Haunted by Ghosts

As well as new books, there is value in reviewing, and thus bringing to public attention, a few slightly older books which have wielded great influence and deserve to be read. King Leopold’s Ghost is one of these books.

There is a debate going on, generally split along left/right divides, about the responsibility the First world has for the state of Africa. Everyone acknowledges the impact of 18^th and 19^th century colonialism on the continent, and some feel the West still has a responsibility to help these countries into modernity and self-sustainability. The other camp tends to believe while helping African nations is nice, the responsibility lies upon the nations of Africa themselves to get their own houses in order, and deal with their internal problems rather than using the excuse of colonialism for their difficulties.

King Leopold’s Ghost is not about this debate, but the book is a must-read for anyone who takes a strong position on either side. First published in 1998, this book explores the history and legacy of the Belgian colonisation of the lands surrounding the Congo river, locally known as the Kingdom of Kongo. Under the personal control of Emperor Leopold II of Belgium after 1885, it was called the Congo Free State. It was eventually taken over by the Belgian government in 1908, largely due to the excesses described in this book, and renamed the Belgian Congo. Following Independence in 1960, it became the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

This is the tale of the Congo Free State, as administered personally by the Belgian Emperor, and the unimaginable slaughter he wrought all while maintaining his public face as a great humanitarian and a man who brought civilization to the darkest parts of Africa. Congo was one of the world’s foremost sources of rubber, a valuable commodity for export, and the people of the Congo were ruthlessly driven to harvest it from vines growing in the Jungles. Anyone resisting this directive was slaughtered; often entire villages were raped, and butchered as an example to others. There was no other economy except ivory, and everything and everyone was directed to produce rubber, resulting in massive starvation as few crops were grown. If a Congolese failed to meet his or her quota of rubber, they would have one of their hands severed. This became so frequent that contemporary writers spoke of many baskets of human hands shown to the administrators as evidence that the work force was being kept on their toes. This was done with some European troops, but mostly other natives, including natives kidnapped as children and indoctrinated to be soldiers of the Force Publique, the main arm of Leopold II’s enforcement policy. This use of tribe against tribe has caused internal strife which lingered long after the Belgians departed. Even at the time, in a world where the ‘plight’ of colonized people was still largely ignored, the excesses in the Congo garnered worldwide attention. Most famously, Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness after a trip down the Congo River at the turn of the century. King Leopold’s rule only lasted 23 years, but estimates of the indigenous death toll range between 8 and 10 million, which would roughly mean 50% of the pre-colonial population of the region.

Readers of this book should be aware going in; it is not a pleasant tale. Hochschild, while not dwelling on the horrors, does not pull and punches about what was going on, and some of the stories can be somewhat stomach-turning. The Congo Free State was essentially a national slave labour camp, in the worst imaginable form of the word. So appalling in fact, that Hitler himself used the example of the Belgian Congo as rationalization for some of his own actions.

The book was a best-seller when it was published, and was nominated for numerous awards. The writing style is approachable and fluid, and the author does not make the mistake of many authors writing about horrific stories: he does not feel the need to spend pages detailing the specifics of the atrocities. The book also points out how amazing it is that this most awful and surprisingly recent example of the horrors of colonialism has been so completely forgotten by the modern world.

To anyone who seeks to get involved in the debate on the legacy of the Colonial era, or who wishes to understand more about sub-Saharan Africa, this is a must-read.

King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild.

 

Lessons Learned

The Vietnam war is a struggle which still raises controversy almost 4 decades later, and has significance to all Americans. The ‘spectre’ of Vietnam has recently been revived, as it has been summoned up as a parable for the current Iraq war by many commentators. They see frightening similarities between the endless struggle against an elusive enemy in the rice paddies of Vietnam, and the similar struggle taking place in the cities of Iraq.

Regardless of the validity of this comparison, it seems that recent books dealing with the Iraq war cannot help themselves from referencing Vietnam, and often in a superficial manner. Yet though many draw the comparison, there are many who say it is not apt, that the wars and the situations are too different.

This was all in mind when I picked up a copy of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Robert McNamara. McNamara was, of course, the US Secretary of Defence from 1961 to 1968, during the beginning and escalation of the Vietnam War. I had encountered his work previously when I saw the exceptional film “Fog of War, lessons from the life of Robert McNamara”, a movie I would recommend to anyone.

The book was written in 1995, and in a sense the title is misleading: it is not a history of the Vietnam war as much as a history of the life of McNamara during the early years of the war. The details of the conflict themselves appear only where they were influenced by McNamara, or when they caused a change in policy or a new debate. If you are looking for a narrative or explanation of the events of Vietnam, this might not be the right book for you. Or at least, you should old off on reading this until after you have read another text to familiarize yourself with the basics of the struggle in South-east Asia.

The book starts with a brief biography of McNamara and his life leading up to his becoming president of Ford, and then leaving shortly after this appointment to take up the position of Secretary of Defence under President John F. Kennedy. It then begins a detailed, behind-the-scenes analysis of the decisions and personalities that created, or better to say could not avoid, the situation in Vietnam. According to McNamara, with the exception of a few hawks, everyone knew that escalation in Vietnam was an imperfect solution with potentially disastrous repercussions, but nobody could come up with a feasible alternative which would not be worse. The book is not self-exculpatory: McNamara defends himself against some accusations, while openly admitting fault in others. He is particularly recognisant of his inability to question some of the basic principles upon which decisions were being made, such as the assertion that is Vietnam fell, all of South-east Asia would fall as well: an argument often used by those in favour of escalation, but never properly explored. Certainly there was a threat of Communist movements, primarily backed by the Chinese, threatening other states in the area, but the extent of the threat, especially faced with significant international reverses to Chinese prestige in the early 1960s, was never determined. Thus decisions were taken based on this and several other commonly accepted ‘truths’, which later turned out to be partially or entirely false.

Mcnamara blames this partly on the confusion caused by a complicated international setting (There were crises in Berlin, Eastern Europe and the Middle East at the time) but also partly on an inexplicable lack of judgement faced with these supposed ‘truths’.

“Such ill-founded judgments were accepted without debate by the Kennedy administration, as they had been by its Democratic and Republican predecessors. We failed to analyze our assumptions critically, then or later. The foundations of our decision making were gravely flawed.” (McNamara, pg 33)

The other problem facing the US administration was near-complete helplessness facing an ineffective regime in Saigon, which was eventually toppled and replaced with a rapid succession of even less effective regimes. The US government new early on that final success in Vietnam would rest on the shoulders of the South Vietnamese Government and military, but when local success seemed impossible, the only answer seemed to be to bolster it with an ever increasing number of American trainers, equipment, bombers, and finally combat troops. Vietnam was one huge example of ‘mission creep’ where the initial objectives, supporting the South Vietnamese, eventually turned into persecuting the war on their behalf.

Finally, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the North Vietnamese state, and the South Vietnamese Vietcong they supported. It was assumed that the VC were entirely a communist insurgency, when in fact they were largely nationalistic. It was also assumed that the North could be ‘discouraged’ from equipping, and later actively supporting the VC through bombing campaigns. This flawed assumption is particularly startling from McNamara, who was heavily involved in plotting the WW2 bombing campaigns against Japan, and saw first hand that even massive bombing failed to break the morale of the Japanese Empire. Again, a series of assumptions were made about Vietnam, about the South Vietnamese government, about the VC and about the NVA: and these assumptions were either never really challenged, or they were challenged too late. It seems the US administrations (for there were three that dealt with the war) were victims of their own public line, assuming that their public statements about the war had to be true, and little effort was spent actually confirming them. Worse still, as the book shows, when independent sources of government advisors DID challenge these assertions, and pointed out the reality of the situation, they were either ignored or dismissed as being biased or unrealistic.

The book gives a clear, well documented analysis of the interior debates and discussions that led to the tragedy of Vietnam. It is presented in a careful and very clear manner, identifying biases and pointing out the mistakes made, even if they were the fault of the author. My first conclusion is that this is an excellent book, and I would highly recommend it to any historian of the era, or any Political Scientist who wanted to understand how small assumptions could lead to great mistakes even with the best of intentions.

My second conclusion refers back to my introductory paragraph. At the end of the book, McNamara lays out in a list the errors which led to the tragedy of Vietnam: the miscalculations and steps that were not taken which could have prevented the war from going as badly as it did. When I read these ‘lessons’, I was temporarily stunned, and had to go back and check the year in which the book was written, I could scarcely believe it was written before the start of the current Gulf war.

I do not with to weaken this review with partisan opinions which belong to myself alone, but I will say this. Read the ‘lessons’ of Vietnam as written by McNamara with the current Iraq war in mind, and I think you will be astonished. To my possibly biased eye, it seemed that literally every single lesson was NOT learned; that the exact same mistakes were repeated; and that the list could just as easily be transposed to the ongoing Iraq war as a current list of grievous errors. I do not wish to put words in the mouth of McNamara, and it is entirely possible that he might not agree with my assessment. But when you read it, see for yourself, and ask yourself if these lessons were truly learned. One way or another, we can all hope that they will be paid attention to in the future.

 

Valuable History

When I began my theological education, I thought I would lose my mind on account of all the references to past theologians about whom I knew little or nothing. A friend might call someone else a ‘Barthian’ or a ‘Thomist’, or a lecturer would question whether a particular idea can be believed after Kant, or someone would laugh about what we would all believe even today if it hadn’t been for Anselm. I knew that I would eventually study many of these figures, but I also knew that I would not study all of them, and that much time would pass before I got to some of them. There are, of course, massive reference books with copious information to which I could (and did) turn, but I also needed something compact, something I could keep on my desk for the quick reference between lectures.

Then a friend introduced me to a very handy little book, Jonathan Hill’s The History of Christian Thought. It was just what I needed. This succinct volume packs a load of useful information. Hill divides the history of the Christian Church into roughly chronological categories: the Church Fathers, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle Ages, etc. Each section opens with a brief introduction to the important cultural, ecclesiastical, or philosophical movements that marked the particular era. Hill then turns to the main content of the section, which consists of a series of entries – each a few pages long – for the major theologians of the era. These entries are then punctuated by more general entries providing further background information – perhaps on an intellectual movement or a church council or a city that became an important centre of thought for the time.

So, are you confused about Calvin? Unsure about Schleiermacher? Ignorant of Irenaeus? In just a few minutes you can have the gist of the thought of any one of these. Each entry is clear and easy to read. Hill does a fine job of simplifying complex ideas without being unduly simplistic. Of course, certain details and nuances are glossed over because of the nature of the book, but if you’d like to know in broad strokes about the ideas of a major Christian thinker, there is a very good chance Hill will provide you what you need.

Another notable characteristic is that Hill treats different schools of thought in a balanced and objective way. To illustrate, a review on Amazon.co.uk says in essence that the book will crush any conservative impulse, while feeding the inner radical. I found nothing akin to that effect, and further, the latest edition of the book is published by IVP Academic, an Evangelical label. So Hill’s objectivity is vindicated – if your starving soul seeks further impoverishment, this work does not seek to dissuade.

Two caveats are needed, both in the category of the book’s strengths also being its weaknesses. First, because Hill does an excellent job of locating each thinker in his or her context, after reading an entry for a thinker you might realize that you need to know more about that context in order to fully understand the entry. So you might read the preceding entry, then the next preceding entry, and each entry will just be illuminating enough to drive you to its predecessor and you may find it difficult to stop. Second, because the book is of a manageable size, not all thinkers and movements are covered. For example, Eastern Orthodox thought after the Byzantine era is ignored. Neither is there mention of the recent phenomenon of Radical Orthodoxy, the writers of which are so hopelessly opaque as to beg for a concise interpreter. And perhaps most importantly from my perspective, nearly two centuries of Lutheran and Reformed confessionalist thinkers are left out in the cold.

Still, if you are not a theologian and yet are interested in the history of Christian thought, do not let these caveats keep you from purchasing The History of Christian Thought.

 

Sira Rasul Allah

There are countless biographies on Muhammad. Not long ago I read Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad in HarperCollins’ Eminent Lives series. Its laughable subtitle is pretty indicative of the substance of the book: A Prophet for Our Time. And of course one should expect this sort of mushy-headed reasoning from Armstrong. I suppose that, for leftwing and rightwing fascists, Muhammad might have set some good precedents. But certainly not for those who don’t find conversion to Islam or subjugation under Islamic law particularly appealing.

There are other noteworthy biographies on Muhammad, too. Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet is a highly readable book, penned by the west’s most famous public Muslim intellectual. If you want to get a glimpse of how a pious Muslim re-envisions the life of Muhammad, this is probably the book to read on the subject. From a historical standpoint, however, it doesn’t square well with the content contained in the earliest sources on Muhammad’s life.

This isn’t really all that surprising, though, for to recount everything in the earliest Muslim biographies would be to present a prophet who really isn’t for our time. As one should expect from any politico-military leader from the seventh century—particularly in the virtually lawless lands of the Arabian Peninsula—Muhammad comes off like a vicious warlord. Only this warlord was not a law unto himself. He allegedly took orders from God.

Few modern biographies examine Muhammad warts and all. Robert Spencer, however, has done a great service in this regard. In The Truth about Muhammad he carefully reconstructs the life of Muhammad as it’s found in the earliest Muslim sources. And he does so for a very good reason. Muhammad looms large in Muslim piety. Obviously! We recently witnessed what happens when you name a teddy bear Muhammad or choose to besmirch him in a cartoon. Imagine what would happen if Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ was matched with a Piss Muhammad, and it, too, was sponsored by the (totally unconstitutional yet federally funded) National Endowment for the Arts. Oh my! Moreover, Muslims are enjoined in the Quran to obey the Prophet. And if you ask a good devout Muslim, they will tell you that they seek nothing more than to emulate the example he set.

In any case, Spencer’s biography is excellent for getting a glimpse of the life of Muhammad as he is depicted in Muslim historical literature read by Muslims, not popular literature written by unwitting apologists for Islam or Muslims themselves designed to domesticate a seventh-century prophet who was raised up to, as Quran 9:33 says, cause Islam to dominate all other religions.

 

Hypothetical Universalism, Real Scholarship

English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology

Jonathan D. Moore

Historical theology is, as its name implies, a hybrid discipline. Its practitioners usually favour one aspect over the other. Either theology predominates over history (that is, ideas over events and political manoeuvring and power bases) or vice versa. It is an unusual scholar who captures both history and theology, events and ideas, with equal effectiveness. My specialty, the English church from Henry VIII to the civil wars, seems currently to be dominated by historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch is a scholar in the field who combines historical and theological insights extraordinarily well, and the same can be said for rising star Alec Ryrie. And there are some others. But I have found most of the prominent scholars to be better historians than theologians.

As one for whom theology is more central than history, I find Jonathan D. Moore’s English Hypothetical Universalism to be a breath of fresh air. Moore takes on the conventional wisdom that the 17^th-century puritan divine John Preston was a Calvinist thinker of the William Perkins school, and blows it away. Specifically, Moore examines Preston’s beliefs about the extent of Christ’s atoning work (did Christ die for all in any meaningful sense of that word, or did he die only for those God elected from eternity?), comparing them and contrasting them with the particularist views of William Perkins. What is brilliant and, for a geek like me, exciting about Moore’s work is that his theological acumen is impeccable. He sees the interrelationships among doctrines and comes at the problem of the extent of the atonement from various theological angles. It is not just the divine decree of predestination that matters, but the death of Christ and the effect of the Gospel call on its various hearers. The result is a picture of Preston as a Calvinist thinker of a kinder, gentler sort. One who believes that Christ did indeed die for all. He was a hypothetical universalist – univeralist because Christ died for all, hypothetical because dying for all doesn’t necessarily mean saving all, for not all who hear the Gospel call are transformed by it.

Moore’s approach is sound and methodical. He analyzes his foil, Perkins, thoroughly. He then compares and contrasts Preston according to the same doctrinal categories, leading the reader inexorably to the conclusion that Preston was just who the author thinks he was. If hypothetical universalism were a crime and Moore a prosecutor, the jury of readers would convict Preston without deliberation.

But Moore does not stop there, he goes on to re-evaluate Preston’s role in the historic York House Conference of 1626 in light of this better understanding of Preston. Moore demonstrates that a correct understanding of a person’s ideas can and, at least in this case, should, colour one’s understanding of the person’s role in events.

English Hypothetical Universalism is a must-read for students of the early-Stuart church or of the history of puritan thought. It would also be a helpful book for those having a decent understanding of the doctrine of predestination who want to deepen and broaden their perspective. Moore’s methodical approach should be both accessible and educational for the informed lay person. Those seeking an introduction either to the doctrines surrounding predestination or to the early-Stuart church should bypass this rather more advanced work.

 

Finding your Nemesis

Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
Max Hastings

 

As a historian, one is taught to identify one’s biases before writing a review, so here we go. I love Max Hastings: I believe he is one of the most accomplished and interesting historians writing today, and based on the sales and reviews of his books many others agree. I was fortunate enough to attend one of Hastings’ lectures last year in Oxford, and got him to sign a copy of Armageddon, his previous book, which I also highly recommend. Armageddon deals with the last year of the war in Europe, 1944 to 1945, in exceptional detail. This book is a companion piece, one might say, and it deals with the last year of the war in the Pacific. Given my affection for this author’s works, I did my best to review Nemesis in as neutral and unbiased a manner as possible.

 

There is no shortage of books written about the Pacific war, ranging from either 1941 to 1945 or 1931 to 1945, depending on your point of view. In the last decade, there have been some remarkable works added to the scholarship of the field, such as the groundbreaking ‘Downfall’ by Richard Franks, which deals with a very similar topic as this book: the end of the Japanese Empire. So it was with some surprise that I learned that hasting was writing Nemesis, another text dealing with the end of this well-documented struggle. It was unclear to me exactly where this book would fit in the scholarship, and what exactly it could add.

Yet Hastings surprised me. Nemesis is an incredible book filled with intricate detail and exceptionally in-depth analysis: and this last is really Hastings’ strength, the careful and rational analysis he does of the events he describes. Where other offers have remarked just how poorly the Japanese Navy performed in the final stages of the war, Hastings gives us a careful and well documented explanation of why this is the case, and then gives us a history of these same root causes. The result is a remarkable knowledge of not only the ‘whats’ and ‘whens’ of the war, but the ‘whys’ as well. Hastings is also very careful to document his assessments with hard facts, and he also identified cases where different sources give different statistics. He does not accept standard assertions as being fact, but challenges and explores them in order to get at the truth. A good example is the exceptionally low surrender rate of the Japanese, which was always attributed to their banzai spirit: Hastings points out that this is largely the case, but it also might have to do with the fact that, by the later stages of the war, the US soldiers and marines were not inclined to take prisoners even on those rare cases when Japanese troops did give up.

Hastings’ other gift is to examine a situation with contemporary eyes: he explains to us the horror of the Kamikaze attacks, especially during their first mass deployment in the seas around Okinawa. He shows us, though personal accounts as well as documentary evidence just how shocking this was, especially for sailors who were fairly sure the end of the war was close. This ability to see things through the eyes of 1945 gives his analysis added legitimacy, as it is largely untainted by hindsight.

The book does not shy away from voicing on the main controversies of the period, and evidencing its conclusions. I particularly liked his statement that the argument that Japan was about to surrender in July 1945 has been so completely and convincingly disproven in recent scholarship that it is a wonder anyone voices it anymore. But Hastings does not stop with making claims, he backs them up in a very convincing manner, drawing from primary documentation and contemporary accounts, and pointing out where these contradict post-war accounts. His analysis of why the US chose to drop the bombs was one of the most detailed I have ever read, and could only have been done by somebody with a deep understanding of the manner by which the US military and the US government interacted.

The book is detailed and clear about the nature and manner of atrocity committed by the Japanese, which Hastings puts on the scale, if not the manner, of the German holocaust. But he is not one-sided, pointing out stupidity or error on the American side when they occur: his analysis of Macarthur is particularly damning.

The last, and to my mind, one of the best, novel feature of this book is that it really is all encompassing. It is not just a story of the big battles between the US and Japan, it is a history of the entire Pacific theatre of operations, including information all too frequently left out of other texts. He explores the British advance across Burma, and the August 1945 Russian advance into Manchuria. He spends a great deal of time exploring the sadly shameful actions of Australia during the latter months of the war, something I had never even heard about previously. Max Hastings presents not only a startling depth of knowledge, but also an amazing breadth of knowledge on minor and seemingly inconsequential fronts in this great war, never once losing track of the home fronts of the reasons behind decisions, both good and bad, on both sides.

In fact the only areas where the book does not spend a lot of time is on the nitty-gritty detail of the actual battles. Huge conflicts like Midway, Coral Sea or Leyte Gulf are summarised in a few pages rather then exhaustively explored: Hastings openly acknowledges that other books have done an admirable job of exploring the minutiae of the battles that do not need to be repeated here, yet enough information is provided so that those who may not have read these other books still understand what is going on.

Finally, the book may be long (over 500 pages) but it is eminently readable, written in open and inclusive language for both the historian and the casual dabbler. Carefully organized into thematic chapters dealing with specific fronts, major battles or strategic themes (such as the bombing campaign, or the submarine blockade), it is straightforward and unconfusing, even if this was your first encounter with the history of the period.

I believe that Nemesis may well be one of the best books by one of the top historians of the Second World War writing today, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has any interest in this fascinating and pivotal period of modern history.

 

Saracens

It was the great medieval historian R.W. Southern who advanced the idea that the most far-reaching problem for Europe during the Middle Ages was the expansion, if not the mere existence, of Islam. And his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages is a classic narrative analysis of this intellectual and geopolitical conundrum. But it does not descend into the details and is somewhat dated.

 

A few historians have tried to fill in the gaps. The most comprehensive narrative by far, and to date, is John V. Tolan’s Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. Beginning with the initial reaction of Christians living in the Levant and North Africa to the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, he takes off and examines what seems like every extant medieval text on Islam through the early fourteenth century.

 

Undoubtedly this is a comprehensive work. Tolan certainly does a great job of explaining how Europeans dealt with the existence of Islam as well as how they responded to the various theological problems it raised. And he contends throughout that Europeans were really only interested in Islam in order to caricaturize, criticize, or demonize it. They certainly weren’t interested in any sympathetic analysis or understanding.

 

There is a lot of truth to this. Medieval Christian scholars didn’t approach their subjects without affection or bias, although some could approach Islam quite ambivalently (see T. Burman’s recent Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560). However, if there is a weakness to Tolan’s examination, it is in his failure to account for the convictions of the medieval mind and its criticism of Islam. Medieval Christians, unlike much of liberal Protestantism and Catholicism, were convinced of the truthfulness of Christianity. It thus makes sense that they rigorously rejected the Muslim religion, for the two carry very different and mutually exclusive theologies.

 

Nevertheless, there is much to learn from Tolan’s work. At the very least, it will expose enthusiasts of medieval European intellectual history to an underrepresented aspect of medieval thought. And for those interested in theology it summarizes otherwise unexamined and untranslated historical theological treatises in clear English prose.

 

The Crusades

Why is it that if you asked the common person about the Greco-Roman world they would—if they’ve never read a book on the subject—confess they lacked adequate knowledge of it? If you wanted to know about Charlemagne one would maybe pick up Derek Wilson’s great new biography or just ask a medievalist? But when you ask somebody about the crusades they immediately have an opinion. Usually it goes like this: the crusades were a holy war prosecuted by the Roman Catholic Church to rid the world of Muslims. Or, the crusades were an early European attempt at colonizing the Levant.

 

In many ways the crusades, especially as they progressed, were a church-sanctioned war against the Muslims dynasties ruling the Holy Land. But they were much more complicated than that. When the first crusade made its way across the Bosporus into Anatolia and then down to Jerusalem, going through Syria, the Muslims had no clue what the Franks were up to. Many of them, according to recent research, thought it was a much delayed response to the seventh-century Islamic/Arab conquests of the Syria and Palestine. As far as the crusaders themselves were concerned, they thought they were there to liberate Christians in the east from the tyranny of the Seljuk Turks, who after the Battle of Manzikert (1071) had swarmed down and displaced the former ruling dynasty. They weren’t just offensive holy wars against Muslims, either. In fact, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europe’s defensive measures against the extension of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe were also, even though defensive, conceived of as crusades. The extermination of the cathar heretics in thirteenth-century southern France were considered crusades. Even the Spanish Armada (158 was conceived of as a crusade.

 

To simply dismiss the crusades as a totally unjust Catholic or Christian response to the Muslim world is not really warranted. But you wouldn’t know that unless you had some knowledge of the course of the crusades. Thomas F. Madden’s The New Concise History of the Crusades is a really great place to start. The narrative is lucid and engaging. He is not interested in using the crusades to indict Christianity (as pop propagandists are). Nor is he an apologist for the crusades. He simply tells it like it was, or at least as much of what we can know of what it was like. He begins his narrative with the last days of Roman Syria and Palestine and its eventual domination by the caliphs and subsequent Muslims dynasties so that one gets an adequate historical backdrop from which the crusades were borne. He ends, after covering all the major historical and ideological twists and turns, at the time of the sixteenth-century reformation when Luther declared the crusades (but not just wars) a diabolical enterprise. And he does it all in 225 pages.

 

Lost Soul a Good Find

When I embarked on my theological education in 2003, I was an Evangelical. Or at least I was mostly Evangelical, perhaps with a smattering of Anglo-Catholicism thrown in for the sake of depth. I never felt fully at home as an Evangelical, but that’s what I was. Then, as I studied theology—and specifically Reformation thought—I became increasingly estranged from my Evangelicalism. The more I identified with Luther (and to a lesser extent Calvin), the less I fit in with my Evangelical friends. And particularly my Charismatic Evangelical friends. But this made no sense to me, because I wasn’t becoming more liberal. I had always thought of conservative Protestantism and Evangelicalism as being one and the same thing. And I had always thought of Evangelicalism as based in the Reformation tradition. But there I was, conservative, Protestant, steeped in the Reformation, and yet far from Evangelicalism.

I discussed this with a friend more schooled than I in the roots of Evangelicalism. He recommended that I read D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, a pithy sub-200-pager packed with insight into the dilemma that I was clearly not the first to encounter. He was right, Hart’s book is indeed all of that.

The conventional wisdom in the study of American religion has been that American Protestantism is rightly understood as divided between conservative and liberal camps. Conservatives (Evangelicals and their sub-group, Fundamentalists) believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture, supernatural conversion, and aggressive evangelism, whereas liberals (mainline Protestants) discount these in favour of beneficent social action. This is the convention into which I had bought, but Hart effectively dismantles it. He argues instead that the most important divide in American protestantism is between confessional and pietistic camps.

Confessionalism, Hart argues, is conservative but it is not Evangelical. It defines the Christian life in churchly terms: creeds, ordained ministry, liturgy, church polity. This is the sphere of holy endeavors. The common sphere, i.e., the activities shared with non-believers such as business and politics, is not where the Christian life is measured for the confessionalist. Pietism, on the other hand, has ‘dismissed’ churchly matters like creeds and liturgy as irrelvent because they are only ‘skin deep’. Instead, pietism ‘attaches great religious significance to public life and everyday affairs’. This is true of both Evangelicals, with prayer groups and a desire to ‘take back the country for Christ’, and mainliners, with social activism.

As Hart demonstrates, the similarities between conservative and liberal pietists are not coincidental. Both groups are outgrowths of early American revivalism. When pietism came to dominate the American religious scene in the 1800s, Hart argues, it was confessionalism that suffered most. That is why confessionalism is today only a limited presence in the American religious scene—Hart focuses on confessional groups within the Presbyterian, Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Furthermore, the rout of confessionalism has left it sidelined in the historiography of American religion. Thus, it is confessionalism that is the ‘lost soul’ of American Protestantism.

Hart’s argument goes far in clarifying for me a disconnection I was already experiencing. On that account I am grateful for this book. But I do have one quarrel with Lost Soul, which is that Hart emphasises that pietists differ from confessionalists in that the former believe faith is ‘supposed to make a difference in all areas of life, not just on Sunday but on every day of the week’. But he never elaborates on this distinction, leaving the impression that confessionalists see faith as a matter of routine with significance only for Sunday. As though confessionalists say goodbye to God as they leave the church building, not to think of Him again until next week. “Prayer? That’s for pietists. And the reading of Scripture too. We confessionists don’t do such things. And I’ll never let my faith come between me and a fast buck!” I trust Hart would see this as a gross parody of confessionalism, but at points he allows room for a disagreeable reader (perhaps an Evangelical) to see confessionalism in just such terms. Greater elucidation of this point would be useful.

With that caveat, Lost Soul is helpful and informative book, accessible for the informed lay person as well as the clergy person and the student of church history.

 

Rising Sun sheds much light

As a scholar of the Second World War, I have tended to focus my attention and interest on the European theatre of war, which I had always deemed the more interesting and pivotal of conflicts. After all, as my MA supervisor once said, there were a half a dozen occasions between 1939 and 1942 when Germany could potentially have emerged victorious, making this a closely fought and hard won war. Imperial Japan on the other hand lost the war irrevocably the moment they attacked Pearl Harbour. Japan had no answer for the vast resources of the United States, and no way to carry the war to them apart from attacking far-flung colonies.

Yet despite my opinion, I decided I needed to learn more about the war if I was to call myself a true scholar of the period, and so picked up Rising Sun by John Toland, recommended to me as one of the seminal books on the era.

My review begins with a couple of warnings. Firstly, this is not a new book. Originally published in 1971, it was republished in 2005 largely unchanged. As such it suffers from the lack of availability scholars now have to former Soviet archives regarding the period. However as Russian involvement is somewhat secondary in this book, that matters little.

Secondly, this book is not for the casually curious. It clocks in at 955 pages and contains a breadth of detail and documentary evidence that is as thorough as it is unbiased. If you pick it up, be prepared for an involved read.

John Toland was an American-born author who lived the majority of his life in Japan, married there to a Japanese woman and raised a family before moving back to the United States late in life. His perfect Japanese language skills and his in depth knowledge of the Japanese archives allowed him to write Rising Sun in 1971, which was a groundbreaking history. It was the first, and considered by many to be the best, book to tell the story of the war from the Japanese perspective. It is based not only on in-depth study of the primary archives of the period (to which Toland gained amazingly complete access, for an outsider) but also remarkable interviews with almost all of the military and civilian leaders from the war still alive at the time. The book was such an enormous contribution to the field that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and it remains one of the most often cited text from the period even 35 years later.