Zion and its enemies

The United States in the next few years may have to decide whether to back Israel’s right to exist against regimes in Iran and elsewhere that hunger for mass murder. Three new books provide helpful looks at Christian understandings. Robert O. Smith’s More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford, 2013) is an academic overview that starts with the Puritans (who put e’s on words like “Own”) and continues to our own day. Paul Wilkinson’s Understanding Christian Zionism: Israel’s Place in the Purposes of God (Berean Call, 2013) is a fervent defense of John Nelson Darby and dispensationalism. Raymond Gannon’s The Shifting Romance with Israel (Destiny Image, 2012) shows the relationship of Pentecostalism and Zionism.

Those who are not Zionists also have reason to support Israel in the face of holocaust threats from some Muslim countries. John M. Owen IV’s Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West’s Past (Princeton University Press, 2014) is a thought-provoking, wide-ranging, well-written look at the relevance of previous religious and ideological battles, including those of Catholicism vs. Calvinism, to our current war against Islamism.

Those who think secularism is the inevitable wave of the future tend to underestimate the Muslim threat, but Owen does not, nor should Christians. He also cautions us against an ahistorical view that Islam is monolithic and so ideological that it is irrational: Owen shows that a state may be both rational and ideological.

Political Islam looks to be a bigger threat than atheism or secularism could be, because they provide no answer to the deeper human search for meaning. Islam provides a wrong and deadly answer, but an appealing one to men who want to be like Muhammad. On the other hand, Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall (Norton, updated edition 2014) claims that Israel has been more on offense than defense in several of its wars. That’s partly a matter of perspective, but even if Shlaim’s critique is true, the reason lies in the sad tale of murderous Judeophobia in 1930s and 1940s Europe that Betty Gold relates in her holocaust memoir, Beyond Trochenbrod (Kent State University Press, 2014).

Short stops

As You Wish, by actor Cary Elwes and Joe Layden (Simon & Schuster, 2014), is an enjoyable behind-the-scenes look at the making of the wonderful comedic romance adventure fairy tale movie The Princess Bride. (Elwes was Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts.) The book on which the movie is based, by William Goldman, is good bedtime reading. David Wheaton’s My Boy, Ben (Tristan, 2014) shows a former tennis champion’s love for his dog, who dies. Joe Bayly’s The View from a Hearse (Clearnote, 2014, first published in 1969) presents a Christian view of human death.

Leland Ryken’s A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible (Crossway, 2014) is a valuable reference guide to anaphora, antithetic parallelism, apophasis—and that’s just three of the a’s.

Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2013) shows the huge difference Christianity made not only in thinking but living—and also shows that Christians did not tolerate homosexuality. Peter Heather’s The Restoration of Rome (Macmillan, 2013) lucidly tells of Theoderic, Justinian, Charlemagne, and the ascent of the papacy. J. Budziszewski’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a scholarly guide to Roman Catholicism’s intellectual peak.

I do like fairy tales, so I was hopeful about a new series coming out from Princeton University Press, “Oddly Modern Fairy Tales,” but three of the five books out so far display postmodern macabre, with tales often ending in death. I can’t recommend The Fairies Return, The Cloak of Dreams, or Lucky Hans. But Told Again (2015), tales by Walter de la Mare first published in 1927, are oldies but goodies about Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack of beanstalk fame, Rumpelstiltskin, and so on, all elegantly told, with the happy endings that make them fairy tales rather than sad journalism, and increase our appetite for the happiest ending of them all. —M.O.