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Issue 023
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Volume 5 No 5 October 1999 >next>
Issue 25 |
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Don Quixote
Now and then, say every 500 years or so, some genius invents an immortal.
And Cervantes—let the drums roll—did it with Don Quixote. More real in fiction than most people are in real
life, Don Quixote is known and embraced around the world. He is more popular at
this approaching turn of the Century than when he first sprang onto the world
stage 400 years ago. A Double Helping
I headed north out of Austin at 5:00 a.m. My destination, Ft Smith, Arkansas. I had reached the Dallas area by 10:00 a.m. and crossed the Red River about noon. Never having been to Ft. Smith, I had little feel for how far my destination was. James Garland Tidenberg was in the hospital in
Ft. Smith and wasn’t expected to live much longer. He had been treated for
cancer for 2 years. Early in the week, I told Judy I felt should go see
Tidenberg and we agreed it was the right thing for me to do. The long drive gave
me a chance to reflect on how “Tidier” and I first crossed paths. Radical Soul Liberty: Our Fundamental Natural Right The title of our session this afternoon is “Challenges to Mere Toleration.” The title is a pejorative one, chosen by someone with definite convictions about the meaning of religious liberty. The term “mere toleration” raises immediate questions about the adequacy of that concept. Let me position myself. I am a practicing Christian and have been for more than half a century. My conversion to the Christian faith came when I was a World War 11 veteran, newly discharged from combat service, and my commitment to my faith is rooted in a deeply personal spiritual experience which I cannot with any integrity deny or compromise. Secondly, I am a Baptist Christian by tradition and conviction. A fundamental part of my Baptist stance is an adherence to the doctrines of the priesthood of the believer, the primacy of the authority of personal religious experience, the separation of church and state, and radical soul liberty. I identify with historical figures such as John Bunyan, Roger Williams, and John Leland, all of whom risked their lives in defense of religious freedom. Against that background the concept of religious
toleration satisfies neither my spiritual nor intellectual conscience. Three Poems by Kenneth Chafin
Decalogue Desecration
The desecration did not occur in an act of anger. The act was not intended as a damning of the decalogue. It was not by the enemies and critics of the decalogue that the act was perpetrated. There was no hostility toward the decalogue on the part of those committing the sacrilege. Those who brought about this act would claim that they love and cherish the concepts contained in the Ten Commandments. The taking away of the sacredness of the decalogue
was accomplished in a simple act of adding an amendment to a piece of
legislation in the House of Representatives. The profaning of God’s Holy Word
was performed with arguably good intentions by those who voted for the amendment.
By this legislative act, states are to be permitted to post a copy of the
decalogue in public buildings. The intent is to have a copy of the decalogue
posted in every public school classroom in America. By this legislative act,
the decalogue was relegated to the same position as the weekly bulletin and
lunch menu of meat loaf and mashed potatoes in school class rooms. The
decalogue can take its revered place on the wall of classrooms along with the
“Just Say No To Drugs” posters and weekly announcements about the Senior Class
play and the Junior-Senior dance. Dangerous Waters of Justice and Righteousness
Spoken by the prophet to a people who perceived themselves as religious and godly, this call to overflowing justice reveals the lie of their existence. The people (then and now) who claim to be within a covenant relationship with God must respond to his requirement “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with ... God” (Micah 6:8; cf. James 1:27). The only hope for the individual Christian, the church, and society lies in the overflowing “dangerous waters of justice and righteousness[1] Berquist calls them,—waters dangerous “for mind and spirit.” [2] For the mind the danger comes in our finitude, our inability to think beyond our general sphere of reference; for the spirit, the danger is in the temptation to build our own theoretical “Babel,”[3] rationalizing a comfortable way to deal with the uncomfortable.
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Tamar and Her Modern Sisters
We don’t want to talk about it, especially in church. Yet it happens every day. It has left millions of girls and women with deep emotional and spiritual scars. Good statistics on this subject are hard to find, but various studies indicate that around 16% of all women report that a relative sexually abused them before their sixteenth birthday. About 34% of all women report that when they were children an adult sexually abused them. Furthermore, one in six women reports being raped at some point in their lives. Though we shrink from considering the horror of
sexual abuse, the Bible does not. In 2 Samuel 13:1-22 we find a graphic account
of an incestuous rape and its terrible aftermath. Public School Values “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from religious conviction.” Of all the groundless, hurtful attacks on public educators, none is more painful than the charge that public schools are “godless” institutions of secular humanism. From Phyllis Schlafly and William Bennett to Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, James Dobson and Pat McGuigan, the staccato drumbeat against public education includes religious defamation. The Constitution requires that public education be neutral in the arena of sectarian religion, but that’s a far cry from the debasement heaped upon public educators. A torrent of abuse has flooded the airwaves since
the shootings in Littleton—if only the Ten Commandments had been posted. If
only prayer had been permitted. If only school teachers were not void of
values. Religious Freedom Award Response
If when the books are closed, the final thirty is written, and I we know how it all came out; if when we see, no longer through a dark glass, that some good has been done; if some evils have been averted and some harm avoided, it will be perfectly clear that many people have been a part of the process. Converging circumstances counted for a lot of what’s taken place. At a farewell party for Congressman Richard Boiling
of Missouri in the early Reagan years I was whining. Fred Wertheimer of Common Cause said, “Dunn, stop complaining;
our sad plight just means that we’ve never been more needed.” I described the
debaptistificarion of the Southern Baptist Convention to Martin Marty and he
responded, James, just remember you don’t know enough to be totally
pessimistic.” Maybe not. It is clear that I have had the good fortune to be in
the right place at the right time. Natural Law The Roman Catholic popes have for many decades relied on “natural law” as the basis for their decisions on sexual issues as well as on some other matters. Sometimes popes speak of this as moral law. Pope John Paul II in speaking to some American bishops in their ad Zimina visit [to the highest authority] June 27, 1998, said, “There exists a moral law ascribed in our humanity, which we can come to know by reflecting on our own nature and our actions, and which lays certain obligations upon us because we recognize them as universally true and binding.” In that pope’s encyclical, “Evangelium Vitae”,
requiring the obedience of American Catholics in opposing abortion and
euthanasia, he wrote, “No circumstances, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever
make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of
God which is written in every heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed
by the church.” A Book Review Saint Augustine
This is a brief, exceptionally well written, excellently researched volume by a Pulitzer Prize winning author in the well-known Penguin Lives series of biographies. The author’s purpose is realized as Augustine, one of history’s seminal thinkers, comes to life. As this happens through the skill of research and writing, one readily concludes that his life from the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era has much to say to today’s milieu. Augustine’s life is set historically at a time when
the fabled Roman Empire was crumbling and collapsing while a maturing
Christianity was dramatically expanding. His lasting contributions through his
writing and preaching took place in a provincial area of North Africa, while
serving as a Catholic bishop in Hippo. His writings in particular extended his
influence far beyond the scope of this ancient parish. His ministry coincided
with the sack of Rome in 410 A. D. ,the rise and fall of whole host of
heretical movements, and the remarkable expansion of a nascent Catholicism
which turned out to be the only stable influence left as the Dark Ages began to
settle in on those regions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Singing the Lord’s Song in a Foreign Land
In Jerusalem, jackals howled and tumbleweeds drifted where throngs of earnest worshippers once jammed the temple complex. Mighty Israel had fallen. Nebuchadnezzar’s minions chained the best and brightest Hebrews for the long trek to bondage in Babylon. Once there, the captives sat down and wept when they recalled the splendor of what once was in Zion. Their spirits were so dejected that they put away their musical instruments. But their captors, possibly wanting entertainment for a pagan banquet, demanded songs of mirth. The entertainment committee insisted, “Get dressed up in your little native temple costumes and sing us one of those cute songs of Zion with the tambourine rhythm.” Now, the dilemma front and center was this: How is
one supposed to be an authentic believer in such difficult circumstances? Or,
to put the question as the captives posed it in Psalm 137:4, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Olin T. Binkley: To See His Monument, Look Around
Olin T. Binkley has been eulogized as a man of faith who impacted the world. Binkley, a North Carolina native who served as president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1963-1975, died August 27 of congestive heart failure. He was 91. Thomas Bland, a colleague of Binkley’s at
Southeastern, spoke during the service at Wake Forest Baptist church in Wake
Forest and talked about an engraving at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London that
says, “If you would see the man’s monument, look around.” The same is true for
Binkley, Bland said.
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