Monthly Archives: March 2020

Eternity, A Book Review

Posted on March 29, 2020 | 1 comment

It has often been said that there are only 2 things for certain, death and taxes.  As we all know, the latter is not certain, since many pay no taxes.  Death however is something that none of us will escape, that is, if past history is a reliable guide to the future.   And in this case, it is. 

Understandably the question of what, if anything, happens after death has fueled the careers of many philosophers and theologians.  Life is much like an unfinished novel left behind by a deceased author.  Many try to complete the novel with their own idea of how it should end.  Interesting.  But no one can really know how the author intended to end the story.

What happens after we die?  It seems absurd to assume that this brief material existence is all that there is.  The material body decays and eventually returns to the vast repository of elements from which it was composed.  But surely something–call it consciousness, spirit, soul, or whatever—continues on in some form or other.

Recently, while serving as a volunteer usher at local theater, I listened in on a discussion about the theater’s resident ghost that apparently chooses to manifest himself from time to time.  One individual assured her audience that a colleague swears to have seen him while closing one evening.  Others claim to have seen the ghost, also.  As the discussion continued, it became clear that there are rumors of ghosts hanging out in a number of the old mansions and downtown buildings.  It is, after all, a very historic city.  I hesitate to name the city for fear that our relatively quiet community might be suddenly invaded by ghost hunters and others attracted to locations of reported paranormal phenomena.  Having ghosts sighted may be as destructive of a community’s tranquility as a visit from extra-terrestrials.  Need I mention Roswell, New Mexico?

The above is a rather lengthy introduction to a short review of a rather brief book by Tony Evans, ETERNITY: UNDERSTANDING LIFE AFTER DEATH (Chicago: Moody Press, 2016, 80 pp.).  Dr. Evans is a much-respected evangelical Christian pastor and author of a number of books dedicated to helping Christian lay people understand their faith in the Gospel, or good news, that Christians have testified to throughout history since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I have benefited from reading several of his books.  We need servants in the Church like Tony Evans, Francis Schaeffer, Tim Keller, and many others who can communicate profound truths in prose that the average lay person can understand.

ETERNITY has the appearance of being a summary of what was perhaps a sermon series on the question of what awaits the individual after death.  For the Christian whatever knowledge is available on that question must come from the Christian Bible, which Christians affirm is the only reliable and infallible truth regarding all matters of faith and practice.  But it is more complicated than that.  It is easier for us to agree on the Bible’s infallibility and inerrancy than it is to agree on what it reveals or teaches.  Since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, there is no agreed upon authority to which the individual believer can turn for a definitive interpretation of the Bible on any particular issue.   

Dr. Evans presents his interpretation of various Bible passages that together provide a picture of what eternity holds in store for the believer.  The event we refer to as “death” is a conjunction, or bridge, “between this life and the life to come” (p. 7).  From the moment we begin our life in a physical body, we are on our way to a destination, a place where we will spend eternity.  For the believer, that means eternity in the presence of God, eternal fellowship with our risen Lord Jesus Christ, and the saints, all those believers who preceded us or will follow us.  It is a specific place, prepared for us by our Lord, where we shall truly live as we never have here, in our resurrected bodies.  It is not some mysterious, shadowy realm of disembodied spirits or winged angels in white robes sitting on puffy, white clouds while playing harps. 

I find Dr. Evans’s description of eternity interesting.  I have heard other descriptions in sermons from the pulpit.  They vary.  Some have believers eternally gathered around the throne praising God along with the heavenly host of angels, cherubim, etc.  The truth is that none of us know exactly what awaits the believer after death.  We know that death, called the last enemy in the Bible, was defeated when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.  We know that we will spend eternity in his presence in a place he has prepared for us.   Beyond that, we can only speculate on what certain verses may mean. 

I am of the opinion that Dr. Evans takes too much liberty with the biblical text, taking as literal what is most likely only figurative language.  Eternity as described by Evans is a place where there are class distinctions, where some live in the heavenly Jerusalem and others reside outside and only make pilgrimages to Jerusalem as Muslims do to Mecca in this fallen world, and where those who “go into eternity after the millennium” will enter with “physical glorified bodies, not spiritual glorified bodies like we will have, because they did not experience death and resurrection” (p. 45).  The latter are the “millennial saints” who will require constant nourishment provided by “the leaves of the tree of life. . . as they carry on life as we know it, except without sin, as they fill the earth” (p. 46).  I am sorry, but I find much of this rather bizarre speculation unjustified by the text cited.  The notion of a thousand-year millennium itself is questionable, being considered by many Christians more a theological construct than biblical teaching. 

Dr. Evans concludes with a description of Hell, which is also generously seasoned with his own speculation of what may be.  At one point in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus makes a reference to hell, he describes it as a place where

“‘the worms that eat them do not die,
    and the fire is not quenched,”

a reference to Isaiah 66:24 in the Old Testament.  Are we to assume that the souls in hell are literally being gnawed on by worms and burned by flames for eternity?  Or, is Jesus using figurative language to describe an existence forever separated from God’s presence?  I think that all we can say with certainty, based upon images used in the Bible, is that heaven is a beautiful existence of eternal fellowship with our Lord and fellow saints for those who accept God’s free gift of grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and hell is just the opposite.  The former is desirable, a wise choice.  Hell is a most unpleasant place to be avoided.

So long as one understands that Tony Evans’s ETERNITY: UNDERSTANDING LIFE AFTER DEATH is one person’s idea of what the Bible teaches concerning eternity, it is worth reading.  Whether this 80 page “sermon” is worth the purchase price is another matter.

Until next time, be good to all God’s creatures and always go under the mercy.

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Not all Cinderella Stories have a Happy Ending

Posted on March 6, 2020 | 3 comments

In a time when it was said that a woman’s name should appear in the newspapers only to announce her birth, engagement, marriage, and death, Rose Parker Stokes was the woman’s name most often appearing in American newspapers between 1918 and 1921.  She was also the subject of a popular novel, Salome of the Tenements, published in 1922.  Within less than a decade, her name disappeared from the public space, while the names of those who were key figures in her life—Eugene Debs, John Reed, Emma Goldman, and others—have never disappeared from scholarly or popular attention.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was followed by a wave of pogroms during which “angry mobs rampage through towns, cities, and Jewish shtetls, or hamlets, raping women, looting shops and homes, and attacking Jews of all ages.”  Pogroms against the Jews in Russia were nothing new.  But the new repression that included new legal restrictions on the daily life of Jews and where they could live resulted in a wave of Jewish emigration to Western Europe and America.

Rosa Harriet Wieslander, an orthodox Jewish refugee from the Jewish shtetl of Augustów, was only 11 years old when she arrived in New York City in November 1890.  Like so many immigrant children, Rosa found employment as cheap labor producing, but not enjoying, the wealth that earned America before World War I the epitaph, “the Gilded Age.”

Rosa spent her first 12 years of employment rolling cigars.  She earned 77 cents for her first week’s work, roughly $22 today.  Later, she earned 13 cents for every 100 cigars she rolled, enabling her to occasionally earn as much as $8 in a week, roughly $240 today.

Immigrants, especially Jews, were looked down on by most Americans.  Senator Henry Cabot Lodge described those from Russia as “inferior people,” and as “dangerous to America as the Goths and Vandals who trampled over Rome.”  The author Henry James, after visiting the Lower East Side of NYC, described the Jews he saw there as “swarming . . . small, strange animals—snakes or worms.”  The future president, Woodrow Wilson, described the immigrants coming to America at the turn of the century as “multitudes of men of the lowest class [possessing] neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”  It was as if, Wilson said, that “the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”

Rosa’s life took a dramatic turn in 1903.  She was writing articles for the Yiddishes Tageblatt, the nation’s orthodox Jewish newspaper.  She wrote articles calling for an end to “Jew-baiting and Negro-lynching” and calling attention the grinding poverty in which the working classes lived.  One evening in July, she met young James Graham Phelps Stokes, a member of one of America’s wealthiest families.  Despite his wealth, “Graham,” as he was known, was committed to championing the cause of justice for the working classes, and after meeting and marrying Rosa in July 1905, advancing the cause of socialism.

Socialism prior to World War I was not smeared by an association with Bolshevism and communism that resulted from the Russian Revolution in 1917.  It attracted many evangelical Christians and reform minded members of the wealthy classes, who the press sometimes referred to as “millionaire socialists.”  Graham and Rosa joined the Socialist Party of America.  Graham ran unsuccessfully as a Socialist candidate for the New York State Assembly in 1908.

Rosa’s marriage to Graham Stokes was a real-life Cinderella story.  Their residence of Caritas Island off Connecticut’s Long Island Sound coastline became a sort of aviary frequented by the who’s who of intellectuals who identified themselves as socialists, trade-unionists, anarchists, suffragists, poets, etc.  Among those in the circle around Graham and Rosa were, at various times, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, William F. Cochran, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jack London, “Mother” Jones, Lincoln Steffens, and many more.  Rockwell Kent referred to Caritas as “the very citadel of the Socialist movement.”

Two events in 1917 doomed the socialist movement in America and eventually were responsible for destroying Cinderella’s marriage to her prince charming.  The first was the Russian Revolution that ended with a Bolshevik victory and the establishment Marist-Leninist totalitarianism.  The second was Woodrow Wilson’s decision to lead the United States into the Great War in Europe to secure a victory for England and France, thus protecting the immense financial investments of America’s bankers and industrialists.

Once the United States entered the war in Europe, Graham became an ardent supporter of the war effort, while Rosa became a fervent defender of the Russian Revolution.  Rosa never wavered in her support of the new Soviet Union, whereas some of her socialist friends who actually visited the USSR—e.g., Emma Goldman—returned totally disillusioned.  Rosa and Graham separated and eventually divorced.  Rosa went to Frankfurt, Germany in February 1933 to undergo a new radiation treatment for cancer developed by a prominent doctor who was an outspoken anti-Semite, who later became an SS officer who gave “a notorious illustrated lecture portraying cancer cells as Jews and victorious beams of radiation as Nazi storm troopers.”

Adam Hochschild is a historian in the best tradition of Barbara Tuchman, Paul Johnson, Bruce Catton, and others who write scholarly researched history in a style than can be enjoyable to read as well as informative.  I have read 2 of his earlier books, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) and To End All Wars (2011) and adopted them as reading for history courses I taught as a history professor.  When I first heard of Rebel Cinderella, I knew I was in for a great reading experience.  I was not disappointed.  Rebel Cinderella appears at just the right time.  The 2020 presidential election has opened up interest in the history of socialism in America’s history, as well as comparisons of the era known as the Gilded Age and our own time, considered by many to be a second Gilded Age.

As both a retired history professor and one who enjoys a good book, I wholeheartedly recommend Adam Hochschild’s Rebel Cinderella : Rose Pastor Stokes: Sweatshop Immigrant, Aristocrat’s Wife, Socialist Crusader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).

Until next time, be good to all God’s creatures and always go under the mercy.

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