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Table of Contents - October 2001
An Open Letter to our Readers Our readers have been almost unanimous
in their praise of Christian Ethics Today. Many write that it is the best
Journal they read (see We’ve Got Mail inside). We still have a number
asking common questions, which I will try to answer: Christian
Spirituality: Inward
Piety or Outward Practice? It’s a delight to return to the Samford campus after two year’s absence and in fond remembrance of the very happy year that Suzanne and I spent here in 1997-98. It’s also a pleasure to receive this invitation from a friend of nearly three decades, Dean Timothy George. And it’s a special privilege to respond to a scholar whose work I have admired for many years, Professor Alister McGrath of Oxford University, in his plenary address today on “Loving God with Heart and Mind: The Theological Foundations of Spirituality.” Unlike
other failed preachers who’ve found no one willing to lay the hands of
ordination on them, I have only two points to make. Both of them operate on the
assumption that Christian spirituality is outward no less than inward: that the
Christian life consists of outward habits and practices that form our inward
character into the image of Christ. My model, in this regard as in so many
others, is a Baptist preacher named Warren Carr. He calls himself a “Flip
Wilson Christian.” Wilson was a brilliant black comedian of the 1960s and 70s
who, among other roles, acted as pastor of “The Church of What’s Happening
Now.” Warren Carr has adopted Flip Wilson’s salutary motto as his own: “What
you see is what you get.” My chief thesis, therefore, is that we are not secret
“inner Christians” who have hidden “spiritual selves.” We are the outward and public
persons, I will argue, who have been formed into the image of Christ by the
visible and audible practices of the Church. We’ve Got Mail Letters from our Readers Fighting
Wars He introduced himself as Colonel Jack Smith. I noticed how much he looked like an English Bulldog. His body was thick and squatty and there was a permanent look of anger on his face. I had not kept him waiting, so I could not be the target of his anger. I guessed him to be about 65. “We’ve been married 40 years. She’s trying to poison me. I can prove it.” He took his heavy briefcase off my desk and set it on the floor. After fumbling with the lock, he took out a file and showed me two charts. “I’ve been
sending food to the Mayo Clinic for two years. They analyze it and send me a
report on the arsenic level. See how the level has climbed? She’s going to kill
me.” EthixBytes A Collection of Quotes, Comments, Statistics, and
News Items Vocation: Divine Summons© I have learned over the years that students, wearily carrying out a writing assignment, often have recourse to the dictionary. Assigned to write on a specific topic, they will begin with a dictionary definition. Let it never be said that I have learned nothing from reading their papers all these years. Look up the word vocation in a dictionary, and you will find that the first two meanings given will be something like the following: “1. a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; esp: a divine call to the religious life:; 2. the work in which a person is regularly employed: occupation.”
It was in part the genius and in part the danger of the Reformations of the 16th
century that they tended to collapse the first of these into the second. One’s
vocation became simply one’s work. To be sure, for the Reformers this was
wider concept than what we have come to mean by work—which is, roughly, a job
for the doing of which one is paid, a way to make a living. For example,
familial responsibilities, though they do not belong to the sphere of work, were
clearly understood by the Reformers to be part of one’s vocation. Hence, a man
could be very conscientious in the duties of his occupation and still fail
terribly in his calling as a father. Should Christians Pray the
Prayer of Jabez? In the past few years Bruce Wilkinson’s little
book The Prayer of Jabez has sold millions of copies. The words of Jabez
found in 1 Chronicles 4:9-10 are being prayed by many Christians on a daily
basis who believe that God is blessing them for their efforts. Pastors have
shared Wilkinson’s principles of the prayer and have encouraged their
congregations to pray the prayer of Jabez. In the preface of the book Wilkinson
writes that God will always answer this prayer! With such great attention being
given to the prayer of Jabez, a closer examination needs to be given to
Wilkinson’s popular devotional book. Does the prayer of Jabez stand out as a
model prayer in the Old Testament and should Christians continue to pray the
Jabez prayer? Two
Essays on Technology What Technology
Can Do for Your Church2001© One church consultant has developed a list of ten rules for successful churches. Number eight says simply, "Connect with technology: Churches trying to reach post-moderns will use technology in worship." This has the appearance of extraordinary insight, but in reality, technology and religion go back a long way. Think about the Bible as a printed book. It was a technological innovation called the printing press that introduced the handheld Bible to the world. It was a novel idea in 1453 when Man of the Millennium Gutenberg started rolling them off his press. Within decades it profoundly reshaped the Christian movement, especially the worship. The same can be said for music, with the
emergence of the piano and the organ; and in our day, the guitar. Consider how
technological advances changed church architecture, heating and cooling, and
most importantly, plumbing? Essay on Technology To Clone or Not
to Clone: What Saith the
Commandments? 2001© The place to post the Ten Commandments is on the office wall of Pannayiotis Zavos. Zavos is, in the words of Time magazine, "the well-known infertility specialist of the University of Kentucky." He has announced his intentions to clone a human. Cloning is the product of human curiosity
and scientific discovery. For sheer power to amaze, for brute unthinkableness,
for unmitigated audacity, cloning has moved to the front of the line. It has
leapfrogged over atom splitting, space walking, genome counting, and web
traveling (and all other stunning developments in the remarkable sage of modern
technology) to become the dilemma of choice for all who bring moral discernment
to bear on public policy.
Updated Sunday, February 06, 2005 |
The
Threat of Theocracy? The greatest danger to democracy in any nation is theocracy. It can occur in any society where a powerful religious organization or combination of organizations is the decisive voice in a political or judicial system. In spite of our constitutional system of separation of church and state there is substantial evidence of theocratic influence and efforts to control in the United States today.
It
is evident in a well-documented alliance of the Republican National
Committee under George W. Bush’s leadership with the Cardinals and
Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, and the silence or collusion of
some largely Protestant organizations. This conclusion is based largely
on the remarkable investigative reporting by a progressive democratic
Roman Catholic organization of the actions of Bush and the Catholic
hierarchy of the United States in the Summer 2001 issue of Conscience,
a journal of Catholics for a Free Choice. Freud Or Fraud? Sigmund Freud, the influential psychoanalyst, fled his native Vienna as a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution in the 1930s and settled in London, where I now live. Recently I visited his London home which has been preserved as a memorial museum. It was an interesting experience. His desk has been kept just as he left it, and in his study is the famous couch, where his patients reclined as they poured out their troubled confessions to him. Without
doubt Freud was one of the significant intellectual figures of the 20th
century. In passing, it is interesting to note that three of his grandchildren
have made meaningful impacts on modern British culture. Anna Freud was a
distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right, Lucian Freud is ranked among
major British artists, and Clement Freud was a long-serving Liberal Member of
Parliament. The Freuds have continued to be an influential family. Musings on EducationLosing
the Mind of the World No Child Left Behind Is Home Schooling
Indoctrination? BOOK REVIEWS: Book Review by Jack Glaze, ret. Preacher
Behave: Handbook of Ministerial Ethics 6th ed. Revised Since 1978 over 30,000 copies of Hensley’s insightful book on Ministerial Ethics, manners and methods have been printed. The revised sixth edition is more generic in approach and serves as an effective handbook for ministers in general, not just preachers. The well organized book is practical, informative and easy to read, it contains biblical admonitions and beneficial suggestions for both ministerial staff and congregations.
Hensley is well prepared for the task undertaken: he has a ThD from Central
Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, has served twenty eight years as a
pastor, and forty years in denominational leadership positions including Metro
Mission, Executive Director Christian Action Commission, and Family Ministry
Program Consultant, Mississippi Baptist Convention. Although retired, he remains
a minister’s pastor. Wisdom gleaned through years of personal Christian
growth, academia, ecclesiastical experience, and counseling has honed his
ethical concerns for responsible action on the part of a Christian minister in
his family, church, and community setting. Book Review by Paul J. Piccard, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and
the Jews This powerful and disturbing book records and analyzes the long history of how Christians, especially Roman Catholics, have dealt with Jews. The work is both scholarly and very personal. Carroll starts and ends an examination of his Church and Jews with the Cross at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and Edith Stein. He starts his personal experience with the discovery that a childhood friend is a Jew and ends with his own children at the site of Hitler’s suicide bunker. He describes a virtual Oedipal relationship with his parents and his discovery of history that his Paulist seminary classes omitted. The central theme of the book is that Christians
took anti-Semitic forks in the road when they might well have written a less
tragic history by following the other road. Carroll depicts Christian attitudes
towards Jews as grudging acceptance at best, a general hostility, and a long
series of atrocities culminating in the shoah—Hitler’s "final
solution." Book Review by Paul J. Piccard, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and
the Jews This powerful and disturbing book records and analyzes the long history of how Christians, especially Roman Catholics, have dealt with Jews. The work is both scholarly and very personal. Carroll starts and ends an examination of his Church and Jews with the Cross at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and Edith Stein. He starts his personal experience with the discovery that a childhood friend is a Jew and ends with his own children at the site of Hitler’s suicide bunker. He describes a virtual Oedipal relationship with his parents and his discovery of history that his Paulist seminary classes omitted. The central theme of the book is that Christians
took anti-Semitic forks in the road when they might well have written a less
tragic history by following the other road. Carroll depicts Christian attitudes
towards Jews as grudging acceptance at best, a general hostility, and a long
series of atrocities culminating in the shoah—Hitler’s "final
solution." Cars.
Cars. Cars. No country
on earth has had a more torrid love affair with cars than America. In 1925
when I was two years old, my Daddy bought a brand new 1925 Model T Ford. He
paid $439.69 for it according to the receipt which I still have, with the
charges broken down: $355 for the “Ford Touring” car itself, $63.90 for
freight, $17.40 for tax, and $3.39 for nine gallons of gas and six quarts of
oil. This car was just a normal part of my early childhood until the Great
Depression. We sold it in 1930 without fanfare when we could no longer buy
gasoline for it. Don’t cry for the Model T, Argentina. Life went on.
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