Bill's Faith Matters blog

May 31-June 1, 2008, weekend

GOD SLIPPING IN NORTH POLL

A new survey shows that almost one-fourth of Canadians say they don't believe in God. What's the right term for such folks, Canatheists?

* * *

THE BLAIR FAITH PROJECT

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is on a campaign to make sure religion is used to unify and improve the world, not divide it. In fact, he's now created the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Do you think this will have more -- or less -- appeal because it's coming from a politician and not from some member of the clergy, for instance?

* * *

MORE INTERFAITH OPPORTUNITIES

As regular readers of this blog and my column know, I'm a strong advocate for interfaith dialogue. But I try to make it clear that I think the goal should be mutual understanding. Which means the goal should not be conversion -- at least that should not be the primary goal; if conversion somehow happens because of this kind of dialogue, fine.

There are lots of ways these days that interfaith connections are happening, and Martin Marty, one of the best observers of religious trends in the country, has taken note of one of them involving seminaries.

Marty is pointing out examples of people of one faith studying at the seminaries of other faiths. Again, the goal is not to learn the enemy's secrets so as to destroy an opponent, nor is it to modify one's own faith in order to be acceptable to another's.

Rather, it is learning in detail about another faith so as to avoid the kind of misunderstanding that leads to hatred and even violence. Beyond that, it's learning how to work and live together in harmony.

As Marty points out in this peace, the truths of one religion aren't compromised when this kind of interaction happens in healthy ways.

I'm not sure why this kind of cross-connecting is so threatening to some people. Perhaps they simply aren't sure about their own faith and worry that they'll abandon it.

* * *

P.S.: Westport Presbyterian Church of Kansas City has created a nice niche for itself in the area of the arts with its Westport Center for the Arts, and on Sunday, June 15, it will be the site of what promises to be a wonderful concert you might want to attend. It's a "Concert of Hope & Peace."

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: The Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., is celebrating its first anniversary. Have you been yet? Me either. But lots of folks have.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here. (My Saturday column this weekend is about the ways the media cover religion.)

May 30, 2008

CROSSING THE EVANGELIZING LINE?

When is it appropriate to try to convert someone from one religion to another? In Dearborn, Mich., which has a large Muslim population, a high school wrestling coach has lost his job because of allegations that he sought to convert Muslim students to Christianity. He says he wasn't doing it on school time. Seems to me it's a little like dating an employee, in the sense that he was someone of authority to students even when not specifically acting as a coach. If Muslim youngsters expressed an interest in knowing more about Christianity, this coach should have referred them to someone else to learn. Otherwise, intended or not, it seems like coercion.

* * *

WHY ISN'T THIS A CHRISTIAN SACRAMENT?

GREENVILLE, ILL. -- I have a question today for Christians. Others, of course, are welcome to listen -- and chime -- in, but it may not mean a lot to non-Christians.

Why isn't foot-washing a sacrament?

I've always thought it fit the requirements. So I've never understood why it failed to make the cut.

I'll say more about that in a minute, but I want you to know about the art you see here. I spent a night this week here in Greenville (east of St. Louis), where my parents lived for a few years in the early 1940s. In fact, I think I was conceived here, but I'd rather not think about that.

While wandering around the campus of Greenville College, I found this really lovely sculpture of Jesus washing the feet of Peter. It's called "Divine Servant," and is by artist Max Grenier Jr. The college is a Christian liberal arts college affiliated with the Free Methodist denomination.

One place you can find the story of Jesus washing the feet of Peter and other disciples is in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John.

Anyway, most Protestant churches say there are two sacraments, Baptism and Holy Communion. Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions, by contrast, raise the number to seven. Click here for a brief explanation of them.

Because the Bible does not provide a definition of what a sacrament is, you'll find various descriptions. I want to quote a theologian I've found quite helpful in my own Reformed Tradition (read Presbyterian) of Protestant Christianity, Daniel L. Migliore, a Princeton Theological Seminary teacher, whose book, Faith Seeking Understanding, I've found a reliable explanation of the Reformed faith. Here's something he says in that book:

"Sacraments are 'visible words,' (Migliore is quoting Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson here) embodiments of grace, enacted testimonies to the love of God in Jesus Christ.

"An often-repeated definition of sacraments was formulated by Augustine, who called them 'visible signs of an invisible grace.' The definition offered by the Westminster Shorter Catechism is much more specific: A sacrament is 'a holy ordinance instituted by Christ wherein by visible signs Chrst and the benefits of the new covenant are represented, sealed and applied to believers.'"

Well, if sacraments are to be visible signs of grace instituted by Christ, someone please tell me why foot-washing doesn't qualify.

* * *

P.S.: The Deseret News in Salt Lake City has provided this forum for readers to respond to the Texas Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that the state had overstepped its bounds in removing children from the FLDS complex. Some of the comments were left before the ruling, but it's quite a cross-section of sentiment. Do you agree with the court?

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, with Rainy Day Books, is presenting a program on Darfur at 7 p.m. June 12 at Unity Temple on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. The speaker will be John Prendergast, co-author with actor Don Cheadle, of Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. 

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here. (My column tomorrow will be about the ways the media cover religion.)

May 29, 2008

LET'S TAPE THIS MEETING

Iran's strange president says he wants to meet with the pope. What's he want to tell Benedict XVI? That the Holocaust didn't happen? That he wouldn't know a nuke if one dropped on his toe?

* * *

THE SEX OF GOD

A week and half or so ago here on the blog I posted an item that led to an interesting discussion about whether God was male, female, both, neither or something else.

I want to return to that subject today just to offer some wider perspectives than I was able to at the time.

First, I want to link you to some information about a Hindu understanding of God as neither male nor female. Each religious tradition, of course, struggles with such questions in its own way, but I think the Hindu approach might help all of us understand that this question is not limited to the Abrahamic faiths.

Next, click here for a discussion of God's sex from the perspective of agnosticism, atheism or at least philosophical theism. Apparently even people who don't believe in God argue about divine sexuality. How cool is that?

Now, on the WikiAnswers site, where people pose questions and others -- some qualified, some not, I gather -- answer them, there is this discussion of whether God is male or female. I sort of like it when theology is left to the untrained in the sense that sometimes, from the mouths of babes, comes some really interesting drippy Pablum.

A somewhat similar discussion can be found here on Yahoo Answers.

My own view, formed in the crucible of Reformed Tradition Christian theology, is that God is beyond sex. God, rather, is spirit. As John 4:24 says, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth." In this case, I believe, the "him" is simply a pronoun of convenience, not only indicating maleness. Certainly in some translations, much of the language describing God is masculine. Some of it is that way even when the original Greek or Hebrew is more gender-neutral. And some of it accurately reflects masculine language in the original.

But I think any vision of God as strictly male or strictly female is a distortion leading to a limited view of God and leading to social consequences that can be harmful.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 28, 2008

A RELIGION-POLITICS ANALYSIS

The Christian Science Monitor, in this piece, offers a good look at whether it's been a plus, minus or something in between for presidential politics to focus so much on religion this year. On the whole, I prefer frank talk about religious faith from candidates, but only if it tells potential voters how a candidate's faith may affect his or her public policy decisions. Sometimes things have gone way beyond that in this race.

* * *

WHAT WERE PEOPLE THINKING (TIMES FIVE)?

I want to continue our semi-theme this week of looking at some historical events that say something about our religious values -- sometimes something derogatory.

On this date in 1934, the Dionne quintuplets (pictured here) were born in Canada. For some reason, even though they were born 11 years before I was, I grew up hearing a lot about them. But apparently I had forgotten how sad and abused their lives became.

What happened, essentially, was that they were not treated with the respect and dignity that almost any religion insists must be given to all individuals.

The government of Ontario took the children from their Catholic parents (their father apparently had talked of exhibiting them for money) and made them wards of the state. The five sisters then were moved to a specially built hospital named Quintland, near their home, and they became a huge tourist attraction. As the rather dated CNN piece to which I've linked you rightly notes, the quints became a freak show.

Nine years later, the girls finally were returned to their parents, with whom they lived until age 18. After that, they had only irregular contact with their parents. Two of the girls died rather young.

This site, which offers updates on the quints, says only two of them remain alive, Annette and Cecile. And this U.C.-Davis site offers some more information.

Of course, there have been countless multiple births since then and I think we've gotten past the sort of gross exploitation that we saw with the Dionne quints, but that still doesn't explain to me how they could have been treated not as humans -- as required by foundational human and religious values -- but as commodities.

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 27, 2008

JOHNNY (CALVIN), WE HARDLY KNEW YE

As I did yesterday, I want to turn again today to the historical calendar to take note of the fact that Protestant Reformer John Calvin (depicted here) died on this date in 1564.

Calvin -- sometimes wrong, often misunderstood and frequently plagued by overly zealous followers who, unlike Calvin, became Hyper-Calvinists -- is the primary spiritual founder of what's known as the Reformed Tradition of Christianity, in which, as a Presbyterian, I locate myself.

In 1536, Calvin published his first version of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he revised five times in his life, making it grow from six chapters to 79. It became, in effect, the Protestant guide for the Reformation that Martin Luther had started. But Calvin, a French native, and Luther, a German, took different paths in the Reformation.

I keep a copy of Calvin's Institutes on the shelf to the right of my desk in my home office. It runs to more than 1,200 pages in a translation by Henry Beveridge, and I find it's actually fascinating from time to time to drag it down and see what old Calvin has to say about this or that.

Plus, he's kind of fun to read. Just now, for instance, I randomly opened the book to Chapter IX of Book One and found this lead sentence: "Those who, rejecting Scripture, imagine that they have some peculiar way of penetrating to God, are to be deemed not so much under the influence of error as madness."

See? You rarely have to wonder what Calvin thinks about things.

Well, I'm guessing -- perhaps wildly -- that only 1 percent of the people in pews of Reformed churches today could, when pressed, articulate a coherent explanation of "predestination" or "double predestination," for which Calvin is famous. And I'm also guessing that of those who can, maybe only 1 percent actually agree with Calvin in all aspects of his thinking on these subjects.

Still, Calvin remains a potently influential figure in religious history, and if you had been around 444 years ago today in Western Europe, you'd soon have known of -- and either mourned or cheered -- his demise.

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 26, 2008

A DATE ABOUT WHICH NOT TO CHEER

This is one of those dates in history that can be instructive but that is not worth any kind of celebration.

It was on this date in 1647 that Massachusetts enacted a law forbidding any Jesuits or other Roman Catholic priests from entering territory under Puritan control.

First offenses were to be punished with banishment. After that, the penalty was to be execution.

Ah, the joys of theocracy -- or some version of it, anyway.

The anti-Catholic feeling among America's first Protestant immigrants was pretty intense, and it tended to issue in these kinds of actions. Eventually, Catholics found haven in Maryland, but the stain of anti-Catholicism has continued in many ways until modern times.

Much of the information on the page to which I've linked you above came from a book called Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People, by Thomas H. O'Connor.

If this subject interests you, that's no doubt a good resource on which to draw.

Can you imagine any state today that might adopt anything close to such a hostile law against adherents of any religion?

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 24-25, 2008, weekend

UNDERSTANDING HAGEE

A newspaper in Israel has published this interview with a John Hagee staff member to unpack some of the Hagee thinking that finally led John McCain to reject the pastor's support.

* * *

DID GOD KNOW THIS WOULD HAPPEN?

A Reform rabbi, in this Washington Post blog entry, talks about what John McCain's rejection of the Rev. John Hagee's support means. The world of religion and politics ain't beanbag, folks.

* * *

PRAY TELL, WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THIS?

The other day I attended an event sponsored by the Interfaith Coalition Against Bigotry. I've written about the Kansas City group's efforts in my Saturday column this weekend.

The event featured public prayers by people from these faith traditions: Buddhism, Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints), Baha'ism, Sikhism, Roman Catholicism and Universalist Unitarianism.

One of the people who prayed said she was struck by "the commonality of our spirit of prayer."

And, indeed, many of the descriptions of God used and many of the petitions were quite similar, no matter which faith the person saying the prayer came from.

Still, I came away wondering whether God is cheered by this kind of interfaith harmony or whether this is just something people do because they draw strength from knowing that people from religious paths different from their own can and do share some kind of common ground with them when it comes to addressing God.

I obviously don't know how God reacts to such events. But I find that what speaks most to me about them is the sense of humility people begin to be aware of and to share when presuming to address the infinite creator of the universe.

In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard, complains about a lack of humility among Christians who gather for worship and prayer:

"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?. . .The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."

So, yes, I found some of the prayers offered at this interfaith gathering to be rather blithely invoked, without enough sense of the utter holiness of God. But mostly I found a gentle sense of humility about approaching the divine. And whether the prayers make any difference in the struggle against bigotry, at least they served to tell all of us there that we should be humble and child-like (not childish) when placing ourselves before the throne of God. I hope others took something similar from the experience.

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here. (I've already told you above what my column is about this weekend, so now's a good time to go read it.)

May 23, 2008

HOW CHRISTIANITY SURVIVED IN CHINA

With the Beijing Olympics coming, lots of thoughts are turning to China and what sort of country it is these days. We know that its record of protecting religious freedom for its citizens has been abysmal, as the annual report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom makes clear. (In this report, scroll down to Page 170 for China.) (As of Friday afternoon, the whole USCIRF Web site was down.)

"The Chinese government," says the USCIRF, "continues to engage in systematic and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief."

China's treatment of Tibet this year stands out as important evidence of this charge.

And yet it's also true that there's been something of a loosening of strictures on religious practice in China in recent years and, at least partly as a result, Christianity is growing quickly there. Or, as the lead article in the new issue of Christian History & Biography Magazine reports, it's "growing incredibly rapidly."

This publication has devoted this issue to how the church in China survived through the darkest days of Communism and began to thrive in recent years. The link I've given you will give you a sense of what's in the issue but not all the content. But you can order a copy of the print edition online.

There are, today, about 50 million to 60 million Protestants and 12 million to 14 million Catholics in China, the magazine estimates. And there are, of course, registered and unregistered churches, the former being the ones the state can control more tightly.

The missionary movement, for all the serious mistakes it made, planted a church that has never died, despite all the forces working against it under Communism. If you'd like a good rundown on how all of this happened, this issue of the magazine is an excellent place to start.

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 22, 2008

GETTING HIGH ON SCRIPTURE?

Drug-busting agents in the United Kingdom conducted a raid on a house and found a stash of drugs inside a hollowed-out Bible, this report says. Was the goal holy smokes?

* * *

STRUGGLING FOR THE ANGLICAN SOUL

All of us who follow developments in the world of faith have been engaged by the internal dispute in the Episcopal Church -- and the wider Anglican Communion -- that erupted in sharper ways with the consecration of Gene Robinson (pictured here), an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

It has been an enlightening, if painful, episode in the life of this church, and a considerable amount of angst has bubbled to the surface as individual members -- and in some cases whole congregations and dioceses -- have concluded that they cannot remain in a church that is willing to be led by a man they believe is violating the rules of scripture so blatantly.

Others have sought to convince such people that the church is -- and should be -- leading the culture in treating all people, regardless of sexual orientation, with love and respect and equality. (While respecting the opinions of the first group, I favor the position of the second group, though I'm a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian.)

Robinson himself has written about all of this in his new book, which I wrote about in my most recent blog book column in April.

I want to commend to you the cover story in the new (June) issue of Harper's magazine, "Turning Away From Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church," by Garret Keizer, a contributing Harper's editor who also has served as an "indigenous priest" in the Episcopal church. You must be a subscriber to the print edition to get access to the full text of the piece online to which I've linked you. But it's worth the price of the magazine to pick up this issue.

In this article, Keizer expresses some of the same thoughts that I wrote about a week or two ago in this blog post. I said there that these sexuality issues are terribly important but they are sucking energy out of the church that should be going to doing ministry for people in need.

Keizer puts it this way:

"How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and envrionmental tape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson. Or, on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson himself."

At the end of the piece, Keizer imagines that he's back in the pulpit, "but only three words will come out of me, and they are not even my words. I hear them all the time in this church. . . They blaze from me and at me, relentlessly in both directions, like lights on the M-3 on a rainy night until I am driving blind with shame and with rage. Feed my sheep."

Faith communities that tear themselves apart over what, finally, are secondary matters, and in the process diminish the good work they should be doing to love their neighbors get it all wrong. Keizer, with sympathy for all sides in this struggle, issues a clear call to repent and return to authentic ministry. 

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.

May 22, 2008

STRUGGLING FOR THE ANGLICAN SOUL

All of us who follow developments in the world of faith have been engaged by the internal dispute in the Episcopal Church -- and the wider Anglican Communion -- that erupted in sharper ways with the consecration of Gene Robinson (pictured here), an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

It has been an enlightening, if painful, episode in the life of this church, and a considerable amount of angst has bubbled to the surface as individual members -- and in some cases whole congregations and dioceses -- have concluded that they cannot remain in a church that is willing to be led by a man they believe is violating the rules of scripture so blatantly.

Others have sought to convince such people that the church is -- and should be -- leading the culture in treating all people, regardless of sexual orientation, with love and respect and equality. (While respecting the opinions of the first group, I favor the position of the second group, though I'm a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian.)

Robinson himself has written about all of this in his new book, which I wrote about in my most recent blog book column in April.

I want to commend to you the cover story in the new (June) issue of Harper's magazine, "Turning Away From Jesus: Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church," by Garret Keizer, a contributing Harper's editor who also has served as an "indigenous priest" in the Episcopal church. You must be a subscriber to the print edition to get access to the full text of the piece online to which I've linked you. But it's worth the price of the magazine to pick up this issue.

In this article, Keizer expresses some of the same thoughts that I wrote about a week or two ago in this blog post. I said there that these sexuality issues are terribly important but they are sucking energy out of the church that should be going to doing ministry for people in need.

Keizer puts it this way:

"How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and envrionmental tape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson. Or, on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson himself."

At the end of the piece, Keizer imagines that he's back in the pulpit, "but only three words will come out of me, and they are not even my words. I hear them all the time in this church. . . They blaze from me and at me, relentlessly in both directions, like lights on the M-3 on a rainy night until I am driving blind with shame and with rage. Feed my sheep."

Faith communities that tear themselves apart over what, finally, are secondary matters, and in the process diminish the good work they should be doing to love their neighbors get it all wrong. Keizer, with sympathy for all sides in this struggle, issues a clear call to repent and return to authentic ministry. 

* * *

P.S.: Until May 29, my Internet access will be sporadic and limited, which means it may take quite a long time for me to get your comments posted. Keep 'em coming and eventually they will see the light of day.

* * *

ANOTHER P.S.: I'm teaching a week-long seminar July 7-13 at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico on writing your own spiritual autobiography. See the "Check this out" section on the right side of this page and click on the Ghost Ranch class item. Time to make sure you have a spot in the class is running out, so do it soon.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here.