Page 4087 – Christianity Today (2025)

How do we respond to the devastation of September 11, the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Many responses come to mind: Prayer. Care for the injured and bereft. Increased security, increased vigilance. Just punishment for the masterminds behind the carnage. Sharper on-the-ground intelligence-gathering. Stronger international cooperation against terrorism. Congregational immersion in Scripture stories of God’s people who lived through radical loss and destabilization, from Joseph to Daniel to John, Peter, and Paul.

But there is one more response: American Christians will want also to become better global citizens.

Hit in the solar plexus

Since the so-called end of the Cold War, many of us have not given much thought to the rest of the world except as occasional business, tourist, or short-term mission connections. Those days of ignorance are over. We have been hit in the solar plexus with the truth that that we are globally connected and cannot cut loose.

In his bestseller on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman describes a label on a computer part that reads, “This part was made in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, China, Mexico, Germany, the U.S., Thailand, Canada, and Japan. It was made in so many different places that we cannot specify a country of origin.” We are globally integrated as never before. Yet many of us have continued to live cocooned in our own little circle of friends, walled off from people who are different. To think about the rest of the world overwhelms us. Masses of data pour over us, jumbled in sound bites that juxtapose great human tragedies with beer ads. We know that even the internationally minded—American expatriates and missionaries—have made mistakes. How can ordinary citizens like you and me know enough to make intelligent comments on global issues?

“Whenever I think about those people over there, I worry,” one churchgoer said recently. “And I know God doesn’t want me to be worried. So I’ve decided he doesn’t want me to think about them.” Another Christian says that’s why she doesn’t read the newspaper anymore. The news disturbs her, and surely that isn’t the will of God.

Pray through the newspaper

Christians should be different. Of all people, Christians are to love our neighbors. When our neighborhood expands to include the globe, then we’re called to love globally. How? Some of the most important steps may be some of the simplest:

• Pray through the newspaper, especially the world news section.
• Befriend foreigners who live in your city.
• Develop strong relationships with your church or denominational missionaries.
• Ask members who are business owners to talk about their global involvements.
• Go to a local college and find out whether there’s a group of local “friends of international students.”
• Ask your high-school and college youth what they’re studying about global issues.
• Teach a church class on the biblical basis of mission, tracing global issues from Genesis to Revelation.

And we should strive to do this without a patronizing smile, at arm’s length. Loving our neighbors means something more. It means being vulnerable. It means entering into their pain. When God in Jesus came to live among us, he shared our troubles and felt our hurts. Do we empathize with those in other countries?

Globalization has hurt a lot of people. Although transnational business has brought a lot of wealth to other countries, people in those countries suspect that transnational corporations—most based in America—are reaping the lion’s share of the benefits. This breeds a love/hate feeling toward America.

In the article “Globalization as a Challenge to the Churches in Asia Today,” published in the October 2000 Asian Journal of Theology, Yong-Hun Jo of Korea writes that poverty levels in Asian countries have worsened as globalization has bloomed. Although the article’s tone is moderate, and recognizes the benefits of a vigorous economy, it also speaks of bankruptcies, destruction of jobs, massive unemployment, a sharp rise in prices and decline in wages, capital flight into tax-free zones, the reduction of public services, environmental degradation, and a growing distance between the rich and the poor. At present 34 percent of the children under age 5 in Southeast Asia are underweight, as are 50 percent of the children in South Asia. Half the people in the world live on $2 a day or less.

And when labor must follow jobs in a borderless world, many leave behind spouses, children, and parents with whom they would have traditionally spent much time. Globalization obliterates family closeness.

Do we feel that pain? The prophet Amos blasted God’s people because they did not grieve for hurting people: “Woe to you who are complacent in Zion and to you who feel secure on Mount Samaria, you notable men of the foremost nation. … You lie on beds inlaid with ivory and lounge on your couches. You dine on choice lambs. … but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph” (6:1-6)

“Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food,” writes James. “If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (2:15-17).

There are many macrostructural and microstructural ways to reach out to these needs, and we must develop skills in these areas. At the same time, we must never forget evangelism. Economic programs may teach methods, but evangelism will unleash the meaning and the motivation to use those methods conscientiously.

The healing of the nations

Our government and military is responding to the devastation of September 11 at several levels, but for cozy and complacent Christians, this tragedy has been a personal wake-up call. There’s a big, real world out there and it is not negligible. We cannot ignore the pains of other peoples without danger to ourselves—from huge hungry populations, from environmental degradation, from religious terrorism.

Becoming global Christians does not mean a paternalistic relationship with believers in other countries. It means being siblings under a heavenly Father. We have much to give in answering some needs, but our brothers and sisters have resources we can no longer live without. We must listen, for example, to how believers in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia have learned to live with the constant threat of terrorism (see “The Hard-Won Lessons of Terror and Persecution,” p. 20). We must learn from believers in Rwanda and Croatia about forgiving known and unknown enemies. And believers in the Near East have much to teach us about responding to extreme forms of Islam.

The Earth—all of it—is the Lord’s. All of Scripture rings with this. God’s concern for global issues didn’t begin when Jesus said, “Go into all the world” or “You shall be my witnesses.” Thousands of years earlier, Abraham heard God call his name, saying, “I will bless you, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:2, 3).

Isaiah saw the people of God as a light to the nations (42:6). Habakkuk saw the “earth full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). Micah saw that “his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be their peace” (5:4-5). Jonah, Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah, and even Naaman’s slave girl saw God’s care for the nations. All of Scripture resonates with God’s absorbing interest in the whole Earth. We cannot be healthy American Christians today and ignore the world. A global concern is not optional. It comes from the heart of God.

In his brief commentary on Revelation, For the Healing of the Nations, Justo Gonzalez paints two biblical futures. Glimpsing them may help us find a place to stand in the wake of these attacks:

There is a vision according to which all peoples and nations and tribes and languages must bow before the beast and worship it. This is the vision of Nebuchadnezzar: “You are commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that. … you are to fall down and worship the golden statue that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up” (Dan. 3:4-5). There is a vision that takes for granted that there will always be a great harlot who sits upon many waters; and these waters are the many nations and tribes and languages and peoples who must bring their wealth to her . …

But that is not the vision of John of Patmos. According to his vision, out of these many nations and tribes and peoples and languages, God will build a kingdom in which all have royal and priestly honor. According to that vision, a great multitude, from all different nations and cultures, will jointly sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.” . …

We must be multicultural, not just so that those from other cultures may feel at home among us, but also so that we may feel at home in God’s future. … because like John of Patmos, our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; because we know and we believe that on that great waking-up morning when the stars begin to fall, when we gather at the river where angel feet have trod, we shall all, from all nations and tribes and peoples and languages, we shall all sing without ceasing: “Holy, holy, holy!”

By Miriam Adeney, a ct editor at large and associate professor of world Christian studies at Seattle Pacific University.

As winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, V.S. Naipaul has many claims on our attention. Here we take up only one: Naipaul’s treatment of religion.

In his 1981 book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, his 1998 book, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Conquered Peoples, and many other writings, Naipaul has issued some of the most unsparing accounts of the contemporary Islamic world anywhere on record. “I was interested in these convert societies,” Naipaul said in an August 2001 interview in the Literary Review. In Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, and Pakistan, he says, “history now begins in Arabia. It’s as though they have no history before the coming of Islam.” Nor does Naipaul limit himself to Islam’s modern face. He has said that centuries of Muslim rule crushed India’s Hindu civilization.

The Reuters story reporting Naipaul’s Nobel discreetly avoided any mention of Islam. “Naipaul’s views of religion”—note the generic term—”have raised some eyebrows,” Reuters said:

“If you follow the whole oeuvre of Naipaul, he is very critical of all religions,” Academy board member Per Wastberg told Reuters. “He considers religion as the scourge of humanity, which dampens down our fantasies and our lust to think and experiment.”

In fact, as we’ll see, Naipaul’s view of religion is more complex than Wastberg suggests. But the missing subtext in the Reuters story is Naipaul’s scathing critique of Islam. The timing of the award has suggested to many observers that the Nobel committee chose to honor Naipaul (long regarded as a strong candidate for the prize) this year in response to the events of September 11. At the same time, Wastberg’s comments and remarks by other committee members indicate that the Swedish Academy wants to send a nuanced message, not singling out Islam for criticism by honoring Naipaul.

“What he’s really attacking in Islam,” said Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the academy, is a particular trait that it has in common with all cultures that conquerors bring along, that it tends to obliterate the preceding cultures. To be converted, you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say, “My ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter.”

Conservative American commentators have often applauded Naipaul. Last week, following the Nobel Prize announcement, David Brooks of The Weekly Standard posted a piece titled “The Closing of the Islamic Mind.” Brooks praised Naipaul and provided a link to a 1990 lecture in which Naipaul contrasts the single-minded, exclusivist faith he encountered in the Islamic world with what he calls “our universal civilization,” which seeks to “accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of the world’s thought.”

“The style of religion he found,” Brooks says of Naipaul’s travels among Muslims, “was a complete way of life.” Brooks simply takes it for granted that his readers will agree with him: this is a Bad Thing. “I was among people whose identity was more or less contained in the faith,” Naipaul says in the lecture. “I was among people who wanted to be pure.”

Hence Naipaul is considerably more tolerant of Hinduism, for example, or of the indigenous religions of Africa than of faiths with the claims of Islam (or Christianity). “The missionary who wants to convert [Africans] to a revealed religion,” he says in the Literary Review interview, “is arrogant and destructive. I am interested in this ancient thing from the earth.”

Clearly this is a long way from the blanket contempt for “religion” that Wastberg attributes to Naipaul. Nevertheless Naipaul emphasizes repeatedly in his writings that he is not a believer of any stripe. Sometimes he puts this as a matter of temperament, but on other occasions he suggests a hierarchy of values in which the unbeliever is one who has evolved beyond the restrictive horizons of belief:

I began to understand what people in Pakistan meant when they told me that Islam was a complete way of life, affecting everything; I began to understand that—although it might be said that we had shared a common subcontinental origin—I had traveled a different way. I began to formulate the idea of the universal civilization—which, growing up in Trinidad, I had lived in or been part of without quite knowing that I did so.

Naipaul goes on to explain how, “in exchange” for the “rituals and the myths” of his Hindu grandparents, he “had been granted the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship.”

In short, Naipaul is an exemplary Modern Intellectual, one who has transcended the claims of any particularistic faith. The universal civilization he embraces draws on many sources—prominently including, for instance, “the Christian precept, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. There was no such human consolation in the Hinduism I grew up with, and—though I have never had any religious faith—the simple idea was, and is, dazzling to me, perfect as a guide to human behavior.” Another key value of the universal civilization is “the idea of the pursuit of happiness. … It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

From this perspective, Christianity is more acceptable than Islam only insofar as Christians have learned to accommodate the demands of the “universal civilization.” Naipaul’s 1989 account of travels in the Bible Belt, A Turn in the South, is much gentler than his reports from Islamic lands, but it displays the same impervious condescension.

Christians, then, should read Naipaul’s accounts of Islam with caution, as believers reading about other believers. Certainly anyone who cares for truth is in Naipaul’s debt. He has often said, truthfully, what others have refused to say; in this respect he counters the whitewashing accounts of Islam we mentioned last week. But like so many others who set themselves up as impartial observers of human folly, he is blind to his own self-serving prejudices.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christianity Today magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere:

Visit Books & Culture online at BooksAndCulture.com or subscribe here.

appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Covering Islam | Getting beyond the feel-good bromides. (Oct. 8, 2001)Christian Scholarship … For What? | Academic speakers affirm the value of beholding God’s creation. (Oct. 1, 2001)Myths of the Taliban | Misinformation and disinformation abounds. What do we know? (Sept. 24, 2001)The Imagination of Disaster | “We thought we were invulnerable.” Really? (Sept. 17, 2001)More Sex, Fewer Children | Mixed messages on condoms, contraception, and fertility. (Sept. 10, 2001)The Strange Case of Napoleon Beazley | The latest poster boy for death row chic. (Aug. 27, 2001)Apocalyptic City | The dream and the nightmare of megalopolis (Aug. 20, 2001)Megalopolis Forty Years On | The ambiguous face of the city. (Aug. 13, 2001)The Future Is Now | You want the news? Read science fiction. (Aug. 6, 2001)Memorable Memoirs | Whether telling us about the Spirit in the South or the crumbling atheism of a Chinese immigrant, these books provide windos into others’ lives. (July 30, 2001)The Distorted Story of Memoir Inc. | There are many good autobiographies out there, but do those who write about them have to pretend they’re the only books worth reading? (July 23, 2001)Looking for the Soul of CBA | Nearly anything that can be said about Christian publishing is true to some extent, thanks to the industry’s ever-enlarging territory. (July 16, 2001)Give Me Your Muslims, Your Hindus, Your Eastern Orthodox, Yearning to Breathe Free | Immigration’s long-ignored effect on American religion is garnering much attention from scholars (July 9, 2001)Shrekked | Why are readers responding passionately about a simple film review? (July 2, 2001)Debutante Fiction | The New Yorker should have paid less attention to the novelty of its writers and more attention to their writing. (June 18, 2001)

Q: What do today’s young men want?

McCartney: Young men today have a tremendous burden to make a difference in their world, but culture tells them that Christ is irrelevant and “uncool.” The world is seducing young people out of the churches. Soon, we’ll look around our sanctuaries and there will be nobody there under age 30, and we’ll wonder what happened.

Q: That’s a painful prediction. What causes you to say that?

A: Young men today have been bombarded by the culture’s messages their entire lives. It’s gotten into their brains and under their skin. Many of them have rejected the idea of a single, objective truth. The only thing they trust is their own experience. Self-fulfillment is their main goal in life, and they “know” that any path to happiness is as good as any other.

Q: Some people have said that this generation of young people is actually more spiritual than other generations. Do you see signs of that?

A: I think there are signs that young people feel a void, and many of them recognize it isn’t going to get filled by pop culture and other influences. The problem is there is a big difference between some vague spiritual awareness and knowing Christ crucified. Focus on the Family has released statistics that only 4 percent of those born between 1977 and 1994 are Christians. Clearly, there is a void. The challenge: What are young people going to fill it with?

Q: What can churches do to speak to young men?

A: Speak to young men in their own language—don’t talk down to them, but take them and their concerns seriously.

Q: Many churches have solid youth groups. How do they keep kids in church after high school?

A: Josh McDowell shared with our staff recently that 41 percent of churchgoing kids say they have no role model they respect. Another 20-22 percent say they “maybe” have a role model. Josh says this is likely higher than any previous generation. Part of the answer has to be that young people will be drawn to stay in church because they see role models there who can feed them truth, in contrast to what they get from peers. Building up strong role models in the church can make a difference.

Q: At Promise Keepers, you’ve specialized in reaching men. What are you doing to reach young men?

A: We’re holding our first-ever event for young men and mentors—December 15, at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. It’s called PASSAGE and will feature speakers like Josh McDowell and Miles McPherson, and great music by Jars of Clay and other bands.

Q: Who should come?

A: We’re targeting young men, ages 13-17. Also, we want their dads, mentors, or youth pastors to come with them. The key to PASSAGE is that we’ll involve churches, youth groups, and parents in the event and follow-up. In the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus showed how a tiny seed could grow into a mighty tree. Together, we can help boys become powerful, committed warriors for Jesus Christ.

Bill McCartney is the former head football coach of the University of Colorado and is Founder and President of Promise Keepers (www.promisekeepers.org). For information on PASSAGE,call 1-800-888-7595 or visit www.passage2001.com.

To reply to the editors of this newsletter, write Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.

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Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Long before September 11, Americans writing from a variety of perspectives were saying that we needed to learn more about Islam, both as a world religion and as the faith of a growing number of Americans. Francis Cardinal George, for example, said that the most significant challenge for the Church in the twenty-first century would be dialogue with Islam, based on mutual respect without eliding differences. More recently, Diana Eck, in her book A New Religious America (touched on in an earlier column; we’ll return to it again), emphasized the impact of Muslims on the American religious landscape.

Still, until a month ago, learning more about Islam was a low priority for all too many Americans. Since the attack, that has changed. PBS has re-broadcast its series, Islam: Empire of Faith. Newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs have been scrambling to provide some context for the attack and the larger movement it represents. Even Oprah has gotten into the act.

Well and good. The impulse to learn, to understand, is welcome, but the quality of the information has been very uneven, and it often comes with a distorting spin. This is the first in a series of columns intended to contribute (on a very modest scale) to this ongoing project. Other subjects will be taken up in this space, but Islam will be a recurring theme for some time.

Much of the recent talk has referred to historical antagonism between Islam and the West, and specifically between Islam and Christianity. Often the suggestion is made that we can’t understand current attitudes in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world without this historical background. For example, Salim Muwakkil, whose column in the Chicago Tribune I regularly read with interest, observed on September 24 that “there are longstanding tensions between the Islamic and Christian world going back to the original crusades.” Similar statements, always with the Crusades as the reference point, have appeared in countless commentaries since September 11.

What’s wrong with this little history lesson? Well, nothing really?if you don’t mind history as told by an amnesiac. The “tensions” between Islam and Christianity began long before the Crusades. The starting point was the seventh century, when Islam began a period of conquest that remade the face of the Middle East and North Africa, extended into Spain, and threatened all of Europe. It was in 638, in fact, that Muslims first captured Jerusalem.

The regions conquered in this period included the cradle of Christianity and the early church. To speak as if “tensions” between Islam and Christianity began with the Crusades, as if Christians had simply decided out of the blue to attack Muslims, is not a small error. It is a fundamental distortion of the historical record.

This does not of course excuse the evil done by Christians under the banner of the Crusades (a subject we’ll take up later). Not in the least. But it does suggest the bias that infects not only popular commentary on Islam and the West today but also many more substantial works, including books written by scholars for general readers.

For example, in the book Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power, by Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (the companion volume to PBS’s Islam: Empire of Faith), the Muslim conquest of Christian lands is recounted only briefly and in highly idealized terms, while unsavory aspects of Muslim rule?including slavery?are even more egregiously distorted to present a benign face. (For a corrective, see the interview with Bat Ye’or in the September/October 1998 issue of Books & Culture.) Again, this is a subject we’ll be returning to; suffice it to say here that such brazen tampering with history is scandalously common.

Surely some of this revisionism is motivated by a laudable desire to counter deeply rooted stereotypes that denigrate Islam in general and Arabs in particular. (Although today a majority of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs, in the minds of many Americans the two are synonymous.) In the aftermath of September 11, that effort has taken on considerable urgency.

But the way to counter untruths and half-truths is not to substitute for them a new set of distortions. Just as certain apologists for Christianity bring discredit to the faith by refusing to acknowledge the stains in Christian history, so many would-be apologists for Islam undermine their own cause. We have to do better than that, even when the truth hurts.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christianity Today magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere:

Visit Books & Culture online at BooksAndCulture.com or subscribe here.

appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Christian Scholarship … For What? | Academic speakers affirm the value of beholding God’s creation. (Oct. 1, 2001)Myths of the Taliban | Misinformation and disinformation abounds. What do we know? (Sept. 24, 2001)The Imagination of Disaster | “We thought we were invulnerable.” Really? (Sept. 17, 2001)More Sex, Fewer Children | Mixed messages on condoms, contraception, and fertility. (Sept. 10, 2001)The Strange Case of Napoleon Beazley | The latest poster boy for death row chic. (Aug. 27, 2001)Apocalyptic City | The dream and the nightmare of megalopolis (Aug. 20, 2001)Megalopolis Forty Years On | The ambiguous face of the city. (Aug. 13, 2001)The Future Is Now | You want the news? Read science fiction. (Aug. 6, 2001)Memorable Memoirs | Whether telling us about the Spirit in the South or the crumbling atheism of a Chinese immigrant, these books provide windos into others’ lives. (July 30, 2001)The Distorted Story of Memoir Inc. | There are many good autobiographies out there, but do those who write about them have to pretend they’re the only books worth reading? (July 23, 2001)Looking for the Soul of CBA | Nearly anything that can be said about Christian publishing is true to some extent, thanks to the industry’s ever-enlarging territory. (July 16, 2001)Give Me Your Muslims, Your Hindus, Your Eastern Orthodox, Yearning to Breathe Free | Immigration’s long-ignored effect on American religion is garnering much attention from scholars (July 9, 2001)Shrekked | Why are readers responding passionately about a simple film review? (July 2, 2001)Debutante Fiction | The New Yorker should have paid less attention to the novelty of its writers and more attention to their writing. (June 18, 2001)

Time magazine recently named T.D. Jakes as “America’s Best Preacher.” On the cover, over a picture of Jakes, the magazine asked “Is this man the next Billy Graham?”

As part of its “America’s Best” series, the magazine wondered which preacher is at the top of the game right now. They called Jakes a virtuoso: “Jakes’s eccentric pauses, coy glances at his audience, and the occasional odd, Holy-Spirit-inspired stutter that sounds like a skipping CD might normally mystify the nonanointed,” Time religion writer David Van Biema says. “And yet somehow, they do not. Like Brando’s mumbling or Michael Jordan’s outstretched tongue, they are pendants to an overwhelming gift.”

Time cited as one of the factors in their selection of Jakes “the extravagant celebratory bounty of black Pentecostal preaching.”

“When it comes to rhetoric, says former Southern Baptist Convention President Paige Patterson, “the best Anglo preachers on their best days don’t preach as well as a good black preacher on his worst day.”

If rhetoric is the test, then Jakes ranks. But what about exegesis and application? What other factors should we consider in determining “best” and “effective”?

We need your help. The winter issue of Leadership focuses on preaching: what makes preaching effective, and who are the best examples? Would you take a few minutes to help us out?

Who is today’s best preacher? Is it T.D. Jakes? Is it Billy Graham? Or is it one of the preachers on the famous Princeton list from 1996? or maybe one of the radio preachers? Or is it someone much of the world has not yet heard of?

We want to know who the pastors and church leaders say is the best preacher. Please send us an e-mail with your nomination. Tell us who you think ranks as the top preacher in the world today. Also give us the reasons for your choice, the criteria on which you judge the effectiveness of a preacher. The results of our polling will appear in the next issue, and we’ll publish as many of your comments as we can.

Contact Us. Please give us your name, church, and city and state.

Thanks for your time. And thanks for adding to the meaningful exploration of preaching in our times.

Eric Reed is managing editor of Leadership.

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Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A city statute that would have slapped money solicitors at the Los Angeles International Airport with a $1,000 fine is a violation of free-speech rights guaranteed by the state constitution, a federal judge has ruled.

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Committee for Human Rights in Iran, both of which use the airport to ask for donations, challenged the ordinance when it was approved in 1997. According to the ordinance, those who enter the airport terminal to seek donations face a maximum six-month jail sentence and a $1,000 fine.

In 1999 an appeals court overruled a 1998 federal district judge ruling that declared the law a violation of the state constitution and ordered the district court to reconsider the issue.

In the 10-page ruling handed down on August 6, U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall decided that neither the Krishnas nor the human-rights committee obstructed access to ticket counters, arrival and departure gates, or baggage-claim areas. City officials had argued that solicitors contributed to congestion at the airport and could jeopardize safety by distracting passengers.

“Unless there is a pedestrian-flow problem, then I don’t think any regulations of that kind are going to be justified in a practical and constitutional sense,” attorney Barry Fisher, who represents the Krishna group, told the Associated Press.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere

In 1992, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness took a similar ban by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to the Supreme Court. The ban was upheld.

ReligiousTolerance.com has a page on Krishna beliefs, practices, and history.

The Hare Krishna Index, Web site for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, is a comprehensive listing of all web sites of the Hare Krishna movement.

What does the fall of Constantinople in 1453 have to do with the exposure of a famous forgery?

For a half century before Turks took the city, the capital of the eastern Roman Empire, church scholars traveled often between Constantinople and Italy. Fearing Turkish invasion, scholars brought more than 230 ancient manuscripts back to Italy, rescuing the texts from oblivion and feeding the Renaissance with “new” ideas.

The discovery of these books led to a tremendous interest in languages and historical and contextual criticism. It also fed a new interest in discovering whether ancient documents were genuine.

Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), a specialist in Latin translation and philology (the study of words), took an interest in examining ancient and modern authors and their style of writing. Thus he became, unwittingly, one of the first scholars to examine ancient documents for their authenticity.

Early in his career, Valla made a critical study of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic church. He raised troubling questions about some of Jerome’s word choices, such as Latin paenitentia (“penance”) for Greek metanoia (better rendered “repentance”). Valla essentially suggested that the Catholic church’s entire system of penance and indulgences rested on a mistranslation! Later critics of that system, including Erasmus, used Valla’s textual notes and praised his work.

Alfonso, king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples, as well as a patron of scholarship, hired Valla as his secretary in 1435. Alfonso wished to expand his territory by annexing papal lands, so in addition to admiring Valla’s intellect, he probably hoped to use the scholar as a secret weapon against the church.

In 1440, under the king’s protection from Pope Eugenius IV, Valla wrote his most famous disputation: On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine. He labeled the work a “ridiculous forgery” and sneered, “A Christian man who calls himself the son of light and truth ought to be ashamed to utter things that not only are not true but are not even likely.”

The Donation of Constantine granted far-reaching property and privileges to the papacy, including ecclesiastical supremacy over the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople; oversight of lands in “Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, and Italy and the various islands”; the Lateran palace; and several items of imperial regalia. Constantine had supposedly bestowed such lavish gifts on Pope Sylvester I to thank the pope for curing his leprosy.

Almost everyone accepted the donation as valid from the ninth century to the fifteenth. Still, Valla was not the first scholar to find the story fishy. Nicholas of Cusa had exposed the falsity of the donation in 1433, but it was Valla’s lucid historical and linguistic criticism that devastated the document’s defense.

Valla knew his arguments would get him into trouble. Regarding the church loyalists who judged Valla’s earlier work as subversive, he wrote, “How they will rage against me, and if opportunity is afforded how eagerly and how quickly they will drag me to punishment! For I am writing against not only the dead, but the living also, not this man or that, but a host, not merely private individuals, but the authorities. And what authorities! Even the supreme pontiff.”

Still, Valla pressed on, determined to expose an error he judged “an enormous one, due either to supine ignorance, or to gross avarice which is the slave of idols, or to pride of empire of which cruelty is ever the companion.”

Valla’s argument hangs on philological study, through which he shows that the language of the donation dates not to the fourth century, but most likely to the eighth. By that time, the papacy had established its territorial ambitions. The borders drawn in the false donation merely outlined the lands that papal forces had sought to conquer through military and political maneuvering.

The forgery was so obvious, and so recent, that Valla could advance only two reasons why dozens of popes had accepted it: “either they have not known that the Donation of Constantine is spurious and forged, or else they themselves forged it, and their successors walking in the same way of deceit as their elders have defended as true what they knew to be false, dishonoring the majesty of the pontificate, dishonoring the memory of ancient pontiffs, dishonoring the Christian religion, confounding everything with murders, disasters and crimes.”

Valla held the papacy in such low regard that he naturally leaned toward the latter explanation. Deeper into his critique, he scoffed, “Even were the Donation authentic, it would be null and void, for Constantine could have not power to make it, and in any case the crimes of the papacy would already have annulled it.”

In his analysis of the effects of this historic hoax, Valla stated that from that papacy’s usurpation of the temporal power had come the corruption of the church, the wars of Italy, and the “overbearing, barbarous, tyrannical priestly domination.” Valla called on the people of Rome to rise up and overthrow the papal government of their city, and he invited the princes of Europe to deprive the popes of all their territorial possessions.

In the face of such an attack, the papacy could not remain silent. Besides, it controlled the Inquisition. Valla was summoned and accused of heresy. But King Alfonso ordered the Inquisition to leave Valla alone, and the case was withdrawn.

Valla continued his attacks on the church. He showed, by using basic historical and linguistic rules, that the Apostles’ Creed was not composed by the apostles, but by later church leaders. Other critiques followed, but then Alfonso began to move toward reconciliation with Rome.

Valla, ever the deft politician, decided that he had better make peace also. He addressed a letter of apology to Pope Eugenius IV, reaffirming his orthodoxy and asking for pardon. Eugenius ignored the request, but when the next pope, Nicholas V, was looking for scholars for his new library (now the Vatican Library), he forgave Valla and made him a papal secretary in 1448. Valla finished his career as a canon of St. John Lateran (the pope’s own church) and died in 1457.

Nicholas V effectively admitted the forgery of the donation when he hired Valla to be his secretary. Still, authorities suppressed Valla’s disputation for decades. The first print edition did not appear until 1517, when Martin Luther and other Reformers would make great use of it.

The false donation gradually receded from prominence, though its authenticity continued to be debated in some circles until the eighteenth century. The papacy held onto the lands in central Italy granted by Pepin, in 755, until 1861, when nearly all of the peninsula united as the new Kingdom of Italy.

Peter E. Prosser is professor of Christian History and doctrine at Regent University (Virginia) Divinity School.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

In the development of the discipline of church history in the United States, few scholars played a more important role than the Swiss-born, German-educated immigrant Philip Schaff.

Known best for his multi-volume History of the Christian Church, which is still in print, Schaff spent his career arguing for and demonstrating the importance of studying the Christian past. Along the way, he founded the discipline of American church history.

Born in Chur, Switzerland, on New Year’s Day in 1819, Schaff had a difficult childhood. He experienced poverty and life in an orphanage, where he was sent after his father died and his mother remarried. Fortunately, a series of benefactors cared for him and provided warm Christian nurture that would shape the rest of his life.

As a student at the boys’ academy in Kornthal, Schaff experienced a dramatic spiritual rebirth that delivered him from intense anguish of soul and allowed him, as he wrote in Personal Reminiscences, “to realize for the first time what it is to have peace with God through the atoning blood of Christ which washes away all sin.” This experience would characterize Schaff’s piety throughout the rest of his life and would also influence his understanding of the role of the church historian.

Schaff studied at the University of Tübingen, one of the most dynamic institutions for theological study in the world at that time, and at Halle before moving on to the University of Berlin, where he found an intellectual home in the mediating theology of August Neander. Schaff called Neander “the most important church historian of our time” and “the father of modern church history.”

Schaff also appreciated his mentor’s deep faith and the Christian devotion that pervaded his work. Schaff noted that “the most enduring merit of Neander’s church history consists in the vital union of the two elements of science and Christian piety.“

Early in his teaching career, Schaff received an invitation that would change his life and the future of the discipline of church history. Two delegates appeared from tiny Mercersburg Seminary, in the isolated hills of south central Pennsylvania, and offered Schaff a position there, on the recommendation of his professors. The young scholar wrestled with the opportunity and eventually came to see it as a “Macedonian call, ‘Come over and help us!'” to which he had to respond.

He arrived in Mercersburg in August 1844 and was pleasantly surprised at his compatibility with his only colleague at the seminary, John Williamson Nevin. Together, historian Schaff and theologian Nevin

developed a system known as “Mercersburg Theology,” which emphasized the church’s heritage and traditions in the face of the prevalent American anti-historical sense. The two men established Mercersburg as an unexpected center of American theological scholarship.

By 1863, Schaff believed that his work at Mercersburg was completed. He spent five years as secretary of the New York Sabbath Committee, then accepted a position at Union Theological Seminary as “Professor of Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolism.” That title reflects the astounding breadth of Schaff’s scholarship and teaching.

During his time at Union, Schaff became involved in numerous ecumenical and scholarly projects, including organizing the international meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in New York in 1873, serving as president of the American Committee of Revisers of the Authorized Version of the Bible through the project’s completion in 1885, founding the American Society of Church History in 1888, and writing and editing a number of multi-volume works of biblical scholarship and church history.

Where opposites unite

Schaff was guided by a number of principles in his study of history. He was convinced, for example, that church history courses in the few seminaries that even offered them conformed to a “dry, lifeless style” that failed to probe the “main thing in history, the ideas which rule it and reveal themselves in the process.” Most church history education likewise failed to foster a sense organic development, leaving students unable to understand their own or their movement’s place in the overall history of the church.

Following philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who posited that cycles of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis raise what is preserved to a higher level, Schaff maintained that “spiritual growth is likewise a process of annihilation, preservation, and exaltation.” An example of this process in Christian thought and practice was the emergence of the Protestant Reformation out of the medieval Catholic Church.

“The practical piety and morality of Roman Catholicism,” said Schaff, “is characteristically legal, punctilious, unfree and anxious; but distinguished also for great sacrifices, the virtue of obedience, and full consecration to the Church.” The Protestant Reformation brought a needed corrective through a faith that “is evangelically free, cheerful and joyous in the possession of justification by grace.”

The abuses of medieval Catholicism were abolished, and the best of the catholic heritage of the Church was maintained, while the Protestant principle of renewal and reform brought about a higher and fuller form of Christianity. In turn, the weaknesses of Protestantism, in particular its tendency to fragment the unity of the Church—especially notable in the American context—would be corrected through the emergence of “evangelical-catholic” Christianity in the future.

For Schaff, though, it is important to note that development never moved beyond the essential character of Christianity that was present at its beginning. The acorn becomes an oak, but never an apple tree.

A project that Schaff envisioned, but did not live to see to completion, was a series of American denominational histories to be produced under the auspices of the American Society of Church History.

The authors of the volumes were to be ecumenically minded, first-rate scholars whose work would portray their own denominations objectively while also recognizing the virtues of other groups. The studies were to be “decidedly irenical in spirit,” and Schaff hoped that the volumes would help Christians understand and appreciate both their distinctive contributions to the Christian tradition and their common heritage.

Schaff viewed the project and its resulting volumes as “a means of bringing the different churches into closer union and ultimate cooperation.” This vision clearly illustrates Schaff’s sense that the study of history serves the life and future of the church.

Some of Schaff’s assumptions about the study and writing of the history of Christianity have been superceded. His model of careful, accurate, comprehensive, and irenic scholarship, though, remains worthy of admiration and emulation.

Stephen R. Graham is dean of faculty and academic life, as well as professor of American church history, at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

When people think of medieval history, they might think of legends about saints (see Great Lessons from “Bad” History, page 22) or entries such as these from the Annals of St. Gall:

710. Hard year and deficient in crops.712. Great flood.714. Pippin, Mayor of Palace, died.718. Charles Martel devastated Saxony with great destruction.

Contrast those sparse lines with this passage from medieval chronicler Ordericus Vitalis:

“When [William the Conqueror’s son] Robert heard about this he was terrified. Seeing disasters all around him, he was brought low and forced to beg for mercy from the unconquered king [Henry I]. The stern king, however, remembering all the wrongs Robert had committed, resolved to hunt him down with a huge army, and press the attack until he recognized that he was beaten and submitted entirely to the king’s judgment.

“Robert, driven to despair by his wretched fate, took the advice of friends and went out to meet the king as he approached the town, confessed his treason, and handed over the keys of the town to the conqueror. The king confiscated Robert’s whole honor [royally granted lands] as well as the estates of the vassals who had stood by him in his rebellion, but allowed him to leave unharmed with his horses and arms, and granted him a safe-conduct through England to the sea-coast.

“All England rejoiced as the cruel tyrant went into exile, and many, fawning on the king, congratulated him saying, ‘Rejoice, King Henry, give thanks to the Lord God, for you have begun to rule freely now that you have conquered Robert of Bellême and driven him out of your kingdom.'”

Medieval chronicles drew upon several sets of annals, plus oral traditions, to compose a comprehensive account. Many chronicles even begin with Jerome’s Latin version of Eusebius’s Chronicle, connecting local events with the span of history from creation forward.

Whether the story of a medieval town (e.g. London or Florence), an event (e.g. a crusade), an abbey, or an ethnic group, each chronicle provided an informative, purposeful, unrefined world view in which readers—or hearers—could find their identity. These four history writers produced some of the most notable chronicles of the High Middle Ages:

Ordericus Vitalis (1075-1142?)

Ordericus was an English-born monk who, after being sent by his parents to Normandy at age 10, became the foremost medieval historian of that region. He billed his Ecclesiastical History as a universal account ranging from Christ’s time to his own, but he focused on life after the Norman Conquest, with special emphasis on political and diplomatic history.

Ordericus pivoted his history on biblical eschatology, describing the church’s role in salvation. Current events fit into God’s plan as well.

In another era, Ordericus might have been a newspaper journalist. Under his pen, William the Conqueror emerges both as a patron of churches and a man who spent his final hours struggling with a troubled past. The First Crusade is undertaken “by the inspiration of God” as Christians of the West, “from the ends of the earth and the isles of the sea,” formed a united army to free the East. His personal interviews, colorful vignettes, and frequent digressions are unforgettable.

Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1142)

Probably Flemish, possibly a Saxon, Hugh became an Augustinian monk and came to the French monastery of St. Victor in about 1115. He became director of the abbey school and wrote extensively. His most influential work, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, sought to apply contemporary learning to worship and the lectio divina (the art of contemplative prayer).

Unlike most medieval thinkers, Hugh believed that the literal sense of Scripture was as least as important as the allegorical and metaphorical senses, and that the literal meaning must be grasped first. Because of this mindset, Hugh emphasized history as the foundation of sacred learning and virtue. Through history, he saw God’s work of salvation.

On the Sacraments follows a historical, rather than theological, structure. Book One moves from Creation to Incarnation, while Book Two moves toward the Last Things. World history coincides with the history of God’s people: “From the beginning to the end, no period lacks its faithful to Christ.”

Otto of Friesing (1114-1158)

Born into a ruling German line, Otto became his land’s finest medieval historian. Following training in Paris, he joined the Cistercian order in 1133, entering the abbey of Morimond in Champagne, where he became abbot. He was appointed Bishop of Friesing in 1137, helped reform his diocese, and took part in the disastrous Second Crusade (1147-1148).

Written at the end of his life, Otto’s Deeds of the Emperor Fredrick I offered an optimistic, almost fatherly interpretation of his era. His most far-reaching work, however, was the Book of Two Cities, or Chronicle of Universal History.

Two Cities offers the first important medieval philosophy of history. Following Augustine and his younger colleague Orosius (see page 13), Otto pits the “City of God” against the “City of the Devil.” In eight books, he traces this struggle from Creation to his own year—1146. The final book depicts the Last Judgment and the world to come.

Pursuing this grand scheme, Otto devalued some secular and pagan elements, becoming careless or overly rhetorical in use of detail. Yet his attention to cause and effect, his attempts to explain the present by understanding the past, and his concern “not to lose the thread of history” are consistently thought-provoking.

Anselm of Havelberg (ca. 1100-1158)

Anselm was one of the first members of the Premonstratensian order, a group dedicated to asceticism, contemplation, and active ministry. In about 1129 he was consecrated Bishop of Havelberg, in northeastern Germany on the Slavic frontier. In 1155 he was transferred to Italy, where he served as Archbishop of Ravenna.

In addition to visiting the courts of both German Emperor and Roman Pope, he journeyed at least twice to Constantinople, advocating ecclesiastical unity and political accord. The first of these journeys inspired his principal theological work, The Dialogues.

Confronted with a foreign culture, Anselm developed, as theologian Walter Edyvean has shown, “an active consciousness of human history.” In Book One of his Dialogues, he uses three different schemata to advance his apologetic for the one, true church throughout the course of history. As none of these is wholly original, Anselm emerges as a student both of history and historians.

Anselm’s view of history is apologetic rather than apocalyptic—unlike the view of his more-famous countryman, Joachim of Fiore (1132-1202). Presenting the grave concerns of his time, Anselm finds hope in the presence of the Spirit of God, who is able to give life and renewal to his people in any age. “With the ancient fathers,” Anselm wrote, “in manifold ways by the one Faith the one God has been served.”

James D. Smith III is pastor of Clairemont Emmanuel Baptist Church, adjunct professor at the University of San Diego and Bethel Theological Seminary, San Diego, and an editorial adviser for Christian History.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Overviews

Marshall Baldwin, Christianity Through the 13th Century (Harper & Row)

Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford)

Paul S. Boyer, ed., The Oxford Companion to United States History (Oxford)

Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (Fontana)

Warren H. Carroll, A History of Christendom (Christendom Press)

Henry Chadwick and G. R. Evans, eds., Atlas of the Christian Church (Facts on File)

Owen Chadwick, gen. ed., The Penguin History of the Church, 7 vols. (Penguin)

F.L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford)

J. D. Douglas, ed., The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (Zondervan)

Everett Ferguson, ed., Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (Garland)

W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Fortress)

Edwin S. Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America (Zondervan)

Adrian Hastings, A History of African Christianity (Cambridge)

Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, 2 vols. (Harper & Row)

Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, 2 vols. (Harper Collins)

Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Viking)

Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans)

Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (InterVarsity)

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 5 vols. (U. of Chicago)

Alexander Roberts, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 10 vols. (Eerdmans)

Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (Baker)

Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Eerdmans)

Ruth A. Tucker, and Walter Liefeld, Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Zondervan)

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Penguin)

Early Church &

Middle Ages

Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word

Augustine, Confessions

Augustine, City of God

Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (Norton)

Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, trans. Emero Stiegman (Cistercian)

Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, Ewert Cousins, ed. (Paulist)

Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (U. of California)

Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (U. of Chicago)

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Blackwell)

F.F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans)

John Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Newman)

Henry Chadwick, Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition (Clarendon)

G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (Image)

Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Eerdmans)

Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule, Walter J. Burghardt, trans. (Paulist)

David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Vintage)

Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History (Addison-Wesley)

Heiko A. Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (Fortress)

Robert Payne, The Fathers of the Western Church (Oxford)

R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (Yale)

James Stevenson and W.H.C. Frend, eds., Creeds, Councils, and Controversies (SPCK)

James Stevenson, ed., A New Eusebius (SPCK)

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, E. Allison Peers, trans. (Image)

Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. by Robert Royal (Catholic U. of America)

Ugolino and W. Heywood, eds., The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi (Vintage)

Frederik Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church (Sheed and Ward)

Kathleen Walsh, ed., Creation and Christ: The Wisdom of Hildegard von Bingen (Paulist)

Reformation and Modern

Stanley Ayling, John Wesley (Abingdon)

Roland H. Bainton, Christendom: A Short History of Christianity and Its Impact on Western Civilization (Harper & Row)

Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Penguin)

Roland H. Bainton, The Reformation of the 16th Century (Hodder and Stoughton)

D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (Unwin Hyman)

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (Viking)

Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (Viking)

Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth Century (Banner of Truth)

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Harvard)

John Dillenberger, Martin Luther (Doubleday Anchor)

John Dillenberger and Clause Welch, Protestant Christianity (Scribners)

Will Durant, The Reformation (Simon and Schuster)

William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story (Eerdmans)

Martin Luther, Small Catechism

Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Blackwell)

John T. McNeill, History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford)

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans)

Heiko A. Oberman, Luther, Man Between God and the Devil (Image)

Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (Oxford)

Lewis W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517-1599 (Harper & Row)

Charles Wallace, Jr., ed., Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings (Oxford)

W.R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648-1789 (Cambridge)

W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge)

F. Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (Baker)

American

Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale)

Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Hendrickson)

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Harvard)

Jon Butler and Harry Stout, Religion in American History: A Reader (Oxford)

Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again (Oxford)

Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale)

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (Knopf)

Keith J. Hardman, Charles G. Finney, 1792-1875; Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse)

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale)

William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford)

Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane, eds., A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism (Ithaca)

George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford)

William Martin, A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story (Morrow)

Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Dial)

Henry F. May, The Divided Heart: Essays on Protestantism and the Enlightenment in America (Oxford)

William G. McLoughlin, ed., American Evangelicals, 1800-1900(Harper & Row)

Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 2 vols. (Beacon)

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford)

Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-19th Century America (Abingdon/Harper)

Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving(U. of Chicago)

Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford)

Sojourner Truth, The Journal of Sojourner Truth (Dover)

Marguerite Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada (Toronto)

Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton)

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History.