|
First, there is overwhelming historical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really existed and did more or less what it says in the Gospels (which the church has often misread, by the way). I have written on this at length elsewhere.
Reading the comments on this website, it’s clear there are some atheists out there who have even more of a mission to unconvert believers than most believers have to convert them!
There are, broadly, three types of prayer. One launches off messages to distant divinities, like a sailor sending messages off in a bottle hoping someone will receive them.
I'm not an expert on this. But a lot depends on the motivation and inner spirituality of what's going on.
My faith tradition (ordinary Christianity) doesn't really try to explain the origin of evil either in general or in particular awful situations. Part of believing in a good Creator God, as Christians do, is to believe that evil is essentially absurd, irrational, a denial of the goodness and meaningfulness of creation -- which is of course all the more graphically the case when faced with multiple, random murder.
In classic Christian teaching God's free offer of forgiveness always stands, but to accept forgiveness means, well, accepting forgiveness. It doesn't mean hearing the word of forgiveness and saying, in effect, 'well, that's OK, because actually there wasn't anything to forgive'. You can't pretend to accept forgiveness and turn forgiveness, as you do so, into 'tolerance' or 'well, it didn't matter that much.'
Jesus was a social revolutionary in the same way that Mozart was brilliant at counterpoint.
That is, it was a key element in a much larger package, but to imagine that it was the main or the only thing is to ignore all the other things that were going on.
Of course, it needs saying because for years the church has screened out that element of 'kingdom of God' teaching, but once the message has been heard -- which I would have thought it has been in many quarters though not all -- it needs to be re-integrated into the larger agenda which Jesus embraced.
About that, of course, I like many others have written quite a lot elsewhere!
I'm afraid we in the UK have only heard distantly of Jerry Falwell. Most churchgoers in England won't have heard of him at all; nonchurchgoers will only have heard of him as a strange character who pops up from time to time when people are writing 'how weird can they get' articles in our newspapers shaking their heads over American strangenesses.
My own sense, having spent a lot of time in the States over the years, is that he was a classic of his type and with a lot more integrity than some of the shady characters in the religious penumbra. But, insofar as I know what he taught -- which I freely admit would be second or third hand -- he was saying some things which I strongly say myself but I think in a different framework, and some things which I strongly argue against (e.g. on the present state of Israel and prophecy).
Within the strange, large economy of God's grace, which filters the truth of scripture through all of us imperfect interpreters, it may be that I make just as many mistakes as I think he did, but we are each called to be true to what we find in scripture and I have no reason to suppose he was not as obedient to that imperative as I struggle to be.
May he rest in peace and, with the rest of us, rise in glory where we shall look back on present disagreements like an adult looks back on childhood squabbles in the playground.
It all depends what you mean by 'satisfied'. St Paul wrote that he didn't suppose he had attained full maturity but was simply forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, and that's pretty much how it is here, too.
The question presupposes a kind of implicit career path which, beginning as a dream, translates into reality (or not, as the case may be) at a certain pace. In human terms I have obviously 'peaked', since I'm in what is clearly my last job, living in the historic house where not only people like J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott and H. C. G. Moule lived before me but also great former bishops like John Cosin and Richard Trevor.
Same as any other time. Say your prayers, study the scriptures, keep close to Christian fellowship (especially at the Eucharist), hold the whole situation up before the God who groans with the pain of the world (Romans 8) and has promised to wipe away all tears from all eyes (Revelation 21). War sharpens some of the horrible things about the way the world currently is but doesn't change the basic structure of a good world in rebellion and longing for redemption -- with humans caught up in the middle of it all.
There is a peculiar aspect to contemporary war because of broadcasting and so on; people can become voyeurs, captivated by scenes of suffering and devastation while they sit in comfortable homes drinking coffee or beer in front of the TV. Like all voyeurism, this can deaden genuine human reactions and give a quite unhealthy sense of false involvement which then breeds the wrong sort of detachment as its reverse. Enough to find out basically what's going on, pray about it, and get on with your real work and the rest of your life.
The idea that wartime somehow suspended all normal human life was undermined two generations ago by a splendid essay by C. S. Lewis entitled "On Learning in Wartime." It's in one of his volumes of collected essays somewhere.
(a) Heaven is important but it's not the end of the world: in the mainstream Christian tradition until the Platonists corrupted it, the ultimate destination is THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH, which will involve an ultimate resurrection (bodily, of course) for God's people (in some versions, for all people).
The way the phrase 'heaven and hell' are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal (for those who want it, check out Ephesians 1.10, Revelation 21 and 22, Romans 8.18-27 and 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 -- though once you see this theme it's there everywhere). When Paul says 'my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better', and when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in Paradise', the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the 'second coming' is NOT Jesus 'coming back to take us home', but Jesus coming -- or 'reappearing', as 1 John 3 and Colossians 3 put it -- to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.
This is one of the big ones, of course, and if there was a straightforward or easy answer someone -- Irenaeus, Aquinas, whoever -- would have come up with it. The problem is contained in the assumptions in the question: 'a good God' and the like. We are never, repeat never, in a position where we can size up God and decide what such a being ought really to do. A lot of people today assume, vaguely, that God ought to be running things, stopping earthquakes, preventing road accidents, whatever. They seldom stop to imagine what their own world might be like if God really stepped in every time we were about to do something wrong.
The Bible doesn't pose, or answer, the question that way. It tells a long, complex narrative about a plan launched by the creator God to heal creation. This plan, begun with the call of Abraham, reaches its climax in Jesus and his horrific death, and works out from there, not to the rescue of souls from a doomed world, but to the healing and renewal of the whole creation. That is the framework within which we may be able not indeed to answer the question as posed (which is actually a very post-Enlightenment way of putting it: see Susan Neiman's brilliant book, "Evil in Modern Thought"), but to grapple with the actual world in which evil remains so powerful yet Jesus and his followers declare that the creator God is becoming king.
On all this (sorry for the plug) see my book "Evil and the Justice of God."
The trouble is the word 'religion'. This is an eighteenth-century western category -- divorced at that stage from the rest of real life in a way it had never been before -- and bears little relation to any isolated reality that societies before then, or indeed most people in today's wide world, would recognize. For most of history, and for most people today, what the west currently calls 'religion' is woven tightly in with home and family, politics and government, music and art and a thousand other things.
What's more, few people prior to the eighteenth century would have doubted that 'religion' in general could be allied with the behavior patterns which Hitchens describes. Most people, in fact, would have said 'but that's simply normal human behavior, however regrettable'. The proof of the pudding is that, with the last two centuries in our mind, we could substitute the word 'atheism' for 'religion' in Hitchens' quote and it would still work (think: French Revolution, Gulag, etc etc).
The question might then be put: granted that 'religion' is now a fairly useless category, and that indeed much mainstream Christianity has been deeply suspicious of 'religion' as such precisely because it doesn't seem to have the life-changing property it's supposed to, is there another dimension, another depth, which is life-changing, peace-loving, and so on? The New Testament insists that there is . . . granted of course that a great many who claim to follow it collapse back into 'ordinary religion' given half a chance . . .
I wrote a big book called "The Resurrection of the Son of God" (2003), and I have another one, smaller and more popular level, called "Surprised by Hope," coming out soon. Yes, of course I believe in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in life AFTER 'life after death' -- i.e. bodily resurrection following a period of being bodily dead. For that to happen, as all C1 Jews and Christians knew, meant that between bodily death and bodily resurrection there would be a period of 'life after death' in a disembodied state, for which e.g. Wisdom 3 uses the language of 'soul'. John Polkinghorne, that great scientist-turned-theologian, says somewhere that God will download our software onto his hardware until he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.
All cultures, ancient as well as modern, have been more or less familiar with the fact (as I take it to be -- lots of empirical and cross-cultural evidence) that people we love who have died (sometimes when we don't even know yet that they have died) can and do appear to us.
Like every other human invention in principle (OK, some smart guy/gal will think up exceptions) E-mail is both a blessing and a curse. Used wisely, it's a great blessing, enabling people to do small tasks swiftly and efficiently and complex ones much more simply. Used foolishly, it's a drug, a time-waster, an encouragement to rudeness or hasty unthought-out messages.
I bet people have asked this question about everything since they discovered pigeons could carry messages.
a. Literal and metaphorical. The word 'literal' is misused if we try to make it mean 'it actually happened'. The word 'literal' refers to the way words refer to things -- that they refer to something 'literally'. If we intend to refer to an event that happens in the space/time/matter world, the way to do so is to say it is a 'concrete' event as opposed to an 'abstract' one. We should note that 'metaphorical' is in that respect like 'literal' -- it refers to the way words refer to things, rather than to the things themselves.
Now we've got that out of the way:
The Question: Which "ism" is more entrenched in America, sexism or racism? Which should religion address?
All 'isms' are shorthands which can obscure the issues they label. 'Religion' ought to be about (among other things!) careful, wise, humble, reasoned discourse about actual questions, unmasking the labels which function only as convenient ways of not really thinking things through. Perhaps that means that 'religion' should address 'labelism' -- especially in the run-up to an election...
Easter greetings to one and all.
The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?
I was also struck by what the Pope said at the UN, that 'freedom of religion' doesn't just mean 'freedom to worship' -- i.e. to practice one's religion in private away from the public square -- but also freedom to work out its meaning in the public domain. Actually, what he said about 'human rights' in that speech was fascinating, too, and mostly missed by the news media; he didn't just say 'we need to emphasize human rights', but (a) we need to rediscover what the roots of 'human rights' actually are, and (b) we need a nuanced use of 'human rights', because the broad-brush use of that idea doesn't get us anywhere. I summarize and oversimplify; his piece was remarkably subtle and was perhaps calling the UN back to a larger vision of its own task than some of its members would be likely to want. In fact, it was as though he'd been reading Nick Wolterstorff's new book on Justice -- a point I put to Nick in an email and with which he agreed.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
Comments (122)