Salem Press

Masterplots II: Christian Literature
Editor's Introduction
In the beginning was the Word. . . . (John 1:1)

More than two billion persons, about one-third of the earth's population, embrace Christianity, the largest of the world's religions. Masterplots II: Christian Literature illustrates and explores how people have used words to develop the Christian tradition. Without the variety of the writings discussed in this book, which include historic and contemporary works from many different genres, Christianity's existence and global reach would be inconceivable. The works selected provide a representative sample of the writings and styles of expression that have been the most influential in Christianity's ongoing development.

The Importance of Silence
Although words are indispensable for Christianity and other religious traditions, it is important in the beginning to consider some other aspects of human experience that provide the context out of which the words of religious traditions emerge. At their best, the words of religion orient people toward what is sacred and help them to act in ways that embody the highest values and ethical relationships. Such words encourage gratitude for the gift of life, reverence toward life's sources, and respect for the goodness that sustains human existence and the natural environment that is necessary for its thriving.

These attitudes of gratitude, reverence, and respect are often expressed in oral and written forms, but those dispositions also link religion with silence, a relationship reflected in the fact that all religious traditions make room for quiet reflection. Religions recognize that humble, meditative silence can be the most fitting response, at least at times, to the awe-inspiring reality of a universe that includes humanity.

Much of the Christian literature discussed in this book, including the Bible, the most fundamental text of the Christian tradition, emphasizes the importance of silence. Consisting both of the New Testament, which is explicitly and definitively Christian, and the Hebrew scriptures that are normative for Judaism, writings that Christians typically call the Old Testament, the Christian Bible's testimony about the importance of silence in spiritual life includes examples such as the following: Ecclesiastes (3:7) stresses that there is not only "a time to speak" but also "a time to keep silence." All the earth, says the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk (2:20), should keep worshipful silence before the Holy One, who creates and sustains the world. Psalm 46 urges men and women to "be still" (v. 10) so that the majesty and works of the Lord can be known. Such counsel is not found exclusively in Jewish and Christian scripture. Key writings from many other religions emphasize related themes too.

Experience leads people to wonder: Why does the world exist? Does human life have any ultimate purpose? What happens when a person dies? How can there be justice when people inflict so much pain, suffering, and death on one another? Both individually and within the communities that shape human life, what should people do with their fleeting time and finite energy? Religions respond to life's fundamental questions in their own distinctive ways, but thoughtful religion rejects careless chatter and cheap certainty about such matters and the passionate experiences of courage and love, loss and grief, out of which they emerge. Instead, sound religion helps people to cope with the silence encountered by their most heartfelt yearnings, which it does, at least in part, by enabling them to see that there are times and places where nothing substitutes for unpretentious stillness in response to life's impenetrable mysteries.

Religions speak about, describe, and interpret the sacred in multiple ways, but silence has places in them all because human beings are limited and fragile. Their experiences include fears and hopes; their minds and memories intensify needs and questions. Humanity's religious expressions indicate that these hungers cannot be satisfied or even addressed fully by human reason alone. Through its claims about revelation or enlightenment and their sacred sources, which are said to transcend human finitude, religions offer access to reality and truth that is not constrained by the limits of reason. Nevertheless, reality may not be grasped absolutely by any single religious tradition, and there is enough difference among those traditions that they cannot all be equally true or even reduced to a simple common denominator that is beyond questioning or criticism. More than likely, no religious tradition apprehends truth infallibly, and reality eludes them all at least to some extent. As the New Testament's well-known thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians puts the point, "now we see in a mirror, dimly, . . . now I know only in part" (v. 12). Ultimately, Christianity and other religious traditions affirm, those circumstances may change, and perhaps beyond death enlightenment and fulfillment become more adequate if not complete. Meanwhile silence--the presence of an absence of total enlightenment and fulfillment--remains.

The Words of Creation
Religion is a response to silence that calls for and recedes into silence in return. That relationship and awareness of it, however, would not be imaginable without words that identify and evoke, explore and communicate the multiple dimensions of those realities. If people lacked language, if they could neither hear nor speak words meaningfully, and in many cases write and read them as well, there would be relatively little, if anything, that human beings could recognize or remember as sacred and holy. Without an evolving connection between silence and speech--written as well as oral--the varieties of religious experience would be very different, if they could be said to exist at all.

Religious traditions often link the very existence of the universe to words that break through silence, even as words unavoidably bring dimensions of silence with them. The opening words of Genesis, the first biblical book that Judaism and Christianity share, illustrate these themes. "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth," says Genesis, "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, `Let there be light'; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" (Genesis 1:1-5).

In this narrative, one that stands at the heart of Christianity because it is at the core of Judaism, the tradition out of which Christianity emerged two millennia ago, God's word broke through and stood out against the silence of the formless void, bringing the world into existence through a process that linked silence and speech. On the sixth day, Genesis continues, God's voice called humankind to life, creating male and female in God's own image. As one version of that creation story stresses, God made humanity responsible for naming other living creatures, an action that involved words breaking through and standing out against silence in ways that symbolize humankind's ongoing accountability for the world.

Genesis makes clear that God's creation of the world led to human history. As that history unfolded, Jewish texts such as Genesis came into existence. Their breaking of silence eventually led to Christian writings. Looming large among them is the Gospel of John, one of four books in the New Testament that concentrate especially on the life of Jesus, a Jew from Nazareth. Jesus did not intentionally found the Christian religion. According to the New Testament book that is called the Acts of the Apostles, an early version of Christian history, the followers of Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch, an ancient city located in what is present-day Turkey. That first-century designation came after Jesus' death. In fact, the term Christian appears only a few times in the New Testament. Without question, however, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christian tradition's foundational figure. Without him and his earliest disciples, all of whom were Jews, there would be no Christian religion.

Usually the scriptures of religious traditions are interpreted to have a divine and holy source. Their truth, these traditions often say, is revealed to human beings. Human minds and hands are inspired to speak and write what is revealed, but the words of scripture are not reducible to human thoughts and terms alone. Nevertheless, those writings, which frequently have origins in oral testimony and are edited and revised before they take authoritative written form, appear at particular times and places in history. For example, tradition identifies John, one of Jesus' original twelve disciples, as the author of the Gospel of John. However, scholars who study the development of scripture tend to affirm that this text probably was not written by that disciple. Their work suggests that this text was attributed to John by the early Christian community from which the narrative emerged late in the first century of the common era (C.E.). This dating places the Gospel of John some sixty years after the Roman authorities in Palestine crucified Jesus (c. 30 C.E.) because they considered him to be a political threat who would incite the Jews in Palestine, a Roman colony at the time, to rebel against their overlords. Whatever the precise date and exact origins of the Gospel of John may be, there is no question that it has long been a definitive and authoritative example of Christian literature.

The Word Made Flesh
None of the many significant features of John's gospel has been more central for Christianity than its opening or prologue, which echoes and augments the breaking of silence found in the creation accounts of Genesis. "In the beginning," the Gospel of John repeats. But then this Christian scripture adds that "the Word" was in that beginning. While the meanings of John's statement are among the key issues explored in Masterplots II: Christian Literature, three points related to that gospel's initial claim are worth noting here.

First, the opening words of the Gospel of John show that Christianity agrees with principal aspects of its Jewish heritage. Specifically, Christians reaffirm the Jewish testimony that God breaks silence and that, symbolically if not literally, God's word, a holy speaking, creates and sustains the world. As both of these traditions unfold, moreover, God's breaking of silence includes words that extend creation by conferring responsibilities and establishing boundaries for human beings. The responsibilities and boundaries include commandments not to steal or murder, to love one's neighbor as oneself, to relieve suffering, and to extend hospitality to the stranger. They also include an outlook that makes it imperative for men and women to love and honor God, the Holy One, with all their heart, soul, and strength. It is understood, moreover, that these requirements are inseparable. One cannot love and honor God apart from respecting and serving one's fellow human beings. Only through caring for life and respecting each and every member of the human family, all of whom bear God's image, does a person truly love and honor God. If people shirk their God-given responsibilities and boundaries, then they menace human existence and imperil the entire creation.

Second, while John depends on Judaism in vital ways, the opening of that gospel also identifies Christianity's most important and decisive departure from the Jewish ways that gave birth to the Christian faith. When John speaks about "the Word," the text still echoes Judaism by referring to God as the One who creates, orders, and sustains creation and its varied forms of life, separating light from darkness and ensuring that darkness does not overcome the light. But then John departs dramatically from Judaism by declaring that "the Word became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). According to John and the Christian tradition, this embodiment--Christians call it incarnation--is a breaking of silence that took place in and through the Jew named Jesus. Thus, Jesus is the person whom Christians call the Christ, the Messiah, Lord, Savior, and Son of God because, contrary to the Jewish tradition, they affirm that God is revealed distinctively in Jesus.

Christians believe that the resurrection of Jesus after he was crucified and buried is crucial to that revelation. For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus signifies not only God's power over every force and sin that wastes life, indeed over death itself, but also and especially God's gracious love for the world and humanity, a central conviction that Christians take to be supported by the life, teachings, and sacrificial death of Jesus. As one of the best-known passages of Christian scripture--it also comes from John--puts this point, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16).

According to Christianity, all men and women are sinners. No one fully succeeds in doing all that God expects and deserves from him or her. That failure is not simply the result of mistakes made in ignorance; it involves self-centered rebellion against God and refusal to obey God's word. Through Jesus, Christians say, God shows that humanity's fallen ways need not persist. By following and relying on Jesus as Lord, the Christian testimony claims, forgiveness, new life, and redemption can be found. Indeed, Christians affirm, the presence of God in Jesus Christ tells the world that the Kingdom of God is coming. Christians express that hope in the words of the Lord's Prayer, another foundational text, in which Jesus teaches his followers to say, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10-11).

Attracted to Jesus through the experiences they have had, which in the twenty-first century include a history of countless testimonies and narratives about his healing and saving presence in human lives, Christians are those who confess that Jesus is their Lord and Savior and who try to embody Jesus' ways in their own lives. Those ways are often mapped in stories told by Jesus. One of the finest examples of these parables, as Jesus' stories are frequently called, is about a good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) who saved a stranger who was robbed and nearly beaten to death by thieves. Jesus used this story to illustrate that love for neighbors requires caring for needy people who may be very different from one's family, friends, or community. When Christians truly practice what they preach, they try to be like the good Samaritan, working diligently and steadfastly to bring God's kingdom closer to reality on earth. Their efforts to follow Jesus typically affirm that faith in Jesus as Lord and faithfulness in living as Jesus taught ultimately save individuals from destruction and death and redeem the world from the dire straits into which it perpetually falls, as history's violence, corruption, and suffering so graphically and persistently show. The centrality of Jesus as the incarnation of God in history, as the embodiment of the Word that breaks the silence of darkness and death with light, love, and life, gives Christianity its particularity and distinctiveness among the world's religions.

Third, Christianity's emphasis on Jesus had crucial consequences that went beyond the fledgling religion's first-century struggles to define itself in a primarily Jewish context. One of them was that even though Jews overwhelmingly rejected Christian claims about Jesus, his early Jewish followers, especially the apostle Paul, were convinced that they should share their Christian message with the world. In the words of Matthew, another of the New Testament's gospels, they were directed by Jesus himself to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19). Thus, Christianity became and has continued to be a faith that takes seriously the importance of converting people to follow Jesus and to accept him as Lord, the saving Son of God.

Christianity's early evangelism in the Roman Empire frequently met resistance that led to repression of the new religion and deadly persecution of its adherents. Nevertheless, Christian influence grew and spread. By the end of the fourth century, not only had Christianity become the empire's official religion but also the religion's leaders had established key institutional, church structures, set normative teachings and doctrines into creedal forms, and identified the canonical contents of the New Testament, which included four Gospels, twenty-one Epistles (several of them authored by Paul), the Acts of the Apostles, and Revelation, which envisions what will happen when history ends and God's dominion over all will be revealed finally and completely. These steps enabled Christianity to gain increasing power to expand its mission and to multiply its impact in Western civilization and eventually throughout the world.

The Impact and Global Context of Christian Words
Opinions differ about how to evaluate Christianity's effects, but there is no doubt that they have been and continue to be enormous. As with all religions, Christianity's accomplishments and shortcomings are many and diverse. They range, for example, from sacrificial service, artistic grandeur, commitment to education, and resistance against tyranny and human rights abuses, on one hand, to dogmatism, intolerance, imperialism, and complicity in racism and violence, on the other. Christianity's long record of anti-Jewish hostility has been especially regrettable.

Christianity's antagonism toward Jews and Judaism had numerous roots. Some are in the Gospel of John. For instance, no sooner does John identify Jesus, a Jew, as the embodiment of the Word than the text states that "his own people did not accept him." For centuries, Christianity taught that Jewish rejection of Jesus contributed decisively to his crucifixion, but even more than that, Christians came to see that rejection as an act of deicide, the attempted murder of God.

More than sixty times, far more than in the New Testament's other three gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) taken together, John uses the term hoi Ioudaioi--"the Jews" as that Greek phrase has typically been translated--and often "the Jews" are vilified as benighted disbelievers who rebel against God's grace and truth. In John, "the Jews" cry repeatedly for Jesus' death when he is put on trial before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. One result is that John attributes a satanic character to those Jews who reject Jesus. At one point, John depicts Jesus as saying to Jews who challenge his authority, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word. You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires" (John 8:42-44).

In recent years, biblical scholars--Christians and Jews alike--have worked carefully to produce translations and interpretations of John that are both more accurate and less destructive as far as that text's views about Jews are concerned. Their scholarship clarifies that John's negative rhetoric about "the Jews" should not be taken to refer to the Jewish people as a whole but only to some Jewish leaders and synagogue authorities in a particular historical context. Unfortunately, centuries-long reading and interpretation of John did not reflect those important qualifications, and the outcome meant that there has been no defamation of comparable severity by one religious tradition of another. That defamation, moreover, had tragic consequences because the ascription of a satanic nature to Jews had the effect of legitimating abuse against them. If every single man, woman, and child of the Jewish community is of the devil--and this is one implication of the defamation as it was typically understood--then no one needed to have many qualms about how Jews were treated. Even violence perpetrated against them could be defended as consistent with God's judgment.

Under Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich (1933-1945), the European Jews were nearly annihilated in the genocide that is called the Holocaust. Christianity alone did not cause the Holocaust, but its anti-Jewish hostility played devastating parts in making that catastrophe possible. Only after the Holocaust has the Christian tradition fundamentally revised its basic teachings about Jews and Judaism, a process that is still under way and full of difficulty because it raises anew primary questions about how John's claim that "the Word became flesh and lived among us" should and should not be understood.

Post-Holocaust revision and reformation of the Christian tradition are by no means the first of the watershed challenges and changes that have been part of Christianity's history. As the articles in Masterplots II: Christian Literature repeatedly show, there is no one-size-fits-all version of Christianity. Try as various "authorities" have tried to do over the centuries, Christians are of many and often contentious minds about what Christian faith means and Christian practice requires. Significant evidence to support that claim is found in Christianity's numerous churches, liturgies, biblical interpretations, and theologies. Their history and the implications of their development are traced in many of the essays that follow.

In Western civilization, the Roman Catholic Church long dominated with its papacy and hierarchical structure, but far from being uniform and unvaried, Roman Catholics, the largest Christian community, have been and continue to be remarkably diversified and differentiated. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other dissenters protested against Roman Catholic authority and launched what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. Far from resulting only in a two-way split between Roman Catholics and Protestants, however, the Reformation multiplied churches and proliferated traditions. Christians periodically call for a restoration of unity, rightly suggesting that Jesus scarcely envisioned a world religion with a vast number of denominations and apparently unending divisions among them, but such calls appear unlikely to reduce the pluralism that has become one of Christianity's hallmarks.

Meanwhile, Christianity is situated more and more in a global context that contains inescapable interaction with the world's non-Christian religions. With the twenty-first century well under way, Christianity's influence wanes in Europe while it grows in Africa and Asia, but the Christian tradition, large and widespread though its presence continues to be, increasingly encounters Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and other faiths in ways that make it less easy for Christianity to assume the triumphal superiority and exclusivism that it has often claimed for itself.

The Christian tradition is no exception to the rule that the identities of religious traditions are not fixed and settled once and for all. Each tradition has to locate the balance that combines strong continuity with its history and its fundamental beliefs and practices, on one hand, with sufficient flexibility and nimbleness, on the other, so that it can adapt to unfamiliar circumstances and to the fresh callings of its own spirit in ways that keep the tradition relevant, timely, and meaningful in a world of change. In the twenty-first century, these needs mean that Christians have to place priority on what their faith should say about the relationship between Christianity and the other major religions of the world. In addition, the contemporary Christian agenda includes the need to determine what Christianity should say about dilemmas such as global warming, abortion, gay marriage, HIV/AIDS, poverty, international relations, war, capital punishment, and much more. The decisions that are taken about these matters involve more than politics and public policy, although they are inseparable from those areas of human life because, in one way or another, Christianity, like every religion, mixes, mingles, and frequently collides with politics and culture. For Christians, the ethical stands that are taken have to be informed and defined by a sound grasp of God's will and sensitivity about what it means to follow Jesus. Honesty requires Christians to acknowledge that such insight and agreement about it are not likely to be achieved easily.

According to the New Testament, God sent Jesus "to bring good news to the poor, . . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19). From the origins of the Christian religion until the present day, as the essays in Christian Literature help to make clear, Christians keep wrestling over and often disagreeing about what the followers of Jesus should make of those words, which keep breaking the silence of indifference and injustice.

The Affirmations of Christian Literature
Just as there is no one-size-fits-all interpretation of Christianity itself, there is no single definition that determines what does and does not count as Christian literature. As this introduction suggests, however, one could say that Christian literature basically includes writings that, in one way or another, affirm a version of the fundamental claim in the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, . . . full of grace and truth."

The word "affirms" does not mean, at least not necessarily, uncritical acceptance, unthinking belief, or uncontested commitment. To the contrary, affirmation is often hard-won; it may take place only after a critical sifting and sorting of experience, testimony, and tradition. Affirmation does not exclude questioning and argument, but may result from and even require those activities; it may be the outcome of encounters with silence that persists and remains. Nor is affirming limited to a specific form of expression. Affirmation can be voiced, for example, in multiple styles and patterns of writing. They can include fiction and poetry, philosophy and theology, prayer and hymn, history and the close reading and interpretation of religious texts and scripture such as the Gospel of John itself.

The acts of affirming often entail dialogue and disagreement with previous affirmations that have been made within a tradition such as Christianity. To affirm a version of John's fundamental claim about Jesus of Nazareth may entail rejection of what some earlier Christian interpretations have held; it may involve revisions and even the breaking of silence in new and creative ways. But literature will not rightly be called Christian if it strays too far beyond the claim that "the Word became flesh and lived among us." Where that line is crossed, however, is likely to remain debatable. Some writings will belong in the category of Christian literature more obviously than others. In some cases, the writings may be in a gray zone where the call could go either way. That fact means, as the pages to come bear witness, that Christian literature consists of genres, approaches, and perspectives whose historical sweep is as vast as their variety is immense.

"In the beginning was the Word." From that Christian claim so many words have flowed and will continue to do so. The essays that follow in these pages show how key examples of Christian literature--ancient, contemporary, and in between--have used words to develop a religious tradition that continues to offer its insight and help for encountering, coping with, and hopefully breaking open the silence that pervades the human journey.

John K. Roth