A wide mercy.

JOURNALIST Peter Boyer has said, rather provocatively, that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is a "war movie"--a martial epic about the struggle between good and evil. Which prompts for Christian believers the theological question, exactly how complete was the victory Christ won, in the drama of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, over the forces of sin and death? The issue has been agitated, at varying levels of temperature, for two thousand years, most notably in the Reformation debate of Calvinist predestinarians, who believe that Christ redeemed a select number of people who cannot resist His act of grace, vs. Arminian champions of human free will, who generally believe Christ died for the purpose of saving all people but will only actually save those who voluntarily assent.

This question has reemerged recently as an intra-Evangelical controversy, which is fully aired in the excellent new book Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate (Eerdmans, 319 pp., $27), edited by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge. The core of the book is a series of essays by philosopher Thomas Talbott, who argues for the proposition known as universalism: that Christ died for the purpose of saving all mankind, and achieved His purpose. Talbott cleverly combines the high Calvinist doctrine of God's sovereignty (i.e., God is omnipotent and therefore accomplishes all He sets out to do) with the Arminian insistence on God's universal offer of grace (i.e., because God is Love, He purposes that all be saved). If both these propositions are admitted in this form, the inescapable conclusion is that all, in fact, will be saved.

The volume includes a number of essays objecting to Talbott's arguments, from various theological perspectives; Talbott defends himself ably in a concluding chapter. To say that Talbott gets the better of his opponents would be an overstatement; more accurate to say that he successfully makes the case for the intellectual respectability of universalism. This book offers a profound yet accessible discussion of the ultimate questions facing man. After the intellect's capacities are exhausted, we are left with fear and trembling, but also and more importantly, with prayer and hope.

* "Elie Kedourie is one of those exceptional writers who oblige their readers to examine what they think they know, and to modify their view of the world accordingly. Whatever he wrote has the power to go beyond received opinion straight to reality." So writes NATIONAL REVIEW senior editor David Pryce-Jones in his introduction to the new edition of The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies (Ivan R. Dee, 488 pp., $22.95), a collection of twelve detailed and lucid essays by Kedourie. Most of the pieces assembled in this volume deal with British involvement in the Mideast in the colonial period, and they offer much insight into the region's continuing problems; of special interest at this moment is the chapter about how the British endeavored to establish a government in Iraq.

That Kedourie is perceptive and brutally honest, showing no partiality to the lionized, is evident in his assessment of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia:

   When Colonel Lawrence renounced the
   world his ambition ... was to become a
   great writer, to exchange the uncertain
   and treacherous triumphs of war and politics
   for the sure and lasting reward of
   artistic creation. The attempt does not
   come off, and [Lawrence's 1926 memoir]
   Seven Pillars is a work seething with
   rancour and resentment, full of advocacy
   and rhetoric, firmly imprisoned in the
   world of practice from which its author
   ceaselessly proclaimed his yearning to
   escape. As a work of art Seven Pillars is
   deeply flawed, [and] impregnated with
   that demonic quality which is manifest in
   Lawrence's career ...

The "Chatham House Version" of the book's title is Kedourie's label for the consensus account of recent Middle Eastern history favored by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, and its guiding spirit, Arnold Toynbee. According to this school of thought, writes Kedourie, "the West is a disintegrating society which, owing to its Judaic heritage, has shown itself to be murderously aggressive." The consequences of this view, for Mideast policy and for global politics generally, are harsh and long-lasting. Any remedy begins with understanding, and to that end Kedourie's book is a signally important contribution.

* In Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (University Press of Kansas, 200 pp., $24.95), Forrest McDonald provides a bracing--and highly entertaining--inside view of the battleground of academic history in the PC age. He also communicates a joy in his craft: "The best historians are those who enjoy searching the record of the past for its own sake. I once had a rather dour senior colleague who went into fits of rage when he heard a junior colleague say, as he often did, 'I study history because it is fun.' But that is precisely the purest motivation possible."

* Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (HarperCollins, 304 pp., $24.95), by Marilyn Yalom, is a remarkable micro-history recounting, yes, the evolution of a chess piece. For hundreds of years chess did without any female pieces, but after the queen was introduced it evolved from the weakest into the strongest piece on the board; historian Yalom ties this development to the rise of Christian queenship, and the cults of both the Virgin Mary and romantic love, in the Middle Ages.