Anglican Centrist

Do You Cheat On Your Taxes?

2011-03-31T17:41:00.001-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Income taxes are due on April 18th this year, so this is a timely question.

According to a survey by DDB Worldwide Communications Group , 15% of Americans admitted cheating on their returns. Moreover, the tax cheats were more likely than non-cheaters to cheat in other ways: to keep the wrong change given by a cashier, to solicit a phony job reference, to lie to obtain a government benefit, even to steal money from a child.

And yet, these cheaters disproportionately believe that they are “overall better people”, who are “special and deserve to be treated that way”. So perhaps I asked the wrong question.

Perhaps I should have asked: “Are you special?”

Spontaneous Generation

2011-03-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I’ve just read “The Grand Design”, the new book by the great mathematician Stephen Hawking (and the less-famous physicist Leonard Mlodinow). When the book was announced a few months ago, I wrote on this site:

I’m looking forward to reading Stephen Hawking’s new book, in which he argues that we do not need to believe in God to explain the existence of the universe. Instead, we are to believe in “M-theory”, which involves 11 space-time dimensions, “vibrating strings, ... point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other objects that are more difficult to picture and occupy even more dimensions of space.” Boy, that’s a relief! Just good old common sense, and none of that religious mumbo-jumbo!

I repeat those words now, not because I’m proud of my rhetoric (although I am), but to alert you to my bias.

To a substantial extent, the claim that Hawking's book proves that there’s no need to assume a role for God in creation is publisher’s hype. It's a good way to generate buzz, but that's not really what the book is primarily about. The book is primarily a summary, for the intelligent lay reader, of current scientific thinking about the origin and nature of the universe in light of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, a sort of “Cosmology for Dummies.”

“Dummies” is a relative term, of course. Although Hawking (I’m going to refer to the author as Hawking, and not Hawking and Mlodinow because Hawking’s the famous name; sorry Leonard) – although Hawking makes these subjects as accessible to the intelligent lay reader as possible, it's pretty deep stuff. At some point along the way, even if you are much smarter than I am (you probably are), you’re likely to find you just can't grasp what Hawking is saying. At best, you'll be able to figure out what the subject matter under discussion is, but not the substance of the discussion. It's like someone who just finished a second year college German class eavesdropping on a discussion between Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche: you can't understand what they're saying, but you might be able to figure out the topic. If you’re as interested in the science that Hawking discusses as I am, you should enjoy this book.

But for purposes of this blog, what is of interest in this book is what Hawking claims regarding religion. These claims are found primarily in the second chapter, which discusses the origins of religious belief, and then later toward the end of the book, where Hawking discusses design in creation.

In Chapter 2, Hawking portrays religion as the invention of primitive peoples who were ignorant of science, but wanted to understand how and why the physical world worked the way it did. In their ignorance they invented gods “to lord it over every aspect of human life.” Once science came along to explain the mysteries of the physical world, there was no further need for religion. As a wise man (not Hawking) said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child”, etc. Yet, religion stubbornly hangs on like some cultural vermiform appendix; most humans haven’t yet “put away childish things”.

There are two things wrong with Hawking’s argument. First, there’s no evidence that religion was invented primarily to explain the physical world. Second, even if that were the original purpose of religion, that doesn’t mean that religion today has no broader and deeper purposes that science has not rendered obsolete.

I’ll take Hawking’s word on matters of math or physics, because he’s clearly an expert, but on the origin of religion, Hawking can claim no special expertise. He's obviously a very smart man, but he offers no evidence that he’s studied comparative religion, cultural anthropology, paleontology, or any of the other disciplines that would be implicated in a serious investigation of the origin of religion. To support his proposition that religion arose to explain the physical world, Hawking cites creation myths from Viking and Amerindian cultures, the former around 1,000-years old, the latter about 6,600 years older than that. Yet, cave paintings, burial practices, devotional objects, etc., found by archeologists suggest that human beings have had some sense of the divine for several tens of thousands of years. The origins of religion are lost in the mists of time.

It’s undoubtedly true that some primitive religions we know about used stories about gods to explain aspects of the physical world, but that doesn't mean that this was the primary purpose for which religion was “invented”. It could just as well be the case that ancient peoples, having become conscious of the divine, then attributed to divinity responsibility for aspects of the physical world. Let’s take a modern-day example. Today some Christians believe in the concept of "intelligent design", the notion that God is responsible for characteristics of plants and animals, such as the cilium of the eye, that (supposedly) cannot be adequately explained by contemporary science, i.e., by evolution. But the adherents to intelligent design did not invent God to explain the development of the eye. It works the other way around: their belief in God came first, and that belief led them to invent the idea of intelligent design. There is no reason to suppose that ancient or primitive peoples could not have developed their ideas about religion in the same way. Thus, the ancient Klamath Indians might not have invented gods to explain the existence of Crater Lake, as Hawking assumes; they might have regarded the lake as confirmation of the gods in whom they already believed for other reasons.

The mythologies that I know a little about, ancient Greek, the Norse, the Irish, do include stories that use gods or other supernatural characters to explain aspects of the physical universe, but they do a great deal more. When Poseidon wrecks the ships on which Odysseus seeks to return home from Troy, the story is not just an explanation for storms at sea. That’s why we still read the Odyssey.

This is certainly true of the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrew stories do explain various aspects of the physical world, but that isn’t their primary purpose. The principal lesson of Genesis 1 is not about the mechanics of creation (pace my creationist friends), but about the relationship between God and the creation. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah may have its origins in some ancient volcanic eruption, but that’s not why the story is read today.

Moreover, whatever may have been the motivation for the “invention” of early religions, today modern religions have very little to do with explaining the mysteries of the physical world that science now promises to reveal. If Hawking thinks that many modern Christians would abandon their religion if they understood what a quark is, he lives in a different world than I do. Some Christians, it is true, have difficulty accepting the fact that science tells us that some Bible stories are not literally true: that the universe was not created in seven days, but in less than a microsecond, that the sun only seemed to stop in the sky while the Lord gave the Israelites victory over the Amorites, and so on. But this doesn’t prove that these Christians believe in God in order to explain the physical world. On the contrary, their belief in God takes precedence over explanations of the physical world that these believers feel are inconsistent with their faith. I’m not a Biblical literalist myself, and I personally hope that the day will come that creationists and other literalists, or their children, will finally come to accept that the teachings of science about evolution, the Big Bang, and other issues are fully reconcilable with Christian faith. When they do, that will not keep them away from church on Sundays.

Hawking returns to religion toward the end of the book, where he addresses scientific findings that some people think support the existence of a creator God. The fundamental laws of physics seem to be “fine-tuned” to create a universe that supports the existence of human beings. For example, human and all other life that we know about depends on the element carbon. Carbon is created in the heart of dying stars and is dispersed into space when the star explodes, whence it can become a constituent of a life-supporting planet. If the laws of nuclear physics were only slightly different, little or no carbon (or oxygen, for that matter) would be created in stars, and life as we know it would be impossible. Every other fundamental force in nature within this universe falls in a narrow range that is suitable for creating an environment in which life is possible.

At one time scientists thought that these fundamental laws of nature represented the only way that things could be. The science that Hawking describes however, shows that these fundamental laws came into existence in the earliest moments of the Big Bang that created our universe, and it was entirely possible that different physical laws, with different values, could have come into being in that process. Indeed, the odds seem to be overwhelmingly against the existence of a universe compatible with human life.

Thus, science poses a question – why is our universe designed to be friendly to us? – for which religion may provide the answer: God. Indeed, some astronomers and cosmologists embrace a belief in God, at least a kind of Deism, for this reason.

Hawking acknowledges this challenge to the pretensions of science to answer every question without reference to God. His response is that equations that underlie the theory of the universe called M-theory show that a huge number of universes are possible. Indeed, the theory implies that in some sense all these alternate universes exist. The number of universes predicted by M Theory is not, technically, infinite, but it is huge: 10 to the 500th power, or a one followed by 500 zeros. You'll excuse me, I hope, if I don't set it out here. Out of that huge number of universes, virtually any set of physical laws must exist in one of them, so our life-friendly universe could come about without any divine intervention. Human life, of course, could only have arisen in this one particular universe.

The other creation problem, which exists for any universe that is supposed to have a beginning, is how the beginning began. If our universe (or all the 10 to the 500th power universes) began in a Big Bang, where did the stuff that went bang come from? Religions can answer that question, although perhaps not every religion’s answer is satisfactory to everyone. The oft-told story (including told by Hawking himself) is that in some religion the world was thought to rest on the back of a giant turtle; and what did the turtle stand on? Another turtle, and that one on yet another: It’s turtles all the way down. In Christian and Jewish scripture, the answer to the ex nihilo problem is that in the beginning God created the universe from nothing. Genesis explains how he did it: “God said let there be light, and there was light", etc. It is nonsense to ask what happened before the beginning.

What is the Big Bang theory’s answer to this problem? If we run the movie of the expanding universe backward, eventually all the matter and all the energy is compressed into an infinitely small space. And then what? Hawking’s answer is that entire universe (and all 10 to the 500th power universes?) simply created itself from nothing. This is possible, he says, because, in a sense, a universe is nothing. The total energy of the universe it seems is zero, because gravity represents negative energy that exactly balances out the positive energy of all the matter in the universe; the net energy is zero. Thus:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing . . . . Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Hawking seems to be quite comfortable with his answers to the question how our universe, so apparently fine-tuned for life like ours, came into being. He may, for all I know, be right. I don't begin to understand the math, and he's one of the smartest (if not the smartest) mathematician in the world.

As it happens, at the same time I was reading “The Grand Design” I was reading another book, “Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer” by C. S. Lewis. We have a discussion group at our church that is reading “Letters to Malcolm” together. I found this passage in Lewis’s book:

[T]he sciences are always pushing further back the realm of mere “brute fact.” But no scientist, I suppose, believes that the process could ever reach completion. At the very least, there must always remain the utterly “brute” fact, the completely opaque datum, that a universe – or, rather, this universe, with its determinate character – exists . . . .

What would Lewis make of Hawking? Lewis thought no scientist could imagine claiming that he had reached a complete understanding of how it is that this universe exists. Jack, meet Steve. Steve, meet Jack.

So, as I say, Hawking’s math may all check out, but still, I’m troubled. Is it really more sensible to assume that a gazillion universes, all but one of which is unknown (and presumably unknowable) to us, created themselves from nothing, rather than to believe that God created this one universe in a way that made life possible? I think Occam's razor favors the second hypothesis, but maybe that's just me.

Let me make one thing clear. My own religious faith does not depend on the inability of science to explain where the universe came from or why its physical laws are the way they are. I’m perfectly happy to assume that someday science will answer all these questions (although I remain skeptical about Hawking’s claim that science has already done so). My faith is based on the resurrection of a Jewish carpenter almost 2,000 years ago and the promises he made to mankind.

So, read “The Grand Design” if you’re interested in the science. It’s short, only 181 pages, and easy reading. Or, if you’d like a greater challenge, read “Letters to Malcolm”. It’s even shorter (124 pages), but you’ll work harder at it, and get more from it, I believe.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

2011-02-16T13:27:00.001-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I was interested to read the other day that doomsday for the human race may arrive in 2036. In that year, according to some Russian scientists, an asteroid called Apophis may strike the Earth, with the force of 100,000 atom bombs; dust and debris from the impact would darken skies world-wide and bring on a global winter. It could be the end for us all.

Other scientists claim that when Apophis gives us a near miss in 2029 we’ll know for sure whether the asteroid is on a collision course with Earth on its next pass seven years later, which will give us an opportunity to send rockets to nudge it into a safer orbit.

But if Apophis doesn’t get us, perhaps another asteroid will, like the one that (some say) killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. (“Apophis” is the Greek rendering of the name of the Egyptian god Apep the Uncreator, the god of darkness and chaos; any doomsday asteroid would be “Apophis”.) An asteroid we hadn’t spotted might pop up unexpectedly with no chance to divert it.

Or, if not an asteroid, then perhaps a supernova, a gigantic stellar explosion, will destroy us. If a star relatively close by (say less than 20 light years away) blows up, it could unleash a flood of gamma rays that would strip the Earth of its ozone layer, leaving us naked to deadly solar and cosmic radiation. Such an explosion is thought (by some) to be responsible for the Ordovician extinction 450 million years ago, in which 60 percent of marine invertebrates died (all living creatures in those days lived in the sea).

Or how about this. There’s a federal facility in the western United States that contains something capable of doing the same damage that Apophis could do. It’s not in Roswell, NM, and it’s not an alien space craft. The facility is Yellowstone National Park and what it contains is a super volcano. Yellowstone in fact is the caldera of a huge active volcano. Its last eruption, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, according to National Geographic. A pillar of ash from the Yellowstone eruption rose 100,000 feet into the air, “leaving a layer of debris across the West all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Pyroclastic flows -- dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit -- rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds. The clouds filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape.” This eruption may have plunged the entire planet into years of volcanic winter. And yet it was a mere volcanic belch compared to its predecessor 2.1 million years ago. As recently as 74,000 years ago, the human race was almost exterminated by the global winter caused by the eruption of a super volcano in Indonesia.

Even if Earth avoids all these routine disasters, some day our sun will run out of the hydrogen that provides the source of its energy (it’s already half way through its life span). When that happens, the sun will balloon into a “red giant”, which will swallow up the Earth. And if by then the human race has moved on to other planets, that will only delay the inevitable. The universe is expanding from the Big Bang that started it, and one of two things will happen. It may reverse itself and contract into a Big Crunch, or it may expand forever until its temperature reaches absolute zero and all energy and matter evaporates. In either event, we're toast (hot toast or cold toast, but defintely toast). It’s only a matter of time.

I could go on, but the point is that neither the human race, nor the planet on which we live, will last forever.

Does this matter? After all, each one of us is going to die someday, and that would be true even if the world and the human race lasted forever. Yet I think it does matter, because it tells us something about the nature of the world we live in, and our place in it. Not only are we, each of us, dust and destined to return to dust, but the same is true of our entire world.

Most Christians, I think, believe that this world will someday come to an end and be replaced by a better one. Some Christians focus a lot on the notion of the End Times. Some even try to put a date on doomsday using biblical prophecies. In reading up on Apophis, I discovered a YouTube video that associated this asteroid with various passages in the Old and New Testaments; the video asserted that any effort to change the orbit of Apophis was bound to fail, because it was prophesied that the asteroid would, indeed, strike the earth.

That isn't my understanding of what biblical prophecy is all about. The notion that what has been prophesied must come to pass seems inconsistent with the sovereignty of God over the universe. The prophet Jonah prophesied the destruction of Nineveh, but when the Ninevites changed their sinful ways, God spared the city, the people, and the animals, too.

And isn’t it just a bit arrogant to claim that human beings can figure out the date of doomsday from reading scripture? Jesus said, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”. And he went on to say, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” The whole point seems to be that we should know that this world will pass away, but we aren't supposed to know when.

I think it’s a mistake to focus excessively on the coming of the End Times. But it’s also a mistake to ignore the fact that the world will end some day, and could end at any moment. My impression is that most mainline Christians don’t really keep the transitory nature of the world in mind. Although they may recite in church that “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end”, they forget about it as soon as the service is over.

This isn’t surprising. When you’re traveling first class, you’re not as anxious for the voyage to end as are those folks down in steerage. Christianity began among people whose lives were pretty rotten. When you told them that the world they knew would pass away, they took it as a promise, not as a threat. We comfortable, middle-class, American Christians (most of us, anyway) aren't in that big of a hurry for our world to pass away. I know that if it were up to me a couple of decades from now, I’d do everything possible to prevent Apophis from wiping us all out.

But there are several reasons why we should remember that our world could end at any time, and will end sometime, and ultimately there’s nothing we can do about it. First, it's true, and it's always a good idea to remember the truth. Second, remembering that this world won't last forever may help us to keep a sense of perspective about the importance of our own little affairs. Third, we are promised that what comes after this world will be far better, and we have that to look forward to.

Here’s how I think about this. I went to YMCA summer camp when I was a kid, and from time to time we’d get to take trips away from camp to hike or canoe somewhere. We traveled in the back of a big open truck, twenty or so boys sitting on wooden benches (of course, they’d never allow anyone to travel this way today, but this was the 1950's). As we drove along we sang camp songs as loud as we could -- Green Grow The Rushes, Ho! Home, Home On The Range. Big Rock Candy Mountain. We called out to the pretty girls as we drove through the towns. We had a grand old time. For awhile I would enjoy the trip so much I thought I didn't want it to end. But that feeling didn’t last, because I knew that when the trip ended we’d be canoeing on Lake George or the Connecticut River, or hiking on Mount Monadnock, or whatever. And that was going to be even better than the trip.

Father Cutié’s Dilemma

2011-02-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Shortly before we moved out of south Florida a year and a half ago, a big ecclesiastical scandal broke in the local press. A popular Roman Catholic priest, Father Albert Cutié, was caught by paparazzi necking on the beach with a young woman.

The son of exiles from Castro’s Cuba, Father Cutié was a well-known figure in the Spanish-speaking community, not only in south Florida, but throughout Latin America, as the host of religious-themed radio and TV programs; he was popular enough to have earned the nickname “Father Oprah”. His celebrity made his transgression a public event (his name didn’t help; although pronounced KOO-tea-eh, it was hard to resist calling him “Father Cutie”).

In short order, the Bishop of Miami suspended Cutié from his priestly and other duties and stopped his salary and benefits. The Episcopal Bishop of Southeast Florida, Leo Frade (himself a native of Cuba), extended an invitation to Cutié to continue his priestly vocation in the Episcopal Church, and Cutié accepted. He was received as an Episcopal priest and has been put in charge of a small parish in Miami. Father Cutié married the woman in the beach photos, and they have recently had a child. I have seen reports that he is soon to have his own TV show again, this time on Fox.

Father Cutié has now written a book about his experiences: Dilemma: A Priest’s Struggle With Faith and Love. It is well worth reading for its depiction of one individual priest’s experiences in the modern Roman Catholic Church.

When I first read the news accounts about Father Cutié being caught with a woman, and then about the speculation that he might join the Episcopal Church, my reaction was that it would have been better if Father Cutié had changed churches on his own initiative, instead of being forced to do so after he was caught in a compromising position. His book helped me see this part of Father Cutié’s dilemma from his own perspective. By the time he was caught by the paparazzi, Father Cutié was already deeply concerned about flaws in what he calls the “ideology” of the Roman Catholic Church, and he had been exploring the Episcopal Church as an institution that might be better suited to his views on religious matters as they had evolved since his ordination. But he found it very hard to make the decision to leave the Roman Catholic Church, in which he had grown up, and to which he had devoted his entire adult life. I found this part of his story quite convincing.

For me, the best parts of this book are Father’s Cutié’s stories about his experiences of the Roman Catholic Church from the inside, and his growing discomfort with certain aspects of the Church. Never having been a Roman Catholic myself – and certainly never having been a Roman Catholic priest – I can’t attest to whether what happened to Father Cutié was typical or aberrational, but as one man’s story it is compelling reading. He describes living in a world in which priests are isolated from their supposed spiritual leaders, and from each other; a world in which violations of the vow of celibacy are commonplace, but are tolerated so long as outsiders remain ignorant of them; in which those who run the organization care about their own power more than anything spiritual. This part of his story would make a good novel (I’m thinking more of a Marquand or Maugham novel than of Sinclair Lewis).

The last third of the book goes over these same issues, but no longer as part of a biography. Rather, we are given Father Cutié’s critique of the Roman Catholic Church today. The chapter names are enough to give you the flavor of his thoughts: “The Myth of Celibacy”, “Disposable Priests”, “The Church that Time Forgot”. To me, this part of the book was not as interesting as the biographical part, I guess because I don’t really care much about what’s wrong with a church to which I do not belong. The people that ought to read these things are the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but somehow I doubt that many of them will find Father Cutié a credible critic.

However, any Anglican that yearns for more centralized control in our Communion, who wants the Archbishop of Canterbury to become an “Anglican Pope”, who proposes to give enforcement powers to the “Instruments of Unity”, ought to read this book.

. . . dreamt of in your philosophy

2011-01-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I recently saw a story about Keith Parsons, a college professor who announced that he will no longer teach his course on the philosophy of religion, because he “cannot take . . . arguments [in favor of theism] seriously any more.”

Boy, was this a shock!

I had no idea that there was such a thing as “philosophy of religion”, or that you could actually get paid to teach it.

OK, OK, I’m being facetious. I have great respect for philosophy (and for religion, too, or at least for some religions). I took a whole course in philosophy my freshman year of college: Phil I, Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius. What I most remember is how Plato wrote his Socratic dialogues so that Socrates always won the argument. I don’t mean just that we the reader ended up being persuaded. Even the guy Socrates was arguing with ended up agreeing with him. As you read along you came to a point where Socrates would say: Alcibiades (or whoever was Socrates’s victim in that particular dialogue), don’t you agree that . . . ? And as the reader I wanted to call out to poor Alcibiades, No, No, it’s a trick question, don’t agree with him! But feckless Alcibiades would agree, and then, sure enough, a few pages later, Socrates would show that if you accepted that assertion, you logically had to agree with Socrates’s conclusion. So old Alcibiades would sigh and agree that Socrates was right. Yes, Socrates, of course you’re right, how could it be otherwise?

This became a standing joke for a while in my crowd. Whenever some classmate would go overboard pontificating about something or other (and believe me, Harvard freshmen pontificated a lot – probably still do), someone would say, Yes, Socrates, of course you’re right, how could it be otherwise? It didn’t shut the pontificator up for long, but even a few minutes were a gift. So, I found that philosophy could be useful.

Later (much later), when I began to discover what my religion was all about, I started to read, or read about, philosophers who dealt with religious issues (or theologians who dealt with philosophical issues): Barth, Buber, William James, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Tillich, etc. So, when I discovered from the article I just mentioned that there was an academic discipline called philosophy of religion, I thought it would involve in-depth consideration of the kinds of issues that these philosophers raised. “Fear and Loathing Revisited”? “I and Thou in the 21st Century”? Terrific!

But I found it was not so. According to the article about Professor Parson’s resignation, “much of philosophy of religion consists in working out the logical implications of arguments”, such as “the argument from evil”. And what is that “argument”? It’s the old chestnut about whether the existence of evil in the world proves that there cannot be a loving and omnipotent god.

Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t for a moment mean to minimize the agony of the person who cries from the heart, How can a loving God permit this terrible thing to happen, my child to die, my home to be destroyed by a hurricane, or whatever tragedy it is. There is evil in the world and it does challenge our faith.

But the “argument from evil” is not a cri de coeur by someone whose faith is being challenged, it’s an intellectual exercise by philosophers who like to play games with ideas. The article tells us:

In the 1970’s, several leading philosophers of religion broke the argument [from evil] down into a “logical” version (that any amount of evil is logically incompatible with such a god) which most philosophers consider defeated, and an “evidential” version (that certain amounts or types of evil we observe in our world are evidence against such a god) which remains a thorny problem.

This seems like a waste of intellect. Do these philosophers ask themselves whether perhaps God could have a different definition of, or perspective on, evil than they do? Have they considered Genesis 1-3 and tried to understand how a religious tradition reconciles the reality of evil in the world with the existence of a loving God? Have they even read and attempted to understand “Fear and Loathing”?

These are rhetorical questions. Perhaps the philosophers of religion have considered all these things and satisfied themselves that their own approach is right. But I doubt it. We are told in this article that 73% of philosophers are atheists, and I suspect that even those who are believers in their hearts know whose game they have to play.

I find this all depressing. It’s like learning that your professor of music is tone deaf. There may be certain things that you can learn from such a teacher, but it can only go so far,

I was thinking about this stuff the other day when I saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing Glory on Martin Luther King Day. I’ve seen this great movie two or three times before, and it is painful each time, but worth the pain. It tells the story of a regiment of Black soldiers, recruited by the Union in the Civil War. Near the end of the movie, the night before the great battle in which most of them will die, the soldiers gather around the camp fires and sing hymns, pray, and testify. Their faith in God gives them the ability to face the coming day.

I don’t have words that can evoke what I felt when I saw that scene. You can see most of the scene here.

This scene says more about the Christian religion than any philosophical exercise can do. Our faith is a peculiar mixture of heart and head, emotion and intellect. On the one hand, it has a mystical power that seems to plumb depths far more profound than mere intellect can reach. On the other hand, it is not a blind and foolish tooth-fairy faith; it depends on a confident knowledge of the fact that God so loved this real material world, and us its real material inhabitants, that he sent his only begotten son so that we could have eternal life. Isn’t that more important that any philosopher’s word games?

For We Have Seen His Star In The East . . .

2011-01-05T07:42:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Some call it Little Christmas, or Twelfth Night, or Epiphany: The end of the Christmas season. Traditionally, it’s the time when the Three Kings visited the Christ child

Everyone who reads this blog probably knows that scripture doesn’t call them kings, doesn’t even say there were three of them. Matthew’s Gospel, the only one that mentions them, says that “wise men [magi] from the east” came looking for the new-born King of the Jews. The notes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible say that the Magi were “a learned class in ancient Persia”, and that they might be called “astrologers”.

The wise men told King Herod that they had seen a “star” that signified the birth of a new king of the Jews. It’s uncertain what the “star” might have been; some have suggested that it might have been a comet, or a nova or supernova. I recently read that the “star” may have been the planet Jupiter, which passed close to the bright star Regulus three times between September of 3 BCE and May of 2 BCE, and for about three months during that period moved in a westerly (“retrograde”) direction – i.e., toward Judea from the perspective of observers in Persia. In June of 2 BCE Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest planets, overlapped, to appear as a single object. Astrologers might well have interpreted this unusual conjunction of stars as a sign of a portentous event.

If that’s the correct explanation, it solves one puzzle in Matthew’s gospel: Why nobody other than the wise men seems to have seen the “star”. When the Magi come to King Herod’s court with their story about the star, this was apparently the first time that anyone there had heard about the phenomenon. In fact, Herod asks the wise men when the star first appeared. If the “star” was a comet, everyone would have noticed it; even a nova or supernova would have been widely remarked, certainly by Herod’s chief priests and scribes (by the way, a 10-year old Canadian girl recently became the youngest person to discover a supernova ). But an unusual conjunction of Jupiter, Regulus, and Venus might have been noticed only by astrologers.

In most of the Christmas pageants I’ve seen (or been in, as I wrote here a couple of years ago), you have Mary and Joseph and the Babe; the three kings and the star; and shepherds, their sheep, and the angels who brought the tidings of great joy. But there’s no gospel that has both kings and shepherds. Matthew has the wise men, Luke has the shepherds. I assume that the new-born savior was visited by both wise men and shepherds (perhaps not at the same time – that could have made the stable awfully crowded), so why did Matthew choose to feature the wise men in his story of the savior’s birth, while Luke chose to go with the shepherds?

On the face of it, it would seem to make more sense for Matthew to tell about the shepherds, and for Luke to tell about the Persian astrologers. Matthew’s is regarded as the most “Jewish” of the gospels, whereas Luke, who had been the companion of Paul in bringing the message of Christ to non-Jewish foreigners, seems to be writing for Greek Christians. So you might expect Matthew to emphasize Christianity’s Jewish background in telling the story of the birth of Christ, and Luke to emphasize its universality.

But what does Luke give us? Shepherds. It would be hard to imagine a more obvious Jewish symbol. The ancestors of the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the twelve sons of Jacob for whom the twelve tribes of Israel were named, were all shepherds (so was Abel, the second son of Adam and Eve, who was murdered by his brother Cain, the farmer). After the Israelites were freed from Egyptian slavery, they became farmers in the land that God had promised them, but they seem to have regarded that as a demotion from their ancestral occupation: Their great king, David, was a shepherd, and shepherds and sheep appear throughout the Hebrew Scriptures (“The Lord is my shepherd”, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel”, “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd”, “And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them”, etc.). Thus, if you wanted your gospel to emphasize Christianity’s Jewish background, it would be entirely appropriate to have the birth of the Messiah of the Jews announced to shepherds abiding in the fields, and to show them – representatives of the Israelite ideal – as the first people called to worship him.

So if shepherds are an obvious Jewish symbol, why didn’t Matthew, the gospeler to the Jews, have shepherds in his story? Why, instead, did he give us foreign astronomers?

The answer, I think, is that the wise men were just as much a symbol of an idealized Israel as Luke’s shepherds were, just a symbol of a different aspect of the ideal. Wise men coming from afar to adore the new-born King of the Jews is something that the Jewish scriptures had been expecting for centuries before the birth of Jesus.

The Psalmist said of the King of Israel:

May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles
Render him tribute,
May the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts.
May all kings fall down before him,
And all nations give him service.
[Psalm 72:10-11]

The wise men weren’t kings, but it would have been appropriate if they were.

But it wasn’t just the King of Israel that foreigners were to honor, but the Lord who the king represented:

All the ends of the earth shall remember
And turn to the Lord;
And all the families of the nations
Shall worship before him.
[Psalm 22:27]

All the nations you have made shall come
And bow down before you, O Lord,
And shall glorify thy name.
[Psalm 86:9]

Isaiah (and Micah, too) prophesied:

Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
That he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
[Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2]

Over and over again in the Old Testament we see the same prophecy, that the gentiles will in time come to understand that the God of Israel is the God of all the world. Thus, Israel, by being God’s special people, would become the means of bringing the rest of the world to God.

Matthew’s story about eastern sages coming across the trackless wastes to do homage to the new born king is therefore just as “Jewish” a story as Luke’s story about shepherds. Luke’s shepherds remind us of the ancient, unspoiled, ideal Israel; Matthew’s story reminds us of the Hebrew tradition that the nations will come to Zion for instruction, that Israel will be a beacon to the entire world, “a light to enlighten the gentiles”.

For us today, or for me at least, the story of the wise men has more resonance than the story of the shepherds. Shepherds aren’t part of the world that I live in, but wise men are – that is, men and women who think that their learning enables them to understand how the world works. There are times when I find myself thinking that I’m one of them. So it’s good to be reminded that the wise men in Matthew’s story got it wrong. Their wisdom, their science, told them that what they were seeking was an earthly king, a king of the Jews like Herod; certainly that’s what Herod feared that the star foretold. When they got to Bethlehem, the child that they found would not grow up to be an earthly king. He would never issue an edict, or call forth an army, or impose a tax, or execute a rival, or do any of the things that kings did, and do. But when he died, three decades later, under a sign that mockingly called him “King of the Jews”, the Roman centurion in charge of his execution said, “Truly this man was God’s son.” That’s who the wise men had found, not the king they were looking for.

That’s quite an epiphany.

Fear Not: For, Behold, . . .

2010-12-22T08:04:00.000-08:00

I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Merry Christmas from the Godfather!

A Mug’s Game

2010-12-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Have you heard? A debate was held the other day between religion and atheism.

Religion lost.

Although this debate is hardly in the same class as the infamous Oxford Union debate in 1933 (the one where the winning side affirmed that “this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”), it is nevertheless instructive.

The debate was held on November 26, 2010 in Toronto, Canada (no, really, please don’t stop reading this just because it happened in Canada). The proposition under consideration was:

Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.

For the affirmative was Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister. Blair is a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. For the negative was Christopher Hitchens, a prominent polemicist for atheism, the author of God Is Not Great, among other writings. (Hitchens is dying of cancer, which has not softened his position on God, and which, to his credit, he did not exploit in the course of the debate.)

The transcript of the debate, and a link to the video, can he found here.

The religion side, as I said, lost. The vote was 68% against to 32% for the proposition. To be fair to Tony, the deck was stacked against him: Before the debate, the audience was 57% against and 22% for.

There are two lessons I suggest we can draw from this debate. The first is that a good polemicist will beat a good politician in debate any time. That shouldn’t be surprising. A polemicist’s role is to argue and score points, to make the other side look foolish, stupid, evil, uninformed, or whatever it takes to win. But a politician’s role is to solve problems, and (at least in a democracy) that means working with opponents, compromising, and downplaying differences of principle. Blair, who was able to lead his country through an unpopular but necssary war, never really had a chance in this debate.

Time and again, Hitchens slammed religion in general and every specific religion that came to mind, not fairly, of course, but effectively:

In the religious view, human beings are “objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well”.

God is “swift to punish [us for] the original sins with which [he] so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.”

“Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?"

Circumcision is genital mutilation.

The Old Testament is responsible for the inability to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Roman Catholic church has “preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms”.

To none of these slanders did Mr. Blair offer a rebuttal. He eschewed (as a politician should) theological issues, and talked instead about all the good things that religious people do for the poor and down trodden of the world.

“[I]t is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion. It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion.”

“My claim is just very simple, there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good.”

But, as a politician who wants to build and maintain relationships with any group that can be helpful in solving problems, he has to say that good works are not exclusively the province of religion, that non-religious people can do the same wonderful things that religious people do. He describes work done by religious people in Africa with children infected by AIDS, and says:

Is it possible for them to have done that without their religious faith? Of course it's possible for them to have done it.

Later he concedes that:

Yes, of course, it is absolutely true, they might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith.

And again:

So when we say, well, that could be done by humanism, yes, it could.

Well, if there are bad things that could be ascribed, at least in part, to religion – the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland – and if the good things done by religious people can also be done by humanists, how do you conclude that, net, religion is good for the world?

The second lesson from this debate is more important, and it is this: It is folly to try to defend or promote “religion” as a generic concept. “Religion” is not a faith, it’s a category. Talking about “religion” in general is like talking about “husbands” or “wives” in general: The differences within the category render generalizations meaningless – unless you want to do stand-up, like Henny Youngman or Phyllis Diller.

If you try to defend or promote “religion”, you drain all the life out of the particular faiths that people embrace and end up with mush like this:

There is a basic belief common to all faiths, in serving and loving God, through serving and loving your fellow human beings.

It’s not that this Esperanto of “religion” is wrong, it’s just that it’s so weak, compared to, say:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good:
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?

Or to:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Besides, beyond the “basic belief” that Mr. Blair says is “common to all faiths”, there are specific beliefs of specific religions, and, truth be told, some of them are hard enough for members of the religion to defend; so how much harder you make it for yourself if you set about to defend all “religion”. Mr. Blair was challenged not only regarding his own church’s positions on birth control and original sin, but also on the Jewish rite of circumcision and the supposed Old Testament warrant for Israeli expansionism, on the Biblical literalism of some fundamentalist Christians, on faith healing, and so forth. There was little he was able or willing to say in response.

The fact is, if you are a faithful believer in a particular religion, there are all sorts of beliefs of other religions that you think are unreasonable, repellant, ridiculous, or just plain crazy. Why should you set yourself up to be beaten over the head about them by becoming an advocate for “religion”?

The defender of “religion” also has to deal with the inconvenient fact that a great deal of the conflict in the world arises out of disputes between members of different religions: Israeli Jews v. Arab Muslims, Roman Catholic Irish v. Protestant Irish, Hindu Indians v. Muslim Pakistanis, and so on. Tom Lehrer put it so well, years ago:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

Mr. Blair argued that some religious leaders struggle hard to bring peace to places rent by sectarian conflict, like Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Undoubtedly he is right. But if the question is whether “religion” is a force for good in the world, you don’t prove it that it is by showing that some religious people try to repair damage caused by religious differences. If you do, John Lennon answers you:

Imagine. . . no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

If you are out to defend “religion”, every religious conflict rebuts your argument. It’s different if you defend a particular religion. Your particular religion may be blameless with respect to, say, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and indeed may be playing a role in bringing about peace and tolerance. Even if your religion is involved in a particular conflict, the option is open to you, as a member of that faith, to defend your religion’s position (“we got here first”, or “they keep attacking us”, or whatever), or even to confess that your religion is in the wrong and you join with some of your co-religionists who are trying to right the wrong. You can’t do that if you are trying to defend “religion” in general.

You may devote yourself to Buddhism, or Judaism, or Hinduism, your life may have been changed by Islam, or Christianity, or Zoroastrianism, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who has devoted his life to “religion”.

None of this means that members of different faiths can’t or don’t cooperate to accomplish common goals and to make this world a better place. They do so all the time, as Mr. Blair testified. But they do so as Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, as Roman Catholics, or Presbyterians, or Anglicans. There’s no need to submerge these powerful religious impulses in some amorphous thing called “religion”.

The Rich Man and Lazarus -- Updated

2010-10-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in fine Italian suits and custom-made shirts, and fared sumptuously every day at the finest restaurants in the city and also at home for verily he employed a cordon bleu chef.

And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at the door of the rich man’s Fifth Avenue coop, full of sores, although not for long because the door man drove him off,

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table, or with the garbage from the finest restaurants in the city, or even from the worst ones; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man also died, and was buried.

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, it doesn’t have to be Evian, even tap water will do, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou are tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, very much like the door man of your Fifth Avenue coop; so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, but Father Abraham, although I didn’t feed Lazarus the crumbs from my table, all my life I paid very high taxes, you wouldn’t believe how high my taxes were, which supported homeless shelters and soup kitchens and other good things for people like Lazarus. You ought to give me some credit for that.

But Abraham said, Son, you were required to pay your taxes. If you had not done so, the soldiers would have come and thrown you in prison. This shows no love, no charity, for Lazarus.

Then the rich man said, but Father Abraham, that’s not all I did. I voted, and I always voted for the Party of Compassion, and gave the candidates of that Party many silver talents of political contributions through several different PACs, and the candidates of the Party of Compassion promised to raise the taxes on all the rich men in the land, to pay for more homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and many other good things; so if you give me no credit for paying my own taxes, you should give me credit for making other rich men pay more taxes.

But Abraham said, Son, I have said that paying taxes that you are required to pay shows no love or charity for Lazarus. How then can you imagine that making other men pay taxes shows love or charity for Lazarus?

Then the rich man said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldnst send Lazarus to my father’s house;

For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, and tell them they can stop supporting the Party of Compassion, because it won’t keep them from coming into this place of torment; let them support the Party of Frugality, which will lower their taxes and they can eat and drink even more sumptuously before they die.

And Abraham saith unto him, Thou still getteth not the point.

By Eric Von Salzen

Ignorance In The Pew[s]

2010-10-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Are religious people more ignorant and less educated than non-religious people? Non-religious people often think so, and may find aid and comfort for that opinion in a survey of “U.S. Religious Knowledge” recently released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Pew concludes that, although “America is one of the most religious of the world’s developed nations”,

[L]arge numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own.

Indeed, Pew says:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans answered only half of the 32 “religious knowledge” questions correctly, but atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Mormons got 20-21 right. Protestants got an average score of 16, and Roman Catholics just under 15.

The specific examples of religious ignorance that Pew highlights are:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

I was surprised by these results, because I haven’t found that the religious people I know are ignorant about religion. Besides, I'm a religious person, and I'm not dumb (at least I don't think so). Also, I hate to see more ammunition being provided to the anti-religious zealots.

So I wanted to take a look at the actual questions and answers that led Pew to these conclusions. It wasn’t easy to find them; they aren’t highlighted on the Pew website. But after combing through the text, I found them in Appendix B. On closer examination, they undermine Pew’s facile conclusions that I quoted above.

Let's start with the question about transubstantiation, which 45% of Catholics got wrong. The question reads: “Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?” The two choices are: They “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or they “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” The first is the “correct” answer to Pew, but it’s incomplete. The Roman Catholic Church, as I understand it, teaches that the bread and wine do become in truth the body and blood of Christ, but also that there is no change in the empirical appearances of the bread and wine; that is, the “substance” of the bread and wine are changed, but their “accidents” are not. Now, I would assume that most Catholics are well-enough indoctrinated to pick the first answer, whether they understand all the details or not – and 55% did get it right – but I can’t get all worked up that a minority picked the other answer. Transubstantiation is a complex theological issue that doesn’t lend itself to a multiple-choice test.

Then there’s Martin Luther, who, Pew says, most (53%) Protestants “cannot correctly identify . . . as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion [sic] a separate branch of Christianity”. The question Pew asked was, “What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation?”, and the choices were Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, and John Wesley. Again, this is a badly worded question. I suspect that a number of respondents who gave the “wrong” answer knew who Martin Luther was, but they didn’t know what the phrase “the Protestant Reformation” meant. Of course this phrase is part of the vocabulary of theologians, historians, and history junkies like me, but if you aren’t familiar with the term, its meaning isn’t self-evident. Just from the words, it could refer to a reform of Protestantism, not a revolt against the Roman Catholic Church (perhaps that’s what the 12% of respondents were thinking when they named John Wesley as “the inspiration of the Protestant Reformation”). The dead giveaway that this was a bad question is that Pew, in describing the results, and wanting to emphasize for readers the degree of ignorance the answers to this question represented, felt it necessary to explain what the Protestant Reformation was (“the Protestant Reformation . . . made their [Protestants’] religion [sic, again] a separate branch of Christianity”). If the respondents had been given the benefit of that hint, I think it likely that more than 47% would have gotten the answer right.

And then there’s Maimonides. The question was, “Maimonides was ___”, and the possible answers were, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Mormon, or Hindu. Only 8% of all respondents knew that he was Jewish, but 57% of Jewish respondents did. Again, it’s a bad question. A non-Jew is very unlikely to have heard of Maimonides, unless he/she has studied comparative religion (I don’t even think he’s mentioned in EFM). It seems to me peculiar to ask about Maimonides, but not an equivalent Christian figure, like Thomas Aquinas for example. Of course, the reason Pew picked Maimonides was undoubtedly because his name doesn’t sound Jewish. If the question had been, “What religion was Hillel ben Samuel?” you’d probably have 90% correct answers, even though hardly any respondent would know who he was.

Thus, the three questions that Pew chose to highlight do not, in my view, prove as much about Americans’ "ignorance" about religion as Pew seems to think they do. In fact, the survey as a whole shows that Americans know a lot about religions, their own and others’. Almost three-quarters of respondents knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (not Nazareth or Jerusalem, two of the other choices), and a similar number knew that Moses led the exodus from Egypt; more than half knew that the Golden Rule isn’t one of the Ten Commandments, and a like number knew that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son for God. Fully 82% knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic.

Other answers, though, do show surprising ignorance. I was shocked that fewer than half of respondents were able to name the four Gospels correctly. (A few years ago some might have mistakenly named the Gospel of Judas, which for a time received a disproportionate amount of attention in the media, but that’s old news now, I think.) In a survey in which more than three-quarters of respondents identify themselves as Christians, it’s hard to understand this result.

About 2/3 of respondents knew that Zeus was the king of the gods in Greek mythology, but only about a third knew that Vishnu and Shiva are Hindu deities (actually, the question refers to them as “central figures” in a religion). Given the relative number of adherents to these religious traditions, one might infer a shortcoming in our educational systems.

Certainly, those whose job it is to teach religion to children, youth, and adults should see the results of the Pew survey as a challenge, but there’s no reason to despair.

CALLING ALL BIBLE SCHOLARS

2010-10-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Ingrid Betancourt, a Columbian politician, was kidnapped by FARC guerillas and held captive for six years. She and other hostages were finally freed by Columbian army forces.

Ms. Betancourt has written a book about her experiences, Even Silence Has An End , which I haven’t read and won’t discuss. What I want to call to your attention is a statement from an interview in which Ms. Betancourt talks about her captivity. She said that one of the few books she had access to was the Bible, and she read it over and over again. She described a passage that stuck out:

“It says that when you cross the valley of tears, and you arrive to the oasis, the reward of God is not success, it’s not money, it’s not admiration or fame, it’s not power. His reward is rest. So that’s what I want for me now.”

I think that’s very powerful, particularly given the circumstances in which she read it. But I can’t figure out what Bible passage she’s referring to.

Can you? Please comment.

Love and Hate

2010-09-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Nine years ago this week, the men captured the planes, destroyed the buildings, and committed vast evil against our country.

Since then, w/ 8,000 dead at home and in Asia, w/ trillions of dollars in damages and rebuilding and fighting: we’ve been at war.

Nine years of war, and an economic meltdown, numerous mega-disasters, and extreme weather patterns, and it sure seems like times are tough.

It’s no wonder the current president and his predecessor aren’t too popular.

But, this is -- nothing new. Is it?

The troubles we face in this country didn’t begin on 9/11. Or the 2000 election. Or with Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter or Nixon. Or the deaths of King and Kennedy.

Or Viet Nam, Korea, Two World Wars, or the War Between the States.

No, the troubles we know all to well, are old. They are original troubles. They go all the way back, to just a few moments after the beginning.

In the Garden of Eden.

The issues that plague us -- greed, ego, sloth, profligacy, corpulence, materialism -- and that’s just at Wal-Mart -- are not new issues. They are just old fashioned sin. And that’s what’s wrong.

Disaster, tragedy, scarcity, and war -- the bane of peace, harmony, plenty and all is well -- they are the teeth of sin.

But, welcome to real life.

Real life. It’s a mixed bag. There’s much to love and there’s much to endure. There’s much to fight, and much to flee.

Real life as we know it, began the day humanity learned to disobey God.

The poetic vision of Genesis says we learned to disobey God the day we ate that darn apple, from that darn tree, and our eyes to truly see and hearts to truly love were distorted. Bent. Blurred.

God gave us eyes to see the glorious infinity of all things, and hearts to love with the pure, unconditional love of God.

But, then, in Eden, with that apple, and the infection of sin, our eyes started to see in a new way. Not to glorious infinity, but partial sight. Dim sight. Sight that catches only reflections of the truth, and those bent in such a way that all things look like what we want, or fear, or desire, or hate.

In Eden, when infected by sin, our hearts started to love in a new kind of way. Not with joy, and hope, and unconditional concern for others, but rather with self-interest. Infected by sin, our hearts learned to love not God and neighbor as self; but self, and neighbor when it benefits self.

And from the infection of sin, the distortion of our eyes to color the world as we desire or fear, and the distortion of our hearts to put our selves first, and those allied with our selves, enmity, strife and sorrow have grown and grown.

That’s what Jesus is getting at in his very HARD words this morning.

So, what could Jesus possibly mean when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple...”???

Such surprising words from the King of Love, no?

Well. To be sure, we must know that Jesus is setting up a very serious teaching here -- and thus uses extreme language to set the tone and stage.

As well, as a first century rabbi, Jesus speaks out of a context in which Masters required total obedience from Disciples. Rabbis were given undivided loyalty by their pupils. That was the culture of Judaism.

So, partly, when Jesus says, “hate ... family, etc.”, he’s saying “Discipleship requires total obedience, and all other priorities are second.”

Jesus as Master, as Lord, as Teacher of Disciples is thus talking about putting that relationship with him first and foremost.

Also, going deeper, Jesus is talking about the deep corruption of the world by sin, though, and how we must learn to hate its fallenness.

We must learn from God to do away, to shed, to crucify, all those distortions of sin’s infection.

We must shed our selfish sight and selfish loves -- not to become hateful, of course -- but to learn how to truly see and love.

---

The challenge of today’s Gospel is a real as ever. Do you, do we, really truly see the truth and know how to love?

Examine your loves -- do we love our family -- for their sake? Or for ours.

Do we love our partners and children and siblings for their sake -- or for ours?

Are we truly loving?

Jesus says, the only way to truly love, to truly see, is to begin by opening our hearts to the Lordship of God. By giving our hearts, our eyes, our lives to the Lordship, the Mastery, the Ownership of God.

The promise is that by doing so, our eyes and hearts will be restored to the way they were when God made them. We will begin to see what God sees in all people, and we will begin to truly love God, neighbor and self.

The Gospel says this is the only cure for what ails the world.

Amen

"The Grand Design"

2010-09-03T12:07:00.001-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I’m looking forward to reading Stephen Hawking’s new book , in which he argues that we do not need to believe in God to explain the existence of the universe. Instead, we are to believe in “M-theory”, which involves 11 space-time dimensions, “vibrating strings, ... point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other objects that are more difficult to picture and occupy even more dimensions of space.” Boy, that’s a relief! Just good old common sense, and none of that religious mumbo-jumbo!

A Cloud of Witnesses

2010-08-16T13:57:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

A day or two after 9/11, an interfaith meeting was held at my church (St. Alban’s, Washington, DC). It was part of a series of meetings among Christians, Jews, and Muslims that had been going on for quite awhile, but they changed whatever the planned agenda had been for this meeting and focused on the terrorist attacks.

I went and listened to clergy, lay leaders, and regular folks from all three Abrahamic faiths express their shock, their sorrow, and their anger at these vicious attacks on our country. No Christian and no Jew blamed the attacks on Islam, and no Muslim offered any defense of the killers.

I think about the Muslims I heard speak at that meeting when I hear and read about the controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, the proposed Islamic center that the Cordoba Initiative wants to build a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site. If the Muslims who spoke at St. Alban’s nine years ago want to worship God in that location, how could I object? They were not complicit in the attacks; they are as much enemies of the terrorists as I am.

If the Catholic Church were to propose building a facility two blocks from the site of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, would anyone object on the ground that Timothy McVeigh was raised a Catholic?

But some people do object, including some of the families of people killed at the World Trade Center. We owe it to the memory of those who died to think about the objections seriously. We owe it to ourselves, too, because all Americans were (and are) targets of the terrorists. Platitudes about America’s commitment to religious tolerance – true as they are – are insufficient to answer the objections.

The problem, as I see it, is that the 9/11 killers and those who sent them didn’t just “happen to be” Muslims. Their Muslim faith was the central motive for what they did. They acted out of a deep conviction that Islam sanctioned these actions; more than that, they believed that Islam demanded this action.

The Muslims I heard speak at St. Alban’s that evening rejected that claim. They denied that Islam permits, much less requires, such murderous actions. They condemned as false and un-Islamic the religious claims of the terrorists. I believed them.

The problem that many people have, who oppose the “Ground Zero Mosque”, is that they didn’t hear the Muslims that I heard at St. Alban’s. Most Americans, I believe, don’t know many, or any, Muslims very well. We hear and read that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups claim to be the “true” Islam, and we don’t have Muslim friends and neighbors and co-workers to tell us, No, that’s not true.

We have the news media, of course, and that’s what most of us rely on to learn about things in the world beyond our own individual experience. Perhaps I read the wrong newspapers, watch the wrong TV shows, read the wrong websites, but I have the sense that the voices of the Muslims I heard at St. Alban’s aren’t being heard very much. I have the sense that most Americans don’t hear, on a regular basis, prominent Muslims and spokespersons for Muslim organizations condemning Islamic religious extremism. The news has been full of Islamic extremism, whether it’s terrorism in the US or the UK or Bali, whether it’s violence or threats of violence against cartoonists who dare to depict the Prophet or movie-makers who criticize Muslim treatment of women, or whether it’s a fatwa against a novelist who criticizes Islam.

What the news has not been full of, so far as I can tell, is Muslim voices condemning Islamic extremism.

So when people hear that Muslims want to build a facility near the “sacred ground” where the World Trade Center once stood, they ask themselves: Are they on our side or on the other side? And they are not confident that the answer is, They’re on our side.

The Cordoba Initiative says that it seeks to improve “Muslim-West relations”. That is a noble goal and something we desperately need. I think they need to ask themselves whether building in this particular location serves that purpose.

(By the way, the photo at the top of this post is not the "Ground Zero Mosque", but what was once the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Spain. It is now a Roman Catholic Church. We live in a complicated world.)

Revenge of the Vampires

2010-08-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I’m not a big vampire fan (well, in my youth I did envy Bela Lugosi for his suave neck munching), so I’ve never read any of Anne Rice’s innumerable vampire novels. I had heard of her of course, and so I was interested several years ago to hear that she had returned to the Christian religion, specifically to the Roman Catholic Church in which she grew up. She did a radio discussion about this with N. T. Wright in 2006, which is worth listening to. She was in the process of writing a series of novels about the life of Jesus under the overall title Christ The Lord, and she has now published two volumes, subtitled Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. I recommend both of them.

Now Ms. Rice has announced (on her Facebook page!) that she has left Christianity. She explains:

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

If that’s not clear enough, she lists several characteristics of Christianity to which she objects, It’s anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science, and anti-life.

If I took her argument seriously, I guess I’d have to leave Christianity, too, because I also oppose anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-science, and anti-life positions (and some of my best friends are Democrats and secular humanists). But I’m not leaving.

In part I infer that what Ms. Rice really objects to are positions of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has confused “Christianity” with Roman Catholicism. This is not surprising. When I was growing up (Ms. Rice and I are of an age) a lot of my Roman Catholic friends thought that the only valid form of Christianity was Roman Catholicism (and a lot of my Protestant friends thought the Roman Catholics were mackerel snappers). If she’d said that she’s leaving the Catholic Church for the reasons she cites I wouldn’t question her decision.

But by saying that she’s leaving “Christianity”, and by identifying all these negative characteristics with Christianity, she’s made a fundamental mistake. Although there certainly are Christians who hold the views to which she objects, not all Christians do so. And more important: These positions are not an essential part of Christian belief or Christian theology. Yes, yes, I know that Paul said some beastly things about gays and women, but that doesn’t mean that you have to believe that all gays are idolaters, or that women must be silent in church, in order to be a Christian. Christianity is about faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of Humanity. If Anne Rice remains “committed to Christ as always” (as she says), she’s a Christian whether she likes the name or not.

The other thing that’s wrong with Ms. Rice’s announcement is that it reflects the notion that you shouldn’t be part of an institution that has objectionable people in it. Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t join a club that would accept him as a member, and Ms. Rice won’t belong to a church that has any sinners in it. She’s going to be mighty lonely. She would do well to read Paul’s letters to the Corinthians to help her understand that our church is made up of flawed people, who are nevertheless called to a common faith.

The attitude that Ms. Rice displays is by no means unique to her or to the Roman Catholic Church. It is an attitude that lies behind much of the friction and fragmentation in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, the idea that we won’t sit in the same pews, or kneel at the same rail, with “THEM” (whoever “THEM” are). Ms. Rice describes Christians as “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous”. The description fits not only Christians but all human beings. Yet we are called to break bread together.

When the Holy Spirit touches the heart of Anne Rice and brings her back to the Christian community, she should be welcomed.

Impasse on Women

2010-07-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

The Church of England still seems to be having trouble finding its way into the 20th Century. The C of E had previously decided to allow women to become bishops (I look forward to the forthcoming BBC series, The Bishop Of Dibley), but to avoid offending the "traditionalists", the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that each female bishop be paired with a "complementary" male bishop -- apparently not for the purpose of keeping the flighty little thing from getting her knickers in a twist, but "to minister to traditionalists unwilling to accept a woman as the head of their diocese." So the New York Times reports.

The General Synod, however, has rejected that proposal, leaving the traditionalists with no choice, I suppose, but Rome or a stiff upper lip.

Perhaps, though, the Episcopal Church could regain the favor of the ABC by agreeing to pair each of our gay or lesbian bishops with a "complementary" straight bishop. What do you think?

By Eric Von Salzen

Hilarious Video - Must Watch This

2010-06-28T16:33:00.001-07:00

OUR FATHER’S DAY

2010-06-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

As Christians we believe in a peculiar kind of God. The God we believe in not only created the heavens and the earth, but this God also loves us, each one of us, as a father loves a child. We have this on the authority of the Son of God himself.

It must have seemed quite remarkable to the followers of Jesus that he addressed God as his father, and even used the word Abba, which implied an intimate family relationship with God. But then, perhaps his followers said to each other, Jesus could say this because he was something special. Even before they began to realize who Jesus truly was, they thought he was at least a prophet, and perhaps even the Messiah, the Anointed One, someone with a really special relationship to God. The son of the Emperor in Rome might call Caesar “Daddy”.

But no, that wasn’t it. Jesus told them that God was their father, too, and they should address him the same way he did. That had to be shocking. The God who created the entire universe, the God who spoke from Mount Sinai in the thunder and lightning and smoke, the God who feeds the young lions and made leviathan for sport, the God that only Moses could talk to face to face, and even he not always – this God they were to call Daddy?

And what kind of father this God was! In what must be his most famous parable, Jesus described a father running to greet his returning prodigal son and throwing his arms around him. This is a father who casts aside his dignity for the love of his child. In our mind’s eye we see the old man running up the dusty road toward the distant figure of his son, his white hair streaming behind him, his robes flapping around his pumping legs, perhaps a lost sandal left behind in the dirt. Is this how we are to imagine the God who answered Job out of the whirlwind and told him how he made Behemoth and Leviathan? Is he that kind of father?

Yes, just that kind of father.

I know that there are some among us to whom the word father does not arouse warm and fuzzy feelings. Fathers are sometimes abusive, irresponsible, cruel, deadbeats, aloof, or absent. Jesus clearly didn’t have fathers like that in mind when he called God Daddy and said that we should, too. It was the earthly Jesus who said these things, before he died and rose again, and I can’t help but think that he was influenced by the example of his earthly father, Joseph. I have a warm spot in my heart for Joseph, because, like me, he was a stepfather. The scriptures don’t tell us much about the kind of father Joseph was, but we can infer that he was the kind of father Jesus wanted his followers to think of when he described God as their father. This kind of father.

I’m fortunate. I had that kind of father. I wish I’d had him longer – I was 33 when he died – but I knew what a father is supposed to be, thanks to him. Now, a generation later, I see my stepson being a father to his three wonderful little girls, and I learn again what a father is supposed to be.

Happy Father’s Day.

Through A Glasspool Darkly, Part Two

2010-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Anglicans cut Episcopalians from ecumenical bodies
Isn't this unnecessarily violent?

Is The Archbishop of Canterbury Next?

2010-05-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph reports from London:

Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin.

It couldn't happen here, of course. We have our First Amendment. But I guess it can happen in the UK. Where could it lead, do you suppose?

By Eric Von Salzen

Theology of Marriage - Robert Wright Article

2010-04-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

From the Diocese of North Carolina's Bishop's Task Force on the Theology of Marriage, which I chaired this past year. This piece is from Robert Wright (a GTS board member, Duke University development officer, and active member of Chapel of the Cross, in Chapel Hill.) -- Greg

HUMPTY DUMPTY, AUGUSTINE AND MARRIAGE

Robert E. Wright

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “Whether you can make words mean so many different things?”
"The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master? – That’s all.”

This conversation between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass sounds in many ways like the arguments now being waged in Anglicanism over matters of human sexuality and ecclesiology. On one side are those who cite church canons regarding property held in trust within a hierarchical church, as well as the Nicene tradition of respecting diocesan and provincial boundaries. On the other side are those who cite Scripture and Tradition regarding who may be considered eligible for marriage and ordination. Each side, in a sense, is playing Humpty Dumpty, regarding how the church's authoritative texts are to be interpreted with regard to sexual ethics as well as the ecclesiology of the church.

An Augustinian Hermeneutic

To be sure, now we all look through the glass darkly, but with Tradition and Reason as sources of illumination, we may more clearly look through the window of Scripture to see God's face. In particular, from our Tradition, St. Augustine sheds much light on our discernment. Perhaps the late 4th-early 5th century African bishop offers us a way out of the game Humpty Dumpty seeks to play, about who gets to be 'master' of what authoritative texts must mean to us. In particular, the Augustinian hermeneutic offers help as the church wrestles with marriage and our desire to faithfully interpret the Bible, as we also seek to include partnered Christians who are gay and lesbian into the sacramental life of the church.

In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, begun c. 396, Augustine wrote:

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way. (I.36.40)

Later he elaborates, situating the interpretation of Scripture in the context of the entire canon and not proof-texting:

For he who examines the divine eloquence, desiring to discover the intention of the author through whom the Holy Spirit created the Scripture, whether he attains this end or finds another meaning in the words not contrary to right faith, is free from blame if he has evidence from some other place in the divine books. For the author himself may have seen the same meaning in the words we seek to understand. And certainly the Spirit of God, who worked through that author, undoubtedly foresaw that this meaning would occur to the reader or the listener. Rather, He provided that it might occur to him, since that meaning is dependent upon truth. For what could God have more generously and abundantly provided in the divine writings than that the same words might be understood in various ways which other no less divine witnesses approve? (III.27.38)

The premise of Augustine’s interpretive principle lies in the distinction between charity (caritas) and cupidity (cupiditas). As he defines these terms:

I call “charity” the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God; but “cupidity” is a motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of one’s self, one’s neighbor, or any corporal thing for the sake of something other than God. (III.10.16)

In other words, the “master” of the text (to use Humpty’s term) is not the human author or those who would have interpreted his words in the historical, social, or cultural context within which they were written, but rather God himself who as Logos is the true author and whose words are always to be interpreted in terms of the law of charity. Of this principle he writes:

. . . every student of the Divine Scriptures must exercise himself, having found nothing else in them except, first, that God is to be loved for Himself, and his neighbor for the sake of God; second, that he is to love God with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind; and third, that he should love his neighbor as himself, that is, so that all love for our neighbor should, like all love for ourselves, be referred to God. (II.7.10)

Later in the work, he explains that this interpretive principle may be applied as well to secular, even pagan, texts.

Augustine applies this principal in determining whether certain texts are to be interpreted literally or figuratively. He quotes the Apostle, “For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth,” commenting, “That is, when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally . . . He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else.” As an example, Augustine notes that “if he hears of the Sabbath, he thinks only of one day out of the seven that are repeated in a continuous cycle . . .” and cites the scribes and Pharisees’ accusations against Jesus for performing healings on the Sabbath. (III.5.9-10)

An Expanded Interpretation of Marriage?

Two remarkable resolutions passed by successive General Conventions of The Episcopal Church in 2000 and 2003, together with the legalization of same-gender marriage first in Massachusetts in 2004 and subsequently in several other states, have effectively changed the terms and the context of the church's debate over the blessing of same-gender unions. Whereas the conversation once tended to be about same-gender partnerships, envisioning them as alternative types of human relationship wholly other than 'marriage,' now people began to be asking whether or not marriage was what we were talking about for everybody - whether straight or gay.

The first, passed by the 73rd General Convention meeting in Denver, stated in part:

Resolved, That we acknowledge that while the issues of human sexuality are not yet resolved, there are currently couples in the Body of Christ and in this Church who are living in marriage and couples in the Body of Christ and in this Church who are living in other life-long committed relationships; and be it further
Resolved, That we expect such relationships will be characterized by fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication, and the holy love which enables those in such relationships to see in each other the image of God; and be it further
Resolved, That we denounce promiscuity, exploitation, and abusiveness in the relationships of any of our members; and be it further
Resolved, That this Church intends to hold all its members accountable to these values, and will provide for them the prayerful support, encouragement, and pastoral care necessary to live faithfully by them . . .

The second, passed by the 74th General Convention meeting in Minneapolis, reaffirmed the resolve that defined the positive qualities of such relationships and added:

Resolved, That we recognize that local faith communities are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions.

I believe, these two resolutions point not to the formation of a new category of domestic partnership - which might be available to persons of any sexual orientation - nor do they represent an altogether new vision of marriage itself. Rather, they point to an evolved interpretation of traditional marriage, whereby it may begin to be understood as appropriate for same-gender couples as well as mixed-gender couples.

When one asks how this might be in light of Scripture and Tradition, it is here that I believe Augustine's hermeneutic of charity - when applied to biblical and traditional texts - is the key to this new understanding of how that may faithfully be.

For example, in Genesis' first creation account, we encounter the words: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Gen 1.27) In the second creation account, we encounter the words: “God said, 'it is not good that man should be alone, I will make him a helper as his partner." And, "then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. " (Gen 2:18&23)

As a Christian who is gay, I interepret these passages to have little to do with purely physically determined gender complementarity, as much as with the personal complementarity that I know to be possible between two persons of the same gender who love each other intimately. Moreover, I see in these passages a calling to mutuality and partnership - as checks against solitude or selfishness, and the sacred vocation partnered persons have to accompany and serve each other faithfully. According to the Augustinian hermeneutic, I interpret these passages in light of how they reveal to me a godly form of life rooted in the love of God and of neighbor as self.

By the same hermeneutic, a reading of Matthew 22 demonstrates God's will for a principled inclusion to all sorts of persons to the wedding feast of God's Kingdom. Such an principled approach would apply not only to the guests, who are all invited but also expected to abide by a set of agreed groundrules ('the wearing of the wedding garment'), but also the couple sealing their covenant with one another, with God, and with the community of faith.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes, “. . . every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is his Lord’s” (II.18.28) Many now believe that The Episcopal Church is called to expand its understanding of marriage - not to make the word mean many things or just any thing - as Humpty Dumpty would do. No, many believe that under an Augustinian hermeneutic of charity, in which we believe the "love of God and of neighbor as self" is the master of our authoritative texts, we may understand marriage to be an honorable estate which includes persons of same-gender affection.

The Tough Guy

2010-03-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I’m not a big fan of Lent. Lent makes me think about things I’d just as soon not think about. In Lent — and particularly in this week, this Holy Week — we’re supposed to think about some very unpleasant things, like betrayal, cowardice, oppression, injustice, violence, torture, pain, and death.

Of course, the discomfort of hearing about these things is eased for us by the fact that we know where it is leading: To Easter and the Resurrection. We’ve already read the last chapter of the book, seen the final reel of the movie; we know how it’s going to come out.

But the people who lived through those events didn’t know that everything was going to turn out all right in the end. Even though Jesus had told them what was going to happen, they didn’t understand it, they didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe it when he told them he was going to be killed, and when he was killed they didn’t believe that he would rise, although he’d told them that, too.

When Jesus was arrested, condemned, and taken to the place of execution, the Disciples thought that it would be all over if Jesus died. And he did die. How terrible that must have been for the Disciples, and for Jesus’ family and friends. Unlike us, they didn’t know that Easter was coming.

And yet, even in those dark days, before anyone knew there would be an Easter, there was the shining light of redemption. And it came at the worst hour of those ghastly days: the crucifixion itself.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus was crucified with two criminals — or robbers, or bandits, or thieves, depending on the translation. And Matthew and Mark tell us that these thieves joined in with the Roman soldiers, and the chief priests and scribes, and the others who gathered below the crosses, in mocking and reviling Jesus.

But Luke tells a fuller story. He says that one of the thieves did indeed mock Jesus, saying, “If you are the Messiah, save yourself and save us!”

Think about that. Here is this criminal, who has been condemned to death, to a painful and dishonorable death. And while that terrible sentence is being carried out on him, he takes the time to mock another human being who is under the same sentence and is suffering the same agonies that he is suffering.

Why did he do that?

Luke tells us that the thief spoke after the Roman soldiers said much the same thing to Jesus, and I think the thief was seeking the soldiers’ approval by joining in with them. The thief was proud of himself for being a tough guy, and he wanted the Roman soldiers – and everyone knew that they were toughest guys around – to know that he was a tough guy, too, he was really one of them, even though they were torturing and killing him at the time. He wanted their respect. So he mocked the man dying on the next cross.

To the first thief, it was important that he be respected by the tough guys, by the people that he respected, and he hoped that they would remember him as a tough guy even after his death. Perhaps they did. For awhile.

But the second thief didn’t join in the mockery. On the contrary, he rebuked his fellow thief. (I’m drawing an inference when I call him a “fellow thief”. Luke doesn’t tell us whether the two thieves knew each other. But the second thief says to the first:

“We have been condemned justly; we are getting what we deserve for our deeds.”

So it sounds to me as though the two thieves knew each other pretty well.)

And then the second thief goes on to say that Jesus “has done nothing wrong.”

Now, if that were the whole story, it would be powerful enough. It would be the story of a condemned criminal, suffering and dying for his crimes, able to see that the man suffering beside him was innocent, and using his last breath to testify to that man’s innocence.

But there is more than that to the story. For then the second thief speaks to Jesus and says: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

The second thief understands that Jesus is just who we (who have read the last chapter of the book) know that He is: The Messiah, the Christ. The second thief knows that after the crucifixion Jesus will come into His kingdom.

Think about that: It will not be until the third day that the Disciples realize what a dying thief knows on day one.

The two thieves offer us two very different visions of what is important in life. Like the first thief, we can seek the approval of those people that we think are important in our world, by doing and saying what they do and say, or what we think that they want us to do and say, and we can hope that they will respect us as their kind of person and even remember us, for awhile, after we’re gone.

Or, we can follow the second thief, and ask Jesus to remember us.

And if we do ask, the promise is there. Because what Jesus said to the second thief was: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

“You will be with me in Paradise.”

Today.

Two days before Easter.

Upon this rock....

2010-03-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

A Prayer Card

2010-03-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

The other day, a Roman Catholic friend enclosed a prayer card with my birthday card. It was a “Prayer For Judges”. I’m a lawyer, and I supposed my friend couldn’t find any prayers for lawyers (we’re hopeless, I guess), and sent the next best thing.

It wasn’t, though, a prayer to support judges in their difficult but important work, or a prayer that God grant them wisdom and discernment. It was a prayer about abortion.

The Prayer For Judges said that judges had legalized abortion by putting their own opinions ahead of God’s Law, and it called on judges to start applying God’s Law and end abortion. I can’t quote it exactly, because I didn’t keep it.

Now the fact is, I oppose abortion, and I think that Rowe v. Wade was wrongly decided. There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits states from regulating or prohibiting abortion. The Supreme Court majority did read its own social and moral values into the Constitution in reaching its decision. I don’t think judges should do that. To that extent, I agree with whoever wrote the Prayer For Judges.

But my mother taught me as a little boy that two wrongs don’t make a right. If it was wrong for the Supreme Court majority to impose their social and moral values on the country by legalizing abortion, it would be just as wrong for different judges to impose their notion of God’s Law to end abortion. The Constitution doesn’t embody the personal opinions of Harry Blackmun, nor does it embody the religious convictions of the Conference of Bishops or the College of Cardinals. Or even of The Godfather.

But judges are a special case. The rest of us, as citizens in a democratic republic, as voters, as writers of letters to the editor, as participants in political parties or tea parties, certainly have the right to use God’s Law, as we understand it, in deciding what policies are right and wrong, and therefore what candidates do and don’t merit our support at the polls. And as Christians that’s what we think we ought to do, isn’t it?

Of course, translating our religious convictions into political choices isn’t easy, and in this post I’m not going to discuss how we decide, based on God’s Law, who we should vote for, or what policies we should support. That’s too big an issue. I’m going to focus on a narrower issue: How our religious faith figures in the way we talk about political issues, and how we try to persuade our fellow citizens to support the positions and candidates we favor.

And the first thing you notice, when you think about that issue is that we don’t often use religious arguments when we try to persuade people to support whatever position it is that we advocate. Our religious convictions may lead us to support or oppose particular policies or candidates; but when we try to persuade others to join us, we don’t usually do so by telling them that it’s God’s will.

One of the reasons we don’t do so is because we know that it generally won’t work. If someone doesn’t share your religious convictions, or isn’t sure what he or she believes in that regard, the religious argument is unlikely to persuade them to support the policy or candidate that you support. Before the religious argument could be effective you’d have to first persuade them that your religious view are right; you’d have give them a full-fledged indoctrination in your religious tradition, and persuade them to embrace it. If you succeed in doing that, you’ll have accomplished a conversion and may have saved a soul, but by the time you do so, the election will be long since over. So when we try to persuade those who don’t already agree with us on a political issue, we usually don’t base our arguments on religious principles, even if those are why we support of oppose the policies we do. We try to construct arguments based whatever values they already have.

Another reason that we usually don’t use religious arguments when we are trying to persuade others to support our positions is that we sense that such arguments can be divisive in a society like ours, with a wide variety of religious and secular faiths. Divisive arguments are sometimes necessary, but we try to avoid them if we can. Suppose I want to persuade someone to support teaching Creationism in the public schools. If I argue that the Bible says that God created the world in seven days so it must be true, no matter what atheist scientists say to the contrary, not only will my argument fail to convince someone who isn’t already a Biblical literalist, I will offend non-fundamentalists and drive them away from my position. A more effective approach might be to argue that the schools should present both sides of controversial issues, because that’s being open minded and tolerant of the views of those we disagree with. We all like to think we’re tolerant, don’t we?

A third, and critical, reason not to use religious beliefs in political discussions is that religious beliefs tend to be about ends, and political issues tend to be about means. Christian religious beliefs, for example, may lead you to believe that you have a moral duty to help the poor, but they won’t tell you whether raising the minimum wage will help the poor or hurt them; for that you need economics. Your religious principles may lead you to want to free the oppressed, to protect the helpless, to stop the evil doer, but whether it’s possible to do this by military action, or diplomacy, or covert action – or whether under the circumstances the best thing to do is admit our helplessness in the face of evil – requires knowledge, experience, and expertise that must be found elsewhere than in scripture.

It’s not impossible to find political issues that can be resolved (for some) solely on religious grounds, but it’s not common either. In writing this post, I’ve used abortion and Creationism as examples of political issues that, for a lot of people (not all, by any means), can be resolved on purely religious grounds. I’m hard-pressed to think of a lot of other examples.

So we generally don’t rely on religious arguments to persuade others to agree with us on political issues or candidates. Yet religious beliefs – or our understanding of God’s Law, to go back to the Prayer For Judges – are important to political decision-making. To many of us, religious principles underlie our political principles, even though we don’t use religious values to explain our politics to others who don’t share them. Our religious beliefs may give us the courage, the energy, and the endurance to pursue political goals. Religious principles may also help us to energize others, who share our beliefs, to join in trying to implement them. The civil rights movement is an obvious example. So is the Prayer For Judges; it probably won’t persuade Protestant or secularist pro-choicers to become pro-lifers, but it may rally Roman Catholic pro-lifers to try harder to support a cause they already believe in.

The other day, I saw another example of how religion can be used to support political advocacy. The Raleigh paper ran a front-page story about people, hit by hard economic times, increasing their use of food assistance programs. The paper illustrated the story with a photo of an out-of-work father and his two daughters holding hands as they say grace over a meal made possible by government food assistance. Leave aside the question whether such advocacy belongs in a news story, and just focus on how effective it is. It’s effective because we think that religious people, those who pray before meals, are good, hard-working folks, who are more likely to give a hand-out than take one. If they need this kind of help, aren’t we glad they can get it? It’s a picture worth a thousand words.

Comment Moderation Turned OFF

2010-03-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in publishing comments --- I have turned moderation off. So -- moderate yourselves! Thanks so much. My apologies.

“. . . Until an Opportune Time”

2010-03-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Today is my birthday. No, I’m not hinting for cards or presents. I’ve been thinking. Today I’m 67. In 1976, my father died, a few days short of his 67th birthday. I’m now having the birthday my father didn’t get to have.

At the time, I thought that my father’s death was awfully premature. I didn’t, though, realize then how very young 67 is. I do now. Sixty-seven is no age at all. If it weren’t for Social Security and my AARP card, I wouldn’t even call myself a senior citizen, much less “elderly”. I feel like a youngster of 50. Most of the time anyway.

So did my father, until the brain tumor. So, as I said, I’ve been thinking.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is cancer. I hate cancer. Cancer killed my father. Cancer killed my best friend from prep school when he was barely 50. Cancer killed other friends in their 50’s and 60’s. When I was 15 I had a friend at YMCA summer camp; he didn’t come back the next summer; he’d died of leukemia. Most of the people I know who died prematurely died from cancer.

Of course, one of the reasons for that is that science has defeated so many other diseases that in earlier times would have killed us before cancer got to us. My father, for example, came back from Ethiopia, where he’d been a medical missionary for six months, with tuberculosis. He hadn’t contracted the disease there, though; it turns out he’d had a latent case of TB since his youth, and it became active when he got rundown and exhausted in Ethiopia. Dad thought it was interesting to contemplate that if that disease he’d been carrying had become active years earlier, before the antibiotics to treat it were developed after WW II, it would likely have killed him. As it was, a course of drugs and a couple of months in a sanatorium, and he was cured. Until the cancer got him five years later.

I hate cancer. There’s no excuse for it. I don’t understand why God created it. Of course I know that earthly life is not supposed to be perfect. That’s what makes it earthly. If it were perfect it would be Heaven. I accept that in this world we must bear mosquitoes and hurricanes and Rosie O’Donnell and other greater and lesser tribulations, but isn’t that enough? Must there also be cancer?

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is eternal life. That’s the great promise of Christianity. It’s only natural that we would think about it more as the span of earthly life ahead of us grows shorter. But what does it mean, this “eternal life”?

If you listen to some “liberal” Christians (I hate using political terminology for a religious category, but what can you do?), the Christian promise of eternal life means a fuller and richer life while we’re here on earth, not something we get later after we die. That’s what the Unitarian minister said she believed in the discussion with Christopher Hitchens that I wrote about in “. . . A Knife to a Gunfight.” Well, there’s surely some truth in that. I know that Christianity has made my own life better, and happier, and more fulfilled than it was before. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it.

Certainly that’s not what the first Christians believed. They didn’t risk life and limb, endure imprisonment, torture, and death, to obtain a richer and more fulfilled life here on earth. I can’t imagine Peter, dying crucified upside down, saying to himself that it was the rich experiences of his earthly life that made it all worthwhile. The first Christians, the ones who actually heard Jesus, thought that when he spoke of eternal life he meant something beyond this earthly life, something after and greater. They thought that when he said “eternal life” he meant, well, eternal life.

The other side of the coin is the idea that life here on earth really doesn’t matter, except as a pathway to Heaven. I remember that on a television show about Heaven some years ago, one of the talking heads, a Roman Catholic priest, said that the entire purpose of life here on earth is to get into Heaven when we die. Well, in a way that’s just common sense. As the old saying goes, life’s short, and you’re a long time dead. If you have to balance the importance of your three score years and ten (or four score and seven years, or whatever modern medicine gives you) of life on earth against eternity, then it’s just logical that where you’re going to spend eternity is the most important issue.

The problem is, while we’re living life here on earth it seems pretty important. What happens later seems remote, no matter how important logic tells us that it is. And that perhaps is why Jesus took the time in his ministry to tell us how to have a richer, fuller life while we are here on earth. Doesn’t the Sermon on the Mount, at least in part, tell us about how to live a good life on earth? Isn’t that what the Parable of the Good Samaritan is about? If the only thing that counts is getting into Heaven when we die, why shouldn’t the Samaritan leave the traveler to die in the ditch, as the priest and the Levite did, and let him go to Heaven sooner rather than later? Is the only reason why we should resist casting the first stone, and should forgive those who trespass against us, and so forth that that’s how we get into Heaven? Aren’t these ways of living better on earth?

Perhaps I’ve created a false dichotomy when I contrast the opinions of the “liberal” minister and the conservative priest. Perhaps the way that we’re told will get us into Heaven is often the way that will also get us a better life here on earth. Not always, of course. If we’re called to be saints or martyrs, well then “rich full life” (in the conventional sense) may not be on the menu. Then the promise of eternal life has got to get us through.

And even for those of us who are not called to be saints or martyrs, the promise of eternal life is part of what can make our life here on earth as full and rich as possible. Life at its best nevertheless includes its disappointments, its tragedies, its pains, its losses. I’m not sure that age brings wisdom, but it does provide perspective. There comes a time when you realize that there are dreams that will not be fulfilled, that the crest of the hill is behind you, that dusk is falling. The promise of eternal life perhaps begins to shine more brightly then.

Imagine life as a night at the opera. If you don’t care for opera, then just imagine any opera. If you love opera, then imagine your least-favorite opera, sung by uninspired singers, with a mediocre orchestra. It isn’t a completely wasted evening. Even poor singers may perform a particular song well. The costumes may be colorful. The sets may be imaginative. But it does drag on.

Now suppose that after the opera is over, you know that you will be joining good friends, or a loved one, for a feast, with your favorite foods and libations; you will be able to share with them what was good, and what was disappointing, about the opera. Don’t you think that this knowledge would make it easier to bear the soprano who can’t quite reach the high notes? Wouldn’t this make you more likely to appreciate the rich-voiced basso in the small role?

Or suppose on the other hand that you have nothing to look forward to after the opera. Wouldn’t that make it even harder to bear?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

“. . . A Knife to a Gunfight”

2010-02-09T19:17:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

In a comment to a recent post of mine, a commenter (Chris H.) referred to a post on the Anglican Curmudgeon blog about a discussion “between atheist author [Christopher] Hitchens and a progressive priest” as proof that “liberalism [is] as damaging to faith as Creationism”. Point well taken.

The Curmudgeon was kind enough to link to one of my Anglican Centrist posts a couple of months ago, and I’m happy to link to one of his.

In The Kingdom Of The Blind provides excerpts from a discussion between the fervent atheist Christopher Hitchens and a retired Unitarian minister (not, thank goodness, a priest). Although the minister describes herself as a Christian, she believes that the God, Christ, and the scriptures are true only “metaphorically”. It’s the atheist who has the best line:

[I]f you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Amen, brother.

This discussion proves – if the point needed proving – how useless it is for professed Christians to try to make their religion acceptable to secularists by diluting all the “God stuff” out of it. The secularists won’t buy it; why should they? And commenter Chris H. (not to be confused, I trust, with Christopher Hitchens) is right that it damages our faith.

The Anglican Curmudgeon is too kind in the title to his post (if he means that the Unitarian minister is the one-eyed person in the kingdom of the blind). I think the title I’ve chosen for this post describes the situation about right.

Can You Go Home?

2010-02-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

Can you go home?

As Buechner tells us, a longing for home is a universal human thing. We all long for home...where it's safe, and warm, and comforting. Home's a place we were made for -- and we've tried to make them wherever we can, whether cave, caravan or condo.*

Since God knit us together in our mothers' wombs, we have yearned to be connected, cared for, and expected at home.

But, can you go home?

Home is what we long to go to -- and come from -- and work towards. And yet, so much of this life involves our leaving home. In good ways and bad.

Certainly a big part of growing up is leaving home, and making a new one.

But, can you go home?

Jesus had a hard time at home. Consider his home life. His first home was a barn. Then he lived on the lamb in Egypt as a refugee from Herod. Then he was raised in a podunk town. And in his religious homelife -- the synagogue where he knew them all and spent his faithful young life tried to kill him, and the Temple which he called "His Father's House" did eventually get him killed.

Yes, even Jesus had it hard at home (and his parents were saints.)

What about you?

Home, like life, can be a mixture of hopes and hurts. Maybe like Jesus you feel you cannot be yourself when you return home -- either to parents, family, hometown, friends, or whatever. Maybe you don't now. Maybe you've had to start a new life, away from too much hurt at home, and not enough hope.

I think we all struggle to match the inner yearning for home with the realities of where we are.

Jesus presents the Good News in an interesting way. I believe he presents the Kingdom of God as the fulfillment of our longing for home. If one substitutes the word 'home' for 'Kingdom' you can see what I mean. Imagine if he said, "home is a place of enrichment, it is good news for the poor in body, mind and soul." Or, "home is a place of liberation, not captivity." Or, "home is a place of light and vision, not shadow."

Jesus tells us that God's dream is that all people have a home like this -- ideally on earth as in heaven.

The Good News of Jesus is that He has come to build the way to that home, and to offer us the building materials for building such heavenly homes on earth (as best we can with God's help.)

The building materials of such homes are grace, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, love. Love not for self, but for other.

These building materials are precious, and of course, we can't forge them ourselves. This is where our prayer life and corporate life in Christ come in -- we must obtain all we need to build our Kingdom homes from the Maker himself.

Can you go home? Allow Christ to bring you by His way.

Who Do You Trust?

2010-01-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

My first exposure to the philosophy of science was in the 6th grade, when we learned about Galileo dropping two balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The lesson was that for centuries everyone had thought that a heavier weight fell faster than a lighter weight, because that’s what the Greek philosophers said. But no one had actually tested that proposition through an experiment, until Galileo. He did the experiment and proved that the two balls of different weights fell at the same speed.

Thus, we were told, it is unscientific (and hence incorrect) to base a conclusion on what some authority figure tells us. Rather, we should base our conclusions on what we learn from actual observations and experiments.

From then on, I and (so far as I know) everyone else in the class have believed that two balls of different weights fall at the same speed. But none of us ever did an experiment to find out if that was true. We believed it because that’s what our teacher and the science book told us. We believed it because the authority figures in our lives told us it was so.

And the fact is that, as a practical matter, we have to rely on authority figures – on experts – for a huge amount of our knowledge. We simply lack the time or ability to find out everything for ourselves through experiments and observations. I believe that the world is round, but I’ve never been around it; I believe the people who say it’s round; I believe the photographs that people tell me are pictures of the Earth taken from space. I believe (sticking with the globe example) that when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the American and French forces at Yorktown, the band played “The World Turned Upside Down”, but I wasn’t there to hear it, and so far as I know I’ve never heard that song.

I believe that light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, but I’ve never measured the speed of light, and I don’t believe that I would be capable of doing so if I tried. (I remember reading that in the 19th century they tried to measure the speed of light by having guys flash lanterns at each other between distant hill tops and seeing how much time passed between the flash and the response; it didn’t work, because light moves too fast for that kind of experiment. I couldn’t do better.)

We believe a lot of things because we believe what we’ve been told, not because we’ve done experiments. But there’s more to it than simple credulity. Although I can’t replicate the Michaelson-Morley experiment, I have read innumerable books and articles that say that light travels at around 186,000 mps: books about astronomy and quantum physics, articles about communications satellites, histories of science, and so forth. According to these sources, the speed of light is interwoven into the fabric of the world I see around me. These books and articles were written by professors at renowned universities. It’s hard to believe that Oxford University would hire a professor who asserted that light traveled at that speed if that assertion were not widely regarded as correct. How do I know that Oxford University is widely respected? Because I’ve read that it is respected in books, magazines, and newspaper articles too numerous to count.

In other words, although my belief that light travels at 186,000 mps is not supported by any experiment that I have performed, it isn’t supported merely by the assertion of one or a few authoritative voices either. It is supported by a web of cross-authenticating authorities, a vast structure of authority.

Almost everything that almost everyone believes, outside of his or her own immediate personal experience, is supported by such a web of authentication. If someone asserts something that’s contrary to that web of authentication, we tend to reject it. If someone tells me that the Apollo astronauts never landed on the moon, that the whole thing was faked in a movie studio, I can’t prove that the assertion is wrong – I saw the lunar landing on television, in the Day Room of an Army barracks (Charlie Company, 3d Battalion, 2d Brigade) at Fort Bliss, TX. It could have been faked; it was nowhere near as realistic as the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But to believe that the lunar landing was faked would require that I tear apart a whole web of authorities that authenticate it, and it would take more than a plausible assertion to persuade me to do that.

Of course, the web does get torn apart from time to time. That was what Galileo did when he dropped the balls off the Leaning Tower. It’s what Michaelson and Morley did, inadvertently, when they found that the speed of light is constant in every direction regardless of the movement of the light source through the "luminiferous aether". Whole new webs were woven as a result of the work of these scientists. In the last couple of months, the web authenticating the theory of human-caused global warming has been frayed by revelations of scientific misconduct by several global warming scientists and scientific institutions. I’m not a climate scientist. I don’t know whether the Earth is warming or not – I’m looking out my window at snow and ice as I write – and I certainly don’t know what’s causing the warming if it is happening. But there was a web of authentication supporting that theory, in the form of books and articles by respected and credentialed scientists and by popularizers of science, even an academy-award winning documentary based on the work of climate scientists. Now we’ve learned that some of the scientists making up that web have been hiding their data so independent scientists couldn’t check it, have been using their influence to prevent the publication of differing conclusions in scientific journals, have presented data in misleading ways, have used unreliable, non-peer-reviewed, and apparently incorrect sources for some of their conclusions. As a result, it’s become much harder for a layman to say, "I believe in anthropogenic global warming because the scientists say it’s true, and they should know." The community of climate scientists now has to reweave the web of authentication before we non-experts can again accept their conclusions with the same confidence we used to have.

The web of authentication is important. Whatever the scientific truth may be, it was reckless and irresponsible for those scientists to risk damaging it.

Which brings us to religion (I discuss only the Christian religion, as I am unqualified to discuss any other). Religious belief, too, is supported by a web of authentication. We Anglicans are familiar with Hooker’s three-legged stool, of scripture, reason, and tradition; that’s just a different metaphor for what I’ve been calling a web. None of us was “there when they crucified my Lord”. If we believe that the event happened, we believe because “the Bible tells me so”, we believe because historical evidence and inference support it, and we believe because thoughtful Christians have believed it for two thousand years and given us good reasons for their beliefs. We can say that our belief is supported by Hooker’s three-legged stool, or by the Godfather’s web of authentication; the point is the same.

(In addition to the stool or the web, some Christians have had an experience of Christ in their own lives that compels belief in the Christian message, in a way that a hot day in August doesn’t compel belief in global warming. But even so, the web of authentication is likely to be an important part of why we believe what we believe.)

The web of authentication of Christian belief is vital, and it would be as reckless and irresponsible of us to tear its fabric, as it was of the East Anglia climate scientists to tear the fabric of the web authenticating global warming.

There are undoubtedly many challenges to the web of Christian belief, but there’s one that I want to mention here: Biblical literalism. Literalism is perhaps most frequently seen in the form of Creationism or its more sophisticated progeny, Intelligent Design, so I’ll start there, but not end there.

I hesitate the call Creationism a threat to the web of authentication of Christian belief, because I know that for many Christians it seems to be part of the web supporting their belief. If the reason that you believe that Jesus Christ died and rose again is that it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is the literal and inerrant truth, then you should also believe that God created the world and all its creatures in seven days, because it says that in the Bible, too. The problem is that the latter is not true. No matter how much you wish it to be so, it isn’t. The web authenticating the billions-of-years history of the Earth and the billion-year development of its present and former life forms is overwhelming. If you insist that the truth of the Gospels is the same as the truth of Genesis 1 and 2, you’ve built your house on sand. Worse, to the extent that you convince others that to believe in the message of Christ they must disbelieve in science you’ve set up a stumbling block in their path to Christian faith.

Now my guess is that on this blog I’m pretty much preaching to the choir in disagreeing with Creationism. If there are Creationists in the Episcopal Church, I’ve missed them. But there are still literalists among us. Quite a few. They are the ones who say that our church must exclude gays and lesbians from our clergy and limit their participation in our community, because of what it says in a few passages in Leviticus and a couple of Paul’s Epistles. These are the ones who will not listen to what modern psychiatrists and psychologists have to tell us about human sexuality, just as the Creationists will not listen to what modern geologists and biologists have to tell us about the Earth and its creatures. Like the Creationists, they create a stumbling block to Christian faith in the way of many.

Think about the web of authentication that supports Christian belief in Twenty-First Century America. And think about where that web is weakest and most vulnerable. If your version of Christianity excludes gays and lesbians you will of course limit your membership to some extent, but that’s not really the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the reason you would exclude gays and lesbians is that you refuse to think about the meaning and application of passages from scriptures written 2,500 or 2,000 years ago. Much of our scriptures are that old, and it is not self-evident that we should govern our lives by them today. We have to be able to explain intelligently why these particular authorities still remain valid and compelling. If we are unable to distinguish Leviticus 18:22 from Luke 10:37, if we insist that to be a Christian one must follow both teachings because they're both in the Bible, we should not be surprised if many decide to follow neither.

And thus the web unravels.

Eli, Eli, Lema Sabacthani?

2010-01-14T12:14:00.000-08:00

From the Rev. Craig Uffman, soon to be ordained an Episcopal priest...

Where Was God in the Earthquake?

I write with heavy heart, my mind assaulted by the images of devastation wrought by the cataclysmic earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday.

As my heart and mind struggle to make sense of the suffering we see now and know to anticipate in the coming weeks and months, I can't help but think of my fellow sisters and brothers in Christ of St. Anne's Church and, especially, our children. What are we to say to one another? What are we to say to our children whom we have pledged to teach to walk in the ways of the Lord? For, at such times, from the very depths of caring souls arises a groan, too deep for words, and, eventually, a haunting question: where was God in the earthquake?

There are those who speak at such times of the omnipotence of God. Some will see this and all such natural disasters as evidence against the God in whom we trust. They will portray the earthquake as 'Exhibit A' in their case against our claims of a good and loving God.

Others will feel it necessary to defend the righteousness of God. Well-meaning Christians will rise to declare this disaster to be God's majestic will, a will wholly impenetrable to us, and they will cite our story of Job to warn us against efforts to comprehend it. And, sadly, other Christians also will rise to declare this disaster to be God's will, but, forgetting Job and distorting our story tragically, they will tell us precisely which group among us brought about the earthquake as punishment for their unforgivable sins.

Each of these do us a service, for they force us to give an account of our faith in God and to remember carefully the truths about God we actually claim. For the same question that moves these groups haunts us, too, as we see the tears of anguished, hungry, and orphaned girls and boys reaching their hands out to us: where was God in the earthquake?

Theologian David Bentley Hart offers the best answer I know in his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? He wrote it upon reflecting on the great tsunami that struck Asia in 2004. Hart reminds us that "we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God."

As we participate vicariously in the tormented tears of young girls, lost and alone in the Haitian darkness, as our hearts pour out tears for the thousands of sons and daughters and mothers and fathers who have died so suddenly and shockingly, and as we turn to our task of being the loving and living hands of Christ in response to this tragedy, let us never forget the urgent truth about God that it is our vocation to proclaim: God does not will our sickness or our death; God does not will that evil be done; God has conquered evil and death through the Cross. This is the meaning of the empty tomb. This is our Easter faith. As Hart says so well, "Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces - whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance - that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with perfect hatred."

Where, then, is God in the earthquake? Hart puts it well: "As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy.... for [ours] is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead....rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, [God] will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes - and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

God's richest blessings,

Craig

Through a Glasspool Darkly

2010-01-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

Houston recently elected a woman as mayor, and the Lord Mayor of London demanded that her election be rescinded, because she is a lesbian.

Well, of course that’s a joke, and a pretty silly one. No English official would ever think of interfering in an American election that way.

But the Anglican Communion is different. The Anglican Communion is (among other things, of course) a vestige of the British Empire, on which the sun once never set, it was “all the pink bits” on the world map, as the school teacher said in that wonderful movie Hope and Glory. Rowan Williams is the nominal head of the Anglican Communion not because he was picked by the senior clergy of the Communion as the best person to lead it (as the Cardinals pick the Pope), or because he leads the largest and most vibrant branch of the Communion, but because he was appointed by the Queen as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is head of the Church of England, and England was, once, the head of the British Empire.

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has selected the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool as its new Suffragan Bishop. Canon Glasspool has been Canon to the Bishops of the Diocese of Maryland since 2001, before which she was Rector of St. Margaret’s, Annapolis, MD, Rector of St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s, Boston, and Assistant to the Rector and interim priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s, Philadelphia. She was ordained in 1982. Her father was an Episcopal priest. Take a look at Canon Glasspool’s Candidate Statement on the LA Diocese website for more information about her.

But what attracts attention to Canon Glasspool is not her credentials, but her sexual orientation. She’s a lesbian and has been in a committed relationship since 1988.

Unlike my mythical Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury has not called on the dioceses of the Episcopal Church to reject Canon Glasspool’s election – although he’s clearly not happy about it. Here’s what he said:

The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.

The process of selection however is only part complete. The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees. That decision will have very important implications.

The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that a period of gracious restraint in respect of actions which are contrary to the mind of the Communion is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold.

I believe that the most recent formal collective acknowledgement by the bishops of the need for gracious restraint was in the Primates Meeting Communiqué issued February 5th of last year. The Primates said:

There are continuing deep differences especially over the issues of the election of bishops in same-gender unions, Rites of Blessing for same-sex unions, and on cross-border interventions. The moratoria, requested by the Windsor Report and reaffirmed by the majority of bishops at the Lambeth Conference, were much discussed. If a way forward is to be found and mutual trust to be re-established, it is imperative that further aggravation and acts which cause offence, misunderstanding or hostility cease. While we are aware of the depth of conscientious conviction involved, the position of the Communion defined by the Lambeth 1998 Resolution 1.10 in its entirety remains, and gracious restraint on all three fronts is urgently needed to open the way for transforming conversation.

On the “front” of “cross-border interventions”, the interventioneers have exercised no restraint, gracious or otherwise, and unless I’ve missed it the Anglican Communion and Archbishop of Canterbury have done nothing about it. On the other two fronts, the Episcopal Church observed a de facto or de jure moratorium for six years, and there certainly has been plenty of conversation, but the opinions on both sides of these issues have not been transformed.

My own view is that gracious restraint is a two-way street, and that non-Episcopalians who object to the LA Diocese’s choice of a Suffragan Bishop should exercise restraint – which I believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury has thus far done.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

2010-01-04T20:05:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I just saw this clip of news commentator Brit Hume recommending that Tiger Woods abandon his Buddhist faith [did you know Tiger is a Buddhist? Why am I always the last to know these things?] because “I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’"

My first thought was, What business is it of a news commentator to give such advice?

My second thought was, That’s awfully rude to the Buddhist faith, and culturally insensitive, too.

My third thought was, What Hume said is what our faith teaches, isn’t it? Aren't we supposed to make disciples of all nations? Even if we are TV news commentators?

What do you think?

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2010 AND BEYOND

2009-12-31T07:13:00.000-08:00

This is a time of year to look back (yech! skip that) and ahead. For the Episcopal Church, there are many challenges before us, many of which have been discussed on this site – because they aren’t new challenges – but one that we must not ignore are empty pews at too many services in too many Episcopal churches.

We can’t keep the pews filled with “cradle Episcopalians” unless we start breeding a lot faster. We need converts from other denominations, other religions, or from no religion.

Here’s a story about how one Episcopal priest responded to an opportunity to rope in a potential convert:

Given my spiritual longing, I decided it was time to explore places of worship. Being a secular Jew, my first step should have been a temple. However, the synagogues around here are practically recruitment stations for Obama (aside from the Orthodox ones, but I don't speak a word of Hebrew). So I decided to experience church on Christmas Eve.

Checking out churches online, I found almost none that offered political neutrality. Most heralded their progressive credentials, welcoming the transgendered, but not conservatives.

I was pleased to find an Episcopal church whose website focused on religion, not ObamaCare. I left a message for the priest that I was looking for a church that didn't press a political agenda because I wasn't a liberal.

I received an icy reply from the priest, the Reverend Lucy, who said with barely-contained disgust, "I don't think you should check us out."

You can read the whole article here.

There is a happy ending (of sorts) to this story. The writer did find a church where she felt welcomed:

Beyond the music and pageantry, what moved me the most was being with hundreds of people who loved God. Maybe some were questioning his presence or feeling abandoned. But they showed up, and that's half of life.

It was a stirring night for this wandering Jew who has traveled from east to west, from Left to Right. As the Sufi poet Hafiz wrote, "This moment in time God has carved a place for you," and sitting in the sanctuary, I felt that place.

Even though I didn't know the right words, or the hymns, or how to pray, it didn't matter. All the differences among people -- race, class, politics, even religion -- vanished. Faith, I realized, is the ultimate uniter.

And in a heartbeat, I understood why leaders from Marx to Mao try to keep people away from God, and why they will always fail. I flashed to an image of those mothers who somehow find the superhuman strength to lift up a car and free their children.

On Christmas Eve, I learned that this same unstoppable power exists inside all of us, especially when we stand together. As Jesus himself taught, faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain.

The whole article is here.

I’m saddened a little that she found this welcome in a Roman Catholic church, not an Episcopal one. Aren’t you?

Happy New Year from the Godfather.

Bill Carroll Response to N Michigan

2009-12-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

The comment from Fr. Bill Carroll in the previous posting is just so strong, I thought I'd put it front and center. This is in response to a letter posted by the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Northern Michigan, composed in April of 2007, itself a response to the primates communique of that year. I bring this up not to bash the Northern Michigan folk but rather to point out a vision of the Gospel which simply must be spoken against. Bill does an incredibly sound job of it.

And please note -- this is not a question of 'conservative' vs. 'liberal.' Not at all. Neither is it one of 'progressive' vs. 'traditionalist.' No, this is a question of creedal/catholic Christianity vs. something altogether else.

Bill Carroll writes:

I'll respond in terms close to Karl Rahner's theology, because I think that Fr. Forrester's theology often is a distortion of Rahner (and Eckhart). At the same time, there are certain tendencies in Rahner that I would not want to endorse, because they might plausibly lead in KTF's direction.

With regard to 1, I could affirm it provided that "all is of God" were glossed "every creature as such is of God." Human creatures of course can turn away from their own true being in sin, and sin is not of God. As privatio boni, sin doesn't properly speaking exist, but a clearer subject is needed for the sentence than "all."

With regard to 2, I would want to insist with Rahner that the human creature as such is the possibility of incarnation and that the Holy Spirit is always, already present as prevenient grace and charity. Nevertheless, even the most radical permissible doctrine of the totus Christus better preserves the distinction between head and members. Moreover, whatever the merits of the theory of anonymous Christianity, the strong identification of someone as a member of Christ in the NT, depends upon his or her Christianity taking on a tangible, categorial ecclesial form.

With regard to 3, every creature as such is certainly a reflection of the uncreated Word and hence related to Christ, the incarnate Word, who sums up in his person all that is good in the created order. It is also true that the Holy Spirit is present in every human creature as actual grace (gratia gratis data) and therefore, in a sense, that Christ is present. But to have Christ living in oneself (as wrt #2) in the Pauline sense implies specific commitment to visible, tangible ecclesial communion through baptism and Eucharist, confession of articles of faith, and acceptance of the discipline of life in Christ.

With respect to 4, this is the root of the problem, ignoring the distinction between the only begotten Son, the second person of the Trinity, who becomes incarnate in our Lord Jesus Christ, and God's adopted children by grace, on the one hand, and between the vestiges of the Creator in every creature and the human being as God's image and likeness, on the other. A pet peeve of mine is that you don't get to call someone a child of God until they are a brother or sister in Christ. It doesn't mean that other people aren't in the image of God and therefore of infinite dignity. The grammar of the NT requires that child of God be restricted to an ecclesial sense.

Northern Michigan Theology

2009-11-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

As I perused the Chicago Consultation website, I came across this from the Diocese of Northern Michigan circa 2007. Certain parts of the statement are of course fine, but I offer the following bits which I find troublesome theologically -- and which remind me very much of the theological views of their recent bishop-elect, for whom consents were not forthcoming. The statement presents what many would identify as an 'incarnational theology' -- but I'm not sure it's quite right. It seems to have weakness in its vision of Creation -- one in which there appears to be no Fall, no evil, no sin -- other than the sin of 'blindness'. I'm reminded of the theological narrative which purports to be "truly" Pelagian, anti-Augustinian, truly Celtic, truly affirming, etc. Having read a bit of Pelagius' work my self (in the BB Rees edition), I'm not sure that even Pelagius would agree with all of this.

Anyhow, what do you all think about these statements?

Here they are:

-- Baptism confirms this most basic truth which is at once, the Good News: all is of God, without condition and without restriction.

-- We seek and serve Christ in all persons because all persons are the living Christ. Each and every human being, as a human being, is knit together in God’s Spirit, and thus an anointed one – Christ.

-- We do harmful and evil things to ourselves and one another, not because we are bad, but because we are blind to the beauty of creation and ourselves. In other words, we are ignorant of who we truly are: "there is no Greek or Hebrew; no Jew or Gentile; no barbarian or Scythian; no slave or citizen. There is only Christ, who is all in all." (Colossians 3:11).

-- Everyone is the sacred word of God, in whom Christ lives.

-- Because each and every one of us is an only begotten child of God; because we, as the church, are invited by God to see all of creation as having life only insofar as it is in God; because everything, without exception, is the living presence, or incarnation, of God...

Dark Matter and Dinosaurs

2009-11-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I was fascinated by the article about CERN and the God particle (the Higgs Boson) that Greg posted recently. Serious scientists are actually talking about particles that travel through time to affect human activities. As a commenter said, “And people think we're weird for believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.” As if that weird science weren’t weird enough, other serious scientists are debating whether the movements of galaxies and galactic clusters – which don’t make sense according to the laws of gravity – should be explained by assuming that 90% of the matter in the universe is stuff we can’t see and know absolutely nothing about (“dark matter”), or by changing the laws of gravity to fit the observations.

This all brings to mind an impression I have that belief in God is more prevalent in some scientific disciplines than in others; specifically that cosmologists and quantum physicists are more likely to believe in God than are biologists.

I’ve done no research on this, and maybe I’ve just been overly influenced by books I’ve happened to read – like God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, on the one hand, and practically every book that Stephen Jay Gould wrote, on the other. If anyone has any actual data on this, I’d love to hear about it.

But for the time being, assuming that this impression is correct, it makes sense to me that this should be so.

Cosmologists and quantum physicists deal with matters that are right on the edge of human comprehension, as the discussion of the Higgs Boson illustrates. I don’t mean merely that I don’t understand these subjects; there are myriad things I don’t understand, from the popularity of rap music to why anyone would eat Manhattan clam chowder if they can get New England. What I mean is that the most powerful human minds are stretched to the limit to puzzle over what happened in the first micro-instants of the Big Bang, or why galaxies are the shape they are, or what it is that makes a quark charming.

A scientist who has to face the possibility that what he’s trying to discover may lie, unknowable, beyond the blue event horizon, might find it possible to believe that there’s something beyond the edge of human comprehension, and that something might be “God”. I don’t claim that every cosmologist or quantum physicist believes in God – that’s probably a minority position at best, and even those who believe in God may more likely be Deists than Christians – but I think that belief can be found in such company.

Now for the biologists. If I’m right that they are the least religious of scientists, there’s good historical reason for their being so. A central tenet of biology -- evolution through natural selection – has been the battlefield on which believers and secularists have waged their campaigns against one another for a century and a half. In this country in recent years the fight has been over “teaching evolution in the schools”. If you were a biologist, your opinion of religion could not help but be affected by the fact that it was religious people who were trying to get the school board to ban evolution from the high school science curriculum, or add a unit on “creation science”. You could be excused for seeing faith as an enemy of science.

And it’s not just biologists for whom Biblical literalism is a stumbling block in the way of religious faith. Many educated people in this modern world are going to hesitate to embrace a belief system that demands that they reject what they have learned to be the established consensus of scientific thought.

Frankly, Christianity makes claims that are pretty tough for people brought up in this modern secular world to accept – that God became embodied as a Jewish carpenter who performed miraculous healings and other feats, was executed in a gruesome manner, and then rose bodily from the dead. We Christians make it much harder for such people to accept the Gospel if we insist that they also have to swallow the claim that all the animals, birds, and fishes were created just as we see them today in seven days six thousand years ago.

I’ve often felt that the Episcopal Church, tiny as it is in membership, may be called to bring the Gospel to intelligent, educated, modern people, who are turned off by the excesses of the Protestant fundamentalists on the one hand, and the rule-bound Romans on the other.

That’s not a bad ministry to have in the United States today. Unfortunately, though, some church leaders – even a bishop or two – seem to think that the way to make the church acceptable to modern people is to dilute its religious content. That hasn’t worked, and it shouldn’t be expected to work. What would draw a modern secularist to a church that said the same things he/she heard all the time from the modern, secular world? Oh, maybe some people will come for the music, or the incense, or the pretty gowns the clergy wear, but that’s not a rock on which to build a church. The only reason for significant numbers of modern, secular people to become part of the church is the kerygma, the Gospel, the Good News. Without that the church is just another venue of the secular world. It doesn't help to tell them that we don’t question the Theory of Evolution, but we have our doubts about the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. If they want evolution without Resurrection, why go to church? They can get plenty of that in the world around them, and sleep late on Sunday.

Northern Michigan

2009-11-03T12:53:00.000-08:00

The Diocese of Northern Michigan is starting a new process to identify and elect a bishop. They admit to reeling after the failure of their last bishop-elect to receive necessary consents. This must certainly be true. The difficult part to sympathize with is the understanding the leadership of that diocese have of what exactly transpired in the case of Kevin Thew Forrester's consents. The head of the standing committee has intimated that some of the trouble may have had something to do with their failure to amply communicate to the wider church the ins and outs of their internal process of discernment. In other words, it seems they think that if they had told everybody why they only had one candidate, everything would have worked out fine.

But, again, that's not the point. To some the fact that they had only one candidate from which to elect may be a big deal -- but not necessarily. It begins to look like a small group has effectively appointed the bishop elect, and then had a convention ratify their appointment, but I suppose that could be alright.

What really bothered folks about the person elected in Northern Michigan was not merely the process, but the result. According to his own published works of theology, the man elected did not uphold the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church according to what is made clear in the Prayer Book, Hymnal and canons. Simple as that.

The reason why the leadership of this tiny diocese, which consists of a few hundred persons in average Sunday attendance, may have difficulty in understanding why their appointment fell through is because it appears that they share the theology of their appointee -- and seem to have no sense of awareness of what the wider Episcopal Church teaches and values as regards the essentials of the Christian faith.

One has only to look at the vision statement of the Diocese of Northern Michigan. It says:

We envision a world in which all people live together in peace
and in harmony with all of creation, where all can contribute
and the gifts of all are joyfully received, nurtured, and supported,
where our diversity is celebrated in community, and every creature
is recognized as having eternal significance.

Now, this may not be such a bad statement at all, if there were anything about it that seemed to say this vision was rooted in the basic Christian proclamation. It is not inherently clear that this vision is particularly Christian -- or even theistic, for that matter. Very possibly this vision could be put forward by someone who is neither Jewish, Muslim nor Christian. Indeed, as well, it seems like no Buddhist or Hindu would necessarily firm all of it -- because I wonder whether they do recognize that every creature has eternal significance.

Time Travel and God Particles

2009-11-01T08:18:00.001-08:00

Interesting:

Search for elementary particles hindered by time travel

By: Irma Zhang

Posted: 10/29/09

More than a year has passed since the world's largest and most expensive physics experiment shut down due to technical difficulties. With intense maintenance and painstakingly tedious corrections, the infamous Large Hadron Collider is back to working standard, and is expected to start once again in December. But according to two physicists, the repairs may have been for naught and the original breakdown was destined to occur.

After observing several strings of bad luck, such as cancellations or breakdowns, that have haunted other supercolliders, physicists Holger Bech Nielson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, have proposed that the sought-after product of the collider is so destructive to nature that it travels backwards through time to stop the collider before it can even be created.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator, with a 17-mile circumference that lies 570 feet underground near Geneva, Switzerland. The accelerator was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for the purpose of finding forces and particles that existed in the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. The LHC has been in the works for 15 years and has cost $9 billion so far.

Protons within the collider are accelerated until they reach a peak energy of seven trillion electron volts, and then collide together to form primordial fireballs.
Although some doomsday theorists speculate that planet-consuming black holes would subsequently form, physicists believe that the collision would instead generate what is known as the Higgs boson, the "god" particle that supposedly explains the origin of mass in the universe.

Nielson and Ninomiya have published multiple papers with titles such as "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC." According to the New York Times, in an unpublished essay, Nielson claims, "One could even almost say that we have a model for God," since the very existence of the Higgs is so contrary to the nature of the universe.

This negative influence of Ninomiya and Nielson's proposed Higgs product could be one possible reason that the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, could have been canceled back in 1993. Furthermore, they predict that all other future Higgs-seekers will be blocked by fate.

However, Neilson and Ninomiya's theory has been met with much criticism. "When I heard about this proposal, I thought it was either a tongue-in-cheek parody or an attempt to see how many people were gullible enough to believe it," Barry Blumenfield, a professor at Hopkins specializing in neutrino physics and hadron-collider physics states. "I don't believe this proposal any more than I believe a field goal kicker missed in the last 2 seconds because of ripples going backward in time that prevented him from making it."

Furthermore, some argue that it's possible that the Higgs boson already exists, but as far as we can tell, the passage of time has not been altered. "Cosmic rays hit nuclei in our atmosphere at higher energies than person-kind will produce [at] the LHC. If the Higgs particle exists then cosmic rays will be producing them all the time," Bruce Barnett, a professor in the Hopkins Physics Department who performs research at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, said. "The possibility of a Higgs being produced does not cause cosmic rays to stop coming from outer space into our atmosphere."

Although it would seem that such a ridiculous-sounding theory would be immediately dismissed by the physics community, the fact that the two proposers are prominent thinkers in the field of particle physics makes their ideas even more controversial. Nielson, for one, is one of the founders of string theory, which combines quantum mechanics and general relativity to explain the most basic components of the universe.

Undaunted, however, Neilson and Ninomiya have proposed a test, using a random-number generator to distinguish bad luck from events prohibited by the future.

The LHC is scheduled to start accelerating protons to an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts by the end of this year, and then build up to 7 trillion electron volts by the end of 2010. But according to Nielson and Ninomiya, even if it does reach 3.5 trillion electron volts, the energy will not be large enough to generate a Higgs. But no matter what happens at CERN, for elementary particle hunters, the theory is the ultimate statement of pessimism.

Benedict's Crozier: Staff or Spear? REVISED

2009-10-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Recent actions by Pope Benedict raise the question for me -- is his papal crozier primarily a staff for the prodding of sheep, or a trident for the spearing of fish? He certainly is leaning in a strongly tridentine direction these days. [ed. note: The Council of Trent was the harsh anti-protestant response of the Roman Catholic Church, and the form of the mass which was established at Trent is called the 'Tridentine Mass.']

Indeed, it appears to be exactly the kind of left-handed spear toss that this pope has been practicing for decades, at least since his time as Grand Inquisitor of the Roman Catholic Church (yes, he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which until 1965 had the name, 'Holy Office of the Inquisition.') Of course, this spear has three points, and only the first strikes at Rowan Williams. The second tine jabs at all Anglicans who cherish the reforms that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries, including our restoration of early catholic models of authority in which the bishops of the church were collegial brethren, and the other orders of the church had a degree of shared authority in their representation at church councils. ('Conciliarism') And the third barb cuts back upon at those in the Roman Catholic Church who actually appreciated the movements developed at the Second Vatican Council, and have lamented the backward-movement of the Roman Catholic Church's leadership under the influence of then Inquisitor, now Pope Benedict.

This is the same Pope, who just two years ago on his own initiative (motu proprio) issued a decree allowing the Latin Mass to be used by any priest who wants to do so, following a minimum of criteria. The purported motivation behind the decision was the pope's desire to reconcile with those traditionalist Roman Catholics who did not approve of the changes to the liturgy and theology of the church coming about in Vatican II. This was the same purported motivation behind the pope's decision earlier this year to restore to communion to several extremely conservative Roman bishops -- including Richard Williamson. Williamson, for those who don't remember, has actively denied the Holocaust. These chaps had originally been excommunicated for their involvement with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Pius X, a rabid critic of Vatican II and its changes in Roman Catholicism. Lefebvre was also, by the way, a supporter of the Nazi-friendly Vichy government, and the fascist regimes of Franco and Pinochet.

The pope's decision to allow the Tridentine mass and the reinstatement of the leading figures of anti-Vatican II Roman Catholicism back into the fold may also be seen to be theologically and ecclesiologically connected to his decision to receive disgruntled Anglican clergy and laity into the Roman Catholic Church via the creation of personal ordinariates. The connection consists of Benedict's long-held antipathy for the conciliar/collegial vision of authority pointed to by Vatican II -- and his long-held preference for the supremacy of papal authority. Benedict is the chief architect of the re-emphasis of central papal authority.

The debate between Cardinal Kasper and then Cardinal Ratzinger over the relationship between local and universal church -- between local bishop and pope -- which occurred some ten years ago -- has clearly been decided in the election of Ratzinger to the throne. He is simply enforcing his top-down, centralized model of imperial authority for the papacy that Kasper and Vatican II opposed. Father Hans Kung, the famous Swiss Roman Catholic theologian and professor who openly repudiated papal infallibility in 1971, and was stripped of his authority to teach doctrine by the Vatican in 1979, writes in the Guardian (UK):

Pope Benedict is set upon restoring the Roman imperium. He makes no concessions to the Anglican communion. On the contrary, he wants to preserve the medieval, centralistic Roman system for all ages – even if this makes impossible the reconciliation of the Christian churches in fundamental questions.

The relationship between the authority of the papacy to the authority of the bishop's of local churches shared by Pope Benedict XVI is as follows: The Fullness of Church Authority reside in the Pope; the province/archdiocese/diocese is under the authority of the Pope; the province/archdiocese/diocese's own particulars are far less important than the universals of the whole church; therefore the Pope should tell the local churches what and how to do; their input is of minimal importance.

Of course all of this goes quite against what Anglicanism is essentially all about -- which is to say collegiality, subsidiarity, and conciliarism. In this model, the authority of Jesus Christ resides in all the members of His Body, but each order within the body is called to different ministries -- some with a greater degree of oversight than others, but none with supreme authority. Conciliarism holds that church councils (sometimes called conventions, synods, or even vestries in a sense) share the authority of God by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when we meet together as representative leaders of the Body of Christ. Roman church imperialism says, no, the authority of God in Christ has been given to the pope.

Indeed, the best thing about the recent actions from the Vatican is that it reminds me how glad I am that the English Church experienced the Reformation in the 1500s, and that bad old Henry VIII may have done us a favor.

Looking Ahead

2009-10-22T16:58:00.001-07:00

I am of course very much an Episcopalian, and this is without question my home in Christ. No fear that I will be swimming the Tiber, now or ever. But, the recent news of our own denominational membership decline is far more troubling to me than any news about the Vatican offering a very small and uncomfortable looking door for former Anglicans.

Our church is in decline, and so are the other large churches we are in communion with in cultural contexts similar to our own. Consider, the ELCA has some 4.5 million members, with an average Sunday attendance of about a third of that -- some 1.5 million -- but those numbers are of course down significantly in the past decade. Same with the Church of Sweden -- which claims some 6.75 million members -- but with just under 300,000 attending church services weekly -- that's about 3%. The Church of England claims some 20 million members, but average Sunday attendance is under a million -- or about 5%. The Anglican Church of Canada has some 650,000 members or so, and about 200-300,000 attend weekly. We have just over 2 million members, and just under 800,000 attend services weekly.

While I agree with Diana Butler Bass' contention that the decline story is not merely because these churches are largely 'progressive' and inclusive of modernity in their vision and practice. It is not just that. My own parish has grown significantly, and so have many other parishes which are equally vibrant in their focus on Jesus Christ, the traditional essentials of the catholic faith, the sacraments, prayers, missions, Christian education, youth work, newcomer development and inclusion, outreach, and fellowship.

But something's clearly going wrong -- if we were given the kind of bill of health by our doctors that our own annual membership statistics indicate, we'd be on meds, exercise, diet-change, etc.

Again, I agree with Diana Butler Bass - churches that are intentional about the Christian practices and message I mention above -- are much more likely to thrive. So why can't we turn this mess around?

I suggest a few things. First, the particular reticence to preach Jesus Christ incarnate, crucified, resurrected and ascended must be put to rest. We must focus on this message with passion, excitement, and interest in sharing it with folks. Second, we have too many ministries that are not thriving -- they need to be consolidated. Third, we must be actively looking for energetic and faithful people who are flexible and able to do something daring in leadership. Fourth, we must consolidate our seminaries, and then require that aspirants go to one of them.

Perhaps most of all, we need to believe that God wants us to grow both spiritually and numerically. Inclusion is our mission -- including people into the kingdom of God specifically -- and that means fishing for people -- not waiting for them to perhaps show up.

Swimming the Tiber Anyone?

2009-10-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

Today's paper has a front page story about big news in the area of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. The Vatican has dramatically and suddenly announced a new provision which will permit Anglican laity (and clergy) to form church entities within Roman Catholicism that are independent of the regular chain of oversight but still ultimately under the oversight of the pope. In other words, in addition to the regular diocesan arrangement of the Roman Catholic Church in which archbishops oversee bishops who oversee parishes which are seen by priests -- there will exist an additional type of arrangement in which former Anglican clergy have oversight of units peopled by former Anglicans. These "personal ordinariates" -- as they are called in the mystifying jargon of catholic Christianity (which we Anglicans also share) -- will follow certain Anglican liturgical traditions and customs.

How will this look on the ground? Very likely in the United Kingdom -- let's say in London -- there will be a bishop who was once a cleric in the Church of England who now oversees a cluster of missions/parishes/chaplaincies led each by clerics who were once in the Church of England, and they will be largely peopled by laity who were once in the Church of England. They will all ultimately be considered Roman Catholic now, and the leadership will of course be reporting up to the Vatican hierarchy.

Interestingly, all of the clergy who leave the Church of England for this new Anglican Rite (or whatever it will be called) will have to be reordained. Since Pope Leo XIII declared in 1896 that Anglican holy orders are "utterly null and completely void" -- in the eyes of Rome we don't have valid deacons, priests or bishops anyway. Moreover, those former Anglican clergy who are married, will be able to become Roman Catholic priests -- but -- they will never be allowed to be bishops while married.

Does this mean that Church of England cathedrals, parishes or dioceses will all of sudden possibly become Roman Catholic again (after more than five centuries of independence)? Almost certainly not. The Church of England is still the established church of the realm, and it will still be around. Does this mean that a great many Anglicans in Britain will become Roman Catholic in this way? I rather doubt it. Lay people have always been free to switch churches and those that have long wanted to be Roman Catholic probably have already made the switch. On the other hand, those clergy who feel they must leave the Church of England because of its inclusion of women into ordained ministry, and its debate over the inclusion of gay clergy and couples, may be end up going this route. Indeed, for those Anglican clergy who cannot abide women or openly gay persons as colleagues, this may be the best choice for them. That is, of course, unless they are primarily evangelical in theology.

Yes, the old split in Anglicanism -- long before struggles of egalitarianism emerged in the past century -- has always been between evangelical/protestant-minded folks and catholic-minded folks. Those Anglicans who identify very much in terms of catholic history, theology and practice, won't have a huge problem switching to a Vatican-based church. Those Anglicans who identify very much with protestant history, theology and practice -- they would have a huge problem. Indeed, until fairly recently, evangelical Anglicans have been as anti-Roman Catholic as anybody -- and virulently so in the past century.

To be sure, most of the Anglicans who have the biggest difficulty with women's ordination and the inclusion of gay persons are not 'Anglo-Catholics' but Anglican evangelicals. This group latter group dominates the various breakaway movements we have seen in recent years, especially in the United States and Canada. As one leader of this movement is quoted as saying in today's News and Observer, Martyn Minns, "there was a Reformation."

So what will this look like on the ground in the United States? Probably not much. I have friends who have already left the Episcopal Church and become Roman Catholics -- one has already returned! Either way, this development won't have much impact on such decisions. As well, there is already a substantial alternative to the Episcopal Church for those more protestant-minded folks who have problems with the ordination of women or the inclusion of openly gay people into the church and its leadership. In Raleigh alone, there are some five different churches with the word Anglican in the name. One meets downtown near Peace street and Glenwood, and another meets on Dixie Trail, near to us. As far as I can tell, these two - All Saints and St. George's -- tend to be a bit more catholic-minded in their liturgy and practice. Another, Holy Trinity Anglican, meets at St. David's School. This congregation as best I can tell has both a fairly mainstream Book of Common Prayer type worship service, as well as a more contemporary one. It's clergy leadership have always been rooted in the Anglican evangelical tradition. Another still, Church of the Apostles, meets in a new facility not far from North Hills, and is primarily rooted in the contemporary evangelical tradition. Yet another, Holy Cross, meets in a property formerly owned by the Episcopal Church on Millbrook Road near Crabtree - I believe they too are rooted in a more contemporary evangelical tradition of worship and theology.

I have friends and family who are Roman Catholic (including my father, stepmother, and two aunts who are nuns) -- and I have always assumed the posture that despite our differences of history and practice and some theology -- we are all disciples of the One Christ Jesus. I have the same exact posture towards my friends in the different variations on Anglicanism which have emerged recently.

What does this mean historically? Hard to say. My first impression is negative. I think that the Pope is doing something, both in terms of its timing, immediacy and surprise-factor, which doesn't seem quite gracious. Most interpreters in England seem to see it as a shot across the bow, a parking of tanks in the lawn, or a plain-faced insult to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the process of ecumenical relations between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Despite the Archbishop's own statement downplaying any sense of insult yesterday, I'm not sure I believe it. Certainly, it doesn't change that much -- all of these Anglican clergy will still have to be ordained again -- as if for the first time -- by a Roman Catholic hierarchy which does not recognize the validity of the ordination they have already had in the Church of England. To many of us clergy, who see ordination as a parallel to the vows people take in marriage, this is quite an insult. To tell me I am not a valid ordained priest of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church -- in the apostolic succession through the past two millenia -- would be the same as to say my marriage wasn't valid either. As well, if formerly Anglican laity and clergy are to operate in small ecclesiastical peculiars -- with their own liturgical customs and practices, and not as part of the wider Roman Catholic diocese in their given region -- one can imagine a tendency toward isolation within the wider church.

Only time will tell what all this means -- and I will be interested to follow it. But, it certainly doesn't worry me too much.

Pope Creates Anglican Doorway

2009-10-20T06:14:00.000-07:00

For those who wish to swim the Tiber, Benedict has made the swim a little less difficult.

According to the Associated Press,

"Pope Benedict XVI has created a new church structure for Anglicans who want to join the Catholic Church, responding to the disillusionment of some Anglicans over the ordination of women and the election of openly gay bishops.
The new provision will allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while maintaining their Anglican identity and many of their liturgical traditions...The new church structure, called Personal Ordinariates, will be units of faithful within the local Catholic Church headed by former Anglican prelates ... Those Anglicans who have approached the Holy See have made clear their desire for full, visible unity in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. ... The new canonical provision allows married Anglican priests to become ordained Catholic priests — much the same way that Eastern rite priests who are in communion with Rome are allowed to be married.
The announcement was kept under wraps until the last moment: The Vatican only announced Levada's briefing Monday night, and Levada only flew back to Rome after finalizing the details at midnight."

Roman Catholic/Church of England

2009-10-20T06:09:00.001-07:00

This statement comes today:

Joint Statement by The Archbishop of Westminster and The Archbishop of Canterbury

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Today's announcement of the Apostolic Constitution is a response by Pope Benedict XVI to a number of requests over the past few years to the Holy See from groups of Anglicans who wish to enter into full visible communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and are willing to declare that they share a common Catholic faith and accept the Petrine ministry as willed by Christ for his Church.

Pope Benedict XVI has approved, within the Apostolic Constitution, a canonical structure that provides for Personal Ordinariates, which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony.

The announcement of this Apostolic Constitution brings to an end a period of uncertainty for such groups who have nurtured hopes of new ways of embracing unity with the Catholic Church. It will now be up to those who have made requests to the Holy See to respond to the Apostolic Constitution.

The Apostolic Constitution is further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic Church and the Anglican tradition. Without the dialogues of the past forty years, this recognition would not have been possible, nor would hopes for full visible unity have been nurtured. In this sense, this Apostolic Constitution is one consequence of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.

The on-going official dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion provides the basis for our continuing cooperation. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and International Anglican Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) agreements make clear the path we will follow together.

With God's grace and prayer we are determined that our on-going mutual commitment and consultation on these and other matters should continue to be strengthened. Locally, in the spirit of IARCCUM, we look forward to building on the pattern of shared meetings between the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales and the Church of England's House of Bishops with a focus on our common mission. Joint days of reflection and prayer were begun in Leeds in 2006 and continued in Lambeth in 2008, and further meetings are in preparation. This close cooperation will continue as we grow together in unity and mission, in witness to the Gospel in our country, and in the Church at large.

+ Vincent + Rowan

Fleming Rutledge on Karen Armstrong

2009-10-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

From Generous Orthodoxy:

Stop Karen Armstrong!

by Fleming Rutledge

Something really has to be done about Karen Armstrong. I am too busy to do it, but I wish someone else would. She is much more an enemy of faith than is "Hitchkins" (Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins). Here she is on the front page of the Weekend Journal (a section of the Saturday/ Sunday section of the Wall Street Journal, September 12-13) facing off against Dawkins. Two entire pages are given over to this: MAN vs. GOD, the headline says (at least the WSJ continues to go its politically incorrect "exclusive-language" way). The huge illustration shows Michelangelo's God over against Darwin (oh, no, not again...). What has happened to the WSJ? is this Rupert Murdoch at work? the WSJ editorials are hyper-right-wing and not to my taste, but for a long time the paper has been, in certain respects, a friend to the apostolic faith. What has happened?

Dawkins, like Freud, is less a threat to biblical faith than Armstrong, who like Jung embraces a generic, spiritualized, anthropocentric approach to God (exactly what Freud identified in The Future of an Illusion). Dawkins is quite right in ending his article the following way (I am condensing):

The modern theologian is scornful of scientific arguments for God's existence [rightly so--this was always off-track]. We are not so naive as to be hung up on God's actual existence. [Here Dawkins accurately nails a lot of today's "liberal" theology.] "It doesn't matter," Dawkins' theological liberal continues, "whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me."

Dawkins then continues, speaking in his own voice, "If that's what paddles your canoe, you'll be paddling up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God...in objective reality...Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that 'existence' is too vulgar a concept to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right."

Karl Barth, of whom Karen Armstrong is blissfully ignorant, said that he found atheists to be more bracing conversation partners than "religious" people. Certainly we can welcome this last observation of Dawkins, although the rest of his article shows his usual, annoying refusal to see that many serious Christians (Pope John Paul II was a notable example) hold Darwin and orthodox Christian faith simultaneously.

Karen Armstrong and others like her are "religious" without a clue as to the Subject of theology. If she really understands the Church Fathers at any level, one seeks evidence in vain. If she has ever heard of the Reformation she does not indicate it. If she has ever had any serious dialogue with any major Protestant theologian her writing does not show it. If she has ever heard of the doctrine of revelation she shows no sign of it. She is a walking, talking, writing exhibit for Freud's basic thesis: God is what we have made up out of our own wishes and needs.

Who can mount a powerful defense against this sort of thing? Marilynne Robinson, for one, knows better-- but her voice is soft. We need thunder and lightning.

You Believe in What?!!

2009-10-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

I don’t read the New York Times anymore. (That once great newspaper was always dull, but it used to be the place to go for reliable, in-depth reporting of national and international news. Now it’s just dull.) So it was only by chance that I saw the Times article a few days ago about Francis S. Collins, MD, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is controversial because, you see, Dr. Collins believes in God.

As the Times explains, “many scientists view [Collins’] outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

Collins is a scientist, the former head of the Human Genome Project, and a Christian. His 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, does just what its subtitle claims. It’s a fine book for intelligent Christians and open-minded skeptics.

The Times says that in this book Collins “preaches about his belief” in God. “Preaches”. Do you get the sense that that word – “preaches” – is meant to be just a tiny bit pejorative, that it’s somehow unseemly for a scientist to “preach”? Maybe I’m overly sensitive. I would say that Dr. Collins “discusses” his faith in the book. But that’s just me.

One of the scientists quoted by the Times, physicist Robert L. Park , says that Dr. Collins’ description of an event that started him on his faith journey “is enough to cause concern”. Here’s what Dr. Collins said about this event in his book.

When he was a third year medical student and was working in a hospital with sick and dying patients, Collins was struck by the fact that in many cases the patients’ faith “provided them with a strong reassurance of ultimate peace, be it in this world or the next, despite terrible suffering . . . .” He goes on:

My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed. It was a fair question; we had discussed many other important issues of life and death, and she had shared her own strong Christian beliefs with me. I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words, “I’m not sure.” Her obvious surprise brought into sharp relief a predicament that I had been running away from for nearly all of my twenty-six years: I had never really seriously considered the evidence for and against belief.

So young Collins started reading about religion, and before long he came upon C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. You can guess the rest.

What does the scientist Dr. Park say about this event, which causes him “concern” about Dr. Collins? He says that Collins, as a man with a medical degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry should have realized that “the moment was nothing but a hormonal rush” and should not have given it “a higher meaning”. Please re-read what Dr. Collins said about this experience. Did he say that his face flushing (that must be the “hormonal rush” Park talks about) was a message from God or in any other way was freighted with “higher meaning”? No, really he doesn’t. In this part of Collins’ story, he’s moved by the faith of some of his patients to begin reading about Christianity. Is that really evidence of mild dementia?

(I’d bet Dr. Park never even read what Dr. Collins wrote, except that Dr. Park is an eminent scientist and would never reach a conclusion without considering the data.)

The rest of the times article portrays Dr. Collins on the defensive, claiming that he has no “religious agenda” for NIH, and that he supports therapeutic cloning. He promised not to let faith interfere with scientific judgment. “I’m a scientist”, Dr. Collins says, “I have a lab”; also, “I drive a Harley”. He played guitar with Joe Perry of Aerosmith. He went on the Colbert Report. When Stephen Colbert asked him to take off his glasses and shake out his hair “to make science sexy and cool”, Dr. Collins did so.

What is wrong with this picture? Is believing in God so freakish that you have to drive a Harley and play the guitar to prove that you’re normal?

Around 80% of Americans believe in God, perhaps 1-2% are atheists or agnostics. Who’s out of step? Who needs to justify himself?

That’s a rhetorical question. No one in a just society should have to justify his/her faith or lack of it. No one should have to drive a motorcycle and play a guitar in order to get away with being a Christian.

I can't play the guitar. And I drive a Volvo.

Red Mass

2009-10-04T19:29:00.000-07:00

When I saw this photo of my former law partner John Roberts standing beside the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington, DC, three questions occurred to me.

First, how come lawyers don't get to wear those fancy robes? In England at least the barristers wear wigs. Here, the Chief Justice of the United States wears a plain old suit. Bah.

Second, should we be concerned, as some people apparently are, that justices of our highest court annually attend a Roman Catholic religious service specially intended for lawyers and judges? Should we, indeed, be concerned that the Supreme Court, although diverse in judicial philosophies, in gender, and in race, is dominated by one religious denomination?

Third, should the religious makeup of the Supreme Court make loyalist Episcopalians comfortable or uncomfortable when looking forward to an eventual judicial resolution of the property disputes and related issues that have arisen out of the current schisms within our church?

I have no answers to these questions. I invite comments.

By Eric Von Salzen

All Saints Church Waccamaw – Abuses of the Statute of Uses?

2009-09-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

By Eric Von Salzen

In the recent case of All Saints Church Waccamaw v. Protestant Episcopal Church, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that All Saints Church of Waccamaw had lawfully withdrawn from the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina and taken its property with it.

As a real estate lawyer, I found this a fascinating case. As a loyalist Episcopalian, I found it disturbing.

The history of All Saints parish goes back to 1745, when Percival and Ann Pawley transferred some 60 acres of land to George Pawley and William Poole “forever in trust for the inhabitants on Waccamaw Neck for use of a chapel or church for divine worship of the Church of England established by law.” All Saints Parish was established on this land in 1767 and has conducted services there ever since.

In August 2003, “prompted by events that are not relevant here,” the Court’s opinion says (but I suppose we can guess), the congregation appointed a committee to recommend whether it should leave the Episcopal Church and the Diocese, and by a two-thirds vote in January 2004, the congregation voted to amend its corporate charter to separate from the larger church. This being America, lawsuits followed.

The state Supreme Court faced two issues. Did the parish own its real estate (so it could take the property out of the Episcopal Church) or did it hold it in trust for the Diocese or the national church? And did the congregation have the corporate power to take the parish out of the Episcopal Church? The trial court had answered both questions in the negative, that is, in favor of the Episcopal Church and Diocese. The Supreme Court reversed and decided in favor of the break-away parish on both issues.

First, the Court had to decide what rules governed these issues. When civil courts are called on to decide disputes involving churches, the courts must tread carefully. Under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government may neither “establish” a church nor deny any person the right to freely exercise his/her religion. This means that courts must steer clear of resolving religious disputes on religious grounds – the Court could not decide this case, for example, by determining which side of the dispute was more consistent with Episcopalian doctrine.

The U.S. Supreme Court, according to the South Carolina Supreme Court, has said that there are two valid approaches that the civil courts can use in deciding church disputes: the “deference approach” and the “neutral principles of law approach.” The South Carolina Court described the deference approach as follows:

Under this approach, a court must only determine whether a church is “congregational” or “hierarchical” in nature. If the church is congregational, the court will resolve the dispute by deferring to a majority of the congregation. However, if the congregation at issue is part of a hierarchical organization, the court will defer to the decision of the ecclesiastical authorities.

Under the neutral principles approach, however, the decision does not depend on the organizational structure of the church.

Rather, the neutral principles of law approach permits the application of property, corporate, and other forms of law to church disputes.

Which approach you take in this case is going to determine the outcome: If you use the deference approach, the Diocese and the national church win; if you use the neutral principles approach, the parish wins (for reasons that I’ll get to in a minute). According to the South Carolina Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a state can adopt either approach. This seems strange to me, but I’m not a First Amendment lawyer. If anyone reading this knows anything about this issue, please comment. Also according to the South Carolina Supreme Court, it had adopted the neutral principles approach in a previous case in 1996, and would take that approach in this case.

To apply neutral principles to the property dispute, you start with the deeds on record, of which there were two, one from 1745 and one from 1903. The 1745 deed conveyed the property to George Pawley and William Poole as trustees for the benefit of the inhabitants of Waccamaw Neck. Under an old English law called the Statute of Uses, enacted by Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII, where land is conveyed to one party “for the use of” another party, the title is treated as though it was conveyed directly to the second party. This statute has been incorporated into the real estate law of most U.S. states, including South Carolina. If George Pawley and William Poole had been “real” trustees, with actual duties to perform with respect to the management of the land, the Statute of Uses would not have applied, but the South Carolina court concluded that they weren’t “real” trustees – they had no duties to perform other than holding nominal title to the land - so the Statute of Uses applied. The Court also held that “inhabitants of Waccamaw Neck” meant All Saints Parish, so the 1745 deed gave the parish title to the land in question.

The other deed was issued in 1903, from the Diocese to the parish, and transferred to the parish any interest that the Diocese might have in the parish’s property. With that, I’m not sure the Court even needed to bother with the Statute of Uses (but that’s the sort of arcane material that lawyers and judges can’t leave alone).

So applying “neutral principles” of real estate law, the parish owns its real estate, and the Diocese and the national church have no interest in it. When the Diocese amended its canons in 1987 to declare that all parishes held their land in trust for the Diocese and the national church, and in 2000 recorded notice in the land records to that effect, those actions had no effect because the Diocese had no ownership in the land, and you can’t declare a trust over property that you don’t own.

As for the second issue, the authority of the congregation to amend its charter and withdraw from the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina, under neutral principles that becomes a question of corporate law. The parish was incorporated as a non-profit corporation under South Carolina law. It adopted its charter amendment withdrawing from the Episcopal Church in accordance with the non-profit corporation act. Nothing in the articles of incorporation of the parish corporation gave the Diocese or the national church any say in the manner. Although at canon law the parish might be subordinate to the diocese, as a matter of corporate law it was an independent corporation, not a subsidiary.

Thus, applying neutral legal principles, the state Supreme Court held that All Saints Church Waccamaw properly withdrew from the Episcopal Church and could take its real estate with it.

When I was in law school, a classmate and I wrote a song about the ancient doctrines of land law that we were studying. It was set to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, and the first verse went like this:

This land was your land, but now it’s my land
Thanks to a writ of novel disseisin [*]
And through abuses
of the Statute of Uses
Your land will all belong to me.

[* Don’t Ask.]

As the Episcopal loyalists who used to be congregants of All Saints Church Waccamaw look for a new church home, they may feel that they’ve been abused by the Statute of Uses.

South Carolina Ruling Implications

2009-09-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

A recent ruling in South Carolina between the Diocese of South Carolina and TEC and a breakaway parish seems to have been in favor of the breakaway group. The Episcopal Cafe writes:

In the case of All Saints Parish Waccamaw v. The Protestant Episcopal Church, the Supreme Court of South Carolina ruled today against the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina. The court said that All Saints Parish is free to separate from the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina and join with the Church of Rwanda and the Anglican Mission in America.

I read the ruling, and from what little I understand of its legal language, it seems that this case may have broader implications for many of the churches/parishes currently in the Diocese of South Carolina. I wonder, indeed, if this may pave the way for the Diocese itself to leave the Episcopal Church and take many properties along with them -- if such a decision comes to be made one day.

Presumably, such will be appealed by the Diocese and/or The Episcopal Church all the way to the United States Supreme Court -- as TEC will have to do in the Virginia cases as well.

A Letter from the President of the House of Deputies

2009-09-14T16:33:00.001-07:00

Sept. 14, 2009

Dear Deputies and First Alternates,

It has been two months since I brought the gavel down to close the House of Deputies at the 76^thGeneral Convention in Anaheim, but the remarkable spirit of those ten days has stayed with me. During our time together in the House of Deputies, we worshipped and prayed, shared some very deep feelings about the controversial issues that confront our Church, learned new skills through the Public Narrative Project, and acted on an extensive legislative agenda that will shape our Church for decades to come. Watching the sensitive, respectful way that deputies went about their business, observing the efficient committee work, and listening to the well-informed debate made me appreciate once again the wisdom of our founders, who determined that all orders of ministry should share in the governance of our Church.

We are living in difficult times, but the members of the House of Deputies have indicated that they are ready to make even stronger commitments to the work of God’s church. It is my hope that we can bring this new energy to bear on a new set of challenges. During this triennium, we must do more with less. We must determine how our interim bodies—the Commissions, Committees Agencies and Boards on which clergy and lay people have extensive representation—can continue to play a vital role in the governance of the Church. We must create ways to continue essential mission initiatives, even without the Church Center offices that once sustained this work. And we must begin to formulate our response to the Anglican Covenant once the final draft becomes available.

For my own part, I would like to begin the new triennium with three announcements:

1. In response to our financial situation, I have decided to reduce the size of my Council of Advice from 14 members to 8. Each member of the council will have a specific portfolio or project and will be supported by his or her own network of informal advisors whom I will call upon from time to time as the need arises. I believe this is the most cost-effective way for me to remain well-informed and advised.

2. This week I am sending letters to various lay and clergy leaders throughout the Church inviting them to serve on the Commissions, Committees, Agencies and Boards that play an essential role in the governance of the Church. In extending these invitations I paid special attention to balancing the new energy and insights of an emerging cohort of lay and clergy leaders with the experience and institutional memory of veteran deputies. Once the invitees have responded and rosters are complete, they will be posted on the General Convention Office Web site.

3. Circumstances including our impending consideration of the Anglican Covenant and the need to sustain the work of our CCABs in the face of reduced budgets suggest a need to speak clearly and convincingly about the distinctive way in which authority is exercised in our Church. To that end, I am appointing the House of Deputies Study Committee on Church Governance and Polity to examine and explain the history, theology, political structure and practical realities of the ways in which we believe God calls us to govern the Church. This group, whose membership I will announce shortly, may also make recommendations to the next General Convention on strengthening our self-understanding.

After this General Convention, I am more convinced than ever that it makes little sense to speak of governance and mission as two different things. Our Church is able to enlist the energy and talent of every member in building God’s Kingdom precisely because we make room for the Spirit-seeking wisdom of all orders of ministry in the governance of our Church. The relationship is symbiotic, it is a relationship of UBUNTU. I urge you to remember that deputies are deputies even when General Convention is not in session. Please remain involved in the life of your congregation and your diocese, and don’t hesitate to inform me of any developments you find significant. I am always available to you at banderson@episcopalchurch.org. Soon I will reactivate the HOD communications tool in the form of the deputy online forum that served us so well prior to General Convention. We will use it as a place for us to share information and opinions about matters pertaining to our work together as the House of Deputies on behalf of the Church.

As always, you are encouraged to share this communication with all the alternates of your deputation and other people of your diocese and beyond.

Thank you again for your participation in an inspiring General Convention...

Bishop-elect of Georgia

2009-09-14T08:59:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Scott Benhase was recently elected on the second ballot by the Diocese of Georgia. He has served for just a short while as rector of St. Alban's in Washington, D.C., and before that here in North Carolina at St. Philip's in Durham. Scott is a very smart fellow, and one who will bring a great deal of solid learning and thinking to the House of Bishops -- if consents are forthcoming (and I cannot imagine why they would not be.)

Here are some of his answers to questions posed before the election by the Diocese of Georgia:

1. What are you passionate about in your ministry, in your personal life, and in the world around you?

I am passionate about leading congregations that begin to see God’s vision for the creation in the Gospel of Jesus, embrace that vision, and then shape their work to be congruent with that vision. The spiritual energy created by such work is contagious. Once a significant number of people in a congregation begin working together for the Gospel (and not for their own agendas) then miraculous results happen. I have seen this happen in each parish I have served and I am humbled by it. It is a holy ground experience. This does not happen every day and my experience tells me it takes years of patient work to see it happen, but because I know it is possible, I remain passionately committed to the Church’s ministry. Some might see the Church as inconsequential to what God is up to in the world. I disagree. The Church is at the heart of what God is up to.

In my personal life I am passionate about my wife, Kelly, and our children. Kelly is just amazing. I am more in love with her now than when we were married 25 years ago. She is my rock and a special blessing from God. Our children are smart, funny, and becoming adults and it is quite entertaining (not all the time, mind you) to watch that process. They are good young adults who care deeply about God’s world. Their spiritual and moral centers are strong.

And I am also passionate about God’s world, even though some might think me naïve, or at least, not paying attention. That may appear pollyannish to some given all the blood in the ink of the headlines. I always try to see the world as God sees it, but that doesn’t mean I’m in denial about the world’s reality. God has never been in denial about the world God created. The cross of Jesus is God’s statement of acceptance of the world as it is. And the resurrection of Jesus is God’s declarative statement that the world (as it is) is unacceptable to God. The cross and resurrection help us all keep God’s big picture in mind, which means we can say with Dame Julian of Norwich that “all things shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

2. Please elaborate on an occasion or experience, during your ministry, of significant personal growth or change.

As Rector of St. Paul’s Church, East Cleveland in 1986, the Bishop gave me the charge of transforming the parish from an older white congregation to one that was predominantly black, reflecting the composition of the neighborhood. The congregation 20 years earlier had been over 1000 and all white. By 1986 the city neighborhood had completely changed and the congregation had dwindled to 40 mostly elderly white folk. My first day the Treasurer placed the parish checkbook on my desk and said: “Goodbye.” The parish was in financial free fall. I had to terminate the secretary and organist because we did not have the funds to pay them. Nothing I had ever trained for or experienced prepared me to deal with this situation. A few days later, six members (most of whom were over 65) came into my office and said: “We love God and we love our Church. We want to be a witness in this community. Whatever you need us to do to make that happen, just let us know.” I was amazed at their selflessness and their willingness to give up power and control for the sake of the Gospel and the witness of the Church. And they were true to their word. I have never met a group of people who were so intentionally committed to the Good News and less concerned with their own agendas. Their act and witness made possible the change and growth of the parish. For the next five years, we became a predominantly black parish. The white leadership humbly took a support role and worked diligently with me to build up new leadership within the parish.

My experience there transformed me personally and taught me a lot about my leadership role in the Church. In order to lead, people have to be willing to follow. In order to follow, people have to trust you and share a consensus with you about where we are headed. And then, we all need to stay focused on the essentials of our shared vision and avoid private agendas. When that happens, the church flourishes. Because this experience happened to me so early in my priesthood, it has stayed with me and been a guide for my leadership in the Church since.

3. What are the touchstones in your faith that will guide your responses to the issues now facing-some would say threatening-the Episcopal Church and the world-wide Anglican Communion?

I’m grounded by a humble faith in Jesus Christ as Lord & Savior of the world. Because Jesus is Lord and God is sovereign, I believe it is not my role to try to manipulate outcomes, especially during the current unpleasantness. Yes, it is messy now, but God is giving us an opportunity. This is a challenging time in the Church and culture. We are experiencing a massive shift. The “modern world” has given way to the “post-modern world.” People are reacting to this change differently. Some are resisting it at all costs. They have drawn a line in the sand and said: “no more.” Others are all too eager to adopt whatever the culture offers with no critical perspective. Still others are just plain stressed out by change.

Like everyone else, we Episcopalians are along for this ride. But we can bring something important to the public square as our culture endures this sea change. And this is where my personal practice of faith guides me. We can live into our common future by being more Elizabethan, that is by helping one another develop a capacity to attend to one another’s differences with a spirit of love (that’s the Anglican Via Media, that Queen Elizabeth helped create). This may be the most important call God is giving us as a Church right now: to stand between the virulent fundamentalists (no matter their religious stripe) and the cultured despisers of religion by witnessing to the reconciling love of Jesus.

I have no illusions about how challenging this is. It will mean that we will have to take seriously what it means to be people grounded in the Gospel. Such a call will have less to do with just trying to be nicer to strangers or more understanding of those who disagree with us. Rather, such a call from God will ask us to wade deep into troubled waters with both friend and stranger.

That’s a Church I want to belong to: a Church that takes Jesus seriously when he teaches us about love for enemies, forgiveness in order to be forgiven, and hospitality to the stranger. Being a disciple of such a Lord will be the hardest work we will ever do. Of course, the alternative for us is forget our Anglican roots and identity, hunker down, and become privatized in our religion; doing our religious ritual on Sundays and trying to pretend that what’s happening around us will go away if we just wait it out. We have the opportunity to be witnesses to a different way of being Christian: one that takes discipleship in Jesus seriously, but also one that is open to the new things the Holy Spirit is up to in the world. My hunch is there are a lot of Georgians who think they have only two choices: adopt the fundamentalist agenda hook, line, and sinker or reject Christianity as being irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be compelling to show them a different way of following Jesus?

Never Forget

2009-09-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

Presiding Bishop Expands GC Address

2009-08-31T12:04:00.001-07:00

She writes:

I always am delighted when people listen to what I say in a sermon or address. Sometimes I am surprised by what they hear.

In my opening address at General Convention, I spoke about the "great Western heresy" of individualism (see the full text here). There have been varied reactions from people who weren't there, who heard or read an isolated comment without the context. Apparently I wasn't clear!

Individualism (the understanding that the interests and independence of the individual necessarily trump the interests of others as well as principles of interdependence) is basically unbiblical and unchristian.

The spiritual journey, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is about holy living in community. When Jesus was asked to summarize the Torah, he said, "love God and love your neighbor as yourself." That means our task is to be in relationship with God and with our neighbors. If salvation is understood only as "getting right with God" without considering "getting right with (all) our neighbors," then we've got a heresy (an unorthodox belief) on our hands.

The theme of our General Convention, ubuntu, was chosen intentionally to focus on this. Often translated from its original African dialects as "I am because we are," ubuntu has significant biblical connections and warrant. The Hebrew prophets save their strongest denunciation for those who claim to be worshiping correctly but ignore injustice done to their neighbors (e.g., Amos 5:21-24), and Jesus insists that those who will enter the kingdom are the ones who have cared for neighbor by feeding, watering, clothing, housing, healing and visiting "the least of these" (Matt 25:31-46).

In my address, I went on to say that sometimes this belief that salvation only depends on getting right with God is reduced to saying a simple formula about Jesus. Jesus is quite explicit in his rejection of simple formulas: "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven" (Matt 7:21).

He is repeatedly insistent that right relationship depends on loving neighbors – for example, "those who say, ‘I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (1John 4:20). The Epistles repeatedly enjoin the followers of Jesus to "give evidence of the hope within you" (1Pet 3:15ff), that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:14-26), that our judgment depends on care for brother and sister (Rom 14:10-12) and that we eat our own destruction if we take Communion without having regard for the rest of the community (1Cor 11:27-34).

Salvation depends on love of God and our relationship with Jesus, and we give evidence of our relationship with God in how we treat our neighbors, nearby and far away. Salvation is a gift from God, not something we can earn by our works, but neither is salvation assured by words alone.

Salvation cannot be complete, in an eternal and eschatological sense, until the whole of creation is restored to right relationship. That is what we mean when we proclaim in the catechism that "the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ" and that Christian hope is to "live with confidence in newness and fullness of life and to await the coming of Christ in glory and the completion of God's purpose for the world." We anticipate the restoration of all creation to right relationship, and we proclaim that Jesus' life, death and resurrection made that possible in a new way.

At the same time, salvation in the sense of cosmic reconciliation is a mystery. It's hard to pin down or talk about. It is ultimately the gift of a good and gracious God, not the product of our incessant striving. It is about healing and wholeness and holiness, the fruit of being more than doing. Just like another image we use to speak about restored relationship, the reign of God, salvation is happening all the time, all around us. Where do you see evidence?

Lutheran News Blackout?

2009-08-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

So, I was perusing the New York Times today in between services, looking rather intently for an in-depth piece on the groundbreaking decisions made last week by the 4.5 million member Evangelical Lutheran Church. They voted to permit same sex blessings, to permit congregations to call clergy who are in same sex unions, and, to join into full communion with the United Methodists.

In other words, they went perhaps farther than the Episcopal Church recently did at its convention, either in the direction of including gay persons living in relationship, or in terms of ecumenism, and, to be clear, they are a much bigger denomination than we are. Indeed, the Lutherans and Methodists are both much bigger than we are.

Yet, surprise, there was nothing at all in today's paper about it. And when I googled the news last Friday, I also came up with relatively little in the media.

So here's my question: why do Episcopalians get so much press on all this kind of stuff, and the Lutherans very little? Is it because Garrison Keillor controls the media?

Theories welcome.

Lutherans in Action - Big News

2009-08-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Our full communion partner, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, has made major steps in their churchwide assembly this week.

- Click here for Lutheran statement on sexuality which has passed their churchwide assembly yesterday.

- Click here about full communion with United Methodists entered into by Lutherans (ELCA)

- As well, it appears that the ELCA have also approved same sex blessings in a vote today.
- Also, persons in same sex unions have been approved by the assembly to be eligible to serve as clergy.

Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

Pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America can bless same-sex unions after a vote Friday by delegates at the Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis.
“I’ve been a life-long member at Redeemer Lutheran Church [in Atlanta], and I was never comfortable asking my church to bless my relationship,” said Bob Gibeling, who is at the assembly.
“This offers great hope to me that when I find a future life-long partner, my own beloved congregation will want to bless that union.”
The change in the Evangelical Lutheran Church does not require pastors or congregations to bless same-sex unions, but allows those comfortable with it to do so.

Classical Liberalism and the Church

2009-08-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

Tobias suspects that the Archbishop of Canterbury may have a dimmer view of our polity than we do. In particular, Tobias suspects that Rowan Williams does not appreciate that our House of Deputies has so much authority in relation to our House of Bishops, and the General Convention as a whole. I don't know if this is true of Rowan, but I have heard this very thing voiced to me by other leaders from other non-U.S. Anglican provinces.

It may not come as a surprise that much of what we are seeing in today's divisions stems from differing values about what constitutes and who constitutes authority in the church. To be sure, the Church of England is still an established old-world church, and The Episcopal Church is the first Anglican Communion church to arise in a context of classical liberalism -- what more need be said?

The Church of England still has crown-appointed bishops. As well, in other parts of the communion, especially in the GAFCON provinces, for example, we see Anglican churches constituted in national contexts where classical liberalism has hardly taken any hold at all. Classical liberalism, again, is that particular bundle of ideas which gave rise to the United States' constitution, etc.

I find it no surprise at all therefore, that we see structural differences which are pretty major. What is amazing, in fact, is that more than two centuries ago the Archbishops of York and Canterbury consecrated William White to the episcopate, presumably knowing that he was the author of our deeply 'liberal' ecclesiastical framework.

Now, this all being said, I am still not sure that we in The Episcopal Church need be at all smug or superior vis a vis the depth of classical liberalism in our ecclesiastical dna. Indeed, the individualist ideology at the heart of liberalism, and the very 'political' machinations which describe so much of our own goings on, are edges where faithful critics of our church might have a good place to start.

Bill Carroll on Easter

2009-08-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

Bill Carroll is Rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Athens, Ohio.

I don’t care what anyone tells you. I don’t care what the hymn says. We do not come to the garden alone.

We come racing with Peter and John, close friends of Jesus, to see the empty tomb. We come with Mary Magdalene, in the middle of the night, trying in vain to care for his body.

We also come with Christians in their billions. Today, they are gathered in Zimbabwe and the West Bank, in Guatemala and Haiti, in a Chinese village, in small town Iowa, in New York City, in the Swiss Alps, and in many other places throughout the world. We are also gathered right here in Athens County. Christians gather in every conceivable type of building: from monasteries to storefront churches, from the little country church to the majestic cathedral, from ancient stone buildings to modern structures of glass and steel. We also gather outside, beyond any four walls built by human hands, to worship the risen Lord at sunrise. We do so in every conceivable way in every conceivable language. In countless tongues, we sing hymns of joy and tell the Easter story.

So, no, my friends, we do not come to the garden alone. We come with many brothers and sisters. We come as a worldwide community, the Body of Christ, the Church.

We come for many different reasons, carrying many different burdens. Some of us are troubled by the burden of sin. Others by the prospect of impending death. Still others come imprisoned by the past and the shackles of memory. We come heavy laden with anger, resentment, and grief. We are fearful and anxious about our future. We worry about finding work or losing a job, perhaps even losing our home. Maybe this has happened to us already. Perhaps we are facing a difficult family situation or life-threatening illness. Perhaps we are bone tired, worn down by hard work and many cares. But, no matter what the reason or burden, no matter how heavy or light, and even if we are among those lucky untroubled few, we come today looking for a word of hope and resurrection joy. We are looking, in a word, for JESUS.

And so, we come. Early in the morning on the first day of the week, we come. We come to the garden tomb with Mary Magdalene. Spices in hand, we come, ready to bury our friend and Lord. We don’t expect much from Jesus. We certainly don’t expect to see him alive. But we have come here in the wee hours of the morning to do what we can.

Mary has spent the night weeping. She must be exhausted. Hours ago, she was already at the end of her rope. Now, she is numb with grief, nearly past the point of caring, in desperate need of sleep. But, when she arrives, there is no body. Insult is added to injury. Even this comfort, however small, is denied her. They have taken his body from her.

And so, she begins to weep. And first the angels, then the mysterious stranger, ask her why. In both cases, Mary’s answer is the same: “They have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” Supposing the stranger to be the gardener, she asks him “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

But then, the stranger, who is Jesus, calls her by name. “Mary,” he says. And she turns to face him. “Teacher!” she replies. Jesus calls her by name, and she responds. Her turning is more than a simple bodily movement. It is a complete change of life. It is conversion. She is leaving sin and death behind her—to serve the living God. Jesus has appeared to her—ALIVE—so her grief gives way to joy. Having been called and sent, she runs to tell the others: “I have seen the Lord.”

No, we do not come to the garden alone. Our faith is built on the foundation of the apostles. It is built on the testimony of Mary Magdalene, who saw and touched the Lord. It stands upon the testimony of a great cloud of witnesses, throughout the world and throughout the ages, who have encountered the Living One and been changed by him forever. Jesus calls person after person into his Body, the Church. We come to him through his community.

Even those of us who have our doubts—who doesn’t?—can glimpse in broken fragments the meaning of Easter. Every sign and symbol we use, every story we tell, points beyond itself to the Great Mystery. We see it mirrored in the flowers and smiling faces. We hear its echoes in our thunderous hymns of joy. We even taste it and smell it in the bread and wine made holy. We feel it in our bones, in the HOPE this Day gives us—in God’s frightening yet exhilarating offer of freedom. For, on this Day, Christ is risen, breaking the power of death. On this Day, he sets us free from all the powers that enslave us. He calls us and sends us in his Name.

The Christian vision of life is very realistic. “The three sad days have done their worst,” and they cannot be undone. We do not deny sin, suffering, and death. In Christ’s presence, our burdens remain real, but they lose their power over us. Easter does not undo the evil that crushes Jesus; it unveils the saving power of his Cross.

On this Day, God imparts a sure and certain hope the world can’t give. God gives us a knowledge born of love. The whole Day testifies to things unseen—to the victory of God—to the grace and mercy that are now claiming our world, from the bottom on up.

For God chooses the weak and despised of the world, and makes of us a kingdom. God chooses sinners, and makes us beloved children. God chooses the fallen, and makes us stand.

The same stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

My brothers and sisters, come to Jesus the Living One, who is that very stone, and lay your burdens down. For we have been born anew to a living hope by his resurrection from the dead.

Tim Chesterton on Williams and Wright

2009-08-06T08:28:00.001-07:00

Tim Chesterton is Rector of St. Margaret's in Edmunton, Canada:

Unlike many of those who are commenting on recent statements about the future of the Anglican Communion by Rowan Williams and Tom Wright, I have no wish to enter into theological controversy with them. On the basic issue, I agree with them (well, with Wright, anyway; even now, I'm really not sure exactly what Williams' personal position is, because of his previously stated conviction that his role as Archbishop of Canterbury requires him to attempt to speak for the Anglican Communion as a whole, rather than giving his own personal views).

I will say, though, that I don't think Rowan Williams takes any personal joy in outlining this particular view of the Anglican future. I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he is still enormously sympathetic to gay people and would prefer to preserve a big-tent Anglicanism in which a diversity of viewpoints on this issue is tolerated. But this is not the political reality of the Anglican Communion, and Rowan has to deal with the reality, not the ideal. The majority of Anglicans worldwide have said that a decision to continue down the road of same-sex blessings and gay ordinations is a decision to walk apart from the rest of the Communion. Whether he likes it or not, this is the political hand that Rowan has been dealt.

Tom Wright, however, disappoints me. I say this as a person who has great respect for his enormous scholarship. His books about Jesus and Paul (including The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, What St. Paul Really Said, and so on) have had a huge impact on the way I read the Bible, and have really helped me understand the life and teaching of Jesus in its proper context in the first century world. Tom Wright as New Testament scholar is an inspiration to me, but Tom Wright as an international ecclesiastical politician repels me. This is because he really seems to relish the cut and thrust of the debate and the imagining of future ecclesiastical realities in which he is cut off from erstwhile friends and colleagues in a new two-track Anglican Communion, simply because they disagree with him over one issue. He sees the future in terms of new configurations and new excommunications and possible new instruments of unity between the two tracks. What is absent in what he has written is how he sees the future for gay and lesbian couples who love each other. He is dealing with an issue, not with individuals and couples.

I repeat, it pains me to have to be so critical of one from whom I've learned so much in my reading of the New Testament. But I must say that one of the strongest arguments against the Church of England's system of crown appointments is the appointment of Tom Wright as Bishop of Durham. He should have stayed in the world of biblical scholarship and resisted the temptation to become an ecclesiastical grandee. His growing image (justified or not) as a mouthpiece of the Anglican right wing is only going to hurt the image of his scholarship, and in my view this would be a tragedy.

I repeat, I do not disagree with his view of same-sex unions or gay ordinations. Nor do I doubt that he and his friend Rowan Williams have read the mind of the Anglican Communion correctly. What I miss in their writings, though, is a tone of regret that things should have come to this.

After all, is it not a shame that people with a professed high view of the authority of the Bible and the consensus of the early church should have chosen to take their stand on this particular issue, to have drawn this particular line in the sand?

They could have chosen a couple of other issues, on both of which the Bible is every bit as clear (more so in my view), and which are every bit as relevant to the struggles of people in the modern world.

The first is the issue of war and peace. It is acknowledged by most people that, for the first three centuries of Christianity, the infant church was overwhelmingly pacifist in its interpretation of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. The early Christians believed and taught that followers of Jesus must not kill others, even as soldiers in war or as magistrates imposing legally-sanctioned capital punishment. This position began to soften later in the post-apostolic period, and when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century A.D., it was not long before a new position emerged, based on a marriage of pagan philosophy and Old Testament teaching: the so-called 'just war' view. But when it was first proposed this was a novelty, an innovation as startling to the early Church as acceptance of same-sex unions is to traditional Christians today.

So why not draw this line in the sand, if we're going to draw lines? After all, the biggest threat to Christian unity is not when Anglicans and Roman Catholics disagree about papal authority or who is or is not a real priest. The biggest threat to Christian unity is that, in many places in the world (recent tribal conflicts in Africa come to mind) it is considered quite acceptable for Christians to kill their fellow-Christians out of loyalty to their own ethnic group. Pacifist Christian groupings such as the Mennonites are sometimes classified as 'sects', but surely this is the ultimate sectarianism: the division of worldwide Christianity into national churches or ethnic churches which then legitimise the killing of fellow-Christians.

So if we're going to draw lines in the sand, why not this one? Early Christianity agreed that Christian faithfulness excluded violence and war. Those who are willing to go along with the early consensus of Christianity in its interpretation of the New Testament could be in track one of the Anglican Communion; those who accept the revisionist interpretation of the just-war position could be in track two.

Or if we want another issue, how about usury? Most Christians today don't even know what that word means! But the Bible is unanimous in disallowing the lending of money at interest; everywhere the practice is mentioned in the scriptures it is condemned. Furthermore, for the first fifteen centuries of Christian history, this was the view of the overwhelming majority of Christians, a view that was not challenged until the Protestant Reformation gave more of a green light to capitalism.

Now, granted, there was a certain amount of hypocrisy in the way that this view was applied in medieval Christendom (Christians weren't allowed to lend money at interest, but kings needed those loans anyway, so they made the Jews the investment bankers of the medieval world; it's unclear to me how Jewish people squared this with the Torah, which is where the strongest condemnations of usury are found). Granted, also, many modern scholars question whether the sort of money-lending which the Bible condemns (taking advantage of your neighbour's poverty by charging him interest on relief loans when he's down and out) is exactly the same as the provision of loans for homeowners and businesses today. But then, isn't this exactly the same sort of argument that gay and lesbian Christians make, when they say that biblical references to homosexuality do not refer to couples who want to live in lifelong monogamous faithful unions? So if we allow one 'revisionist reinterpretation' (the legitimising of usury), why not another (the legitimising of gay unions)?

So why isn't the Anglican Communion making this the line in the sand? Surely it's a huge issue today; it can be argued that usury has condemned millions of people in Africa to lifelong poverty with no hope of relief. Why isn't the Anglican Communion worldwide standing up and saying, 'Acceptance of usury is unfaithful to the teaching of the Bible and it perpetuates poverty and injustice in the world today, so those who accept it will from now on be relegated to track two of the Anglican Communion'?

I have a nasty suspicion about the reasons why the Communion is not going to take a stand on these two issues of war and usury. I suspect that the reason has a lot to do with the fact that taking this stand would have an enormous cost for huge numbers of us. Many Anglicans are in fact investment bankers, or stockbrokers, and many, many more take advantage of the modern capitalist system (which is based on usury through and through) to get loans to buy houses and cars and to start businesses and so on. Dissenting from this all-pervasive system would have enormous economic and social consequences for us. And in a similar way, we all depend (or at least, we think we do) on our armies to keep us safe from international rogue states and terrorists and so on. Making a decision to follow Jesus in loving our enemies and refusing to strike back against them would inevitably have deadly consequences: after all, it led Jesus to the Cross, and he assured us it would do the same for us ('take up your cross and follow me').

Sadly, for the vast majority of Anglicans the issue of homosexuality does not carry that personal price-tag. Most of us are straight; we aren't the ones who would be bearing the cross if the church as a whole agreed that same-sex unions are not a legitimate part of a life of following Jesus. Gays and lesbians are an easy target, because there aren't many of them (tho' more, perhaps, than some Christians would like to think).

Personally, I think it's a tragedy that we're drawing these lines in the sand at all. Historically, it's not been our way as Anglicans. On the (equally clear) biblical teachings about war and peace and about usury, we've allowed for a variety of biblical interpretation. Why is homosexuality so despicable that we don't make similar allowances?

For me, a two-track Anglican Communion would be a tragedy. As I've said, my own view on the subject is traditional, but there are many people with whom I disagree on this issue but agree on almost every other facet of the Christian faith. Contrariwise, there are people with whom I agree on this issue but strongly disagree on many other elements of Christian faith and practice.

So to go back to Rowan and Tom. I think it's a tragedy that Rowan's role as Archbishop of Canterbury requires him to play the role of an ecclesiastical politician in planning the future structures of a divided Anglican Communion, and I think it's sad that Tom seems to relish his role in these global machinations. Maybe they think that (in Luther's terms) 'Here I stand, I can do no other', but if that is the case, I wish they would reflect on why they think they can do no other; is it in the service of God, or is it in the service of the Anglican Communion? Because, of course, these are not necessarily the same thing.

Mind the Frost

2009-07-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost is the first poet I ever studied. My parents were very fond of Frost, and he was quoted from time to time around the house. Like many Americans who studied English literature in high school and college, I had to commit a number of poems to memory, but sadly, to this day, The Road Not Taken, and the first verses of The Canterbury Tales are all I remember.

Perhaps Bob Duncan also knows only two poems, for in his recent open letter to the entire Anglican Communion, he has called Frost's Road into the service of his stark vision of the on-going tales of Canterbury.

The first and founding Archbishop of the newly formed Anglican Church of North America, with its 69,000 members in the United States and Canada, has proof-texted Robert Frost in the service of his claim that The Episcopal Church/Anglican Church of Canada are on the bad road, which must be avoided, and that the Anglican Church of North America is on the good road, which must be taken if righteousness is to be followed.

What is bizarre, of course, is that Frost's poem is not at all a reflection on dualism between good and evil. No, of course, Frost's poem asserts that there are two roads, each with its own merits, with much in common, and that while the road chosen was the one less frequently travelled by, it was not necessarily or inherently 'better' than the other. A bright twelfth grader, who actually did his homework, could see that this poem has absolutely no bearing at all on whether or not one road is 'Blessing' or another 'Curse.' Yet, Bob Duncan makes this very mistake.

But he doesn't just get Robert Frost all wrong.

Duncan begins his epistle of division by recalling Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. What is particularly galling about this is that Dickens was by any contemporary standard that Bob Duncan would employ a liberal Anglican broad-churchman. Dickens, who for so long was a Unitarian, fond of the Boston Transcendentalists, and an advocate of broad toleration of all Christian denominations in the establishment minded England of his time, dedicated Tale of Two Cities to Lord Russell, who was also very much a tolerance-minded liberal Christian.

Duncan then goes on to enlist the great St. Augustine of Hippo, by again taking the dualism of the City of God, and applying it to what he sees as the duality between The Episcopal Church/Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of North America. Again, this is patently absurd and erroneous. Augustine was an ardent opponent of the Donatists, that African-based schismatical sect which sought to purify the church, and argued that within the church there would always be a mixed body -- both wheat and tares. It seems patently obvious that Bob Duncan is asserting that the cause of purification has led him and his allies to create a new, pure, orthodox, and true church, departing from the ways of the old, impure, heterodox, and false church. Even the Pardoner, in his Canterbury tale of greed, and in his own fallen state, conveys the Augustinian response to the Donatists asserting that even sinful clergy can be means of God's grace in sacramental ministration.

Rowan Williams once said that when Jack Spong posted his "Twelve Theses" calling for a radical new reformation of Christianity they looked like the questions a bright senior in high school might pose. In the same way, Bob Duncan's bold call for radical reformation of Anglicanism along a 'Two Ways" dichotomy between blessing and curse, purity and mixity, and his use of literature to make his point, reminds me of the sort of argument I might expect from a bright 12th grader, who has neither read, or understood, the works he cites.

Reconciliation

2009-07-29T08:52:00.001-07:00

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a staggering work of genius, and I have no doubt that it could only have been written under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

For in just 11 verses - Chapter 2:11-22 - Paul manages to explain the cosmic scheme of reconciliation put into place by God in Christ, which is unfolding still- under which all broken relationships, all enmity, all division, all estrangement and all alienation are healed.

In the reconciliation of all things which have come untied, Christ is at work putting the power of God’s love upon the broken, the alone, the unforgiven, the forgotten, the afraid, the abandoned, the mocked, the ridiculed - and they are restored into the holy and living stones from which God is building his true temple; the abode of God and those whom he loves and who love him and each other.

Brothers and sisters, if you want to be healed eternally, and reconciled - retied to God and what’s His - then this is Good News for you. Healing now, and healing forever.

Once you recognize your need for this healing and reconciliation, and who can meet it - Jesus - then your life in the Kingdom begins. It begins with the baby steps of mortal faith and continues beyond to grow fully.

Do you recognize your need for this healing? This reconciliation?

In Mark 6, we see that Jesus and the disciples are recognized and mobbed by large groups of people who all have something in common. They are all sick or lost. They are all in need of leadership, love, compassion, protection and healing - and they know it.

In the Gospel, it doesn’t say that “well” people recognize and follow after Jesus. There is little mention of large numbers of “‘well, perfect or satisfied” people recognizing Jesus.

No, in fact, very often what we see is that the typical reaction to Jesus by folks who think they are “well’ is one of un-recognition or rejection. As Jesus taught, those who laugh now cannot be blessed. Those who are satisfied, self-absorbed and scoffing at the message of God cannot recognize their need or that Jesus is the one to call about it.

Now, to be sure, Christians and churches have made lots of mistakes over the years. There has been, is now, and will always be great turmoil in the world, and even in the Church.

In the Anglican/Episcopal tradition, there has been turmoil, threat and reality of schism for our 500-year history since we broke ties with Rome. In that five- century period, there have been roughly three categories of argument.

The first is over how and what it means to be “catholic.” How can we be catholic without Rome leading us? How can we be catholic without Constantinople leading us? How can we be catholic with so much autonomy, too?

The second is over what it means to be protestant or “reformed,” which is a better word for me. How can we learn from Calvin and Luther, without abandoning the catholic tradition? What is the most authoritative structure for us - the Bible, the church order? What are the sacraments and what means of Grace are there? How independent should churches be?

The third big debate is about how modern we can be. What do science, reason and faith have to do with one another? What effect does modern reason have on our vision of Scripture, etc.?

These three categories all fit under the question of “How can we be faithful to Christ, AND, be Catholic, Reformed, And/Or Modern?”

And for five centuries, these three categorical concerns have captivated many good Anglican/Episcopal minds - and led to much controversy and even schism. And they still are. Today’s question over what to do with gay Christians touches on all three. Today, as historically, there is likely to be a lasting legacy of schism from our current controversies. Just as the Baptist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Methodist groups of churches are the legacies of previous controversy and schism within Anglicanism.

I believe that all of these controversies and schisms remain ongoing - and unsolved. Yet, in my view, none of them makes a dent in the core proclamation of the main thing that Christians need to be all about.

And this core proclamation is this: God wants to reconcile a world that comes untied. We who are in the world, quite obviously, are hell-bent on coming untied from God and each other, and five centuries of Anglican history alone is sufficient to prove it.

For we who must recognize our illness and sin, and that we are untied, we must focus on the gracious gift of the loving God who sent Jesus to reconcile us, to bring peace, to end alienation, and to fix all that’s wrong.

This is the sure foundation of my faith, and I believe of this Church, broken and ill as it is. Jesus Christ is the sure foundation, and only in Him will all things be united that have come untied.

Nick Knisely Knows

2009-07-29T07:32:00.001-07:00

This is a very good piece from Episcopal Cafe:

A few months ago one of the staff here at the Cathedral forwarded an email to me with a request that I answer the question it posed as he had no idea what he should say. The email was very simple. It was from a person in the community who was looking for a new church home. But, before he would consider a congregation, it was very important for him to know where we stood on the question of blessing same-sex couples.

There wasn’t any hint in the email about whether or not the sender wanted us to say we were for blessing same-sex couples or opposed. Just that it was critically important to him that we give the right answer so that he wouldn’t waste his time unnecessarily.

I get letters or questions like this quite commonly. I think most Episcopal clergy do these days. It’s the BIG question that seems to be used as a way to sort through congregations and dioceses so that we can determine which ones are right-thinking and therefore worthy of support and which ones are wrong and worthy of nothing. What was different about this letter though was that I simply couldn’t figure out what the person wanted me to say.

So rather than trying to be pastoral and sensitive in trying to respond to the question behind the question (as is my wont), I decided to be bluntly honest.

“There are people in this congregation who are fully supportive of the Church’s blessing of same-gender unions. There are people in this congregation who are opposed to the Church’s blessing of same-gender unions. While the Episcopal Church as a denomination is on record as calling for equal protection under the law for all citizens, if you’re looking for a congregation that is of one mind on this issue, you’re going to be disappointed with this one. We don’t have agreement internally on this particular - or many - issues. Instead, we just agree to pray and worship together”

We don’t agree with each other. We pray together.

Friends of mine who are involved in the church growth movement offer me their sympathy every three years or so following our denomination’s General Convention. “It must be really hard to grow a church that spends so much time fighting” they say. In the past I’ve agreed with them. But I think I’ve decided that it’s time we as Episcopalians tell the truth about who we are though in a way that tries to explain to others why our struggles are not a “bug” - they’re a “feature”!

The Elizabethan Settlement, which for me is modeled at every Eucharist when I present the host to a communicant with the paradoxical words (to a person of Tudor England) “the body of Christ, the bread of Heaven”, is fundamental to our identity as Anglicans. We are willing to be in relationship with people who will gather with us around Jesus; whether they by free or slave, man or women, Jew or Greek. We are the anti-puritans caring less about clarity of theological categories than we do about loving relationship. “If you will pray to Jesus with me, I will pray to Jesus with you.”

At least we try to when we’re at our best. Which isn’t always that often admittedly.

In my mind, as an Episcopalian of catholic leanings and ecumenical enthusiasm, if there’s one thing that argues for the continued existence of an Anglican witness in the Universal Church - it’s our charism of holding firm to praying with those with whom we disagree no matter how hard that is to do.

Eusebius writes that in the latter days of his life, St. John the Evangelist would respond to repeated requests of visitors to “tell of us of Jesus” by only repeating again and again “Little children, love one another.” When asked by those caring for him why he would only say that he is supposed to have responded “Because if they do only that, it is enough.”

Episcopalians don’t agree to agree. We pray with each other. Because if we can manage to just do that, it seems to me, that we will have done enough.

What happened when I responded to my inquirer wanting to know where the Cathedral I serve stood on the question of same-gender blessings? I sent my short note off fully expecting to never hear from him again.

I got a note back a day later; “That’s so awesome. I’ll be there this Sunday.”

Ruth Gledhill Witnesses

2009-07-28T06:26:00.000-07:00

I have been following the Times (UK) religion writer for some time now, and have never quite been able to tell 'where she's coming from' as a churchwoman. I've often wondered if she was liberal, conservative, anglo-catholic, evangelical, modern, pre-modern or post-modern. Well, in this piece she tells us what she stands for -- in addition to being a journalist.

Ruth Gledhill: View from Fleet Street CEN July 17th

Just like the Church of my birth, I am inwardly divided. I’ve always believed in the adage, ‘bloom where you are planted’ and that has meant that I’ve resisted the temptation to move away from the Church of England when it has occurred. One of those occasions was many years ago when I was sent to interview a Sea of Faith clergyman who, until his stipend was threatened, didn’t seem to think it mattered that he didn’t believe in God. That sea seems pretty dead now, or at least its not floating any boats on my horizons these days. The diocese in question got rid of him before my own concerns cyrstallised into action, and things moved on. I got an insight back then into how many clerics had beliefs, or lack of beliefs, that even in today’s secularized society would shock.

Many of them have now retired and the Church, and along with it the General Synod, has shifted noticeably to the right. By ‘right’ in this context I mean in a conservative direction, whether to the ‘New Wine” style of evangelicalism of the charismatic movement, or the more hard-line, Calvinist-style approach of Reform.

And although church attendance is not exactly booming, the evangelicals are often not given enough credit for the fact that the decline that has been a feature of the post-war era is definitely showing signs of bottoming out. In some places, such as London, it is in reverse, and London is where many of the most thriving evangelical churches – HTB, St Helen’s – are based.

So the evangelicals, from my perspective formed out of 23 years on The Times , of which 21 have been spent on this beat, are winning the battle within the Church, and have been for some time. The battle they are not winning, yet, is that with the wider society. For all the posturing, sermonizing and clarion calls for gospel values, society is proceeded relentlessly along its secularizing liberal path.

Where does that leave people like me, and I believe there are many, many of us? My own background is Anglo-Catholic. I’ve become increasingly liberal as my one-time opposition to women’s ordination has melted away like the ice caps in an age of global warming.

My own church, St Ann’s in Kew, where you’ll find more incense than in Rome at Mass on Sunday morning, became a resolution A and B parish and almost opted for C. But we’re all changing. The only ABC we recognize is the one at Lambeth. The other day we even had a woman celebrant, and I don’t think anyone except me even noticed. Yet we still believe in God, love the Prayer Book, the rhythm of the liturgical year, go to ‘proper’ confession when necessary. Many of us, like me, also revel in the music of the evangelicals. Besides being stirred in our souls by the charismatic power of Peter Jensen, the best bits about the launch of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans were the worship songs.

Yet how bizarre to see traditionalist Bishop of Fulham John Broadhurst up there on the stage talking about how when he was ordained he did not believe in the devil, but now he did and knew where he lived. Satan resides at Church House, he told us. Even Dr Jensen looked slightly startled by this one. Let’s hope Father John was just joking.

I confess I’ve ‘joined’ FCA and if you’ve tried to do this you will realize that this means ticking a box where you sign up to the fellowship’s beliefs. It seemed to be the only way to get on their email list to be kept in touch with events.

My conscience is only slightly troubled. There’s not much to disagree with in the Jerusalem declaration from Gafcon last year.

The trouble is, I support gay ordination, believe the Church should bless gay partnerships under the same principles as it does heterosexual marriage, and support the ordination of women bishops.

Given that, should I even be writing for this newspaper ( the CEN), you and others might justifiably be asking? My view on the above issues is that we should be allowed to confess according to our own conscience in line with our Church’s teaching, as set out by the Bishops, and there is nothing in my beliefs which contradicts what the Church of England teaches. Ultimately, I believe, God is the judge. Where there is doubt, charity must prevail, and this opens the door to justice and truth.

For me, one of the most significant aspects of FCA is the involvement of New Wine. This is a network that never gets involved in politics. Paul Perkin, vicar of St Mark’s Battersea Rise, who chaired the FCA launch is New Wine. And among the greetings, alongside those from the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury as this little noticed offering from Rev John Coles of the New Wine Network:

“This is a follow-on to GAFCON last year, at which I was present along with others from the UK. A conference is becoming a movement. Having talked again to Henry Orombi when he was with us for our Leadership Conference, I am sure this is an important movement and Monday is an important gathering. It’s important for us to show solidarity with orthodox and persecuted Anglicans in North America; it’s important for us to show that there is a strong group of orthodox Anglicans in the Church of England; and it’s important for us to stand together against the slow but steady conforming influence of secular humanism within the Church of England”

I wish the US Church had not split, and pray the same thing does not happen here. In spite of protestations that it is just a movement, there are worrying sings that it could be a ‘schismatic’ movement. These have been spelled out by the new Bishop of Sherborne, Graham Kings, on the Fulcrum site and others.

But maybe it will not split the Church of England. Maybe it is indeed simply ‘new wine’ in an old skin. The grace of the Spirit can be an extraordinary thing, and who knows what can happen. None of us, homosexuals, women, ordinary Anglicans, not even FCA, should give up on the Church of England yet.

Looking Ahead

2009-07-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

I am looking ahead to my vacation, much needed. But I am also looking ahead to the future of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

It may be that the Archbishop of Canterbury's notion of a two-track Communion -- first mentioned years ago -- will indeed come to pass.

All of this is very sad in my opinion -- because I am and will remain very much invested in a vision of the Anglican Communion which sees it as an alternative to Roman or Eastern Orthodox churches -- but which still upholds catholicity, etc. I share the dream of a global fellowship of regional churches which profess the one faith of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit -- but which experience a degree of variation in their local interpretation and incarnation of that faith.

I think The Episcopal Church and the Church of Canada need the Communion more than the Communion needs us. I am not talking finances here -- or control -- or domination. We need to be in full communion with people who do not live in the contexts we live in. That's what catholicity means.

If they will not have us, because of our choice to do what we think the Spirit is calling for us to do anyway, then this is very sad. I do not think we are to be blamed or need to accept full responsibility for the loss of communion, but we ought to recognize and lament this loss.

I think we need to find a way forward that seeks the maximum degree of Christian unity possible -- not a way that makes possible and comfortable lesser such relationships.

I suggest that one way for us to approach the future -- inside the Episcopal Church as well as in relation to other Anglican churches -- is to redouble our commitments to what we think we are all about any way.

As such, I would like to see an intentional focus on that which we are truly passionately excited about. And it would be my hope that this would be more than talk of programs, or agendas, or single-issue advocacy groups, or things which do not keep the main thing the main thing.

Notably, I'd like to see a bit more cohesiveness and discipline in a church which loves to talk about its canons and how the General Convention is our topmost authority. As such, I'd like to see more folks abiding by the language and rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer that we have. More teaching and proclamation about all the elements of the Baptismal Covenant -- and not merely it's last line regarding the dignity of every human being. More teaching about why salvation is BOTH individual and corporate. More teaching about why Jesus Christ is the second person of the Holy Trinity, and therefore, as fully divine, is the incarnate presence of the God who is the unique creator, unique redeemer, and unique sustainer of the world. If he's the Son of God made flesh -- then friends -- of course he's the way, the truth and the light. Pluralism and respectfulness of other faith traditions does not require avoiding, regretting or denying that our most primary tenet is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all. I'm frankly astonished that anybody thinks we need to refrain from making our core proclamation in pluralistic conversation with other faiths -- because the other partners in that conversation do not. We do not honor the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and so forth with whom we are in conversation when we backpedal on our core convictions. They say what they believe -- and we need not be offended; so why should we not do the same?

We need to tell ourselves the truth about our institutional reality: We Are Shrinking. When we lose membership, we shrink. Simple as that. It doesn't matter if we lose people because of lower birth rates, or whathaveyou. Our growth and life depends on including and serving human beings. Nearly every diocese lost membership in the past few years -- and yet the populations of their localities mostly did not decline. What's up?

It's NOT the economy. It's NOT about birthrates. (And, as Diana Butler Bass has argued, it's not necessarily about liberalism either.)

Including and serving people in the name of the Son of God who is Lord of All is our only purpose. Welcoming people, offering them not merely an affirmation that "Questions are OK" but actually providing a few cosmic and beautiful answers (like the Gospel), preaching, singing, working with youth and their families well, caring for people pastorally, feeding, healing, teaching about God in Christ, etc. The basic practices of intentional Christian community are what we are supposed to do, and when we do them, almost certainly, we grow.

I for one welcome a future when we stop fighting over the culture wars and start working together over the peace of God which passes all understanding in Jesus Christ.

Will there ever be a time when leading Episcopalians stop saying that decline is no big deal, that church growth is somehow bad, that strong Christ-centered kerygma is 'offensive'? Honestly. I'd love it if the next General Convention had a single-issue advocacy group with whom some 70% of the deputies were fully in agreement with on the basic issues that we need to get down the basics of preaching and living the full content of the Baptismal Covenant with the idea that God wants us to include and serve MORE people than we are currently including and serving.

The real elephant in the room, in my view, is this: We Are Shrinking. When General Convention passes resolutions which affirm this -- then I will believe we are being authentic in telling ourselves and the world, "This is who we are, we are shrinking, but we want to start growing instead."

When something shrinks for long enough -- it doesn't really matter how vital it thinks it is.

Old Anglican Centrist Site

2009-07-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

I am trying to rework this thing, as I get ready for my August break from blogging.

Go here for old stuff.