Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas
All Things Made New: The Reformation and its Legacy by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper
Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval by Heinz Schilling
GRAND ANNIVERSARIES ARE to authors and publishers what voters are to a politician. They love them, albeit briefly. We can wait all day for a biography of a specific character or a history of a precise event, and then they all come along at once. That’s the case with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which is — all cynicism aside — a vital event in both the evolution and consciousness of Western society. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, a relatively obscure Augustinian monk and academic in Germany, nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, issuing a challenge to Rome, shattering the religious homogeneity of Europe and changing the world.
Changing the world is something to which Eric Metaxas refers in his book’s title, but then rather spoils it with a reference to rediscovering God. That, in fact, is part of the problem with this entirely adequate, but tendentious life of Luther. History is best when we are convinced the players don’t know the outcome, which of course they don’t. That’s not the case here. It’s a “great life” explored rather than an intriguing story told. The author is something of a star in the American conservative Christian firmament, but the heaven in question is not quite as sparkling as all that. He has written biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce, so it was inevitable that a life of Luther would come along for the 500th.
In other words, he’s a journeyman author and seems to write for the occasion rather than for the vocation. Not that this is a failed book, and the tale is told in generally accessible terms. A frighteningly devout young man who as a priest would tremble at the idea of celebrating the mass, Luther became increasingly uncomfortable with Rome’s unethical behaviour and then its theology. He was as much a product of his opponents’ reaction as his own ideas, but when obliged to search further into scripture and history found his Catholicism melting away and an alternative, “protesting” Christian ideal emerging from the resulting religious puddle.
Metaxas is reliable on Luther as an often-troubled man who had no idea what he had initiated. He is also delicate in writing of his marriage to the former nun Katharina von Bora and the death of their daughter, Magdalene, who died in Luther’s arms. But the book is inconsistent, leaping from event to event with strangely unequal attention. It also often seems padded, artificially distended with information that any interested reader would find online or in any reference book. He lists, for example, all ninety-five theses and a full letter from Pope Leo X, who excommunicated Luther. The former, in particular, is obviously of central importance, but it interrupts the flow of the book and, as any biographer knows, there’s none so tempting as an obliging original source that takes up a whole bunch of pages!
Oxford professor Lyndal Roper is a far superior companion for anybody who wants to encounter Luther for the first time — or, for that matter, who already knows the man rather well. In her intensely thorough, but always stylish biography, she places him firmly in his era but also as a figure of colossal historical significance. Luther’s Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, as the Ninety-five Theses are also known, began an exponential process of theological and political revolution. It was a perfect political storm: the rise of nationalism, the development of printing, an increase in literacy and a festering resentment of Rome’s power, corruption and arrogance.
Luther was a pioneer in the field, but far from the first to question the Catholic interpretation of Scripture and authority; that had been occurring for centuries. Popes and bishops seldom reacted well — the brilliant fourteenth-century English theologian and priest John Wycliffe escaped punishment thanks to powerful friends, but after his death his body was removed from consecrated ground and burned, the ashes thrown into the local river. Luther was not metaphorically taller than his reforming forerunners, but he could stand on their shoulders.
Then there was the almost manic energy, the combination of invincible self-confidence and a breathless determination to impose his will. Roper attributes some of this to Luther’s childhood — she is compelling on the man’s early days — and depicts how the more he was opposed and threatened, the more he felt called to rip apart the curtain of the religious status quo.
He was a figure of undoubted genius, but it’s also likely he didn’t entirely realize what he had done. He developed a new theology as he went along, one that would be known as Protestantism, then saw a fresh generation of dissidents take their places across Christendom. There could have been no Calvin, Zwingli or Cranmer without the plump German.
But if he often wrote and thought like an angel, he hated like a devil. This is something that both Roper and German historian Heinz Schilling show without any partisan reservation. Luther’s infamous statements on the Peasants’ War in the mid-1520s, for example, are chilling — particularly as the peasants in question assumed that Luther was on their side and felt encouraged by his work. He condemned them as “faithless, perjured, disobedient, rebellious, murderers, robbers, and blasphemers, whom even a heathen ruler has the right and authority to punish” and argued that “a rebel is not worth rational arguments, for he does not accept them. You have to answer people like that with a fist.”
Worse because of its grotesque contemporary resonance was Luther’s anti-Semitism. As both books explain, he began by being open and friendly toward the Jewish people, believing this attitude would lead to mass conversion. When it failed, he gradually turned against them and finally produced a long treatise entitled “On the Jews and Their Lies.” In it he calls for the burning of synagogues and schools, the destruction of Jewish homes, the theft of Jewish holy books, forced manual labour and, if possible, complete ejection from the country. The Third Reich trumpeted this filth, as did many Lutherans. It must be stressed, however,that there were always valiant Lutheran voices — Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis, being a great example — who disagreed, and since 1945 the Lutheran church has bared and beaten its soul over this issue and has been startlingly honest in its self-criticism.
Schilling puts it rather well when he writes, “This book is not about a Luther in whom we can find the spirit of our own time; this book is about … a Luther whose thoughts and actions are out of kilter with the interests of later generations.” That is an essential, robustly ethical prism. Roper’s is the more satisfying of the two biographies, but read as partners — as daunting as that may be — there is little more to be said about the man.
The Reformation may have started in Germany, but it soon spread throughout northern Europe and beyond. France was far closer than we may think to becoming a pluralistic or even Protestant state at one point, and reform made major inroads almost everywhere outside of Spain and Italy. British academic and broadcaster Diarmaid MacCulloch was knighted in 2012 for his services to literature, and his writings have to a large extent shaped Reformation history. His genuinely masterful life of the archbishop and martyr Thomas Cranmer is one of the truly great modern biographies. This volume is a compilation of twenty-two essays tackling Europe as well as Britain and dipping with a delicious expertise into subjects as diverse as the Council of Trent, Tudor royal image making, the Anglican prayer book, and the alleged latitude of the Church of England.
MacCulloch also writes exquisitely. “If you study the sixteenth-century, you are inevitably present at something like the aftermath of a particularly disastrous car-crash. All around are half-demolished structures, debris, people figuring out how to make sense of lives that have suddenly been transformed.” There, now pretend you’re not hooked.
Peter Marshall has written a long overdue single-volume history of the Reformation in England, fifty years after the seminal work by the great A.G. Dickens. There have been numerous books about various aspects of what happened under Henry VIII and his three children — and many television accounts, from the sublime Wolf Hall to the ridiculous The Tudors — but no popular yet scholarly study as broad in scope as this one. It’s become fashionable in historical circles to revise standard assumptions, making the case that Mary Tudor, known as Bloody Mary, wasn’t really all that bad (she was) or that Elizabeth I was in fact intolerant and cruel (she wasn’t), but Marshall is more responsible and thoughtful than that.
It’s a profound book with a light touch — and all the more impressive in that the author is covering almost a century of intellectual, social and religious history. That demands a whole nest of intellectual disciplines and understandings, and while he’s perhaps better on the early rather than the latter period, it will be a long time before the book is surpassed. And, of course, a long time before the next major anniversary.
As MacCulloch said in an earlier book, “So much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When the children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the children of the Jewish diaspora turned on the religions that had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light.” Let that light shine on.
Maclean’s, October 25, 2017
IT’S PARTY TIME in the religious world. On October 31, Christians — or, to be more precise, Protestant Christians, with a surprising amount of support from the Vatican — celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when legend has it that German monk and professor Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, thus lighting the fuse that blew European Christendom apart.
It matters far more than one might think, because it was not only religion but politics, culture, and economics that would change in that hammering’s wake. In the document, Luther made public his condemnation of the sale of indulgences — money paid to reduce the time spent in purgatory, a sort of waiting room before heaven, by relatives and loves ones. But this academic disputation went further than that, and it was a manifesto of criticism aimed at Roman Catholicism. History, as it were, was given a reboot.
There is much that is positive about Luther. He liberated people from rigid church control, gave impeccable energy to the idea of the individual’s relationship with God, and worked to eliminate corruption and superstition. In many ways, he was a pioneer not just of religious change, but of modernity.
But behind his undeniable genius was a gritty nastiness. He could be crude, abusive, angry, and, perhaps most tragically, profoundly anti-Semitic — a legacy that needs to be grappled with, even 500 years later.
He started as a supporter of the Jewish people, arguing quite rightly that they had been badly treated by the Roman Catholic Church, and quite wrongly that they, if presented with what he regarded as a more authentic Christianity, would surely convert. In 1523 he wrote an essay, entitled “That Jesus Was Born a Jew,” condemning the fact that the Church had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.”
But the Jews did not convert, and Luther reacted appallingly. In 1543, he published “On the Jews and Their Lies,” which today is shocking in its venom, and even for its time stood out as particularly cruel and intolerant. In the 65,000-word treatise, he calls for a litany of horrors, including the destruction of synagogues, Jewish schools and homes; for rabbis to be forbidden to preach; for the stripping of legal protection of Jews on highways; for the confiscation of their money. The Jews are, wrote Luther, a “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.”
Some of his defenders have claimed that Luther was old and ill when he wrote this, ignoring the fact that he lived another three years after the essay and that most of us become mildly grumpy when we feel unwell, not genocidal. Plus, Luther had also managed to have the Jews expelled from Saxony and some German towns as early as 1537.
And regardless of his intentions, Luther’s thinking on the Jewish people had a direct impact on history: the Nazis amplified Luther’s anti-Semitism from the earliest days of the National Socialist movement. It helped in the creation of the heavily Nazified and racist faction of Deutsche Christen, or German Christians, within the German Lutheran church, but perhaps more significantly, partly enabled the culture of anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible.
One especially repugnant case is that of Martin Sasse, the Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Thuringia during Kristallnacht in 1938. He feted the pogroms and the mass destruction of synagogues and Jewish businesses, and even tied it explicitly to Luther himself; just days after what was in effect the beginning of the organized slaughter of the Jews, he distributed a pamphlet entitled Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them! in which he claimed the Nazis were acting as Christians in their violent anti-Semitism, and that this was precisely what Luther would have wanted.
Yes, there was also a powerful anti-Nazi movement within Lutheranism, and the sacrifice and even martyrdom of those pastors and laypeople must never be forgotten. The Confessing Church, for example, was formed in opposition to the regime’s attempt to unify all German Protestants into a single pro-Nazi church. Leaders like Martin Niemoller and Heinrich Gruber were sent to concentration camps, but survived; writer and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was accused of being part of a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, did not.
But Luther was not unique in his Christian anti-Semitism. It’s such a grotesquely paradoxical reaction, of course; Jesus and most of the founders of Christianity were Jewish, but many of those claiming to love Him have hated His race and people. St. John Chrysostom, a major influence on the Eastern Orthodox Church, was virulently anti-Semitic; in 1555, Pope Paul IV issued a bull removing the rights of the Jews and subjecting them to communal humiliation. The examples are, alas, legion. Christians deliberately expunged the Jewishness of their faith and thus distorted it and shamed the teachings and life of that first-century Jewish preacher from Galilee. It’s a birth defect of the historic church, and it didn’t take very long for early Christian leaders to join the club — and while Luther did not codify his hatreds into tangible church policy, he left a heritage of antagonism and hostility all the same.
But 500 years later, have lessons been learned and wounds healed? Is the world a better and kinder place now because Christians have realized their colossal failures, stemming from one part of the Church’s founding figures? It’s a layered answer. The Roman Catholic Church formally rejected its doctrinal anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and Catholics have worked diligently and genuinely to build bridges with the Jewish world since then. And outside of fringe conservative movements within the Church, Rome has been largely successful. Protestantism is diverse by its very nature. Evangelical conservative Christians frequently adopt a Christian Zionist stance and are passionate supporters of Israel, even if often for mangled reasons; the underlying theology looks to the world’s Jews moving to Israel en masse, thus hastening the second coming and the end times. Lots of fire and mayhem to come — sinners beware.
Liberal Protestantism, including most Lutherans, is less absolute. In 1994, the five-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America spoke publicly of Luther’s “anti-Judaic diatribes” and denounced “the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews.” The Central Council of Jews in Germany had long asked for a formal statement from Lutherans on the subject of anti-Semitism, and just last year, the Lutheran Church in Germany obliged, condemning Luther’s writings on the Jews and “the part played by the Reformation tradition in the painful history between Christians and Jews.” The state Lutheran churches in Norway and the Netherlands have followed suit.
Other Lutheran churches reacted earlier; the American Lutheran Church, for instance, acknowledged it as early as 1974. In 1998, on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria issued a declaration that “it is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology.”
The situation is confused by the situation in the Middle East. Progressive churches have been some of the first to admit and condemn past anti-Semitism, but have been equally bold in criticizing Israel, sometimes stridently. Informed critiques of certain Israeli policies is certainly not the same as anti-Semitism, in spite of what some zealots might have us believe, but there are times when attacks on Israel by Lutherans, the United Church and other liberal Protestants do seem to lack historical context and sensitivity to the Jewish experience, and seem more angry at the Jewish state than committed to a greater social and international justice. There have, for example, been numerous motions and even decisions to boycott and disinvest from Israel while at the same time brutal Muslim theocracies have been largely ignored.
Put simply, one of the prime reasons for the creation of Israel in 1948 was because European Christians had acted against their faith and persecuted the Jewish people. It’s imperative that Christians understand that, but it’s unclear that enough of them do. But for all that, the twin solitudes of Jews and Christians were broken down long ago. William Temple, for example, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1944 and helped co-found the Council of Christians and Jews; in 1943, he spoke out in the House of Lords about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, insisting that, “We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.” That type of stance has been replicated and applauded myriad times since then and now, thank God, flows through the blood-stream of contemporary denominations. When in 2008 Lord Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, publicly referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York as “beloved colleagues,” he meant it. When in 1986 John Paul II entered Rome’s Great Synagogue, the first Pope since St. Peter to enter a Jewish place of worship, the emotion was genuine.
As a Christian with three Jewish grandparents, I have hardly ever experienced any anti-Semitism in the Church. But as I celebrate this 500th anniversary, I will do so with reservations. Not because I regret the Reformation — far from it — but because the otherwise sparkling lens that Luther provided is not, for me and I know for many others, completely clear. And that’s so terribly sad.
The Globe and Mail, September 15, 2017
WHEN THE U.S. Supreme Court finally legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, some anonymous wit said that they desperately hoped that the first couple to take advantage of the law would be named Adam and Steve. It was a response, of course, to the galloping homophobia of the Christian right and the fact that it constantly obsesses about what it believes was God’s original design for and of humanity. Born again, alas, often means the same as being born yesterday. Thus the story of Adam and Eve has in many ways actually caused great harm and is still doing so.
To those who embrace the metaphorical nature of the tale — and indeed of much of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament — it’s a story that is entirely unchallenging. The opposite of unquestioning religious belief needn’t be doubt, but faith seeking understanding. Yet in a darkly nostalgic attempt to preserve a patriarchal certainty, some Christians have embraced a raw, unkind literalism. So there could be some good old book burning if they get their hands on this one.
What Harvard academic Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates in his new book, with a lyrical ease of narrative and a genuinely impressive breadth of scholarship, is that the Adam and Eve template is replicated in numerous other cultures and says relatively little that is exclusive to monotheism. He also looks to motive, origin, and source. When some of the exiled Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, they were horrified at the destruction and decay. Ezra and his followers may be celebrated as champions of Judaism, but today we’d probably see them as fanatics who rejected the pragmatism and moderation of most of their co-religionists. Their response to Jerusalem’s demise was to set about ethnically cleansing the city both physically and spiritually. They were also obliged to ask themselves how this could have happened to the chosen people, why so many defeats, so much pain? Simple. The first humans let the side down and punishment was inevitable. Adam and Eve, you’ve got some explaining to do.
None of this material is new and there is no absolute answer to when the first books of the Bible were written, but it’s likely that propaganda was involved. Spin, an agenda or, God forbid, fake news! “Yet millions of people, including some of the subtlest and most brilliant minds that have ever existed, have accepted the Bible’s narrative of Adam and Eve as the unvarnished truth,” the author says. Whenever the Adam and Eve explanation of human origins came into being and whoever wrote it, it has mattered for 2,000 years and still does.
While the book is a history and an analysis of the Adam and Eve story, it is also an account of the author’s wanderings and wonderings through the prism of the Scriptural account of the original founding father and mother. It’s as though the first couple represent a rock thrown into the water and we are taken on a journey to follow the ripples. Greenblatt used the same vehicle in an earlier book about Shakespeare (Will in the World) and the results then and now are compelling. It’s not a unique device, of course, but there’s always the danger of it all becoming too solipsistic, too indulgent. Not here. We spend time with John Milton, a timeless poet, but also the dedicated spokesman of the revolutionary and regicidal Puritan regime of mid-seventeenth-century England. We read of St. Augustine, the early shaper of the Church whose influence on Christianity is incalculable, but not impeccable. We’re told of Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer and his depictions, not only of Adam and Eve, but also of Christ and of those ordinary central Europeans whom he met and knew. And finally, there is Charles Darwin and his ripping apart of the seamless garment of faith and science. He may have caused hardliners a great deal of anguish but, even at the time, there were Christian leaders such as the author Charles Kingsley who were convinced that theories of evolution in no way undermined Christian belief as long as we took an intelligent approach to the creation story. Greenblatt then jumps from matters Darwinian to a delightful conclusion about his own time observing chimpanzees in Uganda.
He’s strong and thorough on the misogyny that has been propagated by Eve’s apparent weakness and manipulation and how it has drenched Jewish, Muslim, and Christian teaching. There’s obviously a new theology at work today in certain circles, but it’s difficult to expunge millennia of assumptions from institutions that rely on authority and hierarchy. Eve the temptress, Eve the mother, wife, pro-creator, helper, servant. Eve the object. Never Eve the leader or Eve the priest. It’s often better than it was, it’s seldom as good as it should be.
Greenblatt knows, as we all should, that ancient texts, whether they are religious or purely descriptive, always require interpretation. While taken in historical context and without banal anachronism the Old Testament is a vibrant, vital text — I certainly believe so as a Christian — but it’s reductive and even dangerous to regard it as pure history. It was written and assembled at different times with different purposes, it’s often tendentious and usually composed by the winners. As the author frequently tells us, the Adam and Eve morality tale is used to excuse and to justify at least as much as it is to illuminate and explore.
Perhaps more time could have been spent on the startlingly gender-free nature of much of Genesis in its original language and the fact that more than one account of the creation story is provided in the Bible, which is something religious zealots either do not know or choose to ignore, but that would be carping. This is iconoclasm with a delicate touch, never mean-spirited and intent on opening doors rather than pushing people through them.
By the way, that first married gay couple in the United States was not, unfortunately, named Adam and Steve. Oh well, we can’t win them all.
The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2018
THE 1962 MOVIE The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah is hardly the finest example of Bible epics. Stewart Granger tries his best as an Old Testament heartthrob, but the script groans and the plot bewilders. For all that, it’s one of the very first lines that earns the film its place in bizarre cinematic history: “Watch out for Sodomite patrols!”
Watch out indeed. Christians have been watching out for a long time, causing incalculable pain, grief and suffering. Today, however, there is open debate within Christian and Jewish theology about the genuine teaching about homosexuality in the Hebrew Scriptures. Many of the most informed, erudite scholars are convinced that faith-based homophobia is a product of tendentious misunderstanding rather than historical and textual accuracy.
Which is where Michael Arditti’s graceful and stylish work of fiction enters the fray. For more than two decades now, the British novelist and critic has been chronicling the influence of faith on our lives in a series of works that subtly sway believer and cynic alike. Of Men and Angels, to a large extent a collection of five novellas around a central theme, follows in that tradition.
In this case, that thread is the story of Sodom, where angels, commanded by God, destroyed the city with fire and brimstone. The elimination of Sodom and its neighbouring city Gomorrah is recorded, of course, in the Book of Genesis, and it’s a story popularly known even in this Biblically indifferent age. It’s why we have the word sodomy and why churches have traditionally supported the persecution of gay people — even now they often oppose LGBT+ rights and marriage equality.
Arditti takes issue with all of that, and with a delicate panache manages to weave modern scholarship into stories that range from the Babylonian exile of ancient Hebrews through a mystery play in medieval York in England, from Renaissance Florence and nineteenth-century Palestine to Los Angeles during the height of the AIDS crisis. He has angels framing the book, and occasionally whispering the narrative. “Yet just as I cannot but admire your ability to turn time-worn myths into a subtle and enduring theology, so I cannot but deplore the consequences,” says the Archangel Gabriel. “And looking back at the earliest account of events in Sodom, I am amazed at the difference from the story that later became canonical.”
Quite so. Thus we are introduced to Jared, one of the Jews taken to Babylon after Judah’s military defeat. He is chosen to translate the Talmud, and realizes that the original account of Sodom is, in fact, largely lost. He becomes convinced that authentic Jewish values are irreconcilable with the hatred and destruction evinced in this part of Genesis. The Babylon where he lives is far more tolerant than he had been told, and his own sexuality is not condemned as it is in the revised version of Genesis.
And this is the key: Revisionism. What was considered absolute, immutable truth for centuries is now thought to have been edited so as to conform to a new puritanism and a need to distinguish the Jewish people from their powerful, and often seductive, conquerors. Simon Muskham in fifteenth-century York participates in a local play about Sodom, but comes to see same-sex love as God-given and precious. Frank Archer, the final leading character, is a Hollywood star — echoes of Rock Hudson here — who, while dying with AIDS, begins his last, greatest movie, speaking truth to church power about the reality of Sodom.
It’s all deeply moving and convincing, and one of Arditti’s many strengths is that he doesn’t allow the argument to dominate the humanity. He is convinced, and I agree with him, that the sin of Sodom concerns the rejection of the stranger, lack of hospitality, greed and mistrust of God. But he is disarmingly subtle in using this as a subtext, lived and breathed through his various characters. He is about story-telling and not propaganda; he is implicit rather than didactic.
On one level this is a novel of human failing and fragility, a splendid observation of our needs and desires, our triumphs and failings, told through the prism of history. On the other, however, it’s a roaring indictment of the obsessive hostility toward homosexuality that even today flows through the bloodstream of the Church body like a toxin. It’s the combination of these two literary brothers-in-arms that makes Of Men and Angels so compelling, and so vitally important.
CBC, March 10, 2017
AMERICAN EVANGELIST FRANKLIN Graham was in Vancouver last week, where tens of thousands of people heard the son of famed Rev. Billy explain how Jesus was the only way. Fair enough I suppose, but Graham’s rather exclusive and harsh interpretation of the Christian message comes with a few strings attached: Islam is evil, Barack Obama is a friend of the Antichrist, Donald Trump is divinely destined, Vladimir Putin is a fine fellow and, naturally, gays and lesbians should be banned from churches because “Satan wants to devour your homes.”
And now, Graham has identified and asked his legions of followers to help him oppose the new great enemy: the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. I can hardly imagine that these sorts of people are Disney-viewers in the first place, but the premise for this concerted attack is fascinating, and it’s already led to theatres banning the soon-to-be-released feature starring Emma Watson. Watson, mind you, came to fame as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, which — according to fundamentalist Christians — was devil-inspired down to its wand.
As with so much that provokes the Christian right, it initially looks like this is a parody. How could a delightful movie about seeing authentic beauty in ostensible ugliness be un-Christian? How could a musical score that celebrates grace, dignity, female empowerment, and selfless love be offensive to God?
The answer is that the filmmakers remarked that there was a gay theme to the remake. In fact, it’s less a theme than a blink, because if you look down at your popcorn for more than a moment you’ll miss the bloody thing.
The most obvious change is that LeFou, the servant of bumptious swaggerer Gaston, is apparently gay. Director Bill Condon said it’s a tribute to Howard Ashman, writer of the original film’s lyrics, who died of complications from AIDS. Rather exquisite and touching one would have thought.
But if you’re expecting LeFou — a figure of fun, remember — to protest about equal marriage or Russian homophobia, you’re out of luck. His sexuality is vague and oblique to the extreme. The most obvious illustration is at the end when he dances with a male character who, as part of a comedy routine, is dressed in a woman’s clothes. It’s all about as sexual as a Don Cherry rant.
But the manic homophobia surrounding Beauty and the Beast is not a joke. It informs and infects what goes on within much of the Christian right in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, in Canada: the opposition to so-called bathroom bills; teens being forced into conversion therapy; attempted and completed suicides; bullying and beatings. Because it also comes from Christians — albeit those on the ultra-conservative fringe — it also disgraces a faith that many of us hold to be sacred.
There’s background and context here. The boycotters are the same people who urged people to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion, even though it was absurdly sadistic and presented the suffering of Jesus in a manner that was humanly impossible. It was little more than Biblical Braveheart, with some of Mel’s Jew-hatred and self-loathing thrown in.
There were also some on the Christian right who initiated a similar boycott against The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, written by C.S. Lewis, arguably the greatest popular communicator of the Christian message in more than a century. Why? The title, silly. There’s a witch in it, and the Bible is not overly enthusiastic about the species.
The movies that many right-wing Christians do enjoy are the Left Behind series, where the good people are suddenly assumed unto heaven and the rest of us, including children, stay behind in confusion. There are three films, and the scripts and acting are a lot like a Kellie Leitch video.
Then there is God’s Not Dead and its sequel, where nasty liberals want to bully Christian kids and remove any reference to Jesus from the school system. These wretched things do well financially because they play into false fears and paranoia. And if you wonder where that sort of pathology leads, look no further than the election of Donald Trump.
One of the ironies here is that the hetero-hunk Gaston is played in the movie by openly gay Luke Evans, while his “gay” sidekick is portrayed by Josh Gad, who is as straight as they come. But that will escape the boycotters and the bigots, who prefer to perceive the world in banal caricatures. Problem is, those banal caricatures lead, in real life, not to harmless beauty but to dreadful and sometimes fatal beastliness.
CBC, December 25, 2017
BETHLEHEM HAS SELDOM been as calm as the Christmas cards make out, and 2,000 years ago the Romans and their collaborating friends in the Jewish population thought nothing of the occasional bit of slaughter. But was there a birth in, was it in winter? Were shepherds involved? And what has the modern Christmas got to do with it all?
To answer the last question: not much. There is a delightful new movie currently doing the rounds entitled The Man Who Invented Christmas, where Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge and Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens show how the season of goodwill was moribund until A Christmas Carol appeared. Not quite.
The book was published in 1843, when Britain was being transformed from a rural to an urban society, with increased working hours, strain on families and wavering of traditions. Dickens wanted to emphasize the charitable nature of it all, to use it as a metaphor for social justice. The phrase “Merry Christmas” already existed, but Dickens was responsible for making it habitual, and the linking of Christmas with snow is also quintessentially Dickensian — perhaps the idea of a new purity, a washing away of dark, mid-Victorian inequality.
But Dickens was merely giving a reboot to a festival that had existed for centuries. Santa Claus or Father Christmas is a development of Saint Nicholas, a Greek bishop from the fourth century, possibly with a few hints of the Germanic god Wodan thrown in. The way he is depicted today is more Coca-Cola and Hollywood than the early church, but then most good stories are collections of earlier legends. Decorating trees, kissing under mistletoe, carol singing, puddings and the like have various origins — some ancient, others modern, all delightful.
Then we have the story that started it all — the one that it’s so fashionable to be cynical about. The early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas, and Easter was the central event in the Church calendar. Actually, it still is.
In the fourth century, it was agreed to treat the birth of Christ as a holiday, but as scripture doesn’t give any dates for the event — it had to be made up. Winter is doubtful because sheep herding takes place in the spring, but nevertheless Pope Julius I opted for December twenty-fifth, probably so as to appeal to pagan converts who observed the festival of Saturnalia in December.
There were other factors however. Many pre-Christian societies had long-established celebrations in December, and the winter solstice was important to northern Europeans who commemorated it with what they called the Yule, where logs would be put on the fire and those sitting around the flames would feast and drink.
It was also one of the few times when meat was readily available because animals were slaughtered due to the difficulty of feeding them in the winter. Add to all this the Roman elite’s affection for Mithra, the god of the unconquerable sun, whose birthday was celebrated on December twenty-fifth, and we have a Christian holiday just waiting to happen.
But it’s too glib, too convenient, to argue that the contrived nature of the Christmas holiday somehow means that there was no nativity and thus that the entire Christian story is — well — humbug. In my opinion, the only arguments as annoyingly facile as those of fundamentalist Christians are those of fundamentalist atheists. There is a middle way. The intelligent doubter will at least consider the ancient non-Christian writings that speak of the Galilean preacher whose followers called the Christ, and the intelligent Christian couldn’t give a snow globe exactly when it happened, but that it did happen.
Belief in Jesus as the Messiah and acceptance of His teachings is something different of course, something more, than the acknowledgement that He lived. The former is an act of faith, the latter an act of logic. And faith has to be given voluntarily and never demanded. It’s taken Christianity far too long to accept that fact alas, which is something to remember this secular, pluralistic Christmas. To quote Dickens’ Tiny Tim, “God bless us, every one.”
United Church Observer, June 2018
THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW by C.S. Lewis is being staged at the wonderful Shaw Festival in Niagara, Ontario, this season. It’s the first book in the Narnia series, but was written after the far more famous The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Countless children have read the seven Narnia books, just as legions of adults have read Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, Miracles and Lewis’s other works. The movie Shadowlands, with Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, was a Hollywood triumph, three of the Narnia books have been turned into films and a fourth one, The Silver Chair, is expected late next year. In fact, the academic and author, who died in 1963, is arguably more popular and influential now than during his lifetime. But why?
Lewis’s Christianity is beautifully argued, with a pristine logic and the crisp, consistent wit one would expect from one of the finest minds of the era. But there’s also something about his image that many find appealing: the quintessential Oxford University professor, walking through the pub filled with pipe smoke, beer glasses, and tweedy friends, to proclaim the Gospel to an unbelieving world.
Still, it would be unfair to reject Lewis simply because of his popularity and because he is so beloved of those who like their Christianity certain and delivered in an English accent — indeed, Lewis was actually from Northern Ireland.
Walter Hooper was Lewis’s friend and secretary in the last months of the great author’s life. “He came to his faith via doubt, pain and even hostility,” Hooper explained, as we sat in one of Lewis’s favourite Oxford pubs. “In a way, it’s a shame that some of his devotees think he offers easy answers. Far from it.”
If Lewis demands anything of modern Christians, it’s that we think and struggle with a faith that is never easy. When his wife, Joy Davidman, died in 1960, the man who told the world about belief lost his faith in a loving God. But only for a time. In the book A Grief Observed, he writes of this experience and of how “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Some of his writings appear a little dated to the modern reader, and his attitudes toward women at times groan in their clumsiness. But he also married a fiercely independent Jewish woman from New York, whose outspokenness was not always appreciated in postwar Oxford. It was because, not in spite, of that attitude that Lewis adored her.
Why is Lewis so popular today? Because he was clever, funny, empathetic, challenging, compelling, and invincibly Christian. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else,” he wrote. Another gem: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
The persona is attractive to some, but the writings should be crucial to all. Lewis himself never thought he would leave much of a legacy. On that he was profoundly wrong.
The Walrus, April 2019
LAST MARCH, A story broke that must have had the sinners of the world praising whatever god they did or didn’t believe in: Pope Francis, leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics, had apparently declared that hell didn’t exist. Atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari, cofounder and former editor of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, reported that after a private interview, Francis had said that while the souls of repentant sinners “receive the forgiveness of God … the souls of those who are unrepentant, and thus cannot be forgiven, disappear.” In other words, it’s game over for those sinners, which is a little depressing, but at least they can expect no post-death punishment. As happens so often with this outspoken pope, however, the Vatican’s communication team quickly stepped in and denied that Francis made the statement at all. It was not the first time that the idea of hell has been questioned by an influential Christian. Rob Bell, a former evangelical church leader, argued a similar point in his bestselling 2011 book, Love Wins: “Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish?” he asks. “Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?” Clearly, the ancient idea, and veracity, of eternal damnation is still up for debate. According to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, only fifty-eight percent of Americans believe in hell, though seventy-two percent believe in heaven. Almost all major religions, monotheistic or otherwise, have featured some hierarchy of reward and penalty after death. The specifics are debated — some faiths describe endless torture, others a place for introspection — but the concept of consequences in the afterlife has been a constant. Is our waning attachment to hell, then, a momentary blip, or are believers finally ready for faith that isn’t tied to fear of everlasting agony? As Nova Scotia-based journalist and author Marq de Villiers explores in his new book, Hell and Damnation: A Sinner’s Guide to Eternal Torment, our ideas around what happens after death have always been in flux. De Villiers’ text is a deliciously cynical analysis of the afterlife viewed from a variety of historical and literary perspectives. He opens with a simple query, “What is this thing called hell?” Though, like any question wrapped up in thousands of years of religious interpretation, it depends whom you ask.
Hell has had many rulers. De Villiers refers to the “Big Men such as Hades, Tartarus, Beelzebub … and the occasional Big Woman” who have been tasked with deciding the unfortunates on the underworld’s guest list. In Christianity, it’s Satan (derived from ha-Satan or “the adversary” in Hebrew) a favoured angel who, after some conflict with God, was kicked out of heaven. He then divided time between hell and Earth, where he has caused all sorts of trouble for us humans. Though some Christians claim their faith is immutable, many of its interpretations have indeed changed — Satan and hell being good examples. De Villiers argues, mischievously, but not entirely unfairly, that Old Nick has gotten a bad rap over the centuries: Satan was originally seen as a more neutral figure within the Church, one who reflected the darker side of human nature that must be struggled against. During the Middle Ages, de Villiers writes, “Satan more and more took on his sinister shape as chief villain and chief prisoner, locked away by God yet with the ability to indulge in unlimited malice.” This change came about partly due to the rise of dissent within the Church. After the Protestant Reformation occurred, in the sixteenth century, certain leaders in the Roman Catholic Church sought to link criticism of leadership with evil. The papacy emphasized the fires and torments of hell for sinners — including heretics — partly because the new Protestant alternative to Rome looked increasingly compelling. Another theory on why the idea of hell became so prominent suggests that much of Europe’s ruling class — and the Church with which they sometimes enjoyed a symbiotic relationship — was terrified that the fear of earthly punishment was insufficient to assure order. But this thesis assumes that the certainty of hell produces good behaviour, and that clearly wasn’t the case — the devil and his instruments, after all, were readily accepted at a time when massacres and murders were common. Other religions have been less concrete in their approach to damnation. For Buddhists, the closest word for hell would be Naraka — a place where some beings go because of poor actions taken in life. “Buddhists were often indefatigable travellers,” writes de Villiers. “And many of them visited the infernal regions, sometimes out of sheer curiosity, sometimes out of piety, and sometimes apparently just for the hell of it.” Naraka, however, is never said to be eternal, and its residents are free to leave after a few hundred million years. Meanwhile, Islamic texts describe a place called Jahannam, where sinners will be punished physically as well as spiritually. There is a lot of fire in Jahannam — indeed, in many religions, flames are linked to ideas of purging and cleaning, as well as being bloody painful. Judaism is the least punitive and precise of the Abrahamic faiths on the issue of hell. Jewish texts instead speak of Gehinnom, which is more like a purgatory — a place where the dead are judged according to their earthly actions and made aware of their failings. Interestingly enough, most adherents to Judaism didn’t even imagine a retributive afterlife until they were exposed to Hellenic ideas around 400 BCE. Ancient Greek thought was multi-faceted, but the mythology envisaged a gloomy place below the underworld of Hades called Tartarus, where torture and suffering were meted out to a deserving few. When Jews became steeped in Greek culture, they picked up some of these beliefs around retribution, and as the diaspora travelled, its theology was influenced accordingly. Not all religious leaders spent time thinking of the many ways people could and should be punished. De Villiers writes that some African and Australian cultures were rare in not having any specific language for hell or any concepts of post-death judgment either. “There was really no need,” de Villiers writes. “Sure, the world has a creator, who had to live somewhere, often in what seems rather like a summer resort for himself, his family, and various magical minions, but this had little to do with ordinary people.” In these cultures, there was no “clear dividing line between life and death; these were not mutually exclusive.” What many would consider death was, for them, simply a change, not a finality.
Not long ago, Christians — especially Roman Catholics — were convinced that suicide led to hell. Now that belief is often rejected. This may be partly because people have, generally speaking, become more empathetic, and there is an increased comprehension of the realities of mental illness. As we understand more of the world, our beliefs tend to change — hell, therefore, is partly a product of us. We see that in the way secular society has dragged more progressive churches — and the Catholic reality if not the ideology — away from conversations about eternal punishment and toward those about the need for voluntary goodness, which, I’d argue, is far more synchronized with the original teachings of Christ. It’s not that people no longer believe in the difference between right and wrong; rather, hell may have fallen out of favour precisely because people believe in making decisions out of love rather than legalism. And that, if you think about it, is rather heavenly. “The systems we create are therefore our systems, not his,” de Villiers writes, referring to God. “They are infinitely malleable, and require constant vigilance, frequent updating, and unending skepticism from an engaged citizenry.” But I am, for my sins, a Christian, and I believe that faith is a dialogue. I take a literary and critical view of scripture and appreciate its metaphors and poetry as well as its truth and virtues. Most of the best people I know are atheists and agnostics, and I believe that Christianity is regularly shamed and stained by its hell-believing adherents. I’ve spent the last three years studying for a Master’s of Divinity, and while I now know more about hell than ever before, I understand it less than ever. Perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In a list of hellish possibilities, de Villiers writes of “cauldrons of boiling oil,” a place “full of stench and noise and pain, torment its sole purpose,” and “ever-burning wrath.” He ends, however, with something different: “Hell is just a state of mind, a radical separation from god.” This idea I like. If God is love — and why otherwise would we bother? — surely the worst thing imaginable is to be cut off for all time from authentic, meaningful, selfless love. As to what that love is and how we find it, I’ll be damned if I can give any satisfying answers.
The Globe and Mail, July 15, 2019
THREE YEARS AGO I wrote with joy and pride that the Anglican Church of Canada had voted at its Synod (the church’s governing body) to approve equal marriage, to give formal and sacramental acknowledgment of the church to LGBTQ people who wanted to embrace holy and lifelong commitments. In other words, gay men and women could be married in Anglican churches.
The vote was extremely close, and a two-thirds majority is required in the three orders of laity, clergy and bishops. Still, it succeeded. A second approval was required, however, and in Vancouver on Friday that didn’t happen. While the clergy and laity overwhelmingly approved, the order of bishops gave only 62.2 percent support, just one or two votes shy of what was required.
People reacted with shock, because even though the church did pronounce that each diocese could move ahead as it sees fit — several have already married same-sex couples and will continue to do so — this was a body blow, especially to those gay Christians who have remained faithful worshippers in spite of rejection.
The Bishop of Niagara, Susan Bell, spoke for many when she said, “My heart aches with lament and my soul is filled with anguish knowing all the pain and hurt caused by the General Synod’s failure to ratify a change to the national marriage canon that would have explicitly expanded the meaning of marriage to include same-sex couples.”
Yet she continued, “The General Synod did also overwhelmingly vote to affirm the prayerful integrity of the diverse understandings and teachings about marriage in the Anglican Church of Canada … As a result, nothing about this decision will change our practice in Niagara. I remain steadfast in exercising my episcopal prerogative to authorize the marriage of all persons who are duly qualified by civil law to be married, thereby responding to the pastoral needs present within our diocese.”
So, while this is enormously hurtful and damages the church’s reputation in the public square and in particular among younger people, it is by no means the final statement. Also, for a church to live authentically, it has to listen to all voices, even if they may appear jarring. But why the continued opposition to what is essentially a call for unconditional love?
The subject is hardly mentioned in the Bible, and when conservatives quote the Old Testament they often do so without a thorough understanding of its nature. The Hebrew Scriptures aren’t linear history and certainly don’t constitute a handbook of modern life — they sometimes defend slavery, demean women, even advocate ethnic cleansing. They’re to be understood through context and reason. For example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sinful cities destroyed because of their wickedness, is far more concerned with respecting guests than condemning gay people — the homophobic interpretation arrived centuries later.
When the Old Testament does mention homosexuality, it also forbids the combinations of certain cloths, eating the wrong foods, or intercourse with a woman when she is menstruating. I have no recollection of any of these subjects being debated at a church synod.
Jesus never mentions homosexuality, and stands in sparkling contrast to many of his contemporaries in being largely indifferent to people’s private sex lives. The song of the Gospels is justice, hope, compassion, and love; it sings of inclusion and grace and tolerance.
There may, however, be one story in the New Testament where Christ does respond to a same-sex relationship. It’s where a Roman centurion asks for his slave, a man he has come to love, to be cured. This soldier is the personification of the occupation, a gentile and an oppressor, hated by the Jewish people. More than this, the Roman military were often mocked by the Jews as men who returned to their barracks to engage in sex. This Roman also uses a specific Greek word to describe his relationship with his servant that goes beyond the platonic. Yet Jesus is in awe of the man’s faith, and heals with praise rather than condemnation.
St. Paul does indeed write, albeit briefly, about what we might today call homosexuality, but his disapproval is for heterosexual men using boys for exploitative sex, not for loving partnerships. Paul is responding to pagan rituals that used homosexual rape as a form of initiation, and while his genius is beyond doubt, he says nothing about equal marriage that has any relevance to the modern conversation.
It’s not over, and the disagreements will, alas, continue. But so many of us, gay and straight, so wish we could just listen to Jesus, welcome equal marriage, and then simply move on. Please God.