Retired Pastor Ruminates

“The theological character of the Christological story is the key to its eschatological significance.” Christoph Schwöbel

The cross of Jesus Christ stands over the future and provides the key to understanding both “the end of the world and the ends of God.” I use the phrase “the cross” as Paul did, as shorthand for the whole decisive act of God by which God defeated sin and death through Jesus Christ. “The cross” used this way includes the resurrection but keeps before us the crucial truth that the Risen Christ is the crucified Jesus. The cross understood this way is our best model for viewing the future as one of discontinuity and continuity, both for personal existence and for human history. The promise of the Gospel is that the faithfulness of God as one who loves his creation transcends the discontinuities of death and futility. It is in this identity of God that hope for the future lies. And for the church this hope is not an abstraction. Already the pattern of discontinuity and continuity is experienced by Christians in their justification, where the sinner is made discontinuous with his or her own sinful actions and assured the continuity of God's graceful relationship based on God's steadfast love and mercy and not on the sinner's past. The church then experiences in its own life the pattern by which it looks in hope to the future. Christoph Schwöbel is surely right when he writes, “The total dependence on God's creative love which is the ground of liberating hope for the future is already the foundation of the church in faith.” (Schwöbel, “The Church as Cultural Space” in John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, editors, The End of the World and the Ends of God, Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000, p. 123)

Early Christology is Eschatological

The earliest church interpreted the cross and resurrection of Jesus to be an act of the God of Israel, and the fulfillment of the hoped for future described in the eschatological texts of the OldTestament. What prepared these Jews to accept a crucified God, and how did that acceptance change their understanding of the very identity of God?

Richard Bauckham has recently made the argument that the way biblical and post-biblical Israel understood the identity of Israel's God had two key features: (1) God as the Creator of all things, and (2) God as the Sovereign ruler over all things. In addition, God is identified by his acts in Israel's history, especially in the Exodus, and by his character description given to Moses: “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34:6) The acts of God and the character of God together identify God as the one who acts graciously towards his people.

This God, then, by his very identity, was expected to act in the future. Second Isaiah, for example, expects a new exodus, which will show decisively God's identity as creator and ruler of all things. “In the eschatological exodus he will prove to be the God of all people, Sovereign and Savior of all, in a way consistent with his identity as the gracious God of his people Israel.” (Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999, p. 71)

The first Christians, who had experienced this new exodus in Jesus, understood that God was continuing the story, and “a new narrative of God's acts becomes definitive for his identity.” (Bauckham, p. 71) The God who acted in the Exodus had now acted again in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. “The new story is consistent with the already known identity of the God of Israel, but new as the way he now identifies himself finally and universally, the Creator and Ruler of all who in Jesus Christ has become the gracious savior of all.” (Bauckham, p. 71)

When the church included Jesus, a human being, humiliated and exalted, into the identity of God, they were saying something radically new about the identity of God. Nevertheless, the novelty of God crucified did not betray the identity of the God of Israel. On the contrary, as the early church examined the scriptures they could find consistency in the novelty. They find the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ to be one and the same God.

In the dying and rising of Jesus, God had done a new thing that could only be adequately described in the language of Old Testament eschatology. It was the restoration from exile, the new creation, the healing of the rift between God and Israel and more. Paul Van Buren once described Christian use of the Hebrew Bible as “reading someone else's mail.” He has recently written “that thesis needs to be qualified by the recognition that in fact the church never read the scriptures with a sense that it was reading someone else's mail, and that is because Peter and his fellow discoverers of the gospel read them as their own Jewish mail, albeit with eyes made new by the desperate need, on that ‘first day of the week,’ to understand the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth as the King of the Jews.” (Paul M. Van Buren, According to the Scriptures: The Origins of the Gospel and of the Church's Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)

So the various writers of the New Testament made new use of familiar eschatological materials to express their belief that in the dying and rising of Jesus Christ, Israel's hopes for an ideal future had arrived, or at least, begun. For example, in Mark, our earliest gospel, there are clearly eschatological features in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus: “darkness came over the whole land” (Mark 15:33, see, for comparison, Jeremiah 4:23), “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Mark 14:38). In the crucified and risen Jesus the hopes and expectations of Israel were now embodied and are accompanied by cosmic signs and wonders appropriate to the coming of God's future.

The reversal of fortune is another common Old Testament eschatological theme taken up by New Testament writers. Donald Gowan writes that: “God's promise to make right all that has gone wrong with this world and human life is the essence of Old Testament eschatology.” (Donald E. Gowan, Eschatology in the Old Testament. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987, p. 15) The dying and rising of Christ mirrors the Old Testament eschatological hope for a restoration or a new creation. We see a good example of this when Paul speaks about “the God who calls into existence things that are not” (Romans 4:17). Another example is how the restoration texts in Second Isaiah are read by the church to refer to the cross and resurrection of Jesus rather than to the return from exile of their original context. We have only to think of the use of Isaiah 40 in the Advent portion of Handel's Messiah to see a powerful example of how the eschatological materials were reused to refer now to Jesus and the reversal of fortune that his coming promises.

These new uses of old eschatological texts help us see that the gospel of Jesus' cross and resurrection were understood eschatologically from the beginning. It can also help us to see that many of our modern problems with the idea of resurrection lie in our attempts to understand the resurrection as an individual and non-eschatological act. But to the Jews of that time the resurrection of an individual was both unprecedented and unexpected. That the crucified Jesus was resurrected could only mean to them the coming of God and with him the general resurrection of the last days (i.e., Daniel 12). Jürgen Moltmann writes:

Jesus' resurrection from the dead was never regarded as a private and isolated miracle for his authentication, but as the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead, i.e. as the beginning of the end of history in the midst of history. His resurrection was not regarded as a fortuitous miracle in an unchangeable world, but as the beginning of the eschatological transformation of the world by its creator. Thus the resurrection of Jesus stood in the framework of a universal hope of eschatological belief, which was kindled in it. (Jürgen Moltmann, “The Eschatological Trial of Jesus Christ” in The Crucified God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974, p. 163)

Among the earliest Christological titles were those with a future orientation, for example, Christ as the “first fruits of them that sleep,” “the pioneer and perfecter of our souls.” These descriptive titles looked ahead to God's new future, now inaugurated in the rising of the crucified, but not merely as the continuation of the past. Rather God's future was understood as a new creation, as new as the original creation was in comparison to the primordial chaos it replaced, and as new as the rising of the crucified Jesus. In referring to the various proleptic Christological titles Moltmann says:

That means that the crucified Christ was understood in the light of his resurrection and that his resurrection was understood in the light of his future in the coming God and his glory. Therefore his historical crucifixion was understood as the eschatological kingdom of glory in which the dead will be raised. The ‘future’ of which the first real anticipation was seen in his resurrection was not understood as future history and thus as part of transitoriness, but eschatologically as the future of history and thus as the pledge of the new creation. (Moltmann, p. 163)

So for the earliest church resurrection of the crucified Jesus was neither primarily an anthropological or a soteriological symbol, rather it disclosed the identity and character of God. God is the righteous one. His righteousness will ultimately be victorious over the forces of unrighteousness, over injustice and sin. That the cross should be the instrument of this victory was surely new content in their understanding of the identity of God, but did not contradict the identity of the God who had acted in the past and who they had always expected to act again.

The Identity of the Crucified

There was then great significance in the identity of the crucified one. It was not just any man who was raised. It was a man condemned by the religious law of his people and brutally executed by the civil law of Rome, the great earthly power of the time. These features are not incidental to the kerygma, as if the raising of any person would have had the same significance and the same subsequent gospel. No, the fact that the one raised was crucified as a powerless victim, abandoned by his friends and even by the one he called Father, demonstrates God's faithfulness and solidarity with all who are powerless and abandoned in this world.

The identity of the God disclosed in the cross resonates with the identity of the God of the prophets who sought righteousness for the poor, the oppressed and the powerless. The cross discloses anew God's righteousness in a world of unrighteousness suffering.

Moltmann writes:

The question of whether there is a God or not is a speculative question in the face of the cries for righteousness of those who are murdered or gassed, who are hungry and oppressed. If the question of theodicy can be understood as a question of the righteousness of God in the history of the suffering of the world, then all understanding and presentation of world history must be seen within the horizon of the question of theodicy. Or do the executioners ultimately triumph over the innocent victims? Even the Christian Easter faith in the last resort stands in the context of the question of the divine righteousness in history: does inhuman legalism triumph over the works of the law and of power? With this question we go beyond the formal statements about the proleptic structure of eschatological faith to the matter of Christian faith itself. We must not only ask whether it is possible and conceivable that one man has been raised from the dead before all others, and not only seek analogies in the historical structure of reality and in the anticipatory structure of reason, but also ask who this man was. If we do, we shall find that he was condemned according to his people's understanding of the law as a ‘blasphemer ’ and was crucified by the Romans, according to the divine ordinance of the Pax Romana, as a ‘rebel.’ He met a hellish death with every sign of being abandoned by his God and Father. The new and scandalous element in the Christian message of Easter was not that some man or other was raised before anyone else, but that the one who was raised was this condemned, executed and forsaken man. This was the unexpected element in the kerygma of the resurrection which created the new righteousness of faith. (Moltmann, p. 175)

Here the biblical affirmation that God cares for the poor and oppressed is given a dramatic new emphasis in the cross. God's steadfast love and mercy engage the suffering world as never before, and at great cost to God. If the raising of a man inaugurates the new eschatological age, then the raising of this man, the crucified one, provides new content to what sort of future it might be and what sort of God is bringing it about.

The Cross as Sacrifice

Another place, and in quite a different way, where we see the eschatological categories of the Old Testament brought to bear on the kerygma is the way that the cross is understood as a continuation and/or replacement of the temple, particularly in the epistle to the Hebrews (i.e., 10:14-18; 12:22, 24). The cross and resurrection can be seen as eschatological symbols of discontinuity and continuity without any sacrificial elements, and often were so seen in the early kerygma. But alongside this understanding sacrificial interpretations soon emerged. Jesus' cross was seen as “a once and for all” atoning sacrifice (1 John 4:10), God doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. This atoning sacrifice now replaced the need for temple sacrifice. Gowan addresses this point:

Because the sacrificial system was still being practiced and it was believed God's way of offering forgiveness involved accepting the blood of a victim shed in place of the sinner, the apostolic church quickly came to a sacrificial understanding of Jesus' death, adding a new and even more unprecedented element to Jesus' claim to be able to mediate divine forgiveness. (Gowan, p. 67)

Since in this view the cross has now made present the future eschatological hope, Christian eschatology became, at least in some sense, a realized eschatology. Gowan suggests that there were other ways the early church retained some eschatological hope in response to the challenge of realized eschatology:

For the first Christians that comprehensive act of forgiveness which the Old Testament promised for the last days had come to pass on the cross, and so what had been eschatological became past tense and, as one experienced it, present tense. Truly futuristic thought is not so different from Judaism, then, in its omission of a great act of forgiveness in the last days and its emphasis on the importance of repentance in the present, but in its teachings about sanctification earliest Christianity did preserve something of the Old Testament hope. A realistic assessment of the lives of forgiven Christians made it necessary to introduce some tension into their declaration that the eschatological hope had been realized, and to look forward to the day when the past would be fully overcome and what they were now experiencing in part would be perfected. (Gowan, p. 68)

Christians lived in the “already” but “not yet” of the eschatological kingdom begun in the cross and resurrection. So the role of the Holy Spirit becomes critical to understanding the cross as an eschatological act of God.

The Eschatological Spirit and the Holy Trinity

The early church clearly believed that the presence of the Holy Spirit was proof of the inauguration of God's reign. Perhaps the most obvious example of this would be the way Luke employed the Joel material in the Pentecost story in Acts 2, but there are many others (i.e. Romans 8:18-27; Galatians 4:4-7). The promise that God would “pour out my spirit in the latter days” was being accomplished in the church who worshiped the crucified God. That same Spirit was now the power of God in the new age to “sanctify” believers, that is, to work in and through them the power of Christ's death and resurrection.

The role of the Holy Spirit also moves us to a trinitarian understanding of the cross. Hans Frei's definition of doctrines as “conceptual redescriptions of the biblical narrative” well describes the later trinitarian understanding of the whole Christ event and its emphasis on the inter–dependence of the divine persons. Jesus' experience of being abandoned by God, in which he endures the condition of the sinner before God, can be viewed as arising from a trinitarian act in history, an act to which God intentionally sent him and which in obedience Jesus accepted. The cross is, therefore, a trinitarian act of mutual consent between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. (See Richard L. Floyd, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. San Jose: Pickwick Press, 2000, and Ingolf U. Dalferth, “The Eschatological Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity” in Trinitarian Theology Today, edited by Christoph Schwöbel. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995)

The view of Karl Barth is helpful in understanding the work of the Holy Spirit as eschatological within the mystery of the Trinity. Barth understands the Spirit to reveal and make contemporary the reconciling work of Christ. However, the Spirit does not add anything to the perfected work of Christ accomplished by the divine act of the cross. Rather the Spirit is the eschatological form which manifests Christ's presence until the final consummation. If for Barth the resurrection is the original form of the divine act and redemption is the final form, then the sending of the Holy Spirit is the middle form, disclosing now to faith what will universally be disclosed on the last day. (George Hunsinger, “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth's Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, pp. 175-176)

Although the act of God is a particular act that takes place on the cross in a particular man, Jesus Christ, when understood as an act of the Triune God this particular act has cosmic implications. The act of God in Christ was for all the world, for every people in every age, and indeed for the whole created order. Within the mystery of the Holy Trinity there is no contradiction between the particularism and the universality of the one act. God, the Father Almighty, who created heaven and earth and the atoning Christ who saves humankind from sin and death mutually indwell one another along with the Holy Spirit who makes Christ our contemporary. Do we need to look any further than the activity of the Triune God to grasp the breadth of the church's mission toward our fellow humans and within the whole created order? In Colossians Paul speaks of this cosmic Christ, in whom dwells all the fullness of God (Col. 1:15-20). It is not too much to say that the very universality of the gospel lies in its discrete particularity: “God with us” in the human Jesus Christ. So that Martin Dibelius was able to say in his commentary on Colossians, “As Paul confirmed the cosmic significance of the faith in Christ, he maintained the exclusiveness of Christianity and saved the Christian Church from becoming just one mystery religion among others and from being submerged and overcome by syncretism.” (M. Dibelius, An die Kolosser, Epheser, an Philemon. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 12. 3rd ed.,rev. by Heinrich Greeven (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1953, p. 39) Although the Gospel emerged out of the particularity of Jesus and his cross and resurrection, that “scandal of particularity” in no way makes the gospel a parochial or sectarian concern. The Gospel bears witness to the reality that the eschatological Spirit is working outside as well as inside the church, and the completion of that cosmic work will be nothing less than the completion of God's creation.

A New Identity for God: Continuity and Discontinuity

How does a divine act that accepts death as the very means of redemption alter expectations for God's future? What is new about eschatology because of the cross? As we have said, the cross provides the key to understanding the identity and character of God for the future as well as for the present and the past. It does so by providing new content about the identity of God. The early kerygma stressed the new idea that God raised the crucified Jesus, and in so doing, defined himself as the God who raises the dead. “The subject of the action was God, the object of the suffering was the executed Jesus, and the event was regarded as an eschatological event.” (Moltmann, p. 188)

So the kerygma characteristically kept in view that the Risen One was the crucified. We see this quite plainly is in the post–resurrection appearances, which display the pattern of continuity and discontinuity. For example, Jesus' resurrection body is tangible so that Thomas can touch his wounds (John 20:19-29); he eats a fish with the disciples (Luke 24:46-43), yet Mary thinks he is the gardener at first (John 20:15); and the disciples on the road to Emmaus don't recognize him until he breaks bread with them (Luke 24:13-35).

The glorified body of the Risen Christ can be seen then as a symbol of the continuity and discontinuity of God's future. He is clearly the same Jesus who was crucified, yet he is changed in that he is no longer subject to death. He has really died. His death is not a charade, nor is his risen body a ghostly apparition. Once again the focus is not on any intrinsic quality in Jesus, but on the identity of the God who raised him. As the apostle Paul said: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).

Likewise, for the Christian death is real. It is not a charade, and Christian faith is not a denial of death. Death is “the last enemy,” as Paul rightly says. Donald Juel is correct when he writes:

There can be no denial of death. The gospel is the ‘word of the cross.’ As a word that takes the reality of finitude and death seriously, it respects the experience of contemporaries who respect the reality of death and finitude. The cross of Christ is ‘eschatological,’ however, not only because it does not evade death. It is an experience of the last things most especially because God does not allow the cross to be the last word. The testimony of the New Testament is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and in so doing opened a new possibility for the whole created order. (Donald Juel, Christian Hope and the Denial of Death, in Polkinghorne and Welker, p. 181)

To understand death in the light of the eschatological cross is to admit the reality and finality of death, while at the same time trusting in the identity of the God who raises the dead. We do not sorrow “as those who have no hope.” Likewise, to contemplate cosmic futility in the face of the eschatological cross is to accept that the created order is finite, while at the same time to trust in the identity of God as the one who loves his creation. Schwöbel writes, “The belief that the resurrection of Jesus holds the key for the answers that can be given to all eschatological questions, like the relationship between old and new, between death and everlasting life, between destruction and futility and fulfillment, is the reason why Christianity from the beginning has been an eschatological religion.” He goes on to say:

If we see the story of Jesus' death and resurrection as the paradigmatic story about God it becomes clear that this story discloses the faithfulness of God to his creation which grants continuity through the discontinuity of death. The hope of creation to overcome the absolute discontinuity of death is not based on an inherent capacity of creation because death is the end of all created capacities, the disruption of all relationships that can be maintained by the creature. The hope of creation is based on God's maintaining his unconditionally creative relationship to his creation. The continuity which transcends the discontinuity of death is grounded in the constancy of God's love which brings to expression the unchangeable character of God's being. (Schwöbel, p. 116)

There can be no basis in the natural order then for the Christian hope, nothing intrinsic to creation, no recourse to an immortal soul or some built–in permanence. While Christian hope holds to the promise that nothing good or true or just done in this world is done in vain, it doesn't look to the created order itself for hope for the future but to the God who loves his creation and sustains it.

Schwöbel speaks of the constancy of God's “character,” where Bauckham uses the term “identity.” I take the terms to mean much the same thing: that God is known by his deeds and his reputation as a God of steadfast love and mercy who provides for that which he has made. So the new creation of cross and resurrection are of a piece with the original intentions of God in creation. The cross reconciles the creator with his creatures and provides a way for the new creation to fulfill the intention of the old. Schwöbel argues that:

The reconciliation between God the creator and his estranged creatures which Christian faith understands to be the point of Jesus' death on the cross is the means by which God carries out his original intention of establishing communion with his creation. From the human side, from the perspective of the human creatures who have cut themselves off from the ground and end of all being, this eschatological act is the beginning of the new creation. From God's perspective, if we may express it this way on the basis of the story of Jesus, the eschaton is the fulfillment of God's original intention actualized through the means of his reconciling act on the cross. The dis-continuity of sin and alienation from God is overcome by God'sremaining continuously faithful to his will which is rooted in his being. (Schwöbel, p. 116)

The eschatological hope then lies neither in a flight from the created order nor in possibilities inherent in it. Rather hope lies solely with God and God's promise for creation. And the story of Jesus and what it discloses about the character or identity of God is then clearly a story not just for Christians but for the whole world. In Leslie Newbigin's poignant phrase, the Gospel is “more news than views” and offers hope that is more than parochial. As Schwöbel puts it:

If the story of Jesus is really a story about God, and if it is the story in which God definitively discloses his relationship with creation which is rooted in God's own being and character, the Jesus story has universal significance. As we said above: The theological character of the christological story is the key to its eschatological significance. Because Jesus' story discloses the character of God's relationship to his creation as one by which God maintains his relationship to creation through the discontinuity of death, this story is a promise for all. (Schwöbel, p. 117)

The Church: A Community of Hope

So the church in each generation bears witness to the God who raises the dead, and brings to the larger conversation about the future its peculiar perspective. The church witnesses to this hope in acts of justice and mercy, in service and evangelism. And it experiences the pattern or model of continuity and discontinuity through its proclamation of Word and Sacrament and through the experience of the justification of the sinner. Schwöbel reminds us that Christians are not engaged in mere wishful thinking about the future but in hopeful faith:

While taking the threat of utter futility seriously, Christian hope is nevertheless left neither to the noble resignation of tragedy nor to the joyless mirth of farce. The gospel of Christ promises a continuity that is maintained beyond the discontinuity of the death of the finite life, a continuity that is already promised in the proclamation of the gospel and in the celebration of the sacraments. For Christians this is not a claim that will only be verified or falsified in the eschaton . . . The church is the place where the experience of grace in the present can provide a basis for hope in the future, because the gift of forgiveness just as the gift of new life after death has the same foundation, the cross and resurrection of Christ, and follows the same pattern of God granting continuity where created possibilities are exhausted. Every experience of gratuitous forgiveness offers vindication of eschatological hope. This is perhaps the most the church can offer in the conversations on eschatological questions. (Schwöbel, p. 122)

This is not to say that the church has always been faithful to its character as a community that lives in eschatological hope based on its trust in the identity of God. On the contrary, the church lives in the world and is tempted by the world to be something else, a mere religion or a chapel to culture. The eschatological character of the church makes it an interim institution as it waits in hope for the final consummation of all things. It is worth remembering that there will be no temple in the New Jerusalem.

Both the communal and the eschatological character are at risk in many contemporary understandings of church, where the church is seen as a voluntary association of like–minded individuals in pursuit of private spiritual goals. This relegation of faith to the private sphere threatens the church's integrity as a community of eschatological hope. Schwöbel sees this as one of the church's chief temptations in our time:

On the one hand, it is the eschatological character of the gospel of Christ that shapes the being of the church as an institution of the interim. The church could only abstain from contributing to the cultural conversation on ultimate questions if it denies its own character as existing in tension between the coming of Christ and the full actualization of the kingdom of God. On the other hand, the message that is entrusted to the church claims universal significance because of its eschatological character. If it would withdraw from cultural conversations on eschatological questions the church would betray the universal impact of its message and turn Christianity into a tribal religion for Christians. This is not to deny that this often happens. Sometimes the churches present themselves as organizations for the pursuit of private religious interests. The inevitable trivialization of the Christian message as an individual path to salvation understood as psychological well-being often accompanies the withdrawal from the public sphere. Consenting to the Enlightenment's creed that all religion must be essentially private is perhaps one of the most serious temptations of the church in the modern situation. (Schwöbel, p. 120)

To avoid that temptation the church needs to keep ever before it what P. T. Forsyth called “the cruciality of the cross.” The cross provides us with the primary model for understanding the church as the community that trusts the God who raises the dead. The church takes its identity from the crucified and Risen Christ who is its Lord.

The Cross as Critical Principle

This has radical implications for the way the church views both its own life and its relationship to the world. The eschatological understanding of the cross provides the critical principle which de–centers our preoccupation with both individual and corporate concerns. It also calls into question any ideology that would use the Gospel to further its own ends. Anthony Thiselton has written:

The cross is a scandalous reversal of human expectations and values . . . . In the theology of the Fathers, as in that of Paul, the message of the cross challenged the corporate constructs, expectations, and wish fulfillments of communities or of individuals as a scandalous reversal of human expectations and values. Far from reflecting pre–existing social horizons, the cross and the resurrection gave birth to new horizons, which in turn effected a cross–contextual liberating critique and individual and social transformation. This is a far cry from the notion thatcommunities can only project their own images onto texts, thereby to construct their meanings. (Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992, p. 7)

The cross provides the church with a anti-ideological bias that protects the gospel from being blown about by any number of contemporary cultural winds or co–opted by any number of alternative faiths, religious and secular.

The cross also protects the church from both utopianism and cynicism, because it keeps in view that the resurrected one remains the crucified one. Thiselton points out how the resurrection appearances function first of all to establish continuity of identity between the crucified Jesus and the transformed, exalted, Lord Christ. That continuity of identity is an important principle for the church as well, the community that rises with Christ also dies with him.

“If the Christian kerygma announces that the new humanity shares in this resurrection, continuity–contrast–transformation, we need not be surprised if the earliest texts also trace the same pattern of transformation and continuity in the experience of the earliest witnesses who proclaim it.” (Thiselton, p. 446)

So Peter denies Jesus, and in so doing, shares in the “failure” of the cross. Apostleship then entails both weakness and suffering, and resurrection, the restoration of a broken relationship.

Thiselton contrasts this understanding to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's construal of apostleship which stresses that “while all the texts point up the repeated failures of men, the women remain models of unfailing discipleship.” (Thiselton, p. 447) She wants to read the Lukan Easter text, “these words seem to be an idle tale and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11) as an anti–feminist text when most people would read them as a rebuke to the unbelief of the male apostles. Fiorenza is intent on explanations which depend on gender differences, but such interpretations cut the theological nerve center of New Testament theologies of resurrection which is “continuity of identity in the context of transformation and change.” (Thiselton, p. 446) Gender differences are not decisive for apostleship, then or now. What is decisive is a community that recognizes its identity in Jesus Christ, so that in its struggles no less than in its victories it knows that it is sharing in the life of the crucified and Risen Lord.

Likewise, the cross helps the church to understand its life and discipleship in other ways than by the canons of success and power that the world so values. It teaches the church to recognize its true hope in the God who raised the dead from the illusory hopes the world holds out for both individuals in the face of death and for human history in the face of futility. William Sloane Coffin once told a group of ministers that “if you didn't have so many illusions, you wouldn't be so disillusioned!” Christian faith which deemphasizes the cross is prone to just such disillusionment about its projects and hopes. But, the cross functions as the critical principle which separates illusory hopes from the true hope that rests in trust in the God who raises the dead. Hans Weder speaks of the necessity of a process of critical disappointment:

. . . the Gospel of Luke can speak of hopes being disappointed as a positive event. Herod's hope to see a sign done by the Messiah is disappointed by Jesus (Luke 23:8ff.). This is a necessary disappointment belonging to the positive work of Christ. It means being saved, so to speak, from the power of futile hope. In a similar way the disciples at Emmaus tell of their hope for Israel's political ‘redemption’; this hope has been disappointed bitterly by the crucified (Luke 24:21). This sort of hope must be disappointed, because it prevents the disciples from perceiving the Risen One (Luke 24:25-26, 33-35) who is the true living Savior, who brings a redemption from the political play of power as such and not only from the hostile powers. It is not by accident that both pieces of evidence mentioned are cited in the context of the cross. Jesus' way to the cross brings all kinds of hope into a fundamental crisis, and since then only that kind of hope is valid that proves true in view of the cross, the cross as a sign of finitude, even for the Son of God. By narrative means Luke shows the way from illusion to hope in the face of thereality to which death and finitude essentially belong. (Hans Weder, “Hope and Creation,” in Polkinghorne and Welker, p. 186)

Weder's insight suggests that the church is able to live in real hope only because the cross has taught it where properly to look for hope. Christian hope lies beyond all human endeavors and accomplishments and beyond all possibilities inherent in the natural world. Christians love the world God made and for which his Son gave his life, and work and pray to make it more like the kingdom to come. At the same time, they know that their true hope lies only in the God who raised the crucified, who is the God who raises the dead. Such hope transcends both personal death and cosmic futility. From the cross the crucified God reigns over the future, and his suffering love will overcome all things.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bauckham, Richard. God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

Dalferth, Ingolf U. “The Eschatological Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity” in Trinitarian Theology Today. Ed. Christoph Schwöbel. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.

Dibelius, Martin. An die Kolosser, Epheser, an Philemon. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 12. 3rd ed., rev. by Heinrich Greeven. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1953.

Floyd, Richard L. When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. San Jose: Pickwick Press, 2000.

Frei, Hans. Types of Christian Theology. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Gowan, Donald E. Eschatology in the Old Testament. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987.

Hunsinger, George. “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth's Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.

Newbigin, Leslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.

Schwöbel, Christoph. “The Church as Cultural Space.” John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, eds. The End of the World and the Ends of God, Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000.

Thiselton, Anthony. New Horizons in Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.

Van Buren, Paul M. According to the Scriptures: The Origins of the Gospel and of the Church's Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Weder, Hans. “Hope and Creation.” John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, eds. The End of the World and the Ends of God, Science and Theology on Eschatology. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000.

I prepared this paper for the Pastor-Theologian Program at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, New Jersey in 2001. A version of this paper appeared in Hope for your Future: Theological Voices from the Pastorate. Edited by William H. Lazareth. Eerdmans, 2002.

I was too old to ever really appreciate Michael Jackson. The Jackson Five were a pop novelty act to me, and by the time Michael came into his own with his biggest album Thriller I was already busy being a pastor and the father of an infant. Later in his life Michael became increasingly bizarre and creepy. The media loved his antics, but to me the fascination was akin to watching a car crash or a train wreck; you don’t feel you should be looking, but can’t take your eyes off it.

Now in death the media circus begins in earnest, as it has so often before when the celebrated die before their time: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Anna Nichole Smith.

So I heard singer Celine Dion tell Larry King the other night that Michael Jackson’s death was like JFK’s in its public impact. I think this is pretty far-fetched, but if it is even remotely true it is a very bad sign indeed for the commonweal. America’s culture of celebrity (which is also one of our more successful exports) is bad for the soul of both individuals and societies.

I once heard Bill Coffin ask rhetorically, “Where are our statesmen?” And his answer was, “A society gets more of what it values, so in America we have a lot of really good basketball players.” We value celebrity, and so we get the wild popularity of American Idol and reality shows where people will degrade themselves just to be on TV. We even have celebrities who are famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton. At least Michael Jackson could sing and dance.

Now it’s always sad when someone dies too young in tragic circumstances, but we need to stand back and realize that Michael Jackson was not Ghandi or Mother Theresa, but a talented entertainer.

It is sad to say but we don’t celebrate the wise, the good, the true, the faithful as often as we celebrate the narcissistic, the beautiful, the outrageous, and the just plain weird.

The church’s notion of the faithful dead as the communion of saints (see my Mystic Sweet Communion) has been replaced in popular culture by the cult of dead celebrities whose lives for the most part serve more as cautionary tales than good examples.

My hometown newspaper, the Berkshire Eagle, gave Michael Jackson’s death the kind of front-page above the fold treatment that a presidential assassination or an act of war deserve. There are important stories to be told in our world, not the least of which is the daily starvation of thousands of people, many of them children. The culture of celebrity distracts us from this and other inconvenient truths. Michael Jackson’s own finest hour may have been in 1985 when he wrote and sang, “We are the World.” That was 24 years ago and the “brighter day” still awaits.

I recently received notice that the theme for my state Conference’s annual meeting this fall will be “Generosity as a way of life.” A cynic might wonder if this is just another attempt to shore up the sagging finances that plague all the mainline denominations.

In August 2000 I had a catastrophic bicycle accident (see I Lost My Marbles on the Mohawk Trail). I was months later diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that eventually led to my early retirement on disability. I was rummaging around in the files and found this piece I wrote for Colleague after the crash. It's called Spills:

In the movie Regarding Henry, the main character, Henry, who is played by Harrison Ford, is a cutthroat New York lawyer and general all–around stinker. He's cheating on his wife with someone at work, his business ethics are shaky at best, and he's a merciless martinet with his young daughter. When she spills her juice at the table he flies off the handle at her. But Henry's life changes when he goes out for cigarettes to the corner store and interrupts a robbery. The nervous robber shoots him in the head with a Saturday Night Special and Henry fights for life and later, for recovery to his old life. He's also lost his memory and had a personality change. At his first meal at home after his discharge from rehab his daughter again spills her juice, and she immediately recoils in anticipation of his outburst. “That's alright, honey,” her father tells her, “I do it all the time.” Whereupon Henry knocks over his own glass: “See!”

When my kids were toddlers such spills were commonplace at our table, and we did our best to be patient. “Don't cry over spilled milk” is part of every parent’s lexicon. The word spill means “to cause or allow (a substance) to run or fall out of a container.” By extension it came to mean to fall. Last summer I had a spill and went over the handlebars of my road bicycle. As a result of that spill, I separated my right shoulder, broke a rib, and sustained a traumatic brain injury that left my wits addled for a number of months. Because of my separated shoulder the first few times I tried to pour juice or put milk on my cereal I spilled it all over the kitchen counter. It gave me new empathy with what my children were facing as toddlers.

Life is a series of spills. Like Henry, we do it all the time. We run or fall out of our container, and it makes a mess that we then have to clean up or fix. The conventional wisdom is to not cry over spilled milk, and to pick yourself up after a spill, and I think from a human point of view that is exactly what one should do. So I plan to get back on my bicycle as soon as it, and I, are ready, whenever that is.

But from another point of view perhaps we should cry over our spills, if we can see in them the larger spilled-ness of our lives. The Christian faith knows that we humans are never quite what God intended us to be. To carry our earlier image of the spilled life, we have fallen outside our containers. We may not be empty, but we are not as full as God wants us to be. Ironically, in Christian theology we call this “the fall” and it is not just about our ancestral relatives in the Garden of Eden, but a truth about human life in general. We are perennially and constitutionally estranged from God, from one another, and from our natural surroundings. As one of our prayers says, “we worship ourselves and the things we have made.”

And so human life is a series of spills and perhaps God does cry over our spills, not over spilled milk, but the kind of wasteful spills that we know, relationships gone sour, talent squandered, potential wasted and the fearsome losses of war. The Christian answer is not then just to pick yourself up, because the truth is we can't pick ourselves up. There are spills you can fix, be they milk on the counter, or the bruises and fractures of a fall from a bike, but there are spills from which we never recover.

The fixing must come from God's side. And the good news we preach is that God does this. God not only cries over our spills, he wants to fill us so that we are whole again. At baptism we pour water into the font and the child is washed and cleansed as a sign and seal of the new life that God promises to pour out to us. And one of the things we are demonstrating when we participate in that symbolic action is this: that although the child is herself a miracle, a gift of God, she will need the gifts God gives to have the new life God wants for her. At the Lord's Supper we take the cup and fill it and recite the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, “Drink this all of you, it is my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.”

We are close to the heart of things in these gestures, when we can realize that in Christ God pours out his own life, that we might have life, and have it fully. That's a great paradox: human life spills, but God fills, spilling his life so that we might have life and have it in abundance; giving us his life-giving Spirit even as we fall out of our containers and face the potential and sometimes very real emptiness of being human.

We can't fill our own containers, only God can do that. He's made us to be filled, and “our hearts are restless until we find rest in Thee,” until we realize we cannot do it ourselves, only God can. Henry only becomes lovable when he accepts his newfound vulnerability. It’s a hard lesson. Some of us must learn it again and again. And it goes clean contrary to the conventional wisdom of the world, which is that to win you must be strong and tough and self-sufficient, needing nothing or no one. But in fact we do need others and we do need God. Because life is a series of spills, and in them God gives us opportunity to come to terms with our need for him, and to accept the life he gives us as a gift, when we stop trying to manufacture life for ourselves without him. So don't worry so much about your everyday spills. They are part of life. Hey, I do it all the time.

When Izaak Walton, the seventeenth century writer best known for The Compleat Angler, set out to write a life of poet and divine John Donne, there was as yet no word in English for a biographer, and the very concept of a biography as we know it did not exist. There were “Lives” written going back as far as Plutarch and Suetonius, of course, but these were in no way distinguished from history. There were also “Lives” of the saints written for the edification of the faithful. It was works such as Walton’s “Lives” in the seventeenth century and Johnson’s and Boswell’s in the eighteenth that helped to create the literary genre we know today.

You would never know by the popularity of biographies today what recent phenomena they are. The Twentieth Century saw the blossoming of the genre, beginning with Aylmer Maude's Life of Tolstoy, first published in 1910. Since then the floodgates of biography have been opened and never closed. “Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote St. John The Evangelist, and this is particularly true of biographies today.

How popular are biographies? Last Sunday’s (this was written in 2006, but make the necessary changes) New York Times Book Review had reviews of new biographies of John Cassevetes, Phyllis Schafly, Ronald Reagan and Christopher Marlowe.

Half of the books on the current New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction are either memoirs or biographies, although there is more than a little doubt now whether James Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, has as much fiction in it as did his Million Little Pieces, which tops the paperback list.

Frey’s situation is a case in point of the popularity of the factual over the fictional. Unless you are one of those rare souls who actually reads books rather than hearing about them on TV, you probably are aware of the flap caused by the disclosure that Frey’s Million Little Pieces, which was published as a memoir, contains a considerable amount of what charitably could be called fiction.

Oprah Winfrey, a force to be reckoned with in the book world, had strongly recommended Million Little Pieces, sending it to the top of the lists, and, when the expose broke, she at first defended Frey. Oprah called in to a Larry King Live show where Frey was taking a beating, and told Larry and his TV audience she thought the criticisms were no big deal, and to stop picking on her guy.

After some days of reflection, and a blizzard of editorials about her, Oprah recanted, and invited both Frey and Nan Talese, his editor, onto her show. There she delivered to the unsuspecting objects of her wrath a rather severe admonition about the importance of truth in general and publishing in particular. Nan Talese made some half-hearted attempts to defend the lying by saying that memoirs involve the intersection of fact with imagination. I will return to the fascinating subject of where the line is between fact and fiction, but for now let us note that the negative publicity hasn’t seemed to hurt sales of either of Frey’s books. But the nugget of fact that I find most fascinating in this tale is the recent disclosure that Frey had originally submitted Million Little Pieces as fiction to 17 publishers, and had been rejected each time. When he reclassified it as a memoir, he had a ready publisher and public.

In other words, many of us love a tale we think is true, better than one that is simply well told. A purported true story may find an audience where fiction cannot, as Frey discovered. This may help to explain today’s flourishing biography trade, and the peculiar fact that people will buy literary biographies of author’s whose books are no longer to be found in the same bookstore in which the biography was purchased. It’s not always true, of course, that biographies of authors are more interesting than the fiction that made the authors famous, but it often is. How many of you wouldn’t rather read about Gertrude Stein, for example, who is fascinating, than actually read her books, which are impenetrable, at least to me.

One of the marks of modernity is a fascination with the individual, and since Isaak Walton’s time the rise of the biography has coincided with the rise of the individual. There were great men in antiquity, of course, whose lives were well worth knowing about, but the focus of writing about them was on their place in a larger narrative of history, a story of battles and empires. Today we read biographies of people who have nothing to do with the sweep of history, some of whom are merely famous for being famous, such as the ubiquitous Paris Hilton.

We are greedy for biographies, and they cover every literary brow, from high to low. Whether your taste runs to the British Royal Family and Hollywood celebrities or to the literati of the 1930’s you’re in luck. The menu has almost too many choices. Recently there have been major biographies of Lords Byron and Nelson, John Coltrane, Edvard Munch, Rudyard Kipling, Emma Goldman, W. B. Yeats, St. Augustine, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Pepys, Sandra Day O’Connor and John James Audubon, to name but a few. Even James Boswell himself, the Ur biographer, is the subject of a new major biography. There were two biographies released simultaneously of Madonna, the singer, not Mary the mother of Jesus.

The recent biographies of America’s founding fathers are a regular growth industry. We have had recent major biographies of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.

Any Civil War General worth his salt has his own Life; I have read biographies of both Grant and Lee in the last year and started one about Longstreet, but decided after a few pages that I didn’t want to know that much about him. Nonetheless reading several biographies can often make you intimate with a period better than a standard history.

So what is a biography? If biology is the study of the organization of life, biography is the writing about life, from the Greek words bios for life and graphein, to write. Like many words biography has expanded from its strict meaning, so now it can be used to denote the mere facts and information about a person. Used in this looser sense, a Wikepedia entry on the Internet, or a Hollywood biopic are both biographies.

But biography, in the strict sense, is a life in writing. It isn’t the life itself, but a written account of it. By way of analogy, I have often explained to people over the years that my written sermon manuscripts are not actually sermons, but only literary artifacts of oral events. To read the sermon is not the same as to experience the sermon. The manuscript has words on a page, but it leaves many questions unanswered. How many people were in the congregation? Were they alert or sleepy? Was the preacher animated, somber, or amusing? Did he mumble or speak up? What was he wearing? Was there a thunderstorm going on outside, or a baby crying? You get the idea.

In much the same way a biography is also a literary artifact, but of a much less ephemeral event, not a half-hour oration but the entire life of a person. This is no easy task. The complexities and nuances of a human life can only partially be captured in words. If only the bare facts of a human life were needed, then a biography could be condensed into a few paragraphs. Where did he live? What did she do? Why is he famous? When did she die? (That sort of thing.) Dictionaries of biography can sum-up several lives this way on a single page, but a full-dress biography, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example, do far more.

They try to capture something of the genius of the life they portray, as a portrait painter tries to do more than simply mirror the physical image of the subject. An engaging biography leaves you feeling you understand something of the person’s inner life, his passions and motivations. And since every life must to some extent remain a mystery, even to its closest intimates, even to oneself, good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art.

The biographer must ask, “What made this person tick?” What is it that she accomplished that makes her a worthy subject for the biographer? Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, put it like this: “The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”(Jay Parini, SALON | Nov. 19, 1997.)

I have said that good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art, and both are necessary. Without careful research, the art will not create a good biography. So how does the biographer go about the task of finding the information necessary? Edel was asked the secret to biographical research, he said, “Get a big desk.” The biographer is like a detective, putting together the pieces of the puzzle, some of which are missing. There will be gaps and silences as well as letters and diaries. James Boswell, who did as much as anyone to create the modern biography, was blessed with a personal acquaintance with Samuel Johnson. He ate with him, drank with him, and traveled with him. He egged him on into lengthy discourses while he took notes in shorthand. In other words, he had access. But that is the exception.

Most biographers aren’t so lucky. The paper trail can be hard to find. Letters are lost, or even burned by protective family members or lovers. Ian Hamilton has written a fascinating account of the obstacles placed in the way of biographers in his book, Keepers of the Flame. He himself knows something of these frustrations in his own attempt to write a life of the notoriously reclusive J. D. Salinger. Hamilton’s book is full of stories of widows and executors fighting off those they perceive as predatory biographers.

Some examples: Lord Byron’s executor put Byron’s memoir to the flames. Thomas Hardy destroyed most of his life’s papers and then conspired with his second wife to pretend she was the author of a biography he was actually writing about himself. Jane Austen’s sister destroyed letters she thought revealed personal material. Poet Ted Hughes, husband of Sylvia Plath, destroyed her last two journals, and then published his own edition of the rest.

And those are only some of the problems associated with writing about dead people; there is a whole different set of problems when dealing with the living. First there is the problem of authorization. If you seek permission to write an authorized biography, does it make you beholden to the author and family so as to skew the final picture? On the other hand, an unauthorized biographer can be perceived as not much better than a stalker.

Listen to Janny Scott of The New York Times tell of the trials and tribulations of two biographers of living subjects: Carole Klein, who was writing about Doris Lessing, and Ann Waldron, who was writing about Eudora Welty:

“These may be boom years in the biography business, but the economics of publishing and popular tastes have put pressure on writers to select living subjects instead of the kind one biographer calls ‘nice and dead.’

The problem is that the living ones tend to say no. Some even encourage their friends to do the same. Which can make spending three or four years reconstructing a hostile subject's life a lonely, dispiriting way of paying the bills.

Letters go unanswered, calls unreturned. Sources hang up when the biographer introduces himself over the phone. One potential source let Ms. Klein fly all the way to London before canceling their lunch date.

'“I will never, never do another living person,'' said Ann Waldron. ‘I have a pretty thick skin but not that thick to undergo this for the rest of my life.’

Ms. Klein was ‘a tremendous fan'’ of Mrs. Lessing's books, interested in the social and cultural context of her life. As she puts it: ‘I had this feeling that we would connect.'’

Mrs. Waldron and Ms. Klein . . . each approached their subjects before making a book proposal. They had known them, at least slightly, before. . . . But Miss Welty and Mrs. Lessing said no, repeatedly. They were not interested in having biographies done, they said. They gave reasons subjects often give: Miss Welty said she wanted her writing to stand on its own; Mrs. Lessing said she was writing a memoir.

‘I was a fool,’ Mrs. Waldron said in retrospect. ‘I rushed in where angels would have feared to tread.’ She said she allowed herself to believe Miss Welty was not adamantly opposed. And being from the South, like Miss Welty, she figured she would be able to get Southerners to talk.

One of the first people she called was a man she had interviewed for an earlier book. ‘I’ll have to call Eudora,’ she remembers him saying. When he called back, he said he had been asked not to cooperate. He said Miss Welty had said: ‘Ask Ann to call me.’ Mrs. Waldron didn't. “She’d just talk me out of it,'” she explained.

Mrs. Waldron went to Memphis and tracked down a retired college administrator who had known Miss Welty years before. Does Eudora know you're working on this book? The woman asked over the phone. Mrs. Waldron said yes. Do you have her permission? No. The woman hung up.

Mrs. Waldron wrote to another man; he never answered, then declined to talk when she reached him by phone. Still another agreed to see her as soon as he returned from Europe. When he got back, he called her. ‘Don't come,'’ he said. ‘I've talked to Eudora.’

Mrs. Waldron drafted and redrafted a letter to him, explaining how much she wanted and needed the interview. She offered not to quote him, if that would help. To try to convince him she was a serious literary biographer, she sent along a copy of one of her earlier books.

He sent the book back unopened and a one-line letter saying: ‘The last thing Eudora needs at this stage in her life is an unauthorized biography,’ Mrs. Waldron said.

Ms. Klein ran into similar problems. When she published an author's query in The New York Times Book Review, looking for correspondence and personal recollections about Mrs. Lessing, Mrs. Lessing's agent sent a frosty letter to the editor that was then published in The Book Review.

‘I am writing on behalf of Mrs. Lessing to say that this biography is totally unauthorized, that no permissions will be granted for extracts from the author's work and that her letters are also copyrighted and cannot be used without her permission,’ the two-paragraph letter said.

Ms. Klein was stunned. ‘If you were an unsophisticated person reading this, you would have thought it was illegal to answer,’ she said. ‘I did think that was out of bounds. This was cutting off the most valuable research tool a biographer has. It was such an extreme step, particularly for a writer to do to another writer.” (New York Times article October 6, 1996. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” by Janny Scott)

And yet, can we not understand why someone would be leery of a lurking biographer? Most subjects of biographies are famous people, and most biographers are not. Can this writer be trusted with something as precious as the way posterity will view ones life? These doubts are natural, and if truth be told, not all biographers are reliable, fair or even truthful. The market for scandalous biographies is insatiable and often lucrative. Who can resist? Many cannot, and the tradition of scurrilous lives is as old as the emerging genre of modern biography.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, as the literary life became increasingly detached from the royal court, writers began to earn their bread in the marketplace and rogue publishers would accommodate their publications to public tastes. The poet Alexander Pope battled one Grub Street hack named Edmund Curll, who has the distinction of being the first peddler of scandalous biographies:

“It occurred to (Curll) that, in a world governed by the laws of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another’s remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, on famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime. He had learned the wisdom of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and knew that there were many rotten corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in. So he seized on them before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches. . . . His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.” (Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson, Clarendon Press, 1910, p 117 quoted in Hamilton, p 50)

So a tradition of suspicion and distrust towards biographers began at the creation. But even with cooperation the research into biography is hard work. James Atlas describes his ten-year effort to write a biography of Saul Bellow: “Over the next decade, I made my biographer's rounds, like the postman deterred neither by sleet nor snow--nor by occasional emanations of reticence or frostiness from my subject--from the routine (often a fascinating routine) of poring over his unpublished manuscripts in the rare book and manuscript division of the University of Chicago Library; lugging my laptop all over America in quest of high-school classmates, cousins, friends, and lovers of my famously peripatetic subject; driving Avis rental cars into the remotest suburbs of Los Angeles and flying into Buffalo, N.Y., in pursuit of letters in private hands. Biography is no vocation for old men; it requires physical stamina. By the time I'd filled up my cupboard with the building materials for my book, I was, to borrow one of Bellow's favorite words, bushed.” (James Atlas, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999)

After all this collecting then the biographer must choose what to leave in, and what to leave out. Out of his particular collection of information, including the gaps and silences, the biographer must sift and sort to create a literary artifact that conveys a living life. What you leave out may be as important as what you put in, and the holes must be respected. Julian Barnes once wrote that a net may be defined two ways, as a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. . . But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net . . . as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” (Quoted in Lee p 5)

And what to leave out is no easy matter as authors get attached to their research like parents to their children. James Atlas again: “The trouble is that you've gone through so much pain to collect the damned junior-high-school transcript or the quote from Bellow's landlord in Paris in 1948 that you feel you have to put it in--just to get credit. Only after you have a completed manuscript does your confidence build to the point where you can go through the top-heavy pile of pages and, encountering the third reference to Bellow's occasional book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, decide: Who cares? and slash it with the red pen. On my second go-round I cut 200 pages. . . . On the third pass, recalling Proust's admonition to one of his correspondents that if he'd only had time he would have written a shorter letter, I managed to cut another 200 pages.”

And when does the biographer know that the research part of the project is over? Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, about which we have had a paper here in the Monday Evening Club, tells of her plight as she finished her research:

“It was July of 2004, and I had just turned in the 765-page manuscript of my biography of the Peabody sisters—three women at the center of New England's Transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and '40s—a project that had taken me nearly 20 years to complete. Free at last—or so I thought—I was on vacation in New Hampshire when a family friend asked me, hesitantly, over gin-and-tonics at a cocktail party, ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ For once, I sensed, this question didn't carry the usual subtext: Why haven't you finished your book yet? She'd been poking around in her attic, my friend told me, and found a trunk full of letters that had belonged to her husband's great-grandmother. One thick packet, tied in pink ribbon, was labeled ‘Mary T. Peabody’—the middle of the three sisters. Would I be interested in reading more letters? Or was it, finally, too late?

After a certain point in the research, as any biographer will tell you, such information induces a shudder of dread. Letters take a long time to read, especially handwritten ones like those I'd plowed through by the hundreds for my book. . . . (And) there was the all-too-real possibility that some new information in these letters would throw off everything I'd written. What if I had to start over again—as I'd already done once before? That was after a manuscript find at the 10-year mark turned up Elizabeth's adolescent diary, the daily journals she'd kept while visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1830s. The same material yielded my greatest scoop, Elizabeth's confession of love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer who ended up marrying her youngest sister, Sophia, a landscape painter, in 1842.

In truth, far more of the material I uncovered in the Peabody sisters' letters had to do with intellectual disputes than with love triangles. Yet the confessional nature of the manuscripts I was working with seemed to bother some people when I talked about them. ‘Don't you feel guilty, reading all that private mail and then quoting from it in your book?’ my friends would ask. It's a common attitude: What was written in private is meant to stay that way. A few years ago I had a tough time trying to convince my own aunt not to pitch a diary my grandmother kept as an Army bride in Paris during WWI, which gave a rare glimpse of civilian life in wartime; she was only trying to protect my grandmother's privacy, my aunt protested.

. . . Perhaps most biographers are plagued with the worry, as they near the completion of their books, that they haven’t been as faithful to the facts as they might have been. As a first-time biographer, anxiously proofreading nearly a hundred pages of documentary endnotes, I certainly was. The farther a biographer is removed from research in the archives, the more she suspects the characters in the historical drama she is constructing may have become her own creations—not invented out of whole cloth, as in a novel, but shaded to make certain personality traits more vivid and to fit a larger narrative. But reading these new letters, I was struck by how distinct each sister's voice was, emerging from the clutter of pages, and how true to the characters I'd put forward in the book. I could almost predict what each one would say as I pulled her letter from the pile. It was as if the Peabody sisters were speaking to me, one last time, across the centuries.” (“The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail. By Megan Marshall.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005. Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.)

In these accounts we get glimpses into the creative process of putting the material together. This is where the deft art comes in to shape the research. With or without cooperation you have your big table full of research, now what do you do with it? The biographer must get a feel for the material and find the way to convey the truth of it. The English writer Richard Holmes has described the biographical process as a “haunting, an act of deliberate psychological trespass, a continuous living dialogue between subject and author as they move over the same historical ground.”

Although the idea of some objective magisterial biography still lingers among us, careful thought tells us that biographers must have a point of view. That point of view can enlighten the picture or distort it. Two opposite besetting sins of biographers can be an excessive love of their subject, hagiography, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, an excessive preoccupation with the dark side of their subject, what Joyce Carol Oates calls “pathographies.” It is all right to like the subject of the life you are writing, after all, who wants to spend that much time with a distasteful subject? But one can overdo it, and biographers often do. The historian Thomas Macaulay called Boswell’s worship of Dr. Johnson “Lues Boswelliana,” or disease of admiration. For as useful and interesting as Boswell’s Johnson is, many later biographers have faulted him for excessive attachment to his subject, what has been called biography as a work of love.

On the other hand, a biography can be a good place to settle scores or get even. I am thinking of Hannah Tillich’s biography of her husband, theologian Paul, in which she depicts his marital indiscretions. Or Susan Cheever’s fine biography, Home before Dark, about her father, writer John Cheever, in which she discloses his promiscuity and alcoholism. These purgings of the soul are often done in the name of healing, but to my mind they often seem like a cheap shot.

It is clear by now that every biographer is an artist, not conjuring up a spirit, but creating in words a facsimile of the life in question. This means each biography, even of the same subject, will be unique. We nod to this reality when we talk of Ellman’s Joyce or Edel’s James. Biographers call this versioning.

So if the old God’s-eye view has been discredited what takes its place? Contemporary biographies now often fly their ideological flags openly, for example the feminist versions of Jane Austen that have proliferated since the seventies. Some of these say she was a feminist and some say she was an anti-feminist. Modern biographers often operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion of class or race or gender. “Was Lincoln gay?” a recent biographer asks, on the basis of documents showing that he once shared a bed in a rooming house with another man, a not uncommon practice in the nineteenth century.

Or if it is not Marx behind the curtain, it is often Freud and his gang. Perhaps Lincoln wasn’t gay at all, but depressed, as another recent biographer has suggested. These make me long for the magisterial Lives of yesteryear, such as Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, or even Gore Vidal’s.

One would think you couldn’t get someone long dead on the therapists couch, but it has been tried. Our former neighbor from Stockbridge, Erik Erikson, wrote psychoanalytic biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther. In the latter, Young Man Luther, Erikson’s interpretation suggests that Luther’s famous Anfechtung, often translated as “doubt” or “despair,” was, at least in part, caused by his recurring constipation, which would explain why there is often more scatology than eschatology in Luther’s Table Talks. But I find Erikson’s hypothesis, apart from being unprovable, highly, may I dare say, irregular.

And the canons of biography change from generation to generation. If Victorian biographies were sanitized, today’s are anything but. Bodily ailments, mental illness, sexual infidelities or fascinations, are standard fair. A spate of recent biographies about British writers in the 1920’s tells us more about their sex lives than what motivated their work.

Which illustrates that biographies in every generation say as much about us and about our times as they do about their subject. This recalls Albert Schweitzer’s famous dictum in his book Quest of the Historical Jesus, that each generation peers as if down a deep well in search of the face of Jesus and instead sees its own reflection.

This should make biographers modest about their claims. Some subjects are well documented, while others leave a scant trail. For example, we know practically nothing about Shakespeare’s life, although a whole industry churns out their best guesses. Theories that Marlowe or Bacon wrote his plays flourish because we know so little real facts. He had no Boswell, and kept no diary. On the other hand, we do know a good deal about Samuel Pepys, but only for the nine years in which he kept his diaries. Biographers can only use the materials they can find, but the temptation to say more is often irresistible.

So in my view good biography is a modest work. The biographer should make no claims he can’t substantiate. Where she makes inferences from the record she should say so. Too often the biographer says that her subject “must have felt” or “must have thought.” Who knows what they felt or thought? Unless there is a journal or a letter speaking of the subject’s interior states and deepest thoughts we are left to guess. If it is a guess, let it be an educated one and say it is a guess!

Otherwise the truth is not served, although a story might be. Those who saw the film version of The Hours will always think of Virginia Woolf as a young Nicole Kidmann with a prosthetic nose calmly walking into the river to her death on a lovely spring day. It was, in fact, an unwitnessed death that took place on a cold, dark, winter day. This is versioning twice removed from an actual event, and raises the question, at what point does biography become fiction? It’s a fine line.

A responsible biography, I am thinking of Hermione Lee’s Woolfe and Victoria Glendenning’s Trollope, for example, will leave questions as questions and honor the essential mystery of a human life. The holes will be acknowledged as such. Yet the biographer will shape and serve up the facts as they can be known in a flowing narrative which can be every bit as engaging to the reader as the very best fiction. This doesn’t happen too often, but when it does a life comes alive, and if we don’t know the subject with completeness, we know enough to feel they would have been worth knowing.

Bibliography

Atlas, James, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999

Hamilton, Ian. Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton, 2005

Marshall, Megan. “The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005.

Scott, Janny. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” New York Times article October 6, 1996.

This paper was presented to the Monday Evening Club in February, 2006.

Martin Langeveld writes a regular blog for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. He is a former publisher of several New England newspapers, including my hometown daily, the Berkshire Eagle. A few weeks ago I heard him deliver a paper entitled “Out of Print” to the Monday Evening Club. The following interview focuses on that paper and the ensuing conversation about it.

RF: The piece of information that most surprised me was that newspaper circulation has been in decline for decades, long before the proliferation of cable TV and the Internet. Why is that?

ML: Well, of course TV did start to eat into people's time as early as the late 1940s. In absolute numbers, newspaper circulation peaked in 1984, but as a percentage of households (ie., how many households out of 100 take a newspaper), it has been dropping since since shortly after World War II, and more precipitously since 1969.

In 1940, there were 118 papers sold per 100 households. By 1947, this had actually risen to 132, but it has declined ever since. In 1969, there were still 100 newspapers sold for every 100 households, a 1-to-1 ratio, although obviously some households read no paper and others read several. By 1980, the rate had dropped to 77 per 100; in1990 it was 66 per 100; in 2000, it was 51 per 100, and in 2008 it was 42 per 100.

Clearly, this is a long-term trend that pre-dates the internet. It's age-related: each successive age cohort reads newspapers less, and as it ages, it decreases its readership. Today even the prime newspaper-reading age groups of people in their 50s and 60s read newspapers less than those same people did 10, 20 and 30 years ago. The average newspaper reader today is about 60 years old, and that average continues to rise.

RF: Why did this happen?

ML: My feeling is that it relates to the proliferation of interests we have experienced since the first half of the 20th century. During most of the period from World War I right through Vietnam, the country had a lot of concerns in common: wars and the depression. We were all in the same boat together, we all talked about the same things, we had little disposable income for frivolous purchases and pursuits. So we all read the same newspapers to know what was going on, and newspapers could cover most of our common concerns and interests. But since the late 1960s, our interests have gone in a million different directions; generally increasing prosperity and discretionary income turned us into a nation of niche interests; and we just don't want, or need, the common ground of a newspaper everyone in a community reads.

RF: You describe the current economic downturn, and the advent of Internet classifieds (such as Craigslist) as creating the conditions for “a perfect storm” that is accelerating the decline of an already faltering industry. Where do you see things headed?

ML: There has been no slowdown at all in the rate of decline. In fact, it's accelerating. In the first quarter of 2009, the total advertising revenue drop for daily newspapers was almost 29 percent, following a drop of 17 percent for all of 2008 vs. 2007. And circulation for the 6 months ending March 31, 2009 dropped 7 percent versus the year-earlier period, which was the largest decline on record. So it's hard to be optimistic.

On top of this, many newspaper owners have onerous debt loads they can't handle any more; they have no access to credit or capital, and they've been cutting resources and talent for years. So it is hard to see how, as an industry, they can pull themselves out of this tailspin. That said, there are many individual newspapers, especially smaller ones, that are still profitable on an operating basis and probably have some life left in them. Eventually, however, I think the daily newspaper will be a thing of the past. But I do see a longer-term opportunity the dailies to morph into weeklies or twice-weeklies — my thought would be a Sunday-style weekend paper printed and distributed on Friday, with no breaking news, just features, analysis, and the traditional Sunday-paper function of being a guide to all other media.

RF: Some of the responders to your paper expressed concern that the loss of traditional journalism would mean less public and political accountability. What are your thoughts about that?

ML: For a long time already, newspapers have not been the sole watchdogs and trustees of accountability. Most people by far get their news from television (for better or worse, but there's certainly good journalism on TV and cable), and late last year for the first time, news online moved into second place ahead of newspapers, which are now the third most-cited source for news. But beyond newspapers, there are plenty of other watchdogs organizations including various public-interest non-profits, and there is a fast-growing sector of for-profit and non-profit online news sites. What they cover is still spotty, but they'll soon cover the spectrum from local to national including a lot of niches never really addressed by newspapers. This conjures up the notion of your neighborhood blogger working in pajamas, and those are around, but there will be plenty of individuals and organizations with a real journalism ethic and motivation. For example, there's now a network of regional investigative journalism non-profits. The Associated Press has just announced a trial run to distribute their material. And there are numerous examples over the last decade when bloggers, not traditional media, have been the first to uncover something and blow the whistle (starting, for example, with the famous discrediting of Dan Rather's 60 Minutes reporting about documents purporting to relate to George Bush's military record; CBS fired a number of staffers in the aftermath and Rather's reputation never really recovered).

RF: Although newspapers have on-line sites, they aren’t getting much share of the eyeballs. Why is that?

ML: Although newspapers were pioneers on the Web in the mid-1990s, they haven't worked hard enough at keeping up with what it takes to attract eyeballs and to engage Web users (meaning, keep them longer on their sites). There's any number of reasons for this. One is the chronic revenue problems of the last few years, which have meant that the online operations of newspapers haven't gotten enough resources in manpower, hardware, or software. As result, for example, many newspapers still don't put hyperlinks in their stories — something that's just a basic and expected features of the Web. But their print-oriented content management systems don't let reporters enter hyperlinks into stories, so the online versions have no links. Even the papers that do hyperlink often have reservations about linking to pages outside their own site — again, that's a pretty basic Web practice and user expectation, but site editors have had a walled-garden mentality. Even The New York Times only introduced outside linking within the last year or so.

But the biggest reason newspapers don't enjoy much visibility online is that they have not realized, at highest levels, that they need to become digital enterprises. Because of the demographic reasons I cited, as well as for environmental reasons and because of the sheer complexity and cost of the supply chain from trees in Canadian forests to your front stoop, nobody would invent the newspaper business model today if it didn't already exist. The future for news and information delivery is just inevitably moving to the digital realm, including desktops, laptops, smartphones and e-readers. But to this day, newspaper editors and publishers are writing columns declaring that print is here to stay. The work flow of most newspapers is oriented around the press start time, not around a 24/7 online publishing culture. So all these things conspire to limit the usefulness and visibility of newspaper content on the Web, and as a result, newspapers do not have much standing in the top online news destinations. They get only about one percent of the total page views of U.S. Web users and a little more than one percent of the total time spent online. With the right practices, that could be dramatically better.

RF: Do you worry that a city without a daily newspaper will lose a common source that created community as the new sources of information fragment into niches?

ML: Not really. Communities have been breaking up into niche interest pockets on their own, it didn't take the diminishment of the central position of newspapers to do that. "Community" stops being meaningful in larger cities, so in in terms of residential groupings I think we're talking about villages, towns, small cities, and neighborhoods here. At this level, weekly newspapers may still be viable for a long time. But community web sites have good potential to fulfill that "community glue" role, as well.

Also, if you expand "community" to mean interests other than residential groupings, social networks like Facebook, and even unstructured messaging on cellphones and Twitter creates communities. On Facebook, and elsewhere on the Web, you can find interest groups to join on just about any subject that strikes your fancy. Before the Web came along in the early 1990s, there were "news groups" on the internet serving a lot of niche communities, but before that, it was a lot harder to meet up with, say, your fellow counted cross stitch enthusiasts. The whole concept of "Red Sox Nation" didn't exist before the Internet enabled it.

And as bloggers, you and I both have the ability to attract our own niche community that's focused on what we have to say. They interact with us by commenting, they recommend (or not) our ruminations to their friends, and they point us to interesting material to explore. And we interact with other bloggers to form a larger community centered on our interests.

RF: As a pastor for thirty years I always had an eye on how the newspaper served the community. You have described newspapers as local monopolies whose purpose was to get readers to attract advertisers. At the same time you described a tradition where publishers felt a mission to the betterment of the community. I’m thinking about how the Eagle back in the day had free obits, and a staffer who put them into a standard form. That is all gone. Now you pay and the family writes it and we get to hear about Fluffy the cat and Dad’s love of the Red Sox. And obits of community leaders often had a feature. I am thinking of our two recently deceased MEC members, Robert Newman, who was head of the Pittsfield Public Library for decades, and Tomas F. Plunkett, a former city counselor. Once upon a time there would have been a feature on the first page of the local section. That is an example of a community service that will go, but will anything take its place if its all about advertising?

ML: I think we're in the middle of a transition from newspapers of record to something else of record, and during the transition, some things are getting lost. Not having front-page obits for community leaders like Bob or Tom is more a function of lack of institutional memory at The Eagle than it is about the changing business model for news.

And actually, I kind of like the content of some of the obits that are now printed just as the family submitted them. To me, they're often more interesting than the editor-curated cut-and-dried ones. Remember that at First Church, in Pittsfield, only male deacons served communion until sometime in the 1960s, and they did so wearing tails. The deaconesses cleaned up afterward. Some traditions are not particularly missed.

So as we move through the transition, the newspaper's role as the intermediary for obits may disappear entirely. There are already several national networks that publish obits tastefully and allow friends to record words of condolence in "guest books" (with a good approval system for those comments, by the way). The business model for these goes through newspapers right now, and newspapers are raking off an exorbitant fee while they still can, but there's no reason the obit sites couldn't work directly with funeral homes. And, while it may seem a little sacriligious to suggest this, there's no reason Facebook couldn't serve as a general conduit for people to learn about deaths in a community, as it already is beginning to do for births, weddings, birthdays and other lifecycle events.

RF: So in what other ways will people get their information where and when newspapers go away?

ML: Nobody really knows exactly, at this point. The Web is young, the transition from legacy media to the digital environment is not complete. But we're starting to see where things might be going. Journalists that once had to be part of an infrastructure of bricks, mortar, machinery and trucks are creating a new ecosystem for news online. As I mentioned earlier, this includes a wide variety of sites ranging from local blogs to regional investigative sites to national political sites. On sites like Politico and RealClearPolitics, politics and especially elections are being covered with an intensity that no newspaper ever sustained. And on neighborhood blogs like WestSeattleBlog, communities are being covered in greater detail than radio, newspapers or television stations possibly could. We don't have these in all communities yet, but I think we will.

Plus, new tools are coming along to connect us with news. A student in a focus group, whose name is not known as far as I can tell, is famous for having said, in response to the question of why he didn't read newspapers: "If the news is that important, it will find me." When newspapers were the principal source of news, we had to pick them up and read them. It was somewhere between a chore and a pleasure. On the Web, so far, we've had to use search and bookmarking or visit news aggregation sites to find news. In a way this is work, also, and has its frustrations. But increasingly, news just finds us — you get an email, a Tweet, you notice a Facebook post, something shows up in your RSS feed. And the Web is now developing user-centric tools that use semantic technology to connect people with news and information based on interests, preferences and demographics.