- John Donne, Holy Sonnet: Batter my heart

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
-  Matthew 3:11-12 (ESV)

I was standing on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, that great domed wonder, looking down upon the city when I met an old man whose name I forget – he was the security guard. He was also looking out onto he city, and he asked me where I was from. “Singapore”, I said, and he smiled.

“Sir Stamford Raffles, 1819,” he said, “Independence in 1965…” He proceeded to rattle off an impressive concise history of my country. I was surprised, and gratified – most people have vaguely heard of the place, but I was glad that this man, at least, had taken care to know about my far-flung bit of what used to be the British Empire. I mean, I suppose the whole reason I had made the pilgrimage to St. Paul’s was to see the legendary cathedral which John Donne ministered in, the place where Donne gave his sermons, where he wore his red vestments as Dean of St Paul’s, and administered the sacraments, was kind of because I had done my GCSE ‘A’ levels on his poetry and fallen in love with it. And I had been taught my ‘A’ level subjects by British men in a program that groomed young Singaporeans to go to Oxbridge on government scholarships. Which, in turn, is all traceable, in a way, to that fateful day that some Scotsman stepped foot on my little island, drew up a treaty and planted a flag. History is funny like that.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking out at the city spread out like a map before us. “Can you tell me what’s your favourite cathedral, other than this one? Maybe one that most people wouldn’t know about?” He pointed a few of them out, which I duly took note of to visit later. “You like cathedrals, then?” “I think they’re very beautiful.” “Sir Christopher Wren built quite a few – in fact, a whole lot of them, you know.” “Yes – he built this one, didn’t he?” “Yes, after the Great Fire of London.”

“1666,” I said, remembering the hysterical Puritan father in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, who stood in the flames of the city and laughed with a certain vindicated glee, for he had thought it would be the year of the end of the world. “Yes, indeed – the year of the devil, as they say.” “It was the year of the plague, wasn’t it?” “Yes, 1665, the year of the plague. Then 1666, the great fire.”

And I remembered what I’d read about the bubonic plague – the despair, the corpses lining the streets, how mysterious it was, how prevalent, how inescapable. It must have seemed like the end of the world, I thought. It really must have seemed like it. I imagined wooden carts on the streets below me, wheeling little hills of corpses out into the further reaches of the city, and shuddered. They didn’t know it was the fleas on the rats, I thought. They had no explanation. They fled one city, and they simply brought the horror with them. People wouldn’t receive them. The doors were barred against them. They were locked inside their own houses, a red X marked on their doors, condemned to live or die – and who knows if it was better to live than die, amongst all that rotting human flesh? It must have seemed inescapable, incurable, it must have seemed like some divine judgment – judgment on a city that did not care for its poor, that left them wallowing in dirt and filth, that abandoned them to disease with its muddied water, its stinking streets.

And then the fire. Two thirds of London was brought to the ground by the great fire. The thing is, only the fire could rid the city of the plague. Plague and fire – like divine or infernal twins, razing the city to the ground. And everything that is shoddily built, everything cobbled together of wood is consumed, is razed to the ground. But only the fire could rid the city of its great disease – the fire purifies, knocking down everything that was not built to withstand it. And the fire disinfects – it eats up the bodies, rids them of their plague. And it raged and raged, and the city went up in flames. But in due time this also fades to embers, and fear gives way to mourning. What was burned down is cleared away; those who had died are mourned. Those who survive are amazed – having stood through plague and fire, they slowly decide it is their task to rebuild. The city must rise again, like some enormous phoenix, renewing itself out of the ashes. Despite the despair, out of the dust, here is something new – a new chance to build a new vision of a city, a city that will have better fire safety, a city that has better sanitation, that will house its poor better.

And among the builders was Sir Christopher Wren, charged with planning the architecture for the new churches that would be raised. As King’s Surveyor of Works in 1669, he was personally responsible for the building of 51 churches, many of which still stand today – among them St. Paul’s Cathedral, that beautiful dome I perched on, surveying the great city I have always loved, long before I had ever seen it.

“The Germans didn’t touch it during the blitz,” said my new friend. “Even though they tried. It was a kind of miracle,” he said. “A great big dome like that. Of course it was a target. It was bombed twice, but each time it missed, or was defused.”

“And it’s your job to protect it,” I said.

“Well, mine and His,” he said, and smiled again.

- Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure -  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

image source

Where was God in the former Yugoslavia, when people (professedly Christian) with extremely minor differences started killing, raping, pillaging neighbouring villages? Where was God when Rwanda descended into chaos? Where was God when the Serbians assassinated the Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria, setting off the chain of events that we retrospectively called, first the Great War, and then (because it had a sequel) World War I? Why did God ask the Israelis to commit, in the Promised Land, what sounds like genocide? Why does Steven Pinker have the ammunition to point out that what he considers “Old Testament Morality” frequently involves condemning interracial marriages, slaughtering children, killing livestock, a scorched-earth policy and taking no prisoners?

These are not easy questions to answer. But I will attempt a preliminary answer. You see, arguably, all this was Plan B – the 40 year wander, rather than the straightforward 4-day trip out of Egypt into the Promised Land. Not that the straight-forward trip is easy – it probably involved as much patience, if not more. In the passage from Exodus, it is “fear”, “hornets” and poorer health that are the chosen agents of God’s judgment on a sinful people – not military victory. (And if we look at the military victories actually in Plan B, we’ll realize that a lot of them don’t even involve fighting, and certainly not greater military might or cunning, but that’s another article). I’m not saying that fear, confusion, hornets, starvation and disease are pleasant things, but they are NOT genocide.

So, let’s look at God’s Plan A: His idea of divinely-sanctioned colonialism:

1) You will eat good food.

2) You will not fall ill, and live as long as your body was made for living.

3) All your procreation will be successful.

4) People will get scared of you (people are usually scared of people who eat good food despite not having a whole lot of resources, don’t fall ill, and multiply quickly – sound familiar?)

5) People will start leaving the lands (usually because they’ve exhausted them – remember, we are in a mix of hunter-gatherer/nomadic/agricultural society, and over-farming is a recurring issue in agricultural societies)

6) Hornets!

7) People will be very fed up with hornets, and slowly let the land (which they probably have overworked – remember only Israel was told to keep the Sabbath) lie fallow. When the land has lied fallow, nature will take over and re-grow and re-fertilize and re-irrigate the land (see the World Without Us)

Generally, remember that this will take a long, long, long, long time. Don’t be impatient.

9) I have set apart a limited amount of land for you. I’ve told you where the boundaries are. Keep your sights on that land only and don’t be greedy.

10) Do NOT worship any of the gods of the other peoples around you. Keep yourselves separate spiritually (and since it helps – physically – and only in the portion of the land I’ve designated). Do NOT make compromises with the other peoples (because it will lead you to compromise My law) **

What can I say? History tells us we are not very good at following Plan A (cf. The Garden of Eden). Well, if only God explained himself better – we might protest – but history’s track record of that isn’t too good either. God is kind to us, and sometimes He gives an explanation, but even then we’re not very good at understanding the explanation. Mostly, we are impatient. When God has promised us something, we want it NOW. We’d prefer to speed things up. We don’t like the long-term stuff. We are hardwired to be demanding and mopey and annoying, like small children when they are hungry. The trouble with being God’s child, though, is that he’s a good Father. And good fathers usually demand that their children grow up.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

- St Paul, to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 13, verse 11

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
- St Paul to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 14, verse 20

**In the original version of this article, this paragraph read

“10)DO NOT try to speed up the process by intermarrying, because that means your wives will convince you to worship their gods. Also, since women had rarely any choice in the matter, “intermarrying” probably meant rape, abduction, forced marriage to form alliances, polygamy (especially harems for kings and patriarchs), etc.”

but I thought better of it since it was not a helpful embellishment of the passage. I apologize if it was not a helpful speculation.

Yes. Five years of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its white steepled churches and its air of vague Unitarianism has definitely rubbed off on me. There are bits I’m personally not proud of – play-acting the New Yorkery sophisticate dodging the hard questions, swirling cheap wine in dirty glasses, trying on different affectations, flipping through fashion magazines with a worshipful intensity that made me hate my body, and above all, intellectual snobbery and pure, blind prejudice. Prejudice that made me hold anyone who called themselves Republican or tacked up a Bush family photo in their dorm in mild contempt, when it was always my philosophy to treat everyone as equal, beautiful, and valuable. I guess it was not until I shipped myself off to my supposedly dream-job in Manhattan itself that I realized this stuff would crush me. The refinement, the condescension, the pretty phrases turned at elite tables, the self-congratulation on one’s own openness and cosmopolitanism. The ironic conviction that you are the most tolerant of the tolerant, and that therefore everyone else should be like you.

But I am liberal. Because beneath that supersubtle veneer, I am dispossessed. I am poor. I am needy, and I need help. I need lifting up.

I glower with resentment that my particular gifts and vocation have always immediately conjured pictures of abject poverty (cf. Avenue Q’s opening number…”What do you do with a B.A. in English?” Seriously, the most depressing 3 minutes of my Manhattan summer…). That is, unless you throw in the towel and become a consultant. Not that I have anything against consultants, it’s the salary that’s the problem for me. You see, I would much rather carry the burden of poverty – for now – than the burden of riches. It’s simply a matter of what temptations I’m more liable to yield to. I know myself. I would be a workaholic. I would not keep the Sabbath. As it is, my eye for beauty gets me into all sorts of trouble with gluttony and lust and pride – I do not need to stoke those fires. I would get obsessed with fashion. I would be filled with anxiety. I would die a slow death in Manhattan, like Madam Bovary, surrounded by exquisite things. I loved New York, but New York couldn’t care less. And I’m not mature enough to opt out of something my dear friends will no doubt find themselves legitimately enjoying – the wonderful restaurants, the museum openings, the fabulous fashions, the privileged refinement of the thing.

How is it fair that my friend is gifted with the vocation of being a Goldman Sachs trader, who enjoys every second of making 20% profit on any given capital, who fits easily in with the New York set, and I am equally gifted but in the bizzaro-artist-writer vocation? Why should I pay for the sins of a society that values one category of gifts more than another? Why should I pay for the fact that I am simply a very very long term (as in, in undiscovered time, a couple of centuries later, when they unearth my poems from a little drawer, if at all, sort of long-term) investment? Or that ultimately, my work will only be recognized in heaven? I mean, I would simply be happy with the dole. But nope, no dole. Also, I’m not even a citizen. So even though I’ve been through this marvelous Harvard education, in two months, grace period on my visa is up, and yup! Deportation to Mexico or Canada.

And I come from a long line of those who were dispossessed, sometimes very obviously because of this artistic disposition. My great grandfather, who goes by the label of “useless poet” in the family oral history, eloped with someone else’s betrothed. To avoid being drowned by the village, they escaped from China to Malaya, where they scratched out a living (or rather, she did) selling cakes and writing name-poems on commission. They gave away two daughters because they didn’t have enough money. Their only son was snatched away by a wealthy landlord. My great-grandmother died of a broken heart, and her husband walked distractedly out of the house, trailing my grandmother and her sister, aged 5 and 7. They walked all the way down the peninsula to Singapore, only to have the girls kidnapped and sold off at a temple where their father had left them in trust.

On the other side of my family, my great-grandfather came to America as an indentured laborer from China. He planted rice in Hawaii, then made good and opened a small tailoring business. He sent for my great-grandmother, and they had a whole string of children who were born American citizens. Not wanting them to lose touch with their culture, he sent them back to China for schooling. Then America passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (I still remember reading about this with tears in my eyes, in the Tozzer Library at Harvard – in that moment, history became unbearably personal – ), and my great-grandfather hurried back to prevent losing everything he had built. But then war broke out, and the family in Asia lost their papers. They had no proof they had ever lived in America. Eventually, my great-grandfather died alone in the mountains of Hawaii in 1940. He did not know what had happened to his wife or children. His grave is there – I visited it, left him a freshly-cut bird of paradise. Meanwhile, the family moved south and south as the Japanese advanced from Manchuria into Hong Kong and into Malaya and finally Singapore. They lost two brothers along the way. They starved in that war, getting bloated cos there was only tapioca to eat, but my grandmother also fell in love and married my grandfather.

So you see, between slavery, immigration, kidnapping, debilitating depression, war, sickness, separation, homelessness, spontaneous poetic elopement and the final, inevitable fall, I can’t help but sympathize with the poor, even though I was born into the fortunate generation that attained comfortable upper-middle-class-ness. It is my legacy. I am homeless myself – but in good company. “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head. (Luke 9:58)”. Jesus lived a life of radical dependence on charity, sponsorship, donations – often from rich women, who would open their homes to him. This is not to say he wasn’t also royal, authoritative, just, wholesome, honorable, and the greatest warrior who ever lived. But he was gentle as well as severe, merciful as well as just, beautiful as well as terrible. I wouldn’t say he was liberal – I prefer the word Generous. In Chinese, there is a proverb that says a good man is one with a stomach so big it could hold a boat: this is a picture of generosity. A boat is also a generous thing – it is always headed outwards, its prow facing the world – it represents hope, always containing something else for someone else – Jesus was like that. He was a truly Generous soul.

And His Generosity is wise and extravagant. Of course if you give the homeless man on the corner a quarter you don’t know if it will go towards drugs or his next meal. But if you give him a sandwich, or even better, piece after piece of the most exquisite Swiss designer chocolate, you know exactly what he’s going to do with it, and it is a tiny glimpse of the Kingdom of God. I mean, it’s actually a completely sound application of Diminishing Marginal Returns. How monotonous that chocolate is to someone who feasts upon it every day! But to the homeless man, it is a revelation! Because so much lies buried, so much human potential, so much light and heat and power that goes untapped and is dispersed dimly because of a lack of opportunity. But beyond lack of opportunity there is a larger sin at hand – that ancient sin that blinds us from looking that crazy muttering bag lady in the eye and seeing Jesus.

My grandmother, whom I have never met, passed on to me her insatiable hunger for knowledge. Sold into slavery, she listened secretly behind the curtain as the two sons of the household were educated, and taught herself to read and write. By the time she was married at 16, barefoot and pregnant with 6 children and one adoptee, she was reading the Chinese classics – Dream of the Red Chambers, Journey to the West, and her personal favourite, the epic of war and war strategy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Did she go to Harvard? Nope. But she sure deserved to be here. I mean, talk about admissions essay material.

I am their representative. My grandmother was one of the most generous people I know. She gave her house to the church when she died – she was my maternal grandmother, and my paternal grandfather was the one who founded that church and served as its first pastor. My parents were married in this church founded upon the backs of their two families, whose stories magnificently intertwined. I am their daughter.

And I realize it is only because of them that I can afford to be generous. It is only because, by a complicated string of Providences, I don’t have to worry about supporting my parents or my siblings, despite being the eldest child (and suffering subconsciously, through no fault of my parents, from the Chinese First Child syndrome). How can I, with all I have received from my family, my culture, my country, fritter it away on acquiring rather than giving? It is a calling that has blown through generations, a realization of the hopes and dreams held beyond even them by unknown, nameless, illiterate ancestors – to tell stories, to discern the meanings of names, to sing hymns, to love wisely and fiercely and well, to read and to know and to do and make new things -

How can I, knowing these things, then turn away and ignore such a siren call? How can I, seeing these things, then turn away and not spread my wings? Hopefully, by the Grace of Christ Jesus our Lord, by the Grace that calls men and women to Himself from generation to generation, the apple will not fall too far from the tree.

According to Tickle, fundamental changes to the world and religion follow a five-hundred year pattern: the Reformation occurred approximately five hundred years ago; back another cycle is the Great Schism which separated Greek Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism; and another five hundred years brings the fall of Rome and the rise of monasticism, five hundred years after the life of Christ. Furthermore, each cycle has a general structure. First there is a hundred-year period of adjustment to the changes. Next there are two hundred and fifty years of relative peace and stability in this new worldview and form of religion. Finally, there is another hundred and fifty years in which this construct falls apart again before the next revolution occurs. She believes that we are nearing the end of this part of the cycle and beginning something new.

Tickle’s descriptive interpretation of the past hundred-fifty years is both scholarly and readable, touching on many major changes without becoming bogged down in details. Examining the past century and a half, she formulates four pressing questions which she claims are driving the Great Emergence and need to be addressed by Christianity:

• Where is the authority?2

• What is human consciousness?

• What is the relationship of all religions to one another?3

• What now is society’s basic or fundamental unit?4

While she succeeds in establishing the importance of these questions in North American society and the need for any religion to deal with them, she focuses on the intellectual issues and outward problems and patterns of the Church, rather than on inner life. Although important, these are not the main business of Christians or the Church, which is to become more like Christ and to spread the gospel. Tickle has an unfortunate tendency to portray the Church as a passive reactor to changes happening in the world of society, economics, and culture. Moreover, she writes as if these reactions are progress — and therefore automatically good, often implying that new, non-traditional answers will become standard for these questions. For example, as she discusses her fourth question in terms of family structure, she inserts this comment about the introduction of the pill and its effect on gender roles: “There is, again, nothing inherently right or wrong in these changes. There is only change itself.”5 Throughout, she ignores the objections of various groups of Christians, neither refuting them nor justifying the goodness of the changes, but presenting the most non-traditional form of Christianity as the form that is going to prevail doctrinally in the Great Emergence.

So far, Tickle only notes an emerging response to her first essential question: authority lies in “Scripture and the community.”6 Theological discussion outside of traditional religion and exchange of ideas replace the more traditional hierarchical forms of authority. Tickle predicts that mysticism, emphasizing experience and paradox, will become much more prominent, as well as interest in pre-Constantine Christianity. Codified doctrine, which assumed a much greater role in Christianity after Constantine and was closely associated with temporal authority, will decline in its importance in unifying communities. What is emerging through these changes is not Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, but rather something new that comes out of conversation and the mixing of all forms of Christianity. Appropriately, then, Tickle calls the new form of Christianity “emergent Christianity.” The Church is a network rather than a building, a fixed set of beliefs, or a tradition inherited from the family. Tickle’s clearest description of the nature of this new form of Christianity is that “‘emergent’ Christianity is fundamentally a body of people, a conversation, if you will.”7

While emergent Christianity puts more emphasis on community and less on doctrine and theory, this change is not reflected in The Great Emergence. The influences on history mentioned in the book are almost exclusively intellectual and theoretical social issues. As Tickle discusses the origins of the Great Emergence, she focuses on intellectuals, such as Einstein and Freud, and social trends, such as the automobile and the rise of women in the workplace, in order to explain the increased importance of community. Even worse, there is no hint of an active God in any of these changes. Her perspective and presentation of the matter tries to absolve the Christian of any blame in the state of affairs, taking away any responsibility for action on the part of the Church. The system of cycles slips into a kind of history where there is no actual progress or regress, only change. Ideas are portrayed as becoming outdated, with little explanation of why they are outdated or why the changes are good. With this perspective, guilt is “neither appropriate, justified, nor productive,”8 and history takes care of itself. Both those who choose to remain in traditional settings and those who embrace change are given similar gentle approval, which dilutes any enthusiasm for the work of God, personal action, or leadership.

Through all of this, Tickle does not define Christianity, either what essentials should remain through all the changes,or what does in fact remain the same. While she claims to include every form of Christianity, her lack of opinion, judgment, or any central doctrine leaves many Christians out of the conversation that is her “Great Emergence.” Arguing that Christianity is reacting to societal changes, Tickle misses out on the grandeur of saying that God is doing a new thing.

[1] The Great Emergence, p. 28

[2] 45

[3] 73

[4] 112

[5] 114

[6] 151

[8] 104

[10] 42

Jennifer Delurey ’12 is a History and Literature concentrator in Winthrop House.

Based on discussion in the comments of the most recent edition of Nick’s discussion of baptism with me, I thought it would be worthwhile to clarify what exactly I take the role of the Church Fathers to be in understanding what the New Testament teaches about baptism.

In beginning the first non-introductory post in the series with a discussion about the early Church Fathers, I did not mean to suggest that they are more important than (or even on a par with) the New Testament; put simply, I did not mean to suggest that they are, in and of themselves, authoritative in any way. When it comes to baptism, the New Testament, not the Church Fathers, is the authority.

Why, then, did I begin the debate with a discussion about the Church Fathers? My primary reasons were twofold:

1. My beliefs about baptism separate me from the vast majority of Christendom. Hundreds of millions of people – many of whom self-identify as Evangelicals or non-denominational Christians – either consider baptism to be a merely symbolic ritual or do not even practice baptism at all. Most of the other hundreds of millions of Christians practice infant baptism. Those of us who (like me) believe that baptism is for believers (i.e., not infants) and is for the forgiveness of sins are incredibly outnumbered.

Thus, it is easy for someone from a typical Evangelical background to hear about my opinions regarding baptism and dismiss it as a hopeless minority view. After all, fifty million (or more) Evangelicals can’t be wrong.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the earliest Christians near-unanimously agreed with me that baptism was more than an external, symbolic gesture. And keeping this in mind will (I hope) mitigate our modern prejudices as we seek the truth about baptism.

2. Nick and I agree that the New Testament is the relevant authority for our discussion; what we disagree about is what this authority actually tells us. And, in attempting to understand what the New Testament says about baptism, I think the Church Fathers are a useful – and oft-overlooked – resource.

Suppose that a friend of mine and I both believe that Jack Bauer is the Son of God, and that we should do whatever he says. We each read The Book of Bauer religiously (literally) to learn more about what Jack’s Word tells us to do.

At some point, my friend and I come to a somewhat difficult passage in The Book of Bauer and disagree about how to interpret it properly. My friend believes that Jack teaches x, while I believe that Jack teaches not-x.

Suppose that my friend and I subsequently discover that all the historical evidence indicates that Jack’s earliest followers – removed from him only by fifty to one hundred years – all believed that Jack taught x. There is more, of course, to be said about what Jack actually taught – but, all else being equal, the unanimity of Jack’s earliest followers about x gives us very good reason to believe that Jack taught x.

I believe that the situation with baptism is analogous. I do not think that the Church Fathers were infallible by any stretch of the imagination. However, as a matter of history, I think that the universal assent of the earliest non-canonical Christian writings – some of which (such as the Epistle of Barnabas) may have been written before certain parts of the New Testament itself – about baptism should give us pause.

As a general historical rule, I think we can say the following about change in doctrine (whether the doctrine be Christian, Muslim, Marxist, or Aristotelian):

a) It is more likely to occur gradually, over a long period of time.

b) It is more likely to be accepted only by parts of the community in question, not by the whole community..

c) It is more likely to occur at the periphery of the doctrine, not at the center.

If Nick is right about baptism, however, then we witness in the early Church a doctrinal shift that appears to shatter all these historical norms – a doctrinal shift that was (if he is right) abrupt (taking place within decades) and universal, concerning an elementary teaching of the Christian faith (Hebrews 6.1-2).

These characteristics of the alleged doctrinal shift lead me to believe that there was not, in fact, any such doctrinal shift, and that Nick is wrong to attribute any systematic error regarding baptism to the Church Fathers.

Of course, the Church Fathers may have been wrong about baptism, so I intend to show that my beliefs about baptism are ultimately rooted, not in them, but in the New Testament. That, however, will have to wait until Monday.

So, why mess with Texas? Because Texas is the largest textbook distributor in the U.S., publishing companies tend to tailor their textbooks to Texas’ standards. Thus, the curriculum decisions made in Texas affect not only the students in that state, but almost all children in American public schools (one educator quoted in the article said that Texas “controlled” up to forty-seven states’ curricula). The biggest issue of contention is the board’s attempt to inject Christian doctrine into large parts of American history textbooks, to the point where one school board member commented, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Led by Don McLeroy, the school board head and the most outspoken Christian activist in that political body, the Texas School Board seems well on its way to putting Christianity back into American textbooks and restructuring the way an entire generation of schoolchildren understands American history.

Jabs at Christianity and political conservatism aside, the New York Times article brings up some challenging questions for American Christians. Though America definitely has a Christian history (the Pilgrims brought Christianity with them from England, the Founding Fathers were Christian, and one spark in the Revolution was tension over English religious oppression), at what point does searching and teaching history become evangelizing? When does the Christian cry for “the truth” actually distort “truth” itself?

Though I think McLeroy’s attempt to put Christianity back in the textbooks is a legitimate and partially well-intentioned one, what I, as a Christian, have a problem with is how far he’s taken it. I wonder how his attempt to rewrite American history (and, yes, a large portion of his amendments blatantly rewrite our history with a historically unfounded religious bent) affects our faith. I can’t help but question how rewriting an entire curriculum will win more people over to the Christian cause. Even if Christianity is written into textbooks, it will become more about fact and less about faith. Won’t the effect of the new curriculum be that an entire generation learn about Christianity as a historical fact rather than a plausible system of beliefs and life guidelines? Is that really what Christians want?

The biggest problem that I have with McLeroy’s form of evangelism is that it doesn’t really educate people about Christianity itself; though the textbook revisions may or may not prove that this country was founded on Christian principles, or that America is a Christian country that exists for the glory of God, changing history books does not further the Christian cause. Telling someone that John Adams was a Christian does not make a convert. Neither does making false references and connections to Mosaic law (even as a Christian, I can’t help but wonder where that proposal came from).  Christians are commanded to actively share their religion, but I doubt that “sharing” means doing so by ignoring scholarly advice and research and manhandling history into a small group’s idea of the Christian universe. Christians have nothing to gain by deceiving people; should the school board turn more politically and religiously liberal in the next few decades, these changes could come back to haunt us. Christianity’s crusade would be powerless, its newfound enemies using the immoral and deceitful acts of a few to falsely characterize Christianity as a corruptive force and a significant source of deceit for an entire generation.

In the end, Shorto did concede that most of the amendments didn’t pass, and that the curriculum in its final form was much more moderate than he expected. However, he remained concerned about what was happening behind closed doors, as he reported that McLeroy and Co. continue to communicate with publishing companies and revise sections of the voted-upon curriculum that they still find “morally objectionable.” What is ironic is how “morally objectionable” has come to describe McLeroy; his zeal for evangelism and his misguided means have led him to the heart of the political and moral corruption that his new curriculum hopes to cure.

Perhaps first I should explain what I mean by “liturgy”. Generally speaking, the liturgy is the set of prayers that governs the order of worship. These prayers are said every Sunday, and (at least in the Anglican tradition, which is what I am most familiar with) include Scripture readings, the Nicene Creed, communal prayers for the church and the world, the confession of sin, and the communion service. Encompassing these prayers is the cycle of the church year; the collect (the short prayer said at the beginning of the service) is different each Sunday, but the same from year to year.

What I realized while attending the non-liturgical churches was that embedded in the liturgy is a substantial retelling of the Christian narrative. There is the Nicene Creed, of course, which lays out the core, necessary doctrines of the Church. There is something powerful about the congregation standing together and saying with one voice what they believe. But it is the Eucharistic Prayer, in particular, that holds before the eyes of the congregation the great drama of history that is at the core of Christianity. For those of you not familiar with Anglican services, this prayer is said by the priest just before the breaking of the bread. It is a fairly long prayer, and as a young child (or a not-so-young child) it is fairly easy to stop paying attention to—every Sunday there are the same words, the same actions, with no congregational responses to make you pay attention. However, if you can break out of the thoughtlessness of routine and really hear what is being said, you realize that here, in miniature, is the history of the world from Creation to the last days. We are reminded that God created the world through love, and that when we fell into sin He sent His son Christ Jesus to redeem us. We are told that Christ before He died instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. The congregation together proclaims that He has died, and is risen, and will come again. We ask to be given strength to serve God in preparation for that day.

Without the liturgy, it is hard to lay out the whole sweep of history at once. The churches that I attended, at least, replaced liturgy with music. While I agreed with every word that was spoken in the hymns, they seemed to lack depth—it is the nature of hymns to focus on one aspect of the Christian experience to the exclusion of the others. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but without an overarching narrative it is far too easy to focus on Christ’s crucifixion and forget the Resurrection, or to focus on the world to come and forget our tasks in this world—or vice versa. The liturgy can provide a framework in which to place songs or sermons focusing on narrower topics, and a reminder that Christianity—that is, the history of the world—is broad and multi-faceted.

That was my experience, at least. However, I firmly believe that there is no one “right” way to worship God. We may disagree about what exactly goes on during Communion, or what kind of music (or dancing? painting? acting?) is most suitable for church, but prayer is prayer, and worship is worship, and using our time and energy and talents to give glory to God glorifies God, no matter the details. Liturgical worship has been particularly helpful to me, and I believe that it can provide important reminders to all Christians, but it isn’t the only way to worship. What is it about your particular tradition that helps you grow in the love and truth of God? What can we learn from each other?