?  Great.

What Brit Hume said was that…  um… to find redemption and forgiveness, Tiger Woods might think about turning from Buddhism to Christianity.  Blecchhh!! Just repeating that makes me feel so dirty.  Can you imagine he said that? What was he thinking?

But seriously, folks… why should saying that cause such a firestorm?

Simple.  Brit Hume stepped on the Third Rail of American culture:  he implied that all religions are not equal.   In America today, you just can’t say that sort of thing.  But Brit said it.  And people lost their minds.

But how did America get to this point?  It happened at some point in the 20th century, when we realized that we were an increasingly diverse nation.  We were no longer a Protestant Christian nation, nor even a Christian nation.  There was more and more pluribus in our unum.

So to help everyone get along we decided to back off on the big, divisive questions about God and Truth.  We would pretend that we all pretty much believed the same things, even though we didn’t.   President Eisenhower summed it up.  He said that America was “founded on a deeply felt religious faith — and I don’t care what it is.”   Silly as that sounds, he meant it.  Ike was no theologian.

Ever since then we’ve lived with this devil’s bargain of pretending that to talk about these things was just out of bounds.  So to say something like what Brit Hume said is to be seen as a nut and a trouble-maker!  We’re supposed to pretend that Truth is an outdated concept.  Everyone has his or her own “truth.”  To talk about Truth as though it was a real thing is to be plum loco — and probably armed and dangerous.  It’s to be like the terrorists who want to kill us for not believing what they believe.   That’s where Truth will get you!

But if you claim to be a Christian, there are three major problems with this approach.

Problem #1.  Jesus said He was the Truth.

And he wasn’t just saying that to impress his friends.   He actually meant it and yes, that implies that not all faiths are equal.  Can you believe Jesus said something so outrageous?  At least he didn’t say it on a political talkshow!  And he said the Truth would set us free.   He actually meant that too.   What was he thinking?

Problem #2.  The Bible says that we must use our minds to actually determine what is true and what isn’t!

It may surprise you, but the Bible doesn’t tell us to blindly accept what it says “on faith.”  It tells us to reason our way to what is actually true.  This means that we have to ask ourselves:  did Jesus actually rise from the dead or is that just an old wives’ tale?   Where do the facts lead?  The Apostle Paul himself said that if Jesus Christ did not actually rise from the dead, then Christians are to be more pitied than anyone!   Whether it’s really true matters.

Do you dare look into these things, or would you rather just leave it alone and pretend the truth of it doesn’t really matter, that no one can really ever know?  Some folks would rather not look too closely.  It’s easier to just pretend there’s no such thing as truth and browbeat anyone who dares talk about truth.   But if you claim to be a Christian, you don’t have that option.  Bummer!

Incidentally, this is exactly why I wrote my Everything About God books — to invite people into exploring these things. You might be shocked to find that it’s actually fun!

Problem #3.  If someone is hurting and you know how to help them, you are obliged to do so.

If someone is driving toward a cliff, do you tell him that all roads are really the same and let him drive to his death?  Or do you risk hurting his feelings and tell him the truth, that he’s on a headed toward disaster and death!  Jesus said:  “Do unto others as you would have other do unto you.”  If you know the answer to someone’s problem and you don’t tell them, what kind of a Christian are you?

So let’s face it:  Brit Hume was trying to help Tiger Woods. He knew that Tiger might get his endorsements and golf game back, but he is losing what’s really important, his wife and his children.  Right now, Tiger Woods is in a hole so deep that even he cannot get out of it.   He needs something more than an amazing chip shot to get back on the green.   Tiger needs outside help, badly.  And Brit knew where he could get some.  But how did Brit know?

Twelve years ago Brit’s son committed suicide.  That tragedy and agony put Brit Hume in a hole out of which he could not climb.  It put him in a spot beyond his own efforts and abilities.  At that point he turned to God — to Jesus — in a new way, and Jesus pulled him out of the hole.  Jesus gave Brit Hume his life back.  He had experienced that.  And he thought he should mention it, to help Tiger Woods.

In what Brit said, he implied that Buddhism does not offer the sort of grace and forgiveness that Christianity does.  This happens to be true.  Doctrinally speaking, only Christianity has this concept of grace.   Go ask any Buddhist.  Only Christianity says that God will pay your debt.  He will pull you out of the hole and dust you off and  put his arms around you and say, “I love you.”  That’s the whole point of Christianity, that we all need God’s help, and God actually wants to help us — not to condemn us, but help us.

That’s all that Brit Hume was saying to Tiger Woods.   And here’s good news:  it’s actually true.  If you don’t believe me, look into it yourself and see where the facts lead you.  God’s not afraid of the truth, and we shouldn’t be either.

So under the circumstances, I think Brit Hume said the only thing a Christian really could say.  But please let’s keep that between you and me.  We wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

* * *

Eric Metaxas is the author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (but were afraid to ask):  THE JESUS EDITION, just published by Regal.  For more information, visit www.ericmetaxas.com.

1200 words.  Copyright Eric Metaxas 2010

*   *
WE OFTEN HEAR ABOUT PEOPLE WHO “need no introduction,” but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it’s William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction — whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity — it’s Wilberforce.

What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that’s ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again — and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.

The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.

The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today — and because of Wilberforce — the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it’s impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that’s the wild miracle of his achievement, that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.

There’s hardly a soul alive today who isn’t horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can’t fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.

The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn’t even mention in publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade — on the buying and selling of human beings — but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to being to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle — brutal and heartbreaking — would take twenty years.

Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and the book you now hold. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce’s accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his life-long goal on his deathbed.

Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, “preferred party to mankind.” But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner, and we can’t even look back to see where we’ve come from.

Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions — with your voice and mine – shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew — and what you and I know today — that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible — no matter the cost.

How is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen “the monster” and are trying to tell everyone else about it — and no one believes them.

To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the “disease” he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mind-set that supported it is gone.

Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization’s view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it’s nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment; it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.

In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age twenty-six and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God’s reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God’s reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers’ keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.

As a political figure, he was uniquely positioned to link these ideas to society itself, to the public sphere, and the public sphere, for the first time in history, was able to receive them. And so Wilberforce may perhaps be said to have performed the wedding ceremony between faith and culture. We had suddenly entered a world in which we would never again ask whether it was our responsibility as a society to help the poor and the suffering. We would only quibble about how, about the details — about whether to use public funds or private, for example. But we would never again question whether it was our responsibility as a society to help those less fortunate. That had been settled. Today we call this having a “social conscience,” and we can’t imagine any modern, civilized society without one.

Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce’s first “great object” was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second “great object,” one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill. The issues of child labor and factory conditions, the problems of orphans and widows, of prisoners and the sick — all suddenly had champions in people who wanted to help those less fortunate than themselves. At the center of most of these social ventures was the Clapham Circle, an informal but influential community of like-minded souls outside London who plotted good deeds together, and Wilberforce himself was at the center of Clapham. At one point he was officially linked with sixty-nine separate groups dedicated to social reform of one kind or another.

Taken all together, it’s difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.

Unforeseen to him, the fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America — and transform that nation profoundly and forever. Can we imagine an America without its limitless number of organizations dedicated to curing every social ill? Would such an America be America? We might not wish to credit Wilberforce with inventing America, but it can reasonably be said that the America we know wouldn’t exist without Wilberforce.

As a result of the efforts of Wilberforce and Clapham, social “improvement” was so fashionable by the Victorian era that do-gooders and do-goodism had become targets of derision, and they have been so ever since. We have simply forgotten that in the eighteenth century, before Wilberforce and Clapham, the poor and suffering were almost entirely without champions in the public or private sphere. We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the “will of God.” Even where this view does exist, as in societies and cultures informed by an Eastern, karmic view of the world, we refuse to believe it. We arrogantly seem to insist that everyone on the planet think as we do about society’s obligation to the unfortunate, but they don’t.

No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed like to the men and women of the nineteenth century, for whom the memory of what he had done was still bright and vivid.

Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both hailed him as an inspiration and example. Lincoln said every schoolboy knew Wilberforce’s name and what he had done. Frederick Douglass gushed that Wilberforce’s “faith, persistence, and enduring enthusiasm” had “thawed the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong arm of that government to in mercy put an end to his bondage.” Poets and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot sang his praises, as did Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier. Byron called him “the moral Washington of Africa.”

The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce’s “whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men. Not a moment of his time is lost. He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing … Oh, that such men as Mr. Wilberforce were more common in this world. So much human blood would not be shed to gratify the malice and revenge of a few wicked, interested men.”

The American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison went further yet. “His voice had a silvery cadence,” he said of Wilberforce, “his face a benevolently pleasing smile, and his eye a fine intellectual expression. In his conversation he was fluent, yet modest; remarkably exact and elegant in his diction; cautious in forming conclusions; searching in his interrogations; and skillful in weighing testimony. In his manner he combined dignity with simplicity, and childlike affability with becoming gracefulness. How perfectly do those great elements of character harmonize in the same person, to wit — dovelike gentleness and amazing energy — deep humility and adventurous daring! … These were mingled in the soul of Wilberforce.”

An Italian nobleman who saw Wilberforce in his later years wrote: “When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the opening of Parliament, every one contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic: as the Washington of humanity.”

We blanch at such encomia today, for indeed, ours is an age deeply suspicious of greatness. Watergate seems to have come down upon us like a portcullis, cutting us off forever from anything approaching such hero worship, especially of political figures. With the certainty of a Captain Queeg, we are forever on the lookout for the worm in the apple, the steroid in the sprinter or slugger. And lurking behind every happy biographical detail we see the skulking figure of Parson Weems and his pious fibs about cherry trees and — of all things — telling the truth.

If ever someone could restore our ability to again see simple goodness, it should be Wilberforce. If we cannot cheer someone who literally brought “freedom to the captives” and bequeathed to the world that infinitely transformative engine we call a social conscience, for whom may we ever cheer? Especially knowing that he has been more forgotten than remembered, and that he himself would have been the first to denigrate his accomplishments — as we can see from his diaries and letters, which show us that he went to the grave sincerely and deeply regretted that he hadn’t done much more.

In the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. “Things have come to a pretty pass,” he famously thundered, “when one should permit one’s religion to invade public life.” For this lapidary inanity, the jeers and catcalls and raspberries and howling laughter of history’s judgment will echo forever — as they should.

But after all, it is a very pretty pass indeed. And how very glad we are that one man led us to that pretty pass, to that golden doorway, and then guided us through the mountains to a world we hadn’t known could exist.

END

_______________________

COMMUNION IN SPACE
By Buzz Aldrin
Guideposts, October 1970

An Astronaut Tells of a little-known but Significant Event on the Moon

For several weeks prior to the scheduled lift-off of Apollo 11 back in July, 1969, the pastor of our church, Dean Woodruff, and I had been struggling to find the right symbol for the first lunar landing.  We wanted to express our feeling that what man was doing in this mission transcended electronics and computers and rockets.

Dean often speaks at our church, Webster Presbyterian, just outside of Houston, about the many meanings of the communion service.

“One of the principal symbols,” Dean says, “is that God reveals Himself in the common elements of everyday life.”  Traditionally, these elements are bread and wine—common foods in Bible days and typical products of man’s labor.

One day while I was at Cape Kennedy working with the sophisticated tools of the space effort, it occurred to me that these tools were the typical elements of life today.  I wondered if it might be possible to take communion on the moon, symbolizing the thought that God was revealing Himself there too, as man reached out into the universe.  For there are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.

I spoke with Dean about the idea as soon as I returned home, and he was enthusiastic.

“I could carry the bread in a plastic packet, the way regular inflight food is wrapped.  And the wine also—there will be just enough gravity on the moon for liquid to pour.  I’ll be able to drink normally from a cup.  Dean, I wonder if you could look around for a little chalice that I could take with me as coming from the church?”

The next week Dean showed me a graceful silver cup.  I hefted it and was pleased to find that it was light enough to take along.  Each astronaut is allowed a few personal items on a flight; the wine chalice would be in my personal-preference kit.

Dean made special plans for two special communion services at Webster Presbyterian Church.  One would be held just prior to my leaving Houston for Cape Kennedy, when I would join the other members in a dedication service.  The second would take place two weeks later, Sunday, July 20, when Neil Armstrong and I were scheduled to be on the surface of the moon.  On that Sunday the church back home would gather for communion, while I joined them as close as possible to the same hour, taking communion inside the lunar module, all of us meaning to represent in this small way not only our local church but the Church as a whole.

Right away question came up.  Was it theologically correct for a layman to serve himself communion under these circumstances?  Dean thought so, but to make sure he decided to write the stated clerk of the Presbyterian church’s General Assembly and got back a quick reply that this was permissible.

And how much should we talk about our plans?  I am naturally rather reticent, but on the other hand I was becoming increasingly convinced that having religious convictions carried with it the responsibility of witnessing to them.  Finally we decided we would say nothing about the communion service until after the moonshot.

I had a question about which scriptural passage to use.  Which reading would best capture what this enterprise meant to us?  I thought long about this and came up at last with John 15:5.  It seemed to fit perfectly.  I wrote the passage on a slip of paper to be carried aboard Eagle along with the communion elements.  Dean would read the same passage at the full congregation service held back home that same day.

So at last we were set.  And then trouble appeared.  It was Saturday, just prior to the first of the two communion services.  The next day, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I were to depart Houston for Cape Kennedy.  We were scheduled for a pre-mission press conference when the flight physician arrived and set up elaborate precautions against crew contamination.  We had to wear sterile masks and to talk to the reporters from within a special partition.  The doctor was taking no chances.  A cold germ, a flu virus, and the whole shot might have to be aborted.  I felt I had to tell him about the big church service scheduled for the next morning.  When I did, he wasn’t at all happy.

I called Dean with the news late Saturday night.  “It doesn’t look real good, Dean.”

“What about a private service?  Without the whole congregation?”

It was a possibility.  I called the doctor about the smaller service and he agreed, provided there were only a handful of people present.  So the next day, Sunday, shortly after the end of the 11 o’clock service my wife, Joan and our oldest boy Mike (the only one of our three children who is as yet a communicant), went to the church.  There we met Dean, his wife, Floy, and our close family friend Tom Manison, elder of the church and his wife.  The seven of us went in to the now-empty sanctuary.  On the communion table were two loaves of bread, one for now, the other for two weeks from now.  Beside the two loaves were two chalices, one of them the small cup the church was giving me for the service on the moon.

We took communion.  At the end of the service Dean tore off a corner of the second loaf of bread and handed it to me along with the tiny chalice.  Within a few hours I was on my way to Cape Kennedy.

What happened there, of course, the whole world knows.  The Saturn 5 rocket gave us a rough ride at first, but the rest of the trip was smooth.  On the day of the moon landing, we awoke at 5:30 a.m., Houston time.  Neil and I separated from Mike Collins in the command module.  Our powered descent was right on schedule, and perfect except for one unforeseeable difficulty.  The automatic guidance system would have taken Eagle to an area with huge boulders.  Neil had to steer Eagle to a more suitable terrain.  With only seconds worth of fuel left, we touched down at 3:30 p.m.

Now Neil and I were sitting inside Eagle, while Mike circled in lunar orbit unseen in the black sky above us.  In a little while after our scheduled meal period, Neil would give the signal to step down the ladder onto the powdery surface of the moon.  Now was the moment for communion.

So I unstowed the elements in their flight packets.  I put them and the scripture reading on the little table in front of the abort guidance system computer.

Then I called back to Houston.

“Houston, this is Eagle.  This is the LM Pilot speaking.  I would like to request a few moments of silence.  I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to invite each person listening, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.”
On World Communion Sunday, October 4, 1970, many Christians through the world will unite in spirit as they—each in his own church, according to his own tradition—participate in celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
For me this meant taking communion.  In the radio blackout I opened the little plastic packages which contained bread and wine.

I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me.  In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup.  It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.

And so, just before I partook of the elements, I read the words, which I had chosen to indicate our trust that as man probes into space we are in fact acting in Christ.

I sensed especially strongly my unity with our church back home, and with the Church everywhere.

I read: “I am the vine, you are the branches.  Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me” (John 15:5).

END

by Eric Metaxas

(This is a review of “To End All Wars”, a film released in 2002.  The review appeared in Books&Culture in July 2002.)

Can a Christian film use the “f” word? Well, that’s one question. But it begs another: what, exactly, is a Christian film? By my lights, it has become all too fashionable for sophisticated Christians to sneer at Christian artistic efforts. And yet, just between us evangelical chickens: how have things gotten to where reasonable folks will sneer at the mere mention of the phrase “Christian art,” as if the juxtaposition of the words were somehow inherently cackle-inducing?

The movie that prompts these questions is To End All Wars, a powerful film that tells the absolutely harrowing tale of a group of Allied POWs conscripted by the Japanese to build the Burma-Siam railway during World War II. Based on a true story told by Ernest Gordon in his book, In the Valley of the Kwai, this movie is bloody, violent, and profound, portraying a raw, full-throated Christianity of the sort that hasn’t been much in evidence since, say, Dostoesvsky. It is emphatically not the cinematic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

As the story goes, Gordon, played with an inner luminosity by Ciarán McMenamin, is a 24-year-old captain of the 93rd Battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, a decidedly Scottish outfit. Their commander is Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Mclean, played by the extraordinary James Cosmo. In anything Cosmo does he practically bursts out of the screen into a theater near you. He is the sort of sixtysomething tough- guy who might eat Jack Palance and Sean Connery for breakfast with kippers.

When Mclean and the 93rd are captured, they quickly realize that their Japanese captors will accord the Geneva Convention the same respect they accord Marquis of Queensbury Rules. When Major Ian Campbell (Robert Carlyle) receives a brutal beating, Mclean explodes in protest and is promptly brutalized himself. Afterward, the bleeding Mclean croaks his plan to his “good boys”: they will make their escape as soon as he has healed. But some weeks later, after another impolitic outburst, the great man is killed by his captors, and the futility of escape from this isolated hell becomes quite clear.

Later, Gordon himself is savagely beaten for forgetting to bow to a guard, and is sent to the prison “hospital,” known as the Death House, a miserable roach motel wherefrom none return. But a Christian POW, Dusty Miller (Mark Strong), attends to Gordon, giving him his own meager rations and quite miraculously saving his life. Soon thereafter one of the other POWs, knowing Gordon had planned to become a teacher, asks him about the meaning of all their sufferings. Gordon, still smarting from his time in the Death House, isn’t interested in answering philosophical questions just yet. But Miller prods him to engage the man, to try answering these questions. “When a man loses hope,” says Miller, “he dies.”

So Gordon decides to start what he calls a jungle university. There, amid the ghastly stench of the Death House, where the Japanese will not bother them, Gordon kindles hope and life. He begins to teach a few willing pupils, starting with Plato’s idea of justice. It is at once completely absurd and quintessentially, achingly human, this handful of broken POWs stirring in their tomb, in their Platonic cave, if you will. But they will not stay here for long studying the shadows within, for Sunday is a-comin’, if I may mix Platonic and Christian metaphors (it’s been done before). The pathetic group of them there inevitably evoke various archetypal images, from the Fiat Lux of Genesis to the light coming into the world in John’s Gospel to Jesus’ resurrection. In this cradle and crucible, meaning meets meaninglessness and throttles it, and Life says to Death, be thou removed.

Soon the lessons expand beyond Plato. Another prisoner teaches Shakespeare, and another teaches the men how to play music on instruments that they themselves have fashioned. It is moving and fanciful, and it all happened.

The fatally embittered Major Campbell will have none of this treacle. When he sees that the classes are giving the men another hope besides escape, he despicably tells the Japanese about the school, and they break it up. All the books, a Bible among them, are confiscated.

But Gordon and Miller don’t pay Campbell back for his vicious betrayal. They somehow manage to love him, thereby heaping hot coals upon his head. It is to the film’s inestimable credit that it can portray Christian love palpably and effectively. But this is only possible because it has portrayed evil effectively first.

We live in a culture where actual evil is almost never portrayed except to give us a frisson of something amid the nothingness, where it is still believed not to exist at all—pious 9/11 caveats notwithstanding—and where the bumpersticker aphorism, “Mean People Suck,” is about as out-on-a-limb as most folks are willing to go in that judgmental direction. The innocents who cling to this attenuated version of what the Spanish call realidad would do well to sit through this movie, because the evil level in it is about two-and-a-quarter headspins shy of The Exorcist—and it is all the more affecting, because these horrors are not sensationalistic spookhouse shenanigans but solid, documented, historical facts.

And yet there is something literally demonic in the cruelty and inhumanity of the Japanese soldiers here depicted. Their code of Bushido—a hypermoralistic worldview that is unspeakably racist, unspeakably cruel, and utterly power-worshiping—is what gives the contrasting biblical outlook such relevance and resonance and punch, that gives the few heaven-sent beams of light a cavern of blackest darkness in which to play.

What Christian films—and Christian “art” in general—have lacked is a willingness to portray evil convincingly. It was Milton’s Satan and Dante’s Inferno that made them two of the most powerful Christian artists of all time. Because they understood evil and did not shrink from it, their depictions of goodness had power. In order to be redemptive, art has to convince us there is something real from which we need redeeming.

Conversely, much secular art in the last half-century illustrates confusion and pain brilliantly but provides no antidote. The screeching hell of marital discord in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives puts the viewer as close to seeing the need for God as any “Christian film” ever has, but stops there. Ditto John Updike’s anti-paeans to adultery and suburban ennui; he limns the darkness all so well, so perfectly—too perfectly—and then splits for the golf course. We get universes of darkness without light, and from Christian “artists” we get watts of light without darkness. So it seems a little chiaroscuro is generally in order. Early on in the movie, at Mclean’s funeral—which is a genuine Christian funeral rather than the papier-mâché facsimiles Hollywood usually gives us (”dearly beloved … ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and so on)—Miller reminds his fellow prisoners that “there is suffering before glory, there is a cross before the crown.” That says it.

Kiefer Sutherland’s character, Lieutenant Jim Reardon, is the only one in the film who himself makes the journey from darkness to light. Sutherland portrays the quintessential American, brash and independent to a San Andreas fault. Like some zonked-out Vietnam War GI 25 years ahead of his time, Reardon is content to hang back and groove on the rubble, as it were, figure out how to get by while everyone else sweats about the nasty situation. And so he engages the local black market, procuring rice alcohol and other amenities for himself—and if his selfish self-sufficiency hadn’t backfired on him, he might have built a tidy capitalistic empire in the moral darkness. But it backfires badly, and then we see his other quintessentially American traits: heart and soul. Yet we are more inclined to sing “Amazing Grace” than “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Reardon’s journey and much of this film can be tough to watch, but when at the end of the movie Gordon’s voiceover poses such questions as “At what price mercy?” and “Who is my neighbor?” we don’t cringe, we engage. He, and the movie, have well earned the right to pose them. Earning this right separates this film from what is usually termed a Christian film.

Directing his second feature, David Cunningham bobbles the ball here and there: the dramatic arc can be a bit squirrely; the music prods us in spots; and the unshirted brutality might have been pulled back a whisker or three. But to hell with these nits; this is a powerful and profound movie, one that deserves praise and attention and discussion and emulation. The way I reckon, it is the Christian film to end all Christian films. Glory, hallelujah. Onward.

*   *
To see this review at BOOKS&CULTURE, visit this link:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2002/julaug/1.6.html

*   *

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.

The scene was St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, just over a year ago, and the sad occasion was the funeral of David Bloom, the former NBC White House Correspondent and Weekend Today Show anchor whose good looks and brilliance and ebullience had recently brought him the greatest fame of his famous life. For several exhiliarating and tense weeks the entire country had watched him and prayed for him as he bounced along in his modified tank, which someone had dubbed the Bloom Mobile, windswept and typically enthusiastic, the best-known embed in the Iraq War, updating us from the ever-changing middle of it all, and somehow reassuring us by his very presence, by his inherent and ineffable upbeatness, that everything — despite everything — was okay.

There was something inescapably iconic about David now, as if in this new role he’d become something larger than himself, as if in spite of himself — shouting over the desert wind to those of us in our livingrooms — he now stood for something — something important. But what? It was as if bright and young and optimistic and brave he had come to represent the very best of us, of America — as if he had come to represent our own best image of ourselves as a people. And then one Sunday morning we got word that he had died, that our friend David had died, and for a little while, the whole world seemed to make no sense at all.

Our lives sometimes seem punctuated by these moments of bad news breaking into the delicate peace that surrounds us and that we don’t notice until it is broken. I was still in bed with The Times and coffee when my friend B.J. had phoned me with the news. B.J. Weber was the chaplain for the New York Yankees for twenty years, but he has a much wider ministry to Wall Street executives and other professionals and he had become a close friend of David’s in his last two years. “Beej, what’s up?!” I asked. He didn’t mince words: “Our friend David Bloom is dead.” This was the black news my wife and I and so many of our friends had been dreading in the weeks and weeks that we’d been watching and praying for David in Iraq. And as usual with this sort of news your whole being seems to reject it instantly, viscerally, even though it’s irrevocable. But somehow you sort of tense up once you ve heard it, as if to fight it back into non-being, something like the way a ball player desperately and inanely tries to will a long foul ball into fair territory from homeplate.

Lord, no. No. I gritted my teeth and pounded my thigh — damn, damn, damn! I then got the details from B.J., and learned that David had not died from an enemy-inflicted wound, but rather, had died of a pulmonary embolism. Then I hung up and just sat there, probably for the very first time in my entire life genuinely angry at God and utterly, hopelessly baffled at His purposes. I always knew that God never fails us, that however difficult it is to see sometimes, He has a plan in the midst of the chaos; and I knew that now. But I suddenly felt as if for the first time in my life I only knew these things intellectually, as if my faith in God had now, for the very first time, been tried and shaken.

* *

When something like this happens it is inevitable that you scroll back, as I did that morning, to the day that David and I had first met. I remembered meeting David one happy morning about two years before, at seven a.m. in the loud and hearty crowd at Jim Lane’s house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Jim Lane was a former partner at Goldman Sachs and every Friday now for the last nine years we have had our Men’s Fellowship/Bible Study at Jim’s house in New Canaan. It had started out in 1995 as a tiny group of men, mostly Wall Street financial types; but over the years the group had grown and grown until now it was extremely large, almost comically so. At least it was comic to me; there were now about 150 men crowding into Jim’s house every Friday morning, talking loudly and intensely, as though they had already been up for hours. This ragtag men’s biblestudy had gotten so big that we now even had an official sounding name: the New Canaan Society. Just a few years before it had been a group of eight or ten of us with me leading them through the Gospel of John. Now we were a veritable throng that swelled giddily past Jim’s vast livingroom, spilling into his dining room and foyer; there was even a group in his library watching on closed circuit tv! And we had internationally known speakers and teachers like Chuck Colson, Jack Hayford, Reinhard Bonnke, Luis Palau and Bruce Wilkinson. The whole affair had somehow become an undeniable phenomenon.

Every week more folks from New York and Connecticut were visiting to see what all the hoo-ha was about, and practically everyone in upscale New Canaan wondered what on earth was going on up there in that house on the hill so early every Friday morning, with cars parked a half mile down the road. For all we knew they probably thought we were some sort of strange cult of BMW owners.

What was going on was as much like an A.A. meeting as anything else: men from many many miles around had heard there was a place you could come and be with other men who wouldn’t judge you, but who knew we all had problems and that in order to deal with our problems we needed each other and we needed God. We’d meet almost every Friday and hear a speaker and sing a couple of songs and talk furiously with each other and then head off to work, recharged for another week. Our simple thesis was that men didn’t make friendships as easily as women did, and that when things got tough at home or in your career, you needed friends to carry the load with you, to be there for you. You needed friends who would help you make the right decisions when the temptation to make the wrong one was stronger than ever. And so we had simply gotten together in that spirit, week after week after week, until things were so out of hand we literally needed a traffic cop in the front of Jim’s house.

So it was on one of those mornings that I met David; I hadn’t had my coffee yet and dozens of friends were hailing me and buttonholing me and in the midst of the friendly melee I bumped into him; he looked awfully familiar, but I couldn’t exactly place him, certainly not without benefit of caffeine. David Bloom, NBC, he said, brightly and helpfully. Right! I said, I thought you looked familiar!

David told me he had been invited by a friend of his, but I didn’t even know the friend’s name; that’s how big this group had gotten. I used to know every single person. David seemed comfortable, even to be enjoying himself, and it didn’t take long for him to see that as serious as most of the men were about their faith, this was certainly not a pious bunch. Our laughter was raucous and frequent — sometimes a bit too raucous and frequent. We didn’t take ourselves very seriously, but we did take God seriously.

And so every week or so I’d see David there, whenever he wasn’t on assignment travelling. He soon became friends with B.J. and Jim, whose investment banking offices were close to 30 Rockefeller Center, where David worked at NBC. Through them he rather quickly came to find what he was looking for and for the first time in his life to finally understand the basics of the Gospel as we call it: that faith in God and Jesus is not about trying to be a morally perfect person. It’s about recognizing that you cannot be morally perfect — which is why you need a Savior. The simple fact is that we need God’s help to be the person He created us to be. So instead of redoubling our efforts and failing again we turn to Him and ask Him to come into our lives and change us. There’s a humility in that that is the core of the Christian faith and that flies in the face of anyone trying to appear morally superior. Jim and B.J. especially are great at making this plain, without the usual religious trappings and jargon, so that normal guys like David can see it in a way they ve never understood it before. And it changes lives.

David’s was no exception. Through his friendships with Jim and B.J. he seemed to find God — and inevitably, himself — in a way that was entirely new for him. And whenever he was at the New Canaan Society on those mornings you could see how genuinely happy he was to be there, how he thoroughly enjoyed it. I remember not long before he’d left for Iraq, after a number of weeks away (he’d been down in the DC area covering the sniper case) David returned and stood up in front — which he’d never done before — and he told us all how much the group meant to him. It had become easy for some of us to take the group and comraderie for granted, so it was especially moving to see how much it had come to mean to this man whom we all admired so.

But as with all of us who are a part of the New Canaan Society, it was and still is always the time apart from Friday mornings where the real business gets done, where the real life of our friendships with each other existed It’s in those phonecalls and lunches where we would privately share our hearts with one another and where we would challenge one another and pray together and for each other. I knew that Jim’s friendship with David was important for both of them and that much of their friendship was in their lunches together at 30 Rock and in their phonecalls, where they would always share the reading from a daily devotional titled My Utmost For His Highest, written by Oswald Chambers, a Scottish preacher from the early part of the 20th century. That little book, which its devotees often simply call Utmost or Oswald is a legendary book, in that it seems to capture and to distill the ineffable essence of faith in Jesus in a way that very very few books ever do. Many of us in NCS read that book every day, and it’s become a kind of unofficial handbook for us — the closest thing there is to Scripture, as some have said.

* *

The last time I saw David was in B.J.’s home here in Manhattan. We learned that he would be leaving the very next morning for Kuwait City, and then on to Iraq. We were excited for him, and envious, in a way — but we were also quite naturally concerned for him, especially those of us who were husbands and fathers. We knew that our friend was going into the heart of an unknown warzone on the other side of the planet; so we talked about it with him and before he left we laid hands on him — the whole group of us did — and we prayed earnestly that God would protect him and bring him back safely to his family and friends.

And then, once the war started, we saw him again, sort of. I’d shout, Hey, honey — it’s David! and my wife and I would watch him, our friend, reporting from his eponymously-named vehicle. Many of us continued to pray for him daily, to have a particular burden about his being there in the midst of so much danger, but I never imagined he would not return home. Frankly we couldn’t wait for him to be back; at the New Canaan Society we’d give him a huge hero’s welcome at some appropriate venue, with wine and cigars, and inevitably we’d all rib him mercilessly about what a bigshot he now was, about how lucky we were that he deigned to hang out with us, now that he was world famous. I was already laughing about what I’d say.

Ten minutes after hearing he had died I was thinking about that dinner — the one we’d never have now — and about the dumb jokes we’d never get to crack at his expense, and about the laughs we’d never get have with him. And then I thought of that final prayer in BJ’s house, and I thought of how God didn’t seem to have answered it. And I for the first time in my life I simply didn’t get it.

Soon after David’s death we learned that the embolism he had died from was a result of his sitting in the cramped space of that modified tank, for days and nights on end. He’d even slept in there. He had told a doctor that he had been experiencing leg cramps and the doctor had told him to take some aspirin and to seek medical attention. But of course this meant that he would have to stop charging ahead toward Baghdad and, naturally David, being the indefatigable and irrepressible optimist that he was elected to continue to charge ahead though the windswept sands of the desert with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. I think most of us would have done precisely the same, or would have liked to think so.

Who could have resisted the undeniably glorious feeling of being part of the central event of your time, and of being the one lucky enough to be bringing it all into America’s livingrooms? And we in our livingrooms could sense it through David and because of him; we could sense the hopefulness and barely bridled elation that came with being part of a liberating army; and America’s love affair with him for those weeks that he rode toward freedom was in a way our love affair with that noble and eternally hopeful and idealistic America, the shining city on a hill, to use John Winthrop’s famous words. So in his role on the other side of our television sets, on the other side of the world, David was a genuine, palpable hero for us, who like all of his kind touches and somehow inspires that which is heroic in us, who makes us all feel we are a part of what he represents, so that we are sharing in his braveness and optimism and exuberant life.

And then that one bright morning we got word that he had died, and that part of us that identified with David died too.

And so, the obvious and eternal and painful question: how could God let this happen? How? Especially after we had so specifically and lovingly prayed for him on the eve of his departure? How could God let someone like that die, someone so vigorous and young and at the peak of his professional success, with a beautiful wife and three gorgeous little girls, and with a faith more vibrant than it had ever been in his life — how?

I think for me it was the vibrance of David’s faith that especially made me ask why God had allowed him to die. What a difference someone makes in the world when their faith in God suddenly blossoms! You may have been some sort of Christian before, you may have believed, in your way; but then suddenly the penny drops and for some unknowable reason you turn your life over to Jesus in a completely new way and everything is new again, as though you had just been born again, which is where that overused and misunderstood term comes from. I had seen this transformation happen in my own life some years before and I had seen it happen in the lives of so many friends over the years. It’s an undeniably beautiful and moving and transcendent thing to witness, as most births are. And for most people, seeing the newborn continues to be beautiful and moving and transcendent. And in a way you are forever newborn, and the world will never be the same. As Scripture says, when this happens, you are a new creature — the old things have passed away. It was clear that David had given his life over to Jesus with that great exuberance and abandon which we recognize as the unmistakeable hallmarks of true love. Perhaps for the first time in his life he was truly himself, and it was a beautiful thing. Why would God have let that die?

And we thought of all the lives that David would touch now. We thought of the ramifications of his newfound faith in a media culture that generally tends not to be comfortable with faith, certainly not of the kind that David now evinced. It was always confusing, somehow, that the media culture seemed so oddly out of step with the religiousness of the very people to whom they were speaking, day in and day out, and it seemed a terrific blessing that now, through David’s dramatic coming-to-faith, there would be someone in that world who got it and who might even help others get it and see it as the wonderful thing it is and not something to be feared and held at arm’s length. What would it look like for someone of his professional and cultural status to be a serious Christian? We could hardly fathom it, but we looked forward to finding out.

So David’s death was a particularly tough pill to swallow, and again and again and again in the days after his death I asked God why.

A few days later I would get the beginning of an answer. It was the first Friday after David’s death and I was up at Jim Lane’s house on the Thursday night before our regular Friday morning Fellowship breakfast. He and B.J. and I were in his kitchen and Jim handed me the hardcopy of an email. He said it was David’s last email to his wife, Melanie, written twenty-four hours before he died. When he wrote the email there was no way David could have known that it would be his last email, none whatsoever; but when I read it there in Jim’s kitchen that night it seemed clear as a bell that God had known. I held the paper in my hands and read it over and over and I knew that I was witness to a miracle. This was the email that I read:

It’s 10 a.m. here Saturday morning, and I ve just been talking to my soundman Bob Lapp about his older brother, whom he obviously loves and admires very much, who’s undergoing chemotherapy treatment for Leukemia. Here Bob is out in the middle of the desert and the brother he cares the world for who had been the picture of health, devoted to his wife and kids, is dying.

Bob can’t wait to be home to be with him, and I can’t wait to be home to be with all of you. You can’t begin to fathom, cannot begin to even glimpse the enormity of the changes I have and am continuing to undergo. God takes you to the depths of your being until you are at rock bottom and then, if you turn to him with utter and blind faith, and resolve in your heart and mind to walk only with him and toward him, picks you up by your bootstraps and leads you home. I hope and pray that all my guys get out of this in one piece. But I tell you, Mel, I am at peace. Deeply saddened by the glimpses of death and destruction I have seen, but at peace with my God, and with you. I know only that my whole way of looking at life has turned upside down here. I am, supposedly at the peak of professional success, and I could frankly care less. Yes, I m proud of the good job we’ve all been doing, but in the scheme of things it matters little compared to my relationship with you, and the girls, and Jesus. There is something far beyond my level of human understanding or comprehension going on here, some forging of metal through fire.

I shifted my book of daily devotions and prayers to the inside of my flak jacket, so that it would be close to my heart, protecting me in a way, and foremost in my thoughts. When the moment comes when Jim or John or Christine or Nicole or Ava or you are talking about my last days, I am determined that they will say he was devoted to his wife and children and he gave every ounce of his being not for himself, but for those whom he cared about most, God and his family. Save this note. Look at it a month from now, a year from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. You cannot know now nor do I whether you will look at it with tears, heartbreak and a sense of anguish and regret over what might have been, or whether you will say he was and is a changed man, God did work a miracle in our lives. But I swear to you on everything that I hold dear I am speaking the truth to you. And I will continue to speak the truth to you. And, not to be trite, but that will set me free. God bless you, Melanie. I love you and I know that you still love me. Please give the girls a big hug; squeeze em tight and let them know just how much their daddy loves and cares for them. With love and devotion, Dave.

Well. Who could possibly fail to be moved by this profound and extraordinary email? It was transcendent; it was a miracle. I could hardly fathom what I had just read. How could David have written these words one day before he died without knowing that he was going to die? It was all just too much. How could a man who doesn’t know he has one day left on earth write all of this? There was only one answer: God knew. Just as God seemed to speak prophetically through Martin Luther King in his “I Have A Dream” speech, in which King seems to allude to his imminent death the next day, so God seemed to me to be speaking through David here. That was the only thing I could compare this to. Suddenly I felt like I was holding a very precious document. I held the paper in my hands and just marveled at it and smiled. When I looked up I saw that Jim and B.J. were smiling, too.

The next morning, instead of our usual Bible study, we had a special memorial for David, right in Jim’s living room, where we had always met. But this time there was a handful of women in our midst: a number of David’s colleagues at NBC news, including his Weekend Today Show co-host, Soledad O Brien. The speaker was the Rev. Tom Tewell of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and it was a powerful service. At the end of it Jim asked me to pray aloud. It’s not often that this happens to me, but as I began to pray I felt God’s anointing so that my words were more than my words; I could sense the presence and touch of God. As I was praying, I was shaking and on the verge of weeping, and as the words poured out of me I thanked God that David was with him and that that was true, that it was truer than anything we knew, that it wasn’t just something that we tell ourselves to feel better, that it was not a fairytale, that it was the Gospel truth.

* *

Over the next week I continued to marvel at that email, and I realized that it was God’s way of telling us that it was okay, that He was with David and with us, that this wasn’t something that had just happened. It was a measure of comfort.

And not long afterward I learned something else that was comforting: the funeral service for David was going to be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral right here in Manhattan, and Melanie had asked Jim to speak. She had wanted Jim to share something about his profound friendship with David, and about David’s faith, and I was greatly comforted that somehow now, despite everything, others would hear.

As the event approached, Jim began writing the comments he would make at the service and he showed them to me, inviting my suggestions. And in reading Jim’s comments I learned something else that was extraordinary. I already knew that Jim and David had been reading Oswald Chambers’ Utmost for His Highest together for months, and I knew they had even continued to do this when David was stationed in Kuwait City, waiting for the war to begin. But once David had been part of the Third Infantry and their advance toward Baghdad, David and Jim had been unable to speak directly, but they had still continued to trade voicemails with each other. In that way Jim continued to encourage David with the readings from Utmost, only now in the form of long voicemails which David heard every day as he famously bounced through the Iraqi desert. But what I hadn’t known was what Jim had read to David in his last voicemail.

Jim’s last voicemail to David before he died was from the April 5th entry of My Utmost For His Highest. And two things about the entry seemed undeniably extraordinary. First of all, the April 5th entry concerned Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the day before his death, on what we call Maundy Thursday. And of course Jim had read this to David on the day before his own death.

But there was a second way in which this entry struck me as perfectly stunning and which was most evident in its very last line. This is what Jim had read to David:

“The agony in the Garden was the agony of the Son of God in fulfilling His destiny as the Savior of the world. The veil is pulled back here to reveal all that it cost Him to make it possible for us to become sons of God. His agony was the basis for the simplicity of our salvation. The Cross of Christ was a triumph for the Son of Man. It was not only a sign that our Lord had triumphed, but that He had triumphed to save the human race. Because of what the Son of man went through, every human being can now get through into the very presence of God.”

And then, for emphasis, Jim read the last sentence a second time: “Because of what the Son of Man went through, every human being can now get through into the very presence of God.”

We learned from David’s cameraman that moments after he heard this last voicemail that morning, just after he had heard that last line twice, David climbed out of the Bloom Mobile and collapsed, and himself entered into the very presence of God.

Who can fathom such things? It seems that there are very rare times in life when the hand of God is easy to see, when God almost desperately seems to want us to know that He is involved in a situation, that it isn’t something that just happened, but that He was involved in orchestrating it, that He is with us in all of its details. It’s at these times that you know how tenderhearted our God is, because in communicating to us that He was involved, God is telling us that as terrible as things might seem, He is with us. We are not alone. I cannot doubt that the extraordinary events surrounding David’s death are a powerful example of one of those times.

* *

But there was still another thing to marvel at in all of this, and that concerned Oswald Chambers himself, the author of My Utmost for His Highest. I found it touching and telling that in that last email David told his wife that he had moved the book to the inside of his flak jacket so that it could be closer to his heart. It seemed that even in this God seemed to be communicating something.

That’s because as I learned more about Oswald Chambers, I noticed some truly remarkable similarities between him and our friend David. Like David, who was 39, Oswald Chambers had died young, at age 43. Like David he died among troops during a time of war, WWI. Both of them had died in the desert of the Middle East, in a warzone, David in Iraq and Oswald Chambers in Egypt. And as with David, who died of an embolism, something that was neither necessarily serious, nor combat-related, so, too Chambers died of a non-combat-related illness, and one that one wouldn’t normally think of as life threatening: he died from a complication that arose after having his appendix out. I couldn’t help being amazed by these parallels.

But there was a final parallel between these two young men and their deaths in the desert of the Middle East, as non-combatants during a war, that was most interesting of all.

It was that both of them died at a time and in a way that made everyone around them wonder how God could have possibly let it happen. Both of them had showed such extraordinary promise and had awakened such great hopes for their futures and all they might accomplish for the Kingdom of God. Both had been taken long before they had realized even a fraction of those great hopes. Both of them had died in a way that particularly staggered those of great and abiding faith.

When Oswald Chambers died, the thousands of young men whom he had given Bible lessons, and all those who knew Chambers, were devastated. He had been so extremely talented and valuable to them, and now all of that talent was unavailable. How could God let that happen? Who would teach them about God now?

But what happened after Chambers’s death begins to give us a glimpse of God’s mysterious purposes. Chambers’s wife, Gertrude — whom he called Biddy — was a prodigious note taker, who had learned Pitman shorthand as a teenager and who could write an amazing 250 words per minute, faster than most anyone talks. Biddy would sit in on her husband’s sermons and bible lessons and would transcribe everything that he was saying.

Shortly after her husband’s death someone asked Biddy if one of those sermons might be printed for the enlisted men to read. Biddy assented and the response was extraordinary. Very soon another of the sermons was printed; and then another and another. After she had returned to England with their daughter, Biddy continued to type out the seemingly endless shorthand notes of her husband’s many sermons that she had taken over the years. As the months and years passed the demand for them continued. Eventually someone approached Biddy with the idea of perhaps putting some of Oswald’s thoughts together in a devotional book, and in 1923 the first copies of My Utmost for His Highest were printed. That little book has been in continuous print for more than eighty years now, has sold many millions of copies, and is today still a best-seller read by people all over the globe. And Utmost is only the most famous and far-reaching example of how Chamber’s thoughts and teachings had reached the world, because before Biddy’s death in 1966, no less than forty books had been published from all of the notes she had taken of her husband’s talks and sermons.

It seems that through Chambers’s early death, and through his wife’s desire to keep his memory alive and his teachings available to those who had never heard him in person, his writings were scattered abroad and found an extraordinarily vast readership, something that likely would have never happened had Chambers lived and continued to preach and teach. More people have been affected and blessed by what he taught on those hot mornings in the desert near Cairo than if he had preached and taught there for ten or twenty or a hundred lifetimes. The more I thought about this unanticipated and astounding multiplication of Chambers sermons the more I couldn’t help wondering whether God didn’t have something similar in mind with David — even before I knew of the remarkable similarities between these two men. I began to wonder afresh at the old saying that God works in mysterious ways.

* *

I couldn’t help feeling that already a part of God’s mysterious ways involved Jim speaking at David’s funeral. Who could have thought, a few weeks before, that the deep and extraordinary faith that David had would be broadcast like this, to an untold audience watching on television and to the assembled throng in that great sacred space on Fifth Avenue? Who could have imagined that my friend Jim would have the singular privilege of telling the world of the central most important fact of David’s life, that he had had a life-changing experience with the living God, and had in his last days been gloriously transformed and filled with hope and joy?

And perhaps most remarkable of all, who could have known that we all would hear these things not just from Jim, but from David himself, when Jim read David’s last email? We would hear these things that morning in David’s own words, which he had written alone to his dear wife in his last day on earth, on that battlefield where he had become so famous. We would hear that the most important thing in life was his relationship with God and with his family, and that he aspired, above all things, to give every ounce of his being serving his family and Jesus. This was more than any of us might have hoped for and we who knew him and loved him could hardly contain ourselves in thinking of God’s faithfulness to us all, in the midst of our doubts.

I think now of a hymn by William Cowper, written in 1774. Cowper was one of England’s greatest and most celebrated 18th century poets, who suffered greatly thoughout his life from depression. But his faith in God sustained him, and besides the hundreds of poems he wrote, he wrote hundreds of hymns, too, many of which we sing today. This is the one I think of now:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.

**

There was a time, not long before David’s death, when I might have seen the sentiments in Cowper’s hymn as bromides — as somehow true, but as cloying in their simplicity. No longer.

And when I think now of that celebration dinner that we would never have, in honor of David’s homecoming, I realize I was wrong in two ways: first of all, we will have that celebration, and second, the homecoming will not be David’s, but ours.

There are some facts more factual and true than that two and two make four. One of them is that God’s children never die. As Chambers put it in his sermon in Egypt during the First World War, and as his wife Biddy transcribed it, and as millions have read it over the decades, and as Jim read it twice on April 5th, 2003, and as David Bloom heard it twice in the very last moments of his life: “Because of what the Son of Man went through, every human being can now get through into the very presence of God.”

And we will. And when we join David in God’s presence there we will rejoice with him as we never could have dreamt of rejoicing with him in this life, and our joy together will be like a waterfall of grace; and our laughter together will be brilliant and golden and everlasting. This is not a fairytale. It is the Gospel truth.

Eric Metaxas
New York City
May 2004

I trust this finds you as miserable and stupid as ever. I am pleased to take a respite from our usual tutorial and venture into something a bit broader, but vastly instructive for our larger purposes. To wit: I shall today croak a paean of praise to a particular work of middlebrow non-fiction. The genre has been particularly good to us, Wormwood! Do you remember The Passover Plot? Or that excellent hoax by Erich von Daniken, In Search of Ancient Astronauts? You may snigger now, but in its day even that harebrained rant proved helpful to our cause. As did most of the books on The Bermuda Triangle and “UFO’s”. And don’t get me started on Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb! Oh, but Wormwood! Those books were mere types and shadows of the one that has in these last days transported me to ecstasies of embarrassing intensity. It is a type of “romantic thriller” (penned by someone under the unwitting tutelage of an old crony of mine from the Sixth Circle); it is titled The DaVinci Code.

I surmised it should be well worth the trouble of familiarising you with it, inasmuch as it contains such a precariously towering heap of our very best non-thinking that it is quite dizzying! It has the genuine potential to mislead, confuse, and vex millions! Indeed the mystical sleight-of-hand involved in shoehorning so many cubic yards of gasbag cliches, shopworn half-truths and straightfaced howlers into a single volume simply beggars belief; and if I didn’t know that the author had had unwitting “help” from my former colleague, the venerable Gallstone, I simply shouldn’t believe it could have been done at all!

Now, Wormwood, before you object to my calling this book “non-fiction” — since it is technically classified as “fiction” — let me say that it is essentially non-fiction, at least as far as our purposes are concerned. That’s because it’s principle delight for our side is that in the tacky plastic shell of some below-average “fiction” the book parades as “fact” a veritable phalanx of practical propaganda and disinformation that would make our dear Herr Goebbels (Circle Eight, third spiderhole on the right) jade green with envy! Souls by the boatload are blithely believing almost all of the deliciously corrosive non-facts that are congealed everywhere in it, like flies in bad aspic, and it is that precisely which most recommends this glorious effort as worthy of our dedicated and especial study.

But where to begin in describing to you its myriad delights? First, a brief synopsis of the plot: a museum curator is murdered by a fanatical albino Christian bigot (nice opening, no?); the curator’s granddaughter and an American “symbologist” (don’t ask me, I haven’t the time) try to find the real killer and are launched on a wildly implausible and fantastically cryptical search for the proverbial Holy Grail, all the while chased by angry gendarmes and the aforementioned unhinged albino. In the process they (and the lucky reader) discover that: the Church is murderous and evil; the Bible is a hoax; Jesus is not divine, but merely a married mortal and an earnest proto-feminist (!); there is no such thing as Truth; and oh, yes… orgasm is the truest kind of prayer. Can you stand it? A virtuoso performance, no? It’s as if the author’s somehow squeezed all of hell into a walnut shell. And oh, yes, one more historical “fact”: Leonardo DaVinci’s homosexuality was “flamboyant”! Do tell.

But that’s just the irresistible plot, Wormwood. It’s the author’s technique in so many other areas that is particularly worth our attention. For example, there is the manner in which the book seduces its reader with naked flattery, holding out the carrot — or should I say apple — of “inside knowledge.” Make note of this, Wormwood; it worked wonders for us in Eden and works for us still. The author trots out the ageless fiddle-faddle about a parallel “reality” beside the “official” one everyone’s been sold. You know, the moth-eaten, bedraggled idea that all of history is a grand “conspiracy” conducted by some hidden elites! But wait, the lucky reader is to be let in on it all, and for the mere price of purchasing this book! He’ll learn the “real” story behind the “official” story that all the other saps have been buying for lo! these many centuries. Heady stuff, eh, Wormwood? Transparent as it might seem to us, this temptation has always been been too great for the humans to bear. They ache to be part of that “inside” group that knows what’s “really” going on, and they fall for it every time. It’s not so different from their craving for gossip or “dirt”; only better, since there isn’t the pesky nuisance of guilt to deal with. They cannot help themselves; they simply swallow it without a thought. That’s the key, Wormwood, for if actual thinking can be prevented, the humans are under our control.

There’s something about a crackpot conspiracy that makes my brown scales twinkle, Wormwood. There’s nothing like a grand conspiracy to twist truth round and round — until the shape of the thing one ends up with is unrecognizable from that with which one began. I remember when I was young, in an immature display of rakish pique I bewitched an inept sausagemaker such that the next time he applied himself to the sausagemaker’s art he became almost instantly entangled in the entrails with which he was working. That image reoccurs to me now as I recall this great book, Wormwood. You see, this book is that hopelessly intestine-entangled sausagemaker writ large, I tell you! The reader will become snarled in the vile, greasy entrails of its thousand half-truths and will die before he extricates himself! What could be better?

But don’t let’s digress. I was speaking of the employment of flattery. Understand, Wormwood, that the successful devil — and this devilishly clever author — well knows his audience, and then tells that audience precisely what it wants to hear. As long as what one puts out is vaguely plausible, they’ll buy it by the yard, and at retail prices! Trust me, Wormwood, these gullible dullards are even likely to thank you for the privelege of being your customer! I particularly admire the writer’s way of tapping into the widespread disaffection and resentment so many modern women feel toward men. This emotional woundedness is a veritable Mother Lode (pun intended) of destructive possibilities, and it is as profitably mined here as ever it has been. The author winds up his female readers by informing them that they’ve been getting the short end of the stick ever since Eve was kicked out of the garden for her assertive sassiness! History has cheated them! The Church has oppressed them and they deserve better! And he supports this wall of custard with a thousand most excellent pseudo-facts!

Really, Wormwood, the author’s pretense of taking the feminine side of things is extraordinary. For he has cleverly substituted the au courant idea of femininity for the thing itself. According to this version of things we must only know one thing about women, and that is, first and foremost, that they are hideously oppressed. Once alerted to this central fact of their identity throughout all of history, and especially of “Church” history, they’ll believe they needn’t bother about much else. Revealed to the readers is the “fact” that in the interests of keeping power in the hands of men the Church murdered five million women in the middle ages! Don’t laugh, Wormwood. This author delivers this screaming absurdity with a deadpan that would make Buster Keaton envious. Never mind that it isn’t close to being even one percent true by any conceivable historical standard. The point is that it sounds true, at least to the ever-expanding herd of sheep who are grazing madly upon this ripping, dreamy, peachy excuse for a book! It sounds true and therefore it must be true! Every woman who has been wounded by a man will be vulnerable to this excellent strategem. Whenever and wherever possible, Wormwood, fan this outrage vigorously.

The ersatz “her-story” of the Church’s vicious oppression of women is seasoned with great steaming lumps of balderdash about Nature and “Mother Earth.” It’s a brilliant connection. Men and women alike invariably eat it up with a spoon because it gives them a heady sense of being somehow “spiritual” without the annoying necessity of adopting all of those patriarchal “rules”! Never mind, Wormwood, that in this Nature goddess silliness they are worshipping deities that don’t exist! The only thing that matters is that they are not worshiping the deity that does! How we accomplish that doesn’t matter a fig! And if we can give them a sense of their own superiority, a recognition of their sober respect for Mother Earth and against all senseless violence, and against all war and for peace and harmony and tolerance and recycling, well, all the better!

I ought to mention, too, that what passes in this book for perhaps the main “argument” in favor of those pagan goddess religions is that they predate Christianity. Behold the genius of this, Wormwood! It suggests that because pagan goddess worship is older than Christianity it is somehow more pure, closer to the source of “true” spirituality. But where is the logic in this, Wormwood? A horse predates a motorcar, but who would prefer it? Monarchy predates democracy! A joey predates an elderly ‘roo! What of it?? Brilliant!

Before I go on, let me say that I have seen some execrable parodies of this book, my very least favorite being Bring in Da Vinci, Bring in Da Funk, a filthy piece of cant not to be read under any circumstances — and I mean it, Wormwood. Don’t give me any humbug about how it will help you see how the Enemy thinks and therefore aid you in defeating him. The fact is, my callow dunderhead, that some things have the ability to corrupt the cynical likes even of you. You might well take these corruptions at face value and start having qualms about working against our enemy above, so ixnay on at-thay ook-bay, et it gay? I’m ot-nay oking-jay!

Now then, another extremely admirable facet of this book is the author’s intimate knowledge of his audience’s skyscraping ignorance, which he exploits to devastating effect. One must ever endeavor to capitalize upon ignorance, Wormwood. This is one of the chiefest weapons in our arsenal, and let me observe — and not without some glee — that the ignorance of contemporary Western Society in matters of history and theology both, is of an absolutely unprecedented greatness. Never before have so many known so little about so much of great importance. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details — as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields. Ha! But ask him to tell you about the Nicaean Council, or ask him what are the Synoptic Gospels and you will suddenly find yourself in the presence of a weatherbeaten cigar store Injun! But then go ahead and ask him who played drums for The Monkees, or the name of that blasted itinerant peddlar on Green Acres and you will think yourself in the presence of a very Voltaire!

Our television executives Down Under have been awfully successful! As I say, this book exploits the ignorance of its readership with an exemplary elan. One particularly daring example claims that the Crusades were principally concerned with gathering and destroying information! This is bold and laughable twaddle, but it fits so nicely into ye olde conspiracy theory — that the powerful religious hypocrites want to keep the “truth” out of the hands of their powerless subjects. And what do readers of this book know of the Crusades?

Then there’s that double whopper with cheese, about how the Emperor Constantine “invented” Christianity in the fourth century! Never mind that people had been believing it for all those years before it was “invented”. And in the same masterstroke the author undermines the authority of the Bible by declaring that what it contains arrived on a strictly “political” vote. All of those wonderful “Gospels” that didn’t fit with the “patriarchal” version of things were cruelly — always “cruelly” — suppressed and rejected; the oppressive messages it now contains were slipped in to fit Constantine’s political agenda! Who among this book’s readers will know that for three centuries most of those same Gospels were already considered a part of the scriptural canon? Who among his dough-headed readers even knows the meaning of the word “canonical”! My nostrils flare in admiration.

And at the creamy center of the story is the swaggeringly wild idea that Mary Magdalene (whom, incidentally, a cousin of mine once possessed briefly, only to be rudely evicted) would have married Our Chief Enemy! Oh, fatuosity! But again, it shrewdly plays into what the reader so wants to believe: that Jesus was not divine, and that all the demands that go along with his divinity may be conveniently ignored. And, perhaps most cunningly, it does not dismiss Jesus entirely, but patronizingly reduces him into a toothless sage, a veritable “nice guy.” Naturaly the author has added that requisite whiff of subversive sexuality. And oh, yes, hold onto your horns, Wormwood: Mary Magdalene is the Holy Grail! You see, her womb… oh, never mind! It’s just too rich!

As singularly brilliant as our colleague is in what concerns us most, the writing is — alas and alack! — scandalously slipshod and often pure giggle-fodder. I mean, the detail of a hulking albino ascetic! Named Silas! Silas! I’m wheezing with laughter this minute! Honestly, it’s too much! I’m almost surprised the author simply make him a drooling simpleton named Benji! “Must kill!” The unintentionally comic monkeyshines of this character almost spoiled my appreciation of the work. But again, it’s decidedly not the fictional elements, however ghastly, that matter here, Wormwood! Most readers won’t notice the thick prose or wafer-thin characters anyway. For many of them, paperback “romances” are like mother’s milk! What does matter is passing along cunning and doubt-sowing falsehoods as smoothly as possible. The rest is merely the narrative butter, as it were, that helps the nasty gobbets slide down the gullet all the more easily. But really, Wormwood — an albino ascetic! Why didn’t he toss in a vicious freckled humpback? Or some cheerful peasants with goiters? I must stop.

Well, Wormwood, there we are. If you can slither past the Early Reader prose and the over-caffeinated, goggle-eyed plot I think you’ll find that you’ve a veritable textbook on your hands, one that will reward you again and again as you stagger forward and downward in mastering the grand and ignoble art of leading souls, one by one, toward a fathomlessly bleak eternity. Cheers.

Your affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

**

(This essay first appeared in THE MARS HILL REVIEW.)