the harvard ichthus » Volume 3, Issue 2

He awakens and begins searching in his native country of the Philippines, among a small fishing community in the town of Lingayen. He comes across many people, asking them where the Ichthus is, trying to discover its significance, believing it will reveal to him a miracle.

This is a spiritual journey mirroring that of many Christians, including the first-century believers who used the symbol of the Ichthus to secretly represent Jesus Christ in times of intense persecution. The fish that Jonas seeks is no mere fish; it is a miraculous one, expected to give him answers to life’s most perplexing questions. It is a symbol for something divine, something universal. Like Jonas’s search for the fish, the quest for the divine will necessarily lead us throughout our world, allowing us to discover that God is truly universal, that His presence can really be felt by every man.

Jonas finds the fish at the bustling market near the village. It is the Kera-Kera’y Dios, which means “God-given portion.” It has many different names across the world – sole, plaice, halibut, flounder. Here, he has found evidence of God’s universality as He reaches all people in the curious form of a half-fish.

But it leads Jonas to question: if God is here, why are the people so poor? If the fish is their “God-given portion,” why do they still live such a meager existence? He addresses God directly in a lamentation. “Your children remain poor…” The scene cuts to rain falling in darkness. “There is no ICHTHUS.”

The conclusion drawn by many throughout the world who know abject misery firsthand is that there must not be a God. If there were, why would He allow poverty, hunger, suffering? Why doesn’t He always provide?

How could the Ichthus, the God-given portion, be so little?

The film tells a version of a story from the Gospel of John, especially relevant to this community which depends on fish for sustenance:

Fisher folk gathered around Jesus one day. Soon enough, they were famished. “Who has food to share?” Jesus asked.
A small boy had a small fish. Immediately, he offered it to Jesus. Jesus took the fish and thanked Heaven. He then divided the fish into two equal parts. One of the halves, he multiplied…7 baskets full. Everyone had more than enough.
The other half he blessed, “I offer this back to the sea in memory of a boy, and his miracle of sharing. May it multiply so that the next generation will have a meal to share.”
Multiply, the fish did…and all its offspring took the form of a half-fish. In due course, the poor had Kera-Kera’y Dios to catch. It is their God-given portion.

There is a reason the Kera-Kera’y Dios, the Ichthus, appears to be a half-fish. Another person Jonas encounters tells him the “Ichthus is half a miracle. We are the other half. And a little child will lead us.”

In being tempted to say there is no God, for God would not allow such a pain-filled world to exist, we forget that He allows life to exist – that He created life in the first place. The provision of plenty, of sustenance and salvation from suffering, is only half of the miracle He has wrought in shaping this world. The other half is life itself. By the end of the film, Jonas realizes that the existence of human life is a miracle and a provision from God.

And what does it mean that a little child will lead us?

Jesus honored the young boy’s selfless act of sharing his fish by splitting the miracle between His provision and our existence. We who have enough to share can do so and thus experience the divine. This is the fulfillment of God’s miracle-to take on the spirit of giving. We can take part in God’s promise of provision by giving to others.

First-century Christians suffered greatly under oppressive Roman rule. Yet they believed, as one poor widow in the film states, that “the holder of the other half of the fish will be true to His word, for He is God.” We can trust that while we hold our half – to feed ourselves, to give to our families, or to share with strangers – God is there, and has never reneged on His promise of provision.

1. Ichthus is a short film by Ton Sison, professor of Theology and Film at the Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago. It was produced on a shoestring budget of $75.

Ann Chao ’08 is a Social Studies and East Asian Studies concentrator in Currier House.

The Contemporary and Catholic Church

Christopher Lacaria — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:11:57 +0000

A poll conducted by The New York Times in the middle of the preceding decade discovered that more than seventy percent of self-identified Catholics deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, the miracle by which the sacramental bread and wine are substantially transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This might point to a widespread doctrinal ignorance among the faithful, but such anecdotes also illustrate an unsettling trend within the Church. Modernity’s preoccupation with the contemporary has eroded belief.

Many Catholics might still have faith in Christ and his teachings even as they deem the Mass and the saving grace of its sacraments to be superfluous, an anachronistic part of our Catholic heritage. Those who fall into this trap are likely well-intentioned, attempting to cleanse the Church of the irrelevant and uninteresting in a world with rapidly changing tastes and manners.

The erroneous syllogism follows thusly: since this is the 21st century, we should think, act, and worship like a 21st century person. Such reasoning, however, undermines the fundamental nature of Christianity, which is timeless-since it is eternal-and should be practiced as such. Os Guinness, a Protestant thinker, articulated this well in his short book, Prophetic Untimeliness.1 The more a faith tries to be “relevant,” the less relevant it will become and at the expense of its faith. When the shift towards a distinctly contemporary Catholicism beckons a disbelief in the efficacy of the Eucharist – the life-force for Catholics – we must realize that this is not a trivial concern.

The erosion of orthodoxy and true faith among American Catholics undoubtedly poses a complex problem, bereft of any definitive explanation, although the secular and materialistic values ascendant in today’s society certainly aggravate it. But equally, if not more disturbing than the allure of heterodoxy among modish “cafeteria” Catholics, is a widespread lack of refuge in Catholic communities for the embattled orthodox. The spiritual program one finds in many parish groups and lay organizations, obsessively oriented around individual preferences and notorious for informality, provides little antidote to a world engulfed by selfishness and faithlessness.
In theory, at least, faithful Catholics should be very well able to avoid a spiritual crisis. The Church rests on a solid foundation of a two-thousand-year-old tradition, buttressed by the inspired Word of Scripture and the testimony of the Saints. The courage and constancy of the Martyrs, during the early days of the Church and up to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century, strengthen our resolve by their example. We have the solace of a religious tradition received via an uninterrupted succession from Christ Himself and firmly ensconced on the rock of Peter.

Furthermore, the universality of the Catholic Church connects us both spiritually and symbolically with this storied and rich tradition. All Catholics take heed of Rome and acknowledge the Pope, the successor of St. Peter and the Vicar of Jesus Christ, as the supreme earthly governor of the Church. We all recite the same prayers, celebrate the same important feasts, and confess the same truths. We are members of a community formed in time but one which yet transcends time. The Catholic Church, traditional and transcendent, offers much-needed sanctuary from the vicissitudes of the modern, decaying age.

Yet many of the outreach and pastoral organizations in parishes throughout the country choose to shrink from rather than embrace the Church’s holy tradition, in vain attempts to conform to the spirit of the modern age. Traditions, so some arguments go, are by their nature exclusive and authoritarian; they isolate the individual, merely prescribing him a list of rules and failing to satisfy his own particular spiritual needs. Also, many are quick to add, formerly “marginalized” demographics – usually signifying women and non-westerners – may feel uncomfortable with the patriarchal and hierarchal institutional structure of the Church. In aspiring to “meet people where they are,” contemporary Catholic spiritual movements are too eager to shed the traditions in which our faith has been forever anchored.

The wealth of alternative spiritual resources within Catholic communities have contributed to a very personalized and individualistic understanding of religion within many Church groups. An undue emphasis on individual preferences and the attendant decline or de-emphasis in formal religious exercises does not bode well for a community intimately intertwined with such a long and authoritative tradition. Unfortunately, one can even see these individualistic elements manifest themselves in innovative liturgical arrangements. In the place of traditional chants and hymns, many parishes have installed musical programs reflective of pop music; in too many a church, the elegant and reverent bellow of the organ remains silent while the strains of electric guitars, keyboards, and drums reverberate through the apse. While attending Easter Vigil Mass at my parish at home, I even had the distinct displeasure of listening to the choir attempt a folksy tune accompanied by the bongo drums as I returned from Communion. How could one be expected to pray seriously – to contemplate the sacrament – amid that racket which could easily be confused with music from the radio? Faddish taste has replaced the traditional sacred music in many American parishes, often replacing reverence with entertainment, a holy mystery with the commonplace. And if you do not think such matters are important, look to the Catholic unbelief in the reality of Christ in Communion. The quest for timeliness and relevance, to evoke Guinness, has created an informality that has seeped from the style of our liturgical music into our trust in the truth of the liturgy.

We would do well to remember Josef Pieper’s dramatic point concerning divine worship:

I do not go to church to hear someone talk or listen to a sermon; I go to church because something happens there. . . . In my opinion the only thing that matters is what the Church itself, the kyriaké or sacred community which “belongs to the Lord,” has believed and thought and said about this subject down through the centuries. And from its very inception the Church has said that the core of religious worship is in fact an event, i.e., something indeed “happens.”

If we stop trying to make things “happen” by our own power – by trying to conform our practices, musical and otherwise, to the casual contemporary taste-then we might be able to realize what really happens at Mass. Those seventy-plus percent of Catholics from the New York Times poll could see the celebration of a divine reality in the Eucharist. They could see the exhilarating mystery in the liturgical rites. And they would be closer to Christ.

The spiritual lethargy currently plaguing American Catholicism in this age of encroaching secularism can in part be allayed by returning wholeheartedly to the traditions of the Church. Catholics would do well to seek solace in the safety and security of traditional forms of worship and prayer. Pray the Rosary. Contemplate the awesome mystery of the paschal sacrifice in reverent silence. Our pilgrimage on earth is not always a smooth path, whose trajectory we are allowed to plot ourselves, and should not expect our spiritual obligations to cater to our most banal and petty tastes, say for rock-and-roll over Gregorian chant. The traditional religious ritual of the Catholic Church allows us to more fully comprehend our place in the great hierarchy of the cosmos, a universe we should not expect to revolve around ourselves.

1. I am grateful to Jordan D. Teti for the references.

Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a History concentrator in Mather House.

On Christian Unity

Brian Flanagan — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:10:52 +0000

As a Roman Catholic theologian studying ecumenism, I’m sometimes asked by friends, students, and even strangers on planes the question, “So what is that?” I explain that ecumenism refers to the practical, spiritual, and theological attempts to regain the unity of the Christian church throughout the oikumene, that is, throughout the whole world. It’s a relatively easy question to answer. But the usual follow-up question is more difficult, and more challenging, for me and for those who consider themselves professional ecumenists: “Who cares?”

Now, as a graduate student, I’m used to being interested in many things that the average person neither cares nor ought to care about; it goes with the territory of academic study. But lack of interest in the unity of the church is more significant than a simple disregard for theoretical or historical minutiae. Our current lack of interest in matters ecumenical betrays a fundamental assumption: that the unity of the church, the real communion of Christians with each other in bonds of prayer, fellowship, shared institutions and shared worship, is an optional feature of the church, a desirable but not essential add-on to the life of the Christian community – in classical terms, something that is part of the bene esse of the church, rather than its esse, its “well-being”, and not its essential being. I would like to argue from my own Roman Catholic Christian perspective that our common conversion to greater oneness in Christ is a crucial part of our collective discipleship, not because it would “be nice”, nor only because it pragmatically would be of assistance in the mission of the church, but because responding to Christ’s prayer that we might be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21) is, or ought to be, a central aspect of our life in Christ. The first essential is a theological argument for the centrality of ecclesial unity to the Gospel, and then, by surveying quite briefly some of the history of the ecumenical movement, I will suggest where we have been, where we are now, and where the Holy Spirit is leading us.

Communion and Salvation

Being in communion of faith, life, and witness with other people is not a secondary or accidental aspect of our relation with God in Christ, but an essential part of that relationship – there is no part of our life with God in which we are not simultaneously living that life with others. One can find the starting point for this understanding in Jesus’ statement that the greatest commandment (singular) is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Cf. Mark 12:29-31 and parallels). This connection between faith and ethics, between communion with God and communion with humanity, goes deep down within the Christian church’s history, and has been developed and nuanced in numerous ways. The theology I’m going to outline here is based on the work of an ecumenist, theologian, and priest named Jean-Marie Tillard.1

A starting point for understanding how the restoration of our relationship with God entails the restoration of our relationship with each other is the Genesis story of humanity’s creation and our fall into sinfulness. Whether we look at the first creation story’s description of humanity created as “male and female,” as a “them,” or at the more fanciful story of Eve’s creation to be a companion to Adam, Genesis points to the fundamental theological insight that the human being is a homo socialis, a being created in relation to God and to others. And, in the following chapters, we see what happens when the relationship with God is broken in humanity’s disobedience: blame and recrimination shatter the original community between Adam and Eve, and the further effects of the disruption lead to brother killing brother, culminating in the confusion and enmity of Babel. In these very rich texts, at least one major motif is that relationship with God and relationship with others are immutably linked. Part of what it means to be human is that one’s relations with others are causally related to one’s relations with God. The story of God’s covenant with Israel is therefore a love story about the restoration of both.

And so when we as Christians look to Christ, to his life, teaching, death, and resurrection, we should expect that restoration of humanity’s relationship with God in Christ to have a dramatic effect upon our relationships with others. One can see this in the radical table fellowship of Jesus in the Gospels, in his eating with sinners and tax collectors, in his conversations with a Samaritan woman, a Syro-Phoenician woman, and a Roman centurion. After Christ’s death and resurrection, the church very quickly saw itself as fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy that all nations would come streaming toward Zion; Pentecost reverses Babel by bringing the diversity of nations together in Christ, speaking all languages; and the Letter to the Ephesians sees in the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in Christ the prototype of the reconciliation of humanity with itself: “But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far off have been brought close, by the blood of Christ.” (Eph 2:13) And again, in 1 Peter, “Once you were a non-people, and now you are the People of God.” (2:10) Examples in the Scripture, in the practices and liturgy of the early church, and in the writings of the first seven centuries of the church could be multiplied to fill the remainder of this essay. Communion with God and communion with others are intimately related, and there is an ordering, a causality: reconciliation with God causes reconciliation with others, not the reverse. We should be on guard against tendencies toward the absorption of the personal in the collective here; we all, but sometimes especially my own Roman Catholic tradition, can benefit from Martin Luther’s emphasis that salvation is always pro me in addition to being pro nobis.

But without exhausting our understanding of salvation, the Scriptures and the church’s tradition strongly support the idea that an essential aspect of salvation is the reconciliation of human beings with each other that results from our reconciliation with God in Christ Jesus. You cannot have one without the other, and, in this understanding, as personal as your relation to Christ is, it is never an exclusive relationship. The corresponding relation to others, to the community of those who are also in Christ, goes all the way down to the roots. The church, the reconciled community of those who were once enemies, of those who were once a “non-people,” can be the concrete way the Reign of God breaks into our lives, into our experience.

Ecclesial Division: The Great Countersign

Numerous events of the history of the church and of our own experiences call this ideal vision into question; we often fail to be the reconciled and reconciling community that we’re called to be. Here in Boston, the moral failings of our Roman Catholic communities in response to clerical sexual abuse ring in our ears as a great stumbling block for many to see the church as a community of salvation, as a gathering of those being brought closer to God. We know the familiar counter-litanies of Christian believers’ failures in the Crusades, in the pogroms, in wars throughout the centuries, in the conquests of Spain and of the Americas. Even taking into account the historical complexities of all these events, it’s hard not to look at them and be reminded that the church is a community simul justus et peccator, to use Lutheran language; a “pilgrim people,” to use the language of the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council.

And yet despite the gravity of these historical failures to live up to our collective calling, one of the most significant, longstanding, and spiritually deadening ecclesial realities is the continuing division of those who claim the name Christian. From the earliest divisions of the fifth century up through modern times, the division of the community whose communion is supposed to be the sign and instrument of communion with God is the great countersign to our claim to find salvation in Jesus Christ. The move from “See how these Christians love each other” to “See how these Christians fight each other” has been a recurring obstacle in our response to Christ.

The earliest foundations of the modern ecumenical movement can be found in the missionary congresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; missionaries from (mostly mainline Protestant) churches had found their attempts to preach the Gospel to all nations hampered by their own lack of cooperation and by their mutual condemnation. The people to whom they preached pointed to the inherent contradiction of Christian division: how, they asked, are we to believe that in your church God is reconciling humanity to God and to itself, if you aren’t even reconciled with yourselves? The concrete stumbling block of competing, sometimes hostile, missionary societies undermined the message being preached. This and other pragmatic concerns, such as the ability to organize relief work and other financial assistance more effectively, and the ability to collaborate on political and social issues with a unified Christian voice, continue to motivate much ecumenical endeavor today.

But the theology of the church as the place in which humanity is reconciled to God and to itself points to the deeper motivation for ecumenical striving to realize the unity of the church: unity is not primarily to be desired for its effectiveness, it is to be desired because it is what God intends for God’s People. To be one as Christ and the Father are one: that is a major axis of the reality we call salvation, and the starting point for all true ecumenical endeavors is to realize that unity is a good because it is given by God, not because it is more helpful to our projects. And, as given by God, unity is, at its core, a grace, a gift, and not an accomplishment. All of our efforts to restore that unity have the quality of discipleship, of faithful service dependent upon God’s grace. But rather than being an addendum or an appendix to our Christian life, the call to Christian unity is at the very core of the working out of our salvation.

Three Models of Ecumenism

Concretely, what does ecumenism look like? It might help here to look at three models of ecumenical relation
to other Christian churches that show where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we might be going. The examples I’m taking will be from my own Roman Catholic Christian tradition – not because we’ve been better or worse at ecumenism, but because that’s the tradition I know best. (It’s also good ecumenical manners to take negative examples from your own tradition, rather than comparing the best practices of your own church with the worst practices of another.)

The first model can be called the “Come Home to Momma” model; it was the dominant model of relations between different churches for most of the history of Christian division. This extended quotation from Pope Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos, his response to the beginnings of the ecumenical movement among Protestant Christians (whom he refers to as “pan-Christians”), gives a good example of what this model entails:

Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? [...] These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted [...] it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring
sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed. (§4)

[T]he union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. (§10)

Comparable examples from the teachings and practice of other Christian churches could easily be found. At the heart of the model is an assumption that ecclesial division results from the unqualified error of the separated churches in relation to one’s own community; the only way forward to ecclesial unity is for the “erring sons [and daughters]” to come home to Mother Church. If we imagine the life of the Christian church as a highway, starting with the apostles and heading toward the final Reign of God, this model looks at each division of the church as an exit ramp heading off into a dead end; the only option for Christians who have left the main highway is to stop, put the car in reverse, and get back to the one true Church of Christ.

Now, we should not underestimate the fact that there’s an important insight at the heart of this model: Christian communion is not simply a matter of good intentions, but of shared relationship in one faith. The desire to avoid interpretations of the Christian faith that would undermine its truth is important, and it would be a false ecumenism that dismissed any doctrinal differences as irrelevant to Christian unity. Some ecclesial divisions have divided the body of the church from real, and dangerous, “dead ends,” e.g. forms of Gnosticism that attempted to separate the Christian faith from its Jewish origins, or Arianism’s claims that Christ was not fully divine.

But ecclesial divisions are almost never that simple, and often are complex events influenced by numerous political, historical, cultural, and sociological factors – and by the continuing influence of human sinfulness upon the church. An honest assessment of the history of Christian division notes how the goal of maintaining the Christian church in its faithfulness to Christ is often complicated by misunderstanding, by struggles of power between ecclesial leaders, and by gaps of knowledge between different parts of the church. The “come home to momma” model of ecumenical relations fails to address the culpability of one’s own community in the divisions of the church. Furthermore, the divisions of the church were not frozen in time, and the new insights into the faith that were at the roots of the schism were developed, nuanced, and brought to fruition in the lives of other communities. These new insights are gifts for the other churches. For example, my own Roman Catholic community would not be the church it is today without our Protestant sister churches’ emphasis upon the primacy of Scripture. Similarly, the liturgical movement in the twentieth century that revitalized the Mass within my church also assisted Protestant churches in reclaiming regular practice of the Lord’s Supper as a shared ritual of Christian faith. Treating the emphases and particular treasures of other Christian churches as a dead end in the church’s journey closes off these possibilities for mutual enrichment, for mutual openness to how the Spirit has remained faithful in spite of our divisions.

A growing awareness of the inadequacies of this model led to a second model, a model of mutual dialogue, toleration, and interrogation. This model calls for conversation between Christian churches, mutual cooperation on practical matters of shared concern, and dialogue to encounter the other churches honestly and without the stereotypes or assumptions of the past. The Decree on Ecumenism (1964) of the Roman Catholic church’s Second Vatican Council expresses it in this way:

The term “ecumenical movement” indicates the initiatives and activities planned and undertaken, according to the various needs of the Church and as opportunities offer, to promote Christian unity. These are: first, every effort to avoid expressions, judgments and actions which do not represent the condition of our separated brethren with truth and fairness and so make mutual relations with them more difficult; then, “dialogue” between competent experts from different Churches and Communities. At these meetings, which are organized in a religious spirit, each explains the teaching of his Communion in greater depth and brings out clearly its distinctive features. In such dialogue, everyone gains a truer knowledge and more just appreciation of the teaching and religious life of both Communions. In addition, the way is prepared for cooperation between them in the duties for the common good of humanity which are demanded by every Christian conscience; and, wherever this is allowed, there is prayer in common. Finally, all are led to examine their own faithfulness to Christ’s will for the Church and accordingly to undertake with vigor the task of renewal and reform.

It is sometimes difficult for those of us coming of age at the beginning of the twenty-first century to appreciate how dramatic a change this was from the past practice of the Christian churches. One hundred years ago, regular conversation and dialogue between, for example, Catholics and Protestants, was not only improbable; from the Catholic side, extended theological conversation, never mind shared prayer or worship, was quite literally impermissible. Obviously at the level of day-to-day life, the American experience involved far more ecumenical interaction than the experts of the day might have preferred, but a Roman Catholic theologian writing in “a student journal of Christian thought” such as this one would have been seen as a radical move.

With the beginnings of the formal ecumenical movement, that began to change. Christians began to have dialogue with their fellow Christians in different churches on a regular basis at a number of levels. “Uniting churches,” like the United Church of Christ in this country, attempted to put into institutional form their shared sense of the deeper unity of the Christian church. Attempts were made to increase opportunities for common prayer, common faith-sharing, common Bible study. Practices like these that are a common part of our shared Christian life at Harvard today were considered relatively radical just forty years ago.

While it is obviously a good thing that decades of ecumenical conversation have helped to dispel so many of our stereotypes about each other and to appreciate each other’s gifts of the Spirit in the living out of our Christian lives, there are a couple of difficulties with this model of ecumenism. Both of these difficulties with this model are further reinforced by the fact that it resonates strongly with the discourses of tolerance in North American culture today. The first is that attention to being faithful, to being true to the message of Christ, is in danger of falling by the wayside in such a scheme; an ecumenism worthy of the name must avoid the slippage from an appreciation of legitimate difference to a full-fledged ecclesial relativism.

But the second danger is perhaps more worrisome; to return to the image of the highway, this model of ecumenism envisions the different churches as different lanes on the same highway. There is an optimism that we’re all headed in the same general direction, but there are still jersey barriers between our churches. The question is this: is this the fullness of unity that Christ desires for the church? There are good reasons to be suspicious of our ability to be the church perfectly before reaching the end of the road, so to speak, but there is a real danger of stopping short at the point in which we tolerate each other, even recognize each other mutually as Christians, but remain content with our divided lives as the closest we can come to being one, to being God’s single people in the world. When my colleagues and contemporaries tell me that they don’t see why ecumenism is all that important, they sometimes reflect a wider complacency that sees the occasional ecumenical Thanksgiving service and a Bible study during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity as sufficient – this is surviving off the crumbs of ecclesial unity when we ought to be feasting together on rich bread.

The third model of ecumenism that I’d like to propose- what many theologians and ecumenists are arriving at as the only feasible model for ecumenical unity today – builds upon the achievements of the ecumenical movement over the past fifty years, but then calls for continuing prayer, striving, and conversion to greater unity among Christians. It refuses to be satisfied with ecclesial unity “on the cheap”- ecclesial unity that would disregard the need to be faithful to the Christian life as we have interpreted it in our distinctive churches. In such a community, there would be space for the different traditions to recognize each other as legitimate ways of being church, and for acting practically on the basis of that recognition – sharing ministers, sharing worship, sharing institutions, and sharing in one mission to the world. To call upon the highway analogy once more, in such a vision the different lanes of the churches merge, but instead of returning to a narrow, one-lane road, they retain their distinctive histories, theologies, and traditions, now in a larger context that allows for greater sharing of gifts, wider theological conversation, and real unity of faith, life, and witness.

Being polite to one another, occasionally cooperating with one another, praying together when and where we can – these are all good things. But this third model of ecumenism suggests that simply being polite to one another is not enough. It is not only a pragmatic question of the church’s effectiveness; it is not enough because it fails to live up to the vision of unity in Christ that the church is called to make real in human history. We need each other to learn from each other, to challenge each other, to share our gifts and insights with each other. But we need each other to be brothers and sisters, not acquaintances. To show forth that unity in Christ is strong enough for a church in the Baptist lane, a church in the Orthodox lane, a church in the Roman Catholic, to recognize each other in their particularities as brothers and sisters, as fully Christian, and as possessing particular graces and charisms – this would be an unparalleled sign of the real power of Christ to reconcile Christians to God and to each other in a divided and broken world.

It should come as no surprise that this kind of ecumenism is also far more messy and more difficult than the other two; it is much easier to ignore the call to mutual conversion by denying the claims of another church to be legitimately Christian or by maintaining a system of mutual toleration that doesn’t really challenge your vision of the church. The demands to be faithful and to be honest in conscience before Christ and before your fellow Christians must prevent the slippage into any easy relativism. But in the careful sifting of what elements of our ecclesial lives are necessary to the church, rather than an idolatrous privileging of the status quo, we are called to greater conversion to the unity to which Christ challenges us. As a gift of God, Christian unity is a grace, and so prayer, “spiritual ecumenism,” as Pope John Paul II called it, is the foundation for all of our efforts to make our unity visible in the world. Such conversion is never easy, because it threatens the identities we have given ourselves with the identity that our God is trying to give us. But to be one in Christ, to value our particularities without idolatrously clinging to them, to love our sisters and brothers without betraying our fidelity to Christ – this is the demanding, messy, thankless, and urgent task of ecumenism.

1.The most accessible introduction to Tillard’s thought, and to many of the ideas introduced in this section, is Tillard’s book Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Communion, trans. Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001).

Brian Flanagan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theology Department of Boston College, and a Resident Tutor in John Winthrop House.

Quest for Joy

Leo Keliher — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:09:41 +0000

A Defense of Christian Truth in a Pluralistic Culture

For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God
for the salvation of everyone who believes: for Jew first, and then Greek.
Romans 1:16 (NAB)

One night in mid-January, my roommate was walking back into Harvard Yard. As he passed through Boylston Gate, a man lounging against it called out to him: “Do you know about Jesus Christ?” My roommate, surprised, responded affirmatively but didn’t stop walking. The man started walking beside him, continuing his questions: “Do you know him as your personal savior? Have you accepted him into your heart so that you can have eternal life? Have you?” He was walking right next to my roommate, their shoulders bumping every few steps, and my roommate mumbled a few vague replies. The conversation was cut short, but he remembered it and complained to me about annoying Christians when he got back to our room later that night.

This is the kind of experience that makes people resent Christianity: pushy insistence on salvation, blindness toward others’ discomfort, and an arrogance that one is right and no one else is. No one wants to be associated with a religion like that, and this is why people roll their eyes at you when any hint of Christian absolutism comes up. After all, haven’t we realized by now that religion isn’t something you can convince anyone about? Non-Christians think it is high time that we stop trying to force our beliefs down other people’s throats and accept the fact that other religions and beliefs are just as valid as Christianity.

This attitude reflects our cultural commitment to diversity, respect, and tolerance: cardinal virtues on both the Harvard campus and in the nation’s broader intellectual climate. In our pluralistic society atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and believers from other religions all live side-by-side. Within this heterogeneous fabric, proposing that everyone should believe in Christianity seems presumptuous in the extreme. A popular argument is that religious pluralism exists because it is not possible to find the “one true religion,” only a religion that best fits an individual’s personality and cultural background. My goal is to demonstrate that this is unjustified and to separate the sociological fact of religious pluralism from the philosophy of religious relativism that usually accompanies it.

Religious Relativism as a Model for Religious Truth

Religious relativism is a dangerous philosophy for religious truth. As Cardinal Ratzinger stated in the Declaration Dominus Iesus: “The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle)” (sect. 4). Justifying pluralism by adhering to religious relativism denies the possibility of absolute truth claims in any religion under the assumption that absolute truth claims do not allow co-existence with other religions. Instead of being a means of finding truth, religion becomes a mere tool for taking care of peoples’ spiritual needs in a way that fits their personality and upbringing. This makes perfect sense to many people, but it comes at a price: no tradition can claim absolute and universal truths.

There are several different models of relativism that are used to justify pluralism, and each is a comprehensive understanding of what religion is and how it relates to truth. Each model necessarily excludes other models, but they all have the common fundamental assumption that religions cannot make a claim to absolute truth. In fact, one prevalent model denies that objective truth exists at all. This is an extreme statement about truth, and when pressed most people will admit that they don’t hold to it. After all, such a statement would undercut empirical science and bar the possibility of truth in everything from research in cell biology to particle physics.

The most common relativistic model states that religion cannot make claims about objective truth and that religion is unable to encapsulate the ultimate nature of the universe. The closest that religions can come to objective truth is in their shared ethical teachings: love your neighbor, avoid attachment to material goods, recognize that the ultimate reality is love or compassion. I have heard people state that since these basic teachings are the real fruit of religion there is no need for organized religions. This is poor reasoning, however, because each tradition produced those fruits after long periods of teaching, practicing, and searching for the truth, supporting their findings with corresponding beliefs and grounding them in a theological framework. Claiming the right to circumvent organized religions prevents a person from seeing that teachings are rooted in the traditions they come from: really knowing a spiritual truth is a product of participating in that tradition. Saying that “God is love” without providing any reason why is logically unsupportable. The mistake of seeing universal truths and spiritual teachings as a kind of meta-religion is that people are free to pick and choose what precepts they desire without regard to how they correspond. Each individual becomes their own religious system. One need only think of the well-documented celebrities who claim to be intensely spiritual, but only practice the parts of religions which are convenient for them.

In contrast, absolutism states that religious claims have universal and objective truth; religions make statements about the nature of reality, and each religion frames a comprehensive understanding of the world. Ironically, religious relativism asserts its own universal claim by denying religious absolutism. It removes absolute truth from religions and places absolute truth in its own model instead. Relativism claims a clear vantage point from which it surveys all religions and declares them to be limited.

In general, models of religious relativism that acknowledge the existence of a transcendent reality understand Christianity as one of many equal religions. Each religion leads to the same God or Ultimate Reality, just by different paths. Spiritual practice, religious observance, and adherence to a religious tradition feed a person’s growth and awareness, whether they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish. Marcus Borg, a liberal Christian theologian, espouses a version of this viewpoint in his book The Heart of Christianity. He deems the “many paths” analogy too simple because it makes religions seem overly similar. Instead of paths, he uses the analogy of a home, a place where you grow to maturation; and he insists that “we do not need to feel that our home is superior to every other home in order to love it” (224).

This relativism is appealing because it allows us to treasure what we know and still feel comfortable celebrating the diversity of our pluralistic culture. However, even though it does recognize a sort of truth in religion, it is only a limited truth that cannot expand beyond the borders of a particular faith. Nothing in them can be taken literally, and their claims are more about a vague spiritual reality than about how we should understand the workings of the world and God. A claim that Jesus is fully God and fully man, for instance, could not be understood as actually identifying Jesus’ nature, because there are other faiths who think of Jesus as just a man. From this it is understood that Christianity is not literally true because other faiths would be wrong. Instead, it is seen as an expression of the Christian reverence for Jesus-it is circumscribed so that religious relativism can comfortably place it alongside other faiths.

The Absolutist Interpretation of Christianity

I discuss here only a few key beliefs of the Christian faith, but these few illustrate that alteration in the absolute nature of Christian doctrine makes the whole structure collapse. Even though pluralists such as Borg are comfortable with a lack of absolute truth in Christianity, I am not. For those who seek to know the truth, it is not enough to find a practical or good religion-it should also be a true one. For instance, adopting belief in the gods of Valhalla might strike me as particularly inspiring, but that belief wouldn’t be an attractive option unless it held objective truth. Worshipping gods that don’t exist just isn’t appealing. Our basic human intuition is to seek truth, and we press on to find out about the nature of reality, not just arbitrary opinions. While this section discusses the claims of Christianity in an absolutist interpretation, I do not argue here for accepting these claims. What I do argue for is that if they are true at all, then they are absolute.

The distinctive aspect of Christianity that sets it apart from every other major world religion is that it centers around a person and not a set of teachings or doctrines handed down from a great teacher or prophet. There are certainly many teachings in Christianity, but without the person of Jesus Christ they would all fall short of the goal of Christian life-direct, personal access to God. This is why the doctrine that God was incarnate is essential, because it means Jesus bridges the gap between God and creation: the two came together in Jesus, and for the first time since the Fall humanity was able to have a personal relationship with God. Because of the basic inadequacy and sinfulness of human beings, it was not possible for them to be intimate with God without Jesus. Where we are sinful, limited, and fearful, God is perfect, transcendent, and loving. The incarnation meant that God came to us because we could not go to God. If it is not true that Jesus was fully God and fully man, then he could not serve as the mediator that Christians believe we all need. As an event in history, the incarnation needs to be true for any of the other Christian claims about humans relationship to God to be true. Abandoning this belief therefore amounts to undercutting the entire Christian plan for salvation.

The centerpiece of this divine plan is that God and humanity were reconciled by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross-the sins of humanity carried a penalty that was paid for by Jesus, who because of his perfection was able to carry the full weight of that penalty. This is a familiar teaching, but it is certainly not anything less than a claim to absolute truth. If Jesus’ crucifixion actually accomplished the reconciliation of humankind and God, then we now have access to God in a way that wouldn’t be possible without Christ’s sacrifice. Saying that the crucifixion is meaningful for Christians but not for Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists is absurd, because the teaching is that it was done for all mankind. Saying that it was a reconciliation only intended for those that it reconciled is circular-it is clear that if Christ’s death actually had an effect in the world, then it was an effect meant for all humans.

This is why the alternative possibility is that Jesus Christ died, but didn’t accomplish any reconciliation. Religious relativism supports this because Christ’s universal sacrifice can’t be true in an objective sense if it didn’t affect all of humanity in a totally unique way. The denial of Christ’s universal effect amounts to a rejection because there is no middle ground-it either occurred or it didn’t.

The view that the crucifixion didn’t accomplish a reconciliation between God and man is not completely unacceptable to a some believers. It means a rejection of the salvific work of God, but there are people who do not believe that any salvific work was necessary in the first place. If the fundamental problem is not the inability of man to be in relationship with God but rather his ignorance of how to be in relationship with God, then the crucifixion and resurrection could be seen as a metaphorical guide to the death and resurrection that is necessary in the spiritual life (Borg 216). Of course, this a much larger topic, but it is enough to point out that when the truth of the Christ’s crucifixion is lost, our understanding of the rest of the Christian faith has to change as well.

This absolutist understanding of the Christian faith is traditional, and for good reason. These truths of our faith all fit together to provide a complete picture of God’s plan for humanity, and they cannot be altered arbitrarily or limited in their scope. Another teaching relevant to this discussion is that since God’s work through Jesus was universal, Jesus is the sole source of salvation. This is made clear in John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (NAB). Also, it is explicit that Jesus’s followers have a mission to evangelize, as stated in the Great Commission, Matthew 28:19-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (NAB). Both of these teachings reference the beauty and fullness of Jesus’ identity. John 14:6 attests to his uniqueness and excludes the possibility of other paths to God. The Great Commission reflects the desire of God for his saving love to be known by all-he refuses to be limited to a specific people or place, and claims the whole world as his territory. This makes sense: if Jesus is all he claims to be, then everybody deserves to hear about the beauty, love, and redemption he offers to us.

Understanding Christianity and Other Religions

Surveying these doctrines can be uncomfortable once we put them in context with other world religions. In our pluralistic environment at Harvard it seems arrogant, insensitive, and backward to claim that Christianity contains absolute truths, especially the doctrine of exclusive salvation through Jesus Christ. In fact, the insistence on absolute truths makes it all too easy to see every Christian as a fundamentalist, like the man who scared my roommate. The beliefs I advocate for should be seen as the framework for a complex, perceptive, and compassionate theology, not as hammers with which to pummel others. Absolutism does not limit Christianity to fundamentalism, and part of its core is a comprehensive understanding of how it relates to other religions.

There is a well-defined theology surrounding this that can be read in documents like the Declaration Dominus Iesus, John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio, and others. The starting point for any discussion of the status of other religions is a full understanding of the universal salvation that Jesus provides. This universal salvation is available to everyone who ever lived, in any time or place. Even when a person has no knowledge of Jesus, his grace is still available to them. Many fundamentalists would resist the idea that someone can be saved without explicit belief in Jesus Christ, but I believe this is not consistent with the universal desire of God, “who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). Jesus Christ is the single mediator who accomplishes our salvation for us, but Christian teaching holds that this mediation works through a variety of means in different religions and cultures. This makes sense, because God would not allow someone to be lost because of their historical and cultural situation. He is powerful and resourceful enough to reach toward every person who has ever been born, but “always consistent with the principle of Christ’s unique mediation” (Dominus 14). We do not know the specific way that the Christ’s mediation operates in other religions, but we do know that it is Christ’s work and no other’s. Other faiths would no doubt disagree with this since they understand salvation to work through different paths.

John Paul II says in Redemptoris Missio that the grace of Jesus “enlightens [people] in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation” (10). This situation is composed of all the particulars of their life and faith. This was phrased eloquently in the Vatican II Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions. She looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life, those rules and teachings which . . . often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (662). Thus Mahayana Buddhism’s teachings on compassion, Islam’s devotion to prayer and admirable aspects of other traditions are valued as “rays of Truth” that point toward Jesus. Christians should not stop short at respecting these rays of light, but “acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral goods” that they find in other religions (663). Because other religions possess genuine spiritual and moral goods, they need to be celebrated and promoted-not ignored because they come from different traditions.

Critics of the Christian faith often do not see that many Christians find value in other religions. This is likely due to the unfortunate mistakes of Christian missionaries throughout history, including today. Gavin D’Costa offers one extreme example in his account of the declaration made in 1513 by a Portuguese explorer named Martin de Encisco. The declaration briefly summarized the history of the ancient world, the life of Jesus Christ, the institution of the papacy, and the granting of South American lands to Portugal. The whole tract was read in Spanish or Latin to natives who had no ability to understand, and afterward the natives were considered Portuguese subjects (D’Costa 136). This is not spreading the Gospel, but subjugation. We can no longer ignore other religions and cultures in our pluralistic environment and the deep disrespect and antagonism toward them still carried by some Christians poisons interreligious dialogue and evangelization.

Believing in the value of other religions while maintaining that there are absolute truths helps Christians to be more unified with the human family and to see others not as heretics or idolators, but as brothers and sisters who are seeking the same truth. This doctrine is perfectly in accord with the best values of pluralism: respect, tolerance, and diversity. What it leaves behind is the religious relativism that reduces every religion to a limited or incomplete expression of truth, unable to make universal claims. Maintaining belief in absolutism is actually preferable for interreligious dialogue, because it allows Christians to communicate the depth of their faith in a genuine way, being honest about what they believe and its implications.

Calling others to Jesus Christ and respecting their religions are not mutually exclusive: they should be seen as organically related. Christians who want to respect others may do so to the extent that they stop making invitations to learn about Jesus out of fear they will be seen as offensive. Rather than risk alienating someone, Christians prefer to keep their mouths shut about the nature of their belief in Jesus. However, once we come closer to Jesus in lives of prayer, it becomes more and more impossible to make any kind of separation between our lives and what we believe. Then, Christians can fearlessly praise what is good in others while still sharing the call to discover the fullness of truth that is in Jesus. These are conversations that happen over time and that require a deep level of understanding, and the worst service Christians can do to Jesus is to speak as Martin de Encisco did-with overbearing arrogance and no chance of being understood. Essentially, the Gospel has to be lived out, and from this it can be shared in a way that takes into account all that is unique about an individual.

If people are offended by invitations to discuss Jesus, Christians should not press them. Yet Christians are called by the conviction of their hearts to make that invitation, and to make it repeatedly. The deep joy that is felt through knowledge of Jesus cannot help but overflow and become an invitation in both action and word. At the same time, all expectations about conversion should be left by the wayside. In the end, the Christian faith affirms the universal love of God for all people, and Christians simply have to trust that those who never discover the full representation of living truth continue to seek it in a different way.

Leo Keliher is a first-year Philosophy concentrator in Canaday Hall.

God and Richard Dawkins

Jordan Hylden — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:08:29 +0000

Richard Dawkins does not believe in God, and he thinks that you shouldn’t either. In fact, if you do believe in God, he thinks that it is probably because you are deluded, weak-minded, uneducated, and quite possibly perverse. All this and then some he argues in his latest book, The God Delusion, which by now has spent a very large number of weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Using what he claims is science and reason, Dawkins-who is perhaps the world’s most prominent atheist and popularizer of science-in this book lays out his case as a scientist for why there “almost certainly is no God,” and moreover why religion (most particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is at the root of nearly everything that is wrong with the world. One might fault Dawkins for many things, but lack of chutzpah is not among them. The existence of God, for Dawkins, is essentially a “scientific hypothesis” against which he confidently asserts there to be all but conclusive evidence and (in his words) “unanswerable” logical arguments.

Unfortunately for Dawkins, his book is not quite so unanswerable as he imagines it to be. Granted, his friend Steven Pinker liked it-”Read this book,” he challenged on the dust jacket, “and see if you can counter Dawkins’s arguments”-but aside from a few others, such as Penn and Teller, it has met with an overwhelmingly negative response. So much so, in fact, that the New York Times saw fit to publish an article about how many negative reviews there were (March 3, 2007). Left, right, and center, philosophers and scientists alike lined up: Thomas Nagel in the New Republic, Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, others in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, National Review, Harper’s, First Things, Books & Culture, and so on. As it turns out, there are a lot of people who were able to counter Dawkins’s arguments quite well indeed – which, to be quite honest, should not have surprised anyone, because the arguments are simply not very good.

In my opinion, that is a shame. Many atheists today have genuinely interesting arguments against God’s existence-such as, for example, the Harvard literary critic James Wood. Thoughtful religious believers today cannot honestly go without butting their heads against Ivan Karamasov’s classic presentation of the problem of suffering (although Dostoyevsky himself was a Christian), or without wrestling against the world-weary skepticism of Montaigne and Hume. Modern-day giants of science, philosophy, and literature such as Wittgenstein, Einstein, Hoyle, Habermas, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, and William James have taken up the question of God with great depth and profundity. Such questions make up a large portion of the patrimony of Western civilization, and a serious contribution to the discussion from a scientist of Dawkins’s prominence would have been most welcome.

Sadly, Richard Dawkins seems not to care a whit about any such thing. Many reviewers have pointed out, and I will also, the surpassing incongruity between his excellent popular science work and his deeply shallow, prejudiced, middlebrow, and poorly reasoned anti-religion oeuvre. I am admittedly no more than an amateur myself, but Dawkins again and again made errors of fact and logic that made my head hurt. Terry Eagleton put it best: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Dawkins on theology.” And commenting on Dawkins’s philosophical skills, H. Allen Orr in the New York Review was no kinder: “[Dawkins] suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically,” he wrote. “The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he’s determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.”

It is all more than a little strange. In fact, there are so many things wrong with the book that it is hard to know where to begin. The central problem, however, I think can be summed up this way: Dawkins thinks that he has written a book using science and reason, but instead wound up writing a book filled with pseudoscience and angry rhetoric, containing no more than a dash of real science and logic thrown in now and then for seasoning. Dawkins exhibits almost no knowledge of theology and philosophy of religion, and what little he does know is deeply distorted by his own anti-religious prejudice. The sad result is that Dawkins has allowed himself to write a deeply unscientific and irrational book, in which straw men are set up over and over again, each time to be mowed down by bullying rhetoric and insult that desperately attempt to conceal the hand-waving and flawed arguments buried beneath.

What’s even stranger, Dawkins doesn’t even seem to realize the contradiction between what he says and what he does. Dawkins apparently thinks that “Reason” is some sort of unproblematic, disembodied tool that can be wrested from particular human perspectives, desires, and power-plays. At least, such is his claim-after which he goes on to fill page after page with burning invective, one-sided argument, and moral preening. It is the sort of thing that postmodernists eat for breakfast. For all its excesses, postmodernist thought was quite right to point out the way in which rhetorical power-plays often hide under the guise of disinterested dialectic, meaning that what goes by the name of “reason” often is not much more than the attempt to justify what one already believes or wants to be true. If Dawkins had the slightest amount of sympathy for the insights of postmodernism, he might have been a bit more wary of trumpeting the virtue of Voltaire and Jeffersonian enlightenment reason. As it is, The God Delusion is a veritable textbook example of everything postmodernism rightly decries, and likely has already been pounced upon by countless Kuhnian skeptics looking for one more reason to look askance upon all the works and all the ways of modern science.

But, for what it’s worth, I would like to hope that it remains possible to have a rational discussion about religion here at Harvard. My experience with this over four years-with students, although not always with professors-was actually quite good, and one of the most stimulating parts of my college education. So at the very least, although Dawkins himself has sadly not added much to the debate, I think there are several of his points that might make for worthwhile discussion.

First, we can examine Dawkins’s central argument, which can be summed up as follows: Darwinian evolution has expunged any hint of design, or telos, from the universe, and hence has rendered exceedingly improbable (or at least unnecessary) the notion that a creator-God exists. Formerly, Dawkins says, people thought that something like a God must lay behind the enormous complexity of the universe, but now that we have been met with Darwin’s argument for how complex organic life evolved from simpler forms of organic life, we ought no longer to suppose that anything complex in the universe did not do the same.

That’s a fair summary, I think. Now, to begin with, it can’t be denied that this sort of reasoning has had a great deal of influence on thoughtful people over the last century or so. When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, it was almost immediately seized upon by Anglican intellectuals in England as threatening to religion, and so was treated as such. Non-religious figures such as T. H. Huxley and H. G. Wells agreed, but took the opposite tack and started to convince a fair number of people that Darwinism meant religion could not be true. And, for better or for worse-in my opinion, much for the worse-the argument has stayed the same ever since, with Huxley and Wells replaced by Dawkins and Pinker, and with any number of fundamentalists jostling for the role of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.

The sad thing is that, in a number of ways, the whole argument is something of a red herring. In reality, biological evolution does not really do what people like Dawkins and Bryan think it does-e.g., provide an all-encompassing explanation of the natural world, human experience, morality, and religion. In fact it is quite limited in scope. Evolution provides a splendid explanation for how species change into other species: Over time, they adapt to their environment by means of genetic heritability and random mutation. Theodosius Dobzhansky was quite right when he said that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Evolution is an elegant and productive theory, without which numerous scientific advances would not have happened.

But for all that, it does not do anything to explain how organic life came about, or how DNA (the necessary foundation upon which evolution is built) came to be in the first place. Evolution does not say how the universe itself was created, or how the astonishing array of molecular, astronomical, and atmospheric constants necessary for life to exist (e.g., the “anthropic” problem, classically set forth by Fred Hoyle) combined as they did. Evolution does not do any of those things because it never set out to do such things in the first place. Arguably, evolution does not work very well to explain things such as consciousness, intentionality, language, morality, music, beauty, or love either. Consequently, although people like Dawkins and Pinker try valiantly, they have never quite produced arguments that explain such things without explaining them away.

Dawkins of course considers the argument against telos his specialty, and so he attempts to solve the anthropic problem at great length. For Dawkins, the answer is really quite simple: Let us say, he muses, that there are a billion billion planets in the universe, and that the odds of organic life appearing on any of them are a billion to one. That means that life would have appeared on a billion planets, of which Earth is only one. Not so improbable after all!

Of course, this is absurd. No chemist or physicist thinks that the probability of life appearing is even close to anything as high as a billion to one. Dawkins may as well be pulling numbers out of a hat. He seems to realize this a few pages on in the chapter, where he evokes the notion of innumerable parallel universes, of which we live in only one, which just so happens to be the one in which we live – e.g., the one that contains life. And since we are here, Dawkins argues, the anthropic problem clearly isn’t problematic after all, and so we don’t have to worry about it.

Now, there very well may be other universes, but I can’t possibly imagine how I would know anything about them-here, Dawkins has ventured beyond science and into speculation. And the logical move of eliminating the anthropic problem by in effect avoiding it is a neat trick, but it manages to bypass the central question altogether.

The philosopher John Leslie (whom Dawkins mentions) illustrates the problem with this sort of reasoning quite well. Imagine, he says, a man sentenced to death by a ten-man firing squad, who at the moment of execution finds to his great relief that all ten shots have missed. Why, he wonders, did they all miss? Did they all plan to miss on purpose? Was there a last-minute stay of the execution? Did a friend tamper with the rifles? All of these questions seem eminently reasonable. But for Dawkins, the best answer would be something like: “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? So obviously, there isn’t much of a question after all.”

Now, one is free, of course, to adopt Dawkins’s bizarrely head-in-the-sand attitude toward the origin of life and the nature of the universe. But for those more inclined to sympathize with the lucky fellow who wondered why his executioners all missed, there are any number of questions that ought to be explored. And this means that the argument from telos, or design, is actually not quite as dead as Dawkins supposes it to be. Thomas Nagel, emphasizing the puzzle posed by the appearance of DNA, puts it quite well:

At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery-an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry. Yet we know that it happened. That is why the argument from design is still alive.

And it is, in short, why Dawkins’s attempt fails. As Nagel points out, the anthropic problem is an enormous philosophical conundrum, the solution to which is up for debate. But if sensible answers exist – contra Dawkins – it is quite safe to assume that the answer will have to come from somewhere other than biological evolution.

There is more to Dawkins’s book, of course-in length, if perhaps not in substance. Quite frequently, he makes the assertion that the invocation of a creator-God explains nothing, since then the existence of God would have to be explained. In order to create the organized complexity of the universe, Dawkins claims, such a God would have to be just as complex and then some. But the existence of such a being is exceedingly improbable, he says: Where did God come from in the first place?

It is an odd question, a bit like asking the color of Wednesday. As many reviewers have pointed out, Dawkins seems to think that when Christians speak of God, they mean some sort of super-smart ultra-complex inhabitant of the natural world, a cross between Zeus and Inspector Gadget. But that is not what Christians mean at all. Christians at least mean by God an infinite, transcendent, and eternal Being, ground of all that is, outside of time and space but active in both. It simply does not make sense to ask when eternity began, or to inquire as to what made infinity. And yet, both ideas are necessary. If anything exists at all-and obviously, we do indeed exist-then something or other had to have been around forever. Whatever that was, it certainly wasn’t us, and given what we know of the Big Bang, it doesn’t seem to have been the universe, either. Hence eternity and infinity, and hence the inference of some sort of Being that transcends the universe. It seems to be necessary in order for us to exist. Of course, thinking about such things long enough will make one’s head spin, and I am far from an expert. But thoughts like these have led many a physicist and astronomer to questions of God, and a good number of them to religion. It is more than a little disappointing that Dawkins seems not to even understand the question.

But enough with Dawkins’s attempts at philosophy. Such as they are, I can only imagine that they are motivated by a very strong prejudice against religion. And indeed, Dawkins makes no secret of the fact that he thinks religion to be the root of all sorts of evil, without which the world would be a far more rational and peaceful place. It is a common complaint these days, especially after the September 11 attacks. But there is, I would contend, no very compelling reason to think (along with John Lennon) that if religion suddenly vanished from the world, mankind’s deep-seated tribal animosity, vindictiveness, prejudice, superstition, greed, selfishness, power-lust, and penchant for violence would suddenly up and disappear. Indeed, if anything, the 20th century’s experiments in secularism ought to have made us wonder if precisely the opposite is true. As so-called “scientific” eugenics, the threat of nuclear technology, and Stalinism ought to have shown us humanity is quite capable of evil and destruction without any help from religion.

Neither does it help to assert that it is “dogma” and “belief,” not just organized religion, that is to blame. Unless we are all to become nihilist epicures-like Nietzsche’s last men, without hope or passion, satisfying our bellies and waiting for death-it seems that some sort of belief is desirable. Indeed, it appears that human societies cannot go without belief in something or other-as the historian Michael Burleigh has shown in his magisterial Sacred Causes, the decline of traditional religion in Europe left a gap that unfortunately was filled for many by Nazism and Communism. (Hannah Arendt, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, said likewise.) The trouble then is not with belief, since that seems to go along with human culture. Rather, the trouble is the content of that belief.

That, in the end, is the conversation that truly matters. And it is a conversation that, without any help from Dawkins, is already taking place among many thoughtful people, religious and non-religious alike. Dawkins seems to think that religion is a sort of reason-free zone, where people can do nothing but endlessly spout off about whatever superstitious version of fundamentalism they hold to. But for most Christians, such a notion appears quite odd. Pope Benedict XVI, in a recent lecture delivered at the University of Regensburg, held that faith is and must be congruent with reason. In so doing, he was saying nothing more than what the church had always taught. As classically expressed by Thomas Aquinas, Christians think that human reason can arrive at a great deal of truth, but cannot come on its own steam to certain truths about the nature of God. Revelation, then, consists of the particular truths about God’s self that God chooses to reveal to mankind-which, once known, prove to make sense given what we knew from natural reason all along. It is a bit like running into a roadblock while puzzling over the answer to a math problem, and then having a friend point out the part you were wrong about. For Christians, faith doesn’t destroy reason, but instead illumines and fulfills it.

This enlarged view of reason inspired Aquinas to pore through the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and the Muslim world, much of which he wound up incorporating into his own thought. For Benedict XVI, that is precisely the model for religious and philosophical discussion in today’s world – careful, respectful, and reasonable dialogue, rather than violent attack or irrational diatribe. One hopes that Dawkins will decide to join in, and sooner rather than later.

There is more to be said, but only space for two final points. First, it must be pointed out that Dawkins’s discussion of the Bible is no better than the rest of his book. “I respect an honest fundamentalist,” he writes, but if anyone should suggest that the Bible might perhaps be honestly viewed by Christians as an inspired yet variegated document that cannot simply be interpreted without a view of the whole, Dawkins seems to think there is some kind of trick involved-for him, it is either full-stop literalism or nothing.

Of course, some Christians do read Scripture this way, but most do not. Most Christians think that the Old Testament is a record of God’s progressive self-revelation to a specific people group, the Jews, some of which demonstrates extraordinary religious insight and truth (for instance, the Ten Commandments and the books of Isaiah and Amos) and some of which shows how much at early stages they had yet to learn. As for the New Testament, Christians think that it contains a faithful record of the life and teachings of Christ, in which the whole of Scripture is illuminated and by which the church itself is constituted and judged. There is no contradiction in saying that the ancient Jews understood God better as time went along (the entire Talmud is witness to this), or that God’s unique self-revelation in Christ provides the Church with the standard for its biblical interpretation.

Neither does Dawkins’s selective use of biblical scholarship prove helpful. When it suits him, Dawkins quotes various scholars in an attempt to “prove” the New Testament’s inaccuracy and moral culpability. He does not seem to realize that much of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German historical-critical scholarship of which he approves was by and large an exercise in anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic prejudice, in which anything that smacked of Judaism or Catholicism was dismissed as “unhistorical,” thus leading to a view of Jesus that looked suspiciously like a nineteenth-century German liberal Protestant. Some of this foolishness persists today (not least in the work of John Shelby Spong and his historical-critical kind), but thankfully a great deal of it has been surpassed. If Dawkins had earnestly engaged with Church fathers such as Augustine and Origen (no biblical literalists they) or the best of modern biblical scholarship from places such as Cambridge, Durham, St. Andrew’s, Yale, and Duke, his discussion might have been more than an extended exercise in prejudice.

Finally, it is worth noting that what is missing in Dawkins’s rather emaciated view of Christianity – as well as in the view of people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker – is any serious reflection on the central message of Christianity, which is that God has revealed himself to the world as a God of beauty, peace, joy, forgiveness, and love. To my mind, it is here that sociobiologists like Dawkins and Pinker are at their most unsatisfying. Love, to their way of thinking, is always something of an illusion underwritten by an ultimate selfishness-kin favoritism in service of genetic propagation, or reciprocal you-scratch-my-back-if-I-scratch-yours agreements. Beauty, more or less, is no more than an index of genetic desirability, whether in humans or natural habitats-and oftentimes is a seductress, who, like the Venus-fly-trap, hides only another power-play under her attractive guise. Certainly, sociobiology can make no sense of the transcendent beauty and emotional power of music-Pinker, in How the Mind Works, famously surmised that music is a fortuitous byproduct of the rest of our senses, a bit like a piece of excess mental cheesecake, which somehow jiggles our neurons in a pleasing way. For them, beauty is a trick, peace is an illusion, and love is a tease.

But as the theologians Hans Urs Von Balthasar, John Milbank, and David B. Hart have noted, Christianity’s claim of ultimate ontological peace stands in contrast to the “ontology of violence” underlying the purposeless world of striving set forth by Darwin’s vision of “nature red in tooth and claw” and assumed by most contemporary thought. For Christians, although the world is in many ways a deeply broken place, one can still see the rays of God’s light shining through-in the self-giving love of one soul to another, in the peace of the Dakota prairie after a summertime rain, in the transcendent beauty of Bach’s B Minor Mass and the symphony of a sunset, or in the joyful wonder of a child playing in winter’s first snow. They are clues, as it were, left to lead us toward the source of ultimate love, peace, beauty, and joy from which they came. And they are, finally, reasons for hope.

In the end, I fear that Dawkins’s book is unlikely to do more than inflame already-heated passions on both sides. Religious fundamentalists now have one more reason to fear and distrust the legitimate results of modern science, and millions of atheists and agnostics have been encouraged to view religious people with similar fear, incomprehension, and disdain. Dawkins has placed one more roadblock in the way of the genuinely respectful and thoughtful dialogue between religious folk and non-believers that is so desperately needed today. To my mind, that is cause for much regret. But it is no reason to suppose that Dawkins has the last word on God.

Jordan Hylden ’06 is a Government graduate from Currier House. He is the former Editor-in-Chief and founder of the Ichthus.

Bridge Builders and “God’s Politics”

Emily Mott — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:07:13 +0000

Renegotiating Christian Identity

According to popular stereotypes, there are two kinds of Christians in America. The first is the liberal Christian. The liberal Christian is a member of a mainline Protestant denomination. He goes to church every Sunday morning because it is what nice people do, but is not overly concerned with salvation or evangelism. He believes that God just wants him to be a good person. The liberal Christian thinks that, as a Christian, he is to take care of the poor, be kind to strangers, and stay out of other people’s business. The conservative Christian is a more forceful character. He wants to know whether you have been saved. He cares about “family values,” by which he means the prohibition of abortion and same-sex marriage, and he probably lives in a Bible belt state. He issues dire threats of damnation and wrath, which will fall upon liberal Protestants, secular humanists, feminists, and ACLU members, not to mention Muslims. The conservative Christian always votes Republican.

While these images are gross stereotypes, they are stereotypes which hold much cultural currency. Most American Protestants know which stereotype applies to them – the sociologist Robert Wuthnow cites a study which asked Americans to classify themselves as religious conservatives or religious liberals. Wuthnow notes that “only one person in six was unable or unwilling to use these labels.”1 These stereotypes speak to an active conflict in American religion which is one aspect of the “culture war.” Although liberal and conservative Christians recognize stereotypes of themselves as inaccurate, they stereotype the other side in ways that suggest a genuine fear for the future of America. Liberal Christians fear an America dominated by religious homogeneity and intolerance, where the government ignores science and dictates what constitutes morality. Conversely, conservative Christians fear an America dominated by secularism and anti-religious sentiments, where it is impossible to raise faithful children or to be taken seriously as a Christian.

Liberal and conservative Christianity are categories which emerge from the culture war framework of diametric opposition. They are reinforced by polemical religious texts which construct the groups in monolithic terms. Yet there is a significant problem with the culture war as a framework: while, as Wuthnow notes, most Americans can identify with one side or the other, sociological research indicates that neither side holds views as consistent as polemical religious texts claim. American Protestants identify with one group or the other, yet these groups are more multivocal than monolithic. There are liberal Christians who oppose abortion and conservative Christians who oppose the Iraq war; each group contains a range of theological, political, and social views, in contrast to polemical texts’ implications of homogeneity within each group.

After conducting interviews with evangelicals, Christian Smith concludes that “we should not assume that all conservative Protestants are alike socially and politically.”2 He notes that ten percent of the evangelicals he interviewed said that “America was never a Christian nation.” In a 1997 study, Charles Hall surveyed members of conservative and liberal Christian organizations on a variety of political issues. His findings show that members of these organizations tend to align with the standard political views attributed to conservative and liberal Christianity, but with a considerable amount of dissent; 13% of respondents from the Christian left believed that abortion should be “never permitted for any reason,” while 19% of Christian right respondents held the same view.3 Of course, more conservatives than liberals believe that there should be no abortion whatsoever, but the numbers are surprising for both sides – the constructions of Christian identity assume that the figures are closer to 0% and 100%.

Findings such as Hall’s and Smith’s point to a little-acknowledged fact: Protestantism in America does not consist of two polarized, homogeneous groups; these two groups do exist insofar as most Protestants identify with one of them, but they are largely a construction. The reality is that there are far more moderate Christians than there are Bible-thumping fundamentalists or tree-hugging Unitarians. Christian writers such as Anne Lamott, Tony Campolo, Brian McLaren, and Jim Wallis illuminate this disconnect between the monolithic categories and the more complicated reality as they try to articulate their own religious identities and to critique the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” Christianity.

In order to have the authority to speak, writers must first clearly position themselves within their own religious group before they can critique it, demonstrating that they are truly members of liberal or conservative Christianity despite the fact that they disagree with some liberal or conservative Christian ideas. This is true of authors Anne Lamott and Tony Campolo, who position themselves within their respective traditions, yet struggle with totalizing constructions of Christian identity. Understanding how these authors question and redefine conservative and liberal Christianity illuminates how the political-theological-social categories of liberal and conservative Christianity operate, and where they break down in individual Christians’ religious identity.

I term authors like Anne Lamott and Tony Campolo “bridge builders” because of their efforts to create a less hostile dynamic between the two groups while still positioning themselves as liberal and conservative Christians, respectively. Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren instead reject the dichotomy between liberal and conservative Christianity in favor of an attempt to construct a new kind of Christian identity. These authors contrast with Lamott and Campolo, demonstrating the difficulty of constructing a Christian identity outside the mainstream discourse. Wallis and McLaren must craft a new way of speaking about Christianity in relation to contemporary issues, as even the language around religion and politics is culturally coded around the two categories of Christian identity that they attempt to defy.

Anne Lamott: “Are You Born Again?”

Anne Lamott’s efforts to define her faith offer insight into how the dominant discourse governs articulations of religious identity. Lamott’s religious identity is somewhat complicated; Lamott grew up secular, but converted to Christianity and became a writer, dealing with religion among other topics in her novels and personal essays. 4 Lamott aligns with many of the political, social, and theological aspects of liberal Christianity throughout her work.5 However, as a Christian who strongly identifies with the experience of being “born again” via a dramatic conversion, Lamott struggles to articulate her identity in a way that values her conversion experience without all the attendant implications of conservative Christianity. This struggle points to the complicated nature of articulating Christian identity in a cultural context that reduces Protestant Christianity to two totalizing categories. Lamott’s experience does not fit in with popular constructions of liberal Christianity, which complicates her attempts to articulate her identity.

Lamott’s essay “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” from her volume of essays Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith describes a turbulent airplane ride next to a conservative Christian. In the essay, Lamott notices that the man next to her is reading a Christian novel about the apocalypse which she describes as “hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic homophobic misogynistic propaganda.” She then describes her exchange with him: “‘Are you born again?’ he asked, as we taxied down the runway. . . . I did not know how to answer for a moment.” Lamott answers that she is born again, but underscores to the reader that the man is a very different sort of Christian than she is. She describes her thoughts about how to articulate her identity as a Christian with a powerful conversion experience but a liberal political, theological, and social outlook. Lamott describes her struggle this way:

[My friends] think I am Christian-ish. But I’m not. I’m just a bad Christian. A bad born-again Christian. And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist liberation-theology enthusiast and maybe sort of a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant. But it’s not true. . . . I am a believer, a convert. I’m probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish on the back of my car. . .

This passage illuminates how the cultural coding of the term “born-again” inhibits Lamott’s attempts to articulate her religious identity. As a liberal, she is uncomfortable with the cultural connotations of the term “born-again Christian,” hence the temptation to present herself as a “vaguely Jesusy bon vivant.” The implications of this term, which Lamott finds more appealing than “born again Christian,” are more acceptable to her liberal sensibilities: it suggests a passion for social justice, an interest in the historical Jesus, perhaps even a spiritual sensibility, rather than the connotations of intolerance and exclusion which she and her friends associate with the label “born-again Christian.”

Lamott’s problem is that the cultural coding of the term “born-again Christian” makes it difficult for her to articulate her religious identity, since she identifies with the literal meaning of the term but not its coded connotations. As Lamott sees it, the fact is that she has had a personal encounter with Christ, accepting him as her savior. Liberal or not, she implies, this constitutes the experience of being “born again,” regardless of the cumbersome connotations this label carries. Despite her distaste for the man next to her, Lamott feels that it would be dishonest not to admit that she shares this aspect of her identity with him. At the same time, she is acutely aware that this label does not mean to him the same thing that it means to her – Lamott sees herself as accepting one element of the theological-political-social package of conservative Christianity. However, by giving an affirmative answer to the question “Are you born again?” she fears she has indicated to him that she accepts it all. “I knew,” says Lamott, “that he was telepathically on to me, could see that I was the enemy, that I will be on the same curling team in heaven as Tom Hayden and Vanessa Redgrave.” Thus, while Lamott would be lying if she did not agree that she was born again, she still feels as if she has lied because she knows that the man’s question was really meant to gauge not just her status with respect to Christ, but also her political and social views. In addition, Lamott claims that if the man knew her true identity, he would see her as “the enemy,” a label which recognizes the power of the polarizing opposition between liberal and conservative Christianity. Lamott’s essay, with its depiction of her struggle to truthfully answer this culturally coded question, illuminates the difficulty of articulating a religious identity which does not conform entirely to either of the two polarized theological-political-social categories.

Tony Campolo: Breaking the Conservative Christian “Cookie-Cutter”

In Speaking My Mind, Tony Campolo engages in a broad-spectrum critique of theological, social, and political aspects of conservative Christianity. In order to support an argument so transgressive of the dominant construction of conservative Christianity, he both makes certain to clarify why he continues to identify as an evangelical and uses a wide range of methods to defend his critiques. Campolo claims that:

There is a common perception among those outside our community of faith that we evangelicals are clones, and that when they have spoken with one of us they have spoken with us all. Too often they see us as people who have a single way of thinking and talking. Recently, I heard someone refer to evangelicals as “cookie-cutter Christians.” To be credible, we must demonstrate that we are a body of individuals, each of whom can think for herself or himself. . .

Campolo states that his book is an “attempt” at such a demonstration. This argument rejects a premise of the culture war framework: Campolo says that in order to be “credible,” conservative Christians must break away from the monolithic category and demonstrate that their community is one of thinking, debating individuals; conforming to the category, he argues, is actually detrimental to conservative Christianity. He is then able to construct the book as an attempt to solve this problem, expressing opinions which vary from the “cookie-cutter” while simultaneously reinforcing himself as a member of the conservative Christian community. By so doing, he attempts to demonstrate that there is room within conservative Christianity for diverse opinions on the issues he tackles. However, in order to achieve this goal, Campolo cannot simply question common conservative Christian positions and doctrines. It is also necessary for him to position and defend his identity as a conservative Christian.

Campolo uses several strategies to defend his identification with conservative Christianity. First, he defends his identity through describing his theology and aims. In his first pages, Campolo characterizes himself as “a detective . . . someone who works hard trying to ferret out the truth about what God is doing in the church and the world.” Despite the fact that he is questioning many of the positions and doctrines of conservative Christianity, however, “this one thing I do know, in accord with the apostle Paul, and that is Jesus Christ – crucified, risen, and coming again. The more I feel the certainty of who He is and what He did for me, the more I love him.” Here, Campolo asserts his identity as an evangelical Christian. The thing of which he is absolutely certain, the belief which he takes most seriously, is the core tenet of evangelicalism, a personal salvific relationship with Christ. This places him squarely within conservative Christianity, making it possible for him to express ideas that question conservative Christian thought, since these ideas are simply exploration and experimentation.

Second, Campolo defends his identity through the authority of biblical texts and the support of anonymous fellow conservative Christians. Campolo supports his assertions with biblical citations and arguments. He buttresses his alternate interpretations by citing the support of anonymous evangelical clergy who are afraid to risk their reputations by expressing the ideas he is advocating. Campolo writes:

I do not want you, the reader, to get the idea that I hatched the ideas that follow in isolation. I have discussed just about everything in this book with other Christian thinkers, some of whom are very well known in the evangelical community. . . . To my surprise, when I shared what I was thinking with these fellow evangelicals, I found much more agreement than I expected. Over and over again I heard words such as “I wish I could say those things, but it would be far too risky. I have a ministry to protect, and my ministry would lose the support of a lot of people – but I am glad that you are willing to step out there and say them.”

Here Campolo suggests that while his views question common conservative Christian positions, they are credible because they are supported by other Christian thinkers. The only reason they are not more widely voiced, he says, is because other conservative Christians are afraid of the consequences of unorthodoxy. Campolo asserts his identity as a conservative Christian and the compatibility of his views with conservative Christianity while suggesting that the construction of conservative Christian identity is problematic because it leaves dissenters unable to express their views.

Finally, Campolo positions himself as a conservative Christian by critiquing the institutions of liberal Christianity as ineffective and antiquated. This criticism is centered in the first chapter, “Whatever Happened to Mainline Denominations?” which points to a number of factors in the decreasing membership and vitality of mainline Protestant denominations. Campolo holds that mainline denominations have lost their vibrancy by focusing on a message of social ethics and neglecting the personal, transformative aspects of Christianity. He also points to the liberalism of the mainline Protestant clergy in comparison to the congregations of these denominations to suggest that parishioners are politically uncomfortable within these churches and suggests that liberal Christianity relies on socialization rather than conversion into the church, de-emphasizing evangelism. By making these critiques of mainline denominations, Campolo positions himself in opposition to liberal Christianity, fortifying his identity as a conservative Christian. He opens the book with an explanation of why liberal Christianity can only become viable by becoming more like conservative Christianity; thus, he implies, since the other side is hopeless, his only real choice is an attempt to reform conservative Christian thought. Hence, Campolo positions himself within the conservative Christian community before going on to critique its dominant views on political, social, and theological issues.

Campolo offers a wide-ranging critique of dominant conservative Christian political and theological views on topics from homosexuality to war to Islam. He characterizes his efforts as:

persuading both inquiring minds outside our faith, and shaky believers within our ranks, that being an evangelical need not involve rigidity in thinking or a refusal to venture into unknown intellectual territories. . . . What I have to say should not be taken as some kind of summa theologica, but rather as a challenge to my sisters and brothers to be willing, for the sake of eternal truth, to endure the heat that will come from those in our evangelical community who think the most important thing in life is to play it safe.

Here, Campolo states that his purpose is not to shift conservative Christianity from one strict alignment of theological, political, and social views to another. Rather, it is to change the dynamics of conservative Christianity to be more accepting of debate and dissent.

Campolo begins his chapter “Is Evangelicalism Sexist?” by describing the criticism he received for publicly declaring that the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision to cease ordaining women was “evil.” Campolo asserts that, given the centrality of the vocation of preaching to his own identity, “to these women, it means the destruction of who they are as persons. That’s why I call it evil when a denomination wipes out the ordination of women.” Campolo goes on to outline a defense for women’s equality both in ministry and in marriage. His argument takes an extremely wide-ranging strategy. Arguing from theology, Christology, exegesis, scriptural translation, and personal experience, Campolo constructs a multifaceted argument in order to make an overwhelming case for reconsidering conservative Christian views on gender. Analogizing sexism to slavery and racism, Campolo argues that it is a “principality and power,” a force that works for evil without conscious wrongdoing by anyone involved. Campolo then reinterprets the scriptural passages which are often used to defend the subordination of women. In order to do this, he points out adjacent and analogous passages that conservative Christians typically interpret figuratively, such as Paul’s directive that women refrain from wearing jewelry and braided hair. His argument is that conservative Christians do not interpret every Bible passage on women literally, and therefore their decision to interpret the passages about subordination of women literally is due not to hermeneutics, but to social context. Campolo then moves from exegesis to personal narrative, describing his mother, who was gifted in storytelling and communication. Often, he says, she told the story of almost running away to join an evangelical sect, the Pillar of Fire Mission.

One day I asked my mother what was so special about the Pillar of Fire Mission, and she told me, ‘They let women be preachers.’ Then it dawned on me: my mother not only had the gift for preaching, but also had a sense of calling. Evil was the ecclesiastical ruling that kept her from living out that calling, and poorer was the church that was deprived of her extraordinary gifts.

Campolo then points to the crucial roles women played in the early church and subsequently turns briefly to the double-bind in which feminist evangelicals find themselves. Finally, Campolo offers his own theory of how Christians should understand gender as equal, but counterbalancing. Over the course of his chapter on sexism in conservative Christianity, Campolo makes at least twelve separate arguments. In order to critique evangelical views, then, Campolo not only feels it necessary to clearly and repeatedly situate himself in the conservative Christian community, but also to take as many angles as possible in each argument in an attempt to gain credibility for his critique of elements of conservative Christian identity.

Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren: Transcending the Culture-War Dichotomy

The previous writers have been bridge builders, standing on one side or the other of the “chasm” in American Protestantism and creating structures that figuratively bridge the gap.6 However, theirs is not the only approach for questioning the dichotomy of the culture war. Unlike Lamott and Campolo, some writers refuse to identify exclusively and primarily with either liberal or conservative Christianity. Rather, they argue that these two categories and the chasm between them are flawed. These Christians, including writers Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren, make a case for an overarching, unifying vision of Christianity which transcends the culture-war dichotomy. This is a particularly challenging project because discourse around American Protestantism is culturally coded to reflect opposition between liberal and conservative Christianity. Like many of the bridge-building authors, Wallis and McLaren must work to prove their theological legitimacy in order to credibly question the dominant categories of Christian identity. These two authors construct a new rhetoric and co-opt pre-existing terms in order to transcend the divide between liberal and conservative.

McLaren objects to the culture-war dichotomy (as well as to other schisms in Christianity), and begins to articulate his objections and to lay out a theology that transcends schism through the title of his book, entitled A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am A missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian. McLaren writes that his project is “to find a way to embrace the good in many traditions and historic streams of Christian faith, and to integrate them, yielding a new, generous, emergent approach that is greater than the sum of its parts.”7 McLaren elaborates on each of the terms in his subtitle, employing a multidisciplinary approach that draws on history, theology, and literature to explain the merits and drawbacks of each of the movements and approaches he is incorporating into his “generous orthodoxy.” McLaren explains the term “generous orthodoxy” by tentatively defining orthodoxy as “what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.” This definition suggests why orthodoxy should be “generous” – while previous orthodoxies have been strict and unyielding, the new orthodoxy must be generous because only God knows the real truth; therefore, Christians should be receptive to truths that other Christians have discovered.

In Jim Wallis’s book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It: A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America, Wallis’s project is to lay out not a new Christian approach to theology, but a new Christian approach to politics 8 which supersedes the boundaries between conservative and liberal Christianity. In a project with overtones similar to McLaren’s, Wallis notes that “Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God’s blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices – saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather, . . . we should pray and worry earnestly whether we are on God’s side.” Wallis then sets out to articulate what he calls “God’s politics,” an approach to politics which does not align with either political party, but rather with the values and issues that seem to be most important in the Bible as he interprets it. He says:

God’s politics is . . . never partisan or ideological. But it challenges everything about our politics. God’s politics reminds us of the people our politics always neglects – the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind. God’s politics challenges narrow national, ethnic, economic, or cultural self-interest, reminding us of a much wider world and the creative human diversity of all those made in the image of the creator. God’s politics reminds us of the creation itself, a rich environment in which we are to be good stewards, not mere users, consumers, and exploiters. And God’s politics pleads with us to resolve the inevitable conflicts among us . . . without the terrible cost and consequences of war. God’s politics always reminds us of the ancient prophetic prescription to “choose life, so that you and your children may live,” and challenges all the selective moralities that would choose one set of lives and issues over another.

Wallis’s assertion that “God’s politics” are not “partisan or ideological” necessarily implies that the partisan politics of liberal and conservative Christianity cannot be God’s politics. Wallis’s description of God’s politics requests that the reader reimagine political engagement based not on existing theological-political-social categories, but rather on a set of issues that Wallis sees as God’s priorities: “the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind,” “creation itself,” peace, and “life.” Wallis constructs these priorities in biblical, rather than political, terms and employs language that does not reflect either side of the culture-war dichotomy. These moves serve his goal of imagining a politics which “challenges everything about our politics.” Although the projects of these two books are different in that Wallis’s project is a new vision for Christian political engagement and McLaren’s is a new vision for Christian belief and religious engagement, they share many of the same rhetorical techniques and political and religious implications.

Both McLaren and Wallis struggle to overcome the divisive implications of the language used in discussions of American Protestantism. In order to do this, they invent language in order to find a new way to speak about Christianity. Both use the titles of their books to introduce a new term, with McLaren referring back to “generous orthodoxy” as a concept and Wallis elaborating on “God’s politics.” At the same time, both authors attempt not to create yet another divisive term. In his introduction, McLaren speaks to the purpose of his paragraph-long title, saying:

The subtitle of this book creates a term so awkward and confusing that it’s certain not to catch on. Which is a good thing, because what we need is not new sectarian terminology or new jargon or a new elitist clique, but rather a humble rediscovery of the simple, mysterious way of Jesus that can be embraced across the whole Christian horizon (and beyond).

Unlike McLaren, Wallis is not afraid that usable terminology will cause further division. However, he allows for some difference of opinion about what it means to practice God’s politics. One of the seminal documents of his movement states, “we call Christians and other people of faith to a more thoughtful involvement in this election, rather than claiming God’s endorsement of any candidate. This is the meaning of responsible Christian citizenship.” By defining God’s politics as a way of thoughtfully considering questions about how to apply biblical texts to contemporary American politics, rather than as a particular way to vote, Wallis allows flexibility in the term which creates room for diversity of opinions among those who attempt to practice God’s politics, and therefore helps prevent his movement from creating more factions within Christianity.

Both authors critique the polarization of American religion, with McLaren focusing on the culture-war dichotomy’s theological aspects, while Wallis focuses on its political aspects. McLaren’s chapter “Why I am Liberal/Conservative” assesses liberal and conservative Christianity from his “generous orthodoxy” point of view. He gives a history of liberal and conservative Protestantism, interpreting the schism as a product of the reformation. He argues that they constitute two different schools of thought on interpreting the Bible and resolving differences in interpretation. The conservative position is to respond to questions about Christianity with absolute adherence to the literal truth of the Bible. When asked about ambiguities in the Bible, he says, a conservative Christian would respond this way:

Never, ever ask this kind of question. The Bible is the ultimate authority, and [one] is qualified to seek to understand it and interpret it (but not question it) using standard principles of interpretation, and that settles it. There are no contradictions in it, and it is absolutely true and without error in all it says. Give up these assertions, and you’re on a slippery slope to losing your whole faith.

Here, McLaren echoes liberal critiques of conservative Christianity, critiques which claim conservative Christianity is rigid and intolerant. McLaren sees conservative Christianity as rejecting curiosity, interpreting it as disrespect for the authority of the Bible. On the other hand, he sees liberals as having the opposite problem, erring to far on the side of questioning the Bible:

When the Bible’s trustworthiness was questioned, then the divinity, resurrection, and existence of Jesus were questioned; even the existence of God was suspect. What was left to believe in? . . . Had Christianity become a wrapper with no contents . . . ? What happens when the methodology of free inquiry that unleashed your movement now turns on your movement and threatens to suck the life out of it?

This passage constitutes a nod to conservative critiques of liberal Christianity, critiques which claim that liberal Christianity is religion without content. McLaren goes on to describe how the polarization of liberals and conservatives occurred and to detail the problem with this polarization. The problem, McLaren says, is that each side, upon encountering the kind of critiques articulated above, responded not by fixing its own problems, but by denigrating its opposition. The polarization of American Protestantism occurred because each side “compared their own best to their counterpart’s worst,” valorizing themselves by looking at the worst aspects of the other side. However, McLaren sees the central ideas of each side as both valuable and reconcilable. A “generous orthodoxy,” he says, will take the best from both sides; he points specifically to liberal Christianity’s social conscience and to conservative Christianity’s achievements in evangelism.

McLaren’s argument suggests that attempts to resolve the polarization of American Protestantism must articulate a clear critique of this polarization. Because a baseline assumption of the dominant discourse around American Protestantism is that there are two ways of being Protestant, McLaren must begin by arguing that neither of these options is satisfactory. He is then able to articulate a way to deal with this split. If his response is to reject the existing categories, he has little choice but to critique them, regardless of the generosity of his orthodoxy. Thus, McLaren needs to engage with (and, to some degree, endorse) the critiques of conservative Christianity as harsh and unyielding and liberal Christianity as “a wrapper with no contents.” Having done this, he has justified his refusal to identify with either category, and he is then able to construct a generous orthodoxy which draws on both liberal and conservative Christianity.

Just as McLaren critiques both theological viewpoints before attempting to construct a way to transcend theological divides, Wallis does the same for political polarization among Christians. Wallis critiques aspects of both political sides, urging American Christians to adopt a third option – voting on a set of “moral values” that go beyond the media’s construction of moral values, homosexuality and abortion, to issues such as poverty and peace. Like McLaren, Wallis adopts certain aspects of each side while critiquing other aspects. Discussing the construction of religion as politically conservative, Wallis says:

I actually happen to be conservative on issues of personal responsibility, the sacredness of human life, the reality of evil in our world, and the critical importance of individual character, parenting, and strong “family values.” But the popular presentations of religion in our time (especially in the media) almost completely ignore the biblical vision of social justice and, even worse, dismiss such concerns as merely “left wing.”

Here, Wallis explicitly identifies with some core ideas of conservative Christianity, while extolling the importance of “social justice,” which he suggests conservative Christianity has neglected. Speaking to liberal Christianity, Wallis critiques the loss of emphasis on a personal, relational God, saying “Much of liberal religion has lost the experience of a personal God, and that is the primary reason why liberal Christianity is not growing. And without a personal God, liberal faith will never grow.” Wallis also offers this critique, in the hope of inspiring secular liberals to understand how some Christians are put off from liberal politics by the issue of reproductive rights:

Political liberals generally fail to comprehend how deep and fundamental the conviction on “the sacredness of human life” is for millions of Christians, especially Catholics and evangelicals, in forming their view of abortion. They include those who are quite committed and even radical on other issues of justice and peace. Christians who are economic populists, peacemaking internationalists, and committed feminists can also be pro-life on the issue of abortion, especially if they are also Catholics or evangelicals.

Wallis sees the American political system as flawed, not offering an option for Christians who care about both the “social justice” of the left and the “family values” of the right. He further argues that conservative Christians have lost sight of the social justice aspects of Christianity (the “public” nature of God) while liberal Christianity has come to see God as public but not personal and is therefore losing momentum and membership.

Wallis’s solution, like McLaren’s, is to take the best from both sides in formulating a third option. This option is “God’s politics,” articulated in Wallis’s document, “God Is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat.” It urges Christians to “measure candidates by whether they enhance human life, human dignity, and human rights; whether they strengthen family life and protect children; whether they promote racial reconciliation and support gender equality; whether they serve peace and social justice; and whether they advance the common good rather than only individual, national, and special interests.” Here, Wallis takes elements of conservative and liberal Christian political views, but employs language which defies categorization in the conservative/liberal dichotomy. For instance, his phrase “human life, human dignity, and human rights” gestures toward both conservative politics (reading “human life” as pro-life) and liberal politics (reading “human rights” as civil liberties, social and economic rights, etc.). However, the phrase is not just a combination of liberal and conservative politics. Rather, it is a move towards a new rhetoric of God’s politics, as Wallis implies that “human life, human dignity, and human rights” are a consistent set of priorities based on the Bible, not a synthesis of liberal and conservative ideals. Thus, both Wallis and McLaren attempt to transcend the culture-war dichotomy in framing a new kind of Christianity; Wallis does this by trying to articulate a set of political priorities based on biblical priorities rather than liberal or conservative ideas; McLaren does it by synthesizing theological elements from over a dozen different Christian movements. Both must work to articulate the reasons for their refusal to identify along the lines of the dichotomy between liberal and conservative Christianity.

Like many thinkers today, all four writers (and others not mentioned here) are deeply dissatisfied with the existing categories of Protestantism in America, but encounter challenges in their attempts to question the discourse of Christian identity. They are troubled by the fact that the dominant discourse fails to describe their experiences, views and identities. Rejecting or redefining these categories, as the authors try to do, is a difficult project – even the language customarily used to discuss Christian identity has political and social connotations. However, the future seems bright for Christians who are dissatisfied with popular images of conservative and liberal Christianity. Writers like Wallis and McLaren are gaining popularity and credibility in their assertion that there are ways of being Christian that do not fit into the polarized and problematic stereotypes of conservative and liberal Christianity. Perhaps, then, Wallis and McLaren’s attempt to craft a new discourse around Christian identity is the only strategy for renegotiating categories of Christian identity which effectively overcomes the discursive and linguistic obstacles that the bridge-builders encounter in their efforts to articulate their religious identities.

1. Wuthnow, “Old Fissures and New Fractures,” 362.
2. Christian Smith, Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 15.
3. Charles F. Hall, “The Christian Left: Who Are They and How Are They Different from the Christian Right?” Review of Religious Research 39, (September 1997): 27-45.
4. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies : Some Thoughts on Faith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 5.; Debra Bendis, “Anne Lamott’s Divine Comedy,” Christian Century, July 1999, 742.
5. This is clear to the writer who interviewed Lamott for a profile in conservative Christian publication Christianity Today: “To be sure, Lamott is a hard-core liberal. I disagree with her on many fronts, for example with her belief that personhood doesn’t start at conception.” (Agnieszka Tennant, “‘Jesusy’ Anne Lamott,” Christianity Today 47 (January 2003), 56.)
6. Wuthnow, “Old Fissures and New Fractures in American Religious Life.”
7. Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, (El Cajon, CA: Youth Specialties, 2004), 22.
8. In the context of Wallis’s work, “politics” is broadly defined. For Wallis, it involves not only political candidates, elections, and policy, but also service work and so on. In short, it is one of the tools at Christians’ disposal for dealing with all of the issues from the previous chapter and many others: war and peace, foreign relations, and so on.

Emily M. Mott ’07 is a Religion concentrator in Leverett House.

Sweet Child of Mine

Faith Sadar — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:06:43 +0000

Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal, 2006.

London, 2027: the world is a depressing place, devoid of the laughter of children. Everyone in the world has mysteriously become infertile; no babies have been born for eighteen years. When a young woman becomes pregnant, the protagonist must help her flee the country to keep her safe and save the human race. Children of Men does not makes its important point through its presentation of a futuristic dystopia; in fact, it’s not centrally about a future society. If the movie were actually focused on the perils of what society might be like in the future, there wouldn’t be too much to say that hasn’t been said and done many times before – an oppressive government, downtrodden masses, depressing background music, and so on.

Cuarón also places little emphasis on the science-fiction elements of the plot. We do not know exactly what caused the universal sterility or the miraculous birth as such traditionally crucial “why” and “how” questions don’t seem that important in the course of the film. These issues become dwarfed in their relevance next to the message of hope through life that the movie projects.

To say the least, the movie does not begin with an encouraging or hopeful tone. Clive Owen plays the protagonist, Theo, who agrees to help a young woman, Kee, leave the country at the request of his former girlfriend (and because of the large payoff he is promised). He does not realize that the woman is pregnant until he is about to leave the political group’s hideout in an effort to save his own life. That night, she calls him into the barn and reveals her secret. From this point on, Theo is determined to see Kee and her child safely out of Britain. One of the crucial elements of the movie is the contrast between Theo’s former, self-focused life and his later life of meaningful sacrifice. As the movie progresses he matures to the point where he can realize that keeping himself safe is less important than defending what can bring hope to the world. Theo knows that the cause is far greater than himself and worth sacrificing to preserve.

In the pivotal scene, Kee reveals her pregnant stomach to an awestruck Theo, who blurts out, “Jesus Christ!” Though the exclamation brings a lighter, more comic moment to the rather melancholy backdrop of the film, it also reveals another facet of the plot. The exclamation is not intended by Theo’s character as an allusion to Christ, but the nature of the plot reveals it as such. The woman is a poor refugee, belonging to a low social class that is looked down upon by society and seen as a social problem by the government. She gives birth to a child who will bring hope to the entire world for future life. In spite of the hope that resides in the child, the government threatens his life, so his mother and adoptive father must flee the country. This is essentially a Nativity story.

But there is no messenger angel, no virgin conception, no prophecy, no explanation given by God for this “miracle.” Many elements of the Biblical story are there, but the actual circumstances surrounding Kee’s pregnancy are absent of religious overtones. It is painstakingly clear throughout the movie that mankind is in desperate need of a miracle – a sign that science and the material world cannot provide. Most have given up hope for the human race, faced with the stark fact that with no new births, the population will continue to age and die off until no one is left. In the midst of all this, where is God? Where is faith? We see brief shots of religious zealots on the streets, proclaiming that infertility is God’s judgment for humanity’s sins. But it is evident that people have largely abandoned the search for an explanation. Rather, their hearts yearn for a saving miracle.

Even without angels and prophecies, the film is able to show us countless moments of divine experience. Every man and woman who lays eyes on Kee’s child is struck dumb in awe, transfixed by a sight no one has seen in eighteen years. What had been a commonplace occurrence – childbirth – now seemed otherworldly and sacred. In the middle of a fierce explosive battle between the government and rebel forces, refugees huddling in besieged buildings leave their safety zones to catch just a glimpse of the wailing baby and to touch with trembling hands the tiny bundle of hope. When Theo and Kee walk outside into a street lined with hostile soldiers, a dramatic hush falls over the entire battle scene. Guns stop firing, people stop fighting and killing. Everyone looks at the mother and child, and several soldiers make the sign of the cross on their bodies. The moment of surreal silence and peace lasts until the child passes them.

In that scene, we realize that the world instinctively responds to the greatness of human life, and the mysterious power that has enabled such (in our mind, everyday) miracles. Amid a vicious war in which lives are thoughtlessly terminated with machine guns and grenades, this source of new life is captivating in its grandeur and simplicity. We are reminded of the hypocrisies of mankind, and the lack of respect we sometimes give human life, which demands so much admiration as a gift to every one of us. We should also consider the parallel to the wonder and joy generated by the new life after death promised by Christ’s resurrection.

The film allows us to see and understand the significance of the birth of Christ over two thousand years ago. The shepherds’ worshipful looks of awe and wonder at the newborn Christ in his lowly manger are mirrored on the faces of downtrodden refugees and battle-hardened soldiers in the 21st century. The deep yearning in our hearts for a lasting hope and an encounter with the divine has remained throughout the millennia. Theo knew the child was the fulfillment of hope, and so he was willing to give up his own life to save the child. Hope is worth the sacrifice.

For those seeking the miraculous, the divine, and the source of life and hope, Children of Men will inevitably point viewers toward the ultimate bringer of salvation in the world – the greatest miracle from the past into the future – Jesus Christ.

Faith Sadar ’08 is a Government concentrator in Dunster House. Ann C. Chao ’08, Books & Arts Editor, is a Social Studies and East Asian Studies concentrator in Currier House.

Friends and Foes

Jieun Baek — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:05:05 +0000

Blood Diamond. Dir. Edward Zwick. Warner Bros., 2006.

After seeing Blood Diamond, I was swept up in a rush of strong emotions, like most others who have seen this movie about the inhumane atrocities stemming from conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone. Alongside those emotions was the urgent drive to take action, to do something to make a difference. I was forced to face the reality of extant child soldiers as I watched ten year-old children drastically transform into miniature soldiers who barely understood the capacity of the power their guns yielded. I had access to a desperate parent’s heart for a split second when I listened to Solomon’s gut wrenching cries, demanding to know where his son was while clinging onto the fence of the refugee camp. Images of a nation rife with poverty, killing, rape, and political chaos led me to wonder how outsiders could possibly be of aid.

The ending text of the movie tells us that today, Sierra Leone is at peace. Many nations have taken action against the trade of conflict diamonds. But alongside the hopeful news, the film also presents the stark facts still remaining. There are still 600,000 child soldiers in Africa. Many are still homeless and lack access to food and water. What can we do to help in such situations? Not only in Africa, but in any humanitarian crisis?

There are certainly many who propose solutions of activism and intervention after watching such a film. But in this review, I would like to illuminate a particular aspect of the movie that is slightly less obvious, but is applicable to Christians and non-Christians alike. Even in the midst of endless chaos, where refugee camps contained millions at a time and militias ran the country, Blood Diamond repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the unbreakable connection that people share in relationships, whether it is friendship, romance, or family.

Danny Archer is a money-driven smuggler who will stop at nothing to find a certain “blood diamond,” an incredibly rare stone named for its rosy tint. He crosses paths with Maddy Bowen, a journalist who initially irritates him with her ideals of making a difference and stopping the bloodshed over diamonds. Danny harbors no hope for the war-torn continent that is his home. He and Maddy are forced into an uneasy partnership so that they can each get what they want – the blood diamond, and a primary source for an explosive news story. As the movie progresses, they begin to develop something beyond a pure business relationship. Her persistent journalistic questions turn personal, and Danny begins his path towards redemption by telling her about his tragic past and how he became so cynical and jaded. This does not resemble a typical romance story where a man is redeemed through a woman’s love. Rather, it is about how one human being can change another by caring, listening, being persistent and not giving up on that person.

Solomon Vandy is an average commoner, a fisherman who desires little in life other than the happiness of his family and a bright future for his children. We can easily see the depth of his love for his family from the beginning of the movie, and that there is an especially strong bond between him and his young son Dia. Their lives are thrown into turmoil when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) raids their village. Solomon is forced to mine diamonds, and Dia is made into a child soldier. Solomon by chance finds a blood diamond, and buries it right before the mine is attacked by government forces and he is rounded up as a prisoner. Later, he reluctantly agrees to help Danny Archer find the diamond in exchange for Danny’s offer to help find his family.

Solomon grows ever more desperate as the film progresses, repeatedly risking his life in reckless attempts to locate his son. Even though Danny repeatedly tells Solomon that they will never run across Dia, he is tortured by the thought that his son could be with any group of rebels they encounter. When he finally finds his son, the boy has already been thoroughly indoctrinated by the RUF, and shouts at his father, “I don’t know you! I hate you!” Still, in the midst of heartbreak, Solomon continues pursuing Dia, believing he can win his son back.

The clearest picture of the resilience of familial love is the scene where Solomon looks Dia right in the eye as the boy points his gun directly at him. The father gently and lovingly reminds his son of his childhood, his family, his mother who misses him so much, and how he is still a good boy. Solomon repeats that even though the RUF “made him do bad things,” his father still loves him very much. As the two embrace over tears of forgiveness, reunion, and remorse, the father’s love has won over the son.

Solomon’s love for Dia also plays a part in transforming Danny. As they climb a mountain, ready to escape by plane, Danny stops and cannot go on because of the pain of his injuries. He sees Solomon and Dia, father and son, gladly reunited. Then he asks to see the diamond, which he has not laid eyes on up to this point. He is finally able to hold it in the palm of his hand, grasping that which he had fought so hard for. But he gives it back to Solomon, signifying he has finally learned a core lesson of this film – life and love are infinitely more precious than a one hundred karat stone. It is too late for him to save himself and the two others at the same time, so Danny decides to stay on the mountain and hold off the militia while Solomon and Dia get on the plane. Solomon is able to be reunited with his family because of Danny’s final, selfless act. Danny Archer-the hardened, ruthless smuggler who would lie, kill, cheat, and deceive to find one more diamond – finally recognizes the worthlessness of the riches he has spent his life pursuing in light of the people he has met on the way. In his last few minutes, he calls Maddy and tells her he feels fortunate that he met her. As he takes his last breath, he appears peaceful after a lifetime of hardship, suffering, and causing suffering for others.

The contrast of values that emerges in Blood Diamond illuminates the difference between pursuing worldly wealth at any cost and the markedly different route of loving others at any cost. It is not always a clear-cut tradeoff, but the film illustrates it in an exaggerated form. In one of the final scenes, Solomon hands over the one hundred karat diamond to a company executive without even glancing at it, and immediately turns to embrace his family with joy.

There is copious literature on how we should take action to help people in dire need. But before we look across oceans and nations, perhaps we need a reminder first of the importance of people right around us. This film reminds us that riches, power, and prestige come and go. What will remain after our “diamonds” dent and discolor? Our friends and family – those closest to us who have shaped who we are, and whom we often take for granted.

Before his death, Danny intimates to Maddy: “I’m really glad I met you.” Living in this whirlwind that is the Harvard experience, it is easy to relegate good friends and family members to a lower priority, and we might not often think about how precious it is to have others by our side. Hopefully we can find peace in the response we might receive from others, as Danny received from Maddy: “I’m really glad I met you too.”

Jieun Baek ’09 is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.

Grace Notes

Alee Lockman — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:04:03 +0000

Blue Like Jazz. By Donald Miller. Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2003.

“God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.”

I feel guilty after having finished Blue Like Jazz. It’s as if I found pages of Donald Miller’s diary and prayer journal scattered on the floor, picked them up at random, and read every note he had jotted down. Some told stories, some felt as if Miller had only a few moments to scribble out a thought. Nothing is in chronological order, no two things appear to point toward the same objective, yet his writing all flows together with such ease that I found myself with a finished book long before I realized I’d read half of it.

The guilt is also a result of my initial assumptions regarding Miller’s memoir. It is a “feel-good” sort of book, yet I was still left with so many questions. Perhaps, though, that is what Miller had intended:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself…I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

What is most refreshing about Miller’s journey is that he resolves very little and does not aim to do so. Instead, he invites the reader to enter his thoughts and to relive his spiritual discoveries, doubts, fears, and joys alongside him.

I assumed Blue Like Jazz would be a typical story of ‘boy is raised with God, boy rejects God, bad things happen to boy, boy finds God, The End.’ Even if we ignore the fact, however, that Miller’s book doesn’t follow a single train of thought, Blue Like Jazz would hardly fall into that category. Rather than forcing a happy ending, Miller makes it very clear that Jazz is only the recollections and realizations that came with the first part of his life-his story is hardly finished. This is perhaps why he chooses to omit the resolution that he claims to desire. The idea of Blue Like Jazz is not to comfort Christians who are already secure in their faith or to convert intellectuals who are convinced of the impossibility of Christ’s resurrection. It instead disrupts the protective bubble that many Christians have created for themselves by questioning our security and challenging us to examine our true motivations for belief. It forces secularists to juxtapose their attempts to rationalize and disprove religious belief with their own personal insecurities and qualms about religion. Miller compels us all to take a step back and examine why Christianity is a persuasion that we hate, or a faith that drives who we are, and how our way of thinking can limit who we are.

In a chapter entitled “Confession,” Miller tells of his time at Reed College and how he and the sprinkling of other Christian Reedies, after ceaseless harassment by the agnostic, atheistic, or simply apathetic students of Reed, decided to build a confession booth in the midst of Reed’s annual festival of debauchery, Ren Fayre. Rather than using the booth for Reed students to confess, Miller and the other Christians chose instead to admit their own faults, and apologize for the hypocrisy that Christianity has displayed throughout time. Miller admits that he expected the booth to be burned down, but he was instead surprised to find that students, who initially thought of the booth as some sort of joke, were responsive and forgiving. Instead of proclaiming the values of Christianity and ignoring its flaws, Miller apologizes for an assortment of negative events that have occurred for the sake of Christianity, such as the Crusades, as well as his own hypocritical actions, including not feeding the poor. “Jesus said to feed the poor and to heal the sick,” Miller tells his classmate, “I have never done very much about that…I know that a lot of people will not listen to the words of Christ because people like me, who know Him, carry our own agendas into the conversation rather than just relaying the message Christ wanted.”

While at Reed, Miller also developed a friendship with a girl who was struggling with her sense of spirituality and secularism. She felt that God was calling after her, but she was not able to ignore the scientific impossibilities of Christianity. “This hurts,” she said, “I want to believe, but I can’t.” Rather than coming up with hard evidence supporting every event of Christian history, Miller admits that this aspect of his faith is often hard for even him to grasp. “I don’t think there is an explanation,” he writes. “My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief… Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational… love cannot be proved scientifically.” God does not make sense, Miller acknowledges, yet it is disbelief, he finds, that makes the least sense of all.

Perhaps the only refrain that is consistent throughout Blue Like Jazz is Miller’s struggle with love. Miller admits that many of the trials he had with his faith were a result of his own insecurities about God’s ability to love him. “A person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God,” he writes, “because he can’t accept who God is; a Being that is love.” It is not enough that we know that God loves us – one-sided relationships never work, as Miller describes near the end of his book. After a failed relationship, Miller is informed that his largest problem was a result of his own inability to accept who he is. “Your value has to come from God,” a friend informed him, “And God wants you to receive His love and to love yourself too.”

Miller’s simple truths make Blue Like Jazz a powerful work. It is not preachy, nor is it overly analytical. Instead, Miller presents one man’s journey through the practical struggles that not only Christians, but all people experience. Some of his realizations seem profound, while others simply reiterate a truth that we have known all along yet have forgotten. By bringing such things to light, Miller reminds us not of the purpose of God, but of God’s purpose for us. This distinct difference is what leaves the reader with a mixed feeling of enlightenment and doubt, yet it is ultimately what probes us to continue searching, trusting, and questioning a God who welcomes us in this journey of exploration.

Alee Lockman ’10 is a first-year student in Grays Hall.