Grand Rapids and New York: The Great Divide
By way of introduction I am Bill Reimer and I have been the manager of the Regent College Bookstore for the past fifteen years. Regent College is located right at “Gate One” of the University of British Columbia, one of Canada’s largest universities. For a bookstore that specializes in Christian studies, this is a fairly unique position to be in. Most bookstores with our specialty are in out of the way locations in seminaries or bible colleges. As I walk on the UBC campus, where 40,000 students are enrolled, I often think about how Christianity relates to this academic world. While there are few overtly visible signs of the influence of Christianity, the university itself is a remnant of a past Christian civilization.
While I write these words a young student, probably from UBC, came into the bookstore with the question, “Where is C.S. Lewis located?” I walked her over to the section where books by or about Lewis occupy a full sixteen feet of shelf space. Titles by Lewis are primarily published by Harper Collins in London and New York and Simon and Schuster in New York. These books are remnants from a time when books by Christian authors had a large general readership and were published by general trade publishing houses.
At my desk on the floor of Regent Bookstore I skim perhaps 2,000 publisher book catalogs per year that can be divided roughly into three categories:
Christian writers concentrate almost exclusively on the first two categories. When they do write for general publishers they are shunted into a “faith” line such as Harper San Francisco or Doubleday’s Waterbrook Press. Very few Christian writers are published in the “New York” divisions of the “Big Four” publishers: HarperCollins, Random-Doubleday, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin-Putnam. These four publishing groups and their associated imprints control a huge percentage of the general book trade.
The Oxford theologian Alister McGrath is a prolific writer who has managed to bridge all three publishing categories. Many scholars criticize McGrath for being too prolific. I think this criticism generally unfounded. McGrath writes for all three publishing audiences. Scholarly books such as Iustitia Dei (Cambridge 1986, 1998) and Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Blackwell, 1987) clearly show that he “cut the mustard.” His Christian Theology: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1994,1997,2001) was at one time Blackwell’s best-selling title and had the second highest sales in Blackwell’s publishing history. McGrath has three recent titles with Doubleday New York that he has aimed at the “Karen Armstrong” market. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture was a cover title of the New York Times Book Review and sold extremely well. The second book is The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis followed by the summer release of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief In The Modern World. These are gutsy books that seek to dialogue with contemporary thought from the platform of a major New York general publisher. What other Christian thinkers and scholars are seeking to do this? There are a few but most write for very small academic audiences writing books with a total print run of, say, 2-3,000 copies. There is certainly a place for this writing but in my experience I think Christian scholars are deeply deluded about the actual readership of their books. Generally academic book sales are very small and the number of people who actually read the book smaller still.
Os Guinness is another writer hoping to crack the general publishing market in the coming years. HarperCollins, New York in February is publishing his Unspeakable: Understanding And Resisting Evil In An Age Of Genocide And Terrorism. Hopefully this book will not simply reflect a stoic Christian worldview but instead point to a deep existential Christian faith as being the counterpoint to evil.
In The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath mentions the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) who labeled nihilism the ultimate “opium of modernity” — the belief that we will not be judged after death for our “betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders.” Milosz , a Christian, saw a great deal of evil in his lifetime. He was 28 years old when Poland fell in 1939. The following poem from his collection Second Space: New Poems (Harper Collins, 2004) was printed recently in The New York Review of Books and gives a glimpse of an existential, personal faith. Perhaps a writer like Milosz is himself a “Constantine” to the world through his writing.
THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE
I could have lived in the time of Constantine
Three hundred years after the death of the Savior,
Of whom no more was known than that he had risen
Like a sunny Mithra among Roman legionnaires.
I would have witnessed the quarrel between homoousios and homoiousios
About whether the Christ nature is divine or only resembles divinity.
Probably I would have cast my vote against Trinitarians,
For who would ever guess the Creator’s nature?
Constantine, Emperor of the World, coxcomb and murderer,
Tipped the scale at the Council of Nicea,
So that we, generation after generation, meditate on the Holy Trinity,
Mystery of mysteries, without which
The blood of man would have been alien to the blood of the universe
And the spilling of his own blood by a suffering God, who offered Himself
As a sacrifice even as he was creating the world, would have been in vain.
Thus Constantine was merely an undeserving tool,
Unaware of what he was doing for people of distant times?
And us, do we know what we are destined for?
While I write these words a young student, probably from UBC, came into the bookstore with the question, “Where is C.S. Lewis located?” I walked her over to the section where books by or about Lewis occupy a full sixteen feet of shelf space. Titles by Lewis are primarily published by Harper Collins in London and New York and Simon and Schuster in New York. These books are remnants from a time when books by Christian authors had a large general readership and were published by general trade publishing houses.
At my desk on the floor of Regent Bookstore I skim perhaps 2,000 publisher book catalogs per year that can be divided roughly into three categories:
- Christian publishers.
- University publishers.
- General publishers.
Christian writers concentrate almost exclusively on the first two categories. When they do write for general publishers they are shunted into a “faith” line such as Harper San Francisco or Doubleday’s Waterbrook Press. Very few Christian writers are published in the “New York” divisions of the “Big Four” publishers: HarperCollins, Random-Doubleday, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin-Putnam. These four publishing groups and their associated imprints control a huge percentage of the general book trade.
The Oxford theologian Alister McGrath is a prolific writer who has managed to bridge all three publishing categories. Many scholars criticize McGrath for being too prolific. I think this criticism generally unfounded. McGrath writes for all three publishing audiences. Scholarly books such as Iustitia Dei (Cambridge 1986, 1998) and Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Blackwell, 1987) clearly show that he “cut the mustard.” His Christian Theology: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1994,1997,2001) was at one time Blackwell’s best-selling title and had the second highest sales in Blackwell’s publishing history. McGrath has three recent titles with Doubleday New York that he has aimed at the “Karen Armstrong” market. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture was a cover title of the New York Times Book Review and sold extremely well. The second book is The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis followed by the summer release of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief In The Modern World. These are gutsy books that seek to dialogue with contemporary thought from the platform of a major New York general publisher. What other Christian thinkers and scholars are seeking to do this? There are a few but most write for very small academic audiences writing books with a total print run of, say, 2-3,000 copies. There is certainly a place for this writing but in my experience I think Christian scholars are deeply deluded about the actual readership of their books. Generally academic book sales are very small and the number of people who actually read the book smaller still.
Os Guinness is another writer hoping to crack the general publishing market in the coming years. HarperCollins, New York in February is publishing his Unspeakable: Understanding And Resisting Evil In An Age Of Genocide And Terrorism. Hopefully this book will not simply reflect a stoic Christian worldview but instead point to a deep existential Christian faith as being the counterpoint to evil.
In The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath mentions the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) who labeled nihilism the ultimate “opium of modernity” — the belief that we will not be judged after death for our “betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders.” Milosz , a Christian, saw a great deal of evil in his lifetime. He was 28 years old when Poland fell in 1939. The following poem from his collection Second Space: New Poems (Harper Collins, 2004) was printed recently in The New York Review of Books and gives a glimpse of an existential, personal faith. Perhaps a writer like Milosz is himself a “Constantine” to the world through his writing.
THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE
I could have lived in the time of Constantine
Three hundred years after the death of the Savior,
Of whom no more was known than that he had risen
Like a sunny Mithra among Roman legionnaires.
I would have witnessed the quarrel between homoousios and homoiousios
About whether the Christ nature is divine or only resembles divinity.
Probably I would have cast my vote against Trinitarians,
For who would ever guess the Creator’s nature?
Constantine, Emperor of the World, coxcomb and murderer,
Tipped the scale at the Council of Nicea,
So that we, generation after generation, meditate on the Holy Trinity,
Mystery of mysteries, without which
The blood of man would have been alien to the blood of the universe
And the spilling of his own blood by a suffering God, who offered Himself
As a sacrifice even as he was creating the world, would have been in vain.
Thus Constantine was merely an undeserving tool,
Unaware of what he was doing for people of distant times?
And us, do we know what we are destined for?
- Czeslaw Milosz 1911-2004
Translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Haas
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