Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney. Threat Vector. New York: Putnam, 2012. Print.

Not too long ago I wrote a review of another Tom Clancy novel in which I said, “Clancy gets it.” Sometimes we know Clancy gets it because he imagines a certain scenario in one of his novels, and after it is published something similar actually happens. In his 1991 The Sum of All Fears, a network of jihadists blow up a football stadium during an NFL playoff game. OK, in the real world, they did in the tallest building in New York City on a significant jihadist anniversary ten years later, but the idea was not that different.

Parts of Threat Vector read like last week’s news, literally. A young hotshot computer programmer/hacker with a top secret security clearance who works for a high tech government contractor defects to Hong Kong with a lot of classified information to share with the Chinese. No, it is not Snowden; this book was written a year ago. But Clancy saw vulnerabilities again, and some of them have become reality.

There is a lot more than this Chinese sympathizer. Typically Clancy’s novels cover a lot of geography and involve a lot of people. Threat Vector is no different. There is a group of former Libyan security officers and Ghaddafi loyalists now working as hired guns in Turkey. We actually met a few in Locked On. There is an American computer geek who gets caught in a Chinese honey trap. There is a former Soviet spy who gets sprung from a Russian prison and given a new identity—actually another veteran from Locked On.

There is a group of Chinese “wet workers”—government assassins—who have been assigned to kill a number of Americans including the girlfriend of the son of the American president. The most powerful general in China has decided it is time to take Taiwan and establish hegemony in Asia. There’s also a top-gun type American fighter pilot known as “Trash” White, a creepy FBI agent who is secretly into child porn, and so on and so on. And behind everything there appears a mysterious eminence grise known as the Center.

Lots of conflict, lots of action, lots of surprises. Told cleverly enough so that the reader can connect the dots and enjoy a good yarn. Over twenty years ago I recall a posting on an online bulletin board (remember those?) that spoke of Clancy fans as technodudes and technodudesses. Threat Vector is realistic escape reading for those fans and the many new ones.

A few quotations from Threat Vector:

Napoleon is credited with saying an army marches on its stomach. But that was in Napoleon’s time. Now it was clear to everyone…that the U.S. military marched on its bandwidth. (745)

…baseball, women, and family—the important things in the world. (835)

Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.

A friend asked me recently what I had been reading. I told him a little about Finding God in Ancient China. He went to his bookcase and pulled out a copy of The Lost History of Christianity for me to read.

Although the book is less than 270 pages excluding references, it has far too much to go into detail here. The book describes the growth of the Christian Church to the east and south of the Holy Land to about the fourteenth century. Today much of the world sees Christianity as a Western or European religion. But until the fourteenth century that was not necessarily so.

The historical record tells us that most of Greater Syria, the Persian Empire, Arabia, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa was Christian. Christians were well-established in Central Asia in what today are the “stans.” At least three times Christianity was established in China before the 1700s. It spread in India, Sri Lanka, and on to the Pacific Ocean.

Most of these churches were Nestorian, Jacobite, or Monophysite churches. Most of these were wiped out or disappeared, though remnants of some of them persist. Only in Egypt and Ethiopia can these churches be considered at least somewhat vigorous today. The author is careful to point out that these are not gnostic or Arian groups. These are all churches that would subscribe to the Nicene Council and the doctrine of the Trinity.

The record of missionary zeal and scholarship that Jenkins describes is extraordinary from a modern perspective. It is truly a nearly lost history. Westerners generally learn that Europeans rediscovered Aristotle and other Greek writers at the time of the Crusades thanks to commerce with Arabs. What Jenkins tells us is that most of these ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians—even the use of “Arabic” numbers, which actually originated in India—were translated or brought to light by Christian monks in the Arabic world of the Middle Ages. Even the distinctive architecture associated today with mosques and the Near East came from Mesopotamian and Arabic church design prior to Islam.

One brief account near the beginning of the book was about a Mesopotamian Bishop Timothy who wrote around the year 800. He was made privy to a discovery of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts that showed that many of the heretofore puzzling quotations of the Hebrew Scriptures in the New Testament were based on non-Masoretic texts. Jenkins notes that no Catholic (which would still have included the Orthodox) would have even understood the issue in A.D. 800. This information and these manuscripts disappeared a long time ago, and it was not until the Dead Sea Scrolls began to be interpreted in the 1950s would people rediscover what had been known to these Eastern Christians back then.

Approximately the first half of The Lost History of Christianity describes the spread of Christianity to the East and South in the First Millennium. The Nestorians had hundreds of bishops throughout India, Central Asia, the Near East, and Arabia. There was even a bishop in Yemen. So what happened?

There is no one answer. The early Muslim conquests, for example, were often tolerant to some degree. In many cases Christians and Jews became top advisors to their new rulers because they were more literate and educated. They often knew multiple languages which made them useful for diplomacy. However, their position became more precarious as a more radical form of Islam emerged around the 12th century.

Also, in many places Christians were centered in cities. When an invading army conquered a city, often the whole city was destroyed including its Christians. As with Viking raids in the British Isles, monasteries were sometimes seen as easy marks for plunder.

Sometimes Christians were identified with a particular faction and became victims when another group rose in power. The Mongols tolerated Christians, and Christianity may have had its widest influence in Central and East Asia during their rule. When the Mongols were overthrown by Tamerlane and other Turkic groups that followed, Christians were seen as allies of the enemy.

The last surge against Christians which ended with the Turkish conquest of Byzantium and what was left of the Arab kingdoms was probably the most devastating. The Egyptian church survived because it was so closely identified with Egypt (Coptic means “Egyptian,” and has the same root). Other churches may have survived as minority outposts when, like the Maronites of Lebanon, they allied themselves with the Roman Catholic Church.

Sometimes the churches themselves had become so much identified with the non-Christian cultural system, that church members no longer saw the distinctiveness of their belief. This was sometimes the case when Christians converted to Islam or Buddhism in cultures where those religions were the primary ones. Jenkins suggest this may account for the numerical decline in American mainline churches during the twentieth century—they became so identified with political or cultural causes rather than religious specifics, that they lost distinctiveness.

Sometimes the church never affected the common people of a region. This was apparently the case in parts of North Africa like Carthage (now Tunisia). When the Arabs conquered this region, the Christian elite who identified with Rome were defeated or left the area, but most of the population was not Christian, so they were open to Islam.

As noted with more detail in Finding God in Ancient China, sometimes the church’s own unwillingness to adapt its evangelism to the native culture made it appear irrelevant or foreign. This happened in the 16th century after Father Matteo Ricci was having success showing that Christianity was the fulfillment of the ancient monotheistic sacrificial system of the Chinese. After this, the Pope told missionaries to China that they could not operate that way.

Jenkins notes that significant churches in the Near East have been eliminated or drastically reduced in the 20th and 21st centuries. The nationalist and Baathist movements wiped out the majority of Christians in Armenia and Iraq in the years 1915 to 1930. In recent years Pan-Arabism, which had included Christians in such countries as Egypt and Palestine, has been transformed into a pan-Islamism so that Christians are being marginalized in these places. In some places they are persecuted or reduced in status, their churches destroyed, and sometimes they have been killed. When they can afford it, they leave.

The author still sees potential for the church beyond an apocalyptic confrontation between Christianity and Islam with its secular allies. The church has grown greatly in much of the world’s South, in Africa and Latin America. The church in China and former Warsaw Pact countries learned to survive underground. As G. K. Chesterton said:

At least five times…the Faith to all appearance gave to the dogs. In each of the five cases, it was the dog that died. (The Everlasting Man II.vi)

Or as the prophet Isaiah said about the Messiah:

Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. (9:7)

Alexander McCall Smith. The Miracle at Speedy Motors. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Print. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

Short, easy-reading, but a true novel with multiple plots—this is the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. This time Mma Ramotswe has been hired to find an orphan’s birth family, but she discovers a reason why no one who knows the truth wants her client to find out who her parents were. Mma Ramotswe is also receiving threatening letters.

Precious Ramotswe’s partner, Mma Makutsi, is engaged to Phuti Rhadaphuti, but her uncles want 97 cows for a bride price. Precious’s uncles got ten when she married Mr. J. L. B. Maketoni, and the consensus around town is that Grace is worth about eight.

Rra Maketoni wants to take their adopted daughter Motholeli to Johannesburg to see if some specialists can make her walk again. And Grace is hired to find out if a certain tenant signed a lease under false pretenses.

Those are the basic conflicts of the novel. Here are some of the things that get them more complicated: a double bed with a large velvet heart on the headboard, mechanical problems at the orphanage, mnemonic problems at the orphanage, eternal apprentice Charlie’s male chauvinism, a banker who really does not care for women, and the onset of rainy season. Grace also wonders if Phuti’s car with its prominent red racing stripe is really the best vehicle for shadowing suspects.

“…it is always sad when people try to do things they cannot do,” said Mma Potokawe. (152)

One did not have to be famous to be remembered in Botswana; there was room in history for all of us.

…evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair. (205)

Wise words for all of us.

The Miracle at Speedy Motors is realistic in the sense that not everything works out. The miracles may not be spectacular, but they are special. If your heart is even a mere two degrees warmer than Scrooge’s, you will finish this book with a smile. Precious and Grace mean happiness for the reader.

D. H. Lawrence. The Rainbow. New York: Modern Library, 1915. Amazon.com. 30 Mar 2011. E-book.

I confess. I bit. High schoolers around North America may recognize the title and the author. 360,000 students taking the Advanced Placement English Literature test this past May were given a selection from this novel to write one of their three essays about. As an AP reader two weeks ago, I read and scored over a thousand of those essays. I had to find out what happened. I read the rest of the novel.

The Rainbow covers the love lives of three generations of Brangwens, a middle class farming family in Nottinghamshire. If you like Freud, you may like this novel. For non-Freudians, much of it is a chore to read.

Have you ever had a friend who was “in a relationship” and the dynamics of the relationship seemed to vary every day? She loves me—She hates me—What did she mean by that?—I can’t live with her—I can’t live without her…

While you may well sympathize with your friend, the talk and analysis of every little detail begins to grate. That is what about three quarters of The Rainbow does. The first quarter about the courtship and marriage of Tom and Lydia Brangwen is like that. So is the second quarter of the book about the courtship and marriage of William and Anna Brangwen.

There is a break which actually reads like a bildungsroman, a growth novel, of Will and Anna’s daughter Ursula. Finally, we get down to a story! But in the last quarter of the book as Ursula becomes an independent young woman at the turn of the twentieth century, it goes back to the ups and downs of two or three relationships. If you like reading niggling details in people’s diaries, then this may be the book for you. Frankly, the first half is nearly boring, but the author seems really interested in Ursula’s story; it just takes a long time getting there.

What keeps The Rainbow from being completely dreadful is that the author does have a way with words. This physical descriptions of flower gardens, industrial tenements, and interiors of old churches can be lovely. The third quarter of the book about Ursula’s childhood is just as Freudian, but it focuses on the family dynamics as she grows. Here we see Ursula begin to discover her place in the family, in the village, and—perhaps—in the world.

Biblical imagery through the novel may also keep the reader’s attention. On the symbolic level, The Rainbow is a modernist retelling of Genesis 3 through 11. The Brangwen farm is the Garden of Eden. The outside world contains serpentine temptations of esoteric knowledge. Later, the farm is likened to an Ark in the midst of the disruption and corruption of the surrounding world.

England banned The Rainbow when it first came out. By today’s standards it is quite tame, but the book does discuss in polite terms the sexual relations between the main couples. The book is Freudian, after all. With the third generation, that includes sexual relations outside of marriage. Ursula’s lover, Anton, is a soldier who, with Ursula, expresses great doubts about the efficacy of war. That was also not a popular stand in 1915 England, either.

Ursula’s own “Ark” is a tough working-class school where she teaches for two years. Her job is more like a zookeeper than a teacher. (The Bible does not tell us about all the labor required to keep an Ark full of animals afloat and healthy). At the end of the novel, after her back-and-forth love-struggle with Anton and others, she sees a rainbow. For her that becomes a sign of promise—not of seedtime and harvest, but a time of women’s rights and free sex. In other words, as Dickens would say for better or worse, “so far like the present period.”

Chan Kei Thong and Charlene L. Fu. Finding God in Ancient China. Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2013. Print.

A number of years ago I read The Discovery of Genesis by C. H. Kang and Ethel Nelson, a book on how many Chinese writing characters or ideograms represented ideas found in ancient history as presented in the Bible. For example, the Chinese word for ship is represented by a character that means “eight mouths in a vessel.” The word for temptation is formed by a character that means “reveal two trees.” That book was interesting as far as it went.

Finding God in Ancient China goes well beyond that. It is thoroughly researched, using many Chinese classics to demonstrate that not only does Chinese history corroborate similar Biblical history, but that traditional Chinese culture was monotheistic. Even after the introduction of Buddhism and dragon worship, those various spirits were seen as lower spirits than Shang Di, literally Lord of Heaven, Creator of everything including those spirits. Until the last emperor abdicated in 1911, nearly every Chinese monarch for over four thousand years offered sacrifices to the King of Heaven.

Besides briefly covering some of the same ground as The Discovery of Genesis in one chapter, this book is a survey of Chinese belief. It emphasizes that Confucius, Mencius, Lao Zi, and most other classical Chinese scholars and writers recognized a great creator God and that a ruler’s mandate was from Heaven. In the West, we tend to equate the Chinese Mandate of Heaven with the Divine Right of Kings that appeared in Europe in the late Middle Ages. There is a difference. The Divine Right meant that the monarch could do pretty much anything he or she wanted and was only answerable to God. To oppose a monarch was to oppose God’s representative on earth—hence the language of the American Declaration of Independence.

The Mandate of Heaven was that God gave the monarch the authority, but the monarch’s position was conditional. He had to rule righteously. If the people were dissatisfied by injustice or if the ruler ruled unjustly, that was a sign that the ruler had lost his mandate. Indeed, that was why the Emperor was normally motivated to offer sacrifices to the Lord of Heaven, to cover for any sins he might have committed. The chiefest of these sacrifices was the Border Sacrifice, done annually from about 2200 B.C. until A.D. 1911 with few breaks. Even the most wicked rulers would still offer this sacrifice. Chan and Fu tell us one especially evil ruler died almost immediately after offering such a sacrifice.

It is interesting to note that unlike most monarchs who ruled in polytheistic cultures (Japan, Egypt, Rome, ancient Greece, Persia, etc.), Chinese emperors were never seen as gods or offspring of gods. They were always seen as human beings, subject to the Creator and His laws.

Finding God in Ancient China is primarily a history book. It includes summaries of the findings of the Revs. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary of the 16th century, and James Legge, a Scottish missionary of the 19th century, who both encouraged missionaries to China to learn the Chinese traditions of Blood Covenant and sacrifices to Shang Di in order to more clearly present the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament to Chinese. The authors maintain that to a culturally aware Chinese person even today, Christianity is no “foreign religion,” but simply the fulfillment of the traditional Chinese worldview.

There is one chapter that is a little weaker. The book tries to connect certain Chinese astronomical observations with Biblical events. It proposes that a certain comet recorded by the Chinese was the Star of Bethlehem that brought the Magi to the infant Jesus. Not only does the timing seem a little early (5 B.C.), it is also true that in most cultures comets are a sign of bad luck. Even in Chinese, a person who is a family troublemaker is called a comet.

That chapter also suggests that a certain solar eclipse recorded by the Chinese in A.D. 31 may have corresponded to the darkness at noon during the crucifixion of Jesus. There is a major problem with that. Solar eclipses only happen during a New Moon (which is noted in the source that the book quotes), but Passover, the day Jesus was executed, is celebrated during the Full Moon. Whatever that darkness may have been, it was no solar eclipse. Some authorities, in fact, see Acts 2:20 “the moon [shall be turned] to blood” as a sign of a lunar eclipse, something that does happen when the moon is full.

Aside from the astronomical speculations, Finding God in Ancient China, originally written in Chinese as The Faith of Our Fathers, is well worth reading for anyone interested in ancient history or the mysterious Middle Kingdom.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned. 1922; rpt. Amazon.com. 16 May 2012. E-book.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.

• “The Rich Boy” Fitzgerald

He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Hemingway

Many readers are familiar with The Great Gatsby. It is the best-known, and probably the best, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels—though This Side of Paradise sold more copies during his lifetime.

Like Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned is about the “very rich.” The main characters of Anthony and Gloria Patch correspond in some ways to Tom and Daisy Buchanan of Gatsby. The one physical difference is that Gloria is blonde while Daisy has dark hair (at least in the novel…). Though no athlete like Tom Buchanan, Anthony has had life greased easily on the fast track. He is the only living descendant of his grandfather, millionaire philanthropist Adam Patch. Anthony spends much of the novel waiting for him to die so he can inherit his fortune.

Anthony could be considered a stereotypical spoiled rich kid. We are told immediately that he appreciated irony, the “Holy Ghost” of the twentieth century. (14) “He went to Harvard—there was no other logical thing to be done with him.” (69) His goal is nothing more than to live the life of the idle rich.

He is clever, intelligent, and manages to marry the “Famous girl” Gloria Gilbert. She is beautiful “but different, very emphatically different.” (531) It does not take much imagination to see her as a stand-in for Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald. Like Poe’s “Helen,” “She was the end of all restlessness, all malcontent.” (1196) Indeed, the cover of the original edition of the book pictured a couple that resembled the Fitzgeralds.

While it has been noted that Fitzgerald admitted Daisy Buchanan was “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” inspired by the Keats poem, Gloria is actually called that directly. Yet Gloria is probably the most sympathetic character in the book. One night at party at their country home in “Marietta,” Connecticut (based on Westport, where the Fitzgeralds lived for a year), Gloria flees the party. She is sober, but most of the other guests are drunk, including a stranger who is making unwanted advances. The fears she expresses are profound and moving—so much so that when some critics maintain that Zelda had a hand in some of her husband’s stories, this provides evidence for that hypothesis. It sounds like something that only a woman could understand. (I immediately thought of the painting Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi).

When Anthony is drafted, he is called the “Man-at-Arms,” an echo of the “knight-at-arms” in the Keats poem.

Much of the action takes place in New York City or the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound. Like the Buchanan family, the Patches chartered four trains to transport guests from New York to Gloria’s hometown of Kansas City for their wedding. Like Tom and Daisy, they honeymoon in Santa Barbara. Unlike Tom, though, Anthony is faithful to Gloria until much later.

The Patches do move around some, but they do not move because of scandal as Nick Carraway insinuates about the Buchanans. They either do not like or cannot afford where they are living. And then Grandpa Patch surprises everyone with his will when he dies. This conflict echoes the contested will of Dan Cody in Gatsby.

Irony abounds as promised. Anthony’s college friends all become officers in the military when America enters the Great War. Anthony fails the physical—probably because of his drinking. However, he does not fail the physical when he is drafted later, so he becomes a private. He is promoted to corporal but then demoted when he gets drunk. What happens to him in the army parallels what is happening to him socially and economically.

There are other echoes of Gatsby in this book. As in many of Fitzgerald’s other works, popular songs are worked into the story line. One song entitled “Daisy Dear” reads, “The panic has come over us, So has the moral decline.” Is this a reason for choosing the name Daisy for The Great Gatsby‘s Gloria?

Anthony and his friends philosophize about why God does not exist. In this novel there is no Monsignor Darcy in the background as in This Side of Paradise, or even any suggestive eye doctor’s billboard. To Anthony and his Harvard buddies, existence and intelligence are mere instruments of circumstances. (2883) Besides, they observe, philosophy and science always change. The reader cannot help thinking that this is less intellectual than willful. When you are rich and young and good-looking—why would you want to have a God?

Maybe old Adam Patch needed a God because of remorse, but do we? And yet, there is a niggling, nagging theme that these people have no hope: They are truly “without God and without hope in the world.” (Ephesians 2:12) “I don’t care about the truth,” Gloria exclaims. “I want some happiness.”

Thanks to his amorality, his money, his drinking, and his pride, Anthony Patch does make a mess of things not unlike the way Tom and Daisy Buchanan do. Tom tells Nick Carraway that he has suffered, but no one believes him or feels sorry for him. Anthony Patch meditates on his suffering, and the reader sees that he has actually suffered some—but he has no one to blame but himself.

In The Great Gatsby the Buchanans escape Long Island, and we learn only that they get away with things and leave messes behind. In The Beautiful and Damned we see what happens to them. Yes, they do get away, literally. They join the expat Lost Generation in Europe. We can easily imagine them as guests at one of Dick and Nicole Diver’s parties. Perhaps they get away, but as the title implies, “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Note: The references to the text are Kindle locations, not page numbers.

References for epigraphs:

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Rich Boy.” The Redbook. Jan-Feb. 1926. Project Gutenberg of Australia. Web. 3 Jan. 2011.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 1938: 52-77. Print.

Robert Finley. The Time Was at Hand. Maitland FL: Xulon, 2011. Print.

If you have read one book by an evangelical American on Biblical prophecy, you have probably read them all. Yeah, they keep getting updated when world events change things—so now they say “Russia” instead of “Soviet Union.” Chafer, Anderson, Lindsay, Walvoord, LaHaye and Jenkins, Rosenberg, they all pretty much say the same thing.

Well, Finley does not. And it is refreshing.

Finley maintains that much of the Book of Revelation and the Olivet Discourse (Jesus’ prophetic lecture in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21) are mostly about events that would happen in the first century. Jesus said “This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” (Matthew 24:34, cf. Mark 13:30, Luke 21:32). Revelation begins and ends with the expression “The time is at hand.” (Revelation 1:3, 22:10).

The Time Was at Hand presents plenty of evidence that much of what passes for possible end-times scenarios today was actually fulfilled from A.D. 66 to 73 when Judea and Jerusalem were under siege by the Romans. The details of the civil war, death, suffering, and treachery endured by the Jews in those years is unparalleled in the history of the world. That was, says Finley, the Great Tribulation. And it put a final and brutal end to the Old Covenant.

The main emphasis of The Time Was at Hand is simply that the New Covenant has superseded the Old. (Jeremiah 31:31-33, cf. Hebrews 8:8-13) The Scripture tells us that under the New Covenant there is no longer a distinction between Jew and Gentile, but that God’s Kingdom is meant for everyone. God’s way with the Jews is no longer different from His way with Gentiles.

Hal Lindsey hypothesized the 144,000 called out Jews in the Book of Revelation will be “144,000 Jews for Jesus” in the future. Finley reminds us that the first generation of Christians were mostly Jewish and that the 144,000 refers to them.

Many American writers suggest that Israel may rebuild the Temple at some point. Finley does not argue the point, but recognizes that since the coming of the Messiah, a Temple is no longer necessary:

If present day Zionists, or whoever, should put up a building in Jerusalem which they choose to call a “temple,” we can be sure that God in Heaven will have no interest in it whatsoever. (290)

Not only does Finley emphasize that God’s Gospel is the same for all people, he also believes that the modern American Christian focus on Israel is a distraction and a hindrance. It is a distraction because American believers are putting time and energy in interpreting Near Eastern events instead of sharing the Gospel. It is also a hindrance in witnessing the claims of Jesus to the quarter of the world’s population in Muslim-majority countries.

“If Christians help Zionists drive out the inhabitants of Palestine and make it a Jewish state,” the Muslims ask, “then why should we not drive out the Christians from other places and make them Islamic states?” And that is just what they are doing in many places where Christians and Muslims lived side by side for generations. (191,192)

I have great respect for Robert Finley. Christian Aid Mission, which he founded, focuses on indigenous and non-Western missions around the world. He is probably more aware than most people of the kind of work that is effective in bringing the Christian message to places in the world where it is unknown. His is a serious concern.

Understand that Finley is no Bible skeptic. Such skeptics will sometimes take the position that Bible prophecies were written down after the fact so that all “prophecies” were already fulfilled. Finley understands that many prophecies about the Second Coming are yet to be fulfilled. He just emphasizes that most, if not all, of the prophecies concerning the land of Israel-Palestine have already been fulfilled. The most important prophecy that has not been completely fulfilled yet is Matthew 24:14:

This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness to all nations [Greek ethnos, i.e. “ethnic groups”], and then shall the end come.” (cf. Mark 13:10)

Finley does draw from some historical sources that may not be well-known. He presents evidence that most Christians and Jews in the Middle East and North Africa converted to Islam during the Arab conquest of that region. He also adopts the thesis made famous by Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe that most Eastern European or Ashkenazi Jews were converts to Judaism in the Middle Ages. When adding the descendants of these people with the converts to Judaism from the time of Esther to the fall of Jerusalem, Finley suggests that few people who today identify with Judaism probably have any Abrahamic ancestry.

I recall reading in the Talmud that some Jews in Babylon had so many ancestral records that they needed a camel to carry them. Most such records were deposited in the Temple and so were destroyed in A.D. 70, so no one knows today. Though Arthur Koestler was an Ashkenazi Jew himself, his hypothesis does remain controversial. Still, I had a friend who discovered at age thirty that she had been adopted. She was able to reunite with her birth family and found out they were Jewish. A Jewish friend of both of us told her, “Only God knows who the real Jews are.”

Finley also makes a convincing case for who he thinks the antichrist is. I am not going to give that away in this review. While this is by no means original with Finley, it is not a name on the usual contemporary list of suspects be it the Pope, a Russian leader, the Kaiser, Hitler, Anwar Sadat, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Carpathia, Henry Kissinger, etc. etc. etc. He also makes some clever observations regarding alien invasion stories like the film Independence Day. No, he does not believe in space aliens—I said, clever, not paranoid.

Finley’s approach is humble. He notes that Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds of the millennium, spent years studying Bible prophecy, and even he admitted that there was much he could not understand and much that he missed.

Finley does not claim to have an end-times scenario worked out. “A great deal of mystery remains,” he admits. (201) It is better to admit that than to be following “fictional prophecy concepts.” (56)

Take a look at this book. It is well worth reading.

Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. Russell Nye. Cambridge MA: Riverside Press, 1958. Print.

Franklin’s Autobiography was not really written for publication, but for his grandson. He wrote it in fits and starts over a number of years. He had only gotten to the year 1757 when he died. Franklin was not only a printer, scientist, and politician, but he truly was a thinker and observer. Some of the things from Franklin’s autobiography are well known, like his tongue-in-cheek attempt at moral perfection or his version of a daily planner. Here are some other things from this autobiography worth thinking about.

While in his twenties, Franklin wrote an article speculating that, if Newtonian physics is exact, then everything is predetermined. This idea would be picked up later by Europeans such as Laplace and Hegel. It even becomes a topic of discussion in Stoppard’s Arcadia. Franklin also read Locke and became more and more persuaded that man needed government because he could not govern himself, but that too much government kept man from achieving his potential. This political tension is still very much with us today.

Though Franklin did dabble with determinism as mentioned above, he ultimately rejected it for typically scientific reasons. He could not observe it. If everything were determined then everything man did was morally good all the time. Franklin could easily see this was not the case. That moral sense had to come from somewhere. He ended up embracing Locke because he realized that the moral sense did, in fact, point to a moral creator.

While Franklin never was a member of any church, and he did have some doubts about some of the Bible’s history, he respected the Bible because its moral precepts worked. Indeed, the Autobiography gives credit to Biblical moral practices for his success in business. Franklin admitted that some of his things were not well written, but he learned from his mistakes. His writing ability and his admiration for Locke no doubt were factors on his being chosen to help draft the Declaration of Independence.

Franklin admired Pilgrim’s Progress. Critics have sometimes compared his Autobiography to that book. When Franklin was writing in the 1750s, the term novel was not widely used, but by his observation, Pilgrim’s Progress was the first novel, at least in English. It was prose (hence, not an epic) with narrative (unlike drama) and with a good deal of dialogue (unlike prose romances). It was indeed novel, something new.

From the autobiography, it is clear that Franklin was no deist. When he was in his early twenties, he found that philosophy somewhat appealing, as he had with determinism, but for reasons similar to why he rejected determinism, he rejected deism. He did attend church from time to time, and he did express in different places that he could see the hand of God in people’s lives. He believed that God had a significant hand in his own life. He could not see how he succeeded in business and others did not apart from Providence.

As Emerson mocked Coleridge for his belief in an objective God apart from His creation, so I recall some of my college professors mocking Franklin. I can see why. I thought at the time it was just that his daily planner made then nervous—though Franklin jokes about that—but it is really that Franklin used reason to argue against their pet theories and against amorality in general. This is the way the “establishment” works today, mockery and ad hominem. Let’s not bother to see whether the idea or observation makes sense, let’s attack, initiate lawsuits, and “demonize the opposition.”

Franklin had an interesting comment on religious doctrines. A friend who was a Dunker, a German Baptist group, complained that people were preaching and even publishing things about his sect that were untrue. Franklin suggested to his friend that they publish a statement of what they do believe. His friend demurred, saying that already they have learned that some things they used to believe they do not believe any more, and that such a statement might keep them from discovering God’s truth. It also might keep future generations from learning more because they might believe the elders had put it all together. Wise. Franklin thought so, too.

Franklin had a number of interesting things to say about the French and Indian War (a.k.a. the Seven Years’ War). Franklin’s Pennsylvania Militia supported and supplied some material for General Braddock. Braddock was convinced that the French fighters in inland America were ill-prepared and, like colonial militias, would be easily defeated by any professional army. Braddock’s pride, indeed, was his downfall. His attitude would continue among at least some of the British military leaders at the time of the Revolution.

Franklin also criticized General Lord Loudon, a bureaucrat who took no action and to Franklin was the man most responsible for English losses during the war. Franklin’s description of Loudon was reminiscent of history’s usual take on the dithering of General McClelland during the U. S. Civil War.

Franklin tells of a fascinating conversation (or lecture) from a Lord Granville who told him that colonial legislatures had to obey whatever their governors told them because “The King is legislator of the Colonies.” (Franklin wrote that in all capital letters!)

Franklin’s reply was, “This is new doctrine to me.”

This exchange does reflect a change in the British government’s view of the colonial constitutions. It certainly foreshadows the division that would come and the new country that would be formed.

Anthony Trollope. The Eustace Diamonds. 1872. Amazon.com. 12 May 2012. E-book.

I had to read this book. I believe it was the most frequently mentioned work in What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Trollope is sometimes considered more dated than other Victorian writers because his novels are so directly focused on the ins and outs of British society, especially the upper classes of his day. Some might say he was a British Sinclair Lewis. One book of his simply goes by the title of The Way We Are Now.

When compared with approach, probably the closest writer to Trollope is Henry James. Both men focus on what the main characters are thinking. Trollope’s characters may not have the depth of James’s. Perhaps that is because Trollope is not as good a writer, or it may be that his characters are just more shallow. In both writers a lot of the action is at the social level.

The Eustace Diamonds is one in a series of six novels in the Palliser Chronicles, but the Pallisers are truly minor characters in this one. Each novel is a tale by itself, so it is not necessary to read them in order or to read them all.

It is also no exaggeration to say that the Eustace Diamonds, that is, the literal diamond necklace owned by the Eustace family, are one of the main characters in the book. Unlike the Hope Diamond or the Moonstone, there is nothing spooky or accursed about the necklace. However, one could make a case that the Eustace Diamonds are the tragic character in the story. Of course, all diamonds have tiny flaws…

Most of the human characters in the novel are pretentious aristocrats or aspiring social climbers. Lady Elizabeth Eustace, or Lizzie, the young widow of Sir Florian Eustace is a bit of both. The educated and beautiful Lizzie married a Lord who conveniently died in a year leaving her a nice legacy of £4,000 a year and a baby son who would eventually become the next Lord. He also—depending on whom you believe—left her the diamonds.

The Eustace family lawyer, Mr. Camperdown, is convinced she possesses the diamonds illegally and becomes her Javert, tormenting her throughout the book. But, please understand, Lady Eustace is no Jean Valjean. She is calculating and manipulative, charming everyone but liked by no one, a Becky Sharp or a British Scarlett O’Hara. At least four men in the novel consider marrying her—but, beautiful as she may be, they only consider it for her income and her interest in the near-gothic Portray Castle of the Eustaces on the Scottish coast.

Like a James novel, The Eustace Diamonds takes its time. There are many conflicts and surprises before the tale completely unwinds. Will the honest but penurious Member of Parliament Frank Greystock, cousin and childhood friend of Lizzie, follow his heart or his ambition? Will Lord George (if he really is a lord) be the “Corsair” to sweep Lizzie off her feet? (Like Rhett Butler?) Will ________ (fill in the blank with any number of characters’ names) quit acting like a jerk? Or is it simply that everyone is interested in money but pretends otherwise?

Lucinda, an American with a British aunt, comes to England with the express purpose of finding an aristocrat for a husband—at least that is what her aunt thinks. Some of the other characters see her as a “grasping” American who has no business in their society. But she is one of the frankest characters in the story. No, she is not pleasant or sympathetic, but she speaks her mind and ultimately acts on her own instead of bowing to social expectations.

Drop the titles, add a little more technology in the background, and this could be set in modern America or China. The only difference is that women were expected to be treated with respect, and for the most part men did so.

While Trollope does spend time analyzing many of the characters, the story is plot-driven. The writer seems to be most exuberant when there is action—not Rafael Sabatini swashbuckling action, but when people are trying to handle conflict. There are two chapters near the end of Volume 1 that describe a lively fox hunt. This British tradition I knew little about. I had a college friend who doused himself with fox scent on Saturdays and worked as an ersatz fox for riders of a nearby hunt club to chase, but that was about it. On the many acres of Eustace land in Scotland, Trollope’s excitement is contagious. Now I get it! Even you do not read the whole book, read those chapters to get an appreciation of the fox hunt. Now if only Trollope had written in the same way about cricket, perhaps we poor Americans could begin to appreciate that…

As a postscript, to give a sense of Trollope’s social commentary, here are some quotations from The Eustace Diamonds (references are Kindle locations, not pages).

Lady Linlithgow would cheat a butcher out of a mutton-chop, or a cook out of a month’s wages, if she could do so with some slant of legal wind in her favour. (170-171)

How few there are among women, few perhaps also among men, who know that the sweetest, softest, tenderest, truest eyes which a woman can carry in her head are green in colour! (365-367)

Of listeners she was the very best, for she would always be saying a word or two, just to help you,—the best word that could be spoken, and then again she would be hanging on your lips. (464-462)

Some vague idea has floated across his brain that the world is wrong in supposing that such friendship cannot exist without marriage, or question of marriage. It is simply friendship. And yet were his friend to tell him that she intended to give herself in marriage elsewhere, he would suffer all the pangs of jealousy, and would imagine himself to be horribly ill-treated!(559-562)

To be alone with the girl to whom he is not engaged is a man’s delight;—to be alone with the man to whom she is engaged is the woman’s. (2484-85)

And a man captivated by wiles was only captivated for a time, whereas a man won by simplicity would be won for ever,—if he himself were worth the winning. (2841-42)

“It is good to be merry and wise,
It is good to be honest and true,
It is good to be off with the old love
Before you are on with the new.” (4572-74)

She could not disbelieve it all, and throw herself back upon her faith in virtue, constancy, and honesty. She rather thought that things had changed for the worse since she was young, and that promises were not now as binding as they used to be. She herself had married into a Liberal family, had a Liberal son, and would have called herself a Liberal; but she could not fail to hear from others, her neighbours, that the English manners, and English principles, and English society were all going to destruction in consequence of the so-called liberality of the age. Gentlemen, she thought, certainly did do things which gentlemen would not have done forty years ago; and as for ladies,—they, doubtless, were changed altogether.
(7789-94)

Young or old, men are apt to become Merlins when they encounter Viviens. (8439-40)

It is only when we read of such men that we feel that truth to his sweetheart is the first duty of man. I am afraid that it is not the advice which we give to our sons. (9837-38)

Thomas Hardy. Far From the Madding Crowd. Rev. ed. 1895. Amazon.com. 2004. E-book.

Thomas Hardy writes wonderfully. He expresses so many things with the perfect word in each sentence. His images and sensory descriptions come alive like no other prose. His word pictures of the natural world in and around southwestern England—what he calls Wessex—delight the mind. His presentation of the farms and singing birds not only makes the writing live but makes the reader want to visit.

But Hardy’s nature in Far From the Madding Crowd is not always idyllic. There is that thunderstorm which washes the torrents of water through the mouth of the church’s “gurgoyle” that doubles as a water spout. Nature is indifferent. It can provide peace and shelter as it does sometimes in this novel, but it can also lead to the destruction of shepherd Gabriel Oak’s flock of sheep, and, therefore, any hope he has of a stable life—and the only hope of winning the hand of the beautiful but proud Bathsheba Everdene. (She is a collateral ancestor of Katniss Everdean, but I would not make too big a deal of it.)

Although critics like Arthur Quiller-Couch have tried to analyze or categorize story plots into different types, famous horror-flick director-producer Roger Corman said there is only one plot: A stranger comes to town.

So in this tale the beautiful but still naïve Miss Everdene comes to Weatherbury to live with her aunt and ultimately inherit her uncle’s working farm. Though legal in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was still unusual for a woman to inherit property like this. Yet we are told that the uncle saw intelligence and promise in his niece. The people in town note that she prefers to ride a horse like a man.

Shepherd Oak saw something else. He and the turnpike gatekeeper discuss their brief encounter on first meeting this “handsome maid.” They each express admiration for her attractiveness, but Oak notes realistically, “She has her faults.” No, not snobbery, he suggests, but something else.

“What then?”

“Vanity.”

And so the first chapter ends. And so the tale of Bathsheba, Gabriel, Mr. Boldwood, Sergeant Tory, Liddy, Fanny, Coogan, and the other inhabitants of the village of Weatherbury begins.

As in other Hardy novels, there are plenty of plot twists—some funny, some ironic. Depending on one’s sense of humor, some readers might find them all ironic. While things never happen randomly, people who do not pay attention to nature lose their crops or flocks. Similarly, people who do not pay attention to character traits of others or to their own flaws may lose their reputations or even their lives.

Because of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy has a reputation of being “dark” or “bleak.” Far From the Madding Crowd is not that. It is merely realistic. Indeed, it even has a very tender happy ending. It is worth getting there.

Of course, to arrive at that ending, the characters have to go through many trials. People are tested. And, as in real life, even the best of people do not pass every test. As in any Hardy novel, there are surprises. One common surprise in his novels is the secret wedding. It seems to be a recurring theme in many of his works. And secret weddings leave some people disappointed, if not betrayed.

Yes, Miss Everdene’s flaw is vanity. And she endures a lot to learn that it is something she must manage.

And if Bathsheba is an ancestor of Katniss, then the dashing, witty, educated, Sergeant Troy is a collateral descendant of Austen’s Wickham. Mr. Boldwood echoes Henchard, the Mayor of Casterbridge. And the abandoned, exploited, torch-carrying Fanny is herself a type that runs through literature, especially stories of knights and chivalry. Think “The Lady of Shallot” or Lancelot and Elaine.

A stranger comes to town. And another. And another. Life is hard. But in this sad story of desperate people, Gabriel Oak, while making mistakes, lives up to his name. He is the steady one. He grows, if slowly. He withstands the storm. He can tell time by the stars. He reads the sky accurately to predict the weather. Ultimately, he understands character and can tell the difference between superficial and deadly flaws. Though he loses his own flock through misjudging a sheepdog, as a servant he helps others save their sheep and corn and even their lives. He is quiet, patient, and, much of the time, in the background. He is a reminder of another Good Shepherd. After all, true character is what you are when no one is watching.