Mere Christianity By C.S. Lewis
Online book:
https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/me ... ylewis.pdf
Contents:
Book Cover (Front) (Back)
Scan / Edit Notes
Preface
Book I. Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe
1. The Law of Human Nature
2. Some Objections
3. The Reality of the Law
4. What Lies Behind the Law
5. We Have Cause to Be Uneasy
Book II What Christians Believe
1. The Rival Conceptions of God
2. The Invasion
3. The Shocking Alternative
4. The Perfect Penitent
5. The Practical Conclusion
Book III. Christian Behaviour
1. The Three Parts of Morality
2. The "Cardinal Virtues"
3. Social Morality
4. Morality and Psychoanalysis
5. Sexual Morality
6. Christian Marriage
7. Forgiveness
8. The Great Sin
9. Charity
10. Hope
11. Faith
12. Faith
Book IV. Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity
1. Making and Begetting
2. The Three-Personal God
3. Time and Beyond Time
4. Good Infection
5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers
6. Two Notes
7. Let's Pretend
8. Is Christianity Hard or Easy?
9. Counting the Cost
10. Nice People or New Men
11. The New Men
Christianity
The article below is about the relationship between the 'Church' and the 'State' in the context of Christianity...
The Political Magic of C.S. Lewis
Extract:
I was politically conservative at the time, and believed that my religious faith, carefully understood, should inform my politics. Yet I was also troubled by what I believed was the subordination of Christianity to partisan ideology — the ease with which people took something sacred and turned it into a blunt political weapon. It was only years later that I learned that one of the seminal intellectual figures in my journey toward faith, C. S. Lewis, shared a similar approach and concern.
In 1951, Lewis — the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Oxford don, medievalist, lecturer on philosophy and the leading Christian apologist in the 20th century — declined an offer from Winston Churchill to recommend him for an honorary Commander of the British Empire. “There are always knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance on the Honours List wd. of course strengthen their hands,” Lewis replied. He would not allow vanity and misplaced political ambitions to discredit his public witness.
As this dispiriting election year has shown, there are many politically prominent Christians today who should think and act more like Lewis.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opini ... inion&_r=0
The Political Magic of C.S. Lewis
Extract:
I was politically conservative at the time, and believed that my religious faith, carefully understood, should inform my politics. Yet I was also troubled by what I believed was the subordination of Christianity to partisan ideology — the ease with which people took something sacred and turned it into a blunt political weapon. It was only years later that I learned that one of the seminal intellectual figures in my journey toward faith, C. S. Lewis, shared a similar approach and concern.
In 1951, Lewis — the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Oxford don, medievalist, lecturer on philosophy and the leading Christian apologist in the 20th century — declined an offer from Winston Churchill to recommend him for an honorary Commander of the British Empire. “There are always knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance on the Honours List wd. of course strengthen their hands,” Lewis replied. He would not allow vanity and misplaced political ambitions to discredit his public witness.
As this dispiriting election year has shown, there are many politically prominent Christians today who should think and act more like Lewis.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opini ... inion&_r=0
Jesus Has Left the Building: Celebrating the Next Reformation
When an anniversary like this rolls around, it’s not too soon to start celebrating. The 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation is just a year away, and will mark the introduction of Protestantism into a Christendom that used to be only Catholic, whether Roman or Greek. Roads parted.
The Reformation democratized church experience; the movement demoted the priest and promoted the people—you were urged to read the scriptures instead of having someone read them for you. The Reformation also reimagined a rowdy and robust sense of grace. You didn’t buy your salvation—you received it by grace, through faith. You had a slogan: sola gratia.
From God, you don’t get what you might deserve—you get what you don’t deserve and can’t possibly purchase.
The Church, argued the reformers, had turned Christianity into a bunch of rules and regulations, rights and wrongs. And it had institutionalized the Holier Spirits. Like the Jesus of sacramental bread and wine, the reformers turned the tables on institutional religion. You can just hear them saying, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Or, “I don’t like the institutional church or organized religion.” “I am a cultural Christian.” “I am a post-denominational Christian.” Their reformation was revolutionary. They wanted their own ways in their own days—and they got them.
In this next Reformation, grace undermines both the idea of the punitive divine and the anarchy of the individual. Individuals are propelled to great community and great works that come out of grace, not fear.
Today we have the same fossilization of institutional religion, only this time it is us Protestants.
Everywhere you look a church is closing its doors, or becoming a restaurant or a condo or a theater. The denominations that developed to support the new democracies are all but moribund, singing a narrative of decline complete with “reorganizations” and hand-wringing about the good old days when everyone knew what a Lutheran or Presbyterian was. Now most people who still believe with a gracing Spirit don’t really care what they are in the first place.
That applies unless you are the type of conservative Christian who has a theology of blame and shame or what I call “punishmentalism.” Then you still want to “get it right.” The mainlines are the old lines, and the evangelicals’ dogmatism will soon be there as well. Gratia always escapes religious tendrils and chains. It goes underground like “the holy grail,” blooding and chugging along.
The next Reformation in this 499th year of the last one is already in full swing. It is “big God” optional and spirit-friendly. It has a narrative of a great rising from democratic roots. It uses technology to further democratize so-called religion. It is global in its reach—imagining that nobody has the right name for God yet. Not Islam. Not Christianity. Not Judaism. Not Buddhism. Not Lutheranism or the Episcopal Church.
Its best quarrels are whether to use the word “interfaith” or “multifaith” or “multipath.” The next reformation reaches for the God of the cosmos, not just the globe. It is blessedly anti-punishmentalist and only punishes those who punish. It has a wild streak and an even more individualistic or renegade streak. It doesn’t want God in a box. It is fiercely anti-institutional.
In this next Reformation, grace undermines both the idea of the punitive divine and the anarchy of the individual. Individuals are propelled to great community and great works that come out of grace, not fear.
We Protestants have oddly become most well known in a world that no longer understands us by the “Protestant work ethic.” We got so far in bed with capitalism that we had to sneak out. Jesus left the building long ago.
Religion is once again resisting fossilization into warfare or dusty denominations or fundamentalisms or all of the above, causing many people to say they are none of the above.
As we drive into the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, most churches will celebrate it in October of 2017. Here at Judson, the church I pastor in New York City, we are celebrating the end of the Reformation in its 499th year. (If you want to quarrel about the actual date, read Brand Luther by Andrew Pettigrew. He argues that Luther actually did post the 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.)
We think the old Protestant impulse is a threat and see a new Reformation already underway. Thus we are celebrating the first year of the next Reformation and letting the old go by.
Christians are no longer what we started out as: a band of questioning Jews and Greeks who met a man named Jesus. Nor are we the holy Roman Catholic Church with global offices in many countries. We are people who protested those ways on behalf of new ones. We read our own Bible, think our own thoughts, and enjoy the priesthood of all believers.
Religion is once again resisting fossilization into warfare or dusty denominations or fundamentalisms or all of the above—causing many people to say they are none of the above.
What is consistent is religious reformation. From our beginnings, we questioned religious fossilization. Then we questioned it again. And now many of us deeply sense that we are not really in the 500th year of the Protestant Reformation, we are in the first years of a new global reformation of religion. Call it spiritual but not religious. Call it fed up with the old ways and the old days. Or call it the multifaith movement, where we know there is more than one name for God and are desperate for the peace that passes tribal understanding.
http://religiondispatches.org/jesus-has ... 8-84570085
When an anniversary like this rolls around, it’s not too soon to start celebrating. The 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation is just a year away, and will mark the introduction of Protestantism into a Christendom that used to be only Catholic, whether Roman or Greek. Roads parted.
The Reformation democratized church experience; the movement demoted the priest and promoted the people—you were urged to read the scriptures instead of having someone read them for you. The Reformation also reimagined a rowdy and robust sense of grace. You didn’t buy your salvation—you received it by grace, through faith. You had a slogan: sola gratia.
From God, you don’t get what you might deserve—you get what you don’t deserve and can’t possibly purchase.
The Church, argued the reformers, had turned Christianity into a bunch of rules and regulations, rights and wrongs. And it had institutionalized the Holier Spirits. Like the Jesus of sacramental bread and wine, the reformers turned the tables on institutional religion. You can just hear them saying, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Or, “I don’t like the institutional church or organized religion.” “I am a cultural Christian.” “I am a post-denominational Christian.” Their reformation was revolutionary. They wanted their own ways in their own days—and they got them.
In this next Reformation, grace undermines both the idea of the punitive divine and the anarchy of the individual. Individuals are propelled to great community and great works that come out of grace, not fear.
Today we have the same fossilization of institutional religion, only this time it is us Protestants.
Everywhere you look a church is closing its doors, or becoming a restaurant or a condo or a theater. The denominations that developed to support the new democracies are all but moribund, singing a narrative of decline complete with “reorganizations” and hand-wringing about the good old days when everyone knew what a Lutheran or Presbyterian was. Now most people who still believe with a gracing Spirit don’t really care what they are in the first place.
That applies unless you are the type of conservative Christian who has a theology of blame and shame or what I call “punishmentalism.” Then you still want to “get it right.” The mainlines are the old lines, and the evangelicals’ dogmatism will soon be there as well. Gratia always escapes religious tendrils and chains. It goes underground like “the holy grail,” blooding and chugging along.
The next Reformation in this 499th year of the last one is already in full swing. It is “big God” optional and spirit-friendly. It has a narrative of a great rising from democratic roots. It uses technology to further democratize so-called religion. It is global in its reach—imagining that nobody has the right name for God yet. Not Islam. Not Christianity. Not Judaism. Not Buddhism. Not Lutheranism or the Episcopal Church.
Its best quarrels are whether to use the word “interfaith” or “multifaith” or “multipath.” The next reformation reaches for the God of the cosmos, not just the globe. It is blessedly anti-punishmentalist and only punishes those who punish. It has a wild streak and an even more individualistic or renegade streak. It doesn’t want God in a box. It is fiercely anti-institutional.
In this next Reformation, grace undermines both the idea of the punitive divine and the anarchy of the individual. Individuals are propelled to great community and great works that come out of grace, not fear.
We Protestants have oddly become most well known in a world that no longer understands us by the “Protestant work ethic.” We got so far in bed with capitalism that we had to sneak out. Jesus left the building long ago.
Religion is once again resisting fossilization into warfare or dusty denominations or fundamentalisms or all of the above, causing many people to say they are none of the above.
As we drive into the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, most churches will celebrate it in October of 2017. Here at Judson, the church I pastor in New York City, we are celebrating the end of the Reformation in its 499th year. (If you want to quarrel about the actual date, read Brand Luther by Andrew Pettigrew. He argues that Luther actually did post the 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.)
We think the old Protestant impulse is a threat and see a new Reformation already underway. Thus we are celebrating the first year of the next Reformation and letting the old go by.
Christians are no longer what we started out as: a band of questioning Jews and Greeks who met a man named Jesus. Nor are we the holy Roman Catholic Church with global offices in many countries. We are people who protested those ways on behalf of new ones. We read our own Bible, think our own thoughts, and enjoy the priesthood of all believers.
Religion is once again resisting fossilization into warfare or dusty denominations or fundamentalisms or all of the above—causing many people to say they are none of the above.
What is consistent is religious reformation. From our beginnings, we questioned religious fossilization. Then we questioned it again. And now many of us deeply sense that we are not really in the 500th year of the Protestant Reformation, we are in the first years of a new global reformation of religion. Call it spiritual but not religious. Call it fed up with the old ways and the old days. Or call it the multifaith movement, where we know there is more than one name for God and are desperate for the peace that passes tribal understanding.
http://religiondispatches.org/jesus-has ... 8-84570085
Crypt Believed to Be Jesus’ Tomb Opened for First Time in Centuries
JERUSALEM — The only mystical power visible was the burning light from seven tapered candles. And yet for ages, the tomb that sits at the center of history has captured the imaginations of millions around the world.
For centuries, no one looked inside — until last week, when a crew of specialists opened the simple tomb in Jerusalem’s Old City and found the limestone burial bed where tradition says the body of Jesus Christ lay after his crucifixion and before his resurrection.
“We saw where Jesus Christ was laid down,” Father Isidoros Fakitsas, the superior of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, told me. “Before, nobody has.” Or at least nobody alive today. “We have the history, the tradition. Now we saw with our own eyes the actual burial place of Jesus Christ.”
For 60 hours, they collected samples, took photographs and reinforced the tomb before resealing it, perhaps for centuries to come. By the time I visited one dark night this week, the tomb had already been closed again. In the end, just about 50 or so priests, monks, scientists and workers had peered inside, and they seem likely to be the only ones on the planet who will do so in our lifetimes.
The tomb believed to be Christ’s was opened as part of a complex renovation of the shrine that was built around it long after his death in what is today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, perhaps Christianity’s holiest site. Scholars hope to study what they found to determine more about the event that spawned one of the world’s great religions.
Pilgrims have been flocking to the church for generations, sometimes as many as 5,000 a day. To get to the tomb, many walk along the Via Dolorosa, the winding path through Jerusalem’s Old City where Jesus is said to have been forced to bear his cross. Vendors like those lining the way today would not have been there then, but otherwise not much has changed.
The church was first built where the tomb was discovered in the fourth century during the reign of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to officially convert to Christianity. It was sacked after Jerusalem fell to the Persians in the seventh century, then rebuilt and later destroyed by Muslim caliphs in the 11th century. After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, the church was restored in the 12th century but burned to the ground in the 19th century and then rebuilt yet again.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/world ... d=71987722
JERUSALEM — The only mystical power visible was the burning light from seven tapered candles. And yet for ages, the tomb that sits at the center of history has captured the imaginations of millions around the world.
For centuries, no one looked inside — until last week, when a crew of specialists opened the simple tomb in Jerusalem’s Old City and found the limestone burial bed where tradition says the body of Jesus Christ lay after his crucifixion and before his resurrection.
“We saw where Jesus Christ was laid down,” Father Isidoros Fakitsas, the superior of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, told me. “Before, nobody has.” Or at least nobody alive today. “We have the history, the tradition. Now we saw with our own eyes the actual burial place of Jesus Christ.”
For 60 hours, they collected samples, took photographs and reinforced the tomb before resealing it, perhaps for centuries to come. By the time I visited one dark night this week, the tomb had already been closed again. In the end, just about 50 or so priests, monks, scientists and workers had peered inside, and they seem likely to be the only ones on the planet who will do so in our lifetimes.
The tomb believed to be Christ’s was opened as part of a complex renovation of the shrine that was built around it long after his death in what is today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, perhaps Christianity’s holiest site. Scholars hope to study what they found to determine more about the event that spawned one of the world’s great religions.
Pilgrims have been flocking to the church for generations, sometimes as many as 5,000 a day. To get to the tomb, many walk along the Via Dolorosa, the winding path through Jerusalem’s Old City where Jesus is said to have been forced to bear his cross. Vendors like those lining the way today would not have been there then, but otherwise not much has changed.
The church was first built where the tomb was discovered in the fourth century during the reign of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to officially convert to Christianity. It was sacked after Jerusalem fell to the Persians in the seventh century, then rebuilt and later destroyed by Muslim caliphs in the 11th century. After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, the church was restored in the 12th century but burned to the ground in the 19th century and then rebuilt yet again.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/world ... d=71987722
Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller?
What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
KRISTOF Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?
KELLER If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.
But the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life, like the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, don’t even mention the virgin birth. And the reference in Luke to the virgin birth was written in a different kind of Greek and was probably added later. So isn’t there room for skepticism?
If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.
And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?
Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).
But let me push back. As you know better than I, the Scriptures themselves indicate that the Resurrection wasn’t so clear cut. Mary Magdalene didn’t initially recognize the risen Jesus, nor did some disciples, and the gospels are fuzzy about Jesus’ literal presence — especially Mark, the first gospel to be written. So if you take these passages as meaning that Jesus literally rose from the dead, why the fuzziness?
I wouldn’t characterize the New Testament descriptions of the risen Jesus as fuzzy. They are very concrete in their details. Yes, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but then she does. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) also don’t recognize Jesus at first. Their experience was analogous to meeting someone you last saw as a child 20 years ago. Many historians have argued that this has the ring of eyewitness authenticity. If you were making up a story about the Resurrection, would you have imagined that Jesus was altered enough to not be identified immediately but not so much that he couldn’t be recognized after a few moments? As for Mark’s gospel, yes, it ends very abruptly without getting to the Resurrection, but most scholars believe that the last part of the book or scroll was lost to us.
Skeptics should consider another surprising aspect of these accounts. Mary Magdalene is named as the first eyewitness of the risen Christ, and other women are mentioned as the earliest eyewitnesses in the other gospels, too. This was a time in which the testimony of women was not admissible evidence in courts because of their low social status. The early pagan critics of Christianity latched on to this and dismissed the Resurrection as the word of “hysterical females.” If the gospel writers were inventing these narratives, they would never have put women in them. So they didn’t invent them.
The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection. N.T. Wright has argued in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” that it is difficult to come up with any historically plausible alternate explanation for the birth of the Christian movement. It is hard to account for thousands of Jews virtually overnight worshiping a human being as divine when everything about their religion and culture conditioned them to believe that was not only impossible, but deeply heretical. The best explanation for the change was that many hundreds of them had actually seen Jesus with their own eyes.
So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?
I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.
Tim, people sometimes say that the answer is faith. But, as a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?
I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.
But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.
In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.
I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?
I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.
Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a nonrepeatable, supernatural cause. Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.
Can I ask: Do you ever have doubts? Do most people of faith struggle at times over these kinds of questions?
Yes and yes. In the Bible, the Book of Jude (Chapter 1, verse 22) tells Christians to “be merciful to those who doubt.” We should not encourage people to simply stifle all doubts. Doubts force us to think things out and re-examine our reasons, and that can, in the end, lead to stronger faith.
I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.
What I admire most about Christianity is the amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world. But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?
The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:
You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.
Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”
I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.
There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.
Tim, thanks for a great conversation. And, whatever my doubts, this I believe in: Merry Christmas!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opini ... d=71987722
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Reaction to the article above
The Diversity of Christian Belief
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/opini ... ef=opinion
What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
KRISTOF Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?
KELLER If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.
But the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life, like the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s letter to the Galatians, don’t even mention the virgin birth. And the reference in Luke to the virgin birth was written in a different kind of Greek and was probably added later. So isn’t there room for skepticism?
If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.
And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?
Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).
But let me push back. As you know better than I, the Scriptures themselves indicate that the Resurrection wasn’t so clear cut. Mary Magdalene didn’t initially recognize the risen Jesus, nor did some disciples, and the gospels are fuzzy about Jesus’ literal presence — especially Mark, the first gospel to be written. So if you take these passages as meaning that Jesus literally rose from the dead, why the fuzziness?
I wouldn’t characterize the New Testament descriptions of the risen Jesus as fuzzy. They are very concrete in their details. Yes, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but then she does. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) also don’t recognize Jesus at first. Their experience was analogous to meeting someone you last saw as a child 20 years ago. Many historians have argued that this has the ring of eyewitness authenticity. If you were making up a story about the Resurrection, would you have imagined that Jesus was altered enough to not be identified immediately but not so much that he couldn’t be recognized after a few moments? As for Mark’s gospel, yes, it ends very abruptly without getting to the Resurrection, but most scholars believe that the last part of the book or scroll was lost to us.
Skeptics should consider another surprising aspect of these accounts. Mary Magdalene is named as the first eyewitness of the risen Christ, and other women are mentioned as the earliest eyewitnesses in the other gospels, too. This was a time in which the testimony of women was not admissible evidence in courts because of their low social status. The early pagan critics of Christianity latched on to this and dismissed the Resurrection as the word of “hysterical females.” If the gospel writers were inventing these narratives, they would never have put women in them. So they didn’t invent them.
The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection. N.T. Wright has argued in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” that it is difficult to come up with any historically plausible alternate explanation for the birth of the Christian movement. It is hard to account for thousands of Jews virtually overnight worshiping a human being as divine when everything about their religion and culture conditioned them to believe that was not only impossible, but deeply heretical. The best explanation for the change was that many hundreds of them had actually seen Jesus with their own eyes.
So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?
I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.
Tim, people sometimes say that the answer is faith. But, as a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?
I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.
But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.
In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.
I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?
I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.
Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a nonrepeatable, supernatural cause. Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.
Can I ask: Do you ever have doubts? Do most people of faith struggle at times over these kinds of questions?
Yes and yes. In the Bible, the Book of Jude (Chapter 1, verse 22) tells Christians to “be merciful to those who doubt.” We should not encourage people to simply stifle all doubts. Doubts force us to think things out and re-examine our reasons, and that can, in the end, lead to stronger faith.
I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.
What I admire most about Christianity is the amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world. But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?
The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:
You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.
Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”
I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.
There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.
Tim, thanks for a great conversation. And, whatever my doubts, this I believe in: Merry Christmas!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opini ... d=71987722
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The Diversity of Christian Belief
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/opini ... ef=opinion
Fewer and lonelier
Why the celibate priesthood is in crisis
The Catholic priesthood and marriage
Erasmus
Jan 22nd 2017, 13:27
by ERASMUS
IN RECENT days, a group of 11 distinguished veterans of the Catholic priesthood in the German city of Cologne, a stronghold of the church, issued an open letter to mark the 50th anniversary of their ordination. Did they use the occasion to ponder aloud the mysteries of their creed, or the wisdom gained in decades of service to the faithful? No. They simply issued a heart-felt cry of pain over their own solitude, a condition they would not wish on future cohorts of clerics. Imploring the pope to allow priests to marry, they wrote:
“
What moves us is the experience of loneliness. As elderly people who are unmarried because our office required this from us, we feel it vividly on some days after 50 years in the job. We agreed to this [form of] clerical life because of our job, we did not choose it.”
The isolation experienced by elderly clerics, especially in wealthy, liberal societies, is one symptom of a crisis in the Catholic priesthood. They were ordained at a time when their status as men dedicated to the church was understood and revered, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. In that era, priests could look forward an old age in which the respect and support of the faithful might compensate to some degree for the absence of any life-partner. With the standing (and finances) of the clergy damaged, in many countries, by child-abuse scandals and shabby attempts to cover them up, the twilight years are a harder prospect than ever for priests on their own, even those who have led exemplary lives. Small wonder that fewer and fewer young men want to walk the same stony path.
As measured by the number of faithful, global Catholicism is faring decently. The flock is still growing in the developing world and migration from poor countries is reinvigorating tired congregations in the West. But the priesthood, with its hard calling of celibacy, is in freefall in many places. In America, the number of Catholics connected to a parish has risen over the past half-century from 46m to 67m, while the number of priests has fallen from 59,000 to 38,000. In France, about 800 priests die every year while 100 are ordained. Priest numbers there have fallen from 29,000 in 1995 to about 15,000. On present trends they may stabilise at less than 6,000.
The result is that many jobs once done by priests, like taking funerals or ministering to the sick, are now done by lay-people or by deacons who may be married. But certain functions, including the consecration of bread and wine which is Christianity’s most important rite, can only be performed by a priest.
And in Latin America, the paucity of clerics is one factor driving the devout to switch from Catholicism to Pentecostalism and other non-conformist creeds, where there are plenty of pastors to serve their needs. Leonardo Boff, the left-wing Brazilian theologian who left the priesthood in 1992 and then married, has described as “catastrophic” a situation where 18,000 priests in his country serve 140m Catholics. He predicts that Pope Francis will soon be obliged to allow married priests, on an experimental basis, in Brazil alone.
Austen Ivereigh, a biographer of the pope, has noted that next year a synod of bishops will consider the crisis in priestly vocations. But Pope Francis is already coping with high-level resistance to the outcome of the previous synod, simply because it cautiously held out the prospect people who divorce and remarry might be readmitted to holy communion. In some ways, the question of allowing priests to wed should be easier. As is often pointed out, the Catholic church does already have a small minority of married priests, including Eastern-rite Catholics and former Anglican clerics. But the decision-makers are invested in the status quo; the current bishop of Cologne is among those who think the celibacy rule should remain.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/ ... n/NA/email
Why the celibate priesthood is in crisis
The Catholic priesthood and marriage
Erasmus
Jan 22nd 2017, 13:27
by ERASMUS
IN RECENT days, a group of 11 distinguished veterans of the Catholic priesthood in the German city of Cologne, a stronghold of the church, issued an open letter to mark the 50th anniversary of their ordination. Did they use the occasion to ponder aloud the mysteries of their creed, or the wisdom gained in decades of service to the faithful? No. They simply issued a heart-felt cry of pain over their own solitude, a condition they would not wish on future cohorts of clerics. Imploring the pope to allow priests to marry, they wrote:
“
What moves us is the experience of loneliness. As elderly people who are unmarried because our office required this from us, we feel it vividly on some days after 50 years in the job. We agreed to this [form of] clerical life because of our job, we did not choose it.”
The isolation experienced by elderly clerics, especially in wealthy, liberal societies, is one symptom of a crisis in the Catholic priesthood. They were ordained at a time when their status as men dedicated to the church was understood and revered, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. In that era, priests could look forward an old age in which the respect and support of the faithful might compensate to some degree for the absence of any life-partner. With the standing (and finances) of the clergy damaged, in many countries, by child-abuse scandals and shabby attempts to cover them up, the twilight years are a harder prospect than ever for priests on their own, even those who have led exemplary lives. Small wonder that fewer and fewer young men want to walk the same stony path.
As measured by the number of faithful, global Catholicism is faring decently. The flock is still growing in the developing world and migration from poor countries is reinvigorating tired congregations in the West. But the priesthood, with its hard calling of celibacy, is in freefall in many places. In America, the number of Catholics connected to a parish has risen over the past half-century from 46m to 67m, while the number of priests has fallen from 59,000 to 38,000. In France, about 800 priests die every year while 100 are ordained. Priest numbers there have fallen from 29,000 in 1995 to about 15,000. On present trends they may stabilise at less than 6,000.
The result is that many jobs once done by priests, like taking funerals or ministering to the sick, are now done by lay-people or by deacons who may be married. But certain functions, including the consecration of bread and wine which is Christianity’s most important rite, can only be performed by a priest.
And in Latin America, the paucity of clerics is one factor driving the devout to switch from Catholicism to Pentecostalism and other non-conformist creeds, where there are plenty of pastors to serve their needs. Leonardo Boff, the left-wing Brazilian theologian who left the priesthood in 1992 and then married, has described as “catastrophic” a situation where 18,000 priests in his country serve 140m Catholics. He predicts that Pope Francis will soon be obliged to allow married priests, on an experimental basis, in Brazil alone.
Austen Ivereigh, a biographer of the pope, has noted that next year a synod of bishops will consider the crisis in priestly vocations. But Pope Francis is already coping with high-level resistance to the outcome of the previous synod, simply because it cautiously held out the prospect people who divorce and remarry might be readmitted to holy communion. In some ways, the question of allowing priests to wed should be easier. As is often pointed out, the Catholic church does already have a small minority of married priests, including Eastern-rite Catholics and former Anglican clerics. But the decision-makers are invested in the status quo; the current bishop of Cologne is among those who think the celibacy rule should remain.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/ ... n/NA/email
Can Art Save Us From Fundamentalism?
In his new book, religious studies scholar Philip S. Francis uses personal stories from young evangelicals to explore how one’s experiences with art can dramatically reorient Christian beliefs and practices.
What inspired you to write When Art Disrupts Religion?
My obsession with one big question: can art save us from fundamentalism? I was reading all kinds of aesthetic theory about art’s “disruptive capacities,” its unique ability to unsettle our preconceived notions of the world and ourselves. I decided to test the theory against the lived experience of people who had grown up with deeply engrained religious beliefs and convictions—with a focus on conservative American evangelicals. Could art disrupt even that? I tracked down hundreds of former evangelicals who had left the fold through the intervention of the arts, and I got deep into the weeds of their experience. Their stories shed brilliant light on the complex ways that art can function in the process of upending and reimagining one’s beliefs. In a more general sense, they can teach us a lot about the role of art in education and social life.
People often ask me, “How did you track these people down?” And I always say, “I can pick the post-evangelicals out of a random crowd from a distance of 20 yards.” But the truth is I found my participants at two very unique field sites.
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/can-art-s ... c-84570085[/i]
In his new book, religious studies scholar Philip S. Francis uses personal stories from young evangelicals to explore how one’s experiences with art can dramatically reorient Christian beliefs and practices.
What inspired you to write When Art Disrupts Religion?
My obsession with one big question: can art save us from fundamentalism? I was reading all kinds of aesthetic theory about art’s “disruptive capacities,” its unique ability to unsettle our preconceived notions of the world and ourselves. I decided to test the theory against the lived experience of people who had grown up with deeply engrained religious beliefs and convictions—with a focus on conservative American evangelicals. Could art disrupt even that? I tracked down hundreds of former evangelicals who had left the fold through the intervention of the arts, and I got deep into the weeds of their experience. Their stories shed brilliant light on the complex ways that art can function in the process of upending and reimagining one’s beliefs. In a more general sense, they can teach us a lot about the role of art in education and social life.
People often ask me, “How did you track these people down?” And I always say, “I can pick the post-evangelicals out of a random crowd from a distance of 20 yards.” But the truth is I found my participants at two very unique field sites.
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/can-art-s ... c-84570085[/i]
Why Catholic priests practise celibacy
The rules date from the Middle Ages
IN AN interview with a German magazine earlier this month, Pope Francis suggested that he would be open to the idea of allowing married men to become priests. Such a change, though momentous, would be a return to, rather than a break from, early Christian tradition: nowhere does the New Testament explicitly require priests to be celibate. For the first thousand years of Christianity it was not uncommon for priests to have families. The first pope, St Peter, was a married man; many early popes had children. How did celibacy become part of the Catholic tradition?
Celibacy is one of the biggest acts of self-sacrifice a Catholic priest is called upon to make, forgoing spouse, progeny and sexual fulfilment for his relationship with parishioners and God. According to the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law celibacy is a “special gift of God” which allows practitioners to follow more closely the example of Christ, who was chaste. Another reason is that when a priest enters into service to God, the church becomes his highest calling. If he were to have a family there would be the potential for conflict between his spiritual and familial duties. The Vatican regards it as being easier for unattached men to commit to the church, as they have more time for devotion and fewer distractions.
The earliest written reference to celibacy comes from 305AD at the Spanish Council of Elvira, a local assembly of clergymen who met to discuss matters pertaining to the church. Canon 33 forbids clerics in the church—bishops, priests and deacons—from having sexual relations with their wives and from having children, though not from entering into marriage. It was not until ecumenical meetings of the Catholic Church at the First and Second Lateran councils in 1123 and 1139 that priests were explicitly forbidden from marrying. Eliminating the prospect of marriage had the added benefit of ensuring that children or wives of priests did not make claims on property acquired throughout a priest’s life, which thus could be retained by the church. It took centuries for the practice of celibacy to become widespread, but it eventually became the norm in the Western Catholic church.
Despite the decrees from the Middle Ages, celibacy is still a “discipline” of the church, which can be changed, rather than a “dogma”, or a divinely revealed truth from God which cannot be altered. As the world has changed, the Church has had a harder time recruiting priests. Numbers have been dropping: between 1970 and 2014 the world’s Catholic population grew from 654m to 1.23bn, while the number of priests declined from 420,000 to 414,000. Some prospective priests don’t want to choose between having a life with God and having a family. It is not inconceivable that the time will come again when they can have both.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economis ... n/NA/email
The rules date from the Middle Ages
IN AN interview with a German magazine earlier this month, Pope Francis suggested that he would be open to the idea of allowing married men to become priests. Such a change, though momentous, would be a return to, rather than a break from, early Christian tradition: nowhere does the New Testament explicitly require priests to be celibate. For the first thousand years of Christianity it was not uncommon for priests to have families. The first pope, St Peter, was a married man; many early popes had children. How did celibacy become part of the Catholic tradition?
Celibacy is one of the biggest acts of self-sacrifice a Catholic priest is called upon to make, forgoing spouse, progeny and sexual fulfilment for his relationship with parishioners and God. According to the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law celibacy is a “special gift of God” which allows practitioners to follow more closely the example of Christ, who was chaste. Another reason is that when a priest enters into service to God, the church becomes his highest calling. If he were to have a family there would be the potential for conflict between his spiritual and familial duties. The Vatican regards it as being easier for unattached men to commit to the church, as they have more time for devotion and fewer distractions.
The earliest written reference to celibacy comes from 305AD at the Spanish Council of Elvira, a local assembly of clergymen who met to discuss matters pertaining to the church. Canon 33 forbids clerics in the church—bishops, priests and deacons—from having sexual relations with their wives and from having children, though not from entering into marriage. It was not until ecumenical meetings of the Catholic Church at the First and Second Lateran councils in 1123 and 1139 that priests were explicitly forbidden from marrying. Eliminating the prospect of marriage had the added benefit of ensuring that children or wives of priests did not make claims on property acquired throughout a priest’s life, which thus could be retained by the church. It took centuries for the practice of celibacy to become widespread, but it eventually became the norm in the Western Catholic church.
Despite the decrees from the Middle Ages, celibacy is still a “discipline” of the church, which can be changed, rather than a “dogma”, or a divinely revealed truth from God which cannot be altered. As the world has changed, the Church has had a harder time recruiting priests. Numbers have been dropping: between 1970 and 2014 the world’s Catholic population grew from 654m to 1.23bn, while the number of priests declined from 420,000 to 414,000. Some prospective priests don’t want to choose between having a life with God and having a family. It is not inconceivable that the time will come again when they can have both.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economis ... n/NA/email
President Carter, Am I a Christian?
Christians celebrate Easter on Sunday. But wait — do we really think Jesus literally rose from the dead?
I asked questions like that in a Christmas Day column, interviewing the Rev. Tim Keller, a prominent evangelical pastor. In this, the second of an occasional series, I decided to quiz former President Jimmy Carter. He’s a longtime Sunday school teacher and born-again evangelical but of a more liberal bent than Keller. Here’s our email conversation, edited for clarity.
ME How literally do you take the Bible, including miracles like the Resurrection?
PRESIDENT CARTER Having a scientific background, I do not believe in a six-day creation of the world that occurred in 4004 B.C., stars falling on the earth, that kind of thing. I accept the overall message of the Bible as true, and also accept miracles described in the New Testament, including the virgin birth and the Resurrection.
With Easter approaching, let me push you on the Resurrection. If you heard a report today from the Middle East of a man brought back to life after an execution, I doubt you’d believe it even if there were eyewitnesses. So why believe ancient accounts written years after the events?
I would be skeptical of a report like you describe. My belief in the resurrection of Jesus comes from my Christian faith, and not from any need for scientific proof. I derive a great personal benefit from the totality of this belief, which comes naturally to me.
What about someone like me whose faith is in the Sermon on the Mount, who aspires to follow Jesus’ teachings, but is skeptical that he was born of a virgin, walked on water, multiplied loaves and fishes or had a physical resurrection? Am I a Christian, President Carter?
I do not judge whether someone else is a Christian. Jesus said, “Judge not, …” I try to apply the teachings of Jesus in my own life, often without success.
How can I reconcile my admiration for the message of Jesus, all about inclusion, with a church history that is often about exclusion?
As St. Paul said to the Galatians in 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” In His day, Jesus broke down walls of separation and superiority among people. Those (mostly men) who practice superiority and exclusion contradict my interpretations of the life and teachings of Jesus, which exemplified peace, love, compassion, humility, forgiveness and sacrificial love.
Do you sometimes struggle with doubts about faith?
Yes, but eventually I decide what I believe, as an integral part of my existence and a guide for my life. This is based on what I consider to be the perfect life and example of Jesus.
I think of you as an evangelical, but evangelicalism implies belief in inerrancy of Scripture. Do you share that, and if so, how do you account for contradictions within the Gospels?
I look on the contradictions among the Gospel writers as a sign of authenticity, based on their different life experiences, contacts with Jesus and each other. If the earlier authors of the Bible had been creating an artificial document, they would have eliminated disparities. I try to absorb the essence and meaning of the teachings of Jesus Christ, primarily as explained in the letters written by Paul to the early churches. When there are apparent discrepancies, I make a decision on what to believe, respecting the equal status and rights of all people.
One of my problems with evangelicalism is that it normally argues that one can be saved only through a personal relationship with Jesus, which seems to consign Gandhi to hell. Do you believe that?
I do not feel qualified to make a judgment. I am inclined to give him (or others) the benefit of any doubt.
Do you pray daily, and if so, do you believe in the efficacy of prayer in a miracle kind of way, or in a psychologically-this-helps-me-deal-with-the-world kind of way?
I pray often during each day, and believe in the efficacy of prayer in both ways. In my weekly Bible lessons, I teach that our Creator God is available at any moment to any of us, for guidance, solace, forgiveness or to meet our other needs. My general attitude is of thanksgiving and joy.
Skeptics have noted that when prayers are “answered,” there is usually an alternative explanation. But an amputee can pray for a new leg, and a new leg never grows back. Isn’t that a reason to believe that prayer helps internally, but doesn’t access miracles?
It is usually impossible to convince skeptics. For me, prayer helps internally, as a private conversation with my creator, who knows everything and can do anything. If I were an amputee, my prayer would be to help me make the best of my condition, to be a good follower of the perfect example set by Jesus Christ and to be thankful for life, freedom and opportunities to be a blessing to others. We are monitoring the status of cancer in my liver and brain, and my prayers are similar to this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opin ... d=71987722
Christians celebrate Easter on Sunday. But wait — do we really think Jesus literally rose from the dead?
I asked questions like that in a Christmas Day column, interviewing the Rev. Tim Keller, a prominent evangelical pastor. In this, the second of an occasional series, I decided to quiz former President Jimmy Carter. He’s a longtime Sunday school teacher and born-again evangelical but of a more liberal bent than Keller. Here’s our email conversation, edited for clarity.
ME How literally do you take the Bible, including miracles like the Resurrection?
PRESIDENT CARTER Having a scientific background, I do not believe in a six-day creation of the world that occurred in 4004 B.C., stars falling on the earth, that kind of thing. I accept the overall message of the Bible as true, and also accept miracles described in the New Testament, including the virgin birth and the Resurrection.
With Easter approaching, let me push you on the Resurrection. If you heard a report today from the Middle East of a man brought back to life after an execution, I doubt you’d believe it even if there were eyewitnesses. So why believe ancient accounts written years after the events?
I would be skeptical of a report like you describe. My belief in the resurrection of Jesus comes from my Christian faith, and not from any need for scientific proof. I derive a great personal benefit from the totality of this belief, which comes naturally to me.
What about someone like me whose faith is in the Sermon on the Mount, who aspires to follow Jesus’ teachings, but is skeptical that he was born of a virgin, walked on water, multiplied loaves and fishes or had a physical resurrection? Am I a Christian, President Carter?
I do not judge whether someone else is a Christian. Jesus said, “Judge not, …” I try to apply the teachings of Jesus in my own life, often without success.
How can I reconcile my admiration for the message of Jesus, all about inclusion, with a church history that is often about exclusion?
As St. Paul said to the Galatians in 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” In His day, Jesus broke down walls of separation and superiority among people. Those (mostly men) who practice superiority and exclusion contradict my interpretations of the life and teachings of Jesus, which exemplified peace, love, compassion, humility, forgiveness and sacrificial love.
Do you sometimes struggle with doubts about faith?
Yes, but eventually I decide what I believe, as an integral part of my existence and a guide for my life. This is based on what I consider to be the perfect life and example of Jesus.
I think of you as an evangelical, but evangelicalism implies belief in inerrancy of Scripture. Do you share that, and if so, how do you account for contradictions within the Gospels?
I look on the contradictions among the Gospel writers as a sign of authenticity, based on their different life experiences, contacts with Jesus and each other. If the earlier authors of the Bible had been creating an artificial document, they would have eliminated disparities. I try to absorb the essence and meaning of the teachings of Jesus Christ, primarily as explained in the letters written by Paul to the early churches. When there are apparent discrepancies, I make a decision on what to believe, respecting the equal status and rights of all people.
One of my problems with evangelicalism is that it normally argues that one can be saved only through a personal relationship with Jesus, which seems to consign Gandhi to hell. Do you believe that?
I do not feel qualified to make a judgment. I am inclined to give him (or others) the benefit of any doubt.
Do you pray daily, and if so, do you believe in the efficacy of prayer in a miracle kind of way, or in a psychologically-this-helps-me-deal-with-the-world kind of way?
I pray often during each day, and believe in the efficacy of prayer in both ways. In my weekly Bible lessons, I teach that our Creator God is available at any moment to any of us, for guidance, solace, forgiveness or to meet our other needs. My general attitude is of thanksgiving and joy.
Skeptics have noted that when prayers are “answered,” there is usually an alternative explanation. But an amputee can pray for a new leg, and a new leg never grows back. Isn’t that a reason to believe that prayer helps internally, but doesn’t access miracles?
It is usually impossible to convince skeptics. For me, prayer helps internally, as a private conversation with my creator, who knows everything and can do anything. If I were an amputee, my prayer would be to help me make the best of my condition, to be a good follower of the perfect example set by Jesus Christ and to be thankful for life, freedom and opportunities to be a blessing to others. We are monitoring the status of cancer in my liver and brain, and my prayers are similar to this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/opin ... d=71987722
This Is How You Lose Them: Why “Generation Z” Won’t Be Flocking To Churches Anytime Soon
Like the dad who’s trying just a little too hard on Snapchat, American churches just want the young, cool people to like them. In a recent interview with Religion News Service, Rev. James Emery White spoke on his latest book, Meet Generation Z: Understanding and Reaching the New Post-Christian World.
In the interview, White said the group that Christians—evangelicals especially—need to win over isn’t Millennials (it’s too late for us), but post-Millennials, aka Generation Z, those born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
In this brave new “post-Christian” world, the youngest and largest generation represents a unique opportunity for evangelicals to affect culture, with White referring to them as “the most influential religious force in the West and the heart of the missional challenge facing the church.”
SPECIAL REPORT: Divest or Dive In? Evangelicals of Color Face a Reckoning
In the sense that “‘the dominance of Christian ideas and influence” is behind us, we’re about as “post-Christian” as we are “post-racial.” You’d think the November election would have challenged this perception, but many white evangelicals continue to cling to the idea that Christianity’s cultural supremacy is under siege.
According to White:
"On the most superficial of levels, most churches are divorced from the technological world Generation Z inhabits. But on the deeper level, they are divorced from the culture itself in such a way as to be unable to build strategic bridges…"
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/this-is-h ... 1-84570085
Like the dad who’s trying just a little too hard on Snapchat, American churches just want the young, cool people to like them. In a recent interview with Religion News Service, Rev. James Emery White spoke on his latest book, Meet Generation Z: Understanding and Reaching the New Post-Christian World.
In the interview, White said the group that Christians—evangelicals especially—need to win over isn’t Millennials (it’s too late for us), but post-Millennials, aka Generation Z, those born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
In this brave new “post-Christian” world, the youngest and largest generation represents a unique opportunity for evangelicals to affect culture, with White referring to them as “the most influential religious force in the West and the heart of the missional challenge facing the church.”
SPECIAL REPORT: Divest or Dive In? Evangelicals of Color Face a Reckoning
In the sense that “‘the dominance of Christian ideas and influence” is behind us, we’re about as “post-Christian” as we are “post-racial.” You’d think the November election would have challenged this perception, but many white evangelicals continue to cling to the idea that Christianity’s cultural supremacy is under siege.
According to White:
"On the most superficial of levels, most churches are divorced from the technological world Generation Z inhabits. But on the deeper level, they are divorced from the culture itself in such a way as to be unable to build strategic bridges…"
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/this-is-h ... 1-84570085
Inside Washington’s strange new $500-million Bible museum
Twin scents of sawdust and compromise swirl through the gleaming new museum of the Bible—small m, big B—that will open next month in a former furniture showroom and municipal meat locker a few blocks from the halls of Congress, bringing 430,000 square feet of exhibition space, interactive displays, children’s activities, “4-D” thrill rides, academic seminars, Holy Land snacks and ecclesiastical controversy to the most cynical city in the world.
Endowed by their creators with US$500 million dollars in cash but only a comparative handful of world-class artifacts, the galleries will overtly promulgate little or none of their benefactors’ Oklahoma Protestant fundamentalism. Intended initially to be a shrine to the literalist creationism endorsed by the billionaire Green family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of Sabbath-observant craft stores, the museum’s focus has shifted from trumpeting the verity of the Gospels to providing jaded Washingtonians with infotainment and a first-century lunch.
In one display—a Nazarene village built of rough-hewn stones, fibreglass sheep and plastic produce—Jesus Christ is depicted not as the redeeming Son of God but as “a popular teacher.” (All that is missing is an Animatronic herdsman singing “A shepherd’s life for me.”) Homosexuality, abortion, school prayer, taking a knee during the national anthem—all have been left aside, at least in the exhibits that a Maclean’s reporter was permitted to tour this week. The eight-storey warehouse of Holy Writ, it seems, will be as much about hummus on pita as it is about the Pietà.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/in ... ar-AAu34iQ
Twin scents of sawdust and compromise swirl through the gleaming new museum of the Bible—small m, big B—that will open next month in a former furniture showroom and municipal meat locker a few blocks from the halls of Congress, bringing 430,000 square feet of exhibition space, interactive displays, children’s activities, “4-D” thrill rides, academic seminars, Holy Land snacks and ecclesiastical controversy to the most cynical city in the world.
Endowed by their creators with US$500 million dollars in cash but only a comparative handful of world-class artifacts, the galleries will overtly promulgate little or none of their benefactors’ Oklahoma Protestant fundamentalism. Intended initially to be a shrine to the literalist creationism endorsed by the billionaire Green family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of Sabbath-observant craft stores, the museum’s focus has shifted from trumpeting the verity of the Gospels to providing jaded Washingtonians with infotainment and a first-century lunch.
In one display—a Nazarene village built of rough-hewn stones, fibreglass sheep and plastic produce—Jesus Christ is depicted not as the redeeming Son of God but as “a popular teacher.” (All that is missing is an Animatronic herdsman singing “A shepherd’s life for me.”) Homosexuality, abortion, school prayer, taking a knee during the national anthem—all have been left aside, at least in the exhibits that a Maclean’s reporter was permitted to tour this week. The eight-storey warehouse of Holy Writ, it seems, will be as much about hummus on pita as it is about the Pietà.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/in ... ar-AAu34iQ
Luther’s reformation
The stand
Excerpt:
Protestantism continues to change lives today; indeed, over the recent decades the number of its adherents has grown substantially. Since the 1970s, about three-quarters of Almolonga’s 14,000 residents have converted; more than 40% of Guatemala’s population is now Protestant. Its story is a microcosm of a broader “Protestant awakening” across Latin America and the developing world. According to the Pew Research Centre Protestants currently make up slightly less than 40% of the world’s 2.3bn Christians; almost all the rest are Roman Catholics. The United States is home to some 150m Protestants, the largest number in any country.
In Luther’s native Germany roughly half the Christians follow his denomination. But today Europe accounts for only 13% of the world’s Protestants. The faith’s home is the developing world. Nigeria has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany. More than 80m Chinese have embraced the faith in the past 40 years.
There are many ways to be a Protestant, from the quietist to the ecstatic. The fastest-growing varieties tend to be the evangelical ones, which emphasise the need for spiritual rebirth and Biblical authority. Among developing-world evangelicals, Pentecostals are dominant; their version of the faith is charismatic, in that it emphasises the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit, held to be a universally accessible and sustaining aspect of God. These gifts include healing, prophecy and glossolalia. According to the World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, Pentecostals and other evangelicals and charismatics account for 35% of Europe’s Protestants, 74% of America’s and 88% of those in developing countries. They make up more than half of the developing world’s Christians, and 10% of all people on Earth.
Changed lives change places. Almolonga’s Pentecostal believers have brought new energy to their town. Where once the prison was full and drunks slumped in the streets, there is now a buzz of activity. A secondary school opened in 2003; it sends some of its graduates, all members of the indigenous K’iché people, to national universities. “We want one of our students to work at NASA,” says Mr Riscajche’s son, Oscar, who chairs the school board.
Scholars have been surprised by the developing world’s Protestant boom. K.M. Panikkar, an Indian journalist, spoke for many when he predicted in the 1950s that Christianity would struggle in a post-colonial world. What might survive, he suggested, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, would be a more modern, liberal form of the faith. The Pentecostal expansion proved him quite wrong. Peter Berger of Boston University, a leading sociologist of religion (who died this summer), saw it as a key part of a wider “desecularisation” of the world.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/essay/21 ... na/77921/n
The stand
Excerpt:
Protestantism continues to change lives today; indeed, over the recent decades the number of its adherents has grown substantially. Since the 1970s, about three-quarters of Almolonga’s 14,000 residents have converted; more than 40% of Guatemala’s population is now Protestant. Its story is a microcosm of a broader “Protestant awakening” across Latin America and the developing world. According to the Pew Research Centre Protestants currently make up slightly less than 40% of the world’s 2.3bn Christians; almost all the rest are Roman Catholics. The United States is home to some 150m Protestants, the largest number in any country.
In Luther’s native Germany roughly half the Christians follow his denomination. But today Europe accounts for only 13% of the world’s Protestants. The faith’s home is the developing world. Nigeria has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany. More than 80m Chinese have embraced the faith in the past 40 years.
There are many ways to be a Protestant, from the quietist to the ecstatic. The fastest-growing varieties tend to be the evangelical ones, which emphasise the need for spiritual rebirth and Biblical authority. Among developing-world evangelicals, Pentecostals are dominant; their version of the faith is charismatic, in that it emphasises the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit, held to be a universally accessible and sustaining aspect of God. These gifts include healing, prophecy and glossolalia. According to the World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, Pentecostals and other evangelicals and charismatics account for 35% of Europe’s Protestants, 74% of America’s and 88% of those in developing countries. They make up more than half of the developing world’s Christians, and 10% of all people on Earth.
Changed lives change places. Almolonga’s Pentecostal believers have brought new energy to their town. Where once the prison was full and drunks slumped in the streets, there is now a buzz of activity. A secondary school opened in 2003; it sends some of its graduates, all members of the indigenous K’iché people, to national universities. “We want one of our students to work at NASA,” says Mr Riscajche’s son, Oscar, who chairs the school board.
Scholars have been surprised by the developing world’s Protestant boom. K.M. Panikkar, an Indian journalist, spoke for many when he predicted in the 1950s that Christianity would struggle in a post-colonial world. What might survive, he suggested, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, would be a more modern, liberal form of the faith. The Pentecostal expansion proved him quite wrong. Peter Berger of Boston University, a leading sociologist of religion (who died this summer), saw it as a key part of a wider “desecularisation” of the world.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/essay/21 ... na/77921/n
WHY ROY MOORE’S EVANGELICAL SUPPORTERS WON’T ABANDON HIM
Amidst shocking allegations that Roy Moore pursued relationships with girls ranging in age from 14-18 years old when he was in his 30s, a new poll shows that 37% of evangelicals are “more likely” to vote for Moore, while another 34% say that these allegations make “no difference.” Some of his supporters have upped the ante by saying that even if the allegations are proven true, they won’t think Moore did anything wrong because they didn’t actually have sex and “he was single” at the time.
Moore is the Alabama Republican Senate candidate and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice, familiar to RD readers from the too-many-to-cite articles documenting his ties to white supremacists and Christian Reconstructionists.
Incredulous observers won’t be able to make sense of Moore’s supporters while seeing the allegations only in terms of inappropriate behavior, or even alleged statutory rape. They will miss the point that the problem is actually far more insidious; a feature, not a bug of this subculture.
The allegations are being read by Moore supporters through a lens shaped by the courtship-purity movement promoted by the Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements widely influential in Christian homeschooling circles. And about which I write in my book Building God’s Kingdom.
As Kathryn Brightbill tweeted: “It’s not a southern problem, it’s a fundamentalist problem. Girls who are 14 are seen as potential relationship material.”
(And she’s written in more depth about that here.)
Many who embrace Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull came to the conclusion that contemporary dating practices are harmful to young people and sought to replace them with a system of “courtship” that occurs under the direction of a girl’s father. Courtship is intended to be specifically focused on finding a marriage partner—almost a pre-betrothal, if you will. Courtship happens in the context of a homeschooling family and community where boys are raised to be adventurous and economically self-sufficient with skills that might prove useful in a societal collapse, while girls are raised to be “pure,” meek, dependent and submissive with the goal of becoming appropriate “help-meets” in their future husbands’ exercise of dominion. Independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency on the part of girls is seen as a (sinful) violation of feminine nature.
While most courtship seems to happen between young people of similar age, it’s easy to see how this particular set of gendered norms leads to significant age differences in marriageability. Men need to be self-sufficient, women should not be. In fact, once a girl can bear children she is old enough to be married and the longer she remains single the more likely she is to lose both her “purity” and her God-given femininity, and instead develop a sinful sense of herself as an independent person. The result is that 14-year-old girls are seen as appropriately “courted” by older men.
In fact, a series of scandals rocked the Christian homeschool world in recent years in which older men admitted to inappropriate contact in pursuing young (sometimes very young) girls. See the story of Doug Phillips and Vision Forum here and the stories of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Biblical Life Principles/Advanced Training Institute and Josh Duggar, here. Josh Duggar was accused of molesting young girls (including his sisters) when he himself was rather young but his targets were even younger. In each scandal a core group of supporters defended the accused.
In other words, older men perusing girls as young as 14 is a natural outcome of the gender values inextricably related to notions of male headship & female submission, promoted in this, the most extreme corner of conservative Protestantism that Moore inhabits. This is a corner of the conservative Christian subculture whose influence far exceeds its numbers and that’s why this scandal won’t lead evangelicals to abandon him as a candidate.
http://religiondispatches.org/why-roy-m ... a-84570085
Amidst shocking allegations that Roy Moore pursued relationships with girls ranging in age from 14-18 years old when he was in his 30s, a new poll shows that 37% of evangelicals are “more likely” to vote for Moore, while another 34% say that these allegations make “no difference.” Some of his supporters have upped the ante by saying that even if the allegations are proven true, they won’t think Moore did anything wrong because they didn’t actually have sex and “he was single” at the time.
Moore is the Alabama Republican Senate candidate and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice, familiar to RD readers from the too-many-to-cite articles documenting his ties to white supremacists and Christian Reconstructionists.
Incredulous observers won’t be able to make sense of Moore’s supporters while seeing the allegations only in terms of inappropriate behavior, or even alleged statutory rape. They will miss the point that the problem is actually far more insidious; a feature, not a bug of this subculture.
The allegations are being read by Moore supporters through a lens shaped by the courtship-purity movement promoted by the Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements widely influential in Christian homeschooling circles. And about which I write in my book Building God’s Kingdom.
As Kathryn Brightbill tweeted: “It’s not a southern problem, it’s a fundamentalist problem. Girls who are 14 are seen as potential relationship material.”
(And she’s written in more depth about that here.)
Many who embrace Biblical Patriarchy and Quiverfull came to the conclusion that contemporary dating practices are harmful to young people and sought to replace them with a system of “courtship” that occurs under the direction of a girl’s father. Courtship is intended to be specifically focused on finding a marriage partner—almost a pre-betrothal, if you will. Courtship happens in the context of a homeschooling family and community where boys are raised to be adventurous and economically self-sufficient with skills that might prove useful in a societal collapse, while girls are raised to be “pure,” meek, dependent and submissive with the goal of becoming appropriate “help-meets” in their future husbands’ exercise of dominion. Independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency on the part of girls is seen as a (sinful) violation of feminine nature.
While most courtship seems to happen between young people of similar age, it’s easy to see how this particular set of gendered norms leads to significant age differences in marriageability. Men need to be self-sufficient, women should not be. In fact, once a girl can bear children she is old enough to be married and the longer she remains single the more likely she is to lose both her “purity” and her God-given femininity, and instead develop a sinful sense of herself as an independent person. The result is that 14-year-old girls are seen as appropriately “courted” by older men.
In fact, a series of scandals rocked the Christian homeschool world in recent years in which older men admitted to inappropriate contact in pursuing young (sometimes very young) girls. See the story of Doug Phillips and Vision Forum here and the stories of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Biblical Life Principles/Advanced Training Institute and Josh Duggar, here. Josh Duggar was accused of molesting young girls (including his sisters) when he himself was rather young but his targets were even younger. In each scandal a core group of supporters defended the accused.
In other words, older men perusing girls as young as 14 is a natural outcome of the gender values inextricably related to notions of male headship & female submission, promoted in this, the most extreme corner of conservative Protestantism that Moore inhabits. This is a corner of the conservative Christian subculture whose influence far exceeds its numbers and that’s why this scandal won’t lead evangelicals to abandon him as a candidate.
http://religiondispatches.org/why-roy-m ... a-84570085
EVANGELICAL AUTHOR ON WHY CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES SUPPORTED TRUMP
Though he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, the Electoral College carried Donald Trump across the line with razor thin victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Nationally, he relied very heavily on support from a base few would have associated with Trump at any other point in his life—Christian conservatives. For decades, this group has advocated the sort of stern public morality that Trump has, for decades, publicly despoiled. And yet, despite his many flagrant sins—indeed, despite his refusal to repent for them—Trump won the support of America’s most self-consciously pious voters. Over the twelve months since, political observers around the world have been asking one perplexed and frustrated question: Why?
In his new book, Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, Stephen Mansfield seeks to answer that question. By contextualizing the 2016 race, briefly recounting Trump’s religious biography, and exploring the mindset of the “Values Voters” who turned out en masse, Mansfield works to make their choice intelligible. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with him about the lessons learned.
More....
http://religiondispatches.org/evangelic ... c-84570085
Though he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, the Electoral College carried Donald Trump across the line with razor thin victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Nationally, he relied very heavily on support from a base few would have associated with Trump at any other point in his life—Christian conservatives. For decades, this group has advocated the sort of stern public morality that Trump has, for decades, publicly despoiled. And yet, despite his many flagrant sins—indeed, despite his refusal to repent for them—Trump won the support of America’s most self-consciously pious voters. Over the twelve months since, political observers around the world have been asking one perplexed and frustrated question: Why?
In his new book, Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, Stephen Mansfield seeks to answer that question. By contextualizing the 2016 race, briefly recounting Trump’s religious biography, and exploring the mindset of the “Values Voters” who turned out en masse, Mansfield works to make their choice intelligible. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with him about the lessons learned.
More....
http://religiondispatches.org/evangelic ... c-84570085
Tomb believed to hold Jesus Christ much older than previously thought, researchers discover
The tomb in which Jesus Christ may have been buried dates back nearly 1,700 years, scientists have discovered.
Tests carried out on the remains of a limestone cave in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, date it back to around 345 CE, National Geographic reported.
Previous evidence had only dated the tomb back 1,000 years, to the Crusader period.
Although it’s impossible to definitively say whether the tomb is the burial site of a Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is largely accepted as the site of Christ's burial.
The research, carried out by the National Technical University of Athens, does not offer further evidence as to whether Jesus was actually buried in the tomb, but it is consistent with the historical belief that the ancient Romans constructed a monument at the site around 300 years after his death.
The New Testament says Jesus died either in 30 or 33 CE, but historical accounts suggest the Romans found and enshrined the tomb in 326 CE.
More..
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/tom ... ailsignout
The tomb in which Jesus Christ may have been buried dates back nearly 1,700 years, scientists have discovered.
Tests carried out on the remains of a limestone cave in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, date it back to around 345 CE, National Geographic reported.
Previous evidence had only dated the tomb back 1,000 years, to the Crusader period.
Although it’s impossible to definitively say whether the tomb is the burial site of a Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is largely accepted as the site of Christ's burial.
The research, carried out by the National Technical University of Athens, does not offer further evidence as to whether Jesus was actually buried in the tomb, but it is consistent with the historical belief that the ancient Romans constructed a monument at the site around 300 years after his death.
The New Testament says Jesus died either in 30 or 33 CE, but historical accounts suggest the Romans found and enshrined the tomb in 326 CE.
More..
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/tom ... ailsignout
Ancient forbidden Christian text of Jesus' 'secret teachings' to his 'brother' found
Biblical scholars have discovered the first-known original Greek copy of an ancient forbidden Christian text that purportedly describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his “brother” James, an early leader of the Church.
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at The University of Texas at Austin, located the rare text in Oxford University archives earlier this year. The experts found several fifth- or sixth-century A.D. Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, one of the books from an ancient collection known as the Nag Hammadi library. Previously, the text was thought to be preserved only via translations in the Egyptian Coptic language.
Only a small number of texts from the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books discovered in Egypt in 1945, have been found in Greek, their original language of composition. Also known as the “Gnostic Gospels,” the books are seen as key documents for understanding Gnosticism, an ancient belief system.
The First Apocalypse of James, like the other books in the Nag Hammadi library, was deemed heretical or forbidden by the church because it fell outside of the fourth-century religious boundaries that defined the 27-book New Testament.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/an ... ailsignout
Biblical scholars have discovered the first-known original Greek copy of an ancient forbidden Christian text that purportedly describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his “brother” James, an early leader of the Church.
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at The University of Texas at Austin, located the rare text in Oxford University archives earlier this year. The experts found several fifth- or sixth-century A.D. Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, one of the books from an ancient collection known as the Nag Hammadi library. Previously, the text was thought to be preserved only via translations in the Egyptian Coptic language.
Only a small number of texts from the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books discovered in Egypt in 1945, have been found in Greek, their original language of composition. Also known as the “Gnostic Gospels,” the books are seen as key documents for understanding Gnosticism, an ancient belief system.
The First Apocalypse of James, like the other books in the Nag Hammadi library, was deemed heretical or forbidden by the church because it fell outside of the fourth-century religious boundaries that defined the 27-book New Testament.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/an ... ailsignout
Lost in Translation? Pope Ponders an Update to Lord’s Prayer
ROME — It has been a question of theological debate and liturgical interpretation for years, and now Pope Francis has joined the discussion: Does the Lord’s Prayer, Christendom’s resonant petition to the Almighty, need an update?
In a new television interview, Pope Francis said the common rendering of one line in the prayer — “lead us not into temptation” — was “not a good translation” from ancient texts. “Do not let us fall into temptation,” he suggested, might be better because God does not lead people into temptation; Satan does.
“A father doesn’t do that,” the pope said. “He helps you get up right away. What induces into temptation is Satan.”
In essence, the pope said, the prayer, from the Book of Matthew, is asking God, “When Satan leads us into temptation, You please, give me a hand.”
French Catholics adopted such a linguistic change this week, and the pope suggested that Italian Catholics might want to follow suit.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/worl ... d=71987722
ROME — It has been a question of theological debate and liturgical interpretation for years, and now Pope Francis has joined the discussion: Does the Lord’s Prayer, Christendom’s resonant petition to the Almighty, need an update?
In a new television interview, Pope Francis said the common rendering of one line in the prayer — “lead us not into temptation” — was “not a good translation” from ancient texts. “Do not let us fall into temptation,” he suggested, might be better because God does not lead people into temptation; Satan does.
“A father doesn’t do that,” the pope said. “He helps you get up right away. What induces into temptation is Satan.”
In essence, the pope said, the prayer, from the Book of Matthew, is asking God, “When Satan leads us into temptation, You please, give me a hand.”
French Catholics adopted such a linguistic change this week, and the pope suggested that Italian Catholics might want to follow suit.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/worl ... d=71987722
What Archaeology Is Telling Us About the Real Jesus
Believers call him the Son of God. Skeptics dismiss him as legend. Now, researchers digging in the Holy Land are sifting fact from fiction.
Excerpt:
For an archaeologist turned journalist like me, ever mindful that entire cultures rose and fell and left few traces of their time on Earth, searching an ancient landscape for shards of a single life feels like a fool’s errand, like chasing a ghost. And when that ghost is none other than Jesus Christ, believed by more than two billion of the world’s people to be the very Son of God, well, the assignment tempts one to seek divine guidance.
Which is why, in my repeated visits to Jerusalem, I keep coming back to the Monastery of the Flagellation, where Father Alliata always welcomes me and my questions with bemused patience. As a professor of Christian archaeology and director of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum’s museum, he’s part of a 700-year-old Franciscan mission to look after and protect ancient religious sites in the Holy Land—and, since the 19th century, to excavate them according to scientific principles.
As a man of faith, Father Alliata seems at peace with what archaeology can—and cannot—reveal about Christianity’s central figure. “It will be something rare, strange, to have archaeological proof for [a specific person] 2,000 years ago,” he concedes, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his vestments. “But you can’t say Jesus doesn’t have a trace in history.”
By far the most important—and possibly most debated—of those traces are the texts of the New Testament, especially the first four books: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But how do those ancient texts, written in the second half of the first century, and the traditions they inspired, relate to the work of an archaeologist?
“Tradition gives more life to archaeology, and archaeology gives more life to tradition,” Father Alliata replies. “Sometimes they go together well, sometimes not,” he pauses, offering a small smile, “which is more interesting.”
More...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/maga ... chaeology/
Believers call him the Son of God. Skeptics dismiss him as legend. Now, researchers digging in the Holy Land are sifting fact from fiction.
Excerpt:
For an archaeologist turned journalist like me, ever mindful that entire cultures rose and fell and left few traces of their time on Earth, searching an ancient landscape for shards of a single life feels like a fool’s errand, like chasing a ghost. And when that ghost is none other than Jesus Christ, believed by more than two billion of the world’s people to be the very Son of God, well, the assignment tempts one to seek divine guidance.
Which is why, in my repeated visits to Jerusalem, I keep coming back to the Monastery of the Flagellation, where Father Alliata always welcomes me and my questions with bemused patience. As a professor of Christian archaeology and director of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum’s museum, he’s part of a 700-year-old Franciscan mission to look after and protect ancient religious sites in the Holy Land—and, since the 19th century, to excavate them according to scientific principles.
As a man of faith, Father Alliata seems at peace with what archaeology can—and cannot—reveal about Christianity’s central figure. “It will be something rare, strange, to have archaeological proof for [a specific person] 2,000 years ago,” he concedes, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his vestments. “But you can’t say Jesus doesn’t have a trace in history.”
By far the most important—and possibly most debated—of those traces are the texts of the New Testament, especially the first four books: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But how do those ancient texts, written in the second half of the first century, and the traditions they inspired, relate to the work of an archaeologist?
“Tradition gives more life to archaeology, and archaeology gives more life to tradition,” Father Alliata replies. “Sometimes they go together well, sometimes not,” he pauses, offering a small smile, “which is more interesting.”
More...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/maga ... chaeology/
The Quranic Jesus and the Historical Jesus: A Messianic Prophet
Excerpt:
The Qur’anic description of Jesus diverges from developed Christian doctrine in many respects. Most significantly, the Qur’an asserts that Jesus was a great Prophet of God and the Messiah to the Children of Israel, but denies that Jesus was the literal son of God or the divine incarnation. This has led some Christians to discount the Qur’an’s perspective as unreliable and worthless because the Qur’an dates to 600 years after Jesus’s life and cannot serve as a historical witness to him. But this objection entirely misses the point, since the Qur’an never presents its claims about Jesus as a historical testimony or reconstruction of specific events. The Qur’an instead offers a theological exegesis or commentary about the person of Jesus, claiming to provide the most correct interpretation of who Jesus was ultimately and what his mission was truly about. Because the Qur’an was originally a set of oral recitations over 23 years – addressed to and in dialogue with an audience familiar with biblical materials – the Qur’an’s discourse about Jesus evokes many themes, symbols, and ideas from the Bible and Talmud in order to reinterpret them and thereby offer a new perspective on theological debates among Jews and Christians.
More...
https://ismailignosis.com/2017/12/24/th ... c-prophet/
Excerpt:
The Qur’anic description of Jesus diverges from developed Christian doctrine in many respects. Most significantly, the Qur’an asserts that Jesus was a great Prophet of God and the Messiah to the Children of Israel, but denies that Jesus was the literal son of God or the divine incarnation. This has led some Christians to discount the Qur’an’s perspective as unreliable and worthless because the Qur’an dates to 600 years after Jesus’s life and cannot serve as a historical witness to him. But this objection entirely misses the point, since the Qur’an never presents its claims about Jesus as a historical testimony or reconstruction of specific events. The Qur’an instead offers a theological exegesis or commentary about the person of Jesus, claiming to provide the most correct interpretation of who Jesus was ultimately and what his mission was truly about. Because the Qur’an was originally a set of oral recitations over 23 years – addressed to and in dialogue with an audience familiar with biblical materials – the Qur’an’s discourse about Jesus evokes many themes, symbols, and ideas from the Bible and Talmud in order to reinterpret them and thereby offer a new perspective on theological debates among Jews and Christians.
More...
https://ismailignosis.com/2017/12/24/th ... c-prophet/
THE DARKENING AGE – THE CHRISTIAN DESTRUCTION OF THE CLASSICAL WORLD
If you ever wondered whatever happened to Roman and Greek religions or asked yourself why so many exquisite statues of that era are disfigured, you must read this book.
The author, Catherine Nixey, is a journalist at The Times and studied Classics at Cambridge describes the vandalism that took place between the mid AD 380s and AD 532 as Christianity grew to become the dominant religion. Christianity's triumph is usually explained as ‘inevitable', but as this book makes clear, it was not simply because the Roman empire was weakened by forces beyond its control. The book reveals the zeal of those espousing Christian teachings, their strategy and their willingness to harness their followers including monks, who were given a licence to destroy. Christians were told that they would reap the benefits in heaven if they became martyrs to the cause of destroying the existing beliefs. She writes with passion and tells a story which has thus far been suppressed, or at best ignored.
The book begins in AD 532 when Damascius and six members of the Academy, the most famous philosophical school in Athens, abandoned the school and the city and went into exile. The Academy had been in existence for over one thousand years, but draconian laws, destruction of temples and book burnings had crushed the followers of Greek and Roman religions. Damascius and his companions came to realise that there was no place for philosophers in the Roman Empire. The Christian Emperor Constantine and his successors had effectively destroyed a culture and a religion which had given strength to its followers, celebrated pluralism and led to the flowering of a civilization which incorporated gods, ideas and philosophies from the Mediterranean world and beyond.
The book goes on to describe the destruction of the temple of Serapis in AD392 and tens of thousands of books which were the remnants of the Great Public Library of Alexandria. This unprompted sacrilege was carried out by Theophilus, the Christian Bishop of Alexandria, and his followers. The book describes how the practice of censorship meant that the works of defenders of the old religions such as Celsus who vigorously criticised Christianity, survived only because he was quoted by those who defended Christianity.
More..
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdail ... world.html
If you ever wondered whatever happened to Roman and Greek religions or asked yourself why so many exquisite statues of that era are disfigured, you must read this book.
The author, Catherine Nixey, is a journalist at The Times and studied Classics at Cambridge describes the vandalism that took place between the mid AD 380s and AD 532 as Christianity grew to become the dominant religion. Christianity's triumph is usually explained as ‘inevitable', but as this book makes clear, it was not simply because the Roman empire was weakened by forces beyond its control. The book reveals the zeal of those espousing Christian teachings, their strategy and their willingness to harness their followers including monks, who were given a licence to destroy. Christians were told that they would reap the benefits in heaven if they became martyrs to the cause of destroying the existing beliefs. She writes with passion and tells a story which has thus far been suppressed, or at best ignored.
The book begins in AD 532 when Damascius and six members of the Academy, the most famous philosophical school in Athens, abandoned the school and the city and went into exile. The Academy had been in existence for over one thousand years, but draconian laws, destruction of temples and book burnings had crushed the followers of Greek and Roman religions. Damascius and his companions came to realise that there was no place for philosophers in the Roman Empire. The Christian Emperor Constantine and his successors had effectively destroyed a culture and a religion which had given strength to its followers, celebrated pluralism and led to the flowering of a civilization which incorporated gods, ideas and philosophies from the Mediterranean world and beyond.
The book goes on to describe the destruction of the temple of Serapis in AD392 and tens of thousands of books which were the remnants of the Great Public Library of Alexandria. This unprompted sacrilege was carried out by Theophilus, the Christian Bishop of Alexandria, and his followers. The book describes how the practice of censorship meant that the works of defenders of the old religions such as Celsus who vigorously criticised Christianity, survived only because he was quoted by those who defended Christianity.
More..
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdail ... world.html
CHRISTIANS OF COLOR ARE REJECTING “COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY” AND RECLAIMING ANCESTRAL SPIRITUALITIES
Excerpt;
Mystic Soul is part of a broader movement of people of color moving beyond dominant Christianity, which largely reflects white culture, to chart their own spiritual initiatives, ones that increasingly incorporate the faith traditions of their ancestors. For the departing, simply put, white Christianity is no longer enough. More precisely put, it was never enough.
This movement isn’t new, but after a solid majority of white Christians across traditions voted for a president who courted white nationalists, the chorus of people of color seeking refuge has only grown louder, its reach wider, and its work to decentralize white theology more deliberate.
For some, that means decolonizing their Christian faith from white patriarchy and capitalism. For others, that means connecting to ancestral faith practices, such as Yoruba, Buddhism, ancestor veneration or particular tribal traditions. For others, it’s an amalgam, a synthesis of severed history, personal heritage and truths from other traditions. For most, it means imagining a spiritual wholeness that has been denied for so long, and chasing it with abandon.
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/christian ... f-84570085
Excerpt;
Mystic Soul is part of a broader movement of people of color moving beyond dominant Christianity, which largely reflects white culture, to chart their own spiritual initiatives, ones that increasingly incorporate the faith traditions of their ancestors. For the departing, simply put, white Christianity is no longer enough. More precisely put, it was never enough.
This movement isn’t new, but after a solid majority of white Christians across traditions voted for a president who courted white nationalists, the chorus of people of color seeking refuge has only grown louder, its reach wider, and its work to decentralize white theology more deliberate.
For some, that means decolonizing their Christian faith from white patriarchy and capitalism. For others, that means connecting to ancestral faith practices, such as Yoruba, Buddhism, ancestor veneration or particular tribal traditions. For others, it’s an amalgam, a synthesis of severed history, personal heritage and truths from other traditions. For most, it means imagining a spiritual wholeness that has been denied for so long, and chasing it with abandon.
More...
http://religiondispatches.org/christian ... f-84570085
Worries Rise as Pope and China Edge Closer to Deal on Bishops
ROME — Pope Francis and his diplomats have been quietly pouring energy into negotiations with the Chinese government that could help end a decades-long dispute over control of the Catholic Church in the country.
But as signs of a possible breakthrough have emerged — how bishops get ordained has long been a sticking point — some Catholics are worried. They fear that the Vatican, in its eagerness for a deal, could betray clerics and parishioners who have illicitly practiced their faith for decades and risked arrest and persecution by worshiping in the so-called underground church. They are also alarmed that a deal could end the independence for which the underground church has long stood.
The dissension escalated on Friday as the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, intensified his criticism of the talks, saying that a reconciliation could result in 12 million Chinese Catholics being effectively put in a Communist-controlled “cage.” He has accused church bureaucrats of “selling out” Chinese Catholics, and warned, “A church enslaved by the government is no real Catholic Church.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/worl ... d=45305309
ROME — Pope Francis and his diplomats have been quietly pouring energy into negotiations with the Chinese government that could help end a decades-long dispute over control of the Catholic Church in the country.
But as signs of a possible breakthrough have emerged — how bishops get ordained has long been a sticking point — some Catholics are worried. They fear that the Vatican, in its eagerness for a deal, could betray clerics and parishioners who have illicitly practiced their faith for decades and risked arrest and persecution by worshiping in the so-called underground church. They are also alarmed that a deal could end the independence for which the underground church has long stood.
The dissension escalated on Friday as the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, intensified his criticism of the talks, saying that a reconciliation could result in 12 million Chinese Catholics being effectively put in a Communist-controlled “cage.” He has accused church bureaucrats of “selling out” Chinese Catholics, and warned, “A church enslaved by the government is no real Catholic Church.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/worl ... d=45305309
HOW THE ABORTION DEBATE TURNED THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT ON TO LIBERAL ARGUMENTS… AND BIRTHED THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM INDUSTRY
Historically, the Christian Right has not been recognized for its celebration of liberal values. On the contrary, any reference to organizations such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition is likely to conjure decidedly illiberal associations. These advocacy groups were famous for their boisterous condemnation of mainstream society and their attempts to legislate a rigid set of conservative moral codes. Among their policy goals, anti-abortion activism was pursued with the greatest zeal. But a recent book by political scientist Andrew R. Lewis suggests that this single-minded religious movement may have yielded some unintended political effects.
In, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars, Lewis argues that anti-abortion activism has been instrumental in conditioning the Christian Right for participation in liberal discourse. Though launched in the stern language of moral condemnation, the Christian Right has followed its anti-abortion vanguard into a twenty-first century rhetoric based in the liberal language of rights. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Lewis about the implications of this unusual outcome.
Full interview...
http://religiondispatches.org/how-the-a ... 3-84570085
Historically, the Christian Right has not been recognized for its celebration of liberal values. On the contrary, any reference to organizations such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition is likely to conjure decidedly illiberal associations. These advocacy groups were famous for their boisterous condemnation of mainstream society and their attempts to legislate a rigid set of conservative moral codes. Among their policy goals, anti-abortion activism was pursued with the greatest zeal. But a recent book by political scientist Andrew R. Lewis suggests that this single-minded religious movement may have yielded some unintended political effects.
In, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars, Lewis argues that anti-abortion activism has been instrumental in conditioning the Christian Right for participation in liberal discourse. Though launched in the stern language of moral condemnation, the Christian Right has followed its anti-abortion vanguard into a twenty-first century rhetoric based in the liberal language of rights. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Lewis about the implications of this unusual outcome.
Full interview...
http://religiondispatches.org/how-the-a ... 3-84570085
Is the pope head of the world's most powerful government? | The Economist
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B76kV7a ... m=20180315
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B76kV7a ... m=20180315
Pope Francis Is Beloved. His Papacy Might Be a Disaster.
Excerpt:
So the idea of this pope as a “great reformer,” to borrow the title of the English journalist Austen Ivereigh’s fine 2014 biography, can’t really be justified by any kind of Roman housekeeping. Instead Francis’ reforming energies have been directed elsewhere, toward two dramatic truces that would radically reshape the church’s relationship with the great powers of the modern world.
The first truce this pope seeks is in the culture war that everyone in Western society knows well — the conflict between the church’s moral teachings and the way that we live now, the struggle over whether the sexual ethics of the New Testament need to be revised or abandoned in the face of post-sexual revolution realities.
......
This experiment is the most important effort of his pontificate, but in the last year he has added a second one, seeking a truce not with a culture but with a regime: The Communist government in China. Francis wants a compromise with Beijing that would reconcile China’s underground Catholic Church, loyal to Rome, with the Communist-dominated “patriotic” Catholic Church. Such a reconciliation, if accomplished, would require the church to explicitly cede a share of its authority to appoint bishops to the Politburo — a concession familiar from medieval church-state tangles, but something the modern church has tried to leave behind.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opin ... dline&te=1
Excerpt:
So the idea of this pope as a “great reformer,” to borrow the title of the English journalist Austen Ivereigh’s fine 2014 biography, can’t really be justified by any kind of Roman housekeeping. Instead Francis’ reforming energies have been directed elsewhere, toward two dramatic truces that would radically reshape the church’s relationship with the great powers of the modern world.
The first truce this pope seeks is in the culture war that everyone in Western society knows well — the conflict between the church’s moral teachings and the way that we live now, the struggle over whether the sexual ethics of the New Testament need to be revised or abandoned in the face of post-sexual revolution realities.
......
This experiment is the most important effort of his pontificate, but in the last year he has added a second one, seeking a truce not with a culture but with a regime: The Communist government in China. Francis wants a compromise with Beijing that would reconcile China’s underground Catholic Church, loyal to Rome, with the Communist-dominated “patriotic” Catholic Church. Such a reconciliation, if accomplished, would require the church to explicitly cede a share of its authority to appoint bishops to the Politburo — a concession familiar from medieval church-state tangles, but something the modern church has tried to leave behind.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opin ... dline&te=1
What is Good Friday?
Arguments still rage about what the most solemn day in the Christian calendar stands for
FOR hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, Good Friday is the most solemn day in the church calendar. It is the time when they recall and often re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus. In Rome there is a torch-lit procession, led by the Pope, in which 14 stages in the agonising drama are remembered. Orthodox Christians, whose Easter celebrations move about in a different system, will mark the event in a week’s time with spectacular ceremonies. But apart from the obvious point that it leads onto the Resurrection of Christ two days later, many Christians would struggle to put into words the exact meaning of Good Friday’s drama.
That is partly because over the centuries, the faith’s most influential thinkers have disagreed on the matter. They generally concur in regarding the execution of their faith’s founder not merely as unjust and cruel punishment but as a kind of cosmic event which transformed the relationship between God and man, freeing humanity from the power of mortality. But how exactly does that liberation from death work? To that question, Christian theologians have offered several different answers.
More..
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economi ... m=20180330
Arguments still rage about what the most solemn day in the Christian calendar stands for
FOR hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, Good Friday is the most solemn day in the church calendar. It is the time when they recall and often re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus. In Rome there is a torch-lit procession, led by the Pope, in which 14 stages in the agonising drama are remembered. Orthodox Christians, whose Easter celebrations move about in a different system, will mark the event in a week’s time with spectacular ceremonies. But apart from the obvious point that it leads onto the Resurrection of Christ two days later, many Christians would struggle to put into words the exact meaning of Good Friday’s drama.
That is partly because over the centuries, the faith’s most influential thinkers have disagreed on the matter. They generally concur in regarding the execution of their faith’s founder not merely as unjust and cruel punishment but as a kind of cosmic event which transformed the relationship between God and man, freeing humanity from the power of mortality. But how exactly does that liberation from death work? To that question, Christian theologians have offered several different answers.
More..
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economi ... m=20180330
FEAR, NOSTALGIA AND POWER DROVE EVANGELICALS TO TRUMP: INTERVIEW WITH EVANGELICAL SCHOLAR JOHN FEA
If you were raised in American evangelicalism during the past thirty years, you’ve probably come to associate Jesus with certain character traits. If you’ve had access to a television over this same span, you’ve probably come to associate Donald Trump with certain others. In most cases, these are diametrically opposed. Where Jesus is humble, Trump is prideful; where Jesus is pure, Trump is lustful; where Jesus is selfless, Trump is the paragon of worldly corruption and greed. On these points and many others, Jesus emerges as the perfect foil for Trump, the contrast always appallingly sharp. If Jesus is the Christ, you might say, Trump is the anti-Christ.
And yet, as everyone now knows, 81 percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump’s candidacy—a fact that raises uncomfortable questions about the state of evangelicalism in America.
Historian John Fea is an evangelical, but not a fan of Donald Trump. When he received the 2016 election results, he reported feeling “shocked,” “saddened,” and “angry,” less about Trump himself than about the evangelicals who had carried him. In his new book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, Fea crafts a historical narrative to explain—and often to critique—the decision-making process of the infamous 81 percent. [For more, read Greg Carey’s critique of Believe Me here. — eds]
Interview and more...
http://religiondispatches.org/fear-nost ... c-84570085
******
The non-Trump evangelicals
Some evangelicals want to wean their brethren off unconditional support for Donald Trump
A GROUP of evangelical leaders gathered near Chicago on April 16th and 17th to discuss the future of their movement. They were not well-known names—though some are pastors of large churches—mainly because they are not active in politics or the media. But that was partly the point of their meeting, held at Wheaton College, the “Harvard of evangelicalism”. Acknowledging that more than 80% of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and that three-quarters held a favourable view of him in a recent poll, many of those attending the meeting have expressed concern that their wing of the Christian faith is being tainted by its often unquestioning support of the president. They want to return it to its spiritual roots.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/united-s ... m=20180419
If you were raised in American evangelicalism during the past thirty years, you’ve probably come to associate Jesus with certain character traits. If you’ve had access to a television over this same span, you’ve probably come to associate Donald Trump with certain others. In most cases, these are diametrically opposed. Where Jesus is humble, Trump is prideful; where Jesus is pure, Trump is lustful; where Jesus is selfless, Trump is the paragon of worldly corruption and greed. On these points and many others, Jesus emerges as the perfect foil for Trump, the contrast always appallingly sharp. If Jesus is the Christ, you might say, Trump is the anti-Christ.
And yet, as everyone now knows, 81 percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump’s candidacy—a fact that raises uncomfortable questions about the state of evangelicalism in America.
Historian John Fea is an evangelical, but not a fan of Donald Trump. When he received the 2016 election results, he reported feeling “shocked,” “saddened,” and “angry,” less about Trump himself than about the evangelicals who had carried him. In his new book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, Fea crafts a historical narrative to explain—and often to critique—the decision-making process of the infamous 81 percent. [For more, read Greg Carey’s critique of Believe Me here. — eds]
Interview and more...
http://religiondispatches.org/fear-nost ... c-84570085
******
The non-Trump evangelicals
Some evangelicals want to wean their brethren off unconditional support for Donald Trump
A GROUP of evangelical leaders gathered near Chicago on April 16th and 17th to discuss the future of their movement. They were not well-known names—though some are pastors of large churches—mainly because they are not active in politics or the media. But that was partly the point of their meeting, held at Wheaton College, the “Harvard of evangelicalism”. Acknowledging that more than 80% of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and that three-quarters held a favourable view of him in a recent poll, many of those attending the meeting have expressed concern that their wing of the Christian faith is being tainted by its often unquestioning support of the president. They want to return it to its spiritual roots.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/united-s ... m=20180419
“Project Blitz” Seeks to Do for Christian Nationalism What ALEC Does for Big Business
Religious freedom has been much in the news as the Trump administration has rolled out policies providing an earthly answer to the prayers of the Christian Right. It‘s a central issue in the Masterpiece Cakeshop vs Colorado Civil Rights Commission currently before the Supreme Court, and it’s no secret that the Christian Right has been busy taking their religious freedom agenda to the states.
Many of the bills on their agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”
The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.
More....
http://religiondispatches.org/project-b ... 1-84570085
Religious freedom has been much in the news as the Trump administration has rolled out policies providing an earthly answer to the prayers of the Christian Right. It‘s a central issue in the Masterpiece Cakeshop vs Colorado Civil Rights Commission currently before the Supreme Court, and it’s no secret that the Christian Right has been busy taking their religious freedom agenda to the states.
Many of the bills on their agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”
The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.
More....
http://religiondispatches.org/project-b ... 1-84570085