Why I Signed the Yale Response to “A Common Word”
December 20, 2007
Over the last few weeks, various Christians have contacted me because they are troubled over encountering my name amidst dozens of other signatories listed in a recent New York Times advertisement as supporting a public statement of support for a recent document from moderate Muslims, “A Common Word between Us and You.” (I’m glad to say that others have contacted me to express their appreciation that I did sign it.) The statement of support, entitled “Loving God and Neighbour Together,” was drafted by several professors at Yale Divinity School, including my friend Miroslav Volf, founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology.
(For all of the relevant documents, see the pertinent press releases and links here.)
It was Miroslav who e-mailed me to ask if I’d like to sign the statement for the NYT publication. I read the original Muslim statement and the Yale response, and didn’t sign right away. I was concerned that differences between the faiths, particularly about the divinity of Christ and God’s triune nature, were not as clearly set out in either statement as I would have preferred. Had I drafted the statement myself, I would have made changes elsewhere as well.
But I wasn’t being asked to help draft it. The thing was done, and the question now was a simple, binary one: Sign or not?
An article in this month’s Commentary, by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin, speaks of “Crimes, Drugs, and Welfare–and Other Good News.” Apparently not everything in our culture is going to hell (as I suggested in my blog entry of September 24, 2007). Indeed, Wehner and Levin point to decreasing numbers of teenage pregnances, increasing test scores in schools, lower numbers of abortions and divorces, and a drop in violent crime.
The authors suggest that a combination of opinion-shaping and policy-making are responsible for the changes. Well, maybe. But not perhaps the opinions and policies they have in mind.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful for their tidings. It certainly is good news that there is some good news.
Some of us historical types have been warning for quite a while, to be sure, that history does not proceed in single, straight lines–or circles. Just as some “leading cultural indicators” have shown that some aspects of contemporary North American culture are worse–from unthinking boorishness in parks and cinemas to a widespread acceptance of fornication–other indicators have shown for a generation that some aspects of culture are better, such as how our society treats handicapped people, or people of other races, or people without property, or people who aren’t men.
Still, the question is why–why some things are improving. And I’d like to know why Wehner and Levin do not even mention the provocative thesis of economist Steven Levitt et al., popularized in his book Freakonomics (2005).
Politics, patience, and power…and theology
November 10, 2007
Politicians, we all know, are among the least respected people in our society. We assume the worst about them and nod our heads sagely as one or another of them is exposed as venal, or hypocritical, or merely ambitious.
Yet we need them, and we need Christians among them.
Politics is about multiple policies, procedures, publics–and therefore about patience. No wonder so many people who want to get things done, and get them done soon, and get them done in a straightforward way tend to despise and avoid political careers.
Christians, of all people, should therefore get involved.
Our theology equips us to expect, and not be shocked by, sin, stupidity, absurdity, and waste. We should take for granted that some people’s motives are bad, everyone’s motives are mixed, and political systems are corrupt, with all that money and power at stake.
Our theology should also, however, lead us to expect some success, some goodness, and some blessing. We who know how things eventually turn out, and who know that God intends to bless the world in the meanwhile, should be hopeful of at least some measure of shalom from government.
So, given our grasp of the light and the dark, the positive and the negative, the “mixed field of the world” and what it takes to get anything worthwhile accomplished in it, we should be unusually patient. And yet we usually aren’t.
“Red-Letter Christians”: A Bad Idea with a Bad Name, Alas
October 22, 2007
Being a “red-letter Christian” sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Tony Campolo, professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University, activist, pundit, and provocateur, tells us that he wants to obey the very words of Jesus, those words that in previous generations of Bible publishing were printed in red.
His comrade Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Fellowship, also known as an activist, pundit, and provocateur, shares this self-designation and thinks that such an approach to Christian discipleship will transcend the division of American political culture between the left and right, Democrat and Republican.
So isn’t being a red-letter Christian (RLC) a good thing?
Well, first, let’s agree that Christians should try to follow Jesus. No problem there. But the trouble with the RLC concept begins immediately afterward.
Why John Tory Is Right–and Wrong–about Religious Schools
September 28, 2007
The great province of Ontario, Canada’s richest and most populous, is in the throes of an election. As many Canadians know, one of the hottest issues in that election is the promise of Conservative leader John Tory to consider funding religious elementary and secondary schools in that province.
As a native of Ontario, a product of its public school (and university) system, and one with some interest in questions of church and state, I’ll offer my full support for John Tory—and my full disagreement with him.
First, then, my support. Tory argues that if the government of Ontario ought to support a Roman Catholic separate school system, as it has for a long time, then it should support other religiously-based schools. It makes no sense in 2007 to continue to cater to the preferences of what used to be the largest religious minority in Ontario without offering similar support to others.
Is America/Canada/Britain/[Your country here] Going to Hell?
September 24, 2007
There is a lot of hay to be made–and book royalties, and speaking fees–with the message that one’s country is flying fast toward perdition. “Leading cultural indicators” are deployed to show that this important social something is worse than it used to be, and so is that…and look over here at all these things that are worse also!
Some of this bemoaning of cultural decline can be simple nostalgia. A New Yorker cartoon shows a grandfather, father, and (grand)son walking together down a city street. The grandfather is declaiming loudly, to the others’ discomfiture, “Everything was better when everything was worse!”
But was everything better in the good, or at least not so bad, old days? Is Canada less Christian than it used to be? Or America? Or Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc., etc.?
Medicine and Religion: Yes and No
August 9, 2007
Richard P. Sloan is worried about the connection of medicine and religion, as well he should be. He is Professor of Behavioral Medical (sic–I hope that word is actually “Medicine”) at Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.
Professor Sloan makes basically two points in his recent posting on the Newsweek/Washington Post website, “On Faith.” He thinks he is making only one: namely, that religion has no part in medicine. But in fact he is making at least two.
His article is entitled, “First, Do No Evangelizing.” This title is just a teeny, tiny bit offensive to Christian physicians who might be expected to bristle at this allusion to the Hippocratic Oath, whose first clause is, “First, do no harm.” Evangelism = harm? Ouch.
But as someone who is in favour of both evangelism and medicine, I think Professor Sloan is right about his main point: physicians must not take advantage of patients’ dependence upon them for their physical wellbeing to press spiritual matters upon them.
A number of American evangelical leaders, among whom I count several friends, recently wrote an open letter to President Bush urging a Middle East policy that includes “a viable, independent, secure state.” Indeed, they say that their support for such a state is a matter of mere “historical honesty” and is “the only way” to end violence in that region.
I have to raise two cheers for this declaration, but not three.
Christianity Today magazine recently published a troubling article about a group of churches in the United States associated with Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California.
What was troubling was that an old, old pattern among evangelical leaders has emerged yet again. Entrepreneurial, charismatic leaders, such as Calvary Chapel’s Chuck Smith, strike out on their own in innovations that result in considerable blessing to many. Calvary Chapel was the home, most famously, of many of the “Jesus music” rock bands of the 70s and 80s and was a key centre for the “Jesus People.”
But such freewheeling personalities are prone to want to do it all themselves and to keep doing it themselves. And they typically fail to realize that the “go it alone” approach that made sense in the “pioneering” phase can devolve into sheer dictatorial egomania in the “settler” phase.
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Christianity and the Politics of Weakness
May 24, 2007
Over the last few years, American evangelicals have been making news by saying that they’re not all on the political right. Some are on the left–at least, as “left” as mainstream American politics ever gets, which isn’t very “left” from a Canadian point of view, let alone a European one, let alone a Latin American one!
But new books keep coming out–I saw an announcement for yet another just today–from evangelical authors telling us that true Christianity eschews both the right and the left, and instead withdraws from power politics entirely. Indeed, this is the “way of weakness, not power,” the “bottom-up” or “up from under” rather than “top-down” approach, and is attributed to Jesus himself “whose kingdom was not of this world,” and so on.
I’m finishing a large-ish book manuscript that takes on this viewpoint at length–as well as some others, such as the “let’s take it over for Jesus” model of cultural transformation (whether on the religious right or left). I won’t try to summarize that argument here.
What I’ll do instead is tell a story about a story.
Jerry Falwell, Father of the Religious Right
May 15, 2007
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has gone to his reward. He departs this life with a significant résumé in public life. And if it weren’t for him, people like him wouldn’t have such résumés.
For in the 1970s Jerry Falwell led American fundamentalists out of their self-imposed seclusion from the mainstream of American culture. Since the 1925 Scopes evolution trial, fundamentalists had withdrawn from major American institutions, or lost battles over them, and devoted their considerable energies henceforth to forming their own parallel institutions: schools, colleges, seminaries, missionary societies, magazines, publishing houses, congregations, denominations, and more.
Jerry Falwell changed all that. Much as the indubitably right-wing politician Richard Nixon could open doors to China, the indubitably right-wing clergyman Falwell could open doors to American public life. And fundamentalists have surged through those doors ever since.
Of Course It Matters that Mitt Romney Is a Mormon
May 14, 2007
U.S. presidential aspirant Mitt Romney continues to attract attention because of his allegiance to the religion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), known popularly as the Mormon Church. Above all that attention is the “meta-question” about whether his Mormonism should even matter in political discussion. I suggest that there should be no question that it does.
Many point to John F. Kennedy as the first successful non-Protestant to win his nation’s highest office. So if Kennedy’s faith wasn’t a problem, so this logic runs, nor should Romney’s.
But Kennedy, as several decades of history have subsequently shown, was different from Romney not only in the type of religion he had–Roman Catholic versus LDS, which is a pretty big difference in outlook–but also in his adherence to it. Romney, by all accounts, is a faithful Mormon. Kennedy, by all accounts, was no one’s idea of a faithful Catholic. So of course Kennedy could be relied upon not to take political orders from Rome. He certainly wasn’t taking sexual orders from the Church. His Roman Catholicism literally didn’t matter. But Romney really believes LDS doctrine and really practices that religion’s faith.
