Author: Sara Palmer

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One New Book for the Preacher

John Buchanan

The Christian Century, Chicago, Illinois

DesmowHlL ι1ρ\0Ίλ ,The Book oj ؛Forgiving : The F ourfold Path of Healing Ourselves and Our World (New York: Harper One), 2014.

Desmond Tutu will surely be remembered for a very long time as a Christian churchman who profoundly influenced for the good one of the most critical periods in the world in recent history. The first black Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa,Tutu was a vocal opponent of the South African system of apartheid, one of the most racist and oppressive political arrangements in our time. For his tireless advocacy for human rights, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, the Pacem in Terra Award, and many other international accolades. In addition. Bishop Tutu served as Chair of the newly democratic South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anyone who ever met him—and I did, briefly—was compelled by both his obvious integrity as a Christian social activist but also his personal charm, grace, and infectious smile. Tutu modeled for many of us just the right mixture of prophetic impatience with injustice and compassionate, deeply human pastoral love. He has partnered to write this book with his daughter, Mpho Tutu, also an Anglican Priest, and Executive Director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. Together they have created a marvelous resource, a highly readable book full of personal anecdotes and, for the preacher, a lifetime of sermon illustrations. The book also includes a methodology for putting into practice the illusive and difficult virtue of forgiving. The book opens with the first of many gripping stories,a widow’s heart-wrenching and horrific testimony before the Tmth and Reconciliation Commission. Her husband had been “disappeared” by the South African government, tortured, and murdered. She told the commissioners that herhusband’s body bore forty-three wounds,acid had been poured on his face, and his right hand had been severed. The woman’s daughter, eight years old when her father was murdered, described the years of hardship that followed, punctuated by police harassment. The Commission members were stunned by what the young woman, now nineteen, said next. “I would love to know who killed my father. So would my brother. We want to forgive them, but we don’t know who to forgive” (page 2). Other anecdotes throughout the book, many of them personal to the Tutus, dramatize the tragedy and potential for violent revenge when the apartheid system ultimately collapsed. Other anecdotes are of random violence to which all of US are subject. One of the personal accounts is of the brutal murder of Angela, Mpho Tutu’s beloved housekeeperandcaregiverforherdaughter.Tutu describes her journey through grief, rage, and revenge to reconciliation and peace. A breathtaking illustration is of Bishop Malusi Moumlwaua, an anti-apartheid activist who was arrested and tortured extensively by the South African police. He later told Bishop Tutu that his experience renewed his commitment to the anti-apartheid cause, but in the middle of torture, he had come upon an astonishing insight. “These are God’s children, and they are

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losing their humanity. We have to help them recover it” (page 34). As I read this and other accounts of suffering and injustice, I found myself wanting only to be silently grateful for these profound examples of Christ-like grace. These people exhibited a depth and strength of faithfulness that puts my own tepid faith to shame. I clearly recall the report of a friend of mine who had visited apartheid era South Africa. He told me about seeing the disciplined, well-equipped, very visible and present South African military, one of the strongest in the world. “There is no way,” he said, “that an absolute catastrophe can be avoided.” He was not alone in that analysis. Historians will ponder for years why it didn’t happen, why black South Africans, when the system fell and the first democratic election was held in 1994, did not exact a terrible revenge on their oppressors. The reasons are beyond the scope of this book, but surely the witness of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his transparent Christian faith are among them, as is the towering figure of Nelson Mandela. This is not a book about Mandela, but he looms large over it. Imprisoned for twenty-seven years in a government penal institution on Robben Island, Mandela emerged from prison as the bearer of black South Africans’ long suffering, but also their hope for the future. The Tutus observe that Mandela’s personal journey from angry young radical to mature, gracious, and forgiving statesman was a dramatic and dynamic model for his people. “When Nelson Mandela went to jail, he was a very angry man. This global role model of forgiveness was not very forgiving on the day he stepped onto Robben Island to begin his prison sentence. It took many years in jail, years he spent cultivating a daily practice of forgiveness, for him to become the luminous example of tolerance who was able to put his wounded country on the road to reconciliation and healing. The man who walked into prison was not the man who invited his prison guard to be a VIP guest at his inauguration. That took time and effort” (page 38). The Tutus ground their exploration into the dynamics of forgiving in contemporary scholarship as well as personal anecdote. They cite, among others, the work of psychologist Fred Luskin, author of Forgivefor Good: A Proven Prescriptionfor Health and Happiness. Luskin cites scientific studies that show that forgiveness training reduces depression and anger and increases general well-being and hopefulness. “Research suggests that people who are forgiving report fewer health and mental problems, and fewer symptoms of stress.” Some evolutionary biologists suggest that human beings are hardwired to seek revenge and hurt back when hurt. It leads to the “revenge cycle”: violence, hurt/harm/loss, pain, choosing to harm, rejecting shared humanity, revenge payback, more violence. The Tutus propose an alternative, a “forgive cycle” in which the harmed person consciously chooses to heal by forgiving . Instead of being drawn into the cycle of revenge and rupture, human beings can choose to forgive and reconnect. The heart of this book, in the practice of forgiveness, is the Fourfold Path of Forgiving. Each of the four Steps-Telling the Story, Naming the Hurt, Granting Forgiveness, Renewing or Releasing the Relationship-is set forth in a chapter. The first step. Telling the Story, is introduced by Bishop Tutu’s powerful and personal memory of an incident that was humiliating and infuriating. In 1960 he and his wife Leah were driving their children to neighboring Swaziland to enroll them in a school that promised a better education. It was a long drive on a blisteringly hot day without air conditioning. Tutu saw a sign: “Walls Ice Cream Ahead.” He pulled the car into

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the lot, and the family clambered out, desperate for the promise of cold ice cream. The boy behind the counter refused to serve them, ordering the family to go outside to the back window. “The rage seared me,” Tutu remembers (pages 68-69). Incidents like that can leave permanent scars on the soul. Somehow he must forgive that boy. It begins with telling the story, preferably to the perpetrator of the hurt. Wen that is not possible to do face-to-face, it is important to write the story in a letter or, at least, to tell it to someone, bringing the pain to words. The chapter includes a helpful section on “The Cost of Not Telling”: carrying the weight of the burden of pain alone, internalizing the pain where it festers and becomes more painful. Telling about it is the first step toward liberation. The final step in the Fourfold Path, after Telling the Story, Naming the Hurt, and Granting Forgiveness, is Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. The chapter is particularly helpful in the realistic acknowledgement that sometimes a broken relationship cannot be renewed, in which case an intentional release can bring the matter to a livable resolution. The Tutu’s make the remarkable and challenging proposal of two simple truths: there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one undeserving of forgiveness . My first reaction, and I suspect I’m not alone, is the familiar skeptical trope: “What about Adolph Hitler and his despicable Nazi minions? What about Jihad John and his brutally murderous ISIS colleagues publically beheading journalists?” The authors remind US, however, that forgiving or not forgiving always involves a choice we make. “In South Africa we chose to seek forgiveness rather than revenge. That choice averted a bloodbath. For every injustice there is a choice….I have often said that in South Africa there would have been no future without forgiveness. Our rage and our quest for revenge would have been our destruction” (page 7). Near the end of the book, the Tutus expand the context by proposing that one of the major issues confronting our nation and the world is the choice between retributive or restorative justice. Retributive justice, an eye-for-an-eye, practiced by most of the countries of the world including our own, is based on the premise that an injustice can only be made right when the perpetrator is made to pay for the harm by incarcération , physical punishment, or death. And in spite of promises of rehabilitation and restoration, our penal system feels and acts like retribution. The authors challenge this entire mentality and the penal justice systems it has spawned. It is both bracing and provocative: can a semblance of civil justice be produced by loving one’s enemies and doing good to those who harm? As I finished reading the book, it occurred to me that this issue comes close to the heart of the Gospel. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against US,” Jesus taught his followers to pray. The clear assumption is that personal forgiveness is organically related to the intentional act of forgiving others. It is fascinating to ponder the implications in regard to the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The argument reminded me of another remarkable book I read recently. Change ofHeart: Justice, Mercy and Making Peace with my Sister ‘5 Killer by Jeanne Bishop. I was Bishop’s pastor and have witnessed and been inspired by her incredible journey. She is a practicing attorney and knows intimately the ins and outs of our criminal justice system. Bishop’s pregnant sister Nancy and her husband were brutally murdered by a teenage intmder in their suburban Chicago home. In her book. Bishop describes the foil range of emotions she experienced, including her desire

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for revenge and retributive justice. Tis young man should be punished severely for the ghastly evil he did and the pain he created. She also describes how her Christian faith led her gradually, over a period of several years, to change her mind about the killer’s life sentence without parole and also finally to reach out to him in prison and to try to build a relationship. That relationship seems to be headed toward restoration, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu have created a unique structure in The Book of Forgiveness. Each of the ten chapters appears to have been written by Bishop Tutu. At the end of each chapter is a poetic reflection, making personal the ideas and concepts in the preceding chapter, followed by a helpful summaty of the chapter’s ideas, concepts, and proposals. I found myself wishing that there had been a similar chapter summary as I struggled with some of the turgid academic theology I have attempted to read and understand over the years. There are three additional sections at each chapter’s end: a Meditation, Stone Ritual, and Journal Exercise. Readers are urged to spend time in intentional meditation, to choose a small stone to use throughout the journey to forgiveness, and to keep ajournai. It is no doubt a generational quirk, but I stayed with the recommended practices: carry my stone, trace my stone, mark my stone, up to the recommendation to whisper to my stone and tell it my story. I terminated the Stone Ritual at that point. Others, perhaps many others, will find it helpful. My recommendation is not to be put off by it. TheTutus and the people they write abouthave endured horrific pain and suffering, more, I suspect, than most of US have or ever will. Out of their personal experiences and the nearly miraculous emergence of South Africa, mostly peacefully from apartheid with its obvious potential for vengeful, violent retaliation. Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu have given US a remarkable, relevant, and very helpful resource.

Journal jor Preachers

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One New Book for the Preacher

o. Benjamin Sparks

Richmond, Virginia 1 זHfrUr . יWith All Our Praters: Walking with God through the Christian Year (Wm. B.Eerdmans, Grand Rapids), 114 pages.

Many qualities adorn this collection of prayers. Here is the work of a preacher and pastor who understands that in addition to the sermon, the other essential contribution to worship is the pastoral prayer. When you read With All Our Prayers, or read even one of the prayers, you find yourself in a sanctuary again, so lively is the concern expressed for the congregation. You become aware that these prayers are on behalf of a church with whom the preacher has worked and laughed and prayed and sung, whose Session meetings he has moderated, whose hospital beds he has stood beside, at whose marriages, baptisms, and funerals he has officiated, and in whose wider community he has immersed himself. This preacher knows a congregation by heart, which is what counts most in ministry. That intimate knowledge is revealed in this slight volume in at least three ways: in the joy with which the people are brought to adore God for the work of creation and for God’s sustaining presence in their lives; in the urgency with which personal anguish and public distress are encompassed within a confident dependence upon God’s providential care; and in regular, faithful petition on behalf of the church and its members to fulfill their calling as emissaries and agents of God’s purpose in the world. In addition to prayers that mark the high points of the Christian year, the preacher uses scripture and lines from hymns to introduce individual prayers in ordinaty time. These prayers demonstrate the pastoral devotion of one who is himself immersed in scripture and in the central convictions of Christian faith: most especially that we are known, swaddled, kept, sustained, upheld, and encouraged by the One who created us, and from whom, in Jesus Christ, we will never be separated. Further, in an age when the language of worship in American Protestantism is unravelling,these prayers represent a recovery of language that boldly and eloquently kneels before the Eternal God, the Almighty One who is maker of heaven and earth and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here is thoughtful language that is inclusive of all persons, but remains uncorrupted by casual, supposedly natural, phrasing that masquerades as extemporaneous prayer. These prayers demonstrate,as well as any formal ecclesiology can define orclaim, the centrality and importance of the particular congregation as the foundation of the church catholic: as the community, the place, where children and adults come to faith and are nourished and sustained in their personal and corporate witness to that faith. The prayers attest over and over to that reality as they are read and savored. Here is a sampling of quotations to illustrate qualities I have described thus far. From prayers for Sundays in Advent:

Some of us come before you in need of courage. Many of US who are outwardly placid and comfortable are inwardly discouraged and beaten….

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Death has come roaring into our households and laid its chilling hand upon our hearts. There are friends who have disappointed US and loved ones who have hurt US…. Let US remain long enough in prayer, 0 God, to hear you say to us: “Be not anxious…. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (p.6)

Give us ears to hear and hearts to understand Christmas as the astounding good news it is, 0 God… not as a deal we make or a bargain we control by our acceptance or rejection, but as a declaration of love that will not let us go even when we struggle against it. (p. 8)

From a prayer for the New Year:

Deepen within US the realization that you are not an abstract, impersonal “something,” but a particular Someone—God with US, God for US, God among US… .And in that knowledge inspire US to dedicate ourselves to the peace you would bring to the world’s enmity; the reconciliation you would seek for our estrangements…. May this be our vocation and our witness as your children and your church, 0 God. ..in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who, whatever the future holds, holds the foture in the strong security of his steadfast love and invincible grace, (pp. 15-16)

From a prayer for Reformation Sunday:

Grant US to know you, 0 God, as our refuge and strength against all that assaults our souls, len greed lures US, make US generous. When pride would make US pompous, make US instead gracious. When envy bids to control US, help US to rejoice in the blessings of others. When we begin to turn in upon ourselves, give US instead a spirit of gratitude and a heart for friendship, (p. 99)

All of us who have prayed each week in congregations come sooner or later to realize that we are stewards of the prayers that have been prayed in our presence. Our own praying, either consciously or not, is filled with language and syntax and style that we have heard and read. We have been tutored by words that spoke to our minds and hearts, often in times of great joy or deep anguish, or words that broke through the distraction or boredom of ordinary days. When John Rogers and I attended Union Seminary in Richmond, VA, we were mentored by such words in chapel. These services were Protestant worship at its simplest . Three out of four days a week, the worship was led by faculty. What I remember most profoundly when I look back are the prayers I heard prayed by the faculty and the president of the seminary. These prayers had about them the same eloquence as the prayers in this book. They awakened the heart without forsaking the mind, but most important, as we listened, we knew that the one leading US in prayer was speaking to the living God. (John Rogers writes of the influence that he experienced at Union Seminaty in a concluding postscript to a prayer he includes on page 111, “A Funeral Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession.”)

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This book of prayers deserves its place on your shelf beside the prayers of Calvin and Augustine, of John Baillie and Ernest Campbell, beside whatever books of prayers to which you turn to nourish your spirit and jump start your imagination as you prepare the weekly prayers for worship with the congregation for which you are responsible. With All Our Prayers is a gift to preachers and to the church catholic.

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One New Bookfor the Preacher

0 . Benjamin Sparks

Richmond, Virginia

Unapologetic:Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, Francis spufford (HarperOne, 2013, originally published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2012), 221 pages.

This is a rollicking read, a short survey of Christian theology and church history written brilliantly, impudently, and conversationally for those who don’t have a clue about much of what Christians believe and do. They may have familiarity with the cultural residue of Christian faith (manger scenes, Christmas carols, Easter lilies, the Crusades, and the Inquisition) in a post-Christian, sometimes anti-Christian age, but they are ignorant of its substance. Uapologetic was written for a British public and so requires a preface to the American edition, which explains that while Christianity has a ceremonial, public face at coro^tions, royal weddings, and funerals, it’s largely ignored by a majority of the British population, who know about it mostly from the media’s coverage of church controversies and scandals that make believers appear to be homophobic, misogynist, or abusers of children. In a telling part of the American preface, Spufford, after commenting on the difference in church attendance (six percent in the U.K. compared to 26 percent in the USA), reveals that there are another 16 percent in the United States who say they attend church, when in truth they do not. He thinks that simply astonishing. In his country, people who attend worship might instead deny it out of embarrassment. Church attendance, the mention of God, and religious language are never an enhancement to status or position. In the U.K., “we are well past the tipping point where the religion [Christian faith] provides a language that can be confidently manipulated in the expectation that it will be [rhetorically] powerful” (p. viii – xi). Spufford also lets his American readers know that he is aware of the virulent, religious culture wars in the United States. In the U.K. there are no school board fights over biology textbooks. There is no aggressive creationist lobby, or much of a religious lobby about anything else. He writes that we wifi find him liberal, in American terms, but he does not argue for a left-leaning Christianity. The most he is trying for “is to persuade people that Christianity as such, in any variety, should be seen as something not xiomatically contemptible, something emotionally comprehensible even if not shared …” (p. xi). Further, he believes that the nature of Christianity in the U.K. (a ate-sanctioned church that pervades public life) is more detrimental to authentic Christian faith than our attempts at constitutional separation of church and state, where religion is voluntary. Finally, for us Americans, he explains that this book is full of swearing. Why should that be? He says he wants to make “a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities are not made of glass, do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience. To express a serious and appropriate judgment on human destroctiveness, in the natural language of that destructiveness” (p. xiii). Some of his spicy, scatological language makes you laugh out loud. And some is so damned clever you are astonished by his facility with language, his cultural and

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theological depth, and his ingenuity. For instanee, in defining original sin (which he declares, you might guess, as hopelessly lacking in emotional or intellectual heft), he uses the acronym HPtFtU which is “the human propensity to f#*k things up.” After he’s explained it, he uses the acronym, ft’s effective, basic, and demonstrates that religious ensibilities [understandings] need not hide themselves from whole dimen ־ sions of human experience. Should this offend any readers of this Journal (and I doubt it), one only needs to recall some of the epithets Martin Luther hurled at the Fope, the Church of Rome, and God help us all, the Jews. At least Spufford does not use this language as a weapon, but only as a tool for o ^ u n ic a tin g with those who have little clue about Christian faith. Do not be fooled by his swearing. It is not frivolous. Unapologetic, while often humorous and irreverent, engages the whole of Christian doctrine: the formation of the canon of scripture with its internal and external history, the doctrines of God, of Christ,ofthe Holy ^ rit,o ^ c h a o lo g y ,to g e th e rw؛ths^^ expositionsoftheodicy both personal and cosmic. ft is the last theological conundrum (why supposedly good people do such bad things to each other and how God can allow it, if God exists?) for which Spufford is especially helpful. As he acknowledges, many people not only hate the church, but they also assume that the church, Christianity, and religion in general are responsible for all the evils that have been foisted on Humankind, especially by the faithful. In a next to last chapter, “The International League of the Guilty, Fart Two,” he addresses what he calls “Christian committed inquiries.” He does not spare us, makes no exceptions, and does not argue that what the good Christians do outweighs the bad: you cannot balance good and evil. Spufford approaches the dilemma head on, beginning with toe hatred that from the beginning was “entangled wito Christianity’s relationship with its older Jewish sibling” (p. 173). He follows anit-Semitism through history to the pressent, yet argues that human societies of all sorts (once we have left behind our hunter/gatherer life) can be/have been organized around the hatred and persecution of someone. Sometimes (usually?) wito toe sanction of toe church where toe church was present. (In a footnote he mentions that Christopher Hitchens argued that Martin Luther King could not be counted to the credit of religion. “He was too good…the non-violence, the humility utterly incompatible wito Christianity’s proven wickedness” (p. 189). And of course, he returns frequently in this chapter to our friend (our real enemy, more like) HPtFtU. ft infects us all, even (especially?) the church, and only by God’s mercy and grace are we rescued from its power. If you’re still wito me, you may have wondered more than once why an account, written. ٠ ٠for those who don’t have a clue about what Christians believe and do is a new book for preachers. After all, are not we toe ones who, week after week through the exposition of scripture and the teaching of theology and doctrine, declare what Christians believe and do? So why is this good for us? First, because it is written by an intelligent layperson who has taken his faith seriously . Francis Spufford is an academic who teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths College (University ofLondon). Before he wrote Unapologetic, he was an accomplished public intellectual, the winner of several awards and prizes for his non-fiction writing. Like his intellectual forebears, c.s. Lewis and Jacques Ellul, themselves laymen, he is writing because of his passionate faith in Jesus Christ and his love for toe church.

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(He is also writing for Iris six-year-old daughter, whose friends will soon begin telling her that she’s weird because her parents go to chureh.) He has no professional axe to grind, even though he is married to a vicar in foe Church of England. He is certainly not attempting to impress his colleagues if his descriptions of withering attitudes toward Christian faith in foe U.K. arc even marginally accurate. He is writing from faith for foe faith itself, not so much in its defense as on behalf of faith’s understandability. Such an approach is enormously helpful in mainline congregations in foe United States who lose foeir children to unbelief at an alarming rate. According to foe Hujfington Post, 70 percent of young adults raised by mainline ?rotestants showed minimal ٢٠lower levels of faith than their parents (quoted in The Christian Century, 11/26/14). There is no agenda in this book, no ideology, and thank Cod, no position taken, except delight in, thankfulness for, and fidelity to Christian faith. It will give vigorous tonal accents to our preaching. Second, it is useful for the preacher’s faith. I don’t know ׳about you, but 1 have always been inspired and ennobled by foe testimony of laypersons and by their obedience and faithfulness. More than anything else, when they live out their faith, they arc and have been a means of grace to me. Unapologetic passes this smell test as well as anything I’ve read. Herc we engage a mind at work in foe service of God, a will not distorted by anger, and a heart which has been shaped by and rejoiees in God’s mercy, God’s love, and God’s forgiveness. Spufford is a man who inspires faith brilliantly, amusingly, and outrageously. When I survey foe geography and climate of ecclesial life in foe United States and absorb its confusion, distress, and sadness, I know of no better antidote than Unapologetic.

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One New Bookfor the Preacher

Marvin Lindsay

Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

Candida Moss, The Myth ofPersecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: Harper O n e , 310 pages.

The Christian’s willingness to die for the faith has been the ultimate witness to the truth of Christianity. A suffering Church, a martyr Church, is Christianity at its best. Lent is a time to renew ourselves in this historieal and embodied witness to the truth. Or is it? Candida Moss’s book The Myth ofPersecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story ofMartyrdom ealls this story into question. Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, has eondensed a deeade’s worth of research into a elear and aecessible narrative that undermines our assumptions about toe motives of early Christian martyrs and toe seope of the persecution they endured. Her book will interest not only pastors and history buffs, but anyone who partieipates in civil society. Moss asserts that toe myth ofpersecution is poisoning eontemporary politieal diseourse. She maintains that a more truthful narrative about who Christians arc and where they have eome from serves both historical aeeuraey and toe eommon good. Martyrdom was not unique to Christians, Moss argues, though Christians did affeet a ehange in toe meaning of toe Greek term martyrs, from eourtroom witness to martyr. Both pagans and Jews embraced death for postmortem rewards, despite laeking a speeific word for this behavior. Moss shows that martyrdom texts are highly stylized, beginning with the gospel ofLuke. The author of the third gospel expunges toe loneliness and terror that grips Mark’s Jesus in toe hour of his death. Luke turns Jesus into Soerates؛ he bears toe cross serenely and manfully. Later, Eusebius of Caesarea would shoehorn toe martyrs of Lyons and Vienne into the plotline of the Maceabean literature. Moss argues that other “early” martyrdom texts were written long after toe events they purport to describe. The authors make their protagonists speak to contraporary theological and pastoral concerns. Moss eoncludes that martyrdom aecounts have been subject to so much theologizing and editorializing that we have no real aceess to toe historical martyr. Martyrs werc few in number, says Moss. The experience ofpersecution was sporadie and local. Pliny the Younger’s letter to Emperor Trajan is the voice of a Roman bureaucrat seeking advice on a protocol for handling Christians in court. He is not bragging to Rome about toe numbers of Christians caught in his dragnet. Emperors Decius and Diocletian implemented toe worst persecutions, but neither targeted Christians per se, Moss writes. Christians were collateral damage in their efforts to unite the Empire and shore up their rale in a period of instability. True, toe Romans despised Christians, but Moss asks toe reader to understand toe Roman point ofview. The peace and prosperity ofthe empire were fragile goods, preserved by currying the favor ofthe gods. The Christian refusal to sacrifice to the gods looked like sedition to toe Romans. “Piety” ipietas in Latin or eusebia in Greek) enttoled^rc than religious devotion in the ancient world. Piety meant respect, and respect was owed in a whole web of relationships: to the gods, the emperor, toe head of household, toe teaeher.

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The Christian refusal to show piety to the gods tugged on a string that threatened to unravel the social fabric. Moreover, the Christian martyrs as Moss presents them are not sympathetic characters. Christians could be truculent in court. They did not go to the lions loving their enemies,but rather demonizing their executioners. They reveled in the hope that they would watch Christ consign their enemies to the fires of hell. Just as members of some terrorist groups wear suicide belts because they possess neither tanks ٢٠٨ artillery, Christians offered their bodies in a war against the world because it was the only weapon at hand. Once Christians gained access to state power, they remined the propensity to demonize their opponents and to characterize their struggles as martyrdoms . As Moss tells it, the Crusades were not a rejection of the martyrdom ethos of the ancient Church, but instead its logical conclusion. If Christians were not subject to sustained persecution, from whence comes this persecution narrative? Moss alleges that Acts of the Martyrs began to be written in earnest in the fourth century to buttress theological claims. Partisans in fourth century theological controversies claimed that their beliefs were orthodox because the martyrs had shed their blood for their beliefs. Martyrdom material also undergirded an emerging church bureaucracy headed by bishops. Por instance, the origins of the Church in Roman Gaul are shrouded in mystery, but Eusebius of Caesarea lent badly needed credibility to the Gallic ecclesial power structure when he wrote that the martyrs of Lyon requested Irenaeus to be their bishop. Martyrdom literature also served to attract pilgrims to shrines. Tourist dollars were good for the economy then as now. In The Myth of Persecution, Moss shifts baek-and-forth from historian to public intellectual. She wants to explode the myth of persecution because talk of persecution has a chilling effect ٨٠contemporary political discourse. When powerful people and vested interests wrap themselves in the mantle of persecution, they exempt their own positions from rational inquiry and attempt to silence those with whom they disagree. Moss prefers that the public square be a place where all truth claims are subject to rational analysis. She asks that we be willing to learn from one another and have the freedom and courage to change our minds, ft is hard to do any of these things when you take honest disagreement for persecution and your opponent for a servant of foe devil. Moss also worries that a persecution mindset prevents people from making important moral distinctions and from ^m ^ehendlng the complexity of contemporary conflicts. A “War ٨٠Christmas” is a very different thing than the experience of Christians being kidnapped and murdered in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Indeed, Christians arc not the only martyrs in foe world. The Chinese government has been a thorn in foe flesh to Falun Gong as well as Christianity. ISIL has persecuted bofo Christians and Yazidis in Iraq. Moss’s case regarding foe scope of martyrdom may be somewhat overstated. Martyr texts and shrines proliferated in foe fourth century because foe Church “had to run very fast indeed to stand still,” in the words ٠۴ historian Robert Markus.’ That is,the fourth century experience ofpeace diverged so sharply from previous Christian experience and from what Jesus had promised them that paradoxically, it generated deep anxiety. The literary output and building boom that memorialized foe suffering of previous generations meant to say, “We have always been a community of martyrs, and by venerating their relics and committing their memories to writing, we always

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will be.” Such massive efforts may mirror an earlier level of suffering that was deeper and broader than Moss’s minimalist reading of the evidence allows. Despite some exaggeration. Moss points the reader in the right direction. She demonstrates that the aneient Christian martyr was a more complicated and ambivalent figure than we were led to believe. So were the times in which the martyrs lived, ff imperial edicts expelled Christians from high pnblic office, then that is evidence that Christians were wielding political power before Constantine came on the scene. Not all Christians were meek as mice, rounded up and slaughtered as soon as they popped their heads out of the catacombs. Some were suicidal; others could only be described as passive-aggressive. Most did not suffer unto death. This Lent, the lectionary preacher will have to say a word about what it means to take up a cross and follow Jesus. He or she will have to address Christ’s “demonization ” of ?eter’s resistance to the cross. Furthermore, the preacher may find him ٢٠ herself in situations of congregational, personal, ٢٠social conflict. How can Moss’s historical revisionism help the preacher in the pulpit, the pastor’s study, on the streets, ٢٠in city council chambers? The argument that Moss presents in The Myth ofPersecution is largely deconstructive. She warns the preacher away from self-serving interpretations of cross-bearing and from a preoccupation with external enemies. In a sense, The Myth ofPersecution elaborates on a pithy quote that Pope Gregory I attributed to Cyprian, the martyred bishop of Carthage: Märtyrern non facit poena, sed causa; that is, “Penalties don’t make martyrs; causes do.”* Not every critical word the pastor hears is a cross to bear. Some may be the judgment of God—an accurate assessment of a deficiency the pastor needs to address. It is frustrating to pastors and parishioners that youth soccer tournaments sans prayers of invocation draw bigger crowds on Sunday morning than Christian worship, but indifference to the gospel is not the same as persecution, and irritation is not on par with death by crucifixion. At any rate, demonizing our secular neighbors is not likely to draw them into a relationship with Christ and his Church. Moss allows that martyrs “can inspire understanding and forgiveness,” and “can motivate those who are oppressed to stand up against political tyranny and social injustice .”3 How, she does not say. That constructive task is left to the preacher, whose call is to preach Christ crucified in such a way that parishioners are inspired to say, “I’m sorry,” and “I forgive you.” It is not easy to lift high the cross in such a way as to call the high and mighty to humble themselves while inspiring the meek of the earth to claim their rightful inheritance, but with the help of the Holy Spirit and aided by good scholarship like Moss’s and a pinch of self-awareness, preachers can fulfill that task.

Notes 1 Robert A. M1؛rku^, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 90. 2 Pope Gregory 1, The Letters ofGregory ﺀ،اﺀGreat, translated by ! ١١٥ ]١H.C. Martyn (Toronto: Pontifica ؛ Institute of Mediaeval Studies. 2004). 222. 3 Moss, 261.