Happy Birthday!
So Shakespeare in Julius Caesar has Brutus to say to Cassius. There have been some tides in my own life, which, to contort poor William’s immortal words a bit, I have taken at the ebb, leaving me bound in shallows and in miseries—somewhat. Yes. Hoist by my own petard, to borrow Hamlet’s felicitous phrase, blown up by my own dynamite. One of the tides which I took at the flood, however, was the conception and launching of Christian Ethics Today. That move has not exactly led “on to fortune;” but it was nevertheless a fortunate plunge, a move which I have been pleasured by, which lots and lots of friends have affirmed, which generous allies in the Christian ethics vineyard have kept afloat financially, and which, as best I can understand it, God has blessed. Since the current issue of the journal marks the Tenth Anniversary of that launching, perhaps some modest celebration will not be considered altogether inappropriate. Birthdays are special. When I was young, my Mother made a chicken pie on everybody’s birthday. It was a very special way for our family to celebrate those very special days. With all the good things she prepared to go with that scrumptious chicken pie, those big birthday meals during the depths of the Great Depression constituted the major part of our birthday celebrations. As we said in Van Zandt County in East Texas, we really put the big pot in the little one. I wish I could whomp up such a glorious feast for all the friends of Christian Ethics Today on the occasion of this Anniversary. Lacking the recipe for that fabulous chicken pie, however, I will have to do with just inviting you to celebrate by looking back over our shoulders for a little while. Now, the journal’s birth ten years ago came about on this wise. A couple of years after my retirement following 28 years with the Christian Life Commission, the Christian ethics agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, it became increasingly clear that some medium was needed for ongoing support of the cause of Christian social ethics. After numerous conversations, discussions, meetings, and phone calls, it was decided that a Christian ethics journal should be launched. I committed myself with God’s help to make it happen. The journal would be called Christian Ethics Today. It would be published about every other month “as energy and funding permitted.” A 32-page, 8 ½” by 11” format was settled on; and about 1500 names and addresses were cobbled together. A fine typist with good computer skills was enlisted to prepare the copy from the manuscripts, which I would secure and provide. A knowledgeable and experienced layout professional was found who agreed to work with me in preparing the copy for the printer. A first-class printing establishment agreed to print the journal on high quality paper with an attractive and readable typeface. From the beginning, it was determined that the journal would be copy driven with no artwork and no advertising. Only some years later were we able to make arrangements to utilize selected drawings by Doug Marlett, one of the nation’s most effective and successful cartoonists. For the first issue dated April, 1995, I elicited a few articles related to Christian ethics, transcribed a rather substantive interview with Christian ethicist Henlee H. Barnett, wrote up a piece on “Christian Ethics: Who’s Alive in ’95?,” personally transcribed from a tape recording the masterpiece of an address on “The Crisis in Public Education” (which Frosty Troy had delivered at the annual meeting of Americans United for Separation of Church and State), and with no small expenditure of time, endurance, and energy, dug out an uncut, untamed, and unemasculated version on Walter Rauschenbusch’s “Why I Am a Baptist,” which to this good day is the only unexpurgated copy of that masterpiece which I have found to be in print. (Reprints from Christian Ethics Today have been widely disseminated; and I still have available a few for $1 including postage and my pro bono handling.) That first issue also included a piece, which I pulled together, but mostly have to take the blame for myself on “95 Theses.” My highly competent and extraordinarily longsuffering wife, Mary Louise, and I proofed all the articles before they went to the typist, after they came back from her, when the layout professional had finished his handiwork, and then once again in blue line form just before the journals were finally printed. For that first issue, I jumped through all the hoops devised in the Post Office’s torture chambers, secured a mailing permit, and located a mailing service company owner who consented to receive the journals from the printer and then to utilize the mailing list I provided to get them to the mailing dock in properly zip-coded order for distribution. The first issue stated that this new journal of Christian ethics was intended “to inform, inspire, and unify a lively company of individuals and organizations interested in working for personal morality and public righteousness . . . [to be] issued as money and energy permit. . . . A few pieces might curl your hair. . . . The opinions expressed in the articles . . . are certainly not the opinions of the employees . . . for there are none. . . . If you hate what is in this issue, please do not write as enough griping has already been heard in other contexts for a lifetime. If you like it, enjoy!” A proud parent could hardly have been more pleased, even elated, over a brand new baby with all its fingers and toes, healthy lungs, and functioning plumbing than I was over that first issue of Christian Ethics Today. From the beginning, the official Board that I had enlisted and I had agreed that we would not charge a subscription fee but would simply tell the readers that if they wanted to contribute anything toward defraying the expenses of publication and distribution, their contribution would be appreciated. Now, after ten years, the journal has never experienced a deficit; it has never once been in the red. Faithful and generous supporters are the primary reason for this happy circumstance; but another reason is that the authors have nearly always been provided with a paltry $100 honorarium, poor pay for work that Gustave Flaubert called harder than digging ditches. I gratefully salute all those authors whose good, and often brilliant, contributions have made possible this enterprise. Although this Tenth Anniversary reminiscing has focused on the past, I have to tell you that when Dr. Joe Trull and his very competent and cooperative wife, Audra, took the journal’s reins in the summer of 2000, that was one of the happier days of my life. I felt like a two-ton hippopotamus was off my back. My five years of editing the journal had been wonderfully rewarding; but the never-far-away deadlines of publication exacted a not inconsiderable toll. After the Board’s election of Dr. Trull, I sang the Doxology all the way home. His work for the past five years has been highly effective, indeed; and I heartily congratulate him and his current Board. God’s best blessing to them. And Happy Birthday again to Christian Ethics Today. EthixBytes “Never
retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.” “The left
mocks the right. The right knows its right. Two ugly traits. How far should we
go to try to understand each other’s point of view? Maybe the distance grace
covered on the cross is a clue.” “I have a
son-in-law serving his second tour in Iraq.
I correspond with him several times a week. I send him packages . . . Don’t
tell me that I can’t support the troops while opposing the war. In a similar
vein, don’t accuse the media of not telling the truth about the war just
because you don’t like what you hear.” “To be a
superpower is to be the champion of peace, freedom, and democracy, of human
rights, environmental quality, and the alleviation of suffering.” “War itself
is the most extreme form of terrorism.” “There is
no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that
occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is
the United States.” “Revelations
is taking the reality of supernatural evil seriously and giving validity to the
prophecies of the End Time.” “There are
seven counts [of war crimes] against Saddam Hussein—five of which he committed
while the United States supported him.” “The
analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Bush’s plans for
spending and taxes would yield deficits through the decade ending in 2015
totaling $2.58 trillion. That is $1.6 trillion worse than they would be if none
of the president’s fiscal plans become law.” “According
to the White House’s own numbers, this budget [Federal 2006] would move 300,000
people off food stamps in the next five years. It would cut the funds that
allow 300,000 children to receive day care. It would reduce funding for
Medicaid by $45 billion over the next ten years, and this at a time when 45
million Americans—the highest level on record—are already without health
insurance.” “About 1400
college students die each year from excessive drinking. Because binge drinking
is frequently tied to fraternities and athletics, . . . some universities are
banning alcohol at both fraternities and football games.” “Statistically
speaking, if you drove across the country, every ninth household you passed was
unable—or in danger of being unable—to afford sufficient food at some point in
the past year.” “In 2004
Roman Catholic leaders received 1,092 new abuse claims against American priests
and deacons, even after they had paid more than $800 million in settlements
during the long-running crisis over predatory clergy.” “There is
no energy policy and no real effort to reduce our voracious demand of foreign
capital. The U.S. pulled in 80 percent of total world
savings last year largely to finance our consumption. . . . 43 percent of all
U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds are now held by foreigners.” “Actually
it’s a lot of fun to fight, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot
some people.” “He has an
abominable record on the death penalty, and while it is certainly healthy to
decide to throw 50 million federal dollars toward the training of lawyers, it
is really nothing more than bonsai gardening; clipping a little bit here and a
little bit there and reshaping the tree. At its roots this is an ugly, racist,
rotten tree that should wither.” “When we
advertise the gospel in terms of the world’s values, we lie to people. We lie
to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves
the Cross. It involves death, . . . We give up our lives.” God and the Tsunami The most catastrophic event in recent memory is the giant earthquake that erupted under the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, caused by the movement of two tectonic plates four thousand fathoms under the surface of the sea. Registering 9.0 on the Richter scale, this two-hundred megaton jolt thrust up a giant wave a hundred feet high that raced at nearly five-hundred miles an hour to devastate 3,000 miles of unprotected shoreline. Saturation media coverage makes it unnecessary to dwell here on the carnage that has already caused 300,000 deaths, 250,000 of them in Indonesia alone. Instead, we focus on the profound religious issues raised by the sheer arbitrariness of the disaster. Since tsunamis do not play politics, there are no enemy terrorists to blame, so does that make God the culprit? Efforts to explain the divine role in such calamities leave much to be desired. As might be expected, some were ready with theories of retribution: one popular author covered all the bases by insisting that God was punishing our enemies for persecuting Christians and punishing us for our moral laxity as a wake-up call to repent. To critics challenging the severity of his verdict, he retorted, “You ought to see what hell is like. It’s going to be an eternal judgment of God on all people.”[i] Others have used scriptural descriptions of upheavals in nature (Matt. 24:7-8; Lk. 21:25-26) to view the tsunami as a sign of the last days when the rewards of heaven will more than compensate us for the severe trials that we must endure here on earth. However, to explain the tragedy in terms either of heaven or of hell leaves it a mystery that will not be solved until we reach eternity, thereby diverting our attention from responses that are urgently needed in the present. The concern prompting this sermon is that, if we as Christians refuse to face head-on the hard questions that arise whenever nature becomes our enemy, that very denial of the problem will create a dark closet of doubt within the house of faith. After all, we are endlessly threatened, not only by earthquakes, but by floods, tornados, landslides, and plagues. It is the mega-scourges that get media attention, but our heartbreaking dilemma is mirrored in the face of one tiny baby dying of leukemia. What do we say when nature seems not only capricious and cruel but downright callous about those whom it hurts the most? As Christians we make some very strong claims about the essential goodness of our world as a gift of God. But how can we sing “For the Beauty of the Earth” on beaches littered with rotting corpses? Let us honor the dead by grappling with the tough issues raised by those terrible realities that cost them their lives. The Creator The religious questions being raised about the tsunami fall into a predictable pattern that has surfaced many times in the past. First, “How could God allow such a terrible thing to happen?” and, second, “Where was God when it happened?” The assumption is that, if God is all-loving, he would not permit such a cataclysm to occur; and, if he all-powerful, he would act to prevent any other force from causing it to occur. Since the Christian faith insists that God is intimately concerned with each individual life (Matt. 10:29-31), we cannot assume that he was indifferent or detached like the Deist god of the Enlightenment. If we have no answers to these questions, does this imply either that God is vindictive rather than loving, or that he is weak rather than strong, or that he is absent rather than present with us? Clearly the tsunami calls into question our most fundamental understanding of God. Let us begin with the issue of power. Many simply assume that God, by definition, is in charge of everything that happens. We like to use the “omni”- words, stressing that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. When we shift out of that philosophical framework, we often speak of God as sovereign, almighty, and majestic. Or as one theologian put it, “God is in control of the entire universe, and there is not even a single atom outside His sovereignty”[ii] Descriptions of God’s absolute power abound which assume that he could immediately halt the most ferocious storm if he so desired. Sometimes it seems as if Christians are in a contest to claim more for their God than other religions claim for theirs, which causes us to insist that our God can do anything he pleases. Let me trouble you to think about whether this is the best way to understand the greatness of God. Obviously God cannot do anything that is inherently impossible or contradictory, such as make a rock so heavy that he cannot pick it up. More important is the recognition that God can act only consistent with his character. Thus, for example, God cannot sin or do anything that would be ungodly, which puts off-limits to him many things that we do. According to the Bible, the holiness of God means that he is unique, radically different from us in what he thinks and does (Isa. 55:8-9). To say that God can act only for good does not mean that he is restrained by some power greater than himself, but rather that he chooses to limit his power by his perfection. In short, God is not free to not be God! Now let us look more closely at the common platitude that God is all-loving. We all know that the word “love” has great latitude, which is well expressed by acknowledging that we “love” our God, our country, our family, as well as cold watermelon and our favorite flavor of ice cream. One kind of love can easily become self-gratifying, as when a lad whispers to his date in the moonlight, “I love you, I love you,” but what he really means is, “I love me and I want you.” Another kind of love can lead to a pampering of the beloved that results in their corruption. All of us know parents who coddle their children until, like bad fruit, they become “spoiled.” Love can be so smotheringly possessive that the beloved is crushed by its embrace. In the Bible, God is pictured as having a very distinctive kind of love that is different from our own, so much so that it required a new word to describe it. This agapē is what we might call “tough love,” sacrificial rather than selfish or smothering in nature. By the time of the Apostle Paul, the followers of Jesus came to realize that it was redemptive love because it was causing them to grow toward maturity (Eph. 3:14-19; 4:13-15). The central truth of the New Testament is that the nature of God was most fully revealed by Christ’s death on the cross, which represented a revolution in our understanding of just how vulnerable his love was willing to be on our behalf (Phil. 2:6-11). When we combine these insights regarding God’s power and love and apply them to his role as creator of the universe, we begin to understand why God did not fashion earth as a perfect planet that never changes, a place where there are no germs or snakes or hurricanes. God did not make a robot world for the same reason that he did not make robot people to inhabit it, namely, because such a world would leave no room for choices, for growth, for the achievement of maturity. Trapped in a world of total predictability, we would be forced to bow to the inevitability of the way things always are. Theoretically, it might seem easier to live in a perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong, but such a world would deny us the most precious dimension of our humanity, namely, our freedom, the freedom to decide what to believe and who to love and how to relate to the world about us. Think of the parents who do everything possible to create a perfect world for their children only to watch them grow up unable to cope with the harsh realities of human existence. There is no maturity without freedom and no freedom without risk. That is why God chose to use his power on the hardest task of all: to love us in such a way that we will freely choose to love in mature fashion. So let us begin to think about the kind of world where responsible freedom is encouraged. The Creation Only after we sharpen our understanding of the character of the Creator are we able to ponder what kind of creation is compatible with God’s nature. Just as we often adopt an absolutist idea of God that puts no limits on the way he uses his power and his love, even so we often entertain a simplistic idea of creation by assuming that God began with a nice clean slate, a perfect emptiness filled only with himself. It is always easier to start like that, in a vacuum with no clutter or carryover from the past. Many of our problems stem from our inability to start from scratch. We lament the legacy that others have left behind but assume that God was not encumbered with such restrictions. The biblical account in Genesis 1, however, is not so simple. For no sooner does verse 1 declare that God created the earth than verse 2 immediately goes on to say that, before this began to happen, the earth was (1) devoid of form or content, having no shape or substance, no law or order. (2) Furthermore, there was a dark watery void underneath this chaos called “the deep.” (3) Again, upon the face of the deep there was a brooding “darkness.” And yet God faced down this bleak abyss. The wind of his breath blew across its shadowy face. He moved in to hatch something new like a bird sets on an egg. The creative God came up against the most uncreative, unpromising raw materials imaginable and determined to use them as building blocks for a livable planet earth (Isa. 45:18). Such a startling picture of chaos leaves us hungry to speculate about where this amorphous nothingness, this watery emptiness, this overarching blackness came from, but on such issues the text is silent, as is its New Testament counterpart in John 1:5 where the origin of “darkness” is not explained but simply posited. The key point lies rather in the contrast: verse 2 describes the antithesis of creation, what our world would be like without the creative intervention of God. In other words, creation does not mean making something out of nothing but it means bringing order out of chaos. You do not create a painting simply by gathering oils and brushes. Or create a cathedral by assembling lumber and bricks. These are only raw materials waiting to be transformed. Just so, to say that our world was “created” means more than to say merely that it “exists,” for the former implies design, purpose, and beauty such as God superimposed by gradually sorting out the confusion that confronted him. It is just here that we come to a second startling biblical insight about creation, namely, that it is unfinished because the nothingness of the void was overcome but not forever banished. Always the possibility of reverting to corruption and disorder lurked in the shadows. In our incredible capacity to choose, we can lay waste to God’s good creation by ravaging its forests, polluting its streams, and fouling its air. The Prophet Jeremiah pictured a relapse of creation to its pre-created chaos (Jer. 4:23-26), but God asserted his determination to work within the constraints of our freedom to renew creation and bring it to completion (Jer. 4:27-28). That is why Jesus affirmed, not only that God was still engaged in his creative work, but that the Son joined him in that endeavor (Jn. 5:17). His miracles, for example, restored small fragments of creation to their original goodness (compare Gen. 1:31 with Mk. 7:37). Indeed, the work of creation will not be completed until there is “a new heaven and a new earth” as envisioned in the last book of the Bible (Rev. 21:1). It is just here that we need to turn aside for a moment and reflect on the meaning of evolution that has become so controversial in contemporary religious life. To be sure, there are those who would use an extreme view of scientific or social Darwinism to discredit the Christian faith, but the growing evidence for a vast process of evolution over billions of years, if understood properly, may actually enhance our understanding of creation. For what it means is that there is an amazing drive toward order, purpose, and wholeness built into the very way that things are made. There was a time when our planet was little more than an uninhabitable mass of fiery magma endlessly pummeled by celestial meteors. Why should this utterly unpromising beginning lead eventually, not only to animal and human life, but to intelligence and community, even to goodness and beauty, rather than collapsing into a meaningless jumble? There are few places to see the work of the creator God more clearly than in the millions upon millions of ways in which nature has decided, in the use of its own God-given freedom, to grow to the point of development it has now reached. And why should these choices that the evolutionists call “natural selection” result in such purposeful progress except that this was the direction that God intended from the beginning? Clearly nature’s quest for harmony and balance is not yet complete, which is why the tectonic plates that have been grinding against one another for some three billion years may still overlap in ways that cause unintended disasters. But the improvements made thus far are breathtaking if only we will stop to behold them. The Creature At last we are in a position to ask what it might mean for us to live in the kind of world just described. Obviously it is an unfinished creation just as we are unfinished creatures. Despite enormous progress, the world is just as broken as we are, thus there is much work yet to be done. Meanwhile, the lurking void reminds us of just how finite, vulnerable, and thus necessarily interdependent we really are. Life is a hazardous venture at best, not only because we cannot predict what may happen next in nature, but also because we cannot predict what may happen next in the human heart. The only way to cope with the many contingences that belong both to the freedom of nature and to the freedom of humanity is to be prepared for the worst but committed to work with God for the best in completing his “new creation.” It may sound audacious to suggest that God has invited us to help him tame the chaos, to literally be co-creators with him in making a better world, but that is precisely why he has endowed us with what we call “creativity,” which means exactly what it says, namely, the capacity to make things new and better! Why would God ask us to “subdue” the earth and “have dominion” over it (Gen. 1:28) unless he had fitted us for that very task? Unfortunately, many Christians have a vague and weak doctrine of creation that leaves them indifferent to the plight of nature. What is needed is an attitudinal change according to which it becomes an overriding passion of us all to leave the world better than we found it. It is a scandal that some environmentalists who have no God are more actively involved in the care of the earth than are some Christians who claim to worship its creator! To take seriously our role in helping creation attain its full potential is to honor science and technology for the great strides made in understanding how the physical world works and what its most pressing needs might be. Specifically regarding the recent tsunami, only since the 1960s have seismologists begun to understand the workings of tectonic plates and therefore gained the ability to predict well in advance when disasters may occur. In this case, several hours of warning time were available but no alarm systems were in place despite the fact that they utilize a simple technology which has been in existence for almost a century. Third World countries often plead the excuse of poverty for their neglect when the problem is really one of priority, most of them spending far more on weapons of destruction than it would cost to install an early warning system able to alert their citizens to danger. If we but have the will to do it, we can make this world a much safer place in which to live instead of squandering our ingenuity and resources on that which can only destroy life and fracture its habitat. That is precisely the kind of choice that God gave us: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life that you and your descendents may live” (Deut. 30:19). To be sure, this will not be a quick or easy task and, in our petulance, we whine at God for not having already done our work for us. But remember, God himself has been working on behalf of our world for a lot longer than we have. At the outset, he spread his labors over six days rather than commanding an instantaneous creation that would be complete from the outset. Instead of pulling the world out of a hat full blown, God followed a gradual progression, an orderly sequence, a purposeful process that has evolved to the present day. We must infer from this approach that he “took his time” because the kind of creativity that honors freedom takes patience even for God. If God never gives up in his efforts to create something worthwhile, if he is willing to work one step at a time, who are we to refuse to join him in that task? The fact that the job is not finished, either for God or for us, does not mean that he has consigned us to live with a succession of tragedies as acts of judgment, punishment, or warning. Rather, he has joined us in the struggle and made himself vulnerable to their impact. In the magnificent eighth chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul wrote of the emptiness, brokenness, and sense of futility that haunts the whole created order (v. 20). No one could have painted the tragic dimension of life on a vaster canvas than did Paul in his personification of every part of creation joining together in a common chorus of cries. But he moved swiftly to interpret this writhing as the travail of an expectant mother about to bring forth her most cherished hope (v. 22b). The spasms that convulse life are but the labor pains by which the creation is struggling to “be set free . . . and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (v. 21). Paul’s key word in this passage is “groaning” which he attributes not only to creation but to the Christian community as we share creation’s ordeal (v. 23) and to the divine Comforter who intercedes on our behalf with “groanings too deep for words” (v. 26). Herein lies our ultimate hope for the transformation of tragedy, not that we have discovered a neat theodicy which somehow “explains” the problem of suffering, but that we have experienced the sovereign God striving with us “in all things” until he once again makes them “good” (v. 28). So, to answer directly the question, “Where was God when the tsunami struck?,” he was on every mile of those battered beaches weeping with those who wept, groaning for the day when nature and all of its inhabitants will know a better world in which to live. As a child of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship missionaries working in the area put it: When wave upon wave of water hit shores thousands of miles from where they began, You were there. When these waves crashed away everything in their path, You were there. When the people You loved enough to die for ran for their very lives, You were there. When houses fell and possessions were swept away, You were there. You saw as these waves broke buildings, stole lives, left terror and grief in their wake. Did Your heart break? I don’t have to ask. I imagine Your tears would put the waters of tsunamis to shame. In the midst of death and destruction, the God of the Universe was there. You were there.[iii] There Is No Tomorrow
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad, but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true—one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That’s right—the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the “Left Behind” series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans. Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “biblical lands,” legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. I’m not making this up. Like Monbiot, I’ve read the literature. I’ve reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.” A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144—just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer—“The Road to Environmental Apocalypse.” Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist makes clear, we’re not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election—231 legislators in total and more since the election—are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought. And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?” Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, America’s Providential History. You’ll find there these words: “The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie . . . that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.” However, “[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth . . . while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.” No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that Militant hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on November 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics. It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don’t know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: “What do you think of the market?” “I’m optimistic,” he answered. “Then why do you look so worried?” And he answered: “Because I am not sure my optimism is justified.” I’m not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It’s not that I don’t want to believe that—it’s just that I read the news and connect the dots. I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration: That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources. That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment. That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public. That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies. That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America. I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the administration’s friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children’s clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study. I read all this in the news. I read the news just last night and learned that the administration’s friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is “a myth, sea levels are not rising” [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are “an embarrassment.” I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California. I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer—pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.” And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice? What has happened to our moral imagination? On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: “How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.” I see it feelingly. The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free—not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma—the science of the heart—the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does. Antonin Scalia: Our Next Chief Justice? Justice Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986 as its most recent appointee. He soon made a reputation as the most far-right member of the Court. He is an outspoken leader of the very conservative Federalist Society and a devoted right-wing Catholic. Alan Dershowitz, in his book Supreme Injustice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), wrote that Scalia’s “conservatisms, according to a professor who is an expert in these matters, are ‘of the Old World European sort, rooted in the authority of the Church and the military. It is more reminiscent of French, Italian and Spanish clerical conservatism than of American conservatism with its libertarian bent.’” According to a Washington Post story, Antonin Scalia was sent to “an elite church-run military prep school in Manhattan where one of his classmates remembered him at age seventeen as ‘an arch-conservative Catholic [who] could have been a member of the Curia’” (Dershowitz, 168). Scalia has generally followed the political program of the U. S. Catholic Bishops against abortion outlined in their 1974 Pastoral Letter. The Letter, which was directed to the Catholic Lawyers Association and among other groups such as the Knights of Columbus, had as its primary focus the influencing of judicial appointments so as “to reverse the decision that legalizes abortion.” Scalia has rarely if ever departed from the Bishops’ position opposing abortion and even uses the language of the Bishops in calling an embryo or fetus “an unborn child.” Justice Scalia is always in attendance at the annual Red Mass in Washington, D.C. The Red Mass [see CET, April, 2002, 26] is a medieval institution that has been repackaged in the United States in the twentieth century to influence judges and other lawmakers as well as the culture of the states and nation. Although it has some religious significance, the event has been used by Catholic bishops and cardinals as an opportunity to advocate the political proposals of the Vatican such as opposition to abortion and separation of church and state, support of aid to parochial schools, and reinterpreting personhood as taking place at conception rather than at birth. There is an underlying assumption that law and morality began with the Roman Catholic Church and divine revelation. Scalia not only attends Red Masses in national and state celebrations, but speaks on occasion to those who meet after the Mass. In other words, he is a papal loyalist who appears to hold the Pope’s authority to be above the authority of secular civil government. In a formal address to a Catholic audience in Fort Wayne, Indiana on October 14, 2001, following a Red Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Scalia was reported by The National Catholic Register as saying, “We attorneys and intellectuals who don’t like to be regarded as unsophisticated can have no greater [role] model than St. Thomas More. Speaking of the beheaded advisor to King Henry VIII, the Reporter indicated that “the saint died because he refused to recognize a king’s authority as being higher than the Pope’s, and his conviction was rejected by society, friends and ‘even his wife,’ Scalia said. (NCR, November 4, 2001) What actually happened in England during the reign of Henry VIII was an Act of Parliament in 1534, known as the Act of Succession, that forbade all payments by the government to the Pope and ruled that all bishops were to be elected rather than appointed by the Pope. The recognition of papal authority was done away. (Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church, Charles Scribners, New York, 1943, 404) Henry and each of his successors were declared “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.” This “was not understood by either the King or Parliament as conferring on the King spiritual leadership such as ordination, the administration of the sacraments and the like, but in all else it practically put the King in the place of the Pope. (Ibid.) The Lutheran Reformation had already taken place, and in 1535 John Calvin was safely in Protestant Basel. So it was not just England that rejected papal authority. Although there were various Protestant revolts against the Papacy, the one in England was less a doctrinal revolt than a question of supremacy. Sir Thomas More was willing to accept the Act of Succession but unwilling to take the oath of supremacy to the King. He saw this as a matter of conscience. He was convicted of treason on the basis of perjured evidence and executed. Scalia was correct in honoring St. Thomas More as a man of conscience, but not because of his rejecting of the authority of civil government. What Scalia did not mention in his commendation of More is that England’s rejection of the papal authority was timely, because Pope Paul III in July, 1542, “reorganized the Inquisition largely on the Spanish model, on a universal scale, though of course its actual establishment took place only where it had the support of friendly civil authorities.” (Walker, 424) So England was spared. Scalia, who led the Supreme Court majority in stopping the counting of the Florida vote in the Bush v Gore Presidential election and thus gave the election to Bush, is discussed in that context by Dershowitz. Among the possible hypotheses for such action is that one of the Justices “hopes to be promoted to Chief Justice when the incumbent retires, as he is expected to do if a candidate of his party becomes President.” Another hypothetical reason is the belief that a certain candidate will ensure a solid majority on the Court to support “our views of the Constitution.” Other hypotheses are explored. However, one of the chief values of Dershowitz’s book is its discussion of the “code of judicial conduct which “has prohibited judges with a significant material interest in the outcome of a case from participating in its deliberations or decisions.” Every “contemporary American judicial code expressly prohibits a judge from ‘taking part’ in any case in which his personal self-interest may be involved,” and “self-interest is broadly defined so as to avoid even the appearance of bias” or the “impression that any person can improperly influence him or unduly enjoy his favor, or that he is afflicted by kinship, rank, position, or influence by any party or other person.” (Dershowitz, 98) What Supreme Injustice did not reveal is that Scalia’s son, Paul, is a member of a militant multi-million-dollar organization, Priests for Life. That organization’s leader, Father Frank Pavone, not only endorses clinic blockades and advertises in newspapers, TV, and on billboards, but also urges voters to vote for anti-abortion candidates. (The Village Voice, May 29, 2001, 51-52) Priests for Life was so important politically that in May, 2000 Presidential candidate George W. Bush met with Pavone (Conscience, Summer 2001, 5). The American people may never know how close a relationship justice Scalia has with his son, and hence with Priests for Life. That, of course, is only part of the Scalia story. Since Scalia has already indicated in his use of Sir Thomas More as his role model, evidently because More refused to accept a King’s authority (civil government) as higher than the Pope, it is essential to refer to the March 28, 1995 Encyclical of Pope John Paul, known as Evangelius Vitae. In that encyclical, the Pope specifically called abortion “contrary to the Law of God” and said “It is never licit to obey it or . . . vote for it.” Since there is no statement against abortion in the Bible, the “Law of God” is proclaimed by the Pope and therefore binding on those who place loyalty to the Pope ahead of secular law and democratic judgment. The Pope specifically wrote, “Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality.” Although at least one lawyer admitted to practice before the Supreme Court called on Scalia to recuse himself in an abortion case, Scalia did not do so. Justice Scalia also doesn’t easily accept criticism. An attorney in Independence, Missouri, who has practiced law for thirty years wrote him in October, 2000, questioning his “participation in the activities and agenda” of the Federalist Society, an organization of right-wing lawyers, judges, and legislators such as Orrin Hatch. Its significance is evident from the decision by George W. Bush to consult it rather than the American Bar Association in making judicial appointments. Attorney J. Martin Kerr wrote, “Your participation and speaking at meetings of the Federalist Society would have the appearance of impropriety in that you are engaging in political activities touching upon the very issues that come before you as a sitting judge of the United States Supreme Court” (October 12, 2000). Scalia’s reply on October 27 denied that the Federalist Society is a “political organization” and added, “I confess never before to have received a letter—not even from a non-lawyer—accusing me of ethical improprieties on the Supreme Court bench. This suggests that, far from being (as you unctuously describe yourself) a ‘humble lawyer,’ you have an uncommon supply of cheek. That can sometimes be admired, but not when wedded to ignorance.” One can only suspect that Scalia would be even more angry at Dershowitz, who not only accuses him of partisan political conduct in his decision in Bush v. Gore with respect to the Florida vote, but who also wrote, “Scalia was known more for his ideological extremes than for his scholarship. Few would have ranked him among the most distinguished theoreticians of constitutional law; but everyone would have ranked him as among the most ideological of right-wing theorists….It was his extremism, not his academic distinction, that brought him to the attention of the Reagan administration and ultimately got him his job on the high Court”(199). The Faith of Mother Teresa Mother Teresa has long been my hero. A missionary of love and hope to the entire world, Mother Teresa profoundly shaped my understanding of the Christian faith. She provided for me a model of what Christ calls each of us to be and do. Every day of her life, no matter where she was or what she was doing, she lived her faith. But to be honest, I always found Mother Teresa’s faith to be a bit simplistic, and I have never been able to resonate with her complete and unquestioning assurance. I never understood how she managed to work among the poorest of the poor and to wash the bodies of lepers and AIDs patients without asking why, without questioning God’s role in all the suffering. But in recent days, I have discovered that she had her share of doubts. On October 14, 2003, while listening to NPR on my car radio, I heard Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s interview with Father Brain Kolodiejchuk, the chief advocate of Mother Teresa’s cause for sainthood. Kolodiejchuck stated that letters written by Mother Teresa to her superiors reveal that she had serious doubts and experienced years of spiritual darkness. The time of darkness began in 1948, the year that Mother Teresa began her new work in Calcutta, India. The darkness came after two years of intense and ecstatic spiritual experiences that began while she traveling by train to the Himalayan region of Darjeeling. On the train, she heard God calling her to devote herself to “the poorest of the poor” and to live among them. Teresa then petitioned the Catholic Church for permission to follow God’s calling and to set up a convent in Calcutta. During the two years in which she prepared to begin her new work, Teresa had numerous vivid and clear visions of Jesus. Jesus spoke to her and revealed himself to her in profound ways. In 1948, the plans were completed for her work, and Teresa began her ministry in the streets of Calcutta. Shortly after she started this new work, the visions stopped. Jesus never again came to her nor spoke to her. The incredible union she had experienced with Jesus completely disappeared, and Teresa was bereft. She felt that God had abandoned her, and she wrote of her tremendous pain in letters to her superiors. Kolodiejchuk read one letter in which she wrote, “I call, I cling, I want and there is no one to answer. The darkness is so dark and I am alone.” In another letter, Teresa wrote of the “terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.” Mother Teresa’s letter revealed that this darkness, this feeling of rejection and abandonment, continued throughout her life. She never again had an ecstatic spiritual experience. She never again felt that close intimate union with Christ that she had experienced in 1946. What I find truly amazing about these new revelations about Mother Teresa is that this woman who knew spiritual emptiness and who knew loneliness and darkness continued to give herself so completely to those around her. She never stopped loving people. She never stopped seeking to meet needs. She never stopped doing the work of the kingdom. She lived every day in faithful obedience to God. When I heard this story on NPR, I was floored. In all the things I have read over the years about and by Mother Teresa, I found no clue that she had experienced great despair. I never knew that she felt distanced from God. Yet knowing that she had her doubts and her times of great questioning have made me love and admire her even more than before. Knowing how she lived out her faith and now knowing of her spiritual struggle, I know that this small Catholic nun will forever be my greatest hero. The Power of Reconciliation There is probably no more divisive time in America than an election season. So I thought it appropriate to tell a story of reconciliation that is very important to me, and one that I have never told before. It is about my relationship with a fellow Christian who, if he were still alive, would likely be voting differently than me in the upcoming election. Bill Bright was the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical organization on campuses around the country. Motivated, above all else, by the Great Commission, Bill Bright wanted to reach every person on the planet for Christ “in this generation.” Concerned about the “moral degeneration” of America, Bright wanted America to come back to God—which for him meant an ultra-conservative political agenda. Bill and I were both evangelical Christians, but we clearly disagreed on a whole range of political issues. In 1976, Bill Bright joined a far-right member of Congress named John Conlan and other conservatives in a project to mobilize evangelical prayer and cell groups for political purposes. It was, in fact, the first attempt to create a “Religious Right” in American politics—several years before the founding of groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. We at Sojourners decided to investigate. It became the most extensive investigative project we had ever undertaken, and resulted in a cover story in the magazine titled “The Plan to Save America.” Bright was publicly embarrassed by our expose and the whole experience. Though we had been scrupulously careful, backing up every fact in the story with at least three sources, Bright angrily denounced me. We invited Bright and the others involved to respond, both before and after the article was published, but they chose not to. Because we also differed on almost every political question from Vietnam to domestic issues, a bitter and public polarization grew up between Bill Bright and myself. The bad blood continued for many years. I remember a particularly painful moment one year at a dinner for evangelical leaders, when Bright again went on the attack against me in a very public way, calling me a “liar.” More than two decades later, Bright and I found ourselves at yet another religious leaders’ dinner. When I saw him across the room, I swallowed hard and headed in his direction. He obviously didn’t recognize me after so long. I introduced myself, and he became quiet. I said, “Bill, I need to apologize to you. I was in a hotel several months ago and knew you were there too. I should have come to your room and tried to mend the painful breach between us after all these years. I didn’t do that, and I should have. I’m sorry.” The now-old man reached out and wrapped his arms around me. Then he said, Jim, we need to come together. It’s been so long, and the Lord would have us come together.” We both had tears in our eyes and embraced for a long time. Then Bill said, “Jim, I’m so worried about the poor, about what’s going to happen to them. You’re bringing us together on that, and I want to support you.” I was amazed. We agreed to get together soon. A few months later, Bill and I were again, coincidently, at the same hotel. I called Bill and we agreed to a walk on the beach together the next morning. Bill and I shared our own conversion stories. We shared our callings and dreams for our respective ministries, and how we might be more connected. Bill then astounded me, saying, “You know, Jim, I’m kind of a Great Commission guy.” I smiled and nodded my head. “And I’ve discovered that caring for the poor is part of the Great Commission, because Jesus instructed us to ‘teach the nations to observe all the things I have commanded you.’ And Jim, Jesus certainly taught us to care for the poor, didn’t he? Caring for the poor is part of the Great Commission!” said Bill Bright. When we got back to the hotel, Bill asked if we could pray together. We sat down and grasped each other’s hands. First praying for each other, we also prayed for each other’s ministries. Bill Bright prayed for me, and for the work of Call to Renewal and Sojourners. When we were finished, he said he wanted to raise some money for our “work of the Lord.” Bill, who was now more than 80 years old, soon began to get sick. I kept track of how he was doing. Then one day, I got a letter—from Bill Bright. Here’s what the letter said: My Dear Jim,
©Reprinted with permission from Sojourners (800) 714-7474. www.sojo.net What Jesus Wouldn’t Do Editor's Note: The following is an edited excerpt from Jim Wallis' new book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (Harper San Francisco). The politics of Jesus is a problem for the religious right. In Matthew’s 25th chapter, Jesus speaks of the hungry, the homeless, the stranger, prisoners, and the sick and promises he will challenge all his followers on the judgment day with these words, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” James Forbes, the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, concludes from that text that, “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor!” How many of America’s most famous television preachers could produce the letter? The hardest saying of Jesus and perhaps the most controversial in our post–Sept. 11 world must be: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.” Let’s be honest: How many churches in the United States have heard sermons preached from either of these Jesus texts in the years since America was viciously attacked on that world-changing September morning in 2001? Shouldn’t we at least have a debate about what the words of Jesus mean in the new world of terrorist threats and pre-emptive wars? Christ commands us to not only see the splinter in our adversary’s eye but also the beams in our own, which often obstruct our own vision. To name the face of evil in the brutality of terrorist attacks is good theology, but to say they are evil and we are good is bad theology that can lead to dangerous foreign policy. Christ instructs us to love our enemies, which does not mean a submission to their hostile agendas or domination, but does mean treating them as human beings also created in the image of God and respecting their human rights as adversaries and even as prisoners. The words of Jesus are either authoritative for Christians, or they are not. And they are not set aside by the very real threats of terrorism. The threat of terrorism does not overturn Christian ethics. The issue here is not partisan politics, and there are no easy political solutions. The governing party has increasingly struck a religious tone in an aggressive foreign policy that seems much more nationalist than Christian, while the opposition party has offered more confusion than clarity. In any election we choose between very imperfect choices. Yet it is always important to examine what is at stake prayerfully and theologically. This examination among evangelicals became clear in the 2004 Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility, an unprecedented call to social action from the National Association of Evangelicals. In contrast to the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson era, evangelicals are now showing moral leadership in the fight against global poverty, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and sustainability of God’s earth. These changes represent both a reaction against overt partisanship and a desire to apply Christian ethics to a broader set of issues. Many people of faith have grown weary of the religious right’s attempts to narrow the moral litmus test to abortion and gay marriage. For example, when likely voters were asked in a 2004 poll whether they would rather hear a candidate’s position on poverty or on gay marriage, 75 percent chose poverty. Only 17 percent chose gay marriage. Any serious reading of the Bible points toward poverty as a religious issue, and candidates should always be asked by Christian voters how they will treat “the least of these.” Stewardship of God’s earth is clearly a question of Christian ethics. Truth telling is also a religious issue that should be applied to a candidate’s rationales for war, tax cuts, or any other policy, as is humility in avoiding the language of “righteous empire,” which too easily confuses the roles of God, church, and nation. War, of course, is also a deeply theological matter. The near unanimous opinion of religious leaders worldwide that the Iraq war failed to fit “just war” criteria is an issue for many Christians, especially as the warnings from religious leaders have proved prophetically and tragically accurate. The “plagues of war,” as the pope has referred to the continuing problems in Iraq, are in part a consequence of a “Christian president” simply not listening to the counsel of religious leaders who tried to speak to the White House. What has happened to the “consistent ethic of life,” suggested by Catholic social teaching, which speaks against abortion, capital punishment, poverty, war, and a range of human rights abuses too often selectively respected by pro-life advocates? The politics of Jesus is a problem for the religious right. The religious right’s grip on public debates about values has been driven in part by a media that continues to give airtime to the loudest religious voices, rather than the most representative, leaving millions of Christians and other people of faith without a say in the values debate. But this is starting to change as progressive and prophetic faith voices are speaking out with a confidence and moral urgency not seen for 25 years. Mobilized by human suffering in many places, groups motivated by religious social conscience (including many evangelicals not defined by the religious right) have hit a new stride in efforts to combat poverty, destructive wars, human rights violations, pandemics like HIV/AIDS, and genocide in places like Sudan. In politics, the best interest of the country is served when the prophetic voice of religion is heard—challenging both right and left from consistent moral ground. The evangelical Christians of the 19th century combined revivalism with social reform and helped lead movements for abolition and women’s suffrage—not to mention the faith-based movement that directly preceded the rise of the religious right, namely the American civil rights movement led by the black churches. The truth is that most of the important movements for social change in America have been fueled by religion—progressive religion. The stark moral challenges of our time have once again begun to awaken this prophetic tradition. As the religious Right loses influence, nothing could be better for the health of both church and society than a return of the moral center that anchors our nation in a common humanity. If you listen, these voices can be heard rising again. © 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21428/ Reprinted by permission of the author and Alternet. A Dad’s War Story Note: Rev. Kliesch’s son is serving in Iraq with an infantry airborne unit that does routine patrols in the Baghdad area. I think about my nineteen-year-old son in Iraq all the time. I wake up thinking about him; I go to bed thinking about him. I wonder what he is doing, where is he, and what he is thinking and feeling. Is he alive? Is he hurt? Is he safe: I even dream about him. I wait for his next phone call, his next letter, or his next e-mail. When they don’t come, sometimes for a week or so, I really become anxious. But we have learned that no news is usually good news. There is a quiet anguish at our house. It is underneath the surface, unseen, but you know that it is there. I pray a lot? Most of all I pray my version of the sinner’s prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon my son.” Of course, I pray for his safety. I pray that he will have the wisdom, skill, and courage necessary to do his job and stay safe. I pray for his protection. But most of all I pray over-and-over my version of the sinner’s prayer. These words seem to be the best words for me. I try to be honest about this war only to find that most who support it look at me as if I am unpatriotic. I listen to their attempts to defend the cause. In their words I detect a lot of pride, not of the patriotic flavor but of the hubris type. To me this seems to be fueling a lot of the support for this war. At times there seems to be a thrill and a sense of jubilation in their voices that America is fighting another war. That is probably one reason many have trouble being honest about it. They are blinded by their pride. I have been angry with a lot of things related to this war. But what really raises my anger is the gloating that I hear and see. For some, the fighting and the dying are like the Super bowl and the World Series all wrapped in one. They cheer when we are victorious; they stick out their chest and challenge the enemy when he taunts. It is the gloating that causes me such pain. Many who cheer this war on, are not in the battles. They are in the stands. They are observers, not participants. No one seems to be eager to bare the sacrifices. I suspect that as long as many do not have to sacrifice in any form or fashion, this war will continue to be a “just war” in their eyes, especially as long as someone else is making the “just” sacrifices. My son did sign-up! He signed up before this war even started. He signed up before he graduated from high school. It is called “Delayed Entry.” He committed eight years of his life to the Army before he could manage his own checking account. Sure, we tried to talk him out of it. In spite of my attempts to tell him that there was going to be a war, he signed up. In spite of my efforts to explain that everything in the Army is about life and death, he signed up. He signed up for the college money. He signed up for the monthly check. He signed up for the girls because his recruiter told him that the girls were pretty in the Army. And of course, he signed up to serve his country. I am proud of him, proud that he is fulfilling his duty. One day someone made the comment to me, “Well, all who are there, signed up.” He happened to be a strong supporter of the war with a 19 year-old son in college. I agreed with him. Then I challenged him to take his 19 year-old son and sign him up for the Army with a request to go to Iraq. He became quiet and said nothing more about the war. He hasn’t mentioned the war to me again. It is real easy to be gung-ho about this war when you don’t personally have to make any sacrifices, whether in family members or in taxes. That makes war real easy. For me the election doesn’t seem to matter any more. I’ve expended enough energy and emotions on it. And now, it just doesn’t seem to be that important. As I watch all the election news, it seems to me that a monster has been released in our country and no one knows how to cage it again. Many see the world in “black-and-white” with no gray areas. Maybe that is the monster. I am not a pacifist, never have been, even though I realize that Christ was. Neither do I support the “Just War Theory.” There is no such thing as a just war. I feel anguish in my soul. These are difficult times to be against the war in Iraq. These are difficult times to have a son in the middle of it. If he weren’t there, it would probably be easy to wait this war out, keep my mouth shut, and keep my friends happy. I have felt patronized by both those who support the cause and those who oppose it. I have also felt supported by them. I don’t know where this war is going. At times I am not very optimistic about it’s outcome. I do hope that all the “rosy” scenarios do come to pass. The politics don’t matter any more. What does is my son. I want this war to be over. I want my son to come home. Is The War on Terror A Myth? “In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means—and our present day political myths have been such a desperate means.” Thus the philosopher Ernst Cassirer reflected on the then recent events of National Socialism in light of his extensive study of myth and ritual. Noting that even so-called primitive societies have recourse to magical rites only in tasks that exceed their natural capabilities, Cassirer located the roots of National Socialism in the seemingly insurmountable social and economic problems that confronted the leaders of the Weimar Republic. Only in a situation perceived as desperate could a populace fall under the influence of the fantastically irrational political myths so cunningly fabricated by the architects of Nazism. I wonder if the threat of terrorism that looms over post-9/11 American society also constitutes such a desperate situation. Like the stereotypical tribesman confronted by an epidemic or natural disaster, are we not confronted by a threat against which we feel ourselves to be powerless? Almost immediately after they occurred, the attacks of September 11, 2001, were defined as acts of war. No other concept seemed to express adequately the enormity of these events. And yet, defining these acts in this way made inevitable a response—large-scale military action—that seems largely ineffective against terrorism. Unlike a hostile state, a decentralized and nebulous terrorist organization appears to be strengthened, not diminished, by the suffering and destruction visited upon an identifiable population. So does the “war on terror” constitute a desperate means? The absence of a causal link between the suffering of an identifiable population and the elimination of terrorist activity likens the purely military response to terrorism to a magical rite. Typical of magical thinking is a blurring of the distinction between mere expression and causation. Whatever expresses death—pins stuck in a voodoo doll, for example—is regarded as a cause of death. One wonders, in light of indications that the nefarious Al Qaeda network continues to thrive, whether the war in Afghanistan served primarily as a cathartic expression of our national outrage, one sustained by the unrealistic hope that the elusive Al Qaeda would automatically—one might even say “sympathetically”—suffer the same fate as the easily targetable Taliban. A “magical” tendency to read causation into a relation of similarity might also account for the astonishing success of the administration, aided by a complicit media, in constructing an erroneous belief in a link between the events of September 11 and Iraq. Where there is only similarity—Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are both bad Guys—we were encouraged to assume a conspiratorial link. There is tragic irony in the fact that this canard, like the stereotypical magical formula, has effected what it signified, for today Iraq is a site of terrorist activity. More recent theories of ritual no longer regard magical rites as desperate, irrational outbursts of activity arising in default of adequate technical knowledge. Rather, such rites are symbolic actions that structure human attitudes and behavior in what would otherwise be disorienting situations. For example, the rainmaking rites found in many traditional cultures express an attitude of expectancy with regard to uncertain weather. This understanding of magical activity as a kind of attitudinal “focusing mechanism” suggests that the war on terror, while not irrational, is as much a symbolic response as a practical one. Out of the complex and uncertain welter of feeling and attitude that 9/11 left in its wake, the war on terror distilled and crystallized a few: anger, pride, loyalty, and the desire for retribution. The war on terror is a myth, a culturally shared narrative that provides authoritative models for acting and feeling. Such political myths define social reality in such a way that certain forms of acting and feeling in a situation seem natural, while others are inconceivable. The Manichaean structure of the war on terror construes the current global situation such that all but the most aggressive military response appears cowardly and irresponsible. Cassirer urged his contemporaries not to be fooled by the face-value absurdity of political myths, which conceals a formidable power to objectify and mobilize the prevailing moods of a populace. Similarly, in today’s uncertain times, Americans should be particularly mindful of the seductiveness and danger of magical thinking. Note: Published with permission from Sightings, Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The Terri Schiavo Case Over two years ago, I listened intently as the neurologist met with my 54-year-old brother’s family three days after the sudden heart attack that left him unconscious and on a ventilator. Our pain compounded as the doctor said to his children, “Your dad will not recover. He has no higher brain functioning. He has no response to pain stimuli. There is no hope.” His sons left the room and returned in about twenty minutes. “We’ve decided to remove dad from the ventilator and donate his organs. We know that is what he would want us to do.” When the day arrived, several of us sat with my brother, Thomas, after the vent was removed. Compassionate doctors and nurses had moved him from ICU to a single room for our privacy. We held his hand, stroked his face, and listened to his labored breathing. He made no response to us, but the lower brain functioning continued to direct his autonomic systems of breathing and circulation. Six hours later, his body relaxed and released him from his struggle. He died with dignity. How grateful I am that compassionate doctors and nurses in a local hospital in Duluth, Georgia, allowed our family to make the decision that Thomas would have wanted. Make no mistake about what you have read and seen concerning the Terri Schiavo case. At issue for all of us is the right of families to fulfill the wishes of their loved ones in the manner of our dying. The Schiavo case became an illustration of evil forces in our culture that are pushing for the state to make decisions that properly belong in the hands of families. It is not suffocating a person for a ventilator to be disconnected and the natural process of dying respected. It is not starving a person for a feeding tube to be withdrawn and for allowing a person to die with dignity. Our physical bodies are not designed to live forever, although medical science can now artificially prolong life for years after the body’s own mechanisms for such functioning have failed. The state should enact proper, broad parameters to make sure that no one’s death is hastened when there is hope for meaningful life to continue, but the State has no business abrogating the proper responsibility of families to fulfill the wishes of their loved ones to die with dignity. The Religious Right wants to make families doubt that dying is a part of living. They use fear and guilt to drive their agenda, which is political, not religious. Politicians, judges, and religious extremists have no right to intrude into this most intimate part of life. The circus that became the dying of Terri Schiavo powerfully demonstrates the wisdom of judges who refused to intervene. May their tribe, and their courage, increase. Gad: A Prophet For Our Times Who in the world was Gad? As a prophet he is so obscure that even book editors confuse him with God![iv] So, you need not feel biblically ignorant if you haven’t heard of David’s “house prophet,” Gad. Gad is most frequently used in the Old Testament as a place name, and we have only two incidents referring to the prophet who served King David and his family. The first brief incident is in 1 Samuel 22:5, where Gad instructs David to leave the stronghold and go into the land of Judah. Though we know nothing about Gad’s background or his call as a prophet, his credentials are revealed in the second passage: “The Lord said to Gad, David’s prophet, ‘Go and tell David . . . .’” (2 Sam. 24:11). The role of the prophet is one who receives a message from God and is told to take the message to others. Generally the message was to a broader part of the Jewish family, but some that I call “house prophets,” like God and Nathan, took their messages primarily to one person. The keys here, of course, are “The Lord said,” and the command, “go . . . tell.” Gad was certainly acting as a prophet, though an obscure one. God’s Prophecies in Context The First Prophecy. Context is always important; sometimes it is most of the story for prophets. Our first prophecy from Gad is in the context of several chapters in 1 Samuel. Here Saul was still king, but David had killed Goliath and was receiving more attention from the people. Look in your Bible at 1 Samuel 18 and you will see a caption, “Saul Becomes Jealous of David” (mine has a picture of Saul’s first attempt to kill David). Chapter 19 is captioned, “David is persecuted by Saul,” and Chapter 21, “David Flees from Saul.” Though David escapes again, the seriousness of Saul’s wrath is indicated by the caption in Chapter 22: “The Slaughter of the Priests.” When Saul finds that David has escaped, he takes his anger out on the Lord’s priests in the house of Ahimelech and kills all but one of Ahimelech’s sons, who escaped to join David. We learn (22:3) that David had gone to Moab, obviously to hide from Saul. While David was hiding in a cave, God apparently brought a personal message to David through the prophet God: “Don’t stay here; go at once to the land of Judah.” That’s all, but clearly this was a message that was intended to save David’s life—and, as you know the end of the story, it served the purpose, as David became king after Saul’s death. (Let’s hold our lesson from this first prophecy until we hear a more complicated story.) The Second Prophecy. Our next word from Gad is in the last chapter of 2 Samuel. David has become a mighty warrior king, Notice in Chapter 23 there are lists of “David’s Famous Soldiers,” setting the stage for a military story. Chapter 24 begins, “On another occasion the Lord was angry with Israel and he made David bring trouble upon them”—specifically by taking a census. God gave directions for taking a census in Exodus (30:11-16), and in both Numbers 1 and 26, censuses were taken for God’s purposes. However, David had no thought of God’s purposes in this census, for the king’s purpose is revealed in verse 9: “The total number of men capable of military service: 800,000 in Israel and 500,000 in Judah.” David had war in mind. Dr. Ganse Little in the Interpreter’s Bible comments, “What David had in mind could not but transgress against the individual freedom—and indeed the very life—of the populace so numbered.” Do you remember God’s warning through Samuel, about what kings would do? They would conscript the people’s young men into their armies. Saul was considered a worse king, but here even the great King David was doing the very thing kings often do out of the power and pride that comes with the office. To David’s credit, his conscience began to bother him, and he tried to repent. However, sin is like a pillow full of feathers scattered in the whirlwind, or like Styrofoam peanuts cast into a raging surf. The damage done cannot be undone. So here we have Gad’s prophecy from God: “You have three choices: What is it to be? Three years of famine, three months of retreating from your enemies, or three days of plague?” Either David or God chose the latter, and 70,000 Israelites died. So, God was saying to David: “Look at what you have done. You have planned a mighty war, and when you lose, in retreat, you would lose 70,000 men. That many could die from a three-year famine or a three-day plague, but that result would be under my control. You have acted as if you were God and planned to lead 70,000 Israelite soldiers into death in needless battle.” Dr. Little concludes, “Herein is seen the fallacy of believing that the state is ultimately protected by . . . any kind of sheer weight of numbers, or wealth, or productive genius, or scientific advance.” Gad’s prophecy and David’s sin occurred around 1000 B.C., about 3000 years ago. What lesson arises from these events? When I read these words, I could not help but hear the echoes of words from the current U.S. political leadership: “We have the strength to fight both al Quaeda and Iraq at the same time!” We have the strength; we have the numbers; we have the technology; we have the weapons. We are just as confident as David was in counting 1,300,000 Jewish fighting men to go into battle. But God’s answer was, take heed! In a bloody retreat you could lose 70,000 men. Don’t rely on your power. On the day I began preparing this message, I was reading the latest edition of Christian Ethics Today (October, 2002), edited by my old college roommate. Hear the titles of the first three articles in the journal: “Iraq: Don’t Go There” by Dr. George Hunsinger of Princeton Seminary, “Ethics of the War on Terrorism,” by Dr. John Swomley of St. Paul School of Theology, and “Just Peacemaking Initiatives Can Prevent Terrorism” by Dr. Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary. These writers range from more liberal Presbyterian thought to Methodism to more conservative evangelical. Are they all modern-day prophets, in the line of Gad and Isaiah, warning not to trust in military and political power, but to trust in God? None of these articles is pacifistic, but they each warn about mixed motives in America’s saber-rattling against Iraq. I’m sure none of these modern prophets claims to have the final word on the present challenge of international terrorism and so-called “rouge nations” bent on developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. But the prophetic word of Christian ethics has been a relatively unheard voice in the national and international debate. Christianity is not obsolete in today’s world. It should be a major voice in the debate. I wonder if our President has discussed the international military issues with his Methodist pasor, or his bishop, or the ethics professors in any of the fine Methodist universities or seminaries. I think he has not. Dr Hunsinger’s article cites a Pentagon study that projects an “acceptable death rate of 20,000-30,000 U.S. soldiers” in a war to conquer Iraq. Our experience in Vietnam and other wars suggest that our estimates often are low. Application For Our Time Although I have already made some applications of Gad’s prophetic voice to our time in relation to our present military situation, I also want to make a much broader purview. To begin, let us notice the different threats to David posed by Gad’s two prophecies. In 1 Samuel 22, David’s obvious danger was an external one—namely, the jealous, angry, and vengeful King Saul. Sometimes prophets warn of external threats. Before September 11, 2001, some lone voices in the FBI and in the intelligence community had warned about the number of middle-eastern men in the U.S. that were studying to fly large airplanes, and even the possibility that crashing the airplanes could be a terrorist plan. Maybe these were “secular prophets” warning of an external threat. (I’m sure some people are convinced that the President is a prophet, warning us of external dangers. In that same issue of Christian Ethics Today I previously quoted is a speech by the founding editor Foy Valentine, given in Fort Worth (Debby and I were there) titled, “Ethics East of Eden.” Dr. Valentine is also the former director of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. When I lived in Nashville I was a member of a black Baptist church. Dr. Valentine and his wife visited our church one morning. He is considered a modern Southern Baptist prophet who ranks with Tony Campolo, the American Baptist sociologist, evangelist, and social activist. Dr. Valentine writes in his article, “Pray that the Lord of the harvest will call forth ethics laborers who will stand up and speak out like Tony Campolo”—the first in a list that included Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity and President Jimmy Carter. In his address, Valentine virtually equated Christian ethics with prophecy. At one place he accuses, “Preaching from today’s pulpits mostly [avoids] ethics like the plague, pussyfoots around prophethood.” He then cites other ethicists of days gone by. The first is Walter Rauschenbusch, the German and American Baptist who helped laun ch the much-maligned “social gospel.” (At Green Lake American Baptist Assembly ground, where I was last Sunday, there is a Rauschenbusch hall.) About the prophet, Valentine said, “Walter Rauschenbusch flamed across the horizon with his detractors bellowing hot Irish epithets against him every step of the way, but without quenching his prophetic fire. Giants emerged to preach and teach and write in an explosion of commitment to doing the gospel.” What did Rauschenbusch rail against so strenuously? Factory owners that exploited sweat labor of their day, that got rich without paying a living wage to their workers—against an economic system that robbed men of dignity, to say nothing of their health and lives. A true “prophet,” Rauschenbusch modeled the ministry of Gad in 1 Samuel 22, warning his parishioners in the Second German Baptist Church in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City of external threats. As he preached comfort and strength to his own church members, he also rallied forces of justice and mercy in the industrial and urban areas of the country, confronting abn unjust economic system. In his preaching and writing he exposed the robber barons and the evil systems without that threatened the American society. In his speech, Dr. Valentine also mentions Clarence Jordan, who started Koinonia Farm in South Georgia. This much-hated early experiment at interracial living in the American South was also the launching pad for Millard Fuller and his Habitat for Humanity ministry. No, there is not a Clarence Jordan Hall at Green Lake, but he was mentioned during the time I was there. The speaker was one who really knew Clarence Jordan, even though he didn’t pronounce his name as I do, and as my grandmother’s family and every other Jordan family I know pronounce it. In that fine old South Georgia accent, the speaker referred to Clarence “Jurden.” So I will follow his lead and say, Clarence “Jurden” was a prophet, but one more like the Gad of 2 Samuel 24. Just as Gad’s message from God in that chapter was one of reproach to the King, so Clarence Jorden’s message to America was of our internal failing, the sin of racial prejudice. The sin of judging men, women, and children by their accents, by their appearance, and by the color of their skin. Other voices followed—the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other ministers (black and white), and brave young civil rights workers who sometimes gave their own lives—all followed the example of Clarence Jordan in breaking down old artificial barriers. That dream, of one long prophet in South Georgia, helped populate Green Lake Assembly grounds last week. I don’t believe there was an ethnic majority at that meeting of young seminarians and of pastors new to the American Baptist denomination. There were almost surely more whites than blacks, but the Hispanics and Asians probably kept the number of whites from reaching 50%. I noticed at the Saturday evening banquet that at our table, without any design or intention, were seated alternatively white/black/white/black/white black. And one of the “whites” spoke in an accent that seemed to have been Spanish. To my left was a white woman in a wheelchair who wants to become an American Baptist Pastor. An d tomy right was a former university dean of education, a black women who is also finishing her seminary education to become a minister. Dr. Valentine’s main theme was that Christian ethics and prophethood are fighting an uphill battle in today’s world. But as we look back to our spiritual forebearers, prophets like Rauschenbusch and Jordan and even Gad, we can appreciate today’s prophets and pray that God will continue to raise up women and men to speak for God in our world. More Honest Churches Needed Jerry Falwell’s remarks last August 24 at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary chapel service sound, well, very much like Jerry Falwell. The question many Baptists should ask is, “Does this sound very much like my Baptist church?” Although Falwell’s political comments received much attention, his words of advice for the role of future seminarians and the churches they will serve were both horrifying and humorous at the same time: “May God lead many of you to some of these moderate churches that deserve fundamentalist pastors like you. . . . Sometimes it takes a full year before that church is who you are.” These words are humorous in the sense that they seem absurd on the surface, yet horrifying in that a distinct possibility exists that what he predicts may come true. That’s right, it seems that evidence has surfaced once again that signals the “takeover” of the Southern Baptist Convention is now a fight for my local church (but then again, maybe it always has been). The churches that are most at risk for this kind of fundamentalist takeover are those churches that are dually aligned with the SBC and some other moderate Baptist organization (the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and/or the Baptist General Convention of Texas, for example). As it turns out, the vast majority of moderate Baptist churches maintain some level of connection with the SBC as well. Consider CBF churches in NC as an example. Approximately 210 churches contribute directly to the CBF of NC. (Another large group of churches contribute to the CBF through the Baptist State Convention’s giving plan known as Plan C, but they are not all identified.) No one has figures for how many of those are “CBF only” churches, but those in the state office who would venture a guess put the number at less than a dozen. That means that almost 200 “moderate” churches remain aligned in some way with the SBC as well, either in financial support to the Cooperative Program, giving to the Lottie Moon missions offering, or through the use of LifeWay teaching materials to their adults and children. Among states in the south, NC is not unusual in the number of moderate churches who also support the SBC, except that the number of Baptist churches who have pulled away completely from the SBC may be higher than most. Is dual alignment, however, a long-term viable option for churches? I believe the answer to be both “yes” and “no.” A large number of Baptist churches that maintain affiliations with the SBC and yet have some connection with moderate Baptists will always be around. The churches that sustain dual alignment for many years to come, however, will be those who increasingly favor the SBC but |
