The question is an ancient one: Did God create us in God's own image? Or did we create God in our own image? Today the question is being raised again by persons who have taken it upon themselves to launch new attacks on religious belief.

I like the answer that Arnold Lunn came to. An outspoken British agnostic, in 1924 he had written a book, Roman Converts, in which he viciously attacked some of his intellectual peers who had recently converted to Catholicism. But several years later, he himself embraced Christianity and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Thereafter he set out to respond to the very criticisms that he had himself lodged against Christian belief.

One of those charges was the contention that belief in God is an exercise in wish-fulfillment, the Freudian notion that we fashion a God who can satisfy needs and desires that would otherwise go unfulfilled. His rejection of this contention was a blunt one: "To argue that the hunger for God disproves the existence of God," he wrote, “is as irrational as to maintain that the belief in the existence of cows is an example of 'wish-fulfillment' because the thought of beef makes a hungry man's mouth water."

This gets at the real issue. Either we hunger for God because God created us with that hunger, or we hunger for God because we refuse to accept the possibility that our deepest spiritual hungers—what the Christmas carol describes as “the hopes and fears of all the years”—are ultimately incapable of being fulfilled.

Those of us who believe have come to experience the biblical invitation as grounded in reality: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

I am less surprised by the Pope's declaration than I am by the shocked responses of many Protestant leaders. The Pope has not said anything that was not there all along. What is good about his recent statement is that it keeps with the changes formulated by Vatican II. While we Protestants are not examples of Christ's "fullest" desires for his church, at least the Catholics let us into the ballpark these days, if only as somewhat defective participants.

Ecumenical relations will not flourish apart from an honest statement of what each church body believes. Pope Benedict has now reminded us that there is no easy path to unity. The most helpful response that we non-Catholics can offer is to make it clear where we in turn disagree with his declaration. So let me state my basic contention. While I love my Catholic friends and have learned much from them, I firmly believe that Catholicism holds to specific teachings--about churchly authority, about Mary, about the sacraments--that are seriously mistaken. From my Protestant evangelical perspective, the Pope has his work cut out for him if he is to bring his church up to speed as a full--to say nothing of "the fullest"--expression of what Christ desires for his church. But my saying that would not surprise Pope Benedict. This means that we are still at the point where we have been for a long time: much in common, but also much to argue about.

You certainly don’t have to be religious to acknowledge that there are moral boundaries that a physician should not cross in responding to a patient’s needs and wishes. And for the believer--Christian, Jewish, Muslim, for example--those boundaries will be reinforced by strong religious convictions. There are some things that God forbids us to do.

But this is not simply a case of religious obligations versus the obligation to serve patients. For the believer, serving a patient is itself a matter of religious conviction. In Christianity, for example, physical healing is one of the things we are called by God to promote. Jesus devoted a lot of attention in his earthly ministry to responding to genuine physical needs.

It is not enough, then, for a physician simply to say “No” to a certain expressed need or wish--or more generally, to refuse to engage in a certain kind of practice or procedure. Even in saying “No,” the obligation to be a healer does not disappear. If, for example, certain Christian communities insist that physicians should not perform abortions, they--along with the physicians in their midst--have a religious obligation to provide alternative ministries of healing, compassion and support for people who in their own lives see abortion as the only solution.

For those of us who claim to be servants of the One whom we refer to as “the Great Physician,” saying “No” to a specific practice or procedure does not cancel our obligation to work for the well-being of people who need healing and comfort.

For a movement to be considered a religion in its own right it surely must have a relatively coherent worldview, a system of thought, that is different on some very basic matters from other movements that want to inform us about our relationship to the divine. From that perspective Mormonism is a religion; it has a fairly robust worldview that distinguishes itself from, say, traditional Christian and Jewish understandings of reality. The Jehovah's Witnesses, on the other hand, do not constitute a religion as such; they are defined by things that they reject in Christianity, such as the full divinity of Christ in particular and in their idiosyncratic interpretations of various biblical passages.

Our attempt to get clear about these definitions is muddied by the prominence of "counter-cult" evangelical groups, who use the term "cult" as a disparaging label. Any group that we especially want to condemn that has any link to Christianity we call a cult. Given that reality, the label has come to carry a lot of baggage. I prefer to think of major and minor religious movements.