“The Pope is right” was my opening line last week. He should have encouraged the bishops of that church to restore the Latin mass, which continues the formative sounds of the Latin church. Memory is audio, and silence is amnesia.

“That church” I said, not “the Church.” Reinforcing the encyclical Dominus Jesus, Benedict XVI has repeated the denial of the word “church” to all the other churches. But subtraction is sectarian, and this medieval move of pulling up the drawbridges around the Roman Church is a cancellation of ecumenicity. The priority and purity of the church is preserved—keeping us “separated brethren” out of “the Church”--at the cost of confining Roman Catholics to a provinciality parading as universality.

This Pope has a generous heart as well as a brilliant and well-informed mind. His greatness contrasts with the small-mindedness and short-sightedness of this sad word-war proclamation.

Yes, subtraction is sectarian. But addition is ecumenical: we Christians should rejoice as more “churches” appear in this time of wide expansion of the Christian movement. For Chrisianity always has been more movement than institution, more strawberry plant than oak tree. The pyramidal model—from the Roman Empire, Pope replacing Emperor—is only one of the socio-models inhabited by world Christianity.

But no matter the form of the church, the fundamental content of the faith is constant, invariable. It's original wording in the Greek of the New Testament is "Kyrios Iesous" and in the Latin of the encyclical, "Dominus Jesus." Two words in Greek and Latin, and these three words in English:
'JESUS IS LORD."

What a welcome question!

“A question as we commemorate the anniversaries of Katrina and 9/ll: Why would a merciful God allow disasters—natural or manmade—to happen?”

WELCOME, because—in our secular culture of God-repression—God is the subject of the sentence expected in answer to the question—as God is the subject of the Bible’s first sentence and, indeed, the subject of the Bible.

As does the Bible’s first sentence (“In the beginning, God created....”), the question assumes that the “Maker of heaven and earth” has the power and knowledge to rule over what he’s made and to overrule any challenges to his authority. Who? God. What? Creation-Nature. How? Providence-Evolution.

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We Christians don’t believe in life after death. We have full belief in Jesus, and afterlife with him is implicit in our experience of him as alive in our here-and-now. (“I am with you always,” he says at the end of the New Testament’s first book.)

Jesus is unique in that his is the world’s only name with which the full range of possibilities exists:

1.....FULL UNBELIEF. Jesus never was born, never lived. Christianity’s foundation is nothing but fantasy. Though this position is, most historians agree, highly improbable, it reappears whenever conditions are right for it.

2.....NATURAL belief. Like everybody else, Jesus lived and died. This is the Jewish position.

3.....HALF belief. Jesus lived but didn’t die (he was taken to paradise): that was somebody else who was crucified. This is the Muslim position.

4.....FULL BELIEF. Jesus lived and died but didn’t stay dead. Three days after his execution, he appeared among his followers—and continued to re-appear many times for more than a month—often enough, and in sufficiently different circumstances, to overcome all their understandable doubts that he could be alive again. His disciples experienced him not as resuscitated (restored to the life he had lived on earth) but as resurrected (re-created in newness of life, with powers of life as we know it but also beyond). We should not be surprised if these experiences—once, to “more than five hundred” (1 Corinthians 15:6)—were variously reported, as indeed they were: we should rather be suspicious if the Bible were to have given us a neat, mythic miracle-story. The materials we have point to a singular historical event in which nature and the supernatural converged. For us Christians, Easter is more than a festival of springtime.

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Preachers are indignant against what offends what they’re for. I felt that indignation in E.O.Wilson when I heard him snort, “Ants are not bugs!” It’s the first thing I thought of when I read the new “On Faith” question:

“In his ‘letter to a Southern Baptist pastor,’ biosociologist E.O.Wilson warns: ‘An alliance between science and religion, forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect, may be the only way to protect life on earth.’ Is such an alliance necessary? Possible?”

Next, I thought of another Southern Baptist—Al Gore—as a Nobel Peace Prize winner for protecting life on earth. Then I remembered two other Baptists of the South who were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes as fighters for human dignity: Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. And I recalled that Wilson himself has a Southern Baptist background. And that Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, the only state of the United States to be founded on complete religious freedom, was a Baptist preacher. And I remembered the influence of the Baptists on Thomas Jefferson, resulting in the Virginia declaration of religious liberty, the predecessor of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And I recalled Jefferson’s letter to Connecticut Baptists, from which we got the phrase “the separation of church and state.” And I remembered that Baptist vision and money founded the University of Chicago, whose faculty has been awarded more Nobel Prizes than any other institution. (What’s with these Baptists?)

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Jesus didn’t die (says Islam, it was somebody else); Jesus died and stayed dead (says Judaism); Jesus died but didn’t stay dead (says Christianity).

That’s the negative way to put the truth of Easter: Jesus didn’t stay dead. The person known as “Jesus bar Joseph” was known not only before but after his death and burial. They knew him before, and afterward they recognized him as the same embodied self (though with some additional powers). They included not just his intimates, but “more than five hundreds brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Corinthians 15:6 New Revised Standard Version). Beyond that earliest New Testament account, all four Gospels have post-resurrection, simple and complex interactions between Jesus and his disciples.

Now to the “Resurrection Faith” question: “Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true – that Jesus came back to life in his body – to be a Christian?”

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