Speaking of the Nazis, I highly recommend Heiko A. Oberman’s essay, “From Luther to Hitler,” contained in the posthumously published The Two Reformations (Yale University Press, 2003). The piece is short and pointed, well worth the read, and just one of a number of excellent essays in that collection.

Here’s how Oberman concludes (p. 85):

I do not intend this analysis to serve the cause of exculpating the Germans who were fated to be born too early. Rather I hope to direct attention to the decade of decision between 1925 and 1935, particularly to the responsibility of academic leaders, who enjoyed a status of respect unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Among those leaders martin Heidegger, Emanuel Hirsch, and others constituted a kind of Nazi think tank that provided Hitler with some of his most effective ideological executioners. Although they are now restored to what may be their rightful glory as scholars, they have forfeited their claim to be regarded as citizens of humanity.

Ideas have consequences and academic leaders have a public responsibility. History, too, has a duty to judge the moral quality of those ideas and what consequences they had.

Three items have crossed my email inbox over recent weeks that may be of interest to PowerBlog readers. The first two are from the Program in Early American Economy & Society (PEAES).

The Seventh Annual Conference of the Program in Early American Economy & Society conference is titled, “Markets & Morality: Intersections of Economy, Ethics, and Religion in Early North America.” The conference will be held on November 7, 2008, at the Library Company in Philadelphia, PA. There are a number of sessions that look promising, including papers like “The Moral Economy of Competition in Early National New England,” from Jason Opal of Colby College and “A Wealth of Notions: Interpreting Economy and Morality in Early America,” by Christopher Clark, University of Connecticut.

PEAES has also announced its fellowships for 2009-2010, including a resident post-doctoral research fellowship with a stipend of $40,000, a research dissertation fellowship with a stipend of $20,000, and four to six short-term fellowships to scholars at any level of scholarly or professional achievement with stipends of $2,000 each.

Finally, Harvard University will also be hosting a graduate student conference from November 6-8, 2008, titled, “The History of Capitalism in the United States.” The conference is “intended as a forum in which to encourage dialogue, debate and more inclusive approaches to the writing of the history of capitalism in the United States.”

Following up on our discussion of the Pew survey on the American religious landscape, I have a few thoughts as to what plagues American Protestantism, particularly of the evangelical variety, and it has to do precisely with the “catholicity” of Protestantism.

To the extent that people are leaving Protestantism, or are searching for another denomination within the broadly Protestant camp, I think there are at least two connected precipitating causes. (A caveat: there are many, many individual and anecdotal exceptions to the generalizations I will make below, and I think they serve to highlight rather than to undermine this basic picture.)

The first is the lack of historical connection to tradition (with a lower case “t”) among American Protestants. Whether by intention or ignorance, the relation of Protestantism to the broader church’s history is sorely under-recognized.

Part of this phenomena is the anti-creedalism, anti-confessionalism of many evangelicals, such that when something like the Apostle’s Creed is even part of a worship service, the church is confessed to be not one, holy, “catholic,” and apostolic but rather “Christian” (or at best “catholic” with a footnote).

Part of it is simple intellectual laziness (i.e. not having the methodological and academic rigor to take up questions of the origins of the Protestant Reformation in its context). The claims of the reformers to represent the authentic “catholic” Christianity of the church’s tradition, focused especially on their grounding in the patristics, must be dealt with responsibly, even if in the final judgment some find these claims to be untenable. More often than not, the claims to the catholicity of the Reformation are ignored rather than engaged.

The second cause is a lack of connection with worldwide Christianity. The “catholicity” of the Church has not only to do with our connection to the past tradition, but also to contemporary believers who live all over the world. If the Pew survey is bad news for American Christianity (and evangelical Protestantism in particular), then the good news is that the church is not limited to North America and that Christianity is growing both by number and by vigor in the global south and east.

Part of the emergent impulse is I think an inchoate and instinctual response to these realities. Wouldn’t it be tragically ironic if at the height of American evangelicalism’s political influence its spiritual core was failing? We need to be concerned about “whitewashed tomb” syndrome, so focused on the external influence of the church on culture, politics, and society that we abandon the church’s primary spiritual calling.

In addition to an increased historical awareness of the roots of the Reformation, one fruitful avenue to explore in making these connections is in the pursuit of a theology of obedience, suffering, persecution, and martyrdom, a theology more along the lines of Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer than of the political and cultural Christendom that has so recently dominated the church in Western civilization.

A sampling of some books worthy of consideration that are indirect popular responses to these problems I identify:

• Charles Colson and Harold Fickett, The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters


• Dennis Ockholm, Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants


• Craigh Hovey, To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church


• Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live? A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory


• Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism

Speaking of the history of morality and moral judgments in historiography, Alister MacIntyre makes a pointed observation about a complementary distinction that arises between what might be called “intellectual” and “social” history:

Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events. There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing their actions, often partially and in a variety of different ways, the very same conceptual changes which at the level of philosophical theory are articulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, by Diderot and Condorcet, by Hume and Adam Smith and Kant. There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.

--After Virtue, 2d ed., p. 61

See also: Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (1906).

Success unsettles the principles even of the wise, and scarcely would those of debauched habits use victory with moderation.
-- Sallust

Last Saturday Dr. Ben Carson, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, received the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medal. In his speech marking the occasion, President Bush said that Carson has “a tireless commitment to helping young people find direction and motivation in life. He reminds them that all of us have gifts by the grace of the almighty God. He tells them to think big, to study hard, and to put character first” (emphasis added).

One of Carson’s themes in his speeches and writings is the comparison of America to Rome, in that the latter foundered when its basic morals were corrupted. America, says Carson, is at a crisis point similar to Rome in the centuries before its decline (for a study of the move from “virtue” to “values” and beyond in the modern West, see Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-moralization Of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values).

The Roman historian and politician Sallust wrote of the situation in the first century BC in his first published work, The Conspiracy of Catiline,

When wealth was once considered an honor, and glory, authority, and power attended on it, virtue lost her influence, poverty was thought a disgrace, and a life of innocence was regarded as a life of ill-nature. From the influence of riches, accordingly, luxury, avarice, and pride prevailed among the youth; they grew at once rapacious and prodigal; they undervalued what was their own, and coveted what was another’s; they set at naught modesty and continence; they lost all distinction between sacred and profane, and threw off all consideration and self-restraint.

It furnishes much matter for reflection, after viewing our modern mansions and villas extended to the size of cities, to contemplate the temples which our ancestors, a most devout race of men, erected to the Gods. But our forefathers adorned the fanes of the deities with devotion, and their homes with their own glory, and took nothing from those whom they conquered but the power of doing harm; their descendants, on the contrary, the basest of mankind have even wrested from their allies, with the most flagrant injustice, whatever their brave and victorious ancestors had left to their vanquished enemies; as if the only use of power were to inflict injury.

Lord Acton was another historian who felt that part of the discipline’s interpretive craft was to render moral judgments about events in human history.

Following his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, in a lecture on the study of history in 1895, Lord Acton urged his audience “never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”

Commentator Perez Zagorin judges that Acton’s “claim that moral judgment on past crimes and misdeeds is one of the supreme duties of the historian was at odds with the entire trend of historiography in his time and set him apart by its rigor from all the noted historians and thinkers about history of his own generation and thereafter.”

But how, after all, can we learn not to repeat the mistakes of the past if we are unwilling or unable to make moral judgments?

Does a good education demand an appreciation for history? It would seem so. What arguments are there to support such a contention?

Neil Postman writes,

There is no escaping ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find it convenient to forget.

In quoting this passage from Postman’s Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Ronald Arnett says that history is “the metasubject needed in a good education.”

This contention is a correlate of C.S. Lewis’ opinion that old books are critically necessary to learning. In his introduction to an old book (Athanasius’ De Incarnatione), Lewis writes, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

Where Postman praises the study of history for what is constant in human nature, Lewis praises historical study for providing us a perspective from which to judge what is transient and contextual about our own times. Lord Acton, himself a greatly learned and distinguished historian once wrote, “History is a great innovator and breaker of idols.”

Lewis also makes an important methodological point about the preeminence of primary sources, as compared to secondary sources. That is, when we have a question about Plato or Platonism, the reader should first consult a book by Plato or a Platonist rather than “some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.”

Christians know too that “the human dilemma” is to be understood within the narrative of redemption history (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation).

Those paying close attention to the developments in Christian higher education will take note of the increasing popularity of “great books” programs (see St. John’s College and The College at Southwestern). These are in some sense an extension of the impulse toward a classical academy model of elementary and secondary education.

For more on “what makes a great book,” visit this Scriptorium Daily podcast, which includes the insights of faculty of the Torrey Honors Institute, a great books program at Biola University.

There’s no better time to re-examine the legacy of the Puritans than on the Thanksgiving holiday, which is so closely associated with the Pilgrim’s exodus to America in 1621. With that in mind, here are a few resources for understanding the worldview that Max Weber called a “worldly asceticism.”

• “Eat, Drink, and Relax: Think the Pilgrims would frown on today’s football-tossing, turkey-gobbling Thanksgiving festivities? Maybe not.” Christian History & Biography.
• “History and Theology of the Puritans.” The Shepherd’s Scrapbook (links to a 16-part series on puritanism by J. I. Packer).
• Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were, by Leland Ryken.
• Meet the Puritans, by Joel R. Beeke and Randal Peterson.

Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson discusses a new book on economic history that looks at the poverty problem from the perspective of “nature vs. nurture.”

Comes now Gregory Clark, an economist who interestingly takes the side of culture. In an important new book, “ A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World,” Clark suggests that much of the world’s remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can’t take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can’t overcome this bedrock resistance.

“There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth, and even complicated economic surgery offers no clear prospect of relief for societies afflicted with poverty,” he writes. Various forms of foreign assistance “may disappear into the pockets of Western consultants and the corrupt rulers of these societies.” Because some societies encourage growth and some don’t, the gap between the richest nations and the poorest is actually greater today (50 to 1) than in 1800 (4 to 1), Clark estimates.

Samuelson notes that “Clark’s theory is controversial and, at best, needs to be qualified.” In his column, The Global Poverty Trap, Samuelson summarizes Clark’s view: “Capitalism in its many variants has been shown, he notes, to be a prodigious generator of wealth. But it will not spring forth magically from a few big industrial projects or cookie-cutter policies imposed by outside experts. It’s culture that nourishes productive policies and behavior.”

“Is American higher education doing its duty to prepare the next generation to keep America free?” Apparently not, according to researchers at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy (UConnDPP), in a study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s (ISI) National Civic Literacy Program.

In a survey of 14,000 freshman and seniors at 50 colleges and universities across the country, every school scored poorly. Also, college seniors, sadly, scored little better than freshman. The average senior score was a failing 53.2%; the average freshman score was 51.7%. In fact, no school scored higher than a D+. The top ten school are listed below:

1. Harvard University 69.56%
2. Grove City College (PA) 67.26
3. Washington & Lee University (VA) 66.98
4. Yale University 65.85
5. Brown University 65.64
6. University of Virginia 65.28
7. Wheaton College (IL) 64.98
8. University of Pennsylvania 63.49
9. Duke University 63.41
10. Bowdoin College (ME) 62.86

A link to the rankings of the fifty schools in the survey are found here. My alma mater, Ole Miss, scored 36th, and Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI ranked 21st.

Some shocking or not so shocking analysis is quoted below, directly taken from the American Civic Literacy Website. You can also examine the entire website for a treasure trove of facts, findings, and analysis.

Students were asked 60 multiple-choice questions to measure their knowledge in four subject areas: America’s history, government, international relations, and market economy. The disappointing results were published in the fall of 2006 in The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions.

The website declares, “This report is not designed to tear down American higher education, but to hold it accountable.” After taking the quiz myself, I scored a 93.33 %, which is 56 out of 60. You can take the quiz here, and see how you measure up against American college students.

In an appropriate quote also taken from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute website, John Quincy Adams, then a state senator, praised the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock:

Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers and of love for our posterity. They form the connecting links between the selfish and the social passions,“ he said. ”Respect for his ancestors excites in the breast of man, interest in their history, attachment to their characters, concern for their errors, involuntary pride in their virtues. Love for his posterity spurs him to exertion for their support, stimulates him to virtue for their example and fills him with the tenderest solicitude for their welfare.

“Martyrdom means a great deal to Orthodox people,” writes historian James Billington in “The Orthodox Frontier of Faith,” an essay collected in “Orthodoxy and Western Culture,” a volume of essays published in honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005).

The 20th Century’s first genocide, the Armenian genocide, began with terror and massacres in the late 19th century and culminated in the great destruction of Christian minorities at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915-1918. Some 1.5 million Armenian Christians perished, according to Armenian sources. With the Russian Revolution and the rise of totalitarian communism, the martrydom of Christians took on unprecedented proportions in the gulags, killing fields and the famines that resulted from forced collectivization of farming.

Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a historian who has written several books on Russian culture, cites figures showing that “something like 70 percent of all Christian martyrs were created in the twentieth century, and the largest number of those were in Russia. Religious persecution was quite ecumenical; all religions suffered. However, since Orthodoxy was the main religion of the USSR, it suffered specially. The same Russian expanses that saw amazing frontier missionary activity in the early modern period suffered enormous devastation in the twentieth century when millions of people disappeared in the frozen wastes of the North and the East. The concentration camps were spread across almost exactly the same places – often using the monasteries for prisons.”

The world will never know all of the names of the millions of New Martyrs, as they are known to the Church, who perished under Communism, an oppression that lasted for most of the 20th Century. But their martyria, their witness, will be forever known to God.

In Russia this week, according to AP, “Russian Orthodox priests consecrated a wooden cross Wednesday at a site south of Moscow where firing squads executed thousands of people 70 years ago at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges. Created at a monastery that housed one of the first Soviet labor camps and brought by barge to Moscow along a canal built on the bones of gulag inmates, the 40-foot cross has been embraced as memorial to the mass suffering under Stalin.”

Noticeably absent, the article said, were representatives of President Vladimir Putin’s government. “This is in keeping with efforts by ... Putin, a former KGB officer, to restore Russians’ pride in their Soviet-era history by softening the public perception of Stalin’s rule,” wrote reporter Bagila Bukharbayeva. Nostalgia for the Soviet era? Read remarks on the subject by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his recent Der Spiegel interview.

The site consecrated to the Russian martyrs this week marked the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s Great Purge, when millions were labeled “enemies of the state” and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The Butovo range was used for executions in the 1930s and until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Some 20,000 people, including priests and artists, were killed there in 1937-38 alone. “We have been ordered to be proud of our past,” said Yan Rachinsky from Memorial, a non-governmental group dedicated to investigating Stalin’s repression. “I know no other example in history when 700,000 people were killed within 1 1/2 years only for political reasons.”

Follow the link below to read the entire report on the memorial to victims of Stalin’s Purge.

Continue reading "The New Martyrs"