Page 4715 – Christianity Today (2024)

I turned the page and found a photograph of a man bending over and talking to a small boy. Both are dressed in black. The man, if I remember correctly, wears a flat-brimmed hat and has side curls. He stoops to the same level as the boy and looks directly into his face. His right hand is on the boy's shoulder and his left is pointing upward toward the sky.

Lifeless bodies are lying all around them. About ten feet away stands another man, in uniform. He is holding a rifle and sighting it at the heads of the man and small boy. It is their turn to die. The squeeze of the trigger must have been almost simultaneous with the click of the shutter.

The photograph breaks my heart. But, strangely, it also encourages me. Wanting somehow to understand what I am seeing, I do what human beings have always done when confronted with something that requires an explanation. I have created a story for myself about it. The story might not be accurate, but it is an important story for me nonetheless. It makes it more possible for me to live in a world that includes the Holocaust.

This man spends his last moments on earth telling a story, or at least so it seems to me. He is a Hasid, one of those most pious and fervent of Jews. As he bends down to speak to the boy, finger pointing to the sky, perhaps he is saying something like this: "Do not be afraid, my son. This man cannot really hurt us. He is sending us to the next world, where we will join your mother and sister. God is waiting for us. Everything is going to be all right."

The man, I believe, was making use of the story he had embraced for his life in order to come to terms with his and his son's horrific death. I choose to see it as an act of defiance. Deprived of all other means of resistance, he resists the soldier with the rifle and all that soldier represents in the most powerful way of all—he insists on the superiority and ultimate triumph of his own story. "You, killer, have the gun and think I am nothing. But I, killer, have God, and you have nothing." The man, however, does not actually say this to his executioner, or likely even think it. He has something infinitely more important to do. He has to comfort for a few moments longer a frightened child. And he does so by interpreting this final, terrifying event in light of the story of their whole lives.

This man has character. No, this man is a character—a character in the story he has chosen to live. The difference is crucial. Character is not something you have; it is something you are that inevitably shows itself in what you do. It is determined by the stories of which you are a part. As the concept of character makes a highly visible comeback in our public conversation, we must rescue it from glib politicians, do-gooders, and busy-body moralizers. When we worry about our character and that of our children—and we should—we ought to think of stories. We should more purposefully choose the stories in which we are characters.

America is rediscovering character. In magazines, on talk shows, in pulpits and classrooms (CT, Sept. 11, 1995, p. 35), and even in philosophy and social science journals, the recurring theme is that we need to be better people. Though it is still not possible to talk about virtue in America and be understood, it is now almost possible to talk about virtues—and that is an enormous change.

We have come to this conclusion reluctantly. Character talk used to be as American as apple pie. It was a conscious factor in whom we befriended, or hired, or married. But the whole concept of character became dated, quaint, even faintly suspect, and slowly disappeared from our public vocabulary.

The public rehabilitation of character has coincided with the values debates of recent years. Values is something of a weasel word, suggesting that the worth of anything derives from someone or other choosing it, rather than from any inherent merit in the thing itself. (Fidelity, for instance, is important if you happen to value it, but not otherwise.) The term fits our relativistic temperament, suggesting that you have your values and I have mine, and there is no valid way of choosing between the two.

We are slowly realizing that oftentimes we do have to choose, as individuals and as a society. We are being forced to admit that some values are better than others, as much as it sticks in our tolerant throats to say so. And as soon as we move from the general discussion of values to identifying the specific values by which one ought to live, we bump into character.

A leading commentator on this move is the well-known social scientist James Q. Wilson, who even a decade ago observed, "The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced—over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry." This concern is now omnipresent.

From the "New York Times" to "Newsweek" to "Forbes," we find sympathetic articles on the need to think consciously about our character. And, lest we forget, 1996 is an election year. We will be treated once again to dueling editorials about the character issue in politics—why it should matter and why it shouldn't. (My own editorial comment: how can anyone think character could ever be irrelevant in an arena so full of oughts and shoulds? Every ought is rooted in a value; every value requires a choice; every choice defines a character.)

When yapping ideologues can be gagged for a moment, there is broad agreement on the need for, and the content of, character. Ask people to list the traits of a good person and you will find consensus in an area where we are often told consensus is not possible. In fact, the list has not changed much over the centuries.

Like so much of Western culture, the traditional understanding of character arises primarily from two sources: the classical and the biblical. Common to each is the assumption that the only significant test of what you believe is how you live. Both wisdom and goodness exist only in actions in the real world. Character is values lived.

Aristotle, the godfather of the philosophical discussion of character, drew on certain common understandings in Greek thought: that human beings are social creatures, that human behavior can be shaped, that certain behaviors are helpful for the society and the individual and others harmful, that the best way to identify good behavior is to look to a good role model, and that good behavior—the key to a good life—is most likely when those behaviors have become habits after years of repetition. In short, do the right thing, and do it often.

In speaking of behaviors, I am instinctively using the language of psychotherapy in which we are all so steeped. The Greeks spoke of virtues. Virtue included the idea of strength, or the capacity to perform an act. Virtue was what you did, not what you did not do. (Avoiding certain wrong acts was not an adequate basis for goodness in Greek or biblical society.) As the skill necessary for athletic performance requires exercise and practice, so too a person could be virtuous only through exercising the virtues in daily acts. That exercise was seen as the basis for forming character.

The Greeks identified four chief or cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Prudence is practical wisdom—that is, wisdom (not to be confused with intelligence or information) that leads to good choices and results in successful living. Justice centers on acts of fairness and honesty and the rule of law. Courage, also called fortitude, gives one the capacity to do what is right or necessary even in the face of adversity. And temperance is self-discipline, the ability to control one's impulses to do things that are gratifying in the short run but harmful in the long.

It is not good enough to get two or three out of four. That might be great for baseball, but it is bad for society. The core virtues make each other possible. A sense of justice is ineffectual if one lacks the courage to stand against injustice. Courage without wisdom is simply foolhardiness. And all the other virtues are undercut when one lacks self-control.

The Bible agrees with all this and adds more. Each of the classical Greek virtues finds support in Scripture. In the Old Testament, a wise person is a person who lives wisely—that is, in right relationship to God—not a person who is simply intelligent or learned. Justice is seen as a primary quality of God that we should try to reflect in ourselves and in our society. Courage is prized on the battlefield but even more as a necessary quality for living as God requires under hostile conditions. And the Old Testament is replete with examples of the consequences of losing self-control.

One place among many where God reveals the character traits he requires is Psalm 15. The psalm opens with a question: "Oh Lord, who may approach your holy place? Who may worship on your holy mountain?" That is, what are the qualities a person should bring into God's presence?

The psalmist then answers the question in the rest of the psalm, part of which reads as follows: "Those who walk blamelessly, live righteously and speak truth from the heart. Those who do not gossip or wrong neighbors or speak evil of those around them." These are actions, not passive states of being. They are not descriptions of one's psychological state or level of self-esteem.

The New Testament brings to the forefront qualities of character that are implicit in the Old and that go beyond the classical understanding. These too grow out of the nature of God as reflected in his creatures: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23). There is a more empathetic, other-directed nature to the Christian virtues than to the classical, a product of their origin in the ultimate virtue —love. (Interestingly, the concern for the poor and disadvantaged in modern secular liberalism derives from this Judeo-Christian heritage, though the debt is rarely acknowledged.)

The Bible parallels classicism in emphasizing the importance of models and mentors. "Be holy as I am holy," God tells us. Christ calls the disciples to follow him so they can learn by word and deed how to live as they should. Paul offers himself as an example to the new Christians of the young church. Conversion begins, but only begins, a lifelong process of character formation and reformation.

And as in the classical example, that process depends more on actions than on abstract beliefs. Nothing is easier than mental assent to a set of propositions, but Christ sets a higher standard: "If you love me, obey my commands" (John 14:15).

As similar as they are in many ways, the classical and biblical notions of character differ at a crucial point—sin. For Aristotle, there is little if anything wrong in our character and our society that cannot be fixed by greater efforts in the way of wisdom, justice, courage, and self-control. Paul, on the other hand, says, "I do not understand my own behavior. For rather than doing the thing I want to do, I do what I hate" (Rom. 7:15).

The classical model says there is nothing wrong that we cannot fix ourselves; the biblical says our radical brokenness can be fixed only by the one who made us. One sends us inside ourselves for help; the other sends us to someone greater than ourselves. This crucial difference continues today. A look at the overflowing shelves of the self-help section in bookstores tells us clearly which option contemporary America has chosen.

These two streams, classical and biblical, flowed together into Europe and shaped moral education (which was at the heart of all education) for 1,500 years. They were not seriously challenged until the Enlightenment. The savants of the eighteenth century recognized the need for morality, especially to keep the masses in line, and looked to the Judeo-Christian tradition to define moral behavior. But they found the God of the Bible inconvenient. Thomas Jefferson turned his Bible into a paper snowflake, cutting out all the passages that involved the miraculous. Like other leading Enlightenment thinkers, he sought to ground morality in reason, not in divine revelation.

The goal of philosophical ethics for the last 200 years has been to find that rational basis for morality—on which, presumably, all reasonable people can agree. The attempt has fizzled. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in his widely influential book "After Virtue," reasonable people have not even been able to agree on what constitutes moral behavior, much less actually find a way to ensure it. Because we no longer share a common moral tradition, we repeatedly talk past each other on moral issues. We are left sifting the fragments of many traditions for an alternative to radical, relativistic individualism. The only universally approved virtue today is tolerance, yet we are increasingly aware that we are doomed if we tolerate everything.

The ascendancy of relativism has been hard on the idea of character. But there is an equally important reason why the idea of character has disappeared from our public discussions, and that is the dominance of popular psychology and psychotherapy in all deliberations of what it means to be a human being. The concept of character—once part of the everyday vocabulary of personal assessment—has been almost entirely replaced with the concept of personality.

Psychology aspires to be a science, and science by definition is mute in the face of any ought. It can deal with what and sometimes with why but not with should. Though character was used as a term in psychology in the early parts of this century and has persisted in Europe, it was banished from American psychology well before midcentury. Gordon Allport, an eminent Harvard psychologist and one-time president of the American Psychological Association, expressed the common view when he wrote in the 1930s that we "must frankly admit that [character] is an ethical concept" and that, as such, "the psychologist does not need the term at all; personality alone will serve."

Psychology took the ancient idea of character, an idea that was central to education and moral development, stripped out value judgments (especially moral ones), and gave us personality to take its place. Allport says, "Character is personality evaluated, and personality is character devalued." In Allport's own terms, the notion of moral excellence (character) was replaced by that of social and personal effectiveness (personality). Defining the self by character traits like courage, honesty, and loyalty gave way to definition by personality traits like assertiveness, self-confidence, and introspectiveness.

Consider Allport's definition of personality as "character devalued." Likely he meant the self looked at objectively, unencumbered by controversial and imprecise values ("ethical moss," in his words). But the net effect of replacing the language of character by that of personality (and that replacement is almost total) has been the literal devaluing of human beings and the human experience. This is not the fault of psychology per se, which has the right to limit what it investigates, but of the wholesale adoption of this way of understanding the human person by a naive and confused society. Psychology may not need the concept of character, but human beings and human society do.

We are now seeing the early stages of a scattered attempt to rehabilitate the concept of character. This change reflects a widespread sense that our society is sick and only strong medicine will do. Having lost much of our faith in social innovations (where, for instance, are the advocates of "open marriage" today?), we are turning to some traditional remedies that we tried to live without, and one of those is character.

But why is the attempt only scattered? Why, in fact, is it often controversial, met in some quarters with great suspicion? Who could possibly object to a greater emphasis on character? The fact is that character has returned to the public conversation during wartime—the culture wars—and no discussion of the role of character is neutral. As so often happens in our public conversations, the debate frequently splits along ideological lines. Many take it as given (and even desirable) that no agreement could ever be reached on what constitutes character or how we should encourage it. They are frightened by what they see as the attempt to equate character and family values with one, and only one, political and social agenda. And the suspicion is mutual.

A clear example is the reception of William Bennett's "The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories." Since its publication in 1993, this hugely successful book has been widely praised as leading the way in the restoration of civilization and widely vilified as trumpeting a retreat to the bad old days of racism, sexism, and (gulp) spanking. Jesse Jackson has complained, accurately, that conservatives have co-opted character and values as their issue, making liberals look like defenders of irresponsibility and moral decay.

Many rightly ask where all this conservative concern for character—especially the virtue of justice—was in the 1950s and '60s, when African Americans were trying to win their most basic freedoms. The oft-lamented golden age when we were supposedly a virtuous (and Christian) people was also a time that was quite comfortable with overt racial segregation and sexism and great numbers of people living in poverty, among other sins.

Nevertheless, too much current liberal reaction is little more than relativistic skepticism about any attempt to establish a widely agreed-on set of values to live by. Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance, in an unusually cynical opinion piece last year for "Time" magazine, scorned the phrase "family values." While acknowledging that we "may be stuck with the family" until we progress to something more "sensible," she depicts the family as commonly "a nest of pathology" and cites approvingly a feminist view that compares marriage to prostitution.

While acidic views like Ehrenreich's contribute nothing to the debate, there is a legitimate concern that a renewed emphasis on character and values not be merely a convenient sound bite for pandering politicians nor provide cover for a retreat from hard-won and still fragile gains for minorities and women. Louis Sullivan, secretary of Health and Human Services under George Bush, argues often and passionately for the relevance of character to health issues in our society (a great deal of ill health being the result of bad choices) but insists that a renewed emphasis on the need for individual responsibility and community-enforced values should not be used as a smoke screen for an attack on the necessary and legitimate role of government in health and other areas.

In fact, both liberals and conservatives frequently promote an impoverished sense of character that is inadequate to support the kinds of changes we need—in ourselves and in our society. The conservative notion too often encourages mere conformity and defends a nostalgic version of the past. Character is not much more than the Boy Scout pledge sprinkled with civic religion.

Liberals have their own version, and it is equally pallid. "Embrace diversity, be nice to minorities, don't laugh at jokes that disempower women." They are unable to articulate a distinction between healthy pluralism and crippling relativism. They rhapsodize about e pluribus but have lost the vision for unum.

(Continued in Part 2)

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We've got to do better than this. As we grope our way back toward the idea of living by shared values (a working definition of character), we should consider the wellspring of talk about character—story. We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, buoyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely conscious of this element in which we exist.

Life as a story is not simply a metaphor, but the way our experience actually presents itself to us. We are characters making choices over time—and living with the consequences—and that is the essence of story both in literature and in life. The more we are conscious of our role as characters making choices that have consequences, and the more we purposefully choose the stories by which we live, the healthier we will be as individuals and as a society.

Stories, as MacIntyre writes in "After Virtue," teach us how to live:

I can only answer the question "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question, "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted—and we have to learn what they are. … It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children … youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living … that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.

If many young people seem confused and directionless today, and their elders with them, perhaps it is because they have been deprived of good stories. They "stutter" in their lives because they almost literally do not know their lines; they do not know themselves as characters in a meaningful story.

And of course, Christians believe the seminal story by which all other stories must be judged is the one which commences, "In the beginning God … " This is the greatest story ever told. The theme of this story is the most hopeful imaginable: God made us, God loves us, and God calls us back to himself. This is the story that gives ultimate meaning to our own stories.

Without meaningful choices there is no story and no character. But how to choose? A traditional answer, approved by both Aristotle and Christ, has been that we pattern our choices and our lives after someone we want to be like. And that someone is often presented to us in story.

Bruno Bettelheim claims that the stories of good and evil in fairy tales—or, we might add, in Bible stories—can play an important role in the moral development of children. And the power of these stories lies not so much in the abstract moral or theme as in the characters. Bettelheim says, "The question for the child is not, 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Who do I want to be like?' "

It is not surprising that the bulk of moral education in human history has been through models, exempla, heroes—that is, through story. Many of the traditional stories of moral education have fallen out of favor because of modern skepticism, the loss of centers of moral authority, fear of hypocrisy, and suspicion that morality might be just another name for authoritarianism, privilege, and misused power.

The stories that provide us the models that help shape our character are all around us. They come first from the family, then from church and school and the popular media. Some are from literature, others from history, politics, family lore, and, alas, television. Among the stories that come to mind from my own childhood are stories of missionaries killed by Auca Indians, of the ground opening up to swallow people who lied to God, of the defeat of Nazism by my uncles, of the first Thanksgiving, of Davy Crockett at the Alamo, of the kids who got paddled for skinny dipping in the creek, and on and on. It is difficult, in fact, to think of anything that significantly influenced me that wasn't part of a story in one way or another.

The most important stories have the power to change our character. I believe, for instance, that my life took a slight but perceptible change in direction in my late teens from reading J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Trolls, elves, hobbits, wizards, dark forests, forest havens, caves, mountain strongholds, treachery, cowardice, courage, perseverance—what have these to do with being a teenager in California during the Vietnam War?

Nothing and everything. I found embodied in that fantasy what every teenager needs to find—especially one coming of age in the moral ambiguity of the late 1960s: that there is a difference between good and evil, that the distinction is usually clear enough to act on, that fighting for good is worthwhile even if one loses, that average, even unimpressive, people can accomplish much, and, farfetched as it may seem, that good eventually wins out in the end.

I purposed quite consciously to try to be on the side of good in life, to the extent that I could discern it, and to take chances to see that it prevailed. I genuinely believe this story helped shape who I was and am. Its characters became a part of my character. If the change in direction was small at the time, it may have been one that, like a small, early course correction in a planetary probe, has made a larger difference in where I am, many years later.

After reading "The Lord of the Rings" two or three times in my teens, I have not read it since. I might not be nearly so impressed now, but that doesn't matter. It did me a service. It helped form my mind as well as my ethics at a time when both were up for grabs. When I later discovered sophistic thinkers who assured me that good and evil were not real categories but only subjective and transient points of view, I knew better. I lacked then the intellectual resources to articulate my disagreement, but I was armed with the holistic experience of a story that kept me from naively embracing what I now think is a widely influential but unlivable view of the world.

Stories not only provide moral education but also shape our sense of identity. In fact, it is impossible to separate our sense of who we are from the stories in which we cast ourselves as characters.

A few years back I was invited to speak at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. I was not acquainted with John Brown University. Wanting to know a little about the place and people, I asked the chaplain to send me some information on the school.

I discovered that John Brown had been a traveling evangelist on the sawdust trail during the early and middle part of the twentieth century. Based primarily in the South, he had ranged as far west as California, saving the lost and admonishing the saved. At some point, he had started a little school in Arkansas.

I will admit to a flicker of condescension when I read this sketch of John Brown's life. I am just old enough to have witnessed a tent meeting or two. I also know something about idiosyncratic institutions dominated by the personality of an eccentric founder, sometimes well after that founder has passed on. I did not make any sweeping judgments, but somewhere in the back of my mind I prepared myself for the possibility of a few days in a backwater place with people not quite as up-to-date as I was.

Shortly before leaving for Arkansas, I was talking on the phone with my father. He asked me what I was up to, and I mentioned I was going to a place called John Brown University. He replied, "Oh yes, John Brown. Your grandfather Nick was saved under John Brown."

It was one of those moments when God reveals to you in great clarity how stupid you are.

My father then told me a story I had never heard. My grandfather Nick had left a crowded and troubled home in Indiana when he was 15 or 16. It was shortly before World War I, and he had nowhere to go. So he jumped on a freight train heading west. He ended up in Los Angeles—lonely and without direction. One night he wandered by a revival meeting led by John Brown. He went in, and there he met God. And because he became a Christian, in a personal and life-directing way, he later looked for a Christian woman to marry, and they chose to raise their only child—my father—as a Christian, and he chose a Christian woman to marry, and they chose to raise me and my brothers as believers. So I discovered that this man, John Brown, whom I had safely pigeonholed as someone of no relevance to my life, was, in fact, an important link in the chain to my own salvation. It was a story I needed to hear.

I didn't just hear this story, I accepted it—made it a part of who I was and how I thought about myself and life. It reinforced my sense of living in a coherent universe, of belonging to something important that has stretched over time, of being a link in a chain—indebted to many in the past, mostly unknown to me, and responsible to many in the future, who likewise will not know who I was. In short, the story affected my character.

The key to every good plot is characters making choices. Choices instill values—right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, wise and foolish—into an otherwise sterile sequence of events.

Frank Kermode claims that every plot is "an escape from chronicity." Chronicity is mere clock time. It is succession without progression, or even meaningful cause and effect. It is time dehumanized and devalued, measured by repetition, not by significance.

The antidote to chronos is kairos, the Greek and biblical notion of time redeemed. In classical Greek, kairos referred, among other things, to a decisive time, a moment that required an important decision. There was a statue to a god named Kairos outside the stadium at Olympia, perhaps in recognition of the need for athletes to seize the moment, to act decisively before the opportunity was past.

Kairos was also linked to the idea of responsibility. One has a duty to fulfill the demands of the pregnant moment. In this sense, as in many others, story time is kairos, not chronos. In life as in art, the characters in a story must choose, and they are responsible for the consequences of their choices. With choosing comes significance.

In Greek thought, the opposite of such choosing and acting was passivity. The Greeks, of course, believed strongly in fate, but that did not mean one waited idly for things to happen. Seizing the moment was an act of faith that one's destiny required and rewarded decisive action. Kairos was an antidote to a fatalism that made one the passive victim of time and chance.

Early Christianity adapted and gave theological richness to the Greek notion of kairos (though its use in the New Testament is not entirely consistent). God is seen as impregnating time with significance throughout salvation history, most notably in the Incarnation. Jesus presents himself in the Gospels as the fulfillment of the very purpose of time and history: "The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" His life creates a new urgency for everyone who encounters his message: "Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation." This message requires a decision ("Who do you say that I am?") and a changed life, not merely assent or dissent ("Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?").

Stories turn mere chronology, one thing after another, into the purposeful action of plot, and thereby into meaning. If we discern a plot to our lives, we are more likely to take ourselves seriously as characters. Healthy stories challenge us to be active characters, not passive victims or observers.

Stories teach us that character, in the ethical as well as literary sense, is more important than personality. Because characters must choose (and refusing to choose is itself a choice), they are inherently valuing beings. Every choice implies an underlying value—a because, an ought. The more conscious we are of our stories, and our roles as characters in them, the more clarity we have about who we are and why we are here and how we should act in the world.

We learn that we are interdependent. Our stories are inextricably interwoven. What you do is part of my story; what I do is part of yours. Such an awareness encourages the shared understandings and shared commitments that are central to a healthy society.

An emphasis on story will not heal every social or spiritual ill, or solve every intellectual quandry. It is not a definitive solution to our troubles so much as a direction to be explored. It will not, by itself, clean up the moral waste dump spawned by relativism.

What it can do is defeat the passivity and paralysis that accompanies a "Who's to say?" approach to crucial issues. How? By encouraging us to think of ourselves as responsible characters in a meaningful story. And when we find that our stories collide with others' stories, it can encourage us to keep talking until we find that point at which our stories interweave.

If we think of ourselves more often as interdependent characters in a shared story, we are more likely to turn out as our mothers intended. One of my mother's favorite admonitions was "Straighten up and fly right." It never occurred to her to doubt that terms like "straight" and "right" had real meaning and were somehow rooted in the nature of things. We need to recapture that assumption, because it is not possible to live well together without it.

That assumption, of course, has been out of favor for a long time. The ruling supposition, instead, has been that all morality is a product of culture and, therefore, that no universal moral rules or principles exist. James Q. Wilson, however, is not alone in arguing, as he does in his recent book "The Moral Sense," that there is much broader agreement from culture to culture and age to age on moral issues than has commonly been allowed, and that the moral sense is actually something naturally built into each human being. (The Christian, of course, has some ideas about where that moral sense originates.)

And morality, specifically character, is at the heart of many of the crucial social and economic issues of our day. Wilson argues, for instance, that poverty and even oppression are not adequate explanations for crime, because they fail to explain why most oppressed people in poverty do not engage in crime—and have not in the past under even worse conditions.

Wilson also cites James M. Buchanan's answer to the question "Why haven't we always had huge deficits as a nation?" Buchanan says it was simply thought wrong in the past to spend money you didn't have and that your children would have to repay in the future. Balancing the budget was, among other things, a question of character, though until recently a discussion of the national debt rarely would have been framed in this way.

Multiply these examples a thousand times—in education, economics, politics, entertainment and the media, the church and the home, and in our private lives—and one can see something of the effect that the return of character is having and could have on our lives together. Character will not save America in the spiritual sense. But some of the qualities of God that he built into us could again be more evident in our public institutions, our private lives, and our shared lives together.

This will happen, however, only if our understanding of character surpasses what we generally hear around us today. Character is more than being a good person. It is choosing a role in a story worthy of the only life you will ever live, worthy of the calling you have received.

I return to that photograph. The man in that scene, if he was a pious Jew, lived his life by rules. And many of those rules were important. But the moment before their deaths he was not telling that frightened child about the rules. Nor did a lifetime of rule-keeping prepare him for his final loving act. If I am right, he was telling the boy a story. That act was the logical conclusion to the story around which he had built his life.

In truth, I do not even know if I am remembering the photograph accurately, having seen it years ago in a book I can no longer find. But it doesn't matter. Their story, as I imagine it, is now part of my own story. The courage and faith I ascribe to them make it more possible for me to believe that courage and faith are realistic options for me under infinitely less oppressive circ*mstances.

Our stories must be as strong as his. They must be strong enough to encompass not only death, but every kind of suffering and failure—divorce, disease, abuse, disgrace, and disappointment. They must even be strong enough to triumph over the dripping tedium of day after uneventful day.

We must be characters in life-defining stories that make it matter that we were ever here. If our present story is inadequate, we must choose to be different characters in a different story. I believe the ultimate author of such a story is the God who made and loves us and calls us to himself. But this is no Boy Scout God. Nor is he the God of humanitarianism. This God is one who came to us speaking these fearful words:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

To be a character in this story calls for more of us than we are anxious to give, but next to it, all other stories pale.

***********************

Daniel Taylor is professor of literature at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Parts of this essay are adapted from his book "The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself Through the Stories of Your Life" (forthcoming from Doubleday).

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A bishop of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has been removed after he attacked an image of Our Lady of Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, on live television October 12.

Sergio Von Helder hit and kicked the statue 22 times on the Universal Church's television network. Police provisionally charged him with public irreverence for religious images, which carries a maximum one-year prison term. Slightly more than two-thirds of Brazil's population are Catholic.

"We are showing the people that this doesn't work," Von Helder said as he attacked the icon on the Day of Our Lady of Aparecida. "This is not a saint. This is not God. Could it be possible that God, the Creator of the universe, be compared with a puppet like this, so ugly, so horrible, and so wretched?"

Edir Macedo, head of the 3.5 million-member Neo-Pentecostal denomination founded in 1977, apologized on television for Von Helder's "thoughtless" and "foolish" attitude. After expressing initial outrage, Catholic bishops eventually accepted the apology and celebrated special masses to honor Our Lady of Aparecida. The archbishop of Sao Paulo, Paulo Evaristo Arns, rejected an invitation to appear on the Awaken to Faith program on which Von Helder struck the three-foot statue.

Other evangelical leaders issued statements against the act but maintained that the Bible explicitly forbids the worship of idols and images.

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Student and faculty protests against the rector of Satya Wacana Christian University in Java have escalated in the wake of his dismissal of a nationally prominent prodemocracy faculty member last year.

Criticism of the rector, John Ihalauw, who was hired two years ago, has intensified since he dismissed Aries Budiman for his outspoken prodemocracy activities.

Ihalauw has suspended more than 60 faculty members for one to two months for their public protests of the dismissal and what they say was the authoritarian manner in which it was executed.

Demonstrations became so serious that the university, with an enrollment of 6,000 students, shut down for several days.

In a September protest, police arrested three students on charges of damaging the university's administration building. The ongoing skirmish has affected both enrollment and income at the university, interrupting some salary payments.

In response, the interdenominational school's sponsoring denominations formed a special five-member committee to resolve the conflict.

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A federal jury in Dallas on October 25 ordered three pro-life groups and seven individuals to pay $8.6 million to an abortionist.

Operation Rescue National (OR) of Dallas is to pay $1.75 million, and its director, Flip Benham, is to pay $1.2 million for invading the privacy of Norman Tompkins and causing him emotional distress. Two other groups—the now-defunct Dallas Pro-Life Action Network and Missionaries to the Preborn, a Milwaukee organization named only because one of the protesters had participated in Milwaukee protests, too—also were ordered to pay $1.75 million to Tompkins.

Benham says he tried to follow Matthew 18 guidelines in confronting Tompkins and the abortionist's United Methodist minister. Benham says five other Dallas physicians who performed abortions quit when he confronted them because they did not want the public exposure.

In October 1992, or began staging a ten-month picket outside Tompkins's business and home. Tompkins brought his hired body guards and bulletproof vest into court, tactics that helped convince jurors he had been terrorized.

Kelly Shackelford, a Dallas-based attorney for the Rutherford Institute who helped defend the pro-lifers, says all the demonstrations were carried out peacefully on public property.

"The police were constantly there, and no one was ever arrested," Shackelford says. "The case really was an attempt to intimidate people from engaging in free speech."

Benham contends he has no money to pay the damages. or remains in business because its offices and equipment are leased rather than owned.

Tompkins lost so many clients that he moved to Gainesville, 60 miles north of Dallas. Tompkins now advertises that he performs "no abortions" and that he is a "Christian doctor."

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Authors Charles Colson and Ellen Santilli Vaughn, along with publishing company Word, Inc., have issued public apologies to a Baptist minister for making libelous allegations about him in the first edition of the best-selling book "The Body."

The book alleged that D. A. Waite exerted "unusual control over the congregation" at Immanuel Baptist Church, which he pastored in Newton, Massachusetts, from 1961 to 1965.

The book accused Waite of blackmailing his parishioners to force them to agree with his decisions. In one instance, the book said, a fistfight broke out between pastor and parishioner during Sunday worship.

The incidents involving Waite were removed from the second edition of "The Body," which was originally published in 1992 by Word.

Some allegations were reprinted in Victor Books' "Turning Toward Integrity." Victor and Waite also reached an out-of-court settlement. Waite initially sought $50,000 in damages, but terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Waite told CT the story in "The Body" contained at least 96 errors. According to a statement by Colson, Waite, and publisher Charles Kip Jordon, the authors did not contact Waite about allegations raised because they thought he was dead. It said, "Had the authors been able to talk with Dr. Waite, and review his tape-recorded sermon from Immanuel Baptist Church, they would have written the chapter differently."

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"You who are watching this tape are hurting and hurting badly," says John G. Bennett, Jr., former president of the Foundation for New Era Philanthropy, at the beginning of a 14-minute videotaped message to ministries and individuals affected by the foundation's collapse in May.

Hundreds of evangelical and other nonprofit organizations became associated with New Era based on the promise that money they gave to the foundation would be returned after being matched by anonymous donors (CT, Aug. 14, 1995, p. 56). These organizations continue to await the results of a bankruptcy process. Bennett is under investigation for fraud.

Bennett asked for the forgiveness of donors, charities, and former New Era staff members. "I have learned a great deal through all of this," he says in the somber-toned tape. "I'm ashamed. I'm remorseful. And yet I know that God has forgiven me, and I pray that you can find it in your heart to forgive me as well." At times in his message, however, Bennett indicates he has little for which to apologize. He suggests that New Era's problems arose because he was a "visionary"—not a manager or administrator.

Bennett says "despite many attempts in the early months to get into our offices to help resolve the issues at hand, it has only been within the last few weeks that we have begun to get copies of the documents that would substantiate our response to these accusations."

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The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in October approved the Church of Christ Uniting (COCU) plan that could formally link nine denominations. A Disciples renewal group is warning, however, that the plan could cause an exodus of both individual church members and entire congregations.

Paul Crow, Jr., president of the Disciples' Council on Christian Unity, called the endorsem*nt of the October 23 covenant communion plan the "most significant ecumenical decision" since the 1832 origin of the 941,000-member denomination. The United Church of Christ (UCC) adopted COCU in July, and the United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church U.S.A. will discuss the plan next year.

Kevin D. Ray, executive director of Disciple Renewal in Lovington, Illinois, says COCU moves the Indianapolis-based Disciples of Christ from its historic and biblical roots. At the Pittsburgh assembly, Disciple Renewal, an independent conservative organization that receives financial support from 300 congregations, issued the Pittsburgh Proclamation, which contends COCU could force the denomination to accept infant, nonimmersion baptism; to lose the established role of laity in communion; and to ordain active hom*osexuals.

The Disciples also agreed to allow "ordained ministerial partners" from the UCC to preach and administer sacraments in Disciples churches.

That has Ray worried. He says many in Disciples congregations are upset at the partnering agreement because the UCC ordains hom*osexuals. "The liberal policies of the United Church of Christ will set standards for ordination in all the partner churches at the lowest common denominator," Ray says. "Unity cannot occur when we are willing to compromise the Word of God." The general assembly defeated a proposal asking for assurance that congregations refusing to participate in COCU would not be penalized.

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Organizers of a failed Maine referendum—that would have repealed a Portland hom*osexual rights ordinance and deleted violence based on sexual orientation from a list of hate crimes at the state level—are worried that special rights for hom*osexuals may be created.

Maine voters on November 7 defeated Question 1 by a 53 percent to 47 percent margin. While the referendum did not mention the word hom*osexuality, it would have limited state and local laws to protect only the classes of "race, color, sex, physical or mental disability, religion, age, ancestry, national origin, and familial status."

Both Cliff Tinkham of Concerned Maine Families and Paul Madore of Coalition to End Special Rights—the two most active groups that worked for passage of the referendum—told CT that the state legislature may pass a special hom*osexual rights law next year. They say that for the first time, the state now has both a legislative majority and a governor that support such a measure.

"This was not a 'so what?' issue for hom*osexuals," Tinkham says. "If we had been successful, people in other states would have known to go the citizen referendum route." Tinkham says the ballot initiative was worded carefully enough that it could have withstood court challenges.

A constitutional amendment approved by 53 percent of Colorado voters in 1992 limiting special hom*osexual rights is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

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AN ARKANSAS HERO

The first time I saw Billy Graham was in Arkansas when I was about 11. He came right into the middle of our state's racial trouble to lead a crusade and to spread a message of God's love and grace. When the citizens' council tried to force him to segregate his meeting, he said, "If I have to do that, I'm not coming."

I asked a Sunday-school teacher in my church to drive me 50 miles to Little Rock so I could hear Dr. Graham preach. For a good while thereafter, I tried to send a little bit of my allowance to his crusades because of the impression he made on me then.

I was elated when Billy came to Little Rock for another crusade a few years ago when I was Governor. We had the chance to spend a good deal of time together, and I have treasured his friendship as well as his prayers and counsel ever since.

I am grateful for the way his ministry and friendship have touched my life and, even more, for the unparalleled impact his Christian witness has had throughout the world.

I am honored to be able to share this tribute with you and your readers on this special occasion.

—Bill Clinton President of the United States

A RARE JEWEL

"Billy Graham," said Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, one-time minister of health in India's Parliament, "is one of those rare jewels who tread this earth periodically and, by their lives and teaching, draw millions of others closer to God."

I've known Billy for many decades, and exempting family, he is the best friend I've ever had. As a result, people frequently ask me what Billy Graham is like when he is not on center stage. I think the Indian minister of health put it well:

look at his life and teaching.

—Sherwood Eliot Wirt Former editor,

Decision Magazine

A SURPRISING REVOLUTIONARY

Billy Graham has been on the scene for one-fortieth of Christian history, and he will go down in history as the best-known, most traveled, most influential, and in many ways most representative evangelical Protestant of these past five decades.

Certainly I am not alone in suggesting that when he first came on the scene—a bit brash, unripe, over-apocalyptic, judgmental in some of the wrong ways, and evoking old revivalist chords—almost everyone in our business dismissed him as a mutation, a celebrity who would have his hour and then be gone.

Instead, he has stayed and helped revolutionize the evangelical element in world Christianity. And no one has been more ready than he to say that he did not do it alone. In fact, his outreaching, ecumenical, and cooperative spirit made him capable of neutralizing most criticism and achieving credibility among Catholics and mainstream Protestants.

Had he not shared in the awakening of many kinds of evangelicalism, I fear that North American Protestantism might have gone the way of tired, late-establishment Anglo-European Protestantism, with its empty monumental cathedrals and its often listless parish churches. (In fact, where Europe is "alive," Christianly speaking, many would credit him for helping it remain so, or helping it to come alive.)

That he is slowing is no secret. That we signal a hope that he will not stop, or have to stop for seasons and seasons to come, is a mark of fervency in a desperate time.

—Martin E. Marty Professor, University of Chicago Divinity School Senior editor, "The Christian Century"

I have never known a greater man among men. Yet his simplicity, his common touch, his childlike compassion for his fellowman is the source of his greatness.

—Johnny Cash Singer March, 1992

Billy just isn't normal. He's got too much energy.

—Morrow Coffey Graham Billy's mother

A SPIRIT-EMPOWERED ETHOS

To be sure, Billy Graham will not go down in either secular chronicles or ecclesiastical annals as a theological giant like Karl Barth or a formative thinker like Reinhold Niebuhr or an institutional change agent like Pope John XXIII. Yet who will presume to estimate his impact on the spiritual experiences of multitudes around the world and his influence as the spearhead, the voice, the icon of Reformational Christianity?

Billy's commanding presence and his magnetic delivery have not been the primary factors that have opened minds and hearts to the saving truth in so many different countries and cultures. Rather, his ethos of utter integrity, his understandable simplicity, his unaffected humility, and his own evident commitment and faith have opened those doors.

God's Spirit works through gifted agents who seek no glory for themselves—and Billy never has. His Spirit-empowered ethos has been steadily augmented by his relationship of love and devotion to his wife, Ruth, by his moral transparency, and by his spotless reputation with its total freedom from the least taint of self-seeking or scandal.

—Vernon Grounds Former president, Denver Seminary

BEYOND 15 MINUTES

What impresses me most about Billy Graham is his discipline. He sticks to what he believes God is calling him to do. His life reflects the apostle Paul's "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel of Christ." In a celebrity culture, he has not had Andy Warhol's 15 minutes but 50 years; yet he has not been regarded as a celebrity among celebrities but as the most respected person in America. Imagine all the self-serving things that he could have done—which most people would have done—with that measure of fame and influence.

He advanced ecumenism not by promoting ecumenism but by being ecumenical in the way that matters most-namely, by calling all of us to the Christ who cannot be limited to any ecclesial structure. Call it discipline. Call it faithfulness. Call it one of the more remarkable ministries in the long two thousand years of Christian history.

—Richard John Neuhaus President, Religion and Public Life Institute

THE THEOLOGIAN MEETS THE EVANGELIST

My meeting with Billy Graham, who was at that time holding his huge evangelization crusades in the Los Angeles stadium, was of great importance to me. I at first had reservations about accepting his invitation to sit next to him on the balustrade. When I then did indeed do so on the insistence of my friends, I kept my eyes wide open critically. As the people came forward in their thousands to confess their faith, however, I was aware only of calm meditation on the part of his crew and detected no expressions of triumph. His message was good solid stuff. Afterwards I wrote him a thank-you letter in which I confessed that whenever I had previously been asked for my opinion of him I had said that I felt that many essential elements were lacking in his proclamation of the gospel; he advocated an individualistic doctrine of salvation, and even this took place only in relation to the initial stages of faith. … I found the answer he gave me extremely significant. I was, he said, completely right in my criticism. What he was doing was certainly the most dubious form of evangelization. But what other alternative did he have if the flocks that had no shepherds would not otherwise be served? This answer gave him credibility in my eyes and convinced me of his spiritual substance.

—Helmut Thielicke in Notes From a Wayfarer: The Autobiography of Helmut Thielicke (Paragon House, 1995)

When I think about Billy Graham, I think about a true Point of Light. I think about a man who has served his fellowman with compassion. I think about a man who has dedicated himself to the Lord's work.

So I am proud to be among those saluting Billy Graham for his half a century of selfless service to others. The Bush family will always be grateful for his friendship and counsel.

—George Bush Former President of the United States

AT HOME IN TENTS OR CONGRESS HALLS

Billy Graham is Christianity's best-known evangelist, who literally carries the gospel to the ends of the earth, focuses clearly on Jesus Christ as the only savior of mankind, and invokes the Bible as God's inerrant Word. He is at home in tent meetings, in stadiums, and in Congress halls. His presence at the 1966 World Congress of Evangelism in West Berlin on the rim of Marxist Eastern Europe attests to his courageous dedication to the gospel.

Among television evangelists he maintains a spotless reputation for fiscal integrity. The evangelical strand of twentieth-century Christianity owes to him an incomparable challenge and debt. One can only wonder how many football fields would be crowded if converts who found spiritual regeneration and renewal through his ministry were numbered.

—Carl F. H. Henry First editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY

GOD GAVE IT TO HIM

Someone asked me about how I felt the [1957] Billy Graham Crusade in New York City would go. I said what I seriously believed: "It is going to be a success because God didn't sponsor no flops." That same night I went and found that it was a fulfillment of something I had been seeking for years.

When I first heard him there was something about him that sounded so good. I didn't think any white preacher could be that good. His voice is compelling, and that wasn't acquired. That wasn't got in no seminary. God gave it to him, and no one can take it from him.

—Ethel Waters Singer; October, 1970

The spirit of reconciliation we sense in many hearts of South Africans can be traced back directly to the Billy Graham meetings held in Durban and Johannesburg in 1973. He was the one who demanded total integration for all of his meetings, and it was done. From that moment on we were on the road to reconciliation.

—Bishop Alpheus Zulu of Zululand Johannesburg, South Africa, 1985

WITHOUT SHADES OF GRAY

I've known Billy Graham for 60 years, and some time ago, he said to me, "I don't know how much longer I can keep going at this speed." I responded, "Billy, the difference between you and me is that you are 76 years old and I am 76 years young." He returned, "If I didn't have any more to do than you do, I'd feel young, too!" The man has a sense of humor.

In 1950, when he went to the Mayo Clinic the first time, thinking something was drastically wrong with him, he asked me to accompany him. Then a strange thing happened; they turned him loose and kept me. During my surgery, the doctors allowed Billy to come in and observe. One of the doctors gave me some sodium thiopental—truth serum—and said, "Now is the time for us to find out what preachers have done in their past."

Billy told me later that "I stood over you, ready to club you at a minute's notice. I didn't care what you said about yourself, but I didn't want you to incriminate me!"

Stories aside, Billy is honorable and open in the area of personal ethics. I have been with him when people have offered him homes, airplanes, and all kinds of other things. He has always responded, "I cannot accept any personal gifts." He wants no gray areas in his life—he is a man of integrity.

I also know one movie producer who offered him a fantastic salary if he went into the motion-picture business. Billy turned him down, explaining that God had called him to preach the gospel. Billy is a man of singular vision.

—T. W. Wilson Billy Graham Evangelistic Association

When I first met him, I was impressed by his genuineness, his enthusiasm, and his obvious excitement for ministry. As I have worked with him these past five decades, his kindness, genuine compassion, loyalty, and humility have left an indelible imprint upon my heart and life. His fidelity to the Word of God and his unswerving commitment to his call as an evangelist have been a continuing source of inspiration and encouragement to me and to countless numbers around the world.

—Cliff Barrows Songleader, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association

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