Page 2863 – Christianity Today (2024)

Much attention has been paid to the idea that evangelical Christians are, politically, in motion. Only 29 percent of “born-again” Christians now say they support Republicans, compared to 62 percent in 2004, according to Barna Research. Among those who participated in the Republican primaries, many went for John McCain, who once called certain Christian leaders “agents of intolerance.” Many younger evangelicals are stressing issues like the environment and poverty, and, as Christianity Today readers know better than most, a new generation of evangelical leaders has emphasized different styles and modes of worship.

But while many Christians re-assess current alliances, practices, and beliefs, one characteristic relatively unchanged: their sense of history. A recent Beliefnet survey found that more than 70 percent of conservative evangelicals believe the Constitution created a Christian state. Whether it’s prayer in schools or the Ten Commandments in courthouses, many evangelicals still believe that being a good Christian means advocating for a stronger government role in promoting religion.

I’d like to respectfully suggest that the important dialogue within the evangelical community would be enriched if it were to more boldly re-examine its historical roots. What it would find is that evangelicals of the founding era had very different attitudes about the separation of church and state than many of their modern counterparts. In fact, we would not have religious freedom or the separation of church and state without a key alliance between heroic evangelicals and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1784, Virginia’s leading politician, Patrick Henry, proposed taxing citizens to sustain and support churches. This was a liberal bill, as these things went. The proceeds of the “assessment” could benefit any church, not just the dominant church. But a young James Madison opposed the idea — which he called an “establishment” — on the grounds that it would, by entangling the state with the church, actually harm religion. Madison eventually won, in large part because of support from Virginia’s Baptists. Even though tax support was non-coercive and could directly benefit the Baptists, one Baptist petition stated that the measure “departed from the Spirit of the Gospel and from the bill of Rights.” Responding to the argument that the assessment would help battle the spread of heretical views like deism, the petition declared that virtuous religions would win in a marketplace of faith: “Let their Doctrines be scriptural and their lives Holy, then shall Religion beam forth as the sun and Deism shall be put to open shame.”

The Baptists further argued that Henry’s approach ignored an important lesson from Christian history: that the greatest flowering of Christianity occurs without government support. During its first few hundred years, Christianity was oppressed, yet “the Excellent Purity of its Precepts and the unblamable behaviour of its Ministers made its way thro all opposition,” one petition declared. After Constantine endorsed Christianity, persecution subsided but “how soon was the Church Over run with Error and Immorality.” Another Baptist treatise projected how seemingly beneficial government support could lead to constraint: because money would be collected through the tax system, the “Sheriffs, County Courts and public Treasury are all to be employed in the management of money levied for the express purpose of supporting Teachers of the Christian Religion.” In all, some 28 counties sent in petitions arguing that the gospel required rejection of the assessment.

The alliance between evangelicals and Madison and Jefferson reappeared at critical junctures. When Madison ran for Congress in the first elections, against the charismatic war hero James Monroe, it was the Baptists who rallied to him because of his support for the separation of church and state. It was the evangelicals who prodded Madison into proposing a Bill of Rights that guaranteed religious freedom and limited the government role in religion.

The most pungent illustration of the alliance rolled toward the White House on New Year’s Day in 1802. Standing at the door of the new presidential mansion in Washington, President Thomas Jefferson saw two horses pulling a dray carrying a 1,235-pound cheese with an inscription: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The cheese was a gift from evangelical activist the Rev. John Leland of western Massachusetts — a “thank you” for Jefferson’s support of the separation of church and state.

It is commonly assumed that Baptists supported the separation of church and state to avoid persecution. That was certainly partly true. The Baptists of Virginia suffered a wave of persecution at that time. But the evangelical passion for keeping church and state separate had theological roots, too. Christians were to render unto Caesar what was his — the religious and political spheres were meant, by Jesus, to be separate. Just as important, both the Baptists and the philosophers believed in the primacy of individual freedom. For Madison and Jefferson, individual liberty trumped the rights of kings or governments; for evangelicals, an individual’s personal relationship with God was more important than church and clerical authority. Let’s remember who will provide the final assessment of a life well lived, Leland wrote: “If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

If alive today, 18th-century evangelicals might well agree with their theological descendants that the nation needs more religion. But they would disagree that it requires more state support or advocacy for religion. It was the evangelicals who worked with Madison to shape the true “founding faith,” which was not Christianity or secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.

Steven Waldman, editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, is the author of Founding Faith: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, published by Random House.

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Larry King is not known as a tough interviewer. Yet with smooth-talking pastor and author Joel Osteen, he went for the jugular, asking whether Jews and Muslims must believe in Christ to go to heaven. And Osteen blinked: “I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.”

While Osteen later apologized for seemingly downplaying the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, the pluralistic pressure to waffle on this issue is intense. Several mainline denominations support a two-covenant theology, which holds that Judaism and Christianity are parallel, divinely guided paths to God. In addition, in 2002 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a document, “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” affirming that “Jews already dwell in a saving covenant with God.”

Noting that many church leaders and theologians have “retreated from embracing the task of evangelizing Jews,” in 1989 a global group of evangelical theologians (including Vernon Grounds, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, and Tokunboh Adeyemo) drafted the Willowbank Declaration on the Christian Gospel and the Jewish People. They denied that “any non-Christian faith, as such, will mediate eternal life with God.”

Such a statement, attacked when it was released, remains politically incorrect. Voices both inside and outside the church say that evangelizing Jewish people—calling them to repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord, Savior, and Messiah—is inappropriate. Rabbi David Rosen recently told CT that if someone relates to him “as someone who’s going to burn in hell, then I can’t really see that as genuine love toward my people and my faith.”

I love and respect the Jewish people and their faith. After all, Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity is firmly rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Certainly the Holocaust and the church’s horrific anti-Semitism have changed the context for evangelism. We have much for which to apologize. But we cannot apologize for the gospel, which is Good News for Jewish people precisely because they—like all human beings—need Jesus. Paul, a Hebrew of Hebrews, said plainly, “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. for … all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin.”

Some believe that Romans, which states emphatically that “all Israel will be saved,” teaches that Jews do not need to hear the Good News from us. (Along those lines, Rosen asks evangelicals to “suspend your proselytizing and allow the Almighty to do whatever the Almighty thinks is the thing to do in his own time.”) Such interpretations remind me of the apocryphal story of the misguided churchman who condescendingly told budding missionary William Carey, “Young man, sit down; when God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid and mine.” If Carey had sat down, the modern missionary movement might have died stillborn.

Ordinarily God uses people to spread his message. Good news is no news at all if it is not communicated. And it must be shared first with the Jews (Rom. 1:16). Their calling as God’s covenant people makes our evangelistic obligation to them greater, not less. “The biblical hope for Jewish people,” Willowbank says, “centers on their being restored through faith in Christ to their proper place as branches of God’s olive tree, from which they are at present broken off.”

Some people denigrate the methods and motives of people who evangelize Jews. They claim that focusing ministry on—or “targeting”—Jews is just plain wrong. “Billy Graham didn’t target Jews,” pastor John Hagee says. “Bill Bright refused to target the Jews. I’m not targeting the Jews.”

Others charge that those who evangelize Jewish people are deceptive or are attempting to snare the vulnerable in the Jewish community. These would include students, the aged, Russian Jews, the impoverished, those from dysfunctional or interfaith families, and the uneducated.

Strangely, other types of focused evangelism—such as among students or the homeless—seem to be acceptable. As Willowbank correctly notes, “The existence of separate churchly organizations for evangelizing Jews … can be justified … as an appropriate means of fulfilling the church’s mandate to take the gospel to the whole human race.”

Of course, deception and manipulation are always wrong. The ends do not justify the means when it comes to evangelism. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church has rightly told Jewish audiences that he doesn’t believe in coercion—though he does believe in persuasion.

So must we. As we continue the good works of dialogue and practical ministries among our Jewish neighbors, let’s renew our commitment to also sensitively but forthrightly persuade them to receive the Good News.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Previous articles about evangelism to the Jewish people include:

Interview with a Pharisee—and a Christian | How two believers of two faiths talk to one another with conviction and civility. (October 12, 2007)

Kosher Cooperation | Jewish elites broker new relations with evangelicals. (October 1, 2003)

Editor’s Bookshelf: The Church’s Hidden Jewishness | In the Shadow of the Temple illumines Hebrew thinking in a Greek world (Sept. 15, 2003)

Editor’s Bookshelf: ‘Normalizing’ Jewish Believers | How should Christianity’s Jewish heritage change how Gentiles relate to their faith? An interview with Oskar Skarsaune (Sept. 15, 2003)

Christ via Judaism | Lauren Winner’s spiritual journey is an invaluable—and, to some, unsettling—reminder of where we came from (July 7, 2003)

Weblog: Messianic Jews in Canada Lose Appeal to Use Menorah Logo (June 26, 2003)

A Christian Studies Torah | Athol Dickson’s The Gospel According to Moses encourages exploration of Jewish roots (May 14, 2003)

Weblog: Christian Seders Accused of Being Anti-Jewish | We’re waiting for Elijah, not Jesus, say Jews (Apr. 28, 2003)

Do Jews Really Need Jesus? | What evangelicals believe about evangelization of the Jews—and whether the Holocaust makes a difference in that task (Oct. 8, 1990, reposted Aug. 16, 2002)

The Chosen People Puzzle | When it comes to relating to the Jewish people, should we dialogue, cooperate, or evangelize? (Mar 9, 2001)

Is Evangelism Possible Without Targeting? | The founder of Jews for Jesus responds to Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein (Jan. 14, 2000)

Can I Get a Witness? | Southern Baptists rebuff critics of Chicago evangelism plan. (Jan. 14, 2000)

Witnessing vs. Proselytizing | A rabbi’s perspective on evangelism targeting Jews, and his alternative (Dec. 3, 1999)

To the Jew First? | Southern Baptists defend new outreach effort (Nov. 15, 1999)

How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend | The amazing story of Christian efforts to create and sustain the modern nation of Israel. (Oct. 5, 1998)

The Return of the Jewish Church | In 1967, there were no Messianic Jewish congregations in the world. Today there are 350. Who are these believers? (Sept. 7, 1998)

Mapping the Messianic Jewish World (Sept. 7, 1998)

Did Christianity Cause the Holocaust? | No, despite what a biased film at the tax-supported Holocaust Museum implies (Apr. 27, 1998)

Is Jewish-Christian a Contradiction in Terms? (April 7, 1997)

Jews Oppose Baptist Outreach (Nov. 11, 1996)

Christmas and the Modern Jew | Christians often seem to lack both good missionary strategies toward Jews and sensitivity to their situation in life (Dec. 8, 1958)

Graham Feted By American Jewish Committee | In 1977, Graham walked a fine line between in his work ‘to proclaim the Gospel to Jew and Gentile.’ (Nov. 18, 1977)

To the Jew First | Witnessing to the Jews is nonnegotiable. (Aug. 11, 1997)

Billy Graham: ‘I have never felt called to single out the Jews’ | The evangelist discusses targeted evangelism in one of his most quoted statements (March 16, 1973)

For the past couple of weeks, Ur-banites have been wrestling with questions about church membership. Below, Ken Sande, president of Peacemaker Ministries, takes one of the big questions head on: how does a church discipline its members?

On January 18, 2008, The Wall Street Journal Online published an article by Alexandra Alter on church discipline entitled Banned from Church. When Alexandra interviewed me before writing the article, I explained the biblical basis for church discipline and acknowledged how churches have sometimes neglected or abused the process. I also described how properly applied accountability can help people break free from sinful and destructive conduct. I even provided examples of churches that had used loving discipline to stop crooks from defrauding elderly people, protect lonely women from being seduced, and move child sexual abusers to confess their crimes (“A Better Way to Handle Abuse“).

Despite our conversation, Alexandra chose to paint an entirely negative picture of discipline by using the example of a 71-year-old woman who had been removed from her church for questioning her pastor’s leadership. Examples of protecting the elderly, the lonely, and the helpless from abuse apparently did not fit into her preconceived notions of church discipline.

I’m sad, but not surprised, when secular writers present a negative stereotype of church discipline. What troubles me far more is how many Christians share these distorted views.

Like Ms. Alter, most Christians seem to see church discipline either as a harsh, legalistic, and unloving process, which true followers of Christ should never practice, or (also well illustrated in the WSJ article) as a handy tool for getting rid of inquisitive, irritating, or challenging members.

Neither of these views is biblical.

The Bible never presents church discipline as being negative, legalistic or harsh. True discipline originates from God himself and is always presented as a sign of genuine love. Consider these three verses: “The Lord disciplines those he loves” (Heb. 12:6). “Blessed is the man you discipline, O LORD, the man you teach from your law” (Ps. 94:12). “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline” (Rev. 3:19).

God’s discipline in the church, like the discipline in a good family, is intended to be primarily positive, instructive, and encouraging. This process, which is sometimes referred to as “formative discipline,” involves preaching, teaching, prayer, personal Bible study, small group fellowship, and countless other enjoyable activities that challenge and encourage us to love and serve God more wholeheartedly.

On rare occasions, God’s discipline, like the discipline in a family with growing children, also may have a corrective purpose. When we forget or disobey what God has taught us, he corrects us. One way he does this is to call the church to lead us back onto the right track. This process of “corrective” or “restorative” discipline is likened in Scripture to a shepherd seeking after a lost sheep (Matt. 18:12?13).

Thus, neither restorative nor corrective discipline is ever to be done in an unloving, vengeful, or self-righteous manner. It is always to be carried out in humility and love, with the goals of restoring someone to a close walk with Christ (Matt. 18:15; Gal. 6:1), protecting others from harm (1 Cor. 5:6), and showing respect for the honor and glory of God’s name (1 Pet. 2:12).

Biblical discipline is similar to the discipline we value in other aspects of life. We admire parents who consistently teach their children how to behave properly and lovingly discipline them when they disobey. We value music teachers who bring out the best in their students by teaching them proper technique and consistently pointing out their errors, so they can play a piece properly. We applaud athletic coaches who diligently teach their players to do what is right and correct them when they fumble, so that the team works well together.

The same principles apply to the family of God. We, too, need to be taught what is right and to be lovingly corrected when we do something contrary to what God teaches us in his Word. When this is done as God commands, it usually leads to repentance, change, and restored relationships (see 2 Cor. 2:5?11). But when people harden their hearts, it is entirely appropriate for a church to take the rare but necessary step of removing them from fellowship, both as a warning about the gravity of their sin and as a means to protect the innocent and weak from harm.

Practically, it is important to consider such things as legal liability issues and how to secure informed consent to a church’s disciplinary practices. But the most important questions to ask are: Why has the church bought into the world’s view of church discipline? Why are we afraid of carrying out a process that Jesus himself has commanded us to follow in order to protect his church and retrieve his lost sheep? And what can we do to show our people and the world that redemptive church discipline is truly God’s gift and blessing to his church?

Ken Sande is the president of Peacemaker Ministries?, a lawyer, and the author of The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict (Baker, 2004).

Will Higgins’s report on attendance levels at Holy Week services at a military base in northern Iraq is intriguing on several levels. First, although there are some 4,000 soldiers stationed at the base, the chaplains deemed 150 chairs and 3 Easter services more than sufficient to accommodate the number of soldiers inclined to attend. A Good Friday screening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ drew only four soldiers, two of whom snoozed their way through it.

While such anecdotal evidence from a solitary military base is by no means enough to establish statistical significance, it does at the very least challenge conventional wisdom that there are no atheists in foxholes. Looking around for other media coverage of Easter services among American military in Iraq, I found little of interest save a small collection of photos that revealed services most notable for their sparse attendance (Be sure to click on the third photo to see if you can identify the gun at the foot of the praying soldier’s feet). Sergeant Christopher McFadden of Indiana National Guard’s 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team finds the low attendance “dumbfounding.” “If you saw the possibility of dying in front of you,” he continues, “now would be the time to open the door and at least look inside.”

Although I tend to share McFaddens’ surprise, low attendance levels at Easter services is not the only aspect of the article I find intriguing. For one, the article points out that McFadden, an ardent Christian, carries around a metal-bound Bible printed during World War II for distribution to American soldiers, a Bible whose carrier in three previous tours of duty–in WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq–has returned home safely. McFadden had hoped this Bible and its 3-0 record would provide an entry point for evangelizing his comrades. Instead, he sincerely laments that for them this Bible is “more of an artifact, a good-luck charm, than a symbol of God’s power.” McFadden’s comments raise interesting questions about the locus of God’s power, and how we associate that power with particular material objects. Where does the power of Bibles–metal-bound or otherwise–reside? Is it in the “thing” itself and indifferent to the disposition of its carrier, or do its readers, hearers, and heed-ers know the power of God to save from death via receiving the Living Word that is not limited to any one particular copy of the Bible?

Second, the article contains a sidebar indicating that Franklin Delano Roosevelt included a foreword to the special-issue Bible “commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.” Operating in a cultural climate sensitive to questions of church and state, such words at first sounded odd to me–from another time with different sensibilities. But when I read the words of McFadden’s pastor just a few lines down, I was reminded that these sensibilities are still with us. Apparently, just before McFadden departed on his tour of duty, his pastor told the congregation to think of McFadden as any other missionary, “except this one’s paid for by the government.”

Most intriguing of all, however, is the cryptic quote from “missionary” McFadden that closes the article. In an attempt to make sense of the war and his place in it, McFadden employs an oft-used interpretive lens in reflecting on the mysteries of divine providence: “We’re in the desert for a reason. God has put us here to find ourselves.” McFadden’s quote shows us that for at least one soldier, making sense of the war is a “bottom-up” affair that begins with personal experience and plays out in the terrain of the heart rather than the combat zone of northern Iraq or the landscape of contemporary geopolitics.

Sgt. McFadden leaves me wondering which is more notable–the apparent lack of faith among the military, or the theological ruminations of one of the faithful.

It’s the rare character who can’t get a little compassion from Tom Perrotta. Known for suburban social commentaries like Election and Little Children, Perrotta is a surprisingly soft-hearted satirist, cushioning wit with the sympathy of an afternoon talk-show host. Whether describing an uptight supermom or a grief-stricken child molester, Perrotta rarely fails to see the humanity in his characters. So how does he do with conservative Christians in The Abstinence Teacher?

In Perrotta’s newest novel, America’s culture wars boil down to the troubles of two lonely suburbanites, Ruth Ramsey and Tim Mason. Ruth is a divorced sex-ed teacher whose philosophy is, “Pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power.” When she takes one lesson too far, telling her students that some people actually enjoy oral sex, a family from a local fundamentalist church, “The Tabernacle,” threatens to sue. The school board descends with a new abstinence-only curriculum, and Ruth is outraged. She balks at having to teach “a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance.”

Ironically, Ruth’s own life is fairly joyless. So when she meets Tim, the attractive coach of her daughter’s soccer team, she’s predisposed to feel weak in the knees. But—oh no!—barely two pages go by before it turns out that Tim is one of “them,” those loony legalists who preach that abstinence is sexy.

This is all straight from the headlines, but once Perrotta begins to write from Tim’s perspective, he has some surprises in store. Though Tim tries to be a faithful Christian, he’s a former addict who hankers after his old trinity of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll. Marriage to a church girl (Carrie, my favorite character) hasn’t dampened his wanderlust, even though the couple has followed the advice of their church-approved marriage manual, Hot Christian Sex (a send-up of the LaHayes & Co.). With his tenuous faith and occasional slip-ups, Tim frequently finds himself on the wrong side of Pastor Dennis.

Which brings me to my main criticism: It’s obvious that Perrotta did some research for this book (he mentions a Promise Keepers rally in the acknowledgments), but how much? His Tabernacle strikes me as literary jerry-building, an offhand composite of theological strains and worship styles that will probably ring true to an average reader, but not to an insider. It’s little wonder that Tim Mason doesn’t get much out of his Christianity—it’s a fiction.

Still, The Abstinence Teacher isn’t all bad. The relationships are believable, especially when Tim and Ruth retreat from their stereotypes long enough to find each other. And it’s gratifying to watch Ruth’s daughters rebel in an unexpected direction—defying their mother by heading off to church to find Jesus. The only victim left is Carrie, a genuine and all-too-familiar Christian woman who deserves a faithful husband and a decent church. Sadly, she won’t find either in this novel.

Betty Smartt Carter, a novelist and Latin teacher living in Alabama.

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There is no agreement in the church today about what happens to people when they die. Yet the New Testament is crystal clear on the matter: In a classic passage, Paul speaks of "the redemption of our bodies" (Rom. 8:23). There is no room for doubt as to what he means: God's people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life. The rest of the early Christian writings, where they address the subject, are completely in tune with this.

The traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story of God's ultimate purposes. If we squeeze it to the margins, as many have done by implication, or indeed, if we leave it out altogether, as some have done quite explicitly, we don't just lose an extra feature, like buying a car that happens not to have electrically operated mirrors. We lose the central engine, which drives it and gives every other component its reason for working.

When we talk with biblical precision about the resurrection, we discover an excellent foundation for lively and creative Christian work in the present world—not, as some suppose, for an escapist or quietist piety.

Bodily Resurrection

While both Greco-Roman paganism and Second Temple Judaism held a wide variety of beliefs about life beyond death, the early Christians, beginning with Paul, were remarkably unanimous on the topic.

When Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being "citizens of heaven," he doesn't mean that we shall retire there when we have finished our work here. He says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own. Jesus will do this by the power through which he makes all things subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul's thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian's future body and the means by which it comes.

Similarly, in Colossians 3:1–4, Paul says that when the Messiah (the one "who is your life") appears, then you too will appear with him in glory. Paul does not say "one day you will go to be with him." No, you already possess life in him. This new life, which the Christian possesses secretly, invisible to the world, will burst forth into full bodily reality and visibility.

The clearest and strongest passage is Romans 8:9–11. If the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus the Messiah, dwells in you, says Paul, then the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies as well, through his Spirit who dwells in you. God will give life, not to a disembodied spirit, not to what many people have thought of as a spiritual body in the sense of a nonphysical one, but "to your mortal bodies also."

Other New Testament writers support this view. The first letter of John declares that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. The resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in its glory and power, will be the model for our own. And of course within John's gospel, despite the puzzlement of those who want to read the book in a very different way, we have some of the clearest statements of future bodily resurrection. Jesus reaffirms the widespread Jewish expectation of resurrection in the last day, and announces that the hour for this has already arrived. It is quite explicit: "The hour is coming," he says, "indeed, it is already here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of Man, and those who hear will live; when all in the graves will come out, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment."

Life After Life After Death

Here we must discuss what Jesus means when he declares that there are "many dwelling places" in his Father's house. This has regularly been taken, not least when used in the context of bereavement, to mean that the dead (or at least dead Christians) will simply go to heaven permanently rather than being raised again subsequently to new bodily life. But the word for "dwelling places" here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place, but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.

This fits closely with Jesus' words to the dying brigand in Luke: "Today you will be with me in paradise." Despite a long tradition of misreading, paradise here means not a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day. The main point of the sentence lies in the apparent contrast between the brigand's request and Jesus' reply: "Remember me," he says, "when you come in your kingdom," implying that this will be at some far distant future. Jesus' answer brings this future hope into the present, implying of course that with his death the kingdom is indeed coming, even though it doesn't look like what anyone had imagined: "Today you will be with me in paradise." There will, of course, still be a future completion involving ultimate resurrection; Luke's overall theological understanding leaves no doubt on that score. Jesus, after all, didn't rise again "today," that is, on Good Friday. Luke must have understood him to be referring to a state of being-in-paradise. With Jesus, the future hope has come forward into the present. For those who die in faith, before that final reawakening, the central promise is of being "with Jesus" at once. "My desire is to depart," wrote Paul, "and be with Christ, which is far better."

Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant in the ancient world. It wasn't a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.

What then about such passages as 1 Peter 1, which speaks of a salvation that is "kept in heaven for you" so that in your present believing you are receiving "the salvation of your souls"? Here, I suggest, the automatic assumption of Western Christianity leads us badly astray. Most Christians today, reading a passage like this, assume that it means that heaven is where you go to receive this salvation—or even that salvation consists in "going to heaven when you die." The way we now understand that language in the Western world is totally different from what Jesus and his hearers meant and understood.

For a start, heaven is actually a reverent way of speaking about God, so that "riches in heaven" simply means "riches in God's presence." But then, by derivation from this primary meaning, heaven is the place where God's purposes for the future are stored up. It isn't where they are meant to stay so that one would need to go to heaven to enjoy them. It is where they are kept safe against the day when they will become a reality on earth. God's future inheritance, the incorruptible new world and the new bodies that are to inhabit that world, are already kept safe, waiting for us, so that they can be brought to birth in the new heavens and new earth.

From Worship to Mission

The mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in the power of the Spirit, of Jesus' bodily resurrection. It is the anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory, transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made.

If that is so, mission must urgently recover from its long-term schizophrenia. The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both. The world of space, time, and matter is where real people live, where real communities happen, where difficult decisions are made, where schools and hospitals bear witness to the "now, already" of the gospel while police and prisons bear witness to the "not yet." The world of space, time, and matter is where parliaments, city councils, neighborhood watch groups, and everything in between are set up and run for the benefit of the wider community, the community where anarchy means that bullies (economic and social as well as physical) will always win, where the weak and vulnerable will always need protecting, and where the social and political structures of society are part of the Creator's design.

And the church that is renewed by the message of Jesus' resurrection must be the church that goes to work precisely in that space, time, and matter. The church claims this world in advance as the place of God's kingdom, of Jesus' lordship, and of the Spirit's power. Councils and parliaments can and often do act wisely, though they will always need scrutiny and accountability, because they in turn may become agents of bullying and corruption.

Thus the church that takes sacred space seriously (not as a retreat from the world but as a bridgehead into it) will go straight from worshiping in the sanctuary to debating in the council chamber; to discussing matters of town planning, of harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture, green spaces, and road traffic schemes; and to environmental work, creative and healthy farming methods, and proper use of resources. If it is true, as I have argued, that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced. This is not an extra to the church's mission. It is central.

The church that takes seriously the fact that Jesus is Lord of all will not just celebrate quietly every time we write the date on a letter or document, will not just set aside Sunday as far as humanly and socially possible as a celebration of God's new creation, will not just seek to order its own life in an appropriate rhythm of worship and work. Such a church will also seek to bring wisdom to the rhythms of work in offices and shops, in local government, in civic holidays, and in the shaping of public life. These things cannot be taken for granted. The enormous shifts during my lifetime, from the whole town observing Good Friday and Easter, to those great days being simply more occasions for football matches and yet more televised reruns of old movies, are indices of what happens when a society loses its roots and drifts with prevailing social currents. The reclaiming of time as God's good gift (as opposed to time as simply a commodity to be spent for one's own benefit, which often means fresh forms of slavery for others) is not an extra to the church's mission. It is central.

Whatever is Holy

One of the things I most enjoy about being a bishop is watching ordinary Christians (not that there are any "ordinary" Christians, but you know what I mean) going straight from worshiping Jesus in church to making a radical difference in the material lives of people down the street by running playgroups for children of single working moms; by organizing credit unions to help people at the bottom of the financial ladder find their way to responsible solvency; by campaigning for better housing, against dangerous roads, for drug rehab centers, for wise laws relating to alcohol, for decent library and sporting facilities, for a thousand other things in which God's sovereign rule extends to hard, concrete reality. Once again, all this is not an extra to the mission of the church. It is central.

This way of coming at the tasks of the church in terms of space, time, and matter leads directly to evangelism. When the church is seen to move straight from worship of God to affecting much-needed change in the world; when it becomes clear that the people who feast at Jesus' table are the ones at the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine; when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and shamed—then it is natural for people to recognize that something is going on that they want to be part of.

No single individual can attempt more than a fraction of this mission. That's why mission is the work of the whole church, the whole time. Paul's advice to the Philippians—even though he and they knew they were suffering for their faith and might be tempted to retreat from the world into a dualistic, sectarian mentality—was upbeat. "These are the things you should think through," he wrote: "whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy." And in thinking through these things, we will discover more and more about the same Creator God whom we know in and through Jesus Christ and will be better equipped to work effectively not over against the world, but with the grain of all goodwill, of all that seeks to bring and enhance life.

N. T. Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. This article is excerpted from his latest book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Other articles about the resurrection are in our Easter section.

N.T. Wright's newest book, Surprised by Hope, is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

PreachingToday.com interviewed N.T. Wright about the book.

Last year, I was at the Leadership Summit Debrief in Chicago. It’s a gathering of all the lead pastors from different churches that serve as satellite sites for the Leadership Summit. This group gathers to review the Summit and be mentored by Bill Hybels and other key leaders that they bring in.

One of the leaders that they brought in this year was Rich DeVos. DeVos is a billionaire (listed as the 73rd wealthiest person in the United States and the 248th wealthiest person in the world), founder of the Amway Corporation, owner of the Orlando Magic, and Christ Follower. We had about 90 minutes to do questions and answers with this remarkable leader and here are a few of the highlights:

Why did you decide to trust Bill and invest so much in the Willow Creek Association?

First of all, I believe success attracts success. I first met Bill through his father and I saw his ministry continue to grow and grow. I was always fascinated with church builders – people could grow a church that would reach people. Bill was a success and I wanted to be a part of helping him. Secondly, I’m a cheerleader. I believe the most important words you can say to a person are “You can do it!” It’s awfully simple, but I just want to tell people they can accomplish their dreams.

You did an interview for the Leadership Summit a few years ago and when asked about getting money from wealthy people you told pastors to “hit ’em up.” How?

First, introduce yourself and help them get to know you. Be straightforward in your presentation and tell them what you need and what it will accomplish. They will like to see something started and finished. Don’t just tell them it is for the budget. Tell them what you need and what it will accomplish. Be specific.

When you have to fire someone, what is the best way to do that?

I always want to be able to say, “I’ve been talking to you about this for 6 months?”

It should not be a surprise.

You are writing a new book titled Powerful Phrases of Positive People. What are some of those phrases?

Here are some:

• I’m wrong,

• I’m sorry.

• I trust you.

• I’m proud of you.

• I luv ya!

There are many times when simply carrying on a conversation seems impossible—whether the subject is race, or the war in Iraq, or the propriety of tipping at Starbucks; whether the setting is a seminar room or the family dining table or the blogosphere. A couple of volleys are exchanged and the parties return to business as usual.

Last week I responded to a blog by the scholar Matthew Avery Sutton, who had posted a response to Frederica Mathewes–Green’s recent piece in Books & Culture, “Holy Hegemony!” The subject was Aaron K. Ketchell’s book Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri, which Mathewes–Green had discussed at length in her piece on Branson. Sutton described Mathewes–Green’s piece as “ridiculous” and accused her of systematically, willfully misrepresenting Ketchell’s book. He described Ketchell’s book as “brilliant,” a “careful, balanced, and sophisticated analysis of Branson that incorporates the latest religious and culture studies theory.” My response took up those charges, and now Sutton has replied.

So what has been accomplished so far? Not much, I’m sorry to say. But it may be worthwhile to persist. Yes, Sutton is busy and I am busy. On the other hand, the two of us (along with Frederica Mathewes–Green) are among the very few people in the world who have read—or will read—Ketchell’s book. And most of you who are following this exchange have read Mathewes–Green’s essay–review. It seems that we shouldn’t squander the opportunity for conversation.

The tone of Sutton’s rejoinder is genial (humor is always welcome, though a little forced jocularity goes a long way). He’s suggesting, if I am reading him correctly, that there’s nothing personal in our disagreement, a sentiment I share. Neither of us, for instance, has called the other a “jackal,” as the Chinese head of the Communist Party in Tibet recently referred to the Dalai Lama. I appreciate that, and I wish I could say that Sutton’s rejoinder cleared up some of the confusion sown by his first piece.

Alas, with the exception of a couple of grudging concessions, no. And so I will try, one more time, to do that—and then try to move the conversation—if it can be so called—forward.

First, then, confusion. Sutton writes in his rejoinder: “Unlike Mathewes–Green and Wilson, I hoped to keep this discussion in the realm of ideas, not personal religious commitments.” What? This comes from a writer who began by referring gratuitously to Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, then described Frederica Mathewes–Green as “a popular writer and veteran on the evangelical lecture circuit.” How is this more “in the realm of ideas” than what Mathewes–Green wrote? Can’t Sutton be bothered to remember his own words? And it appears that, even though I already quoted last week what Mathewes–Green actually said in this context, I’m going to have to do it again, because Sutton continues to misrepresent her. Here is what she wrote:

Ketchell explains that he began studying Branson because his thesis advisor specialized in Marian apparitions, and the topic of folk religion drew his interest. (Of his own background, he says that his family “has for many generations been staunchly Catholic.”) As he thought about a past visit to the Ozarks, “I recalled that in that region one could not find statues of Mary or paintings of St. Sebastian skewered with arrows, yet its religious attractions were comparable mixtures of sacred and secular.” (I am stumped as to how a statue of Mary is a “mixture of sacred and secular”; I can only guess that Ketchell considers art intrinsically secular because it partakes of the material world.)

Please note: Contrary to Sutton’s account, Mathewes–Green does not say that Ketchell is Catholic; she quotes, parenthetically, what he said himself about his family background. Nor does she suggest that this background accounts for his conceptual muddles, any more than it accounts for his mangling of the English language.

There is more to be said in this vein, but let’s move ahead to the conclusion of Sutton’s rejoinder:

In sum, what Wilson has ignored in his blog is the point of my criticism of Mathewes–Green’s review. He can take his shots at me, as Mathewes–Green took her shots at Ketchell, but these have nothing to do with the fact that Mathewes–Green, in her effort to position Holy Hills as on the wrong side of the culture wars, completely missed Ketchell’s argument. Holy Hills is an important book that, mixed metaphors aside, makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on American religion.

OK. The whiny rhetoric—”taking shots”!—doesn’t exactly invite further engagement, but I think this conclusion nevertheless points the way forward. What appears to be an impasse may not be the end–point after all.

If you read Mathewes–Green’s piece, with its extensive quotations from Ketchell, you are probably wondering what on earth Sutton meant when he said, in his initial response, “That Mathews–Green read this book through the lens of the culture wars tells us a whole lot more about her than it does about Ketchell’s brilliant, engaging book.” Isn’t it clear that Ketchell himself repeatedly casts Branson in precisely such terms? And if you actually read Holy Hills of the Ozarks, that impression would be confirmed.

So is Sutton simply obtuse, or disingenuous? No. Here is the context of his judgment, at least as I understand it. Ketchell’s book is representative of a broad trend in the study of American religion, and in particular the study of conservative Protestant believers—fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals. A growing number of scholars have produced what might be called ethnographic studies of such believers, seeking to understand how they construct their shared social world. Susan Friend Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics and Mitchell Stevens’ Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (which considers both religious and nonreligious homeschooling advocates) are two examples among many, and within this broad trend there are many subdivisions (emphasis on “material culture,” for instance). But what links most of these books is an effort to understand.

Understand what? Well, in part the trend reflects the collapse of secularization theory (which still has its defenders, yes) and the simplistic understanding of “modernity” that went with it. So many of these studies seek to understand how various religious groups that were supposed to wither away are in fact negotiating the challenges of modernity. And for many—though by no means all—of the scholars working in this vein, the ideal is a kind of sympathetic detachment from the object of research, a studied “neutrality.” But this ideal is in tension with another influential trend in the study of religion and in the academy today more broadly, encouraging “committed” scholarship. (If we do carry the conversation on, this would be one subject to pursue. Another would be Ketchell’s almost complete failure to live up to his claim in the introduction—repeated elsewhere—that his study “broaches the many ways that tourists have utilized Branson’s ontological fables and accompanying ideological constructs to conceivably refashion their nonvacation lives.”)

I think—and I may be wrong—when Sutton says “Mathewes–Green, in her effort to position Holy Hills as on the wrong side of the culture wars, completely missed Ketchell’s argument,” he means that Ketchell isn’t taking either “side” in the culture war. Rather, Ketchell’s book should be seen as offering insight into how the evolution of Branson reflects the complex negotiations with modernity carried on by conservative American Protestants. And in fact, despite its huge flaws, which go much deeper than Sutton has acknowledged, I think that Ketchell’s book does shed light on this subject. I also think that throughout the book there’s a tension between his stance as a “neutral” observer and his desire to reassure the reader that of course he realizes how benighted the outlook of these people is in many respects—a tension that Mathewes–Green identified, though not precisely in those terms.

One last point. Ketchell is in some ways far more sympathetic to Branson than I would be. Such places give me the creeps, though I have some good friends who’ve been to Branson and loved it. But Ketchell makes my skin crawl too. Let me conclude by quoting one of my favorite passages from Mathewes–Green’s essay–review:

Granted, Branson is thoroughly pro–family; a random stack of brochures tout a high proportion of family acts, such as the Gatlin Brothers, the Lennon Sisters, the Osmonds, the Hughes Brothers, the Presleys, the Duttons , the Brett Family, the Haygoods, and the Branson Brothers (I’m not sure if the “Brothers” are some or all of the eight young people on the cover, representing a variety of genders and races). But there’s nothing ominous in this. Branson is full of family acts because it’s where acts settle to raise their families. In Ketchell’s determination to see “conventional gender roles,” he misses seeing the hardworking women in these and other shows. He insists instead that Branson promotes “a value structure that cherishes the procreative impulse, sanctions male authority, locates femaleness within the realm of childbearing and nurture, and stamps these dictates with a divine imprimatur that bestows them with a sense of naturalness rather than social construction.” Yet I was unable to find any reference to childbearing, or even to gender roles, in Branson. Ketchell notes that Mormons fit in well because Branson “prizes extended families, heralds procreative inclinations, and values temperance.” Later he states that “the unbridled acquisition of offspring in Branson is not solely limited to biological breeding. Some musical families have augmented their ranks through the channels of KidSave International,” a Christian nonprofit that assists adoptions from Russia and Central Asia. Somehow it sounds like a bad thing.

Indeed.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2008 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

I‘m sitting in front of a west–facing window, looking roughly in the direction of Lake Michigan, and it is snowing and blowing. My driveway was under six inches of slush yesterday, and today the last 50 feet to the garage was like driving across icy moguls. But, ah, to the south, in the lands of cacti and palm trees, men are squatting in catcher’s gear, feeling the whump! of fastballs tossed by other grown men 60 feet and 6 inches away. Baseball has stirred from its ursine slumber and crawled out into the bright sunshine. For lovers of the pastoral game, it is high time.

Not only has it been a long winter here in the north country, but we’ve suffered through the incessant bad news of substance abuse, the release of the Mitchell Report, and the sleazy drama of the congressional hearings. Ugh.

So what is the path back to some measure of unmitigated, un–asterisked love of the game? One way, not without its risks, is to hear stories of the past, of baseball’s “Golden Age.” The danger of nostalgia is that we might cover over one set of problems in order to escape from our own present woes—so, for instance, the racial struggles and tyrannical management of the Fifties and Sixties might easily be downplayed. And since the players themselves are not always the best historians, I approached We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved with a bit of a skeptical eye. This second volume of The Baseball Oral History Project, compiled by none other than former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent (yes, there was life before Bud Selig!), has some of the recurring drawbacks of oral history—the stylistic weakness of the interview/monologue, the rambling nature of reminiscence, some unwieldy repetition. Vincent’s desire is to match the tremendous liveliness of Larry Ritter’s interviews from the early Sixties, of players from as far back as the Teens and Twenties, that became the book The Glory of Their Times. Ritter’s work was groundbreaking— he had to hunt down many of the old–time players he interviewed in the depths of their retirement obscurity—and the first–person accounts of fighting with Ty Cobb or breaking a young Babe Ruth into the fraternity were pricelessly delivered by the likes of Smokey Joe Wood and Goose Goslin on the still available original recordings that predated the book. The Glory of Their Times is a true and lasting piece of Americana.

But if Fay Vincent has been unable to measure up to his exemplar, he is not to be much maligned. He has delivered some good interviews, a few great ones even (especially the chapter with quirky Braves ace Lew Burdette—just in the nick of time, it turns out), and a scattering of wonderful anecdotes. The lineup moves roughly chronologically from Ralph Branca, Dodger pitcher and the victim of Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “Shot Heard Round the World,” up to figures such as Frank and Brooks Robinson. If the volume is a little Yankee–light for my liking (only Whitey Ford chimes in for the Pinstripes), Vincent has nevertheless caught up with players who were in the midst of many of the significant events of their era, so the individual stories intertwine with lore and generally known history in illuminating ways.

One of the threads that I tried to follow throughout the interviews was the presence, as teammate and nemesis and hero and even enemy, of Jackie Robinson in the lives of these ballplayers. The interview with Branca, who won 21 games at age 21 in 1947, the year Robinson’s came to the Dodgers and broke the color–barrier in baseball, reveals the kinship and adoration of one who witnessed Jackie’s daily travails firsthand. Branca relates how Robinson got after black fans who naively cheered on his every move that year: “He popped up and they screamed and yelled. He turned and he got on their case, said, ‘What are you yelling at? I popped up. Learn this game. Stop acting like fools.’ And that would be Jackie.”

Another Dodger—and another rookie from that famous 1947 team—whom Vincent interviewed was Duke Snider. Patrolling Ebbets Field while Willie Mays took charge uptown at the Polo Grounds and Mickey Mantle did the same across the river at Yankee Stadium, Snider helped make New York City in the 1950’s the world capital of centerfield excellence. Duke offers a deeper history than most on Jackie’s wonderful athleticism, since he was a high school student in L.A. at the time Jackie starred in three sports at Pasadena Junior College and UCLA: “He could stop and start faster than anybody I’ve ever seen. He had a kickoff [return] one time against Compton in football when he was at Pasadena, and he reversed his field twice, and the third time he came around he went for a touchdown, 80 some yards, but he actually ran about 175 yards, because he dodged everybody.” Duke notes that, those first weeks of their mutual rookie year in Brooklyn, “I wasn’t prepared to see what Jackie had to go through.” Yet, that suffering so close at hand seemed to bond the Dodger team, and Jackie was the undisputed catalyst and leader of that team’s maturation into a perennial contender. Snider recalls that reckoning simply: “I will tell you the one thing that I remember more than anything else: Jackie comes into the clubhouse, goes to his locker, disrobes, and puts his baseball uniform on. And when he put that baseball uniform on, he put his game face on with it. You could see it in his eyes. You could see it in his eyes that he was ready to go out there and beat somebody. And that I think helped a lot of us in realizing what the game was all about.”

Several of the other interviewees gave interesting, even moving snippets on Jackie; Robin Roberts, in selecting the best players he saw at every position during his long stint as the Philllies ace, notes as an aside: “Jackie? I wouldn’t pick him at a position. I just want him on my team. He could play wherever he wants.” Carl Erskine, another Dodger teammate, mentions his awe when, after pitching against the big–league club in an exhibition game while still a minor–leaguer, he was approached in the dugout: “And a voice said, ‘Where’s Erskine?’ And a guy said, ‘Hey, Carl.’ And I said, ‘Yeah?’ And I saw it was Jackie Robinson … . And he came and shook my hand. And he said, ‘Son, I hit against you twice today. You’re not going to be in this league very long. You’re going to be with the Dodgers soon.’ Well, by mid–July, I had won fifteen games in Fort Worth. I was called to the Dodgers. And when I went in the locker room early to get a locker, I was there by myself. When the regular Dodger bus came and the guys were coming in, Jackie was the first guy to my locker. He shook my hand, again, and he says, ‘I told you, you couldn’t miss.’ ” Such fraternal, even paternal, kindness reveals an angle on Robinson that we haven’t often seen.

Intriguingly, perhaps the best black ballplayer of the generation that followed Jackie’s retirement, and the man who eventually broke the next color barrier by becoming the first black manager—namely, Frank Robinson—reveals in his interview that Jackie Robinson’s courage was not only inspiring, but perhaps inimitable: “Jackie Robinson meant, at that time in 1947, that if I had the ability to play Major League Baseball, or professional baseball, that I could have the opportunity. That’s what it meant at that time. I think Jackie Robinson’s contribution to baseball was tremendous, there’s no doubt about that. But I think his contribution off the field, in our society, was even more because I think he brought his country together at that time with his baseball play in the way he conducted himself. People said, ‘Well, could you think you could have done that, what he went through?’ I said, ‘No way.’ There’s no way that I could put up with it and then do what he did. I don’t know how he did it, but he was the right man.”

Two of the most interesting interviews came from players who battled Robinson tooth and nail through a decade of National League pennant races: the Giants’ Bill Rigney, more famous later on as a manager than he was as an infielder, and the Braves’ pitcher Lew Burdette. Rigney offers the counterpoint to Branca’s account of the 1951 Giants–Dodgers death–struggle. Branca emphasizes the sign–stealing scandal, corroborated a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, which may or may not have tipped off Bobby Thomson on the inside fastball he drove out of the Polo Grounds, winning the pennant for the Giants in the most dramatic fashion possible. Rigney remembered Robinson mocking the Giants earlier in the year, through the thin clubhouse wall at the Polo Grounds, and there is a bit of a vengeful tone when Rigney recounts the result of the Giants’ charge at the end of the season: “when we got on to Ebbets Field that day, Mr. Big Mouth, Jackie, was in the batting cage hitting … and I said, ‘Jackie, turn around, you’ll never guess who’s here.’ And he wouldn’t turn around. That was the first play–off game.” Yet, when Rigney reflects back on his whole career, he finishes with this confession: “I thought one of the worst things I did or one of the things I didn’t do—and I regretted all my life—is that that opening day in the Polo Grounds on the eighteenth of April in ’47 when Jackie Robinson hit his first home run, I didn’t walk over to him and say, ‘Hey, I’m Bill Rigney. I just want to shake your hand and wish you the best of luck because it’s not going to be easy for you, but I wish you the best,’ and leave it at that. And I regretted it all my life that I didn’t do it, because I knew I was too late, you know, after I got to know him.”

An even more poignant manifestation of the competitor/companion effect that Jackie seemed to embody comes in the interview with Lew Burdette, which I found the most entertaining and thoughtful in the book. Burdette’s description of the mind–games that he played with hitters, many of whom were convinced that he threw a spitball because of jerky machinations on the mound, is hilarious. His other quirks, such as breaking the hold that Orlando Cepeda had on him as a hitter by having the catcher tell the Baby Bull what was coming, or his decision, along with catcher Del Crandall, to occasionally pitch whole games without using any signs at all, provide refreshing fodder for those a bit wearied by the hyper–serious modes of modern pitching and catching.

But when Burdette tells of his tenuous on–field relationship with Robinson, and the face–to–face conclusion of it, he is dead serious, and surprisingly lyrical: “[Jackie] tried to run me over once when I was covering first. He went over top of me once, but I raised up and threw him on his back. I mean, we had a lot of it for a lot of years, and I got all kinds of hate mail, you know. Racial. ‘Dirty racial slurring degenerate’ and all that stuff. And my son even got into a fight in school because of it. But when I found out that Jackie was not going to go to the West Coast, I asked Walter Alston, ‘Is Jackie not going to the coast?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, can I talk to him in that little room behind your dugout?’ He said, ‘You promise me you won’t fight?’ I said, ‘I promise. But if he’s not going up, I want to settle something with him.’ He said, ‘Promise me you won’t fight.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He went back in the dugout in the clubhouse, and we were over in our clubhouse, and Walter came right in, came up to me, and he said, ‘Jackie says he’ll meet you there in five minutes. Promise me you won’t fight?’ ‘Yeah, I promise, Walter.’ So I went up there and Jackie comes in in a little bit, and he said, ‘Hi, Lew.’ I said, ‘Hi, Jack.’ He said, ‘What do you want to see me for?’ And I said, ‘I want to tell you something; that you pulled the best play that I’ve ever had against me. You laid a perfect bunt down, scored the tying run, and that’s better than popping up or something like that, you know. But I thought it was a very brilliant play. But I turned around and called you what I would call my mother for bunting in that situation. I called you a ‘dirty bunting so–and–so’ and you charged me on the mound.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t change anything, because you and I had some great collisions down the first–base line.’ He said, ‘I don’t think I got the best of that.’ I said, ‘Well, I wanted you to know that I understand you’re not going to the Pacific Coast, and I wanted you to know what a great play you pulled on me, and you thought I said something about being black.’ I said, ‘But I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Gee whiz.’ He said, ‘We went through all that stuff and you didn’t even say it?’ He said, ‘You hurt me several times.’ And I said, ‘Well, you tried to hurt me, but I had the advantage because I had the bulk.’ And he said, ‘Lew, I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘Don’t be. I enjoyed it.’ He said, laughing, ‘I understand that.’ He said, ‘You make me feel a lot better.’ ” Okay, it’s not exactly Achilles and Priam reconciling in the last book of the Iliad, but there is a beauty to this rapprochement that stirs the heart.

***

Turning from We Would Have Played for Nothing to the latest installment from the high priests of statistical sophistication, ‘the Baseball Prospectus team of experts,’ and their thick tome It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book, edited by Steve Goldman, I thought at first that I would be trading the allusive power of story for the hard empiricism of the number–crunchers. Having previously reviewed a book of essays by this innovative squad, I knew that I was in for elaborate formulae, charts and graphs a–plenty, and a Soviet–style panoply of acronyms with strangely affecting phonetics, such as VORP (the crucial measure of a players worth over a completely average replacement player), and WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player, a yet–more–elaborate calculation that gets at the bottom–line: how many wins did the player create?). These are new kinds of numbers, generated by the desire to show real worth, rather than just let us live by the “nutrition–less bread” of Batting Average, RBI, and ERA (all of which delude more than clarify).

Enough said on the numbers racket, because I was wrong about this book! The authors are interested in story, the true story, the deep–down story of reasons, besides (but not precluding) luck and cruel twists of fate, for why several great pennant races in baseball history were great. And whether you go numbers–heavy, digging into the charts and taking stock of the VORPs and WARPs, or numbers–light, skimming the charts and muttering, “This is why I teach English” frequently under your breath, you will be enlightened by this book. These mathematician–writers are able to captivate us with pinpoint moments, exact pitches or managerial moves or mental errors or emotional collapses (or all of the above) that decided the outcomes of entire seasons. Horrible moments for the eternal goats (such as Ralph Branca giving up the “shot heard round the world,” or Gene Mauch micromanaging the 1964 Phillies into a late–season collapse, or Fred Merkle’s boneheaded play that seemed to sink the 1908 Giants) are shown as only small pieces of much more complex puzzles. Likewise, legendary feats like Carl Yastrzemski’s final two weeks of torrid hitting for the Red Sox miracle in 1967, or Tug McGraw’s emotional bravado with the “You Gotta Believe” 1973 Mets, are scrutinized and “right–sized”—fine feats, yes, but surrounded always by a broader context. The writers thus walk a fine line between clarification and revisionist demythologizing, and I think they carry the task out with a healthy balance of both love of science and love of mystery. In some ways, their work is more true to Medievalism than to Modernity.

I can only give a few highlights of this elaborate, somewhat diffuse volume, so I’ll just trot out my favorite quirky points. Jay Jaffe’s essay “The Replacement–Level Killers” reveals how managers sticking it out with certain veteran players during a pennant race can do irreparable damage, all in the name of loyalty and supposed worth. So the Angels use of Bob Boone as their catcher throughout the 1984 AL West race, with his supposed defensive acumen used as a cover for a horrific year at the plate (hitting only .202 and slugging a mere .262!), led to a VORP of –24.1, a pennant–killing formula. Not quite as numerically destructive was Don Zimmer’s perverse insistence on playing Butch Hobson at third base for the 1978 Red Sox, victims of the Yankee charge and the “Boston Massacre.” We read with fascination this description: “Revered by Zimmer as a gamer, Hobson played the field despite bone chips that locked up his elbow when he threw and—cringe!—had to be rearranged after each play. He made 43 errors, was 21 runs below average, and fielded .899, becoming the first regular to break the .900 barrier since 1916, when gloves were little more than padded mittens.” It’s just this mix of numerical exactitude and rhetorical flourish that gives It Ain’t Over its flair, a combination that gets at baseball’s distinctive appeal as the sport of both head and heart.

Because baseball is a game of at least supposed fairness, with the same strike zone for everyone and the same number of chances for each team, the story of 1972 AL East race stands out like a jagged, unnatural feature of the landscape. Clifford J. Corcoran’s essay “The Book of Job,” which leads off Chapter 7, hints at the dark questions of theodicy bound up in the first strike–shortened season, now mainly forgotten because of the confusions of the 1981 strike and its double season, and especially the brutal amputation of the pennant races and World Series due to the 1994 strike. What the 1972 strike did, with the unwieldy and uneven sets of cancellations during the two–week deadlock at the beginning of the season, was leave teams playing different numbers of games, and hence, at season’s end, the Tigers and Red Sox each lost 70 games, but the Tigers played one more game and won one more game, and hence took the divisional crown in an ugly numeric conundrum. Corcoran’s essay traces carefully the final weeks of the season, when Baltimore and New York were both hanging around as well, and Corcoran notes that many other small decisions and events, like Tolstoy’s “calculus of history,” added up to the Boston failure. The mid–season trade of Sparky Lyle to the rival Yankees for first baseman Danny Cater not only gave the Yankees a key to their bullpen (and robbed the Red Sox of their closer) but also caused the Red Sox to keep hot first base prospect Cecil Cooper in the minor leagues, while Cater did next to nothing. Double Whammy! Even on the field, the minutiae, often the ironic minutiae, began to add up to disaster for the Red Sox. In the final three–game series at Detroit, the Red Sox had the pennant in their crosshairs if they won two out of three. Game one was against their nemesis, Mickey Lolich, the Tigers rotund ace, but somehow, down 1 to 0, Yastrzemski got a pitch to hit with two men on, and crushed it off the top of the wall, the ball bouncing halfway back to the infield. One run scored, and the venerable Luis Aparicio was rounding third with Yaz chugging behind him when Aparicio slipped and began scrambling around. As Yaz narrated it, “He comes back to third and I’m on third and I’m still thinking I’m going to go. So I pushed him off the bag and said, ‘Luis, you can still make it.’ And he started running and gets halfway and falls down again. I was all set, even watching the relay, before he fell down the second time, to still go for an inside–the–park home run and follow him in. I just couldn’t believe it. One of the greatest base runners who ever lived. You don’t mind getting beat, but not to have the best base runner the game had ever seen fall down twice going from third to home.” The Red Sox never took the lead, and then lost the next night on two uncharacteristic errors. The on–field ironies were thus the icing on the proverbial cake of the final irony, that, having won the third game, they had no final chance to tie the Tigers, since they played one less game that year. The strike had added to the Red Sox curse in new and seemingly unjust ways, but, as Corcoran ends his piece: “Sometimes, kids, opportunities aren’t equal; the world isn’t always fair.”

In many shades and nuances, this is the message of this book, that numbers and percentages and normal expectations don’t always measure up to reality, a notion well–captured in the introduction, where chief editor Steven Goldman notes that “Baseball is the most accessible of sports: The players are not hidden behind masks or beneath helmets, not blurred by constant motion, but are knowable. In no other sport are the outcomes of games and races so susceptible to individual quirks, strengths, weaknesses, and prejudices. If ‘it ain’t over ’til it’s over,’ it’s because the players’ very humanity skews the odds, upsets predictions, causes them to delight and disappoint.” And so the human stories—and, without too much of a stretch, the opportunity to reflect on the wonderful mystery of humanness—are the chief pleasures of these two very different baseball books, and of baseball itself.

One other brief comment of storytelling baseball books—I have found in the children’s section of my local library (my kids are young and rambunctious, so I rarely get out of that wing!) several gems, including books about Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and a very funny history in cartoons of old–time baseball. But I recently found a stunningly beautiful text called We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, written and illustrated by artist Kadir Nelson, the recipient of a Caldecott Honor and several NAACP Image Awards for his illustrations of books about Harriet Tubman and Duke Ellington, and books by Spike Lee and Will Smith. After looking at the exquisite paintings of players and scenes from the Negro League’s past, I can see why he has been so lauded. The text of the book, Nelson’s first effort at writing, is good, broken as it is into nine innings, moving chronologically from the early days up to Jackie Robinson, and told in a discursive, anecdotal style that captures the rambling, hand–to–mouth lives of these great and often forgotten players. But it is the paintings, the portraits more or less, that are most captivating. They somehow show the strength, the suffering, the toughness, and the pride of these men, from the cover portrait of Josh Gibson, the “black Babe Ruth,” with his biceps flexed, showing sheer power, but his face sad, showing the frustration of never playing in the Major Leagues. The portrait of Willie Foster of the Homestead Grays, in street clothes in a Pittsburgh neighborhood, with four little boys carrying his spikes and his glove, is stirring beyond words. Finally, the tableau that Nelson offers Josh Gibson in the foreground, on deck and waiting, while Satchel Paige delivers a pitch to Buck Leonard in the near distance, with the distant stands of Griffith Stadium in D.C. swelling with thousands more fans than likely ever saw a Senators game there, hints clearly and achingly at what baseball missed by the disallowing of all the greatest players of the world to compete together.

***

This great experiment, of true integration of the game with all the best players in the world, continues right up to this moment, and as we look toward the 2008 season—the umps will be yelling “Play ball!” any day now—the faces and names of a score of nationalities peer back at us, with more to be revealed, perhaps, at the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Apparently, the home Chinese team has been thriving under intense tutelage, and the Latin American and other East Asian teams are gunning for medals as well. I read a recent interview with the Tigers’ triple–threat centerfielder Curtis Granderson, who mentioned his tour of South African and the flourishing of baseball in such outlying realms. We will see if the Cubs’ massive investment in the latest Japanese imported star, their new right fielder Kosuke f*ckudome, will give them a boost anything like the fabled Ichiro gave to the Mariners in his “rookie” year.

Let us begin there, smack dab in the middle of things in the NL Central, and let us assume that this infusion of polished talent will take the perennially disappointed Cubbies and their loyal fans strugglers all the way to the Promised Land—or at least to the divisional crown, which Chicago will snatch away from the Cardinals with their damaged star, Albert Pujols, and the scrappy but unconvincing Brewers. NL West, you say? Will Joe Torre continue the trend of successful Yankee managers of yore being unable to replicate their Bronxian success, as he settles into (ach! the horror to a Yankee fan who came of age in the late ’70s!) Dodger blue? No, but the untimely rise of the Rockies last year will be exposed as a fluke, and the D’Backs will struggle as well, as the Padres ride young pitching all the way up the hill this year. The NL East shows the Mets usurping the Yankees usual place as the New York team spending huge money in free agency to shore up a desperate run under impatient management—but will Johan Santana’s golden left arm put them over the top? I say they find the wildcard, but that the Phillies, stocking up on power hitters in their micro–dimensional park, batter the fences and take the division, with the Braves retooling and the Marlins starting half the Tigers’ minor–leaguers after trading their core again! Playoff time will find the Cubs wreaking vengeance on the Mets for the 1969 pennant snatching, and the Padres outlasting the Phillies in a full–series. The Padres–Cubs NL showdown, 1984 revisited, will see a seventh game, a Peavey–Zambrano battle with an unlikely hero hitting a solo shot in the tenth for the 1-0 win and the pennant—but for whom?! Wait and see … we must traffic through the American League first.

In the AL East (we’ll reverse our order of prediction), the Red Sox look good—too good, in my incredibly biased estimation, and I think Josh Beckett’s heavy innings last year and Schilling’s advancing age take them both down for 10 or so starts. Hence, the patchwork Yankees (if you can call $200 plus million dollars on the payroll “patchwork”) sneak away with the division. The Devil Rays, in breaking news, will stink. In the AL West, Seattle seems primed, the Angels are already very good, but I’m choosing Texas, getting a little proximate magic as the Cowboys move into their new facilities next door in Arlington. I’d talk about the Ranger pitching staff if I could name any of them … . Hmmm, no, don’t second–guess these picks! So that leaves the AL Central, and since I’ve lived in Michigan for a decade, and since I love the grizzled sagacity of Jim Leyland, and since the Tigers picked up a front–line starter and a middle–of–the lineup star when they traded for the Marlins’ Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera, it will be hard to pick against the them. Assuming that the Indians’ one–two punch of Sabathia and Carmona cannot possibly be so dominant late in the season this year, and assuming that the highly talented but highly flammable White Sox will struggle under Ozzie Guillen’s misrule, and assuming that the Twins just don’t have enough arms without Santana, and assuming that the Royals, well, are still the Royals, the Tigers will get in, but I’m going to have to say wildcard, with the White Sox surging late. So, with Texas out–bashing the White Sox in a divisional series that sees 50 runs scored, and with the Tigers nipping the aging Yankees’ staff (wait! can Mariano come through one last time … ?), Detroit will then render the Rangers helpless in the October cold for a Game Six victory and the second pennant in three years.

And so, with that eleventh–hour home run by a mid–season acquisition—yes, the 50–year–old Julio Franco (!)—the Cubs are flung into a rematch of the 1935 (and 1945) World Series with the Tigers, with snow and wind in the Great Lakes air as the series goes six chilly games back and forth, until power outages force a seventh game as a day–game at Wrigley, with no P.A. and no scoreboard, and just the Achillean right arms of Zambrano and Justin Verlander shearing off bats and nerves, until the portly Cabrera, already a veteran at 25, experiences “dé;jà; vu all over again,” remembers his cruel dominance of Cubs’ pitching as a teenaged rookie in 2003 with the Marlins, and finds Waveland Ave. in the glow of a late afternoon sunset. The Tigers are world champions, and the Cubs, well, wouldn’t it spoil the very basis of Cub–ness (to steal from Heidegger) to win it all? Hasn’t anyone seen how pedestrian and ho–hum the Red Sox fans have become in the midst of their winning ways? We need the Cubs to be the Cubs, because we need some baseball stories to remain, in the parlance of Tokien, “true myths” by which we find our way in the world.

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2008 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Preaching Today: In your book Surprised by Hope, you talk about a deeper understanding of hope “that provides a coherent and energizing basis for work in today’s world.” How has that deeper understanding influenced your preaching through the years?

Bishop N. T. Wright: [Studying] the Resurrection for an earlier book, Resurrection of the Son of God … ended up rubbing my nose in the New Testament theology of new creation, and the fact that the new creation has begun with Easter. I discovered that when we do new creation—when we encourage one another in the church to be active in projects of new creation, of healing, of hope for communities—we are standing on the ground that Jesus has won in his resurrection.

New creation is not just “whistling in the dark.” It’s not a kind of social Pelagianism, where we try to improve things by pulling ourselves up from our own bootstraps. Because Jesus is raised from the dead, God’s new world has begun. We are not only the beneficiaries of new creation; we are the agents of it. I just can’t stop preaching about that, because that is where we’re going with Easter.

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