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The East German Church and the End of Communism
by John P. Burgess
Oxford Univ. Press
185 pp.; $35
The Turned Card: Christianity Before and After the Fall
by Desmond O'Grady
Loyola Press, rev.
and expanded ed.
231 pp.; $22.95
Apart from Serbs smashing another ethnic neighbor in the former Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe is long gone from the newspapers, evening news, and consciousness of most Americans. The doughty, but struggling economies of the region hardly factor in the rush of goods and services that so captivates American perceptions of the wider world. With the breaking of the Marxist-steroid affinity, even sports in Eastern Europe have gone to pot. Croatia's surprising run in the World Cup is only the exception that proves that rule. This lack of concern by Americans for the regions of the former Soviet empire is a shame for generally human reasons, but also for specifically Christian concerns. In almost all of the former Communist countries, some form of Christian faith survived (often heroically) through the years of oppression, and in almost all of the countries today several forms of Christian faith are active in struggling for the souls of the people.
Yet books have not yet caught up to the Christian significance of what went on and has been going on in Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the former Yugoslavia. These two books, while a help, are at best propaedeutic for fuller studies yet to come. John Burgess spent a year and several shorter excursions in East Germany before 1989, and he has returned several times since the Wende of that year. His account is helpful on how theological discussions before 1989 prepared the way for Lutheran East Germans to handle difficult questions of political democratization after reunification. But the book is limited by its preoccupation with political process. Certainly the church's contribution to democratization is a valid theme, but it can hardly be as important as what the churches may have contributed under communism and may yet contribute in current circumstances as churches, that is, as purveyors of Word and sacrament pointing to the knowledge of God.
Desmond O'Grady's general account is broader, with its attention to Poland, Czech and Slovak lands, and some parts of the former Soviet regime. Although the activities of John Paul II enjoy a major place in the book, much space is also helpfully devoted to other, mostly Catholic, Orthodox, and Eastern Rite Catholic Christians who suffered one way under communism, and now in another way through struggles over the return of land, the exercise of political power, the election of former Communists, and the search for credible forms of piety. Yet O'Grady, who covers Catholic and European matters from Rome, writes self-consciously as a journalist and so does not dwell on longer-term forces and consequences. The spectacular events of 1989 woke up the whole world; it is a shame so many of us are so eager to fall back to sleep once the fireworks give way to the quotidian affairs in which enduring Christian life consists.
—Mark Noll
Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X
By Tom Beaudoin
Jossey-Bass
198 pp.; $22
I was halfway through Tom Beaudoin's Virtual Faith when I stumbled across a pair of intriguing news items concerning forthcoming films with a religious bent. In one, Clerks director Kevin Smith dodged rumors that Alanis Morissette had been cast in the role of God in his next film, Dogma. In another, it was reported that Hal Hartley, director of such strangely spiritual films as Amateur and Henry Fool, had just finished—for French TV!--The Book of Life, in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene (the latter also played by an alternative rock musician, in this case P. J. Harvey) confront the Devil in present-day New York.
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