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In Praise of Piety
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13110 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1987 |
3,440 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
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
...
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