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In Praise of Piety
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13110 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1987 |
3,440 Words |
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
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VOICES FROM THE HEART
Four Centuries of American Piety
Edited by Roger Lundin and Mark A. Noll
Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987
396 pp., $19.95.
It requires either sangfroid or insouciance to use the word piety in a book title. Assuming that one can tell something about a book by its cover, it does not make the heart grow fond to see "Four Centuries of American Piety" emblazoned on this anthology. Pious-somber-dour-grim-puritanical-joyless-judgmental-holier-than-thou: Piety does not elicit favor today. Pious people plod glumly through a noisome world, pinching their nostrils lest they scent a whiff of gaiety or mirth. Pious people have no fun. Professors Lundin and Noll promise to burden one with four centuries of this kill-joy spirit.
Rescuing Piety
The editors engage in a courageous act of reclamation, seeking to restore the word "piety" to its former high estate. That piety is held in low regard tells more about contemporary America than about the term itself. Like honor, piety has fallen on hard times. Maybe our ancestors, who valued both concepts, knew something we have forgotten. In their introduction, Lundin and Noll explain why they think so: "Piety as its best is public as well as private. It embraces the lived world as well as the secret realm of the heart. And it can inspire a broad range of service to God and humankind as well as encourage a deeper personal religion."
Beginning with the Puritan leader John Winthrop, they present excerpts from the writings of fifty-five American Christians who illustrate this definition. Catholics and Protestants, men and women, blacks and whites, native born and immigrants, full-bodied believers and tormented doubters, these writers demonstrate Americans' long and vigorous exploration of the substance and practice of piety. In the intensity of their search, one captures a sense of the high drama of the Christlike life; one also welcomes back into esteem a much-abused word.
What Does It Mean To Be A Christian?
Taken together, these selections hazard to answer that most momentous of questions: What does it mean to be a Christian? Almost two thousand years ago Jesus Christ told us. With parable, precept, and declaration he enunciated a gospel so clear that even a child can grasp it. The authors of the four Gospels recorded his message. St. Paul fleshed out the word spoken by the Word, and the writers of the general epistles--James, Peter, John, and Jude--added their own commentaries. The Church collected the canon, and the New Testament was born. Add to that the wisdom and counsel of the Old Testament of the Jews, and one has the Bible and Christianity.
One also has Christians, and there's the rub. Flannery O'Connor, in a letter printed in Voices from the Heart, remarks: "Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image." We have the historical fact: Jesus dwelt on this earth; we have the Book and the Church. But these were given to frail and fallible human beings, the
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