Editors' note: For an introduction to our Commending the Classics series in The Death of Ivan Ilych, read Leland Ryken's first installment. This week, Ryken suggests reading chapters 2-4.

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As narrated in this novella, the life of Ivan falls into two eras—life before his accident, and life after that accident. Chapters 2-4 tell the story of life before the accident (with chapter 4 serving as a transition as it records the onset of Ivan's illness, while stopping short of identifying the illness as terminal). The keynote of Ivan's life before his accident is summarized in the first sentence of chapter 2: "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." It is terrible in its superficiality.

Ivan's childhood and early professional life are spent in social conformity. His marriage, too, is "thoroughly correct," "easy and decorous." When his wife becomes irritable and family life demanding, Ivan retreats into his professional life. He unexpectedly gets a promotion, and he "was completely happy." Then Ivan becomes preoccupied with decorating his house, which represents a further stage of dehumanizing in his life. One day while decorating his house Ivan bruises himself when he missteps on a ladder. This becomes the turning point of his life, as it leads to an undiagnosed illness and then to deteriorating health. Chapter 4 tells of the growing pain in Ivan's side, of futile visits to doctors, of the gradual isolation of Ivan in his private world of illness.

Life of Conformity

Chapters 2-4 trace a sequence of phases through which Ivan's life passes, so we should follow the contour that the story lays down. The keynote for all three chapters is sounded at the outset, with its equation of Ivan's "ordinary" life and the fact that it is "therefore most terrible." Exactly what makes Ivan's life terrible? The verdict is voiced by the narrator, and if we follow the cues laid down in the text itself, we will see the ways in which Ivan's life is terrible—not externally, but morally and spiritually.

Externally, Ivan's life is not terrible, and we can profitably begin by tracing the things that make his external life successful, as narrated in the first half of chapter 2. It is a life in which conformity triumphs. Already as a schoolboy Ivan fit in completely. Upon graduating from law school, Ivan receives "an easy and agreeable" position. His life flows "pleasantly and decorously." When he transfers to a new town, he "settled down very pleasantly." He married "a sweet, pretty, and thoroughly correct young woman."

The sheer accumulation of details would itself lead us to protest against the superficiality and banality of such a life, but Tolstoy does not put the entire burden of interpretation on us as readers. He creates a narrator to serve as a tour guide through the story. As the vocabulary of conformity noted in the previous paragraph accumulates, we catch a distinct note of scorn toward what is being portrayed. When the element of conformity is highlighted to this extent, we cannot help but see that it is being mocked.

This relates to the rhetoric of narrative—the techniques of persuasion by which a story gets us to assess characters and events in the manner desired by the storyteller. Selectivity of material is one of these rhetorical strategies. What a storyteller chooses to include influences what we see and how we see it. Tolstoy chose to include details that add up to a life of conformity in which the protagonist does all the "right" things as prescribed by social norms.

For reflection or discussion: Literature is a mirror in which we see ourselves; it is also a window through which we look at life around us. Both of these are profitable premises from which to assimilate the first half of chapter 2. Where do you see your own lifestyle and inner inclinations laid out to view in the account of Ivan's life of conformity? At what points are you reminded of what you see in your society or neighborhood or circle of friends? How does the story bring conviction?

Protecting Life from Unpleasantness

The first phase of Ivan's life, from infancy through early marriage, is a life of ease. Of course this life is a spiritual void—a life without meaning. Additionally, Ivan himself is a moral nonentity, totally self-absorbed. This self-absorption is threatened when Ivan's wife becomes pregnant, and thereupon Ivan enters a new phase. The story is orchestrated in such a way as to lead us to see the strategies by which people manage to escape involvement with human suffering.

The first thing Ivan does is lose himself in his professional work. Correspondingly, his marriage and domestic life become a mere social convenience, not a high value. His work becomes a "separate fenced-off world of official duties, where he found satisfaction." Ivan becomes an organization man.

The second half of chapter 2 is conducted in such a way as to show that Ivan manages to shield himself from human suffering. When he receives a promotion and moves to a new town, the higher cost of living cancels the higher salary, his wife does not like the place, and two of their children die. Ivan simply spends "less and less time with his family." The "whole interest of his life" centers in his job. Everything considered, Ivan manages to sidestep suffering and finds that "life continued to flow as he considered it should do—pleasantly and properly."

Tolstoy has constructed his story in such a way that only dying will bring his protagonist to a state of awareness regarding the true issues of life. Until Ivan reaches that point, a series of intermediary and potential impetuses to awareness enter Ivan's life. In the second half of chapter 2, that impetus is domestic disappointment. But Ivan comes up with a defense mechanism against that disappointment. A key statement is that domestic life became something "in which [his] sympathy was demanded but about which he understood nothing."

For reflection or discussion: We should continue to operate on the premise that literature is a mirror in which we see ourselves and a window through which we see life around us. How is the second half of chapter 2 true to life as you know it?

Another Narrow Escape

In the first half of chapter 3, another form of suffering enters Ivan's life, accompanied by another possible occasion for Ivan to face life's true issues. Ivan's income is inadequate and his marriage unfulfilling. He becomes depressed and takes a leave of absence from work. It appears that he may need to embrace human suffering and learn from it.

But then the unexpected happens. By chance, Ivan lands an improved job. Having escaped suffering yet again, "Ivan Ilych was completely happy." His life and marriage reach a new level of triviality when furnishing the new home becomes the passion of his life. Even his official work "interested him less than he had expected." In short, Ivan has become interested in things rather than people. "Life was growing fuller," the narrator tells us in mockery. Again, "Everything was as it should be." At one point the narrator tells us that Ivan's "chief pleasure was giving little dinners to which he invited men and women of good social position," and a few paragraphs later that his "greatest pleasure was playing bridge."

In either case, we are to understand that Ivan is living life at the level of complete triviality and social convention. Tolstoy is adept at giving us aphoristic sentences that sum up various phases of his story and the broader issues of the story as a whole. Chapter 3 ends with one of these sentences: "So they lived, and all went well, without change, and life flowed pleasantly." As readers we are expected to supply what is omitted from that progress report, namely, that Ivan and his wife are totally superficial people, cut off from essential humanity. Ultimately their physical prosperity makes this type of life possible.

As we end chapter 3, we can profitably sum up what the story has presented up to that point. First, we have observed a life of complete social and moral conformity. Second, we have seen Ivan avoid family involvement and suffering through work. Third, we have viewed a life materialistic triviality, with devotion to physical things and the home prominent on the list of priorities.

For reflection or discussion: This story provides an anatomy of how many (most?) people in the affluent West (and perhaps worldwide) live. What are the keynotes of that lifestyle? In what ways is it your own lifestyle? By God's grace, to what extent have you avoided it?

Turning Point

The story gradually leads us to wonder what will bring Ivan to a state of moral and spiritual awareness. The answer comes in a seemingly trivial event that nonetheless becomes the pivot on which Ivan's whole life turns. In the middle of chapter 3, we read in passing about a bruise that Ivan sustained when he slipped on a ladder while decorating his house. The very triviality is ironically important: just as Ivan's life has revolved around the shallow trivialities of life, so his injury is undistinguished (a slip on step ladder).

To heighten this effect, the ladder incident is tucked into the middle of a chapter devoted to chronicling how Ivan managed to do everything in life "easily, pleasantly, correctly, and even artistically." However, a new note is sounded as we move into chapter 4.

This chapter is mainly devoted to the progress of Ivan's illness. Earlier Ivan had distanced himself from his wife's physical difficulties, and now she turns the tables on him. We read that "the more she pitied herself the more she hated her husband." She demands that Ivan go "to see a celebrated doctor." "He went," and with disappointing results. The doctor treats Ivan as he himself treats people in the law courts—as a professional case. The doctor is preoccupied with figuring out the physical cause of Ivan's pain and ignores Ivan's anguish: "It was not a question of Ivan Ilych's life or death, but one between a floating kidney and appendicitis."

One of the great triumphs of Tolstoy's story now enters aggressively. It is the literary technique known as psychological realism and consists of our entering the character's thought process. An early example occurs in chapter 4 with the account of what goes through Ivan's mind on the journey from the doctor's office to his home. We read that "all the way home he was going over what the doctor had said." He tries to translate the medical terminology into answers to his questions, "Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet nothing much wrong?"

In addition to this uncertainty and anguish, Ivan finds himself ignored by and isolated from the people around him. His wife impatiently listens to his account of his visit to the doctor, finding the report "tedious." Her advice: "Mind now to take your medicine regularly." As Ivan himself becomes convinced that "something terrible" is taking place inside of him, "those about him did not understand or would not understand it, but thought everything in the world was going on as usual."

As Ivan's physical state deteriorates, his mental anguish increases. So does his isolation from those around him. Again a summary statement at the end of chapter 4 packs the punch: "And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him."

For reflection or discussion: It is hard to beat this story for its truthfulness to life. For example: when have you or a family member or friend faced Ivan's situation of a physical ailment for which there is no medical help or even diagnosis? How does the suffering of Ivan in regard to that correspond to experiences in your own life? Suffering is what forces Ivan to probe beneath the pleasant surface of life; has this been your experience?

Summary

The overall shape of this story resembles Shakespeare's play King Lear so closely that one wonders whether it was in Tolstoy's mind as he composed his novella. Both stories revolve around the tragic theme of wisdom through suffering.

While that is common to all literary tragedies, the following paradigm is not. Both King Lear and The Death of Ivan Ilych first divest the hero of all external privileges that had given meaning to life. With space thus cleared, the second half of both works traces the hero's moral and spiritual progress forced by intense suffering.

The Gospel Coalition invites you to join Leland Ryken in reading and discussing Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Illych. To learn more about our series on Commending the Classics, see earlier reader guides from Leland Ryken on Albert Calmus's The Stranger and "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Phil Ryken on Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, along with Kathleen Nielson on the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.

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I first read and studied this novella as a sophomore in college. It was my first intense adult encounter with literature. Being a work of Christian fiction, Tolstoy's story also gave me a vision for the integration of literature and Christianity that never left me. I am happy to report that this great Christian classic still appears in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, where I encountered it in college.

In my last posting on Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown," I claimed that while Hawthorne's religious views are important, his short story is universal in its issues and does not require being contextualized in the broader landscape of Hawthorne's religious views. The same thing is true of The Death of Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy is an important figure in any history of modern Christian thought and practice, but knowing about his unorthodox Christian faith is not a prerequisite to understanding his masterpiece on suffering and death. I will therefore concentrate on the story itself, with minimal reference to Tolstoy's tortured religious life.

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian who lived from 1828 to 1910. His biography reads like an adventure story and a tragedy. At the approximate age of 50, Tolstoy reached a point of extreme despair about life. He resolved his despair in what can loosely be called a Christian conversion. The Death of Ivan Ilych was Tolstoy's first major fictional work published after his conversion and belongs to a group of works in which Tolstoy explained his religious views.

Brief Facts on The Death of Ivan Ilych

• Date of writing: 1884-1886 (Tolstoy worked on his masterpiece over a two-year span and made numerous references to the composition of it in his correspondence)
• Date of publication: 1886
• Language: Russian
• Best-known English translation: by Aylmer Maude; the translation used in this discussion guide
• Approximate number of pages: 60
• Format: 12 chapters (representing a symbolic completeness, corresponding to how Ivan's life ended in such a way that "what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly")
• Genres: novella (short fiction, but longer than a short story); realism; satire; semi-autobiographical fiction (inasmuch as the spiritual progress of the protagonist is modeled on the spiritual conversion of the author); the literature of dying
• Setting of the action: multiple, inasmuch as the story encompasses the entire life of the protagonist, but mainly St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia in Tolstoy's day
• Chronology of the plot: the story begins with the death of the protagonist at the age of 45 and then (starting with chapter 2) moves back to the beginning of Ivan's life
• Style: simple and matter-of-fact prose (reminiscent of biblical narrative)
• Point of view: the story is told by a reliable narrator who knows everything (including what characters are thinking) and relentlessly forces us as readers to get beneath the surface level of life
• Inferred purpose of Tolstoy: to jolt readers out of living by the shallow norms of modern society and to lead them to face the serious and unavoidable issues of life and death
• Double plot: the story of external action (the level at which most characters in the story live) and the story of Ivan's internal life

Mirror of Modern Life

The Death of Ivan Ilych is a picture of the values by which many (and perhaps most) people live. It is a life without meaning. We need to note a great divide that runs through the story, however. With two exceptions, the characters who inhabit the world of the story are content with the trivial and materialistic life. This includes Ivan before he injured himself and embarked on the process of dying. But the story also pictures an alternative to life without meaning. As a result of his suffering, Ivan repudiates the values of materialism to embrace something more human, more moral, and more spiritual. The ultimate breakthrough comes when he is converted on his deathbed.

One of the great strengths of this story is its satiric portrayal and exposé of modern life. The features of modern society that we confront as we read include the following:

• the triviality of the things that occupy people's daily lives
• preoccupation with material things
• worship of success and prosperity
• social climbing
• careerism
• self-centeredness
• breakdown of families
• social conformity
• sexual permissiveness
• denial of death
• trust in medical technology, and a sense of betrayal when doctors cannot heal a patient

The mere portrayal of these familiar facets of modern life would itself be powerful and convicting, but Tolstoy's master stroke is his narrator. The narrator describes external and internal events in such a way as to heap scorn on the spectacle of living by the norms listed above. One of the best tips for reading is thus to regard the narrator's voice as a helpful tour guide that prompts us to respond correctly to the data that is presented.

Death Is Announced

This discussion guide will divide the story into three disproportionate units. This week's posting will limit itself to the opening chapter. There is no reason not to read more than the opening chapter in connection with this week's posting, since the opening chapter achieves its full meaning when we have the whole story in our awareness.

Tolstoy himself highlighted the opening chapter as a freestanding unit by devoting it to the death of Ivan Ilych and the responses this death elicits (and fails to elicit) in Ivan's family and colleagues. Only afterward does Tolstoy take us to the beginning Ivan's life. It is as though we cannot understand Ivan's life without first understanding his death. The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying correctly observes that structurally this story privileges Ivan's death over his life. By the time we end the story, this perspective will seem entirely logical to us.

Additionally, the opening chapter is the portal through which we enter story, so we should view it as our introduction to what will follow. One commentator claims that as a prelude to the story, the first chapter is designed in such a way as to implicate the reader in sharing the wrong responses made by the characters in the story.

Plot summary of chapter 1: During an interval in a trial in the law courts, someone announces to the assembled lawyers that their colleague Ivan Ilych has died. Immediately the colleagues begin thinking in terms of how the death will benefit their career climb, and then they take stock of the tiresome demands of visiting the widow to pay their condolences. We make the visit to the widow with a specific colleague named Peter Ivanovich. During his visit, Peter learns the details about Ivan's suffering and death. Yet he manages to distance himself from everything that might bring him to perception, including an awareness that death will come to him, too. All responses (including the widow's) remain on the surface level, and Peter leaves feeling lucky when he gets to his scheduled card game only a little late.

Narrative World of the Story

We need to begin by accepting that Tolstoy intended something definite by rearranging the chronology of his story in such a way as to begin with the last event in Ivan's life, namely, his death. One commentator believes this strategy puts us as readers into the story. As various characters respond to the death, we share their inner thoughts. Those thoughts are selfish, unfeeling, distanced, death-denying. We are right there to share Peter Ivanovich's irritation at the inconvenience of a colleague's death.

The opening pages of any fictional story are designed to initiate us into the narrative world that we enter when we commit ourselves to read the story. There can be no doubt that this is what Tolstoy accomplishes by beginning with the announcement of Ivan Ilych's death. Merely by recording what characters thought by way of response to Ivan's death, Tolstoy has plunged us into the world of the story by a kind of shorthand method. Our response to what we observe is double—shock at the attitudes displayed in various characters and at the same time awareness that these are the same thoughts to which we are at least tempted when confronted with the inconvenience and demands occasioned by someone's death. This story is like the Bible in its manner of convicting us.

For reflection or discussion: Since this is our initiation into the world of the story, we need to note the essential features of that world. What leaps out most obviously? How do the features of modern life listed above already establish themselves in our awareness? How do your own experiences and observations confirm the accuracy of the portrait that chapter 1 paints? Taken a step further, how does the narrator's voice get us to evaluate these features? At what points in the account are we particularly aware of the shallowness and deceitfulness of social conventions?

Foreshadowing Things to Come

Initiation is one of the two main items of narrative business that Tolstoy achieves in his opening chapter. The other is a skillfully managed strategy of foreshadowing. The opening chapter is a "teaser" that makes us curious about the rest of the story. Four things in particular are foreshadowed.

The first is embodied in a statement that describes the look on the face of the deceased Ivan: "The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly." We will not learn what this means until the last chapter, where even the word rightly will explode with meaning. What is here a foreshadowing will be echoed in our memory when this key sentence is explained.

A second piece of foreshadowing is the information that the widow imparts to Peter Ivanovich regarding Ivan's suffering. We learn that Ivan's suffering was so terrible that he screamed for (a symbolic) three days before his death. Again we are teased into wanting more information.

Third, the ease with which Peter Ivanovich and Ivan's widow manage to sidestep the reality of death foreshadows a leading motif in the story as a whole. In the opening chapter, Peter is only momentarily struck by the possibility that what had happened to Ivan Ilych could happen to him. The widow's response to Ivan's suffering is the self-centered statement, "I cannot understand how I bore it."

Finally, in view of what we later come to know about Ivan's servant, Gerasim, we can view our introduction to him in the opening chapter as a foreshadowing. As Gerasim performs his servant's duties, we catch a glimpse of someone who understands what is happening in life. In contrast to Peter's and the widow's denial of death, Gerasim says forthrightly that death "is God's will. We shall all come to it some day."

For reflection or discussion: The skillful use of foreshadowing in chapter 1 is something that subsequent chapters will bring to fruition. Other techniques, though, can be relished in the opening chapter itself. For example, part of the triumph of this novella is its exploiting the literary technique of realism. Writers of realism love the apparently random and trivial detail that make a story lifelike. The pouffe [cushioned chair or couch] with its unwieldy springs takes on a life of its own in the scene set in Ivan's house. What other realistic touches strike you as cleverly managed by Tolstoy? More generally, knowing that Tolstoy worked on this 60-page novella for two years, what evidence do you see of careful craftsmanship?

Summary: The opening chapter is a detailed dramatization of how the death of Ivan Ilych fails to affect his family and acquaintances. By contrast, the story will eventually record how the death does affect Ivan. The story as a whole is arranged in such a way as to encourage us as readers to share Ivan's insight into suffering and death, and to rise above the imperceptiveness of his (and our) society.

I learned about Carl F. H. Henry at the feet of my mentor Leroy Forlines, professor of theology at Free Will Baptist Bible College (now Welch College) and author of books with titles such as The Quest for Truth and Classical Arminianism. Over the course of his career, Forlines taught his students the Henrician epistemology of God, Revelation, and Authority and the cultural mandate similar to what Henry outlined in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

It was from my Arminian professor that I learned to love Henry, and that should be no surprise. Henry longed for vibrant faith, practice, and spirituality shared by all classic evangelicals—be they Arminian, Calvinist, Lutheran, or Anabaptist. He hoped for a transdenominational evangelical university that would bring together scholars from the various strands of confessional Protestantism.

This is the sort of program Henry modeled in the pages of Christianity Today. It's what caused Free Will Baptists like Billy Melvin, Wesleyans like Dennis Kinlaw, Lutherans like Robert Preus, Anabaptists like Edmond Hiebert, and Arminian-leaning Dispensationalists like Norman Geisler to rally behind Henry in his defense Scripture's truth claims and to sign on to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

My mentor loved Henry because, though Henry was a Calvinist and he an Arminian, they could put their differences aside in championing evangelical orthodoxy against a growing secularism, Protestant liberalism, and then-fashionable neo-orthodoxy. They could agree the Christian world-and-life-view had enormous implications—not just for a personal relationship with God, but also for culture and the created order as a whole.

Rather Ironic

My own love for Henry deepened when I was a student at Yale Divinity School in the early 1990s. Now that I look back on this time, it seems rather ironic—given current evangelical stereotypes—that a Free Will Baptist boy from the Deep South would be in the hotbed of Yale postliberalism, studying with George Lindbeck by day (and loving every minute of it) and leading the Divinity School Evangelical Fellowship in discussions of God, Revelation, and Authority by night.

Yet this "Reformed Arminian" had grown to love Henry's brand of presuppositionalism and his compelling defense of the classic Protestant doctrine of biblical inspiration. I was drawn to his Reformed emphases on human depravity, penal substitionary atonement, and the imputation of Christ's righteousness in justification. I identified with his down-to-earth evangelical spirituality coupled with a broadly Reformed-Kuyperian approach to culture and the implications of the Christian world-and-life-view.

Simply put, Henry seemed to this young Arminian theological student to be a more biblically faithful model of epistemology, theology, and cultural engagement than the postliberalism and liberation theology I was encountering at Yale. Indeed, I always thought Lindbeck didn't quite understand Henry. It seemed, in casting evangelical theology as merely "cognitive propositional," Lindbeck missed the distinctiveness of Henry's Reformed, faith-seeking-understanding epistemology. He seemed to be pigeonholing Henry and the mainstream evangelical tradition in a way that didn't do them justice.

Now, 20 years later, postmodernity doesn't seem so cool (at least to me) as it once did. It seems as though the evangelical academy is one of the few places where postliberalism is still in style (though its evangelical fans like to call it "postconservatism"). That's why I recently enjoyed reading Greg Thornbury's excellent new book, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry (Crossway, 2013). This work has the prospect of resurrecting Henry's reputation among younger evangelicals. I hope as a result that our younger colleagues will actually read Henry, rather than just skimming his work and caricaturing him like so many evangelicals of my generation have done.

Undergirding Truth

I think Henry would have liked what Thornbury is doing and would have felt well represented by his book. Thornbury highlights the fact that Henry represents a Reformational epistemology as well as a traditional understanding of the nature of truth as that which conforms to reality. This view of truth undergirds the historic Christian view that Holy Scripture is without error in all it affirms.

Thornbury rightly insists that Henry's view of scriptural truthfulness isn't the novel invention of 19th-century Cartesian foundationalists, Enlightenment modernists who had too strong a dose of rationalism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Instead, it's common to historic Christianity from the Fathers up through the Reformers.

This is why evangelical Thomists like R. C. Sproul and Norman Geisler could join hands with those leaning more Augustinian in their epistemology, such as Henry, Francis Schaeffer, Ronald Nash, or Cornelius Van Til. They all shared the same traditional Christian approach to the truthfulness of Scripture as rational, propositional revelation from God.

Like these other thinkers, Henry never believed that the propositional character of special revelation—as important and non-negotiable as it is—exhausts the multiform character of divine revelation, as he and they are often caricatured as believing. Thornbury wants to resurrect this noble, classic evangelical understanding of divine truth and revelation for a younger audience. It will be healthy for younger evangelicals to let the clean sea breeze of classic evangelicalism blow through their minds. I believe this will help sweep away the cobwebs of well-worn postconservative clichés and stereotypes.

I do believe Henry would have responded favorably to the nuancing of some of his constructions in the light of postmodernity. (I also suspect Henry would find fruitful—and faithful—the ways scholars like Michael Horton and Malcolm Yarnell, whom Thornbury needlessly chides, have nuanced the Reformational epistemologies they received from their evangelical forebears.) Moreover, I think Henry would respond favorably to the proposals of Calvinist Don Carson (The Gagging of God) and Arminian Grant Osborne (The Hermeneutical Spiral), both of whom attempt to assert a classic evangelical view of revelation, truth, and hermeneutics in dialogue with postmodern thought.

Was Henry a man of his time who understood and communicated to his modernist interlocutors? Yes. But was he a captive to modernism? No. My hunch is that when our evangelical descendants look back on us in 100 years, the fact Henry was using a little too much rationalistic language and categories (a 300-year-old fad) isn't going to look nearly as faddish as postmodernism, postliberalism, postconservatism, postfoundationalism, postpropositionalism, and all the other "post"-fads presently driving much of evangelical theological method.

Culture and Kingdom

But in addition to epistemic and theological considerations, Thornbury desires to resurrect Henry's approach to culture and the kingdom so eloquently stated in The Uneasy Conscience. This is much needed in today's evangelical environment, with people on the one hand calling for evangelicals to be silent for a time in the public square while those on the other hand redefining the mission of the church as much in terms of saving the whales as saving souls.

Henry's view of the in-breaking kingdom of God as "already but not yet" made him critical of social-gospel liberals, whose over-realized eschatology made them place too much salvific significance on social justice and too little on evangelism. But he also believed his fundamentalist brothers and sisters didn't sufficiently emphasize the "already" nature of the kingdom and so ignored the social and cultural implications of the gospel.

Henry's life and ministry called 20th-century evangelicals back to a full-orbed Christian world-and-life-view that emphasized the Great Commission: making disciples and teaching them to live out Christ's teachings. This is just the sort of balance we need in the current evangelical debates about the Christian's role in society and public life.

Describing Henry as the man who "invented evangelicalism," Timothy George says Henry wanted to foster a movement that was "transcontinental, interdenominational, theologically affirmative, socially aggressive, and irenic." These are still worthy goals for a compelling, vibrant, theologically orthodox evangelical movement, and I believe a fresh reading and appreciation of Henry is just what we need to help us work toward these goals he valued so highly and embodied in his life and work.

In Gregory Thornbury's new book, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism, he tells a story of a conversation with Millard Erickson, who joked, "You know I love Carl Henry's work. It's extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English." I laughed to myself when I read that story, because I resonated with Erickson's point. Some of Henry's more serious theological work can be dense and difficult to understand.

But if you read some of Henry's cultural lectures, you find an upbeat, confident, and engaged mind. He speaks to the challenges of the day—his and ours. And as Thornbury describes, he writes and speaks with a "swagger" that finds confidence not in himself, but in the authority of God and Scripture and the power of the gospel.

I sat down with Gregory Thornbury and Collin Hansen—both Henry enthusiasts—and talked about where to begin with Carl Henry's work. We told stories of how Carl Henry got fired from Christianity Today (a periodical he served as first editor) and the day he trash-talked with Karl Barth.

If you've never heard of Carl Henry or don't know where to begin, Thornbury and Hansen are good guides. After you watch the video, consider taking up Thornbury suggestion to read Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief or Hansen's recommendation of The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

Recovering Classic Evangelicalism from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

I used to be a Christian who didn't think about Jesus. I was bored with him. I remember telling my husband one day that I was tired of hearing him say, "Jesus loves you, Luma." It all seemed trite and superficial. I wanted, I needed, something deeper. Something more challenging to my mind, more impactful than "Jesus died on the cross for your sins." That tired story, heard countless times since my father first spoke the gospel to me in a train station in Thessaloniki, rang hollow.

But despite my weakness, ambivalence, and even hostility, this same gospel has never let me go and will not let me go—through hardships, divorce, rebellion, passivity, legalism, and back again. Although I believe I've been a Christian since I was 8 years old, for many years my faith was accompanied by a cloudiness and distortion like that of the blind man Jesus healed: "I see men, but they look like trees walking" (Mark 8:24). It hurts to write these words, yet they must be written. They must be written for the sake of many who silently live the way I lived and think the way I thought.

Most of my life has been spent finding one way or another to atone for myself. Operating from a hazy understanding of what Christ did in his life and death to win my salvation, this self-atonement was like a vortex—a downward spiral into the depth of my amnesia. I wanted to be "godly," and thought I had a pretty good idea of how to go about it. But the harder I tried to approximate my mental image of what a godly woman was supposed to be, the worse my depression, panic attacks, and rage became. I poisoned our household with my anger and my "holy" laws. Down I went like a dragon falling from the sky with blood and fire spilling everywhere and contaminating everything in its path. At the end of hope, feeling and believing myself to be on the receiving end of the hot displeasure and disappointment of a holy God, I crashed. And then, when there was nothing left of me, there was Jesus. Savior, Redeemer, Friend. No displeasure, no disappointment, just the blazing fire of unmerited grace.

Chastened by the wonder of his glory, I'm now able to tell you about a Savior who wasn't ashamed to condescend to love and rescue a woman like me. A woman at his feet—a woman of the cross.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." I invite you to the same; come, and die, and be raised again to live to Christ.

My ultimate goal in Gospel Amnesia: Forgetting the Goodness of the News is expressed in Jesus' words to the church in Sardis: "I know your works; you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up." (Rev. 3:1-2) Some of us have forgotten the love we had at first (Rev. 2:4). Others of us are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, good only for spewing (Rev. 3:15-17). But whomever we are, or wherever our amnesic tendencies lie, we need the white-hot fire of the gospel—now, today (Heb. 3:12-15).

Editors' Note: This excerpt is adapted from the preface of Luma Simms's new book Gospel Amnesia: Forgetting the Goodness of the News. 

Editors' Note: For an introduction to our Commending the Classics series in Gilead, read Philip Ryken's first installment, "A Novel View of Pastoral Ministry." This week, Ryken suggests reading pages 149-215 of Gilead. See also:

• Getting the Gist of Gilead
• Positive Portrayal of the Pastorate 
• The Challenges Every Pastor Faces
• Dying with a Quiet Heart

One of the great loves of Robert Boughton's life—and also his greatest grief—is his son Jack. Here Gilead author Marilynne Robinson views a familiar character-type from a fresh vantage point. We do not see the prodigal son from the perspective of his father, but of his father's best friend. John Ames, too, has a fatherly role in Jack's life (the young man is his godson), but he stands more in the position of the older brother (see Luke 15:11ff.). Ames describes himself as the good son who never left his father's house, "one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained" (see Luke 15:7).

The Older Brother

Like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son, Ames resents Jack's careless immorality. "I don't know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment," he says, "without ever giving anyone any grounds for hope." For as long as Ames can remember, there has been something "devilish" about the boy's petty thefts and other sly transgressions. His juvenile pranks were not fun-loving, but mean-spirited.

But Jack's greatest sin of all was to father the child of a poor country girl out of wedlock, and then to neglect the child, who died of a common infection. The guilty charity of the rest of the Boughton family came too late to save her. "It was just terrible what happened to her," Ames says, "and that's a fact."

At one level, the Reverend Ames believes that "the grace of God is sufficient to any transgression." This principle is deeply rooted in Robinson's own commitment to Calvinism, as expressed through her essays in The Death of Adam (New York: Picador, 2000) and other places. She writes, "We are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace."

John Ames believes in sin and grace as much as Robinson does. He believes further that Boughton's love for his wayward son—"the most beloved"—exemplifies Christ-like compassion. Yet he is also angered by the extravagance of his friend's fatherly affection, which he regards as overindulgence.

Given the chance, Boughton would pardon every last one of his son's transgressions, past, present, and future. Ames finds it hard not to resent this grace, even though he knows his feelings are at odds with his theology:

I have said at least once a week my whole adult life that there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me.

Ames's struggle to reconcile the true gravity of human sin with the free grace of God's forgiveness is complicated by his unique role in Jack's life. The boy was born long before Ames had a son of his own, and as a gift of Christian friendship, Boughton named him John Ames. Jack is Ames's namesake, his alter ego; indeed, he is "another self, a more cherished self."

Yet when Ames performed Jack's baptism, he found his heart strangely cold towards the child. To his own guilt and shame, he has always found it hard to love his godson the way that his friend intended, or the way he knows a godly pastor should. He regards his namesake as possibly dangerous (where will Jack's growing friendship with Lila and Robby lead?) and probably dishonorable—someone who will "never really repent and never really reform."

"I don't forgive him," Ames says. "I wouldn't know where to begin."

The Younger Brother

Like the Reverend Ames, Jack Boughton fears that he is beyond forgiveness. Although he is an agnostic ("a state of categorical unbelief," he calls it: "I don't even believe God doesn't exist"), Jack still wonders whether there is any grace for him. This is the personal issue that lies behind the philosophical question he asks about predestination in one of the book's central dialogues: "Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?"

Ames and Boughton both err in taking this question as primarily theological rather than intensely pastoral. But Jack is really asking about himself: can he be saved, or is he beyond any hope of redemption? Surprisingly, it is Lila—not the ministers—who understands the real question and gives the most helpful response: "A person can change. Everything can change."

The Father's Blessing

If the Reverend Ames fails to give Jack the spiritual help he needs, it is not without misgivings. He believes he is called to save the prodigal son and give him grace, that "ecstatic fire," but he is struggling within his soul: "I regret absolutely that I cannot speak with him in a way becoming a pastor."

Ames begins to wish that somehow he could make up for the boy's cold baptism, that he could "put my hand on his brow and calm away all the guilt." Given the circumstances, he does the only thing he knows how to do and prays for Jack, asking God for the wisdom to care for him as a good shepherd.

These prayers are answered in the novel's climactic scene, which brings the balm to Gilead. After revealing that he has a "colored" wife and son, Jack decides to leave Gilead for good, even though it means abandoning his father in his dying days—a sin Ames knows that "only his father would forgive him for." The Reverend Ames meets Jack at the bus station and asks to bless him, to pray for God's protection and pronounce a final benediction: "Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father."

These are loving words of the prodigal grace that God lavishes on all his prodigal sons. They are words of blessing for both men—for John Ames as well as John Ames Boughton, the Older Brother and the Younger Brother. For the Reverend Ames to utter these words on behalf of his namesake is worth seminary and ordination and all his years in ministry. It is also the final preparation he needs to die a peaceable death.

For reflection or discussion: All of the father-son relationships in Gilead are marked by some form of estrangement or abandonment. According to the Reverend Ames, "A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension." This is true for Ames himself, whose father cannot understand why he stays in Gilead, and whose son is too young to comprehend most of what his father wants to communicate.

How has your relationship with your father (or some other family member) hindered your spiritual progress or helped you understand the grace of God? How can a father lavish grace on his children without excusing their sins or becoming overindulgent? Who are some of the prodigal sons and daughters on your prayer list? Where have you seen God's grace at work to restore children who have wandered away from him?

Thank you to the many thousands who joined us last week for five days of fellowship, teaching, and worship together in sunny Orlando. We believe God was honored as speakers and singers from around the world made much of Jesus as revealed in the Gospel of Luke. Within a couple weeks we hope to make media from all of the plenary talks, workshops, and many special events available, as usual, for free. We appreciate our sponsors and donors who make it possible to spread these resources around the world. We're thrilled that the conference livestream—broadcast in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Farsi, and French—reached about 35,000 unique viewers in around 130 countries. It's exciting to think about the long-lasting effect of the messages on churches in Brazil, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, and so many other nations that sent large groups to Orlando and tuned in from home.

If you enjoyed the music at TGC13, we encourage you to check out Songs from the Book of Luke, the new album by the church for the church, and sign up for a free song from Keith and Kristyn Getty, who recorded a live worship album at this year's national conference. I doubt anyone in the room will forget thousands of a cappella voices singing Holy, Holy, Holy to close the event. But if you want to relive some of the conference highlights, browse nearly 1,000 photos in our TGC13 album on Facebook and follow us on Instagram.

As we return to our various ministries back home, we pray that the conference messages will continue to bear spiritual fruit in your discipleship. That's what we produced The Gospel of Luke from the Outside In, a 12-session group study written by David Morlan and featuring video teaching by D. A. Carson. Now that you've heard sermons about Luke's account of Jesus' life from birth to ascension, we hope you'll teach others this good news.

If you couldn't join us in Orlando, or missed a chance to visit the huge LifeWay conference bookstore, we have some good news. Our friends at Zondervan have generously discounted a special set of eBooks for an after-conference sale. We invite you to browse the list below—featuring authors such as Tim Keller, Michael Horton, and D. A. Carson—and continue the learning process of TGC13. 

Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Tim Keller, $5.99)

Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples (Michael Horton, $7.99)

Insourcing: Bringing Discipleship Back to the Local Church (Randy Pope, $6.99)

Reclaiming Love: Radical Relationships in a Complex World (Ajith Fernando, $6.99)

Bound Together: How We Are Tied to Others in Good and Bad Choices (Chris Brauns, $3.99)

For Calvinism (Michael Horton, $3.99)

A Place for Weakness: Preparing Yourself for Suffering (Michael Horton, $3.99)

Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (D. A. Carson, $3.99)

Deuteronomy: The NIV Application Commentary (Dan Block, $5.99)

Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Gregg Allison, $5.99)

How to Read the Bible through the Jesus Lens: A Guide to Christ-Focused Reading of Scripture (Michael Williams, $3.99)

Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? (Edited by Robert Peterson and Christopher Morgan, $3.99)

The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Tim Challies, $3.99)

Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture (Wayne Grudem, $4.99)

Preaching and Preachers (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, $3.99)

Worship by the Book (Edited by D. A. Carson, $3.99)

Christian Beliefs: Twenty Basics Every Christian Should Know (Wayne Grudem, $3.99)

A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir (Collin Hansen and John Woodbridge, $3.99)

The Hardest Sermons You'll Ever Have to Preach: Help from Trusted Preachers for Tragic Times (Edited by Bryan Chapell, $3.99)

Sticky Teams: Keeping Your Leadership Team and Staff on the Same Page (Larry Osborne, $3.99)

Editors' Note: For an introduction to our Commending the Classics series in Gilead, read Philip Ryken's first installment, "A Novel View of Pastoral Ministry." This week, Ryken suggests reading pages 217-247 of Gilead. See also:

• Getting the Gist of Gilead
• Positive Portrayal of the Pastorate 
• The Challenges Every Pastor Faces

From the beginning of his letter, John Ames has known that soon he will have to leave behind his church, his family, and his life itself. Marilynne Robinson deftly shows us signs of the patriarch's imminent mortality, through his growing need for sleep, through other physical symptoms, and through the solicitous concern of people waiting for him to die. Ames has even begun to write his funeral sermon, hoping to save old Boughton the trouble.

With death approaching, Ames reminisces about the past, which he describes honestly and poignantly without lapsing into undue sentimentality. He speaks of his love for his wife, the gracious gift of a son, and many other pleasures, including the joys and blessings of pastoral ministry. "Oh, I will miss the world!" he says. "Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration," as the "Lord breathes on this poor grey ember of Creation and it turns to radiance."

The Reverend Ames also has more than a few regrets, as any minister does—"the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many." He often wonders whether any of his sermons "were worth anything" and fears that he has been "boring a lot of people for a long time." He wishes, in fact, that his old sermon notes (an image of his own mortality) will be burned. He has often "known, right there in the pulpit, even as I read the words, how far they fell short of any hopes I had for them. And they were the major work of my life, from a certain point of view."

Ames also regrets his failure, at times, to offer the best spiritual counsel: "I still wake up at night, thinking, That's what I should have said!" But his biggest regret, by far, is to leave behind his wife and son. Sadly, he will not be able to provide for their needs, or to share life with them as they grow up and grow old.

The Last Testament

In dealing with these regrets, Ames sees two choices: "(1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord." Hoping to die "with a quiet heart," he chooses to place his ministry, his family, and his own life into God's hands. Rather than foolishly imagining that his congregation will be unable to manage without him, he preaches that Christ himself will be the pastor of his people. As for his son, he practices what he earlier preached from the story of Abraham and Ishmael, that "any father must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God."

Thus ends the life of a faithful minister, who tried to keep the gospel before him as a standard for life and preaching, and who remained loyal to his calling in a single church for nearly 50 years. Gilead is the town where he was born, and also the town from which he will leave for home. "I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love," Ames writes near the end of his letter. "I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence."

After that final conflagration, there will still be more stories to tell. Robinson uses a beautiful analogy to describe the narratives of the life to come: "In eternity this world will be Troy, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."

For reflection or discussion: Christ calls every one of his followers not simply to live well, but also to die well, with "a quiet heart." Who are the pastors, ministry leaders, and other Christian servants that you have seen finish strong in life and ministry? What habits or commitments enabled them to persevere? In what ways are you passing on a legacy of faith to others? How are you preparing to finish well? 

What shade of darkness is surrounding your life today? Maybe there are some severe realities from your past that have caused you to struggle to believe God's goodness for your future. Maybe you don't carry around any dark secrets or weighty tragedies from the past, but still feel like you're walking under a black cloud of mild despair and nagging doubt.

What's interesting about doubt and despair is that they cause our focus to center on the very thing that God wants us to stop focusing on: ourselves. He knows that ever since Adam and Eve shifted the desire they originally had for God over to themselves, we inherited something we'd struggle with our entire lives. Us. It's this self-consuming focus on us that ultimately casts a dark shadow of doubt over our hearts and minds. And the world tells us this is a good thing. How many times a day do we hear these lines?

I need to do what's right for me.

I deserve some more me time.

I need to focus on myself.

I need to learn to love myself.

When we as believers struggle to believe, it's not that we've misplaced hope; it's that we've misplaced God, who is our hope. We've traded the desire and affection we're supposed to have for God with a desire and affection for self. It's a repeat episode of Adam and Eve. We find ourselves unclothed, afraid, and ashamed, living in doubt of God's promises and in denial of his goodness. But God finds us and restores our hope in himself alone. When we find ourselves under cover of darkness, God doesn't just hand us flashlights so we can see our way around without tripping over everything. No, he consumes the darkness with his light! He illuminates those areas in our lives so that we aren't hidden under darkness any longer but "hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). He wouldn't be our great God if he did anything less.

For you are my lamp, O Lord, and my God lightens my darkness. (2 Sam. 22:29)

Look around and see what lamps are lighting your life. We constantly have the dim lights of careers, relationships, hobbies, kids, and homes threatening to replace the all-consuming, all-illuminating light of Christ in our lives. These dim lights ultimately burn out because they were never meant to be our ultimate source of light. In these times, our prayer needs to be like David's, when he was hiding for his life in a cave from King Saul:

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by. I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me. He will send from heaven and save me; he will put to shame him who tramples on me. God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness! (Ps. 57:1-3)

Like he did for David, God will fulfill his own purpose in us. He will transfer our selfish gaze back to his selfless ways. He will provide us with joyful reassurance in our darkest times of doubt and wondering. He will show us mercy in the dark solitude of our storms and become the great refuge for our sorrowful souls when we repent of our self-sufficiency and return to the shadow of his wings. We will once again feel the strength and security of his steadfast love and be reminded of his never-ending faithfulness. He will lighten the depths of our darkness with the lamp of his transcendent love, and we will see ever more clearly the goodness of his grace and the greatness of his glory.

We will once again have hope in Christ, our only hope.

Editors' Note: This excerpt is adapted from Ted Kluck and Ronnie Martin's new book, Finding God in the Dark: Faith, Disappointment, and the Struggle to Believe (Bethany House, 2013).

Editors' Note: For an introduction to our Commending the Classics series in Gilead, read Philip Ryken's first installment, "A Novel View of Pastoral Ministry." This week, Ryken suggests reading pages 86 to 149 of Gilead. See also:

• Getting the Gist of Gilead
• Positive Portrayal of the Pastorate

**********

One of Marilynne Robinson's extraordinary accomplishments in Gilead is to establish, as a woman, a plausible narrative voice for a man. Further, as a layperson, she manages to capture with remarkable authenticity the interior life of a man who serves in pastoral ministry.

The Reverend Ames is honest about the challenges of ministry, familiar to any pastor. He complains about church meetings ("just a few people came, and absolutely nothing was accomplished"). He confesses how hard it is to love his sheep ("After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it").

At the same time, Ames knows that his parishioners treat him differently, giving him more respect than he deserves—a "kindly imagining" that is hard for him to disillusion. He also laments the relentless approach of next week's sermon ("it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it's already the next week").

The Difference a Minister Makes

With these inevitable challenges come many opportunities for personal ministry. The same people who suddenly change the subject when they see the minister coming, Ames says, will "come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things"—the dread, the guilt, and the loneliness that lie under the surface of life.

In each pastoral encounter, Ames has sought to discern what the Lord is asking of him "in this moment, in this situation." Even if he has to deal with someone who is difficult, that person is "an emissary sent from the Lord," who affords him "the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me."

Over the course of a lifetime in ministry, addressing a wide range of spiritual needs, the Reverend Ames has learned that trying to prove the existence of God is an ineffective strategy for dealing with spiritual doubt. "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense," he believes. In fact, "the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it" because "there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things."

He has also learned how to answer the questions that people have thought about the torment of hell, which he believes the Bible characterizes primarily as separation from God: "If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don't hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul."

Ames has also learned the value of friendship for ministry. He is blessed to have Robert Boughton as his oldest, dearest friend and closest colleague in ministry. Having grown up together in Gilead, the two men now serve as pastors of the town's leading churches. They do not work in isolation, but share ideas, discuss their sermons, and pray for one another's families.

For reflection or discussion: What are the hardest challenges you face as you serve God in the church? What are the most important lessons that you have learned about ministry—the first lessons you would pass along to someone who is just starting out? What are the most common questions that people ask about God? How have you learned to answer them, or not to answer them? What patterns of relationship and accountability support your ministry? What relationships do you still need to put into place?