African Pentecost: My Great-Aunt’s Journey to the Congo

Historians trace the birth of Pentecostal Christianity to the first decade of the twentieth century, especially to the revival that began in April 1906 at Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where a “Weird Babel of Tongues,” as a newspaper headline put it, erupted under the leadership of African-American preacher William J. Seymour.

Azusa Street was a long way from South Carolina and the staid Lutheranism in which my great-aunt Marie Ropp was raised. But she found her way to Pentecostalism in that pivotal first decade and became one of the movement’s earliest missionaries in the Belgian Congo (today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where her life ended abruptly.

For many years, my family knew little about her, but thanks to the miracle of online databases, I’ve pieced together her story. Like that of many missionaries, hers is a tale of noble aspirations and millennial zeal set within a context of brutal imperialism and racism whose economic fallout is still evident in the DRC today.

Marie Winatha Ropp (1883-1911) was born in Newberry County, South Carolina, to George Anderson Ropp and Caroline Achsah Stilwell. The first of 10 children, she was 19 years older than the youngest child, Ruby Caroline, my maternal grandmother. A photograph of the two sisters (see above) is one of the few surviving images of Marie.

As a young woman, Marie was known for her earnest piety; her hometown newspaper described her as “estimable” and “highly consecrated.” At some point, perhaps while she was a student at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, she had a conversion experience at a Pentecostal meeting, according to a note written years later by her mother.

She also became interested in foreign missions. Asbury was then a hotbed for the Student Volunteer Movement, which recruited college students to serve as missionaries overseas. The president of the Asbury chapter was William Pryde Gillies (sometimes Gillis), an immigrant from Scotland. William likely introduced Marie to his younger brother David—her future husband.

David Pryde Gillies, born in Glasgow in 1879, graduated in 1907 from the Missionary Training Institute (later, Nyack College) in Nyack, New York. The Institute was sponsored by A. B. Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), which groomed many early Pentecostal leaders before evolving into its own distinctive (non-Pentecostal) denomination.

Some early C&MA pastors were credentialed in other denominations. Such was apparently the case with David Gillies, who is listed in several documents as a Baptist minister even as he pastored the C&MA tabernacle in Youngstown, Ohio. Marie exchanged letters with him during this period, but as she wrote to her parents in April 1910, “neither of us seemed to think we would ever be more than friends.”

In the meantime, after a fire destroyed Asbury’s main facilities, Marie followed one of the professors, the Rev. Albert L. Mershon, to New York City to continue studies with him after he became principal of the Home School and Workers’ Training Institute at C&MA headquarters. She was also making plans with William Gillies and his wife, Mary Ellen, to go to South Africa as missionaries.

The three departed the United States in December 1909, sailing first for Sunderland, England, where they visited the newly established Pentecostal Missionary Union (PMU), the first organization of its kind in the United Kingdom, founded by Alexander Alfred Boddy and Cecil Henry Polhill. Boddy was an Anglican vicar drawn into the Pentecostal movement by Thomas Ball Barratt, himself converted after visiting the United States and reading accounts from Azusa Street. In 1907 Boddy and his wife and daughters first spoke in tongues. His Sunderland parish thereafter hosted successive Pentecostal conventions.

Boddy reported on the visit by Marie Ropp and William and Mary Ellen Gillies in his magazine, Confidence: “We loved these servants of the Most High, and they will be often remembered in our prayers.”

When the group purchased passage on a steamer to South Africa, they were surprised to discover that David Gillies, who had been in England himself, was on the same boat. As Marie wrote to her parents, “it was there that we began to feel that God was surely bringing us together” and “that He intended us to labor together.”

Within weeks of their arrival in South Africa, Marie and David were married in a joint ceremony with another young missionary couple in April 1910. A letter by the parents of one of the other missionaries, published in The Bridegroom’s Messenger (a Pentecostal newspaper in Atlanta), identified Marie and David as PMU missionaries.

Marie and David’s initial plan had been to evangelize among the workers at the Crown Reef Gold Mine in Johannesburg. But as David wrote in a long letter to his new in-laws, the mine captain “deplored the fact of our spending our lives in Native Evangelism,” which too often “spoil[ed]” the Black African workers.

At Rustenburg, 140 miles northwest of Johannesburg, Marie and David were equally frustrated. “The native here is hard to reach because of being contaminated by unchristian whites,” David wrote. “[I]t is also easy to discern that he has been fatally inoculated by the germ of formality,” by which he meant other Protestant groups hostile to charismatic religious practices.

Eventually Marie and David felt that “the index finger of God’s providence was pointing northward,” as David put it, so on June 25, 1910, they departed on a 1,349-mile rail journey to Salisbury, Rhodesia (today, Harare, Zimbabwe). Finding no suitable lodging in Salisbury, they made camp in the grasslands outside the city. “We are not yet through traveling,” David reported in his letter. “I believe before you read this we will be located among many benighted thousands who know nothing of our Redeemer.”

They finally found their mission field farther north in Katanga province of the Belgian Congo. Congo’s experience under colonialism had been particularly violent. As the Congo Free State until 1908, it was the personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, whose mercenaries terrorized the native population with amputations and other punishments for failing to meet production quotas in the rubber industry. (See my previous blog post.) The plight of the Congolese had moved the hearts of many prospective missionaries.

Marie and David’s work in the Congo lasted less than a year. In late March 1911, both became ill with a “fever” (probably malaria or yellow fever). Marie had recently given birth to their first child, Jeanette Caroline, which likely complicated her condition.

Marie died on April 5, 1911, and the baby died 8 days later, according to a note written by Marie’s mother. The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, reported that Marie was buried at Elisabethville (today, Lubumbashi). The article does not mention the child.

Back in Sunderland, Boddy announced in Confidence the death of “dear Sister, Miss Marie Ropp.” “We remember her cry for the heathen, at Edinburgh, January, 1910,” he wrote, referencing a PMU conference held there. “Now she has laid down her life for them—lost it to gain a hundred-fold more, and to see her Lord. But we fear she suffered hardships, which she would not have suffered if more generous help had been forthcoming.”

David returned to the United States in 1912 and married Amelia Antons, a teacher, in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913. The following year, he transferred his ministerial credentials from the Free Baptist Association to the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. He pastored congregations in several states, including Michigan, New York, and Arizona. Amelia died in 1941 in Michigan; David died in Los Angeles in 1965. A son (their only child) died in 1958.

I don’t know what led David away from Pentecostalism, or whether he and Marie would have accepted the Pentecostal label. They lived in a liminal space when Pentecostal denominational boundaries were still forming. I wonder if they ever spoke in tongues, which Pentecostals see as a sure sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit. But Marie engaged in at least one charismatic practice: miraculous healing. David’s letter to his in-laws mentions two times when he was ill or injured and she anointed him, prompting “instant healing.”

Marie also exhibited the millennial urgency that characterized Pentecostals, who believed that the restoration of charismatic practices proved that the Second Coming was nigh. “[W]hen God leads,” she wrote to her parents, “all is changed, and sometimes very suddenly.” In God’s providence, she continued, perhaps she and David would get back to America. “[B]ut should we not be allowed this, let each of us be ready for the return of Jesus.”

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved 

Bibliographical Note

The quotations above from Marie Ropp and David Gillies are from letters published as Marie Ropp, “A Romantic Marriage,” Evening Index (Greenwood, S.C.), June 9, 1910; and David Gillies, “Travels and Experiences in South Africa,” Evening Index (Greenwood, S.C.), September 15, 1910. The note from Marie’s mother (referenced above) survives in partial, secondhand form thanks to my mother, Mary Wise Thuesen. The quotations from Alexander Boddy are from “Sunderland,” Confidence: A Pentecostal Paper for Great Britain 3, no. 2 (February 1910); and “Pentecostal Items,” Confidence: A Pentecostal Paper for Great Brtain, 4, no. 6 (June 1911), digitized courtesy of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center in Springfield, Missouri. Other sources (besides immigration records, city directories, census records, and the like) include: “Weird Babel of Tongues,” Los Angeles Daily Times, April 18, 1906; “Miss Marie Ropp Soon to Sail as a Missionary,” Newberry (S.C.) Weekly Herald, December 7, 1909; W. H. Elliott and Wife, “Letter from Africa,” The Bridegroom’s Messenger 3, no. 64 (June 15, 1910), digitized by the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center; “Columbia Woman Died in Africa,” The State (Columbia, S.C.), May 16, 1911, and reprinted in Greenwood Daily Journal, May 16, 1911, and Evening Index (Greenwood, S.C.), May 18, 1911; Gavin Wakefield, Alexander Boddy: Pentecostal Anglical Pioneer (London: Paternoster, 2007), 80-89; and William K. Kay, “Alexander Alfred Boddy,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online). Finally, I thank my colleague Philip Goff for sharing background information on the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Illustration credits: Marie Ropp holding Ruby Ropp: personal family photograph. Map of the Belgian Congo, circa 1896: Library of Congress. Missionaries boarding a train in Congo, ca. 1900-1915 (below), Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh.

Remembering Lumumba

As a historian of religion, I know the power of relics. The term comes from the Latin reliquiae (“remains”), meaning the body or personal effects of a revered person.

Last week, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) repatriated the remains—a single tooth—of the slain Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961). That only a tooth survives is a metaphor for the brutality of colonialism and its neocolonial aftermath in the DRC’s history.

From 1877 to 1908, when the country was known as Congo Free State and ruled as the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, its people endured unspeakable violence at the hands of the Force Publique, the military that enforced production quotas in the rubber industry. Workers who failed to collect the required amount of sap from the rubber vines were punished by having hands or limbs amputated—a story told in King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild.

As my IUPUI colleague Didier Gondola has recounted in his history of Congo, among the first outsiders to witness the atrocities were two African-American missionaries: George Washington Williams, a Baptist minister and U.S. Civil War veteran, and William Henry Sheppard, a Presbyterian minister. Their protests were a prelude to the international campaign that led Leopold to cede control of the country to the Belgium government in 1908.

Missionaries continued to arrive during the period of the Belgian Congo (1908-1960). One of them was my great-aunt Marie Ropp, whose story I’ll tell in an upcoming blog post. She died in 1911 in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi).

A half century later, the 34-year-old Patrice Lumumba, charismatic leader of the Congolese National Movement, became the first prime minister of the newly independent nation.

The triumph of independence was short-lived. As American historian Bruce Kuklick and Belgian historian Emmanuel Gerard have written, Congo’s own politicians were competitors in a struggle involving “a righteous but flawed United Nations; an arrogant and destructive United States; and an entrenched Belgian bureaucracy determined to maintain imperial prerogatives.”

Kuklick and Gerard note that no high-ranking officials in the United States had much knowledge of Congo. That didn’t stop the CIA from seeking to assassinate Lumumba on the pretext that he was a pawn of the Soviet Union. Though the CIA plan failed, the U.S. government got its wish when Lumumba’s Congolese and Belgian opponents conspired against him. Following a coup by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Lumumba was arrested and fell into the hands of secessionists in Katanga province. Taken to a house on the outskirts of Elisabethville, he was tortured and executed by Katanga soldiers under the command of two Belgian police officers.

Later, in bungled attempts to hide the evidence, Lumumba’s body was buried and reburied before being exhumed again, dismembered, and dissolved in acid. A Belgian officer, Gerard Soete, saved a tooth as a trophy, which a Belgian judge in 2020 ordered returned to Lumumba’s family.

On June 20, 2022, Lumumba’s children received the tooth, contained in a flag-draped coffin, at a ceremony in Brussels. They accompanied the remains back to the DRC for interment in a mausoleum in Kinshasa. “His spirit, which was imprisoned in Belgium, comes back here,” his nephew, Onalua Maurice Tasombo Omatuku, told Agence France-Presse.

Lumumba’s spirit had already grown larger than life as a symbol of revolutionary resistance. Soon after his death became public in February 1961, protests erupted around the world. Some countries, including the U.S.S.R., issued postage stamps honoring him. Malcolm X called him “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent.” Cities renamed streets in his memory.

One such street I know personally is Lumumbastraße in Leipzig, Germany, so named during the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic. A bust of Lumumba was erected there in 1961 at the Herder-Institut of Karl Marx University, where many foreigners have studied the German language. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Karl Marx University reverted to its original name of Leipzig University, the bust was damaged and ultimately removed. But in 2011, a replica of the original was installed to mark the 50th anniversary of Lumumba’s death.

I saw the original bust when I studied at the Herder-Institut in 1993. At that time, a recently reunified Germany was still coming to terms with East Germany’s Communist history, in which Lumumba symbolized resistance to the West.

In the United States, anti-Communism for decades prevented a similar celebration of Lumumba’s legacy. Within weeks of his death, for example, an editorial in the evangelical Protestant magazine Christianity Today accused Moscow of orchestrating the worldwide protests of his murder. Lumumba’s demise, the editors wrote, was “a sharp blow to Soviet aspirations in the Congo.”

Though Lumumba had been elected democratically, the United States government backed the authoritarian one-party regime of Mobutu, who renamed the country Zaire in 1971. When Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, the country took its present name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Today, the DRC is writing a new chapter in memorialization and civil religion as Lumumba’s remains receive the honor they were so long denied.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998). Ch. Didier Gondola, The History of Congo (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 72-73. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3, 148, 207-8. Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, trans. Ann Wright and Renée Fenby (London: Verso, 2001), 127-28, 140-43. Jason Burke, “Belgium Must Return Tooth of Murdered Congolese Leader, Judge Rules,” The Guardian, September 10, 2020. “Remains of Independence Hero Lumumba Arrive Home,” Agence France-Presse, June 22, 2022. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, 2nd ed. (New York: Pathfinder, 1992), 92. Eric Singh, “Leipzig Honours Lumumba,” African Information Centre, May 17, 2011. “‘Push Button’ Riots Now Promote Communist Goals,” Christianity Today, March 13, 1961, pp. 25-26.

Illustration Credits: Wikimedia Commons

The Great Breakup: Sex and the Splintering of the Mainline Churches

Schism at the grassroots in Hickory, N.C.: St. Stephen’s (ELCA) and Miller’s (NALC), which both became part of the ELCA in 1988, are in separate denominations again because of the Lutheran fight over sexuality.

Sixty years ago was the summer of love for American Lutherans. In June 1962, 7,000 people packed Detroit’s Cobo Arena for the founding convention of the Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran denomination yet created in the United States, with 3.2 million members.

The product of a broader push toward church unity, the LCA followed the establishment of the American Lutheran Church two years earlier, both formed by the consolidation of smaller Lutheran synods. The era of mergers would culminate two decades later when the LCA and ALC joined to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in 1988.

My father, Theodore Thuesen, was one of the clergy who witnessed the LCA’s founding. His ethnic Danish synod, the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, was small—the liberal wing of Danish Lutheranism in America—but participated as a full-fledged partner in the LCA merger. “We thought it was good for us to be part of a much bigger, united church,” he told me. “And we very much liked and admired Franklin Clark Fry,” the LCA’s first president, dubbed “Mr. Protestant” in a Time magazine cover story in 1958.

I inherited the view that bigger is better, at least as far as the church is concerned. The Nicene Creed, after all, calls the church catholic, meaning universal. A bigger church meant more resources and a greater public witness. I was thrilled to take part in the messaging when, as a college student, I landed an internship at The Lutheran magazine at ELCA headquarters in Chicago.

But it turns out church unity was so twentieth century. The ELCA, which had 5.2 million members at its founding, has fewer than 3.3 million today. While much of that decline is from the widespread attrition afflicting the mainline churches, part of it is from the loss of conservative congregations after the ELCA voted in 2009 to ordain LGBT clergy in committed relationships. Many of those conservative parishes are members of a new denomination, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), created in 2010.

To see the effects of the NALC withdrawal, take the ELCA’s North Carolina Synod. In 2009, it had 237 congregations and 80,614 baptized members.  Just three years later, it had 198 congregations and 62,292 members.

The breakup led to some strange situations. In my hometown of Hickory, North Carolina, near where I went to high school, there were three Lutheran churches of different denominations within a stone’s throw of each other: St. Stephen’s (LCA), Miller’s (ALC), and St. Stephens (Missouri Synod). After the 1988 merger, St. Stephen’s (LCA) and Miller’s were both in the ELCA. But because of the sexuality battle, they’re now denominationally divided again: St. Stephen’s stayed with the ELCA, and Miller’s joined the NALC.

The fight over sexuality has spawned breakaway movements in other denominations. After the Presbyterian Church (USA), itself the product of a 1983 merger, approved LGBT ordination in 2012 and same-sex unions in 2014, some conservative congregations joined groups such as ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.

In the Episcopal Church, after Gene Robinson became the first openly gay diocesan bishop in 2004, many conservative parishes rebranded themselves “Anglican” and affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America, which has cultivated alliances with bishops in the Global South.

And just this month, the United Methodist Church became the latest mainline body to suffer a split over homosexuality when a conservative faction announced the formation of the Global Methodist Church.

Change is the only constant in history, of course, and the analytical side of me agrees with fellow historian Mark Granquist that the mainline “urge to merge” from the 1960s to 1980s was a passing moment when Protestants embraced a corporate, bureaucratic model of governance that ignored simmering tensions at the local level.

But the theological side of me resists this new age of downsizing by schism. I find the conservatives’ faithful-remnant vision of the church profoundly unrealistic, not to mention driven by an issue that never should have caused a breakup in the first place. LGBT clergy need not be threatening to heterosexual Christians. And if sexuality is a proxy for a battle over biblical authority, I can’t join the conservatives there either. I’ll never agree to making Leviticus or the Apostle Paul an infallible guide to sexual ethics.

That said, the liberals deserve part of the blame for the present era of bad feelings. From the ELCA’s inception, conservatives felt disenfranchised by a quota system meant to diversify representative bodies but that ignored the denomination’s still overwhelmingly white, small-town base. In this context, the 2009 sexuality vote was the last straw. When a tornado passed near the Minneapolis Convention Center during the voting assembly, some conservatives preposterously claimed that it was because of God’s anger over homosexuality.

So a pox on both their houses? I’m afraid the pandemic has already taken care of that. Many congregations today are less concerned about church unity than about survival.

Still, I can’t help but lament mainline regression on the goal of church unity. The Lutheran Summer of Love of 1962 coincided with a much greater ecumenical milestone in the convening of the Second Vatican Council. At that time, even reunion with Rome seemed a real possibility to some Lutherans.

Today the Catholic Church has its own sexuality problems, while Protestants can’t see past their current breakups. In their present disunity, Protestants seem almost to have reverted to the situation described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer after visiting the United States in 1939. “It has been granted to the Americans less than any other nation of the earth to realize on earth the visible unity of the church of God,” he wrote. “In Minneapolis, four Lutheran churches of different observances are said to stand in a single street.”

I’m guessing that Bonhoeffer, who was likely gay (as Charles Marsh’s biography revealed), would have been grieved but not surprised by today’s feud over sexuality. It seems that discord is still American Christianity’s special calling.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved 

Bibliographical Note

Membership statistics from the North Carolina Synod of the ELCA. Mark A. Granquist, “The Urge to Merge,” Lutheran Forum 47 (Summer 2013): 20-23. On the “Lutheran” tornado in Minneapolis in 2009, see Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 147. Bonhoeffer quotation from No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928-1936, from the Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Volume 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 94. Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).

Illustration Credit: Photo by Peter J. Thuesen

Praying to Heavenly Mother

Latter-day Saints are once again embroiled in controversy over Mormonism’s doctrine of the Heavenly Mother, divine spouse of the Heavenly Father.

At the recent General Conference (April 2-3, 2022), apostle Dale G. Renlund, in an apparent effort to rein in feminist theology, admonished Latter-day Saints not to pray to Heavenly Mother, even though the church teaches that all humans “are beloved spirit children of heavenly parents, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother” (Gospel Topics Essays).

Renlund’s address followed other recent comments in which he contrasted the “speculation” about a Heavenly Mother with the scriptural revelations attesting to a Heavenly Father.

Ironically, Renlund’s argument—that the Heavenly Mother is mere speculation—was later echoed by an opponent of Mormon theology, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading voice of conservative evangelical Protestantism.

In his daily radio commentary, Mohler discussed the LDS controversy and decried the “obviously feminist agenda” behind calls to pray to Heavenly Mother. “Remember, evangelical Christians,” he told his listeners, “there is no Heavenly Mother. There is no consort to God the Father the Almighty. This is something that came by the invention of a late adolescent male in upstate New York in the 19th century.”

Mohler concluded that there is “no more graphic example” of the distinction between “historic biblical Christianity” and Mormon theology than the doctrine of the Heavenly Mother.

Mohler is wrong that Joseph Smith invented the notion that God the Father has a consort. In fact, the idea is present in scripture. As the archaeologist and biblical scholar William G. Dever has noted, the word asherah occurs more than 40 times in the Bible, usually in reference to a cultic, tree-like object dedicated to Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess, who was associated with sacred trees.

Many ancient Israelites apparently regarded Asherah as a consort to Yahweh. Archaeological discoveries from the 8th century BCE contain the inscription “Yahweh and his Asherah.” This popular belief alarmed the biblical writers, who like today’s conservatives (whether Mormon or evangelical), tried to stamp out the mother goddess’s cult. Deuteronomy 16:21 expressly forbids erecting an asherah next to the altar of Yahweh. In 2 Kings 23:15, Josiah burns an asherah that had been placed next to Yahweh’s altar at Bethel.

Yet readers of the King James Bible—including the Prophet Joseph Smith—would have been unaware of the full significance of these references because in that translation asherah or asherim always appear veiled in phrases like “groves” or “every high hill and green tree.” Dever calls this erasure “Asherah Abscondita.”

If Joseph Smith was unaware of the biblical Asherah, then Mohler may be partly right that the Heavenly Mother originated, at least for Latter-day Saints, in his own speculation. Smith’s role is a debated point in LDS history. The first clear reference to the Heavenly Mother comes from a hymn by Eliza R. Snow, one of Smith’s wives. But the church’s sixth president, Joseph Fielding Smith, Sr., claimed that God first revealed the Heavenly Mother to Joseph Smith, who revealed it to Snow.

Still, even if the Heavenly Mother originated in Smith’s (or Snow’s) speculation, I fail to see how that diminishes the power of the idea. What is scripture, after all, but canonized speculation? Even if we regard the Bible or the Book of Mormon as divine revelation, they are still speculative in that they represent humans’ grasping for God in their own limited language.

Eliza Snow’s hymn, “O My Father,” (no. 292 in the current LDS hymnal), speculates its way to a Heavenly Mother: “In the heav’ns are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a mother there.”

In the recent General Conference, Renlund cautioned against giving reason free rein: “Reason cannot replace revelation. Speculation will not lead to greater spiritual knowledge.”

But the line separating reason and revelation, or speculation and knowledge, is rarely clear within religious traditions. Doctrine is language that operates by its own internal logic. And it arises from human yearnings on this side of the veil.

Those yearnings have led people to a Heavenly Mother since before the biblical Israelites. And reason tells me that no General Conference address will stop Latter-day Saints from seeking her.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved 

Bibliographical Note

William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 102, 163, 209. On Asherah, see also Susan Ackerman, “The Queen Mother and the Cult in Ancient Israel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112 (1993): 385-401; and Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York: Knopf, 2022), 149-52. On Eliza Snow and Joseph Smith, see Linda P. Wilcox, “The Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven,” in Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, ed. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 64-77. See also the overview of the Heavenly Mother doctrine in Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106-11.

Illustration Credits: Eliza R. Snow, c. 1852, Church History Library, Salt Lake City; Eliza Smith’s hymn as printed in Times and Seasons, November 15, 1845, Digital Collections, Brigham Young University Library

“His Mighty Arm Is Making Bare”: Mormonism’s Embodied God(s)

Does God have a body? That’s the question at the center of biblical scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s entertaining new book, God: An Anatomy.

The traditional answer among Jewish and Christian theologians has been no. Apart from the Christian belief that God became incarnate in Christ, God has been viewed as an abstraction, utterly transcendent, surpassing bodily existence.

But Stavrakopoulou argues that Judaism and Christianity are “post-biblical religions” whose disembodied deity is at odds with the God of the Bible. The biblical god, Yahweh, appears in “startlingly anthropomorphic ways.” Like the Babylonian deity Marduk or the Greek god Zeus, he had arms, hands, legs, feet, and even genitals. “He was a god,” Stavrakopoulou writes, “who fell in love and into fights; a god who squabbled with his worshippers and grappled with his enemies; a god who made friends, raised children, took wives and had sex.”

Over time, theologians grew embarrassed with this god. Influenced by the Platonic notion of the immateriality of the divine, they imagined a more rarified deity, exemplified in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one incorporeal “substance.”

Yet one major Christian tradition resists this abstract, disembodied deity. Though it’s beyond the scope of Stavrakopoulou’s book, Mormonism is distinctive for its embrace of anthropomorphism. As Terryl Givens shows in his definitive account of Mormon theology, early Latter-day Saints rebelled against the idea that God, to quote the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), is “without body, parts, or passions.”

As Givens points out, the Mormon prophet and founder Joseph Smith emended Genesis 5:1-2 to stress God’s embodiment (Smith’s addition in italics): “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; in the image of his own body, male and female, created he them.” In a later revelation, Smith was more explicit: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (Doctrine & Covenants 130:22).

God’s body also appears in Latter-day Saint worship. The first hymn in the LDS Church’s present hymnal (1985) is “The Morning Breaks” by Mormon Apostle Parley P. Pratt. The fourth stanza reads: “Jehovah speaks! Let earth give ear, / And Gentile nations turn and live. / His mighty arm is making bare, / His mighty arm is making bare, / His cov’nant people to receive.” The image of God’s mighty arm is a reference to 3 Nephi 16:20 (itself a quotation of Isaiah 52:10): “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God.”

Stavrakopoulou alludes to the same passage from Isaiah 52, noting that in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile, Yahweh “flexes his muscular arm like a bodybuilder as he accompanies his repatriated exiles in triumphal procession back to Jerusalem.”

Does such imagery debase God? Many modern thinkers thought so. Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, once predicted that the “religion of the future will not perpetuate the Hebrew anthropomorphic representations of God,” which he dismissed as “archaic and crude.”

Later in the twentieth century, feminist theologians such as Mary Daly raised a different concern, that the traditional masculine imagery for God risks absolutizing a divine gender. “Sophisticated thinkers, of course, have never intellectually identified God with a Superfather in heaven,” Daly explained. But the problem with male imagery, including the constant use of male pronouns, is that it unconsciously shapes our thought, even if rationally we insist that God is genderless.

I take Daly’s objection seriously. As a historian of American religion, however, I’m equally intrigued by Mormonism’s reversion to a more Hebraic deity. Mormonism’s embodied Father becomes even more fascinating when seen alongside his spouse, the Heavenly Mother (analogous to Yahweh’s consort Asherah), who is less well-defined in official LDS theology but nevertheless a vital part of the tradition.

Whatever one thinks of Latter-day Saint belief, it partakes of the primal human—and biblical—longing to make God tangible. “Throughout the Hebrew Bible,” Stavrakopoulou writes, “it is the intensity of a face-to-face encounter with God that worshippers most desire.” Psalm 105:4 puts it poetically: “Seek the Lord [Yahweh], and his strength; seek his face evermore.”

I can’t belittle this desire, especially in a day when war is again erupting, when nations are crying out for deliverance. In such a time, the biblical hope that Yahweh will bare his mighty arm does not seem so archaic, so primitive, after all.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credits: God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022)
Asherah figurine: Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Bibliographical Note

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York: Knopf, 2022), 9, 11, 18, 258, 311, 420-21; Terryl L. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 89, 94-95, 106-11; Charles W. Eliot, The Religion of the Future (Boston: John W. Luce, 1909), 16-17; Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 17-18. On recent feminist appropriations of Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother, see Joanna Brooks, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright, Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

In the Midst of Life: Teaching About Death and Dying

Last week brought the beginning of a new semester and a bumper crop of 36 students to my biennial course “Religion, Death, and Dying.”

It’s a sobering subject, especially amid a pandemic. But as I tell the students, even as we confront death’s reality, we must save room for humor too.

We begin by acknowledging the inevitability of death. In the course description on the syllabus, I quote from the burial rite in the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.” It’s the opening line of an anthem once attributed to Notker the Stammerer (d. 912), a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland. According to legend, Notker composed the anthem, Media vita in morte sumus, while watching the construction of a bridge over a chasm. Realizing the danger that threatened the workers, Notker wrote:

In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

That the story about Notker is likely untrue doesn’t detract from the pathos of the text, which in its Latin original became part of the Lenten liturgy in the Sarum rite, the missal used in medieval England. Martin Luther translated the anthem for the German burial service, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer integrated an English version into the Book of Common Prayer. According to liturgist Massey Shepherd, Media vita represents a striking example of the medieval “sense of awe and dread in the presence of death.”

Particularly powerful is the musical setting of Media vita by John Sheppard (d. 1558), who may have composed it during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1557. In this monumental choral work, the agony of loss is palpable. (I recommend the recording by Stile Antico.)

One American who knew the agony of loss was Mark Twain. In the last years of his life, he grew despondent following the deaths of his 24-year-old daughter Susy from spinal meningitis, his 58-year-old wife Livy from heart failure, and his 29-year-old daughter Jean from drowning after suffering a seizure in the bathtub.

To Twain, the words of Media vita would have rung all too true. We’re already in the process of dying. Death comes for us all, sometimes when we’re least prepared. The untimely deaths of his wife and daughters fueled Twain’s own religious skepticism, which left him increasingly comfortless as he approached the end of his own life.

But Twain also left us plenty of gallows humor about death. I quote one of his memorable lines on my syllabus: “I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

Twain’s mordant wit expresses an important truth: in thinking seriously about death, we become more honest with ourselves and others. That’s the premise of my course. While part of the goal is cultural competency—learning how different religions approach death—the deeper purpose is existential. By contemplating death in the midst of life (media vita), we gain wisdom for living.

© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credits:
Media vita, Codex Sangallensis 546 (1513), Stiftsbibliothek, St. Gallen
Mark Twain in 1907 by A. F. Bradley

Bibliographical Note

The translation of Media vita in morte sumus quoted above is from the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, Burial of the Dead, Rite One, p. 484. On the Notker legend, see Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Jr.,The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 332-33; Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (San Francisco, Harper, 1995), 484-85; and David Hiley, “Notker,” Grove Music Online (2001). On Mark Twain, see Peter J. Thuesen, “American Christians and the Emptiness of Death,” Church History 85 (2016): 360-64. Twain quotation from Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper, 1940), 203.

Finding Meaning in the Cloud, or What Bach Conveys

The New York Times recently gave music lovers a treat when the newspaper added a playlist of selections from Johann Sebastian Bach to its “5 Minutes” series. (The series asks experts what piece they would recommend to make someone love a composer after just five minutes of listening.)

Bach is my favorite composer, so I was pleased to see some of my own top choices on the list, including his early funeral cantata known as the Actus tragicus, BWV 106 (recommended by John Eliot Gardiner) and his organ Fugue in E-flat major, “St. Anne,” BWV 552 (recommended by David Allen).

But as one who loves Bach’s organ works above all, I have another favorite of this genre: the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 538, nicknamed the “Dorian.” (This is not to be confused with his more famous D minor Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565, which so often appears among Bach’s greatest hits.)

The Netherlands Bach Society has posted free on the web an exquisite recording of the “Dorian,” performed by Leo van Doeselaar on the Baroque-era Christian Müller organ of the Walloon Church in Amsterdam. I love watching Van Doeselaar’s feet work the pedals and his whole body shake as the fugue nears its contrapuntal climax.

In his new biography of Bach, David Schulenberg calls the “Dorian” “one of Bach’s most austere, uncompromising instrumental compositions.” The fugue is structured around canon, or precise imitation, unlike many fugues where the imitation is looser. “There are no fewer than fifteen canonic passages over the course of the fugue; these increase in complexity and level of dissonance as the piece progresses,” Schulenberg writes.

Reading Schulenberg takes me back to my undergraduate days at UNC-Chapel Hill when he blew my mind with his “Bach and Handel” course. As I learned then, it takes a highly trained ear to appreciate all the nuances of Bach’s counterpoint. Even now, after decades of listening to Bach’s organ works, I’m no expert.

What do I hear in the “Dorian” that I find so arresting? It’s a question that fascinates me about all music, especially purely instrumental works like Bach’s organ repertoire. Why does music resonate? In his book Resonance, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa writes that music seems to open up a realm of experience inaccessible to other languages. Music constitutes an “irreducible aesthetic excess,” a wealth of meaning that defies conventional analysis.

For Bach, the pious Lutheran, music conveyed God’s grace. He jotted a revealing comment to this effect in the margin of his Calov Bible (page pictured above), an annotated edition by the Lutheran dogmatician Abraham Calovius. The context is 2 Chronicles 5:13–6:1, which describes the dedication of Solomon’s Temple. In the New Jewish Publication Society translation, the passage reads:

The trumpeters and the singers joined in unison to praise and extol the Lord; and as the sound of the trumpets, cymbals, and other musical instruments, and the praise of the Lord, “For He is good, for His steadfast love is eternal,” grew louder, the House, the House of the Lord, was filled with a cloud. The priests could not stay and perform the service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the House of God. Then Solomon declared: “The Lord has chosen to abide in a thick cloud.”

Bach wrote in the margin: “NB. With devotional music, God is always present in his grace.”

To me, the cloud is as potent a metaphor as the music itself. Like the divine presence hidden in the cloud, music conveys meaning that transcends any rational description. Who is to say what the “Dorian,” or any great composition, finally “means”? All I know is that it speaks to me like the proverbial cloud of unknowing; I feel its power in a mystical way.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Quotations from David Schulenberg, Bach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 111. Quotation from Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 94. Bach’s Calov Bible is held by Concordia Theological Seminary, St. Louis, which is the source of the photo above. On Bach’s handwritten notation on 2 Chronicles 5, see the comment in Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 339.

Harry M. Orlinsky and the De-Christianization of Jewish Scripture

In the undergraduate course I teach on the Christian tradition, my first unit is on Christianity’s Jewish foundations. The students, who are mostly from Christian backgrounds, are surprised to learn that Jews and Christians read Hebrew Scripture differently.

The Christian name for the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament,” signals the difference. It’s like a giant prism that refracts Hebrew Scripture through the lens of the New Testament, reinterpreting Jewish texts as prophecies of Christ.

Within a Christian liturgical context, these reinterpretations make sense: Old Testament texts can function as literary types (images or figures) that foreshadow Christ. But to go beyond this and claim that the original writers actually had Christ in mind is to do historical violence to Hebrew Scripture.

A wonderful new guide to what the disputed texts meant in their original Jewish context is Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler’s The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020).

Their book got me to thinking about an earlier scholar of the Jewish-Christian divergence: Harry Meyer Orlinsky (1908-1992), longtime professor at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.

Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, Orlinsky was trained at the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, the nation’s first Ph.D.-granting institution dedicated to Judaic studies, where his mentors included Max Margolis, the editor-in-chief of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation of the Bible. Orlinsky also completed postdoctoral studies with a Christian scholar, the prominent biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, at Johns Hopkins.

Orlinsky eventually succeeded Margolis as a leader of the JPS translation, serving as editor-in-chief of the Pentateuch for the revised edition, Tanakh, published in 1985.

But Orlinksy’s biggest claim to fame was as the first Jew in the English-speaking world to serve on a major Christian Bible translation project, the Revised Standard Version (1952), sponsored by the National Council of Churches.

The RSV Bible raised the ire of conservative Protestants for its translation of Isaiah 7:14, the alleged prophecy of the virgin birth of Christ. Where the King James Bible (1611) had read, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,” the RSV changed “virgin” to “young woman.”

On linguistic grounds, the RSV’s rendering is unassailable. The underlying Hebrew word is ‘almah, which means simply a young woman; the Hebrew word for virgin (betulah) does not appear here. (Orlinksy’s JPS Tanakh goes a step further and translates the verse in the present tense: “Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son”—a grammatically sound reading similar to that in two Catholic translations, the NJB and NABRE.)

But to conservative Protestants in 1952, the substitution of “young woman” for “virgin” seemed to destroy one of the key proof texts of Christ’s miraculous birth. Some blamed Orlinsky, who became the target of vicious anti-Semitic attacks. Fundamentalist firebrand Gerald Winrod denounced the committee’s “modernism” as the “bastard offspring of Talmudism” and castigated the National Council of Churches for allowing “Jewish rabbis” to participate in projects such as the RSV. The Churches of Christ preacher Foy E. Wallace, Jr., maligned Orlinsky as a “hostile infidel Jew” who harbored “bitter hatred for Christ and Christians.”

I recount the controversy in my In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Oxford, 1999). More recently, I was reminded of Orlinsky when I ran across a copy of his 1964 Goldenson Lecture at HUC-JIR, “The So-Called ‘Suffering Servant’ in Isaiah 53.”

There he tackles another disputed text between Jews and Christians, Isaiah 53, which speaks of a servant figure who was “wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities,” passages Christians have long interpreted as references to the passion of Christ.

Whereas Orlinsky tried to stay above the fray over Isaiah 7:14, on Isaiah 53 he was more combative, rejecting any suggestion that the chapter referred to the sort of vicarious atonement Christians associated with Christ’s death. (Jewish interpreters disagree on the actual identity of the servant: some see him as representing the Jewish people; Orlinsky believed it was the prophet referring to himself.)

Orlinsky’s lecture includes this memorable observation: “[H]istory is full of the supercommentary of eisegesis grafted upon the original exegesis which differed from it altogether.” It is the job of the historian, he wrote, to remove the “layers and crust” and try to discern an author’s original meaning.

To call Christian interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 53 “eisegesis” (a reading of something into the text rather than out of, or exegesis) is not to say it’s wrong in a liturgical context. But Christians can preserve their liturgical use of the traditional “virgin” at Christmas and the “Suffering Servant” in Lent even while admitting the truth of Orlinsky’s statement.

Only by acknowledging that the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are different books can Jews and Christians move on to deeper understanding of each other.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved 

Bibliographical Note

Orlinsky’s 1964 lecture appears as The So-Called “Suffering Servant” in Isaiah 53 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1964).

Albert Raboteau and the Power of Images

In spring 1993, I was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill nervously awaiting word from the Ph.D. programs to which I had applied. I still remember the thrill of receiving an acceptance letter from Princeton University signed by Albert Raboteau, dean of the graduate school.

Albert Raboteau was a familiar name. As a religious studies major, I had encountered his classic Slave Religion (1978), a pioneering study of the rise of a distinctive Christianity among enslaved peoples in America.

He was a professor in what would become, after I accepted Princeton’s offer, my new academic home: the Department of Religion, which has been well represented among Princeton’s graduate school deans. (My own dissertation adviser, John F. Wilson, was dean of the graduate school from 1994 to 2002.)

As a new graduate student, I was more than a little intimated to serve as a teaching assistant in Professor Raboteau’s class on African-American religious history. But I soon discovered that Al (as graduate students knew him) was warmhearted, soft-spoken, and unpretentious.

Albert Raboteau died last weekend, September 18, at age 78. Princeton University and Americanist historians everywhere have lost a renowned scholar, a trusted friend, and a gracious human being.

Nearly three decades after I began graduate school, I’m still teaching Professor Raboteau’s work. This week in my American Religion class at IUPUI, my students are reading his essay, “Richard Allen and the African Church Movement,” collected in A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (1995).

My appreciation for Al’s lyrically written scholarship has only increased over the years. But my favorite memory of him is not about words but images. While I was in graduate school, I was intrigued to learn that Al was enrolled in a class on icon painting (or as Eastern Orthodox Christians call it, icon “writing”). A convert to Orthodoxy to from Catholicism, Al had embraced that most characteristically Eastern Christian form of piety—meditation on images.

I’ve since come to realize how fitting this was. A scholar who had written about the biblical images that animated the Black Church was now creating literal images of Christ and the saints. He later wrote about the experience of seeing a Russian Theotokos (Mother of God) icon in an exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum and how this had turned him on the path to Orthodoxy. “She seemed to hold all the hurt in the world with those eyes,” he recalled. “I stood in front of her for a long time. I gazed at her and she gazed at me.”

Images have an unaccountable power. Though I’ve spent much of my career writing about controversies over doctrine, I’m convinced that images hold greater sway over the psyche than any rational argument. This is no less true of the verbal images—the biblical stories—that enliven the Black Church. One of Professor Raboteau’s most famous essays, “African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” is about the power of the Exodus motif in the African-American experience.

To a greater or lesser degree, all Christians dwell in the Bible’s images. The hold of biblical imagery over the Christian imagination is vividly expressed in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which Al Raboteau assigned to his class when I was his TA. As Deborah, one of the novel’s characters, tells her husband, Gabriel (a pastor): “ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend? You is just got to be in it, that’s all.” To be “in it” means to make the Bible’s characters one’s own, to inhabit biblical stories as if entering a life-size mural of salvation history.

Some Christians, especially the Orthodox, also dwell in literal images, filling their churches and homes with icons. The Orthodox justification for the use of icons is twofold: humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and God becomes incarnate in Christ. Humans, like Christ himself, are images of the invisible God.

When I imagine Al Raboteau in the afterlife, I picture him writing an icon. May we follow his example and learn to find the divine image in each other.

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Bibliographical Note

Albert Raboteau described his encounter with the Russian icon in Albert J. Raboteau, A Sorrowful Joy (2002; Reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 41-42. His essay “African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel” appears in A Fire in the Bones (cited above).

“Urgently Beating East to Sunrise and the Sea”: On the Religious Meaning of Turtles and Spiders

The sound of ocean waves crashing on the shore always stirs in me a kind of religious awe. But at the North Carolina coast recently, I had a different kind of mystical experience.

During an evening walk on the beach on the first day of my annual getaway with my sister and her children, we came upon a group of volunteers from a sea turtle rescue organization. They were gathered around a nest where a fresh indentation in the sand indicated that buried turtle eggs might be hatching.

We stood there for a long time as darkness fell, hoping to see the hatchlings emerge. But nothing happened.

Heavy rain the next few days interrupted the volunteers’ vigil. During breaks in the rain, we kept returning to the same spot, but each time, there was no change in the fenced-off place in the sand.

On our last evening at the beach, we had little hope of seeing anything. But when we arrived at the nest, the volunteers pointed to a small hole that had just opened in the sand. A hatchling was about to emerge.

About ten minutes later, a baby loggerhead sea turtle poked its head through the hole. We were transfixed as its tiny body, barely two inches long, appeared. Crawling out tentatively at first, it soon beat a steady path down a shallow trench the volunteers had dug to ease its passage.

Guided by instinct, the fragile creature made its way to the water’s edge as the tide was coming in. Then it was gone, swept away by the sea.

What happened to that little turtle? With so many predators lurking by water and by air, the odds of its survival were not great. But with a little luck, it might grow to adulthood and return someday to lay its own eggs at the shore.

The baby turtle’s inexorable journey to an unforgiving ocean brought to mind Robert Lowell’s haunting poem, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (1946), based on the colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards’s famous “Spider Letter.”

In that manuscript, the young Edwards described what naturalists today call “ballooning,” in which certain spiders fly considerable distances by casting themselves on gossamer threads to catch the wind. By this method, Edwards observed, spiders flew eastward toward the sea, only to be consumed by the waters.

Lowell’s retelling of Edwards’s letter is a poetic masterpiece:

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea

To Edwards, spiders displayed the wisdom of the Creator, who kept nature in balance by seeing to the destruction of some of them (by water or by birds) while constantly replenishing their numbers such that “taking one year with another, there is always an equal number of them.”

Lowell’s poem is darker, invoking in its later stanzas Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which a spider dangled over the pit of hell becomes the image for a condemned sinner. Lowell questioned the logic of a theology in which God predestined some humans as vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.

I’m less sure than Edwards or Lowell about the theological message of spiders—or turtles. The empirical side of me says that certain things just are and that it’s futile to look for deeper meanings. But the mystical side of me wants to know what spiders and turtles are seeking when they urgently beat east to sunrise and the sea. Surely the ocean, like nature itself, conceals vast mysteries that we humans can scarcely imagine. 

© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved

Illustration credits:
Loggerhead sea turtle hatchling at Indian Beach, N.C.: Peter Thuesen
Detail of Jonathan Edwards’s “Spider Letter”: New-York Historical Society
Robert Lowell: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine

Bibliographical Note

Robert Lowell’s “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” originally appeared in Lord Weary’s Castle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946). Jonathan Edwards’s “Spider Letter” appears in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 163-169.