Thomas Farr at the Washington Post thinks that the Obama Administration is side-lining both American law and policy on this subject:

Religious freedom advocates were encouraged by the President’s stated views and allowed themselves to hope that America’s international religious freedom policy, long isolated at the State Department, would be strengthened under the new administration.

Their hopes are fading.

Almost 14 months into the Obama presidency, the ambassador at large for international religious freedom — a position mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act — has not been named, even though other positions of less weight and importance to our national interests have long been filled.

Although I have no doubt that this basic thesis is correct, there are some strange things here.  Just a couple:

To be successful, this ambassador at large needs foreign policy experience. Without it, it will be extremely difficult to succeed within Foggy Bottom’s notoriously thorny bureaucracy, let alone deal with foreign officials who believe (as many do) that U.S. international religious freedom policy is a vehicle of cultural imperialism…

They (the State Department’s recent actions) signal that this administration is not prepared to defend the United States against the false charge of “cultural imperialism,” the idea that our religious freedom policy is a front for American missionaries. Incredibly, this canard has apparently been accepted by some at Foggy Bottom and the White House.

That, in turn, is based on the concept that religious freedom is a by-product of Christianity, which is a religion of conversion.  A religion of conversion, all other things being equal, is the main beneficiary of an environment where conversion is simple and legal, which is a by-product of general religious freedom.  State Department liberals figure that, if you have religious freedom, Americans will send missionaries to spread the faith.

The Episcopalians have found out the hard way, however, that Americans aren’t the only ones capable of organising a missionary effort.  Their experience with the Africans should have taught somebody something, but it hasn’t, which is why the left keeps trying to paint the effort in Uganda re homosexuality as an American import when it is entirely indigenous.

I’m glad I’m an adherent of a Third World religion.  More punishing lessons from that part of the globe are forthcoming.

Other new Obama foreign policy initiatives, from outreach to Muslim communities to the normalization of gay rights in international law, are getting serious policy attention and resources. But religious freedom — which enjoys broad support among the American people and can contribute both to justice and national security — is, in effect, being sidelined.

This is another one of those initiatives by this administration which is self-contradictory.  You think that Muslim communities are going to help with the normalisation of gay rights?  Somehow, one outreach will be negated by the other.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

The subjects of evolution and creation are explosive ones, not only because of their scientific implications, but for their social and political ones as well.  That’s been the case since Darwin first set forth the theory.   It is certainly true today; for all of their protestations about the desire to be “scientific,” implementing whatever can be extracted philosophically from evolution or creation overshadows the impact each has on the course of science.

For Christians, evolution has been a difficult subject from the start, because it challenges (depending upon your hermeneutics) the Christian view of man.  That’s a large reason why Christian organisations have been in the forefront of allowing the presentation of “creationisms” in the public schools, the aversion of the legal system notwithstanding.  And understanding creationism in the plural is justified: contrary to its opponents’ representations, creationism is not univocal in many ways.

That diversity of opinion is in many ways the raison d’être of The Late Great Ape Debate, Bayard Taylor’s foray into the evolution-creation debate from a Christian perspective.  He begins by taking the reader through two seminal events in the debate: the 2007 opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the 1925 Scopes Trial in neighbouring Tennessee.  His treatment of the latter–which he picks up again later in the book–is that it a) was a set-up publicity stunt by the ACLU and their evolutionist friends, b) its coverage was larded (especially by H.L. Mencken) with the same high-handed, elitist snob contempt for William Jennings Bryan and the citizens of Dayton that we see today against “flyover country” inhabitants in the U.S., and c) the dramatisation Inherit the Wind is a propaganda piece which played fast and loose with the facts of the case.

From here he lays out the core of what he believes the Christian can and cannot believe about the subject.  That core is surprisingly broad, a theme he carries throughout the book.  From here he delineates the five lines of thought on the subject that are out there: young earth creationism, old earth creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution and naturalistic evolution.  He carries through his subsequent description of each of these in a laid-back fashion, using different types of apes and monkeys as monikers for each.  In doing so he shows the strengths and weaknesses of each, how they relate to the Scriptures and science and how they relate to each other.  Using a combination of charts and anecdotes, his presentation of the whole scene is one of the best and most succinct that I have seen anywhere.

In putting his own wrap on the subject, he makes two significant conclusions.  First, he finds that those who a) profess and call themselves Christians and b) who adhere to pure naturalistic evolution are “surrender monkeys,” and his poster child for that is none other than Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a bête noire of this blog for many years.  His trashing of Spong is, for one of those who follows the Anglican-Episcopal world, one of the high points of the book.

The second is that he himself tends to gravitate towards intelligent design.  In doing so, he points out that ID, far from being the monolithic cause its opponents caricature it as, is a fluid, open world with many different points of view.  That made me rethink where I was at in this debate.  One thing that Taylor’s book underscores is that the debate is constantly changing in response to the morphing scientific, political and legal environment that we find ourselves in.

He ends the book with a brief but trenchant section on how he thinks it best for Christian parents to introduce their children to the subject, and how Christians in general need to concentrate on what is essential and not get sidetracked in that which is not.

The Late Great Ape Debate is, IMHO, one of the best treatments of the subject I have seen, especially for the general reader, and it will be some time before it is bettered.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

From here (where there’s more):

Church of God Eurasian Theological Seminary provost Ilya Okhotnikov recently participated in a dialogue in Russia which is addressing the high divorce and abortion rate in the country.

Russian Orthodox Church leaders called on Christians to be firm in defending traditional marriage and lamented the family crisis in the country. According to some estimates, over half of the marriages in Russia end in divorce. Women in the 140-million-strong country undergo some 1.5 million abortions annually.

“We, Christians of different denominations, should profess the inviolability of the evangelic norms on the holy matrimony between man and woman,” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said in a welcome message to participants of an inter-Christian forum for former Soviet republics held in Moscow.

Christians, he said, should “openly testify that deviation from the God-given fundamentals of marriage cannot contribute to forming a healthy individual.”

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

It seems that the prospect of women in ministry–and especially women as diocesan bishops–is always linked to a discussion of the nature of authority in churches.  That was certainly the case in my own 2007 piece on the subject, Authority and Evangelical Churches, and now the CoE’s “Ugley Vicar” takes on the issue in his own post Anglicanism, Authority and Ordination.  Although our two church environments are different (they are both episcopal in nature, however) many of the underlying issues are the same.

One point I’d like to make from the outset is this: if it is unacceptable for a woman to have any kind of authority over a man at an episcopal level, i.e., a female bishop over a male priest/minister, than it’s unacceptable for a woman vicar/pastor to have the same kind of authority over a male layman.  The reverse is likewise true.  Once you allow women in what many of us would refer to as “credentialled” ministry, then you’ve blown your argument about the authority issue at a higher level.  That’s the situation that both the CoE and my own church find themselves in right at the moment.

But John Richardson (the Ugley Vicar) introduces something into the debate which, frankly, I wish I had explicitly done sooner: the concept of more than one kind of authority.  Taking his cue from John Goldingay’s book Authority in Ministry, he comes up with the following:

In it, he identified two kinds of authority. Authority A is the institutional kind possessed by the centurion, who said to one man “‘Go’ and he goes, to another ‘Come’ and he comes.” Authority B, he said, is the kind possessed by Jesus who, “spoke with authority because he was in touch with God and with truth” (8).

Richardson then spends a great deal of time applying this to the CoE.  To be honest, much of the discussion is specific to his church, a state church where “Authority A” is tied up in its legal status.  One thing he brings out that is relevant to my earlier treatment of the subject is the nature of the Act of Supremacy: he states the following:

That’s significant because, if one accepts the “engineers” premise, it absolves Anglicanism (or at least the C0E) of the great besetting problem with most of Evangelical Christianity, the one that is at the centre of my whole thesis in Authority and Evangelical Churches:

What I’d like to spend the rest of this piece doing is to generalise his concept of “Authority A” and “Authority B” and perhaps use this to shed some light for the rest of us who are involved with this issue.

If one looks at things objectively, any organisation–secular or religious–requires Authority A to function.  That just goes with the territory.  There’s nothing unique to the church about this.  This applies whether the church has state sanction (as is the case in the UK and many European countries) or not (the US.)  It also applies if the church is incorporated or an unincorporated religious association (and we see both in all parts of the world.)  And I’m also inclined to think that this kind of authority isn’t what is referred to in the New Testament when the subject comes up.  In fact, some writers (the Jesuit John McKenzie comes to mind) contend that one of the main points of the New Testament is that the church get past this kind of authority altogether.

Authority B is another matter altogether.  Although it certainly has New Testament sanction, how it’s implemented varies depending upon the ecclesiastical environment.

At one end of the spectrum is Roman Catholicism, whose implementation of this is tied up in the concept of magisterium, the inherent ability of the Church to authoritatively speak on matters of faith and morals.  That in turn is tied up with its ecclesiology, and I’ve discussed that issue many times on this blog, starting many years ago with We May Not Be a Church After All.  I’ve always felt that the Roman Catholic Church can never admit the sacerdotal ministry of women because of this and many other issues, unless they modify their underlying idea of themselves.  In this environment, Authorities A and B are effectively a unity.

At the other end are the “independent” Evangelical churches (the Baptists in this part of the world are foremost in this) who have, whether they care to admit it or not, evicted Authority B from their churches altogether.  They have done this through the aforementioned process of rebellion to be sure, but they have also done so because their concept of church is a complete rejection of the church possessing either the magisterium or the status of a formal intermediary between man and God.  As a consequence of this they have no grounds to exclude women from credentialled ministry unless they can demonstrate that Authority A is what the New Testament refers to.  Today, however, what we’re seeing in many Evangelical churches is a de facto entry of Authority B into the church, something which I think is objectionable and defeats the whole purpose of such churches.

Somewhere in this mix are the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and groups, whose idea is to restore the spontaneous, Spirit-led appointment to leadership that we saw in the New Testament.  This is the mirror image of the usual Evangelical model: it has a clear concept of Authority B but in a sense evicts Authority A from the church.  This has in turn led to the woes the movement has experienced: lack of accountability, self-validating leadership and ephemeral organisations.  The Classical Pentecostal churches were the first attempt to fix these problems, and have done so in varying ways and with varying degrees of success.  Most of these lessons had to be learned the hard way once again during the Charismatic Renewal of the 1960’s and 1970’s, with even more variation in the results.  Women have always done relatively well here because of the Spirit-led nature of leadership, underscored by the explicit conferring of the gift of prophecy on women in Joel and Acts (something that Lord Carey likes to note.)  But back-pedalling has taken place here too, as we all know.

With Anglicanism, we have a muddle.

Richardson points out that, in the formation of the Church of England, the whole concept of the sovereign being a part of the doctrinal formation of the church was taken out of the equation.  English sovereigns had good precedent for doing so, as Roman Emperors made the fourth and fifth centuries an exciting time picking winners and losers in the Christological controversies.  But they, wanting a Protestant church (especially Edward VI and Elizabeth I) passed this up.  The 39 Articles notwithstanding, the Church of England also passed up the explicit assumption of magisterium, preferring to see itself as a restoration of New Testament and Patristic Christianity that had gotten lost in Roman Catholicism.  And I’ve always been inclined to think that Anglicanism is one of the better attempts to get back to this, all things considered.

But having done all of these “Protestant” things, the Church of England still retains the decidedly “Catholic” structure of bishops as successors to the Apostles.  And that’s where the tricky part comes in.  It’s true that the CoE’s ministers and bishops have legal authority and a structure, the “Authority A.”  But as bishops women would have (in theory at least; as Richardson alludes to, it doesn’t always work out) whatever spiritual authority comes from the “Catholic” side of the episcopacy, and, as he points out, for those who see this as an impossible combination, no provision has been made.

Given Anglicanism’s equivocal nature (and I mean that in the scholastic, not pejorative sense,) I think that there are three possibilities for resolution.

The first would be to actually adopt a consistent, univocal theory of the authority of the church, i.e., either Roman Catholic, Evangelical or even Charismatic.  Given that this hasn’t been properly resolved on either side of the Atlantic, this is unlikely, and given some Evangelicals aversion to women as ministers (let alone bishops) it may not resolve anything.

The second is that of parallel jurisdictions.  This flies in the face of the concept of the “holy Catholic and apostolic church,” but the blunt truth is that, considering these churches as a whole, we already have parallel jurisdictions.  As Richardson reminds us, the Articles state that “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England,” but subsequent to that he established a presence in the UK and has certainly made a nuisance of himself lately.  (Personally, I think the term “flying bishops” used in this context is a promotional scheme for the airlines, but I digress…)

The third would be for the church, as have many churches, simply decide to ordain women as bishops and let the chips fall where they may.  And that’s what I think is going to happen.

I’ve been a supporter of women at all levels in ministry, and remain so.  But that support is based on an ecclesiastical environment where churches have either a) denied, b) forfeited or c) adopted a Charismatic concept of “Authority B.”   Taking this step needs to be done with a clear idea of authority in the church, and very few have thought this issue through.  Richardson is to be commended for having explored the issue the way he has.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Disappointing but unsurprising:

The current main preoccupation of the military these days is to combat Islamic careerists in their quest for the expansion of the dar-al-salaam.  As a Vanderbilt University faculty member reminded us recently, homosexuality is punishable by death under Islamic law and the implementation of that law is a goal of same careerists.

The LGBT community has two choices: it can either allow the military (where Evangelicals are well represented) to protect them from their real enemies or it can demoralise large portions of the population to the point where they won’t bother to defend others’ right to exist.  To some extent, that’s what happened in the Roman Empire (in that case over taxation and the government’s suppression of groups such as the Donatists and Monophysites) in the years before Muhammad’s successors swept out of Arabia and conquered much of the civilised world.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

While beating around the net, I came across this bizarre 2008 piece in the Daily Kos:

The attendance at the Lifebuilders Conference is notable as a very damning link to neopentecostal dominionism; Lifebuilders is a yearly “Lay Missionary” conference of the Church of God of Cleveland, TN, a neopentecostal dominionist group which can be considered a sister church of the Assemblies of God (both are splits from the Christian and Missionary Alliance, one of the earliest pentecostal denominations) and which shares similar theology to the Assemblies; in some ways it is even more explicit, in that part of the church’s mission explicitly calls for growth rates of over 10 percent per year to be expected for churches.

Let’s see, where do I start?

1. LifeBuilders is the men’s ministry of the Church of God.  So they’re halfway there: they got the denomination right.  And yes, until our General Assembly in July I’m still working for the Laity Ministries Department, which oversees LifeBuilders.  So I can speak with some knowledge on this subject.
2. Unfortunately, we don’t have annual, national meetings.  The 2008 series they linked to were sponsored by the then Executive Committee of the church, and that hasn’t been replicated since (the 2008 series was the first in the decade.)  These conferences–dating back to the first one in 1996–were certainly not “Lay Missionary” conferences (our department’s “Consultation on Lay Ministries” comes closer to that description, but they were much smaller.)  So obviously the Kos’ research prowess is either lacking or characteristic, depending upon your point of view.
3. As far as the church’s growth rate is concerned, one only needs to review this report to see how that’s panned out.
4. I am blissfully unaware of any connection between the Laity Ministries Department and Bill Gothard.

And that last point is a good thing for me, because I’m not a big Bill Gothard fan, as regular readers of this blog know.   The Kos series was a) inspired by the fact that Mike Huckabee is a Gothard Man and b) written during his 2008 Presidential run.  The series is designed to inspire fear of the “Gothard cult” in the heart of liberals and other readers.

Unfortunately, the left doesn’t know when it’s being done a favour, and Gothard, in his own strange way, has done them a big one.

There’s no question that Bill Gothard is one of the most influential Evangelical leaders of our time.  Although his name has been forgotten, those he trained in the Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts and elsewhere have gone on to become pastors and other leaders in Evangelical Christianity.

Gothard’s disciplined approach has served these people well in their “moving up in the organisation.”  But the leaders he’s raised up tend to be unimaginative, “inside the box” types of thinkers which have left the Evangelical world in the lurch at at time when it needs really creative people with a fresh view to counter the assault it has received from the other side of the spectrum (and that would certainly include the Daily Kos.)  Gothard people (or those who act like Gothard people, like George W. Bush) are sitting ducks for an opponent who can move fast and outflank them both in the bureaucracy and in the court of public opinion.  The most successful turning of the tables took place after the 1994 election, when Bill Clinton managed to survive a Republican congress and his own scandal woes to win re-election in 1996, and then survive impeachment as well.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was yet another turning the tables on a party full of “Gothard people.”  But Obama and his colleagues in Congress have squandered much of that advantage in their own version of Gothard thinking–by resurrecting the old statism and unionism in the nationalisation of GM and Chrysler, in their attempts to get “card check,” and most famously in the health care initiative.  They have taken a sure victory and turned it into a mess.

Now the Tea Party activists have their shot at greatness.  But the right in general hasn’t resolved the tension between its insistence on economic and other freedom and the Gothardian obsession for authority.  That tension undid the Bush Administration and, until we get back past the authoritarianism to the freedom, we’re going to have a nation with nowhere else to go but downward.  And Evangelical Christianity, if it continues to blindly tie its fortunes to that nation, will go down with it.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

This speaks for itself:

Hermilo Jasso’s website is here.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

This 2005 piece, from David “Spengler” Goldman, is as succinct of an explanation of the importance of blood in spiritual life as I’ve seen:

All religion is about life, that is, about life eternal. Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality, and for this men will sacrifice their physical existence without hesitation. That is true of paganism as much as it is true of revealed religion. The young men of the tribe march to war to protect the existence of the tribe, confident that the perpetuation of their blood and their memory will compensate them for their death in battle. But the expansion of the great empires of Macedonia and Rome made the tribes themselves sentient of their mortality; that is the dawn of history, namely of the knowledge that every nation has a history, and that this history must have an end. As Franz Rosenzweig (1886 – 1929 – one of the most influential modern Jewish religious thinkers) wrote:

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

The pagans of the pre-historic world found immortality in the gods and totems of their tribe; when history intruded upon their lives on horseback, the power of the old gods vanished like smoke, and the immortality of the individual faded before the prospect of a great extinction of peoples. Among all the tribes of the world from  the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, only one claimed the eternity of its bloodline under a covenant with a universal God, namely the Jews.

The blood of the pagan was his life; to achieve a life outside of the blood of his tribe, the pagan had to acquire a new blood. It is meaningless to promise men life in the Kingdom of Heaven without a corresponding life in this world; Christianity represents a new people of God, with an existence in this life. That is why Christianity requires that the individual undergo a new birth. To become a Christian, every child who comes into the world must undergo a second birth, to become by blood a new member of the Tribe of Abraham. Protestants who practice baptism through total immersion in water simply reproduce the ancient Jewish ritual of conversion, which requires that the convert pass through water, just as he did in leaving his mother’s womb, to undergo a new birth that makes him a physical descendant of Abraham. Through baptism, Christians believe that they become Abraham’s progeny.

I present this for two reasons:

1. Many of our ministers do not understand this simple explanation of the blood.  The importance of the blood for the remission of sins (cf Heb 9:22) is fairly straightforward, but beyond that things can get very fanciful from the pulpit.
2. It is in part an answer to Houston attorney D.C. Toedt’s (the “Questioning Christian”) musings as to why the emphasis on the Body and Blood in the way we look at the Last Supper.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

From the 1928 BCP, it’s the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard:

For the Kingdom of Heaven is like an employer who went out in the early morning to hire labourers for his vineyards. He agreed with the labourers to pay them two shillings a day, and sent them into his vineyard. On going out again, about nine o’clock, he saw some others standing in the market-place, doing nothing. ‘You also may go into my vineyard,’ he said, ‘and I will pay you what is fair.’ So the men went.

Going out again about mid-day and about three o’clock, he did as before. When he went out about five, he found some other men standing there, and said to them ‘Why have you been standing here all day long, doing nothing?’

‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

‘You also may go into my vineyard,’ he said.

In the evening the owner of the vineyard said to his steward ‘Call the labourers, and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, and ending with the first. Now when those who had been hired about five o’clock went up, they received two shillings each. So, when the first went up, they thought that they would receive more, but they also received two shillings each; On which they began to grumble at their employer.

‘These last,’ they said, ‘have done only one hour’s work, and yet you have put them on the same footing with us, who have borne the brunt of the day’s work, and the heat.’

‘My friend,’ was his reply to one of them, ‘I am not treating you unfairly. Did not you agree with me for two shillings? Take what belongs to you, and go. I choose to give to this last man the same as to you. Have not I the right to do as I choose with what is mine? Are you envious because I am liberal?’ So those who are last will be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:1-16, Positive Infinity New Testament.)

If there’s one thing that bothers me about Evangelical Christianity these days, it’s that people expect–and are promised–a big pay-off for what they do (and especially what they give) to the Lord.  There’s really nothing new about this–it’s an issue that comes up more than once in the Gospels and elsewhere–but these days it’s pursued with a singular lack of subtlety.

We know that our reward is eternity with God.  That is ultimately the “two shillings” (I love the old British currency in this translation) of the parable.  What else is better?

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

This coup has the left in apoplexy:

Instead, when Tim Tebow and his mother agreed to tell their story (of how Tim was born even when his mother was advised to abort him) in an ad that’s a part of Focus on the Family’s “Celebrate Life, Celebrate Family” campaign, an ad that cost Focus on the Family about $3 million to have aired during the Super Bowl, the crap hit the fan.

To say that the abortion industry and their lobbying arm went crazy is an understatement.

“An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year – an event designed to bring Americans together,” said Jehmu Greene, president of the New York-based Women’s Media Center in a statement.

First: the event is designed to make money for the NFL, the teams, the network and the advertisers.  The Super Bowl is big, but to characterise it as a public civic event is a stretch.

Second: others (especially leftists at the University of Florida) object to Tebow “representing the University of Florida” with a message like this.  Well, unless he’s actually in an activity directly connected with the football team, he’s not representing UF any more than any other student.  He’s certainly not a paid representative (the NCAA sees to that) and this is supposed to be, for the moment at least, a free country.

Now there are two other questions that need to be answered here.

1. Will Tebow be able to play in the NFL if he wants to?  The League has gotten awfully PC in its old age.
2. Will Evangelical youth pastors, whose main preoccupation with the Super Bowl is to block the beer commercials, be able to do this and still show Tebow’s ad to their young people?

I hate to admit it, but with most Super Bowls, the commercials–beer and otherwise–are the best part.  (My wife certainly thinks so.)

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites