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R e v i e w s
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This Rock
Volume 16, Number 9
 November 2005 
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A Europe without God
Ten years ago, on my first visit to Europe, there were obvious signs that the Church was in trouble. I was staying with a friend outside of Delmenhorst, Germany. On Sunday morning, we asked our German host where we might attend Mass. He kindly walked us to an impressive and imposing 900-year-old church.
The doors were locked.
"I guess they aren’t having services today," he told us. Germany didn’t have time for God, even on a Sunday morning.
That phenomenon is what George Weigel ably tackles in The Cube and the Cathedral. The title comes from Weigel’s comparison of Paris’s La Grande Arche de la Defense (a featureless, forty-story cube housing the International Foundation for Human Rights) with the Notre Dame Cathedral. The entire cathedral, says Weigel, would fit inside the cube. Weigel wonders which culture, the cube or the cathedral, would better protect human rights, and he uses that as his jumping-off point for examining what has happened to modern Western Europe.
Citing Europe’s declining birth rates, the Islamicization of the continent, and odd European attitudes toward death, Weigel posits that modern Europe is suffering from a grave illness. Weigel traces the genesis of Europe’s "civilizational morale crisis" back to World War I. This, he says, is the breakpoint at which European civilization began to destroy itself.
Communism, fascism, and Nazism, explains Weigel, were all expressions of the atheistic humanism that Europe embraced. Freedom, for the European man, means being radically secular.
"Ultramundane humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism," writes Weigel. "And inhuman humanism can neither sustain, nor nurture, nor defend the democratic project. It can only undermine it or attack it."
Drawing from other writers who have written on the subject, Weigel uses modern examples to explain the European problem. Those examples include such recent actions as the European Union’s exclusion of the Christian sources of European civilization from the EU constitutional treaty and the European Commission’s rejection of Italian leader Rocco Buttiglione for his Catholic religious beliefs. Weigel demonstrates how modern Europe is attempting to build a Europe without God.
To do so, argues Weigel, is for Europe to ignore its Christian roots. It ignores the history of St. Benedict and his role in preserving Christian culture and civilization in Europe during the Dark Ages. It also ignores the Church’s role in establishing the European university system and the role that prominent Catholics played in founding the European Union. To ignore such history is to build Europe upon a lie.
The lingering question that remains is: Has Europe only lost its way, or is the train completely off the tracks?
Not only does the book raise important questions worth grappling with, but it also suggests that Europe’s problem could become America’s problem. If the elimination of moral truth’s role in governance triumphs in Europe, Weigel argues that it could also triumph in the U.S.
Weigel lays out four possible scenarios for Europe’s future: (1) the success of the secular project, (2) a muddle with different countries doing different things, (3) a reconverted Europe, and (4) a nightmare scenario in which Christianity becomes extinct in Europe and is replaced by Islam.
Having just returned from World Youth Day in Cologne, I have hopes that scenario number three might prevail. I saw the first signs of this reconnection during my time in Germany.
There, 1.1 million young people gathered to attend Mass in a country where most do not. There, Pope Benedict XVI called young Europeans back to their Catholic roots. In Cologne, Benedict called Europe to the things that it seems to have forgotten. He called them to attend Sunday Mass. He called them to adoration of Christ. He called them to belief in the Eucharist. He called them to holiness.
By hosting World Youth Day in Germany, the Church also showed Europe an alternative future—one with an abundance of young people, one where young people fill its vacant churches wall to wall, one not of despair, apathy, and indifference but enthusiasm, energy, and joy.
Whereas John Paul II came from the East, battled Communism, and helped tear down the Berlin Wall, Benedict has come from the West to do battle with secularism and atheistic humanism and tear down the stronger wall that Europeans have erected against the faith.
Will Germany listen to its native son’s invitation? Will Europe?
My eleven days in Cologne taught me that anything is possible. At the end of my trip, one thirty-two-year-old woman told me that Benedict’s words were "drawing [her] closer to the Church." One after another, irreligious Germans told me that they had been moved by their encounters with pilgrims and the Pope.
Will Benedict sow the seeds of Europe’s new springtime? Europe’s very future depends upon it.
-- Tim Drake
The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
By George Weigel
Basic Books (2005)
202 pages
$23.00
ISBN: 0465092667
A History Apart
Writing history is always an ambitious undertaking. The sheer quantity of primary and secondary sources one must collect is daunting if one is to provide an accurate sweep of a decade, a century, a millennium, or more. Writing a history of some thirteen centuries of Christianity, for instance, might come best near the end of a long scholarly career.
Everett Ferguson, professor emeritus of the Bible and distinguished scholar-in-residence at Abilene Christian University in Texas, compiles a summation of his long career teaching church history in his textbook Church History, Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual and Political Context. The title and subtitles alone convey the scope and depth of the enterprise Ferguson undertakes on behalf of Protestant publisher Zondervan, the Michigan-based Christian publisher and self-proclaimed number-one seller of Bibles in the world. Though founded as an independent operation by two brothers in the 1930s, Zondervan became a branch of mega-publisher HarperCollins in 1988.
Zondervan’s size and reach all but guarantee that its offerings will have an impact on a sizeable audience. With Ferguson’s Church History, readers will get a text that perpetuates a number of anti-Catholic biases unsupported by Scripture or a more objective reading of history. While former Protestant ministers such as Scott Hahn and Alex Jones attribute their conversions to Catholicism in large part to their discovery of the early Church Fathers, Ferguson’s readers will be led down an intellectual path portraying the Catholic Church as a distortion of the faith of the apostles due largely to accretion of pagan rituals, holidays, and ideas.
This reviewer was intrigued by the amount of the New Testament that Bible scholar Ferguson does not refer to in his history. He describes Jesus’ childhood as "an apparently normal Jewish youth that was largely uneventful." What of the birth in a stable in Bethlehem? The flight into Egypt? The prophecies of Simeon and Anna? The finding in the temple? When referring to Peter’s profession of faith identifying Jesus as the Christ, he notes Mark 8:29 and not Matthew 16:16, which is followed by Christ’s words establishing Peter as the "rock" on which Christ will build his Church. Though this History, as it must be, is full of references to Church councils, there is no reference to the very first one, the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15:1–29, which establishes not only the scriptural basis for Church councils but also the primacy of Peter—and therefore his successors—in settling their outcome.
Instead of acknowledging these scriptural bases of Catholic ecclesiology, Ferguson writes that "to call Peter ‘pope’ or even sole bishop is anachronistic." Instead of acknowledging that the canon of Scripture was decided by the Catholic Church under the authority of Peter’s successor, Ferguson writes that the Church "functioned as a witness, not as the judge" in determining which books belong in the Bible—which sounds very much like a distinction without a difference.
Ferguson writes that "many features of the Greco-Roman religion became incorporated into Christianity as the gospel spread into the pagan population." As evidence, he points to Church fathers such as Cyprian, who freely used the language of pagan religion to describe Christianity. Although he did not create the terminology, Cyprian was among the first to speak extensively of the bishop as a priest, the Eucharist as a sacrifice, and the Lord’s table as an altar. The obvious shortcoming in this analysis is that all the "pagan" terms he enumerates are common in the Old Testament and in fact reflect Christianity’s inheritance from Judaism, as even Ferguson himself acknowledges later in the book:A priestly understanding of ministry, a sacrificial understanding of worship, and the view of the church building as a holy temple were among the religious ideas developed under the influence of the Old Testament. This Church History has other problems. Often enough to be troubling, the author speaks tangentially of historical figures or movements without explaining who or what they were. In a book with a good index but no glossary, that’s a serious defect, especially if it is intended to introduce students to this history. The lack of a glossary could be particularly troubling when a student finds repeated references to now-obscure heresies or "isms" (Sabellianism, patripassianism, homoousianism, homoiousinism, etc.). There is also an annoying failure to place the ancient names of cities and provinces (e.g., "Seleucia in Isauria") on a map of today’s world.
For student of intellectual history, Ferguson’s book can be a helpful walk through many of the leading figures of Christian antiquity up through the Middle Ages. But this book is not for beginners, not only because it assumes knowledge no beginner would have but mostly because of fundamental biases and inaccuracies that distort the history of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
-- Jay Dunlap
Church History, Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation
By Everett Ferguson
Zondervan (2005)
544 pages
$29.99
ISBN: 0310205808
Crisis Management
Marshall Johnson, the former director of Fortress Press, a large Lutheran publishing house in Minneapolis, has written a fairly useful book. His (correct) assumption is that the Church has been influenced by the various crises it has undergone since its founding by Jesus Christ, and he sets out to define twelve of these crises and how they affected it.
The book is very helpful in defining terms and giving etymologies to words such as transubstantiation and the Naassenes (a Gnostic sect of the second century, from the Hebrew word nahash, meaning "serpent"). It is also remarkably easy to read. Johnson gives a very good overview of the ideas that were raised in one epoch or another and who the people were behind those ideas. There are also helpful summaries at the end of each chapter, and the twelve crises that he chose were well-chosen.
The fact that he is Lutheran, though, skews his entire perspective in favor of the reformers and against "the Roman church." His attitude toward medieval Catholicism, for instance, seems to be rather condescending. "The Roman church," he writes, "responded to heresies, especially the Cathari, with the full-blown Inquisition." Or "the Roman church promised complete remission of sin for those who died in battle with the infidels."
Well, since we’re talking about Western Europe here prior to the Reformation, there was no other church besides the Roman Church. And the weighted use of the term Inquisition is meant to imply something sinister.
Prior to the Reformation, Johnson’s outlook is fairly mainstream, though he does show sympathies toward people such as John Wycliffe and Jan Huss. But there also appears to be a tendency to try to be an impartial observer or a modern-day news reporter so that even the most egregious errors are treated equally with the truth, and that can be unsettling at times. One does get his opinion clearly in the summaries at the end of each chapter, though, and they fall within orthodox Christian views.
Until his treatment of the Reformation, that is. There, Luther is cast in an almost entirely favorable light and the fault of the Reformation lies almost completely with Rome. "It is no exaggeration to say that the response to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses by the monasteries, the papacy, and the emperor created the Protestant Reformation." No fault is ascribed to Luther for belligerence, throwing the papal bull condemning his errors into a bonfire, or calling the Pope the Antichrist. As for calling for princes to deal with the Peasant Revolt with ruthlessness, Johnson calls it "infamous" and "tactless," but that is all.
After the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the only crises Johnson discusses are those from a Protestant perspective. What Johnson calls competing truth-claims, for instance, logically arises when anyone can be correct and no one is subject to anyone’s authority.
In his epilogue, Johnson writes, "Indeed, it is not difficult to find in the early and medieval churches parallels to almost every variety of Christianity in our fragmented world today." That is true. But the difference between then and now is that then there was an authority who was recognized as having competence over these competing truth-claims. Since 1517, though, that authority has been rejected, and the resulting crisis has shattered Christianity into tens of thousands of shards so that it is hardly recognizable today.
-- Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz
The Evolution of Christianity: Twelve Crises That Shaped the Church
By Marshall D. Johnson
Continuum (2005)
209 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 082641642X
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