Although my childhood self wasn’t focused on any particular topic, my adult self had a very clear focus: integrating Christian faith with everyday work.

For years, I had struggled to consistently bring the principles of my faith to my corporate work life. I had written periodically about the topic for websites and devotionals. But my book, as I envisioned it, would compile the entire treasure trove of failure stories. It would give a self-deprecating account of how poorly I had lived my faith at work, if only to reassure readers that their performance couldn’t be any worse than mine.

I also approached the book-writing process as someone curious about how books get published. I wasn’t patient enough (or confident enough) to wade through the full-service publisher path, but I wanted more support than I thought I would get by self-publishing. So I chose to work with a hybrid publisher and an independent editor, a combination that promised a fast route to publication alongside opportunities to learn from knowledgeable partners.

When my book was released, I was ecstatic. Something I had wanted since childhood had come to pass. I humbly thanked God for allowing my vision of serving him to become reality.

Now I just needed to entice people to buy the book. I thought that part would be easy. I had spent my career in marketing and communications, helping clients and employers communicate their customer-value propositions. I assumed I could do the same for a book. Never mind that I had no public presence and no connections with a defined reading audience. I was confident I could convince people to buy my God-inspired tome. With a catchy title and a nice cover, how hard could it be?

The Problem with Christian Book Endorsements

Katelyn Beaty

But I didn’t rest on appearances alone. I did marketing things. I bought advertising. I did podcast interviews. I spoke to groups. I wrote guest columns. I entered contests (and won a couple). I gave books to friends and told them to tell their friends. I checked a lot of boxes. It was exhausting and expensive, but it was worth it to tell the world about my brilliant and life-changing creation.

Over eight months have passed since the book’s launch. How have sales been? In a word, miserable.

When I started the journey, I thought that selling 5,000 copies would be a good goal. Maybe I had that in mind because it’s a nice round number (and 10,000 seemed brazen). The reality has been rather humbling. Instead of aiming for the thousands, I would have to content myself with lower figures—much lower. As in, dozens. As it stands, I’ve given away far more copies than I’ve sold.

On one level, this is not only disappointing but also positively embarrassing. I’m a professional communicator, for crying out loud! I feel as if I have talked about this project nonstop for years. Yet the number of copies I’ve sold might fit in a middle schooler’s backpack. As a human with a fragile ego, I found it discouraging to consider the sheer number of books—other people’s books—that readers buy every week.

But I am more than a worldly being. I’m a spiritual being, too, a child of God, and a growing Christian. And that part of me still rejoices. Here are four reasons why.

First, the book ministered to those who read it. Of course, I think the book is wise, funny, and inspirational. But I recognize I’m probably biased. So I was thrilled when friends told me they enjoyed the copies I offered. Granted, they were obligated to say nice things. (It was a free book, after all!) But I listened carefully to their reactions and was excited when they talked about specific sections that caused them to dig deeper into their own faith.

One friend pushed back on what I had written about the perils of pride, until he heard his priest speak on the topic and recognized the point I was making. Another friend, who is discouraged with the human failures she sees in organized religion, told me, “You almost make me believe in God again.” (Note to self: Follow up on that.)

It was even better when friends of friends—people I didn’t know—told me they got something out of my writing.

I was completely taken aback when a friend told me his men’s group had read the book. He invited me to speak to them one Friday afternoon. As a group we laughed at the (intentionally) funny parts and talked about the challenging parts. But mostly we encouraged one another to keep going. I was humbled when one of the guys, remarking on a passage about my tendency to miss opportunities to share my faith, exclaimed, “That’s me!”

Another highlight was an Amazon review by an individual I didn’t know:

I’ve never come across a book like this and enjoyed it all the way … I appreciate the vulnerability of the author’s writing paired with well-applied scriptural insights to help us … be better true Christians at work. Well done, brother. You made me smile

Writing the book was a pretty solitary activity. As I sat alone at my desk, I vaguely hoped the words I typed would connect with someone. So hearing directly from people who read and resonated with what I wrote was both humbling and empowering. It was reassuring to learn that my writing could shine Jesus’ light and encourage others. 

Even if thousands don’t buy the book, maybe it was uniquely meant for the few who did.

Second, I discovered new friends and co-laborers. Writing the book was a solitary activity, but trying to market it absolutely was not. Because I had no mailing list, social media presence, or built-in audience (what the kids these days call a “platform”), I needed to humble myself and ask total strangers to help build all that. In the process, those total strangers became valued partners and more.

Over the course of the book-making and marketing experience, I recall meeting more than 50 new people, from advertising and sales associates to writers’ workshop organizers. I met literary agents, freelance editors, magazine publishers, web developers, and bookstore owners. Perhaps because we had lengthy conversations, I built special relationships with various podcasters.

Perhaps most significantly, I also met fellow writers taking a journey similar to mine, writers who encouraged me much more than I encouraged them. (Unfortunately, the author who assured me that my book would sell much better than his, which he published through an academic press, turned out to be more encouraging than accurate.)

In some cases, my connections amounted to little more than brief email exchanges or short phone conversations. I can think of others who became friends and ministry colleagues. Interactions that might have been merely transactional grew into supportive relationships. Which brings me to the next blessing worth mentioning.

Promoting the book launched the next phase of my life. Because I saw a potential opening for books aimed at marketplace ministries—parachurch organizations serving people who want to better integrate their faith and work—I targeted those groups. If it benefited those organizations, fine, but my motivation was to use them to advance me. God had a different idea.

In one instance, I reached out to an organization called WorkLight, sending essays without any guarantee of them being published. Over time, my involvement expanded to areas beyond writing. Leaders invited me to help guide publication content, plan communications strategy, and advance the ministry. I attended the organization’s national leadership meeting and even did a home stay with a board member, an experience way out of my comfort zone. But it was a true blessing. People who were unknown to me six months ago have become friends and co-travelers on our collective faith journey.

The Faith and Work Movement Is Leaving Blue-Collar Workers Behind

Jeff Haanen

Approaching an organization called Unconventional Business Network bore similar fruit. At first, I mainly intended to find an audience for my book. But my efforts eventually paved the way for other opportunities, like contributing regular devotional articles and speaking at a sponsored event.

Meanwhile, I got serious about using my own social media presence to encourage others. My LinkedIn account now regularly features devotions or faith observations about the workplace.

What I intended as marketing channels God turned into avenues for ministry.

Finally, God used my “failure” to grow my faith. In hindsight, my book adventure started from a place of hubris. On some level, I figured the path would be easy and the finished product would win me esteem, especially because I felt that God had put this project on my heart. That’s one reason why, at least initially, the paltry sales figures came as a gut punch.

I often tell people that because my ego is so important to me, God effectively uses it to get my attention. But rather than feed my ego, he allowed it to be bruised, all so he could open me to new opportunities, change my perspective, and grow my faith. I learned to see the common ground I shared with others in the faith-and-work movement as fruitful in its own right. Connecting with them might not have done much to sell my book, but hopefully it played some small but God-ordained role in advancing his kingdom.

Perhaps most importantly, this adventure has changed how I view myself. After struggling for so long to live out my faith at work, I have become someone who regularly writes and speaks about how my relationship with God forms me for his purpose. Maybe my years of church attendance, Bible studies, and small group participation prepared the way for that journey. But something about the act of writing a book—stepping forward in faith into an endeavor I felt God calling me to pursue—seems to have launched it in earnest.

All of this is far more rewarding than the smug feeling of seeing my BookScan numbers hit triple digits. Perhaps I’ll never sell another book. Perhaps I’ll sell enough to fill a second backpack. But maybe the purpose of the book was teaching me humility, deepening my faith, and making God’s presence more real.

My advice to new authors is to take a step back at the start of your book-writing journey. Ask yourself what you think God is really calling you to, and why. Then be ready for God’s blessing to show up in ways you don’t expect. Maybe your blessing will be huge sales. (In which case, great, I’m not at all jealous. Nope. Not one bit.)

But you may be surprised to find that the blessing comes in the shape of new friends, fresh ways to use God-given talents, and a renewed trust that God will always deliver what’s best for you, even if it wasn’t what your heart had desired.

Who could ask for anything more?

Tom Petersen is the author of Thank God It’s Monday(?): Balancing Work and Faith While Keeping Your Sense of Humor.

The post My Book Sales Stink. But I’m Glad I Took the Publishing Plunge. appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Catholics Come Home campaign was founded by its president, Tom Petersen. Twelve years ago Tom returned to the Catholic Church following a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ at a men’s retreat. Sensing God’s call, Tom consecrated his 25 years of experience in the advertizing field to the task of promoting spiritual renewal among Catholics. This “apostolate” (or what evangelicals might call a parachurch ministry) is dedicated to reversing the tide of lapsed Catholics, calling them, with the warmest intonation and most technologically savvy forms of media, to “come home.” As Tom puts it on the website:

Each of our television commercials invites people to come to CatholicsComeHome.org, where they are given the opportunity to learn (or relearn) the truth about the Catholic faith, find their local parish and return home. As our site says, coming home to the Catholic Church has never been easier!

Catholics Come Home wants to partner with Catholics like you to evangelize our fallen-away brothers and sisters, the un-churched and the under-churched. Campaigns are launching in numerous archdioceses and dioceses across the United States. With your help, Catholics Come Home plans to air nationally on mainstream television networks, during the top TV programs in 2010.

After the U.S. airings are underway, plans are slated for international airings—to help fill empty churches across the globe, and re-evangelize our culture worldwide.

The scope of Peterson’s vision is enormous, but then again so is the challenge, as the website points out:

• Only 33 percent of U.S. Catholics attend Mass on a weekly basis. That means approximately 42.7 million U.S. Catholics are not practicing Catholics.
• The number of Americans identifying themselves as non-religious/secular increased 110 percent from 1990 to 2000! It is now 13.2 percent of the total population. Comparing this statistic with the previous one, non-religious, secular individuals outnumber active, Mass-attending Catholics by 58 percent.
• As many as 100,000 baptized Catholics in the U.S. drift away from church each year.

With one in ten Americans identifying as “former Catholics,” according to a recent Pew Forum study, many in the Catholic Church long for renewal. It is a mission which Pope John Paul II called a “New Evangelization,” a lay-led initiative of outreach to inactive or fallen-away Catholics.

Are any Catholics listening? You’d better believe it. The number of organizations “answering the Pope’s call,” as it’s phrased, is impressive. Simply take note of the lawn signs outside of your neighborhood’s local parish advertising programs such as “Alpha” and “Theology on Tap,” or visit the Vatican’s YouTube channel, or tune into Relevant Radio or the EWTN Global Catholic Network, or now surf the web to CatholicsComeHome.org, and you’ll see it. Trenchantly conservative, devout, enterprising, organized, and above all committed to the Church, these Catholics are serious. In them, the spirit of Ignatius of Loyola lives.

I haven’t heard too many proponents of the New Evangelization compare their efforts to the legacy of Loyola and his Society of Jesus; but for me, an armchair church historian, the parallel is striking. Starting with a commitment to supporting and serving the papacy, both endeavor to promote dynamic faith among laypeople and to enrich the structures of public life. The parallel of theological substance, spirituality, innovation, and evangelistic zeal is remarkable. With this connection in mind, I would like to offer two words of caution: one for Catholics and the other for Protestants.

Catholics would do well to remember that although Jesuits eventually became aggressive adversaries of Protestantism, this was not so in the beginning. As Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “When the Genevan Pierre Favre, one of Ignatius’s closest associates from his Paris student days, instructed fellow Jesuits in how they should treat Lutherans, he stressed that it should be a matter of simple Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the other.’ “

From this historical example, my encouragement to Catholics pursuing the New Evangelization is to remain positive. While there will necessarily be moments of defining yourself over and against Protestants, don’t let this become your modus operandi. Unfortunately, this negative trend seems to have already started in some of the above-mentioned apostolates. Even the Catholics Come Home site, in the “Answering Your Questions” section, has some content that is, shall we say, less than winsome. It’s one thing to express disagreement with Protestants; it’s quite another to portray them as morons.

Protestants must be equally vigilant. For many in our tradition the temptation will be to dismiss or perhaps mock the programs. After all, that’s what we’re supposed to do when we encounter error, right?

Speaking as an evangelical pastor, card-carrying Calvinist, want-to-stand-up-and-salute-when-I-hear-Luther’s-Mighty-Fortress kind of guy, I nonetheless feel secure enough in my Protestant convictions to express appreciation for elements of the Catholics Come Home programs and other New Evangelization efforts. Turning away from sin, commitment to reading Scripture, looking to the Savior, protecting the life of the unborn, serving the poor—these and other such themes are ones that Protestants can affirm, even though we disagree with the institutionalized structure of Catholic authority, the role of the sacraments, and requisite precepts surrounding them. This sort of measured response—consciously gracious while rooted in biblical principles—is more intellectually honest, more missionally compelling, and more genuinely Christian.

Chris Castaldo serves as Pastor of Outreach at College Church in Wheaton and is author of Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic (Zondervan). “Speaking Out” is Christianity Today‘s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Recent Christianity Today coverage of Protestant-Catholic relations includes:

Not All Evangelicals and Catholics Together | Protestant debate on justification is reigniting questions about Rome. (Oct. 29, 2009)

Amiable Impasse | Charitable Catholic/evangelical dialogue snags on imputation, authority. (Sept. 8, 2009)

The Post-Neuhaus Future of Evangelicals and Catholics Together | Charles Colson says the convert to Catholicism helped break down the most important barrier. (Jan. 23, 2009)

The post Catholics Come Home? appeared first on Christianity Today.

The director, Andrew Adamson, is off to a good start. Swinton is a formidable actress, capable of spooking viewers with just a glance, and yet she’s also exotically beautiful. She could fulfill Lewis’s description of that bone-chilling baddie brilliantly. McAvoy’s still unknown to most moviegoers. He’ll have his hands (hooves?) full playing the gentle faun who becomes a target of the witch’s wrath. Now comes the real challenge—finding child actors talented enough to play Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy without making them corny or merely cute.

Adamson’s got a good track record so far, but is he right for Narnia? That’s something to think about as you watch the film he’s turned loose in theatres this week—Shrek 2.

Shrek sequel may be better than the original

Shrek stands as one of the most successful family films of all time. When it was released, it boasted standard-setting animation. It wove fairy tales together with a wicked wit, turning the genre on its head and mercilessly spoofing the often-superficial, saccharine storytelling of Disney animation studios. But it also damaged its own credibility by relying far too heavily on cheap punch lines, flatulence jokes, and pop culture references, as if the filmmakers did not trust their own story to hold the attention of both children and grownups.

Shrek 2 serves up a lot more of the good stuff and finds a better balance. While it tells basically the same story in a new context, it’s funnier, digs deeper, and provides a fast and frenzied finale. The relentless references to other films, television shows, and pop culture personalities are brilliantly employed so that they do not detract from the storytelling, which remains simple but strong. In fact, by turning Hollywood—and the cosmetic surgery culture it has spawned—into the target of its sharpened comedy arrows, Shrek 2 is a much more resonant tale of integrity and authenticity versus the forces of conformity and superficiality.

My full review is at Christianity Today Movies.

“Shrek 2, in many ways, is an improvement over the original film,” says Michael Elliott (Movie Parables). “The satire on popular culture seems sharper; the crude humor has been softened; the characters are both familiar and fresh; and the computer generated artwork seems more technologically advanced. Bottom line: the film is a winner for all concerned.”

Annabelle Robertson (Crosswalk) enthuses, “Really good films are oh-so-rare these days, so when one combines top-notch writing, excellent acting, a positive message and brilliant satire about pop culture, I can’t help but rave. I’ve also never been a fan of animation, but I am now.”

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, “Shrek 2 echoes both the wit and charm, if not the freshness, of the original—a rare achievement in the world of sequels. The wall-to-wall humor will keep young viewers laughing, with the bawdier zingers ricocheting off their funny bones and above their heads. Adults will also have fun spotting the parodies of both current and classic Hollywood fare. And while the follow-up’s message of self-acceptance is somewhat recycled from the earlier installment, it is one well worth repeating, especially in our superficial society which puts such a premium on surface appearance at the exclusion of inner worth.”

The Greek gods aren’t the only things missing from Troy

In Troy, thousands of soldiers put their lives on the line so an angry king can bring his brother’s adulterous wife Helen (Diane Kruger) back home from the city of Troy where she’s hiding with Paris (Orlando Bloom), her lover.

But wait … no, that’s just a front. The Mycenean king Agamemnon (X2‘s Bryan Cox) is only using Helen (Diane Kruger) as an excuse. In truth, he’s marching so he can claim Troy and expand his empire. The city of Troy, ruled by King Priam (Peter O’Toole), is defended by Prince Hector (Hulk‘s Eric Bana). He and a host of warriors are forced to defend their home because of local boy Paris’s affection for his lover, the cheating Queen of Sparta. Troy is a citadel that has proven impervious to attack. But one soldier, Achilles (Brad Pitt), who cares only about his own glory, sees an opportunity for fame and fortune. And so he joins the attack, ready to run his spear through anyone who will meet his challenge.

While the film boasts an impressive cast and epic animated battles a la The Return of the King, the studio has promoted the film’s other selling point. Apparently Pitt’s exposed, muscular torso is the real attraction for many people, just as his long flowing hair seemed the focus of Legends of the Fall. The emphasis on brawny smackdown demands so much screentime that the Greek gods, the major players in Homer’s famous literary epic The Iliad, are only mentioned in passing references. Those hoping for a detailed translation of the book will have to complain to director Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm, Das Boot) and writer David Benioff (The 25th Hour).

Critics agree that the film delivers some dazzling duels, but many also agree that the film’s as meaningless and superficial as Pitt’s well-oiled exhibitionism.

Troy “is about the quest for personal glory in a heartless and indifferent world, and the unfortunate thing about Wolfgang Petersen’s mega-budgeted, star-studded film is that it, too, lacks heart and comes across like a hollow quest for Hollywood glory,” says Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies). “It is difficult to tell whether Troy feels like a hollow exercise in epic filmmaking because its characters lack any sense of their own purpose, or because Petersen’s direction is so pedestrian and derivative of earlier films.”

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, “Petersen has crafted a bold portrait of war, which is both epic in scope and intimate in its emotional poignancy. While the pre-Christian world of Troy is fueled by a toxic stew of tribal nationalism, revenge and rabid chauvinism, it also celebrates virtues such as honor, courage and loyalty.”

Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films) says the film “skews basically negative on religion,” but concludes, “As a retelling of a classic war tale Troy does a more than respectable job. Many of the battle scenes are riveting, especially a dramatic early scene involving a spectacular stunt and the bravura showdown between Achilles and Hector, one of the best duels I’ve ever seen. The drama is engaging; unlike Gladiator, which expected us to root for the hero, Troy asks us only to appreciate the characters’ conflicts and situations. And Peter O’Toole as the Trojan king Priam steals the entire film with one single scene.”

Nevertheless, Brad Pitt’s performance bothers Greydanus. “[He’s] poetry in motion on the battlefield … but is unconvincing in quiet moments and does nothing to make the gratuitous bedroom scenes less laughable.”

Marvin Olasky (World) says, “Parents should keep in mind bloody fighting scenes and two bed scenes in which private parts are barely kept private and illicit sex is made to look good: Troy is rated R. But the language is clean, and those who like summer epics and can tolerate Hollywood’s typical spices will probably enjoy this one.”

Phil Boatwright (Movie Reporter) compares Troy to another famous war film—Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which he says “magically gave personality to its legions of soldiers. The depiction of death on the battlefield in that remarkable film honors those who gave their lives for their country. [In Troy] Petersen does not accomplish this reverence for the sanctity of life. His dying warriors are merely pawns to liven up the lopsided script. The battle sequences serve only to entertain us, much like the goings-on in the Coliseum did for the citizens of Rome. You may get an adrenalin rush from the epic grandness that a $150-million budget can bring to a special effects department, but I don’t think you’ll feel much emotion.”

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) agrees. “We never become emotionally connected to the events being enacted for us. We are always aware of the actors behind the characters and the CGI effects behind the action.”

Films like this usually draw men more than women. What will women think? Annabelle Robertson (Crosswalk) says, “Troy is a beautiful film full of special effects, dramatic war scenes … and enough testosterone to power Sparta’s ships. Women will be drawn by the history, the costumes and the romance—if not Pitt’s buff body, which is seen naked from above the groin and the side in several scenes.” She says, “The film fails to convey the drama and excitement of Gladiator and feels more like the dated Ben Hur. Not all the details match the original work, so students of the book will be disappointed. The biggest flaw is the characterization, which remains underdeveloped.”

Brett Willis (Christian Spotlight) writes, “For a viewer desiring a pure hero to root for, there’s a scarcity of choices here.” He adds, “I was amazed that the script was carefully written to avoid any explicit teaching that the Greek gods were ‘real.'”

To explore the authenticity of Petersen’s Troy, check out Archaeology.org‘s examination of the film’s dé cor and battlefield “re-enactments.” To read the ho-hum responses of mainstream critics to the year’s first major blockbuster, click here.

Critics punish bland comedy for Breakin’ All the Rules

When magazine editor Quincy Watson (Jamie Foxx) gets dumped by his girlfriend, he composes a letter that becomes a tirade on the subject of breaking up. This testimonial turns him into a celebrity of sorts, and his friends begin coming to him for advice on their own relationships. In Breakin’ All the Rules, it turns out that the “art of breaking up” is not as simple or formulaic as it might have seemed.

It also turns out that writer/director Daniel Taplitz has a few things to learn about the art of the screenplay.

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says the movie “breaks little new ground, incorporating standard mistaken-identity plot devices into a mediocre script which, though laced with attempts at emotional sincerity, is for the most part stale and predictable.”

Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) says, “This formulaic and rather tepid romantic comedy follows the predictable path from beginning to end with mediocre results. The film bears little resemblance to reality or how people might react in an actual relationship. The games that these characters play in the name of love are sophomoric and shallow and would be soundly rejected by anyone with a shred of self-respect.”

Only a few mainstream critics have found the film worthwhile.

Coffee offers quirky conversations between celebs

Independent filmmaker extraordinaire Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Down by Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) has just released a film that compiles his collection of short sketches in which famous figures meet to sip coffee, smoke cigarettes, and shoot the breeze. Coffee and Cigarettes was filmed in black and white, but the cast is quite colorful; it includes Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Cate Blanchett, Roberto Begnini, the White Stripes, Bill Murray, and a surprising variety of others.

I found it to be a hit-and-miss collection, but Jarmusch’s unconventional approach always makes for an interesting time at the movies, and many of these sketches are hilarious and memorably surreal. My full review of the film is at Christianity Today Movies.

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, “The oddball assortment of sketches … ranges from the mildly amusing to the utterly inane. Though Jarmusch’s patchwork approach is interesting, the net result is neither as developed nor as entertaining as his similar slice-of-life Night on Earth. And while he once again uses commonplace activities … to explore societal peccadilloes, the smokescreen of social commentary lifts rather quickly, revealing the film for what it is: a motley mosaic of over-caffeinated conversations involving people sitting around talking nicotine-stained nonsense.”

Film Forum will return in two weeks.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The post Shrek 2 = Twice the Laughter, Troy Gets By on Achilles’ Appeal appeared first on Christianity Today.

In The Sentinel, Douglas plays veteran Secret Service agent Pete Garrison. Fellow agent David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland) suspects that Garrison is having an illicit affair with his (Breckinridge’s) ex-wife, and while Breckinridge is right about the affair, he’s wrong about whom it involves. Instead, Garrison’s trysts–and here’s the twist–are with the First Lady (Kim Basinger).

Are you filled with the American spirit yet? Wait, there’s more. Things get complicated when Garrison is assigned to investigate a plot to assassinate the President (David Rasche), and make room for a sexy new agent on the force (Eva Longoria of TV’s Desperate Housewives).

Director Clark Johnson, who also directed the underwhelming S.W.A.T., and writer George Nolfi, who scripted Oceans 12, have apparently fallen short of the standard set by other secret-agent thrillers like Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire and Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive. In fact, even Kiefer Sutherland’s hit television series 24 earns higher marks than this.

Russ Breimeier (Christianity Today Movies) compares it to In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive: “Smoosh the two together and you have this cookie cutter conspiracy thriller. While there’s nothing wrong with revisiting familiar material, The Sentinel struggles with execution.” He describes the storytelling as “soapy,” and adds, “As much as people may want to see Douglas and Sutherland interact and outwit each other, the film confuses acting together with yelling at each other. … The Sentinel suffers from a flimsy and predictable story shallower than the average made-for-television production.”

But David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) writes, “The Sentinel strikes a nice balance between being a smart mystery and a straight action film, with some dexterously executed chase sequences. Visually gritty and kinetic, the movie is garnished with pulses of surveillance-style images and sound-bites to create a high-tech atmosphere of paranoia, reminiscent of conspiracy classics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.”

Bob Hoose (Plugged In) began thinking that it was a “nicely crafted little thriller. … But … while The Sentinel doesn’t overdo the overt content (sex and gore) the way most of its 21st century peers do, it still puts audiences in the line of fire, leaving them to fend for themselves when it comes to ethics and morals.”

Mainstream critics are highlighting the holes in The Sentinel‘s preposterous plot.

Dreamz spoofs American Idol, the Prez, and more

Writer/director Paul Weitz follows up his popular corporate comedy In Good Company and the warm-hearted bachelor antics of About a Boy with something far more ambitious—American Dreamz, a satire about presidents, first ladies, American Idol, and pop culture. And while he’s not winning as many rave reviews as he did for his earlier projects, he is getting mixed reactions from the religious press.

Carolyn Arends (Christianity Today Movies) emphasizes that the movie is “a satire. It cannot, therefore, be held accountable for gaping plot holes, implausible set-ups, Iraqi terrorists who speak to each other in accented English, presidential figures who are more lobotomized than caricatured, and truly dreadful American Idol pop song parodies. All of the above are an intentional part of the fun. You should also know, however, that American Dreamz‘s brand of satire is closer to Saturday Night Live than Oscar Wilde. … Weitz hits his targets mostly because they’re too wide to miss, and there’s nothing particularly nuanced about his portrayal of (North) America’s obsession with celebrity (and apathy about most everything else). Still, cheap or otherwise, there are plenty of laughs. American Dreamz ain’t subtle, but it’s amusing.”

Christa Banister (Crosswalk) writes, “If Weitz really wanted to use the film as a springboard for his opinion about the state of the world, he should’ve taken a cue from better executed, less wishy-washy satire like Wag the Dog or Election. But as a lightweight, escapist comedy for those looking for something to watch on a Friday night, this wildly uneven farce may just do the trick. Or you could save money and add it to your Netflix queue in the coming months.”

Harry Forbes (Catholic News Service) says, “There are, in fact, probably too many targets … but this is on the whole an amusing satire of fame and politics, despite some elements that on paper might raise eyebrows.” He adds, “Weitz carefully avoids most of the bad-taste pitfalls, but some may still find the terrorist business insensitive fodder for comedy. … But Weitz also underscores the paradox of how those who set out to destroy American culture can be smitten with it. On the other hand, the moderate portrayal of Omer’s relatives is one of the screen’s more positive depictions of Arab-Americans.”

Jenn Wright (Hollywood Jesus) says, “It would be nice to be able to say that, in the midst of the broad satire, Weitz offers some glimmer of hope, or some solution to the idolatrous craze that has become the American dream. Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of anything—or anyone—acting as a positive influence. Instead, we see myriad examples of manipulation, avarice, naï veté , and willful ignorance, with very little sanity to balance the pessimism.”

Christopher Lyon (Plugged In) says, “One thing is clear after sitting through American Dreamz: If Mandy Moore could sneak on to American Idol, she’d have a real shot at winning the thing. The girl sounds good, even singing the ridiculous numbers voiced by the show’s contestants. But the film isn’t really about the singing. Unfortunately, it’s not about the laughing, either. … As a satire, the effort falls flat. The targets are too broad, the observations tired, and the jokes stale.”

Some mainstream critics are trying to forget these Dreamz, while others are giving Weitz credit for trying to write a warm-hearted political comedy.

Silent Hill‘s Christians are twisted villains

In Silent Hill, this week’s shock-treatment horror film, Radha Mitchell (Melinda and Melinda, Man on Fire) plays a mother searching for her little girl (Jodelle Ferland). When the clues lead her to a ghost town, she encounters demonic monsters and horrific revelations.

Christians are more likely to be disturbed by Silent Hill than others, because they’ll find that director Christopher Gans has included some grossly distorted portrayals of Christian faith, villainizing the church as a malevolent and manipulative force. And all audiences should be warned that the film is based on a video game that includes graphic scenes of rape and violence.

Did I mention that the movie is No. 1 at the box office? Tom Neven (Plugged In) “More disturbing than this film … is the thought that legions of young people have long been absorbing Silent Hill‘s sick worldview as they try to master the various levels of four different games. Before the film’s arrival, various fan sites on the Internet began buzzing with speculation about it, with some worried that … Gans would not stay true to the dark spirit of the game. One complained that a brutal rape scene involving a bound, gagged and blindfolded woman was to be excluded from the production. … I can credit the filmmakers with that small bit of restraint while simultaneously condemning them for their gangrenous portrayal of religious faith.”

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) says, “Gans’ journey through hell abounds with nightmarish visions worthy of Dante. But in exploring themes of faith, fanaticism and motherhood, the film, which starts out eerily intriguing, eventually descends into confusion and gore. Its perplexing ending will leave you, like the haunted hamlet, in a fog.”

Mainstream critics are making plenty of noise about their dislike for Silent Hill.

More reviews of recent releases

Friends with Money: Christa Banister (Crosswalk) writes, “Presumably, what the audience is supposed to learn as a result of all these conversations we eavesdrop on at the dinner table and as the girls gossip with their significant others later on, is that middle-aged life has its challenges—with or without money. Wow, that’s surprising; now did it really take 88 minutes to make that point? Ultimately, a better conclusion would’ve been the very non-Hollywood theme that a selfish perspective on life can’t help but lead to emptiness and internal conflict.”

The Notorious Bettie Page: Greg Wright (Hollywood Jesus) writes, “If Pleasantville sang the praises of unfettered sexual awakening, The Notorious Bettie Page employs a similar black-and-white-world-gone-color technique to reach quite a different conclusion: that there’s bondage and blinders, and then there’s moral restraint—and that there’s a world of difference between the two. Pleasantville threw off the former while glibly dismissing the latter; Notorious takes both equally seriously.”

The Wild: Andrew Coffin (World) says, “As with Ice Age: The Meltdown, The Wild‘s creators are convinced that nothing is so funny or entertaining as a kick, whack, swat, fall, bonk, or smack. The voice talent present here is impressive, and it lends some humor to the characters, but these animal-shaped punching bags just don’t register with the heart.”

Marcus Yoars (Plugged In) says, “Apparently aiming at the 4-and-under crowd with loud, grating and well-worn attempts at humor, the filmmakers seem to bank on the fact that moviegoers will completely overlook just how unoriginal the material here is. … Add up these and other copycat segments and the final mix is what should’ve been a straight-to-DVD effort. Instead, parents who decide the film’s potty humor, double entendres, language issues and slapstick violence aren’t that big of a deal will be forced to stay awake at the multiplex hoping young ears and eyes will also catch a few positive messages. Namely, ones that accentuate the importance of parent-child relationships and how being true to yourself is better than living a lie.”

Scary Movie 4: Marcus Yoars (Plugged In) says, “[I]t’s hard to find a moment not filled with sexual sight gags, crude language and over-the-top violence played for laughs. And by the way, yes, some of those movies were already parodied in the last Scary Movie.”

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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When the name Michael Mann appears at the front of a movie—as it does before Public Enemies, opening this week—you know you’re in for a heat wave. And probably a crime wave too.

Mann loves to turn up the temperature. His films follow fevered individuals pushing back against “the Man”—that is, the oppressor. The establishment. The forces that would make one conform to a program. And in that friction between the corporation and the Individual with a Vision, things turn violent.

Sometimes the individual is a brave and moral hero caught in the crossfire of corrupt forces. Think of Will Graham (William Petersen), the unconventional FBI specialist tracker in Manhunter; Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Last of the Mohicans; or Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) on a crusade for truthful journalism in The Insider.

Sometimes that hero is not quite so admirable. Lieutenant Vincent Hannah (Pacino) in Heat wreaks havoc on the lives of those dear to him in his furious pursuit of bank robbers. And both Crockett and Tubbs of Miami Vice—the television series that brought Michael Mann to fame, and the movie that paired Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx—make moral compromises all the time in their single-minded quest to bring down drug lords.

And sometimes—as in Mann’s new movie Public Enemies—the “hero” is almost 100 percent criminal, pursuing his vision in defiance of the law. Like The Joker, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) pursues an ambitious and violent agenda, laughing as he exposes the flaws in the forces that pursue him.

Thus, Mann is an auteur preoccupied with an obvious theme: Single-minded men, and their struggle to do their particular job—whether ethical or unethical—with their own particular methods and style, without buckling under the pressure to conform. His heroes, whether cop or robber, declare, “I’m gonna do it my way.”

No wonder he made a movie about Muhammad Ali.

Each of these characters may as well be speaking for Mann himself, whose movies are distinct, personal, and sometimes, yes, a little too criminal in nature.

Does “Cop vs.  Robber” Equal “Right vs. Wrong”?

Public Enemies is as slick, polished, and loaded as the heavy artillery that Dillinger and his gang assemble before any of their professional bank robberies in this twenty-one-gun salute to films about cops and robbers. It delivers all of the conventions we’ve come to expect from great movies about bank heists, manhunts, and 1930s crime, but at the same time it turns the genre upside down.

While we’re watching a story about FBI chief Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) on a quest to hunt down Dillinger, Mann pulls the same stunt he did in what is arguably his masterpiece, 1995’s Heat. He blurs the lines between “good guys” and “bad guys,” finding something admirable in Dillinger’s genius, and something appalling in Purvis’s steel trap of justice.

Ultimately, we’re meant to see that there isn’t much separating the robber on the run from the cops on his trail. As you watch Public Enemies, consider the two titans caught up in the clash. Both take terrible risks to achieve what they want. Both leave a bloody wake of “collateral damage.” Both are out to prove to the world that they cannot be outdone. Both make choices that seem morally reprehensible.

At the end of Heat, Collateral, and Public Enemies, the wages of sin do eventually punish the crooks. But they punish the do-gooders too. In Heat, Lieutenant Hanna has suffered harrowing trials at home due to his neglect of his family. We’re left asking: Was it worth it? Was Hanna’s furious pursuit of Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) worth the damage done to his loved ones?

The question is timely and relevant. When J. Edgar Hoover [Billy Crudup] announces at the beginning of Public Enemies that he is beginning the United States of America’s “first war on crime,” the vocabulary reminds us of what has become a household term: “the war on terror.”

Just as Mann questions our admiration of lawmen, he refuses to show contempt for criminals. He’s interested in Dillinger’s extraordinary popularity across the U.S. during the Great Depression. Why did we love a crook so much? Perhaps it has something to do with our own resistance to conformity and control. Dillinger single-handedly humiliated the nation’s authority figures and made a mockery of the U.S. justice system. Mann suggests that the nation, fed up with their leaders’ insufficiencies, found Dillinger’s one-man show rather exhilarating. Through ongoing jailbreaks and bank busts, he exposed the incompetence of our technology, our scientific methods, and our assertions of God-like power.

At the end of Heat, there is an unsettling camaraderie between the cop and the bank robber. Even as they are locked in competition, they develop enormous respect for each other’s strength of will. No joke: We see the “hero” and the “villain” hand-in-hand at the end of the film.

Similarly, we see a lawman bond with Dillinger in the closing minutes of Public Enemies. (Surprise: It isn’t Purvis. It’s another manhunter, one more familiar with what it takes to survive a dozen shootouts.)

Crime and the law are almost mirror images in Mann’s world. In Public Enemies, both the criminals and law enforcement are increasingly corporate ventures. The man of vision suffers under a heightening pressure to conform. The real crime on Mann’s mind isn’t bank-robbery, but the dehumanizing consequences of greed and ambition. Mann doesn’t deny that Dillinger is a criminal; he’s just more interested in the aspects that motivate him and make him such a success. He’s interested in the trails criminals blaze, and how they blaze them.

An Elusive Moral Center

The moral center to Mann’s universe is an elusive thing.

We watch Dillinger admiring the glamorous crooks of the 1930s movies he attends—like the one played by Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Likewise, Mann is sometimes a little too taken with his tricksters. The “bad guys” lose in the end, but we can’t shake the impression that Mann’s enamored of the professionalism and zeal of these crooks.

In Heat, the crooks get what they have coming, even though the lawmen lose a great deal along the way. And in Collateral, the bewildered innocent (Jamie Foxx) watches the glamorous villain (Tom Cruise) come to a moment of realization, an apprehension of emptiness that echoes the despair of General Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now: “The horror, the horror.”

But in Public Enemies, the crimes of Dillinger’s gang are not portrayed with the same seriousness as the brutality of the lawmen. Mann seems almost giddy in the presence of these bank robbers, dazzled by their style. His camera avoids the carnage of their cruelty. But he does not hesitate to show us lawmen abusing their power, shooting innocents and even beating a woman. This too easily brings the audience into rooting for killers.

To some extent, I can understand Mann’s sympathy for his villains. There is honesty in his portrayal of Dillinger’s appeal. In the real world, evil flourishes precisely because it is seductive, appealing, and almost reasonable. Dillinger’s way is a path of visceral excitement, sensual pleasure, amplified ego, and high adventure, and he is reacting against some real societal wrongs like greed and arrogance.

“And what do you want?” Billie Freschette (Marion Cotillard) asks Dillinger. “Everything,” he says. “Right now.” And that is precisely what he gets. His glory lasts only a few fleeting moments. He has his reward.

Sure, it is all taken from him. The wages of sin close in. But it’s a bittersweet justice. As it should be. These were not merely cold-hearted crooks. They were people with dreams—however misguided—pursuing what was denied them in their early years. (Dillinger’s father beat him, disillusioning him to authority. Billie never knew the love of a father, and was seduced by Dillinger’s authoritative love for her.) We know that Dillinger got what he “deserved,” but we also have seen that he was a tragic human being who never quite found the right way to chase a dream.

This may leave a bad taste in the mouths of conscientious viewers. We would hope that wicked men would come off looking foolish and repulsive. Dillinger’s motto, included in the film’s trailer, rings out: “We’ve havin’ too good a time today. We ain’t thinkin’ about tomorrow.” Isn’t that the philosophy of the wealthy, irresponsible people who sank our nation into this present economic crisis? It doesn’t sound so much like a hero’s philosophy when you’re one of the victims of such greed.

The deeper implications

Still, Mann cannot shake the deeper implications of such a philosophy. He seems genuinely troubled by betrayals and moral compromises. Corrupt heroes get caught between corrupt lawmen and corrupt drug dealers in Miami Vice. A troubled hero struggles in the crossfire of corrupt Redcoats, corrupt Native Americans, and other misguided forces in The Last of the Mohicans. And justice seems impossible as the media, the law, and corporate liars contend with each other in The Insider.

It’s healthy for us to join Mann in reflecting on the corrupting nature of power. Just as a farm boy like Dillinger can turn wicked, so men in a uniform can make terrible decisions, betray the public, and disgrace their station.

But let’s also note that Mann’s glamorous villains come to ruin in the end. By contrast, his heroes come to ruin as well—but the rightness of their cause is hard to deny.

To be truly heroic, we must count everything we have as loss. True courage requires a living sacrifice.

In retrospect, the characters that shine most brightly in Mann’s films—for me, anyway—are those who encounter the seduction of individual glory and reject it for the greater good.

In The Insider, Lowell Bergman wants to take down Big Tobacco, and he won’t let offers of money or fame cloud his vision. He will put the truth on the air for all of America to see, even if it wrecks his career. He’ll risk it all to bring down those heartless corporate executives.

Even more heroic, Jeffrey Wigand—a flawed and fearful man—finds the courage to stand up and tell the truth, knowing that he may lose his career, his family, and his life in the process. And he suffers devastation. For this moviegoer, Wigand is the most affecting and admirable of Mann’s myth-sized men. His choice reveals the truth, which is more powerful than any machine gun.

Mann is right to see that the world is not about good guys and bad guys. We don’t live in a world of “white hats” and “black hats,” and when we decide that we do, we open ourselves to horrible presumption and error. Whatever team you’re on, not one of us is truly righteous. So says the Good Book.

He’s right to blur the lines, kindle questions, and confuse the issue. On the front lines of good versus evil, things can get very confusing. Sometimes, men can blaze their way to hell with the most lawful methods. Others, crime on their minds, may be reacting against even greater crimes, and groping for the freedom and love that they need.

But Mann’s conclusions leave some things clear. Truth is good. Justice is possible. And love is costly.

That is the messy area Michael Mann explores. And I’m grateful for his films, for the ways he challenges me to wrestle with these questions.

© 2009 Jeffrey Overstreet subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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Michael Douglas (absent from the screen since 2003’s The In-Laws) is Pete Garrison, a respected Secret Service agent who stepped between John Hinckley Jr.’s gunfire and President Regan twenty-five years ago. Today he heads the team that protects First Lady Sarah Ballentine (Kim Basinger). After a colleague (director Clark Johnson) is murdered before he can privately share important information with Garrison, the investigative division of the Secret Service steps in, led by top agent David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland of television’s 24). Garrison then receives a tip from his favorite snitch: the Secret Service has a mole masterminding a plan to assassinate President Ballentine (David Rasche from television’s Sledge Hammer).

Complicating matters further are the relationships between these characters. Breckinridge was once Garrison’s friend and protégé, but the two recently had a falling out after Breckinridge suspected Garrison was having an affair with his wife. He’s mistaken—Garrison is instead sleeping with the First Lady whenever the two can discreetly slip away to the Presidential retreat without suspicion.

It’s this shameful secret that causes Garrison to fail the office polygraph test and thus become the chief suspect in the assassination plot he’s trying to foil. Rather than talk it over in custody, he goes on the run and relies on his years of experience as a Secret Service agent to uncover the mole himself while also evading Breckenridge and his assistant Jill Marin (Eva Longoria of television’s Desperate Housewives), who studied under Garrison at the Academy.

Yes, The Sentinel is as soapy as it sounds, derailing the suspense, mystery, and action needed to drive a film like this. As much as people may want to see Douglas and Sutherland interact and outwit each other, the film confuses acting together with yelling at each other. See, Breckinridge is by-the-books procedural and bases all his decisions on evidence, while Garrison follows his instincts to make snap decisions. Oh, and then they’ve got that whole affair thing between them too.

The actors are simply going through the motions here. Garrison is a variation on the same character Douglas has been playing for the last fifteen years—the intense hero struggling to overcome his sins. Though Sutherland is “playing by the rules” this time, he’s still in full Jack Bauer mode, following the evidence but still making some hasty leaps in logic; you’d think the actor would want to try something different in his time off from 24. Meanwhile, Longoria’s character merely exists as clichéd eye candy—the plucky feminine agent on her first field assignment after graduating second in her class at the Academy.

But the actors aren’t really to blame for relying on what’s worked before. The Sentinel suffers from a flimsy and predictable story shallower than the average made-for-television production. At the very least, the filmmakers and studio would have been wiser to hide the point that Garrison becomes a suspect in the investigation, especially since it doesn’t happen until midway through the movie (to the disappointment of those hoping for lots of cat and mouse between the two leads). It would have been refreshing to shed some doubt on Garrison’s innocence and hint at potential plot twists. Instead, there’s never a question of Garrison’s innocence, the film’s only surprise being the identity of the mole, which can easily be guessed early into the film.

The dialogue is shallow too, denying heart from relationships that require depth and poignancy. While on the run with everything falling apart, Garrison tells the First Lady, “Don’t worry, we’re going to get out of this.” She asks how. “I haven’t figured that out yet,” he responds with dead seriousness. When confronted about the affair involving the country’s most visible couple, Garrison’s explanation is similarly oversimplified—”Because I love her.” Too bad the forbidden love isn’t played with any believable sense of chemistry or passion. For that matter, the film goes no further to explain why the First Lady is unhappy in her marriage, and at times, it actually feels as if we’re supposed to root for the adultery, because after all, they’re the heroes.

Also frustrating is the editing, which jumps from scene to scene with the attention deficit of a channel surfer. For the first half, director Johnson pointlessly uses annoying montages of death threat letters and phone calls to transition between scenes. And at one point, the movie needlessly jumps between scenes of Garrison assisting the First Lady while Breckinridge explains crime scene procedure to the local police. The effect is exactly like a dissatisfied television viewer unable to decide which television program is more boring.

And while The Sentinel is rarely dull with the pacing, it lacks genuine thrills. It takes 45 minutes for the first true action scene to arrive, and while the climactic shootout is pretty well staged, it’s the sort of sequence one expects in the middle of a good movie, not the end. If only the film staged more thoughtful chase sequences between Garrison and Breckinridge, or better yet, established an identifiable villain that’s truly menacing.

One thing the movie does get right is the subject matter. The Sentinel is based on the 2003 novel of the same name written by Gerald Petievich, a former Secret Service agent who also wrote the books that inspired To Live and Die in L.A. and Boiling Point. Thus the film is overflowing with tricks of the trade that demonstrate codenames, surveillance, technology, and tactics that agents use to protect government leaders and themselves. Much of it is fascinating in a Tom Clancy kind of way, but the story simply doesn’t live up to it.

Aside from In the Line of Fire and The Fugitive, The Sentinel also reminded me of 2006’s Firewall with Harrison Ford. Both have 60-something superstar actors who haven’t been in a hit movie for some time. Both are predictable in execution and reminiscent of better films previously made by their stars. And both are still watchable in spite of their flaws. But are you looking to spend $10 opening weekend or are you looking to pass the time on a trans-continental flight? If it weren’t for the clout of its two leading men, The Sentinel would be nothing more than a made-for-cable or direct-to-DVD feature.

Talk About It

1. Garrison and Breckinridge represent two different form of response—instinct vs. procedure. How are both important in a job such as the Secret Service? Does one outweigh the other? What does Scripture say about each (browse through Proverbs for some examples)?
2. Does The Sentinel portray Garrison’s relationship with the First Lady as honorable? Do emotions justify his actions? Why or why not? What message(s) do you believe the movie communicates concerning adultery? How does this compare with a Biblical stance concerning adultery? Does the film show cracks in the relationship between the President and First Lady?
3. The press materials describe The Sentinel as a redemption story for Garrison’s character. Do you agree or disagree with that assessment? What qualities or components are needed for a true redemption tale? What could have been added to this story to make it more redemptive?
4. Garrison and Breckinridge shared a long history of friendship together, but let a misunderstanding get in the way. Why did they let it perpetuate for so long? How is it resolved in the movie? What does this suggest about honesty and trust in a relationship?

The Family Corner

The Sentinel is rated PG-13 for some intense action violence amounting to a handful of characters that are shot. Most discouraging is the film’s cavalier attitude towards adultery. The scene of sensuality involves the hero and the First Lady, though the story moves on before any nudity. There’s also some bad language, including taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Photos © Copyright 20th Century Fox

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What Other Critics Are Saying

The secret about this Secret Service thriller is out: The Sentinel is not so thrilling. Still, Michael Douglas shouldn’t be feeling too badly about it. At least he was smart enough to stay far, far away from Basic Instinct 2.

In The Sentinel, Douglas plays veteran Secret Service agent Pete Garrison, who is disgusted with one of the other agents—David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland)—because he suspects that Breckinridge had an affair with his ex-wife.

Meanwhile, Garrison is engaging in an affair himself—with the First Lady (Kim Basinger).

Are you filled with the American spirit yet? Wait, there’s more. Things get complicated when Garrison is assigned to investigate a plot to assassinate the President (David Rasche), and make room for a sexy new agent on the force (Eva Longoria of TV’s Desperate Housewives).

Director Clark Johnson, who also directed the underwhelming S.W.A.T., and writer George Nolfi, who scripted Oceans 12, have apparently fallen short of the standard set by other secret-agent thrillers like Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire and Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive. In fact, even Kiefer Sutherland’s hit television series 24 earns higher marks than this.

But David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) writes, “The Sentinel strikes a nice balance between being a smart mystery and a straight action film, with some dexterously executed chase sequences. Visually gritty and kinetic, the movie is garnished with pulses of surveillance-style images and sound-bites to create a high-tech atmosphere of paranoia, reminiscent of conspiracy classics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.”

Bob Hoose (Plugged In) began thinking that it was a “nicely crafted little thriller. … But … while The Sentinel doesn’t overdo the overt content (sex and gore) the way most of its 21st century peers do, it still puts audiences in the line of fire, leaving them to fend for themselves when it comes to ethics and morals.”

Mainstream critics are highlighting the holes in The Sentinel‘s preposterous plot.

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Judging by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle’s exhaustive August tour through each of South Dakota’s 66 counties, you’d think he was fearful about re-election. But for Daschle, it’s an annual event. He drives solo through prairies, tiny towns, and Indian reservations every summer. This time, however, Daschle is in the fight of his political life, partly because conservative Christians in South Dakota are newly galvanized against him.

Polls currently show Daschle slightly ahead of former U.S. Rep. John Thune, a 1983 graduate of Biola University who challenged Sen. Tim Johnson in 2002, losing by only 524 votes. Defeat of Daschle would not only be a symbolic loss for Democrats, but it would also deal a near-fatal blow to their attempt to regain control of the closely divided Senate.

The senator’s supporters promote his ability to deliver federal dollars for local projects. His critics claim Daschle’s party obligations prevent him from heeding South Dakota’s conservative majority on matters like abortion and the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). Thune told CT, “He has come back here for 26 years now and said one thing in South Dakota and something else in Washington. Nobody holds him accountable. He continues to portray himself here as pro-life.”

The abortion issue gained local traction this year when the South Dakota legislature considered mounting a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. “That was the first mainstream, serious debate we’ve had in this state about what we ought to do [about abortion]. But you didn’t necessarily hear about it in churches,” said Greg Belfrage, host of an afternoon drive-time radio show in Sioux Falls. “The churches here pass up a lot of opportunities to connect with people on real-life issues.”

That may be changing. Bishop Robert Carlson, head of the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, recently told Catholics, “You cannot vote for a politician who is pro-abortion, when you have a choice, and remain a Catholic in good standing.”

Daschle said in a written statement to CT, “My record reflects the principles embodied by Catholic teachings and the church’s legislative positions far more often than not. I am opposed to abortion. We can make meaningful progress in the effort to prevent abortion. That is my goal.” Daschle voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, reversing earlier votes against the ban during the Clinton administration.

On the Federal Marriage Amendment, Daschle’s vote against it has energized evangelicals. “It’s just electric around here. People are really engaged,” said James Petersen, pastor of Central Baptist Church in Sioux Falls. Thune’s first paid advertisement criticized Daschle’s role in defeating the FMA. This small-state race will be a big indicator of whether the FMA resonates with voters in November.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Tom Daschle’s Senate and campaign websites offer more information on the senator.

More information about John Thune is available from his campaign website.

Other campaigns and election issues Christianity Today has covered this week include:

California’s Prop. 71 Stem-Cell Scam | Supporters of cloning embryos for research have $11 million to convince state voters. (Sept. 29, 2004)

It’s Not About Stem Cells | Why we must clarify the debate over harvesting embryos. (Sept. 29, 2004)

Wooing the Faithful | President Bush needs evangelicals more than ever, but it’s unclear how badly they want him for another four years. (Sept. 28, 2004)

John Kerry’s Open Mind | The candidate has roots in liberal Catholicism, establishment Protestantism, and secular idealism. (Sept. 27, 2004)

Not Far from the Brahmin Tree | Kerry’s morals have been shaped by an old Protestant establishment. (Sept. 27, 2004)

The post Senate’s Top Democrat in the Cross Hairs appeared first on Christianity Today.

Significant Books

It is always difficult to select which books should be designated the “most significant books of the year,” especially when the quality is often so nearly equal. Five were chosen, however, from several categories that should be on the “must” list for all evangelicals. This is not to say that evangelicals will agree with everything that is said in these books, but that they will profit by reading them.

Appearing last month just in time for inclusion in this survey, was the long-awaited, two-volume Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody). Edited by R. Laird Harris, Gleason Archer, and Bruce Waltke, the Wordbook contains the contributions of 46 evangelical Old Testament scholars. Less exhaustive than the multi volume Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament being published by Eerdmans, the Wordbook could prove to be of more practical help to students and pastors. Its entries include all the significant theological words of the Hebrew Bible. Further, every Old Testament word not chosen for essay treatment is listed with a one-line definition. Words from the same Hebrew root are both listed by root and cross listed in alphabetical order. An index correlates the numbers of the Hebrew words as given in Strong’s Concordance with the numbers as given in the Wordbook, making its contents readily accessible to the reader who knows little or no Hebrew. The bibliographies alone are worth the price of the two volumes. Despite numerous typographical errors (which doubtless will be corrected in future printings), the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament stands at the top of this year’s five most important books.

In second place is Michael O’Connor’s remarkable study of Hebrew Verse Structure (Eisenbrauns). It applies the tools of modern linguistic research to Old Testament poetry in a comprehensive way for the first time. Although somewhat technical, this important work is packed with all sorts of useful information. In addition to including a Scripture index at the end of the book, the author uses an internal cross-indexing system to help the reader quickly find relevant comments on the passage in question. Useful as well as a reference work for many of the most ancient poems in the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Verse Structure is a landmark volume that will be required reading for students of Hebrew poetry.

Two unusually fine commentaries share third and fourth places on this list, both of them coming from the pens of Australian scholars. The latest addition to the New International Commentary on the Old Testament, J. A. Thompson’s The Book of Jeremiah (Eerdmans), rivals John Bright’s Anchor Bible commentary as the best in English on Jeremiah. Unlike Bright, Thompson follows the text in its canonical order. His highly competent treatment lends itself to use by scholars and teachers as well as for sermon preparation and personal study. Unwilling to commit himself on the question of who put the book of Jeremiah into its final form. Thompson is nevertheless certain it represents “the authentic history and preaching” of the prophet.

Australian Francis I. Andersen, in collaboration with David Noel Freedman, has produced the best critical commentary on Hosea (Doubleday) in the English language. Although Hosea contains many passages that are virtually unintelligible. Andersen and Freedman decided to stick to the Masoretic text while admitting that many textual problems remain unsolved. Hosca’s setting, in their judgment, is the eighth century for the most part, the initial compilation having taken place early in the seventh. Although the book’s final form was shaped during the Babylonian exile, there is very little evidence of altering of the text to update the material. This most recent addition to the Anchor Bible tends to be somewhat repetitive, but that is a minor point. Students of Old Testament prophecy will turn frequently to this book.

Rounding out the five best Old Testament books of 1980 is a slim paperback by Douglas Stuart, Old Testament Exegesis (Westminster). Helpful without being overly technical, its goal is to bring serious Old Testament exegesis back into the life of the average seminary student and working pastor. It explains the procedures and aims of exegesis, tells how to use the tools of exegesis, and emphasizes preaching and teaching values. Its excellent bibliographies are supplemented by four do’s and fourdon’ts in application at the very end of the volume.

Text And Language

John Kohlenberger is editor of The NIV Interlinear Hebrew-English Old Testament (Zondervan); the first volume covers Genesis through Deuteronomy. Although the book does not quite deliver what its introductory sections promise, it may nonetheless prove helpful to those who have minimal knowledge of Hebrew. Somewhat more useful as an aid to rapid reading of the Hebrew Bible is Volume 1 (also covering Genesis through Deuteronomy) of A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Zondervan), by Terry Armstrong, Douglas Busby, and Cyril Carr. Words that occur in the Old Testament 50 times or less are listed verse by verse in the order of their occurrence, and a well-written preface sets the parameters for using the book most effectively. Nelson’s Expository Dictionary of the Old Testament (Nelson), edited by William White, Jr., and the late Merrill Unger, assisted by 12 contributors, treats over 500 of the most important terms in the Hebrew Bible, arranged in alphabetical order by their English equivalents. Although marred by a large number of errors, repetitions, and contradictions, all of which fail to inspire confidence, it will be a helpful volume if used critically.

Erroll Rhodes’s translation of Ernst Wiirthwein’s fourth edition of his classic The Text of the Old Testament (Eerdmans) does for the Stuttgart Biblia Hebraica what Peter Ackroyd’s 1957 translation did for the third edition of Kittel’s. Although Rhodes’s translation is neither as felicitous nor accurate as Ackroyd’s, updating of footnotes and a discussion of the Qumran Cave II Psalms scroll are welcome. A few additional plates have been added and most of the plates are clearer than in the earlier edition, but numbers 32 and 34 are upside down—and number 4 has been printed backwards as well as upside down! Despite these flaws, however. Würthwein’s is still the best brief work available on the subject.

Introduction And Survey

Alice Parmelee’s moderately liberal Guide to the Old Testament and Apocrypha (Morehouse-Barlow) includes numerous little-known bits of information such as the origin of the word “mugwump” and the fact that General Allenby used Jonathan’s tactics to defeat the Turks at Michmash. A helpful appendix discusses “Prayer in the Old Testament and in the Apocrypha.” Opening the Old Testament (Christian Publications), by H. Robert Cowles, has 13 chapters and would be suitable for a Sunday school quarterly class format. W. Lee Humphrey’s Crisis and Story (Mayfield) introduces the Old Testament in terms of reshaping the basic Moses-Sinai and David-Zion accounts. Although intended as an introductory volume for college students, those readers should look first at a more traditional approach. Using a fascinating pastiche of quotations, photos, and commentary, Mark Link has produced a brief survey: These Stones Will Shout (revised edition; Argus Communications). The book adopts a polemic stance from the outset, and it is certainly questionable whether “most scholars agree” (page 21) with its somewhat liberal ideas.

In Highlights of the Bible: Genesis-Nehemiah (G/L Regal), Ray Stedman provides a topical summary overview for laymen of Genesis through Esther. Picking up where Stedman leaves off is William MacDonald’s Old Testament Digest (Walterick), a brief summary of Job through Malachi written from a pretribulational perspective. For some reason, the author decided to include a verse-by-verse paraphrase of the Song of Solomon.

Commentaries

As usual, commentaries constitute the largest single grouping in this year’s Old Testament selections. For the sake of convenience we have divided these into four subsections.

Pentateuch. The chief feature of Exploring Genesis (Moody), by John Phillips, is its overuse of alliteration, which is amply demonstrated in its 23-page outline of Genesis. When an author writes that Genesis “begins with a blaze of brightness in heaven and ends with a box of bones in Egypt” (page 379), alliteration has become an end in itself. For all that, however, the book has homiletical helps, interesting illustrations—and sometimes erroneous etymologies. Up from Chaos (Standard), by LeRoy Lawson, is a sketchy, 13-chapter commentary on selected Genesis passages. In How It All Began (G/L Regal). Ronald Youngblood offers a 13-chapter commentary for laymen on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Harold Shaw Publishers has issued revised editions of two slender volumes entitled Genesis 1–25: Walking with God and Genesis 26–50: Called by God, both by Margaret Fromer and Sharrel Keyes, and intended for Bible study groups. In The Promises to the Fathers (Fortress), Claus Westermann looks into the preliterary history of the present patriarchal narratives as background in determining their theology. He distributes the Abrahamic promise narratives into six distinct motifs: descendants alone, the land alone, land and descendants together, a son alone, descendants and a son, and a blessing combined with various other promises.

Spiritual Greatness: Studies in Exodus (BMH) is a brief, 13-chapter laymen’s commentary by Tom Julien. It does not include the book of the covenant (chapters 21–23) or the chapters on the tabernacle (25–31; 35–40). Louis Goldberg has written a brief study guide and commentary on Leviticus (Zondervan), with questions at the end of each chapter. Longer and therefore more substantial is R. K. Harrison’s Leviticus (InterVarsity), the latest addition to the Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries series. It attempts to make Leviticus clear in its original setting and relevant for today, and is especially helpful in relating holiness to obedience and faith. Hans Jochen Boecker’s Laws and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East (Augsburg) is a fascinating analysis of the book of the covenant, the Law of Holiness (Leviticus 17–26), and Deuteronomy, against the background of ancient Near Eastern law (especially the Code of Hammurabi), stressing law as the basis of numerous theological concepts in Old Testament times. Moses and the Deuteronomist (Seabury), by Robert Polzin, which treats only Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges, emphasizes the priority of literary analysis of texts over historical analysis but takes the narrative aspects of the Deuteronomic history seriously.

Historical Books. James Noonan provides a laymen’s commentary on Ruth. For the Love of Man (Dorrance). Boaz is a Christ figure, redeeming Naomi’s debts and then redeeming Ruth from her precarious situation in society by marrying her. A worthy addition to the Anchor Bible is I Samuel (Doubleday) by P. Kyle McCarter, Jr. Although it goes too far in reconstructing I Samuel and denigrating the Masoretic text, it is instructive, meaty, and up-to-date. David (Christian Herald), by Norman Archer, gives equal time to the successes and failures of Israel’s greatest king. Practical, chatty comments on the life of Elijah are offered by William Petersen in Meet Me on the Mountain (Victor). In Understanding Chronicles One & Two (Walterick), John Heading surveys their contents with application to Christian worship and fellowship. Brief comments on selected chapters from Nehemiah with extended references to the potential for revival today are contained in When Revival Comes (Broadman), by Jack Taylor and O. S. Hawkins. Esther: Courage in Crisis (Victor), by Margaret Hess, is well researched and contains numerous helpful personal touches.

Poetry and Wisdom. Heading this section is Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy (Eisenbrauns), by the prolific David Noel Freedman. It is a collection of recent articles (some of them already classics) on the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. The validity of Freedman’s emphasis on syllable counting remains debatable, but the essays themselves are nevertheless helpful and thought provoking. Mildred Tengbom gives insight and comfort from selected portions of Job in Sometimes I Hurt (Nelson). A cut above most brief commentaries in application as well as interpretation is Job Speaks to Us Today (John Knox), by the patriarch’s namesake, John Job. Stressing wisdom as a major Joban theme is My Servant Job (Baker), a topically oriented discussion guide by Morris Inch. Out of the Whirlwind (Baker), by Andrew Blackwood, Jr., is a brief but perceptive commentary for laymen first issued 20 years ago as Devotional Introduction to Job. Laura Pleming’s Triumph of Job (Robert H. Sommer) provides a flash of helpful insight here and there, but it also contains many decidedly unhelpful and erroneous statements.

Claus Westermann’s The Psalms (Augsburg) uses a modified form of Hermann Gunkel’s classification of the Psalms according to form and assumed life setting rather than proposed historical setting. Westermann redefines “thanksgiving” as “narrative/declarative praise” (generally voiced by individuals) and distinguishes it from “descriptive praise” (generally voiced by the congregation). Praise: A Matter of Life and Breath (Nelson), by Ronald Allen, is a thematic commentary on selected psalms, stressing praise as an important and neglected element in worship. Eugene Peterson offers A Year with the Psalms (Word), a series of 365 brief devotional thoughts and prayers covering the entire Psalter. Peterson is especially sensitive on Psalm 137:7–9, but the whole is quite satisfying devotionally. The Lord Is My Shepherd (Westminster), by well-known New Testament scholar William Barclay, was in progress at the time of his death and therefore never completed. Devotional as well as exegetical, it covers only five psalms (1, 2, 8, 19, 104). A reprint of a 1979 BMH book, The Perfect Shepherd (Baker), by John Davis, is a detailed commentary relating Psalm 23 to Davis’s experiences among modern Bedouin in the Middle East. A Thirst for God (Zondervan), by Sherwood Wirt, is a sensitive series of reflections on Psalms 42 and 43. Those looking for guidance in difficulty will find help here.

Prophets. Written for students and lay people, Yesterday’s Prophets for Today’s World (Broadman), by F. B. Huey, Jr., treats such questions as the conditional nature of some prophetic passages and the ways the New Testament handles Old Testament prophecies. The approach is topical rather than book by book. Robert Wilson, in Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Fortress), uses modern anthropological methodology to demonstrate that not all the prophets were related to their societies in the same way. His chapter on “Prophecy in the Ancient Near East” outside the Bible is one of the strong points of the book, and his stimulating analysis of what he calls “millenarian movements” will be of special interest to many evangelicals.

Published originally in German 60 years ago, August Pieper’s masterful exposition of Isaiah 40–66 has finally been translated into English as Isaiah II (Northwestern Publishing). He divides the latter part of Isaiah into three sections of nine chapters apiece and claims each section is composed of three triads of three chapters apiece. E. John Hamlin, who teaches in Singapore, has written Comfort My People (John Knox), a study guide to Isaiah 40–66 with application both to people living in the West and in the Third World. The Histories and Prophecies of Daniel (BMH), by Robert Culver, is a down-to-earth commentary that does not dodge difficult problems of interpretation, and also admits uncertainty where there are no ready solutions.

A Baker Book House reprint of The Twelve Minor Prophets, by Ebenezer Henderson, originally published in 1845, is an excellent example of a classical orthodox commentary, giving the state of the art as practiced more than a century ago. Henderson lashes out against double/multiple meanings in Scripture, and his exegesis of the messianic passages is crisp and satisfactory. Manford Gutzke’s Plain Talk on the Minor Prophets (Zondervan) is a brief survey of each prophet, with practical application for today. Jonah: Living in Rebellion (Tyndale), by James Draper, Jr., is a commentary based on the Living Bible and provides an alliterative outline in each of nine chapters. Denise Adler has written Jonah: Lessons in Obedience and Repentance (Tyndale), a short discussion guide with spaces in which to write answers to questions. Although lay oriented. Just Living by Faith (InterVarsity), by Andrew and Phyllis Le Peau and John Stewart, does not talk down to lay people from the scholar’s ivory tower. And it shows excellent understanding of Habakkuk and his message.

Concluding the survey of commentaries is a slim volume in the Study Bible Commentary series. Malachi (Zondervan). Its author, Charles Isbell, is a competent Old Testament scholar, who pleads for “a doctrine of inspiration that is broad enough to include all of the people who were involved in the making of the biblical books at every point along the line” (page 21). An excellent study of prophets (life and ministry) is Yesterday’s Prophets for Today’s World (Broadman), by F. B. Huey, Jr.

Archaeology And History

A survey of Israelite history for college-level courses, Israel in Ancient Near Eastern Setting (University Microfilms), by Christopher Hong, suffers from a certain imbalance because of its stress on Israel’s earlier history as opposed to the monarchy. It also tends to be overly polemic. Alice Parmelee, A History of the People of Israel (Morehouse-Barlow), offers a retelling of the history of Israel from the patriarchs to the present—from Abraham ben Terah to Menahem Begin. Wonders in the Midst (Standard Publishing), by Ward Patterson, is a brief, 13-chapter volume covering the historical period from Moses to Samuel. John Davis and John Whitcomb offer A History of Israel from Conquest to Exile (Baker), a revised composite of three earlier works (two by Davis, one by Whitcomb) originally published 10 years ago. Judging from the footnotes and bibliography, the revision did not include updating. Israel’s United Monarchy (Baker), by the late Leon Wood, is a massive and perceptive scholarly study of the reigns of Saul. David, and Solomon, with characteristic application from the heart of a pastor.

Kenneth Barker provides a brief introduction and bibliographical update to Israel and the Aramaeans of Damascus (Baker), a welcome reprint of a volume first published in 1957 by the late Merrill Unger. Scriptures, Sects and Visions (Collins/Fortress), by Michael Stone, is a survey of the intertestamental (“second temple”) period written from a Jewish perspective. The author stresses elements of continuity between the Israelites of the preexilic period and the Jews of the postexilic period. Martin Hengel, in Jews, Greeks and Barbarians (Fortress), concentrates on the political and social history of Palestine from Alexander the Great to Antiochus III, emphasizing the effects of Hellenization on the Jews of Palestine and the Diaspora. The Land of the Bible (Westminster), by Yohanan Aharoni, is a revised and enlarged paperback edition of this important historical geography, brought up to date by his friend and translator, Anson Rainey, after the author’s untimely death.

Theology

God at Work in Israel (Abingdon), by Gerhard von Rad, is an English translation of a 1974 volume of lectures delivered by the late Old Testament theologian. Written in nontechnical language, they consist of “critical paraphrases” of biblical passages and studies of biblical themes. As one might expect, they are extremely perceptive and thoroughly Christocentric. The Hebrew Republic (American Presbyterian Press), by E. C. Wines, is a reprint of a nineteenth-century volume. Originally published as Book II of Commentary on the Laws of the Ancient Hebrews, its thesis is that the American republic was established on the divine wisdom and eternal principles of truth and justice found in the laws of Moses, not on principles derived from Greek or Roman paganism. Millard Lind, a Mennonite author, has written Yahweh Is a Warrior (Herald), a theological treatment of Genesis through Kings (the so-called primary history). According to the author, the Old Testament teaches that the ultimate warrior is the Lord, downplays human might in warfare, and emphasizes divine intervention.

Liberating Limits (Word), by John Huffman. Jr., has 10 crisp, helpful chapters, one on each of the Ten Commandments. These are sandwiched in-between a thoughtful, introductory chapter and a concluding chapter that ties together everything in Christ in an unusually satisfying way. Meredith G. Kline has given us another thought-provoking book, Images of the Spirit (Baker). His thesis is that “the theophanic Glory was present at the creation and was the specific divine model or referent in view in the creating of man in the image of God” (page 13). Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Fortress) is a revised edition of a 1964 volume deriving from H. Wheeler Robinson’s seminal essays written in 1935–1937. Gene Tucker’s introduction asserts that “corporate responsibility” is a better explanation than “corporate personality” for the Old Testament phenomenon under consideration. Ronald Hals’s Grace and Faith in the Old Testament (Augsburg) is evangelical in presentation if not in presupposition. Hals insists that “the presentation of the grace of God in the Old Testament and the understanding of his people’s response of faith are essentially similar to the way the same two realities are described in the New Testament” (page 85).

Two volumes on messianism round out the theology sections. The Messiah Texts (Avon), by Raphael Patai, brings together a great deal of fascinating material about the Messiah from extra-biblical, traditional Jewish sources. Interestingly enough, it is arranged in such a way as to make it possible to see Jesus as its referent and/or fulfillment—though that is not what the author intends (for Patai, Jesus was “one of many Jews who claimed to be divinely inspired redeemers”). In Messianic Expectation in the Old Testament (Fortress), Joachim Becker nicely summarizes the various aspects of the problem of relating New Testament messianism with Old Testament restorative monarchism. Although written from a literary-critical and traditional-historical perspective, in its final chapter the book betrays its author’s basically Christian presupposition—that after all is said and done, Jesus Christ is the messianic theme of Holy Scripture.

Miscellany

Heading this section is 540 Little Known Facts About the Bible (Doubleday), edited by Robert Tuck. First published over a century ago as Biblical Things Not Generally Known, this welcome reprint is a quaint volume, providing fascinating information on biblical names, places, customs, traditions, and teachings. By contrast. The Book of the Bible (Morrow), by Eunice Riedel, Thomas Tracy, and Barbara Moskowitz, is a strange mixture of good insights and bad exegesis. Self-contradictory at numerous points, it is poorly edited and filled with cliches that sometimes border on blasphemy. An imaginative retelling of several Old Testament stories is offered in Peter Dickinson’s City of Gold (Pantheon). Though sometimes taking liberties with the biblical text, its style is engrossing and its original color illustrations are powerful.

In And They Took Themselves Wives (Harper & Row), David Bakan rewrites ancient history on the basis of the documentary hypothesis in an attempt to show that the earlier norms were matriarchal. His exotic methods of interpretation are nothing more than allegory at its worst (Noah was originally a female figure, baptism is salvation from drowning, and so on). Five Women, by Denis Adler, is a Tyndale House study guide that asks for answers to questions about the five women in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. A series of personal reflections on Moses’ encounter with God as recorded in Exodus 33 and 34 is the subject of The Back of God (Tyndale), by Bill Austin. In Chosen Days (Doubleday), David Rosenberg celebrates eight Jewish festivals and holy days (including Holocaust Day in the modern period). He includes free renderings of the pertinent biblical passages as well as imaginative art work contributed by Leonard Baskin. Loosely organized around the Ten Commandments, Sabbatical Reflections (Fortress), by Brita Stendahl, contains a wealth of sensitive and personal insights.

The final volume in this survey is Reclaiming the Old Testament for the Christian Pulpit (John Knox), by Donald Gowan. It is a manual on the use of form and traditional-historical criticism as techniques for discovering what to preach from the Old Testament and how to preach it most effectively, and includes examples of brief sermons. Readers can learn a great deal about preaching from the Old Testament without buying into everything Gowan says.

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While at times the CT Institute on eschatology [“Our Future Hope,” Feb. 6] reminded me of evangelical rabbis in a Christian Mishnah, I appreciated the discussion. My only regret was that Kantzer’s “plea for unity” has been ignored by the evangelical … church. I pastor a church that could not allow men like John Calvin, Martin Luther, Francis Schaeffer, John J. Davis, Charles Hodge, and a host of others to join or teach because of their eschatological positions. That’s not just unfortunate, it is a sinful tragedy, which shames the gospel of Jesus Christ as much as Peter’s refusal to eat with the Gentile believers in Antioch.

REV. MIKE BOYER

Everett Evangelical Free Church

Everett, Wash.

The CT Institute discussion was excellent. Gleason Archer’s comments make me recall a story about an ardent dispensational premillennialist like Dr. Archer, who visited his physician with a sore throat. The doctor put the tongue suppressor in the man’s mouth and instructed him to say “ah.” After much effort, all the patient could manage was a muted “pree.” In frustration, the doctor demanded to know why the dispensationalist would not cooperate. He replied, “Doc, I am so convinced of my premillennial view I can’t even say the first syllable of that other viewpoint.”

REV. BOB PARSLEY

First Baptist Church

Prescott, Ark.

The vignettes of the various millennial views were very helpful, but in error on at least one point. Midtribulation premillennialism actually is a special case of pretribulation premillennialism, not a variety of the posttribulation kind. In both the pretrib and midtrib systems, the Rapture comes before the Great Tribulation. The only difference between the two is that pretribs call the whole seven years “the Great Tribulation,” while midtribs insist that only the last three-and-a-half of the seven years qualify for that title.

REV. CECIL TAYLOR, PH. D.

Cedar Crest Southern Baptist Church

West Monroe, La.

Thank you for a fine job editing our discussion on eschatology. May I suggest one correction? In the bibliography under amillennialism, the volume of mine that should have been listed is not Created in God’s Image but The Bible and the Future (Eerdmans, 1982).

ANTHONY A. HOEKEMA

Calvin Theological Seminary

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I would like to report from personal experience that pretrib premils are “Rapture happy”—they practically worship the Rapture. It will save their skins—at least that’s the impression they give. Jesus should be our focus, not the Rapture; if it comes, fine, but if not, we are called to be faithful.

JACK F. MANIER

Dayton, Ohio

Why defend a lie?

Charles Colson is among the most respected of current Christian writers. However, in his “Must Government Deal in Deception?” [Feb. 6] he goes too far in defending the situational lie. Rahab was commended for her faith, not for her deception.

VERN LEWIS

Lyle, Minn.

Colson asks, “Can government always tell the truth?” He seems to imply that sometimes it cannot. I would like to suggest the reason it often “cannot” is revealed in some of the examples Colson cites; currency manipulation and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations is so commonplace today that we almost expect it from our government. But when government insists on doing things it should not do, it is not surprising that lies are used to cover the dirty tracks whenever possible. If government did its job (protecting the lives and property of citizens within its borders), there would be much less “need” for lying and cover-ups.

HAROLD ORNDORFF, JR.

Highland Heights, Ky.

Robert Coles versus “Wheel of Fortune”

After your cover story on Carl Rogers, I was surprised to see yet another psychologist on the cover in the person of Robert Coles [“The Crayon Man,” Feb. 6]. However, I found the articles, as well as Dr. Coles, both elucidating and challenging. In the same week in which Newsweek’s feature was television game shows, an in-depth, yet readable account of one who finds biblical truth in the poverty of children is extremely refreshing.

REV. ANTHONY L. BLAIR

Lurgan United Brethren in Christ Church

Shippensburg, Pa.

Thank you for the article about Robert Coles and his work, which updates Legh Richmond’s Annals of the Poor of 150 years ago. Then compare that article with the one debating the details of eschatology. The latter is intellectually stimulating, but what does our Lord think of this? How much more does the Bible say about the poor than it does about the millennium? Why do our shibboleths (doctrinal statements) include the latter and not something about our interpretation of Matthew 25:31–46?

RALPH A. EWERT

Lincoln, Neb.

The article on Robert Coles is one of the most extraordinary in the history of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

NORMAN R. WENGER

Sun City, Ariz.

I sincerely appreciated Philip Yancey’s interview of Dr. Coles. It stimulated me once again to take a good look at whether I am trying to pull “A’s” out of my walk with the Lord, or if I am truly serving him in Spirit and truth by taking time for the least and the best of these.

Regretfully, the conclusion to the article leaves one hanging on the thin line of misinterpreting the “spark” as a statement for universal salvation. We must never leave it unclear that the spark of God’s image is marred in every human, and only the washing of Christ’s redemptive blood can regenerate that marred relationship with God.

REV. DAVID E. GRUDUM

Grace Bible Fellowship Church

Reading, Pa.

Gored Oxymorons

Prof. Warren S. Blumenfeld of Georgia State University recently published a book that catalogues thousands of oxymorons, those self-contradictory expressions like jumbo shrimp, freezer burn, and working vacation.

As I read the book I realized, with all due respect to Professor Blumenfeld, that he had overlooked a few oxymorons from in and around my church. Take, for example, our pastor assuring us that due to Communion, he would be giving a mini sermon.

Or the poster that announced the community Easter sunrise service would feature a unified choir. Whoever wrote that has obviously never sat in a choir loft.

Then there was the announcement in our bulletin noting that the church was looking for a volunteer junior-high leader. And the short business meeting announced by our board chairman to discuss hiring a long-term youth pastor.

It really got bad when I was invited to a conference where the keynote address was by an expert in practical theology.

Now that I’ve alerted you to their existence, you’ll quickly find other Sunday morning oxymorons. But why take my word for it? I’m a confirmed skeptic.

EUTYCHUS

Saying “no” more than once

In response to your editorial “Saying No” (Feb. 6), youthful sex is not the only social issue where a secular or sanctified “no” would correct a multiplicity of problems. Isn’t it amazing that when one observes biblical principle, even in the twentieth century, so many negatives, natural consequences, are avoided. It makes one wonder whether the physical world and the message of the Bible might not have something in common—doesn’t it?

DWIGHT E. ACOMB

Fresno, Calif.

Praise the Lord! Finally a prochastity movement. I have been trying to explain (and even understand, myself) my feelings and ideas for solutions to teen pregnancy before abortion is an option. To me, the solution is not stopping abortions but stopping the reason for them by building self-esteem and making “saying no” peer acceptable, and even “cool”—or whatever it is they say these days.

LOIS MARTZ

Hillsboro, Oreg.

Model oneness

Thank you for your news coverage of the ICBI’S Summit III on the application of Scripture [News, Feb. 6]. The article, however, implied more basic differences than consensus among conferees. The opposite is true: a genuine, congenial spirit prevailed. Together they discussed; together they prayed and sang; and together they forged out more than 170 resolutions on which they would agree.

ICBI is nearing the completion of its ten-year plan. A lot has been accomplished—but in minimizing these accomplishments, history will show that ICBI’S greatest contribution lies in the fact that men and women of strongly differing theological systems, yet all committed to the Scriptures, could in fact work together and produce together. ICBI is a model of true ecumenicity for years to come.

CARY M. PERDUE

International Council on Biblical Inerrancy

Walnut Creek, Calif.

Family to the rescue

One small correction in your report about the Second Mile Project I initiated to help Pastor Charles Blair and Calvary Temple in Denver [“A Concerned Christian Goes the Second Mile,” Feb. 6]: Instead of 24, there were 50 Christian leaders on the National Committee of Concern, representing all theological and ministry positions. It is a classic example of the whole family of God helping one part that is hurting.

J. ALLAN PETERSEN

Family Concern

Wheaton, Ill.

So many presidents!

Concerning the appointment of Robert A. Seiple as president of World Vision [Jan. 16], Mr. Seiple was appointed President of World Vision US; the Rev. Tom Houston is President of WV International. Because your magazine is widely read outside the United States, it is important that any confusion in the minds of your readers be removed.

WILLIAM J. NEWELL

World Vision Canada

Mississauga, Ont., Canada

The post Letters appeared first on Christianity Today.

Will Change Undo The Church?

A Church for the 21st Century,by Leith Anderson (Bethany House, 246 pp.; $14.99, hardcover);Church Without Walls,by Jim Petersen (NavPress, 226 pp.; $9.99, paper);The Consumer Church,by Bruce Shelley and Marshall Shelley (InterVarsity, 232 pp.; $9.99, paper). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, religion editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

Imagine a traveler using an outdated map trying to book a flight to the Soviet Union. The travel agent explains that the Soviet Union is no more, having been replaced by 15 independent republics. But the would-be traveler will hear none of it. “This can’t be,” he shouts. “It’s right here on my map!”

Like it or not, this traveler resembles many leaders who are trying to plot a course for the church of Jesus Christ by using outmoded analyses and traditions. At least, that is the opinion of the authors of three new books that are trying to move the discussion of ecclesiology out of the ivory tower and into the pulpit and pew.

These new books share some similarities: discussions of staggering “paradigm shifts” for how we must view our changing world; references alternating between the New Testament and contemporary books on business and marketing; and critical re-evaluations of church history and tradition.

Yet each book also reflects the unique perspective of its author. Leith Anderson, senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, provides a hands-on manual for managing change that reveals his decades of experience as a leader and servant of local congregations. Jim Petersen, an executive with the Navigators and a former missionary to Latin America, fears that the church’s self-serving traditionalism may hinder believers from carrying out the Great Commission in the contemporary world. And church historian Bruce Shelley (who was assisted by his son, LEADERSHIP journal editor Marshall Shelley) sees the church being forced to answer a difficult question: Will we go with the flow and compromise our biblical distinctives, or will we remain true to tradition and be seen as out of touch with the real needs of modern men and women?

Although the tone of these books varies from hopeful to gloomy, all three communicate an urgent message: The church must change now or drift into cultural irrelevance. Although the challenge they describe is monumental, it is no more difficult than the challenge faced by the earliest Christians. As Petersen writes: “They were called upon to sort out Jesus from Judaism in order to become a people for all nations. We are called upon to sort out Jesus from our traditions in order to make Him available to our Nation.”

A Cheerleader For Change

If George Barna is the church’s guru of growth, Leith Anderson is the church’s cheerleader for change. In A Church for the 21st Century, he provides practical strategies for churches trying to survive and even thrive in an age of increasing social fragmentation and decreasing denominational loyalty.

Anderson wants churches to rethink their mission and tap into America’s deep spiritual thirst. Thriving local congregations will be those willing to reach out and meet people where they are instead of expecting people to invade the sanctuary: “Churches of the twenty-first century will not be those that emphasize self-preservation and isolation without risk. The survivors and thrivers will be those which exist for others.”

According to Anderson, a major transformation has occurred in how contemporary seekers enter the church. While earlier generations joined congregational life through Sunday services or Sunday-school classes, today’s seekers enter the church through a host of special-interest offerings: divorce-recovery workshops, athletic teams, or various support groups.

Transforming these isolated interest-driven sheep into members of a unified flock places new and pressing burdens on today’s shepherds. While exuding compassion for harried pastors, Anderson admits that pastors who champion change may fall victim to either stress from their critics or dismissal from anxious church boards. He gives practical counsel for how to be an effective leader and for how to avoid danger.

One thing Anderson does not provide is a sure-fire, one-size-fits-all model for the church. He compares those who blindly implement the techniques of the latest church-growth seminar to a doctor who discovers a new drug and prescribes it to all his patients, no matter what their illness. Anderson describes a variety of shapes churches may take, including megachurches, the larger metachurches, full-service, seven-days-a-week churches, and revitalized traditional churches.

Anderson believes churches can be relevant without selling their souls. But his call to re-evaluate the church’s mission will raise eyebrows among those who prefer to do church as usual.

Missionary To America

Jim Petersen left the mission fields of Brazil’s university campuses for an executive position with the Navigators in the new evangelical capital of Colorado Springs. He expected to find a thoroughly Christianized city. But looking at his own neighbors, he saw little church involvement (one neighborhood family was Mormon, another practiced Christian Science) and much pain.

By reaching out to his unchurched neighbors, Petersen began to understand why the church was having trouble being a vehicle of redemption to a hurting world. He struck up a friendship with a neighbor who liked to jog, but when the man asked Petersen to jog on Sunday morning, Petersen felt an uncomfortable tension between going to church and “being the church” to his neighbor. At the same time, a youth pastor criticized his teenage daughter for having non-Christian friends.

Petersen’s tension led him to a fresh study of the New Testament and church history. What he sees in today’s church is an institution-bound organization that has forsaken its biblical mission. Comparing some church leaders to legalistic members of the Sanhedrin, who were the recipients of some of Jesus’ harshest criticism, Petersen argues that theological and ecclesiastical systems have usurped the place of the gospel: “Human beings seem to have a perverse, irresistable need to turn whatever they believe into a system that they promptly use to enslave themselves and everyone around them. We do this repeatedly with the Christian faith, endangering the easily obscured truth of grace every time.”

Petersen calls for a renewed evangelistic vision, a radically revised understanding of incarnational ministry, and a redesigned church that prepares every member for his or her part in the work of building God’s kingdom.

What Price Change?

Bruce Shelley has no problem with change. As a professor of church history at Denver Seminary, he has spent an entire career studying changes in the church. But in The Consumer Church—the most sober of these books—Shelley asks Christian leaders how far they are willing to go to accommodate modern paradigms and what they are willing to sacrifice in the process.

Looking at contemporary society, Shelley sees an ethic of expressive self-fulfillment replacing the Puritan’s ethic of humble self-denial. And he sees some churches bending over backward to pander to a society for which religion is no more than another consumer choice. “In recent years Americans have chosen churches not so much to meet God and surrender to his revealed ways as to satisfy some personal need. Unlike the rich young ruler in the Gospels, church attenders seldom ask, ‘What must I do?’ They are far more likely to ask, ‘What do I get out of this?’ ”

Like Petersen, Shelley has little patience for traditionalism. But he fears the abandonment of all traditions will leave the church a hollow shell.

Shelley’s strongest warning is for those who would so lower church entrance requirements that being a part of the church is no more demanding—or meaningful—than choosing a restaurant: “Evangelical congregations must expect people to be more than consumers of religion. They must teach believers to discipline their personal tastes and submit themselves to the standards of God’s Word. That happens only within the community of faith.”

All three of these books wrestle with the complex changes confronting the church today, but the task is hardly new. Facing change has been a challenge throughout the church’s 2,000-year history. The task grows more complicated in times such as our own, however, when even the pace of change is changing and picking up speed. We can be thankful that these three books—which provide both a crash course in contemporary cultural analysis and a fresh look at God’s biblical design for the church—provide the updated maps for our journey toward the church of the twenty-first century.

Waiting For The Antichrist

Last Days Madness: The Folly of Trying to Predict When Christ Will Return,by Gary DeMar (Wolgemuth and Hyatt, distributed by American Vision in Atlanta, 240 pp.; $9.99, paper). Reviewed by Mark A. Horne, an editorial associate with Prison Fellowship.

After Edgar C. Whisenant’s second failed attempt at prediction in The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989, many hoped that Christian readers would learn from their mistakes. Then the Gulf Crisis hit, prompting such an outbreak of apocalyptic literature that even the secular media thought it was a trend worth reporting. Since then, of course, the rebuilt Babylon has turned out to be somewhat less than anticipated—leaving everyone disappointed but the booksellers. Nevertheless, publishers continue to pump out “end times” books claiming to contain proof of a near-future Armageddon based on a supposed link between biblical prophecy and the latest headline.

In Last Days Madness, Gary DeMar hopes the evangelical reading public will soon realize the futility of keeping track of the umpteenth revision in “the prophetic calendar.” One by one, DeMar ably refutes the claims of writers who insist the Bible contains a timetable for predicting modern events. He sheds biblical light on such topics as the number of the Beast, the identity of the Antichrist, the battle of Armageddon, and other prophetic topics. He strengthens his case against the promoters of “last days madness” by citing many other predictions of impending Armageddon that have been made through the centuries. “They all have one thing in common,” writes DeMar. “They have always been wrong!”

If there is any weakness in this much-needed book, it lies in its stress on refutation. It is one thing to explain what the Bible does not teach; it is another to explain what it does teach. While DeMar does set forth his own position—that many of the prophetic passages in the New Testament refer, not to a future tribulation, but to God’s judgment on Israel in the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70—he does not explain his perspective in any sort of detail. For most of DeMar’s readers, after all, belief that we are living in the “last days” is not merely an interpretation of various passages in Scripture, but a comprehensive commitment to the idea that history is about to come to a close. To learn suddenly that the church may be around awhile is bound to be a disorienting experience.

A likely explanation for DeMar’s negative emphasis is his past experience with “end times” advocates. Last Days Madness is the latest in a series of exchanges between a group of evangelicals, loosely identified as Christian Reconstructionists, and the dispensationalists and quasidispensationalists who believe that Christians are presently living in the “terminal generation.”

In the book, DeMar has restricted himself to proving that the texts commonly used to support the idea that we are living in the “last days” actually refer to events that took place in the first century. He points out that Jesus plainly stated that his prophecies relating to “the coming of the Son of Man” would happen to the generation to whom he was speaking (Matt. 23:36; 24:34). He is careful to make his case in such a way that historic premillenialists and amillennialists will find much to agree with. DeMar’s skill as a communicator and his ability to refrain from partisan polemics makes Last Days Madness an effective book.

As The Court Turns

Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Court,by David Savage (Wiley and Sons, 473 pp.; $22.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he is a member of the California and D.C. bars.

The judiciary is the most secretive and least understood branch of the federal government. Yet its power is immense. Less than 20 years ago the opinion of seven men overturned the laws of every state on abortion. Other decisions, often by five-to-four votes, have stripped the public square of the mere mention of religion, mandated busing and quotas, rewritten election procedures, and helped force the resignation of a sitting President. “In the end,” writes David Savage, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “the Constitution means what these nine persons say that it means.”

In Turning Right, Savage helps make understandable recent judicial controversies and the conservative campaign to reshape American jurisprudence. Savage is not entirely pleased at the change in the Court’s direction, but his book is generally free of ideological cant.

The strength of Turning Right is its humanization of the justices and Court operations. Savage mixes historical sketches of past cases with biographies of the justices, vignettes of oral arguments before the Court, and quotes from actual opinions to advance his thesis that Ronald Reagan and George Bush have pushed the Court to the right. Contends Savage: “The transformed Court no longer sees itself as the special protector of individual liberties and civil rights for minorities. To a remarkable degree, the new Court mirrors the affable but solidly conservative man who heads it,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Savage wrote Turning Right before the last term, in which cases such as Planned Parenthood v. Casey have called into question conservative control of the Court. While there may formally be a six-member “conservative” majority, half of those justices seem willing to uphold past liberal precedents. Still, the Court is no longer regularly breaking dramatic new legal ground.

Savage covers the full range of issues, including abortion and religious issues. Typical of Savage’s approach is his coverage of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the 1989 case that upheld some state restrictions on abortion. He briefly summarizes the line of abortion cases stretching back to Roe v. Wade, allowing that “if [Justice Harry] Blackmun’s opinion made medical sense, however, it did not succeed as well in making convincing legal sense.… Certainly the states that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment did not think they were making their abortion laws unconstitutional.” Then Savage looks at the internal Court dynamic in Webster, including Rehnquist’s decision to write the opinion himself and the divisive struggle that ensued among the nominally conservative justices.

Originally, viewed as “the least dangerous” branch, the judiciary has proved to be a powerful policymaker. Savage helps strip away much of the mystery surrounding the Court in Turning Right. It is a book well worth reading by anyone interested in learning a bit more about America’s unelected superlegislature.

Author Interview

The Reforming Of A Novelist

Novelist Larry Woiwode thinks it is ironic that most of his readers are secular East Coast literary types. Despite a life-changing conversion 15 years ago, despite his attending a doctrinally conservative Orthodox Presbyterian church, the acclaimed novelist is largely unknown among evangelicals.

Woiwode (pronounced “why-would-he”) works and lives on a small flax and alfalfa farm in the sparsely populated prairies of western North Dakota. The nearest town, Mott, has a gas station, a beauty parlor, but no bookstore. A visitor wanting to buy the novels of the town’s most famous resident will be pointed to a Super-Valu grocery store.

In addition to writing short stories for the New Yorker, Woiwode has published a number of highly regarded novels, including What I’m Going to Do, I Think in 1969, and Beyond the Bedroom Wall in 1975. Of the latter, the late literary critic John Gardner wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years.”

Woiwode’s latest novel, Indian Affairs, has just been released by Atheneum. Woiwode describes it as “an attempt to unravel some of the complexity of the Native American situation, without neglecting one of their first contacts, the Puritans. It contains a developed Christian apologetic,” which, interestingly, has missed the notice of most reviewers. His new book, Acts: A Writer’s Reflections on the Church, Writing and His Own Life (due in the spring from HarperCollins), develops what Woiwode talks about here: faith, fiction, and how Christians can address a culture increasingly resistant to the gospel.

What was the process leading to your becoming a Christian?

The outline is fairly simple. I was raised a Roman Catholic and baptized into the faith. At about the time I was in college, I started falling away because there was no way to justify why I was doing certain things or why I held certain views. If all I could say was “that’s what the church teaches,” it didn’t present a very convincing argument to unbelieving friends. So I became disaffected with the church and essentially stopped attending.

I lived the life of the hedonistic agnostic for the next few years. At about this time, I was living in New York City and working on Beyond the Bedroom Wall. During the writing, I had to look up passages in the Bible, to see what the Lutheran and Catholic families in the story were thinking. Because I knew these families, I knew that they were thinking along biblical lines. I also realized by that point that Christianity had the power to change people’s lives.

So then I would become tom between two extremes. The Spirit would convict me of my apostasy and my sin, but I would resist and go on living the way I was. Eventually I was briefly brought so low that I had to look at what the Spirit was insisting.

One of the problems for me in reading Scripture was that it would seem to take me every direction, and I couldn’t reconcile what seemed to me differing viewpoints. Until, that is, someone pointed out to me the five points of Calvinism. Then everything fell into place. About that time, my wife and I were attending a church in Chicago—Trinity Chapel, where Francis Mahaffy was pastor. Through the preaching there, my calling and election was made sure. The more I studied Scripture, the more I came to the conviction that I was a child of God.

Themes of belief and doubt run through your writing. What is the role of faith in your fiction?

The question that fiction presents is: In the face of death, what is my stance? The answer is faith. You must have faith. That answer is implicit in the fiction itself, though not in a programmatic way. When I write, I’m aware that every sentence is moving across a blank page on faith. I’m not writing Janette Oke novels, but I’m convinced that the only answer for mankind in general is faith in Jesus Christ.

There are many deaths in your novels, especially in Beyond the Bedroom Wall. Why is mortality such a persistent theme in your work?

Death is the one event that’s inevitable, that we all have to face. Modern life has become so sanitized that people assume they’re going to live forever. Writing about death is a way of reminding people they’re going to die. Isn’t that one of the techniques used by James Kennedy in his Evangelism Explosion? “If you were to die tonight …”

Presbyterian minister and novelist Frederick Buechner says that for him, writing a novel is similar to what he does in a pulpit; he is just using a different form. Is that true for you?

I think that the best fiction is always teaching us ways to apply ourselves to life. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy—the whole Russian tradition does that, often using a spiritual viewpoint. It posits a way to live (just as the atheistic existentialist Albert Camus does) and then asks what sort of way do you want to live? One of my reactions in reading Camus was: “I don’t want to live like Meursault [the protagonist in The Stranger].” I don’t want such emptiness in my life that I go out and blow somebody’s head off.

So fiction, even Christian fiction, need not present a glorious, uplifting story. It can present the opposite, so that readers say not just “I hate this book,” but “I never want to live like that.” I believe that the best Christian fiction teaches you to apply Christianity, just as the best seminaries should. In fiction, the method is different; it’s done through metaphor.

My editor at the New Yorker, William Maxwell, once told me that the only way to do a book was to write it so well that when the reader put the book down he said: “Well, my life will never be the same after that.”

What do you say to critics who claim that such an approach uses fiction to proselytize, that it makes stories preachy?

It’s no more preachy than the writer who wishes to present a humanistic point of view or a Marxist point of view. A story is an attempt to create a believable, attainable lifestyle. My view happens to be informed by the historical Christian faith.

Do you believe your fiction doesn’t get the attention it deserves because you are a self-acknowledged Christian?

I think that there is a prejudice against the Christian point of view in just about every realm. The reception to the more explicitly Christian Poppa John made clear to me how much prejudice exists in critical circles, which, let’s face it, are controlled by the humanist hegemony. As I discovered when I taught in the university, humanists do not like to be crossed in their beliefs, and one of their beliefs is that you can’t have faith in anything.

When a novel like Poppa John is literally dismissed in a sentence in Time magazine when, before, my other novels generally had good reviews, that tells you something.

What role are Christians to play in the world?

“To glorify God and to enjoy him forever”—the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. There is no simple way to put it better. Paul breaks it down to whatsoever I eat or drink or do, I should do it all to the glory of God. When I sit down to write, I hope that that’s what I’m doing. When I work in the fields, I feel the same. I’m as in touch with creation when I’m at my desk writing as when I’m running machinery all over the literal creation.

If I am indeed scrupulous to bring glory to God in all aspects of life, then when his judgment comes, as I believe it will, I will be judged—after claiming Christ’s righteousness—on how well I’ve glorified him. And so, of course, I hope to enjoy him forever.

Interview by Timothy Jones.

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