She was troubled that a sermon on Luke 14:26 ("If any one comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even himself, he cannot be my disciple") interpreted "hate" as "lesser love." Does Luke's use of miseo ("to hate") support that?

(Warning: I am not a fan of interpretations of Luke that water down its radicalism. I was saved because one night, unchurched and bored, I read Luke and took verses like this one at their face value. Here, finally, I met a Jesus whom I had never met in sermons or Sunday schools, a Jesus I could no longer ignore. Fortunately I was unaware of the widespread homiletical tradition of qualifying and explaining away passages that threaten the suburban social status quo, so I was left with the alternatives Jesus meant his audiences to face: Take it or leave it. Either take me seriously, or go away. Either enter the kingdom, or don't. Just don't waste my time.)

Luke 1:68-71: "Blessed by the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us."

Luke 6:22: "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man."

Luke 6:27-28 (par Matt. 5:43): "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you."

Luke 16:13 (par Matt. 6:24): "No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to the one and scorn the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."

Luke 19:12-14: "A nobleman went into a far country to receive a kingdom and then return. Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten pounds, and said to them, 'Trade with these till I come.' But his citizens hated him and sent an embassy after him, saying, 'We do not want this man to reign over us.'"

Luke 21:17 (par Matt. 10:22, Matt. 24:9, and Mark 13:13): "You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death; you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But not a hair of your head will perish."

The Christian hatred of family that Luke's Jesus commands is radical allegiance to Jesus that forsakes all other loyalties and bears all social and personal costs. It does this because competing loyalties – and culturally strong family loyalties more than most – distract and disempower the would-be disciple.

In our culture this is easy to misunderstand. In the ancient world, as in many cultures today, a person depends on family to survive. The most powerless are widows and orphans. It is far more important to be a family member than to be a citizen. (Note that in parts of America the opposite is true: People can get along all by themselves, but not without the government. Hmmm....)

In our culture family connotes romantic love, sentimentality, and the like – emotional goods. In ancient cultures, family was a precious material and political asset. Jesus is calling on people to forsake their social security if they are to be his disciple. The kingdom of God is not additive or multiplicative in its power; it does not supplement or complement our other assets. It stands only on its own.

Moreover, since family love comes with strings attached, its asset is sure to become a liability. Jesus prophesies that his disciples will be handed over and persecuted by the very family that once protected their own. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Arab countries find this out all too often. Families pressure their members to look after the family's interests. Widows and orphans, strangers and the poor are other people's problems. To prefer strangers to family is to break social taboos that keep society functioning – and that maintain its structural oppression.

For Jesus to inaugurate a new order of self-sacrificial love for all God's beloved children, Jesus and his disciples will have to confront a world of principalities and powers whose little fiefdoms it threatens. Those principalities scale all the way up to America and the UN, and all the way down to my little young family at the dinner table.

The context of the passage makes all this clear:

Now great multitudes accompanied him; and he turned and said to them, "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even himself, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he [or she] has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build, and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace. So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be his disciple. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is fit neither for the land nor for the dunghill; people throw it away. The one who has ears to hear, let him hear.

This is not an argument for the clerical celibacy or monasticism of some, for Jesus claims that no one can be his disciple unless he or she renounces every loyalty. Besides, in his community, we are not isolated from each other, but pressed together around a table that brings us together in profound commitment. The Church is not a bunch of hermits; together we are one bride.

What does this text say about culture wars between "pro-family" conservatives and "pro-social" liberals? It proclaims a third way – not splitting the differences, but offering a radical "pro-church" (or better, "pro-kingdom") alternative which alone offers salvation for a world torn apart by party politics. (No wonder everyone abandoned Jesus by the end.)

My family is precious to me, but I am not to rely on or obey it so as to compromise my reliance and obedience on the kingdom. Nor am I called to show lesser love for my mom, my brother and sister, my wife, or my children. I am called to show Christlike love for them – enormous love rooted not in our familial claims on each other but only in Christ's claims on all of us; love that never makes our dinner table an alternative to the communion table, not even a little, but only points the former toward the latter.

Likewise, my country is precious to me, but I refuse to let my temporal dependence on it overshadow my dependence on God. I may not love it with anything less than the love of Christ. And Christ in his love did not become a Zealot to fight alongside his fellow Jews, but became sin and a curse to liberate all peoples, including his fellow Jews, from bondage to enemies and 'friends' alike.

Anything less just wastes his time.

Incidentally, as the sermon series was one on commitment, I suspect the pastor at that church might agree.

8:50 AM


October 30, 2002

Eve Tushnet (bless her heart) thinks a link to this site would bring "extra spice" to the conversation at No War Blog.

There is only one problem: Where have I said that I oppose an American, allied, or UN war against Iraq?

I just think that (a) any such war should be just, and (b) what God has called Christians alone to do to bring the world hope and peace will be confused and frustrated by our fighting in it.

12:59 PM


I am encouraged by the debate now springing up about the likely future shape of Islam. It feels like the beginning of an honest exchange. I hope it continues and thrives, not just among secularists or Christians or Muslims but across all these groups, not just in the weblogs and journals of commentary but in the mainstream media and the school system. (I'd rather the politicians leave it alone. Governments are the last places we should look for honesty about anything.)

Until now the dominant position has been to regard Islam as one flavor of some general thing called "religion." In this view – a very modern one – "religions" are basically interchangeable ideologies of transcendence (or whatever; scholars of religion can't agree).

It follows from this sweeping assumption that if Christianity could be Romanized, Europeanized, reformed, modernized, liberalized, and fundamentalized, then Islam can too. So can Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism (the rest of the Big Five "world religions"). What distinguishes these traditions from each other is rather incidental compared to what unites them. Because they are basically varieties of a common social phenomenon, they are all susceptible to common mutations. (By contrast, what distinguishes "religions" from "non-religious" traditions is all-important.)

This is not the place for me to criticize the presuppositions behind this "generalist" line of reasoning, but it is worth pointing out that there are plenty of persuasive theological, philosophical, and historical ways to do it.

The opposing position is more "particularist". Rather than assuming we know a lot about a tradition simply because we have classified it as a religion, we approach it on its own terms. Sure, it may have common properties or family resemblances with other traditions, and these traditions may or may not be commonly known as religions. But there is nothing necessarily alike about them.

(For an instance of a family resemblance, I think liberal Islam parallels the kind of diluted Deism that reigns in America's political and cultural imagination. Many Muslims plead that Americanism is essentially Islamic, and I think they are right. In fact, the two are closer to each other than either is to premodern Christian faith, early Protestantism, "Anabaptism," Catholicism before the twentieth century, or my own postmodern Christian vision. Most Americans believe in a god of good works who rewards obedience with worldly success. The secular ones buy self-help books, while the "Christian" ones buy The Prayer of Jabez, but both camps share an underlying ideology whose resemblance to Islam goes unnoticed when Islam is partitioned into the category of a constitutionally disestablished "religion".)

Colby Cosh rightly takes John Derbyshire and Damian Penny as generalists, and points out that critical features of Muslim traditions diverge rather than converge with Christian ones. (Cosh could have added James Q. Wilson to his list.) For example, the Quran occupies roughly the same position in Islam as Jesus (not the Bible) does in Christian faith. To Muslims Muhammad is more like the Christian Mary, bearer of the Word, than he is to the Christian Jesus. (Did I come up with that? I wish. I actually learned it from Seyyed Hossein Nasr's marvelous guide to Islam.) So Muslims criticize the Quran about as readily as Christians criticize Jesus. The central conviction of Muslim faith is inlibration, not incarnation. Muslim faith centers on a message ("submit!"), while Christian faith centers on a story ("believe the good news!").

Another critical distinction is that Jesus the politician refused to reach for the sword to inaugurate or defend his politics, whereas, as Cosh tactfully puts it, "Muhammad was a politician and an excellent general." Christianity took shape outside Jewish and Roman institutions of state power; Islam took shape as imperial conquest.

Differences such as these mean that when primitivist Christians have looked back to first century A.D. for inspiration, they have been drawn to a fundamentally different politics than primitive Muslims looking back to the first century A.H.

Wilson's account is not a picture of Christianity returning to its roots, but a picture of its slow and incomplete de-Constantinianization and domestication under the firm hand of modernity. So his parallel is Ataturk's modernization of Turkey. It is not reform in the Christian sense (that would be Wahhabism). It is forceful liberalization and modernization.

Even so, Christian distinctives facilitated the process of Christian modernization rather than standing in its way. Christians found the example of Jesus quite helpful in learning how to stop persecuting and fighting their enemies. Jesus' nonviolence made "neutering" Christianity (Cosh's word, not mine!) an exercise in remembering, not just discovering. Muslims have not been finding Muhammad so helpful as a friend of Muslim modernization.

In one area where the two traditions do look somewhat alike – their struggles against and absorptions of modernity – the outcomes are not encouraging for peace. Liberal Christianity has not fared well as modernity has aged and withered. As the Church explodes around the world, the sectors that are growing are conservative, revivalist, primitivist, charismatic – "fundamentalist." These people are unsatisfied with the compromises European Christians made with their intellectual, political, and cultural context. Likewise, liberal Islam has made few inroads beyond westernized academia. Islam's fastest growing sectors are even more dissatisfied with Islam's briefer encounter with western modernity. They are also conservative, revivalist, primitivist, "fundamentalist" – and more militant. If conservative Christianity is a headache to liberal democratic capitalism, imagine the migraine conservative Islam promises to be.

People who want to draw historical parallels would be better served by analogies between Islam and Judaism, not Islam and contemporary Christianity. Islam and Christianity are both large and evangelistic, but Islam and Judaism have closer notions of politics and law (not least because of the influence of converted rabbis in classical Muslim jurisprudence). Both have glorious histories of temporal rule. Both have quietists, collaborators, mystics, philosophers, judges, hermits, and militants.

Below I compared militant Islam's conflict with the modern West to Zealot Judaism's conflict with ancient Rome. Zealot Judaism lost its mother of all battles, and militant Islam is set to lose its Armageddon. Islam and the rest of the world will find a way to end the conflict and coexist. How, I do not know. Perhaps Muslims will find ways to read the Quran differently. Perhaps they will reverse the old principle of abrogation where later (and more bellicose) texts superseded earlier, more congenial ones. Perhaps they will learn to spiritualize the Quran's overtly political ayat much as the rabbis learned to spiritualize the Torah. Perhaps the Islamic survivors will be varieties resembling today's universalistic Ahmadis, spiritualistic Sufis, peaceful quietists, and synchretistic folk Muslims.

Or perhaps the Muslim faith will simply stop making sense to people, the Quran will stop sounding true, and Islam will stop growing and begin to fade away. After all, traditions do decline and even disappear. There aren't a lot of Zoroastrians around today.

Or perhaps not. There is really no telling, because we have not been here before. Islam is not just another religion, the Quran is not just another book, Muhammad is not just another charismatic leader, Islam's history is not just another trajectory, and the twenty-first century West is not just another civilization.

9:25 AM


Apparently it is just as offensive to criticize Muslim oppression out of expertise as it is out of ignorance. According to Rod Dreher, Bat Yeor is getting the Jerry Falwell treatment from Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others at Georgetown University. (More from me on Yeor and dhimmitude here.) Dreher quotes Walid Phares of Florida Atlantic University:

"After 9/11, and continuing jihadist attacks on Christians around the world, it's very sad that students at a prominent university would try to suppress voices of academics, of researchers who are just trying to shed light on a very difficult issue. History is history, and in the same way Christians have criticized their own history, including the Crusades, it's time for the Muslim intellectuals to start criticizing the Islamic conquests and the jihad."

My time at Stanford was in the mid-eighties, while the Reagan years were making liberals go berserk but before the full-blown heyday of political correctness. Even so, in some programs and departments, and in White Plaza, the left basically owned the conventional wisdom and often controlled the discourse. Once in a while a Stanford Daily editorial by a Hoover fellow would come down like a thunderbolt and leave us speechless. But only rarely. For most of my time there, I went along with the conventional wisdom as a mushy moderate. But in my last quarter I finally reacted against all the accumulated indoctrination and manipulation by concluding that the campus left had something to hide, and became for a while an unreconstructed right winger.

I am still not over the anger and sense of betrayal that my alma mater left me with. (It's a good thing that dorm life and football game halftimes just about compensated for them.) Don't these people realize that they are their own worst enemies? Don't the students, staff, and faculty at America's top universities realize that standing against politically incorrect suffering discredits everything they stand for? Don't top universities realize that when they get in the way of full and honest inquiry, they no longer want to be taken seriously? That they are no longer willing to be top universities?

All this, say Bat Yeor and Littman, shows how the Jews and Christians of Georgetown have embraced a dhimmi mentality, by abasing themselves before the sensibilities of Muslims, whose co-religionists persecute and oppress Jews and Christians abroad. Political correctness demands that Islam be thought of as inherently peaceful and tolerant, and no explorations of its history and doctrines that would lead to a contrary view may be presented.

The main text in my church history course – at a suburban evangelical university that is not even nationally ranked – is brutally honest about every century of Christian failures. My students, few of whom had ever encountered ancient or medieval Christian history in any significant way before this course, are being initiated into Christian history not with an idealistic or triumphalistic view of our tradition, but with a fair, even occasionally antagonistic one.

I have designed the course this way because I refuse to leave my students open to feeling they have been cheated out of the truth. I want them to have a better education at Azusa Pacific than I had at Stanford. I actually believe the truth of Christian faith can survive fair and honest historical scrutiny. (By the way, my students are handling it, God bless them. They are a great group of men and women.)

Are Georgetown's pouting students and staff really that threatened by a couple of historians?

I've been there, so I'm not surprised. But I do feel sorry for all the young people who are paying a fortune and spending four or more years of their lives in order to gain an "elite education" that needs basic remediating. And I feel even sorrier for the millions of people throughout the world who suffer while the intellectually insecure avert their eyes.

It is to be hoped that the Georgetown debacle may result not in Bat Yeor's voice being silenced by dhimmitized Americans, but amplified by Americans who are tired of the silence on Islamic persecution of dhimmis.

If years of careful, peer-reviewed scholarship by an Egyptian Jewish woman are not enough to earn this message a fair hearing, then I have an alternative. Campus groups need to find people who have personally suffered persecution as dhimmis – preferably poor women of color – bring them to campus, and have them speak. Let's see how consciously ignorant our "top" campuses are willing to be.

</snap>

8:52 AM


October 29, 2002

Internet radio has gotten me buying music again. (Are you listening, RIAA? I didn't think so.)

Two Kirk Franklin CDs arrived yesterday: Nu Nation Project and One Nation Crew.

I'm hooked.

12:07 PM


October 27, 2002

Posting will be light for a few days. Two children are sick and, even worse, my wife is sick too. So our family will be in survival mode for a while.

Have a joyful Lord's Day!

12:25 PM


October 26, 2002

It has been two terrible weeks to be either the victim of an Islamist, or a Muslim. October has brought new connotations to the words "Bali", "Maryland", and "Moscow." Everyone now knows of a Mohamed who is a terrorist. (It may be premature to chalk up John Mohamed's killing spree to Islamist-inspired or Islamist-sponsored terrorism, but so far the signs are not good.) An Algerian massacre is so overshadowed by the rest of these that it won't even make a day's worth of headlines.

Weeks like these induce a kind of apocalyptic panic in me. The panic is inappropriate, but the apocalypticism is not. I want to explain why.

Jesus lived in a time of simmering conflict between Rome and Israel. Apocalyptic theology interpreted the ongoing conflict (as it had interpreted earlier conflicts with Babylon, Persia, and Greece) in terms of the promised end-times when God would see Israel through its final tribulation. The conviction that God backed Israel in the conflict left the chosen people, oppressed by a dominant power, that much more tempted to fight back, and that much more willing to take on impossible odds to fight the wars that proved not only futile, but counterproductive. Triumphalist eschatology provoked Israel to take up the sword, and Israel soon politically died by the sword it sought to live by.

Triumphalist Islamism, frustrated by the technological inferiority of Muslim societies, remains sure of God's favor and the inevitability of its victory over the Dar al-Harb ("House of War," the non-Muslim world). Whether it comes through conquest or through persuasion, victory is part of its metanarrative. This is the story Islam has told since the phenomenal conquests of its first few years. Whether it reaches for the sword out of insecurity or overconfidence or both, it reaches from within a tradition that makes sense of its actions.

For this reason, I find the assurances of Muslims that their religion is not really about war and conquest utterly unpersuasive. Of course it is. Naturally the conquest is more elegant when it happens nonviolently. However, the dominant story of the Quran and its community is of divinely intended, approved, and empowered conquest that makes social and personal space for human submission (islam), faith (iman), and virtue (ihsan).

Yet what made first-century Israel so volatile was not that one metanarrative reigned, but that two metanarratives conflicted. Israelite triumphalism threatened Roman triumphalism. The Roman-Israelite conflict from around 200 BC-200 AD was a slow and bloody process of working out a new relationship between the two storied peoples. Rome had to find a way to tolerate a people that could not practice its state religion. Israel had to find a way to tolerate a social context that did not respect its political aspirations. The result was a mutual compromise: Romans ruled Jews with an iron fist. Jews won a Roman concession excepting them from Rome's emperor cult.

Jesus of Nazareth got in the way of all this by presenting an alternative. (Here I am drawing on John Howard Yoder's essay, "The Original Revolution," which you can find in his For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical.) Jesus refused simply to side with the Sadducees who were willing to compromise with Rome. He refused simply to side with Zealots who advocated military action. He refused simply to side with Essenes who withdrew communally, or with Pharisees who withdrew spiritually, to a realm unthreatened by the rival narrative. Instead Jesus built a community of disciples that told a different story: The Reign of God has arrived in Jesus' ministry. Into a world committed to violent offense and self-defense, it spreads as a place of divinely intended, approved, and empowered peace among peoples. It is won and protected not by the sword but by the good news of God's forgiveness. At Jesus' table sit Simon the Zealot, Levi the tax-collecting oppressor, and eventually Paul the Pharisee and Cornelius the centurion. Reconciled.

The Jewish and Roman authorities, and even the disciples themselves, were so threatened by this peace that they all rejected it. Pilate offered "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" to the world as an example.

What irony. "'Now is the judgment of the world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.' He said this to show by what death he was to die" (John 12:32-33). In the Father's resurrection of the Son, the world's judgment of Jesus becomes God's judgment of the world. The resurrection, not the sword, creates the true social and personal space for human submission, faith, and virtue.

Today Jesus is just as much in the way of two "new," really old, metanarratives. One is Islamist peace through zealotry. The other is pax Americana. Both win and defend their turf through violence. Both tell stories featuring the persistent theme of war. One of my former teachers, Jim McClendon, quotes Michael Goldberg's Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust Toward a Jewish Future. Goldberg says the American story

begins with tales about Pilgrims who set out in search of freedom. Later, the story reaches its climax with chronicles of revolutionaries who struggled for their independence. Afterwards, it continues with an epic about a civil war waged to liberate all those within the nation's borders. The American story next moves forward with legends about rugged individualists who pioneered those hard-won liberties in uncharted new frontiers. And throughout the story as a whole, we repeatedly hear of American men and women willing to fight and, if necessary, die to defend their cherished freedoms (8).

The American master story really came home to me one night when my family rented a Bugs Bunny video in which Bugs' rabbit-hole is dug up by a construction worker at a high-rise construction site. The boorish worker's dismissive attitude leads to an all-out guerrilla war of wits and improvised weaponry. Bugs takes some hits but ultimately prevails. After an entire trailer lands on the worker, he raises a white flag. The scene closes with a high-rise in which a rabbbit-sized semicircle is carved out. "After all," Bugs comments, "a man's home is his castle."

That cartoon perfectly represents the American story. "Leave us alone," we say. "And if you don't, there will be hell to pay." Over and over, the American story finds itself in conflict with the stories of others. Whether America is the defender or the aggressor, there is hell to pay every time.

That cartoon represents the Muslim story too, doesn't it?

Personally, in this conflict I am much more tempted (and I do mean "tempted") to throw in my lot with Roman America than Zealot Islam. And as I have repeatedly said here, I support America's efforts to defend both those who are dying at the hands of Islamists, and peaceful Muslims who may be scapegoated. There is some Bugs Bunny in me. Nevertheless, I find American assurances that its cause is not really about war and conquest equally unpersuasive. Of course it is. American history books tell America's story as clearly as the Quran tells Islam's.

McClendon seems to feel the same way. No hater of America, he quotes these words in Witness, a theology of culture that concentrates on American culture, music, art, science, philosophy, and religion as fertile soil for the good news to yield a harvest:

I do not belittle the American master story; it has meant life and hope to millions of families including my own. At least on one point, though, it contrasts sharply with the biblical master story just reviewed: In the story Americans tell themselves, every great problem from independence to slavery to totalitarian threats is finally resolved by the ultima ratio of war. ... In surprising contrast, the biblical master story pivots upon a slave people who ran away 'in urgent haste' (Deut. 16:3), upon a Savior who enters the capital city riding on a donkey and who is called the Prince of Peace; today it demands a living witness to that peace.

Both Muslim and American assurances that we can all get along are either naive or disingenuous. Master stories like these do not just get along. Something will have to give.

When Jesus offered his alternative, both Rome and Israel spurned it, until the resurrection changed a few minds on both sides. Muslims and Americans have adopted a more effective way to reject the way of the cross. Both traditions learned long ago only to appeal to Jesus selectively, self-servingly, and conveniently, Islamizing and Americanizing Jesus, seeking to assimilate him as a champion of their causes. They thus turn their backs on the community he created – whose early achievement, before it was reinfected with (Constantinian) Roman triumphalism, was a just peace between Jews and Romans at a common table of fellowship. They fall back on their own resources, now with God's apparent imprimatur.

As today's conflict works itself out, it is forever changing both Islam and America (and every other storied people who gets involved). The years ahead promise to change us all further. I do not know how Islam and America and the world's other peoples will ultimately be affected by this contest of stories. I know that they will survive it. I also know that they will not be redeemed by it.

Redemption can only come through their trust in another story, in the good news of an undomesticated, crucified and risen, ascended and returning Jesus.

Jesus told his disciples not to lose hope as the world was engulfed in apocalytpic wars, because God's reign was and is at hand. The question is not whether God's favor reigns. It is not whether captives may be free, sins may be forgiven, poverty may find abundance, ignorance may become wisdom, or whether any other blessing may be had. In Christ all promises find their fulfillment. The question is only whether the world's peoples will accept what Christ has achieved when his Holy Spirit offers it to them.

Whether you are a Muslim triumphalist, an American patriot, or a supposedly neutral quietist, I write not as someone who hates you, or (in my less panicked moments) who fears you, but only as a living witness to a story that will always get in your way. It is a story authored by Jesus himself and signed by his resurrection. It is a story neither you nor we can ultimately domesticate to serve other purposes than God's own. It is a story none can silence through intimidation. It is also a story you cannot ultimately ignore, for God in his love has promised that all peoples will hear it.

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places; all this is the beginning of the birthpangs. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and put you to death; and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most people's love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come (Matt. 24:6-14).

Shabbat shalom.

12:49 PM


October 23, 2002

Sunday's sermon was the first of a series on self-esteem. Uh-oh!

Al Franken's Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live and California's commission to promote self-esteem – parody and self-parody – have conspired to make the concept an object of derision except among the stubbornly touchy-feely (and my generation, "X", is a lot more derisive than touchy-feely already).

Now my pastor, whom I respect immensely even though he is a baby-boomer, starts a series on it that is neither parody nor self-parody, and so I have to take it seriously. So be it.

His timing is actually terrific. Just a few days earlier in The Independent, Howard Jacobson powerfully located western and American self-hatred, concentrated in the left, in "our lack of self-worth" (via Andrew Sullivan):

Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – "What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?" etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel's will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.

Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged.

In locating the root of sin in human pride, Augustine brought astonishing clarity to the task of personal and cultural discernment. he helped transform shame cultures into guilt cultures. He created imaginative space in the west for the humility demanded by the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Augustine also created a blind spot. In his wake, the west has long been more adept at identifying self-glorification than self-loathing. In its doctrine of total depravity, Calvinism codified Augustine's insight that sin corrupts all of human life. While right in what it affirms, the doctrine was too easily interpreted as denying any human worth apart from saving grace. This is something it actually does not do; but the Arminian school of Augustinianism nevertheless sensed a problem of imbalance, and so rightly stressed human ability as well as human depravity.

Awareness of depravity without hope of redemption is an awful thing. It haunts Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. It afflicts those whose "Catholic guilt" keeps them away from church rather than drawing them back into the confessional. It is one reason the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines of predestination are so loathed by all but a few. It tempts a world Jewry struggling to make sense of the Shoah. Now it debilitates a western left wing characterized by a powerful and comprehensive conviction of democratic capitalism's structural injustice. With Marx's labor theory of value discredited, where can hope be found? The powerful are just too powerful. The masses love Big Brother. Capitalism's global conquests promise to extinguish the hope of peoples everywhere. Perhaps desperation is the author of the left's toleration of and alliances with global democratic capitalism's various enemies. Triangulation is all that is left.

Yet the Good News despairs of no people, of no culture. Calvinists and Arminians, Augustinians and Pelagians alike know this, for Jesus himself has promised that the good news must be preached to all peoples (Mark 13:10). Even if I were predestined to damnation, my culture is not.

That is the real ground of social self-esteem. The possibility exists in all cultures – even ours, even our enemies' – of redemption. God has promised grace to restore and perfect nature. Total depravity describes us – the sex and drugs may be problems after all! – but it does not totally describe us. Our people can still be wronged.

Now one's cultural hope does not lie in the Darwinian triumph or even survival of one's own present civilization, but in its crucifixion and resurrection in Christ. This is as true of the west's declared enemies and the conflict's bystanders as it is of the west. All things are being made right and made new in the Kingdom. Cultural self-preservation and renewal are not simply up to us; they are divine commitments. In fact, the Church is empowered by a Holy Spirit who is up to the task. Because Jesus' crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost are irreversible achievements,

we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ... If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life (Romans 5:3-10).

Know someone who does? Don't compound their hopelessness with your derision. Comfort them instead.

11:08 AM


October 22, 2002

As I write I am hearing Koko prophesy over Internet radio. Since I started listening to urban gospel I have noticed that occasionally the black Church's prophetic tradition of speaking in God's name coincides with the black choral tradition of a female lead singer. Here the results are wonderful: God, woman of color, honoring my deathbed Christianity while pleading for more:

You say that you love me, you can't live without me

Then why do you call me only when you need me?

12:49 PM

What about Camassia's contention that the bones of "Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" don't prove much faithwise? It depends on how much of a historical skeptic you have been. Fundamentalists will just shrug their shoulders and say, "We told you so." But for years I have been working in very different circles. A colleague just told me about a fellow biblical scholar who doubts the historicity of everyone before – get this – Origen. Now that's fringe, but it still tells you the dynamics of the guild. I have a hunch that fellow's powers of rationalization are already keenly honed, but this should still give them quite a workout.

More than anything, this discovery blows the doors off of every other extrabiblical attestation of Jesus' life, in both antiquity and proximity. Not just Jesus' mere existence; his life.

For this is the ossuary of the one who by tradition is acknowledged as Jesus' kin, as one of his early critics, and as following Peter as leader of the Church in Jerusalem.

James is not described in the gospels as being a believer before his brother's resurrection. In fact, the gospels generally present Jesus' family and home town as incredulous about what he has become since his baptism (Mark 3:21, 3:31-35). That's an odd enough tradition to be pretty uncontroversial historically. The gospels are not fabricating their unbelief, but explaining it away.

Yet something changes in James. In one of the earliest and most reliable historical narratives we have – a confession Paul learned from the apostles in Jerusalem and transmitted to his churches – we have testimony that the risen Jesus appeared to James (1 Cor. 15:7). That testimony is missing from the gospels (whose stories of resurrection appearances diverge anyway), but it explains why, from being out of the loop, James suddenly emerges as a leader of the young Church (Acts 12:17). In fact, it explains the change like nothing else can.

Peter and Paul usually get the lion's share of theological and historical attention, not least because of their associations with Rome. But the first Christian community was in Jerusalem. It was in Jerusalem that the narratives of Jesus' resurrection appearances were collected. It was in Jerusalem – through the influence of James, according to Acts 15 – where it was decided that Gentiles could join the community without being circumcised. Jerusalem is a theological center, even the theological center, of the first-century Church.

In the tradition, James represents the conservative Jewish wing of the early Church. Yet his Aramic-speaking, culturally conservative fellowship seems responsible for the practice of calling on Jesus as "Lord." You can see this in Paul's closing one-word prayer in 1 Cor. 16:22: "Maranatha!" Even though he is speaking to a Greek audience, he leaves the Aramaic prayer untranslated, which means it is a liturgical text like "hallelujah" or "amen" that goes back beyond his own ministry to the common Jewish inheritance of all Christians. (For the same reason, that text in 1 Cor. 15 I already appealed to calls Peter "Cephas," his Aramaic name. That helps confirm its Palestinian rather than Pauline origin.)

The prayer means this: "Lord, come." It is a prayer to Jesus. That's already a stretch for Jews who pray only to God. It calls Jesus "Lord," which for Jews was the circumlocution for the unpronouncable Name YHWH. That's even more of a stretch for a group of Jews who should know better than to associate the invisible God with anything in the heavens, earth, or below. It calls on him to return – meaning to return at the end of the age. In the context of Jesus' own claims, that makes Jesus not just a rabbi or a sage, but the Son of Man of Daniel 7. All of these are indicators that the Jewish Church in Jerusalem, not just the Pauline and Petrine fellowships of Jews and Gentiles elsewhere in the empire, worshipped Jesus as divine. And James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus, was its leader.

From growing up with your brother to thinking him a lunatic to praying to him as Lord, all within the frame of a Jewish life, is quite a transformation.

James' fellowship does not break with the Pauline and Petrine fellowships of Jews and Gentiles elsewhere in the Roman empire. After a long and often anti-Semitic tradition of reducing Christianity to a Hellenistic departure from Judaism, this little stone box is a nice reminder of how old, how close to Jesus, and how Jewish is the tradition of worshipping him. It also reminds us of the staggering theological importance of the Church in Jerusalem.

This ossuary tells us that James continued to associate himself with Yeshua as a figure of unusual prominence. It also tells us that the traditions of Jesus' lineage and family are not fabrications of imaginative literary communities isolated from each other. (Wonderful reading on the gospels as intertextual projects of communities in close communication can be found in Richard Bauckham's The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences.) That we have the box itself tells us that Church practices of recollecting texts as well as relics of its past are more reliable than sometimes conveniently supposed. Christians are conservators as much as innovators.

This box doesn't establish anything substantial about Christian faith or life that both biblical literalists and sober and fair-minded historical critics didn't already know. But it confirms a lot, both before and after the crucifixion. Remember the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? This is bigger.

UPDATE: Nice wrap-up, as usual, in the CT weblog.

PEDANTIC PROFESSORIAL UPDATE: The hawklike Camassia reminds me that James' bones were not discovered, only the box. That's right – but since an ossuary is made to house the bones of one who has already been dead for a year and exhumed, I am assuming that it was made after James' death, whether or not it was used as intended.

This even crossed my mind when I was about to hit "Post" and I left it anyway. Serves me right!

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. Time is reporting bone fragments at the bottom of the ossuary. The owner has no intention of testing them, however.

11:46 AM


I am not as much of a geek as Camassia thought I would be!

Now that she has a weblog, I can already tell my students will have to wait even longer to get their papers back.

A. Religion as "tricky to define"? You bet. I avoid the word whenever possible. But I do like to use it this sentence: If soccer isn't a world religion, what is?

But science as religion? I think that stretches the meaning of "religion" beyond even its present semi-uselessness. Religion connotes devotion and even worship. Science as belief (in the weak modern sense of the word), yes. Scientists believe that the scientific method works. They may even be devoted to its practice, in the same way that farmers are devoted to agriculture. But we don't call farming a religion (unless we're arguing for federal subsidies).

Many fundamentalists who subsume science into religion do so out of intellectual insecurity. They have already subsumed their own religion into science.

Science as a belief system? In my circles that sounds too much like "science as ideology." Sometimes science is confused with modern ideologies or belief systems on which it sometimes rests today: materialism or empiricism. But scientists need not be materialists or empiricists. Indeed, scientists who are Jewish, Christian, and Muslim historically based their confidence in the fruitfulness of scientific inquiry in the conviction that the universe is the creation of one purposeful god, rather than the chaotic and possibly incoherent effect of a pantheon. "Belief systems" in which science finds its various places are broader than the method itself. Let me put that more accurately: The forms of human life that support scientific inquiry cross confessional and ideological lines. That's wonderful news, because it gives us things to discover together even when we can't appreciate them the same way.

So empiricists who subsume science into ideology tend to do so for the same reasons as fundamentalists: To trade on science's good reputation.

Intelligent Design as science? Well, it's certainly a hypothesis, but not one with much positive explanatory power. Since all it can do is criticize reductionist rival accounts and draw a big phenomenological question mark, there's no reason to dwell on it. It probably rates a few minutes in class, but no more.

B. The Old Testament as the "bad part" of the Bible? [UPDATE: Camassia is only forwarding, not taking, this position.] What gives? It was Jesus' whole Bible, and he never criticized it. If anyone allowed himself to be associated with "the law, the prophets, and the psalms" (Luke 24:45), it was this Jew who took it upon himself to fulfill it. (This might not matter to secular leftists turning anti-Semitic, but it matters to me.)

C. The bones of "Jacob, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" not proving much faithwise? That deserves its own post.

D. The historicity of the resurrection? Yeah. The reality of the resurrection? Definitely. More soon on both of these claims, their distinction, and their relationship.

RETENTIVE "CAMASSIA IS WATCHING" UPDATE: I originally said that "Religion connotes devotion and even worship" because I agree with Camassia that religion as commonly defined does not demand devotion, let alone worship. I am working from the term's common use rather than the precise academic use, because scholars of "religion" have never managed to agree on what religion is in the first place. Religion is an essentially contested concept. The term is used for a wide variety of practices with family resemblances, but no clear commonality. These are all good reasons not to use the word too much around me. It's like using the term "warp" around a Trekkie.

I think the word I would prefer here to bridge the gap between "ideology" and "religion" is cosmology. (Many religions, including so-called "pagan" ones, are cosmological, as well as many traditions not commonly called religious.) Is science cosmological? It can be. It does a stunning job of explaining the instrumental causes of the universe, and while I think it is structurally unsuited to explaining whatever first cause there might be, so are many other cosmologies.

Why do I care about making such fine distinctions? Because I think the vocabulary of faith and reason, science and religion is confused and misleading. When Darwinists accept the language of "faith" to describe their confidence in the theory of historical evolution, I think they have conceded too much to creationists. It makes Darwinism sound dogmatic, unscientific – and monopolistic if it does not grant equal time to creationism. It reminds me of my Catholic students who refer to evangelicals but not themselves as "Christians."

Likewise, on "orders of faith": I have confidence in the resurrection of Jesus, but faith goes beyond confidence and even certainty, to trust. Should a scientist ever trust a theory? (These are questions I should be asking my colleagues in science rather than just blogging.)

As you know, because you and I belong to different communities, we use words in somewhat different ways. I also have a habit of using some terms in technical theological senses but others in popular senses, without bothering to identify which is which. Sorry for the inevitable misunderstandings and lengthy "clarifications."

I think the reason fundamentalists fight with science is that they read Genesis 1-3 like pagans.

(Of course, these chapters' ethical lessons also come through clearly to Jewish audiences, their theological anthropology and doctrine of creation to patristic theological audiences, and so on. Why assume it can only have one proper interpretation?)

One last thing, on Jews ashamed of their own Scriptures: It's not as if this is a new thing. Philo, first century Alexandrian Jew, pioneered the use of allegory to interpret passages he found culturally troublesome. For centuries Alexandrian allegorists showed how it was done, and allegorical exegesis still survives all over Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I advise embarrassed Jews to call a rabbi and find out how these things have been addressed for the past 2,000 years. If that's not possible, then just go get a copy of Barry Holtz's extraordinary Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts.

But allegory is not a license just to scrub away the inconvenient parts of either testament. The God of Jesus Christ does lay down "strict laws (with draconian punishments)" (Matt. 5:17-26) is "a jealous god who wastes whole cities" (Matt. 11:21-24) and favors "the chosen people" then and now (Rom. 11). The Jewish people are not an allegory.

11:16 AM


This is cool.

Really cool.

8:38 AM


I am not happy with the previous post (immediately below) as it stands, and it has bothered me all night.

Oh, I stand by what I have already said. But something is missing. Specifically, hope is missing.

What most concerns me about the intimidation of Islam's critics through the ages is that everyone suffers from it. Punished "sinners," "infidels," and "apostates," (many of whom have been Christians and Jews) obviously suffer. The "orthodox" punishers suffer too, in that they inhabit a dictator's world where sincerity is indistinguishable from hypocrisy, faith indistinguishable from flattery. Silenced bystanders suffer as well, in that they no longer get to see truth prove itself.

Free-speech traditions are not trouble-free either. In the Enlightenment free speech was grounded in the false hope that unaided but properly trained universal human reason could appreciate transcendent truth. As an Augustinian Christian I wouldn't believe that even if postmodernity had not come along to discredit it on additional grounds.

Yet I am not one of those Augustinians who trusts in coercion to do what reason alone cannot. Better ground for Christian toleration of free speech lies in the true hope that the Word of God is alive and active, free and powerful, returning fruitful rather than void. Even human depravity cannot finally withstand its persuasive power. Minds are vulnerable, but the truth is not.

Neither tolerance nor religious (or irreligious) coercion can change this. In the unfolding war between western libertarianism (or is it libertinism?) and Islamist coercion – and here I am drawing a relative distinction rather than an absolute one – I don't believe Christians should be fully sympathetic with either side. Nor should either side's victory cause us to lose hope. For nothing can finally silence the truth of Jesus Christ. To be sure, each poses a considerable threat. But the truth survived a crucifixion, and it will survive these persecutions too. The human freedom that the Good News promises – good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed – will come to all peoples.

In the meantime, people can be forced into a sort of belief or unbelief. There may even be seasons of life when force becomes necessary. Israel's faith centers in a Law that once ruled it penally. My wife and I make our kids say "please," "thank you," "I'm sorry," and "I forgive you." We even make them sound like they mean it. After a few years, they really do.

However, these rules are training wheels. Their point is to empower lives of freedom. Jesus' Pharisee contemporaries, so well intended and so like him in so many ways, nevertheless tended to make the Law an agent of dependency. Sin, Rabbi Paul says, coopts the Law of Moses and makes it an agent of its tyranny. But the Law itself is holy and just and good. It is a tutor to keep us safe until the age of its fulfillment in Christ. Rabbi Jesus made impressive use of the Law in the service of his program of restoring fellowship among God, God's people, and all peoples. He did not come to reassert the Law and prolong humanity's childhood. Nor did he come to abolish the Law and inaugurate a reign of Reason. He came to fulfill the Law and embody it with perfect freedom, so that it could find a new and even more profound place in God's world.

In Jesus' Kingdom, the Law remains, but its old terrors are gone. Here is my favorite example: In confronting persistent Corinthian sin (1 Cor. 5), Paul appeals to Deuteronomy 17:7: "Drive out the evildoer from among you." In the old age the context of this text was the stoning of one who transgressed the covenant. In the new one, it refers to nonviolent excommunication in the hope that such a drastic measure will bring out the sinner's repentance. No new blood need be shed – "for Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed" (1 Cor. 5:7).

What is true of the Law as embodied in first-century Asia Minor is also true, though less determinatively, of the culture of all peoples in all ages. Frustrated by their own incapacities and corruptions, all cultures find themselves restored and perfected – not tamed or obliterated – under Christ's reign. Muslim cultures too.

That's not an agenda. It's a promise (Rev. 22:2).

So I am not waging a culture war aganst Islamism, let alone Islam. The triumph of western free speech over Muslim dhimmitude would not be an unqualified victory for the Good News. It would simply replace legal tyranny with libertinism, one set of taboos with another. So would the triumph of enforced Islamic deference to Muhammad over western free speech. In the book of Revelation, libertines and oppressors alike are excluded from the New Jerusalem. The speech of human eternity is perfectly free and perfectly respectful.

Because Jesus already reigns, life can be like that today, not just someday. Jesus did not return insults with curses, but offered forgiveness. There is something profoundly right about western free-speech traditions – and there is also something profoundly right about Sharia too. But apart from Christ's Kingdom, their rules become taboos of piety, patriotism, and political correctness. If Christians respect the reign of Jesus, then we should cultivate "cities of refuge," social spaces in and out of our churches, where God's children can speak freely and consequentially about the things that matter most without fearing for their lives.

If we do so, it will show all the world that Jesus already reigns.

7:34 AM


October 21, 2002

A student in the doctoral program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government writes:

In your weblog post dated October 11, you say:

Civilizations clashed as several innocent Indians were murdered because of fallout after Jerry Falwell called Muhammad a terrorist. I am using Huntington's language because I think this is more than a foolish remark by a foolish person (though it certainly is that). I think it portends the future of western-Muslim relations, and that future is dark.

Since Falwell and Christians in general were apparently inconveniently inaccessible, rioting Muslims targeted Hindus instead. So far five people have been killed and 47 injured.

A few comments:

(a) I am not certain what you mean when you say Hindu-Muslim rioting in India is symptomatic of a Muslim-Western civilisational clash. Even within the (deeply flawed) context of Huntington's theory, Hindus are hardly Western. And furthermore, Indian Muslims (and debatably even Pakistani Muslims, for that matter) are civilisationally and culturally far more South Asian than Muslim, which I have pointed out several times personally to Huntington, though he can be rather deaf when it suits him.

Find another example for your thesis, this one doesn't fit.

I am not particularly interested in defending Huntington's or anyone else's precise list of clashing world civilizations. However, I do find quite helpful his characterizations of social groups whose ways and plausibility structures differ intrinsically and so clash naturally. The hard-won western cultural habit of tolerating criticism of figures such as Muhammad and even Jesus is not a Muslim cultural habit. When westerners exercise their habit freely, the consequences often include violence or the threat of violence.

An article on Indian and Kashmiri reactions to Falwell in Pakistan's Dawn reported that "in the south districts of Anantnag and Pulwama people took to the streets shouting 'death to enemies of Islam.'" This is a mild example in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Do you really want me to supply more to support "my thesis"? They won't be pretty.

(b) Further, the riots in Solapur were not caused by Muslims 'targeting' Hindus. On the contrary, a prominent Muslim organisation called a general strike, as a peaceful method of protest common in India; on the day of the strike, some local supporters of the Hindu fundamentalist party the Shiv Sena were asked why they were not supporting the strike and lashed out at those Muslims asking the question; in the ensuing melee, the police fired at the (mainly Muslim) crowd, killing one; and the subsequent riots were mainly in reaction to this ill-judged firing order by an inexperienced sub-inspector.

Again, you need to find another example.

The police have arrested M D Sheikh, who is president of the Muslim Vikas Parishad (MVP), which had given the call to all Muslim business establishments in the city to down shutters on Friday.

The parishad was protesting the American Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s reported remarks against Prophet Mohammed on a TV programme recently.

The immediate provocation for the riots, it is learnt, was the use of force by the activists of the MVP on the establishments owned by the majority community. Violence started from Asra Nagar township in Solapur on Friday when local businessman Nagesh Takmoge refused to close his shop after being asked to do so by the MVP.

As news of the violence spread in the minority-dominated area of Vijapur, the decorations for the ongoing Navratri puja were destroyed by arsonists.

In the subsequent police firing, three persons were killed while two died in mob violence.

... The BJP spokesman Prakash Jawdekar said Muslims in other parts of the world did not react violently to the Baptist priest’s remarks.

"Why there was a reaction to Mr Falwell’s statement only in Maharashtra?," he asked and alleged that certain fundamentalist elements were instigating communal trouble in the state.

He blamed the Democratic Front (DF) government for its failure to curb the violence.

Let's say I do grant that Muslims were acting peaceably, Hindus lashed out, people were killed in the shooting that followed. That could still jibe with accounts like this:

The rioters attacked each other with knives and stones during the strike called to protest what Falwell said on CBS television early this month. Muslim organizations said Falwell's remarks were derogatory and blasphemous.

Chris Mooney of The American Prospect blames CAIR, the Council for American-Islamic Relations:

I would suggest that a Friday e-mail alert from CAIR, whose subject line read, "ISLAM-INFONET: Deaths Result From Falwell's Comments," is an offense of a different order. CAIR clearly twisted the news in order to put forward the ludicrous – and chilling – suggestion that Falwell's behavior has murderous consequences.

In the body of CAIR's e-lert, which took the form of a bulleted list of news stories with short excerpts of each (sometimes followed by links), the above line about Falwell was repeated but now with attribution to a prominent news source: "DEATHS RESULT FROM FALWELL'S COMMENTS (AP)." Scrolling down, however, revealed no actual link to an AP story bearing such a title. Instead, there was a brief excerpt of a report on violence in the Indian city of Solapur that erupted during a Muslim general strike to protest Falwell's comments. So far the violence has resulted in nine deaths and numerous injuries.

A Nexis search for wire stories about the riots didn't turn up any that ran with nearly so provocative a title as CAIR's. In fact, though Falwell's remarks did prompt the demonstrations, it's hard to argue that he turned them violent. The direct causes of the first five deaths were 1) clashes between Hindu and Muslim protesters wielding knives and stones; and 2) police gunfire, presumably to control the crowd.

Indeed, an Agence-France Presse story on the events in India also observed that "a similar strike called by Muslim bodies in India's financial capital Bombay ended on [sic] peacefully." How could Falwell have had anything to do with the difference between Solapur and Bombay? A general strike devolved into rioting in one place but not the other, and in one instance nationalistic Hindus and police were involved.

Much more temperately than CAIR, The New York Times on Saturday presented the events in India objectively: "5 Die in India During Protests Over Falwell." The Washington Post, in turn, reported, "5 Die in Hindu-Muslim Clashes; Televised Falwell Remark Leads to Further Conflict in India."

Do the strikers, the rioters, and CAIR represent all American Muslims? Of course not. I never said so. I merely argued that speaking about Muhammad only in terms that respect the sensitivities of "a few hypersensitive Muslims," in order to ensure that no people suffer as a consequence, will amount to western self-censorship that forecloses an honest examination of the life of Muhammad.

I think the history hardly makes this a difficult argument to support. Where Muslims have held political power (whether formally or informally), non-Muslims have generally had to hold their tongues for fear of reprisal over comments taken as insulting or blasphemous to the tradition. Now an American Islamic organization is asking public figures like Falwell to hold their tongues too, and blaming them for the deaths of innocents when they refuse.

More generally, while I approve of your sentiment that Falwell's remarks should not be attacked merely because of their consequences, I must point out that like the shouting fire in a crowded theatre exception to the free-speech rule, when there is a clear chain of causation that should be easy to predict between the remark and deaths there should be some blame apportioned to the maker of the remark. This does not take away from anyone else's guilt at actually going out and rioting or even taking offence, but it is nevertheless there.

Successfully.

As another point, we hear continually about how marginal clerics in the Muslim world are continually going on and on about the evils of Christianity. I do not hear a chorus of disapproval from the same sources when the three most prominent evangelicals I can think of – Falwell, Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson – essentially attack Islam and the Prophet.

Or do you mean Christian organizations? You will indeed find disapproval of Falwell's remarks from leading Christians. Along with it you will find admissions that our disapproval is uncomfortably muted. Certainly hypocrisy has something to do with that asymmetry. But keep in mind several other important reasons for the missing chorus of evangelical disapproval of "attacking Islam and the Prophet":

First, the Inquisition still casts a shadow in the West. It took a while for Christians to come around to the tradition of speaking freely without fearing for one's life, but we have grown to appreciate it. Second, centuries of Christian martyrs who died for "attacking Islam and the Prophet" cast another shadow. There is a holocaust going on in the Sudan that doesn't get much attention outside Christian circles. While the evangelical missionaries I know advise never insulting the sensibilities of those Christ has loved with his own life, they and their flocks still suffer for the occasional, and sometimes systematic, Muslim practice of deeming Christian remarks derogatory and thus punishable. Past and present violence against Christians tend to temper our disapproval of the public figures who actually call attention to Muslim violence, even when they do so insensitively and foolishly. Third, evangelicals have repeatedly been asked to get over our habit of protesting and boycotting films, artistic exhibitions, and books we find insulting and unfair. We are a bit bemused when we are suddenly asked to have the opposite reaction when it is others who feel insulted.

And finally, if you want to see the censorship of the mob at work in the West, try standing in a crowded subway station in NYC and saying loudly "Well, they had it coming." What may be all right in Cambridge MA or on the pages of The Nation is definitely taboo elsewhere in this country.

Now no strikes or riots follow each new issue of The Nation. No right-wing rioters are using Noam Chomsky's comments as occasions for violent reprisals against leftists. No chorus of editorialists is blaming leftists for inciting them. Yet you are right that western traditions of free speech have their limits. I acknowledged some of them in my post, not least when I recalled both campus political correctness and the "inquisitors" and "blasphemers" who drove honest scrutiny of Jesus and Church underground for centuries. I am happy to add patriotic taboos to religious ones – after all, in the last year I have never held back my criticisms of Christians who put country before God. And I hope I can take your comment to imply that you too are upset by both Muslim and western "censorship of the mob." That was, after all, the point of my original post.

11:44 AM


October 20, 2002

We read a text of terror today in Church: Psalm 139.

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my every thought when far away. You chart the path ahead of me and tell me where to stop and rest. Every moment you know where I am. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. You both precede and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to know! I can never escape from your spirit!

I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night – but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bight as day. Darkness and light are both alike to you. You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – and how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thouhts about me, O God! They are innumerable! I can't even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up in the morning, you are still with me! O God, if only you would destroy the wicked! Get out of my life, you murderers! They blaspheme you; your enemies take your name in vain. O Lord, shouldn't I hate those who hate you? Shouldn't I despise those who resist you? Yes, I hate them with complete hatred, for your enemies are my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.

After everything that has happened since last year, how can we help but hear militancy in this passage? And not just any militancy, but militancy delivered in the now familiar idioms of the Middle East, where after all this passage was born. This meme has replicated itself catastrophically for millennia – in ancient Israel's futile calls for God to destroy its enemies, in the Constantinian Church's oppressions and crusades and inquisitions, in Islam's holy wars and punishments of infidelity, in America's utilitarian "enlightened self interest." This is the meme that so many secularists want to extinguish before it extinguishes them, and the whole world with them.

After 9/11 I wanted to believe that this meme is an Arab thing – "Death to Israel!" – but that comforting illusion was shattered when I read an account of a rally in Israel in which the crowd shouted "Death to Arafat!" The shock of that line, which at first sounded so un-Jewish, suddenly brought me back to piles of biblical texts, which suddenly sounded like they could have come right from Osama's mouth.

The Bible surges with Near Eastern culture – with Semitism. It both draws on and feeds the sensibilities of its original peoples. And those sensibilities, as warped by sin as the sensibilities of any nation, lead their peoples astray. Never mind Jerry Falwell's issues with Muhammad. We have a bigger problem: Is God a terrorist? What do we do with texts that make this kind of speech holy and normative for Christians?

A. We could cut them. The Revised Common Lectionary tends to excise inconvenient passages from the texts read in Church. This approach would keep the happy part, Psalm 139:1-18 and 23-24, and skip the offensive verses.

B. We could find a different passage that is less threatening to our cosmopolitan sensibilities, push the uncomfortable material into modern obscurity, and sniff at the "fundamentalists" who refuse to do the same, presumably because of the hatred in their hearts. (I have run across a "Possibility Thinker's Edition" of the Bible, published by Robert Schuller's organization, in which "positive" verses are highlighted in blue. I don't have it in front of me, but I'd bet serious money that verses 19-22 are not in blue.)

C. We could affirm the passage on its face and shrug our shoulders at its horror. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. We could then sniff at the liberals who refuse to do this since "they don't believe the Bible."

D. We could 'clarify' the passage by throwing pop theology at it. We could interpret it according to the axiom "hate the sin but love the sinner." Nice try, but the text doesn't say to hate the sin. It says to hate the sinner.

Ask yourself: Why does this section of the psalm seem so out of place in a church service? It apparently did not seem out of place originally. What changed between Ps. 139's "hate your enemies" and Matthew 5's and Romans 12's "love your enemies"?

Here's what changed: The Kingdom came.

The Kingdom did not come to take scissors to Israel's Scriptures. Jesus did not come to sift through the 'good' verses and the 'bad' verses. He came to fulfill all Israel's Scriptures – "everything written about me in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44).

The inconvenient part of this psalm is actually key to getting the whole thing right. Jesus took on the alienation of sin that has been making us enemies of God and each other, and overcame it through friendship. He identified with this enemy of God, and all the rest of you too, taking our alienation into his very relationships with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and healing it by the power of his love. He hated me – not just my sin, but my self, twisted by sin, bound by it and a servant to it – by loving me unconditionally and breaking sin's grip.

"Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Jesus' nonviolent love, not jihad or inquisition, is the definitive shape of God's hate.

It was the risen Jesus who "opened [the disciples] minds to understand the scriptures" (Luke 24:45). The happy ending of his story trains us who feel hatred toward the unjust (Ps. 139:19-22) to go on and invite the Holy Spirit's examination of our own hearts (vv. 23). That exam yields the diagnosis that we are among those enemies (v. 24a), and that we need God's leadership if we are to see eternal life (v. 24b).

In fact, when the light of resurrection returns us to Ps. 139, we find that this exam was performed even before we invited it (vv. 1-6), that the diagnosis is unavoidable (vv. 7-12), and that the restoration of our original beauty (vv. 13-15) is a long-planned cure of fellowhip that is already offered us (v. 18). We can trade the hating love that condemns with the loving hate that rehabilitates. "Death to Arafat" – or to whomever – can become prayer for our persecutors. That is the way of Jesus Christ, the Lion of Judah, the lamb slain for the sins of the world.

Arab peoples need the healing of the gospel, and so do American peoples, and so do the Jewish people. The Good News promises that through Israel all nations (including Israel herself) will someday enjoy the healing of the leaves of the Tree of Life (Rev. 22:2). Then we will discover the full goodness of what it means to be Jewish and Arab and American.

Death to Israel? Death to Palestine? Death to America? Amen! Not through earthly weapons of mass destruction or heavenly showers of fire and brimstone, but through the baptism of God's forgiving judgment and the eternal communion of the Kingdom of God's peace.

5:17 PM


October 19, 2002

Camassia, a friend of mine who just started a blog that promises to be worth one of your shortcuts, thinks teaching fragmentary Christian religion in schools will be distortive:

It was [in public school] that my mother, who was raised unchurched, first heard the Abraham/Isaac story. And it scared the crap out of her. As she saw it, it was a story about a parent who would willingly murder his child under orders from an invisible person. That pretty well put her off Christianity at an early age.

I think of this story when I hear arguments by people who want to bring prayer back into public schools or put the Ten Commandments on the walls and that sort of thing. They tend to assume that by stuffing bits of Christian theory and practice into schools, they're getting bits of morality in too. But as the case with my mother – and, for that matter, Muslims, Jews and Christians – indicates, people will interpret these things according to what they know, or don't know. Christianity is a worldview, a mega-narrative, and unless you're already inside it a lot of things don't make a darn bit of sense.

Outside the metanarrative these fragments of Christian faith can make sense. More precisely, people manage to make sense of them by turning them into fragments of some other metanarrative. Camassia's mother made sense of Abraham as a murderous parent oppressed by a bloodthirsty God. What else was she supposed to do?

That observation applies to everything schools teach. I went through a (private) high school course in "the great books" in which we marveled that every stratum of the western canon was concerned with the basic modern issue of whether the individual or the state has the highest authority. Actually we didn't marvel about that, nor did it even cross our minds, because we failed even to question the assumption that our concerns were the same as theirs. I didn't even think twice about it until a New Republic article in around 1995 drew my attention to it. My class had imposed a twentieth-century political agenda on the entire western world.

Public schools center by definition on the metanarrative of their sponsor, i.e., on the public agenda of the state. Naturally any religious practice, however fragmentary, will be ripped out of its actual context in a community of faith and find a new and artificial place in the curriculum. The Ten Commandments in a courtroom cannot mean what they do in a classroom, a museum, a book on world religions, a synagogue, or a Church. Each context renarrates them according to a different story:

My own conviction is that the Decalogue's ultimate significance lies in its fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. So while I acknowledge that many (not all) of these are both rich and appropriate, here is my favorite display of the Ten Commandments:

Where are they? Right there in the middle, nailed to the cross.

This is the metanarrative in which the Ten Commandments truly find their place. The life of Jesus is where we learn what it means to have no Gods but YHWH, to have no image but the Image himself, to respect God's name as it has been entrusted to us, to rest in God's eternal peace, to choose life, to be faithful to God's and our spouses' claims on our bodies, to share what we have rather than taking what we want, to witness with all we are to the Truth who is the Way to the Life, and to be content in God's gracious provision.

Since a public school is forbidden to show this to me or my children, why would I want us confused by a Decalogue turned into something else — reduced to some historical moment in the evolution of American law?

Sure, the consequence is a biblically and theologically illiterate society. The alternative is a biblically and theologically confused one. Take your pick.

11:33 PM


E-mail today from a student who has been missing class a lot lately:

If there is anything I can do to get back into your good graces, let me know. For instance, I could slap those guys who bug you about grading their papers.

3:16 PM


Posting has been light for several reasons. (Why does this always happen right after Glenn Reynolds links to me?!)

First, it's crunch time at school, at home, and in computerland. My stack of papers to grade just got a lot thicker. The stress level is rising – meter almost to 'panic'.

Second, a lot has been going through my mind in the last week, but it has been to inchoate to blog. For instance:

I would absolutely love to sit down and compare two visions of the relationship between Good News, Church, and world: First, the Calvinist vision of Abraham Kuyper. Here the absolute transcendence of God means no one institution, practice, community, or 'sphere,' even the Church, can dictate to others how their faithfulness to God should be specifically shaped. Kuyper's vision offers room to all, Christian and non-Christian, to pursue obedience or disobedience in the various ways available to them. It lets farmers farm to the glory of God, appreciating the significance of what they do apart from whether it is put to use in the Church. This scheme operates according to the hard Calvinist distinction between special grace, which brings the elect to eternal salvation, and common grace, which temporally favors all creation, even those elected to damnation. The second vision is an Arminian account of life in the business world by the guest preacher at my church last week, Dale Walker. He described mission as a partnership of 'priests' and 'kings,' those who mediate saving grace and those who supply them. Thus someone in the business world is a 'king' whose efforts raise support for 'priests' in mission fields. (Of course these are soft distinctions; missionaries can support themselves and businesspeople can witness in more than just instrumental ways.) This is a suggestive metaphor, since it is grounded not only in the Israelite institutions of priesthood and kingdom, but in the prophetic, priestly, and royal work of Christ who fulfilled them and extended them to the life of the prophetic, priestly, and royal Church. This scheme depends on the Arminian and Wesleyan refusal to distinguish between saving and non-saving grace. All God's favor is 'common' – offered to all – and all is ordered toward the redemption of all creation. In the space of several days I was offered both these pictures of Gospel, Church, and world. "I do not know which I choose" (Phil. 1:22). In fact, I do not know whether to choose in the first place. As some of you know, I am not particularly happy with the dilemma Calvinism and Arminianism offer their audiences. I think the field of alternatives is broader.

The other thing that has been going through my mind lately was prompted by an essay on engineering method by Steven Den Beste. It prompted me to consider some of the various ways I have been involved in theological thinking and writing: study groups, individual research, seminars, reading circles, lecture delivery, panel discussions. These have various strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps the most rewarding project has taken the shape most like the method his team pursued at Tektronix (in which our group didn't 'code' any final statement for several years, but eventually came up with a satisfying and stable final statement. I wonder whether academic theology, so dedicated to building 'cathedrals' of individual thinking, would find itself spinning its wheels less and debugging its past mistakes if it dedicated more of its efforts to 'bazaars.' Computer people will get my allusion (which is actually rather unfair to the actual tradition of cathedral building), but actually a better illustration of what I'm talking about is from the theological tradition itself: the Church council. What if theologians worked in councils more often than carrels, meeting to brainstorm, to give and receive corrections early and charitably, to shift our egos to the success of the team rather than to our own list of publications? What I have in mind is a lot more than peer-review.

If only I had more time, I could begin developing these two ideas as much as I would like. Oh well!

2:34 PM


October 17, 2002

Yesterday's student quote of the day, after one of my classes learned that I'm not a fan of the Christian music scene (except for urban gospel and my church's incredible worship band):

"You really should listen to more Christian music. I'll rip you a Keith Green CD."

P.S. Cultural indicator of the day, after I pointed out the incongruity of his offer: He's still going to do it.

8:26 AM


October 16, 2002

It was late when I wrote this, and it shows. Apologies in advance.

In their first few centuries Christians were targeted by authorities, mocked by intellectuals, and slandered by popular opinion. Yet through wave after wave of persecution they did not strike back. Moreover they kept praying for their emperor. While sometimes allowing themselves strong words of frustration against their murderers, they remained pacifist and continued to invite their enemies into Christ's peace. In such circumstances they kept their hope and discovered a new level of joy.

Fast forward to last Saturday night, when the bombings in Bali opened up a new chapter as well as a new theater in World War IV. Now public opinion in the UK is turning sharply in favor of British military participation. Rumor (via Instapundit) has it that the French are quietly becoming supporters of American military action (quietly enough to avoid riling their Muslim minorities and markets). Idiotarians abroad are suffering the same self-destruction as their American counterparts did in the weeks and months after 9/11. Islamists have made a whole new set of mortal enemies.

Meanwhile, taking a page out of the Indonesian PR handbook, Bangladeshi politicians are outraged that Time magazine has called attention to the presence of Islamist militants there. Nice timing!

That makes three of the four most populist Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (the fourth is India) – fronts in Islamism's war against the West and its sympathizers. It is as hot as ever in the Middle East, east Africa, and north Africa. Amazingly, Iran just managed to vindicate Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham. Al Qaeda is reportedly downsizing and decentralizing. This problem is not going away any time soon.

The pain and bitterness of suffering Australians in weblogs I frequent is both striking and familiar. It is the same pain and bitterness that Americans experienced a year ago (and many others, as the WTC bombs killed a lot of non-Americans). Since this will surely not be the last attack, the cycle is sure to be repeated.

Every time western patience will wear thinner, south Asian or African or Middle Eastern politics will become more precarious, and economic ruin will visit more of the poorest parts of the world. Why?!

Coming across this reaction today (again via Instapundit) took my breath away:

I have many Muslim friends. My girlfriend is Muslim. But I must sadly conclude that the world would be a better place if the entire Islamic faith simply ceased to exist. Anne Coulter caught hell some months back for suggesting that Muslims should be converted to Christianity. I'm coming to believe that she may have had a point. We de-Nazified Germany. What precisely is the difference? Do the Rawlsian math. Weigh the potential suffering of Muslims denied the opportunity to practice their cockeyed faith against the current suffering to others caused by Muslims who do.

I know, I know. I'm being extreme. I'm reacting in anger. I shouldn't say such things. But ---- it, I am angry! If Muslims want understanding and tolerance from me, how about, at a minimum, they stop murdering my ------- friends.

I have a confession to make. At times I have had the same thought. I thought it in an Islamic history course when reading about the conquests, the subjugation of Christians and Jews, the annihilation of pre-Muslim cultures, and the Turks' use of Christian slave children as elite military forces. I have lovely Muslim friends and appreciate the beauty and logical power of Islam, yet after spending too much time in historical research or surfing the net after a major disaster like 9/11 or this year's Passover bombing in Israel, the thought crosses my mind: Wouldn't the world just be better without Islam?

In my Church history course, we are presently discussing the Crusades. That nauseating history makes World War IV look tame. But does it make me wonder whether the world would be a better place without Christian faith? Of course not.

One reason for the distinction I draw between Islam and Christianity here is an old-fashioned double standard. Like most people I naturally give "my own" the benefit of the doubt. Of course the world is better with us. That is utterly unchristian: The Church is to judge its own, not outsiders (1 Cor. 5:1-20). The problem is not the double standard itself, but my urge to apply the stricter standard to the wrong group.)

(Incidentally, this means I quite understand why Jews would think that neither Christian nor Muslim faith is worth the trouble it has caused them. In fact, it humiliates me that they who have better grounds to think and say it largely refrain from doing so. Perhaps it is because Judaism gave up its missionary aspirations long ago. Perhaps it is because many Jews are better Christians than I.)

A better reason for my distinction is my greater confidence that the Good News of the Kingdom of God is worth the trouble Christians have made of it. I do not share this radical confidence about the Quran. If I did I would become a Muslim. Since God has not convinced me that Muhammad is God's messenger, I do not know quite what to make of him or his followers. (This does not justify my wondering whether Muslim faith is worth the trouble, but it does explain my not wondering whether Christian faith is worth the trouble.)

Some of my brothers and sisters are more confident. Vatican II's Nostra Aetate ascribes to Islam a positive role in God's plan of salvation. That makes it a good thing. Is that defensible theology, or just wishful sixties liberalism?

Tonight, reading Vincent J. Donovan's wonderful Christianity Rediscovered, about his experiences as a missionary in Tanzania, I found the answer. I hope it will forever stop me from wondering whether Islam is worth it.

The gospel must be brought to the nations in which already resides the possibility of salvation. As I began to ponder the evangelization of the Masai, I had to realize that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture and tribal, racial customs and traditions. In this realization would have to rest my whole approach to the evangelization of the Masai.

I had no right to disrupt this body of customs, of traditions. It was the way of salvation for these people, their way to God. It was one of the nations to whom we had to bring the gospel – bring the gospel to it as it was. In those customs lay their possibility of salvation.

... An evangelist, a missionary must respect the culture of a people, not destroy it. The incarnation of the gospel, the flesh and blood which must grow on the gospel is up to the people of a culture.

... The gospel is, after all, not a philosophy or set of doctrines or laws. That is what a culture is. The gospel is essentially a history, at whose center is the God-man born in Bethlehem, risen near Golgotha.

At that moment facing me was that vast, sprawling, all-pervasive complex of customs and traditions and values and dictates of human behavior which was the Masai culture, a nation in the biblical sense, to whom I had to bring the gospel. At this point I had to make the humiliating admission that I did not know what the gospel was. During those days I spent long hours thinking long, difficult thoughts, and sometimes frightening ones, about the momentous task that faced me – the bringing together of a culture and the gospel (30-31).

The Good News of Jesus Christ is a message that missionaries translate into the languages of the nations. We do it because we know that call to take it to all peoples implicitly promises that translation is always possible. It is a matter of providence. It is a function of God's universality.

Not every detail can be translated right away; the process of embodying the message of God's favor inevitably involves transformation of the medium. As Islam learns the ways of the Kingdom, some things will have to stop: jihad, dhimmitude, and the like. But transformation is not destruction. As the good news takes new forms in its new home, it affirms and rectifies the forms of life that enable its discovery and begin proclaiming it. Even jihad and dhimmitude are perverse expressions of good things. They resemble Israelite institutions that were fulfilled in Jesus' peaceable kingdom. (For instance, Jesus' entry into the Promised Land takes the form of baptism under John; his conquest of Palestine takes the form of a ministry of relief to the poor, sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, liberty to the oppressed; his exodus takes the form of crucifixion and resurrection to eternal life; and his exile takes the form of ascension to the Father's right hand.) In him, and only in him, it's all good.

Islam is worth even the troubles it has lately been bringing the world. God has made communities of Muslims who can hear and re-tell the story of Jesus' world-saving love in distinctive ways. Islam rules the languages spoken by beloved children of a God who wants them to hear his offer of peace. Their lives as Muslims are vocabularies in which God's grace might be articulated, the nations reconciled, and the world healed.

That is, if Christians will bother to share the good news with them in a form they can recognize.

I have a hunch that Donovan's insight is one of the reasons the first Christians put up with all that persecution. They neither fought back nor fled because in the end they really did love and pray for their persecutors. More importantly, they loved the God who loved their persecutors. So the same letter that laments the extermination of Christians (Rev. 6) and condemns Rome as the Beast (Rev. 13) foresees a new world where the kings of the earth will bring their treasure and all nations, Rome included, will find