Getting Over a Really Bad Dream

In the early hours of October 28, 312, a man had a dream that changed the history of the church forever. As Lactantius reported it, the dream was of the first letters of Christ's name, superimposed on one another in the form of a cross, which made it look like a sword. Underneath the sword were the words: "By this sign you will conquer." The dreamer, Constantine, facing a battle to the death the next day for the imperial throne, took the dream seriously enough to have the symbol painted on his soldiers' helmets and shields. He won the battle, and gave our God the credit.

Things have not been the same since. What began as a new era of toleration for Christians throughout the Empire soon devolved into systematic, centuries-long, State-governed programs of imposing Christianity upon people by force. To the conquerors belonged the spoils --- including the right to dictate personal faith. "Constantinian Christianity" was a way of going out into the highways and by-ways and compelling people to come in, or else. Islam learned the lesson from us well; by the eighth century, Muslim leaders were doing the same thing.

We might still be doing it this way if some Christians had their say about it. For example: remember the last revision of the Hymnal? One of the biggest arguments in the committee was over what to do with "Onward Christian Soldiers." Nobody wants to give up that great tune. But the words are something else, e.g., "Like a mighty army moves the church of God…marching as to war."

Just what we need for the war on terrorism, and to play a mediating role in Jewish-Muslim conflicts. As James Carroll reminds us in his very disturbing book, Constantine's Sword, for well over a thousand years the cross has been to Jews a symbol of Christian persecution, and to Muslims a symbol of Christian imperialism. We might add to Carroll's analysis the observation that the modern expansion of Christianity by persuasion more than by force has not helped all that much. It has only made our Jewish and Muslim friends even more nervous about what our true motives are. They remember Constantine all too well. And tremble. If our words don't get them, our swords will.

Personally, I hope that Lactantius got Constantine's dream wrong. Down deep, I think he probably did; truly revelatory dreams tend to work more to up-build people than to divide and conquer them. Among the many outrages perpetrated on people in the name of the Christian cause, surely one of the most horrific is the use of a symbol for the cross on which our savior died for all as a battering ram to storm the sanctuaries of other peoples' sincere worship.

This Christmas season might be a good time, before we go back to our crosses, to leave up a little longer our crèches. St. Francis started something really promising at that midnight mass in 1223, bringing a manger scene right into the sanctuary. It was, and is, a scene of gentleness, that extols the wonders of faith shared by the poor and the powerless of the earth --- just the kind of people in whom our Lord seemed to be most especially interested.

I wish we could make Jesus more visible in our nativity scenes as the "swaddled" newborn that he was. Certainly, Luke didn't want us to miss seeing him this way. Usually an elegant writer, he slipped into repetitiveness in reporting, first, that Mary "swaddled the baby in swaddling clothes." And then, he emphasized it again: the angel told the shepherds that they would find the baby "swaddled in swaddling clothes." In other words, Mary wrapped him tightly. Just as Joseph of Arimathaea would, after he took Jesus' body down from the cross.

With all due respect to Constantine, the dream of Amahl, which I think is what Amahl and the Night Visitors is really all about, goes him one better. It gets Amahl to the crèche, long before anyone has to get to the cross. And it gets him there in the company of some pretty impressive people. Probably they weren't kings, notwithstanding our penchant for making them so. Nevertheless, you get the point. The place where the kings of the earth belong is not at the front of armies, but in a cave, paying homage to the real Prince of Peace. Or on a winding, congested street in Jerusalem, helping a beaten and dispirited man --- who was once swaddled in love by a mother wise enough to know that his life would be beyond all earthly protection --- to carry his cross.

The Tenth Commandment

Recently, I had an occasion to look again at Exodus 20, and especially at the way the Ten Commandments are expressed there. (Deuteronomy, for example, puts several of the commandments a little differently.) You remember those commandments, don't you? The ones we can't have up on courtroom walls? This time around, it was the 10^th on the list that captured my attention: the prohibition against coveting. Attached to the prohibition is a list of specific things not to covet, but the overall force of the commandment is still pretty clear: we are not to covet anything or anybody, period.

Like the other nine commandments, this one, too, has actions in mind, some to engage in assiduously, and some to avoid at all costs. But the 10^th commandment puts the emphasis less on actions themselves and more on the intention behind the actions. Thus: don't desire, pine for, lust after, whine about, or demand what you have no right to, and then you won't be tempted to grab it for yourself when no one is looking. Good advice. Yearning for things we do not and should not have, instead of giving thanks for things we do and should, corrupts the human spirit just as surely as violating any of the other commandments does.

The biggest problem that coveting leads to is a potentially lethal degradation of our God-given capacity to think responsibly about what we owe others and what they owe us. By means of the careful nurturing of envy, covetous people gradually convince themselves that whatever they want, whenever they want it, they have a permanent right to possess. And if they really can't have the object of their fantasies, then they believe it is still within their rights to ensure that nobody else gets it either.

This is the way abusive lovers think when the one(s) they abuse finally get over them. This is the way that sexual predators think when the objects of their craving refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of their demonic claims. This is the way that greedy corporate executives think when their compensation packages, their perks, and their colleagues' grudging admiration prove impotent to fill their howling inner emptiness. This is the way that terrorists think when societies of infidels keep reminding them by their very existence of how ignorant, backward, and hopeless their own ways of life ultimately are.

And this is also the way that too many people think when confronted with the stark facts about the distribution of resources, opportunities, and wealth today. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer? No problem! Just elbow your way into the company of the rich. If you haven't got an off-shore, off-the-books operation running, get one! Doesn't God help those who help themselves? If it is to the little that some are only barely getting by on, I doubt it.

The wildly popular way of dealing with abusers, sexual and corporate predators, and terrorists these days is the way of the jail cell, military coups, and maybe even missiles. For the short run, this fairly limited strategy may have to do: we have a fundamental obligation before God to protect the innocent from harm. But it will really be too bad --- and in the long run, ineffective --- if this is all we can do. What else is needed? Getting to the underlying deprivations and pain that give rise to our enemies' covetousness in the first place. And being willing to examine our own covetousness along the way, the kind of covetousness that always asks what somebody else should be doing about the poor, the sick, the demoralized, and the despairing people in every society everywhere. Share the resources, the wealth, the technical know-how? Sure, so long as the resources we are talking about are yours and not mine.

One time I counseled with a man just released from prison. He hadn't changed much. Somewhat to my surprise, though, he was astonishingly candid with me. " Here it is, Reverend: I need what I need, and if I can't get it, so much for the worse for whoever's got it." I could not help wondering to myself whether St. Paul ever came upon anyone like this when he was in prison? He certainly would today, but not only in prison. My counselee expressed with painful accuracy just what covetousness has come to mean today in "polite society," as well as among people we lock up and out of our concern.

Is it society's fault that this man has come to look at everything so cynically? Of course not. His perspective is one that he carefully nurtured all on his own. Is it society's fault that he lacks a vision inspiring enough to make him want to change it? Now that's something worth thinking about, while we stare winsomely at our brilliantly lit Christmas trees.

Fighting the Right War

These days, we are looking at a different kind of war than the one that 9/11/01 inaugurated. Our war on terrorism continues, but a war with Iraq may be just beginning. Fighting both wars at the same time will be serious business. Not so another kind of war I've been reading about.

Steve Smith, of the United Methodist Reporter, wrote recently that mainstream Protestantism is caught up in "theological warfare" between its progressivist and traditionalist branches, and he implies that for us mainliners, nothing less than the future of Christian faith and practice may be at stake. In light of the momentous conversations and preparations about real wars that lie ahead of us in the free world, it's silly if not obscene to describe intra-ecclesial mean-spiritedness by means of war metaphors, even if our disputes rise to the level only of skirmishes rather than crusades. Engaged in a war for the integrity of the church's faith and practice? They've got to be kidding us.

But then again, maybe not. A group called The Confessing Theologians Commission, some of whose members are theological colleagues whom I deeply respect and admire, is stating in the strongest possible terms that there are deep theological rifts in our denominations that root in the preaching of "other gospels" by people who lack both faith and humility. What God is calling us to do, the Commission insists, is to reform our denominations by getting them back to truthful confession of historic Christian beliefs, so that we can once again be about the proper business of the church: Bible study, evangelism, prayer, and caring for the poor and needy.

To all this, our own denomination is responding through an Information Project for United Methodists, whose aim is to "study" present day confessing movements. Study? Not likely. What launched the project is a concern to counter alleged attempts on the part of theological conservatives ("traditionalists," in Smith's term?) to steer the church in their own direction. Because this is so, it might be well to hold ourselves back just a little when the invitation comes to embrace the "information" the Project uncovers for us.

So here we have it: let's straighten out what we believe as Christians, and how we believe it; let's all believe it together and in the same way; and then we'll all be both at peace and in mission at the same time. And if we have to engage in "theological warfare" to accomplish these noble aims then let the noblest among us launch the pre-emptive strike. Wow. Does anyone think, for example, that getting Roman Catholic bishops back to the basics of traditional beliefs will somehow cure pedophilia among their priests?

As if we don't have enough wars to deal with already... And this is the real point. We do have enough wars in front of us right now, and what those who fight them most need from the church is input on how it might be justified to pursue them, for however long they might take. By way of example: neither the war against terrorism nor a future war with Iraq can possibly be justified, from the standpoint of our faith, if the only thing they accomplish is improving the security and life-style of our own people at the expense of other peoples' resources and opportunities. In a word, forget about cheap oil. Instead, concentrate on safeguarding the innocent, the oppressed, and the needy --- those who are at the mercies of other's whims, callousness, and evil.

A while back, many of us were captivated by a wonderfully witty and at the same time stunningly profound question: what if they gave a war and nobody came? Well, we're in one serious war already, and a lot of people keep on showing up for it. Maybe we can accomplish our aims in Iraq without getting into a second one, and maybe not. There is one "war" out there, however, that we can choose not to show up for, the war between people in our churches who have to have it their way or no way. To this kind of war, I hereby declare myself to be a conscientious objector, and I strongly urge everybody else in the church to do the same thing.

There is the old story of the acolyte who helpfully collected his pastor's sermon notes from the pulpit following a church service. He couldn't help noticing one handwritten note in a margin of the manuscript: "argument weak here; shout like the devil." Our so-called theological warfare between progressives and liberals is like an extended marginal note on a lesson plan whose pages are completely blank. Riling up people is easier than teaching them something really important.

The Best Alternative To School Prayer

When I was growing up, each of my school days (every one of them spent in public schools) began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer. However, I never came across a class that might have helped me understand religion better --- my own, of which there was little to nothing, or anybody else's, of which there seemed to be a lot more. Today, the picture is a little different. The Pledge of Allegiance is in; the Lord's Prayer is out; and most kids still study little to nothing about religion.

What's wrong with this picture? For a lot of my Christian friends, what's wrong is that prayer is no longer in it. And they've been hopping mad about the situation for years. I myself still wonder what the big deal was, and is. When I said the Lord's Prayer daily as a kid, it meant nothing, because I had no faith to go with it. When I "got religion" later on, I said it all the time, out loud in the company of Christians, and silently most everywhere else. Is anybody really worse off since the Supreme Court finally told us where to put it?

What's really wrong with the picture is the third element in it, not the second. Too many kids --- and adults --- are functionally illiterate about religion, and our public schools could help by teaching at least our kids and grandkids something about the many religions currently represented in our increasingly pluralistic society. Teaching about religion is something far different from indoctrinating people into a particular faith tradition.

When I ask educational bureaucrats about this, the reaction I usually get is the kind I would expect if I had suggested that the schools advocate legalizing drugs or permitting concealed handguns in the classroom. You would think that religious beliefs can hurt us as badly as pot and bullets can. Actually, there is some validity to this otherwise bizarre view: not knowing enough about other peoples' religions can get us killed just as surely as drugs and guns do.

There is another image associated with the study of religions that I frequently encountered during my years as a college, university, and seminary faculty member. Many students shared with me their hesitance to read about religious traditions different from their own, on the ground that exposure to them could weaken their personal faith. Other religions, they seemed to think, are something like infectious diseases to which we ought to avoid as much exposure as possible. There is a fetching quality about this metaphor. It also suggests that the best way to avoid catching a religion's unhealthy viruses is to expose ourselves gradually to its healthy ones.

I admit that if I were an educational bureaucrat, I would have to acknowledge some very good reasons for caution about introducing the study of religion in our schools. The number of the reasons is roughly approximate to the number of frenzied Christians still tapping on heavily guarded school doors to slip the Lord's Prayer through. If we ever do implement religious studies as a substitute for prohibited prayer, as the Supreme Court encouraged us to do, we can be sure that these folks will create one ruckus after another in the interest of seeing to it that the studies are done "right." That is, their way: monotheism, the 10 Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, with heavy dollops of creationism in biology classes, and let the rest of the religious world go by.

One thing that school systems do know something about, though, is handling ruckuses. Fending off true believers who would co-opt the study of religion for their own narrow proselytizing purposes should be no more difficult than keeping at bay all those who won't give up on putting prayer back "were it belongs." The worst reason for not offering courses on religion in our schools is the one I read about just recently: " The only thing that teaching about religion will accomplish is just stirring up conflict." Has this guy been to a school board meeting lately?

It is easy to understand and appreciate why parents and religious leaders might worry about kids' learning something about the world's religions on school grounds Some kids will come home less trusting of what they have been told to believe about their own, and of the people doing the telling. As the cliché says, a little learning can be a dangerous thing. A lot of learning, though, especially about religion, can make the world safer and more joy-filled. And that's something that will make the worry worth it.

Religious Pluralism

In 1965, America's immigration policy underwent a dramatic change. Tight restrictions on immigration from non-European areas of the world were lifted, threatening the comfort zones of most America-First types. For the rest of us, the change opened untold positive possibilities for inter-cultural and inter-religious experiences and dialogue, and a widening sense of what genuine community could be in an increasingly pluralistic society.

That same year, Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, died. Prophetically, Tillich's last book, on the future of religion, argued that in the generations to come, people of vastly different religious persuasions will gradually reject the time-honored strategy of imposing their beliefs upon one another by various forms of coercion, and begin to support dialogue that leads to greater tolerance and mutual understanding. The dialogue for which he hoped has in fact steadily generated momentum since his death. Most people who participate in it come to appreciate more, and not less, their own religious traditions.

In many areas of the world, we still must be able to make a credible case for the gospel of Jesus Christ to people of no religious sentiments whatever. At home, however, we find ourselves talking with people who already have a lively faith of their own, quite different from ours. We no longer converse just with Protestants of other denominations, with the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, and with Orthodox, Conservative, and Liberal Jews. There are also increasing numbers of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims to be heard from, not to mention those who keep alive the Confucian and Taoist traditions. Also prominent in the conversations are the voices representing Native American religious belief and practice.

As Diana Eck brings out in A New Religious America, the motto of our country, E pluribus unum ("From Many, One") is taking on rich new meanings. Our manyness now encompasses far greater differences, and our oneness far more layers of complexity, than could have even been imagined by the Founding Fathers. In this book, Eck, a Harvard professor of comparative religion, and a life-long Methodist to boot (some wags might regard this as a potentially devilish combination), discusses thoroughly and brilliantly how this is happening in the religious sphere of our common life. Her study is worth a close reading.

A lot of good Christians I know take great offense at the notion that they should pay any heed at all to other religious traditions. If Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, they tell me, then we have no business spending much time with people who are on their way to perdition. We should just tell 'em all where it's at. A billboard I once saw on the front lawn of a church sums up this outlook rather well. In bold letters, it read: Hey people, come to Jesus! Or go to hell.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that hell is other people. I think he got it partially right. It is truly hellish to be in the company of people for whom the human family is made up of those like them and those unlike them, and for whom the second group doesn't count.

My One-Way-Or-Else friends in the church understand correctly one very important thing about religious dialogue: it does indeed involve a commitment to respect both one's dialogue partners and the views they want to share as potential sources of new discoveries and insights that we are not likely to come by all on our own. Dialogue involves listening, questioning, and reflecting. Most of all, it presupposes a desire and willingness to learn. Some Christians believe strongly that there is nothing anybody from the outside can possibly teach us. By contrast, Paul Tillich trusted that inter-religious dialogue will make people better representatives and practitioners of their own particular faiths. Tillich's trust was well placed.

"Pluralism" is a hard word to be neutral about, just like "conservative," "liberal," and the really explosive one, "relativism." (More about the latter later.) The last three members of this volatile mix are somewhat different in function than the first. Conservatism, liberalism, and relativism all suggest outlooks or attitudes toward the facts of experience that we can choose to accept or not. Pluralism suggests a realm of fact itself. We may choose to ignore it, but we cannot deny it. Religious pluralism is an especially important fact about life in America today. We will be much the worse off spiritually if we do not embrace it gratefully.

Getting Left Behind When the Rapture Comes

A good friend once told me of a terrifying experience that soon followed his becoming a "born-again" Christian. Late for what he thought was a Gideon ministry breakfast at a local restaurant, he opened the door to the meeting room and found no one there. "Leroy," he went on to tell me, "the first thing that came into my mind was that the rapture had come and I was left behind. I ran to the phone to call my wife, and when she answered, I didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed."

It was by God's help alone that I avoided saying something inane in response. I only asked my friend to tell me more about what getting left behind would have meant to him. His answer then, and this was many years ago, is the same answer that I keep getting nowadays from yet another generation of the rapture-possessed.

The one thing that we don't want to happen to us in this life, their message goes, is to be caught unaware when our Lord returns on the clouds in glory to usher in the end of the world. Here is how the scenario plays out: first, those who have died in the faith will be raised from their graves to meet believers still alive on the earth; then, both groups will be lifted into the air together ("raptured") to meet Christ on their way to heaven; finally, everyone left behind will suffer horribly, as the world comes to its divinely appointed, cataclysmic end. The point of the prophesy is that we must work really hard at being a strong enough believer to be taken up, rather than left behind, by Jesus when the end-time comes.

Ever since my friend shared his terror with me, I simply have not been able to get out of my mind the words I was thinking at the time, but refrained from saying: He's got to be kidding me. Now, when people tell me how much the books of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins mean to them --- the theme of all ten (!) is the rapture --- the same thought keeps popping into my head. I am aware that rapture talk is right there in the Bible, with a no less credible figure than St. Paul himself standing behind it. (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) But what Paul said about the rapture back then (it has been a long time coming, hasn't it?) is not the same thing as what the don't-get-left-behind crowd says about it today.

Paul's vivid word-picture of our being raised up to meet Christ in the air was clearly intended to answer a different question than ones we now bring to it. Rather than speaking to questions like What's the second coming going to look like?, or, Who makes it through and who doesn't?, Paul is answering people who are uncertain about whether believers who have already died can share in the blessings of a second coming yet to occur. (4:15) By means of his picture, he answers this question, and no other, and he does it with a resounding YES.

Clearly, there are ominous rumblings in this part of Paul's letter. By concentrating his attention here only on the destiny of believers, dead and alive, he cannot help but suggest (a) that non-believers who have died will not be raised up at all, and (b) that non-believers who are alive at the time of the second coming will be left behind to experience the world's destruction. The trouble comes when we give more importance to the unstated implications of Paul's account than we do to the main point it conveys.

The image of "meeting the Lord in the air" does indeed suggest a process of ascending into heaven with Christ. But it also points to an encounter with Christ that comes to completion with the return of all his followers to earth with him, preparatory to his enthronement there as Lord over all. Which meaning did Paul have in mind? We cannot know for sure. What we can know is that he wanted most especially to reassure his readers that they --- and we --- shall always be with the Lord, no matter what.

Sometime after my friend told me about his panic-attack over missing the rapture, he shared with me what got him over it: knowing that God was still with him, even as God was present in that empty Gideon meeting room, and that God would continue to be with him, and with his wife, and with the world, for a long time to come. Hearing him say this made me feel just a twinge of rapture myself. Enjoying together a moment with God, we were both snatched up into His presence.

Putting the End of the World in Perspective

Doom sayers never give up.

Just when we thought we were over Hal Lindsey's too-loudly-trumpeted revelations of coming world catastrophe, we were greeted with the "Left Behind" series of Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins, now into ten volumes and counting. Surely even the most faithful followers of this series must find it more than occasionally monotonous. After all, how many ways can there be to scare people into getting ready for the rapture? As for tendentiousness, though, these books do not come even close to the rest of the high end, repent-now-or-else literature gobbling up precious shelf space in bookstores everywhere.

You don't have to be an apocalypse oriented Christian to play the end time lottery these days. Even highly respectable astrophysicists are weighing in, by reminding us that human destiny is inextricably tied to the eventual and certain death of the sun around which our planet revolves. A lot of social scientists are getting with the program, too, with their warnings that there will be no habitable environments anywhere once the world's superpowers finish unleashing their nuclear arsenals on each other.

What I find especially troubling about all three of these perspectives is their failure to address the fundamental question which underlies and motivates all human efforts to understand and accept mortality: is there any transcendent purpose for our lives on earth, and for the historical process itself? For astrophysics and the social sciences, there is no meaning to the question itself. Human experience may reflect a glorious nanosecond in the longer history of matter, energy, and living things, but only that. Whether we are done in by the sun or by our own meanness of spirit, it will still be as if we had never existed at all.

For apocalyptic Christians, by contrast, there is definitely a meaning to the question, but the meaning is mostly negative. Briefly stated, their answer to the question about the purpose for what will happen to the human race is this: Because most people have failed to become the kinds of men and women that they should be, God has decided to cut his losses, open heaven to a pious few, and wring down the curtain on everybody else and on the planet that supports them as well. God's purpose for doing all this seems to me to reduce to little more than satiating his own disappointment, frustration, and anger with us.

What a God! Good parents don't give up on their children, even those they can't seem to do anything with. Would a good God do any less, even with an admittedly indifferent and recalcitrant humanity? Whatever happened to the covenant with Noah, anyway?

To Christians caught up in apocalyptic kinds of thinking, then, the future really looks no better than it does to scientists focusing on the outer edge of the universe, or peering into the miasma of the human spirit's destructiveness. The "end" of everything can mean only the final moment of a temporal sequence, beyond which things on earth simply are no more. From the perspective of the Christian tradition as a whole, however, the "end" of things means something quite different. It means the fullness of life. It means human beings' coming to completeness. When the world comes to its end, in this sense of the word, human history stands at its true beginning. The really big thing to contemplate about the end-time is that it will break in on us not with the cooling off of the sun or the heating up of our leaders, but with our living toward one another as Christ lived toward and died for us.

Certainly, in the midst of uncertainty, danger, and calamity, most of us would like at least a hint or two about when the bad times will be over, and what life will be like from that point on. What we most need in such situations, however, is assurance that there is some larger purpose (telos) to the bad times, whether the bad times plague us for only a little while, or go on indefinitely. When the greatest teachers of the church wrote about the end of the world, they wrote about "end" in this latter sense: what the world will be like when all of God's creatures put their whole trust in him, obey him joyfully, and give unceasing praise for the life and world he has given us.

In the words of an old catechism, to the question, "What is the chief end of man?," the correct answer was and is, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." This is, quite literally, the end which has no end.

The Lessons of 9/11

Jesus once chided the Pharisees and Sadducees for their inability to discern "the signs of the times." (Matthew 16:3) Somewhat abruptly, he then went on his way. Matthew gives no hint of what these religious leaders thought and felt about Jesus' chastisement. My own hunch is that some of them stayed angry long enough to make sure that no one would ever again do to them what Jesus had just done to them. And the way they sought to pull it off was by jumping into every tragedy with a definitive explanation of why it happened, sometimes even before the "why?" question could be asked.

Pharisees and Sadducees like these are still around. Last year, following the 9/11 attacks, they made their presence known immediately and gracelessly, imperiously shoving aside our cries of terror, disbelief, confusion, grief, and anger with truly appalling "discernments" of what we were supposed to take away from the overwhelming tragedy unfolding before us. Surely the most outrageous were these:

1. God is punishing America for the immorality its liberals have unleashed on us.
2. The certain damnation of those who died in the conflagrations before giving their lives to Christ should be a warning to all.
3. Muslims the world over must be brought to account for their hate-filled religion and hearts. And
4. The final battle with Satan is now fully launched; the end of the world is near.

No one I know who said any of these things has been open to much discussion about the pronouncements. Even so, perhaps there may be one or two somewhere willing to consider at least these rejoinders:

1. It is hardly likely that all who died in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania as a result of terrorist attacks were less moral than the rest of us who survived.
2. Salvation and damnation are matters for God alone; no human being has the right to claim "certain" knowledge of anything pertaining to either.
3. Most Muslims the world over are at least as outraged by the desecration of their religion as non-Muslims are. And
4. Inside traders of so-called religious secrets are even more contemptible than their counterparts on Wall Street; religious prophets of the end of the world have a track record whose errancy is without parallel in any other sphere of human experience.

The way that Jesus saw through his antagonists' disingenuous requests for help in discerning the signs of the times must have been truly galling, as were his concluding words to them, that the only sign they will have is "the sign of the prophet Jonah." At least, it would have been had they remembered that Jonah is sign of the power and scope of repentance. Even if reluctantly, Jonah went to Ninevah as God demanded, and there preached the necessity of repentance. To his shock and amazement, the Ninevites listened, and repented. And so should we, if we are at all inclined to gloss over the real lesson of 9/11 because we find it too hard to confront. (cf. Jonah, chapt. 3)


9/11 most especially forces us to deal with the awesomeness of God's great gift of freedom to human beings, the power to act on the basis of deliberation and choice, and on the basis of instinct and whim. We cannot have freedom in the first sense without also having it in the second. We are not truly free until we choose the first use over the second. The implications are staggering. We are not free to be responsible unless we have the power to be irresponsible. We are not free to trust in God unless we have the power to reject his will and his way entirely. We are not free to create unless we have the power to destroy. We are not free to love unless we have the power to hate. Could God have eliminated all of these very dangerous possibilities inherent in human freedom? Of course. Would we then still bear within ourselves a measure of his own glorious freedom? Of course not. Is freedom, then, worth the price? Yes, thanks be to God.

So: what does this all have to do with gleaning the lesson of 9/11? Simply this: 9/11 is the work of a few human beings who used a divine gift for demonic purposes, and the work of no one else. 9/11 calls us to genuine repentance of every misguided effort to put the blame anywhere else. It reminds us that freedom misused can be catastrophically destructive, even as freedom used as God intends can overcome every evil that its very existence makes possible.

Being a Liberal Christian Without Losing Your Faith

Throughout the Christian community, wide disagreements persist over what theological framework best serves proclaiming the Christian message in today's church and world. The most popular terms for the conflicting positions --- "conservative" and "liberal" --- do not help us much. They quickly contaminate responsible discussion and debate, and drive people into warring camps of true believers shouting at each other across an unbridgeable divide. But these are the terms we are living with. So, last time I tried to make the best of a bad situation and write about the positives and negatives of "conservative" Christianity in as balanced a way as I could. Today, it is the "liberals" who will be under respectful scrutiny.

As I have come to understand it, the heart of liberal Christianity is a passion for identifying the historical center of the Church's faith and separating it off from the accretions of tradition which distort it. Beliefs, guidelines for worship, and rules for action are constantly tested by reference to the best understanding of genuinely apostolic faith that modern scholarship can reconstruct. Practically speaking, what this means is that liberal Christians strive to be Jesus-focused more than tradition-focused.

Liberal Christians also emphasize translating Jesus' original teaching and preaching into terms that can be understood outside the environment of Palestine in the first half of the first century. The rationale for doing so is the perception that just this was what the first apostles did so effectively. A corollary of this emphasis is an openness to and interaction with current-day social, cultural, and religious ideas and practices. Such openness, it is believed, is essential for developing a credible presentation of the Christian faith to diverse constituencies. Finally, liberal Christians seek to build and celebrate congregations that are especially committed to being inclusive and service-oriented.

Alas, just as conservative Christians all too often de-form healthy theology into malignant ideology, so do liberal Christians. For the latter, what begins as responsible skepticism about the validity of church traditions sometimes devolves into a rejection of the possibility of reconstructing any historically reliable, normative picture of apostolic Christianity at all. Then, along with Christianity, all other religions become repositories of relative values only. Cut off from participation in a community of faith with a lively commitment to truth, spirituality reduces to highly subjective personal experiences and striving that are impervious to others' assessment, and often to their understanding as well.

At its worst, Liberal Christianity mandates what can only be called a hands-off policy toward anyone else's faith. Theirs is theirs, ours is ours, and neither must ever create any problems for the other. The only way we have of deciding whether we are Christian enough, or at all, is simply by weighing how open we are to people who are different from us, and how committed we are to the struggle for justice and equality everywhere. Once, I sat in a faculty meeting in which several colleagues proposed, with straight faces, that training people for ministry must consist in nothing but a training in multiculturalism. When I asked, "What about training in understanding the gospel instead?," they laughed. I was not trying to be funny.

If we are to get beyond what divides conservative and liberal Christians today, loyal members of both groups will need to do some serious rethinking of their doctrinaire stand-offishness toward one another. Last time, I imposed some suggestions on conservatives. Now, it's the liberals' turn. My first suggestion for liberal Christians is that they learn to cherish the historical kernel of apostolic faith as the beginning more than the final expression of God's good news. Tradition, as the on-going process of reframing the Christian message for the here and now, has more to say to us than liberal Christians often give it credit for.

Second, along with learning from people who represent social, historical, and religious traditions different from ours, there are times to share openly and confidently with them what we believe with our whole hearts about Jesus Christ. Social action is great; social action with evangelism is greater. A qualifier: particularly in the light of the Middle East situation today, liberal Christians --- and conservative Christians also --- need to give particular attention to presenting God's message in a way that is respectful of Jews and Muslims alike. Finally, liberal Christians need to end their flirtation with "New Age" religion, with its atomizing of our spirituality, and rejoice once again over the power of individual, personal transformation for building lasting Christian community.

Have you heard the one about the liberal and the conservative in the same pew at church? I would surely like to.

Being a Conservative Christian Without Losing Your Faith

Throughout my 35 year teaching career in colleges, a university, and a seminary, there has been one issue in particular that I and most of my students have had to deal with constantly: the issue of how conservative or liberal people in our churches expect us to be. In dealing with this issue more often than I would have liked, I have learned two things about most of the people for whom it is an issue. The first is that our being liberal or conservative is their test of our faith, credibility, and acceptability in the sight of God. The second is that neither I nor any of my colleagues in ministry are ever going to be conservative or liberal enough for them.

Is there any way to get beyond this kind of stereotyped, spiritually enervating thinking about who is and who is not of the elect among us? I believe so. This column focuses on the conservative side of being Christian. Next time, I will deal with the positives and the negatives of liberal Christianity.

As I experience and treasure it, conservative Christianity powerfully integrates four strong and compelling emphases. The first is a passion for holding up the whole of the Bible --- and not just the parts of it with which we are more comfortable --- as conveying the final and authoritative revelation of God. The second is an abiding concern for identifying the distinctiveness of the Christian faith over against social, cultural, and religious ideas and practices that can deflect attention from furthering the mission of Christ in the world. The third is an insistence that our churches teach clear beliefs, conduct worship according to biblically grounded guidelines, and promote concrete and decisive actions on behalf of people in need everywhere. Finally, conservative Christians actively seek a personal, deeply inward, transforming experience of, and continuing relationship with, Jesus Christ.

Could any earnest follower of our Lord not want to be a Christian in these senses of the word? Hardly. The problem comes when the center does not hold --- when conservative Christians begin to de-form a living, dynamic process of constant re-centering of faith into a steadily hardening ideology that, instead of embracing people in ever widening circles of love, drives them into warring camps endlessly disputing with each other over who is and who is not really Christian.

As ideology rather than faith, conservative Christianity is not a very attractive proposition. It no longer rejoices in the overall reliability of the Scriptures. Instead, it imposes a rigid doctrine of biblical literalism, inerrancy, and infallibility as something the assent to which is deemed necessary for our salvation. It no longer looks eagerly for signs of God's presence in every human society. Instead, it devalues other religions and peoples in a spirit of exclusivism and superiority. It no longer strives for a deeper understanding of the Christian tradition as a whole. Instead, it reduces faith to an intellectual assent to its own preferred and largely unexamined doctrinal emphases. It no longer encourages believers to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit for themselves in deciding how God wants them to live. Instead, it imposes its own rules for action and demands unquestioning obedience to them. Finally, conservative Christian ideology no longer celebrates the many ways God chooses to bring women and men to faith. Instead, it judges the genuineness of others' faith by the presence or absence of a single kind of religious experience, e.g., a personal encounter with Jesus, conversion at an identifiable moment in time, baptism by immersion, speaking in tongues, or whatever.

There is a better way to be a conservative Christian than to substitute ideology of this sort for genuine faith. It begins with distinguishing the message of the Bible in the Bible, and then goes on to assess all the other parts of the scriptures in the light of this message. It includes learning to discern God's activity in other societies, cultures, ideas, and practices through the light that Jesus Christ sheds on them. (Is Jesus Christ not, after all, the light of the world, and not just the church?) It accepts beliefs, guidelines for worship, and rules for action as responses to God which are always open to fresh disclosures from him. And finally, it invites people to hope for a deep and personal relationship with Jesus Christ that is unique to their own circumstances and longings.

What's new about this way of being a conservative Christian? Not much. It's what conservative Christianity at its best has always been.

The Unforgivable(?) Sin

Sometimes I talk with people who believe that they or someone they love did something unforgivable and would be punished by God forever. The offenses they name are very different, both in scope and severity: lying repeatedly to one's parents; doubting the virgin birth of Jesus; being a lesbian; dodging the draft; committing adultery; failing to pay a pledged tithe; having an abortion; and showing anger toward God.

Quite a list, to be sure. About some of the items on it, the Bible offers explicit guidance; about other items, the Bible leaves us to work out inferences on our own. One thing, though, is clear about the list as a whole: there is nothing on it which our Lord counted as an unforgivable sin. When Jesus talked about the latter, he had something quite different in mind: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Only this, he said, will never be forgiven.

In Mark's Gospel, blaspheming the Holy Spirit means attributing the effectiveness of Jesus' exorcisms to the power of Satan. (3:22, 28-30) Some scholars suggest that Mark may have meant something more general as well, that we commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit by attributing to Satan not just the exorcisms, but the power of Jesus' ministry as a whole. The text itself suggests a carefully restricted context for Jesus' words. They seem to have been meant for certain scribes who traveled from Jerusalem to Galilee to accuse him --- in considerable confusion --- both of being possessed by Satan and of driving out other demons by Satan's own power. Jesus must have enjoyed asking them, in response, How can Satan drive out Satan? (vs. 23)

Happily, I have yet to meet scribes like these, and so I have yet to find myself in a situation which really permits introducing on my own the subject of a sin that will never be forgiven. If someday I should happen upon such scribes and hear them saying horrific things about Jesus' exorcisms, I will probably give them the full dose of Jesus' teaching on the subject, and move on to more productive conversations as quickly as possible. From the perspective of the Gospels as a whole, though, it looks as if Jesus' scribes dropped this particular subject immediately and began assaulting him in other ways.

Although I still meet people who are absolutely convinced that they have done something truly unpardonable, I do not know anyone who has actually committed the one and only unforgivable sin that Jesus warns against. Perhaps a heartfelt "Whew!" is in order. The sins that "from time to time we most grievously have committed" are serious enough to warrant close attention in their own right, without our working overtime to ferret out something even worse.

By the mid second century, Christians apparently began easing off from an earlier morbid fascination with unforgivable sin. A powerful sign of the shift in attitude is evident in the Apostles' Creed, which probably originated in the congregation at Rome before the century was out. Contained in that Creed is the familiar affirmation of belief "in the forgiveness of sins." Not some sins. Not all sins but one. But all sins, period.

This Roman congregation got it right. If there is any one thing that Christians at all times and everywhere can agree upon, it is that in the name of Jesus Christ, God forgives us our sins and calls us to forgive others as we have been forgiven. Paul put it well to an earlier Roman congregation: nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:39) Some sins are relatively minor and atoned for relatively easily, e.g.: failing to attend Sunday services regularly. Other sins are serious enough to put the very quality of our relationship with God and our neighbors in jeopardy, e.g.: failure to care for the poor and the needy. But no sin is powerful enough to overcome God's reconciling us to himself, through Christ.

Both the overly scrupulous and the spiritually mature among us are highly susceptible to despair over the terrible things we do to ourselves, to one another, and to our relationship with God. My own list of especially worrisome sins is becoming shorter, but the things on it are bothering me more and more, e.g.: denigrating other people according to their beliefs, affiliations, income, gender, ethnicity; celebrating having more while others have less; treating the created order as largesse there for the taking. But where sin is, grace also abounds. God will always love us more than we love our sins.

Bethlehem's Present Travail

A first visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is usually overwhelming: sacred traditions beckon while harried groups jostle for position, guides and liturgists shout at one another, hawkers intrude winsomely and menacingly, and beggars implore constantly. Nevertheless, for most people who enter the sanctuary as pilgrims and not just as tourists, God still draws near, as unexpectedly and surprisingly as he did somewhere close by two thousand years ago.

During the Palestinians' recent takeover of the church, a takeover which barely avoided desecration, I began wondering whether God might give up on the place altogether, maybe to wait things out in caves with the few shepherds left in the surrounding hills and valleys. But things are no better out there either. Instead of angelic voices singing about a coming peace on earth, gunfire tolls a future of implacable hatred and violence.

Certainly the Palestinians and the Israelis have enough on their hands, in Bethlehem and everywhere else in the West Bank, not to fret overly that a place in their country sacred to Christians, hallowed since the fourth century as the birthplace of Christ, could have been treated so cavalierly. After all, when there is war on, places as well as people sometimes suffer collateral damage, right? And this particular place? The Palestinians are gone; the clean-up is over; and everything is back to normal (except for the absence of tourists.) Why belabor things? Well, though belaboring will not help anyone, reflection just might. In specific: that endangered Palestinian fighters could regard the Church of the Nativity as merely there for the conscripting reveals something of major importance about Christian presence in our Lord's homeland, and about whether Christians any longer have anything to say about what should go on there.

Viewed from a little larger perspective, a temporary occupation of the Church of the Nativity is merely one more in a series of recent events around Bethlehem which, together, point to the steadily declining influence of Christians in the area. Escalating violence between Muslims and Israelis in and around Bethlehem has made commerce all but impossible, to the detriment especially of Christians who have constituted the larger portion of the area's middle class. Most of these Christians have already left or are in the process of leaving.

If the inability to make a living were not enough, Christians have also been affected by the conflict even closer to home, literally. Frequently, Palestinian youth have used the rooftops of Christian families to fire upon Israeli troops, and, as is easily understandable, the troops have fired back --- on the homes from which they were threatened. On both sides of the conflict, the plight of the Christian population in Bethlehem has been of diminishing concern for some time now. But for me, a frequent visitor to the Church of the Nativity, it is the discourtesy of its recent uninvited guests that symbolizes especially powerfully how small a role Christians now play at the axis of Christian history

In the years immediately following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, it was commonplace for otherwise knowledgeable Americans to look askance at the continuing skirmishes between native Palestinians and newly arrived Jews, and to wonder why the two groups couldn't simply settle their differences in a Christian manner. Now, our country, puffed up with Christian pride, can think of little more to do but hurl broadsides at both sides to settle things --- or else. There is a good reason for both Palestinians and Israelis to respond with the kind of impudent question every child learns at recess on school playgrounds: "or else what?"

Certainly, it is naïve to suppose that Palestinian-Israeli conflicts in Bethlehem, and anywhere else in the Holy Land, are readily amenable to Christian wisdom. Actually, it is little short of preposterous to think so. We Christians, whose example Muslims and Jews now are somehow supposed to follow, stand in a tradition that includes taking back the Holy Land from Muslims by force, in the name of a Christian Jihad, and leaving a whole generation of Jews to an evil regime bent on nothing less than their total extermination. In the light of what we have ourselves stood for in the past, our present protests against Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and against Palestinian suicide bombers in Jewish cities, are significantly lacking in moral force.

Whatever moral force we Christians can ever hope to regain with Palestinians and Jews can be regained only if we become more willing --- much more willing than we have so far showed ourselves to be --- to insist on less and listen to more from those struggling to live together in almost impossible circumstances. Perhaps the single most important thing that happened in the Church of the Nativity during its recent captivity was the hospitality shown more often than less by Christians caught on the church grounds and unable to escape. My guess is that God approved their kneeling before wounded Palestinians to offer food even more than he did their kneeling before his son's birthplace.

Images Of The Family: Ours And God's

Though family structures in our society continue to change rapidly and radically (does anyone any longer know what an "intact family" is?), several fantasies of family life still captivate us, no matter how unrealistic they may be. One is that families are islands of safety and comfort in an increasingly bleak and barren, if not threatening and violent world. In this fantasy, home is an always welcoming, always peaceful place of return from weary, workaday life, soothing us after the day's confrontations at the office, on the streets, in the classroom, with disinterested peers and hostile strangers, and on the bottom of deteriorating infra-structures.

Another fantasy is that families are endlessly renewable sources of energy for approaching life in a playful spirit, like entertainment centers positioned as close to wet bars as design considerations permit, like campgrounds that beckon fun-seekers of all ages all the year around, and like circuses in which no one ever tires of cotton candy, ice cream, and daredevil displays. In this fantasy, families that play together stay together, fun is what goes and comes around, and the waves that some members make never capsize other members' boats.

Finally, there is the fantasy that families are open systems of consistent and honest feed-back between warm and loving kinfolk who enjoy one another and have only each other's best interests at heart. In this fantasy, family reunions are like bellying up to the bar at Cheers, "where everybody knows your name," or like delightedly sitting on the floor in an encounter group and being cradled in the fuzzy warmth of others' graciously tendered self-revelations.

Far from being islands of safety, however, many families are seething cauldrons of criticism and abuse. Far from being rollicking playgrounds, many families are joyless wastelands of indifference and neglect. Far from being loops of never-ending positive feedback, many families are static-filled conduits of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust. One of the reasons that so many people are wondering about whether there is any hope for the institution of the family is that their hopes are built on clinging to fantasies about family life in spite of all the evidence which undermines them. When facts demand that they give up the fantasies, they give up hope, too.

Together, the three small fantasies just described point to one much larger one, a Master Fantasy if you will, that families should not rest content providing us with what we need in order to help us to get on in life. Instead, they should sacrifice themselves in order to provide us with everything that we want --- so that we will not have to make a life for ourselves at all. Life under this Master Fantasy is truly tragic. Conflict, covert and overt, is the real story of every family relationship dominated by the fantasy; deep down, each family member blames someone else for making life less than it is supposed to be; and no one truly believes that anything and anyone can change for the better. This Master Fantasy, and all the little ones besides, we are better off without.

Does God dwell in fantasies about human families? I doubt it. Does God have hope for families? I am certain of it. For God has not left us clueless about what his own image of the family might be. To me, one of his most valuable clues is in the letter to the congregation at Ephesus, specifically at Ephesians 2:19: "You are members of God's household." All of us, the writer is telling us, are part of a larger whole, larger than our nuclear and extended families, and larger even than the family which is humankind itself. We are already approved and initiated, full-fledged, lifetime-and-beyond members of the family of God.

What can this mean for us, as we seek greater fulfillment as families? Primarily, that as members of God's family first and foremost, we have a higher loyalty than just to our own families and to making them into refuges, carnivals, and therapy groups. The loyalty that God asks from us, as his children, is a loyalty to building each other up to care about and to serve the needs of others, as he cares about us and sent his son to die for us. For as long as a family's interests remain self-centered only, for that long will that family's quality of life continue to deteriorate. For as long as family members look beyond their own interests, and ask what they can do, together, to make God's world better for everyone, for that long will their bonds become stronger and healthier.

Leroy's Plan

In 1974, shortly after Nancy and I came to FUMCR with our two daughters in tow, I offered my first course to the adult membership, on prayer. It went well enough to encourage the staff to ask for more from me, and I kept offering Bible and theology courses there and elsewhere. Since that time, my life has been constantly enriched by teaching some of the liveliest, most inquiring, and most caring laymen and laywomen any minister could hope to meet anywhere.

And the work goes on, this time in a new format, a column that focuses on how we can relate faith and theology to the important issues with which every Christian struggles, sooner or later, in everyday life. The first few columns will deal with issues that I think warrant our thinking about, together. After these, the next columns will address topics that you also identify as you take the time to contact me. My hope is that the columns, your e-mail reactions, and my personal responses back, will generate the kind of spirited conversation that I have grown used to by working with so many of you in face-to-face situations.

In all of my teaching, both at Perkins School of Theology and in local congregations, what I have tried most to do is to offer a way of studying and thinking hard about what faith is, as faith is illumined by the scriptures, the Christian tradition as a whole, human experience, and reasoned inquiry. The single most important question that I keep asking myself is: how can we best bring the insights and the power of our faith to bear upon the decisions that we as Christians regularly must make about living as God wants us to live in the world? Over the years, it has been a constant source of gratification to encounter increasing numbers of people willing to ask this same question, who are as impatient as I am with ill-considered, superficial, or overly dogmatic answers to it.

At this stage of my ministry and life, one thing about the Christian faith is especially clear to me: God's work in the world is more encompassing, and sometimes more mysterious, than our finite understanding of things can often express adequately. Words, symbols, creeds, and doctrines are but finite and imperfect means of representing what is infinite and perfect. Together, they are like clouded glass through which we can see the things of God only dimly (1Cor.13:12). Until we see God face to face, however, they are all we have. As such, they deserve to be handled respectfully and tenderly, and with compassion toward everyone who seeks God's truth with their help. For surely it is better to see only partially than not to see at all.

In the columns to come, the work that I will be striving to accomplish bears a strong resemblance to the work of washing windows. Its aim is to keep the glass upon which we are so dependent for seeing God's truth as clear and as polished as my finite abilities and imperfect understanding will allow. A lot of what I will be doing to this end will take the form of wiping away grit and grime that constantly accumulates from the gusts of poorly conceived, badly thought out, and downright false teachings that break over our lives like dangerous tropical storms. Along with the spiritual ammonia, I also plan to bring the corrective lenses of the scriptures and the history of Christian thought to our attempts to see things more clearly as Christians, acknowledging at every step of the way that in this life our knowledge of God's world, and all that God is doing in it, is less something we possess, and more something for which we hope.

Years ago, a former student of mine wrote me a note of appreciation, closing it with a phrase I have never forgotten: Thinking Christianly, Don. Grammatically, I suppose, Don's parting words do not constitute a shining example of English usage at its best. Theologically, though, Don has it right. Loving God with all our mind is not primarily a matter of having and entertaining a lot of thoughts, even well-formed and convincing thoughts. It has to do more with engaging in a never-ending process of thinking, a process so infused with faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ that when we are engaged in it we really can describe ourselves as thinking Christian-ly. Please accept this column as an invitation to think "Christianly" with me.