Life of Cesar Chavez celebrated on Easter, people freak out

My faith is in shambles today, because Google honored Cesar Chavez today instead of celebrating Easter. Or at least so the Christian Right would have it.

Google has a custom of altering the logo on its main page to mark major holidays, significant events and anniversaries, and just because it can. A lot of these doodles are fun, like the time it replaced the Google logo with a functioning Pac-Man game. (My daughter still plays that.) Others are educational, like the time Google honored M.C. Escher. Other times, they're just odd, like the logo honoring the 150th birthday of L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. (For what it's worth, I speak the language, and just shrugged at that one.)

But heck, it's their logo, they can do whatever they want with it. Right?

Apparently not. On Easter Sunday this year, Google honored Cesar Chavez, a labor activist born on March 31, 1927, and not the Resurrection, and that, apparently, was too much. Glenn Beck got all snarky at the imagined disrespect; other Twitterfolk suggested that Google was elevating Chavez over Christ, or even found it a tremendous insult to their religion.

Come on, really?

I fully understand that Christians on Easter may greet one another with cries of "He is risen!" and "He is risen indeed!" But it's silly, it's pointless, it's completely un-Christlike, to demand that everyone else celebrate the Resurrection with us, and to take offense when a corporation like Google, with users who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, Jainist, Shinto, Sikh and Wiccan as well as Christian, does not take the time to affirm our particular set of religious beliefs, or even to celebrate our holiday with us.

The empty tomb on the first Easter is foundational to my faith. It is the basis for my belief that Jesus is the Son of God, the foundation of my hope that one day I too will rise from the dead, and for my conviction that God's dream is for us one day to live in a world free of pain, disease, death and infirmity, for us to walk with him as his people and for him to walk with us as our God.

I don't need a Google Doodle to affirm my faith today, and even if Google actually savaged Christians today with a doodle that declared "He's dead, you nitwits," my faith would be unrattled. (Though at least in that case I could understand being upset.)

But, in fact, Google's choice of doodles today is one that affirms my faith, and if you're a Christian you also should find it encouraging.

Cesar Chavez, after all, was a tireless advocate for the rights of poor workers. Himself an American farm worker, Chavez was a leader in the labor movement in the 1960s and also worked for civil rights, encouraging Mexican Americans to become registered voters involved with the political process.

With Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, a labor union that worked to ensure laborers were paid well and treated with dignity. One of the hallmarks of his activism was his strict commitment to nonviolence.

Chavez, it should be noted, was a devote Christian, He drew his inspiration for all these stands and for his actions from the person, the teachings and the life of Jesus Christ.

And isn't a transformed life the best way to honor the man we believe rose from the dead?


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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hell and damnit

So I watched this classic Sylvester and Tweety cartoon this afternoon with Rachel, without much regard going in for its soteriology, because I crack up every time I see Sylvester starts running through his lives at the shooting gallery.

Woodenjaknowit, we're barely a minute into the cartoon when Rachel asks why heaven looks so scary. And once I explain that Sylvester didn't go to heaven, she wants to know why not, and then I have to explain that he went to hell because "he was a bad old puddy tat." Too late I'm remembering that this cartoon gave me nightmares the first time I saw it, nearly 30 years ago, and that it called into question a lot of the Pleasant Old Guy associations I had picked up from God in Sunday school.

But I'm already in too deep, and it's getting deeper by the moment, because her next question is the one that I think every parent with faith secretly dreads: Is there really a hell?

I hate the very notion of hell. Too much, I want to scream. It serves no purpose, provides no balance, comes too late to make a difference or matter. I can trot out a thousand justifications for its existence, drilled into my head so I could parrot them back so I could bypass the discomfort the doctrine always causes me. I can even provide arguments to mitigate the sheer awfulness of a world where the sun never sets and rest never comes to the weary. It's not a Dantesque place of unspeakable torments that go on day and night without stop for all eternity; it's not a place that has fired the imaginations of poets and fundamentalists, with Sisyphus pushing a rock endlessly uphill, Tantalos trying to satisfy hunger and thirst with food and drink that remain just-so-barely out of reach, or where false priests wear robes of gold to punish them for their simony.

I want to tell her that hell, if it exists, is a garbage dump where the fire never ceases to smolder, and worms never cease to chew, and that nothing in gehenna is really what it once was, but it's no use. The more fantastic images remained indelibly ingrained in our culture, and all my protestations to the contrary sound empty and trite before they clear my throat, and so they die there, unvoiced and unheard.

I hate the very notion of hell. I wish I had never heard of it.

the aclu and foot baths

In 2005 the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Christian football coach who prayed before games, calling it "inherently coercive."

The same chapter now supports Michigan schools installing Muslim footbaths in the restrooms. They insist it's not coercive and doesn't endorse Islam because anyone could use the footbaths. Despite the protests of the Wall Street Journal, I have to say it seems reasonable to me. This is an accommodation of people's religion, rather than publicly drawing other people into religious observances.

If it were more overtly religious, like a Muslim judge posting the Decalogue in his courtroom, I expect the reaction would be the same as if a Christian judge had done it. The ACLU would claim it was a violation of the separation of church and state.

What, you don't think the ACLU has it in for Christians and Christianity, do you?

Despite the popular Chicken Little thinking I've seen in evangelical circles, the sky is not falling. The prevailing influences on our society remain Judeo-Christian, from our literature to our lexicon. I've yet to see any evidence that it is inimcal to the national good to extend a little courtesy to minority religions such as Islam.

I know of one case off the top of my head in New Jersey a few years ago where the ACLU came to the defense of a church organization when it was barred from renting a municipally owned building that had been rented to other nonreligious organizations. The Princeton Borough goverment had rejected the application to rent the space on an errorneous leading of the Establishment Clause; the ACLU pointed out that renting space to some groups and denying it to others based on their religious nature is discriminatory in nature. That's not exactly anti-Christian, is it?

Paranoid thinking is inexcusable when it comes from healthy adults who should know better but choose not to. Culture war mentality is counterproductive, creating as it does tremendous chips on our shoulders and the accompanying hosility toward those we have prejudged to be against us. Do that enough and people who have no problem with us will find one.

What if God has left the building and isn't listening anymore?

A friend of mine preached a sermon yesterday on experiencing the presence of God. I don't recall exactly what he said, but it put me in mind of an image I've had lately of a choir singing to an empty auditorium, as a type of the American church. That started me thinking further, and I recalled this passage from the minor prophets:

I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!
— Amos 5:21-24

What if God has left the bulding? Would we even know? The news Amos brought must have seemed like a shock to the Israelites when they received it. The feasts they were celebrating were the ones that God had commanded they celebrate for all generations, the music was good, and if that was their style, I'm sure the Israelites "felt the presence of God" when they worshiped. If God isn't listening to our worship, and doesn't want our offerings, how would we even know?

It's not just a rhetorical question. Music is a great way for us to cover up our emptiness and feel spiritual. Younger churches in particular like their worship like they're having a rock concert. The music is loud, and the pounding pulse of the music beat induces an adrenaline rush that we all-too-easily accept as a sign that God is really moving in our midst, especially once the church reaches the tipping point and everyone's properly excited. Older-style charismatic churches play this game too: leaders launch into praise choruses with fast tempos and then at midway switch into slower, more worshipful songs. The pace and tone of the service is so well sculpted and so structured that if you go to the same service long enough, you realize what's happening and you can't help but ask whether these weekly moves of the Spirit -- which too often have tears right on cue -- are really nothing more than clever artifice. Nor are older churches, with their familiar songs played on the familiar sound of the organ, exempt. Sentiment for a familiar hymn, the safety of structure, and sculpted regimen are just as good for filling in the void as adrenaline and masterful manipulation.

What if God has left the building? Would we know?

One of the comforts of fundamentalism is that it provides surety. God is this way. To understand the Bible, you have to use this approach. Anyone who commits these sins is going to burn in hell forever. Among themselves at least, evangelicals aren't quite that severe -- at least many aren't -- but there's still a tendency to reduce God to clever sayings, tidy cliches, comforting Scripture verses and attitudes pertaining to divine sovereignty, grace, Christ's essential friendliness, and the coming judgment on the ungodly, non-Christian world.

What if we're structuring our churches, our doctrines, our Bible studies, and our lives just so we can hide from ourselves the fact that God is sick of the insincere flattery we shit out of our mouths every week about how much we love him ("If you love me, you will obey my commands"), want to see his kingdom come on earth as in heaven ("Do not be hearers of the word only, do what it says"), and how we love everyone (except gays, liberals, conservatives, blacks, whites, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, environmentalists, George Bush, Bill Clinton, James Dobson and Benny Hinn)?

Sometimes I wonder if God has told us fuck off, and we were so busy listening to ourselves being spiritual that we never heard him over the din.

If so, we'll probably be the last ones to notice. A friend of mine who is a Buddhist by philosophy told me a few weeks ago that he actually had been an evangelical Christian for a few years, back when he was a teen. He finally left the fold because he was sick of all the junk in the church.

Another friend of mine has said a few times that the attitude of other Christians toward her because she is gay has driven her away from any sort of church-based corporate worship. Yet another friend, raised Catholic, can't say a good thing about Christianity, although like the other two, remains intrigued by Jesus and by his message.

Usually when I read stuff like this online, there's some piece at the end that wraps it all up and points to a sign that the church still has it together, or that somebody else over yonder is showing us how to get back on track. Some really daring people will give three or four easy steps to put things right.

I suck at giving comfort. Deal with it. What if God has left the auditorium? What if he doesn't want our money, our religious holidays, or even our worship? How would we even know?

The Right's full-court press to control the Supreme Court

Why is it that people who call themselves his followers engage in it so readily?


Christ came to set us free. When the Religious Right presses court in politics, the goal is not to liberate people as much as it is to make people behave in a manner that they consider acceptable (no gay marriage, no foul language, no obscenity, and so on). Controlling people is not what Christ is about. 

Belief.net has a well-written article by Marci Hamilton concerning the push from the Religious Right to determine the next Supreme Court appointment now that Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement. Hamilton has articulated fairly well one of my chief concerns with the insistence of the Religious Right that nominees conform to a narrowly defined list of behaviors, beliefs and attitudes, without exception.

For that matter Christianity Today has another article, about Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and how James Dobson and others on the Right have accused him of not being insufficiently pro-life. The ostensibly pro-choice positions they are taking issue with are positions Gonzalez has taken based on his understanding of the law, rather than on his personal beliefs. 

That is, of course, how our government is supposed to work. Issuing rulings based on personal beliefs  and not upon the rule of law is what the Right calls "legislating from the bench" and takes a good deal of umbrage at.

church and state redux

According to the New York Times, the pastor of the Waynesville, N.C., Baptist church who kicked out members for not voting for Bush last November, has resigned. Frankly, his resignation is probably the best solution to the whole mess.

Healing, if it happens, will be a long time in coming. It wasn't just the pastor who booted them -- those nine members were voted out, which means that even if the poison originated with the pastor, it wasn't limited to him. The article I read indicated the pastor needed a major police escort when he left the church, and also indicted he expressed no remorse for what he had done, only that it had worked out this way.

I just find it appalling when ANY Christian leader abuses leadership and authority like this, whether on the Left or the Right politically, or on some other minor issue. (And yes, compared to the Deity of Christ or other key doctrines, I would consider abortion to be a minor issue.)

Ugh. The whole thing leaves a dirty taste in my mouth

church and state

In Waynesville, N.C., the pastor of East Waynesville Baptist Church has kicked out nine members for not voting for President Bush. That's hideously over the top. I hope the IRS revokes the church's tax-exempt status.

A story on CNN indicates that the ousted members are considering a lawsuit. Also inappropriate. What is it they want, to be reinstated as members? I'd pass. Returning to a church with an atmosphere as poisonous as that church's surely has become, is just foolish.

How on earth did we ever get to this point, that we feel we have the right to define the dictates of other Christians' consciences? This may be more egregious than most, but it's hardly an isolated attitude. I've run into many Christians who looked down their nose at me for voting for Kerry, as I'm sure you have too.

It's a sad day for the Church when we get more concerned with the kingdoms of this world than with the kingdom of the next.

Religion and politics don't go together

Faith and politics make poor bedfellows.

Political maneuvering reforms society with all the grace and delicacy that a sledgehammer brings to fine sculpture. We set up certain rules that require certain forms of behavior, and force everyone into that mold whether they will or no. Control and requirements are the world's way of doing things.

That's not how the kingdom of God does business.

A rule that is fine for one situation will not work in another, and love is to be our law -- not the disinterested sort Plato wrote about, but the up-close and personal kind that Christ modeled. The world uses legislation and judicial fiat and such because control is what the world understands; as children of God, we are called to get to love the people in this miserable world and through the force of Christ's love, change them and the societies we live in.

I have little to no faith in political action committees, lobbyists or any other agency to stop abortion or to right the other wrongs facing our society, and I get concerned when I see the amount of effort Christians, churches and parachurches put into the political process.

We could elect thousands of Christians into office, and it won't move our country away from a spiritual precipice, or we could pass thousands of laws to enforce our notions of morality, and nothing would change.

People would still go to hell, only now they'd curse us as they do it.

showoff doctrinal terms

Tetragrammaton: The name of the Lord, literally. It refers to the four Hebrew letters used to denote God's name, often represented in English as YHWH or JHVH.

Decalogue: The Ten Commandments.

J-source, P-source, Q-source. These are terms made popular by the Jesus Seminar and other scholarly movements to determine who wrote what portions of the Bible.

E, P, J and D are the four "authors" of the Tanakh. E stands for Elohim and J for the Tetragrammaton as noticed; the two of these quite often appear in pairs, which suggests to scholars that they represent two separate traditions about the Israelite faith, which some editor -- called the redactor -- joined together into the single course of Scripture we now have. The E story of creation takes place over seven days; the J story begins in Eden. Similarly, there are some psalms that are virtually identical, except one uses "Elohim" and the other uses YHWH.

P is the priestly source, which includes most of the Torah. It lays out the laws for everybody, sets up the priesthood and so on. P is supposed to be responsible principally for the book of Exodus after the parting of the Red Sea up through the book of Numbers.

D is the Deuteronomist, who retells the law in the book of Deuteronomy, with a few minor variations, and then is generally held to be responsible for compling everything up through 2 Kings. I believe some people have linked the Deuteronomist to Jeremiah, who was a prophet during the reign of King Jehoshaphat (I think -- sorry, I'm writing this from memory, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now), the last righteous king of Judah who returned Judah to whole-hearted devotion to YHWH and during whose reign the book of the Law was rediscovered (*koff* *koff*, say the scholars).

The Q source remains the collected sayings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke supposedly cribbed from.

Parousia: The word's Latin root has to do with giving birth to something; the one time I distinctly remember reading it, I had understood it to be a reference to the Second Coming. I believe it refers to the birth of the Kingdom of God, which many first-century Christians expected would happen within their lifetimes, particularly when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

Pelagian heresy: In a nutshell, and if I understand it correctly, it's a heresy that claims it is possible for men to please God and live a righteous life apart from Christ simply by exercising free will.

Glossolalia: A fancy word for speaking in tongues under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Not to be confused with charisma, which is the supernatural endowment of a believer by the Holy Spirit to perform miraculous signs.

transubstantiation: A teaching held within the Catholic Church, but also within several mainline Protestant denominations, that Christ is physically present in the elements of the Eucharist, that when we take communion the wine miraculously becomes his blood and the bread miraculously becomes his body. There are actual names for the different views on how this takes place -- for example, it becomes it in the stomach so we don't become sick or commit cannibalism; or it becomes it at the moment of consecration but in such a way that it becomes indistinguishable from unconsecrated bread and wine -- but I never bothered to learn those names.

Christological: Christology is the doctrines of Christ, such as his being entirely God and entirely man, and what that means.

hermeneutics: a ten-dollar word that essentially means "Bible study"

synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. Those three gospels have a lot in common in terms of structure, narrative, sayings of Jesus and so on that suggest a common source. The gospel of John has an entirely different structure, has an entirely different set of sayings it draws on, has a radically different focus than the other three, and is considered by some scholars to be from a different tradition entirely (perhaps even later since some of the phraseology appears to be written to correct Gnostic error). Since Mark and Luke were both journeymen with Paul, and Matthew appears to be highly derivative from Mark as well, I suppose that makes some degree of sense.

In terms of divine election, I would say it is the Arminian position that best represents my understanding, although at the same time I agree with the basic principles of Calvinism. How's that for something to wrap your brain in a knot?

My understanding -- and I never went to seminary, so I'll readily concede that I very easily could be wrong -- is that the -lapsarian doctrines have to do with when God decreed that Christ would have to die for our sins. With that explanation, I'd have to say I'm prelapsarian since I can't see God playing catch-up with us.

The Arian heresy is essentially one of the doctrines propagated by the Jehovah's Witnesses today, viz. that Jesus was a created being and not of the same substance as the Father, that he was created and not begotten.

What I don't understand and never have is what that has to do with white supremacists.

On a tangent, does anyone know what the name is for the heresy found in "Paradise Lost?" Milton has God create all things out of himself rather than ex nihilo, and declares Jesus to be his son and chief of them all. It's similar to the Arian heresy except that in this case Jesus is of the same substance as the Father, but so is everyone and everything else.

A glossary of terms

Tetragrammaton: The name of the Lord, literally. It refers to the four Hebrew letters used to denote God's name, often represented in English as YHWH or JHVH.

Decalogue: The Ten Commandments.

J-source, P-source, Q-source. These are terms made popular by the Jesus Seminar and other scholarly movements to determine who wrote what portions of the Bible. The J-source refers to portions of the Bible that use the Tetragrammaton; whereas the P-source refers to the "priestly" texts that use the word Elohim, which we translate as God.

The P-source is where we get the opening section of Genesis, in which Elohim creates the heavens and the earth, and stage by stage gives order and life to the earth, culminating in the creation of man. The account of Eden never uses Elohim, however, and refers consistently to YHWH. And so on, throughout the Tanakh.

The Q-source refers to a postulated compilation of the sayings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke used when embellishing Mark's gospel to create their own. Matthew and Luke attribute a lot of the same phrases and teachings  to Jesus, in more or less the same order, but not necessarily connected with the same events.

Parousia: The word's Greek root has to do with arrival or appearing. It's used academically as a reference to the Second Coming, which many first-century Christians expected would happen within their lifetimes, particularly when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

Pelagian heresy: In a nutshell, it's a heresy that claims it is possible for men to please God and live a righteous life apart from Christ, simply by exercising free will.

Glossolalia: A fancy word for speaking in tongues under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Not to be confused with charisma, which is the supernatural endowment of a believer by the Holy Spirit to perform miraculous signs.

Transubstantiation: A teaching held within the Catholic Church, but also within several mainline Protestant denominations, that Christ is physically present in the elements of the Eucharist, that when we take Communion the wine miraculously becomes his blood and the bread miraculously becomes his body. There are actual names for the different views on how this takes place -- for example, it becomes it in the stomach so we don't become sick or commit cannibalism; or it becomes it at the moment of consecration but in such a way that it becomes indistinguishable from unconsecrated bread and wine -- but I never bothered to learn those names.

Christological: Christology is the doctrines of Christ, such as his being entirely God and entirely man, and what that means.

Hermeneutics: a ten-dollar word that refers to how we approach the Bible when we study it. Do we take literally? Is it meant to be understood within its historical literary context?

synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. Those three gospels have a lot in common in terms of structure, narrative, sayings of Jesus and so on that suggest a common source.

The gospel of John has an entirely different structure, has an entirely different set of sayings it draws on, has a radically different focus than the other three, and is considered by some scholars to be from a different tradition entirely (perhaps even later since some of the phraseology appears to be written to correct Gnostic error).

Since Mark and Luke were both journeymen with Paul, and Matthew appears to be highly derivative from Mark as well, I suppose that makes some degree of sense.

god of abraham

Hang around evangelicals and fundamentalists enough, and you may hear a belief expressed that seems a little bizarre: that Jews do not worship the God of Abraham because they do not believe Jesus is God. In this opinion, they worship either a false God or "nothing." Got that?

It's actually a very common belief, but one I consider misguided. It often ties in with the idea that God broke his covenant with the Jews and Christians are the new chosen people. I thought Paul said something about being grafted onto the vine, but maybe I misunderstand, and what he actually meant was the exact opposite.

As I understand the argument, it's that Judaism changed when the decision was made as a people group to reject Christ; i.e., Judaism became something like the Democratic Party, known for what it is not. Passages like Isaiah 53 have been reinterpreted to apply to Israel and not to the messiah, beliefs about what the messiah will do have altered so that they are inconsistent with Jesus' teachings and actions. There's other small stuff too, like the matzoh during the seder. One of the pieces of matzoh is taken away and hidden for the children to find, a practice that some scholars believe was originally a Jewish way of saying "See? The body really *was* stolen."

The argument also goes that much of Judaism as it is practiced today is spiritually dead. That's why temples sponsor seminars on alternative spirituality, like transcendental meditation, and est and what have you. The religion has become encrusted with tradition and extra teaching (the Talmud, the Mishnah, and so on) that keep people away from experiencing the Tanakh as it was intended by God.

Invariably when this discussion surfaces, as it has before I made this post, it soon turns on issues of salvation. Since Paul says point-blank that Christ came first for the Jews, then for the Gentiles, many evangelical Christians argue that contemporary Judaism lacks saving knowledge of God. After all, if someone doesn't need Christ to be reconciled to God, but can be drawn near through faithful observance of the Law, isn't Christ's sacrifice negated?

Paul essentially says, "If there a law that could have brought you to God, this one would have done it." But he hammers home the point that following the law only brings death, because sin increases where there is law. ("I would not know to covet if the Torah did not say, 'Do not covet.'")

It's been a while since I wrapped my brain around Paul's reasoning and the arguments set forth in Hebrews, but isn't the idea that the thrust of the Tanakh was to show us our need for a savior, an intercessor between God and man, and to get us to anticipate the coming of that savior and to accept by faith what he would do?

Based on that reasoning, I would have to say that, yes, you can worship God in a sense but not in full knowledge and not in saving knowledge either, by trying to draw near to him through faithful observance of the Torah's requirements. Paul also talked about this in Romans, regarding the hardening of the Jews' hearts so that the full number of Gentiles could come in. (And that's when he also stresses that the Jews remain God's chosen.)

I think it is clear that no one who lived before Christ was saved by keeping the dictates of the Law. They were saved the same way that we are today, through faith in God's promise. For them, the promise had not yet been realized. For us, we can see the realization of the promise in Jesus Christ.

Now, that brings up the question of the Jews who, for whatever reason, don't see Jesus as God's promised Messiah, but still do believe in the promises of God for redemption and for a Messiah. Does their faith in God's promise and in the coming Messiah count for nothing now that Jesus has already come? I don't know. God will have mercy on whomever he chooses, and they could be part of the group. I leave it up to God. I'm making no attempt to discern the mind of the Almighty on this or any other matter.

As to who worships the God of Abraham, my own thesis is pretty simple: There is no God but one. Anyone who acknowledges the God who created the heavens and the earth, the uncreated Supreme Being, is worshiping that God, though sometimes with essential (not minor) differences in understanding his nature and his character. I usually compare it to the faith of the Samaritan woman. She and other Samaritans worshiped God, but the Jews worshiped him in knowledge. So I'd go a step further and risk offending other people, by saying that Muslims also worship the same God that Christians do. In an Arabic-speaking country, I would refer to God as Allah and to Jesus as Isa, the same way I don't mind appropriating the English noun "god," and that Paul didn't object to using the pagan word "theos."

Islam of course denies the divinity of Christ. It accepts the virgin birth, but insists that Jesus was a prophet and no more than a man, making it fundamentally incompatible with Christianity and its teachings about God. I say that because Christian doctrine teaches that God is revealed through Christ and through the silent testimony of creation, and that he God does not tabulate our works and judge us based solely on our obedience to what we perceive his will to be.

But like Christianity, Islam describes God as the creator without beginning. Its depiction of God is incomplete in the Christian understanding -- and it certainly lacks the grace given through Christ -- but the Arabic word "Allah" is no worse a substitute for the Tetragrammaton than the English pagan word "God," the Greek word "theos," or the Kali word "kembu."

The dilemma within a Christian framework of what happens to anyone who has not heard the gospel but was trying to serve God is one that I'm sure we've all spent a lot of hours pondering, discussing and reading about. I generally don't say any particular group is headed to hell, or individual people for that matter. It's not my call to make, thankfully.

But it is an interesting theological question. With pagan peoples who hear the gospel for the first time, one often can see a dividing line once the gospel arrives. The segment that responds favorably to the gospel exhibits a marked change in behavior as they embrace the new revelation as the fulfillment of a cultural concept or religious belief they've long had. (Check out "Peace Child" or "Eternity in their Hearts" for some examples.)

The catch is that the segment of the population that doesn't embrace the gospel also demonstrates marked changes in attitudes and behavior, often toward the darker side of life and often as a societal or spiritual repudiation or rejection of Christ and Christianity.

Skip forward 100 years or so, to a person in the latter population segment. Under the scenario I've just presented, that person will have been raised in a culture with an ingrained bias against Christianity, even if he or she has never actually heard the gospel personally.

viewing the other side

A friend of mine has sent me a column by David Limbaugh pertaining to the interaction of Christians and the church with other worldviews and society as a whole. From the column:

I sincerely don't want to start an argument over religion, especially in these sensitive times, but I feel compelled to defend the Christian faith so that it does not become "collateral damage" in our war on terrorism.

Read the entire piece

Limbaugh takes issue with a recent editorial in the New York Times by political science professor Alan Wolfe, who draws the oh-so-popular parallel between American fundamentalism, as practiced by men like Jerry Falwell and the Islamic fundamentalism of terrorists like Osama bin Laden. And when Wolfe goes a step further and points out other issues of evangelicalism or American fundamentalism that are still current today, he sees hotbeds of regressive and uncivilized behavior lurking in American churches.

Limbaugh's piece is passable, and I do agree with him that equating Falwell and other fundamentalists and evangelicals with bin Laden's fiery style of "blow them up" fundamentalism, is just wrongheaded thinking.

Ironically, Limbaugh wraps up his article with some doozy misstatements of his own. First is the common argument in evangelical circles that the Founding Fathers were Christians. To the best of my knowledge, that is not the case; the argument usually stems from a reading of popular deist language referring to "Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ" and such.

Jefferson regarded belief in the supernatural as absurd and even published a Bible without reference to it; similarly George Washington's Book of Prayer is -- from what I have heard, I have never read the book myself -- an unoffensive and unassuming book that could be adopted without accepting the Christian faith.

Limbaugh also makes the statement that other religions claim exclusivity. Not true. Buddhism and Hinduism both teach that life is an ever-revolving wheel on which we all will turn until we reach Nirvana. Wiccan readers can correct me if I'm wrong on this point, but pagan religions also generally argue that all gods melt into one and lead to truth. Generally the only religions with claims to exclusivity are Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and most Jews don't really seem to feel that way, from what I've seen.

Limbaugh objects, and rightly so, to the bias that lumps intense or serious religious devotion in the same wagon as the hatred that masks itself as religious devotion. Yet when it comes down to it, he also is lumping unlike things together, claiming desirables like the American Founding Father's for Christianity's own, despite evidence to the contrary, and projecting his religious views onto other religions, essentially a variation on what Wolfe did.

Makes me wonder how often I do the same thing.

the church politic

The gospel inevitably touches on political matters, but it itself is not essentially political. The church politic fails for the very reason that the church is not supposed to be a political entity, but a spiritual one.

If we retain a focus on Christ, we will change society because we'll be changing the building blocks of society, even if we never get involved in the political arena.

What I'm saying is:

• The church can be content to be a Sunday-morning phenomenon (with extra services, radio shows and what have you thrown in). This is one of the pitfalls we often fall into. It leaves us with a message but no audience.
• The church can see the Sunday-morning option as no option at all. "By making ourselves irrelevant and uninvolved with the larger society, we forfeit leadership in our society to people with no desire to honor Christ," the reasoning goes. "Therefore we must reinsert ourselves and bring Christ back into the schools, the courts, the legal system." This often gets us focused on gaining power and results in us reminding ourselves and the world how evil the world is and how much more righteous we are. We have an audience now, but no message, and soon we don't have an audience either.
• The church can be involved with people on an individual basis, helping them buy food, pay the rent, repair their property, provide for their children, find ways to live peaceably, and so on. We not only have Christ's message, we also have people's full attention.

lobbying for righteousness

I think we should just outlaw crime and sin, and then we'll be in an earthly paradise.

But seriously: The Civil Rights Movement represented a major paradigm shift in our society's way of thinking about segregation and race relations. That shift bore fruit in people's unwillingness to tolerate racism any longer, and their willingness to be beaten (and worse) for crossing the segregation line in the South. Those actions had political significance but what I'm saying is that they are where the real breakthrough happened, not in legislation that Congress signed.

The lobbying effort to change the law must follow the change in society, or it is doomed to failure. During the GOP primary, Bush said he would not support a constitutional amendment to ban abortion on the grounds that a nation that could pass one wouldn't need it. Though his performance during much of the rest of the primary branded him a yogurt-head, I do have to agree with the wisdom of that remark.

If we want abortion to end -- and I'm sure many of us on this forum do -- we need to bring a paradigm shift to society at large, not send high-power lobbyists to Washington.

Politics has its place in church-world relations, but I think it's a much smaller place than we've allowed it to be in the United States. It's also unclear exactly how directly we can apply the example of Israel to the United States since Israel was, in no particular order, a monarchy, a theocracy, called to be a peculiar people different from the surrounding pagan peoples as the church is called to be today.

The United States is a democracy -- a concept not even found in Scripture -- pluralistic, and very much like its neighbors. How the church interacts with it must necessarily be different from how Israel interacted with itself.

The government has chosen (wrongly, I would say) to recognize neither the humanity of the unborn, nor the sanctity of their life. This does not alter the sanctity of unborn life, nor does it release us from our obligation to save those lives.

What I am saying is that our efforts at saving those lives are best oriented at a personal level to the women most likely to get abortions and to the doctors most likely to perform them.

As we effect a social change, we will see our leaders begin to follow.

dominion theology

Thinking about this subject more last night while I walking the dog.

In addition to the example of Christ refusing earthly dominion over the nations when Satan offered it to him, and in addition to the clear teachings of Christ that his kingdom is "not of this world" and manifests itself within people's hearts (as opposed to their legal, economic or political systems), we also have the account of the Israelites.

For those not familiar with the establishment of the Davidic dynasty in Israel, essentially the Jews were upset that while other nations had a king, the closest thing they had was a crazed lunatic who lived in a cave and came out every now and then to rout the Phillistines.

When they requested to go from a theocracy to a monarchy, the Bible says that God grew angry with the people, that their request for a king was a rejection not of the judge Samuel but of God himself. I would posit that this was so -- even when the king was faithful to God, as Saul initially was, and as kings like David and Hezekiah generally were -- because the nation was putting its trust in something tangible and "real," rather than in an unseen deity.

That's often the same pit Christians fall into when we start relying on political means to improve society or to stave off something we consider sinful. The idea is that if abortion is outlawed, if gays are not afforded special protection, if school-sponsored prayer is allowed again, somehow our nation will be more godly and a better place to live.

That is, of course, utter nonsense. We're relying on external criteria to measure what only God can perceive, because he weighs our hearts and that is where he jduges. When we focus on bringing those external appearances into conformance with our expectations instead of dealing with the underlying problem -- people are disconnected from God -- we sell our soul for a misplaced relevance, and lose the moral and spiritual authority the church has.

Our responsibility as Christians is to model Christ's character. That means bringing people to him through sharing the gospel, through feeding the poor, through visiting those who are sick or in prison, through clothing the naked, and generally coming to the aid of those in need.

If we do that, we're going to see a lot of changes happen in our society whether we engage in political activism or not. I would contend that we would in fact see more changes because people would be seeing the gospel being lived out all around them instead of listening to well-paid, finely dressed lobbyists who claim to represent the disadvantaged. More than that, when the church gets into the streets of the cities and engages the people there, they change: crime drops, drug use drops, recidivism drops, and so on.

Sometimes being a watchman simply means making people see what they don't want to. Wasn't it William Booth who forced England to see the illegal traffic in children by carefully documenting the steps he took to buying a child to have sex with him? He personally didn't engage in any political manuevering, but England changed pretty dramatically overnight.

That, I think, is how we're supposed to treat the ailments that sin has afflicted our world with. We get involved in people's lives and get them to see the abhorrence of what they're doing. Abortion will drop much faster if only one in ten people who claim to be pro-life takes in a teenager in crisis pregnancy or pledges to take financial responsibility a child of a woman who "can't afford to have a baby," than if we continue to lobby Washington to rewrite the nation's abortion laws.

tax-exemption for churches

Saw a recent column by Cal Thomas on a measure that would repeal the law that prevents churches from dabbling in politics. From the column:

Though the measure is rarely enforced, the political activism of some conservative Christians over the past two decades has caused religious and political liberals to demand that the tax-exempt status of some conservative ministers be revoked. These same people are mostly silent about the political activism of liberal clergy, especially those who are African-American who preach politics, lobby Congress and endorse candidates from the pulpit. Jones is right when he complains that the Internal Revenue Service applies a double standard to the law.

Read the whole column

To the best of my knowledge, nothing about the rules governing 501c(3) organizations forbids them from taking a stand on issues. What is forbidden is lobbying for specific political candidates or parties. That is, I think, as it should be, as long as it goes across the board. If churches choose to endorse politicians, that's their right: But they should have no tax-exempt status that other organizations lack.

At the Assembly of God church I attended while a college student, the church regularly had information posted about abortion, gay rights, and so on. If the pastor had said from the pulpit that he was voting for George Bush, that would have been crossing the line and could have cost the church its nonprofit status.

In my opinion, the whole thing is a red herring anyway. Our focus shouldn't be on upending Roe v. Wade or undermining the Vermont Supereme Court's decision on gay unions but on reaching the lost and demonstrating compassion to those who need it. If we make the wholesale commitment -- not just monetarily, but personally, in a relationship -- to help women and teenage girls in "crisis pregnancies" by taking them into our homes, giving them unconditional emotional support, and so on, we'll see abortion rates drop. All politicking has accomplished in 31 years has been to get us labeled as obsessed with issues the larger society considers to have been largely resolved, created enmity between us and the people who need Christ's love, and spawned all sorts of lunatic-fringe movements like God's Army. Similar solutions and problems exist along the church's attitude toward gays.

Remember, Christ was offered political power, but he told Satan where he could stick it.

My concern is that too often politics has become the preferred means of saving the world the evangelical church has chosen. Christians have the same right to a voice in the political process as any other group, but we should also be enlightened enough to realize that the power to realize the level of change we want does not lie in political parties, legislation or voting blocs.

I'll stick with the abortion issue because it's one we hear a lot about in Christian circles. That one child in three is killed in utero is appalling, to put it mildly, and I've taken part in my share of the protests and marches to end abortion.

That said, I don't think it's a fruitful use of energies and effort to fight on the legislative front for the end of abortion. Why? Because changing the law -- which we have been unable to do after 31 years -- is not going to change the underlying problems with the American culture that led to Roe v. Wade in the first place. To do that, we need to engage our culture on a person-by-person basis and bring a spiritual -- not a political -- revolution to our nation.

That requires personal commitment of time, energy, and a commitment to love. Relationships are nowhere near as easy to maintain as political zeal.

Political zeal also necessarily has the consequence of villifying our opponents, with the result that our opportunity to display Christlike character is diminished. In the situation with abortion, it's also impossible for the two sides to agree on what the debate is over. It came as a complete shock to a pro-choice co-worker of mine that I'm "pro-life" and not "anti-choice"; Jennifer always had considered the issue to be one of choice.

But then, there are many other reasons besides abortion that the judgment of God could come on the United States: arrogance; hoarding wealth; worshipping the bottom line; failing to reach the lost of the world with the gospel, even when they come here; and so on.

Abortion and homosexuals often are just popular whipping-posts for preachers because they don't make as many parishoners uncomfortable.

children and religion

We had our 2-year-old daughter at the hospital a couple days ago after her temperature hit 105 degrees. After we had been checked in and after the initial round of professional poking and prodding, an administrative type asked, "What religion is she?" My response: "I don't think she's decided anything yet, but we're Christians."

keeping the sabbath

I would have to say that where I come down is somewhere on both sides of the debate of whether to keep the sabbath. I agree that keeping the Sabbath is not burdensome in the least, but I also agree that it is left to the individual believer to decide how or if to keep a Sabbath.

A fair amount of it ties back into the Christian segmentation of the Mosaic law into civil, moral and ceremonial law. While that's a breakdown I've heard before, I'm not convinced it's a division reflected in what Christ did on the Cross; rather, it seems to me to be a description of the function of different aspects of the law.

Nowhere in the Torah is a distinction made between those three types of law: you find "moral" law, like the proscription on homosexual intercourse, incest and bestiality mixed in with other laws on how to make clothes and where to go to the bathroom. First-century Jews in fact regarded any effort to say one part of the law was more important than another as heretical, which is why the one scribe tried to trap Jesus by asking him which of the commandments was the greatest.

Since the Torah finds its fulfillment in Christ and we are freed from its sting and free to live by faith -- Paul quite specifically warns the Galatians against subjecting ourselves to live under part of the law, since we then are obligated to follow all of it -- I have to say that God does not require us to keep the sabbath. It's up to each of us to decide how, if and when we do so.

It's also worth noting that the sabbath existed long before its observance was required. All the way back in the creation story, God blessed the seventh day because on it he rested from his work. So even though we're freed from the requirement of keeping the sabbath, we're not free from the blessing of keeping the sabbath (if we keep it).

So what is the blessing? Well, as an outgrowth of this discussion, my wife and I started keeping a sabbath about a month ago. We keep ours on Sunday. Since it's essentially arbitrary which day you begin your week on, we start ours on Monday. Our reasoning was more or less what I've described above.

We started brainstorming reasons God might have had for putting the sabbath in the law he gave Moses. One reason we came up with is the standard reason you'll hear in churches: It's to remind us that we can't supply all our own needs, no matter how hard we work, and so we need to have faith to take one day off in seven. The second chief reason we thought of us is that it builds family.

Think about it. If you have one day in seven where you, your spouse and your children are all together, it gives you time to focus on what's really important in life. We might still do stuff around the house, or run a few errands, but we're doing them together and in each other's company. We keep the computer off all day, and we don't make long-distance calls to family members, because it's our sabbath. We know it's *our* day as a family.

We've been loving it. In fact, I've noticed that we're getting frustrated with each other a lot less.
So even though I don't think a sabbath is required, I do think people who choose not to observe one, or even to split it across two days as many of us in America do, are missing something. (Incidentally, we use Saturday to get a lot of solitary stuff done around the house. That's when I do my work on the garden and the yard, for example.)

Cain killed Abel, but did he murder him?

Was Cain guilty of murder?

It's not as silly a question as it first appears. Remember that Abel's death is the first human death recorded in the Bible. It's conceivable that when Cain struck his brother he had no idea of what was about to happen.

Writing for the Watchtower

I think it would kind of fun to write articles for Watchtower.

Just think about it. You could be about halfway into a story about the significance of 1914 or some other major Jehovah's Witnesses doctrine, and then just stop and say, "I'm sorry. I just can't espouse this any more. I mean, let's look at some of the many weaknesses to our doctrines on the Deity and on Christ..."

The end result would be the same -- you wouldn't be writing for "Watchtower" -- but can you imagine the hoopla if it turned out the editor didn't even look at your story before running it?