Page 3316 – Christianity Today (2024)

Suffering from poor health all his life, Richard Baxter preached, he said, “as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” Living daily in the shadow of eternity gave the Puritans a deep appreciation for living every moment on this earth to the fullest for God. “Promise not long life to yourselves,” Baxter advised, “but live as those that are always uncertain of another day.”

For the Puritans, to “redeem the time” (as Baxter put it) meant to order one’s daily life in accordance with godly principles and for maximum effectiveness. One of the Puritans’ favorite epithets was well-ordered. Their opponents nicknamed them the disciplinarians. The Puritans aspired to be worldly saints—Christians with earth as their sphere of activity and with heaven as their ultimate hope. Baxter exhorted his readers, “Write upon the doors of thy shop and chamber, … This is the time on which my endless life dependeth.”

This approach to life resulted in three vintage Puritan traits: the ideal of the God-centered life, the doctrine of calling or vocation, and the conviction that all of life is God’s.

The God-centered life

The Puritans’ sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.

Baxter’s parting advice to his parishioners at Kidderminster was to “be sure to maintain a constant delight in God.” Preaching before the Houses of Parliament, Cornelius Burges admonished everyone present “to lift up his soul to take hold of God, to be glued and united to him, … to be only his forever.”

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life. “In a divine commonwealth,” wrote Baxter, “holiness must have the principal honor and encouragement, and a great difference be made between the precious and the vile.” Our own culture has conspired to make such holiness seem burdensome, but the Puritans found it an appealing prospect. Ralph Venning, in a book-length treatise on sin, called holiness “the beauty of earth and Heaven, without which we cannot live well on earth, nor shall ever live in Heaven.”

Of course, it takes vigilance over one’s actions to produce a holy lifestyle. Very tellingly, the Puritans repeatedly used such words as watching, exact walking, and mortification to describe their preferred lifestyle.

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy. “Christianity is not a sedentary profession or employment,” wrote Baxter, adding, “Sitting still will lose you heaven, as well as if you run from it.” The Puritans were the activists of their day. In a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons, Oliver Cromwell crossed out the words wait on and made his statement read “who have wrestled with God for a blessing.”

Stressing the God-centered life can lead to an otherworldly withdrawal from everyday earthly life. For the Puritans, it produced the opposite. Richard Sibbes sounded the keynote: “The life of a Christian is wondrously ruled in this world, by the consideration and meditation of the life of another world.” The doctrinal matrix that equipped the Puritans to integrate the two worlds was their thoroughly developed ideas on calling or vocation.

The Puritan doctrine of vocation

The Puritans spoke of two callings—a general calling and a particular calling. The general calling is the same for everyone and consists of a call to conversion and godliness. “The general calling,” wrote William Perkins, “is the calling of Christianity, which is common to all that live in the church of God. … [It] is that whereby a man is called out of the world to be a child of God.”

A particular calling consists of the specific tasks and occupations that God places before a person in the course of daily living. It focuses on, but is not limited to, the work that a person does for a livelihood. Several important corollaries follow from this doctrine of vocation.

Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God. Thomas Manton thus commented that “every creature is God’s servant, and hath his work to do wherein to glorify God; some in one calling, some in another.”

Secondly, the Puritan view that God calls all workers to their tasks in the world dignifies all legitimate kinds of work. Above all, the Puritan doctrine of vocation sanctifies common work. William Tyndale said that if we look externally “there is difference betwixt washing of dishes, and preaching of the word of God; but as touching to please God, none at all.” Baxter explained how this could be: “God looketh not … principally at the external part of the work, but much more to the heart of him that doth it.”

The Puritan doctrine of vocation (inherited, we should note, from Luther and later Continental Reformers) integrated life in the world with the spiritual life. The spiritual life was no longer limited to some “sacred” space, nor was it reserved for monks and nuns who had retired from the world. Instead, it is “in your shops” (said Richard Steele in his classic treatise The Tradesman’s Calling) “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.”

This view of work as vocation offers more than simply the possibility of serving God in one’s daily work. It offers the possibility of serving God through or by means of that work. To work is to serve God. Baxter’s exhortation was for workers to “serve the Lord in serving their masters.”

There is a moral dimension to work as well. When the Puritans spoke of the rewards of work, they almost automatically paired serving God with serving humanity. “The main end of our lives,” wrote Perkins, “is to serve God in the serving of men in the works of our callings.”

If daily work is as central to the spiritual life as the Puritan doctrine of vocation asserts, it is no wonder that the Puritans threw themselves with such zest into their work. We need, of course, to draw a distinction between the original Puritan work ethic and the secularized perversion that followed. The original Puritan work ethic was this: “Be laborious and diligent in your callings … ; and if you cheerfully serve [God] in the labour of your hands, with a heavenly and obedient mind, it will be as acceptable to him as if you had spent all that time in more spiritual exercises” (Baxter).

All of life is God’s

An additional genius of the Puritans was the skill with which they managed to view all of life as God’s. The Puritans lived simultaneously in two worlds. For them, both worlds were equally real, and life was not divided into sacred and secular.

According to Thomas Gouge, Christians should “so spiritualize our hearts and affections that we may have heavenly hearts in earthly employments.” “If God be God over us,” wrote Peter Bulkeley, “he must be over us in every thing.”

It is no wonder, then, that the Puritans saw God in the commonplace. Richard Baxter asked his readers, “Canst not thou think on the several places thou hast lived in and remember that they have each had their several mercies?” John Bunyan asked in the preface to Grace Abounding, “Have you forgot … the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your soul?”

In such a framework, there are no “trivial” events, and all of life is potentially a teachable moment. One Sunday morning when the young Robert Blair had stayed home from church he looked out of the window to see “the sun brightly shining, and a cow with a full udder.” Blair remembered that the sun was made to give light and the cow to give milk, which made him realize how little he understood the purpose of his own life. Shortly thereafter, he was converted while listening to a sermon.

There was no place where the Puritans did not find God. They were always open to what Baxter called “a drop of glory” that God might allow to fall upon their souls.

C. S. Lewis wrote enthusiastically of “the beautiful, cheerful integration of [William] Tyndale’s world. He utterly denies the medieval distinction between religion and secular life.” Such integration is one of the most attractive features of the Puritans. Their goal was an ordered and disciplined daily life that integrated personal piety, corporate life, everyday work, and the worship of God.

Leland Ryken is Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

William Perkins (1558-1602)

The C. S. Lewis of the Puritan movement

A 17th-century source describes an incident in the prison ministry of William Perkins: A young felon proceeding to the scaffold looked half dead, “whereupon Master Perkins laboured to cheer up his spirits, and finding him still in an agony, and distress of mind, he said unto him, ‘What, man? What is the matter with thee? Art thou afraid of death?’

“‘Ah no (said the prisoner, shaking his head) but of a worser thing.’

“‘Sayest thou so? (said Master Perkins) Come down again, man, and thou shalt see what God’s grace will do to strengthen thee.’

“Whereupon the prisoner coming down, Master Perkins took him by the hand, and made him kneel down with himself … when that blessed man of God made such an effectual prayer in confession of sins … as made the prisoner burst out into abundance of tears; and Master Perkins finding that he had brought him low enough, even to hell gates, he proceeded to the second part of his prayer, and therein to show him the Lord Jesus … stretching forth his blessed hand of mercy … which he did so sweetly press with such heavenly art … as made [the prisoner] break into new showers of tears for joy of the inward consolation which he found … who (the prayer being ended) rose from his knees cheerfully, and went up the ladder again so comforted, and took his death with such patience, and alacrity, as if he actually saw himself delivered from the hell which he feared before, and heaven opened for the receiving of his soul.”

This ministry to the condemned in the Cambridge castle jail may reflect Perkins’s sudden conversion as an undergraduate at Christ’s College. A possibly apocryphal tale says that the worldly student overheard a woman scolding her son, “Hold your tongue, or I will give you to drunken Perkins yonder.” His conscience convicted, his life made a sharp turn sometime between 1581 and ’84, when he was in his mid-twenties.

Having enrolled at Christ’s College in 1577, he gained his B.A. in 1581 and M.A. in 1584, and in that latter year he became both a faculty member of Christ’s College and a preacher at Great St. Andrews Church in Cambridge. Preaching in a powerful, resonant voice to both townspeople and students for 18 years until his death at age 44, he had an effective ministry both to an academic audience and to ordinary people. J. I. Packer has referred to Perkins as “the C. S. Lewis of the Puritan movement.”

Perkins’s writings ranged over topics from predestination to co*ck-fighting, from witchcraft to equity. Strongly Calvinistic in his theology, his collected writings, totaling over 2,500 pages, reached eight printings between 1608 and 1635 and were translated into half a dozen languages. Packer has termed Perkins “the dominant Puritan theologian for the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign” and the “father-figure,” “pioneer,” “architect,” and “most formative” of the Puritan devotional writers down through Richard Baxter almost a century later. His many works are characterized by a mastery of biblical doctrine and knowledge of people’s inner needs, combined with an urgent concern for the salvation of souls.

—W.B.

John Milton (1608-1674)

Blind poet of paradise

Still regarded by most literary scholars as the second-greatest English writer (behind Shakespeare), John Milton was correctly labeled by theologian Augustus Strong as “a Puritan of the Puritans” and the one in whom “the English Reformation finds … its poetical embodiment and expression.”

Milton’s Puritanism owed much to an experience that his father had as a teenager growing up in a Catholic home. Milton’s father was disinherited and left homewhen he was discovered reading an English Bible in his room. He made sure that his own son did not suffer a similar fate. He sent his child prodigy to a local Christian grammar school called St. Paul’s School, located in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. At the end of Milton’s home street, Bread Street, stood the local parish church, where the Puritan pastor Richard Stock preached twice on Sundays and catechized the neighborhood children on weekday afternoons. The climax of Milton’s education was studying at one of the most Puritan of the Cambridge colleges—Christ’s College.

The story of Milton’s career choice is the story of a young Puritan thwarted by the state church. Theoretically headed for the ministry throughout his college education, Milton would not have been welcome in the Church of England. He himself spoke of having been “church-outed by the prelates.” So Milton chose to write Christian poetry as his vocation, because he regarded poetry as being “beside the office of a pulpit” in its inherent dignity and influence on society.

Before Milton wrote his major poems, however, the Civil War occurred. Milton self-consciously laid aside his poetic calling for 20 years to become an important international political figure in the Puritan cause. He became Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. He wrote volumes of pole-mical prose defending the regicide of Charles I and articulating the Puritan position on political and ecclesiastical issues.

The chief importance of the 20-year break was that Milton became totally blind midway through the period. His fortitude and submission to God’s will as he weathered this trauma are evident in his famous sonnet that begins, “When I consider how my light is spent,” and ends with the sentiment, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Following his political career, the blind poet composed his major works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—all of which embody Christian themes and subject matter. But his lyric poems, especially his sonnets, are as great as his major works.

Late in his life, Milton resided on Bunhill Row, close to Bunhill Fields, the famous cemetery where numerous Puritans are buried (including John Owen and John Bunyan). He was buried in St. Giles Cripplegate Church, which today houses busts of Cromwell and Bunyan in addition to Milton.

Milton died without having realized his vision of a reformed English society but still believing in the ideals of what the Puritans themselves called “the Good Old Cause.”

—L.R.

John Owen (1616-1683)

The Calvin of England

In the spring of 1655 there were rumors of a Royalist uprising against the regime of Oliver Cromwell, particularly at Oxford. That university town had been the base for the forces of Charles I, who was executed in 1649. The Vice Chancellor of the University took charge of the security of the town and county, riding at the head of a cavalry troop, armed with sword and pistol. This was the 39-year-old John Owen, tall and imposing, dressed more like a layman than the clergyman he was. According to a contemporary historian of Oxford University, not particularly friendly to the Puritans, Owen “went cloakless to show off his figure, powdered his hair, and wore large tassels on his bandstrings, pointed ribbons at his knees, Spanish leather boots with large lawn tops, and his hat mostly co*ck’d.”

Although described in dress and action uncharacteristic of a Puritan minister, Owen was nevertheless the outstanding theologian and an ecclesiastical and political leader during the era of the Puritan Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate, 1649-58. Such scholars as J. I. Packer, Peter Toon, and Sinclair B. Ferguson have agreed in calling him “the Calvin of England,” “the greatest of the Puritan scholastics,” and “the theological giant among the Puritans.”

His writings have remained in print for more than 350 years, some of his more practical and devotional works being available today in paperback. The 19th-century edition of his works occupied 24 volumes—including his 7-volume commentary on Hebrews and also his great work on the Holy Spirit, said by some to be the first systematic treatment of the Holy Spirit by a Christian theologian. It was John Owen who recommended the manuscript of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress to his publisher, Nathaniel Ponder, thus assuring that this Puritan classic would reach posterity.

Born in 1616, Owen received his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford by 1635 and moved to London when the Civil War broke out in 1642. Serving as vicar of a parish in Essex, he became a frequent preacher to Parliament and eventually a chaplain and spiritual adviser to Cromwell. His first masterpiece was published in 1647, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, setting forth the doctrine of “limited” (that is, definite or particular) atonement.

Richard Baxter took issue with this position and viewed Owen as an unfortunate substitute for the deceased, more moderate Jeremiah Burroughes among the leaders of the Independents or Congregationalists. Nevertheless, after the monarchy was restored and both Baxter and Owen were ejected from their positions, Owen wrote to Baxter in 1667, when the latter was seeking to promote unity among the nonconformists: “Sir, I shall pray that the Lord would guide and prosper you in all studies and endeavors, for the service of Christ in the world, especially in this your desire and study for the introducing of the peace and love promised among them that believe, and do beg your prayers.”

—W.B.

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

The preaching tinker

Dr. John Owen, who from his Oxford days had connections with many in high places, was once asked by King Charles II why he listened to an uneducated tinker. His reply: “Could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, please your Majesty, I would gladly relinquish all my learning.” This uneducated tinker/preacher was the Puritan John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which next to the Bible is the best-selling Christian book of all time. Also significant among his 60 books produced during some 30 years of ministry are his other allegory, The Holy War, and his autobiographical account of his four-year quest for assurance of salvation, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

Bunyan was born in the village of Elstow, just south of the town of Bedford in central England. His father was a “brasier,” a maker and mender of pots and kettles, and the young Bunyan, after a two-and-a-half-year stint in the Parliamentary army as a teenager, would return to Elstow as an apprentice to his father in 1647. With sufficient education to read and write, he benefited from two devotional books that his bride brought as her dowry and became regular in church attendance. Although “a brisk talker on religion,” he realized he lacked the personal knowledge of God that he sensed in some poor women whose conversation he overheard. He finally found peace of soul after an agonizing inner conflict, as described in Grace Abounding, and in 1653 joined the nonconformist church in Bedford to which the poor women belonged. By 1657 he was formally set apart to the office of preacher.

As he traveled, pursuing his trade as a tinker, or mender of pots, he used every opportunity to preach—in woods, in barns, on village greens, or in town chapels—and his fame as a preacher spread. He also began to write, showing an energetic style, a command of plain English, and a thorough knowledge of the Bible.

With the restoration of the monarchy, laws against nonconformity were revived, and Bunyan was arrested for preaching without a license. He was imprisoned in the county jail, where he would spend most of the next 12 years. His first wife having died, Bunyan had in 1659 married a second wife, Elizabeth, who cared for his four motherless children and eventually bore him two more. During his lengthy imprisonment she pleaded diligently for his release while he helped to support the family from prison by making long-tagged shoelaces, “many hundred gross of which he sold to the hawkers.” His imprisonment did, however, give him more time and incentive to write, and from his cell came most of his great literary works.

Thanks to Charles II’s covert intention of favoring Roman Catholics in England, Bunyan was among the nonconformists pardoned in 1672 by virtue of a Declaration of Indulgence. Called to be pastor of the Bedford church, now meeting in the barn of one of its members, he used it as a base for an itinerant ministry so extensive and influential that he became playfully known as “Bishop Bunyan.” Imprisoned once again in 1676, he was released after six months, and in 1678 John Owen aided in the publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which became an immediate hit and has remained so for more than three centuries.

Best identified as a Particular Baptist of an open sort—one who is Calvinistic in theology, congregational in polity, and adhering to believer’s baptism though not requiring immersion for church membership—Bunyan reflects the impact of the Puritan movement upon the lower middle class of 17th-century England. He in turn has become perhaps the most influential of all English Puritans.

—W.B.

William Barker is adjunct professor of church history at Covenant Theological Seminary. Leland Ryken is Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

The Name No One Wanted

The surest way to conjure up images of repression, joylessness, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy is to call something or someone "Puritan." Twentieth-century poet Kenneth Hare wrote, "The Puritan through Life's sweet garden goes/To pluck the thorn and cast away the rose." The Puritans themselves were used to such scorn. From its very first use in early 1560s, "Puritan" was a term of abuse, implying a "holier than thou" attitude on the part of those who were so called—a claim to superior saintliness. The Puritans, at least at first, detested the title. Richard Baxter said, "I am neither as good nor as happy" as the name suggested. They preferred to call themselves "the godly," "the faithful," or "God's elect." But in the sense that this was a movement of people who wanted to purify the church in accordance with Scripture, it was an apt nickname.

Home Is Where the Art Is

Though the Puritans have gained an unaesthetic reputation for banishing paintings and musical instruments from churches, closing theaters, etc., they were not—contrary to popular opinion—hostile to the arts themselves. Puritans associated art in churches with Catholicism, but they bought art for their homes. They objected to theaters, which had become centers of prostitution and dissipation in their day, but they did not necessarily object to dramatic art—John Milton wrote a masque, Comus, for private performance. Oliver Cromwell owned an organ, and he hired an orchestra and held dancing at his daughter's wedding.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

Anglican treatises on marriage listed procreation as the primary purpose of marriage, followed by restraint and remedy of sin, and finally companionship. The Puritans reversed the order, putting mutual society, help, and comfort in first place.

Daniel Rogers wrote, "Husbands and wives should be as two sweet friends, bred under one constellation, tempered by an influence from heaven whereof neither can give any reason, save mercy and providence first made them so, and then made their match; saying, see, God hath determined us out of this vast world for each other." In direct contrast to the medieval Catholic glorification of celibacy, the Puritans placed a very high value on marriage, sex, and family—as long as they occurred in that order!

Merry Christmas? Happy Holidays? Neither One

When Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, he canceled Christmas—prompting modern naysayers to cry, "Humbug!" But it wasn't a Scrooge-like hatred of joyous festivities that prompted the Puritans to distrust carols, mistletoe, and decorated trees. Christmas, like the rest of the saints' days and festivals in the Catholic/Anglican calendar, was in their view not only unnecessary and unbiblical, it also diminished the specialness of the one day of every week Scripture did set apart for Christians to celebrate God's work in Christ: the Sabbath. As Richard Greenham explained, "Our Easter day, our Ascension day, our Whitsuntide is every Lord's Day."

The Puritans were not averse to devoting certain days to spiritual activities on occasion. They were fond of calling their own private thanksgiving days, to which they invited family members, neighbors, and the local pastor. According to his diary, Puritan pastor Thomas Heywood attended several dozen such thanksgiving days per year.

Faith in a Nutshell

The Puritans perfected the art of pithy definitions and aphorisms. Here are a few examples:

"Theology is the science of living blessedly forever" (William Perkins).

"Theology is the doctrine of living for God" (William Ames).

Faith is "a persuasion of my heart that God hath given his son for me, and that he is mine, and I his" (Thomas Cartwright).

"In the Word preached the saints hear Christ's voice; in the sacrament they have his kiss" (Thomas Watson).

"Christ dying for us, is our Redemption; Christ dwelling and living in us, is our Reformation" (William Dell).

"The soul of religion is the practical part" (John Bunyan).

Forget Superbowl Sunday

The Puritans took Sabbath observance very seriously. When King James I threw down the gauntlet by publishing the Book of Sports—a list of the sports and games one could lawfully engage in after church—the controversy that followed was so volatile that a 17th-century historian cited it as one of the leading causes of the English Civil War.

The Puritans did value recreation—just not on Sunday. On other days of the week, they enjoyed hunting, a form of football, fishing, bowling, swimming, skating, archery, and any other amusem*nt they did not deem immoral (such as gambling or horseracing). In fact, some Puritan leaders urged employers to give their workers time for play and exercise during the week, so that Sunday could truly be a day of rest for both spirit and body.

"Purified" Worship

The Puritan critique of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was well established by the time the Westminster Assembly began its deliberations in 1643. In addition to offensive requirements for clerical dress, the Prayer Book service was considered too Roman Catholic in its ceremonies, too long to allow sufficient time for preaching, too earthly-minded in its prayers, and too rigid in its structure. When they finally had a chance to reform the Prayer Book, the Puritans crafted a set of guidelines, known as "The Directory for the Publick Worship of God," rather than a set form of service. Although it was never officially approved in England, many Puritan pastors followed its guidelines voluntarily (see p. 21 for an example of an order of service). —Contributed by Michael Lawrence

A Peek Inside a Puritan's Palm Pilot

Someone once said to the Puritan preacher Richard Rogers, "Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, but you are so precise." He replied, "O Sir, I serve a precise God." With strict self-discipline, the Puritans sought to regulate their daily lives so that every thought and action served and glorified God. One young Puritan woman was said to "order her soul first, and then all other things were set in the exactest order." Here is what a Puritan's typical day might have looked like:

• Rise at 5 a.m. for private prayer, Bible study, and meditation, followed by family worship
• Family worship, including prayer, Bible reading, and the singing of a Psalm
• Throughout the day, hours were set aside for secular employment, reading books, periods of private prayer, instruction of children and servants, conversation with Christians and nonbelievers, and acts of charity
• Mealtimes were occasions for spiritual conversation and godly conduct; Puritans asked themselves, "Did I eat, drink, for the glory of God?"
• Family worship again in the evening, this time with discussion and questioning
• Self-examination and prayer before bed

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

The year 1660 was a catastrophe for radical Puritans. The return of the monarchy under Charles II spelled disaster for people like John Milton, who had written passionate tracts defending religious liberty, republican government, and the legitimacy of killing a king. He made a last-minute plea, urging the nation to rally to “the good old cause.” Having set out for the Promised Land by “turning regal bondage into a free commonwealth,” it would be folly to return to the servitude of Egypt.

Despite his warnings, the monarchy was restored and a warrant was issued for Milton’s arrest. He survived, thanks to influential friends, but other Puritan revolutionaries were put to death in gruesome public executions or locked up in the Tower of London.

Moderate Puritans, like Richard Baxter, did not share Milton’s despair in May 1660. Although Baxter had been a supporter of Parliamentary causes during the English Civil War, he was no anti-monarchist and deplored the execution of Charles I. While his ministry had flourished under Cromwell, he was no great admirer of the Lord Protector. The return of the Stuart dynasty promised an end to years of political and religious upheaval, and initially Baxter looked forward to the restoration of a comprehensive national church encompassing both Puritans and Anglicans. In June 1660, he was appointed a chaplain to the new king, and he preached before Charles II in July.

In October, leaders who favored a church led by bishops met to negotiate with those who favored a church ruled by elders (presbyters). The king declared that the restored church would be governed by bishops and presbyters and would allow considerable latitude on matters of ceremony. Baxter was offered a bishopric, and although he turned it down, he recommended others who might be willing to accept. The Presbyterians were willing to agree to a church governed by bishops so long as they did not impose strict conformity on “tender consciences.”

But the hopes of moderate Puritans were quickly dashed.

Turning up the heat

Puritanism was associated in the minds of many with revolution in church and state, and Puritans soon faced a popular backlash. Almost 700 Puritan ministers were ousted from their parishes in 1660 alone—Baxter himself was deprived of his living in Kidderminster, and not allowed even to deliver his farewell sermon. During negotiations with the bishops in March 1661, he finally recognized that they were determined to enforce conformity to the Prayer Book and unwilling to accommodate the consciences of English Puritans. With the election of the monarchist “Cavalier” Parliament, hard-line Anglicans were on the rise, and over the next few years Parliament enacted a series of punitive laws against religious dissent. The centerpiece of the legislation was the Act of Uniformity (1662), which required all clergy to be ordained by bishops, to renounce earlier commitments to reform, and to assent to the new Prayer Book. The Act forced more than 1000 Puritan ministers out of their parishes, bringing the total number ejected to just over 2000 (around one-fifth of the total number of clergy).

England now witnessed a persecution of Protestants by other Protestants without parallel in 17th-century Europe. Thousands of Puritans were arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Hundreds of meetings were violently broken up, and nonconformists were even attacked by organized gangs and angry mobs. The statistics for Quakers alone are startling: Around 15,000 suffered imprisonment or fines, 450 died in jail, and 200 more were banished.

The more mainstream Presbyterians were treated less harshly, but one in ten of the ejected minsters spent some time in jail. Baxter himself was imprisoned in 1669. Like Bunyan—who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedford jail—he was not unduly troubled. “My imprisonment,” he wrote, “was no great trouble to me.” His jailer was kind, he had “a large room” and “a fair garden,” and his wife was “never so cheerful a companion to me as in prison.” They “kept house as contentedly and comfortably as at home,” and received a constant stream of visitors. But prison was hot and noisy, and Baxter found study difficult due to constant interruptions. He was grateful that his imprisonment lasted only a few days.

Persecuted pastors

Despite suffering persecution, Baxter continued to seek peace and reunion with the Church of England. He regularly attended worship at parish churches and actively encouraged nonconformists to practice “occasional conformity.” He also participated in negotiations with moderate Anglicans who shared his desire for a broader national church that would accommodate Puritans. Anglican laymen like the scientist Robert Boyle joined forces with Baxter to raise support for the missionary work of the Puritan John Eliot among American Indians.

A minority of Puritan ministers even managed to hold onto their parishes, despite their failure to conform fully to Anglican ceremonies. Ralph Josselin—whose famous diary offers a remarkable record of 17th-century life—remained in his Essex vicarage until his death in 1683. Powerful politicians like the Earl of Shaftesbury were openly sympathetic to the plight of nonconformists. Indeed, Shaftesbury’s secretary, the philosopher John Locke, became a leading advocate of religious toleration.

Finally, Charles II himself disliked religious persecution and introduced a Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 to allow nonconformists to open legal meetinghouses. Although the king’s Declaration was quickly overturned by Parliament, Baxter was able to resume his public ministry in the 1670s. He moved to London and preached regularly to gatherings of nonconformists. He was, however, kept under a close watch and subjected to various kinds of harassment, including fines.

Baxter on trial

Persecution intensified in the 1680s, after nonconformists and their Anglican sympathizers had tried and failed to exclude the king’s Catholic brother (James, Duke of York) from succession to the throne. Baxter was arrested and tried before Judge Jeffreys, a man notorious for his drunkenness, vengefulness, and brutality.

The trial was held on May 30,1685, before a crowded courtroom at the Guildhall in the heart of London. Approaching the age of 60, Baxter was a frail and stooping figure, “nothing but skin and bones,” according to one eyewitness. But his friends had secured half-a-dozen of the finest defense lawyers, and witnesses were lined up to testify to his good character and moderation.

Jeffreys, however, had no intention of conducting a fair trial. Throughout the proceedings, he poured abuse on the venerable preacher. He told the court that Baxter was “an old rogue,” “a conceited, stubborn, fanatical dog” who deserved to be “whipped through the city.” He had “poisoned the world with his Kidderminster doctrine” and preached incendiary sermons to foment war against Charles I.

Baxter’s lawyers pointed out that this was a travesty, that Baxter had been willing to accept bishops, and had done more than anyone to convince Puritans to remain in communion with the Church of England. Jeffreys was contemptuous. “Baxter for bishops!” he exclaimed, “a merry conceit indeed.” The truth was that the “old knave” had “written books enough to load a cart,” each one packed with sedition. Baxter, Jeffreys insisted, was a bitter enemy of bishops and kings and would not hesitate to plunge the nation into another civil war.

Throughout this bitter harangue, Baxter behaved with the utmost dignity, responding calmly on the rare occasions when he was allowed to speak. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, later wrote that Baxter had never seemed so “honourable” or so “great” as when he “stood at bay, berogued, abused, despised.” But Jeffreys had ensured that the jury was packed with enemies of Puritanism. Baxter was found guilty, fined, and jailed from June 1685 to November 1686.

On his release, Baxter quickly returned to preaching, and he lived to see the relatively bloodless “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, which overthrew the Catholic king James II. Nonconformity was now guaranteed toleration by act of Parliament. Baxter still dreamt of a national church that would embrace all English Christians, but the new era was to be one of sanctioned pluralism rather than Christian reunion.

John Coffey is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, England, and author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588-1689.

Pastoring Plague Victims

by John Coffey

By the 1660s, London was the largest metropolis in Western Europe, with almost half a million inhabitants. But in April 1665, the city was hit by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague. Around 200,000 of the more prosperous residents fled to the countryside, and they were joined by many of the Anglican clergy. Most of those who remained were the poor who lived in crowded and unsanitary alleys, cellars, and tenements. By September, when the plague was at its worst, 10,000 people perished in a single week.

With many churches left without a resident minister, nonconformist ministers seized on the disaster as an opportunity to return to their old parishes. Baxter tells us that the plague brought “one great benefit” to the city, for it “occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to preach the Gospel, to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people.” In Baxter’s words, they pitied “the dying and distressed people that had none to call the impenitent to repentance, nor to help men to prepare for another world, nor to comfort them in their terrors.” Their courage was widely admired and ensured that in the future nonconformist ministers would enjoy greater “freedom of preaching” in the city. Yet at the very time that they were ministering to the victims of the plague, the Parliament (sitting safely in Oxford) was passing the Five Mile Act, which prohibited nonconformist clergy from coming within five miles of their former parishes or any urban corporation.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Though J. I. Packer has earned the nickname "The Last Puritan," his many decades of Puritan-focused scholarship, teaching, and writing have helped to create a new generation of Puritan protégées. His 1990 book, A Quest for Godliness, has been especially influential. As he recounts in his "Changed Lives" article in this issue (p. 50), Dr. Packer also owes a deep personal debt to the Puritans. Currently Board of Governors Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Dr. Packer spoke with Christian History & Biography recently about the nature of Puritanism and its continuing legacy.

What kind of movement was Puritanism?

Puritanism in England was a holiness movement—seeking holiness in church, family, and community, as well as in personal life. It started around 1564 when certain clergy began campaigning for more holiness in the Prayer Book liturgy of the Church of England. They complained that the Book of Common Prayer still contained "Romish rags" and offensive rituals. Other concerns soon surfaced, and it became clear that Puritanism was at heart a movement to raise standards of Christian life in England, with the conversion of England as the final goal.

It wasn't that the Puritan clergy or the members of Parliament who supported them set out to create a party. It was rather that a party of like-minded people emerged. Puritan clergy gathered laypeople around them. They found the most support in the towns, where there were godly people who were prepared to take seriously the fact that Bible religion was something they were not very good at and needed to become better at. And the movement swelled, developed, and became a constituency.

In the 1580s William Perkins began producing little books on personal religion that became the headwaters of a flood by 1640. Puritan pastors insisted that part of being a good Christian was to read Puritan devotional books, and so a common literature bound the constituency together.

What did the perfect church and the perfect society look like to the Puritans? What was their dream?

Their dream was holiness in their own lives and in the lives of those around them. The Puritans didn't talk about the "state"; they simply talked about conducting all of life in a way that honored God and respected other people. That was their idea of community. The perfect church was a church containing families that practiced holiness and worshipped with a purged liturgy under the leadership of a minister who was a powerful preacher of the Bible.

The Puritans hoped that England would one day be converted. As a Christian country, it would be the paragon of a truly godly nation that would become the envy of the rest of the world. People would line up and say, "Please tell us what your secret is, please tell us how we can become like you." The Puritan clergy and the lay-people who followed them were impressed by the fact that in England there had never been a war over religion—which was not the case anywhere else where the Reformation had gone. That was a marvelous gift of God to England. The sense that England had a unique mission was reinforced by the ruin of the Spanish Armada. God had fought for England. That meant that God had a special vocation for England.

This shaped the prayers of the Puritans from that time on. They believed that doing everything they could to advance the kingdom of God in England was tremendously important for the welfare of the world. When Oliver Cromwell invited the Jews to settle in England, it was because he believed that the day was coming when the world would be blessed through the conversion of the Jews. It would be part of the fulfillment of England's vocation. Looking back on the Cromwell era, Richard Baxter wrote that there never was a time in recorded memory when the word of God brought so many people to faith as during those years, and if the Commonwealth conditions had continued for a quarter of a century more, England would have become a kingdom of saints and a wonder of the world.

That's what they all wanted. Because of the Restoration of the monarchy and the ejections of Puritan ministers in 1662, it never happened. But they did extraordinarily well considering how much was stacked against them from the start.

Why did some Puritans leave England to go to continental Europe or the New World, while others stayed?

Those who left England mostly did so under a cloud. James I, a Presbyterian, came down from Scotland to be king of England in 1603. He had said of the nonconforming Puritans—the Puritans who wouldn't use the bits of the Prayer Book that they didn't like—that they would have to conform or he would "harry them out of the land, or else do worse." Puritans knew that they were back in a similar situation to Christians in the Roman Empire in the second century A.D. They were practicing religion in a way that involved technical lawbreaking. There was no police force, of course, but every local magistrate had his own posse of soldiers whom he would send out to arrest the nonconforming clergymen and would then report them to the bishop, who was the disciplinarian for each diocese.

Some Puritans decided they could conform under protest and sufferance, simply stressing that they didn't like these rituals. They didn't believe they sinned in using them. But other Puritans did.

I think it's fair to say that the people who left England were the clergy and laity who felt most strongly about the inadequacies of religion in England. The Prayer Book offended them because these ceremonies were still in there. The clergy, knowing that James I thought that conformity to Prayer Book order was very important, felt themselves to be under threat from the authorities if they stepped out of line. So they had a new idea: If they started a colony in the New World, New England would be out of reach of the restrictive powers that were crippling them in old England, and so they could realize their ideal of the godly community and be a beacon for the world. England's vocation under God was stirring their minds, but they had given up hope of achieving it at home.

Those who stayed in England believed that patient suffering under pressure was part of the Christian vocation, and they were prepared to do that. The majority of these Puritan clergy became lecturers—people hired by a parish to preach sermons once a week (usually on Thursday) to make up for the fact that the rector who took services in church on Sundays wasn't a preaching man. The Puritans believed that the Word is the prime means of grace, so it was important to have lecturers where no good preaching was going on.

What key ideas characterized the Puritan view of the Christian life?

Everybody is a sinner, and the Puritans spent a lot of time and energy establishing that fact. God in his grace has sent his Son to save us through his death, which is the basis of our justification. Now he gives a covenant promise to those who have faith. Faith is committing yourself to the God of the promises, and specifically to Jesus Christ the living Lord. You become his penitent, obedient disciple.

As a Christian, you must believe that you are accepted through Christ, you are adopted into God's family, you are an heir of glory, and you are now a pilgrim on the way to heaven. Every day of your life must be reshaped. That's discipleship. The Puritans made good use of the category of "duty," meaning simply what is due to God from us who by his grace have been saved from sin. The Puritans were very strong on moral teaching, but they weren't legalists: Duty is done out of gratitude to the God who has saved you. This is sanctification, and it required that you put not only your personal life but your family life in order. The Puritans had a clear idea of God-fearing family life and a very strong and humane doctrine of marriage as a partnership in the Lord.

When it came to Christian character, the Puritans stressed humility before God, submission to Scripture, and integrity—that is, honesty, truth telling, being a man or a woman of your word—in all relationships. You should also be a philanthropist, generous in giving to the poor.

The Puritans insisted on keeping the Sabbath holy. This meant that from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night, you should be doing things that honor God and nourish the soul. Baxter says that for the godly, Sabbaths are joyful days—there's nothing else that they'd rather be doing.

The Puritans were robust in their view of life. To be a Puritan was to look forward to the glory that is to come and to prepare for a good death—that would be the last act of a life of good and faithful discipleship.

The Puritans called themselves "physicians of the soul." What did they mean by this?

A physician's business is to check, restore, and maintain the health of those who commit themselves to his care. In the same way, the minister should get to know the people in his church and encourage them to consult him as their soul-doctor. If there is any kind of spiritual problem, uncertainty, bewilderment, or distress, they are to go to the minister and tell him, and the minister needs to know enough to give them health-giving advice. That's the Puritan ideal.

Just as a physician must know physiology, the Christian minister must know what spiritual health is. It's pure knowledge of the will of God, the true gospel of God. It's regular praise and regular prayer. It's acceptance of responsibility in the family, in the church, and in the larger community where you do business. That's spiritual health. And falling short of that calls for intervention, rebuke, correction, and instruction in righteousness.

Puritans believed that an educated conscience is absolutely necessary to spiritual health. This meant knowing the moral requirements of God so that your conscience supports you when you are doing right and condemns you when you are doing wrong.

Did this emphasis foster a special relationship between a Puritan pastor and his congregation?

Yes. Of course, this varied from clergyman to clergyman. Richard Baxter leads the pack here. Baxter said that, just as you go to your physician for a check-up from time to time, so you should go regularly to your pastor for a spiritual check-up. And you should always be ready to hear humbling guidance, direction, redirection about the Christian life. Counseling people for spiritual diseases was a distinctive Puritan emphasis, and it indicates the closeness of commitment to the flock which the Puritan pastor thought ideal. I don't think that their mastery of this field of spiritual ministry, with all the principles of correction taken from Scripture itself, has ever been surpassed.

What false stereotypes do people have about the Puritans?

H. L. Mencken once said, "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." That is nonsense. The Puritans were in fact pleasant people, cheerful people. Many of them had a teasing wit and the capacity to laugh and make others laugh. It's not the case, either, that all of them dressed in black and made themselves stand out as if they were going to a funeral. John Owen, when he was Oxford's vice-chancellor, was much criticized for being a natty dresser!

How were the Puritans innovative?

They introduced the Christian Sabbath to England. They also introduced the Christian family to England, in the sense that they thoroughly worked out the responsibilities of father and mother inside the home, the pattern for family prayers twice a day, how everybody should be taught the Bible and taught to pray on their own, both adults and kids. Thus they took the idea of the godly home further than it had ever been taken before.

They also devised a style of preaching that England had never experienced before. It was expository, but it was plain and searching, whereas the preaching of Anglican divines was more often than not a way of showing off their learning. Here is what the Puritans did best—preaching the Bible, preaching the gospel.

What aspects of the modern world or modern Christianity have their roots in the Puritan movement?

Ever since the Puritan era ended, people in the West have been trying to ensure that we don't slip back into anything that would recall the Puritans. But the idea of the Christian family as American evangelicals maintain it in some form of family religion, family prayers and the responsibility of the father as the spiritual leader—this was a Puritan ideal. Also, the Western ideal, on both sides of the Atlantic, of integrity in public life is something which the Puritans established and which we still hope for, because we know it's right. When moral lapses take place, we think it scandalous. That is a Puritan reaction.

Until the mid-19th century, nearly every serious Christian read Puritan literature. Since then, it seems that the Puritans have fallen into disrepute. Why?

In the middle of the 19th century, a great deal of new devotional literature began to be produced, and it was quite simply easier to buy and read those little books than the large, antiquated Puritan volumes. Evangelical piety had become more superficial and simplistic than had been the case before. Puritans were fairly demanding. The only bit of the Puritan literary heritage that went on being printed, sold, and read was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is an amazing piece of work. It's brilliant from a literary as well as from a spiritual standpoint.

From the middle of the 19th century on, popular devotion became man-centered, and the Puritan way of being God-centered (doxological) has been marginalized. The Puritans wrote about the challenges of living to God in a conflicted age like ours, in which there are spiritual battles to be fought. They were thorough in their Christianity in a way that few since their time have matched.

But there has been a modern resurgence of interest in the Puritans. Their books have become available again and have found a public. Seminaries have courses on Puritan theology and devotion. In its own way, Puritanism is now once again quite a power in the evangelical world. Christians have become disenchanted with the sort of devotional literature that was abroad when I was a young believer. They want something with more backbone.

Reformed enough?

Many aspects of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer came under criticism from Puritans from the late 16th century onwards. All Puritans agreed that four ceremonial requirements in particular were unbiblical and revealed lingering Catholic influence:

Vestments. Clergy were required to wear a white surplice during public worship. The Puritans objected that these vestments were too associated with the Catholic priesthood in the minds of laypeople. A special uniform implied that the clergy were holier and closer to God than other people, thus denying the priesthood of all believers.

Kneeling at the communion table. The Prayer Book required communicants to kneel as they received the bread and wine. But the Puritans argued that this invited people to believe in transubstantiation—the Roman Catholic doctrine that the substance of the bread and wine changed into the body and blood of Christ—and to venerate the elements. The Puritans preferred to sit at a table and pass the bread and wine to each other, as it was done in Reformed churches in other countries.

The sign of the cross in baptism. According to Prayer Book specifications, the priest poured water on the head of the child being baptized and then made the sign of the cross on the child's forehead. The Puritans believed that the essence of baptism was the water symbolizing new life in Christ; the sign of the cross was an unbiblical human addition.

Wedding rings. In pre-Reformation days, marriage was regarded as a sacrament; the ring given by the bridegroom to the bride was the outward and visible sign of this invisible grace. According to the Anglican Articles, marriage was not a sacrament but a human partnership blessed by God. A ring, said the Puritans, was thus unnecessary.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

The Prototypical Evangelical? Historians David Bebbington, Mark Noll, and George Rawlyk have identified four characteristic marks of “evangelicalism”: a stress on conversion, a focus on Christ’s redeeming work as the core of biblical Christianity, an acknowledgment of the Bible as the supreme authority, and an energetic and personal approach to social engagement and evangelism. According to Paul Lim, the life and ministry of Richard Baxter reveal all four of these qualities. Read more about this remarkable man.

On July 28, 1875, the town of Kidderminster in the English Midlands witnessed a rare moment of Christian unity. After over 200 years of deep Protestant divisions, clergy from all denominations came together for the unveiling and dedication of the statue of a Puritan preacher.

The inscription at the base of the statue read, “Between the years 1641 and 1660 this town was the scene of the labors of Richard Baxter, renowned equally for his Christian learning and his pastoral fidelity. In a stormy and divided age he advocated unity and comprehension, pointing the way to everlasting rest.”

Baxter himself would have been pleased by the ecumenical spirit of the event. Refusing to be boxed into any party or sect, he called himself a “mere Christian”—a phrase that would influence C. S. Lewis centuries later—and spent his life trying to persuade his fellow Protestants to reconcile their doctrinal and political differences and work together towards holiness. “In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity” was his motto.

By age 44, he was the most famous clergyman in England, known for completely transforming the town of Kidderminster and fostering cooperation between clergy. By his death in 1691 he had written over 130 books selling more copies than any other English writer of the time. This voluminous outpouring of pastoral and theological commentary earned him the nickname “scribbling Dick.” Preaching and writing to awaken dulled consciences, comfort the afflicted, and point people to the rest found only in Christ, he was a hero for many Puritans.

When George Whitefield visited Kidderminster 50 years after Baxter’s death, he commented, “I was greatly refreshed to find what a sweet savour of good Mr. Baxter’s doctrine, works and discipline remained unto this day.” And the legacy continues. Baxter’s bestseller The Saints’ Everlasting Rest is a classic in devotional literature. His autobiography remains one of the most trusted historical sources for understanding the religious and political culture of 17th-century England. His handbook for pastoral ministry, The Reformed Pastor, influenced preachers like Charles and John Wesley and Charles Haddon Spurgeon—who had his wife read it aloud on Sunday evenings to “quicken my sluggish heart.”

A Shropshire lad

Richard Baxter was born on November 12, 1616, the only child of a landowner in Shropshire, England. His hometown of Rowton was spiritually sleepy and in need of what Patrick Collinson calls “a hotter sort of Protestants.” The 80-year-old pastor never preached. Baxter was confirmed at age 15 without ever being asked to recite the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Ten Commandments. Already winds of discontent were stirring that would provide the stormy religious background to the English Civil War. James I had just decreed that popular games could be played on Sundays, and Baxter recalled how after church the sounds of uproarious dancing around a maypole and the loud music of the tabor and pipe outside the window disrupted the family’s devotions.

“Many times my mind was inclined to be among them,” he wrote, “and sometimes I broke loose from conscience and joined with them; and the more I did it the more I was inclined to it. But when I heard them call my father Puritan it did much to cure me and alienate me from them; for I considered that my father’s exercise of reading the Scripture was better than theirs, and would surely be better thought on by all men at the last; and I considered what it was for that he and others were thus derided.”

Richard Baxter, Sr., had been converted through reading the Bible and tried to pass his love for Scripture on to his son. When the young Baxter realized that it was for practices such as “reading Scripture” when the rest of the town “were dancing on the Lord’s Day” that people like his father were reviled, he became convinced that “godly people were the best, and those that despised them and lived in sin and pleasure were a malignant, unhappy sort of people.”

As a teenager he read several Puritan devotional books that opened his eyes to the love of God and taught him how to live by faith in Christ. Though his formal education was poor and he was persuaded not to attend university, he acquired a massive amount of learning through his own reading. “And the use that God made of Books, above Ministers, to the benefit of my Soul, made me somewhat excessively in love with good Books”—an apt comment for someone whose personal library numbered 1,400 volumes by the time he died, an impressive collection that included first editions of many Latin and Greek Fathers, as well as medieval Scholastics and Jesuit theologies.

The true meaning of reformation

Already beset by the illnesses that would plague him for the rest of his life, Baxter decided to make the best of what he thought was his short time left on earth. He was ordained at age 23, and after a short stint as a schoolmaster and a year as pastoral assistant in Bridgnorth, Baxter accepted a call to be “lecturer” in the parish of St. Mary’s in the small weaving town of Kidderminster.

Shortly after Baxter arrived in Kidderminster, the English Civil War erupted, and he spent five years as a chaplain in Oliver Cromwell’s army, hoping to bring a voice of moderation into the struggle. But he was troubled by what he saw. Like his fellow Puritans, Baxter believed that the church in England was in desperate need of reform in order to make it more like Calvin’s Geneva, which the Scottish reformer John Knox called “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the Apostles.” But he could not agree with those who would tear apart the unity of the church by separating from it, or who ignored the fact that reformed faith also meant holiness of life.

When he returned to Kidderminster in 1647—this time as vicar—he brought a new understanding of reformation, later expressed in The Reformed Pastor: “Alas! Can we think that the reformation is wrought, when we cast out a few ceremonies, and changed some vestures, and gestures, and forms! Oh no, sirs! It is the converting and saving of souls that is our business. That is the chiefest part of reformation, that doth most good, and tendeth most to the salvation of the people.”

Conversion is the key

The Reformed Pastor, published in 1656, was the culmination of Baxter’s thinking about the ministerial role and the product of an enormously successful ministry in Kidderminster. Baxter believed that a true church was not composed of a mostly absent bishop and thousands of parishioners who preferred to pursue trivial pleasures rather than following the “plain man’s pathway to heaven.” Nor was it made up of a “society of friends” like the Quakers, who eliminated the office of pastor. A true church was both a hospital and a school, and healing and learning could only come through truth rightly taught and embodied. In that regard, the pastor, both as a role model for others and also as a shepherd and teacher, was absolutely crucial.

The pastor must be “awakened” and reformed himself—thoroughly converted, humble, and obedient—before he could awaken others. The goal of preaching was to exalt Christ by confirming, convicting, and comforting the faithful and by converting the rest. Baxter urged his fellow pastors to preach “with clear demonstrations of love to their souls, and make them feel through the whole, that you aim at nothing but their salvation,” so that “the increase of the purity and the unity of his churches” could be manifested.

Baxter himself preached twice a week, for an hour on Sunday and another hour on Thursday, and his preaching was characterized by enormous energy and urgency. “What!” he wrote, “Speak coldly for God and for men’s salvation! … such a work as preaching … should be done with all our might, that the people can feel us preach when they hear us.”

The personal touch

But preaching was not enough—a more hands-on strategy was needed to awaken sleeping souls. As a pastor, Baxter believed that conversion could happen at any age, and that the most effective way of finding out whether a person needed to be converted was not by public preaching but by private conversation. He would spend an hour with each family, using the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments to instruct each person and gauge his or her spiritual condition. Every Monday and Thursday Baxter would start at one end of town, his assistant would start at the other, and together they managed to interview 15 or 16 families a week—a total of 800 families (the whole parish) each year.

Baxter discovered that some people learned more in an hour’s conversation than in ten years of preaching. He became convinced that personal instruction, or catechizing, was essential to insure the salvation of parishioners and thus the reformation of the parish. It also helped people better understand his sermons and enabled him to know who was ready to take the sacraments and where loving discipline was needed.

As a result of Baxter’s one-on-one catechizing, he got to know his parishioners so well that he adapted his pastoral care to their widely varying spiritual states and needs. Rather than simply dividing people into “godly” and “ungodly,” he claimed that there were 12 different categories of people in his parish—including those who merely conformed to the externals of church membership, those who desired to live godly lives but did not yet understand the fundamentals of faith, those with skeptical tendencies, those who rebelled against their pastor, and those whose wrong-headed theology was leading them into lawlessness.

Thanks to his intimate knowledge of his flock, most of Kidderminster’s 2,000 adult inhabitants were converted under Baxter’s ministry, and this town formerly infamous for its ignorance and debauchery became a model Christian community.

His program for reform and unity did not stop with Kidderminster. From his weekly fellowship with neighboring clergy grew the Worcestershire Association, an interdenominational alliance of Anglican, Presbyterians, Congregationalist, and Baptist ministers dedicated to Baxter’s ideals of evangelistic preaching and catechizing families. The fervor spread to other counties as well.

Baxter also wrote 47 books during his Kidderminster years, including a compilation of his sermons titled A Call to the Unconverted. It sold over 30,000 copies in its first printing, went through 23 editions before 1700, and was translated into French, Swedish, German, and Dutch—as well as into Algonquian by John Eliot, the pioneer missionary to the Native Americans whose ministry Baxter praised highly.

Richard Baxter was soon a role model for Puritan pastors everywhere.

A wider parish

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Baxter emerged as the leader among conservative Puritans and with them was ejected from his pulpit (see p. 38). But for Baxter this was an opportunity to embrace all of England as his “parish,” since by then he was one of the most sought-after writers of the day. Living in or near London, he published another 87 books, ranging from a defense of nonconformity to pleas for church unity, from a highly complex systematic theology to a huge compendium of Christian ethics. He was one of the first Protestants to produce a paraphrase of the New Testament, which aimed for “plainness and brevity” and included both doctrinal notes for younger scholars and ministers and practical notes for use at the “family altar.”

Because books had played a key role in his own Christian growth, he promoted the kind of reading that instructs and nurtures. He donated a number of books to the fledgling Harvard College, although in a letter to a colleague, Baxter wrote that he would rather his books be “carried on peddler’s backpacks” than kept in “learned men’s libraries.” He knew that while the poor were the very ones who could reap the most spiritual benefit from his writings, they could not afford the cost of books. So he arranged with his publisher that he would receive every tenth copy printed in lieu of royalties—copies he then distributed free. He also spent a good portion of his income buying Bibles for the poor.

Heavenly minded for earthly good

Despite his success as a pastor, a writer, and a leader, Baxter’s life was not without its share of afflictions and setbacks. Ironically, his personality was not as suited to peacemaking as his convictions were. The same passion and straight-talking honesty that made him such an effective pastor often ended up causing insult and division in other spheres. A teacher by nature, Baxter could never seem to take off his schoolmaster’s hat when relating to his peers. His long speeches before the bishops at the Savoy Conference—a failed attempt to revise the Prayer Book according to Puritan standards—only served to bore his listeners.

His lifelong striving for a peaceful middle ground meant that he was often misunderstood by people at both ends of the spectrum. He endured two prison sentences and caught flak from some Puritans for advocating “occasional conformity”—attending weekly service at the local Anglican church and sometimes celebrating the Eucharist, sometimes not. He also fumbled theologically by coming up with his own doctrine of justification which he believed avoided the extremes of Calvinism and Arminianism. His contemporaries observed, however, that it came dangerously close to “justification by works.” For his high-church persecutors, he was too Puritan. For some of his fellow nonconformists, he was not Puritan enough.

Frequently believing himself at death’s door because of his many illnesses, Baxter overcame disappointing circ*mstances by meditating on the heavenly reality to come. In The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, he showed how reflecting upon the “excellency and certainty” of heaven could anchor and shape one’s earthly sojourn. One particular paragraph from his Dying Thoughts on Philippians 1:23 captures Baxter’s philosophy:

My Lord, I have nothing to do in this World, but to seek and serve thee; I have nothing to do with a Heart and its affections, but to breathe after thee. I have nothing to do with my Tongue and Pen, but to speak to thee, and for thee, and to publish thy Glory and thy Will. What have I to do with all my Reputation, and Interest in my Friends, but to increase thy Church, and propagate thy holy Truth and Service? What have I to do with my remaining Time, even these last and languishing hours, but to look up unto thee, and wait for thy Grace, and thy Salvation?

Baxter lived until age 76, considerably longer than he had expected. He died December 8, 1691, two years after the Act of Toleration put an end to persecution and guaranteed freedom of worship for Puritans. The huge funeral procession, attended by people of all ranks and including Anglicans as well as nonconformists, foreshadowed another ecumenical gathering nearly 200 years later at the unveiling of the Baxter statue in Kidderminster.

But such public accolades would not have been to Baxter’s taste. In his funeral sermon, William Bates recalled the famous Puritan leader’s characteristic humility: When a friend was “comforting him with the remembrance of the good many had received by his preaching and Writings, he said, I was but a Pen in God’s hand, and what praise is due to a Pen?“

Paul C. H. Lim is associate professor of historical and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Reaching the Kidderminster Kids

by Craig A. Smith

In the preface of his book Compassionate Counsel to All Young Men, Baxter confessed that “in the place where God most blessed my labours at Kidderminster, my first and greatest success was upon the youth.” Baxter had a threefold strategy for reaching the young people.

First, Baxter started the equivalent of a youth group. No social events! Just three hours together once a week on Saturday evening in various homes to pray and to prepare themselves for the following Lord’s Day.

Second, he taught the kids through weekly family conferences. He spoke first to the children, whom he then sent out of the room while he addressed the adults. His approach was direct, discussing matters of their salvation. His method, which he outlined in his book The Catechising of Families, was prescriptive, believing that everyone needs to be taught what they are, from where they are, for what purpose they have been made, and what means must be used to attain this goal. Baxter focused on the family because he saw its role as a school or church, to train up a succession of people to follow God’s calling for their good and the good of the community.

Third, he dedicated one of his Thursday lectures every month to speak to the youth and those who educated them because he judged that “the work of educating youth aright [was] one half of the great business of man’s life.”

So important was reaching the young people to Baxter that he concluded: “There is no man that ever understood the interest of mankind, of families, cities, kingdoms, churches, and of Jesus Christ the King and Saviour, but he must needs know that the right instruction, education, and sanctification of youth, is of unspeakable consequence to them all.”

Craig A. Smith, lecturer in New Testament at Trinity College, Bristol

Sunday Morning with the Puritans

by Michael Lawrence

Devised by the Westminster Assembly in 1643, “The Directory for the Publick Worship of God” was the Puritans’ attempt to reform the Prayer Book liturgy, and many pastors followed its guidelines. Had the Puritans printed church bulletins, one might have looked something like this.

Call to WorshipMany churchgoers used Sunday not only to worship, but to chat with friends and neighbors, conduct business, or catch up on sleep. Thus the Directory exhorts the people “wholly to attend upon [the publick worship] … forbearing to read [other things] … and abstaining from all private whisperings, conferences … as also from all gazing, sleeping and other indecent behavior.”

Prayer of Invocation, Praise and Illumination

Old Testament Reading: Haggai 2

Singing of a Psalm

New Testament Reading: Hebrews 12Ignorance of the Bible was a deep concern of the Puritans. “[T]hat the people may be better acquainted with the whole body of the scriptures” they read “one chapter of each Testament … at every meeting.”

Prayer of Confession and Petition

Sermon: “Christ above Moses” (Heb. 12:25-29)This was the centerpiece of Puritan worship. Puritan pastors were typically given one or even two turns of the hourglass. And as today, a good preacher could draw large crowds, not only from his own village but from distant towns.

Prayer of Thanksgiving and ApplicationUnlike the Book of Common Prayer, which provided set forms that the priest and people recited, the Directory simply indicated the subjects to be addressed in prayer. The minister could then either write his own prayers or pray extemporaneously.

The Lord’s Prayer

Singing of a PsalmPuritans sang only Psalms—no hymns—and without instrumental accompaniment. But don’t imagine a boring monotone. It was said you could hear a Puritan church before you saw it, both because of the singing and the vocal agreement in prayer.

Benediction

Announcements:Catechism class will meet this afternoon at 2 p.m. at the pastor’s house.

The church dogwhipper requests that you please assist him in his duties by keeping the churchyard gate shut, as curs, sows, and geese are unseemly in the publick worship.

Michael Lawrence, Associate Pastor of Capital Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Being asked to review a book by an economist that is 500 pages long and has over 1,000 endnotes is an unusual event in today’s publishing world. Academic economists mostly write articles; few write books; even fewer write books the scope of Benjamin F. Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Friedman is Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, and he merits the old-fashioned title, “Professor of Political Economy.” Like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall before him, Friedman takes readers far beyond the neoclassical paradigm and econometrics of contemporary economics and instead weaves a remarkable tapestry of economics, history, and politics, with theology and psychology also sewn in. So the question is: what does the resulting fabric look like?

The backdrop of the tapestry is the proposition that economic growth is a good thing. This proposition probably bears repeating because the majority of books written today (certainly outside the field of economics) contend that economic growth is a bad thing. But stitched into Friedman’s contrarian backdrop are two different analytical threads that are rarely sewn together. The first is that growth is good because it means more goods and services. The second is that growth is good because it generates morality.

The first thread in Friedman’s analysis is the conventional wisdom in economics. This idea goes back to Adam Smith: the wealth of a nation consists of its goods and services, not its gold. Today, an economics teacher might simply state what seems obvious (at least to economists): expanding a consumer’s choice set necessarily makes the consumer better off (or at least no worse off, since the consumer can always choose the original choice set).

Today the conventional wisdom is often criticized. At one time, those opposed to what Adam Smith called the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” faulted the market system for producing too little. That was the old-fashioned case against capitalism. Today, anti-growth environmentalists and small-is-beautiful advocates fault the market system for producing too many goods and services. Once scarcity was bad. Now abundance is. Once the market system provided too few choices; now it produces too many.1

The second thread in Friedman’s analysis is that people generally behave in a more civilized and ethical fashion when economic times are good. As Friedman puts it, “Economic growth—meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens—more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” In short, economic growth “not only relies upon moral impetus, it has positive moral consequences.”

Just as opponents of economic growth often couch their objections in moral terms, so Friedman makes the case for economic growth in moral terms, arguing (from history and contemporary data) that the moral positives of growth outweigh the moral negatives. Economic textbooks focus on the GDP data and personal income figures of a nation. Friedman calls attention to unpriced benefits that accompany economic growth, such as greater tolerance and the extension of democracy.

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is no libertarian tract. Stitched into the tapestry that Friedman weaves is a generous role for government through taxation, environmental protection, and welfare provisions. Benjamin Friedman is not to be confused with Milton Friedman. But both Friedmans can restrain their enthusiasm for the anti-growth protesters whose policies would deprive others of higher incomes, more education, more employment opportunities, as well as the prospect of a more humane and democratic society that is derivative of economic growth.

Friedman begins with an intellectual history of the idea of progress itself. Aristotle, Descartes, Smith, Turgot, Rousseau, Comte, Calvin, the Puritans, Augustine, Burnet, Edwards, Montesquieu, Carlyle, Ruskin, Marx and Engels, they are all here and more to boot. In Friedman’s tour through the history of ideas, one is reminded that while there may be some new things under the sun, the writer of Ecclesiastes was not far from the mark: there is not a whole lot that is new.

Adam Smith wrote, “Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour.” This is Friedman’s point. He quotes Comte: “all human progress, political, moral or intellectual, is inseparable from material progression,” which is a variation on Friedman’s thesis as well.

Critics of Friedman’s argument (that growth is good) did not arrive upon the scene in the 1970s with the small-is-beautiful counterculture. More than a century earlier, Carlyle wrote with distaste about the “cash nexus” that connected people in a market economy. John Ruskin, had he lived long enough, presumably would not even have taken a train to Davos to join the anti-free trade protesters in Switzerland. He considered train travel not “traveling at all; it is merely ‘being sent’ to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.” What Ruskin would have thought about air travel in and out of LaGuardia, O’Hare, and Atlanta-Hartsfield today we can well imagine.

As I read Friedman’s book, I wondered how many of my colleagues in the dismal science could differentiate between premillenialism and postmillenialism. Friedman can, and shows why it is important. Indeed, religion is important, if not central, to his survey of the idea of progress. (Friedman thanks William Hutchison at the Harvard Divinity School for assisting him in his research.)

The historical core of Friedman’s book (chapters 5-8) involves a retelling of U.S. history (primarily from 1865 on), with an eye to whether periods of growth had positive moral consequences and periods of stagnation had negative moral consequences. These chapters are a mix of economic history and political history. (A reader unacquainted with U.S. history during this period would find these chapters an efficient way to become educated.) To further buttress his hypothesis, Friedman (in chapters 9-11) examines economic and moral trends England, France, and Germany.

Impatient readers may jump to chapter 12, “Economics and Politics in the Developing World,” where Friedman shows that his hypothesis about the positive relationship between economic growth and morality is not confined to the Western world. Data shown in this chapter reveal that economic growth and political freedom are related, with some exceptions (such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). Friedman also reminds us that, because of the phenomenon of compound interest, policies that bring about only modest changes in economic growth rates can generate sizable gains in living conditions over time.

Friedman’s discussion of international trade (especially in chapter 14, “Growth and Equality”) is a thoughtful response to the opponents of globalization. Most economists have long known that the poorest countries typically are the ones with the least amount of trade with other countries, undercutting the argument that trade extracts wealth from underdeveloped countries and transfers it to the West. Friedman’s analysis and evidence is in the mainstream. Regarding child labor, he concludes: “The evidence . . . shows that most child labor . . . is used not in manufacturing, but in agriculture, where the work is harder and the opportunities for schooling even more limited.” As a consequence, Western-imposed restrictions on child labor may have perverse consequences; indeed, economies that trade tend to have less child labor. Friedman concludes that globalization benefits countries that trade. The recent strategy of China and India to open their borders will do far more to help their citizens than the strategy of Myanmar and North Korea to isolate themselves from trade.

Friedman also devotes a chapter to economic growth and environmental issues (chapter 15), which is a readable and persuasive exposition of the “Kuznets curve” (that economic growth reduces, not increases, environmental degradation). It was no surprise to most economists that countries behind the Iron Curtain had low environmental quality: their national incomes were low. This chapter is full of fun facts: did you know that forests in the U.S. now contain 40 percent more wood than fifty years ago? Simon Kuznets would have been pleased.

The final chapter is a summing up, with a prescription for advancing economic growth and avoiding stagnation. Once again, it is evident that Benjamin Friedman is not Milton Friedman. The policy medicine to promote economic growth and prevent stagnation calls not only for the invisible hand of the market but the visible hand of government intervention. I was disappointed to see Friedman avoid discussion of the flat tax, even as more and more countries adopt this option (our tax code is now three times the length of the King James Version of the Bible). And in stressing the importance of educational opportunities, Friedman does not clearly endorse the merits of vouchers and school choice.

Only in rare circ*mstances is a reviewer pleased with every page of a book. Let me close with three quibbles about The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

Most readers of Books & Culture would applaud Friedman’s use of religious scholarship and welcome his emphasis on the importance of religion in the promotion of economic change; and most readers of this journal would commend an economist who cites John Calvin, Richard Baxter, Saint Augustine, and Saint Jerome, among others. And I do too. Still, it was (for me) disconcerting that among the more than 1,000 endnotes, there was no reference to the writings of E. Calvin Beisner, Brian Griffiths, Donald A. Hay, Paul Heyne, Peter J. Hill, John D. Mason, Ronald H. Nash, Michael Novak, Ronald J. Sider, Robert A. Sirico, and other Christian scholars who have made important contributions to the study of the morality of markets and economic growth. Their inclusion would have meant more text and more footnotes, to be sure. But I was left wondering whether the Harvard Divinity School library lacked the output of these authors.

My second quibble involves the economics of public choice, or rather the lack of its influence in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Friedman writes as an economist who, at least implicitly, understands the Adamic Fall. Friedman is well acquainted with the evils of racism, intolerance, human deprivation, and want. He obviously believes that economic growth will thwart or at least reduce these evils. But Friedman’s enthusiasm for some government prescriptives seems to ignore the prospect of the Fall affecting governments, or the representatives of government. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is written almost as though the economic field of Public Choice did not exist. Public Choice is that field of economics that examines the behavior of governments through the rational actor model. The work of James M. Buchanan, Mancur Olson, George J. Stigler, Gordon Tullock, and Barry Weingast (and others) about how governments work (and don’t work) is neglected here (see p. 336 for an exception). My preference would have been to have fewer pages devoted (say) to the history of the New Deal and more wrestling with how governments can be induced to promote growth, instead of engage in rent-seeking activity.

My last quibble is with Friedman’s moral taxonomy.

I do not doubt for a moment that as incomes rise and unemployment falls, there will be less racial discrimination, and I would agree with Friedman in a heartbeat that this would be a desirable cause-and-effect consequence of economic growth. But some of his moral categories seem tethered to the academic environs of life in Cambridge rather than life in other parts of the country. For example, Friedman seems to correlate anti-immigration views with moral backwardness. I am unpersuaded. My hunch is that farmers and ranchers in Cochise County, Arizona may not be opposed to Mexican immigrants because of racial prejudice or xenophobia. They would be opposed to 3,000 people crossing into their county every night, cutting their fences, killing their livestock, and trampling their fields whether the interlopers were Mexicans or members of the Harvard faculty.

But let me state what I trust is obvious: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is an important book on an important subject. Alfred Marshall, the great Cambridge economist of an earlier generation, left the study of mathematics as a young man and turned to economics because he wanted to help the poor. Benjamin Friedman continues in this grain. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth deserves to be widely read, and no doubt will be. The next time the world’s capitalists and the anti-capitalist protesters gather in Davos, Freidman’s book could be distributed and read with profit by those in the streets and those in the conference rooms.

Kenneth G. Elzinga is Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia.

1. Readers of Books & Culture may recall the reviews of Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, and Edlar Shafir, ed., Preference, Belief, and Similarity: Selected Writings of Amos Tversky, by Andrew P. Morriss (July/August 2005) on modern objections to large choice sets. Friedman is more concerned about people who have too few choices, not too many.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

He’s old now, largely forgotten, his work rarely seen outside a few classrooms. For a very long time, however, from the mid-1950s to the early ’80s, no moviemaker anywhere commanded more attention, at least among film snoots, intellectuals, and, oddly, churchgoers, or at least the headier among them. For one, he was the master, the Man, the Swedish filmmaker whose work was prolific, stylistically bold, and always compelling, even haunting, albeit sometimes cryptic. Just about single-handedly, Ingmar Bergman exalted cinema into a searing, accessible, psycho-philosophical crucible, imbuing the medium with dead-serious intellectual and religious freight. More than that, though, especially for religious folk, what distinguished him in film after film was his painstaking (and painful) display of the death-throes of God in Western culture and, no less so, in his own dire soul. It is perhaps not too much to say that Bergman, born heavy-duty Lutheran, thrashed out for all to see both the before and the after of non-belief. After all, this is the fellow who wrote and directed films of deep-down faith angst, all riveting still, like The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978), and a dozen others of equal worth but less fame. And then, since 1982 and his most celebrated film, the strangely sentimental Fanny and Alexander, a long silence. Only very occasionally has a screenplay borne the name Ingmar Bergman, and those he has given only to trusted others. (In the meanwhile, Bergman returned to the theater to direct more than twenty plays.)

Then, at 87, surprise, along comes another Bergman film, Saraband, the whole thing, both writing and directing, done by the magician himself. Released two years ago in his native Sweden, the film returns to characters whose messy divorce and afterlife Bergman scrutinized thirty years before in the five-hour Swedish television series Scenes from a Marriage (1973; later cut in half for movie houses). Long before reality TV or sagas on the home-life of gangsters and undertakers, Bergman inspected a single marriage for fissures that break into chasms of hostility. As for the sequel, well, the praise has been lavish: “vital … magnificent” (Phillip Lopate, Film Comment); “powerful and poignant” (Richard Corliss, Time); “marvelous” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times); and “profoundly affecting … sublime” (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal). Not bad for an old guy.

Which means, happily, that this is the very same Bergman, in the days after the Fall and after Christendom, painting portraits of bereft, comfortless humanity as it lurches about trying to recoup its inestimable losses. To be sure, the one part of Lutheranism Bergman never discarded was its stringent realism about human nature (nor did witnessing his parents’ marriage, his father a noted preacher, do much to cheer him up; Bergman himself was married five times). But ah, what bracing stuff this is, Bergman as moralist, turning once again with unflinching, dead-honest candor to regard a species hell-bent on self-deception, narcissism, avidity, and plain old meanness.

No one gets off easy—no one. If Bergman is tough on the shortfalls of his pious elders, he is harder still on the f*ckless self-absorption of the new élites, the belief-less modernists of Bergman’s own sort, artists especially, who do no better than their parents, and usually a lot worse. Indeed, the predominant note in Bergman’s long career is one of pained amazement at what people do to each other in pursuit of they know not what. And amid their willy-nilly scramble to wring from life some measure of blessing, a secular grace, be it love, sex, smartness, art, or cool, these narcissistic latecomers appear to be as insensible of their own malice as they are of life’s limits. At least the bygone Christian vision reined in the worst when folks presumed they had something to be guilty about.

The men are weak, callous, or plainly cruel, such as Jan Rosenberg in Shame (1968), Andreas Winkelman in The Passion of Anna (1969), both played by the remarkable Max von Sydow, or Johan (Erland Josephson) in Saraband. Women by contrast usually seem lost or have about them some kernel of moral purity (many end up with the name Eva). In any case, even when the women rival men in their cruelty, Bergman seems to grasp the origins of their malice, except perhaps in the case of concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) in Autumn Sonata (1978), whose aestheticism shrivels her daughter’s body and soul, or Marianne (Lena Andre) in Faithless (2000, directed by Liv Ullmann, with a screenplay by Bergman), whose sexual perfidy demolishes the lives of all those she loves. And for this resolute moral inspection, Bergman’s remarkable style seems more than suited: chiseled scripts, close-ups aplenty, very long takes, structural disruption, and lush visual richness, even in the spare black-and-white films of his early days. Or, as Bergman himself put it in stating his preferences in film stories: “robust, direct, concrete, substantial, sensual.” And of course, not the least, for forty years the cinematography of Sven Nykvist has transfigured Bergman’s worlds not so much with radiance (though that is there) but with seriousness. What cinematographer Chris Menges says of his own aims describes Nykvist’s accomplishment: what “one tries to do is create light that glows—soft, hard, or whatever, but something that is believable, that perhaps has mystery in it.”

Most of Bergman’s notoriety derives not from his rep as a moralist but as cinema’s reverse pilgrim: from full-blown orthodoxy, albeit an uneasy faith, Bergman journeyed to an anguished atheism, one that has, in any case, clearly waned in recent years as Bergman, well into his seventies, examined again that amply troubled family crucible into which he was born. In fact, it is easy enough now to segment Bergman’s long career as a director and screenwriter, some sixty years, into three distinct phases. It is, all told, a pilgrim’s traverse, a long arc that has come to look more and more like a circle, one that, remarkably, given the measure of Bergman’s rejection, returns to the specifically Christian hope with which his mature work began.

That first phase started in earnest when Bergman had achieved sufficient commercial success that the Swedish film industry gave him carte blanche to make what he wanted. He had already written and directed films for ten years, beginning in his late twenties and averaging more than one film a year, but he was broke and close to giving up when Smiles for Summer Night (1955), a lusty but light-hearted sex comedy, hit gold in Sweden and won big at Cannes and elsewhere. (Yes, surprise, Bergman is a funny fellow.) With the new freedom this triumph gained for him, he chose to make The Seventh Seal (1957), which had its birth in a play written in student days. Visually lush and provocative, it remains one of the globe’s great films and perhaps the best religious film ever made.

Knight Antonious Block (Max von Sydow, 28 but looking a worn fifty, a face carved from wood, as Bergman has called it) returns to Sweden amid the Black Death after ten years in the Crusades. His soul sorely troubled, contesting as he is with death and doubt, Block wants belief and the love and hope it gives, but God is impalpable and, at best, remote: “Faith is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, however loudly you call.” Despite the travail of darkness, the witness of the sweet goodness of life and love intimate the healing that will come: for the dead, as one character puts it, “the rain washes their faces and cleans the salt of the tears from their cheeks.”

Then came Bergman’s great trilogy of affirmation, though the films grew increasingly severe: The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Winter Light (1963). These are harsh, even malignant worlds wherein the struggle to believe in a God of love becomes ever more daunting. Bergman refers to “God’s silence” and, worse still, to “an ugly, revolting … spider God” whose intent is to torment humankind (Winter Light). Nevertheless, affirmation comes, though it often does seem, as some critics insist, pat and tacked on. The exception is Winter Light, perhaps Bergman’s greatest film, in which a bitter, narcissistic cleric replaces one image of God—”an entirely private, fatherly god … who guaranteed me every imaginable security” with another, one who suffers for and with humankind so it might endure its anguish. To this end, Bergman marshals his full cinematic arsenal: a riveting, stripped-down screenplay, painterly composition, Sven Nykvist’s crystalline cinematography, and, of course, the really stunning performances that Bergman always extracts from his actors, in this case Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin.

By Bergman’s next film, The Silence (also released in 1963), an arduous Kafkaesque nightmare of alienation, he seemed to have altogether abandoned the possibility of God, and that largely because God seemed to have abandoned thirsty, bewildered humanity. For critics this confirmed Bergman as modernity’s cinematic prophet of angst and everlasting darkness, and for the next long phase of his career that label pretty much fit. In these films—with only a couple of exceptions—God is simply not on the chart, horizon, or anywhere; the very notion is for Bergman an imaginative blank. Through Persona (1966), Shame, The Passion of Anna, and many others to the end of his film directing career with Fanny and Alexander, Bergman displays the labyrinthine complexities of psyche and soul as they lurch toward others and their own intolerable selves, and never is the outcome cheery. Indeed, most people seem over-equipped with a nasty set of claws with which they, either inadvertently or intentionally, end up shredding others. That is true even in the present Saraband, wherein aged father and son still loathe each other with a sort of perverse perfection. The only moderately happy ending comes in the melodramatic Fanny and Alexander, where Bergman idealizes a cheerful bacchanalian tolerance as the cure for human maladies. As for religious belief, the usual take is that Bergman’s final comment is his portrait in Fanny of the sad*stic Lutheran bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö), whose deservedly hideous end makes hell redundant.

And yet, that critical judgment ignores persistent hints that even amid Bergman’s post-Christian sojourn, the question of belief was far from being settled. Moreover, Bergman’s screenplays of the 1990s, for a trilogy that explores his parents’ lives, reveal a remarkable third phase, one that is more than surprising—nothing less, in fact, than what seems a return home in thirst for a transcendent caritas that defeats strife, sorrow, and obscene death.

Evidence that Bergman had never discarded the possibility of belief as fully as many contended is ample. It is there, for example, on the edges of perhaps the bleakest of all his films, Shame, where venal Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) ponders by the body of a gentle and innocent farmer, a suicide from mistaken persecution for animal torture; above his bed, in stark counterpoint to the town and Rosenberg himself, hangs a portrait of Jesus walking among sheep. In Cries and Whispers, the dying agony of Agnes (Harriet Anderson), luminously devout, is tended by the immense compassion of similarly devout maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), both of whom are shown in contrast to Agnes’ two sophisticated but profoundly unhappy sisters. In the harrowing Autumn Sonata, Eva (Liv Ullmann), a country pastor’s wife, hosts her gadabout mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a renowned concert pianist. The two quarrel through a long night during which Eva spills a lifetime of grievances about lousy mothering, and the film ends with slight hope of reconciliation—save for Eva’s remorse and eloquent sense that a divine reality of love contests despair and death.

Bergman’s screenplays in the 1990s show a writer trying to decipher the riddle of himself, and in a very direct fashion at that. The first of these, Best Intentions (1992), three hours long in commercial release, recounts the courtship and early marriage of Bergman’s parents, from whom he was alienated. Sunday’s Children (1992), directed by son Daniel, depicts a day in the ten-year-old Bergman’s relationship with his father (Samuel Fröler), a prominent preacher and tender but volatile father whom the artist even as an old man himself is reluctant to forgive.

Last, and most telling, is the riveting Private Confessions, a recounting of his mother’s midlife infidelity with a seminary student. Anna (Pernilla August) is shown making five confessions in the film (the Swedish television version has six, as does Bergman’s novelization), three of which are to minister Uncle Jakob (von Sydow simply gets better with age). The ending that Ullman appended to the screenplay, one which Bergman first refused but eventually preferred to his own, shows belief embracing Anna, as she at long last allows the loving but severe hands of God, a central image in the film, to enfold her storehouse of frustration and unrequited longing.

In the film’s last sequence, a decade after her affair, Anna visits the dying Jakob and ends up partaking, reluctantly, in what looks to be Jakob’s last communion. There, belatedly, she again recognizes, amid his pain and vomit, his hands as God’s hands, which was indeed his very intention. And afterward, alone on the street, she recalls, smiling, his long-ago assertion that on occasion an unambiguous Love does indisputably enter history, as it did in the improbable emergence of the church itself. By such evidences of then and now, the embers of solace and hope light and warm the way of the desolate pilgrim.

To be sure, for Bergman belief is no larking song of triumph over despair. Rather, this is a desperate, hard-won turn, and it is necessarily, given Bergman’s dire sense of the world’s suffering, to a God of pity and consolation whose compassion mourns for the world and finally overcomes both the devastations that we do to each other and those that life itself bestows. Finally, then, Bergman acknowledges the mystery of the wild improbability of divine love, which is as it must seem from within human misery and through earth’s dark glass. In the end, though, as Private Confessions and even parts of Saraband suggest, Bergman himself confesses hope that God does fathom woe and lostness, does take all waste and sorrow into himself, and does finally, sooner or later, in infinite mercy, heal and make new all that is.

Roy M. Anker is professor of English at Calvin College and author most recently of Catching Light: Looking for God at the Movies (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Every now and then, I catch my more senior colleagues casting longing glances back to the public life of the Sixties, which, for all its asperities, exhibited more vibrancy than contemporary rhetorical culture. Several years ago, I began teaching at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and I recall vividly when one of my new colleagues showed me, with no little chagrin, a program of student papers for an annual academic fair on our campus. Despite our school’s legacy of neo-Calvinist transformationalism, which in the late Sixties was almost indistinguishable from a neo-Marxist social critique, most of these essays in the program represented politically conservative commitments. On another occasion, I heard a peer confess feeling disoriented upon seeing student residences dotted with Bush/Cheney signs on a campus that witnessed, thirty years back, Nixon burned in effigy.

When I ask students why they do protest so little, they reassure me that they write a lot of e-mail. Oh, and they cultivate blog presence, too. But it’s hard to be impressed with point-and-click activism. Thirty years ago, in protest of an administrative decision to scuttle the college’s adherence to a particular brand of neo-Calvinist thought, students from our school joined professors for a sit-in. When I told my students this story, one asked, “What’s a sit-in?”

I sound nostalgic and more than a little censorious. But I’m not trying to resuscitate protest rhetoric. A picket line in our cafeteria today would be as odd as those red-faced street preachers who used to point their bibles at our windshields. I am curious, though, about what this change means.

One place to start looking for an answer is a series of Notre Dame lectures by the late Wayne Booth, published in 1974 as Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent.1 Booth’s death this past October prompts a reexamination of his depiction of the rhetorical culture of the Sixties and his intuition that student rhetoric anticipates the discourse of the broader culture.

As a University of Chicago dean at the height of that turbulent decade, Booth stood between administrative rationalists and student ranters. These opposing sides, he argued, shared an essentially religious commitment to the segregation of fact from value. He could find no more articulate advocate for this divide than the public intellectual Bertrand Russell, “perhaps the last and greatest modernist to embody both extremes of the creed.” Russell, in other words, managed to speak for both sides of the divide—the champions of “fact” and the champions of “value”—because both were willing to defer to his faith in critical doubt—i.e., his insistence that mind, world, and knowledge can be reduced to what can be known by science. Buy into Russell’s dogma that we only know for sure what we can’t doubt, and here’s the insight you’re left with, Booth concluded: “I can only trick you, or force you, or blackmail you, or shoot you—and thus change your mind permanently.”

Booth’s counter was to doubt the doubters—in hopes, perhaps, that two negatives would undo a positivist. Watch, for instance, how he (Q) jabbed questions into a passage from Russell’s What I Believe (R):

R: “Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature.”
Q: I agree, but this seems to me to be precisely what you deny when you choose to rule out all of man’s values as irrelevant to Nature.
R: “His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motion of stars and atoms.”
Q: Why? What kind of laws? The laws—no doubt extremely general—of Supreme Being? You have rejected those. The law of gravity? Of chemical combination? You have made a huge leap here. …
R: “Of this physical world, uninteresting in itself, Man is a part.”
Q: The original proposition reasserted and still unproved.
R: “His body, like other matter, is composed of electrons and protons, which, so far as we know, obey the same laws as those now forming part of animals or plants.”
Q: So far as we know, in your sense, we can also say that they don’t.
R: “There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing.”
Q: Why? Let’s see one. And what about psychology and politics and ethics?
R: “And it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken.”
Q: Why? What a curious inversion of Pascal we have here!

But Booth did more than scrape the skeptics. He built a kind of transcendental argument based on what he took to be indisputable about the nature of the person: “Man is essentially, we are now saying, a self-making-and-remaking, symbol-manipulating creature, an exchanger of information, a communicator, a persuader and manipulator, an inquirer.” If this is true to human experience, then even “in a time when ‘everyone believes’ that ‘there are no shared values any more,’ ” our nature requires adherence to one “firm public value”: that we ought to engage with each other argumentatively. John Lennon’s lyrics, Vietnam protests, and Auden’s poetry are thus just as important as academic papers, logical arguments, and scientific formulae. All can be instances of the rhetoric of assent.2

Some variation on this theme continued to be integral to Booth’s work even up to his final book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.3 In what follows, I’d like to critique an omission in this book (as representative of an omission in the whole of his work), but I find that criticism daunting to mount, not only because I admire him so much, but also because he has, in a way, anticipated my criticism: “I can only answer, ‘Sorry, but did your last short book cover everything?'” At times, his book does read like a short course on the Rhetoric of Everything. From the history of rhetorical theory, to the contemporary state of rhetoric in education, politics, and media, to a “rheterology” of science and religion, the book frames “Listening Rhetoric” in a way deftly helpful for pastors, teachers, media practitioners, and anybody else interested in the “art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse.” One chief obstacle to such discovery and improvement is what he called “rhetrickery,” a sophistic vice whose origin Booth traced to the dualism he had explored some thirty years back in Russell’s rhetoric.

But although Booth’s long argument with modernism has helped to disrupt the dualism between romanticism and rationalism, anyone who pays much attention to our public discourse today has to wonder about the persistence of the fact/value divide. There are some continuities: as in Booth’s day, we are still long on aspirate assertion, short on clearly consonanted reasons. But more and more, our dominant dualism emerges between preference and procedure. When I ask my students why they don’t protest administrative missteps, they tug down their designer ball-caps and say they’re not sure what channels to use. This delicate attention to procedure would, to put the matter gently, strike students of the Sixties as odd. But even more significantly, it has a privatistic momentum. The old fact/value divide compelled people to pit “What is rational?” against “What do I feel?”—a dualism that is at least half public. Today, the tension is between the questions, “What do I want?” and “How do I get it?” Or, better, “What should I wear?” and “Do you take Discover?”

Somebody ought to write Postmodern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, this time critiquing a representative intellectual for our time. Any takers for Richard Rorty? Dubbed by Harold Bloom “the most interesting philosopher in the world today,” Rorty, like Russell, is an adroit rhetorician capable of speaking to non-philosophical audiences. But unlike Russell, whose rhetorical notions encouraged the noisy but sometimes necessary activism of the Sixties, Rorty’s discourse tends toward the privatistic. He would strenuously object to this characterization, noting that he has spent a great deal of ink on cultivating public-mindedness in such works as Achieving Our Country. But he brackets to private life such concerns as religion, sexuality, and other projects of self-perfection. This bracketing gives the American experiment the feel of a satellite dish network: politics becomes the technical procedure to keep the satellite online, so we can all go home and watch what we want.

At times, nonetheless, Rorty sounds very much like a rhetor of assent. Indeed, Booth included him among “those who have taught me a lot about rhetoric, even when I sometimes disagreed with them.”4 Furthermore, Rorty’s construction of a dialogue with Steven Weinberg sounds like Booth’s dialogue with Russell. Weinberg, one of today’s great preachers of the gospel of objectivity, insists that there is as much correspondence between scientific laws and nature as there is between your insistence that a stone in your backyard is objectively heavy and the stone’s “actual” heaviness. Give an ear to Rorty’s response:

But ask yourself, common reader, in your capacity as everyday speaker about rocks, whether you recognize anything of the sort. If you do, we philosophers would be grateful for some details. Do both the subject and the predicate of your sentences about rocks (“This rock is hard to move,” say) stand in such a relation of correspondence? Are you sure that hard-to-moveness is really an aspect of objective reality? It’s not hard for some of your neighbors to move, after all. Doesn’t that make it an aspect of only subjective reality?

Or is it that the whole sentence stands in one-to-one correspondence to a single aspect of objective reality? Which aspect is that? The rock? Or the rock in its context, as obstacle to your gardening endeavours? What is an “aspect” anyway? The way something looks in a certain context? Aren’t some contexts more objective than others? …

I can come up with conundrums like this for a long time, but I suspect that Weinberg would not see the point of my raising any of them. The difference between us is that I am in the philosophy business and he is not. I concoct and hash over conundrums like that for a living.5

You may be beginning to understand why Booth refers to Rorty as “excessively relativistic,” when passages like this one, with its seemingly irresistible sequence of questions, offer more velocity than validity. Here is no inquiry to be considered, only a momentum to be admired—apparently on the grounds that clever performance achieves solidarity quicker than truth claims.6 But what else is there besides performance when, as Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, language has no access to truth, the self has no identifiable nature, and society has no warrantable goal but to avoid causing pain?7

Thirty years ago, on the very day my fellow professors and their students desecrated Nixon’s image, the Ladies Guild decided to plant petunias on our campus. It must have looked like a Neil Simon troupe stumbling onstage during the second act of The Crucible. But the story also suggests that there was a time when the line between the politics and petunias (or, as Rorty’s essay has it, between “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”) was more sharply drawn than it is now. We’re not likely to see such back-to-back performances of beautification and protest on our campus today, because politics and petunias have, if not exactly kissed, at least become indistinguishable from each other. Not that there are fewer performances—only that they now fold together so well that they appear seamless. As sociologists Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst argue, our mass-mediated lives, lined with speakers and screens, encourage us to construe public life as a sequence of performances in which “we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time.” In other words, the diffusion of our mediascape wreaks havoc with once tidy modernist dualisms, such as the public/private divide: “Performances for diffused audiences are public and private. Indeed, they erode the difference between the two.”8

Rhetorical criticism of Rorty’s performances might suggest a different set of questions than the ones Booth raised about Russell. In comparison with students of the Sixties, students today may look indolent, apathetic, and egocentric. But what if their classroom quiescence is actually a species of what speech therapists call topophobia, the fear of speaking in public? What if Rorty’s garrulity is only the strange obverse of a pervasively felt stage fright?9

I listen to students for a living, as they talk in the classroom, on the sidewalk, at the coffee shop. Their vocal quality is sibilant, often nasal, with plenty of back-of-the-throat fry. Few students use their chest cavity for resonation. They often qualify their own remarks, deprecate themselves, leave sentences unfinished. Their favorite tag is some variation on “You know what I mean?” Now, you could say that all these apparently modest habits of discourse suggest a mastery of the rhetoric of assent. But it sounds to me like a loss of rhetorical nerve, as if students have picked up Booth’s inflections but not his convictions. They sound like actors who have mastered a dialect but can’t remember their lines. Call it the rhetoric of accent: slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to shrug.

Could we tinker with Booth’s rhetoric of assent to help out the topophobics? Stephen Webb has argued that stage fright is a deeply theological issue, so for starters let’s think about Booth’s theology. He identified himself as “a lifetime pursuer of religious truth” and described his journey “beginning as a devout orthodox Mormon, through increasing doubt to professed atheism, to a recovery of religious belief that some might call mere pantheism, or perhaps Deism.”10 At first blow, these two theological descriptors, one transcendent and one immanent, appear opposed. But he was right to insist upon the importance of both. “Scores of books have reported the quest for a final theory that will explain everything. Why? Because ‘everything’ is really there, waiting to be explained—and it is also here, supporting our pursuit of it.” But what is neither here nor there, Booth thought, is a personal God. Instead he preached a god term, helpful for instilling modesty in people who talk too much, but not finally adequate for people who can’t manage to talk at all.11 What John Updike somewhere describes as our frail and faltering being may well require not just a god term but a Word who, in all eloquent grace and outspoken truth, is God coming to terms with us.

Craig Mattson is associate professor of Communication Arts at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois.

1. Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974).

2. These discourses—Lennon’s lyrics, for example—are referred to by John Hammerback, one of Booth’s careful readers, as “reconstitutive rhetoric”—conversionist discourse that works as much by identification and irony as by logic and empirical demonstration. Hammerback draws heavily on Booth (in conjunction with Kenneth Burke and Edwin Black) in developing a model of reconstitutive rhetoric that seeks to explain how certain rhetorics which, by every modernist light, should have failed, nonetheless succeeded. His model posits that some people, when addressed by convincing discourse, don’t just change their minds—they change their identities. See John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetorical Legacy,” The Southern Communication Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Summer, 1999), pp. 323-332.

3. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (Blackwell, 2004).

4. Booth, Rhetoric of Rhetoric, p. 82–83.

5. Richard Rorty, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks, and the Laws of Physics,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 1999), pp. 184-85.

6. Booth would also want to point out that such a momentum is hardly as overwhelming as it might appear at first. Rorty assumes that if the truth cannot be found to exactly correspond to our statements than the truth must not be findable at all—a dogma Booth deconstructed for more than thirty years.

7. Rorty’s problem may not be merely epistemological but also “acoustemological,” to use Stephen Webb’s neologism from The Divine Voice (Brazos, 2004), which I reviewed in the May/June 2005 B&C. Booth, whose practice of “Listening Rhetoric” makes him attentive to so many aspects of public discourse, is peculiarly unobservant when it comes to the sound of talk. But aurality may be especially important in the Rortyan passage cited above. Rorty cleverly ticks questions off in a list of “conundrums,” but he sounds bored, almost as if he were reading the passage over an intercom. C. S. Lewis accused moderns of being hollow-chested. This discourse sounds hollow-voiced.

8. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998), p. 73, 76.

9. Stephen Webb is helpful again: “Displaced, uprooted, and detached from traditional communities, we often do not know what to say when we open our mouth.” The Divine Voice, p. 77.

10. Rhetoric of Rhetoric, p. 160.

11. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 275-276. A “god term” is our peculiarly human quest for “pure persuasion, absolute communication, beseechment for itself alone, praise and blame so universalized as to have no assignable physical object”—whatever, in short, we persistently name as our highest good.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A dedicated, manic assassin of the reputation of the Jews and of Israel, Norman Finkelstein is much admired by college student audiences for his lively platform presence and his snarling, late-night comic style. The Finkelstein method (which brings the audiences to his lectures) is to hold up to ridicule individual pro-Israel polemicists by endless nitpicking about references that go wrong or about anomalies and contradictions between and among their many published statements in many different times and places. The entire lifetime record of the published author is picked over for anomalies, contradictions, and food for tu quoque. Finkelstein brings a virtual wheelbarrow of documented errors onto the platform and pours it out, to the delight of the audience, as proof that the general truths from which his adversary draws his scholarly or political commitments have, before your very eyes, been proved to be “myths,” “frauds,” and “hoaxes.”

No serious person can deny the doggedness of Finkelstein’s pursuit down the path from footnote to footnote. The effect can be quite chilling, especially when it comes home to the vulnerable celebrity-polemicists such as Alan Dershowitz and various spokesmen for the Anti-Defamation League or the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dershowitz gets the full Finkelstein treatment in the present book; in fact, the bulk of it is a rehash of the record of Finkelstein’s several assaults on Dershowitz’s uneven polemics. The real scholars, producers of the unanswerable accounts which draw upon documents in all the relevant languages, don’t get noticed—except (for example) in a footnote about the reigning master of Middle East History, Bernard Lewis, where in the tu quoque mode, a reference appears to a remotely relevant matter (Lewis’ judgment on the historicity of the Armenian massacre). There are no references to any of my three published scholarly books on matters very germane to Finkelstein’s apologetics. But then, I am being petty.

Anyone whose familiarity with the historical record is second- or third-hand is almost bound to carry away from these lively performances the impression that he has just seen reduced to ruins the truth upon which the other side (the Jews, Israel, and the friends of both) depends—that all that massive detail about discrepancies in the references, all that gotcha, adds up to demolition of historical truth.

Let me note a few departures from reality (in order of occurrence): The opening line of Finkelstein’s book is about Joan Peters’ 1984 book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, which we are immediately told is now universally dismissed as “a gigantic hoax.” In fact, the first reviewers of that book noted the whiff of scissors-and-paste about it but welcomed it rightly as providing for general readers proof of the fallacy of Palestinian nationhood. Meanwhile, although other scholars have fleshed out the same theme with more accurately reported documentation, Peters’ book remains a valuable summary vindication of the observation (sustained by all the travel literature and all the governmental surveys, all the royal commissions and all the scientific demographic and topographic studies) that it was the success of the Zionist experiment in that part of the Ottoman Empire that created the basis for the development of economic life. And it was this success that drew an adequate population base (including tens of thousands of Arabs from nearby regions) to lay the foundations for partition of the region and the eventual erection on the site of two mutually respectful political entities: a Jewish State and another Arab State (Jordan, four times the size of Israel, having already been carved from the mandate).

Everything about the past that Palestinians believe they cannot live with Finkelstein dismisses as “hoary Zionist myths,” “propaganda,” or “fairy tales.”

Finkelstein shows no familiarity with the monumental scientific studies of the region conducted in the 1930s by Walter Lowdermilk, Assistant Chief of the Soil Conservation Division of the Department of Agriculture in the Roosevelt Administration, housed today in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. These proved irrefutably that centuries of absence of adequate population had led to the degradation of the soil, and that the beginning of its restoration traces to Jewish colonization. Nor does Finkelstein make reference to any of the other scientific studies, including those commissioned by the Mandate Authority in the inter-war years, which document the same conspicuous truth. If he has heard of these studies, Finkelstein is suppressing knowledge of them; if he has not, he stands in contempt of historical record and scientific fact.

Then comes Finkelstein’s blanket denial that any substantial part of the population of the region in pre-Mandate days was other than “indigenous”—a term which he uses exactly as it is used of North American first nations. This assertion stands together with another: that what was indigenous was Arab. The reality (again borne out by all the Ottoman documents, all the Royal Commissions and other scientific studies of the time as well as the memoirs and reports of all the missionaries) is that many races besides the Arabs (Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and many descended from blocs of inhabitants transferred from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkan peoples) lived in Palestine when the Jewish settlers arrived in the mid-19th century. In the face of all this, Finkelstein simply posits that Palestine and the Palestinians have always been exclusively Arab.

Throughout the book we find evidence that Finkelstein has bought, kit-and-kaboodle, the PLO’s fantastic anti-history: the Jews did not originate there four thousand years ago, they wandered in somewhere along the line unnoticed by History, but were thrown out by the Romans upon the destruction of the Second Temple two thousand years ago; none were to be found thereafter until after the modern Zionists, abetted by cynical British imperialists, began their usurpation of the land. The record of history and the methods of history count for nothing in this company. Everything about the past that Palestinians believe they cannot live with Finkelstein dismisses as “hoary Zionist myths,” “propaganda,” or “fairy tales.”

Then we have the assertion that “it is today conceded by all serious scholars” that the Arab radio broadcasts of 1947–1948, urging local Arabs to flee, are “a Zionist fabrication.” No, not all serious historians have conceded this point; indeed, even memoirs of Arab statesmen of the time make reference to the broadcasts. Ditto Finkelstein’s assertion of undisputed consensus for the claim “that the Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed in 1948.” All the major details of the story leading to the success of the Jewish struggle to achieve their homeland with the approval of the United Nations are tossed aside as “myths . … Zionist fabrications,” which persist, we are told, only because most people have read the book Exodus by Leon Uris, or have seen the sentimental movie based upon it.

The same “unqualified consensus,” Finkelstein assures us, maintains that “Palestinian detainees have been systematically ill treated and tortured, the total number now reaching probably tens of thousands.” Among many other difficulties with this assertion, there is no reference at all in these pages to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners imprisoned as terrorists, many of them multiple-murderers of Israeli citizens, who have been released and restored to the Palestinian Authority in the misguided hope of winning points with American and world opinion. Most of these have evidently resumed their careers as assassins.

But the epitome of chutzpah is Finkelstein’s breathtaking assertion that there is “on historical questions” an “unqualified consensus” against any part of the story about current events as told by Israel and the Jews—”or at least among those sharing normal human values.”

All of this gets us to the top of page 3. To continue at this pace would take a lifetime, for which I have better uses. What sticks to me as I put aside this noisome book is the odor of loathing for Jews everywhere—for their history, for their habits of thinking, and for their pervasive influence in the world. To achieve this unrelieved contempt for Jews, for Israel, and for the friends of Israel, Finkelstein raises the Palestinians to the unrelieved dignity of victims. There is no hint in all these pages of why Israel has had to resort to violence. There is no hint of moral distinction between violent force exercised by a state in defense of the lives of its citizens and violence exercised by suicide bombers. There is no reference to the history of Arab terrorism and no reference to the present reality of Islamic terrorism—although we are told that “the overarching purpose of the ‘war on terrorism’ [led by the U.S.] has been to deflect criticism of an unprecedented assault on international law.”

No thought at all is given to the circ*mstance that has forced Israel to arm itself as it has done, to rally its entire population to make the sacrifice of compulsory military service. There is no recognition that from its birth the only option given to Israel has been self-defense or liquidation—something always candidly declared by its Arab foes. Symptomatic of this technique of avoiding matters of behavior on the part of Israel’s enemies is the fact that there is not a single substantial reference to Islam in the entire book. (Present company will want to know what is said about Christians and the Church—but there are no references in the index to either. There is, however, a routine sprinkling of undeveloped asides concerning American fundamentalist tools of the Israeli right.)

No honest friend of Israel denies that Israeli soldiers and Israeli citizens have often—too often—resorted to foul means. Israel has in place legal mechanisms for detecting and punishing these aberrant acts; many Israelis languish in prison today for their unlicensed assaults against Arab civilians. There exists in the Israeli press, among Israeli scholars, and in the fray of Israeli politics a lively debate on such matters (including voices as critical of Israeli government policy as Finkelstein is).

But in the world according to Finkelstein, Israelis are sad*stic oppressors—partly by conditioning, but ultimately by nature. “Of course,” he says, “with marginal exceptions, no one contests Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism; the criticism springs from its gross violation of human rights in the name of fighting terrorism.” But the “exceptions” are not “marginal”: they include the entire Muslim world, a working majority of the member-states in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and at least the left end of the political spectrum throughout the Western world.

Those of us who imagine that our loyalty to Israel follows from sincere calculation of historical rights and wrongs are mindless dupes of the Jews’ mighty propaganda machine. The Jews exploit the world’s fear of appearing anti-Semitic to command silence while they perpetrate unremitting sad*stic violence upon an entirely innocent population. No one will be surprised to learn that their partner in this cosmic crime is the United States: “The brutal U.S. aggression against Vietnam and the Bush administration’s aggression against Iraq engendered a generalized anti-Americanism, just as the genocidal Nazi aggression during World War II engendered a generalized anti-Teutonism. Should it really surprise us if the cruel occupation by a self-declared Jewish state engenders a generalized antipathy to Jews? … The real wonder is that the spillover hasn’t been greater.”

Leave aside, for our purposes here, the equation of the United States with Nazi Germany. Finkelstein’s words encourage his readers and listeners to treat Israel and all Jews as outlaws. What does this lack to distinguish it from the Jew-hatred which spills out daily from the imams of Palestine as of the other Arab polities? Theological referents aside, how do these words differ from the recent message of the official imam of the Palestinian authority, Sheikh Mudeiris: “Why is there this malice [as Muhammad taught, on the part of the rocks and the trees towards the Jews]? Because there are none who love the Jews on the face of the earth: not man, not rock, and not tree, everything hates them. They destroy everything, they destroy the trees and destroy the houses. Everything wants vengeance on the Jews, on these pigs on the face of the earth, and the day of our victory, Allah willing, will come.”

This is a book that has to be read very slowly and carefully, neglecting none of the footnotes, none of the charts and graphs and none of the appendices—or not read at all. Having done the former, I recommend the latter.

Paul Charles Merkley, a retired professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, is a consultant on foreign policy. He is the author most recently of American Presidents, Religion and Israel (Praeger).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.