Category: Book review

The Bible’s Grand Story in the Unseen Realm

Part 2

I love books that offer a grand sweep of the Bible that ties the whole together through a theme like the Exodus or the Temple. Seeing how all of Scripture unites in multiple ways is enlightening and energizing for me.

In that regard, Heiser’s The Unseen Realm does not disappoint. As I noted here, his book is not just a catalog of spiritual beings. Rather he tells a remarkable story of God’s plan for creation from Genesis to Revelation through this clarifying lens.

And what is that story? “The Old Testament is basically a record of the long war between Yahweh and the gods, and between Yahweh’s children and the nations, to re-establish the original Edenic design” (p. 376). And the two wars are actually one, with rebellious spiritual beings using the nations in their battle.

Here’s how it unfolds. While initial conflicts emerge in Genesis 3 and 6, a turn comes, unexpectedly, in Genesis 10 which offers an apparently boring list of seventy nations descended from Noah and his sons. But these are the nations split up in Genesis 11 after the fiasco at the Tower of Babel. God doesn’t completely forsake them, however. In Genesis 12 he promises to bless them through Abraham and his family.

What is going on here? Moses offers a striking explanation of the episode at Babel: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind [at Babel], he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:8-9 ESV).

God, says Moses, gave up the corrupt nations to their rebellion at Babel, turning them over to “the sons of God,” which is a reference to the divine council (a group of spiritual beings often referenced in places like Gen 6:2; Ex 15:11; Job 1:6; 2:1; Ps 82:1, 6; 89:6-7; etc.). The nations are disinherited from God at Babel and given over to the control of these equally rebellious “sons of God.” But God chooses one nation for his inheritance—through whom all the nations will eventually be brought back into the fold. That is, Israel.

As we know, that is ultimately fulfilled by God in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique Son, who accomplishes the task Israel failed to complete. When the New Testament then refers (as it does frequently) to the nations (e.g., Matt 28:19; Mk 13:10; Acts 1:8; Rom 16:26; etc.), this is more than a statement about a worldwide mission. It is a reclamation project which involves God’s plan to dethrone the rebellious spiritual beings who led the nations astray, and bring all peoples back to himself.

Many years ago I heard the phrase “territorial spirits” to describe how nations were guided by evil beings who had a certain geographic or ethnic domain. I was skeptical, thinking it derived from isolated and contested texts like Daniel 10:12-21. Heiser doesn’t employ that terminology, but he does use the phrase “the divine council cosmic-geographical worldview,” to describe what he sees as permeating Scripture (p. 349).

What difference does all this make? How does it affect our life in Christ?

Those are the questions I’ll address in my next post.

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Image: Ziggurat at Ur, modern Tall al-Muqayyar, Iraq. Such temple towers were characteristic of Mesopotamia, 2200 to 550 BC, and was likely the pattern followed at Babel (see John Walton and Tremper Longman III, The Lost World of the Flood, pp. 129-42). Image by Abdulmomn Kadhim from Pixabay.

The Unseen Realm of the Supernatural

Part 1

We aren’t comfortable talking about spiritual beings. For those of us, even Christians, who grew up in a world dominated by science and a material mindset, talk of angels and demons just feels weird.

Even when we read the Bible, we tend to downplay such topics. In The Unseen Realm, however, Michael Heiser opens our eyes to what is hiding in plain sight.

We know about the angels in the Christmas story and the demons Jesus challenged. Paul also offers a rich vocabulary for such beings which includes “the rulers . . . the authorities . . . the powers of this dark world and . . . the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).

Heiser, however, focuses on the divine counsel that appears in Job 1–2. You remember—in the midst of this assembly comes The Accuser (aka Satan) who casts doubts on Job’s character and loyalty to God.

While God doesn’t need spirit helpers (as he doesn’t need human ones either), he has chosen to use them, to let them participate in his work—and they are much more involved than we might think.

As Heiser puts it, “Though the kingdom story of the Bible is rarely taught with it in mind, the divine council plays an important role throughout that story’s unfolding. The scriptural pattern is that, when God prepares to act in strategic ways that propel his kingdom forward, the divine council is part of that decision making. The council is the vehicle through which God issues his decrees” (p. 349).

Is he overstating things? There’s more than we might think. Consider the “let us” language of Genesis 1:26 and 11:7. Or the “myriads of holy ones” who came with God when he gave the law on Sinai (Deut 33:1-2; Acts 7:52-53; Gal 3:19). Or those who participated when Isaiah was commissioned (6:1-7). Or another scene much like the one in Job (1 Kings 22:13- 28). Or those who will occupy the multiple thrones of Daniel 7:9 and Revelation 4:1-8.

Yet some rebelled, turned their back on God. The Bible doesn’t exactly tell us why or how. Our ideas on this backstory owe more to Milton’s Paradise Lost than Scripture. But rebel they did.

In Psalm 82:1-7 God judges these beings for supporting the wicked and oppressing the weak. Sometimes they are referred to as gods (Ex 15:11; 1 Kgs 8:23; Ps 97:9), gods who are completely inferior to Yahweh, the true God. We see their ultimate fate in the book of Revelation.

While The Unseen Realm is massively researched, Heiser is a Scripture nerd who writes so nonexperts can follow along. In plain language he answers questions like:

  • Are these beings “gods”?
  • Why are they called “sons,” and how does Jesus as the only Son fit in?
  • How did ancient people think about spiritual beings?
  • Who are the Nephilim of Genesis 6:1-4 anyway?
  • What in the world is Paul talking about when he says we will judge angels (1 Cor 6:3)?
  • Why wasn’t the Old Testament more explicit about a Divine Messiah dying and rising again?
  • And where is Armaggedon . . . really?

But The Unseen Realm is more than a collection of questions and answers about oddities in the Bible. Heiser sees the whole sweep of God’s plan for creation tied up in these issues. The main purpose of his book is, in fact, to unveil for us this grand narrative.

That is the topic of my next installment.

Our Surprising and Profound Mission

The center of Paul’s monumental letter to the Romans has some of the most beloved lines in the Bible:

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (8:1)

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” (8:31)

“Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:39)

These are wonderful assurances. Could it be, however, that we have somehow missed the point? In his book Into the Heart of Romans, Tom Wright suggests we have.

These assurances are not, as is commonly thought, about going to heaven. Heaven is never mentioned in the chapter. Rather they concern our current state here on earth—where we have a God-given mission to undertake.

Wright is at pains to say repeatedly, “Assurance of salvation is indeed based, throughout Romans, on the sovereign love of God poured out in the death of his son. But this passage, Romans 8:18-30,” as he explains in persuasive fashion, “is speaking about the vocation of the saved community, the calling to implement the already-accomplished work of Jesus, the Messiah within, and for the benefit of the wider world of all creation . . . . Salvation is not simply God’s gift to his people, it is God’s gift through his people—to the wider world” (pp. 161, 163).

Much of the traditional interpretation is based on misunderstanding glory as meaning heaven (as in “gone to glory”). “The primary meanings of ‘glory’ in this passage are simultaneously, the glorious presence of God himself dwelling within us by the spirit and the wise, healing, reconciling rule of God’s people over the whole creation. . . . In the Hebrew scriptures, ‘glory’ regularly comes to refer specifically to rule and power” (pp. 110, 120; emphasis original).

If we are to engage in the task that God delegated to us in Genesis 1:28 of being stewards of the earth, how are we to do that? That is what the “strange” verses in Romans 8:26-27 are about.

Paul’s comment about the Spirit helping us in our weakness and interceding “for us through wordless groans” is not some odd tangent. This is our vocation as Christians that we can carry out with full assurance that none can prevent. For when we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit takes up our groans into the Triune God.

I find it boggling that when we groan for the sins and suffering and troubles of the world, it is not only an expression of sorrow. God is joining us, right there, as part of his own redeeming work.

I think of when my prayers seemed to be intense expressions of agony, and even anger at God. Does God hear? Does he care? Astonishingly, Paul is saying that these moments when I am at my lowest are in fact transformed by the Spirit into moments of grace for the sake of others.

“God is working,” as Wright says about God’s loved ones, “with these praying-in-the-dark people for the wider good of this world. . . precisely at the point where they are at the end of their mental, emotional and spiritual tether, [where they] find within themselves the deep sorrow of all the world, as it were concentrated into one place, and find at that moment that they are part of the dialogue of love between the father and the spirit. This, [Paul] says, is what we are called to do and be. . . . These verses, I suggest, explain and contextualize the present work of lament which anticipates the future promised work of the redemption of all creation” (pp. 135, 137).

I find that profoundly reassuring.

Taming Dragons

We don’t find dragons just in myths or in movies. We find them in the Bible more often than we might think. The dragon in Revelation 12 is just the last of many times we find sea monsters or twisting serpents (see Gen 3), all part of a larger category of chaos creatures like those mentioned in Daniel.

As Andy Angel summarizes in Playing with Dragons, the Old Testament associates them with disorder and evil which God ultimately controls. Sometimes they are equated with the seas and rivers from which they arise, seas which God rebukes, setting their limits, trampling them (Gen 1:7-10; Job 7:12; 38:8-11; Ps 65:7; 89:9-10; Jer 5:22; Da 7:2-3; and for portraits of Jesus as ruler, like God, over the chaos of the sea, see Mark 4:35-42; 5:11-13; 6:45-52).

Surrounding cultures had long used such images to explain their world, the forces of nature, the fates of humans. Why would the biblical writers do so as well? Moses, the psalmists, and prophets borrowed from these well-known tales but changed them significantly to distinguish Yahweh from the gods in those tales. For them there is no contest between God and these other forces (as there is in other cultures). Yahweh is clearly superior, in a class by himself (Ex 15:11; Ps 86:8; Jer 10:6).

Andy Angel, however, emphasizes another dimension in all this, a very human dimension. We often find these creatures mentioned when the authors are struggling with suffering and the triumphs of God’s enemies. If God has already defeated these chaos creatures, they ask, why do his people still suffer? We find these questions most prominently in Psalms of lament (Ps 74, 77, 89, 144) and the book of Job (Leviathan and Behemoth in Job 38–41).

Matthew, as Angel points out, also takes up these themes especially in the stories of Jesus and the disciples on the waters. The gospel writer gives his own spin to the topics of chaos, fear, and faith in the midst of suffering.

All these stories are more than stories. The forces of darkness are all too clearly at work in our world. Nor does the Bible whitewash this reality. Rather in our sorrow it invites us to struggle with God, to cling to God like Jacob did in the wilderness.

We might wish for clearer answers. What God instead offers is himself, his presence, and hope—hope based on the even more solid reality of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. He offers “a hope that one day this God will finally conquer all chaos and evil, and that we can be a part of that new creation.”*

*Andy Angel, Playing with Angels (Cascade Books, 2014), p. 103.

Ten Key Books

What books influenced me most? Here is an updated list of ten that have formed my thought life, my spiritual life, my sense of aesthetics, and how I view and interact with the world.

After making the list I noticed that I read most of them before I was twenty-five. And I suppose that’s to be expected. In mid-life and beyond, I’ve largely been shaped (though hopefully not set in stone). I present these books here roughly in the order in which I read them.

Hamlet—I had a stellar high school English teacher who spent weeks taking us line by line through what he called the greatest play by the greatest author in history. Mr. Ryan opened our eyes to a feast so we could partake of a whole new world of life, ideas, emotion, and drama. Though I didn’t quite grasp it at the time, Hamlet grounded me in notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Escape from Reason—Francis Schaeffer’s book taught me that ideas had consequences and that Christians could engage the world of philosophy and learning with confidence.

Mere Christianity—Lewis’s classic still stands as a landmark of clear thinking. Just the other day I was talking with someone who said we can only know for certain what is objective. Lewis’s thoughts on self-contradiction modeled for me how to respond: “But isn’t your statement about objectivity itself a subjective judgment?”

How to Read a Book—Mortimer Adler’s and Charles Van Doren’s essential guide shows us a wide variety of ways to understand and appreciate what we read. More than that, this still widely used volume taught me much about how to think.

The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien’s trilogy showed me the power of imagination. In creating a fictional world of orcs, wizards, Hobbits and Ents, he made courage, honor, faith, friendship, goodness, truth, and love believable in our world too.

Knowing God—Early in my adulthood J. I. Packer focused me on the centrality of what we were made for, of what brings true wisdom, and on what the essence of eternal life is—to know God. And there my attention remains.

Watership Down—The structure, characters, action, setting, themes and tone of this near perfect novel are so skillfully and compellingly presented that we forget we are reading a 400-page book about rabbits.

The Cross and the Prodigal—I read this in the mid-1970s, in its original Concordia edition. Kenneth Bailey so revolutionized the way I read the New Testament that I was delighted to bring it back into print at InterVarsity Press in 2005.

The Sparrow—Mary Doria Russell’s novel, set in the near future, is a thoroughly profound, readable, and gripping meditation on ultimate questions and on walking with those who suffer. The characters on this multi-year journey are not only supremely believable but are so fascinating, intelligent, mature, and likeable that I wished I could have joined them. And I did.

Jesus and the Victory of God—This tour de force by N. T. Wright still astonishes in its ability to challenge academic conventional wisdom on the one hand and the church on the other. Here is a book that unveils the cosmic, multi-dimensional achievement of Jesus.

Tired of Being Jerked Around?

Are you tired of extreme predictions of both an eco-apocalypse and a techno-utopia? You know what I mean:

Be Afraid: The world will run out of oxygen in 8 years!
Have No Fear: Renewable energy will eliminate all carbon emissions!
Be Afraid: Sea level cities will soon be inundated with water!
Have No Fear: AI will clean the world’s water supply!

Instead of being jerked around by social media and news media, wouldn’t you rather listen to someone who is knowledgeable and reasonable, who is neither optimist nor pessimist? If you want some level-headed perspective, stop following the news and start reading How the World Really Works. Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba, has studied all this for decades, and will at once blow your mind and improve you mind.

What’s really going on with energy? In 1975 oil supplied 45% of the world’s energy. In 2019 it was 33%. (Natural gas, wind, and solar have made the difference.) But the world simply can’t go all electric because we have no way to store massive amounts of electricity—and electric jets? Not in our lifetime.

What really makes the world go round? Besides energy, four key material pillars hold up modern civilization, all of which depend on carbon fuels. At the dinner table I asked the family to make a guess. Maybe you’d like to try.

I was impressed that they came up with three of the four—steel, plastics, and concrete. We’ve seen huge increases in these—which all dependent on high levels of energy to create.

What’s the fourth? Surprisingly, ammonia—whose nitrogen content makes it key for producing fertilizer which in turn made 75-year-old predictions of mass starvation laughable. But we must not forget that lots of oil is still needed for that and for the plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting of food.

Wait. There’s more! With all the fad diets out there, how do you decide which one will give the longest life? It’s not that hard, Smil says. Look at the countries with greatest longevity and copy them. Two at the top are Japan and Spain. Since their diets are quite different, you have a choice.

What’s actually happening with globalization, with global warming, with contagious diseases? This book has so much sensible, even-handed information on all these and more.

Granted, Smil has a lot of numbers. But he does his best to make big ideas and trends very understandable. Throughout he uses everyday examples to keep us on track. For example, getting two pounds of chicken to the table requires about half a wine bottle of crude oil.  

I love books that give a big picture like Jared Diamond’s Upheaval and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. They are so much more informative than the annoying, irrelevant, and sensationalized snippets that flood our daily news feeds. To find out what’s really going on, instead spend your time with books like How the World Really Works.

“I’d Never Do That!”

Mary Doria Russell had a problem.

She was teaching anthropology and came to stories of the massive mistakes explorers from the West sometimes made when they first encountered different people groups around the world. Often death, pillaging, and slavery resulted.

Inevitably, students would say something to the effect of, “Oh, I would never make a mistake like that. How could they have done something so stupid?” 

But Russell knew that even though it seemed simple, it wasn’t. How could she adequately explain that first contact is just much more difficult than we can imagine? That’s what motivated her to write her profound, wonderful, absorbing novel The Sparrow.

She imagines a group of intelligent, well-meaning, goodhearted, skilled people who make an effort to meet a species from another world. One reason I especially like the novel is that this is just a great group of people. If I were to go on a multiyear journey, these are absolutely the kind of people I would love to travel with. 

Despite this team having far more gifts, abilities, and experiences than her students or most of us, things go wrong—terribly wrong. Even the most benign actions like trying to improve nutrition for those they meet had disastrous effects they had difficulty anticipating.

Should we never try to help people in other cultures? Should we never try to fix things that seem wrong? That’s not my point.

Rather, when we do, we should approach such efforts with a maximum dose of humility. We need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who act in ways we find wrong or unenlightened. We need to learn as much as we can before we act.

Why? Because we just don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t adequately appreciate the finite, limitations of human knowledge or of our own perspective. Nor do we appreciate enough how our fallen, sinful nature can unconsciously skew our opinions about what is wrong with the world and how to fix it.

What can we do when we encounter people we think are strange or just wrong?

  • Remember how fun it is to learn new, surprising things.
  • Don’t automatically dismiss information or ideas that are contrary to our viewpoints.
  • Remind ourselves that we are finite and that our motives or emotions may be skewing our outlook in ways we aren’t aware of.
  • Ask those we are trying to help what they think would be the best ways we could be of assistance.
  • Remember that all of us—the people we are trying to help as well as those we disagree with—are people with God-given value and dignity.

Try to help others? By all means, and always with great humility.

The Greatest One-Term President

When Jimmy Carter died December 29, 2024, and as Joe Biden ended his term, my daughter asked me, “Who do you think was the greatest one-term president.”  

A number of candidates came to my mind. William Howard Taft and Gerald Ford were two. But I think the best answer is George Bush Sr.

The title of Jon Meacham’s book on Bush, Destiny and Power, certainly sounds like a presidential biography. But I think a better title would have been The Good President. George H. W. Bush was not only extremely effective in foreign policy and reasonably effective domestically, he was one of the truly honorable men to hold the highest office in the country.

Jon Meacham consistently emphasizes how the values Bush learned from his parents shaped his life personally and publicly—work hard, do your best, compete to win, serve others. Yes, he came from a well-to-do background that gave him many opportunities others didn’t have, but he also knew he was expected to excel on his own.

Bush volunteered to fight in World War II and flew many combat missions, including one in which he was shot down. He left the family cocoon in Connecticut to start his own business in oil. His 1964 U.S. Senate bid in Texas was overwhelmed by the Johnson landslide. But two years later he won a Congressional seat. Then came a series of challenging assignments—ambassador to the U.N., chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, director of the CIA.

He lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan but won on the ticket as Vice President in 1980 and then 1984. He showed his calm, sure-handed demeanor during the critical hours after the assassination attempt on Reagan. But his sense of loyalty got the better of him in not more strongly opposing the Iran-Contra deal.

Meacham, while clearly admiring Bush, is not afraid to mention other mistakes. Promising no new taxes in his 1988 presidential run was doctrinaire but didn’t fit the pragmatic Bush. He was then severely criticized when he worked with a Democratic congress to bring down the deficit by cutting expenses and raising revenues.

Yet he also championed the bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Act. Though politics has always been rough and tumble, hearing how Bush worked with both parties for the common good made me almost nostalgic.

His foreign policy expertise shone in his deft and understated response to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 as well as in putting together a large coalition of nations against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91. Again, when a coup attempted to unseat Gorbachev, he skillfully played but did not overplay U.S. support of the Soviet leader.

George H. W. Bush may not have had the communication skills of Reagan or the charisma of Clinton or the intelligence of Obama, but he may have been our best president of the last fifty years.

Growing Creative

Leonardo da Vinci is best known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Yet it’s possible his achievements in science even outstripped those monumental paintings. A hundred years before Francis Bacon (the “father” of the scientific method), da Vinci pioneered key concepts in anatomy, geology, and fluid dynamics by the uncommon means of observation and experiment.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of all these was his investigation into how the human heart functioned. Remarkably, he made a glass model of a heart so he could better see how blood flowed. Some of his findings were not proven until five hundred years later. Even as late as 1960 scientists misunderstood some aspects. Only in 2014 was da Vinci conclusively shown to be correct.  

How did da Vinci manage to be hundreds of years ahead of his time in so many different areas of science? That is the story Walter Isaacson tells in his fascinating biography, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaacson’s other biographies also focus on some of the most creative minds in history—Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs—because Isaacson wants to know where inventiveness comes from and how to nurture it.

In his last chapter Isaacson offers a list of how we can all learn from Leonardo to be more creative. One is being collaborative. Da Vinci readily consulted with those who had expertise that he lacked, such as in anatomy and mathematics. He also cooperated, for example,  with several colleagues in developing his Vitruvian Man which famously shows the proportions of a human figure inscribed in a circle and a square.

What Isaacson does not point out is that being in an urban setting enhances the possibilities of multiple connections which is the essence of creativity. Many recent studies have shown how social proximity, networking, and openness in cities can result in expanded creativity. The more people you can interact with, the more your own mind is stimulated. Da Vinci worked almost his entire adult life in the thriving centers of Florence, Milan, and Rome.

Isaacson also highlights the role of being interdisciplinary. Da Vinci was fascinated by almost everything—optics, neuroscience, aerodynamics, paleontology, and more. Like being collaborative, having many interests (and reading widely) makes possible many more fresh connections, stimulating new insights, and unexpected questions which, again, is at the heart of creativity.

These first two, being collaborative and interdisciplinary, allowed him to develop a habit of using analogy to understand what he observed. He saw eddies in water and by analogy correctly assumed there must be similar eddies in air movement. He even went further to suppose that curling locks of hair followed some of these same patterns. He also deduced from autopsies and other observations that eddies must occur within the bloodstream as blood circulates, even though the medical assumption of his day was that blood didn’t circulate but went back and forth.

Likewise he wondered if the principles by which trees branched was analogous to that of rivers and then to how blood vessels branch in a body. He was right about it all.

And if anyone is going to remember your work, writing everything down on paper is essential. No one is going to have your Facebook posts in fifty years. Da Vinci probably filled 35,000 pages of books with his notes, doodles, observations, sketches, and lists. While only about a fifth of these survive, if he hadn’t put things down on paper, we’d have none of his insights.

Not all his ideas were brilliant. Some were dead ends. But by being immensely productive, we increase the chances that something remarkable will emerge.

Sadly, his genius was hidden in those notebooks for centuries. Why? He never published and rarely finished paintings.* Therefore, only hundreds of years later did others unknowingly perform experiments and make discoveries that ended up replicating what he had done much earlier.

Why did he release so little to the public? He was a perfectionist and possibly ADHD, haphazardly following every shiny idea that flitted across his mind. He was too distracted to finish much and didn’t seem to care about sharing knowledge.

Ironically, the hyper-charged mind that so sidetracked him also made him incessantly curious about everything—which may have been his greatest strength. Did birds flap their wings faster on the downswing or the upswing? Why were fossils on top of mountains?  Why do we see objects with slightly blurred edges instead of in sharp outline?

No, we can’t all be Leonardos. But we can be more creative at home, at work, in relationships, in gardening, in cooking, in writing by making one or two of his natural impulses into our habits.

_____

*Da Vinci even kept the Mona Lisa till his death, never turning the painting over to the patron who commissioned it (and was thus never paid) because he was forever tinkering with it.

The Rarest of Leaders

When John Kennedy ran for president, I was excited. He was young, charming, and witty. And as an eight-year-old Catholic, I thought it was cool that he might become the first Catholic president. My enchantment with JFK continued into my early teen years when I read his book Profiles in Courage.

Given our day of politicians being hyper-pressurized to conform to their party (Republican or Democratic), I decided to revisit this book about eight U. S. senators from over a span of two centuries. I remembered little of it but wondered what the stories might teach about a willingness to sacrifice one’s political career for principle and the common good. And I found some of what I expected.

When Senator John Quincy Adams supported the contested trade policy of the other party’s president (that is, of Jefferson who had defeated Adams’ own father!), “Simply because he had placed national interest before party and section, the Federalists had deserted him. Yes, he thought, I did not desert them, as they charge— it is they who have deserted me” (p. 30).

But then I also found sentences I tripped over. Kennedy wrote that radical, abolitionist Republicans made Reconstruction “a black nightmare the South never could forget.” (p. 139) Well, yes, the dozen years after the Civil War were a nightmare for most whites when northern troops enforced the Fifteenth Amendment so blacks could vote as full citizens. But was Kennedy really accepting a racist white viewpoint that this period was a disaster?

Apparently so. I was then bewildered to read, “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi.” Kennedy said that corruption was rampant and that taxes rose by a factor of fourteen under the state government elected in Reconstruction. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins” (p. 147).

Yet as historian Nicholas Lemann writes, “None of this is true.”

Only in recent decades has the fuller, more accurate story become better known of the systematic campaign to deny blacks the vote in the South after Reconstruction from 1877 to the mid-twentieth century. (See, for example, of Ken Wytsma’s The Myth of Equality, pp. 55-57.) Layer upon layer of requirements were (unequally) enforced to limit who could vote, limits “not based on race” which nonetheless somehow(!) dramatically reduced black but not white voting.

Kennedy also writes positively about even the staunchest and best-known pro-slavery Senator in U.S. history—John C. Calhoun—who, Kennedy tells us, nearly made the cut in his book as one of the Senate’s most courageous.

Given that Civil Rights is one of the chief pillars of Kennedy’s presidential legacy, what is going on? Several answers are possible.

One is that Kennedy was simply a man of his time, influenced by the northern and southern white desire to not rock the boat by dredging up all the unpleasantness of the past. Another (less courageous and more cynical) answer is that this book, published in 1956, was intended to broaden southern support for the presidential candidacy of a senator from Massachusetts in 1960.  

Kennedy was a complex person, and we should not judge him one dimensionally. We should also be generous enough to recognize that people can grow and change. Profiles in Courage likewise needs to be read more than one dimensionally.

One thing we can take away is this: we still need those most rare of political leaders—those courageous enough to stand against their party and even their own constituents in order to stand for the value of every human, the common good, and doing what is moral.