Lament and Hope at Year's End

It has been over two hundred years since Pastor John Fawcett wrote his winsome poem, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.” One source of the poem’s inspiration was his parishioners’ outpouring of grief as they faced losing him to a prestigious and better paying appointment. The other was his own grief, as well as his wife’s, confronting them at every turn in their preparations to move. By the time the couple stood ready to leave, they were wholly overcome. So, instead of forging ahead, they unpacked their wagon and stayed put --- for the next fifty years.

What made it impossible for the Fawcetts to abandon their congregation is captured eloquently at several places in this much beloved hymn. Between its members, Fawcett wrote, often “flows the sympathizing tear,” from pouring out prayers ardently before God, from sharing fears, hopes, comforts and cares intimately, from sustaining each another in their mutual sorrows and burdens, and from feeling as one in their common aims as Christians.

Today, when Christians “asunder part,” the “inward pain” they feel is often less the pain of grief and more the pain of anger. Why? Because instead of being “joined in heart,” they are increasingly rent by self-serving and woefully incomplete understandings of their church’s faith and mission. If members of these warring factions “hope to meet again” at all, they do so for the delight of hurling still more ill-conceived certitudes at each another, in the service more of jihad than of koinonia. If you doubt this, you cannot have been following the current “discussions” in our churches about gays and lesbians, stem cell research, maintaining peace and security, late term abortions, relations with Israel, the authority of the Bible, and the finality of Christian revelation

The current rationalization for this misguided delight is the otherwise high sounding principle that unity in the church must never be purchased by sacrificing integrity of belief. In the solemn pronouncements of this tenet, it matters little whether by “integrity of belief” is meant, at one extreme, conforming to the tenets of a particular faith tradition (e.g. Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon), or at the other, following only the dictates of individual conscience in matters of faith. From either extreme, holding fast to a false dichotomy between the integrity and the unity of belief, between sound doctrine and principled scepticism, can only undermine Jesus’ hope that all of his followers would become “perfectly one.” (John 17:23

Happily, there are still many congregations like the Fawcetts’ all across Christendom. But Christendom itself looks less like that heart-joined community at Wainsgate and more like Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain swept with confusing alarms of struggle and flight.” When Arnold wrote Dover Beach, most likely in 1851, he was mired in melancholy over a lost faith that he characterized as withdrawing from the human spirit just as powerfully as the tide recedes from the shoreline. However, his poem contains images that arouse not only a poignant sense of sadness, but also an anxious sense of unwanted combat: the darkling plain is also one on which “ignorant armies clash by night.”

Given the successes of the Christian mission in so many parts of the world in this present generation, successes that are likely to continue, there is precious little illumination still to be found in bemoaning, as Matthew Arnold did, the “long, withdrawing roar”of a credible faith. But we should not dismiss so easily the image of Christian believers as hostile combatants struggling against one another in a smotheringly dense darkness. For it is indeed like being buffeted by “the night wind, down the vast edges drear” to have the struggle to be made better by God’s grace shouted down by fellow believers for whom finding out where in the darkness we are “at” or “where we are coming from” has long since given way to telling us where we should be at and where we should be going, and daring us to make their day more spiritual by getting into mind to mind combat with them.

Despite all the theological controversies that rage across Christendom today, it is still possible for inquirers and believers alike to experience the life of faith in vital fellowships of kindred souls who share an inclusive vision of the depth and breadth of God’s power, grace, and love. Multitudes of congregations accomplish it all the time. But the “night wind” still howls, and armies of the over-believing and the overly sceptical continue to clash in seemingly willful ignorance of each other’s significance to the very One whom our faith also posits as the one, true guide of all

In the darkness and all the howling winds, though, there still shines a light that can never be put out. One early Christian tradition spoke of it fondly as a star hovering over a manger. Another equated the light with the manger’s occupant. Of all things! The blessed ties that bind us all are --- a baby’s arms. This is something really worth getting up in arms about.

Constitutionally Correct Praying

The summer following my first year in seminary, I had the privilege of serving my home church as youth director. My first day on the job, the senior pastor asked me to represent him at the City Council meeting that very afternoon, and offer the opening prayer. When I walked into the Council Chambers, the members (most of whom belonged to our congregation) greeted me both respectfully and affectionately. So, I gave them a rousing prayer on working together as an expression of gratitude to God, and returned to my seat full of myself for the contribution I had just made to the tone of the deliberations which were to follow. In spite of my contagious spirituality, however, our guys started right in on each other and hollered their way through the rest of the meeting, with enthusiasm and without shame.

If we add to this little story countless others about government meetings moving along swimmingly without the benefit of any prayers, we just might begin to wonder about the efficacy of civic prayers at all. And we might begin to question whether it is any longer worth the effort to overcome the problems of making prayer even possible in such settings. Years ago, the United States Supreme Court determined (at least, according to prevailing interpretation) that only generic prayers in governmental meetings are acceptable. More recently, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to the effect that public prayers couched in the language of specific religious traditions are flat-out unconstitutional. These are huge hurdles to overcome.

And yet, a number of local councils across the country seem undaunted in the face of them, as they cavalierly deny that Christian majorities have any obligation to accept the renderings of secular courts at all. Prayers “in Jesus’ name” are still bouncing off the walls of their meeting rooms. My guess is that at least some of these representatives’ constituencies will start taking a second look at this hard-headedness when Christians in their communities are no longer in the majority. Hopefully, they will wise up even sooner.

It is no wonder that many people now argue that it would be best for religious believers to get out of the business of praying at government meetings, period. On the face of it, there is something to be said for taking this view. Religious leaders are justifiably uncomfortable having to censor their own prayers in order that nobody gets upset at their mention of Jesus, or Amithaba, or Allah, or Whomever. And civic leaders are justifiably frustrated over having to provide opportunities for every religious tradition to contribute a prayer publically at some time or another, or having to ensure that every public prayer somehow turns out to be non-sectarian.

The American Civil Liberties Union is on record as saying that accomodating all religious traditions at meetings of governmental bodies is tantamount to abandoning the First Amendments’s articulation of a neutral stance toward religion. Further, the ACLU argues, going this route leads inevitably to discrimination against some religious traditions by leaving them out, however inadvertantly; there are simply too many of them to account for easily. However, the Rutherford Institute, a legal advocacy group for religion in society, looks at both issues differently. To the Institute, the First Amendment also prohibits actions that inhibit the free expression of religious beliefs. And the organization sees no problems with clergy from a variety of faiths being recognized by governmental bodies to offer prayers expressive of their respective traditions.

That organizations like the ACLU and the Rutherford Institute have become so involved in an issue like prayers at city council meetings should say to us that the easiest way out of the current controversies may not in fact be the best way at all. I continue to harbor doubts that being prayed over will make officials govern us any better. But our right to ask that they do just this, and to use prayer as a way of imploring divine assistance for them as they strive to do it, is something about which I have no doubt whatever, and neither does the Rutherford Institute. But the ACLU is less naïve than the Institute is about the many difficulties and dangers we must face as we express this right in ways respectful of everyone’s convictions of conscience. The Institute needs to be more forthcoming about this, even as it continues to remind us that these are the difficulties and dangers that accompany every form of honest religious expression in a pluralistic society, difficulties and dangers that every American should gladly and gratefully acknowledge.

Left Behind Liberals

For liberal Christians, things are really tough these days, up and down. They have to figure how to avoid being left behind not only when Jesus meets the elect in the air, but also when “W” re-does American society on the ground. The first prospect still can be brushed off with a closer reading of St. Paul. But not even a trashing of Alan Greenspan will make the second go away. 

The fact of the matter is that liberal Christians have been getting pretty much what they deserve of late in secular elections, and the outcome of the one Election that really counts may still be in doubt for them as well. As always, the qualifier “may” is important. For none of us should presume to think God’s thoughts for --- Him? him? Her? her? the Divine? the Transcendent? It? Now you begin to get the idea: one of our problems in the church today is that some liberal Christians can’t even complete a sentence as simple as this one.
   
A second problem is that other liberal Christians are altogether sure about language like this, but also terribly misguided about how being narrowly truthful in what we say is only rarely being broadly helpful. Alternating masculine and feminine pronouns when we refer to God? Praying to Sophia instead of to a Heavenly Father? “God Godself is with us…” Please say you are kidding when you talk like this --- please. Alas, we know you aren’t.

One of the reasons that liberal Christians can’t get to first base these days is that the way they swing their words makes striking out inevitable. Another is that they want to play the game at all only by their own rules. Home plate for liberal Christianity has always been what we can know on solid historical grounds about the life, faith, and ministry of Jesus and his early followers. But liberal theologians keep shifting the plate around, indiscriminately. Time-honored methods for discovering facts about the first century all too often get twisted in the support of ideologies that reputable historical research simply does not support.

A case in point is the recent strange turn of Mariology, in the direction of the Magdalene and away from the virgin. An affair between the former and Jesus, they say? Marriage, and even children? This Mary as the God-designated leader of the church? Her authority stolen by power-hungry male disciples? Women driven underground in the church all the way back to Paul’s time? Fiction writers like Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) are not the only ones making this stuff up. So are liberal “scholars,” whose books are selling like Starbucks coffee to … can you guess?

From the standpoint of real rather than media-driven scholarship, what lies behind these otherwise bizarre aberrations is a sequence of not-all-that-far-out conjecturing, a process of inference that is always worth respecting and encouraging, even if its results must be rejected whenever the evidence requires it. The radically-liberal school of Christian thought just described is anchored in hypotheses about which witnesses to Jesus and first-century Christianity are the earliest, and therefore the most important. (“Earliest is best” is a cardinal premise of all recent liberal theology.)

According to scholars aligned with this self-designated “Re-Imaging” wing of thought in the church, the anti-Gospels accounts of Jesus and his ministry come from sources that pre-date the Gospels themselves. Therefore, the argument goes, they deserve the first consideration in shaping the Christian story for today’s world. The problem is that hardly anybody else --- conservative or liberal ---agrees with this construction of the sources for our knowledge about early Christianity.

Basically, the most reliable sources for understanding our faith are still the books of the New Testament themselves. Yes, they are maddeningly incomplete, as a whole. And yes, we can get along without The Book of Revelation, if we have to. Jude doesn’t help all that much, either, and James may leave us with more problems that it solves. But what we most certainly do not need thrown into the mix is The Gospel of Thomas, or of Mary Magdalene, or the host of other fourth-century documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and now promoted with great fanfare.

Maybe it is because of earlier and more invidious “Red scares” in this country that mainstream liberals have for all practical purposes taken themselves out of the red zones that count right now. Shouting until you are blue in the face, rather than red, is much more acceptable. How ironic. For recovering the vital center of liberal theology, and making it an equal partner with conservative interpretations of the Christian faith, is one of the things most needed today if the church is to present a truly full-bodied, red-blooded witness to the gospel in all its fullness.

"Moral Values" and the 2004 Election

Only non-religious liberals, especially within the media, could have been surprised that “Moral Values” would become this year’s biggest voter concern. Or that John Kerry, a man of obvious moral sentiments and convictions, would thoroughly flunk a moral values test that he should have passed with honors. How did he manage to do it, anyway?

The easy answer is that the Senator’s own moral values were too far out of synch with those of a large majority of the electorate. But this answer will not get us very far. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush took pretty much the same positions on the most important issues of the campaign, such as finishing things in Iraq, protecting against terrorism, the need for health care reform, creating new jobs with better than living wages, and on at least one very “hot button” issue, gay marriage. They did drift apart on stem cell research, but nowhere near as much on abortion.

A better way to account for Senator Kerry’s being perceived as too far out on moral values is in terms of his personal disposition and temperament, in contrast with the President’s. It was not so much what values the two men held; it was the way each expressed his own. Bush was, is, and always will be loudly vocal about values; Kerry became so only after a good bit of reluctance, when it was for all practical purposes too late. Hesitance is not highly prized in our society; if you are afflicted by it, you will be better off not letting it ooze out from behind public podiums. By contrast, standing up for what you believe, with neither nuance nor doubt, will get you elected almost every time.

But we still need to go deeper. For behind the stylistic differences between Bush and Kerry were values of a quite different kind than either discussed very articulately in the campaign. These represent a kind of values that do not typically take the form of rules prohibiting and prescribing specific behaviors in highly circumscribed spheres of life, as in “no late term abortions,” “marry someone of the opposite sex only,” or “support our men and women in uniform.” Rather, they express broad principles, in the language more of aspiration than of accomplishment. As ethicists put it, the reason why these higher-order moral values are not easily translated into particular political programs, plans, and strategies is because they constitute the bases of any and all programs, plans, and strategies, political and otherwise.

What we are talking about here, as Bush One might put it, is “the vision thing” all over again, particularly the vision of a country that is always and at the same time safe and free. If America is ever to become that shining city on a hill on which the rest of the world will gaze admiringly and gratefully, it can become so only when these two overarching moral values can be maintained in comfortable balance. We are not there yet, but we have been working on it for almost 400 years now, and just about everything we have done to establish government of, by, and for the people can be viewed as one long, continuing experiment to ensure God’s promise of security and gift of liberty, together.

The operative word here is “together.” Achieving either security or freedom is never particularly difficult. But the price is always steep. Realizing only one of these values necessarily demands giving up the other. The better course is to honor both, even if it means that from time to time we choose one direction --- toward security is what the majority seem now to want --- before we shift back toward the middle ground, as circumstances permit. John Kerry lost his bid for the Presidency because he too strongly emphasized ensuring liberty before people were quite ready to go that route with him.

If liberals are to recover from their latest drubbing on the “moral values” playing field, the first thing they must do is seize the right to define themselves from the conservatives who gleefully stole it from them. Then, they must begin re-framing the terms of the next round of debate on “moral values”, by acknowledging openly that our most cherished moral values are also religious ones. And while they are working up a sweat on their side of the field, conservatives should be doing more push-ups in the end zone on the notion that ensuring both security --- their own supreme value --- and liberty --- the liberals’ strongest value --- is worth everyone’s best efforts. They would do well to consider that there are no “moral values” worth honoring on only partisan, ideological terms, whether in politics or religion.

Jews, Palestinians, And a Divided Christian Community

Recently, The Institute of Religion and Democracy began wondering whether mainstream Protestant denominations are tilting toward anti-Semitism. Four groups in particular --- Presbyterians (USA), Episcopalians, United Methodists, and Lutherans (Evangelical) --- look suspicious to the Institute, primarily for how they criticize human rights abuses world-wide, often through the World and National Councils of Churches. What arouses the suspicion is not the clearly justified criticism itself. The issue for the Institute is the disproportionate criticism of Israel by leaders of these four denominations and two Councils, in comparison with their less frequent and softer criticisms of nations such as Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Sudan.

The Institute's concern is worth a closer look. This country has for a very long time given preferential treatment to Israel in the Middle East, through both liberal and conservative administrations, and in the process has devalued Palestinians' legitimate claims to respect, land, and opportunity there. Israel's egregious violations of the Camp David accords by building settlement after settlement in the West Bank (when you see them for yourself you'll know exactly what I mean) typically arouse very little ire from our leaders. And conservative Christian churches continue to proclaim from the steeple tops Israel's never-annulled role in the salvation process itself. If, then, there is now a credible anti-Israel sentiment building in our churches, that would constitute big and important news.

Recent polling data (more reliable than what's been coming from political pollsters) shows pretty well that (a) liberal mainstream Protestants ("liberal" by their own designation) have gradually been moving away from the view that the United States should favor Israel's cause and people over those of the Palestinians, and that (b) in the process they have been arguing for stepping up criticism of Israel's violations of Palestinian rights. All this in spite of the Palestinians' own terrorism in the form of suicide bombings and incitements to violence in general.

It is interesting that liberal Protestants may now be aligning themselves more closely with the position on Israel that Roman Catholics have maintained consistently for some time. Since conservative Protestants (again, self-designated) are likely to remain more favorable to supporting Israel, the beginning of a widening division among Christians on the Arab-Israeli conflicts in general could have a growing influence on foreign policy decisions in the next administration. How the Catholic/Liberal Protestant alliance plays out against the Conservative/Fundamentalist Protestant one may have new and major effects on more Middle East strategies than just our approach to the Palestinians.

What seems to be getting most deeply under the skin of the Institute of Religion and Democracy is the dominance of liberal leadership in the mainstream Protestant denominations. The Institute is right in noting that the rank and file members of these denominations include conservatives and moderates who are less critical of Israel than their liberal counterparts are, and that their leaders have become. But the Institute is almost certainly wrong in conjecturing that liberal Protestants might become full blown anti-Semites. A closer look at what their leaders in particular have been saying makes plain that the attacks on Israel's policies and actions toward the Palestinians does not in any way come from anything like a growing hatred of the Israeli people. It comes from an urgency to hold Israelis accountable for the shocking incongruities between their purported values and their concrete actions. In essence, liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics are holding Israel to a higher standard of behavior than they are now applying to other nations, and arguing vehemently for the appropriateness of doing so.

Why? Because Israel's place in the world requires it. A nation that has known oppression, slavery, and persecution first-hand for millennia, as part of a divine plan, simply has no business imposing any of the same on those over whom it gains power, both within and beyond its borders. From at least the eighth century B.C.E., the Hebrew peoples' greatest prophets saw this with stark clarity, as they did the divine-ordained relationship between the peoples' troubles and the peoples' apostasy. Their prophesying had less to do with predicting than with interpreting the future: bad things will continue to happen because God wills them to happen, and God wills them to happen because his people have not been faithful to their covenant obligations. Israel's right to exist is a God-given right to exist as a covenant people, not as a conquering nation belligerent toward its enemies and paranoid about the loyalty of its friends.

And what of America's "right to exist?" It should be keeping us awake at night to contemplate that America, too, has divinely-defined conditions that God expects us to meet. And that posturing too much like the ways Israel is posturing may not be the best way to meet them.

The Right to Health Care

If current campaign rhetoric is any indication, neither Republican nor Democratic leaders will come even close to working out a better approach to health care in this country than the one we now have and that we have long bemoaned. Part of the problem is us. For most Americans, "better" must include at least three things not achievable in combination: universal access, unlimited choice, and low cost. The other part of the problem is the politicians. They are unwilling to own up to the facts conveyed in the previous sentence.

Is there a Christian way to think about this two-fold problem? Sure. The second part of the problem is easy. One thing that it means to acknowledge that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" is that we put our own concerns first more often than we should, and that we are generally unresponsive when others, temporarily in better control of their own self-centeredness, try to persuade us that we need to be better in control ourselves. Today's political fall-out from humanity's primordial falling-out is that greedy leaders continue to get themselves elected by promising equally greedy citizens what, deep-down, everybody should know they should not have: the best things of life at somebody else's expense.

The first part of the problem is harder: if it is true that our society cannot provide everyone affordable health care that also offers complete freedom to choose one's caregivers, then what will our society provide? Juxtaposing can/can'ts with will/won'ts is deliberate here. Sometimes, what we say we will do really is something that we just cannot do; other times, what we say we can and cannot do turns out to be merely what we will and will not do; and at all times, it is the better part of wisdom to respect the difference. If this is not complicated enough, an even more important question will make it so: if it is true that our society cannot provide optimal health care for all its citizens, then what should our society do instead?

From the standpoint of the Christian faith, it is difficult to find any justification for a system of health care that does not provide equitably for the needs of all, especially a system that makes needed care more readily available, and at a higher quality, to people who can afford to pay for it than to people who cannot. Further, it is difficult to find any justification for allowing the health needs of the poor in any society to go unmet while further enhancing the general well-being of that society's wealthiest members. Does this imply that financing universal health care in America will have to include the systematic redistribution of at least some of the country's wealth? Of course. Can it be done equitably? Possibly. Current redistribution efforts are strongly directed toward the already-have-a-lots. Given the momentum, changing the direction will not be easy.

It may well be, as some economists contend, that we can provide affordable health care for all Americans, as long as we put the primary emphasis on preventative care and restrict freedom of choice somewhat. If an approach like this is sound financially, is it also justifiable "Christianly?" It would seem so. The God of the Bible is a God who most certainly is interested in the well-being of each and every creature --- human and non-human --- that make up the world he is continuously creating. But this God is also, and more so than a ruggedly individualistic American society is, interested in the well-being of the whole society, even if its individual members do not always gain everything to which they consider themselves to be entitled. One unpopular implication of this perspective is that the rationing of health care for some may be necessary for the good of the whole. The alternative, though, is just about what we have now: the rationing for some --- the poor --- for the good of the still fewer --- the better off.

In spite of the unwillingness of government leaders across the political spectrum fully to ensure it, the right to health care will still exist in this society for all the generations to come. From the standpoint of the Constitution, it derives from "unalienable" rights to life and the pursuit of happiness. From the standpoint of faith, it derives from the promise of Christ himself, that we shall not only have life, but that we shall have it "abundantly."

Iraq: a "Just War?"

As biblical scholars keep reminding us, considerable differences of outlook sometimes separate Jesus of Nazareth from the church that ministers in his name. One big difference is over their respective understandings of the end-time. For Jesus, it was not very far off. For the church, it is long delayed. The latter outlook is especially important to what the Christian tradition as a whole has had to say about war and peace.

For Jesus, the real wars are taking place on a transcendent rather than mundane plane; they will be of short duration; and in them, God is overcoming evil forces in the cosmos that are beyond human control. For the rest of us, very earthly threats to human well-being have been plaguing humanity for a long time, before and after Jesus' brief sojourn on earth, and the innocent still need our protection from them. And so, though the peace that passes understanding is surely on the way, we will be continuing to deal with the wars and rumors of war all around us.

But how? The church's main answer to this question has been that though war is only a last resort for settling problems, it can be an acceptable last resort under certain conditions. Respecting these conditions can make war, if not desirable, at least "just." Typically, the conditions are stated in terms like these: (1) A war must have a very limited purpose, confined to protecting the innocent from harm; (2) The definition of its goals and strategies must be clear enough to permit unambiguous determination of whether and when the goals of the war have been met; (3) There must be a broad consensus of opinion supportive of the view that going to war is the only way to settle a particular conflict; and (4) Strategic decisions and actions must minimize harm to non-combatants on both sides.

One of the most disturbing sides of the war in Iraq is how little we have heard from self-proclaimed Christian political leaders --- Republican and Democrat --- about our decisions and actions from the standpoint of the "just war" theory itself, and about why this way constitutes a better way of looking at warfare in general than the way of either naïve pacifism or aggressive jihad. Thinking hard in "just war" terms can be an important corrective to the we-are-right, go-it-alone mentality that has already lost us most of the world's trust and is making everyone on the planet less safe as a result.

Is America's war on Iraq a "just war?" Condition (4) above gives us at least a little encouragement in this regard, some of our aberrant interrogation practices notwithstanding. Condition (3) clearly does not. Simply put, practically nobody abroad agrees with us on our unilateral invasion of Iraq, and our unwillingness to give credence to this fact, even as we tout "globalism" as the way of the future, should be bothering our leaders us a lot more than it is.

Conditions (1) and (2) are inseparable; without a clear understanding of why one goes to war in the first place, one cannot determine the proper time and circumstances to wrap it up. The war with Iraq was initially justified by the claim that bringing Saddam Hussein down would make the world safe from his weapons of mass destruction. On the basis of this definition, the "exit strategy" was obvious: we would leave when the weapons were no longer a threat. But when the weapons turned out to be non-existent, so did the exit strategy. To cover this embarrassing state of affairs, the primary purpose of the war had to be re-defined, this time in terms of making Iraq a democratic nation, whether it wants to be one or not.

From a geo-political standpoint, making the world safe for democracy may still be a plausible foreign policy goal. But as more than a few commentators have said, working with Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Iran might have been more productive for openers than invading Iraq. From a Christian standpoint, though, the whole idea of actively promoting American-style democracy looks suspiciously like just one more form of converting people by force and brooking no opposition in the process. What makes the idea especially ominous nowadays is that Islamic leaders have learned their lessons from old Constantine just as thoroughly and well as Christian leaders have.

As Election Day approaches, one thing that Christians can start demanding from both political parties is a lot less posturing about who had the bigger war record way back then. The phallic quality of this "debate" is utterly dis-grace-full. What we need a lot more of, instead, is careful and painstaking thinking about what a "just" solution to the Iraqi conflict would look like, right now.

The Economics of Apocalypse

It is frustrating to watch liberal Christians become their own worst enemies by twisting an important biblical principle into an absurd political ideology. The principle is that in God's eyes, the needs of the poor and the oppressed come first. The ideology is that God loves poor and oppressed people more than (she) does anybody else.

Conservative Christians ideologize differently about economics and theology, but no less one-sidedly. Their starting point is promising: God helps those who help themselves. But then they confuse matters with the decidedly unbiblical notion that God helps the poor best through the rich. That is when things really begin to get weird.

Unlike the rest of us, the very rich are not having to help themselves at all; others who aspire to be so are doing it for them. They have already secured disproportionate tax cuts for the upper-upper classes along with the repeal of their estate tax obligations; they have gotten their cronies on corporate boards; and they are well along the way toward privatizing Social Security and health care, as well as reconstructing Iraq with eyes fixed fondly on their companies' bottom lines. God is hardly in these equations at all.

This latter does not seem to have troubled either liberals or conservatives all that much. Perhaps it is because both groups have convinced their followers that they have had at their beck and call a divinely prescient economist standing in God's stead. Surely it is time for both groups to rethink their idealization of a man whose wisdom is anything but God-like.

Remember when Alan Greenspan said all those nice things about how things were going in the really, really big Bull Markets? Later on, he got worried about the resulting and long predicted surpluses in the federal budget, and jumped on the tax cut bandwagon, assuring the soon to retire that nothing bad would ever happen to their Social Security benefits as a result. The cuts --- along with a couple of wars --- have not only wiped out the surpluses; they have encumbered the government with huge deficits that Mr. Greenspan now recommends dealing with not by reversing tax cuts for the wealthy, but by --- you guessed it --- cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Has God finally fallen out of the equations altogether?

Perhaps not. The more I talk with self-proclaimed conservative Christian friends about both their theologies and their economics, the more I see behind their views a decidedly apocalyptic view of life in this world. One friend is very clear about this: Leroy, none of us is going to be here for very long, you know. And when Jesus comes back, and it's going to be soon, it won't matter whether we're rich or poor. All that will matter is whether we have believed in him. When I asked my friend how he was doing with divesting himself of his assets and giving them all to the poor --- for that is the way the earliest Christians went about preparing for the End --- he stared at me as if I had started speaking in tongues. After he recovered, he said something to me that still leaves me with chills: You're not getting it Leroy; Jesus won't count my holdings against me, so I can keep on holding them. When I stammered out, And even increase them?, he said, with an ever wider grin on his face, Of course!

Now, I do get it. While we wait around for Jesus to return, we can keep on granting a few privileged people the right to take advantage of everybody else, because at the literal end of the day, what they pile up for themselves in the interim will not be counted against them. And neither will the enjoyment they receive from it. Since there will never be enough to go around anyway, why shouldn't at least a few people get some good out of life before time runs out for everybody, themselves included? And if Armageddon is even slightly delayed, maybe at least some of the rest of us can grab enough for ourselves to make our own transition to the next world a little easier.

This kind of thinking is what a lot of Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in these past few years, making what Paul Krugman calls "the great unraveling" of America a truly bi-partisan effort from first to last. It takes a lot to get politicians to agree on almost anything. But against this unraveling, there are few protesters. Too many people have been too busy championing the cause of the winners, the richest, and the most powerful instead of that of the last, the least, and the lost.

Death, Taxes, And The Bible

As a people, we are living a good bit longer than folks did even a couple of generations ago, but we all know that every last one of us is going to die, no matter what. And we have also believed that, just as the grim reaper will find us eventually, so will the tax man. Or will he? The tax man, that is, not the grim reaper.

If tinkering with the tax code --- to date pretty much a bipartisan business --- keeps moving in the direction its current tinkerers apparently think it should --- then some people in our country may wind up saying good-by to this world without ever saying hello to tax men and women at all. Not very many, of course. Payroll taxes either will remain the same or increase. Rebates on and cuts in income taxes will benefit the very large majority of taxpayers very little. And so, most of us will still be able to chant the "death and taxes" refrain for about as long as we pray "Even so, Lord, quickly come."

But by design, there are a privileged few who are going to be relieved of this burden for a long time to come. They are the ones whose incomes are large enough to keep their Social Security and Medicare taxes annoying, but relatively inconsequential in their larger schemes of things. They are the ones who will pass on the benefits of their successes unencumbered by estate taxes. And if their bought and paid for tinkerers can keep on disguising their real agenda, they will be the ones who will pay no taxes on their capital investments at all. Three guesses as to how they will be making their money then. The first two don't count.

Many of the people tinkering their way to this kind of Promised Land are good Christian people who seem to have gained assurance of the rightness of their cause by some version of the very "trickle-down" economic theories that experts in the field have been questioning for decades. If the richer are permitted to do what they need to do in order to get richer, the thinking goes, the poorer will get richer too. A pouring down rain raises all boats. At least, if it doesn't sink some of them first.

For my pre-November election studying this year, I've been taking some fresh looks at, of all things, the Bible. This can be a tricky business at best, and downright dangerous at worst, when the subject at hand is economics. For instance, one thing you find in the Bible is a rather consistent denunciation of the practice of putting bread on the table and a boat down at the marina by using money to earn interest. And the people who pay the interest are just as guilty as those who charge it. If you are of a Fundamentalist leaning, and want to argue that everything the Bible says is binding on us today in the same ways as it was when the Bible first said it, let me know how you are doing with refinancing your life-style in the light of this teaching. Better yet, why not just get it over with and share everything you've got with all the rest of us, right now?

Looking to the Bible for guidance on the decisions we make about money does not have to be as tricky or as dangerous as we might otherwise think it is. For instance, one Old Testament text from The Book of Amos defined a starting point more than adequately both for ancient Judaism and early Christianity:

"Listen to this, you that grind the poor and suppress the humble in the land while you say…"When will the sabbath be past so that we may expose our wheat for sale, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the refuse of the wheat; that we may buy the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals?" (Amos 8:4-6, REB)

Jesus' economic theory lines up with the prophet's quite well. It assumed that we must begin all our decision-making with a concern for the poor. By contrast, working hard on not being poor, and doing so at the expense of the poor, is a sure way to get locked out at the gates of heaven. But at least the surroundings will not be strange to us. For it is precisely on the outside and not the inside of those gates that most of our tax tinkering has been going on.

Who's In, Who's Out, and Who Says

Plunging into the Scriptures is spiritually renewing for me, especially when I can look at them with the help of scholars who are both serious and faithful about their craft. Wrangling with the "Church Fathers" is my close second to wrestling with the Bible. One morning, while poking around in a number of Patristic texts and commentaries, willy-nilly, I re-discovered an important fact about the theological discussions of the first three centuries that is more than just a little relevant to this present decade.

In those days, every revered teacher held very strong opinions about what everyone else ought to think about the emerging core doctrines of the church. The trouble was that the opinions they put forward differed greatly, even though this obvious fact did not stop them from insisting that if you did not agree with them about their favorite doctrinal constructions, you had already put yourself outside the Christian fellowship.

Ever since Constantine dictated that potentially divisive theological debates should be snuffed out either by his bishops' votes or his armies' swords, the church has been working overtime to convince Christians that they must all share one mind about every core belief of our common faith. As Constantine behaved toward the bishops, all too many church leaders behave toward their fellow believers: affirm the same things in the same way, or you're out. In previous centuries, you were not only out; you could also be dead.

Religious freedom? The dictates of conscience? The devil, you say. We'll tell you what and how to believe, and whether you are doing the belief-thing right or not. The erudite way of putting this is usually to make frequent references to "the mind of the Church" as having long ago demonstrated beyond all doubt the errors of deviant opinions about God, Christ, and human destiny. Make that mind your own, and you will be thinking straight as a Christian. Step outside that framework of thought for even a moment, and you will lose not only your own mind and your friends in the true faith, but your eternal soul as well.

For a while, it looked like the Protestantist movements of the sixteenth century were going to help greatly in recovering the openness of a truly apostolic Christianity. But not even a generation after Luther nailed his own theses to the Wittenburg church door, Protestant groups of all ilks were promulgating creeds and confessions to show (a) how wrong all the Catholics are, and (b) how even more wrong all the other Protestants are. The first objective is not the issue it once was, but the second still is. Holding fast to the right beliefs, as defined by the right people, once again threatens to become the single most important sign of genuine faith.

The idea that there is one and only one "mind of the Church" is fetching, but also wistful. One thing that psychology has taught us well is that we argue the most vehemently for things about which we have the greatest doubts. We need to apply this teaching to the fact that churches sometimes get their people to say the same things in the same way only by force. Christians do not and cannot see things alike all the time, contrary to the illusions of those in our time who are calling the rest of us to wage a jihad for "purity of doctrine."

Actually, the idea of "the mind of the Church" is a very dangerous idea. What makes it so is that it generally confuses the whole Church of Jesus Christ with the leaders of and in it who have their own favorite theological axes to grind. Much of what has passed for authoritative church teaching is just that: the prescriptions and prohibitions of a chosen few who are authorized to define the faith for rather than with everybody else, and to ostracize those who think differently than they do.

Are there beliefs that in the holding of them will set us outside the Christian fellowship? Of course. One is that the Maker of Heaven and Earth takes delight in the destruction of anything he has created. Another is that anything we do is acceptable in the sight of God as long as we do it from sincere and thoughtful deliberation. And there are more besides. But in the end of the day, the "mind of the Church" will contain far fewer of them than a lot of church leaders will like, and some of their most righteously held favorites not at all.

More Beliefs Worth Doubting

A while ago, I began a Top Ten List of beliefs that I claimed, only a little whimsically, Christians might be better off without. By the end of that column, I had gotten through six of them, and promised somewhat vaguely to get to the other four sometime. Well, here they are. Which of them should be last, and which first, I leave up to you.

We will never really change society until we first experience a change in our own hearts. There is a lot of truth conveyed in this affirmation. Part of it is that social change is a very high priority for Christians, and that working to bring it about is something we should be doing practically all the time. Another part of the truth is that positive social changes have a better chance of lasting when the people who are affected by them are themselves changed for the better in the process. Actually, the only thing wrong about this belief is that little word, "first," in it. Putting it in there all too often turns a principle for bringing about needed social change into a rationalization for never even beginning. If we have to "set our hearts" right in order to make things better for other people, then they had better not count on us for very much. What God asks us to seek first is the Kingdom. If we get a changed heart at the beginning of doing so, so much the better. But even if we do not, we can still be sure of getting it by the end.

The Bible contains all that we will ever need to know about anything. At least, this is what a lot of uninformed Protestants have been saying since the Reformation. The implication is that Christians are people of one, and only one, book. Any other books and any other kind of learning can only distract us from, or even undermine, the foundations of our faith. This strange view is a far cry from what Protestantism as a whole has stood for through the centuries: the view that the scriptures contain the truths that are necessary for our salvation, but not all truth whatsoever. In 1763, John Wesley took an interesting tack on the issue at a meeting with his lay preachers. Pushed hard for permission to rely only on the Good Book, Wesley admonished his interrogators that going this route would be tantamount to setting ourselves above St. Paul, who relied on many books and not just one.

People with strong faith do not get overwhelmed by fear or anger. I hear this a lot, especially when someone is not only overwhelmed by these feelings, but is also guilt-ridden from having them in the first place. The fact of the matter is that fear and anger are exactly the way that we "should" respond in all kinds of situations, so much so that not feeling anxious and resentful can sometimes become even more problematic for us than the stressful situation was originally. A good example is the harm we do to ourselves by not acknowledging our fear and anger after a significant loss. Jesus himself got angry a lot, and felt sheer terror at least once, during his own lifetime. In ours, especially now that they must be lived in the aftermath of "9/11," not honoring feelings like these can dangerous both to our health and to our survival.

There is no salvation apart from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Many Christians are such because they feel very deeply and personally the presence of the Risen Lord in their lives. Some of their friends, however, are the Christians they are simply because they have been raised that way, or simply because the Christian way of life makes sense to them. Is the first group "saved" and the other not? Possibly, but only God can possibly know for sure. What interests me especially about Evangelical Christians' insistence that we have to make a conscious, personal decision for Christ is the implication that any relationship with the Lord has to be forged by us, that God's prior decision to draw all men and women to himself in Christ doesn't count for as much. Sad but true to say, there is a great deal about humanity's relationship with God that is one way, and running in the opposite direction: God keeps on embracing us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

This column ends with a disclaimer. No one Top Ten List can fully encompass all the beliefs out there that are being entertained seriously by Christians who would be better off by setting them aside. And so, someday, when you least expect it, you just might be looking at still another list, or two, or…

Bill Clinton in Biblical Perspective

My first reaction to the release of Bill Clinton's autobiography was amazement, that the book's first reviewers could tell us so quickly what we should get out of it --- not much.

Frankly, I doubt that these guys could have read it carefully enough to reach this conclusion responsibly. More likely, they had their minds made up already about Mr. Clinton's make-up, and they used what they encountered in cursory looks at his book to fill in around the edges of long locked-in certitude. And so, they ring only the same wind-worn chimes about the Clinton era. Hillary's book got the same treatment.

For all of their tendentiousness, however, the early reviewers of My Life nevertheless have been able effectively to re-launch the one rhetorical shower-blast, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, that will keep on pummeling Bill Clinton until, in a phrase of his own, the last dog dies. Its theme is the squandering of the opportunities that the former President's immense talent and political gifts opened up, however briefly, to the American people. He could have done so much, the refrain goes, if he weren't --- check your own favorites --- so hungry for others' admiration, so wonky about social policy, so self-aggrandizing, so disloyal to faithful associates, so priapic, so… so… so…

Two things about this indictment should be more troubling than they have been, especially to people who strive to be as loyal to their country's principles as they are faithful to their churches' biblicism. The first is the anomaly of demanding a transcendent perfection in the leader of a government whose system of checks and balances presupposes the fallibility of every citizen, and the importance of keeping power diffused across three branches rather than concentrated in just one. The system works best when we keep expectations of all politicians on the low rather than the high side, and aligned with what we in fact get from most of them: something a lot less than their best, because they and we almost always act from what is less than the best in us.

Clinton's presidency is likely to be remembered more for the scale of its missed opportunities than for the missed opportunities themselves. Bigger than most of his predecessors in so many different respects, Clinton's humanness simply requires a bigger mural for its full display. Nine hundred plus pages haven't even begun to do it.

The second thing to note about the squandered opportunities refrain is how foolish it sounds against a major theme of the Bible. Lest we forget, both the Old and New Testaments are crammed to overflowing with references to people who misuse from the first moments of their appearance in history every last one of the divine capacities with which they are endowed as part of their created nature. The pages depict in all their ingloriousness people who represented with an eerie perfection the pattern which each and every one who comes after them exhibits shamelessly to a world falling steadily under the sway of a widening human corruption. As we have in every one of them from Adam to Saul (both of them), we have met the enemy in Bill Clinton, too --- and the enemy is us.

A lot of people have allowed themselves either to be charmed by Bill Clinton, or to excoriate him, for the same reason: he is just the kind of rascal they themselves would most like to be. There is something especially ironic about this. For of all the dishonorable people we love to read about, Mr. Clinton seems the least willing to carry our own yearnings for us. He is too preoccupied with his own. Perhaps it is his failure to accommodate us in this regard that made impeaching him so irresistible, even though we surely should have known that dissipating so much vital energy for governing the country on such a preposterous cause called us into question far more than it did him.

Bill Clinton can serve as an important and helpful case study for those of us who are working hard at becoming better loggers, that is, seriously committed to getting the logs out of our own eyes rather than fixing their gaze on the specks in others'. He serves even better than does the woman taken in adultery as an example of someone at whom we can with great profit practice not hurling the first stone. He is, after all, only --- a man, merely human. Just like everyone in the Bible is, at least until the really human one finally showed up.

Jailhouse Conversions

Should you ever become a convicted felon, you will find out quickly that a visit from God in prison will benefit you not only in your next life, but also while doing your time in this one. You might lose more friends from getting religion than you had without it, but on balance, you will still be better off. Your new friends will be a considerable improvement on your old ones, particularly if you have to make peace with your surroundings for a long time. And if you ever do get out, telling people about your cell-block conversion can give you a huge leg up on re-entering the society of the law-abiding.

Does this opening paragraph seem a little cynical to you? If you think so, you are not alone, especially now that Terry Nichol's second jury failed to sentence him to death for his participation in the Oklahoma City bombing. One thing that seems to have carried weight in the assessment of Mr. Nichols was the belief of some of his peers that he had become "religious" since the bombing, and that as a result, he could make a positive contribution to others in prison were his life spared.

In other cases, other juries have seemed ill-disposed to such religious sentiments. And the outrage over the Nichols jury's ambivalence suggests that a very large number of people in our society have great difficulty seeing how a violator's claim to conversion after his or her heinous act can ever mitigate against punishing the act itself according to the full measure of the law. Apparently, one or more on the second Nichols jury took the accused's profession of new-found religion at face value; others did not. Would it make any difference to our own reactions if we could know for sure whether the profession was genuine?

I think it just might. For along with the suspiciousness that most people have --- the most conscientiously religious included --- of the genuineness of jailhouse conversions, the possibility of sudden and wholly transforming experiences of God's presence and power in another person's life is a possibility that has always been close to the vital center of American thought and life, whether that possibility is framed in religious terminology or not. "In the criminal justice system," as Law and Order buffs refer to it, merely bringing offenders to justice is never enough; rehabilitating them is even more important. (Although in the passion of the moment, it is easy to forget this.)

Our revivalist traditions put the point a little differently, e.g.: "There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains…(William Cowper) But the point is still the same, as Cowper went on to say: even those who are as "vile" as the thief on the cross can become as clean as that thief became that day, washed in the blood flowing from Jesus' own. Even Timothy McVeigh? Apparently not; Tim seems to have cast his lot early on with that other thief on Golgotha, who remained content only to mock his Redeemer. But Terry Nichols? Well, most of us simply do not know whether the reports we have heard of his new-found faith are reliable or not. However, if they are reliable…

Therein lies the problem: only God knows the truth that is in each human heart, no matter how true or how false anyone's most heart-felt professions may seem to anyone else. Professing faith falsely mitigates nothing. Professing faith truly might mitigate even the most horrendous acts --- all sins are forgivable, if the Apostles' Creed is any guide --- if we could only know that the professing is genuine. But we cannot, at least not as God knows. However, God has not left us utterly in the dark about the things of the heart. We are richly blessed by our Creator with the capacity to discern the spirit within each of us by looking at what we do. It is by our fruits that we are to be known.

By this measure, Terry Nichols still has a lot of proving up to do, and most people have seen no good reason to give him any more time in which to do it. They may be right. Certainly, we can understand why the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims would want to run out the clock on Mr. Nichols, if in fact all of them do. But I cannot help wondering if the blood that is still on his hands may have come from two fountains, and not just one.

A Methodist Theologian Not To Forget

This summer, a number of Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church are including in their meetings a celebration of the life and work of Albert C. Outler, one of the most influential Methodist theologians in the history of the denomination, on the fifteenth year of his death. They are bringing back fond memories.

When I joined the faculty of Perkins School of Theology in 1969, I brought with me an intimidating homework assignment. The previous Spring, my first letter of welcome to the faculty was from Dr. Outler, and it included both an invitation and a recommendation.
His invitation was to teach the course in Methodist Constitutional History which had been a favorite of his at Perkins for many years. His recommendation was to start boning up seriously on Methodist history --- right then. To get me started, he sent under separate cover his own copy of William Warren Sweet's Methodism in American History.

My second day at Perkins, I was unpacking books when Albert dropped by and asked me to lunch. Alas, I had to face this great man across fish and chips with a still too general knowledge of Methodist history and with the confession that though I was gaining on it, it was going to take a while. "I can help," he said. And help, he did. He encouraged me to work up a briefer overview of American Methodist history than he was himself accustomed to offering in the Methodist Constitutional History course. Then, he suggested that my students and I might spend the second half of the semester working with him directly on an interim report to General Conference about doctrinal standards for the new United Methodist Church. What a deal!

Albert Outler was at that time chair of the Theological Study Commission formed by the just merged Methodist and Evangelical and United Brethren churches, whose mandate was to work out a statement on basic doctrine that would represent both traditions faithfully. Few people knew how difficult his task was. His committee members were constantly firing off notes, recommendations, and position papers that they not so subtly suggested would provide just the perspective on United Methodist theology to last us until the second coming.

Albert's problem, as I came to see as a result of reading all this material, was that members of the Study Commission neither saw the history of the merged denominations the same way nor shared anything close to a common theological methodology. In spite of these obstacles, however, the "theological pluralism" that the Commission's final report celebrated was anything but "theological indifferentism," contrary to the viewpoint of many of the report's critics right down to the present.

More often than not, I was simply awestruck watching Albert steer this very diverse group of committed Christians toward a working agreement on difficult matters of normative doctrine. But I should not have been surprised. Albert was already working with the greatest and most ecumenically-minded theologians of our time on the most vexing issues threatening Christian unity, and his particular contributions to Protestant-Roman Catholic dialogue on the meaning of tradition were well known and appreciated. Further, he had spent three years as the Methodist Church's official observer at the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. The book he wrote about Vatican II's new vision of the church remains one of the finest produced by any of the theologians who attended, Protestant and Catholic alike.

While in Rome, Albert quickly won the trust of the movers and shakers at the Council, and in so doing, got us a hearing for our own doctrine and doctrinal standards statement. What he wanted the Vatican to know especially was that at least the United Methodist branch of Protestantism had moved beyond the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, attack and counter-attack, into an era of honest acknowledgement of mutual sin, by hearts warmed by grace, set ablaze by the one Spirit with a love to share with all humankind.

With the approval of the 1972 General Conference, Albert delivered what became Part Two of our Book of Discipline in person to the Roman curia. And Rome's response was historic. In it, for the first time since the Reformation, the Roman Church officially recognized a Protestant body --- ours --- as a church instead of as merely a group of "separated believers." I was in Albert's office when he opened the official communication from Rome, and shared with him a moment of pure, unbounded joy, a kind of joy that our current encirclement by the wagons of unthinking and unloving traditionalists and liberals alike threatens to snuff out altogether.

The Politics of Holy Communion

When John F. Kennedy ran for President of the United States in 1960, he had to persuade a lot of non-Catholics that he was a loyal enough American to be President in spite of his own Catholic heritage. He accomplished the task so well that he not only got himself elected; he supposedly laid to rest "the Catholic issue" in American politics permanently.

Well, maybe not. Some in the American Catholic hierarchy, most notably Cardinal McCarrick of the Washington Archdiocese, are now in the process of exhuming the coffin. Specifically, they are threatening to withhold communion from Catholic legislators who do not vote the church's way on issues before them --- especially on issues related to abortion. And so, as Catholic Senator John Kerry continues his own run for the Presidency, he faces a far more insidious version of "the Catholic issue" than the one with which his predecessor had to deal: this time, the issue is subversion of the Constitution by leaders in his own church.

Fortunately, at least for those of us who still think that the First Amendment is the best guide to living out our faith in a pluralistic society, our country is now getting some important support from Catholic legislators themselves. Upwards of fifty in the Congress have already challenged publically their church leaders' high-handed attempts to coerce consent to church doctrine through manipulating the political process. Hopefully, more and more state and local Catholics will join with them, or else the rule by clerics that we are decrying nowadays in Saudi Arabia and Iran could be here before we can even get our e-mails off to the Pope to unpack. For if Catholic bishops and priests can't pull off the power grab just by themselves, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham will be more than eager to lend their support to the cause.

It is little short of sickening to contemplate priests refusing to serve communion to the politically incorrect while they are flipping the wafers onto the tongues of their pedophile brothers in the order. But it is downright blasphemous to contemplate their withholding Christ himself from those who, for whatever reason, have gotten themselves to Christ's table in the hope of receiving Him there. For these same priests are teaching the faithful that Christ is indeed bodily present in the elements of the bread and wine. On the ground of this same sacred teaching, withholding these elements is tantamount to shoving the Lord himself away from His own table. Archbishop McCarrick shouldn't need another 95 theses nailed to his cathedral's front door in order to get this.

We Protestants, though, are by no means clean on this issue. A number of traditionalists, clearly with too much time on their hands, have been doing some tinkering of their own around the communion table, to the effect that we should now prescribe the attainment of "worthiness" as a condition for coming to it. Or if not worthiness, at least baptism. By contrast, John Wesley thought of the sacrament itself as having converting power: partake of it and then you just might get the idea that new life in Christ is a life better than any you could carve out on your own. Methodists who really want to be more traditional than they think our church now is should begin right here.

If you have been around long enough as a Methodist yourself, you probably know by heart the Wesleyan words of invitation to the communion table: "Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking henceforth in his holy ways, draw near with faith…" Nothing that we've done to make communion liturgies more worshipper-friendly comes even close to capturing the power of these particular words.

But the words are of invitation, not of pre-condition, and certainly not of command. Just like the words of Genesis 1: "Be fruitful and increase." Most of the uncharitable pronouncements about abortion and homosexuality rampant in our churches today derive from deforming this divine invitation into a divine imperative, making the multiplication of offspring the sole validation of sexual behavior. If you are trying to out-populate the original inhabitants of territory you want for your own, this may not be a bad political strategy, but it makes for very bad theology under any conditions. Just as does deforming Wesley's vision of what will happen as a result of coming to communion into a set of virtues you must acquire before you get there.

Methodist Schismatics

Not hours after the conservatives cleaned the liberals' clocks at Methodism's recent General Conference, two phrases began circulating among a few of the conservative delegates themselves: "irreconcilable differences" and "amicable divorce." Say what? By then, you might have imagined that liberals were entertaining thoughts of schism. But conservatives?

As expected, everything went the conservatives' way on the one big issue of this Conference: gays and lesbians in the church. Homosexual behavior was denounced once again, as were ordaining and marrying gays and lesbians. Further still, failure to live up to the ideals of faithfulness in marriage and celibacy in singleness got newly defined as "chargeable offenses" against clergypersons. What more could conservatives have wanted?

It is hard to know for sure, but the kind of thinking that informs conservative Methodist movements in general provides more than just vague clues. It is a kind of thinking that is from first to last anchored in taking the Bible as the inerrant foundation of faith and life, and in respecting those traditions of belief, worship, and behavior that conform to scriptural rather than to cultural standards. The forty-one delegates who voted against a General Conference unity resolution (869 voted for it) appear to hold some version of the belief that United Methodism has lost its scriptural bearings irreparably. They believe this so strongly that they say they are going to spend the next four years persuading other Methodists toward schism.

Ok, folks: take your best shot. If you and your followers-to-be are really serious about this, then I have some suggestions for how you might construct a more internally consistent biblical theology for your new church than the theology of our present one. How about beginning with just five issues, and perhaps moving on from there?

The first has to do with sex. If I understand correctly the way you read the Bible, then it seems clear that you could find in it no double standard on this matter. In specific, what you have been requiring from the clergy with respect to sexual behavior, you will have to require from the laity too. The implication is obvious: in your new church, you should have a process for conducting regular and fair-minded reviews of the sexual conduct of all your members, clergy and lay, married and single.

Second, on the basis of this same principle, and since your new church will already exclude homosexuals from the ordained ministry and deny same-sex cermonies and weddings, your next step should be to get rid of all that other stuff in our present Book of Discipline that talks about respecting homosexuals as persons. Then you can get them out of your congregations altogether.

Third, there is the matter of divorce. Read from your perspective, the Bible offers a clear basis for addressing it: make divorce also a chargeable offense for clergy and laity alike. Marshall the texts that are right in front of everybody's noses, and defy anyone put off by them (divorced members in particular can be testy about this topic) to show why a truly scripture-based faith should not come down hard on divorce. Perhaps you could start by prohibiting re-marriage, and then work back from there. After all, the Bible does say one strike and you're out, doesn't it?

Fourth, especially for those of you who are ecumenically-minded, you should propose an end to the ordination of women. This practice is killing us with the Roman and Orthodox churches, whose leaders think we are stupid and apostate to have let this go on for so long. Have we forgotten that Paul silenced women in his own churches?

Finally, you should strike a bold note for ending another practice that is sucking the life out of us as spiritual beings, the practice of usury: charging interest on money borrowed. No matter that it is the basis of all modern economic systems. The Bible flatly forbids the practice, and so did the church, before it started putting relevance ahead of faithfulness. It is no wonder that conservative Muslims excoriate Western values so vehemently today. They understand our Bible better than we do!

Once you begin to take up all these issues in earnest, you will find many others out there willing to give your new denomination a try. Personally, though, I think I'll just stick with the one we've got. It's not very pure, doctrinally, or in any other way for that matter. And it certainly isn't much of a substitute for the Kingdom. But somehow I doubt that yours is going to be much better. You people are too much like the rest of us.

Second Comings

When there were more Dads in households than there are now, wayward children sometimes were successfully terrorized into submission by the apocalyptic warning, you just wait 'til your father gets home! I for one rejoiced greatly over what I believed was the happy demise of this awful threat and the culture that legitimized it, even though my own father was pretty much of a pussy cat when it came to whippings out on the back forty. As it has turned out, though, my belief was wrong, and my rejoicing naïve.

It now seems clear that whole megachurches of Christians have never given up on waiting for Daddy to come home and straighten things out. To be sure, the latest version of this wistful hope puts it all in the hands of a favorite son rather than of the father himself. Skimmed the most recent "Left Behind" volume yet? It's a by-intent heart-stopping vision of Christ's return to earth in power, glory --- and vindictiveness. If The Book of Revelation wasn't enough to whip you into shape, surely this one, the authors believe, will get the job done.

From Paul's time to the present, believing that Christ will come again is indeed a core affirmation of the Christian faith --- e.g., the "he will come again to judge the living and the dead" article of the Apostles' Creed. The basic point of the doctrine of the second coming has always been that, all appearances to the contrary, the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ were not invalidated by his crucifixion. God's raising him from the dead proved that, and it is from a position of enthronement that the risen Christ will come to us as our true judge, to annul all of the claims of earthly kings and judges to have final authority over us.

So far, so good. Two problems, however, always present themselves whenever the doctrine of the second coming comes at us like just one more version of "Pop is after you." One is that most articulations of the doctrine never get beyond screaming that the Judge is coming and to run for cover. The still more basic point of the New Testament as a whole --- that the Judge forgives --- is almost always lost in the gloating over what is about to happen to everybody else. (Have you ever heard anybody proclaim the final separation of the righteous from the unrighteous who had not already put himself or herself in the first group?)

The second problem --- and it is one for which Paul is just as accountable as everybody else who salivates for Jesus' return --- is that the earliest Christian preachers took the resurrection itself to be God's validation of Jesus' life and ours. Whenever the principalities and powers of this world begin to look too strong for the cause of Christ, what we are supposed to dwell on is that his cause has already triumphed, not that God is going to give him a second crack at his enemies. In this sense, Easter was the second coming. Sorry you missed it.

But it still may not be too late for you, at least if you'll just quit harping on how all of the rest of us are finally going to get what's coming to us when the eldest Son comes knocking at our doors on the Father's behalf. You might have missed Easter, but you can't miss Pentecost, because it keeps happening again and again, just like it did in that upper room on Easter afternoon. (John 20:22) What was, perhaps, a third coming, for sure becomes a fourth, and a fifth, and a …, forever. Why? Because the breath that the risen Christ breathed into his disciples that day was and is the breath of eternal life. And as if this were not enough, it was and is the power of forgiveness.

How in the world did the message about the coming of God's Son to reconcile and make new devolve so quickly into a missile setting off only more alienation and hopelessness? Most probably, it had to do with persecution, and with the malignant hopelessness that too much of it so easily engenders. Comforting ourselves with the notion that our persecutors will get theirs is understandable.

But Jesus suffered more than a fair share of persecution himself, and at its height, Luke reminds us, he promised a thief on the cross next to him Paradise that very day, and died with words of forgiveness and trust on his lips. Those are far better words to remember in times of persecution than words of hate and condemnation toward persecutors and unbelievers alike.

Divinely Ordained Murder

When God speaks, do children have to die? Abraham thought so, and Isaac almost paid the price. Jesus thought so, and did pay the price. Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney apparently thought so, too, but their peers, unlike those of Abraham and Jesus, simply wrote them off as nuts.

In the long run, the mental health experts who messed with both of these terribly disturbed mothers' trials may do the rest of us more harm than good. First, they focused (as they should) on the accused parties'craziness, and on what medication can do for it. But they appear to have shied away from saying much about the religious culture which shaped both mothers' actions --- a culture for which there is only a theological remedy, not a pharmacological one. Second, they influenced two juries to draw cruelly different conclusions about the same aberrant behavior: while Ms.Yates' insanity warranted imprisonment, Ms. Laney's did not.

I would have hated to be on either of their juries, and I feel grateful, even if also a little guilty, that other citizens had to do what I was not called upon to do. The disparate punishments the two juries meted out, however, leave us with a daunting moral and spiritual dilemma: when someone is so out of touch with what God asks everyone to do, as to do exactly what God never asks anyone to do, what sort of punishment is appropriate?

There is, of course, a part answer to this question that is easy to determine. Whatever else punishment in cases like these should be, it has to ensure that people who do harm in God's name cannot remain in a position that allows them to keep on doing it. But the "whatever else" part of this answer still has to be dealt with.

If you think God is telling you to do something terrible to someone innocent, are you simply off your rocker? Are you merely hearing a voice in your own head rather than one from on high? Your therapist would say so, and every therapist to whom I have ever referred people with religious delusions also says so. Before you can get to a shrink, though, as the surviving members of Ms. Laney's family have discovered, there are a lot of people who get to you first with trust your inner voice messages, coming at you through the sponsorship of truly weird groups of self-proclaimed true believers. If there is psychosis to be ferreted out in the killing of theYates and Laney children, it is to be found in their parents' religious associations as much as it is in their mixed-up inner psyches.

It is surely psychotic to hate, maim, and murder any human being as a test and an expression of personal and communal faith. Unlike Abraham, we are supposed to know that there was a lamb in the bush on Moriah's slope, and that God desires all our sons and daughters to live. In fact, we know this so well that we have no excuse for acting as if it were not true. And no excuse for telling anyone else, in the name of God, to trust the inner voice and get on with suddenly sacred executions, whether of one's own children or an "infidel" peoples'. The only sacrifice of offspring that the one true God ever asked of anyone, he asked only of himself and of his own, and he intended that sacrifice to be enough for everyone. Let's say it all together: everyone.

And while we are on the subject, it is just as surely psychotic to take gleeful comfort in the notion that when Christ comes again, everybody who hasn't yet pledged fealty to him will be cast away to the outermost regions of hell. With the release of the last book in the "Left Behind" series (we should be so blessed), a lot of bookstores are going to be crawling with spiritual gloaters for some days to come. Frankly, this psychotic series left me behind a long time ago, and not in the way that its authors will think. Care to join me?

I hope and pray that Deanna Laney will finally get the help she needs and deserves in the hospital settings that await her. Hopefully, the staffs in charge will also keep at bay the people in her world who have assisted her so effectively to lose her mind. For the life of me, though, I cannot see how Andrea Yates is going to get the help she needs and deserves spending the rest of her life in prison. Some of the people who sent her there pretty obviously need the same kind of spiritual help that so many in Ms.Yates' world need even more.

Shouting At the Devil (The Passion of the Christ)

It takes going to a full-blown, all-out, on-fire Pentecostal church to experience a pastoral practice that overly respectable Christians have long viewed with contempt, the practice of looking Satan squarely in the face and telling him in no uncertain terms to get lost. Exorcisms are no match for shouting-down-the Devil sessions. If you can ever catch Bishop T. D. Jakes at just the right time in one of his many inspiring worship services, you will get this point immediately.

In Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, there was indeed a lot of shouting going on, but none of it was at the one who most deserved it. The Satan figure was given free reign to move in and out of scenes with a will of (his/her?) own --- whispering, staring, hovering, taunting, relishing, gloating --- and to put words from an old spiritual to a little different use, nobody ever said a mumblin' word. Just as Luke did not, when he closed his narrative of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness with the hair-raising words, "So, having come to the end of all these temptations, the devil departed, biding his time." (4:13)

The devil came seriously back into the picture when he took possession of Judas (Luke 22:3), and started sifting the rest of the disciples "like wheat." (22:31) Jesus then conceded him the dark night of his arrest (22:53), a darkness that returned at mid-day to cover Golgotha and "the whole land" in infamy (23:44). But unlike what happens in Gibson's picture, Luke's picture reaches out to Satan not on Satan's terms, but on God's: Satan has been "given leave" to do his destructive work.

Personally, I would like it better had Luke refrained from introducing this character altogether. His narrative has no real need of him, other than to do a little spooking around here and there. Luke's Jesus seems supremely confident that his own prayers for the disciples' faith will be answered in the long run, as they certainly were. And he is in no way himself unstrung by Satan's sifting. Unlike the anguished words put in his mouth on the cross by Mark and Matthew ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), Luke gives him triumphant ones: "Father forgive them…you will be with me in paradise…into your hands I commit my spirit." As another song goes, if the devil doesn't like it, he can sit on a tack.

But Mel Gibson obviously needed Satan in his own reconstruction of Jesus' Passion, just as legions before us have needed Satan for their own foul purposes of hating love and loving hate. So, from Gethsemene to the foot of the cross, the Evil One flounced in and out, on (its) own, through deranged children, in the rage of Caiaphas and the terror of Pilate, and over an inflamed mob, to be seen clearly only by the one through whom God was soon to deal out its final defeat.

I think, though, that there may be an unintended gift to us in all this: for on the big screen, there it was, just waiting to be shouted at and out.

Are you ready, Satan? Try this for openers: when you tell us that you own us and are owed a divine ransom for our souls, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. Still listening? Here's more: when you tell us that God is so angry with us that he must make one of us pay for everyone else's sins, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. When you tell us that God's justice must be served before his love can be savored, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. When you tell us that you have any power, authority, purpose, vision, or truth in you, you are nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

As for you Mel, a little shouting may be in order, too. When you tell us that you are only giving us the gospel story, you are lying to yourself as well as to us. When you tell us that your picture of the Passion is a picture of human redemption, you are lying to God. Yours is a picture of a lava flow of rage: pure, unbounded rage. An exploding star system of rage, with black holes all around. Give it up, Riggs, you want to take us down just like you took the really bad guys down in all those other lethal weapon flicks. You want to know where I saw you in your Passion Narrative? Not where you wanted me to see you, at the cross, with hammer and nail. I saw you in that wretched baby flaunted before the eyes of our misery-ridden Lord.

The Passion of the Christ is, in every sense of the word, a truly dreadful movie. But --- and this is where Satan really does get into the act --- its producers will be praying joyfully all the way to the bank.

The Physical Suffering of Christ (The Passion of the Chirst)

If you have not yet seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, you just might want to give up the project, even if your friends are adamant that you go, NOW. The violence is extreme and unnerving, and because it is, the film cries out for our taking a second look at just what the Passion Narratives in the Gospels were trying to do in their own depictions of Jesus' physical suffering.

One thing they were trying to do was to make sure that Jesus' followers fully appreciated his humanity as well as his divinity. By the time the Gospels were written down --- close to half a century after Jesus' death and resurrection --- many people were becoming bewitched by the notion that God's Son only appeared to be a man, but really was the Eternal Father in disguise. The brutal treatment that Jesus endured in the final hours of his life on earth was of interest because by focusing upon it, his followers could insulate themselves against false, because overly spiritualized, representations of the Christ circulating widely by the end of the first century.

Another thing that the Gospel writers were trying to do was to help people not only know about, but experience concretely and deeply God's freeing them from the consequences of their sins. The premise of the Passion story is stated best at Isaiah 50:6, that through the lashes on the Messiah's back, humanity's relationship with God is permanently healed. The right man, in God's sight, suffered in our place. Remembering and meditating on Jesus' pain came to be a way of receiving God's mercy and grace into one's own heart.

But how many lashes did Jesus have to take for the sake of both our redemption and our experience of it? Or to put the question another way: just how painful did Jesus' suffering have to be in order to accomplish God's purpose for his chosen people, and eventually, for us?

Mel Gibson is a lot clearer about how to answer these questions than early Christian tradition seems to be. A cursory reading of the Passion Narratives in the four Gospels together, the basis of Gibson's script, suggests that Jesus was at the very least mocked by both Jewish and Roman officials, struck or beaten by the former, and whipped with flesh-ripping, blood-gushing precision by the latter. As is usually the case with the Scriptures, though, more than just a cursory reading almost always makes things more complicated.

Mark and Matthew seem to have known about a Roman practice of flogging criminals before crucifying them, and from the way that both tell the story of Jesus' humiliation, they presupposed that their readers would know about it, too. Perhaps this was why they chose not to incorporate the gruesome details into their respective narratives. Had they given us a verbal picture as vivid as Gibson's visual one, though, it almost certainly would have been for a different purpose than his. They would have known that Jesus' severe flogging actually hastened his death on the cross, and that the Roman soldiers' violence toward Jesus, therefore, actually served a merciful and not only a sadistic purpose.

Things are quite different, though, in the next two Gospels. Luke's Jesus is ridiculed and beaten by some of his fellow Jews, but he receives no flogging either from them or from Roman guards. Pilate proposes a flogging, but only as an alternative to sentencing him to death by crucifixion. The (Jewish) crowd will not hear of it, of course, so Jesus goes straightaway to the cross. In John's Gospel, Pilate both proposes the flogging and has it carried out, but for the same purpose as Luke describes: to avoid condemning Jesus to die while also keeping a Jewish crowd satisfied. If Jesus' conversation with Pilate after the flogging is any indication, he seems anything but whipped senseless in the process. (John 19:8-11)

What might we take away from this brief second look at the Passion Narrative to help us assess Mel Gibson's film? Two things, perhaps. The first is that the details of the physical violence done to Jesus did not have the same importance to the Gospel writers as it does to this archly traditional Roman Catholic movie director. The second is that the focus of the first Passion Narratives was less on what Jesus did for us in his suffering than on what God does for us through raising him from the dead. When Joseph of Arimethaea mercifully saw to a proper entombment of Jesus' broken body, he left Calvary's cross empty. We can, too, with gratitude and joy.

Violence and Salvation (The Passion of the Christ)

This column's Ash Wednesday posting coincides with the release of Mel Gibson's new movie about Jesus' final twelve hours. The film is opening with an avalanche of prior publicity, controversy, and expectation. Happily, the column is not likely to suffer the same fate. Almost certainly, though, we will be hearing more about the film, the reactions to it, and the theology that informs it throughout this Lenten season. And so, this column and the next two will be devoted to exploring at least a few of the faith-issues that Gibson's work raises so forcefully.

As we have come to understand it from the four Gospels, the Passion Narrative is about a lot of different things all at once: conspiracy, misunderstanding, wrath --- human and divine ---, betrayal, abandonment, power --- human, divine, and satanic ---, humiliation, and undeserved suffering, all in the context of proclaiming the history of human salvation's consummation at the cross of Jesus Christ. I cannot imagine that anyone would ever get all of it, either at once or over a lifetime, or that anyone who does manage to get even a small part of it could absorb a fraction of what God has put into it. I know that this Holy Week will mark the 26^th year that I have been leading Bible studies on Jesus' Passion, and when I am through with this next one I will be just as far from fully understanding his suffering as I was when I started all those years ago. But I also know I will be even more grateful for what it testifies to about our salvation, which is probably all that any of us should ever ask from the story anyway.

About Mel Gibson's particular (and, as we shall see, peculiar) rendering of the Passion of Christ, two major controversies have been flourishing for quite some time. One, about the film's alleged anti-Semitism, probably will go away soon. At least, it should. Anti-Semitism, in the modern sense of the term, refers to a prejudicial attitude toward Jews just for being Jews. Hitler held it, but the Gospel writers did not. Those whom the latter scorned were some of the Jewish people's own leaders, notably Caiaphas, for not being good enough Jews. All of the Gospel writers knew good Jews in abundance, many of whom were Jewish Christians to boot.

A corollary issue with this one is Gibson's depiction of Pontius Pilate in a relatively positive light, in contrast with his characterization of the High Priest. Well, on this matter Gibson is indeed guilty as charged. But so are the Gospels: Pilate comes across in all four a little better than he does in other historical documents of the period. But never to the point that anyone could ever exonerate him of his complicity in Jesus' death. He only thought he could wash his hands of the whole affair. Imagine living out the rest of eternity known primarily for the fact that the Savior of the world "suffered under" you.

But the second major controversy that Mel Gibson has stirred up is not likely to go away at all. It has to do with the graphic nature of the way that his film depicts the violence done to Jesus in the hours leading up to and including his crucifixion. The scenes are so graphic that they yield a bitter irony. What one writer once referred to as "The Greatest Story Ever Told" has earned an R rating from the motion picture industry. An evangelical minister promoting the film declared that he will be taking his eleven-year-old with him to see it. I sincerely hope that the good Reverend will reconsider his plan.

But how far should we go as Christians to meditate upon and to tell other people, especially our children, about the details of our Lord's physical suffering? (The details at stake here are primarily about the beating and the flogging; Jesus'suffering on the cross itself was mercifully brief, at least compared to that of most crucified prisoners.) A good rule of thumb for dealing with this question, one that Mel Gibson has not used well, is to go as far as the Scriptures suggest that we go, but no further.

Our four Gospels tell us a lot of different things, and not just one thing, about the pain that our Lord endured for our sake. Just what some of these things are will be the subject of the next column. To anticipate the conclusion a little: learning more about them will make the question with which the previous paragraph began even more pressing and even less easily resolved.

The Methodists, the Anglicans, and the Gays

Just when things were going well in the current Methodist-Anglican dialogue, New Hampshire Episcopalians elected a gay man their bishop. So much for achieving "full communion" between our denominations. But then again…

The break-down of these talks illustrates well the polarized context in which serious theological conversation must be carried on these days. Inquiry, exploration, and re-consideration are luxuries from a by-gone era. Now, the name of the game is being right rather than being wrong, choosing up sides, and flaying your opponents without mercy.

While traditionalist Episcopalians are setting up a separatist-looking Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, their Methodist counterparts are stepping back from supporting closeness with the Episcopal Church in America until its leaders get their heads on straight about gay-lesbian relationships. Whatever happened to "Come and let us reason together"? It wasn't just Isaiah's invitation; it was God's. (Personally, I doubt that the prophet would have been up to the task all by himself.)

For United Methodists, the new issue emerging is the issue of which Episcopal Church is it with which we should seek full communion. (Not merger, of course --- creating a "super-church" has been off the agenda of most ecumenical dialogues for decades.) "Network" Anglicans say that their gay-supporting fellow members have sundered the historic unity of the Anglican Church, and only those who reject gay relationships have the right to consider themselves members of the true body of Christ. Traditionalist Methodists seem to be looking at things this way, too, abhorring even the thought of hob-nobbing with the doctrinally impure.

One noted Methodist theologian, a former colleague of mine whom I much admire, recently jumped into the discussion by pronouncing, in effect, that the truths of the Scriptures trump all proposals for church unity. Another way of putting his point is that resolving theological differences by contradicting the plain meaning of the Bible is always a no-no. And so, the gay bishop, and all who support him, must go. All of a sudden, we are looking at the Scripture principle in its most doctrinaire form: the Bible is no longer the primary source of doctrinal unity; it must be recognized as the only source.

If only things were this simple. For one thing, the unity of the earliest Christian communities was achieved in spite of one body of Scripture (The Torah) and in advance of the other. (We didn't have an official New Testament canon until the fourth century.) As a matter of fact, the decisions about which writings would be included in that canon were based upon a writing's conformity to an understanding of the Christian message forged long before even the possibility of a Christian canon was seriously entertained.

While our Anglican brothers and sisters are sorting out which of their fellow Christians do and do not represent their tradition at its finest, Methodists might well give some more thought to which Scriptures they particularly have in mind when spreading scriptural holiness all over the place. When sexuality is the issue, I for one have in mind, to begin with, how Jesus talked with the Samaritan woman (John 4:7:-29). It didn't seem to bug him all that much that she had left a trail of husbands in her wake or that she was living with a guy to whom she was not married at all.

Most probably, Paul did intend to say some nasty things about gays. But he also revealed what most of us would deem a rather dismal attitude toward marriage in particular and sex in general: better to be married than burn with desire. (1 Corinthians: 7:9) I keep wondering how this fits into the slogan that has passed for moral instruction in the United Methodist Church for decades now: chastity in singleness. If Paul is right, we had better not trust ourselves, our spouses, or our kids to unmarried ministers. As he reminded his congregation self-righteously, very few people can live as chastely as he did.

And then there is the story of the woman taken in adultery. (Nobody knows for sure where it really goes in John's Gospel; the REB adds it at the end, like an appendix.) Decorum dictates that we put the emphasis on the last verse, and remind each other that Jesus told the woman not to sin anymore. But the heart of the passage is our Lord's telling us to ratchet down our eagerness to pass judgment on others and to quit ignoring our own sins.

Scriptural truth OR church unity? This is surely one of the most devious and destructive dichotomies ever devised. Change the "or" to an "and," though, and we can get somewhere.