Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six

In this next book by Tom Clancy, he departs on a tangent from the Jack Ryan saga to follow John Clark, as he did earlier in his book Without Remorse. As part of the new post–Cold War world, terrorism is rising to be a major area of threat, as evidenced from Clancy's two earlier books, and also from our world situation today. In response to this threat, Clark, with the endorsement of President Ryan (who basically doesn't figure in the book), starts a special international squad, Rainbow, of highly trained special-operations troops to be a terrorism response squad. Joining him are Chavez, another of Clancy's favorite characters, and a broad cast of troops from the US, Britain, and other NATO countries.

They are quickly put to the test. Terrorist activity first at a bank in Zurich, and then at the home of a prominent businessman in Austria give the team a chance to show what they are worth. They carefully coreograph a response and decisively put down both incidents. Their third response is to a terrorist takeover of WorldPark (a EuroDisney immitation), and again their action is impressive and decisive. Each episode is full of Clancy's vivid descriptions of tactical maneauvers, technological advances, and personal stories. Vintage Clancy.

Part of the impetus behind these terrorist attacks is coming from John Brightling, head of Horizon Corporation. Brightling and a group he calls the Project are out change the world. They want to eliminate all but a chosen few humans from the planet, in what they see as the only way to save the Earth from human destruction. To do this, they want to raise global awareness of terrorism, in order to get their guy a consulting contract for the upcoming Olympic Games in Australia. That will be their delivery point of Shiva, an engineered form of Ebola that will spread from there throughout the world. Once the outbreak is known, Horizion plans to step in with a "vaccine" that is actually a virulent form of Shiva, thereby infecting most of those who haven't yet been reached with the epidemic. Only their own people and those they deem worthy get the real vaccine.

The last terrorist attack they plan before the Olympics is a direct attack at Rainbow, which they see as a threat to the success of their plan. So they carefully set up an ambush of Clark's wife and daughter (Chavez's wife) at their place of employment, the hospital near the base. They plan to ambush the Rainbow troops as they respond. But the plans fall apart when Noonan, the Rainbow tech-guy, disables all cell-phone communications and disables their ability to act in a coordinated fashion. Wife and daughter escape unharmed as Rainbow is again able to act decisively to counter the terrorist plot, but this time taking two losses and a few injuries in the process.

Their plan is working, until Dmitry Popov, the ex-KGB agent they have enlisted to set up the terrorist attacks, gets wind of the big picture for the Project. He is horrified by Brightling's intentions, and finds his way off of the Project facility in Kansas and heads to New York. He contacts Clark, and asks for a meet, and even though he set up the hit on Clark's wife and daughter, Clark accepts. As soon as he learns of the plot, Clark informs Chavez, who is consulting at the Olympics with a few other Rainbow troopers. They stake out the fogging system room (the planned point of deliver for the virus) and nab the Project member who is going to plant the virus.

As soon as Brightling realizes that he can't reach his man, and that things are falling apart, he orders all physical and electronic evidence destroyed, and gathers up the members who know the whole story of the Project's plans and flies them off to the Project Alternate facility in Brazil. But the FBI and Air Force are able to track the plane, and Clark decides that Rainbow will follow the planes down. Because they are sure most of the evidence has been destroyed and because they fear making the details of the plot public, FBI agents aren't sure about if the group can be successfully prosecuted, and if it should be. In face of this, Clark faces them head on, sending in his troops. He gives them an opportunity to surrender, but Brightling sends out armend men to counter the force. Using an advanced people-finding gadget that Noonan has been plaing with, Clark is able to vector in the Rainbow troops to neutralize the threat from the Project defenders. Once it becomes clear that the battle is won, Brightling and his group surrender. Instead of taking them back to the States, Clark destroys all of the facilities at the Project compound and releases the members into the jungle to try fend for themselves (to commune with nature, as he puts it).

With Rainbow Six, Clancy again demonstrates his narrative sense, as well as his ability to tell a great military story with a moderately complicated plot. He also builds some interesting and clearly flawed characters who just try to do the right thing. And the reader clearly wants to empathize with them. But there are some clear weaknesses in the book. One, a weakness that has cropped up in a few of his other novels, is torture. Clark is a character with a dark side, and torture, or the threat of it, is a necessary instrument to elicit information and serve a greater good. And at first blush, in Clancy's narrative world, that may seem true. But who should be allowed to weild this terrible sword, and decide when it's really serving a greater good. The fear that evil will win out makes it seem easy to do whatever we can, and at whatever cost, to make the good triumph. But we should never allow torture to be justified. It violates the basic humanity, of both the tortured and the torturer. And it most certainly flies in the face of our most basic Christian convictions about right and wrong, and about sin and reconciliation. Which brings up the other major flaw in Clancy's story: retribution. The one unasailable fact that seems to drive his logic as the story concludes is that the perpetrators of this ghastly plan deserve full and complete punishment for their intentions. They must be delt with, decisively. And if the law might have trouble doing that, or if we don't like all of the consequences, it's justifiable to bend the rules a bit to exact "justice" in a slightly different way. Again, the line of thinking is tempting, but it again sees retribution as good, and sees all actions toward that end as justifiable. The victims become the perpetrators in a new act of violence. Where does it end?

Randy Alcorn, Safely Home

Ben Fielding is a successful American businessman, working high up in a multinational corporation that does a lot of business in China. As a publicity stunt, his corporation sends him to China to live with a normal chinese family for six weeks, and the family they choose is the family of his former friend and roommate from college, Li Quan. Ben remembers Quan as a brilliant historian, and assumes he has gone back to China and become a respected professor, but when he arrives, he finds a different story. Quan, a Christian, was never allowed a teaching post because of his faith, and thus his lack of allegiance to the communist government and its values. So he is now a locksmith. As Ben spends time with the family, he comes to understand their underground life, attending church in the middle of the night in a near-by home, and the risk that comes with being a Christian, even in the new "open" China. Ben has assumed that all he has been hearing form the Chinese government about religious tollerance is true, but he comes to see the full picture, of government limits on what sanctioned churches can preach, where they can meet, and who can be a pastor. These limits are such that Christians are still forced to go underground, a move which makes them enemies of the state. Quan has been in prison many times, as had his father and his father's father, and endured much persecution, abuse, and harrassment.

Ben had turned from his faith, as his own life and its success took center stage. But as he is confronted with the depth of the Li family's faith, he slowly realizes his own need. Quan returns to prison, and is held for many months. Ben does all he can to get him released, but all he can successfully do is arrange a few visits. But he continues to stay with the family, and to keep working on Quan's behalf. During this time, he continues to learn more about the underground church, and the missionaries that work around China spreading God's word to a people who is hungry for it. Through all of this, he comes to realize that he has been turning his back on God, and cherishing his own view and perception of reality, and he comes to believe again and anew in God.

Despite Ben's best efforts, Quan's time in jail, though it has been fruitful in that he has been able to minister to others, finally ends in death. For him, this means joyful reunion with his family and with his Lord, and for Ben this means a return to the States, where he reenters his life with renewed vigor, working toward reconciliation with his former wife and his kids, and seeking to reenter his career with a new focus and outlook. No longer is his own advancement the goal, but instead, he works toward making their company a force of reform especially in China.

The book ends with a glimpse of heaven and with the final victory of heaven and the King over all the earth, the time when there will be no more martyrs, when God no longer stands by, but when all things are made new.

Safely Home is a worthwile story about the persecuted church in China. It gives the reader a glimpse of what faith can cost, and of what it means to stand up for Jesus in the face of opposition. In America and the West, faith is often a relatively easy road, but taking a close look at a place where that isn't the case is a powerful call to revisit our own faith, and see where it will take us. I have been encouraged and also challenged to think more about persecuted Christians around the world. It is a source of sorrow that people must endure such things for their faith, but also a source of joy that people do. It is a worthwile endeavor for us to "borrow" their faith, in a sense, to draw strength and encouragement from it, and to hope that that same faith emerges more and more within us.

Albert Wolters, Creation Regained

Understanding the Christian worldview is essential for Christians as they engage the world and be obedient to Scripture. So says Albert Wolters in Creation Regained. In this short book, Wolters sets out to explain what a worldview is, and therefore its importance, and then briefly outlines the major components of a specifically Christian worldview. He then concludes with a discussion of how this worldview can be put into action through using the categories of structure and direction to discern appropriate ways of life and action. He works from what he calls a “reformational” perspective—that is, a perspective that seeks to recognize the biblical concepts of sin and redemption as central to understanding life, as well as a perspective that recognizes the need for constant “reformation” of the Christian life as we seek to always conform more and more to God’s will.

(For a more complete review, seem my theology blog: http://developingtheology.blogspot.com/2007/01/albert-wolters-creation-regained.html.)

Wolters begins by defining worldview as “the comprehensive framework of one’s beliefs about things” (2). This careful definition points to a number of major themes that define what a worldview is: it is about things, that is, everything from politics to cosmology to God; it involves belief, that is, reasoned and committed assertions; and it is a comprehensive framework, meaning that it involves a system of interconnected beliefs that define how we see the world. Wolters goes on to assert that worldview is an essential field of study, because everyone has a worldview, whether they know it or not, and our worldview helps define how we see the world and understand ourselves in it. After laying this important groundwork, Wolters spends the next three chapters defining and elaborating on the three major components of a Christian worldview: creation, fall, redemption.

Wolters carefully investigates each of these areas, gaining important insights about how Christians should understand these central themes in our understanding of God, the world, and our place in it. He focuses especially on the assertion that all (earthly) things are God's good creation, are tainted by the fall, and are within the scope of redemption. He then puts this insight into practice through using the concepts of structure and direction. Structure is the good way in which God has created something, its essence, the way something is as part of the order of creation. Direction is the orientation of that thing, its use and development along the plane of sin and redemption. These two concepts will become the filters through which all things are seen, as Christians seek to determine what about a thing is structural, that is, what components or dimensions are part of God’s good creation, and what about a thing is directional, what is in conformity to God’s will and what is against God’s design and intention. Using this as a framework encourages Christians to see all things, from politics to social dance, as part of God's good creation, though fallen, and sees them as things Christians can seek to "redeem" through their action and reasoned participation in them.

Wolters has written an important study on what it means to be a Christian in the world. Worldview is an absolutely essential category for understanding the Christian life, and for understanding Christian interaction with all of life. His categories of structure and direction are especially illuminating as they help Christians to recognize and affirm the good that God has created in all areas of life, far beyond the church, but also help Christians to name those dimensions of reality that are distortions of God’s will and intention. It is a good introduction to these topics, written at a level that all intelligent readers will be able to appreciate and learn from. Wolters has done an admirable job of challenging Christians to be reformational Christians, God’s reforming representatives throughout all the world. It is an encouraging book that challenges us to look anew at the world around us, and how it does and doesn't conform to God's will, and how we can work to point all things toward God.