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An unvarnished look at the 20th century could make an atheist out of anybody: the trenches in France, the ovens of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda, Columbia, Angola, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on and on…
The earth is hurting, wounded, though we hope not mortally, by human activity that has set in motion rapid and often destructive environmental changes.
Chicago Theological Seminary is located across the street from the wonderful Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and I often visit there.
I believe that the “end of the world” theologies of the radical Christian Right helped to get us into the war in Iraq and are still fueling the drive to extend the war. “The war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse,” says Rev. John Hagee, a mega-church pastor in Texas.
Innocent lives lost, families shattered, a community forever marked by senseless violence—the pain felt and the pain yet to be lived because of the Virginia Tech shootings can cause anyone to ask “Where is God in all this?”
The relationship of repentance and forgiveness is a very controversial subject in theology and ethics. In the mid 1990’s, I and 22 other religious leaders, scholars, and activists labored for four years to come up with practical steps to reduce violence and increase peace. We published the outcome of this work in 1998 in the book JustPeacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War. We were all Christians, representing more than a dozen different Protestant and Catholic communions. We worked by consensus and when we got to the topic of “repentance and forgiveness” our group almost fell apart. Why?
“Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” (Mark12:41a)
Everybody knows the touching biblical story of the “widow’s mite” where the poor widow puts all she has into the temple treasury. Jesus contrasts her generosity in giving out of her poverty to the gifts of the rich, who give only give out of their abundance. (Mark 12: 42-44)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the term “religionless Christianity” and used it in his writings from a Nazi prison that were published posthumously under the title Letters and Papers from Prison. While Jewish theologians have had to ponder questions of what the Jewish covenant with God means in light of the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to recognize that the forms of the Christian religion had failed utterly to confront the massive evil Nazism represented, indeed even cooperated with it.
“War is hell,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman. Hell can be defined simply as the furthest away you can get from what is good and right, the furthest away you can get from God. War, therefore, is the antithesis of God’s will for humanity. God’s will is that we take care of one another and the creation. War, by contrast, is the organized destruction of human beings and the deliberate infliction of damage to their land, their homes, their communities and all that they hold dear.
When Dante’s voyager-narrator in the Inferno reaches the entrance to hell, he reads the following inscribed above the gate:
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS
AMONG THE LOST…
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.
Latin was a terrific choice for spreading the Christian faith to the Roman world when Latin was the lingua franca of the “known world.” That was about 2000 years ago. To revive the Latin Mass now is to give the Catholic faith over to the dead hand of traditionalism. This effort is simply another nail in the coffin of Vatican II and the heroic efforts of that Council to bring the Catholic faith into modernity. It is a giant step backward.
How many of us have cried “Oh, My God” in the last six years as we have seen horrific events unfold? The attacks of 9/11 and the destruction and aftermath of Katrina are certainly two times many of us have had that reaction. Both of these events were genuine tragedies; both were tragedies that involved an enormous helping of human callousness and downright evil.
Both times I have asked myself (and been asked), “Where do we begin as religious leaders to help people make sense of the senseless?”
Lament is one way. The cry from the heart helps us express the anger and outrage
that are there in each of us. After 9/11, we at CTS read the Psalms each day in chapel at noon. We began with Psalm 22, changing the pronouns to reflect our corporate response: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us? Why are you so far from helping us, from the words of our groaning?” Where are you, God? How could you let this happen? Where could God possibly be in acts so vile?”
Where is God when people who were too poor to leave New Orleans drown from a massive hurricane? Where was God in the response that was too little too late?
Several theological themes can help us reflect out of our pain and frustration.
The image that kept coming into my mind as I was reading Mr. Hitchens’ book God is Not Great is of a large child stamping his foot and screaming in rage because things aren’t going his way. “Religion Poisons Everything!” he rants. Everything? Really, Christopher, every single thing? I doubt it.
E-mail is the electronic evidence for the existence of good and evil. Furthermore, it is an accelerant, like gasoline, so that when something gets out electronically it spreads like wildfire. It also removes the personal from the ethical equation, so it is likely E-mail does more harm than good.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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