Reputation

Comments such as these suggest how, for some of Forster's admirers, his popularity and the widespread view of him as an avuncular, yet morally provocative 'grand old man of letters' have made it almost impossible for them to respond dispassionately to his work and, indeed, to separate the man from his writing. One of the main reasons for this, for the fact that Forster's status as a maker of literature is so closely intertwined with his broader cultural currency, is that his work has been seen as a repository of value. It is not a coincidence that the rather old-fashioned word 'sage' has often been used to describe him: he was 'the great liberal sage of the interwar and postwar periods'. For his admirers, he embodied qualities that seemed especially desirable to those who had been through one or even two world wars: a firmly secular wisdom, anti-collectivist, rational, wry, stoical and wistful, saddened (but not overwhelmed) by the inevitability of compromise and the failure of ideals, not lacking in conviction, but refusing to be chauvinist.

INTRODUCTION

The bane and bog of most evangelical theology for the last century has been the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Within the evangelical movement it has either bogged down in the sinking quagmire of debate or hovered emptily in the stale air of banality. To be sure, part of this dilemma is shared by all Christian theology in the West, namely, that the Spirit has been portrayed in Scripture without a face or with non-personal characteristics (such as a dove, wind, fire). The result is that theological consideration of the third article of the creed lacks depth and nuance. In some ways, this is fitting since the Holy Spirit points to Jesus Christ (John 15:26) and “will not speak on his own” but only what he hears (John 16:13; TNIV). The Spirit will glorify Christ because it is from Christ that the Spirit receives whatever he makes known to the disciples (John 16:14). Hence, one prominent scriptural image that we receive concerning the Holy Spirit is this manner of deflecting glory and attention to Jesus the Christ. Such a deferential move may be one reason why Christian theology has added very little to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381): “And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, Who proceeds from the Father and Son, Who is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and Son, Who spoke through the prophets.”

What is the story? How does one tell it, understand it? Does one read it as one would a Jane Austen novel with the heroine Lucy Honeychurch, like EmmaWoodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, coming to learn who she is and what she wants through false starts and confusions, both internal and imposed by society, finally rewarded by the right husband (not her mistaken first choice) at the end? That is certainly one way of reading the novel, and for many years following its 1908 publication, it was read as a cheerful Bildungsroman, its heroine's education unfolding as social comedy inflected by social satire, although marred in the eyes of some by too much whimsy or fantasy or sentimentality or downright eccentricity. But that story, even as it organises the plot, is not the whole story. Threaded through a comic tale of tourism and its discontents, built on the scaffolding of the standard marriage plot, is a darker, more complex, less end-determined narrative.

To a degree, that story was heard by the novel's early readers, but for the most part with puzzlement rather than pleasure. Why does Mr Emerson preach so much? What motivates the Reverend Beebe? Why is George so unrealised as a character? These questions recur through the century but from the publication of James McConkey's study in 1957 onwards, they more often become the means to enter Forster's novel with varying degrees of sympathy. They are seen less as pointing to flaws in the novel than as constituting its interest. This version of Forster's text tests its plot elements against a set of abstractions, utopic ideals, and beliefs about truth and passion, about comradeship and the call of the blood, rather than against the social conventions and public expectations of the realist novel.

An evangelical is:

1. an orthodox Protestant

2. who stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revival movements associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield;

3. who has a preeminent place for the Bible in her or his Christian life as the divinely inspired, final authority in matters of faith and practice;

4. who stresses reconciliation with God through the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross;

5. and who stresses the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of an individual to bring about conversion and an ongoing life of fellowship with God and service to God and others, including the duty of all believers to participate in the task of proclaiming the gospel to all people.

This definition has been specifically devised for this volume. As I have tried it out on colleagues, they have jokingly referred to it as “the Larsen Pentagon,” which is a compliment to the standard definition of evangelicalism, the Bebbington Quadrilateral. The British historian, David Bebbington, in his seminal study, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989), defined evangelicalism by identifying its four distinguishing marks: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism - that is, evangelicals emphasize conversion experiences; an active laity sharing the gospel and engaged in good works; the Bible; and salvation through the work of Christ on the cross. Bebbington's definition is routinely employed to identify evangelicalism; no other definition comes close to rivaling its level of general acceptance. It is the definition used by numerous scholars who have studied aspects of evangelicalism.

It used to be the case that anyone studying English literature had at least heard of Forster's Aspects of the Novel and its famous distinctions between story and plot, flat and round characters. We can make no such assumptions today when literary study, dominated by theory, disdains such old-fashioned terms. But Forster's short book has much to tell us, not just about the elements of fiction, but also about the nature of criticism which is too often seen, rather simplistically, as a critique not so much of literature, a term it barely recognises, as of the social order. There is no reason why criticism should not look at wider issues but if it takes so little heed of the complexities of art, how can it hope to enlighten us about the much greater complexities of society?

Forster formulates his views about the novel in reaction to Aristotle's Poetics, a conception of history, and a sense of Englishness. In a perhaps typically English, self-deprecating sort of way, he regards the novel as a lower form of art. But that is simply a ruse to boost its status. Aristotle, Forster tells us, was wrong to think that human happiness and misery took the form of action; we must seek for that in the secret life which is the novelist's special territory. Plot, therefore, is not as important to the novel as it is to drama. Forster wants to bracket history out of his discussion of the novel mainly because it tempts us to think in terms of periods, which then prompts us to read novels as mere reflections of their time and so lose what is distinctive about them. In addition, the historian, like the dramatist, is concerned with action which, as we have said, is not the novelist's primary interest.

'What do you want for yourself?' When D. H. Lawrence asked Forster this question, early in 1915, the writers had known each other barely a week. They had met and talked amiably just a few days earlier, at a dinner party hosted by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Books and letters soon crossed in the mail, followed by an invitation for Forster to stay with Lawrence at Greatham, Sussex. Both men had by this point won acclaim (Forster rather more than Lawrence) and each hoped to cement what he thought would be an important friendship. But the visit did not go well. On the second day, Lawrence launched into a tirade about Forster's work, life, and philosophy that ended, hours later, with Forster asking plaintively, 'How do you know I'm not dead?'

Readers might prefer to draw a veil over this exchange, convinced that it points more to Lawrence's aggression than to Forster's reticence. But the exchange has different value, I believe, in showing how Forster sometimes tried to transpose desire into nonsexual forms, including literary depictions of marriage and what he called 'democratic affection'. This chapter will examine the creative tensions informing this transposition and its implications for readers and critics, especially those wanting to assess sexuality's influence on Forster's life and work. For with startling perception, Lawrence broached a set of issues, sexual and creative, that Forster had huddled defensively and privately berated himself for, and throughout the 1910s could find no simple way to resolve.

INTRODUCTION: EVANGELICALS ENTER THE THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS

The question of the theology of religions - the relation of Christian faith to other living faiths - is an urgent issue for evangelicals for several reasons. First of all, evangelicalism, unlike any other contemporary Christian movement except for the Roman Catholic Church, finds itself embedded within all major religions and cultures of our shrinking globe. Second, evangelicals in general are the most mission-minded believers of all; their encounter with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and followers of other religions is an everyday experience. Third, evangelicals' entrance into the mainstream theological academy during the past decades has exposed them to a fruitful dialogue with views different from their own.

With sweeping generalizations, one can say that there have been three main stages in the development of evangelical theologies of religions during the twentieth century. The first phase, lasting until the midcentury, continued the typical Protestant particularist attitude according to which not only is salvation found in Christ, but also a person has to make a personal response of faith in order to be saved. The second phase in my chronology started when a few influential evangelicals such as the British scholar of religions Sir Norman Anderson and another Englishman, the literary critic C. S. Lewis, started questioning the particularist viewpoint in the mid-twentieth century.

It is an opportune moment to consider Forster and England: the past few years have witnessed the publication of an important body of work in history, literary criticism, and cultural studies on Englishness during the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods, when Forster came of age as an author. Drawing on this work, a number of critics read Howards End as a 'condition of England' novel, a fictional expression of popular anxieties about rising poverty, imperial decline, and race degeneration. Such analysts contend that Howards End, insistently focused on personal relations, also carries social and political implications. They interpret the novel as a national allegory in which interactions between various English types analyse England's unhealthy condition and project a better future. Other critics read A Passage to India as a dissenting imperial allegory, which assails the ills of Anglo-India and allegorises the impossibility of friendship between English and Indians under empire. I argue similarly that most of Forster's literary works can be understood as national allegories that diagnose an ailing nation and offer literary cures for the malaise they anatomise. Thus while he frequently writes against Edwardian England, Forster is also something of a literary patriot.

Forster's national allegories function in two ways: as parables of Englishness enlivened and as fantasies of England reconciled. Some offer women and men suffering from the pathologies of middle-class Englishness a passage to nature, passion, and freedom. In Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room with a View (1908), and A Passage to India (1924), Forster's English abroad are confronted with individuals and events that shock them.

Forster's short stories are commonly held to be insubstantial, lacking the sophistication associated with other twentieth-century practitioners of the form. They are deemed to be governed by a whimsical fascination with the supernatural, and to represent light relief from the novels. Without making excessive counter-claims, this essay seeks to demonstrate that Forster's stories are, on occasion, more technically interesting than is sometimes assumed, revealing some affinities with the work of other modernist writers, and betraying some intriguing points of contact with the novels.

Forster's reputation as a short story writer rests, principally, on the two volumes of stories published during his lifetime, The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928). These twelve stories were combined in 1947 to form the Collected Short Stories; the same twelve published in the Abinger Edition as The Machine Stops and Other Stories. In his editorial introduction to the Abinger Edition, Rod Mengham correctly observes that 'Forster's decision in the question of what should, or should not be collected was a significant act that needs to be recognized' (MS, p. vii); but Mengham also points out that the title Collected Short Stories was 'grossly inaccurate' (MS, p. vii), even though sanctioned by Forster. The stories collected in 1947 were all written before the First World War, and omit all of those (complete) stories published posthumously as The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972). Introducing this posthumous collection, Oliver Stallybrass indicates that the stories cover the whole extent of Forster's career, 'ranging, probably, from 1903 to 1958, with some revision as late as 1962' (LC, p. vii).

WHAT IS GENDER?

“Gender” is not an indigenous theological concept but a sociological one. And on its journey into theology it checked in a large amount of baggage which needs to be reclaimed, unpacked, and examined before the concept can be accorded new citizenship. Where this has not happened, the concept's culture and background have been incorporated into new territory, its debates and assumptions unwittingly absorbed, without being fully understood. So our first task is to look at what the concept of “gender” has brought with it from the social sciences and the implications this has for theology.

Sociology's concern with social institutions and processes means the areas of work and family have been significant in the development of the discipline. Inevitably these have involved discussions of the varied societal roles of men and women, including the division of labor. Yet for decades such discussions were somewhat clichéd, based on uncontested stereotypes masquerading as empirical sociological data. The functionalist Talcott Parsons, for example, offered categories which he felt adequately described role differences within the family. He presented the “feminine role” as expressive, fulfilling functions “internal” to the family (strengthening family bonds, socializing children), whilst the “masculine role” was instrumental, performing the “external” functions of a family (provision of monetary support). There was little acknowledgment that such descriptions were, in fact, heavily theoretically loaded and embraced many assumptions waiting to be contested.

What is “justification” and how is it related to atonement? Justification is being found just or righteous before God. The atonement is how Christ accomplishes our justification through his sacrifice on the cross. The following essay will examine biblical foundations of these doctrines, their historical genesis and controversies, and then in conclusion some pressing questions raised about them in contemporary theology.

BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS

As Roger Olson rightly notes, for most contemporary evangelicals “justification by grace through faith alone” is the “soul of the Christian Gospel.” This is understood to be the heart of the Protestant Reformation, grounded in its emphasis on sola scriptura. Martin Luther's reading of Paul's letter to the Romans is the foundation for the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but Protestants claim Paul warrants this doctrine, not Luther. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was originally an Augustinian monk. He read the works of St. Augustine and found them preferable to the theologians of the Middle Ages, who were known as “the Schoolmen.” However, not even Augustine offered Luther a satisfactory account of how terms such as “law, sin, grace, faith, righteousness, flesh, spirit and the like” were to be understood. Luther thought the church of his day misunderstood these terms, largely because philosophical categories alien to the Bible led it astray. Luther wrote, “Augustine got nearer to the meaning of Paul than all the Schoolmen but he did not reach Paul. In the beginning I devoured Augustine, but when the door into Paul swung open and I knew what justification by faith really was, then it was out with him.” Luther turned from Augustine to Paul to discover how the righteousness of God overcomes our sin.

Evangelicals understand themselves as confessionally orthodox Protestants oriented to piety that is personal. Therefore they claim to embrace not only the Trinitarian and Christ-centered biblical doctrine expressed in the Nicene Creed, but also the basic understanding of Scripture's authority that was held by the church fathers - in a Protestant way.

The Eastern Orthodox churches respect the authority of Scripture as a (foundational) subset of the church's great Tradition; the Roman Catholic communion respects Scripture as the ultimate written source of God's Revelation in Jesus Christ, but grants to Tradition (via the magisterial teaching office of the church) a decisive role in its interpretation. The Protestant distinctive of sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” rejects the “coincidence” and “supplementary” views of Tradition's relation to Scripture in favor of an “ancillary” view: contrary to popular misconceptions of nuda scriptura, tradition plays a vital role when understanding God's revelation via Scripture, but the role is “ministerial” rather than magisterial. Scripture is the final authority over, but not the sole source of, Christian belief and practice. Evangelicals have used underlying concepts from the Protestant Reformation to support this theological sufficiency: “the priesthood of all believers” and “the clarity of Scripture.”

Chalky cheese

No reader of the opening chapters of Howards End could fail to gather that the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes are meant to be contrasted. But whether these families are really as different as chalk and cheese is a conundrum that grows in significance as Forster's fourth novel unfolds. And even if a reader still thinks that the two households are fundamentally unalike in their conduct and convictions on completing the book, the thornier question of where Forster's deepest sympathies lie, with his heavy-handed idealists or his sports-mad philistines, may well remain unsettled. For despite its narrator's poise and its assured (if sparse) social comedy, not to mention the clear overlap between Forster's interests and those of the Schlegels, it is not Howards End's certainties that catch the eye but its hesitations, tensions, 'rich ambiguity . . . [and] fundamental irresolution'. Like Charles Wilcox and Aunt Juley on their fateful journey from Hilton station to Howards End, Forster can seem at 'cross-purposes' in this novel 'composed of contraries', yet that only makes it all the more intriguing in the context of his contrastdriven work as a whole and all the more absorbing in its own right. 'Whatever the flaws, weaknesses and contradictions we may perceive in Forster's own ideological position', Peter Widdowson comments astutely, '[Howards End], by containing them, gains rather than loses'.

AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM: TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL MODE OF STORYTELLING

Once upon a time not too long ago, religious historians told the story of American evangelical Protestantism - that staple of American religion and bedrock of American identity - as if, at best, black people were not central actors; as if, Ralph Ellison might say, they were “invisible.” At worst, the tale was told as if black folks existed not at all; as if black folks were not historical subjects; as if, both as a group and as distinct persons, they were persone non gratae.

But a new breed of religious historian eventually arose, and new questions dawned. The new breed recognized the incompleteness of their inherited story of American religion, generally, and American evangelicalism, particularly. The saga had to clarify the signal importance of black folks, account for chattel slavery, and foreground the rise of black evangelicalism.

Five novels by Forster were adapted for the cinema in the 1980s and 1990s - A Passage to India (1984), A Room With A View (1986), Maurice (1987), Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), and Howards End (1992). They have all generated debate about their style and politics. These adaptations are implicated in contemporary disagreements about the means and ends of historicising through film, particularly about the exploitation of 'heritage' culture. The appropriation for film of canonical literary texts from an earlier era has been identified with the commercial values of the heritage industry and its often retrograde or nostalgic view of British culture and politics. Through discussion of the styles of the Forster adaptations, my chapter tests the adequacy of this assessment.

Traditionally, discussions of literary adaptation focused on a film's fidelity to its 'original', on the 'notion of a text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, “correct” meaning which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with'. More recently, this view of adaptation has altered. 'The most successful adaptations of literature . . . aim for the spirit of the original rather than the literal letter; they use the camera to interpret and not simply illustrate the tale; and they exploit a particular affinity between the artistic temperament and preoccupations of the novelist and filmmaker'.

In July 2000, some 10,000 evangelists, theologians, mission strategists, and church leaders from more than 200 countries - more than belonged to the United Nations at the time - came together in Amsterdam at the invitation of Billy Graham to renew their commitment and formulate new strategies for world evangelization in the twenty-first century. The theologians' track at this meeting was chaired by James I. Packer, a British theologian based in North America, whose writings had been translated into many languages and whose influence was widely recognized throughout the world evangelical movement. This gathering produced a theological statement, the Amsterdam Declaration, which defined Christian theology as “the task of careful thinking and ordering of life in the presence of the triune God,” and also asserted that “theologians can help to clarify and safeguard God's revealed truth” by “providing resources for the training of evangelists and the grounding of new believers in the faith.”

Amsterdam 2000, as this conference was called, was a mosaic of global, transdenominational evangelicalism, a religious current identified by Wolfhart Pannenberg as one of three (along with Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism) vital, ascendant forces within the world Christian movement. The four preceding chapters in this book explore the distinctive voice of evangelical theology as it has emerged in its African, Asian, European, and Latin American contexts. Our purpose here is to review some of the major issues, themes, and leaders that have shaped evangelical theology in North America. Perhaps this chapter will also allow readers of the whole volume to evaluate the degree to which North American evangelicalism is or is not like evangelicalism in other parts of the world and also the degree to which North American evangelicalism does or does not set the tone for discussions and practice in other parts of the world.

When Forster sends his characters to Italy, he invokes a complex tradition of representing English travel to southern Europe. Italy epitomises the 'sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration'. Its monuments and artefacts were a staple component of the Grand Tour, the eighteenth-century tradition of travel to the Continent that functioned as the finishing stage in a young English gentleman's education. As Dr Johnson's comment suggests, a young gentleman 'ritually joined himself to the “Classical Mind” by visiting the sites made famous by the texts he had studied'. As the Continental tour became more accessible to a broader range of English travellers in the nineteenth century, however, the value of this kind of travel could no longer be taken for granted. Rather than offering a chance to commune with the 'Classical Mind', English travel to Italy in the post-Romantic period could actually exacerbate a sense of cultural and historical belatedness. It could expose rather than resolve a sense of emotional and sensual alienation.

AN INTRODUCTORY PARADOX: THE DIFFICULT, DIFFIDENT EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE OF GOD

Evangelicals are a people of the gospel (evangel). The good news about what God has done in Jesus Christ for the world presupposes two key theological truths: (1) God has acted (there is something good to report); (2) God has spoken (the news comes from God and so it is utterly reliable). There is no gospel, neither Christological content nor biblical form, apart from the speech and act of God. It therefore stands to reason that evangelicals enthusiastically affirm the God of the gospel, and on one level this is true.

A cursory examination of evangelical theology thus finds nothing exceptional to report: evangelicals agree with the orthodox consensus of the church that God exists, reveals himself in word and deed, and is able to accomplish his gracious purposes. The very logic of the gospel - the declaration that God enables believers to relate to God the Father in Jesus Christ through the Spirit - implies the divinity of the Son and Spirit as well. Hence evangelicals concur with the Trinitarian formula produced by the church fathers in 325 AD - the Nicene Creed - professing belief in one God: Father, Son, and Spirit.

One nevertheless detects a certain malaise in evangelical theology. Though evangelicals did not depart from orthodox affirmations, the doctrine of God languished through much of the twentieth century, mired in a deep funk.