Winning One For The Grinch

For teachers in the Plano School District, the last days of school before this year's holiday break became more dangerous than even their most watchful administrators could have imagined. Apparently, metal detectors were taking care of the guns and knives pretty well, but candy cane pens almost got through to some of the kids, and may still.

Why the fuss over a nicely decorated school supply? Because the pens in question (a) carried an explicitly Christian message and (b) were to be distributed at a class holiday party and not where stuff like this is supposed to be left, for students to pick up as they choose. The parents of the child carrying the contraband were reported to be "heartbroken" that public schools are becoming God-less places, at Christmas and at other times besides, and a conservative Christian outfit that calls itself the Liberty Legal Institute is challenging the District's grinchiness on First Amendment grounds.

Since this school district only recently coughed up $400,000 to settle another free speech lawsuit, it is probably fair to surmise that its leaders have a lot of work ahead getting school policy written up right. Somehow, existing policy statements are not doing what they are supposed to do. And there will continue to be trouble in the Model City if Plano citizens are left as much in the dark as they may be now about witnessing to their faith in a religiously pluralistic school community.

In the meantime, an eight-year-old boy was all of a sudden put in a very vulnerable position, having to spread the word of Christianity on behalf of his conscientiously religious parents long before he is able to make a decision of faith on his own. And he was supposed to do it surrounded by weary school personnel facing one lawsuit if they caved on the issue, and another if they didn't. My guess is that the grown-ups in this otherwise very silly scenario will all be able to take care of themselves. I am less sure that the child will.

And so, what I've been praying for these past few days is that, somehow, frightened teachers and administrators will still be able to nurture this little guy toward an age-appropriate understanding of what James Madison, et.al., were really fighting for over 200 years ago. It wasn't for the right to drop a testimony of faith on the desks of a captive audience --- especially of innocent children --- or to slip something religious into their hands when they weren't looking. Nor was it for the right of parents to make their children do their own religious bidding.

It is easy for Christians to wax nostalgic at this season of the year about nativity scenes long gone from city squares, carols long unsung in school classrooms, and prayers long silenced at civic events. It is pleasant to remember growing up among people who permitted, encouraged, and enjoyed all three. What made it all possible, though, was the silent suffering of the small handfuls of other folks in our communities whose religious orientations were not permitted to count. Empowering their descendents is worth soft pedaling the Christmas cheer --- and de-religifying the candy cane pens --- any day.

Not too long ago, I found myself in a fairly heated conversation with a good Christian friend about Islamic Fundamentalism, and the stridency with which the movement proclaims the sovereignty of Allah over all of human history. What got my friend's blood pressure up was his fear that these guys were going to start pushing the "Koh-Ran" into everybody's face whether they liked it or not. My own systolic rate took a leap for the worse as I tried to convince my friend that Fundamentalist extremists speak for the Muslim world no more accurately than they do for the Christian. He was not convinced on that particular point, but he did acknowledge something important nevertheless. He admitted that he might be a little off center condemning the Muslims while insisting that we ought to reinstate Bible reading every morning over our schools' intercoms.

By all present indications, the Plano candy cane caper may not be sorted out anytime soon. Whatever the final outcome may be, though, there will still be a little boy out there who deserves to experience the joy of faith and of Christmas on his own terms, and not just on those of his parents and his school district. Merry Christmas, Jonathan, and a pen-less one to the rest of you, too.

Beliefs Worth Doubting

When David Letterman rolls out his latest Top Ten List, our laugh meters can approach overload. Savvy preachers know this, too; the device is a great way to reign in their congregations' fretting about the week's frustrations and failures, and to help them tune in to God's better ways of handling them.

Lately, I have been working on another kind of Top Ten List, far less entertaining, but maybe at least a little bit enlightening. I am not nearly as good at this sort of thing as Letterman is, and as a lot of my preacher friends are, so I am starting slowly. What follows, therefore, is an abbreviated first draft: a Top Six List of beliefs that as a Christian you might be better off without, or at least qualifying somewhat. I'll get to the other four later, maybe.

Trust in God, and all good things will come to you. I wonder how this squares with the experiences of a lot of people who recently lost their homes to the Southern California fires. Most of them, of course, are insured, and a lot of them are pretty well off besides, so maybe God is just teaching them a lesson about conspicuous consumption --- in this case, perhaps, of land that should have remained unsettled --- without imposing a forbiddingly high net cost. As a warning, perhaps? If this sounds credible to you, call me and we can talk about a few other choice acres I would like to sell you near San Diego.

You have to forgive those who wrong you. Genuine forgiveness reflects choice, not obligation. It is something freely given, not compelled. While it is certainly better in the long run to forgive than to hold onto our grievances, letting the grievances go before we are ready to be reconciled with an offender or enemy will not help our spirituality very much. It might help to look at the issue from God's side. For instance, does he have to forgive us? Hardly. Does God choose to forgive us? In Christ, he has told us that he does. And he invites us to do likewise. But we always have the (God-given!) right to decide whether or not to accept the invitation.

The Lord is coming again, soon. If you hang loose on how soon is "soon" anyway, you can't go too far wrong on this one. Usually, though, hanging that loose is more like hanging by a thread. It has been a really, really long time since Jesus ascended into heaven, you know. Most truly spiritual people have long since been investing themselves in a lot of other godly things besides just waiting around, or sending frightening e-mails about the latest doomsday prophecy.

God helps those who help themselves. I am sure that this is partly true. Taking care of ourselves can free up the energy of people who love us to provide care for others in greater need. I seriously doubt, though, that God has no concern for what people who do help themselves are helping themselves to. (Enron execs: your day is coming, and not only in court.) The really big problem with this affirmation, though, comes with its usually unstated word, "only," as in: God helps only those who help themselves. What is most wonderful about God is that he helps those who cannot help themselves, for example, sinners like us who can never justify their existence before Him.

Jesus is our guide, example and friend. Well, to quote another friend, two out of three ain't bad. "Guide" suggests that though we still have to travel uncharted spiritual terrain ourselves, we will not have to travel it alone. "Friend" might be a bit cozy as an image for a saving relationship with God's only Son (even though Jesus himself seems to have used it) it still gets much closer to the truth than "Judge" does. "Example," though, simply will not do. Unless, by way of other kinds of examples, being celibate and being at enmity with your family is God's will for all of us.

This land is your land, this land is my land. I suppose so, although especially around Thanksgiving time I begin to get bothered all over again about how we acquired title to it and over how much conscripted labor it has taken to manage a lot of it. Indians, Africans, child laborers, legal and illegal immigrants --- in some respects there is not a whole lot of difference between them. The difference, that is, that they make to God. Sometimes it has been very hard for us as their exploiters to remember that this is their land, too. Saying this enough, and with enough conviction, just might make the cranberry sauce taste even sweeter this year.

Marriage and the Constitution

Who among the Founding Fathers would have ever thought that some day we might draft an amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman only? But with the recent ruling of Massachusetts' highest court, to the effect that same-sex couples must be accorded the right to marry, we may not be far from doing just this. For those who find the possibility of same-sex marriages repugnant, amending the Constitution may be the only way to preserve what most people in this country believe marriage is at its core.

If the chaotic state of Texas' own Constitution is any indication, however, solving major questions of social policy by amending constitutions should be a much more serious business than it all too often is. Last resort approaches are rarely helpful as opening gambits. Unless the highly reactive quality of much current thinking about same-sex unions improves, we are not likely to generate a very edifying discussion and debate about what marriage is and isn't, whatever may be the outcome of efforts to make it finally a constitutional issue.

Consider, for example, the nearly hysterical outcry of Supreme Court Justice Scalia when anti-sodomy laws were recently overturned by his court. He fulminated that the very fabric of society was being rent asunder by our failure to hold up committed heterosexual relationships as the norm. But both divorce and adultery statistics make plain that for decades now, a large segment of our society has failed to abide by this norm, almost to the extent that Judge Scalia's fellow Catholics are failing to abide by their church's bans on the use of contraceptives. Are the errant behaviors merely signs of sinfulness, or are they, perhaps, more of an indicator that many people nowadays actually believe something quite different from what they say they believe?

Consider also the principal pattern of reasoning that is shaping most of the current arguments against same-sex unions: God has created us male and female, and intends for us to create heterosexual and not homosexual unions. No biblically-informed Jew, Christian, or Muslim would disagree with this reading of the first two chapters of The Book of Genesis. But therein lies the rub: a religious justification for a social policy of a society pledged never to force religious ideas or practices upon its citizenry. Maybe revising the Constitution is, after all, the only way around this consideration. But before we get there, maybe we ought to try opposing same-sex unions on other than religious grounds. Are there any other grounds?

Jews and Muslims will have to weigh in on the question of same-sex unions from their own respective backgrounds. As a Christian, though, I find it a pretty weighty consideration how selective most of us are in applying our Bible to questions of human sexuality. For example, certain biblical texts are slam dunks against the approval of gay and lesbian sex. But even more biblical texts are slam dunks against divorce. If we appeal to the Bible to deny same-sex partners the legal rights we grant to their heterosexual counterparts, it would seem highly dubious not to apply the same standard to the divorced in our midst (who outnumber gays and lesbians exponentially, and probably always will.)

There may be fellow Christians out there who are still prepared to put divorced people in the dock, and keep them there. I just haven't met any, for a very long time. Just as I haven't met anyone lately who argues that the failure to "be fruitful and multiply" invalidates a marriage as marriage. Or who say that you can get divorced but that you can't get married again. Once upon a time a lot of people did say stuff like this. Why am I not running across them anymore? Most likely because we are all operating under the assumption that as a rule book for today, the Bible needs some work, and that as a whole, the Bible serves us better as a narrative of grace and mercy than as a rule book anyway. Where we are going wrong is in not applying this very fruitful premise to all of the issues of human sexuality with which we must deal today, homosexuality included.

Maybe those in our society who approach the gay rights questions from a secular, ethical point of view more than a religious one are already up and ready to move the rest of us forward to a responsible resolution of the newly emerging debate on same-sex marriage. But I doubt it. A constitutional solution? Perhaps. A lot more thinking and deliberating in an atmosphere of mutual respect? Now that's the ticket.

Trusting Our Doubts

After turning in grades at the end of a term, most seminary faculty members subject themselves to the usually humbling task of reading their students' course evaluations. Once, while I was reading my own sets, a colleague walked into my office and silently laid on my desk a copy of a letter that was signed and attached to one evaluation form. It was from a student he had previously described as someone he had not gotten through to at all. Now, in a somewhat awed tone of voice he said, "Well, he sure got through to me."

I picked up the letter to read it, and found especially interesting its next to last paragraph:

Professor, you made a bigger difference than you could possibly know by showing me how to raise responsible questions about things we thought we were never supposed to doubt. When you first started doing that, I truly believed you were a man of no faith. Then, I began to see that it was your very faith that was pushing you, and us, to raise the questions in the first place. I guess the difference between you and me is this: My faith was so weak I couldn't allow myself to question anything; you believe in God so strongly that you can question everything.

I commented to my colleague that the last sentence would make quite an epitaph for him someday. He replied with a smile, "I'm putting it in my last will and testament today."

Because the student who wrote this moving letter was also one of my own advisees, I knew something of his spiritual pilgrimage, and the toll it took on relationships with fellow Christians less hospitable than he to questioning and doubting official church teaching. In his community of faith, to doubt is to sin, the only atonement for which is to deny, rather than to work through, the doubt. Forgiveness of this particular sin always includes the admonition to go and doubt no more.

Most people I know who experience full blown crises of doubt would very much like to doubt no more. The problem is that they cannot simply will their doubts away. They need to be able to counter them with reasoned arguments, precisely what believe-it-or-else types are either unwilling or unable to put forward (or both.) A former parishioner of mine, very doctrinaire about what being a Christian involves, once told me that we should not even think about trying to answer a doubter or an unbeliever. All we would accomplish, he said, would be to give credibility to his erroneous thinking.

Not everyone, of course, must wrestle as my advisee did with a church tradition inimical to raising questions and thinking hard about what we are to believe as Christians. Some people grow up in churches hostile to the very idea of tradition itself. Imagine what it is like for them to be trapped in classes presided over by old geezers like my colleague and me, forced to listen for hours on end to historical overviews of normative Christian doctrines. Having had it up to here with all that, another advisee of mine once laid his fury on me full blast: There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about the trinitarian controversies that could possibly have relevance for anybody today. I don't mind mucking around in mythology like this, but it surely is crucial to know that it's mythology and not truth.

Many Christians are every bit as certain of their theological liberalism as my former parishioner is of his proudly vaunted conservatism. One thing both they and he hold in common is an antipathy to taking seriously any questions raised from standpoints different from their own. Another is an unconquerable certitude that their beliefs are the right ones and that people who differ from them deserve only their contempt. A major lesson to be learned from these anecdotes is that conservative Christians hold no monopoly on closed-mindedness. (Read much feminist theology lately?)

In today's churches, questioning and doubting have fallen on bad times. Both conservatives and liberals act like they have taken doubt-shots to make sure they escape the infection. I know a better serum for them all. It is stored in the introduction to Paul Tillich's great book, The Protestant Era. Among the many helpful things that Tillich wrote in that introduction, the best was his suggestion that just as we are justified (pardoned) by a gracious God in our sins, we also justified (made acceptable) in God's sight in our doubts.

One Nation "Under God"

Recently, at a meeting attended by a number of public school teachers and administrators, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by muffing the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. While everybody around me was still on "under God," I was already racing ahead to extol the virtues of liberty and justice for all. One of my table partners took great delight in wondering out loud just what kind of a minister I was, anyway.

In truth, messing up the God reference is the way it usually goes for me. Maybe I would get it right if I said the Pledge often enough. But it still would not be easy. For just when they were putting in the "under God" phrase for the first time, I was finishing up my twelfth year of public school saying the Pledge the old way, without mentioning Him at all. My relative indifference to the addition probably has a lot to do with my having gotten along pretty well without it for so long.

The Cold War context for this particular alteration of the Pledge ought to arouse at least a modest suspicion that many of our leaders back then were seriously confused about the scope of God's presence in human history. In specific, they were saying in 1954, whether it is to freedom's shores or to the Pearly Gates, no communists need apply. This kind of Amateur Night theology was still drawing crowds thirty years later, when another ever so faithful President self-righteously condemned the whole of a foreign government as an "Evil Empire." Never mind that more than a few of its citizens were risking everything to worship surreptitiously in supposedly banned Orthodox churches.

It is hard to find fault with a general notion that every nation should aspire to conduct itself as if before the judgment seat of God. The trouble begins when we try to get specific about what the notion implies for a country's legal system, its foreign policy, and its vision for humankind's future. A lot of people in our own country take in the strictest literal sense the Pledge's reference to one nation under God: our nation, and ours alone. But a lot of people in other countries put a quite different spin on the affirmation: their congeries of nations, under their God.

Now that the Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance is permissible under our Constitution, it is likely that we will be hearing a good bit about a peculiar anomaly in our system of government that we do not think about as often as we should. It is that citizens who want to worship their nations' God rather than our nation's God have the "unalienable" right to do so --- by virtue of our belief that the right is God given! Are you keeping up with me on this?

It is difficult to imagine that the constitutional question before us can even be addressed, much less answered, without probing as deeply as we can both the mind of the Founding Fathers and the mindlessness of anti-Communist demagogues, in order to understand better whom they had in mind when they spoke of God. The former seem to have been praising the Maker of the Heavens and the Earth. The latter seem to have been bowing down before a tribal deity who got a bad case of heartburn from reading Hegel, Engels, and Marx. I think I can learn to recite "under God" without further stumbling if I can be sure that it is the first kind of God we are talking about. If the Pledge is about the second kind of God, I will invoke my constitutional right to remain silent while others recite it aloud, and trust that they will not think me any less loyal to our country for doing so.

After all this particular wrangling about religion in American life is over, we may very well be left with the old form of the Pledge of Allegiance, rather than the post-1954 one. Would we be the worse off for it? I doubt it. Frankly, though, I think I would have a hard time grasping how the reference to God in our present Pledge violates the spirit of a constitutional system whose liberties it ensures are so unambiguously attributed to the will of the Deity. Just as hard a time as my atheist fellow citizen --- the man who got all this started --- should have grasping how it is indeed God who is the source both of his right and his capacity to disbelieve.

Infidels

Branding practitioners of other faiths as unbelievers is hardly a new thing. People have been doing it for millennia, and their successors will continue the tradition for as long as human beings still occupy the planet. (Which may not be too long.) It is a rather effective recruitment strategy, but only if you think conversions forced by shaming or by the sword are as good as conversions elicited by changed hearts. Personally, I doubt that God counts the former kind as worth much.

Although branding someone an infidel is pretty sick, we could do worse. Names do hurt people, but not as much as sticks, stones, and terrorist bombs do. And it may not be all bad for Christians to be on the receiving end, for a change, of other true believers' religious slander. Remember the pious words about freeing the Holy Land from the infidels? For all the centuries the flap went on, who the real infidels were became increasingly difficult to determine. One thing is certain: by the end, fewer infidels were staying out of the Holy Land than were pilgrimaging into it.

As early as the end of the first century, Christian churches were caricaturing people in terms of those who are with them and those who are against them. Consider, for example, an especially purple passage from First John: Anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ is nothing but a liar. He is the antichrist, for he denies both the Father and the Son: to deny the Son is to be without the Father; to acknowledge the Son is to have the Father too.(2:22-23) Apparently, what influenced the writer's florid language was a much simpler statement from the Fourth Gospel, no one comes to the Father except by me. (John 14:6)

Statements like these abound in the New Testament. And they are not very encouraging of serious thought. Action, not thought, is what they call for: get Jesus front and center in your life, now. And reaction is what they threaten: prepare yourself for our wrath, and for God's, if you don't. What especially interests me about this kind of language is that it was hurled at people within the Christian fold as vehemently as it was at people beyond it. Why? The standard answer to this question is that believers were falling by the wayside and needed an attitude adjustment. In this regard, The Book of Revelation may be the most effective get-your-head-screwed-back-on-right book ever written.

This "falling by the wayside" interpretation is worth another look. As I understand the first century evidence, what really seemed to be jerking a lot of church leaders' chains was not that people were denying Jesus as their savior. It was that they were giving more thanks to God for their salvation through Jesus, than they were to Jesus as their God. Making salvation dependent upon acknowledging Jesus alone as humanity's savior became the official corrective to this undesired state of affairs. The result was to make condemnation of people as infidels much easier. Here we go again. We are saved by works and not grace after all, this time by the work of saying the right things about Jesus.

Ironically, Jesus' own words said far more about God than they did about himself.

When I was in seminary, one of my responsibilities in the church I served was to keep the outside bulletin board interesting to passers-by. My first morning on the job, the senior pastor handed me the keys to it while telling me what not to put up behind the glass. My predecessor, he said, once filled it with a startling invitation: Hey, People! Come to Jesus, or Go to Hell! Today, all we have to do is substitute Allah for Jesus in a second formula like this, and religion's potential for bringing about world destruction suddenly stares us right in the face.

Jesus' Way or No Way, then, is certainly one way to understand the Christian witness of faith. Worth studying also, however, is why a lot of unnamed fellow believers in the first century saw the matter a little differently. The many hints in the canonical texts about what they were like are intriguing. One hint is that although they were surely grateful that God had sent His son to them, it was God's own gracious work in Christ that was central to them. Celebrating the work itself seems to have been more important to them than fixating on the name of the one through whom it was initiated.

What Christian infidelity really is, these early witnesses may have discovered, is substituting God's message bearer for God's message, letting a perfect embodiment of the message long ago get us off the hook of striving to be that embodiment ourselves, in the here and now.

Anger in the Bible

A lot of good Christians have been brought up on the not so good notion that anger is a sin. Not surprisingly, they struggle not only with their angry feelings, but also with guilt about having the feelings in the first place. Things usually go better when they get a sense of what the Bible as a whole says about anger and discover that having it isn't something to feel guilty about.

The really big text for Christians on the subject has always been Matthew 5:22. This is the passage that the greatest teachers in the church keep coming back to in their own sermons and discourses on the subject. My favorite version of the New Testament, the Revised English, translates the verse this way: "Anyone who nurses anger against his brother must be brought to justice." The REB's distinctive reference to "nursing" anger is delicious. But how it expresses the main point is more problematic: don't be angry --- ever. All of the most widely used modern translations of the New Testament concur with this reading of Matthew 5:22.

My own thinking about anger has been influenced by a quite different rendering of this verse, that of the old King James Bible: "whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause is in danger of the judgment." The underlining is mine. Only rarely do I go with the KJV in order to decide questions of substantial import for faith. (Style is another matter; only the REB comes even close on this front.) But here is one time that it makes sense to depart from all the up-to-date translations of Matthew 5:22, and to follow the KJV's lead instead. Why? Because otherwise we will be left with a message allegedly from Jesus that simply cannot be his. Let me put the point in the sharpest possible way: Jesus cannot have condemned unconditionally any and all forms of anger.

Of all the newer translations of the New Testament --- that in most places are indeed more accurate than the KJV --- only one even hints that there might be any problem translating this particular Matthean passage. And that one (The New English Bible) buries its acknowledgement in an easily missed footnote: "Some witnesses insert without good cause." Indeed they do. From a long time back. And these witnesses have had a far more profound influence on Christian preaching and teaching about anger than have those which leave us with a Jesus who flogs us for every angry feeling, thought, or deed, no matter how fleeting or inconsequential.

The decision that modern translators have made about rendering Matthew 5:22 minus the "without good cause" clause is generally based upon a prior assumption that certain fourth century manuscripts of the New Testament are better than others and that therefore we should follow those consistently, no matter what. The problem with this otherwise helpful rule of thumb is that it can leave us with a rendering of a particular teaching of Jesus that is impossible to reconcile with what we know of the whole of Jesus' witness. This is certainly what has happened in the case of Jesus' so-called words on anger. Come under judgment for being angry at all? We are supposed to take these words from a man who got angry enough to call people fools, whited sepulchers, serpents and vipers (Matthew 23:19, 27,33), and to lay waste the Temple courtyard in a fit of righteous pique?

For Christians who feel guilt over feeling angry, there is a lot at stake in what we make of the quite different renderings of Matthew 5:22 in the ancient New Testament manuscripts from which we are always having to choose. One rendering locks you right into your guilt and grinds you into the dust with an impossible to fulfill command never, ever to get angry. The other tells you to direct your anger to the right cause.

How do we decide between the two? By comparing both with the whole witness of the Bible on the subject. Probably you've already noticed that the Bible is really a very angry book. The God who inspired it comes across in it as chronically hacked off, as do the prophets who speak for Him. What are they mad about? Primarily, about us. They are angry about our failures to live as we say we are going to live, and even more importantly, they are angry about our failures to show unconditional grace, mercy, and love in God's name to everyone we meet. When we get angry about these failings, rather than about our failures to get what we think we deserve every minute of a wasted life, then the Kingdom will be a lot closer than it is now.

REB is the Revised English Bible from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1989

One-Issue Religion

Only rarely have I finished teaching a Bible or theology course without at least one class member challenging the soundness of either my mind, my faith, my character, or all three. And this is how it should be. From at least as early as the writing of Ephesians, the Christian community has been dealing with all sorts of "cunning rogues and their deceitful schemes"(4:14), from whom people both need and deserve to be protected. First John says that we must "test the spirits, to see whether they are from God; for there are many false prophets about in the world."( 4:1)

I think I have passed muster on a fair number of the challenges that fellow Christians love to conjure up for us academic types. There is one kind of challenge, though, that gets me almost every time. It comes in the form of a test of faith with only one question. The one question must be answered with either a yes or a no; it has only one correct answer, and the test is graded either pass or fail. "Pass-Fail" also means "In or Out." Get the answer right and you're in the company of true believers; get it wrong and you're gone.

Just so you'll know, there are more than a few one-question tests that I used to fumble pretty badly, to the amusement and sometimes to the derision of their administrators: Sir, do you believe in the virgin birth? That abortion is a sin? That Jesus is God? That the Bible is infallible? That homosexuals have a place in the church? That non-Christians can be saved? The fumbling comes from my wanting to add a "But" and an "And" to all my yes or no answers. The only permissible answers to test questions like these, though, are no-ifs-ands-or-buts ones.

There are two things about "tests" like these that every believer should find especially distasteful. One is the presumptuousness of those doing the asking that they have the right to make a final determination about the genuineness of another's faith. The other is their presumption that only one question will do the job anyway. Answer just this one question correctly and you're in; miss it and you're out. All of a sudden, political correctness is raised to a transcendental level: where we come out on one and only one issue determines our worthiness for the Kingdom.

Some time ago, I decided to quit subjecting myself to tests like these, no matter how sincerely my hearers laid them on me. I am still open to having my mental functioning, faith, and character checked on a regular basis, and I am still as interested in the results as I am those of my latest blood tests. But like complete blood counts, reliable tests of faith measure a whole lot of things and not just one, and what they uncover is often subject to more than one interpretation and predictive of more than one outcome. Answers to questions about what we should and should not believe as Christians are more trustworthy when they are prefaced by "on the one hand…and/but on the other…"

Most people I know who are knowledgeable about how our system of government is supposed to work lament the deformation of our current political rhetoric into tunnel-vision pleadings for single causes --- prescription drugs for seniors, abortion rights, affirmative action, redistricting, campaign spending reform, tax cuts, defensive wars, universal health coverage, tariffs, or whatever. Putting our best thinking into dealing comprehensively with all of these concerns together is not very marketable these days. We would rather keep a watchful eye out for what each politician has to say about our own favorite issue and then choose up sides with the one who does what we want on only that issue. And we are supposed to have something to contribute to a future democracy in Iraq?

Unfortunately, one-issue mentality is rampant in the church, too. Demand allegiance to the doctrinal fundamentals, or else. Sit looser on requirements for belief, or else. Bless and ordain gays and lesbians, or we'll walk. Do either and we'll run. Make room for other religions, or go away. Take Christ as your personal savior, or go to hell. As louder and louder salvos fire back and forth across wider and wider divides, the cries of people desperate for food, clothing, shelter, safety, community, and meaning still sound in the distance, but unheard. I'm not sure that God's world has the time any longer for one-issue wars within either our country or our churches.

Be Careful Where You Put The Ten Commandments

Two years ago, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore dedicated a monument to the Ten Commandments that has since been displayed prominently in the state judicial building. Now, his colleagues on the bench say that the monument has to go, at least from the building's rotunda. His Honor professes to be expressing the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment to our country's Constitution permits. But fellow judges regard his actions as amounting to the establishment of religion, which the First Amendment prohibits.

The way our system works, only judges can finally decide (a) whether an issue like this one is a constitutional issue at all, and (b) if it is, just what the Constitution does and does not say about it. The rest of us, however, can have opinions about both. And a lot of us do. My own began with chagrin that Judge Moore has been taken seriously by anyone as a defender of everyone else's faith. Of all the people who should know better, he tells us with a straight face that a 5,000 pound granite monument to a specific religious tradition, sitting in a federal building, isn't an in-your-face insult to a society committed to religious liberty for all.

Putting the best face on it, what the recently suspended Judge Moore is trying to do is call our attention to the place that the Judaeo-Christian tradition occupies in American history and life. Is this a problem? Of course it is. Part of the problem is with where and how the Judge wants to drop his testimony: at the courthouse rather than in our classrooms and churches. More importantly, it is with his obliviousness to what freedom of religion must mean for a religiously pluralistic society. Pretty clearly, Judge Moore is about the business of elevating one religious tradition in this country above all the others.

For the Judge and his ardent supporters, the indispensable foundation of morality, ethics, and the law is belief in God. "Let's get this straight," he has been quoted as saying, "It's about the acknowledgement of God." Without the superstructure that such a belief provides, he and his fellow believers hold, all three become mere human contrivances whose truth is relative only to the cultures that think them up.

I once heard an eminent Protestant pulpiteer put it this way: When you take "God" out of "Good," all you're left with is a zero. At the time, I thought that his remark fell somewhere between the howlingly funny and the reprehensibly facile. I still do. Human beings can be moral, ethical, and lawful whatever they may or may not believe about God. And they can be none of the above while professing a strong belief in God with all the verbal eloquence of which dissembling people are all too often capable.

Contrary to Judge Moore's certitude, if we are forced to honor the roots of Western law by compressing them into one form or another of a Decalogue, then we are going to encounter difficulties that more thoughtful believers will not be able to resolve easily. For one thing, we will have to decide on exactly which version of the Big Ten we are to go with. Personally, I prefer Deuteronomy over Exodus on the matter, but not everyone will agree. Next, we will have to try to figure out what each commandment meant for its own day before we can get very far figuring out what it implies for ours. Merely citing a prohibition against killing, for example, gets us about as far in determining punishment for capital offenses as it does in formulating foreign policy: nowhere.

And then, of course, there is the matter of how Jesus weighed in on the Decalogue. Apparently, just two commandments were enough for him. It might even be that he wasn't thinking primarily of commandments at all. The so-called "Love Commandment" doesn't look very much like just another externally imposed rule for behavior. It looks much more like the image of an inward virtue, of the sort the ancient prophet Jeremiah seemed to have in mind: I shall set my law within them, writing it on their hearts…For representing this kind of law, granite seems hardly the best medium.

However the situation in the Alabama judicial building is finally resolved, at least two ironies in it should prove memorable. First, a hard-shell Fundamentalist Christian jeopardizes his tenure on the federal bench by defending a tradition of Jewish legalism that Jesus himself staunchly opposed. And second, some of the most ardent supporters of memorializing this tradition the Judge's way belong to a denomination that includes people who are convinced that God does not hear the prayers of Jews anyway.

A Gay Bishop, for Heaven's Sake

A little over a year ago, this column began with an invitation to think "Christianly" about issues of importance to the life of faith. The point of the invitation was, and is, to emphasize that how we think as Christians is at least as important as what we think, and that if we keep this distinction clearly in mind, we will have a lot fewer decidedly unChristian wrangles in the church about who is and who isn't a real Christian.

There is probably no issue before church members today that needs approaching in this spirit more than the issue of this present column. Unless you've been on a space station, you probably know that bishops of the Episcopal Church recently elected their first "openly" gay colleague. ( I always find this qualifier intriguing.) The vote was 62 to 43 in favor. It would seem that the Rev. Gene Robinson had a good bit more success in his election than President Bush did in his. But then again, maybe not. To my knowledge, nobody has fled the country over the latter. More than a few Episcopalians may flee their church over the former.

With all due respect to a church in which I have no standing, I would like to express a hope that they won't pull out, that their faithfulness to the Anglican Communion will weigh more heavily than their distress over feeling that some of their leaders have compromised either the sanctity of the sexual relationship, the truth of scripture, the integrity of the Christian witness to the world, or all three. About their feelings, I have nothing but respect. About the premises upon which at least some of their feelings are based, however, I have some doubts.

The sanctity of the sexual relationship? Father Robinson, we have been told, has been in a committed relationship for 13 years. His ex-wife does not believe that it disqualifies him to be either a priest or a bishop. His daughter attended the House of Bishops meeting with him. By contrast, if television offerings these days are any indication, heterosexual marriages are beginning with contests, surviving with the help of adultery, and terminating with irreconcilable differences, permanent resentments, and uncontrollable impulses to start the sordid process all over again.

The truth of scripture? The jury of biblical scholars is still out on the extent to which the Bible as a whole (the "as a whole" here is crucial) condemns gays and lesbian behavior. The verdict has long been in on whether the Bible as a whole condemns gay and lesbian people: it doesn't. These same observations are pertinent to what the Bible also says about divorce. If being gay is incompatible with being a bishop, isn't being divorced a disqualifier also? Looking to the Bible for an easy answer to one question often makes getting any answer to another one much more difficult.

The integrity of the Christian witness? It is hard for me to see much integrity in putting the proclamation of laws and rules above the offer of grace and love. Sometimes I am more Pauline than I like to admit: laws and rules do sink us in hopelessness and spiritual death rather than raise us to joy and eternal life. Whether in the world of business or the transcendent environment of grace, Peter Principles get us nowhere.

On the gay bishop question, I have to think that our Lord's focus would have been more on what kind of a man Father Robinson is all the way around, and less on his partner of choice. What would have interested Jesus especially was the last minute set of allegations about the Reverend's knowledge of a porn site link and pattern of touching people inappropriately. I think Jesus would have been especially gratified to hear that the allegations had no merit.

I am not sure that Bishop Stanton of Dallas chose the right time to go into his closet to pray about his church. Perhaps he could have attended the next day's session and stayed in prayer there, while participating in other orders of business. But I am with him on recognizing Episcopalians' need to be in prayer over what lies ahead for their church. It will be good for other Christians to pray over it, too. Father Robinson's election to the episcopacy will have lasting consequences for all churches, not just Anglican ones.

What I will be praying for especially is that the mind of some of our churches, already made up too soon on both sides of the gay-lesbian issue in general, can still be open to the mind of Christ, as Christ continues to disclose it to us. Care to join me?

No-Growth Churches

It is startling to consider that 80% of Christian congregations in this country may be either stagnant or declining in their membership. I use "may" in order to keep open the possibility that the available statistics have a flaw or two in them, but I sincerely doubt that they do. Apparently, a lot of church leaders today share my doubt. They have shifted, not so subtly, their principal criterion for assessing growth away from adding members and toward increasing worship attendance.

This shift is not all bad, though. Evangelism has been too tightly associated with getting more names on rolls and pledge lists. Literally, the word means sharing the good news from God in Jesus Christ, and worship services provide a rich context for doing just this. The problem is that no-growth congregations usually conduct worship services in just the ways that large numbers of outsiders do not find attractive.

No-growth congregations do other things that are equally effective at promoting decline, not always in numbers but almost always in vitality. Typically, they put all of the "doing church" eggs in just three baskets: getting people to come to worship, getting people to come to Sunday School, and getting people to come to programs. And almost always, the people gathered in these baskets are only their own "kind," economically, ethnically, and culturally.

What's missing in this strategy? For one thing, new converts to the faith. For another, pluralism. Even more, mission and outreach. Some people believe that emphasizing the last will take care of the first two. I am not so sure. Growing up, I was blessed to be in a congregation that decided to spend as much on others as it did on itself, and that constantly worried over whether they were still doing enough. For all that, however, the congregation remained a homogeneous group whose new members came in mostly by transfer from other congregations and denominations.

One way to reverse a no-growth situation is to expand the facilities. The underlying assumption, often correct, is that if you build more, more will come. Another way is to learn more about people in the surrounding community and to serve them better without asking things from them in return. I cannot find any good reason why both approaches should not work side by side. The fact of the matter is, however, that most no-growth congregations opt for the first approach to alter their situation, and never quite manage to get around to the second. As do churches starting from scratch. As soon as possible, they acquire vast tracts of land as far away from congested inner cities and town centers as possible, and then wait for people who can afford it to move out to them.

The campuses of so many mega-churches are especially inviting to people who look and act like their hosts, in the cars they drive (going to church by bus? subway? on foot? Are you kidding?), the music they applaud (17^th and 18^th century chorales, please), and the tidiness they demand all over the acreage. Herein, I think, lies the biggest problem with many churches' approaches to expansion. They replicate only themselves by their additions. They don't want to do this, at least from what their leaders say. But they still go ahead and build facilities too fancy for most of the people they leave behind, people who desperately need what just their magnificent new facilities can provide.

Two things worry me especially about fancy church buildings. One is the power they hold to make a lot of people feel unworthy to enter them. Probably, like a lot of Dr. Phil's subjects these days, I am carrying a lot of emotional baggage about stuff like this. I know that I get anxious when I'm sitting in a den that looks larger than our own house and that contains too many pricey things to permit easy passage from its sofas to its bay windows.

The other thing that worries me is that fanciness often outstrips our abilities to pay for it, whether in our homes, office buildings, or in our sanctuaries Most expansionists know this going in. They count on large influxes of new families (single parents don't count for much) to help with the large new bills.

Don't get me wrong. All other things being equal, I think good facilities make for effective ministry. The real ministry, though, only begins in the facilities. It comes to fruition apart from them. Certainly that was true for Jesus. One time he said that the Son of Man did not even have a place to rest his head. But that was okay, I think. He was too busy to sleep much, anyway.

Disease as Metaphor

A distant but genuine second to enjoying a meal with my wife is enjoying a meal with a book. The other day, I took a rather somber book to lunch with me and noticed raised eyebrows from the restaurant's manager as I pushed my tray to the cashier's station. With a twinkle in his eye, he queried, "A little light reading, huh?"

The book was written by Sherwin B. Nuland, a noted surgeon and historian of medicine at Yale. Its title is what caught the attention of the lunch crowd: How We Die. I'm on at least my third reading of it. For one thing, it helps me sound more knowledgeable than I really am when I get into discussions on the golf course with my medical ethicist playing partners.

Over this particular lunch and reading, what especially caught my eye were two passages in the author's discussion of cancer. Brace yourself.

Cancer, he wrote, is a foe "berserk with a malicious exuberance of killing. The disease pursues a continuous, uninhibited, circumferential, barn-burning expedition of destructiveness, in which it heeds no rules, follows no commands, and explodes all resistance in a homicidal riot of devastation. Its cells behave like the members of a barbarian horde run amok --- leaderless and undirected, but with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach."

A couple of pages later, the author offers a second lurid metaphor: "A cluster of malignant cells is a disorganized autonomous mob of maladjusted adolescents, raging against the society from which it sprang. It is a street gang intent on mayhem."

What Dr. Nuland had been searching for were metaphors by which to make the insidiousness of cancer more readily understood and respected. What I started searching for was a way to use his depiction of cancer as a metaphor for insidious processes in present-day society that we tend to deny as much as we tend to overlook early warning signs of cancer in our bodies.

Of all the worrisome things going on in our country these days, three ought to be throwing us, as Americans, into panic, and as Christians, into crises of conscience. One is the widening economic gap between those among us who are getting richer and those who are getting poorer. It would seem that this gap is no respecter of ethnicity, gender, or age. Parts of our economy are like a rising tide all right, but not the kind that raises all the other boats. They're more like a tidal wave in which most boats get sunk.

The second is our outrageously disproportionate consumption of the rest of the world's resources. It would seem that the consuming is no respecter of anybody else's needs, wants, or rights, but is an admirer of our power to grab things, anywhere, before they are gone. There's really enough for everyone out there? In your dreams. Be sure to get yours first.

The third is the squandering of our children's future --- and their children's --- for the sake of maintaining a standard of living enjoyed by only a few in the present generation. It would seem that the rush to spend now is no respecter of political party, ideology, or family values. Tax more and spend more; tax less and spend even more. Is there any real difference?

Running amok, plundering, bringing about mayhem --- yep, that's just about got it.

Alexis de Tocqueville's greatest fear about democracy in America, about which he wrote in the 1830's, was that our spirit of individualism would lay waste to our spirit of cooperativeness and community. What he could not have envisioned was that the process by which the disease would spread --- e.g., through uncontrolled self-assertion, paranoid perception of others as competitors only, ruthless exploitation of anyone and everyone capable of doing our bidding, and terminal addiction to adrenaline and endorphins --- would be very much like a cancer. Having already failed to prevent the disease, we may also be beyond the point of cure. And there are not many societies around the world willing to provide us hospice care.

Over the years, I've pastored a lot of people struggling with cancers of the body. Most of them coped better with the disease, even though they did not recover from it, when they were surrounded with folks who loved them. Maybe there is a metaphor here, too. What if we could surround our social malignancies with a renewed love for our country as a commonwealth of equally important, mutually respectful and supportive individuals with a commitment to the integrity of the whole that matches commitment to the well-being of the parts? Then, we would no longer be restricted to palliative care for a dying democracy. We would be on the track of curing it.

Hope you had a happy Fourth.

Christian Marriage Today: The Promise

It is little wonder that the institution of marriage, even among Christians, is in trouble these days. Too many people want too many good things out of marriage relationships, whether in their first, second, or however many. And too many people put too little of themselves into any of them.

When neither partner is contributing, an end to marital frustrations is often just around the corner, at the courthouse. When one partner is contributing and the other isn't, an end to the misery may not be in sight at all. The one won't get out, and the other won't get in.

A lot marriage counselors insist that whatever happens in a marriage happens because of what both partners do and do not do, not just one or the other. I've never thought much of this dogma. Consider adultery, for example, or abuse, by one partner and not the other. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know: the victimized partner usually can do at least something to de-motivate the other's wayward behaviors. But does this mean that the victimized partner should somehow share the blame? I know a lot of genuine victims of bad marriages who continue to think so. I don't agree with them. And neither should their victimizing spouses, the best of whom are now former spouses.

Most marital problems start with at least one partner's selfishness, disguised adroitly during courtship. Unless, of course, the mating rituals are public affairs on "Reality TV." (This latter should become the primary definition of "oxymoron.") The unstated Declaration of Intent goes like this: I want what I want when I want it, and I am marrying you to give it to me. What begins in selfishness ends in hopelessness --- I will never get what I want from you and I will never be able to give you what you want from me. To love and to cherish? To crave and to criticize is more like it.

Over against this rather curmudgeonly assessment of marriage today still stands, proudly, a Christian perspective that continues to offer a great deal of encouragement --- realistic encouragement --- about the future of marriage, on the far side of premature commitments made in the absence of either maturity, character, or both. Here are three encouragers that I think are worth every genuinely committed couple's taking to the altar.

(1) From a Christian perspective, it makes sense for couples to keep on trusting that each partner in marriage can and will receive acceptance and support as an individual with needs and wants that are worthy of both partners' respect. Why? Because the cherishing of individuality is at the very center of God's love. We only have to experience just a little of it coming from God to want to give a lot of it to our partners, whom he loves more perfectly than we ever can.

(2) From a Christian perspective, it makes sense for couples to keep on risking that faithful and warm companionship is a better bet than fleeting and hot adventure, no matter what society says about always keeping our fires burning, at home and everywhere else. Why? Because the kind of life that our excitement-centered, in-the-present society offers its adrenalin-addicted members can only be an affront to God's call to partnership with him in tending the creation caringly. Keeping the juices flowing in the privacy of our bedrooms is good. Breaking bread around our family tables, and with strangers beyond our doors, is even better.

(3) From a Christian perspective, it makes sense for couples to keep on planning for a meaningful future that will outlast them, through their children, their contributions, and their prayers. Why? Because the future that is finally in God's hands is also a future which God invites us to help him bring about, joyfully. The real "War on Terrorism" is indeed jihad, in the Q'uran's major use of the word as an inner struggle of the soul. It is a struggle against the terror of the future that self-centeredness never fails to enflame, and other-centeredness never fails to extinguish.

Traditionally understood, marriage bears humanity's hopes for the continuity of the generations and the stability of society. Today, the marriage relationship revolves more around the happiness of the partners in it. Both understandings are valid and important. To them we can add a third. Hearth and home, and the bedroom at their center, are places to practice grateful love in a way that leads to a greater lovingkindness toward and in all. More even than children, the real "fruits" of marriage are the qualities of character by which couples give of themselves not only to each other, but also and especially to God's least and lost.

Christian Marriage Today: The Reality

It's quite a privilege to stand at a chancel rail or altar and watch the couple you've just married walk jauntily down the aisle toward the joy-filled reception that awaits only the completion of the picture-taking. And there I was again, standing, listening to the recessional music and watching the exiting, musing some more about where the church has come in its understanding of marriage, and of how that understanding is so fully embodied in the liturgy I just read. What got to me especially that time was how important the Declaration of Intent now is in all our wedding services --- the "Will you…I will" --- after which alone the ceremonies get under way in earnest.

Today, the foundation of any marriage relationship under Christian auspices is understood to be the informed consent of the couple. Bonds arranged, forged, or coerced by someone else --- parents, tribes, overlords, or whomever --- may be legal, binding, permanent, satisfying, and fruitful, but they simply aren't marriages. When in the marriage service itself I ask my couples to declare publicly their intention "to enter into union with one another," I am also lifting up for all of us to see what transforms just a relationship into a marriage. It isn't what I say or do (e.g. "I pronounce/announce that…"), or what anyone else says or does (e.g., "Who gives this woman to be married…"). It's what the intended themselves do. The couple creates the marriage; except for the legalities, the rest of us are only supportive witnesses.

What a man and a woman join together all on their own, however, that same man and woman can "put asunder" just about anytime they please. And they do. Though it is misleading to keep on purveying the apocalyptic message that half of all marriages will end in divorce, it is certainly true that too many of them will. And one of the big reasons why they will is that we put the whole burden of making it in marriage upon the couples themselves. If it feels good, we seem to be saying to them, do it; and if it doesn't, don't do it any longer.

For all of the re-writing of its liturgies that the church is so fond of doing, traditional meanings still seem to have a way of surviving the best intentions of with-it revisionists to get everything into up-to-date, easy-to-understand language. Thank God we still have these words, for example, invading the otherwise too-precious moments of the exchange of rings: "these rings are the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, signifying to us the union between Christ and his Church." They are not just a sign of the couple's mutual promises to each other, and they are not just a sign of the marriage relation itself. They are a sign of a more perfect union than any we on earth can create, to which our marriages are intended to be a witness.

Pretty heady stuff. For people with pretty strong hearts, full of love not just for their spouses, but for all "to whom love is a stranger." (Sometimes, liturgical re-writes get it right!) I think what this means is that much more is involved in every marriage relationship than only the couple's fulfillment and only the production and nurture of offspring. Intimacy, mutual happiness, and fruitfulness are not ends in themselves. Pauline theology got the idea, but put it very badly. For Paul and a lot of church tradition, the primary purpose of marriage is to contain our lustful preoccupations in this life so that we can go about the proper business of preparing ourselves for the next. Or in other words, according to the (unmarried) saint: Better to marry than to burn. Actually, it is this idea itself that makes me burn. Far better to put it this way, as our current liturgy does: in our marriages, we learn how to become "generous friends" to all of God's creatures.

By this time in the festivities, the ushers were returning to the front pews to begin escorting parents and grandparents out. Before lining up for my picture with my newly married friends, I had just enough time to pay quiet lip service to the thoroughly but exclusively modern notion that marriage is one more of the many voluntary associations that will enhance my couple's quality of life together. I'm glad they came together, not just eagerly, but willingly. What I continue to hope for them is that they also experience the wonder of being in a truly sacramental relationship, one which makes present to others not only their own love, but God's.

Christian Marriage Today: The Fantasies

Even though June weddings do not dominate local church calendars the way they once did (church weddings are now spread out more evenly across the year), I still find myself thinking about marriage more often in June than in most other months. This year, I've decided to think out loud, or more precisely, through the keyboard. The result will be three columns, this one and the next two. A warning: it might take still another June or two before my keyboard will let me quit harping on the subject.

Not long ago, starting a traditional marriage was an idea very much out of favor. Swinging experimentalism suggested that permanent relationships were heading straightaway toward extinction. The high divorce rate was scaring a lot of otherwise faithful couples off. (It's still too high, but at least it has leveled out.) For both men and women, getting a good purchase on separate careers made a lot more sense than getting a good rate on a joint mortgage. And living together first, ostensibly to get all the kinks worked out before closing the deal for good, often became just one more way of substituting unconventionality for commitment.

And now? Experimentation and exploration are proving dangerous and wearying. Rather than feeling more creative and genuinely intimate, a lot of people are feeling more anxious and lonely than ever. A while back, one high-wire, thirty-something friend said it well: I finally reached the conclusion that anything would be better than living this way, even getting married.

I wonder. In spite of some new-found interest in the old ways of marriage, many of the best and brightest among us are still clinging to expectations of what marriage should be that border on sheerest fantasy. For example, I continue to be regaled with pictures of marriage as the best compensation available for life's many hardships, such as money shortages, job losses, frequent moves, illness, and all around unhappiness in general. Or with naïve couples' eager anticipation of all that having children will do to make their lives less frustrating and more enhancing. Or, with romantic tales from the age of chivalry --- and their anti-matter versions from the afternoon soaps --- of preserving the quality of first love forever in a relationship in which each partner's every emotional need will be met perfectly.

Certainly, couples can become more resilient in their relationships by confronting hardships, but as a general rule, hardships are real bummers in adding zest to marriages. As are children, particularly too many of them too soon. Once, the fact that children were economic assets was all that couples needed to get busy being fruitful and multiplying. Today, children are major economic liabilities for all couples, and emotional ones also for those not mature enough to share love easily instead of demanding love greedily. Kids draw shamelessly on the emotional capital of their parents, particularly of parents already stressed out over their marriages and their lives.

The fantasy that the state of falling in love is a state that will last forever is a real humdinger of a fantasy, so much so that the very medievals who conjured it up knew better than to believe it. Back then, being beside yourself with feelings for another was confined to a partner not available either for intimacy or marriage. As the tale of Tristan and Isolde and lots of others like it cautioned, if you consummate a relationship fraught with longings like this, both you and your lover will surely die. Sadly, though, endless ecstasy remains a marriage ideal, and the predictable failure to achieve it overwhelms many lovers with disappointment, anger, and eventually, despair.

It is little wonder, really, that marriage relationships have been so volatile in recent generations. After all, what marriage could possibly fulfill the impossible expectations that many partners continue to hold for it? For all this, however, people continue to yearn for a quality of intimacy that holds out realistic hope of overcoming epidemic loneliness and meaninglessness rife in the competitive, consumption-oriented, winner-and-loser society we grandiosely offer the world as our crowning accomplishment and legacy.

And so, an even bigger question for all of us in the church: might the understanding of marriage that our tradition mediates have something after all to say to men and women who are looking desperately for more in marriage today? Our faith's answer to this question is a resounding Yes! In the next two columns, I'd like to share some thoughts about why the somber facts of marital instability and collapse that hit us in the face almost daily do not have to dissuade us from proclaiming this answer loudly and confidently.

Democracy as a World Mission

It is reassuring that experts on Iraq are questioning whether ensuring open elections is the best way to begin rebuilding the country. A lot of other things must happen first, especially along the lines of building an infrastructure with the kinds of checks and balances that have proved indispensable to democracy's successes world-wide.

The checks and balances recommended by our own Founding Fathers rightly presupposed that left to their own devices, most people will subordinate the public good to their own self-interest, and therefore need a system that makes it difficult for any one person, group, or arm of government to gain inordinate power over the others. You just can't trust anybody for very long, not our legislators, courts, and presidents, and not Iraq's tribal chiefs, her clergy, or even her people en masse. If there is ever going to be a strong democracy in Iraq, it will be because the Iraqi people learn to protect themselves from each other while still working together for the common good.

This rather somber assessment of human nature goes all the way back to Plato's late dialogue on the Laws. It is also solidly grounded in the Christian tradition, from Paul through Augustine all the way to Calvin and beyond. It is ironic, of course, that Calvin in particular, who of all theologians should have known better, set up a theocracy in Geneva, apparently excusing himself and his closest associates from the consequences of the original sin he taught about so well.

Even more ironic than Calvin's Geneva is the idea of a democratic nation imposing on a ruined dictatorship, as an alternative to a theocracy, a political system whose premises reflect an unashamedly Christian understanding of human existence in the world. It worries me what might happen when more of our leaders wake up to this idea. President Bush, of course, already gets it and is asking us, in effect, so what's to worry? For him, disseminating democracy to the ends of the earth does not seem to be all that much different from carrying out Jesus' Great Commission to take the gospel to everyone. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are very large differences between the two. It won't work to demand --- and here I borrow some words from a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. --- that all the different factions in Iraq simply sit down and work out their differences like good Christians.

If democracy in Iraq is to be something better than rule by random majorities, we are being told, the process of creating it will require will power, a lot of time and money, and the patience to cope with unanticipated dangers at every step. The primary reason given is that democracy is inimical to the history and mind-set of Middle Eastern peoples. I think the work ahead is going to be difficult for a different reason: as managers of the process, we do not now seem disposed to maintain a sufficient amount of mistrust toward either the Iraqis or ourselves.

What is especially striking about Iraq right now is the degree to which its various constituencies arrogate evils of every sort to people who are not like them, and reserve claims of righteousness only for themselves. In a word, they are especially adept at projecting onto others what they refuse to acknowledge in themselves. It's going to be a rough go persuading people to accept a checks and balances system of government who are unwilling to concede that anyone else might need some protection against them.

And what of mistrusting ourselves? We seem bent on creating a new Iraq in our own image, without factoring in all there is about our image that may not be worth perpetuating. Our greedy consumption of the world's resources, for example. Or our assumption of a Messianic role toward just about all the world's peoples. It's going to be a rough go granting Iraqis the major responsibility in rebuilding their own nation when we are unwilling to concede that they might need some protection from us.

It's hard to determine just how close the Mizpah of Genesis 31:49, whether it was a pillar, a town, or both, might have been to places we have been hearing about recently in Iraq. The covenant that Jacob and Laban entered into there, though, is very close indeed to the heart of the issues both we and the Iraquis must face in planning the country's future, together. The KJV got the meaning just right: "The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another." Otherwise, Laban's daughters, and the boundaries between the two mens' territories, will be perpetually at risk! Now that's the kind of thinking that may just get us somewhere after all.

The Judas Complex

Most mental health researchers I know believe strongly (a) that there are more psychological disorders out there than diagnostic manuals currently define, and (b) that the next revisions of their manuals will lift up more rather than fewer ways to get and stay distressed. (B) is a sure thing. (A) is less certain, although I for one have an addition to propose, should any of the editors ever be of a mind to listen.

My proposed addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ---offered with tongue slightly in cheek, I call a "Judas Complex." The source of the name is not the infamous Judas Iscariot, but rather all those in the Christian tradition who have contributed to making him so. St. Augustine, for example, characterized the biblical Judas as the embodiment of everything reprehensible about the Jewish people as a people. By contrast, to the very end Jesus embraced Judas as one of his chosen Twelve. Clearly, Augustine suffered from my newly discovered disorder. Judas himself, and Jesus, did not.

For the sake of enhancing my respectability in the mental health community, I will describe the Judas Complex after the fashion of approved diagnostic manuals. The defining characteristics of this complex are: (1) An unassailable conviction of being part of a noble plan for making everyone else's life better; (2) Acute moral outrage over the failure of others either to appreciate the wisdom of the plan, to support the plan vigorously, or both; (3) Relentless blaming of someone else for even the smallest failure(s) of the noble plan; (4) Consistently describing the party or parties blamed in the worst possible light, most frequently for the purpose of inciting retaliation by the plan's remaining advocates; (5) Evoking the name of Satan in the interest of explaining the offensive behavior of the blamed party or parties; and (6) Exhibiting intense negative reactions to considering that there might be some likeness between the subject of the disorder and Judas Iscariot himself, e.g.: "Surely you do not mean me!"(Mark 14:19).

Analogous with the relatively high incidence of sickle cell anemia in the black population, the relatively prominent presentation of the Judas Complex among Christians has led some theologians to suggest something along the lines of a genetic predisposition to the disorder. Generally, theologians who find this suggestion fruitful also exhibit a strong interest in some form of the doctrine of original sin. Along with vehement denial of the disorder altogether, a particularly strong indicator of its presence in practicing Christians is the disclaiming of responsibility for it on the ground that is part of the unalterable order of nature itself.

Analogous with the resistance to treatment prominent in the major personality disorders, the Judas Complex is more easily adjusted to than it is resolved or dissolved. What seems to offer the most consistent palliative help is a ready supply of people to denigrate, oppress, and in extreme forms, even to exterminate. Virulent Christian anti-Semitism seems to be an especially cogent illustration of how people afflicted with the disorder can assuage guilt feelings by projecting personal wrongdoings on others.

This is about the best that I can do to get my new idea about a mental disorder heard in the therapeutic community. And I have no illusions about what is likely to happen there: we are going to be told about a number of new mental disorders, but the one I have just defined probably will not be among them. That's okay. It is the Christian community that most needs to hear about it anyway.

Within our churches, the most evident feature of this complex is scapegoating: If it weren't for…everything would be all right. On this score, the real Judas got a bum rap from the very start. Caiaphas' henchmen wouldn't have been able to find Jesus without Judas' help? Are you kidding me? What really gets interesting about what happened to this man is who put the finger on him in the first place. Actually, it had to be quite an assortment of people: former followers who joined the procession up the Mount of Olives to arrest him; the Eleven companions who barely woke up in time to see the Lord hauled off for trial; the crowds who were supposed to riot over the Messiah's being put to death and never did. How convenient a money-grubbing Judas turned out for all of them.

And for us, too? Perhaps --- if the guilt we feel for failing our Lord in our own lives becomes too much for us either to bear or to accept responsibility for. If Matthew has it right, Judas couldn't handle his own guilt feelings, and hanged himself to be freed from them. Sometimes I think that his death was in its own way as tragic as Jesus' was. For even at the moment of his being given over, Jesus still could call his betrayer "Friend." (Matthew 26:50) Only a few hours later, Jesus would die for Judas, too. When I "survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died," I just can't keep holding onto my own Judas Complex. Thanks be to God.

A Better Way To Deal With Sadness

In Love Among the Ruins, a novel set in the aftermath of the Kennedy era, Robert Clark depicts a conversation between Edward, a pharmaceuticals representative, and a favorite client, Dr. Fields. They are talking about a highly promising new drug for treating depression. "I think that's the coming thing…," the wise old doctor says. "Stress followed by despair…feeings of worthlessness, torpor, anomie, flat-out nothingness." Edward then asks, "So the Age of…what, Anxiety's over?" Dr. Fields replies, "Superceded. At least some time soon. By the Age of Black Bile, of Acedia…spiritual sloth…despair."

Dr. Fields was prophetic. For the first half of the 20^th century --- as poets, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even politicians all knew well --- the big life-issues revolved around coping with a cascade of fears. Sexual repression, wars (hot and cold), economic collapse, genocide, and a nuclear arms race will do that to you. And the Age of Anxiety isn't completely over. Enron, WorldCom, orange alerts, ineffective antibiotics, and duct tape shortages are making sure. "Superceded," though? A good way of putting it. The "coming thing" has indeed come, and dwelling just on our fears won't help us very much to cope with it.

The signs? For one thing, the failed hopes that underlie collapsed marriages. Our country enjoys the dubious honor of sustaining one of the highest divorce rates in the history of civilization; some experts say it's the highest. For another, the rising tide of suicide among kids in their teens and even younger. And then there's all that cacophony that attempts to pass for music, pounding the last vestiges of sensibility and understanding out of traumatized ears and brains. Not enough? Then, add the desperate efforts to escape despair that are at the root of our society's alcohol and drug problems, as well as of our impossible-to-win "War on Drugs." (Maybe we shouldn't get too distraught over the latter; after all, we didn't win the war on poverty either.)

What Bunyan famously referred to as "the slough of despond," Dr. Fields might have described as a deep and abiding sadness over losses too numerous to enumerate, too important to discount, and too searing fully to heal. For this kind of sadness, it will make little difference whether the relief sought comes from bars, the street, or chem labs. And this is what is really sad about sadness: how easy it is to confuse curing it with medicating it.

A great deal of human sadness, rooted in what Judith Viorst once called "necessary losses," is in fact curable in very ordinary ways. For the losses that give rise to it are themselves very ordinary, even if painful, losses. They have to do with basic human needs, e.g., for food, clothing, shelter, companionship, emotional support, and credible reassurance that things can and do get better. Mapping how to get these needs met is not like mapping the genome. What we do, to get enough of what we need, or recover enough of what we have lost, is put up a fuss (hungry newborns are especially adept at this), and work together to overcome our mutual frustrations (newborns are not very good at this, which is why it is a good thing to grow up.)

It is hard to get through life without at least some sadness, because putting up a fuss sometimes falls on deaf ears, or merely provokes whoever we hope will help us to put up a fuss of their own. This is the kind of sadness that Freud called "ordinary human unhappiness" (in contrast with "neurotic misery"). I like this way of putting it, and I imagine that Dr. Fields did too. When the frustrations go deep enough, and last long enough, medicating the sadness might help temporarily. Sooner or later, though, we will still have to summon the resources within us to get angry again, to be hopeful that help is available, and to make ourselves available to be of help to someone else. Caring about ourselves and others is still the best Rx for sadness around.

There is a kind of sadness, though, that is hard to treat this way. Medicating it doesn't work very well either. It's the sadness that comes from discovering the aw(e)ful gap between our aspirations and our accomplishments, our noble ideals and our petulant actions, our promises and our delivery --- between what we ought to make so, can make so, and actually do make so. Here's something really to be sad about. We will never get through this particular slough just by howling, snorting, sipping, or doing-for. The only thing that will really help is forgiveness.

Shock and Awe

We may never know just how shocked and awed the Iraqi regime was the first night we bombed Baghdad. It's pretty clear, though, that most everyone else was, a whole lot. My own experience of shock and awe was not over the number of nightly sorties we launched, or over the variety of bombs and missiles we put into each of them. Nor was it over the total amount of damage we inflicted. What quickly became overwhelming to me was our capacity for precision targeting of the destruction we can do, whenever and for whatever reason we choose to do it.

To be sure, there are a lot of positives about the capacity to fine tune our acts of aggression and our defensive responses to others'. One is that its exercise can help us to keep harm inflicted upon innocent people to a minimum. Another is that it can help us to think longer and harder about how we respond to perceived threats to our security, instead of acting indiscriminately, from some combination of fear and rage, before doing much thinking at all.

With all due respect to accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, however, especially in a time of war, the downsides of the capacity to inflict harm in precisely calibrated doses are popping up all over the place. Exercising it has already moved the taking down of a nation's center of order and governance from the category of a reprehensible strategy of terrorists to that of an obligatory strategy of duly constituted, sovereign states. It has already diminished the will and patience of our own leaders to continue seeking nonviolent alternatives to disarming Iraq, and probably other rogue regimes as well. The capacity is like the capacity to relish liquor, sex, and drugs too much. Exercising the capacity to savor power, coercion, and control too much can put at risk other peoples' health as well as our own.

On July 26, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico, under the direction of the world renowned physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the detritus with which the explosion filled the sky, Oppenheimer impulsively chanted some terrifying words from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." The context of this passage, as Oppenheimer knew only too well, has made its words profoundly disturbing across hundreds of generations: Prince Arjuna's chariot driver is revealing himself as God. For Christians, it should be supremely ironic that the name of the Alamogordo test site was Trinity.

The Nuclear Age that officially began on that day seduces us with the promise of enhancing human well-being everywhere by the peaceful uses of previously unimagined power, and at the same time horrifies us with vivid reminders that this same power can extinguish all life on our planet. What we have had most especially to fear is the ever-present possibility that once released, nuclear weapons would follow a trajectory of death on their own, freed from the hands and the buttons that sent them on their way. In such a scenario, there will be no victors, only a holocaust --- or Armageddon, perhaps --- of carnage and death, of destruction remedied at best only with the passage of time measured geologically.

Before the first week of the War on Iraq was over, our world's situation may have been changed permanently. Certainly it was changed dramatically. Along with a Doomsday scenario that can still be set into motion anytime by crazed world leaders with too easy access to red phones, codes, and mindlessly obedient intermediaries, we now have pressing up against us an armamentarium of devices by which we can impose our will on others selectively, but no less decisively, for purposes readily obscured in the language of double-speak and double-dealing ("national interest," perhaps?), but always for our own self-aggrandizement.

Hopefully, we can bring an end to this present war without having to confront something that is really scary: our "smart" bombs may turn out to be smarter than we are. If this proves so, then we will have to learn to be more fearful of ourselves than we have ever had to be of our weapons. In this light, it may be more important than we have yet imagined to take a second look at a disturbing text from our own scriptures: "When the Lord saw how great was the wickedness of human beings on earth, and how their every thought and inclination were always wicked, he bitterly regretted that he had made mankind on earth."

Robert Oppenheimer felt greater shock and awe in the presence of the Bhagavad-Gita than he did when he observed the world's first nuclear explosion. Genesis 6:5,6 just might be enough to do it for us.

The Kingdom And The Neighborhood

In my grief over the death of Fred Rogers, I have been thinking about the Kingdom of God a lot. Perhaps it is because he was not only a dear personal friend, but a friend in Christ who with great gentleness and powerful integrity has helped me over the years to glimpse just a little better what this Kingdom is all about. The outpouring of love that his dying has occasioned is staggering, but not surprising. It has been wonderful being in the Neighborhood together, and being reminded over and over again by his words and beautiful face that we are indeed special, just the way we are. Fred could keep on saying this with confidence and love because he knew that it is God who is making it so.

The first three Gospels present Jesus' core message with astonishing succinctness: the Kingdom of God is at hand. (cf. Mark 1:14) Jesus preached and taught a lot more than this, of course, but it is striking how consistently Matthew, Mark, and Luke kept coming back to this way of expressing the heart of it all. The Kingdom is all about God's incomprehensibly magnificent graciousness to us, to all of us, notwithstanding our sins and our difficulties trusting that his love is indeed all-surpassing, unconditional, never-ending, and ultimately transformative of all our defects and despair. It is God's countenance lifted toward us, his face shining on us. (Numbers 6:25,26.)

Is the Neighborhood anything like the Kingdom? Well, yes and no. Certainly Fred knew who our true King is. And he knew that the true Neighborhood is nothing less than the whole of the world that God is creating. What happens in Mister Rogers' smaller neighborhood is only a sign of what God is struggling to make happen everywhere. It's a good sign, though, for when God's work of reconciling the world does come to completion someday, the world will not only be a better neighborhood to live in; it will be everyone's very best neighborhood ever, and it will be more than just a little like Fred's. For now, though, his television visits have served more as a kind of refuge, against all the other 'Hoods' out there in which peoples' only specialness is as commodities for others' exploitation.

Like the Kingdom, the Neighborhood is both here, and yet to be. From a boat on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus told people sitting on the shore of seeds growing on patches of good soil surrounded by rocky ground, well-trodded footpaths, and choking weeds. (Matthew 13: 1-9) From a piano bench in a television studio, Fred told an interviewer of a little girl retreating to a small TV set, the volume too low for her abuser and rapist to hear, listening transfixed to songs about being special and having a true friend. Whether it is about the Kingdom or the Neighborhood, the question really is the same: can the world as we know it ever really become a place of safety, nurture, delight, and encouragement, in the midst of painful truths faced honestly by people who love each other without ceasing?

Only a few hours after Fred died, his colleagues in the television industry began airing video clips of his life and ministry. For me, the most poignant was one in which he spoke passionately about what television can and should be in our society. It reminded me of a number of conversations that he, his beloved Joanne, my own beloved Nancy, and I have shared over the years on the same subject. I couldn't help experiencing this particular clip against the backdrop of both the conversations and the painful fact that not even rapid channel surfing relieves us anymore from programs that denigrate, degrade, and deform the best that is in the human spirit.

The Kingdom of God is all around us, but in the midst of rocks, concrete, and weeds. Eventually, though, Jesus assures us, its seeds will produce crops thirtyfold, sixtyfold, even a hundredfold. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is just the next channel over from lonely and angry people vying to be their own neighbors' humiliators, falsely assuming that the only alternative is to be humiliated instead. Its creator never lost hope that the medium containing it is as capable of depicting the soul's inherent goodness as it is of exposing its wrecked possibilities.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Fred Rogers, for reminding us so many times that the Kingdom is within us as well as beyond us, and that it is within us now ---especially when we can hear over the din of other television programs his wonderfully kind voice telling us how special each of us really is.

The Pressure to Believe

Many thoughtful Christians I know --- layfolks, pastors, and bishops alike --- are feeling increasing pressure to bring or to keep their beliefs in conformity with the church's normative teaching through the centuries --- in a word, with "the faith of the apostles" --- or else. Most resist the pressure well, and some even turn the tables on their pressurers. "Judge not, lest ye be judged…" still seems to level the playing field effectively in the game of serious theologizing.

Nevertheless, pressures continue, and not always from right field. From all the way beyond shortstop to the left field stands come "who cares???" shouts --- about anything from the past imposing itself upon present day Christian life, the apostolic tradition included. To muddy the metaphors still further: whether they are sitting on the right side or the left side of the pews, people engaging in these kind of pressure tactics should know better. Insisting that Christians must hold only the "right" beliefs, or that they must hold any and all traditional beliefs in suspension, is another form of works-righteousness: its unjustifiable premise is that we are saved by what we do and do not choose to believe.

To be sure, a little pressure to get right with our faith tradition is not all bad. What people are supposed to believe as Christians is not something that the church has just made up as it has gone along. Sorting out all of the implications of the apostolic tradition for Christian living in the present has always been arduous business, deserving of attention and respect. It matters a lot, though, who does the sorting and how open they are to letting the apostolic tradition speak to us on its own terms and not theirs. The single most important discovery I keep making in my own sorting is that figuring out what the tradition does and does not demand of us is more complicated than we would like it to be.

Recently, a respected colleague in ministry, George Ricker, published a book with the winsome title, What You Don't Have To Believe To Be A Christian. It's all about the beliefs from which God has liberated us, and the rich new possibilities of understanding that constantly dawn on the horizon of reasoned, prayerful inquiry into the truth. George is one of the best read, most effective pastors that I know. He is a more than reliable guide through the morass of over-belief that is now threatening the church's vitality everywhere.

One chapter of George's book, on the Trinity, especially interested me. What we don't have to believe about this doctrine, he writes, is that it is an accurate portrayal of the inner being of God. What we can believe, instead, and still be a Christian, is that the doctrine expresses well how human beings experience God.

This seems innocent enough, until we bring to mind the many theologians who come to this same conclusion in a way quite different from the way that George does. Their standard rejection of traditional trinitarian doctrine is that it is based upon an outmoded world-view. Since the world-view doesn't square with our own, the argument goes, then we must relieve people from having to defend it, and the doctrines that go with it, anymore. I think that this ploy carries about as much validity as the doesn't-fit-must-acquit argument does in the infamous "OJ" trial. As that trial's jurors showed the whole world, though, sometimes there's just no accounting for mental lapses.

No one has ever thought that George Ricker's mind was fried, though, and he proves his intellectual mettle again in the way that he opens up fresh new inquiry about very old beliefs, without having to reject the world-view behind the Christian tradition. With respect to the Trinity, George shows us what we don't have to believe about it simply by appealing to the great variety of opinion about the doctrine contained in the Christian tradition itself.

There is an important lesson to be learned here by people ready to bludgeon fellow Christians whose faith they deem at variance with the Christian tradition. It is that the weapon with which they would slay unbelievers is more often than not only a partial, and therefore partially wrong, understanding of the very tradition which they claim to defend. In the Christian tradition as a whole, there are far more understandings of the Christian gospel than any of us could possibly become informed spokespersons for. (Has anybody really straightened it out yet what Jesus did and did not say about his next coming?) Paradoxically, this also means that our traditions contain far less that we must believe than most traditionalists seem willing to concede.

In the fullest sense of the phrase, the more's the pity.

Methodist Inquisitors

It did not take long for our Protestant ancestors to drive the Roman Catholic hierarchy right up the wall. As we are so fond of saying these days, the RC's had "had it up to here," and proceeded forthwith --- on July 21,1542 to be exact --- to crank up the languishing machinery of the Inquisition in the interest of repressing deviate opinions once and for all. If the interests of doctrinal purity were not enough to fire up people to burn their neighbors at the stake, there was the additional happy prospect of confiscating all of the heretics' properties.

These days, nobody in our churches is making much of a living out of exterminating the unorthodox. The realization that this is so, however, does not diminish some peoples' unholy passion to make the rest of us believe exactly and only what they themselves believe. What gets to me is how many Protestants seem to want a piece of this inquisitorial action. The Reformation started out with a commitment to every believer's enjoying a direct relationship with God. It may end up promoting blind loyalty to barely comprehended doctrines as a substitute for joyous celebration of gladly received grace.

What gets to me even more is that there are increasing numbers of Methodist Protestants with the same kind of Torquemada-envy that is on the rampage among Fundamentalists and Traditionalists all over the place. Recently, for example, a rowdy bunch of United Methodist clergy and laity from the North Central Jurisdiction lodged a complaint against one of the Jurisdiction's bishops, allegedly for teaching what is contrary to our denomination's Doctrinal Standards. The group wants this bishop either to renounce his teaching or resign from the episcopal office. If he does neither, then the group will insist that he be removed from the ordained ministry. These folks are only the latest group of Methodists to weigh in on the matter; this particular "firestorm," as it has been called, has been raging over half a year and shows no signs of abating.

Think about it for a minute. One bishop puts forward his best effort at theologizing, in this case at a theological seminary --- just the place where we want such things to go on. Another bishop challenges him vigorously. So far, so good. Even better, the ensuing debate went just the way our Doctrinal Standards Statement originally envisioned theological conversation to proceed in our churches: scriptural passages were flying; tradition was being re-discovered; personal experiences of belief, doubt, and unbelief were respected and given fresh articulation; and reason was put in the service of seeking new meaning in old images.

Then the trouble began. Paranoid about the "apostolic faith" slipping away before their very eyes, self-appointed arbiters of every other Methodist's faith began hurling just the kind of anathemas that have polarized and paralyzed thoughtful people in the church ever since Paul permitted non-circumcised Gentiles to become followers of The Way. Contrary to their deformed, terror-stricken vision of a church mutating into godless liberalism, the last thing the United Methodist Church needs right now is an inquisition just when our leaders finally are getting bold enough to think some original thoughts.

As someone who has taught and written about the Doctrinal Standards of the United Methodist Church, I continue to find it irritating when Methodists confuse the "marrow of Christian truth" with doctrinal utterances the assent to which they arbitrarily deem necessary for acceptance into the Christian fellowship. (At least they haven't started telling us that the assent is necessary for our salvation.) If it were not proving so destructive to Christian fellowship, the confusion would be simply laughable. Construing the content of Christian belief as right doctrine is like construing the substance of the spinal cord with the vertebrae that surround it.

It is no accident that the Christian tradition as a whole constantly refers to the doctrines of the faith as symbols. The Apostles' Creed itself was once better known as "The Old Roman Symbol." As the greatest teachers of the church have reminded us, symbols operate at many different levels at once. And at every one, the way not to understand a symbol is the way of literalism. With legalism, literalism can only draw us ever downward, finally into the realm of death. Symbols, by contrast, offer us life, if we joyfully allow them to be what they are, instead of doggedly trying to make them into something that they are not.

Going on a tear about doctrinal impurity is a far cry from lifting one's heart and voice in gratitude to the One whose presence to us on this earth must always be shrouded in mystery. Blindly upholding unexamined doctrines is no way into the mystery. The better way is to work hard, together, to let the great symbols of our faith bring the mystery closer themselves.