Page 3381 – Christianity Today (2024)

Ancient Beginnings

52 According to tradition, the Apostle Thomas arrives in India and establishes seven congregations.

c. 189 Pantaenus, a missionary from Alexandria, arrives in India.

c. 200 The Syriac Chronicle of Edessa describes a “church of the Christians” in India.

345 During the Great Persecution in Persia, Thomas a Kana leads 400 Christian refugees to the Malabar coast.

883 Anglo-Saxons bishops sent by King Alfred visit the tomb of St. Thomas (Mylapore).

c. 1293 Marco Polo stays on the Coromandel Coast, describes the tomb of St. Thomas as a place of pilgrimage, and visits Christians and Jews in Quilon.

1502 Thomas Christian leaders ask Vasco da Gama for an alliance against Muslim predators.

The Dawn of Missions

1542 Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier and two Tamil assistants teach the Apostles’ Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments to Paravars (fisherfolk on Coromandel Coast), baptizing 10,000 in a single month.

1606 Roberto de Nobili begins a 50-year career in the Jesuit Madurai Mission, adopting Brahman culture and becoming a renowned scholar and poet.

1622 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide is created to send missionaries into areas of India outside of Portuguese Padroado authority.

1653 At Koonen Cross, some Thomas Christians declare independence from Roman Catholic authority.

1706 German Pietists Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau reach Tranquebar and establish a printing press and charity school.

1710 Jesuit missionary Constanzo Giuseppe Beschi begins a spectacular career as the greatest Tamil scholar of the age.

1733 Aaron becomes the first Tamil evangelical pastor in Thanjavur.

1750 C. F. Schwartz begins career as a renowned evangelical missionary-statesman-scholar, diplomat, and mentor to leaders of later mass conversion movements in Tirunelveli.

1773 Indian Empire (Raj) established.

1792 William Carey’s Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens evokes waves of evangelical missionary voluntarism.

1799 Serampore Mission established by William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and David Ward.

1813 American Congregationalists (A.B.C.F.M.) found the Maratha Mission. Other missions soon follow.

1833 Charter Renewal Act allows for full entry of missionaries into India.

1833 American Presbyterians begin work in Punjab and build a strong educational system.

1838 Jesuit order, restored by Gregory XVI, returns to its Madurai Mission after an absence of 64 years.

1841 Welsh Presbyterian missionaries in the Khasi Hills build educational infrastructures; local Christians later lead conversion movements until over 95% percent of all Khasis become Christians.

1844 First Synod of Pondicherry launches Catholic reforms.

1848 Nehemiah (Nilakantha) Goreh is ordained as an Anglican priest.

1855 Abolition of slavery in Travancore (Kerala) opens the way for mass conversions among untouchables, lower castes, and former slave castes.

The Age of Empire

1857 The Great Mutiny begins, followed the next year by the replacement of the East India Company by the British crown.

1866 Maulvi Imad id-din, ordained scholar-missionary, wins renown for apologetic writings reconciling Christian faith and Muslim culture.

1876 Naga Christians establish a “village of refuge” where American missionaries translate Scripture, set up schools, and lay the foundation for movements by which over 95% of Nagas eventually become Christians.

1886 Pandita Ramabai makes a triumphant tour of the United States.

1886 Catholic hierarchy of India established.

1888 Mar Thoma Evangelistic Association founded, with missionaries reaching out to low-caste peoples, forming ashram-like settlements.

1888-89 Salvadorians, led by German missionaries, arrive in Khasi Hills and gain first converts.

1891 Brahmabandhav Upadhyay is baptized as an Anglican; later joins the Catholic church.

1894 H. A. Krishna Pillai, renowned Christian poet, publishes a classical Tamil version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

1894 National Papal Seminary established at Kandy (moves to Pune in 1950s) to promote indigenization of the Indian Catholic hierarchy.

1895 Narayan Vaman Tilak (1862-1919), celebrated Brahman poet, makes a quest of reconciling Hindu heritage with devotion to Christ.

1899 Two Mizos become Christians, five years after missionary arrival. (Today Mizo Christians make up 86% of the population of Mizoram.)

1904 Sundar Singh has a vision of Christ and becomes a wandering Christian sadhu.

1905 “Holy Spirit Revival” and speaking in tongues among devout school girls at Pandita Ramabai’s Mukti Mission attracts world-wide attention.

1905-06 Revival in the Khasi Hills, with 8,000 converts, spreads to surrounding areas.

1910 First World Missionary Conference meets in Edinburgh.

1912 V. S. Azariah becomes first Indian Anglican bishop; his efforts in Dornakal inspire the conversion of over 200,000 Malas and Madigas and provoke conflict with Gandhi.

1923 Bishop Tibertius Roche becomes first Indian head of a Latin Rite diocese (in Tamil Nadu).

1927 Amy Carmichael founds Dohnavur Fellowship for rescuing child temple prostitutes; becomes friend of Gandhi.

Toward the Contemporary Era

1947 Independence of India, accompanied by the Partition of the Indian Empire into India and Pakistan, followed the next year by the forming of independent Burma and Ceylon.

1947 Church of South India is formed, combining formerly Anglican, Congregationalist, Reformed, and Methodist denominations; soon followed by Church of North India (CNI).

1948 Mohandas K. Gandhi is assassinated.

1951 Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) forms the Catholic Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.

1960s Freedom of Religion Acts bolster Hindu efforts to stop Christian conversion

1961 Third World Council of Churches, held in New Delhi, leads to the formation of the World Council of Churches as a permanent body with headquarters in Geneva.

1977 Indian Supreme Court defines evangelist’s work as a threat to the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed to all citizens of India.

2002 Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion of Religion Ordinance passed.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

As a conductor and composer, I am constantly asked the question, “Who is your favorite composer?” The truth is that my answer changes every day. If we’ve just performed a Beethoven symphony, then he gets my vote. If asked after a Brahms concerto or a Mozart opera, then I lean their way. But what if someone asks, “Who is the composer who has influenced your life the most?” That answer has always been the same: Johann Sebastian Bach.

Millions of people have heard of J. S. Bach. There are many Bach Societies, Bach Festivals, even entire orchestras and choruses dedicated to performing his works. Thousands of concerts and hundreds of CDs present his matchless music. Yet in his day, Bach was virtually unknown as a composer, at least outside of the German towns where he quietly lived and worked.

J. S. Bach was never attracted to stardom, fame, or fortune. This unquestionable genius was refreshingly modest and unassuming. He told a student, “Just practice diligently, and it will go very well. You have five fingers on each hand just as healthy as mine.” Once, when an acquaintance praised Bach’s wonderful skill as an organist, Bach demonstrated his characteristic humility and wit by replying, “There is nothing very wonderful about it; you have only to hit the right notes at the right moment and the instrument does the rest.”

Perhaps one has to have worked in the performing arts world as long as I have to fully appreciate the rarity of such humble sentiments. In today’s competitive music world, the temptation is always to make yourself look better by tearing down the reputations of others. As a young man in music school, I was often surrounded by the clash of egos, and, it must be admitted, I had my own struggles in this area. Bach provided a way out.

I remember reading for the first time in my freshman year a simple statement by this master musician. Bach said, “Music’s only purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit.” The more I pondered this sentence, the more it liberated my heart. Music was given to glorify God in heaven and to edify men and women on earth. It wasn’t to make lots of money, or to meet my ego needs, or to see my name in lights. Music was about blessing the Lord and blessing others. After months of auditions, rehearsals, recitals, and competitions, the simplicity of Bach’s statement was a balm for my soul.

Furthermore, I noted that Bach’s own life was in complete accord with his beliefs. Though he possessed a musical genius found perhaps once in a century, he chose to live an obscure life as a church musician. Only once in his 65 years did he actually take a job where his brilliance might bring him to the world’s notice. For a while he worked as Kapellmeister of the court of Prince Leopold. But such surroundings were a distraction to him. He soon left to accept a lowly position as cantor at a church in Leipzig, where he would again be cloistered in his unacclaimed but beloved world of church music.

More than anyone in history, Bach explained the “why” behind our various vocations, careers, and talents: They are for others and for God, not for ourselves. The next time you hear a masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach, reflect on his heart for glorifying God. His life and example changed my life and is still changing lives all over the world.

Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh is the Artistic Director of the MasterWorks Festival and the Executive Director of the Christian Performing Artists’ Fellowship. He is the author of nine books, including Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers (Zondervan, revised edition 1996).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

“India, your children will be the ambassadors of your salvation,” said Pope Leo XIII in 1886. Pope Leo’s farsighted prediction reveals a deeper assumption that has proven true again and again: No Christian tradition can thrive in India until the Indian people make it their own.

Through the work of pioneering Jesuit missionaries such as Francis Xavier, Roberto de Nobili, and Constanzo Beschi, Catholic Christianity had begun to strike its roots in Tamil Nadu, the southern part of the country, from the 16th to the 18th century. But in the late 18th century, the church entered a period of severe decline almost to the point of extinction. It was a time of religious crisis in Europe, and the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 deprived the mission field of workers. Without adequate leadership by local pastors, some Christians in India relapsed into former ways and some others were forced to convert to Islam.

In addition, Catholic leaders abroad were locked in an ecclesiastical quarrel that had sapped the energies of the church for centuries. The Portuguese in India enjoyed the privileges of royal patronage. Called Padroado, these were rights granted by popes to kings of Portugal to look after church affairs and even to appoint bishops. Frustrated by the Padroado, the Vatican had tried to centralize its mission work in 1622 by establishing the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide). The conflict—often within the same village—between pastors, missionaries, and bishops of Padroado on the one side and those directly under Rome on the other revealed a church divided within itself and lacking singleness of purpose.

But with the strenuous labors of religious societies like the Foreign Missionaries of Paris, along with the restoration of the Jesuits and their return to India in the 1830s, the Catholic mission began to experience an awakening. The division of mission territories into Vicariates Apostolic in 1845 helped to give great cohesiveness to missionary work. And into the turmoil of Bombay came the peacemaking skills of Swiss missionary Anastasius Hartmann. A man renowned for gentle firmness, the new bishop worked to restore order and at one point refused to yield a church to those who perpetuated the schism, even when his opponents blockadedhim inside. In serving as a mediator between Catholic communities he was helped by British officials of the imperial government, who were employing Catholic military chaplains. The Examiner, a Catholic magazine Hartmann founded, served to alleviate confusion and build unity.

Catholicism in India was on the threshold of revival.

Reorganization and reform

In 1841 the French missionary Melchior de Marion Brésillac arrived in India determined “to direct all my own work and thought towards training a native clergy … which has hardly been thought about yet at all.” But he encountered such frustration that he finally gave up and returned to France.

Brésillac was not the only one to realize this enormous weakness in the Catholic presence in India. Clément Bonnand, the gifted Bishop of Pondicherry, helped generate a spirit of renewal that prompted at least some Catholics to respond by trying to make Christianity truly Indian in its interpretation, symbols, theology, and leadership. With official backing from Rome, Bonnand strongly supported many reform efforts. In 1844 he convoked a groundbreaking synod that resolved to promote the ordination of indigenous priests and the founding of seminaries to better train them. Bonnand himself set up a printing press for the diffusion of Christian knowledge, established primary schools, trained catechists, and encouraged the founding of new indigenous congregations and religious orders to serve in the fields of education, charity work, and health care. What emerged from these multifarious initiatives was nothing less than a new vision for Catholicism in India

Pope Pius IX had such great trust in Bonnand that he appointed him Apostolic Vicar in 1858 and sent him on a visitation tour throughout India in order to report on the state of the Christian communities in various parts of the country. Bonnand’s extensive report revealed that in six major Vicariates there was not a single Indian priest, and in six others there was no seminary. It was a wake-up call to the Catholic mission.

Trickle-down evangelism

Though some missionaries still resisted the idea, most agreed that the Indian Catholic community should be served by an indigenous clergy and hierarchy. But an indigenous clergy first required an educated laity from which potential priests could come.

In an effort to create a modern educational system that would teach local elites to speak English and serve the goals of the administration, British officials of the Raj offered to fund any group willing to establish and run schools. Protestants had already established school systems and colleges in this way. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, the Catholics—particularly the Jesuits—launched networks of primary schools and colleges, including St. Joseph’s College in Tamil Nadu, St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta, and many other institutions.

The motivation behind such organized efforts in the field of higher education was the hope that Christian influence on elites studying at these institutions would trickle down to the rest of society. Only a small percentage of elites actually converted to Christianity, but the result of this missionary zeal was a widespread and high-caliber system of college and universities throughout the continent and the training of some of the country’s foremost leaders in various fields.

Mission to the margins

Educating the elite did not, however, entail neglecting the marginalized. The spirit of social reform sweeping across Indian society awakened the need for more organized social involvement. Besides schools, Catholics established dispensaries, hospitals, and other centers of medical care, mostly in rural areas, and engaged in charitable work such as taking care of widows and orphans. Catholic support contributed to the enactment of legislation in 1856 that challenged the traditional Hindu stricture on remarriage of widows.

Outreach to “the least of these” owed much to the contributions of Catholic women. The entry of female missionaries into fields long dominated by men brought a new quality to Catholic mission activity in the 19th century. One of the earliest women’s religious orders to set foot in India was the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny. In 1827, women of this order reached Pondicherry and started schools for girls.

Most remarkable were the indigenous women who joined new religious orders founded in India itself, many of which deliberately aimed to serve poor, illiterate women, including widows. One of these female religious orders recruited candidates chiefly from among the “untouchables” in order to counter the general prejudice against and exclusion of such outcasts in Indian society. Rooted in the soil and fluent in the language, local Indian women were able to carry out missionary work more effectively than their European sisters.

Christianity gained the strongest foothold among the poorest and most remote communities. Huge numbers of untouchables joined the Catholic fold in the 19th century hoping to find not only spiritual nourishment but the human dignity and respect they had for so long been denied by the rest of society.

In the northern part of the country, Catholics, like Protestants, met with great success among the adivasis (aboriginal tribes) in the last decades of the century. Among the Mundas and Oraons of Jharkhand, for example, the Belgian priest Constant Lievens gained an enthusiastic following by defending the tribal people against the landlords and moneylenders who were oppressing them. In the Khasi Hills of Assam, the German Salvadorians and later the missionaries of the Society of Don Bosco ministered to the illiterate, the poor, and the young.

The conversion of so many outcaste peoples, however, sharpened the issue of caste hierarchy among Christians and divided the Catholic communities. Churches had long practiced separate seating for high-caste and low-caste members and even created separate cemeteries. Missionaries themselves disagreed over the correct response to the caste system. Some considered it diametrically opposed to Christianity. Others thought of it as a social practice that must be tolerated for the greater good of “saving souls.” Repeated appeals to Rome for a clear directive were in vain, and the general rule was to compromise and to accommodate to the local social custom. To this day, caste division and prejudice continue to be a scandal in the church.

Catholic success

The caste system was one of many challenges faced by the Catholic church in India. Whereas 19th-century Protestants could boast many outstanding leaders, apart from a few exceptional personalities like Bishop Hartmann in Bombay and Bishop Bonnand in Pondicherry, there was a dearth of great leadership in the Catholic community. Moreover, missionaries of different religious orders and nationalities were often pitted against each other, sometimes to the point of public acrimony.

In 1886 Pope Leo XIII tried to resolve the conflicts between Padroado and Propaganda by establishing a centralized Catholic hierarchy for India. At that time, all the bishops were foreigners. But the pope’s determination that Indian Christians would be the ambassadors of salvation to their own nation in time yielded rich fruits. In 1893 he founded the Papal Seminary in Kandy, Sri Lanka (later transferred to Pune) to train indigenous priests. In 1896 he appointed three Indian bishops. And in 1923 Tibertius Roche—one of the descendents of the fisher folk of southeast India whom Francis Xavier had evangelized in the 16th century—became the first Indian head of a Latin Rite diocese in India. The indigenization of the Catholic hierarchy had officially begun.

Buttressed by an increasingly native clergy, a widespread system of schools and universities, and an organized mission of social outreach, by the time of Indian independence the Catholic church stood poised to explode in growth and influence. Its success touches upon irony: Today, struggling Western parishes are importing Indian priests. Ambassadors indeed.

Felix Wilfred is professor and chair of the Department of Christian Studies at the State University of Madras, India.

When In India, Do As The Indians

The strategy of many 19th-century missionaries to spread the gospel among the elites had an early precedent in the extraordinary tradition set by Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656). Settling in the south Indian temple-city of Madurai in 1606, the Jesuit missionary was determined to reach Brahmans by becoming, at least in appearance and learning, a Brahman himself. He stopped eating meat, donned a long ochre garment and a turban, applied sandal paste to his forehead, and wore a sacred thread across his chest, just as the Brahmans did. His outward appearance was that of a true Hindu sannyasi (world-renouncer). Identifying himself as an Indian, he came to be known by his Indian name: Tattuwa-Bhodakar. Adept alike in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, he engaged in dialogues and debates with Brahman scholars. De Nobili reasoned that if Christianity was presented in a way the high-caste Hindus could relate to, they would realize its truth. In his view, when the upper castes converted, the conversion of the lower castes would then follow.

De Nobili’s efforts to adapt Christianity to local thought patterns, customs, and manners scandalized other missionaries (including those of his own Jesuit order) and provoked censure and condemnation from Rome. But in the long run, he proved to be far ahead of his time. He is now recognized as a pioneer of the inculturation so ardently advocated by the Second Vatican Council.

—Felix Wilfred

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

During his 1920 tour of Europe, the Indian convert to Christianity Sundar Singh (1889-1929?) was proclaimed a living “Apostle and a Saint.” As one Oxford scholar put it, “we feel from knowing him, we understand [St. Francis and St. Paul] better.”

Such praise and adulation, however, were only faint echoes of the devotion Sundar Singh had inspired in India, where he had wandered robed in the style of a sadhu (ascetic “holy man”) preaching Christ for 15 years. His Indian admirers proclaimed “How like Christ he is!” wherever he went. This likeness, they asserted, reflected a deep, mystical union: “It is no sin to call Sundar Singh ‘Swami’ [i.e., Lord] for Christ himself dwells in him.”

What was it about Sundar Singh that inspired many Indian and European Christians? Like Paul, he claimed that his conversion came through a vision of Christ and that he traveled to the “third heaven” in ecstasy. Like Francis, he imitated Christ’s life of poverty, wandering, and preaching. And like Christ himself, he taught in parables and suffered persecution.

Yet in the Indian context that shaped Sundar Singh’s Christianity, all these aspects of exemplary Christian religious life had strong parallels in Indian traditions. The sadhu or “holy man” renounces worldly life in seeking ultimate “salvation.” In this way, Sundar Singh sought to demonstrate that Christian faith and Indian religious culture had much more in common than the Christianity brought by foreign missionaries seemed to allow. Indian Christians understood and appreciated this, and by the 1920s, many European Christians began to agree.

Seeking the hidden God

One of Sundar Singh’s parables about longing for God, reminiscent of Christ’s teaching, is characteristic of him:

“A woman hid herself behind some thick trees in her garden and her little son came out in search of her, crying as he walked. He searched the whole garden but found no clue of her anywhere. The servant said to him: ‘O son, why are you crying? Quit pursuing your mother! See how sweet are the mangos of this tree … I’ll pick some and bring them right now.’

“The child said, ‘No, no. I want my mother. My beloved mother is sweeter than those mangos by far … Actually this garden and all its fruits and flowers are mine, since whatever belongs to my mother also belongs to me. I want only my mother.’ The mother who was sitting in the bushes and listening to all this immediately got up and grasped her child to her breast and began to kiss him. That garden became a paradise for the boy.”

Sundar Singh was 15 years old when he decided that the garden of the world, though filled with beautiful things, was not enough to satisfy him. In the absence of God, the garden itself lost its appeal. His growing spiritual longing, unsatisfied by his study of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian scriptures, had left him no choice-either he would obtain the vision (darsan) of God or continue to search in the next life. As he prepared to commit suicide one night in December 1904, Sundar Singh received a vision of Christ, who revealed his crucified love to the young Sikh.

This revelation brought him peace. It also provoked conflict. His father, a respected landholder in a rural village of Punjab, was not willing for the family to suffer the political and social humiliation of his son’s conversion to a “foreign” religion that predominantly attracted “untouchable” castes. As soon as Sundar Singh made his determination clear by cutting his hair (uncut hair was one of five symbols of Sikh identity), he was expelled from his home.

The life of a sadhu

His devout mother, before her death, had been a model of spirituality to her son and had instilled in him the desire to emulate the mendicant ascetics (sadhus) whom she venerated. His vision of Christ and his expulsion from home provided the opportunity to pursue this path. After he was baptized, he gave away his few possessions and began to wander, accepting offerings of food as he went from village to village, meditating on, preaching, and singing the news of God’s incarnation (avatara) in Christ.

Though the largely Presbyterian missionary community of Punjab had long been opposed to this kind of “syncretism,” the blending of asceticism with devotion to Christ made sense to Sundar Singh. If the world was like a garden in which God was hidden, it was best not to be distracted by worldly pleasures, however good and sweet. In long hours of meditation, prayer and fasting, he found the vivid presence of Christ much sweeter than any other experience.

In hundreds of villages where he preached, this connection between local religious traditions and the Christian gospel made a crucial difference to his audience. In one instance, nine Hindu listeners, now ready for baptism after seeing and hearing him, stood and proclaimed, “We knew all about Christ for the last 20 years from the European missionaries; but now we understand truly that He is the only Savior.”

A living example

Sundar Singh was not the first convert to combine Indian asceticism and Christian devotion, or to have visions. His fame in the 1920s might never have extended beyond the villages of North India. After his first decade of wandering (ca. 1905-1915), he remained nearly as obscure as Christian sadhus who had preceded him. But times were changing. Some liberal missionaries were embracing “fulfillment theory.” Proponents of this view, as expressed in J. N. Farquhar’s The Crown of Hinduism (1913), argued that non-Christian religions were a praeparatio evangelica and hailed Sundar Singh as a living example of the fulfillment of Hinduism in Christ. Consequently, as English-language publications about him were produced, he was invited on a series of wide-ranging tours, both in India and abroad. The Christian West was in need, not only of a new “St. Paul,” but also of a hero similar to self-consciously “Hindu” mahatmas or “saints” such as Gandhi.

Once invited abroad, however, Sundar Singh’s message was disarmingly simple. It focused not on theological assessments of “other” religions, missionary strategy, or Indian nationalism, but on the universal human need to seek God, and on God’s revelation in Christ. The one thing necessary for those in both East and West was to sit in silence at the feet of the Divine Master, who was equally hidden and equally accessible to all.

In 1922, Sadhu Sundar Singh made his final return to India. As the onset of illness restricted his movement, he lived less and less in the garden of this world and more and more in the heavenly paradise (bihist) of his ecstatic visions. He composed eight devotional books and, when strength permitted, made intermittent returns to the lifestyle of a sadhu. In June of 1929, despite extremely poor health, Sundar Singh set out for Tibet. He never returned. And thus he disappeared, as historian Eric Sharpe put it, “into the brilliant darkness of legend.”

Timothy Dobe is a doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

It was July 1706. The people of Tranquebar, a small Danish trading station on the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India (modern-day Tamil Nadu), rejoiced to see the Danish ship Sophia anchoring in the deep waters. Tamil boatmen rushed to offload the cargo. The captain who oversaw the transfer of goods became impatient and mercilessly whipped the boatmen. But one of the passengers on the ship, a 23-year-old German missionary, objected, “Do not whip! They are people.” To this the captain replied, “No, they are Malabarians [i.e., ‘beasts’].”

In contrast to the callous attitudes of merchants who exploited lowly workers without concern for their well being, the missionary, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719), had come to India for the express purpose of letting all people, high or low, know their privileges, rights, and responsibilities before God. Ziegenbalg’s deep respect for the Tamil people, their culture, and their traditions left an enduring impact upon south India and had far-reaching influence. By the time William Carey, the celebrated English Baptist missionary often called the “father of the modern missionary movement,” arrived in Calcutta in 1793, evangelical Christianity in India was nearly a century old. Almost every missionary method that he later developed had already been tried—by a Pietist Lutheran in Tranquebar.

Pietist pioneers

Early Lutheran Reformers had associated “mission” with preaching the Word of God and administering the sacrament, leaving little place for cross-cultural missionary work. But German Pietism (sometime called “The Second Reformation”) opened the door to a more holistic understanding of Christian outreach. Halle Pietist leader August Hermann Francke believed that evangelism and education went hand in hand and that every person on earth should be able to read the Bible in his or her own language and to learn some useful skill—a revolutionary vision for world mission.

A Pietist court preacher in Copenhagen persuaded King Friedrich IV to start an overseas mission in 1705. He also managed to bring two young German Pietists, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, to Copenhagen and strove to have them ordained as missionaries. The king took it for granted that the Danish Lutheran Church and the Danish East India Company (DEIC) would support his decision. This did not happen. In fact, the directors of the DEIC dispatched a secret order to the governor of Tranquebar directing him to hinder the missionaries—an order that unfortunately reached the governor before the missionaries arrived. He left them stranded on the shore.

A converted missionary

By 1706, Tranquebar (Tamil: Tarangambadi, literally “village of dancing waves”) was already a flourishing trading settlement of about 30,000 people, including 20 Danes, 500 Roman Catholics (mostly of Indo-Portuguese descent) and 2,000 Muslims. About 90 caste groups worshipped in 51 major temples and spoke 18 different languages (predominantly Portuguese and Tamil).

Soon after his arrival, Ziegenbalg ventured to bridge the gap between the Europeans and the Indians, who looked on Christianity as something foreign. He learned to speak Tamil, read Tamil literature, and carefully studied the ideas and practices of the people. In 1708 he confessed that his knowledge of the local culture had “converted” him, and he no longer viewed the Tamil people as “the uncivilized heathens,” like other Europeans did. His experience enabled him to treat the Tamils as equal partners and friends and to earn their trust in return. In fact, his commitment to justice and the welfare of the common people collided with the interests of the DEIC, which did not hesitate to imprison him for four months.

Ziegenbalg was committed to helping the Tamil Christian converts practice their faith within their own cultural setting. Once a Tamil medical doctor asked him, “Should converted Christians give up their culture and social status?” Ziegenbalg replied, “No, converted Tamils should not become Europeans! Conversion does not mean a change of outward appearance; rather it requires a change of mind and results in a transformed life.” He believed that conversion to Christian faith should re-orient the entire life of the converts, including their cultural and religious heritage, towards Jesus Christ.

Ziegenbalg’s Tamil sermons, hymns, ethical writings, and German translations of Tamil literature demonstrate his deep cultural and religious sensitivity. Moreover, his work in Tranquebar epitomized Francke’s vision of Bible translation and universal literacy. He was the first to translate the New Testament into Tamil (printed in 1715) and began translating the Old Testament as well—a project completed by his successors B. Schultze and J. P. Fabricius. Aided by Tamil partners, he built a church and founded schools where children studied the Bible along with Tamil ethics, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and world geography. In the course of time, these children became the bearers of Tamil Christianity.

Tranquebar and beyond

Ziegenbalg’s colleagues tried to follow his example by continuing his translation and literary endeavors. Their many accomplishments include a treatise on Tamil medicine (1713) and the first English-Tamil Dictionary (1779). C. T. Walther, one of Ziegenbalg’s most gifted successors, observed that Tamil culture was in many ways similar to ancient Hebrew culture and sent his observations back to Germany, hoping that his insights would clarify the meaning of certain biblical customs and idioms that Europeans could not easily understand.

Walther, who believed that European missionaries were merely temporary guests and catalysts among the Tamil people, was also a strong advocate for indigenous leadership. In 1727 he encouraged Rajanayakkan, a convert from Roman Catholicism, to establish a congregation in Thanjavur—a task no European would dare to attempt since Thanjavur was an ancient citadel of Tamil power and pride. Rajanayakkan, a soldier in the army of the King of Thanjavur, also acquired a grant from the Maharajah for a model modern school. In 1733, Walther persuaded the mission authorities in Europe and the Christians in Tranquebar to ordain Aaron as the first Tamil Lutheran pastor in Thanjavur.

The Tranquebar Mission bore fruits beyond its own small region. Ziegenbalg’s colleague B. Schultze established a Lutheran mission in Madras (then the major center of the English East India Company) and became the first missionary supported by the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge—a remarkable example of early ecumenical cooperation linking India, Germany, Denmark, and Britain. Moreover, the Halle Reports, the first mission periodical newsletter or magazine (published since 1708), popularized the Tranquebar Mission not only in Western Europe but also in Russia and North America and led to the emergence of voluntary missionary societies. Ziegenbalg’s pioneering endeavors thus not only laid the foundation for tremendous growth of the church in South India in the coming century, but it also set the pattern for future missionary work all over the world.

Daniel Jeyaraj is associate professor of World Christianity at Andover-Newton Theological School.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

The story of conversions in India is an excellent example of the indigenous discovery of Christianity (rather than a Western Christian discovery of indigenous societies). No culture is sacred but every culture has the potential to become so. Throughout history, Christian faith has transcended ethnic, national, and cultural barriers, reshaping and redeeming the cultures it has entered. But Christian faith has also taken the shape of those “host cultures” as people in each culture recognize resonant themes in the faith.

Missionaries from abroad bring an initial stimulus, with new technologies for transmitting both Scripture and science. Those technologies serve, together with local agents, to “translate the message” into idioms that are locally acceptable and attractive. After an incubation period—during which early converts absorb, thoroughly internalize, and adapt the gospel to their own culture—explosions of spiritual energy turn whole communities to the new faith. Nowhere can this pattern be more clearly seen than in the process that culminated in Tirunelveli (then spelled Tinnevelly). From 1799 onwards, whole villages forsook old ways and turned temples into chapel-schools. Christians doubled or tripled their numbers in every decade thereafter.

Strategies: literacy and learning

This story starts in eastern Germany—in Halle and Herrnhut, the wellsprings of Pietism. Evangelicalism and Enlightenment were twin engines in A. H. Francke’s vision of bringing universal literacy and numeracy to every person on earth—man, woman, and child—so that each might gain access to God’s Word in his or her mother tongue.

Ziegenbalg came to Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India in 1706. He built the first modern Tamil schools, printed schoolbooks, scriptures, and scientific studies. As small congregations and trained Tamil pastors and teachers proliferated, the Halle vision spread to more and more villages in the Tamil countryside. By the 1730s, Tamil evangelical leaders such as Aaron and Rajanayakkan had gained royal patronage and were building the first model school in Thanjavur. Forty years later, disciples whom C. F. Schwartz (one of Ziegenbalg’s successors) had trained at higher-level schools in Thanjavur were fanning out, two by two, across the peninsula, until their chapel-schools reached Palaiyankottai in Tirunelveli Country.

Schwartz, perhaps the most remarkable of all Halle missionaries in India, was adept in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, Portuguese, and other European languages, both modern and classical. A skilled preacher, teacher, schoolmaster, diplomat, and statesman, he ended his 50-year career as Raja-Guru, Protector-Regent, and “Father” to Serfoji, Maharaja of Thanjavur.

By then, gifted disciples he called “Helpers” had gone far and wide—from Tranquebar to Tiruchirapalli, to Tirunelveli, and even as far as Travancore (almost 300 miles away). This outreach occurred during times of ceaseless war, famine, and suffering. It took place in the face of implacable opposition to Christian missions from the English East India Company, whose forces were then extending their rule over much of the subcontinent.

Gifted disciples

Missionaries from abroad deserve only limited credit for the efforts that turned Tamil communities toward Christian faith. Time and again, adventurous and gifted converts brought the gospel to their home villages in their own tongue.

Schwartz’s disciples illustrate this. As early as 1769 a Vellalar (from a high caste that had created a proud classical Tamil civilization) Christian soldier stationed with the East India Company’s garrison at Palaiyankottai wrote Schwartz about his small congregation, begging for a pastor. In 1778, Schwartz himself came to Palaiyankottai. While there, he baptized an affluent Brahman widow whom he already knew. Christening her “Clarinda,” he gave her a place of leadership within the small congregation. Clarinda, with help from a Vellalar catechist-disciple named Rayappan, ran the local school and endowed the building of a proper (pukka) “prayer/school” hall. She was not satisfied until her small congregation had its own full-fledged and properly trained pastor-teacher.

The person sent to tend the congregations was Satyanathan Pillai. Satyanathan came from a highborn Vellalar family in Thanjavur. A veteran Schwartz disciple, he had served as pastor-teacher of the suburban village “prayer hall” as well as the city congregation of Thanjavur. When Satyanathan first came to Tirunelveli in 1783, Schwartz also recruited a brilliant youth named Vedanayakam Pillai and took him back to Thanjavur where, in due course, he became the most renowned Tamil scholar-writer of the age. The Maharajah later recognized Vedanayakam’s achievements and bestowed on him the title of Sastri (Master of Learning). Meanwhile, from 1790 onward, after he was ordained as the very first Tamil evangelical missionary, Satyanathan began to lead what was to become India’s first extraordinary and rapid Christian conversion movement.

Back from the dead

This process accelerated in 1797. A young Shanar (low-caste) convert, Sundaranandam David, returned from Thanjavur and launched a radical bhakti (or “spiritual or devotional”) movement among his own people. Schwartz, aged and failing, had trained and sent him to help Satyanathan. The movement began when Sundaranandam’s relatives, blinking their eyes at his sudden appearance as if from the dead, heard the wonders of his conversion. Soon after they themselves had embraced the gospel, four families at Vijayaramapuram, not far away, asked for instruction.

Then Shanars at Shanmugapuram and surrounding villages also joined him. Satyanathan and Sundaranandam found themselves talking and talking with people who allowed them “not even a quarter of an hour’s leisure.” For 16 days, they worked night and day. Shanars, treated with respect for the first time in their lives, responded in droves. One relative explained, “I am glad to see that you behave so kindly towards us and make no distinction of caste.” Whole villages began to turn Christian. Soon, thousands of Shanars (who now began to call themselves “Nadars,” or “Lords”) flocked to embrace the new faith.

This, in turn, aroused the wrath of landlords. Fearing loss of the free labor landlords believed was due them, they called for the warlords. Toughs and “club-men” from Ramnad descended upon the new communities and “plundered, confined, and tortured” them, pulling down their mud-thatch huts and prayer-schools, burning their books, and exposing them to insults, intimidation, and violence. This persecution coincided with wars then tearing apart much of south India. Beyond fortified towns and villages, devastation, famine, and pestilence stalked the land. Thousands of Christians lost everything and saw lives destroyed, prayer-schools and dwellings pulled down, property taken, and families beaten, stripped, and sent into the jungle to die.

Sundaranandam, charismatic and fiery, led the movement after Satyanathan’s health began to fail and he retired to Thanjavur. Thereafter, constant persecution and martyrdom set a pattern that would be replicated in other movements of mass conversion. During the century that followed, whenever whole villages turned Christian en masse, persecution would follow.

Villages of refuge

Desperation inspired creativity. The first “Village of Refuge,” modeled on biblical lines, was called “Mudalur” or “First Village.” It was so successful that other settlements soon followed (i.e. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Samaria, Galilee, Megnanapuram, Sawyerpuram, Anandapuram, Dohnavur, and many more). Voluntary “self-help” societies were formed within each village to care for the needy, those fleeing their homes, the sick, poor, widows, and orphans.

As numbers of Christians doubled, missionaries began to arrive. They helped to build institutional infrastructures. Eventually, schools, printing presses, colleges and seminaries for training leaders, and hospitals followed. Pietistic communities of Tirunelveli Country became so numerous, prosperous, and strong that in the long run they helped, in some measure, to transform local Hindu culture and society.

In 1816, James Hough, a military chaplain and disciple of Cambridge pastor Charles Simeon, arrived. He had forsaken a Church of England “living” to serve God in India. He found 53 thriving congregations meeting in thatch-roofed prayer-houses, where children recited Scripture and copied verses onto palm leaf (cajan) books, and where worshippers tarried to sing hymns “to a late hour.” They gave him a joyful welcome. Hough opened schools, using his own funds to erect small buildings, hire schoolmasters from Thanjavur, and buy books from Tranquebar. By 1819, with help from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) and the Church Mission Society (C.M.S.), 15 Tamil schools were serving 551 students and two English schools were teaching 59 students. Two more “villages of refuge” were also founded, Pohlayarpuram and Houghayarpuram.

The arrival of Karl Rhenius in 1820 radically transformed prospects for Tirunelveli’s evangelical Christians. An ex-soldier from Berlin, with Moravian leanings, he had come to India under the fledgling C.M.S. at a time when the English were hard to enlist. He was later described as “one of the ablest, most clear-sighted and practical, and most zealous missionaries that India has ever seen” and as the “Apostle to Tirunelveli.” A charismatic and fiery individual with a superb command of Tamil, he had a vision for social revolution.

“Pilgrims,” again trained and sent out two by two across the countryside, quickly brought fresh outbreaks of mass conversion. Shanar (a.k.a. Nadar) villages were the most responsive, but converts also came from other communities, including some landholding Vellalars. Again, whole villages turned Christian. Sometimes converts threw images of village deities into wells and transformed local temples into prayer-school halls. Again, when persecution broke out, new villages of refuge sprang up. Dohnavur, for example, was endowed by a Swedish-Prussian Count to whom Rhenius had written. It was here that Amy Carmichael would later establish her well-known ministry to girls fleeing temple prostitution.

On June 2, 1830, an assembly of Tirunelveli congregations founded their own Philanthropic Society (Dharma Sangam). During severe persecution, with landed gentry throwing up resistance, this society showed how converts could help one another and strengthen themselves by setting up a permanent endowment for purchasing new villages of refuge where new Christians might live in peace. One such endowment, made by David Pillai Asirvatham, a prominent Vellalar Christian, was celebrated in a special kal-natu (“founding” ceremony) on December 15, 1836, and christened Suvisesha-puram (“Gospel-village”). By that time, members of congregations numbered 11,186. Two decades later, this number had grown to 46,047. (Catholic Tamil Christians in Tirunelveli villages numbered roughly the same.)

One strength of this movement lay in its inner support structures. Tirunelveli congregations themselves, among their hundreds of schools, systematically promoted female education and fostered voluntary societies for charitable purposes. In every Christian village, congregations assembled each morning and evening at the ringing of a bell for united prayer. Each congregation was governed by its own panchayat or “council of five,” the pastor and schoolmaster sitting with headman and elders, so that conflicts could be resolved and standards of behavior maintained. Following the Halle pattern, within a system of universal education, each person was continuously drilled in truths of the faith. All, old and young alike, were expected to memorize and recite Scriptures, doctrines, and duties. Small groups examined each other in basics. Baptism and communion could be delayed, sometimes years, until rigorous tests were passed.

By 1831, overarching structures had begun to knit congregations together. Coffers of the Dharma Sangam remained full, reaching 13,320 rupees in 1858 (a rupee, then worth half a dollar, could feed a family well for a fortnight). The Bible and Tract Society (and Press), founded in 1822, printed 45,000 tracts and boasted a 1,237-rupee surplus. The Shanti Sangam (Peace Society), Suvisesha-fanam (“Gospel-penny” or Poor Fund), Widow’s Fund, and Missionary Society that sent its members (known as Desanthari or “Pilgrims”) to every village where no conversions had yet occurred, along with several hundred schools and two colleges for training leaders (some teachers being non-Christian Vellalars), were all locally supported.

These voluntary associations gave Tirunelveli congregations a sturdy sense of self-reliance and independence. During these years, there was little dependence upon colonial (European or Western) resources, motifs, or styles. Most importantly, these Christians remained culturally Tamil—in art, architecture, poetry, and music. Works by Vedanayakam Sastri, and later H. A. Krishna Pillai’s epic Rakshany Yatrikam, an adaptation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 4000 verses within the idiom of classical poetry, brought Tamil evangelical culture to its zenith. The cultural contributions of Tamil Christians serve to silence those who charge that Christianity in India was never more than an “alien” imposition of “cultural imperialism.”

Repeated story

The story of Tirunelveli evangelical Christianity provides a template that can be applied to the story of every other major conversion movement in India over the past two centuries. The same pattern of Christian expansion was replicated among Pulaiyars in Travancore (now Kerala), among Malas and Madigas in Andhra, as well as among all the aboriginal peoples, such as the Khonds, Mundas, Santals, Garos, Mizos and Nagas, dwelling along the forested escarpments of India’s internal and external frontiers and maritime shorelines. Hundreds of such stories, each reflecting unique peculiarities of its own processes of inception, incubation, and expansion under indigenous impetus, can be told.

In virtually every instance, a local culture was Christianized within a community that was either excluded from the great traditions of Sanskritic civilization or had not yet been significantly touched by that civilization. Nor had any such culture yet felt the full impact or attraction of Islamic civilization. This meant that, when touched by the gospel, as conveyed by the combined forces of Pietistic Evangelicalism and Pietistic Enlightenment coming out of Germany, together with modern sciences, printing presses, medical facilities, and technologies, such cultures were open to radical transformation.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is professor emeritus of history and South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Trapped within Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine’s ideological thesis, is a poignant history of Russia’s Jews. It is a history of desire—of 19th-century Jews seeking to free themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution; of the shock of betrayal under Stalin, as Jews were persecuted for their ethnic Jewishness; and finally, of Soviet Jews’ spasmodic, discomfiting, but at times passionate rediscovery of their Jewish identity. The emblazoning image Slezkine leaves us with is of thousands of Russian Jews, most of whom “had probably never been to a synagogue before,” coming to meet Golda Meir in 1948 on Yom Kippur at the Moscow synagogue, chanting in the streets, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Unfortunately, Slezkine surrounds and ultimately overwhelms the promise of this narrative with a thick and loathsome typological shell. Instead of dealing fully with actual Jews, Slezkine mythologizes all Jews as the descendents of Mercury (Hermes), “the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword.” As Mercurians, Jews work with their minds and by their wit. They value language, they value ideas, they value talent and merit. Even when they dwell in a land for centuries, they are essentially nomads, eschewing any permanent connection to place and nation: “A Jewish house in the Ukraine did not resemble the peasant hut next door, not because it was Jewish in architecture (there was no such thing) but because it was never painted, mended or decorated. It did not belong to the landscape; it was a dry husk that contained the real treasure—the children of Israel and their memory.” Sure of their divine exceptionalism, Jews think their neighbors dim-witted: “Their world is larger and more varied” than those of the poor or the princely, both of whom lack a Mercurian intellect. These non-Jews, in Slezkine’s typology, are Apollonians, committed to arcane structures of nobility and caste that run according to values such as manliness and honor, but not merit and ingenuity. Jews think they are better than the Apollonians, lord and plebe, because Jews think better than both: “[Jews] would all take a justifiably dim view of Ivan,” for “[i]f one values mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or peasant.”

Slezkine’s grand and, one can only say, facile thesis consists of the great modern victory of the Mercurians over the Apollonians. It is an account breathtaking in its reductionism: “[F]or much of human history, it seemed quite obvious who had the upper hand. … Then things began to change: Zeus was beheaded, repeatedly, or made a fool of; Apollo lost his cool; and Hermes bluffed his way to the top.” Modernity emerges on the heels of the Jewish Mercury: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds.” In a nifty syllogism, to become modern is to become Mercurian, which is to say, to become Jewish: “only the Jews—the scriptural Mercurians of Europe—came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere.” Indeed, it appears that Slezkine is either being modest or inexact in referring only to the 20th century as “the Jewish century.”

Ultimately, the real value in The Jewish Century is that it reminds us of precisely what is so objectionable about typological thinking. There is, of course, the obvious: Slezkine’s valorization of Jews relies on the very terms used by any and every anti-Semitic tract: for Slezkine and, say, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews are effeminate, cosmopolitan, cunning thinkers whose odd insular languages and blood ties separate them decisively from their neighbors—whom, for good measure, they see as inferior. At the very least, any scholar taking up this tired dichotomy must address how he expects his use of these terms not to validate the racism of which they are a part. Slezkine not only confirms that Jews historically have been seen as “devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy and crude,” but he, shockingly, affirms this view of Jews as rational: “This, too, is a statement of fact, in the sense that, for peasants, pastoralists, princes and priests, any trader or moneylender, or artisan is in perpetual and deliberate violation of most norms of decency and decorum.” One would think that at this point doing history requires more than affirming society’s most reflexive and stereotypical beliefs, even if the values they traditionally reinforce are inverted in the process.

Yet, where The Jewish Century is most instructive of the failure of typological thinking is in the way its emphasis on epic battles and the myth of historical tectonic shifts overwhelms and buries the empirical details of human life that make history a joyfully unpredictable and rich affair. Typological histories are committed to imposing unchanging value-structures on human events, and in this they become anything but historical. Typologies become systems unto themselves. Instead of analyzing history, Slezkine preoccupies the reader with typological brain teasers such as: “Modernity meant universal Mercurianism under the nationalist banner of a return to local Apollonianism.” The more time spent translating abstractions such as this, the more distant become the actual circ*mstances of people’s lives. Consider how just now wading through the abstractions of Mercury and Apollo has made remote and hazy the compelling historical narrative of Russia’s Jews that I outlined at the outset. This is precisely how it feels to read this book.

Ultimately, when resisted even slightly, typological histories can be shown to be absurdly and comically inaccurate. In claiming that “good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world,” Slezkine writes as if the history of political theory does not exist; after all, Aristotle and Augustine, non-Jews both, have contributed a thing or two on citizenship. Indeed, Slezkine’s own account tumbles inward. At one point he insists that “Jews epitomize Western civilization—as its original creators, best practitioners, and rightful beneficiaries.” In almost the same breath—literally eight pages later—he admits that “Jews did not launch the Modern age. They jointed it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands.” On the text’s first page, he claims that nationalism is modernity’s “principal religion,” which is to say that modernity is “about every nation becoming Jewish.” Elsewhere he claims that “nationalism … [was] fundamentally Apollonian,” which by his calculus means that nationalism is fundamentally un-Jewish. What needs to be said here is screamingly obvious: No single people epitomizes Western civilization or nationalism. People, civilizations, and political phenomena are best thought of as full of knots; responsible scholarship gives an account of their tangles.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about The Jewish Century is that it so often—even centrally—betrays its own typological thesis. Slezkine claims that of the three loci of Jewish life in modernity—the Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States—only the United States was Mercurian. Marxism, in its anti-nationalist universalism, and Zionism, in its remaking of Jews as self-sufficient farmers and manly warriors, embodied Apollo. Given that of the three, only the United States did not have Jews central to its theoretical beginnings, we might reasonably wonder how it can be that, as Slezkine says, becoming modern is about becoming Jewish. That is, if we are to take Slezkine’s terms seriously for the moment, what he presents is a story of the way in which the majority of 20th-century Jews were only too ready to remake themselves as Apollonians. Typologically, the Jews, in fact, missed out on their own century.

Of course, in light of the destruction of European Judaism, the 20th century was anything but the Jews’ (or anyone else’s, for that matter). If the absurdity of Slezkine’s typological argument is not amply revealed by the fact that the terms by which he mythologizes Jews—Jews are cunning, clannish, lacking “in dignified maleness,” good with money, disproportionately represented in business and print—are the very terms by which Nazism justified the Jewish genocide, then consider this: “One reason the twentieth century became the Jewish Century is that Hitler’s attempt to put his vision into practice led to the canonization of the Nazis as absolute evil and the reemergence of the Jews as universal victims.” Slezkine’s calculus becomes obscene when being the victim of genocide is made to affirm “Jewish values.” There is no meaning to being slaughtered; it is simply to die a horrible death.

In the end, if we strip away all the typology, the motivating question of this book very well may be, how is it that Jews have been able to achieve a real measure of material and intellectual success as decided minorities? To that end, Slezkine presents innumerable lists of high Jewish demographics, from banking in Minsk to university faculties in Moscow. This is a legitimate question; there is nothing inherently wrong about trying to account for Jewish achievement. But if we are looking for generalizations, what more can be said beyond this: that under the pressure of historical circ*mstance, some Jews exhibit certain habits, practices, and values that make for certain types of social prominence? Further than this, what’s required is to spend time in specific historic contexts, gathering and analyzing evidence of what worked and what didn’t. Slezkine does not do this hard and necessary work. He gives us myth instead. And he leaves us to wonder what became of those Moscow Jews promising to return to Jerusalem.

Jonathon Kahn has a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1998 Ross Gregory Douthat enrolled in Harvard University. The it school, known to Ross Douthat and countless other hopefuls as the H-Bomb. Twenty thousand students. Twenty-two-billion-dollar endowment. More than one million dollars per student. Begun in 1636, the school denies entry to 91 percent of applicants while admitting the best and brightest. Harvard is Harvard.

That same year, I, Nathaniel Jon Daniel Taylor, began my studies at Bethel University. The it school for Baptist General Conference diehards and their ilk. Three thousand students. Fifteen-million-dollar endowment. Five thousand dollars per student, 220 times less than Harvard. Bethel wants to be a good school that educates and trains students in a Christian context. And Bethel is Midwestern to a T: only 27 percent of the students are from out of state. The student body is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and, of course, Christian.

I majored in English Literature and graduated in glorious sun in May of 2002.

Ross Douthat majored in History and Literature and graduated in a downpour a week later.

Three years after our entrance into the “real world,” I’m working at Starbucks and leading high school orchestras on tours of Europe. Ross Douthat works at The Atlantic Monthly and now has written the story of a young man’s four years at the richest, best, most desirable school in the world. Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class is a commentary on the culture of Harvard and the privileged of America. For Douthat, Harvard was not the “refuge of genius and a sanctuary of intellect” he had expected to find; rather, he soon discovered that “the real business of Harvard … was the pursuit of success.” Harvard is the “best known ticket” to entrance into “a privileged class of talented students [that] sits atop the world … secure in the knowledge that they rule because they deserve to rule, because they are the best.” Harvard is the place where the ruling class is educated and maintained.

Both Harvard and Bethel are sold as known quantities—brands that parents can trust. Parents understand that Harvard means success. Bethel promises a solid education in an evangelical setting. At Bethel parents know their children will be kept safe from godless professors, a sexualized culture, and binge drinking—and may even find a good Christian spouse. Their children will enter as Christian teenagers and leave as Christian adults. And at the end, after the entire bill is paid, both sets of parents will be happy.

Harvard is fully entrenched in the world of the American Dream, the world of liberal piety, capitalist joy, status, and money. To a degree Bethel is caught in this same world. Bethel wants to be high on the US News and World Report college rankings, proudly informing donors and prospective students that it is the eighth-ranked university in such-and-such region. It wants recognition for its success as a school educating doctors, professors, pastors, professionals, teachers, and nurses. It wants its students to go out and claim great fame and success. It wants all this, yet Bethel is an avowedly Christian school that is “committed to a distinctly evangelical Christian philosophy of education.” Bethel’s definition of success is constrained by the calling of God to live in the Kingdom of Heaven. In God’s kingdom success is not measured by the percentage of alumni that give money or which former students walk the halls of power or the latest academic research. In God’s Kingdom success is loving God and loving your neighbor and giving hope to the hopeless and blessing your enemies. Unfortunately for Bethel, these are difficult things to measure and even harder to execute. How do you help students see the Kingdom of God? Where is the course that trains Samaritans to be good?

Bethel’s particularistic commitments are sharply at odds with Harvard’s fervent pluralism. In step with the wider culture, Harvard is dedicated to Tolerance. As long as the students are happy with their moral position, then so is Harvard. Harvard is Las Vegas to Bethel’s Vatican City. Where Harvard turns a blind eye to rampant p*rnography, Bethel combats it.

It’s true that, in this admirable desire to mold Christian character, Bethel is too often simplistic in its answers. Like many other Christian schools, Bethel has a lifestyle statement that focuses on prohibiting drinking, premarital sex, and other vices. Students are exhorted through Bible studies, chapel, church posters in the hall. This unceasing barrage, this chorus of affirmation and certainty, however well intentioned, leaves many students frustrated and cynical about Christianity, especially in its evangelical permutations. In our moments of doubt, fellow students may urge us to “just pray about it and believe.” It seems that questions are wrong and doubting is faithless. Like many a good parent, Bethel has a hard time letting students find their own way in becoming adults.

But then comes a moment when we notice that Bethel hasn’t simply replaced our parents in telling us what to do. To our surprise, relief from cynicism is found in the classroom, where professors honestly and humbly engage difficult issues of literature, history, physics, philosophy, and a life well lived. This is Bethel’s secret: it is a school blessed with a group of wise and wonderful professors who ask hard questions and seek honest answers. From my freshman discussion of the nature of faith in Shusaku Endo’s Silence to my senior Literary Theory course where voices quivered in defense of feminism, I found professors who didn’t allow unexamined convictions to pass unchallenged.

The faculty at Bethel engage in students’ experiences and provide a framework for students to understand their changing lives. Professors show by their example what it means to be a Christian living an intellectually full and honest life. This direct interaction with strongly committed teachers is what makes Bethel work as a school.

For all the glories of its faculty, Harvard does not offer this intensive interaction. By Douthat’s account, Harvard “rarely rewards devotion to undergrad education.” Its professors are off doing research, maintaining tenure and status, and traveling far and wide, leaving the dirty work of teaching undergrads to graduate student assistants. The demands of faculty to produce and to be a success are too high to bother with teaching.

Outside the classroom, Bethel’s audacious mission to encourage Christian discipleship provides abundant opportunities for service: mission trips to Mexico, tutoring in Minneapolis, volunteering as tax preparers for the poor, and countless others, large and small. Harvard, of course, offers similar opportunities, and I’m sure that many students there (Christian and otherwise) give their time and energy to service (just as there are many at Bethel who can’t be bothered). But the ethos of Harvard, as Douthat describes it, is fundamentally about success. Harvard will prepare the way for you.

This has certainly been true for Douthat himself. At Harvard he wrote for the Crimson. He interned at National Review and went skinny-dipping with William F. Buckley, Jr. From Harvard and National Review and the drive to succeed he landed at The Atlantic Monthly, where he wrote Privilege. He’s been interviewed by NPR and skewered by Slate. His book has been widely and (mostly) favorably reviewed. At the age of 25 he is wildly successful, and he clearly deserves it. He is a very capable and insightful writer who will go on to do great and good things. But his success is due in part to Harvard—the institution, the education, and the culture.

Success, in an odd way, found me too. From Bethel I got work on an Indian reservation and rode horses with Lonnie Little Bird and saw a world outside my own. From Bethel I struggled to teach math to a kid who can’t get 2 + 9 and learned to love a neighbor. From Bethel and tutoring I landed at St. George’s in London, a window on the wider world.

Bethel was good to me and Bethel was hard for me. It was a strange place, mixing stereotypical puritanical living with the boundless love of God—signing covenant statements about community while finding community in the inner city of Minneapolis. At the beginning Bethel, for me, was not a place of hopes and dreams; rather it was a place of societal duty. I needed a degree, and Bethel would provide one. But by the end of my four years, I was surprised by what I had learned and how I had changed. At Bethel I began to understand how to live a good life, a kind of success even Harvard might envy.

Nathaniel Taylor is a dutiful Starbucks employee and sometime tour guide residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The top-selling golf books on Amazon.com aim to help you play the game better, from The Plane Truth for Golfers (about the plane of the golf swing) to Tiger Woods’ How I Play Golf. The only non-instructional book in the top ten features Phil Mickelson’s ruminations on who and what helped him win the 2004 Masters. Keep scrolling down and you’ll find the occasional biography or history among the 6,700 books listed, but you’ll be overwhelmed with instructional books.

It isn’t until you get to 107th place that you run into Deepak Chopra’s Golf for Enlightenment, a book that aims to teach seven lessons of “the game of life.” And then come thousands more books about shaving strokes from your score.

It appears that golfers don’t give a rip whether golf can teach them something about life. They just want to consistently drive the middle of the fairway, hit the green in regulation, get out of sand traps in decent shape, and sink those birdie putts. And they’re willing to spend money on books that help them do that.

Christian publishers publish books to help people think about all of life from a godly perspective. Since golf is considered at best a mere diversion, and at worst a game that tempts one to use the Lord’s name vainly, Christian publishers usually don’t show much interest in golf.

Unless the book can help readers think better or live better for God—thus three of the books reviewed here. The Chopra book does the same thing, but from a pop-Eastern religion-cum-Western-psychology perspective. The target audience for such books, presumably, is golfers who want to be better people.

But as I noted, golfers don’t want to be better people. They want to be better golfers. As the Amazon rankings suggest, these books are destined to collect dust on the shelves of golfers who have received them as Father’s Day or birthday gifts.

Moral golf

Don’t get me wrong. These books have virtuous things to say. For example, each of the nine chapters in Roger and Becky Tirabassi’s Transform Your Game begins with a lesson about golf, which is then applied to life. It nearly goes without saying that I would be a better golfer and person were I to “Practice like the Pros,” “Play by the Rules,” and “Overcome the Hazards.”

Another example: In The Heart of a Golfer, Wally Armstrong devotes a chapter to “Trust Your Swing.” After three pages of golf anecdotes and advice, he concludes by reminding readers that we can “trust Christ with our future.” I’m unconvinced by the analogy, but there’s no doubt that both bits of advice are salutary.

Finally, in Life Lessons from the Game of Golf, Steve Riach profiles professional golfers and their character traits. So Payne Stewart’s chapter focuses on “faith” and “influence,” and Jack Nicklaus’ chapter is about “sacrifice” (though it is mostly about his wife’s sacrifice in letting Jack practice and trot around the world while she raised the family; stretching illustrations to the breaking point is a common occurrence in such books).

Deepak Chopra’s lessons are more mystical—”Find the Now and You’ll Find the Shot,” “Play from Your Heart to the Hold,” “Let the Game Play You,” and so forth—but the result is the same: tidbits of advice for better living, from “Be willing to redefine yourself everyday” to “Don’t act when you’re in doubt.”

Of course, some of Chopra’s advice runs directly counter to Christian sensibilities. “We are here to nourish the self,” he explains early on. “The self is the source of your personal identity.” Still, he connects to his subject by explaining that golfers must first examine themselves and their attitudes before they can improve—a truism on which we can all agree.

Well and good. I am not about to argue against such virtues as they relate to golf or life. Self-control is an absolute necessity in both, as are perseverance and patience, and a host of other virtues.

Books in this genre, of course, are implicitly trying to get at a deep truth—that in golf, as in every sphere of life, there is spiritual truth to be mined. One’s instinct in this sport, as in all sports, is to assume that the spiritual fruit lies in the area of morality—that golf will make you a better person. A study of golfers on the course would suggest just the opposite, which is perhaps all the more reason these authors felt compelled to write these books.

But such books merely scratch the surface of “golf spirituality.” Indeed, golf is a sport rich in Judeo-Christian meaning, but books that express that meaning most simply and artfully are being written in the thousands already.

The Theology of Golf

By rich in Judeo-Christian meaning, I don’t necessarily mean rich in theological allusions—although golf has plenty of that. For example, it seems patently clear that golf is a living apologetic for hard-core Calvinism.

You hit a near-perfect iron to the green, so accurate it strikes the flag stick—and then ricochets off and ends up in a sand trap. So much for your perfect iron. On the next hole, you wickedly slice a drive into a thick cluster of trees, hear a frightening thud—and see your ball magically bounce out into the middle of the fairway. This sort of thing happens in every round. There is no sense shaking one’s fist heavenward or cursing the ways of this inscrutable god. If one wants to get on in the life of golf, the best posture is to humbly accept this god’s complete sovereignty and prepare for the next shot.

In this regard, golf is Protestantism on steroids. It is a purely individual sport. In team sports, the weight of salvation is shifted constantly, from pitcher to shortstop to batter, or from quarterback to lineman to linebacker. No one player has the burden for more than part of the game, and every teammate is there to bring encouragement one to another. In golf, the burden rests squarely on the shoulders of the golfer for every shot, from start to finish.

Since after every shot, golfers have between three and four minutes to reflect on that shot, we tend to become as introspective as the most anxious Puritan. And what we’re introspective about is our sinfulness—that is, how we’ve missed the mark once again—and what we can do to correct our wayward swing. The system of scoring in golf reinforces all this. It is the only system in which there is a direct correlation between the player’s sinfulness and his score: the less one misses the mark, the lower one’s score.

Golf can also be mined for how it plays into Christian mythology. It is the only major sport played in a garden—though many golfers spend more time in the wilderness. Even at average courses one is often impressed with the splendid aesthetic balance of grass, trees, flowers, and sand, and the way the eye is drawn down the green, curving fairway. If Wrigley Field is beautiful in its own way, for its pleasing symmetry, Pebble Beach is positively Edenic in its splendor.

In addition, the structure of the game harkens more to salvation history than do other sports. Baseball in this respect is more like a Greek tragedy. You play an inning, run around the bases, and the next inning you find yourself back at home plate, where you start all over again—that’s history as a circle. In golf, you begin with a goal on the horizon, toward which you travel. And then when that trek ends, with the ball resting safely in the hole, you walks to the next tee to commence another journey. This is history with a telos, an eschatological goal.

Still, as intellectually entertaining as such theological ruminations are, they fail to get at the heart of what makes golf a deeply spiritual activity. To do that, we need to talk about the nature of play.

Play Is the Thing

In his classic hom*o Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Catholic scholar Johan Huizinga explains that play is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the play intensely and utterly. … It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.”1

As such, play is “the first act of freedom,” says Michael Novak in The Joy of Sports. “The first free act of the human is to assign limits within which freedom can be at play. Play is not tied to necessity, except to the necessity of the human spirit to exercise its freedom, to enjoy something that is not practical, or productive, or required for gaining food or shelter.”2

Play is what it is precisely because it aborbs us “intensely and utterly” but for no apparent good reason. Play is play when it is engaged passionately and pointlessly, when it doesn’t do any good by our usual calculus. If we play primarily to stay in shape or to build character or to make a lot of money, the activity is better called exercise or catechism or work.

Play is play, then, when it mirrors the Sabbath—a day in which nothing useful (by human reckoning) gets done. Though we usually speak of the Sabbath as rest from labor to get ready for another exhausting week of work, this is not its theological origin. God did not create and participate in the Sabbath because he was worn out after fashioning the universe. Instead, the Sabbath is the seventh and final act of his creation, and as such is the culmination of Creation—the point of it all.

The Latin Vulgate translation of Proverbs 8:30-31 runs like this: “I [Wisdom, i.e., Christ] was at his [God’s] side putting together everything, my delight increasing each day, playing before him all the while, playing in this world made of dust, and my delight was to be with the sons of men.” Or, as Thomas Aquinas saw it, in Luiz Jean Lauand’s summary: “God plays. God creates playing. And man should play if he is to live as humanly as possible and to know reality, since it is created by God’s playfulness.”3

Modern scholars recognize that the original Hebrew moves in a slightly different direction. Still, Aquinas’ insight accords with the sweep of salvation history, which begins with the creation of the Sabbath and culminates with the Eternal Sabbath—characterized by freedom and joy in the presence of God. Remembering the Sabbath is crucial not simply because we need a break but because it manifests our origin and our destiny—the full sweep of God’s salvation history. When Peter Berger, in his Rumor of Angels, says that play (freedom and joy!) is a “signal of transcendence,” he’s getting at that connection between play and Sabbath.

That golf teaches virtues is all well and good. That it is a quirky metaphor for many theological themes, fine. But its real glory is to be found not in what it can teach us but in what it is: a game to be played.

Ironically, the eastern mystic Deepak Chopra comes close to grasping this theological take on golf. His chapters each begin with a fictional story involving Adam Seaver and Leela. Leela, he lets us know in a prologue, represents the way “ancient sages” define life—as a “game.”

“The divine game isn’t a competition but play for the sheer joy of it. It has the total innocence that comes naturally to young children. … We have to accept the divine gift that makes heaven out of life on earth.” A few paragraphs later, he quotes “one spiritual leader” (Chopra is vague at attribution) as saying, “When you look around, there is eternity in every direction.”

Then he applies all this to golf: “If you approach golf the wrong way, trying to manage its mechanics from the level of ego, these limitations are reinforced. If you approach golf the right way, letting your spirit be free to enjoy the leela, these limitations disappear.”

Chopra is fundamentally right about the nature of golf. Like all sports, it is all about leela, a Sabbath, from beginning to end. It’s all about play.

And Chopra is almost right about the nature of life. It is all about the Sabbath, from beginning to end, and therefore fundamentally about play—freedom and joy in God. As such, it has many moments when eternity is manifested within it—if only we have eyes to see.

Ah, yes, but Chopra, as usual, soon veers off into silliness. Sorry, Deepak, but a heck of a lot of golf is about mastering the mechanics of the swing, and there is only one entity that can practice those mechanics: the self. And the self, no matter how much he or she enjoys leela, will always and everywhere face limitations. It’s called finitude.

Chopra’s pseudo-mysticism soon leads him to say things that suggest he really doesn’t understand “play” after all. The hint comes when he says that play has a “total innocence that comes naturally to young children.” He apparently has not watched young children play. Lots of competition there, and some of it pretty intense. This discomfort with play as something that engages us “intensely and utterly” comes out later, when Leela tells Steve to simply stop keeping score and to “forget where the ball goes.” Chopra imagines that golf can be enjoyed by just swinging away at the ball with no goal, no telos.

Catholic theologian (also, as I recall, an NFL coach) Vince Lombardi put it most Christianly: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” This does not mean that anything goes, for as Huizinga notes play “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.” But it is not play unless it is engaged “intensely and utterly.” I’m not sure how golf can be played if you don’t keep score, and you don’t strive to keep that score low. It is these limitations and passions that are golf’s genius, at the very core of its freedom and joy. Chopra, in trying to transcend these limitations, ends up subverting the play element.

The Most Christian Golf Book in Recent History

Lest the Christian reader (and golfer) despair, there is hope, and hope aplenty. There are all sorts of books at Amazon.com that seek to help readers experience the theological essence of golf.

As a beginning, I recommend the most theologically informed and eschatologically hopeful golf book written in the last twenty years: Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. There are two reasons it remains very near the top of the list of bestselling golf books. First, it seeks to answers the golfer’s ongoing existential question: “How do you build a swing that you can depend on to repeat in all kinds of wind and weather, under all kinds of presses and pressure?”

Second, it proclaims a gospel—some splendid good news (caps are in the original): “THE AVERAGE GOLFER IS ENTIRELY CAPABLE OF BUILDING A REPEATING SWING AND BREAKING 80.” It is the kingdom of golf heaven drawn near.

Golf most reflects things divine when it is played as if it were nothing but human—proceeding “within its own proper boundaries of time and space.” It is an expression of human freedom most when it is played by “fixed rules and in an orderly manner” and “intensely and utterly.”

Golf books that teach you how to play the game better and better are really the most theological of golf books, because they take the game of golf most seriously, as if it were play. And though the Christian golfer should surely try to be virtuous while on the golf course, he is most Christian, and most virtuous, when he’s simply trying to lower his score.

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. He writes an occasional column for Christianity Today Online about theology and sports called “Play Ball.”

1. Johan Huizinga, hom*o Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Reprint: Beacon Press, 1971).

2. Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (Madison Books, rev. ed., 1993).

3. Luiz Jean Lauand, “Ludus in the Fundamentals of Aquinas’s World-View,” International Studies on Law and Education, Vol. 2 www.hottopos.com/harvard2/ludus.htm

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

By the standards that please accountants, administrators, and the people who do the numbers, times have never been better for Christian higher education, or so it seems. After all, over the last ten years, total enrollment at Christian colleges has increased by more than 45 percent, nearly three times the rate of growth at the 1,600 private colleges and universities in the United States, and ten times the growth of enrollments in state schools. Total undergraduate enrollment at member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities now stands at over 135,000, with probably another 40,000 enrolled in ancillary and graduate programs. Endowments of Christian colleges have begun to creep up into the fabled top 500 of college and university endowments. Wheaton, the richest of all the Christian colleges, ranked 145th in the nation in terms of endowment in 1993, and ran a budget of $45.3 million; in 2002, its budget was $63 million, and its endowment stood at $159 million. The same good things were happening in other places, too. Messiah College, for instance, was sitting on an endowment of over $65 million in 1994 (ranking it 202nd in the nation) and $94 million in 2002; Gordon College saw its budget soar from $29 million in 1998 to $39 million in 2001.1

The high times even trickled down to the faculty. A full professor at Eastern College took home $44,000 in 1994; at Messiah, $48,000; and at Westmont, $48,900. In 2003, the full professor at Westmont was earning $68,700; at Messiah, $65,100; and at Eastern, $68,500.

Nor does any of this seem to be a fluke. “Christian elementary and secondary schools, home schooling, and youth ministries are all thriving,” reported The Chronicle of Higher Education in a feature story in 1999, and they have provided a potent market for Christian higher education recruiting. Christian higher education has also developed more sophisticated marketing tools, and it has benefited from the increasing perception that secular and state schools offer little more than non-stop parties and binge drinking. And probably most surprising, Christian higher education has rocketed upwards in terms of academic and intellectual respectability. “Of all America’s religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism … ranks dead last in intellectual stature,” wrote Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe in 2000. But when Wolfe visited Wheaton College, he discovered that the students “are as outstanding as any in America,” while its faculty “are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life.” No longer, warned Wolfe, can Americans “write off conservative Christians as hopelessly out of touch with modern American values.”2

If news like this made for happiness, then we should be happy indeed. The problem is that it lacks context. The enrollment surge represents a great accomplishment, but its greatness is somewhat diminished by the fact that the total undergraduate enrollment of Christian colleges still amounts to only 1 percent of the 15 million or so students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States. Institutional membership in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities stands at an all-time high of 130, but that amounts to less than 4 percent of the 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States—and at a time when self-identified evangelical Protestants number over 20 million Americans and comprise 7 percent of the population.3 In other words, only one in seven evangelical Christians is likely to attend a Christian college, although these institutions could—and statistically should—correspondingly carry three times as many as they do. Places like Indiana Wesleyan report enrollments of over 10,000 students; but 70 percent of Indiana Wesleyan’s students are part of its off-campus College of Adult and Professional Studies. Fully a quarter of the CCCU colleges and universities enroll fewer than a thousand students; fully a third enroll less than a thousand full-time undergraduates.

It’s not merely that the pool of students is disappointingly small. Christian higher education also has to compete with secular campuses where various Christian ministries have carved out “safe” spaces for Christian students. The success of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and church-related college-age organizations around the country on secular campuses has undermined a major rationale for attending a Christian college or university. So long as Harvard, Dartmouth, or Penn State could be portrayed as quicksands of secularism, Christian colleges had an important trade-off to offer student recruits: the Ivies may offer a more prestigious education, but they’ll smother your spiritual life, and what will it profit a bright kid if he gains a Harvard MBA but loses his soul? Yet today at Harvard, “there are probably more evangelicals than at any time since the 17th century,” says Peter J. Gomes, the minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, and certainly no part of an evangelical himself. As Harvard expanded enrollments in the 1970s and 1980s, that “meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university.” Evangelical students venturing into deepest, darkest Cambridge will still find more than enough hostility to Christianity to challenge their faith; but they’ll also find the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, the Asian-American Christian Fellowship, RealLife Boston, or Park Street Church’s Friday evening prayer fellowship in Emerson Hall. Campus Crusade alone has 27,000 staffers on 1,000 American college and university campuses. And as they grow, such ministries reduce the sense of threat and exposure evangelical students have to feel on secular campuses—and reduce, also, one of the major incentives for coming instead to a Christian college.4

Size, of course, is not a moral quality, so maybe I’m putting our attention on the wrong category. But acceptance rates may be moral qualities, since acceptance rates are generally understood as a good measure of how picky a college can afford to be, which in turn is supposed to indicate how stable (and tuition-proof) its financial position is. By that standard, not many of the Christian colleges enjoy much fiscal stability. For instance: according to the 2002 Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities, Huntington College accepted 650 new students in 2001—but this was almost 95 percent of those who applied, and only a third of the 219 who actually enrolled had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. This suggests that Christian colleges are enormously eager to take whatever students sign up—which suggests, in turn, that they do so because, like the airlines, they cannot afford too many empty seats: Christian higher education is so dangerously tuition-dependent that it can’t be too picky about the caliber of student it enrolls. We apologize for this by reasoning that our educational philosophy is one of ministry, and ministry doesn’t turn people away. On the other hand, that type of student tends to be much more expensive to educate (for reasons I’ll come to in a minute); so even when increases in enrollment improve revenues, they also increase costs. As Melissa Morris-Olson wrote in 1997, “increased enrollments in colleges and universities have not necessarily resulted in improved financial conditions.”5 And the reason is that we are filling those seats with high-maintenance students.

Sadly, it is precisely Christian colleges and universities which are in the weakest financial position for dealing with such students. Whatever the high-number financials are for a Wheaton or a Messiah, the truth is that they are depressingly lower for most of the rest of Christian higher education. In 2002, while little-known Carnegie “Master’s Colleges and Universities” like Rider University enjoyed revenues of $111 million (or Suffolk University, which had $127 million, or my old neighbor, Villanova University, which had $285 million), Christian colleges in the same Carnegie category went a-begging. Eastern had revenues of $47 million, Geneva had $33 million, Malone had $32 million, and enrollment powerhouse Indiana Wesleyan reported only $55 million. That pales beside the revenues enjoyed by the top-flight Carnegie ‘Baccalaureate’ colleges that places like Gordon, Wheaton, and Eastern think of as their real counterparts. The wish, in that case, is only father to the thought, since none of the CCCU schools—not even Wheaton—could match the $110 million in annual revenues enjoyed by Amherst (or Amherst’s $877 million endowment), the $128 million reported by Grinnell (or Grinnell’s $1.111 billion endowment), or the $129 million enjoyed by Oberlin (with its comparatively modest portfolio of $537 million).

The wild ’90s were good for nearly every college or university endowment, and almost all Christian colleges experienced endowment growth. But compared broadly, that growth was amazingly meager. Wheaton’s place in the endowment ranking actually slipped to 159th in 2002, and 166th in 2003; Messiah fell 100 places to 302nd by 2002, and skidded to 320th in 2003, losing 6.4 percent of its endowment value in the bust year of 2002. Seattle Pacific, which was lodged at 398th in 1994, was mired at 575th in 2003.6 Over the same decade that Harvard and Princeton tripled their endowments, the rate of endowment growth at Wheaton was a third less, while Messiah’s grew by only 60 percent. Either because development officers at Christian colleges are unusually modest in what they ask for, or (what is more likely) donors are concluding that their dollars buy them more prestige at Harvard than Messiah, the financial base of Christian higher education seems actually to be shrinking, rather than growing. And the closure of William Tyndale College, despite a takeover by Regent University and a influx of $1 million in cash, may well be only an indication of what the lengthening financial shadows of Christian higher education are pointing toward.

As the costs of private higher education across the board soar ever upwards, and as the purposes of college education turn ever more vocational, only the most élite of private liberal arts colleges are likely to survive in their current configurations. And especially for Christian liberal-arts colleges, which are disproportionately grouped in the upper Midwest, the question will eventually be asked: Why do we need 13 Christian colleges in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois? Why, for that matter, do we need three in Pennsylvania? Even the schools which do not finally succumb to the pressures of finance and under-enrollment will still be asked whether merger and consolidation offer a better deployment of resources that are clearly strained to the limit. Inevitably, we will have to wonder whether we are better served by 130 financially edgy colleges, or fifteen combined and (hopefully) stable ones. And inevitably, too, there will be an unholy amount of jockeying among certain Christian colleges whose idea of consolidation will amount to little more than a Darwinian absorption of their lesser-endowed fellows.

What grinds this comparison in deeper is that places like Amherst, Grinnell, and Oberlin were all themselves once Christian colleges—all of them, in fact, founded in the 19th century by righteous Congregationalists who were convinced that Harvard, Yale, and the other old foundations of American higher education had gone rubbery. They are, in effect, enjoying the fat incomes that were originally designed for Christian tables.

Or perhaps (and this is more unsettling) their trajectory reveals the direction Christian higher education in America eventually goes when even modest success comes knocking at the door. I suspect that many of Christian higher education’s schools suffer most, not from lack of money or lack of management, but from a dismaying level of confusion over their exact purpose, a confusion which often begins in the sorry tale of finance that I have just recited, and ends in the loss or crippling of Christian mission. James T. Burtchaell’s sobering 1998 study, The Dying of the Light, chronicles with relentless dismay how the press of finance led to the crumbling of mission in precisely the places Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst once were. Until the Civil War, higher education in America was almost entirely private and Christian—not Christian in the sense of an explicit commitment to faith-learning integration, mandatory chapel and Bible courses, or any of the attributes CCCU schools today use to identify themselves as self-consciously Christian, but Christian in the sense that they had been founded by churches, were staffed by clergy and overseen by boards of clergy, and assumed that their students already possessed a Christian identity from their churches which required only a moralized liberal arts curriculum to polish up. Of the 109 undergraduate colleges in the United States in 1848, not more than ten could be classified as secular. But during the Civil War, in an effort to promote “scientific” modes of agriculture, the federal government undertook a massive legislative intervention in the form of the Land Grant College Act to finance (from the sale of federal lands) the establishment of state-owned vocational schools. In time, these vocational colleges expanded their focus to include teacher-training, engineering, and a number of other “mechanical arts.” Between 1862 and 1910, state-financed higher education posed a serious challenge to the reign of the private, church-related colleges, and the colleges responded in three ways:

(a) they turned to new sources of financial support, such as trustees, alumni, foundations, and industry, many of which required a toning-down of particular religious viewpoints if the colleges were to appeal successfully for the donations of wealthy individuals not of their particular persuasion (a Baptist college, for instance, was not likely to get much money from a Presbyterian financier if it unwisely flaunted its Baptist distinctives);

(b) they turned to new forms of governance, recruiting academics-cum-administrators rather than clergymen as presidents, and deep-pocket philanthropists as their trustees; and

(c) they turned to new forms of professionalism, as they looked to recruit ever-more prestigious faculty—faculty, unhappily, whose first allegiance was to their professional guilds or disciplines, rather than to the church that stood behind the college.7

And so, by a long process (sometimes very long: Princeton still maintained mandatory chapel for undergraduates as late as the mid-1960s), the Christian identity of places like Grinnell, Oberlin, and Amherst was steadily effaced, to the point where one can hardly recollect that they ever had any religious connections at all.

I am not sure that the same developments promise to be any less lethal to Christian higher education today. Lacking endowments sufficient to ensure fiscal stability, and finding the tuition revenue generated by increased enrollments mysteriously proving inadequate to their expenses, Christian colleges turn first to their boards of trustees or directors. Since more than three-quarters of the CCCU schools were organized under the umbrella of evangelical denominations, their boards were originally expected to contain a substantial representation of their sponsoring denominations (in at least two cases I have had direct contact with, even faculty and administration were expected to be members of that denomination). But these were exactly the trustees who were least likely to prove equal to the task of supplying budget shortfalls, and that has meant that the boards of evangelical colleges have recruited some unlikely converts to their governing agencies—individuals who are either well-endowed themselves but of meager religious profile, or else religiously sympathetic but not so well-schooled in evangelical theology as to know what part of the foot goes into the shoe first. This, then, casts board members into roles in the life of Christian colleges for which they may not be well-prepared. And that only speaks to the well-intentioned. In too many instances, board candidates are recruited without any explanation of what a board is supposed to do, recruited sometimes for the prestige they get from being a trustee, or recruited without commitment to putting time or effort into dealing with “problems.”

Boards, in order to stay on top of this managerial explosion (and also because this is the only way their business-world backgrounds have conditioned them to see matters), have increasingly turned to non-academics as their presidents—people, in other words, who have either never lived inside academe, or who have ever only held administrative or development posts in higher education, and who tend to see a college’s imperatives in business-driven, rather than mission-driven, terms. As late as the 1980s, the majority of presidents of Christian colleges were academics with terminal doctorates in some recognized discipline, while the presidents of Bible colleges were usually holders of undergraduate theology degrees and graduate education degrees. By the end of the 1990s, however, barely more than half of the Christian college presidents had a Ph.D. Only 8 percent of those were in the humanities and only 11 percent in theology or biblical studies; more than half had been career administrators. These are not prophets or the sons of prophets; they are managers.8

The same imperative that pushes Christian colleges in pursuit of managerial leadership also pushes them in pursuit of prestige faculty, who, presumably, can act as enrollment magnets (and, incidentally, as hiring trophies for administrators). We want, naturally, the best faculty talent we can get, and we want to get it from the best schools. But the “best” schools frequently turn out to be also the most secularized ones, which means that we are likely to find ourselves recruiting people who are already deeply enculturated in the value systems of élite universities, and who cannot be easily persuaded to abandon them for the missions of Christian colleges. Or else, we recruit faculty whose professional expectations have been shaped by the research university, and who experience disgruntlement and communicate disaffection when they discover the teaching loads and salaries on offer in the cash-strapped Christian colleges.

Even when we are able to recruit new Ph.D.s who can pass doctrinal muster, the passing grade is often not a high one. Lacking much theological training beyond Sunday school, faculty are often unwilling or unable to fully embrace and explain the mission of a particular Christian college. Pascal once remarked that “pious scholars” were rare, and this would not be a bad thing for search committees to commit to memory. In some cases, I have seen Christian college faculty positively pride themselves on being only “amateur” or “lay” theologians, on the grounds that they are much too committed to their disciplines or their students to acquire deep theological learning. (I have found this to be especially true in those evangelical traditions, like the Anabaptists, which have long histories of anti-intellectualism.) Unhappily, theological amateurism often becomes a vacuum into which secularism fears not to tread. In 1996, a Bethel College student, Andrea Sisam, went to the extraordinary length of suing Bethel for forcing her to view in class selections from the film The Tin Drum, which included scenes of simulated oral sex; and I remember being recruited for a senior administrative post at another Christian college, and being asked how I would respond to parents who were upset when a faculty member in the arts assigned Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to his students.9 All of this is certainly first-rate academics; whether it is still Christian is a good question, and one which I expect was once asked at Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst, too, before the tide washed the questioners away.

Can Christian institutions choke on their own success? Quite possibly, and especially on the success we have most prided ourselves upon, which is student enrollments. We concentrate on the increased enrollments without also asking what it is we are increasing our enrollments of. And that may be a much more troublesome proposition than the numbers themselves. As Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton noted in 1998, “students are coming to college overwhelmed and more damaged than in the past.” More than half of the campuses Levine and Cureton surveyed reported difficulties with student eating disorders; 44 percent reported campus disruptions, 42 percent drug abuse, 35 percent alcohol abuse, 25 percent gambling, and 23 percent suicide attempts. Nearly one-third of all freshmen grew up in single-parent households; and they are driven to college, not by a passion for learning, much less truth, but by terror that without a college degree they have nothing to look forward to but lives on minimum wage. There have always been problem students; but the numbers who bring problems with them to college have grown, as have the intractability of the problems (histories of sexual abuse as children, single-parent and dysfunctional homes, chronic psychological traumas and illnesses). The less selective a college can afford to be, the more likely it will see mounting numbers of the damaged among its student population.10

On the other hand, those students who come mercifully free of such problems pose problems of their own. Today’s college student arrives on campus with expectations very different than those of a generation ago, largely because advances in information-related technology have raised those expectations to the level of “normal.” Computer systems and internet access are no longer luxuries, both for on-campus communications networks and for personal convenience; but they still cost as though they were. Ubiquitous as the internet seems to be, it is also very much an infant technological tool; connections, systems, and usage can be surprisingly fragile—and maintenance, highly expensive. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently installed software for intercepting viruses that carried a $400,000 price-tag. Just as with administrative costs, the greater the drive to enroll more students, the more expectations are laid on technology, and servicing those expectations may turn out to cost more than the gains made by enhanced enrollments.11

But more than mere problems among students, there is the cultural dilemma of what Peter Sacks savagely lampooned as The Attitude, a postmodern sensibility of “utter disengagement” which expects entertainment, is puzzled by demands for work, and which regards the reading of books or the application of reason as being nearly as foreign as the other side of the moon. Postmodernism has given us a generation steeped in “consumerism, entertainment, and entitlement,” complained Sacks, and in an institutional environment governed by managerial administration and cost-focused boards, woe to the faculty who sit lightly by these demands.12

Surely, you argue, Christian institutions should simply rebuff these ungodly attitudes as firmly as they rebuffed the ungodlinesses of earlier decades. Except that my own experience of Christian education is that rebuffs are expensive, and culture is powerful. I have seen played out before my own eyes the tendency of evangelical Christians to deplore certain behaviors, find that the deploring has only gotten them strange looks and marginalization by the dominant culture, and then discover ways of rationalizing those behaviors. A female faculty member at a Christian college in California confessed her horror to me, more than a decade ago, at how easily abortions could be procured there—and how readily parents, who liked to talk pro-life politics in public, paid for their daughters’ abortions in private. Litigation-shy administrators have turned to an evangelical version of don’t-ask-don’t-tell to deal with gay and lesbian faculty. Binge drinking is ignored by residence life directors and student-life vice-presidents who know that trustees and parents will vent their wrath on them, not the drinkers.

Even when trustees finally do attempt to intervene in a principled fashion, they are not likely to be thanked for it. When Huntington College dismissed “open theism” advocate John Sanders last fall for theological cause, the college president criticized the decision” because it “could be a blow to academic freedom.” I suppose it could. But why, in a Christian college, do we now declare that secular academic virtues are more important than questions of Christian doctrine?

“Christian colleges … profess Christian doctrine and practice as our defining feature and our primary driving force,” laments Eric Miller of Geneva College, “but a stroll through the campus bookstore, or a visit by an accrediting agency …. remind me of the extent to which we at Christian colleges, despite our clear differences of belief and behavior with our secular equivalents, swim in the same polluted waters.”13 After so much effort at creating and supporting Christian higher education, it is almost the worst judgment we could hear, and yet it springs at once to mind: why bother?

It’s the unaffected willingness of evangelicals to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the age that so deeply troubles me. I do not say this merely because I am besotted with the old wineskins. I have spent a quarter-century in Christian higher education, and with only a few sunspots of grief. It is the city of my first love, and God forbid that anyone should hear this as anything but the faithful wounds of a friend. I also am describing systemic, not personal, dilemmas, and those dilemmas are actually not all that far removed from the pressures secular liberal-arts colleges experience. But for Christian colleges, the dilemmas are complicated by the issue of faithfulness, which we gloss over to our peril, but which also has no easy solution once we trade in conviction for professionalism. At the end of the day, I would prefer conviction, even if the conviction is a little oddball, to professionalism which dies the death of a hundred moral updates.

It would be horrific to think that evangelicalism cannot keep its colleges, that what happened to Grinnell or Amherst or Oberlin—or Yale or Harvard or Dartmouth—is indicative of a deep-seated weakness in the evangelical mind that insists on playing itself out in an endless spool of accommodation and conformity. We hear the call of our Savior to be in the world, but not of it; we hear the demand of the prophets to serve God and not Baal; but we also hear the call of our cultural Sirens, and we discover that we do not believe what we hoped and thought we believed. What we believe in is management, financial survival, increased enrollments, and growing endowments, all the while crying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord is here. My friend Mark Noll made quite a sensation in 1994 when he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a jeremiad against evangelical anti-intellectualism; and right as he was in what he said, he may not have been right enough. What we may suffer from even more seriously, more than just a scandal of the evangelical mind, is a scandal of the evangelical heart—or, as Ron Sider has it, a scandal of the evangelical conscience, a shrinking back from the costs and penalties which a testimony against the culture of American higher education will require, a leaving of our first love. Today, our calling as evangelical Christians in higher education may be, as T.S. Eliot said, to “make perfect our wills.” Doing so may be the only hope we have of saving our minds.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. His book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster) was cowinner of the Lincoln Prize, the second time he has won this annual award for the most outstanding work of scholarship on Lincoln.

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s annual surveys of pay and benefits of leaders at private and public colleges and universities also include data on expenditures and revenues. See the surveys for May 5, 1993 (pp. A17-A24) and October 23, 1998 (pp. A-39-A58) for the data referred to here. This data, and the data on endowments which I have drawn from The Chronicle’s annual endowment rankings, can also be accessed through The Chronicle‘s website at www.che.edu.

2. CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education (CCCU, 2000), pp. 13-14; Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (Thomson/Peterson’s, 2002), p. 1; Leo Reisberg, “Enrollments Surge at Christian Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 1999, pp. A42-A44; Alan Wolfe, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2000), pp. 56, 58.

3. D.G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 4-5. There are many ways to count “evangelicals,” and other sources arrive at much higher figures.

4. Neil Swidey, “God on the Quad,” Boston Globe, November 30, 2003.

5. See the statistics on these institutions in the CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education and Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (2002); Melissa Morriss-Olson, Survival Strategies for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU, 1997), p. 4.

6. Justin Ball, Justin Bell et al. “The Highest-Paid Leaders and Employees at Private Institutions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2003, pp. S14-S35; “College and University Endowments,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004, pp. A30-32.

7. James Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 819-851.

8. James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard Magazine (October 1998), p. 6; John G. Plotts et al., “Career Paths of Presidents of Institutions Belonging to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities,” Research on Christian Higher Education, Vol. 6 (1999), pp. 137-146; Martin Finkelstein, “The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,” Liberal Education, Vol. 89 (Fall 2003), pp. 1-11.

9. Charlotte Allen, “Is Deconstruction the Last Best Hope of Evangelical Christians?”, Lingua Franca (December/January 2000), pp. 47-59.

10. Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton, “Collegiate Life: An Obituary,” Change (May/June 1998), pp. 14-17; Levine, “How the Academic Profession is Changing,” Daedalus, Vol. 126 (Fall 1997), pp. 6-10.

11. As it is, colleges and universities actually find it easier to raise money to construct new buildings than for the maintenance of them, and since it’s easier to defer maintenance on a dormitory than on a computer network, we are witnessing the rise of an attitude which proposes to dismiss building maintenance altogether. Build it, patch it, tear it down and replace it with another building, because it will, in the long run, be cheaper to replace it than maintain it. The cost to the quality of institutional life, however, is the creation of an atmosphere of impermanence and improvisation on a campus. “Financial Pressures Squeeze Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2003, pp. A8-13.

12. Peter Sacks, Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America (Open Court, 1995), pp. 9, 121.

13. Eric Miller, “Alone in the Academy,” First Things (February 2004), pp. 30-34.

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