Bill's Faith Matters blog

Global Christianity's shifts: 12-20-11

What an incredible difference a century makes. In 1910, according to a new study on global Christianity, there were about 600 million Christians in the world, two-thirds of them living in Europe.

One hundred years later there are nearly 2.2 billion Christians on the globe but only about one-fourth of them live in Europe.

"Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population" was released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The changes it describes over the last 10 decades are simply breath-taking.

Before offering some thoughts on what these changes might mean, I want to look at a few highlights from the report:

* About 37 percent of the global Christian population today lives in the Americas. That's up nearly 10 percentage points from 1910.

* Christianity has exploded across sub-Saharan Africa. In 1910, only 1.4 percent of the world's Christians lived there. Now almost a quarter all of Christians do.

* In that same period, the percentage of Christians living in the Asia-Pacific region of the world has gone from 4.5 percent to 13.1.

* Christians in 1910 made up just over one-third of the world's population. That figure still is roughly the same today, give or take a percentage point or three. As the Pew Forum's associate director of research, Alan Cooperman, noted to journalists in a conference call I participated in yesterday, "In absolute terms, it's a picture of relative stability."

* Today there are more Christians in the U.S. -- almost 247 million -- than any other country. The next three on the list are Brazil, Mexico and Russia.

The Executive Summary of the new study says that it "is based primarily on a country-by-country analysis of about 2,400 data sources, including censuses and nationally representative population surveys. For some countries, such as China, the Pew Forum’s estimates also take into account statistics from church groups, government reports and other sources."

In the conference call for press yesterday, Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, noted that among the many changes in Christianity over a century, "Protestantism has changed dramatically. We pick this up, for instance, in the United States, where obviously we've done the most polling on this. (There) people's identification with particular denominations has become more tenuous. . ."

Much of the growth of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. is coming in independent churches, meaning Protestantism in the U.S. is becoming "post-denominational," Lugo said.

Well, there's much more in the study, and you are free to dig through it, which will take you a bit of time. The embargoed copy I worked from to prepare this report ran to 130 pages.

Is there anything shocking about this report? In broad sweep, no, though seeing the 100-year comparison brings all these changes home in ways we may not have experienced before.

As Conrad Hackett, a primary researcher for this study, noted yesterday, "One thing that I didn't anticipate going into this study is just the fact that two out of three countries and territories in the world have majority Christian populations. And furthermore, 90 percent of all Christians live in a country that has a Christian majority. That's not something I expected."

But lots of scholars have been giving us the broad outlines of these changes for some time. The best known relatively recent books have come from Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom) and Mark Noll (The New Shape of World Christianity). They and others have made the point that the growth of Christianity has been happening in the Southern Hemisphere and Asia and that North American and European Christianity are very much minority voices in the faith now.

Similarly, John L. Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter has looked at these trends as they affect Catholics and analyzed them in his book The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church.

None of the information in this new study suggests what the global Christian population will look like in the future, though the Pew Forum folks are working on those projections, which should be released next year or in 2013. Previous projections about Islam suggest that religion will grow more quickly than the general population in the decades ahead.

What all of these and similar studies and analyses tell me is that what we used to think of as Christendom -- the intermingling of the faith with the culture and the state -- is dead or dying. That's less true in the U.S. than in Canada or Europe but it nonetheless seems an unstoppable trend. More, it is good for the church. It allows the church to be the church and not a kind of ruler or dictator of political, social and economic practices.

The church needs to be free to exercise its prophetic voice, to point out what is wrong in the world, what has run morally amok, and what to do about it.

That's hard to do when you run the world.

It would be foolish to predict the shape of global Christianity in 2110. But at least for the next decade or two the trends we've seen in recent years of growth in Africa and Asia can be expected to continue. As I say, though, we should know more about that from the Pew Forum folks in a year or so.

Beyond that, as we Christians are wont to say, who knows where the Holy Spirit of God will be moving and how people will respond?

Finally, when considering global estimates of adherents of any religion, I think it's helpful to keep in mind a distinction that author Rodney Stark draws in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, which I reviewed here. He notes there that there may be 2.2 billion Christians on the planet, but only about 1.5 billion of them can be considered active participants in the religion. And much the same thing is true for other religions, too.

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IS B-16 JUST POOPED?

Observers are noting that Pope Benedict XVI seems worn out, and it is raising questions about whether and when popes should resign. It has always struck me as odd that popes think they need to stay on the job until their dead.

A survivor's reward: 12-19-11

I remember the first time Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn and I went to Maria Devinki's house to interview her for our book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.

I was a little nervous. Maria (pictured here), now of blessed memory, was our first interview and the only person in the Kansas City area then who met our criteria for the book: A Jew who survived the Holocaust in Poland because of help from a non-Jew.

She invited us to sit at a dining table and, elegant and proper, finally parked herself and invited our questions. But first she had something to say: “Just to make it short and sweet before we go any farther, that generation, my generation, will never forgive."

Whatever my personal beliefs about forgiveness, I knew I had no standing to challenge this phenomenal woman who had, among other things, spent 27 months living under the floor of barns in Poland to keep the Germans from murdering her, as they murdered some six million other Jews in World War II.

Maria was an amazing presence. She knew who she was and was sure of herself without being arrogant. I grew to be in awe of Maria Devinki. And I always felt it an honor to be in her presence, whether we just happened to show up at the same gathering or whether she was a speaker at our book launch events in 2009 at our request.

She not only foiled Hitler's plan for her death, she lived to be 91 and a half years old and to be a raging success at life over and over and over, as you can see by reading the obituary to which I've linked you. And not just a business success -- though surely that -- but a success at doing what's right.

At her funeral the other day, I listened to her rabbi, her son and her grandsons speak about this force of nature, Maria. And, of course, I knew that it was because a non-Jew had helped to save Maria, her husband Fred, Maria's mother and others that Maria's son (and two daughters), grandchildren and great-grandchildren were even alive.

I hesitate to call Maria's marvelously generous and productive life revenge for what Hitler tried to do to her and did do to so many other Jews. Revenge seems like the wrong word and a diminishment of this woman's life. But in the funeral home chapel that afternoon there was a ringing sense that somehow good had crushed evil, that sweet generosity had stomped all over murderous bigotry.

The DNA of those much-needed traits has been passed on to generations to come, and the world will be a hugely better place because Maria Devinki survived and Hitler did not.

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IN LOVE WITH RELIGION

Just as Maria Devinki was in love with her religion, Judaism, so Rabbi Alan Lurie is -- rather unexpectedly -- in love with religion, too, as he writes engagingly in this piece.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving this year, may I immodestly suggest that you give family members and friends one of my two books that you yourself (surely) already have read: They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, and/or A Gifit of Meaning, a collection of my more serious columns from The Kansas City Star. If you prefer to order directly from the University of Missouri Press, call 800-621-2736. Or if you're in the Kansas City area, see me or Rabbi Cukierkorn for the first book. Or buy yourself and your significant other an April Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel, led by me, Rabbi Cukierkorn and Father Gar Demo. For details, click here.

Grasping the God particle: 12-17/18-11

I am struck by the arrival of the Advent season, when Christians prepare to celebrate the incarnation -- God coming in human form -- at the same time that scientists seem to be on the verge of finding the illusive subatomic "God particle," or Higgs boson.

For one scientist's idea on what finding the Higgs boson might mean, click here.

The Christian doctrine of the incarnation is both simple and complicated, not unlike quantum physics. The doctrine proposes that the eternal God of all creation entered human history at a particular time and place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

What God demonstrated in doing this was the inexplicable intersection of infinity with finitude, of timelessness with time, of spirit with matter. Theologians use the word kenosis to point to God's pouring out of God's own self into human flesh. The kenotic event of the incarnation required a self-emptying God, which is to say a movement of God into the material world or God giving away God's own Godness, though, of course, traditional Christian theology asserts that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine. And now you begin to see the paradoxical, counter-intuitive nature of the incarnation and its relationship in that way to modern science.

But what exactly is the material world into which God emptied God's own self? What makes it up? How does it hold together? These are the questions scientists have been asking for a long time, and over the years they've been making some progress in finding answers.

But it seems that the more answers they find the more questions they have. Over the years we have moved from Aristotelian science (with its idea that the world is divided into "accidents," meaning the color, texture, look of matter, and "substance," meaning the core essence of matter) to Newtonian science (with its precise measurements of mass and speed and thus its predictability) to Einsteinian science (with its understandings of gravity as the bender of space and time) to post-Einsteinian science (with mysteries so deep that it required Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle even as a place to start explaining it).

The subatomic world has become so counter-intuitive, as it's described by scientists, that language seems inadequate to contain it. So we dream up illustrations like Schrodinger's Cat.

All of this is simply to say that the material world God entered in the incarnation is, in some ways, a reflection of God's own self in that it is both simple and complicated. We can make broad statements about that world and about God that seem to be true, but the deeper we dig to understand the details the less we seem to know. In fact, in the end I think it's arrogant to say anything at all about God, and yet we all seem incapable for being silent on the subject. Me especially.

We are at a similar point in our understanding of the creation. We can and must continue our quest to grasp its essential nature and its rules, but we should not, in the end, be surprised if understanding it remains beyond our abilities, in just the way that God remains beyond our grasp and always will.

After I wrote what's above, I found that columnist Michael Gerson had some insights on this subject worth passing along in this piece, in which he makes some good points about "the wild improbability of the universe" and how that should lead us to a sense of wonder.

(By the way, the illustration here today from Discovery Magazine is just someone's idea of what the Higgs boson might look like because, of course, we haven't found it yet.)

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AN ATHEIST ENTERS THE ETERNAL MYSTERY

Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous of the so-called New Atheists, has died of cancer at age 62, and people are analyzing his life and his writing style. He was a worthy intellectual duelist. But I found it sort of sad that he was so interested in proving that among the many gods in whom people have believed across the course of history, none of them was worthy enough for him.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving this year, may I immodestly suggest that you give family members and friends one of my two books that you yourself (surely) already have read: They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, and/or A Gifit of Meaning, a collection of my more serious columns from The Kansas City Star. If you prefer to order directly from the University of Missouri Press, call 800-621-2736. Or if you're in the Kansas City area, see me or Rabbi Cukierkorn for the first book. Or buy yourself and your significant other an April Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel, led by me, Rabbi Cukierkorn and Father Gar Demo. For details, click here.

Playing the Shari'a card: 12-16-11

Another way in which religion will -- and this time should -- play a role in the upcoming presidential election is that voters need to figure out whether the person for whom they vote will be a uniter or a divider in a time when we need a uniter.

As I've said before, if the call to Americans of the 20th Century was to get racial harmony right, the call of this century is to get religious harmony right, especially as the American religous landscape continues to get more diverse.

So let's look at a bad example of what I'm talking about. Newt Gingrich (pictured here).

As Michael Gerson of The Washington Post makes abundantly clear in this good piece, Gingrich is perfectly willing to say outlandish, anti-Islamic stuff just to garner electoral support from bigots.

Gingrich is especially outrageous when it comes to describing the meaning and implications of Shari'a, often inadequately translated as Islamic law.

It is, he says, "a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world as we know it.”

Oh, puh-leeze.

If Gingrich were serious about understanding Shari'a and what it really means for Americans and the world, he'd spend some time with a monumental new book from a University of Kansas law professor that I wrote about a few months ago here and here. It's Understanding Islamic Law (Shari'a), by Raj Bhala.

If Gingrich were to understand what this book clearly shows, he'd know that Shari'a is dangerous only in the hands of violent extremists, in whose hands everything is dangerous. And he'd quit fomenting hatred by saying hateful stuff.

I especially liked Gerson's conclusion: "As president, Gingrich would be forced to repudiate his previous views out of strategic necessity. But those views demonstrate a disturbing tendency: the passionate embrace of shallow ideas."

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WISDOM FROM THE FOUNDERS

As we move toward the official opening of the presidential primary (and caucus) season, it might be a good idea to remind ourselves of the vision our Founding Fathers had about religious tolerance. This excellent analysis in The Economist is a great place to start. If you want a fuller treatment that gets it right, I recommend So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, by the late Forrest Church.

Hitting highs and Lowe's: 12-15-11

Well, the Lowe's chain of stores has taken lots and lots of criticism (along with a few misguided cheers) this week for its boneheaded decision to pull its advertising from a reality TV show called "All-American Muslim."

I haven't watched the show, but what I've read about it tells me it's an effort to help people understand how American Muslims are negotiating the American culture and should not be feared.

Clearly Lowe's heard from people who thought its advertising on this show was somehow anti-American. So the company elected to withdraw that advertising from the program. Surely a big company like Lowe's doesn't want to offend bigots and ignoramuses.

So Lowe's posted a note on its Facebook page saying, in part, "Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance."

To "respectfully defer" to Islamophobes is to honor their prejudices and fears. To "pull our advertising on this program" is to back up that misplaced honor with what Lowe's really cares about, which is money. As you may know, Lowe's caved in to pressure from the Florida Family Association, which called the TV series "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values." Who even knows what those words mean, though clearly they represent a gross misunderstanding of traditional Islam.

Many people and groups have been weighing in on this, including the Rev. Dr. Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Seminary in New York, who issued this statement: "American companies that are rumored to have pulled their ads from ‘All-American Muslim,' should immediately tell their consumers whether they — like Lowe's — have also caved into these bigoted demands, or if they are standing up for an America where people of all faiths and identities can flourish."

Yes, of course, a company is free to decide where to advertise and where not to. But its choices can reveal a lot about its core values.

What I most dislike about these kinds of corporate cave-ins and bad decisions (think BP and the oil spill) is that they hurt innocent employees who had nothing to do with the numbskull choice but who now may suffer if, in fact, people carry through on their understandable threat not to shop there any more.

I hope Lowe's decision went against the advice about this given by its advertising and p.r. people. If not, this is far from the last time Lowe's will foul things up this badly.

By the way, for a good overview of this whole matter, click here for a New Yorker piece about it.

(The photo here today shows the "All-American Muslim" characters Nader, Nawal and baby Naseem.)

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A MIDDLE EASTERN DEATH

There's more distressing change in the Holy Land -- the Dead Sea is really dying. But as far as I know, the Dead Sea Scrolls are still very much alive.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving this year, may I immodestly suggest that you give family members and friends one of my two books that you yourself (surely) already have read: They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, and/or A Gifit of Meaning, a collection of my more serious columns from The Kansas City Star. If you prefer to order directly from the University of Missouri Press, call 800-621-2736. Or if you're in the Kansas City area, see me or Rabbi Cukierkorn for the first book. Or buy yourself and your significant other an April Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel, led by me, Rabbi Cukierkorn and Father Gar Demo. For details, click here.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column now is online. To read it, click here.

Faiths building together: 12-14-11

The good interfaith work that began in 2007 at Kansas City's branch of Habitat for Humanity is continuing today with the construction of the third "House That Abraham Builds."

It's a Christian-Jewish-Muslim joint project. The latest house is taking shape on Bellefontaine near 25th and should be complete before spring.

I stopped by the site the other day and had a conversation with Father Jason Lewis, rector of St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church, (it's in Loch Lloyd on the south edge of the KC metro area) who was accompanied by a number of his parishioners pounding nails and laying down roofing.

I asked him why his congregation is taking part in this work. As hammers pounded through our words, he said:

"I think it's important for all three faiths to come together to build something, to act in compassion with one another, as opposed to emphasizing what separates us but to emphasize what unifies us.

"We all share a common social justice commitment, that God benefits the poor, has a preference for the poor, so why not emphasize that?"

I asked him whether this work thus far has resulted in any long-term friendships or connections between people of different faiths.

"You know," he said, "I'm hoping. What I'm really looking forward to are some shared worship experiences." Indeed, one of the lessons about interfaith dialogue and connections is that they take time and a long-term commitment. It's helpful to work together on projects such as a Habitat house, but more is required if Muslims, Jews and Christians are to get to know each other in deep ways.

If you want more details about how this project came about and who's involved, The Catholic Key, Kansas City's diocesan newspaper, did this article about this project earlier this year when ground was broken.

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CHRISTMAS WITH AN EASTERN RELIGION PATINA

Speaking of faiths connecting in various ways, the Self-Realization Fellowship is promoting a Christmas message called "Let Us Rejoice" by SRF's late founder, Paramahansa Yogananda.

This is an excerpt is from The Second Coming of Christ by him.

(Copyright © 2004, Self-Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles. Reprinted with permission.)

Let us make this Christmas a real celebration of the birth of the holy child by striving to realize the consciousness which he attained.

Let us make this celebration an uplifting and spiritual experience.

Let us not for a moment forget the one whose birthday is being commemorated while in our zeal we go about the joyful and exciting preparation for the happy festivities.

Let us use this occasion as a new impetus to inspirit us on the Christ-path of truth and love.

Let us use it as an opportunity to express the Universal Christ-love for all people and all creatures—exalted and lowly, near and far, large and small, known and unknown.

While we are remembering the physical birth of the baby Christ Jesus, let us realize his eternal loving presence in omnipresent Christ Consciousness, which is always with us no matter where we are or what we are doing.

Let us resolve anew to discipline ourselves—to control our bodies, our minds, and our emotions—and to strive ever toward Christ understanding.

Let us establish the Prince of Peace consciousness as our inner ruler, that we may meet our crosses and tests of life with power, victory, and tranquility.

Let us meditate until we perceive the Infinite Christ reigning in our own hearts.

Let us learn to love those who love us not; and to forgive those who do ill against us.

Let us break all our mental boundaries of color, creed, and nationality, and receive all—even our inanimate and animal brothers—in the endless, all-embracing arms of our Christ Consciousness. This will be a true and fitting celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth.

Let us rejoice and give thanks for this wonderful gift of light and love from the Great Giver.

Peace. Joy. Peace

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THE BOOK CORNER

Following in the Footsteps of Jesus: Meditations on the Gospels for Year B, by José A. Pagola. This small volume contains short but insightful meditations on the weekly lectionary passages of scripture used in the Catholic Church. They are well put and thoughtful. But what makes the book really worth reading is, believe it or not, Professor Pagola's brief Foreward. It cuts right to the heart of Christianity and calls believers back to the center, Jesus Christ. "He is the one who can free us from spiritual inertia and stagnation. He can revive our faith and set our hearts on fire. Without him everything shuts down: the gospel becomes a dead letter; the church is just another organization; religious practice is frozen." Exactly.

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P.S.: It is now possible to register for both of my 2012 Ghost Ranch classes,  "As Death Nears: Preparing for the End of Life," to be taught July 8-15, with Dr. Nancy Tilson-Mallett,  and "The Questions of Forgiveness: Writing Toward Wholeness," to be taught July 16-22, with Douglas Hundley. For more details and to register, click here. And don't wait long. I expect both classes to fill up rather quickly. Ghost Ranch is a beautiful retreat center in northern New Mexico.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column now is online. To read it, click here.

Christmas in art: 12-13-11

The other evening my bride and I stopped by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to have a look at the Rodin exhibit currently featured there in the new Bloch Building (shown in my east-looking photo of it above).

When we finished, we walked through an area in the older building where lots of religious art is displayed, including various representations of what gets shorthanded as "Madonna and Child," depictions of Mary and Jesus.

The Christmas story is, as we know, quite remarkable for the way it combines our love of babies, our need for hope, our attraction to a story about overcoming obstacles, our admiration for parents trying to do the right thing for their child and our openness to the incarnation.

Aside from artwork depicting Jesus himself, it's hard to think of a religious topic that has been explored more often than the relationship between Mary and the baby Jesus -- or just Mary and Jesus of any age.

We somehow want to make this story ours by imagining it in specific detail, even if those details are wildly representational and not especially realistic.

What baby and mother, after all, sit around in a cave or stable with halos over their heads?

Anyway, I found this interesting collection of this kind of Nelson Gallery art at Present Magazine's online site and I invite you to have a look.

And, by the way, this subject interests not just Christians. As you may know, Muslims honor Jesus as their second most important prophet and the Qur'an contains many references to Mary, including an account of what Islam acknowledges was a virgin birth.

(The Madonna and Child painting shown here is an oil on wood panel by Hayne de Bruxelles done about 1454 or 1455.)

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SOME CONTRIBUTORS TO VIOLENCE BETWEEN MUSLIMS

How do we begin to understand the Muslim-against-Muslim violence that grows out of the Shia-Sunni split in Islam. It's complicated and ever-changing, but a Harvard law professor makes some good points about it in this Bloomberg piece. Strong states, he argues, have kept the violence in check. Which does not foretell good things in Syria. Sigh.

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P.S.: It is now possible to register for both of my 2012 Ghost Ranch classes,  "As Death Nears: Preparing for the End of Life," to be taught July 8-15, with Dr. Nancy Tilson-Mallett,  and "The Questions of Forgiveness: Writing Toward Wholeness," to be taught July 16-22, with Douglas Hundley. For more details and to register, click here. And don't wait long. I expect both classes to fill up rather quickly. Ghost Ranch is a beautiful retreat center in northern New Mexico.

Un-Southerning the Baptists? 12-12-11

Yes, names or organizations are important. They can quickly convey a sense of the core of the group, which is why I still don't understand companies that lose their full name in favor of just initials. The name "CHJ Corp." tells me nothing.

But even more important than an organization's name is what it does, what it stands for, what its purpose and mission are. And if changing a name means no change in any of that, I'm not sure what it accomplishes in most cases.

Which is why I find it curious that the Southern Baptist Convention is thinking about renaming itself. Like many Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptists have been losing members in recent years. Apparently some of the leaders think the name of the denomination turns people off.

Indeed, as the story to which I've linked you shows, some people do react negatively to the denomination.

But my guess is that their rejection of it has much more to do with theological positions and with the way the denomination chooses to approach various issues.

For instance, it wouldn't matter to me what you called the denomination, if Baptists are being taught a literalistic, Criswellian view of Scripture, I won't be attracted to the SBC. So it's sort of a truth-in-advertising issue when it comes to changing the denomination's name.

And one of the people quoted in the story gets that:

"Wiley Drake, pastor for 24 years of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif., . . .has vociferously opposed several past attempts to change the name.

"We're very conservative, very biblically based. We always have been known for that," he said. ..."To take 'Southern' out of our name would be to water down our theology ... and hide who were are as Baptists."

So be who you are, Southern Baptists. A change of name won't change your denomination's heart.

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BANNING PRAYER IN SCHOOLS? UH, MAYBE NOT

In this political silly season, some candidates (I'm looking at you, Rick Perry, among others) are again making misstatements about what is permitted in public schools in terms of prayer and other expressions. This good column from the Balitmore Sun sets the record straight. It's not hard to get this right. Candidates get it wrong on purpose for exploitive reasons.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving this year, may I immodestly suggest that you give family members and friends one of my two books that you yourself (surely) already have read: They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, and/or A Gifit of Meaning, a collection of my more serious columns from The Kansas City Star. If you prefer to order directly from the University of Missouri Press, call 800-621-2736. Or if you're in the Kansas City area, see me or Rabbi Cukierkorn for the first book. Or buy yourself and your significant other an April Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel, led by me, Rabbi Cukierkorn and Father Gar Demo. For details, click here.

When God is missing: 12-10/11-11

As I've been helping to lead a three- to five-year planning process for my church, one of the things that has struck me over and over is the need for people to experience some sense of what Jesus meant when he declared that the kingdom, or reign, of God was at hand.

That kingdom clearly has not fully come even now, 2,000 years later. Otherwise, why would there be wars, poverty, homelessness, crime and other sorts of evil in the world? But part of the job of the Christian church universal is to help demonstrate what the kingdom will look like when it finally is made manifest (an act of God, not people).

Which is why you find Christians working for justice, seeking to combat illiteracy, feeding the hungry and on and on -- because when God's reign finally is here, there will be universal justice, there will be no illiteracy, there will be no hunger.

This approach to the faith requires adherents to acknowledge and, in whatever way possible, experience the presence of the living God now. And, as this good piece from the Alban Institute, argues, that's so often what's missing in many churches today. The author, a theology teacher, writes this about a syndrome he calls "rational functionalism," which he says often afflicts the church:

"The primary problem at the core of rational functionalism is that it fails to treat God as a tangible presence. God is treated mostly as an idea or thought, or as an entity we encounter when we die, rather than as a tangible presence in the here and now. There is no sense that God's kingdom is all around us, and that this kingdom is a spiritual reality in which we can experience God directly."

In churches afflicted with rational functionalism (and to some degree it's a disease every church experiences), he writes, "sermons tend to become academic papers read to the people in the pews. They don't address more basic issues: How are we supposed to endure living with pain, loneliness, and turmoil? How are we supposed to find God amid life's darkness? Bible studies focus on the historical, sociological, economic, and cultural issues of the time, with the intent of uncovering what theological message the writer of a Bible passage is trying to impart. They don't address more basic issues: What is God saying to me through the Scripture about how to live my life? What is God saying to me about what God is doing in my life, especially in the face of my suffering? How is God calling me to love others and to reach out to those who are suffering, both near and throughout the world, and who are in need of God's love as well as mine?"

Those are the questions that, in general, any community of faith must help its members answer. Otherwise, why exist?

(The photo here today is one I took at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, where I'll teach two classes this July.)

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HELP SAVE THIS GOOD AGENCY

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom hasn't always gotten everything right since its creation in 1998, but for the most part it's been an effective, important agency that has helped to call attention to religious abuses and oppression around the world. But now Congress may let it shut down because of funding issues. That would be a serious mistake. I hope you'll tell you're member of Congress to get this fixed now, before a Dec. 16 deadline.

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THE BOOK CORNER

 Shattered Soul? Five Pathways to Healing the Spirit after Abuse and Trauma, by Patrick Floeming, with Sue Lauber-Fleming and Vicki Schmidt. As most of us know from following the priest abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, stories of sexual abuse of minors are sickeningly common. And, of course, abuse extends far beyond the church. It happens in many places, leaving damaged victims to try to rebuild a healthy life. Nothing about that rebuilding process is easy, as the authors of this book know, having been abused themselves. The five pathways toward healing outlined in this book are not about psychological restoration. Rather, they are about finding spiritual wholeness. "Abuse of any kind," the authors write, "especially childhood abuse, whether sexual, physical, verbal or emotional, deeply wounds the mind and body of the victim. What sometimes has not been widely acknowledged is that abuse profoundly wounds the survivor's soul as well." But they are clear that victims of abuse need both kinds of healing and that psychological counseling almost always comes first. The suggested pathways toward soul healing are courage, holy anger, grief, forgiveness and transformation, and each is unpacked in ways that should help victims of abuse move toward recovery. There is, however, a bit of fuzziness in places in the book about the difference between soul and spirit. Indeed, at one point they say aren't going to try to define soul at all but then in effect do so, suggesting it refers to "the ineffible, essential, eternal core of light, love and energy deep within and all around us that is most truly and essentially who we are." Never having experienced sexual abuse, either as a child or an adult, I have difficulty knowing how much this book might really help people who have been victims. But because it's written by victims there is a ring of authenticity to it, and my guess is it may well lead to some healing.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving this year, may I immodestly suggest that you give family members and friends one of my two books that you yourself (surely) already have read: They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, and/or A Gifit of Meaning, a collection of my more serious columns from The Kansas City Star. If you prefer to order directly from the University of Missouri Press, call 800-621-2736. Or if you're in the Kansas City area, see me or Rabbi Cukierkorn for the first book. Or buy yourself and your significant other an April Jewish-Christian study trip to Israel, led by me, Rabbi Cukierkorn and Father Gar Demo. For details, click here.

Rethinking Nuremberg: 12-9-11

A few weeks ago here on the blog, I wrote about the Nuremberg trials that were held right after World War II to hold some Nazi officials accountable for their crimes.

I have always sort of accepted the conventional wisdom that these trials were a good and necessary act, a way of getting Germany to acknowledge the horrific nature of the Holocaust.

Well, I still think the trials were necessary, but my thinking recently has been complicated by reading the Folio Society's brand new edition of a book first published in 1978, The Meaning of Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner.

No doubt there is some later scholarship than Haffner's that may challenge his ideas, but I'd like you to consider what he says:

". . .the Nuremberg 'war crimes trials' (were) an unfortunate performance which no one now likes to remember.

"The justice of the victors had many shortcomings: the principal defendant was absent, having removed himself from all earthly justice; the law underlying the trials was retrospective ad hoc law; worst of all, Hitler's real crime, the production-line mass extermination of Poles, Russians, Jews, gypsies and invalids was only a marginal charge, bracketed with compulsory labour and deportation as 'crimes against humanity,' while the principal charges were those of 'crimes against peace,' i.e. war as such, and 'war crimes,' defined as 'violations of the laws and usages of war.' . . .

"Hitler's real crimes, which. . .made the blood run cold in people's veins, now have to be laboriously picked out from among what we might call the normal dirt of war."

 So Haffner's objections are that for the most part the Holocaust was not the central crime being prosecuted in the trials and that by declaring war itself a crime it has made criminals and liers of everyone who has prosecuted any war since -- a case of all emphasis being no emphasis.

The idea that the Nuremberg trials did not focus on the Holocaust as such may not have been original with Haffner and certainly has been repeated since then.

For instance, in Leni Yahil's important 1987 book, The Holocaust: The Fate of Euopean Jewry, she notes about the Nuremberg trials that "the crimes the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews were uncovered in these legal proceedings. . ." And yet she contends that the trials "gave both a public and a legal seal of approval to the civilized world's outrage at the crime of genocide." And that's clearly right.

It wasn't until the 1960s trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel that Jews were able to lay out in a court in excruciating detail the mass murders of Jews that Hitler had ordered and conducted with the help of Eichmann and many others. Which is a primary reason that trial was so important.

For my review of the latest book on that trial, The Eichmann Trial, by Deborah Lipstadt, click here.

The important point here is that whatever focus the Nuremberg trials had, it's crucial to remember the crimes of Hitler and to understand as much as possible about how they happened. Otherwise our amnesia will doom us.

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THERE PERRY GOES AGAIN

I don't know why we should be surprised when politicians exploit religion in untrue ways to gather votes. In fact, I'm not surprised that Rick Perry did just that. But it still angers me, as it also upset the careful author of this good piece about it. I just have trouble imagining how ignorant and gullible Perry must think we are about religion, prayer, Christmas and what's allowed in public schools.