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Allah is my Lord and Yours

What would the world look like if the primary solidarities that ordered it were religious rather than national? This is not the world we live in, though there are signs that it’s the one we’re moving toward. Among those signs, ambiguous and interesting, is the public letter sent last May by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, to George W. Bush.

Ahmadinejad’s letter received rather little sensible comment in the American media, and almost none that paid attention to the fact that it is framed as an address by one believer in God to another, and that it appeals to Bush to treat the faith he shares with Abmadinejad as more important than what divides them.

Ahmadinejad begins the letter by asking whether U.S. foreign policy since 9/11, especially the war in Iraq, can be justified in Christian terms. "How," he asks, "can these actions be reconciled with . . . duty to the tradition of Jesus Christ (PBUH) the Messenger of peace and forgiveness?" (PBUH, or "Peace Be Upon Him," is a traditional Muslim honorific for Jesus understood as prophet.)

The same question is then applied to other matters: to U.S. support of Israel; to U.S. opposition to the election of Hamas in Palestine; to the history of U.S. involvement in Iran over the past century; to the invasion and reconstitution of Afghanistan; to the depiction of events in the Middle East by U.S. media; and to the military expenditures of the U.S. government.

The letter continues with an appeal to Bush to consider how the prophets from Moses to Jesus would judge all this. Abmadinejad asks Bush to take his Christianity seriously, and to join with himself in seeking to discern the proper application of the teachings of these prophets to current events: "We believe that a return to the teachings of the divine prophets is the only road leading to salvation.... Surely Allah is my Lord and your Lord, therefore serve him; this is the right path.. . . Service to and obedience of the Almighty is the credo of all divine messengers.

There follows an exhortation to Bush to return to his Christianity by taking the message of the prophets -- one of whom is Jesus -- seriously. Then, most strikingly, comes the claim that liberalism and Western-style democracy" have failed and can no longer, if they ever could, serve the will of God as explained by the prophets. The future, says Ahmadinejad, belongs to those who are "flocking towards a main focal point -- that is the Almighty God." Doesn’t Bush want to join them? Doesn’t the fact that he is a follower of Jesus suggest that he should? The letter ends with a traditional Islamic phrase, "Peace to whoever follows the path" -- the path, that is, of belief in and faithful response to the one God.

This his letter is a political document, of course, and like all such it is no doubt duplicitous, multilayered and deliberately deceptive. But suppose that Ahmadinejad means what he writes to Bush about the importance of their shared faith, and that his appeal to Bush to take his Christianity seriously as something that should bring him close to Islam and to Muslims is at least in part serious. Can we Americans, especially we American Christians, hear this appeal? What might the results be if we could?

The speeches given before the UN on September 19 by Ahmadinejad and Bush gave no sign that either side hears the other. Bush spoke entirely in the language of diplomatic negotiation and political advocacy, as Ahmadinejad also largely did. But the latter’s challenge to Bush to take his own religion seriously remains before us as a stimulus to thought, no matter whether its offerer is serious about it.

Unfortunately, we’re likely to be deaf to this aspect of Ahmadinejad’s letter because we live in a world in which transnational religious solidarities make almost no sense. We Americans may call ourselves Christian or Jewish or Muslim, and some few of us may even think and say that this is the most important thing about us, and that the solidarity we share with our coreligionists goes deeper than any other. But in fact almost none of us really believes this, as is evident in the fact that almost none of us would do -- or even thinks we would do -- for our coreligionists what deep solidarity demands. And what is that? It is to be ready to shed blood, our own or that of others in their defense or service.

We might, some of us. be ready to do these things for our families, especially our spouses and children. Rather more of us will do them for those with whom we share citizenship. Over 3,000 U.S. servicemen and women have died for their fellow citizens since 9/11, and many more have killed. Some have done so eagerly, no doubt, and some with deep reluctance. But they’ve done it, with whatever feelings and under whatever constraints. This shows deep solidarity, and we can all understand the kind of solidarity it exhibits. It seems natural: the world we live in is one in which this kind of deep solidarity makes sense. It does not seem natural -- it seems fanatical, fantastical, crazed, primitive -- for Christians to shed blood for other Christians, Jews for other Jews, Muslims for other Muslims, without respect to citizenship or national boundaries.

For us, and for a long time now, citizenship rather than religion has provided the principal bond of solidarity in the service of which we shed our own blood and that of others. In the great slaughters of the past century or two in Europe and America, Christians have killed Christians and Jews have killed Jews because they were separated by citizenship in time of war. It would have seemed odd -- treasonably, seditiously odd -- for an English Christian in 1914 or an American one in 1941 to have refused to kill or die for his country because he might have to kill his coreligionists on the other side. A very few did object on these grounds, but what they had to say could be taken seriously as little as we are able to take seriously Ahmadinejad’s appeal to Bush. We American Christians all know, deep in our bones, that when it comes to the shedding of blood, citizenship trumps baptism.

There’s a history that explains why this seems obvious to us -- why we don’t find it odd, for example, that American Christians should have killed one another with (usually) the blessing of their priests and bishops in the U.S. Civil War. It’s a history, extending now for more than 300 years, of the subordination of all loyalties, all solidarities -- and especially those that have to do with the giving up of one’s life or the taking of the lives of others -- to those demanded by the bonds of citizenship. And it’s in the service of those solidarities that the dead bodies have been and continue to be stacked very high indeed. Many, uncountably many more have been killed in the service of nation-states than in the service of religions during the past two centuries.

Nations are jealous: they don’t want their citizens whoring after foreign gods, and the worst form of such infidelity is to exhibit primary loyalty to some polity or institution other than the one you’re a citizen of. The forms and rituals of citizenship, whether bred in the bone of the native-born or given as catechesis to the adult immigrant, always emphasize the importance of primary allegiance to the state and primary solidarity with fellow citizens.

All this feels natural. Anything else -- a declaration of primary loyalty in all things to the Roman Catholic Church or to the Ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims -- sounds odd to American ears, fanatical or crazy. The first Catholic president of the U.S. had to go to considerable trouble to make it clear that his primary loyalty would be to the service and safeguarding of the Constitution, and if this has to be said less forcefully now, 45 years later, it’s only because everyone assumes that no sane U.S. Catholic would think anything else. We all know where primary loyalties lie and what the proper place of religion is -- as private hobby, as neutered lapdog, as purveyor of branded consumer goods and, of course, as supporter and encourager of the virtue of patriotism.

Could it be different? Should it be different? I think it should, though I doubt that it easily or soon will be. Ahmadinejad’s letter asks American Christians, in the person of our Christian president, to make an effort of imagination, and there are few signs that we are prepared to make such an effort, few signs that we have the linguistic or conceptual space even to understand how.

The effort would begin, for Christians, by taking seriously our own language about the bonds we share with all other Christians. These bonds go deeper and demand more of us by way of solidarity than any others, even than those of family. The bonds of citizenship are to them as cotton thread is to a steel hawser. Or so our liturgies of baptism and confessions of faith seem to say. Shouldn’t this have some effect upon the question of whom we think it proper to shed blood for?

A second stage in the act of imagination called for has to do with our relations to those who are our ancestors and offspring in loving response to the God into whose death we Christians have been baptized. Might not our solidarity with them -- I mean with Jews and Muslims -- go deeper and demand more than our bonds with the pagans who repudiate or are ignorant of the God of Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad? Christians have overwhelmingly good reasons to think this true of our solidarity with the Jews. And although matters are more complicated with respect to the Muslims, there is at least a strong prima facie case for deep solidarity with them, too -- as Ahmadinejad also appears to think.

It’s never cear where acts of imagination will lead, and this is certainly true of the one asked of American Christians by Ahmadinejad. But some results are likely. Beginning to imagine the world as if religious solidarities were more important than national ones would inevitably divert imaginative effort from depicting and ornamenting the glories of the nation and of citizenship. And this would be a very good thing. Among the principal problems of American Christianity is that it finds America altogether too interesting because it invests too much imaginative work into shaping and decorating its golden image. This is a mistake. America is just one more pagan nation, mired in blood up to the elbows; as such it is not very interesting. Paying attention to the imaginative challenge of Ahmadinejad’s letter might help us to see this more clearly.

Perhaps, too, we may hope that he will develop a fully Islamic critique of Iranian projects of the same order as the Christian critique of American projects he recommends to our president. Such a critique is desperately needed as Iran becomes more deeply involved in the violence between Israel and Hezbollah and moves, perhaps, toward its own nuclear capability.

How, our president might ask theirs, as one believer to another, can this be reconciled with faith in the God who created us all for the same end, and with duty to the message of Muhammad, his prophet? That appeal would not only be more Christian than the language of diplomacy that belongs to realpolitik it might also have more chance of being heard. What, President Abmadinejad, would Muhammad do, and will you let what you and your country are doing be put to that question?

Da Vinci Code as a Teaching Moment

As master of the Temple Church in London, one of the sites featured in The Da Vinci Code, Robin Griffith-Jones has had the chance to talk to hundreds of people about the claims of the best-selling novel. His book on the topic, The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple (just published by Eerdmans), is based on a regular talk he gives to visitors at the Temple Church. Before coming to the church, Grifftth-Jones was a minister at a housing project in Liverpool and also worked with Mother Teresa’s sisterhood in India. Educated in theology at Cambridge University and ordained a priest in the Church of England, he is the author of The Four Witnesses and The Gospel According to Paul. We talked to him about the popularity of The Da Vinci Code and how it has affected his life at the Temple Church.

How has the popularity of The Da Vinci Code changed your responsibilities and routines at the church?

We have five times more visitors now than we had three years ago. We allowed the film company in to film here. With the fee, we will be able to employ a part-time marshal in the church for the next three years or so to keep the church open to visitors seven days a week.

For more than a year I have been giving a talk on The Da Vinci Code almost every week; numbers are currently running at 150 to 200 people in the audience each time. As important as anything in this talk is the opportunity it gives people to ask questions. It is humbling to hear how the novel has variously unsettled or encouraged or convinced the people who have read it.

I respond as fully as I can to the questions. I am sometimes challenged: Do I really think it is worth giving all this attention to the novel? I would rephrase the question: Do I really think it is worth giving all this attention to the people who have read the novel? My answer is yes.

What are people most interested in seeing at the church?

The tomb that Robert Langdon, Leigh Teabing and Sophie Niveau were looking for! But once people have spent a few minutes in the church, they realize what a very special place it is: very calm after the burly-burly of Fleet Street.

When visitors realize our Round Church was built to re-create the shape and the holiness of the round Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem -- to duplicate, here in London, the holiest place on earth -- many of them are slightly moved, I think. It opens the eyes, even of nonbelievers, to a world of the imagination which they had never entered before.

What are your normal responsibilities at the church?

During the week I am mostly the chaplain to the community of lawyers who work all around me. The church was entrusted by the king to two societies of lawyers, Inner and Middle Temple, in 1608; they still maintain it, and do so with great generosity.

On Sundays we have a loyal congregation of all ages but see very few lawyers; they are, quite sensibly, with their families, well away from the Temple where they work all week. We are finding the funds now to have services on weekday evenings, when the lawyers themselves can join us.

Ours is a busy church. We use the most traditional form of service, from the 1662 Prayer Book -- and we have a wonderful choir of men and boys.

Can you give us a brief account of the Knights Templar and how the Temple Church came to be?

The Templars were founded at the time of the Crusades, around 1118, to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. No wonder that they built round churches -- such as our own -- to "re-create" the Holy Sepulchre. (Our Round Church was built in 1185.) They were soon given vast endowments and estates, and became expert at their management. So they came to be used by the kings of Europe and the popes to manage national and papal finances. (The French treasury was in the Temple in Paris throughout the 13th century.) The Lombards, the Jews and the Templars invented international banking, complete with credit transfers and a money market. All of this gave the Templars vast wealth and power; it had nothing to do with Mary Magdalene!

As you can see, almost every theme pursued in The Da Vinci Code is a theme close to my own heart. I was asked recently whether I was a real-life Robert Langdon. Well, no. But I am probably as close to being a "symbologist" as anyone can be.

You seem to regard the novel’s popularity as a teaching moment.

So many people -- inside and outside the churches -- have wanted to ask so many questions for so long about Christianity, but have felt they might seem insulting or stupid. The novel has brought a lot of these questions out into the open. If the churches raise the drawbridge, hide in their ancient pageantry and make some angry or dismissive response, it will simply confirm in people’s minds that we have something to hide or simply don’t know the answers to their questions. What if we take this opportunity to present our story? It is far more exciting, humane and deep than Dan Brown’s; let’s help people to hear it.

I am not being naive. Of all the people reading the novel or seeing the film, perhaps one in 10,000 will read my book or hear my talk. Well then, we need 9,999 more people to be taking the opportunity this craze offers.

I am not being unduly optimistic, either. The film will, I suspect, be utterly gripping. It will provide, for millions of people, a credible -- but utterly false -- narrative of Christianity. This is unsettling.

In the past couple of months I have seen two films, The Constant Gardener and Syriana. I knew nothing about the chemicals industry and the oil industry before I saw the films, and in fact, of course, I still know nothing. But now, for each of those industries, I have a vivid, dramatic narrative in my mind. The films have given me a template into which I can fit anything else I hear about these topics. The film of The Da Vinci Code will offer the same for Christianity. And it is false. We have our work cut Out for us.

Though the book is based on a number of major fabrications, you seem to have sympathy with aspects of the book -- for example, its interest in Jesus’ sexuality. Why?

Why not? Jesus was wholly human. The Bible says nothing either way about his being married or single. Why, I am regularly asked, do the churches assume he was single? It’s a good question.

As a historian -- setting aside for a moment the theological questions to which this gives rise -- I see in front of me a genuinely open issue. And to the extent that Christology is based on the historical record of scripture, that leaves Christology with some unexpectedly open issues too. (Of course, Christology is based on other things as well. Fine. Let’s explain these foundations, openly and honestly.)

Is all this unsettling? Yes. Should we therefore block our ears to the questions the book raises, huff and puff and tell people not to be obsessed with sex? No. It is the churches that have for 2,000 years been obsessed with sex; everyone else has been getting on with it. So let’s be frank and generous, and engage in a genuine discussion, until people actually want to hear why we still believe -- and believe it is important – that Jesus was single. (If we do; I know that some very distinguished historians of the early church do not.)

I sometimes hear, from conservative Christians like myself, how disappointing it is that people cannot tell the facts of scripture from the fantasies of The Da Vinci Code. Well, that’s odd. The novel’s characters say that Jesus was a married man and father. We say he was born of a virgin, walked on water, raised people from the dead and came out of his own grave. Which of these accounts, to a neutral observer, seems more fantastical? I think it is time we admit that our claims are bizarre -- and then people will respect us when we explain why we think these claims should be believed.

So has the appearance of this best seller been a positive thing in your eyes?

To the extent that the churches have responded with generosity, energy and openness, yes. To the extent that we have drawn up the barricades and fired out angry salvoes, no. And with the film about to come out, the need for responses is not over yet.

Upside-Down World (Mark 10:46-52)

This portion of the narrative is a continuation and expansion of what has just preceded. The other ten disciples are jealous, are angry with James and John because they have pushed Jesus -- successfully -- to give them a preeminent share in his destiny. Jesus has not criticized or dismissed their insistent demand but has lovingly transformed it from a desire for glory into a willingness to suffer. Still, why should some of the disciples be granted privileges over the rest? Why won’t they all share to the same extent in Jesus’ fate ("cup") and special vocation ("baptism")? If all are equally brothers and sisters in Christ, why are some Christians apparently more equal than others? Once again Jesus’ words indicate a’ reversal of values and norms. If "glory" is now about suffering rather than reigning, "ruling" means serving, not lording. The most prestigious person in the messianic kingdom is the one who is not above all but below all -- the slave of all, to put it scandalously And what does that slave metaphor really mean? To do what Jesus himself is doing by giving his life for others -- by taking up a cross.

This past summer I officiated at the wedding of two former students. They had chosen 1 Corinthians 13 as their wedding text, and during the service I offered a few words of reflection on the passage with an eye toward its significance for the occasion. I spoke about giving and sharing, how living with other people means that we cannot always have our own way and how in marriage, as in our families and churches, we must place the interests and needs of others above our own. I mentioned that this way of life was Jesus’ own and that Paul considered it the basic template for Christian living. It was, I thought, well-trodden homiletical ground. To my surprise, numerous guests at the wedding sought me out later to say that while they liked what I had said, they found it "different" and "unusual." Although all of them were members of churches, they found my description of the Christian life as centered on giving and sharing strange -- it is not a doctrine or a feeling but a way of living together with others. What on earth, I wondered, are they hearing in church?

I fear that many churches have relegated primary concerns to the background by pushing secondary matters up front. Two years ago, I heard a Christmas sermon whose main thrust was the importance of paying bills on time. The pastor said it was an especially important message for the season. Not one word about what it means for us that God in Christ became a human being! More recently, another pastor admitted to me that he still has not addressed the war in Iraq from the pulpit because he does not know what to say. When exactly did it become so difficult to know whether Jesus sanctioned violence? At what point did the idea that all people are created in the image of God lose its currency and appeal? Is there nothing at all to say about the war from the perspective of the Christian faith?

I know that the church has many faithful voices, whose week-in, week-out proclamation of Christ continues courageously in spite of the smug apathy generated by the consumeristic wealth of our culture. Yet the most glaring weakness of contemporary American Christianity is a failure of proportion, and it can be observed almost everywhere. The combination in many churches of an obsession with issues of sexuality and a simultaneous lack of serious engagement with the theological issues at stake in the current war illustrates the point nicely.

I readily understand the growing appeal of high liturgy, Orthodox tradition and icons, premodern biblical interpretation and any worship service with more music and less talking. I understand, too, the suspicion and frustration in many churches and denominations with theological education, with its distance from church life and its mixed constituencies and agendas. People in the pews yearn for theological depth and authenticity. The problem is, they often want that depth without wanting it to make a difference in their lives. They want spirituality but only so long as it does not prevent them from making trips to the mall in their SUV from the gated community they call home.

"It is not so among you." I am struck by the realization that this statement is an expression of fact rather than a command. Jesus tells the disciples they simply are not a group that can organize itself according to a worldly hierarchy. Instead, an alternative politics is at the heart of their identity. Christian words and actions will flow from this politics, but the politics itself is who they are. Rather than treating church polity as secondary, Jesus insists on the reverse: first live as servants of one another and then you will know what to say and do as my disciples.

Kindness and compassion are not theoretical principles that the church reflects upon and then seeks to apply to the problems of the world. Kindness and compassion are how the church is to live, and in that concrete form of life the other polities of the world will be instructed and redeemed. So there is a connection between authoritarian leadership in the church and the church’s present difficulty in distinguishing what is central to the gospel from what is not. The Christian leader who belittles someone or puffs up himself or herself at another’s expense cannot proclaim the gospel adequately because that leader no longer lives it. This alternative politics is not an extra thing, an add-on for especially holy Christians or Christians with unusually sensitive dispositions. It is not an extra thing at all. It is the thing. It is what Jesus was -- and is -- all about.

Sons of Entitlement (Mark 10:35-45)

James and John McZebedee matriculated at my seminary again this fall. The "Sons of Entitlement," I call them. They are usually -- but not always -- young and white in addition to being male. They have typically grown up in the church, attended Christian colleges and majored in religion. They like to refer to their mental index of Theologians Worth Reading and readily scoff at those theologians they have not read (and so are not worth reading). They patronize second-career students, female students, minority students and those ministerial students who are without apparent academic ambitions. Their fathers are frequently pastors. It is possible, these Sons of Entitlement piously concede in candid moments, that God may be calling them to become professors or bishops. They are rather easy to dislike.

Plus, they push hard in the classroom. "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." It is not exactly a request but more of a demand barely cloaked in a statement of fact. The Sons of Entitlement talk a lot -- preventing others from speaking -- and pose questions that are more like efforts at entrapment than genuine attempts to learn. ("Teacher, since you said X before, how can Y also be true? Are you sure you know what you are talking about? I read a book once that said q something else.") These students bristle at structure and deadlines (such things are for lesser students); regular attendance (they have more pressing obligations); and real, rather than inflated, grades (they received straight As in college, so why should they be getting Es now?). Not too long ago, a student asked me during a final exam if he could write an essay on a topic of his own choosing rather than on one of the three possibilities provided by the test. When I explained that such latitude would be unfair to everyone else in the course, he replied softly, "No one else has to know." On another occasion he expressed interest in becoming a bishop. I bet he makes it.

I tend toward righteous indignation when I encounter such greedy ambition. But Jesus is annoyingly patient in similar situations. The words that come to my mind are, "Who do you think you are?" The words that Jesus says are, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?" Surely he must realize that Zebedee’s boys need to straighten out their values and goals. After all, their primary concern is where they will sit in glory, not whether they can actively pursue a ministry or earn rightful acclaim. Yet Jesus engages their request respectfully, if also firmly. "You do not know," he tells them. He means, "You still do not fully realize what Christian glory entails, how very different from worldly glory is the glory waiting for me." Jesus has in fact just told all the disciples what will happen to him (vv. 33-34), how he will be betrayed, condemned, mocked, spat upon, flogged and killed, but then rise again.

It is the rising-again part that has apparently captured the attention of James and John. To their way of thinking, this is an excellent moment to make a bid for leadership roles in the messianic kingdom. By contrast, Jesus’ response seeks to remind them that the way to messianic glory leads through the cross. The "cup" Jesus will drink is the cup of his destiny, his suffering, his abasement. Even he will ask God to take it from him before things are done (Mark 14:36). But James and John claim for themselves a capacity that Jesus himself can only barely manage: "We are able."

At first glance, the old hymn seems to have gotten the significance of the words dreadfully wrong. "Are ye able, said the Master / To be crucified with Me? / Yea, the sturdy dreamers answered / To the death we follow Thee / Lord, we are able." Does this lyric not turn the disciples into heroes, ironically underwriting their pretension to glory?

Yet both Jesus and the hymn surprise me. Jesus credits James and John with sincerity and grants their request. Or, rather, he grants part of their request. He grants them a share in his suffering and shame. Seats in glory are not his to give.

But the question remains: why does he grant them anything at all? Jesus surely perceives the selfishness of their ambition and the ignorance behind their youthful boldness. They really do not know what they are getting themselves into. Yet he accepts their desire for glory insofar as he can. So there must be something here worth engaging, worth affirming, worth granting. My own tendency is to demonize James and John, but Jesus treats their ambition as worthy of redemption. I am reminded of how earlier in this chapter a rich man bragged that he had kept all the commandments. Then Jesus, "looking at him, loved him," we are told (v. 21).

Maybe the greater sin in the seminary and the church is not misplaced ambition but complacency and lack of ambition altogether. Where ambition exists, it can be redirected and purified. But where it is entirely absent, mediocrity takes hold, the status quo hardens, and professors and committees debate endlessly about methodology and procedure. Yes, it is too easy to demonize James and John; their act of stepping forward matters more to Jesus than their immediate reasons for doing so. Rather than begrudging the ambition of the Sons of Entitlement, then, might I engage them with respect and love, as Jesus did, while working to refocus their ambition on the cross? The second verse of the hymn adopts that very approach: "Are you able to relinquish / Purple dreams of power and fame/ To go down into the garden / Or to die a death of shame?"

Now the refrain. James? John? Anyone? Are you able?

Exposing Zacchaeus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded us that grace is free but not cheap, gratis but not banal, gratuitous but not superfluous. The reformers of the 16th century defined the cost of grace by a single word: repentance. Repentance comes about when "terror strikes the conscience" (Melanchthon). Only thus can grace be truly free: in recognizing our sin, we are left without any bargaining chips, without appeal and defenses.

The movement of grace must always start with us. If terror does not strike the conscience, what we get is terrorism, whether through suicidal bombers or genocidal indebtedness, through weapons of mass destruction or weapons of mass deception.

The incipience of grace requires us to move away from the protected hideouts where we refuse to see, to hear, to talk about the truth. Consider this definition of an idol: that which arrests the gaze so that we don’t see or hear or speak the truth. For the idol to be smashed, our protective hideouts need to be exposed. Exposure frees the gaze and gives us a true vision, a vision that strikes our conscience with terror at what is happening and makes us confess our share in it.

One encounters an idol being exposed in the words of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman who lived in the slums of São Paulo. She had almost no formal education, but she knew how to write, and she kept a journal, which was found by a journalist and published in the late 1950s. In an entry of 1956 she wrote the following about her son João:

João came in saying he had a stomachache. I know what it was, for he had eaten a rotten melon. Today they threw a truckload of melons near the river. I don’t know why it is that these senseless businessmen come to throw their rotten products near the favela [shantytown] for the children to see and eat. In my opinion, the merchants of São Paulo are playing with the people like Caesar when he tortured Christians. But the Caesars of today are worse than the Caesars of the past. The others were punished for their faith. But we, for our hunger! In that era, those who did not want to die had to stop loving Christ. But we cannot stop loving eating.

Worth noting is that the entry was made on December 25, Christmas Day -- though this Christian woman made no mention of that fact.

Something seems to be amiss. This is after all the day that Christians in Brazil no less than in any other part of the world celebrate the birth of God among us as a little child. The woman’s silence about Christmas is eloquent. And her comparison between loving Christ and loving eating could not be more evangelical: you stop loving Christ if you make him into an idol so that he is no longer the God exposed in the flesh, born of poor and displaced parents, in a stable amid animals, dung and flies, who hung helpless on a cross and who promised to be among the hungry, the sick, the little ones of all ages, in every street child.

The silence regarding Christmas in this diary entry is powerful because it tacitly reveals the idol that Christmas has become and exposes an unlikely place of epiphany: a dirty river bank where children eat rotten melons. Who defines Christmas --those hungry children amid the rotten melons or the merchants amid their luxurious and lavish Christmas banquets? Carolina Maria de Jesus. exposes the dire conditions under which Christ was born and is being born, the place where faith and grace are brought forth amid the hunger of the world. Is this not what Jesus meant by saying that we don’t live by bread alone? Is Jesus not saying that life begins among those who, like those children, cannot rely on bread alone, precisely because they don’t have it?

Repentance, the bearer of grace, can come only when we expose ourselves and are exposed to the wounds of the world. This is what repentance means -- literally to bow down, to be bent over (re-pendere) by the weight of the pain of the world.

A famous biblical story of exposure and repentance is that of the tax collector Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Zacchaeus means pure or innocent (from the Hebrew ZaKaI). Ironically, this chief tax collector was called pure and innocent even though tax collectors ranked high in the registry of sinners. In the ceremony of his naming, Zacchaeus was given his name as a promise. Luke’s story is about how Zacchaeus became ZaKaI, became what he was promised to be. (Just so, in the baptismal rite we are given the promise that through repentance we return to righteousness and innocence.)

Tax collectors, not to mention chief tax collectors, were considered a special class of sinners by the Jews for a number of reasons. They were fellow Judeans who were working for the Roman occupiers. They not only got rich by impoverishing others, but were known to send troops to invade homes of those who allegedly were withholding unreported goods. Presumably Zacchaeus and his cronies invaded the homes of common people and plundered them; the more goods they could tax, the richer they would become. That was Zacchaeus’s goal, and he reached it. He "was rich Luke says.

What brought Zacchaeus into this Lukan story is that he somehow knew that he needed something that all his wealth could not afford. He had wealth, but not health; he was safe, but not saved (the word for health and salvation in Greek is the same: soteria). The text tells us he was a zeteios, someone who inquires, searches and seeks. When Zacchaeus learned that a healer by the name of Jesus was coming to town he was not in denial; he knew that he needed some sort of healing.

The text tells us that he was of short stature. The word for stature (helikía) can also be translated as maturity or, metaphorically, character. In other words, Zacchaeus did not have much character. He was held in low esteem. This was the case whatever his actual physical height.

It does not take much guessing to know what people like Zacchaeus do to compensate for their low character. They climb. They will do whatever it takes to be above the common folk, who they know have greater character and integrity. They climb political ladders or corporate ladders. Zacchaeus, we know, climbed a nearby sycamore tree. But the symbolism is the same. His aim was to raise himself above the common folk. He climbed the tree in the hope that he would see this acclaimed healer and that the man of Nazareth, respected as he was by the folk that Zacchaeus preyed upon, would also see him and affirm the stature he had earned by climbing. Maybe what his ego was waiting to hear was Jesus saying, "Zacchaeus, you climbed that tree to see me. That is what makes you greater than this entire crowd."

But beware, you social, economic and political climbers. Don’t try to impress Jesus; it will backfire. The man from Nazareth looks at the man in the tree, way above the common folk and even above Jesus himself (for the text says Jesus needed to look up to see him), and orders him to come down immediately: Zakxaie. speúsas katábethi. Sémeioron gar en oíko sou dei me meintai.

The usual translations fail to convey the sharpness of Jesus’ remark. Dei me meintai is not a self-invitation, a gesture of etiquette; it is an imperative, a demand, even a threat. It might be rendered, "Zacchaeus, get down at once; today I must definitely come to your house." Or, more fully: "Zacchaeus, get down from there and face your own low and debased stature and know yourself for what you truly are. And today I will enter your luxurious and secured home just as you have invaded and plundered the poor houses of these people." How about that for grace?

But grace is what it is -- harsh grace, but grace indeed. Zacchaeus tumbles down from the tree; he repents, meets his true stature. He exposes his character for what it is. Zacchaeus, understandably, is a bit embarrassed, but like anyone who admits to a long-hidden wrongdoing he is also relieved. He happily welcomes Jesus into his house, which might well have been as guarded as are some of the houses of the wealthy in the U.S. Before Jesus says anything, Zacchaeus hastens to tell him that he will give half of what he has to the poor, and that to those he has defrauded he will make restitution fourfold, surpassing the law which prescribed that one-fifth of the defrauded amount should be added to the restitution, The words he receives from Jesus are what he was looking for: "Today healing/salvation (soteria) has come to this house."

Salvation was not promised to Zacchaeus in heaven. It was given in the very gesture of his act of vulnerability. He became ZaKaI, innocent, like someone brought back to the baptismal font.

Did Zacchaeus live up to his words? That seems taken for granted. For Zacchaeus, that would be the easiest part. The hardest part was to welcome Jesus into his well-protected house -- off-limits to common folks -- to welcome that man of the common people who had addressed him with menacing and harsh words. That act was like piercing a hole through a dam. A small hole in a huge dam will eventually bring it all down. Zacchaeus’s gesture of vulnerability had that effect: it pierced a hole in the dam that held secure his wealth and power.

So who are the Zacchaeuses of today? Where are their protected houses? What are their home-security measures? How is Jesus calling them down from the sycamores of success and wealth?

Before answering by pointing to others -- or to the workplace, the corporation, the school, the city, the class, the nation that needs to be challenged -- we need to start with ourselves as we think about exposure and repentance. A sermon by John Chrysostom illustrates what it means to start with ourselves.

In one of his "Homilies on the Acts," Chrysostom notes that the church of his day had created institutions to care for the poor and strangers. It would seem to be a great thing for the church to do. But to the surprise of today’s readers -- and perhaps to those of his own time -- the "golden-mouthed" preacher launches an attack on these institutions, not for the works of charity they perform but for the way they are put to use by well-off Christians.

These ministries to the poor and the stranger were used to keep them out of sight and out of churchpeople’s houses. They were instruments to prevent exposure and to avoid the face of the poor, argues Chrysostom, instruments for keeping Christ and the angels at bay. Hebrews 13:2 says, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Also, Christ says in Matthew 25:40, "Truly I say to you, as you did to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."

Chrysostom knew where transformation begins: by allowing the other, the poor and the stranger to become known, to have a voice, to have a face. Without exposure there is no repentance; without repentance, no grace; without grace, no transformation.

The Gospels prepare us to hear the word of grace by first making us hear the voice of John, the voice crying in the desert, denouncing and exposing the leaders of the people as a "brood of vipers" and calling all to a baptism of repentance. This prepares the way for the one who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire -- a baptism no longer in water, but in the wells of grace (the Holy Spirit) and in the fire that changes, transforms and purifies all.

Chrysostom criticizes his fellow Christians for excusing themselves from meeting Christ because church charities were doing it for them. He asks: If the priest prays, does that mean that you do not need to pray? If the church cares for the little ones, does that mean that you need not care and receive Christ in your own home? In other words, the great preacher was saying: You want a Christ without first meeting John the Baptist. You want a cute little babe in a golden manger, a fair and kind teacher, a glorious resurrected Christ now seated in the splendor of heaven at the right hand of God’s throne. But you avoid the filthy stable, and have paid little attention to the homeless preacher without a place to lay his head. You have not endured the exposed body on a cross, tortured as the worst sinner and killed as a political criminal, who cried out words of abandonment.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed that the marginalized are the fragile side of a society, and that is why they must be kept hidden. The centers of power see their own weakness in the margins, and they don’t want those margins exposed. Exposure would hasten the transformation of the status quo, and that is the last thing that those benefiting from the status quo want.

Zacchaeus was transformed by an act of self-exposure. This is why the ultimate revelation of God is not the sight of God’s glory -- which is what Moses wanted -- but the sight of God exposed in the misery of a condemned criminal, hanging naked on a cross and enduring an excruciating death. It is this sight that Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director and poet, calls us to consider:

All his wounds are open to the sun

and He dies under the eyes

of everyone: even His mother

under His breast, belly and knees,

watches His body suffer.

Dawn and dusk cast light

on His open arms and April

softens His exhibition of death

to gazes that burn Him.

Why was Christ exposed on the Cross?

Oh, the heart shudders at the naked

body of the youth. . . atrocious

offence to its raw modesty...

The sun and the gazes!

You must expose yourself (is this what the

poor nailed-up Christ teaches?),

the clarity of the heart is worthy

of every sneer, every sin,

every more naked passion...

(is this what the Crucifix means?

sacrifice every day the gift

renounce every day forgiveness

cast yourself ingenuous over the abyss).

We will be offered on the cross,

on the pillory, between the pupils

limpid with ferocious joy,

leaving open to irony the drops

of blood from the breast to the knees,

gentle and ridiculous, trembling

with intellect and passion in the play

of the heart burning from its fire,

testifying to the scandal.

Ground Rules for Muslim-Christian Conversation

I have been involved for 25 years in fruitful conversation with Muslims, and I have read the Qur’an and a lot of literature about Islam. But I confess that Emperor Manuel II Paleologus (Paleologus meaning Old Word) was not on my mind before Pope Benedict XVI launched his entry into the newsrooms of the world. At a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany the pope quoted an unlikely source for interreligious understanding -- a portion of a 14th-century text in which the emperor (whom the pope describes as ‘erudite") wrote: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

It is important to locate the context of this quote. In 1391 the territory that Manuel II governed was minuscule, and he was desperate about the imminent collapse of his "empire." His fears of the fall of Byzantium were realized. In 1453, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Muhammed II, conquered the city founded by Emperor Constantine and made it his capital. Constantinople became Istanbul, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. The rise of the Ottomans entailed the killing and dispossession of Christians.

Did the pope cite Emperor Old Word because he was grieving the loss of Constantinople as a major Christian center? If so, then one may hope that the pope will take advantage of his trip to Istanbul to do something that Paul VI did not do when he visited Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in 1964: Benedict could issue to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos I a formal apology on behalf of the West for the Fourth Crusade, whose marauding soldiers never reached Jerusalem hut turned their full forces on Constantinople, savagely sacking the city in 1204. If Benedict XVI does this, there will be tears of joy among Eastern Orthodox Christians.

But let us assume for a moment that the pope cited Emperor Old Word because he meant to initiate -- however inartfully -- a candid conversation with believers and nonbelievers about faith and reason and about religion and violence in the modern world. These themes were the core of his lecture at Regensburg.

The pope’s repudiation of religiously motived violence requires another, broader contextualization of the passage from Manuel II. The year 1391 is at the midpoint of Christian violence against Jews and Muslims in the West, which included the expulsion of Jews from England on Tisha B’Av in 1290, the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306. the re-conquest of Spain from the Moors in Spain and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. Is it too much to ask the pope to recall these events with sorrow and to express on behalf of the church sincere repentance to the descendants of those who were so viciously displaced and exiled by our ancestors? Another moment to weep with those who weep.

We should also be clear on the context of dialogues such as the one cited by the pope between Emperor Old Word and an unnamed Persian scholar. Staged dialogues between Catholic princes or Dominican theologians and various Jewish or Muslim scholars rarely, if ever, advanced the state of mutual respect or deepened understanding of the other. The purpose of the "conversation" was to demonstrate publicly the superiority of the Catholic position. Paleologus, the presumed scribe of the dialogue, unsurprisingly recalls the points he scored much better than the contributions of the Persian scholar. Is it any wonder that for centuries Jews and Muslims have been leery of such dialogues?

In the days after the speech, Benedict several times distanced himself from the words of the emperor that caused offense, noting that they "were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in anyway express my personal thought." The pope also expressed the hope that his apology "serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect." He stated that "in no way did I wish to make my own the words of the medieval emperor. I wished to explain that not religion and violence, hut religion and reason, go together." And he reassured his listeners of his "profound respect for world religions and for Muslims."

If Muslims are the best judges of the adequacy of this apology, the jury is still out. The Muslim Public Affairs Council in the U.S. and the Muslim Brotherhood of Britain both read the pope’s words as an apology and promptly expressed gratitude for what he did. In Ankara, the Turkish foreign minister announced that the pope’s trip to Turkey is still on. Other Muslims, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, are looking for more. There are no abstract limits to the dynamics of repairing relationships. For all I know, more actions may be forthcoming from the pope, especially if his Muslim critics initiate the next step in the process by prompt repudiation of recent Muslim violence against Christians. Several Muslim voices -- including that of MPAC, the American Task Force on Palestine and Muslim leaders in Palestine -- have in fact done precisely that, but they are not the ones who are saying the pope must do more.

Some Catholics insist that the pope has not made an apology at all and should not do so. This view underscores the rest of the pope’s words after he said "I am deeply sorry" and construes them to mean something like: "I am sorry that you inattentive folks are so agitated about what I said, hut I am not withdrawing a single iota of subscript." This reading is ungenerous. It overlooks the explicit and personal clarification by the pope that he emphatically disagrees with the denigration of Islam reflected in the words of the emperor.

The pope did not grovel, nor should he. A mea culpa should not be ostentatious. But as pope he has the responsibility as a pastor to teach all of us, believer and nonbeliever, that when we make a mistake, it is best to admit it promptly. Why would people inside the church want to take that achievement away from him?

The Regensburg lecture and the responses to it can stir discussion among Christians about our own responsibility to persons who are not members of our own faith. From years of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, I have learned three things: that no subject of profound concern to one partner in dialogue should be a taboo subject, that the most likely way of fostering frank conversation about difficult matters is to communicate to our dialogue partners an empathic understanding of their fears and concerns, and that both sides have a duty to be honest about the wrongs committed by their own community in the past.

There should be no doubt, for example, that at this moment in world history Muslims and non-Muslims need deeper awareness of one another’s attitude toward violence. When Muslims today think of violence, they remember the atrocities of Bosnia, the bombing of Baghdad and the recent assault upon the civilian population and infrastructure of Lebanon.

Catholics are in a good position to identify with this sort of pain inflicted upon Muslims. When these attacks occurred, they were all promptly criticized by the pope, local Catholic conferences and alert Catholic laity. It cannot be otherwise in a community that lives by the teaching of Vatican II: "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation."

Bringing up the past can be dicey, but also important in getting to general attitudes. Vulnerability is probably the best way to probe the lessons of history. For example, I am prepared to acknowledge -- as did Pope John Paul II -- the wrongs committed in the Crusades against Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims by Christian princes and soldiers at the invitation of popes. When conversing with Muslims, I refresh my memory about gross excesses committed by Christians against Muslims, in part because that’s what they remember vividly, but in greater part because that’s what I tend to forget.

To establish empathy with the victims of violence is in my experience the only way to get to clarity or common ground about general principles. Empathy reduces defensiveness. Finger-pointing assures the descent of dialogue into useless pursuits of who started what -- a strategy I have never known to work either in interpersonal relationships or in group relationships with more complicated communal memories.

To return to the recent war in Lebanon: once a Muslim appreciates that a Christian partner in dialogue really cares about Muslim civilians who suffered in the attacks on their homes and on the infrastructure of civilian life, that Muslim can also appreciate the Christian’s concern about Hezbollah’s use of Katyusha rockets to target Israeli and Palestinian civilians in Haifa and Nazareth and other places in Galilee;

This point might lead, in turn, to frank assessment of the historical use of force by Jews, Christians and Muslims in various periods of our sad histories, and -- dare I hope? -- to repentance for excesses and abuses. Consensus of this sort might even evoke a conversation about methods of interpretation of sacred texts. Jews, Christians and Muslims should not and will not delete from their sacred texts passages that describe violence. But the process of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue that Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly endorsed may cause participants to question whether any canonical story of violence -- such as the conquest narratives in Joshua and Judges, or functionally equivalent texts in the history of Islam -- may legitimately be claimed to offer a religious warrant for continued violence in today’s world.

All the better for this conversation, of course, if Muslim dialogue partners bring to the table a deep memory of Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi, Averroës and Avicenna, each of whom attended in various ways to the profound connection between faith and reason, the central point of the pope’s lecture. One can hope that with the pope’s personal mea culpa for the offense caused by his use of a text he clearly does not agree with, Emperor Old Word will be allowed to recede into the obscurity he richly deserves. More important, one can hope that all of us in the Abrahamic traditions -- Jews, Christians and Muslims -- can embrace the hopeful word offered by Pope Benedict in his lecture at Regensburg: faith and reason are coordinates; religion and violence are contradictions.

American Idol

One of the most startling developments in the culture war is the apparent takeover of the Republican Party by conservative evangelicals who claim that the U.S. is a Christian nation, uniquely called and blessed by God. Fearing that the nation has strayed from the founders’ Christian intentions, conservative activists have dived into politics, hoping to reclaim the nation for God.

The efforts of evangelical lawmakers have produced striking results. In Missouri, Republican legislators have proposed a resolution declaring that the founding fathers "recognized a Christian God" and established the nation on God’s principles. The resolution goes on to defend voluntary prayer in schools and religious displays on public property because they reveal "the positive role that Christianity has played in this great nation of ours.

The 2004 Texas GOP platform affirmed "that the United States of America is a Christian nation," founded "on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible." Texas Republicans formally rejected "the efforts of courts and secular activists who seek to remove and deny such a rich heritage from our public lives," and even declared the doctrine of separation of church and state to be a "myth" that must be rejected in order to restore the founders original intent.

One of the architects of that platform was David Barton, vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and one of the chief advocates for a Christian America. Barton’s view of American history has energized millions of voters and forced lawmakers to take conservative Christian causes seriously. Declared by Time magazine in 2005 to be one of the 25 "most influential evangelicals in America," Barton has constructed a providentialist interpretation of American history to go with the issue-based advocacy of the religious right.

According to this view, the United States has abandoned its covenantal commitment to God, and its only hope of avoiding destruction in the form of divine judgment is for Americans to reclaim their godly heritage, recommit themselves to traditional morality and elect Christians to office. Then and only then will the nation halt the moral decline evident since the cultural upheaval of the 1960s.

Barton once declared to a large evangelical congregation in Ohio, "The culture war in this countly is tied at halftime. I’d be worried, but the good news is I know the rest of the team -- all of you -- is going to be showing up to play in the second half." Speaking at hundreds of churches, conferences and political meetings across the country, Barton recruits fellow combatants to battle. He presses for Bible instruction in public schools, school prayer, public displays of the Ten Commandments, impeachment of "activist" judges, antiabortion statutes, prohibition of gay marriage and a host of other conservative positions. Barton sees the struggle as one between "light and darkness, truth and lies, righteousness and evil." He even goes so far as to claim that individual Christians will be accountable to God on judgment day for the votes they cast; God will be checking whether they voted Republican.

Through his books, pamphlets, amicus briefs, Supreme Court testimony, political consulting and frequent public appearances, Barton has become one of the most powerful figures in conservative Christian politics. In 1989 Barton founded Wall. Builders, based in Aledo, Texas, whose expressed goal is "to exert a positive influence in government, education, and the family by 1) educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country; 2) providing information to federal, state and local officials as they develop public policies which reflect Biblical values; and 3) encouraging Christians to get involved in the civic arena.

The name "WallBuilders" comes from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. Barton uses this concept of "rebuilding the walls" to represent his "call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation’s foundations."

Barton has developed connections in every sector of the Christian right. It was after an appearance on James Dobson’s radio program in the late 1980s that he first found a large audience. He appears regularly on D. James Kennedy’s radio program, broadcast from Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables, Florida. Barton has spoken at two "Reclaiming America for Christ" conferences sponsored by Kennedy’s lobbying group, the Center for Reclaiming America. He has also appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club television talk show, and his literature is marketed by every major Christian right church and organization, including Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and scores of Christian socially conservative advocacy organizations like the Eagle Forum and the Providence Foundation.

Barton’s connections extend beyond Christian networks to the heart of the Republican Party in Texas and in Washington. Barton speaks regularly at pastors briefings sponsored by the Texas Restoration Project -- a network of hundreds of "patriot pastors" whose goal is to "reclaim Texas" and "restore Texas and America to our Judeo-Christian heritage." These pastors briefings are a combination of revival meeting and political rally, featuring pastors and Republican leaders who encourage Christians to take the reins of culture through the democratic process.

The language at these gatherings is often highly charged. At one briefing in Arlington, Texas, pastor Dwight McKissic informed the audience that God sent Hurricane Katrina to destroy New Orleans in order to purify a nation that is increasingly tolerant of homosexuals. In 2005, the Texas Restoration Project sponsored "Reclaiming Texas Sunday," a get-out-the-vote campaign in which pastors encouraged parishioners to support Proposition 2, a state constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Barton’s pastors’ briefings have become national affairs. One briefing featured representatives Tom DeLay, Dick Armey and Chris Smith and senators Sam Brownback and James Inhofe. The invitation was printed on WallBuilders stationery and signed by Representative J. C. Watts. Barton has spoken at several "Worldview Weekends" alongside evangelical lights like Charles Colson, Tim LaHaye, David Limbaugh (Rush’s born-again brother), actor Kirk Cameron and DeLay. Among Barton’s many media credits are appearances on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes and on ABC’s Nightline, where he defended DeLay’s attack on activist judges in the wake of the Tern Schiavo case. Barton is also active in the national struggle over public school curricula, consulting with both Texas and California on educational standards.

His work has been praised by Newt Gingrich and numerous members of Congress. With Senate leader Bill Frist in 2005, Barton gave a "Spiritual Heritage Tour" of the capitol, one of hundreds of such tours he has led for citizens and lawmakers. Barton was hired during the 2004 campaign as a consultant by the Republican National Committee to give a series of get-out-the-vote speeches to clergy around the country.

Although Barton’s political connections are important, it is his ideas that matter. His work is informed by a particular view of history. While he has produced dozens of books, pamphlets, tracts and audio releases, his ideas are displayed most clearly in his 1989 self-published book The Myth of Separation, later edited and republished as Original Intent:s The Courts, the Constitution and Religion (WallBuilders, 1996). Barton distilled the main ideas from that book into a 1993 video, America’s Godly Heritage.

According to Barton, the vast majority of the founding fathers were committed evangelical Christians who credited God for the nation’s success. Jumping from one citation to another, he selectively retrieves remarks from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams and claims these founders as Christian conservatives. He interprets all references to "Providence" by the founding fathers as references to the personal God of evangelical Christianity.

Barton cites approvingly John Jay’s claim that Americans should "select and prefer Christians for their rulers," and views George Washington’s survival at the Battle of the Monongahela as evidence that God was preserving Washington for his later role in the Revolution, which Barton interprets as God’s struggle between liberty and tyranny. Detailing this last argument, Barton engages in a diatribe against secularist historians and contemporary educators in his booklet The Bulletproof George Washington.

After thus establishing that the U.S. originated as a Christian nation, Barton cites selected sources from the 19th century to prove that this remained the dominant understanding. He cites the role of the Bible in teaching literacy; Charles Finney’s conversion, brought about by his study of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws; and an 1892 Supreme Court opinion, Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S., which stated, "This is a Christian nation."

Having developed his providential view of America’s past. Barton critiques modern American culture. "The First Amendment never intended to separate Christian principles from government, he declares, pointing out that the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" appears not in the Constitution but in Jefferson’s letter to Danbury Baptists in 1801. The "original intent" of the founders, Barton argues, was to prohibit "the establishment of a single national denomination," not to remove Christianity from the center of public life.

Barton pins the creation of the "myth of separation of church and state" on 20th-century judges. He argues thatmthe vast majority of Americans assumed that the U.S. was a Christian nation until the 1960s, when judges denied the will of the people by removing God from public life.

Central to this drama are two Supreme Court cases: Engle v. Vitale (1962), in which the Court decided that government-directed prayer in public schools was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause; and Abington v. Schempp (1963), which declared unconstitutional a Pennsylvania statute that provided for compulsory Bible reading in public classrooms. Those two cases serve are watershed events in Barton’s story of America, for they resulted, he says, in God’s turning his face from the U.S. and allowing the nation to descend into rampant immorality.

With a series of multicolor charts, Barton shows that beginning in 1962 the number of teenage pregnancies, divorces and single-parent families went up, as did rates for sexually transmitted diseases and violent crime. SAT scores started to fall. All because of Engle v. Vitale.

When discussing student performance on achievement tests, Barton notes that private or religious schools account for a disproportionately high number of National Merit Scholars and says that is because "one school utilizes religions principles and one does not." Factors like class, race and region play no role in Barton’s reasoning.

For Barton, it was in the early 1960s when "for the first time in the nation’s history, we officially told God He was no longer welcome in the public affairs of this nation. The charts simply illustrate a principle that the Founders understood, believed and discussed" -- namely, that the nation will prosper only if it honors God.

In Barton’s view, the U.S., like ancient Israel, is in a covenantal relationship with God. Citing numerous Old Testament examples, Barton argues that God deals with nations "based on the stands of the nation’s leaders. The courts and our elected officials have pushed God from public life, and now we are suffering the consequences.

Barton rallies the troops with the age-old jeremiad of moral declension. Citing a 1963 study stating that 97 percent of the nation believed in God, Barton thunders, "We have lost ground in recent years as we have lost our understanding of the Founders’ intent and teachings. We do have a Godly heritage in America, but we have been robbed -- robbed by the 3 percent." He continues, "We have got to get involved and take [our heritage] back. A Godly heritage is the foundation of America; and the church must take right ground. We must recover the things that we’ve given up in recent years. We must get involved!"

Barton is clearly more interested in current cultural squabbles than he is in history. Put simply, Barton is a bad historian. In fact he has no training as a historian -- his BA., from Oral Roberts University, is in math education. He retrieves only those aspects of history that, often taken out of context, match his emphasis on America’s Christian identity. And by levying ad hominem attacks on his detractors, he remains outside genuine historical discussion.

Some of his critics have matched him in vitriol. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the Texas Freedom Network and a host of other institutions and individuals have attacked Barton as an enemy of freedom. One source accused him (falsely) of knowingly addressing neo-Nazi hate groups. Recent books and articles have lumped Barton in with the "theocrats ""Christian nationalists," "religious Reconstructionists," "Dominionists," even "neo-fascists," whose mere existence threatens the foundations of American democracy.

Amid these attacks, it is important to differentiate the particle of truth in Barton’s work from the nonsense. It’s true that most of the founders were at least loosely Christian; they affirmed the existence of Providence and thought that Providence played a role in the shaping of the new nation. Barton is right to point out that Christianity had a much more important role in 18th-century culture than it does in today’s. And he is right to question those who interpret "separation of church and state" to mean the removal of religion from public life. Historically, Christianity has been a significant factor in our nation’s history, sometimes supporting power structures in their search for hegemony, sometimes critiquing those who use power capriciously, sometimes shaping a civil religion which sustained the soul of the nation, and sometimes moving individuals to profound acts of selflessness.

But it is historically absurd of Barton to dismiss the separation of church and state as a myth, given that the founders expressly intended to end state support for a specific church, The founders were, on the whole, less religiously orthodox than the average American. They pushed the new nation toward tolerance and less reliance upon historic Christianity.

It is anachronistic to label the founders evangelical Christians. Some were orthodox Christians, some were deists. and only a few might be termed evangelical in the modern sense. Although almost all of them affirmed the role of religion in moral formation and saw Providence at work in America’s founding, their belief in the moral governance of the universe was more a reflection of their assumptions as Enlightenment thinkers who did not separate religion from public life than a sign of heartfelt Christian belief.

It is interesting, in this context, that Barton thinks the Supreme Court should have upheld school prayer in Engle v. Vitale. The prayer in question, spoken at the beginning of each school day, was

"Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen." Such a bland prayer represents an anesthetized civic faith, not the robust faith of the Christian tradition. By calling for a least-common-denominator public faith, Barton seems happy to settle for less than the God of historic Christian orthodoxy.

Examining Barton’s misunderstanding of the relation between Christianity and public life might help us develop a sounder conception of Christian citizenship.

To begin with, Barton reduces Christianity to individual morality. Absent from his historical and theological writings is a full notion of God’s justice. For Barton, a righteous God is primarily concerned with abortion, divorce, public displays of the Ten Commandments and homosexual sex -- not with poverty, racial oppression, environmental degradation or global hunger. Any notion of Christian citizenship must have a fuller concept than his of God’s dominion over all things and God’s desire to redeem all of creation.

Second, for Barton political power is an unmitigated good when used by the right people. In the face of this blind confidence in power, human history testifies over and again to the dangers of power -- even when wielded for seemingly good ends. In addition, Jesus Christ modeled for humanity the surrender of power for the higher end of redemption. Christians engaging in public action should always be suspicious of power’s ability to corrupt the soul. True power comes not through electoral politics, but when Christians sacrifice their needs for others.

Third, Barton makes an idol of the state. Ancient Israel was the only nation chosen by God for the special purposes of extending God’s redeeming work to the world. Even if the U.S. were God’s chosen nation, it would fulfill that calling only insofar as it lovingly brought God’s justice to all people, regardless of national identity. As global Christian citizens, American Christians must not idolize the nation, but faithfully serve God, who knows no nationality.

Finally, Barton’s vision of a Christian America has no room for the church. Without a robust theology of the church, Barton has no place to go but to the state to find the venue where Christians can act out their public commitments. When Christians engage the powers of this world, they properly do so not as a voting bloc but as the eternal community of God’s called-out ones -- the church of Jesus Christ. Absent the church, which forms Christians into committed disciples, Barton, along with many American evangelicals, have turned to politics as the truest expression of Christian commitment.

Another Commandment (Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34)

I read this week’s lectionary passages last summer in the Urubamba Valley in my native Peru, and in my native Spanish: "Pero Cristo ya vino, y ahora el es el Sumo sacerdote . . . " At first I resisted the Hebrews passage, as I prefer Jesus’ concrete teachings to more abstract theological concepts. So, while leading a tour group across the Andes, I turned to Mark: "And man must love God with all his heart and with all his mind and with all his strength; and he must love his neighbor as he loves himself."

I can picture this scene unfolding in Peru. I can imagine Jesus at my parents’ house, surrounded by my family and friends. Although these are people who try to do what’s right, Jesus’ revolutionary ideas would make them uneasy. I can bear one of my cousins asking Jesus, in all seriousness: "What is the greatest commandment?" Jesus tells him compassionately, "Loving God and loving others as much as you love yourself’ -- an answer that can be under-stood anywhere in the world, an answer that we still find compelling.

The problem is not that we don’t know the answer, but that it’s so difficult to live up to that commandment. In Lima, where inequality and poverty are visible around every corner, Jesus’ answer is a radical call, one that pushes us beyond even the good works that we are doing. Many of us, after all, are involved in charities and ministries to others.

In those efforts we come "close to the kingdom of God," but there most of us stop, just short of actively pursuing for others all we want for ourselves: a home, a car, insurance, clean water, schooling, warm clothes, health care.

I studied this scripture while touring Peruvian churches. I saw amazing silver and gold altars and incredible paintings, jeweled communion cups and other sacred art that attest to the love that churchpeople have lavished on God for many centuries.

It was more difficult to find evidence of love for others. But at one small altar in a church’s side chapel stood the image of San Martin de Porres, dressed in humble robes. Under the image burned dozens of candles. "Martin," our tour guide explained, "was the illegitimate son of a freed slave and a Spaniard. He didn’t have the money or position to join a religious order, so he presented himself as an offering to the order. He just wanted to serve God. His good deeds were legendary; he started an orphanage and a hospital, even though he was little more than a slave,"

How could the child of a slave, raised in poverty in a racist and classist society, love God so totally and unconditionally and ask nothing but the privilege of service?

Later, as our tour group rested in Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas, a crowd began to form. Workers’ unions and agrarian cooperatives had called for a national demonstration in opposition to the Free Trade Agreement. When we saw the angry signs that read: "People-eating Americans: Leave our community!" we decided that it was prudent to move on. I started gathering my group to leave, but some of the demonstrators cornered me. "Why do Americans want to ruin our farms?" asked a poor farmer who thrashes wheat by hand every summer. He produces enough to subsist on but has heard about "what happened to the small farmers in Mexico." I assured them that most U.S. farmers have no idea what the FTA will do to small farmers in Cuzco. They asked me to use my influence to tell farmers about their brothers and sisters in the Urubamba Valley. "We have children too," one woman told me. "We don’t want them to starve."

I promised to pray and to speak out. The crowd laughed when I asked them to pray for us, but I in-sisted. To do what’s right by all the world’s farmers, I told them, the brothers and sisters in the U.S. are going to need God’s guidance. We’re going to have to learn to listen and to consider how our actions, our policies, our laws affect all peoples -- something that is not easy to do. One woman promised to pray each day, and I thought of San Martin. He would have been concerned about our inability to care for the poor, to follow the servant Christ. He would have prayed for us. He would have prayed as he was commanded, wanting for us what he wanted for himself: knowing the love of God to the point of joyful, selfless service.

Christ was asked to cite the most important commandment. If he had stopped at "Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart," we could be satisfied with building glorious churches, creating amazing worship services and giving extravagant offerings. But Christ gave a second commandment -- the corollary of loving God, its indispensable application: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus tells us that we are called to do for the poor farmer in Cuzco, the inner-city gang member, the undocumented worker and the pregnant teen what we would want done if we were in their places. Most of us don’t know if we are capable of such selflessness.

As I pondered our ability and inability to love, I returned to the Hebrews passage. The only way I can make sense of Jesus’ commandment is to focus on redemption. As if intoning a beloved hymn, I remind myself: "How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!"

Then I pray for my sisters and brothers who are welcoming spring in the Urubamba valley.

Small Change (Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44)

The story of the widow’s mite offers a profound contrast between two types of temple worshipers. But we often misinterpret the reason for Christ’s comparison. He is not preaching a lesson in personal piety and sacrificial giving -- although pastors like to use this story during stewardship campaigns. It is critical that we hear instead an indictment of the preference we show to the rich and successful. In Jesus’ time as today, worshipers were assigned worth according to what they could do for the temple. Prominent "teachers of the law" were seen as assets, while poor widows were a definite burden.

Although we as church leaders are proud to count prominent teachers of the law as church members, Jesus tells us that it is the poor widow who is fulfilling her calling and is showing the right relationship to God.

I think of my first visit to an American church back in the 1970s, when I was an exchange student. I came from a very conservative Catholic background and was not used to lay participation in worship. When I heard the pastor ask, "Brother ____ will you lead us in prayer for the offering?" I felt that the pastor was using the opportunity to publicly acknowledge the importance of a particular church member. I remember being a little embarrassed; I heard echoes of the Pharisee’s prayer in the temple (Luke 18:10-14), a sort of litany of privilege which sounded to me like: "Thank you that we are citizens of this great country. Thank you that we have good jobs that pay ten times what the rest of the world makes so that we can bring this bountiful offering."

I still feel somewhat embarrassed by those prayers. I want to amend them by standing up and adding: "Forgive us for taking our good jobs for granted and doing so little to secure living wages for all your children. Forgive us for enjoying our luxurious church building while so many of your children feel unwelcome and unworthy to even come in.

I am also embarrassed by the titles that we flaunt in church. For example, I cringe when I recall a service of dedication for a seminary professor’s baby. The bulletin listed the names of babies and parents in what seemed to be their order of importance, starting with "Amy Marie, the child of Dr. and Dr. ____" There is a thin line between affirming church members and putting value signs on them. Why do we introduce visitors and new members by their job titles and degrees? What title do we give to a poor, unemployed widow? Could this lack of sensitivity be the reason she is not joining our worship?

I served for nine years as pastor of a mission church. My transient and poor-immigrant congregation couldn’t meet the denominational expectation of our becoming a self-supporting church. At best, on a Sunday there might be six or eight adults who could read well enough to help in the liturgy. Some needed glasses -- a luxury for new immigrants. Others were illiterate or lacked self-confidence. One man liked to stay close to the back door "in case immigration police come. Most felt inadequate and undeserving. These worshipers brought little that the various denominations can quantify in reports.

A fellow pastor, whose ministry at a shelter reaches many battered women and many children, confided to me that she doctors her reports, counting as offering money the honoraria and donations she has received through speaking engagements. She doesn’t want the viability of her church or her members’ faithfulness to come into question. She shields those who need the love of God. She wants the offering reports to reflect what she and I know the worshipers are bringing: more than they can afford, given out of profound thankfulness to God. I remember seeing Helena, a widow, unfolding a $20 bill to put in the offering plate. I knew that at the same time her family was having to sell its possessions to pay the ransom for her only son, imprisoned by guerrillas in Colombia.

All too often we turn these "poor widows" away. Some Anglo churches evict their poor Hispanic mission congregations; some denominational leaders are slow to advocate in behalf of newly homeless congregations. Our leaders tend to focus on church planting that is viable: churches get started in wealthy subdivisions full of professionals who can give out of their abundance and pray eloquently. These churches are solvent and have wonderful programs, but their members may be excluding and even exploiting the poor.

As I go to court with poor immigrants, visit their children in schools and translate for them in job interviews, I am always stmck by how much social capital I have by simply being able to speak English well and to work as a professional in the community. The immigrants are poor in voice and status. May God forgive me when I feel that I am of more value to the kingdom. May God forgive us, his churchpeople, for using our social capital to attract to our churches those who are powerful and rich while we ignore those who might seem a burden -- those whose humble worship surely pleases God.

Wrestling with the Death Penalty

Book Review:

The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice. By Bill Kurtis. Public Affairs, 192 pp.

Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA. By Tim Junkin. Algonquin Books, 304 pp

Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. Edited by Erik C. Owens, John D. Carlson and Eric P Elshtain. Eerdmans, 318 pp.

The Sound of Sheer Silence and the Killing State: The Death Penalty and the Bible. By Millard Lind. Cascadia, 188 pp.

Everyone has an opinion about the death penalty. Theoretically (and abstractly) I have always been opposed to it, for the usual reasons: there are too many mistakes for such a permanent solution; there are too many racial, IQ and class inequities; there is no conclusive evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime -- and there is a good bit of evidence that it is violent crime. Also, it seems to me as a Christian that it contradicts the gospel call for forgiveness and truncates the possibility of transformation.

I’ve never been able to forget a story I heard on public radio told by a man called Race Horse. Having been evangelized by no one, Race Horse found himself in the worst conditions of solitary confinement – "the hole" in a southern prison. It was dark, the guards had taken his clothes, he was defenseless. Inexplicably and quite suddenly, he was caught up in the assurance that God loved him, and his life was never the same.

But all of these fine sentiments about capital punishment were tested eight years ago when my 25-year-old niece was brutally murdered, along with two young coworkers, in a Starbucks in the upscale Georgetown community of Washington, D.C. It was the end of a Fourth of July weekend, there was an accumulation of money in the safe, and Cait was the manager in charge of clean-up. An assailant with two firearms entered the coffee shop and killed all three of them without taking a penny. Cait died from three gunshot wounds to the head and chest, with the keys to the safe clutched in her hand. The Starbucks manual expressly tells employees not to use heroic measures in the face of violent crime, but certain young people will ever be brave. Because it was Georgetown, because there were three victims, news clips of the three body bags being removed from the scene played on TV over and over again.

The search for the assailant went on for a year and a half. The FBI became involved because the prime suspect had committed several violent crimes -- he had killed a security guard and wounded a Prince George’s County police officer -- and because he was involved in interstate drug running. The District of Columbia does not have capital punishment; the feds do. When Janet Reno called for the death penalty, we had to face facts; we were a divided family. My mother, my sister and I continued to stand firmly against capital punishment; others were less sure. Luckily the assailant, Carl Cooper, took a plea bargain and confessed to enough crimes to get him life in prison without parole. But all of this caused me to become much clearer in my own reasoning.

What do families expect to glean from execution? Closure? Some books cannot be closed. Cait’s could not. The arrest brought great relief, but we don’t want closure on her life or even her death, for the way she died tells us a great deal about the world we live in and the kind of work that needs to be done to make all of our neighborhoods safer places to live.

Justice? What was done to Cait and Emory and Aaron was grossly unjust. Killing Carl Cooper would not take that away. Killing everyone on death row would not take that away. It is an affront that will remain on the record until all injustice is wiped away by divine intervention. There are some injustices that human law cannot reconcile -- and ought not try to reconcile.

Peace? If we had waited until Cooper’s trial and ultimate execution for our peace, we would be troubled people indeed. In such a rending of life and family, peace needs to be immanent, continually sought, recognized in small acts. Planning the memorial service, filled with poetry and scripture, meant much to me. At the service itself, during the last hymn, "Amazing Grace," people spontaneously moved into the aisles so they could hold one another -- and hold on. Witnessing Cooper’s execution would have been cold comfort indeed compared with these events.

I later received a letter from my sister in which she reflected on the memorial service for Cait. She said: "I can only think on it with pleasure: turning destructive hate/venom into love and forgiveness, good memories of this essentially good child. There’s no doubt that I think Carl Cooper -- having admitted to at least five murders -- should be imprisoned. I have no idea how to redeem him, to correct his hurts and terrible passions, nor do I have much hope for that -- though as I think about it, I may try to visit him someday."

That is my story. We need stories because they humanize the abstract and allow both teller and hearers to locate themselves within a shifting landscape of moral values.

Of four recent books confronting and critiquing the death penalty in the U.S., two illustrate the important difference between telling and storytelling. Their authors speak from knowledge of persons who were exonerated after spending years on death row. Bill Kurtis, CBS correspondent and anchor of Cold Case Files, launches The Death Penalty on Trial with the statistics that convinced former Illinois governor George Ryan to declare a moratorium on executions in his state in 2000 and, three years later, to commute all death sentences. For example, since reinstatement of capital punishment in the 1970s, Illinois had exonerated and released more death row inmates than it had executed. With this recent history as context, Kurtis works his way through the cases of Ray Krone (whom DNA evidence proved innocent of the murder of a woman in Chicago) and Thomas Kimball (who was exonerated after a careful vetting of circumstantial evidence). Kurtis reluctantly concludes that any of us could be caught in the trap of a judicial system that makes the kinds of mistakes he painstakingly narrates.

Attorney and novelist Tim Junkin presents a single case in Bloodsworth. Dawn Hamilton was nine years old when she took a walk in the woods near her home in Essex, Maryland, in July 1984. Later her body was found; she had been raped and brutally murdered. Her anxious parents wanted the perpetrator arrested and erased from society, and they put terrible pressure on detectives to round up suspects quickly.

Kirk Bloodsworth, an ex-marine who was going through a bad time -- drifting from job to job, drinking, smoking pot, at odds with his girlfriend and parents. -- presented an easy target. After he was arrested, bungled police procedures, bad forensic science and overreliance on investigative techniques such as psychological profiling, composite sketching of suspects and unreliable eyewitness accounts skewed the case. Bloodsworth found himself on death row, facing Maryland’s gas chamber and the brutal threats aimed at anyone in the prison system who has been accused of child rape. He continued to assert his innocence, writing hundreds of letters to anyone who would listen and scouring the prison library for material pertaining to his case and others like it. Eventually he was exonerated by DNA evidence, a fact readers discover in the first chapter -- which colors one’s journey through this labyrinthine account with incredulity.

Bloodsworth is a fast-paced thriller with a happy ending, but the real hook of the story is what happened to the suspect -- something that, again, could happen to any of us. Bloodsworth, who is presently an advocate for criminal-justice reform, drives this home: "And if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. It can happen to your child, your son, your daughter -- it can happen to anybody." For a moment the reader becomes as vulnerable as the protagonist.

Because it focuses on a single case, Bloodsworth is more effective than The Death Penalty on Trial, which does not allow for the same depth of reader engagement. But the storytelling approach works well for both, bringing readers to the verdict that the death penalty is a highly dangerous judgment that perhaps ought to be "put down" itself.

And yet, in an ironic turn, both authors are highly suspicious of the narrative approach when it is used to influence a verdict in court. Kurtis reminds readers of the musical Chicago, in which lawyer Billy Flynn tells Roxie Hart, on trial for the murder of her boyfriend, "You’ve got nothing to worry about, kid. It’s all about show business, and I’m a star." Flynn intends to win acquittal by using the old "razzle-dazzle" on the jury. Kurtis sees this scene repeated in almost any courtroom where "two lead actors -- the prosecuting and defense attorneys" face off in an effort to create a persuasive story" that will "make the jury think the way [they] think." Highlighting the rhetorical skills of one prosecutor, Kurtis concludes, "All he needs are a few pieces of evidence and he [can] construct a palace." Talk about razzle-dazzle!

Junkin also highlights the lawyer’s socially perceived role, enhanced by televised celebrity trials, as dramatic entertainer. "A trial is a game. A contest. A re-creation that may or may not bear any semblance to what it purports to mimic. The lawyer’s job is to win this contest." Junkin contends that "walking into the courtroom is like walking into a theater" and that, depending on how the show plays, the defendant can feel caught inside "some insane theatrical production" with no exit. Both Kurtis and Junkin also point out the vast difference in state resources that go to the prosecution compared to the defense; prosecuting attorneys tend to get top billing.

The genius of stories is that the hearers and readers cannot remain outside the text but have to play the game the story sets up, entering the gaps the storyteller strategically leaves for just that purpose. Kurtis and Junkin contend that closing statements at a trial are quite different. While acknowledging the humanity of the participants, the attorney ought to construct a linear argument, a coherent and exhaustive arrangement of empirical facts that can bear the weight of scientific scrutiny. Kurtis and Junkin argue that in the adversarial and contentious U.S. system of justice, a lawyer is almost required to be a showman. The assumed goal is to win the fight by any means possible, not necessarily to aid the court in discovering facts. So when, in Junkin’s account, Judge Smith of Baltimore County admonishes a prosecutor who has lost sight of the difference between fact and fiction -- "It isn’t gamesmanship we are playing here. It is truth" -- he is holding up an enviable distinction that both Junkin and Kurtis wish were in place. While it is accurate to say that story produces truth, it is not the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt kind of truth that ought to be the goal in a court of law.

This distinction resolves the tension between Kurtis and Junkin’s narrative methods and their critique of courtroom histrionics. As they present their stories of persons exonerated from death penalty judgments, both authors seek their readers’ interpretive complicity in evaluating the effects that tragic legal oversights have on defendants and communities. Both strive to be factual, but neither argues the case or pretends to do so.

The other two books in this foursome are explicitly expository. Religion and the Death Penalty, which emerged from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and Millard Lind’s The Sound of Sheer Silence and the Killing State offer much to extend and challenge thinking about capital punishment.

Religion and the Death Penalty is organized around religious traditions, specific religious arguments and policy applications of moral theory. Some highlights of this collection are Khaled Abou El Fadl’s eloquent explication of the complexities and restraints behind implementation of the death penalty under Islamic law; an interesting intersection between Fadl’s discussion of reticence in the use of the death penalty and David Novak’s review of capital cases in Jewish tradition; Stanley Hauerwas’s unequivocal claim that the cross is justice (negatively in terms of Jesus’ execution according to human law and positively in terms of the ultimate meaning of the cross as mercy and forgiveness); and, conversely, the claim by Beth Wilkinson, prosecutor in the Timothy McVeigh case, that "Even as a Christian, I felt nothing for Mr. McVeigh."

What I brought away from this collection of essays is the humbling realization that Christians hardly have the last word in terms of complex moral reasoning and that Christians hardly agree, even on religious principles, about something so radically central as the right of the state to engage in premeditated murder. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a proponent of the death penalty on moral and constitutional grounds, soberly admits that he is part of a "machinery of death"

The target audience for Religion and the Death Penalty is quite different from that of Kurtis’s and Junkin’s narratives. It was compiled for academic and policy-oriented persons and contains few personal stories; the authors seem to be after our minds and souls, not particularly our hearts. The Sound of Sheer Silence and the Killing State has an even narrower target audience -- serious biblical Christians and seminarians. Lind is a Mennonite, so readers will be pretty sure where he is heading with his analysis, but if they have an interest in the fine points of biblical hermeneutics, the journey on which he takes them is quite enlightening. Readers may not understand every point, but there is no danger of getting completely lost. Lind establishes the design of his argument, executes it and then reminds readers of what they have read. It is significant and validating to observe that many of the points he raises are echoed by the Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars writing in Religion and the Death Penalty.

Lind rejects the notion that the Old Testament lex talionis (an eye for an eye) is about revenge; rather, he claims, it is about ensuring that no punishment exceeds the crime. Likewise, he contends, God’s covenant with Noah establishing that those who shed the blood of human beings will have their own blood shed is not about the death penalty. Rather, he argues, God was using a parable to remind the descendants of Noah that human life is worthy because it reflects the image of God.

Lind reminds readers that the Decalogue is preceded by a "motive-model sentence" assuring the Israelites that they have been granted liberation and grace by God, who brought them out of slavery. He also reminds them of how complicated the prophets’ dealings with hubristic death-dealing kings were and of how beautifully Jesus builds on the work of the prophets.

While acknowledging that God allows his people to practice the death penalty, Lind illustrates how closely that allowance is governed by moral and procedural checks, and he notes that it is never condoned by Jesus:

"For Jesus, the solution to the problem of the broken human relationship is not retribution -- not even the limitation of the lex talionis, equal damage -- but forgiveness to infinity."

The Sound of Sheer Silence and the Killing State is a valuable addition to the literature of biblical exegesis on the death penalty, but it will not reach beyond a fairly small circle of specialized readers. More problematically, it glosses over the question of reasoning biblically with the secular state, an issue much better handled by David Novak and Stanley Hauerwas in Religion and the Death Penalty -

A weakness of both theoretical volumes is that the authors cite few contemporary cases to validate and complicate the points they make. Like the first two books treated here, these are not courtroom arguments that lead to a single irrefutable point. They are speculative works designed to engage their readers in discourse. For that purpose, readers would have been well served by the use of diverse stories to illustrate important ideas. All readers desire the integration of theory and praxis, of mind and heart. This is not about adversarial razzle-dazzle, it’s about incarnational thinking. Who knows when any of us might have to face this issue in the flesh? As someone who has been forced to do so, I welcome all the information -- factual, philosophical and personal -- that I can get.