Articles – Page 185 – Religion Online

Selling Native American Soul

One cool October afternoon in Vancouver, British Columbia, I took my place in line to see what the critics had deemed the runaway hit of the 1986 World’s Fair. "Spirit Lodge," sponsored by General Motors, was a nine-minute Indian mystical experience. Crowds waited patiently in line, often for as long as five hours, to glimpse a show which had been running every ten minutes for 12 hours, several days a week for five months. Bob Rogers, director of the GM exhibit, commented that "during the first days someone had to actually stand outside and beg people to come and see it. They’d say ‘A nine-minute show? No thanks.’ "But then," Rogers said, "the world discovered it."

"Spirit Lodge" captivated audiences with scenes of an aged Indian storyteller recounting the legend of a magic canoe that could transform the initiated believer (thanks to cameras and holographic expertise) into a different time and space. It was a rare show at the fair. In contrast to the exhibits that glorified technology, the GM production hinted at an ancient, elusive mystery. With the help of 70 mm film images and a focused light crystal, actors in heavy makeup and costumes invited casual observers to participate in a third dimension filled with dreams, eagles and shadowy visions.

The commercialization of religious experience is not unique to our society or era. Yet even casual observers can’t help noticing the rise of interest in Native spirituality. Whether in advertisements for Sun Bear and his Vision Questing Seminars or in a Mann County weekend invitation to an expensive "authentic" Sioux sweatlodge ceremony, the recent marketing of Indian religious experience and ritual warrants a closer examination. This trend may be yet another example of the burden of materialism and our hunger for alternative realities. It also betrays a subtle but destructive prejudice that continues to divide and plague the American psyche.

Any casual browsing through bookstore shelves reveals a glut of books on modern spirituality that claim a vague authority by beginning with variations of "A medicine man once told me. . ." There is no sign that the best-selling Medicine Woman series by Lynn Andrews or Carlos Castenada’s almost-classic Teachings of Don Juan, the Yaqui Sorcerer have lost any of their legitimacy or attractiveness -- despite mounting criticism from the Native community. Organizations and agencies dealing with Native tribal groups put their own credibility in jeopardy by not using more discernment in endorsing such works.

As those who work alongside tribal groups know, tribal spiritual leaders are generally reluctant publicly to criticize others. This is partly due to a Native respect for personal experience. It is also, in part, due to a proliferation of spiritual leaders within any given tribal clan or Native community. These men and women lack the priestly frames of authority common to institutional churches. Equally significant, Native people are cautious as a result of the repression of Native traditional practices over generations. Although initial provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 affirmed constitutional protection for the practice of Native traditional beliefs, those basic rights continue to be threatened by legal challenges to the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978. In both northern California’s recent Gasquette-Orleans Road Supreme Court ruling of 1988 and South Dakota’s 1983 court ruling on Bear Butte, indigenous peoples lost protection of and access to sacred sites which in their view have for centuries held life-giving power and meaning. Yet despite their suspicion of the public and doubts about the government’s willingness to defend their religious rights, tribal leaders across North America are increasingly critical of Native and non-Native "medicine teachers" who proclaim themselves the carriers of revelation and special power.

Two intriguing examples of what is at stake here are the resurgence of interest in the photographs of Edward S. Curtis and the recent (now defunct) lawsuit filed against Andrews, whose books relate her training as a shaman. These events reflect the shape and complexity of what is fast becoming a source of bitter dispute and misunderstanding among Indians, spiritual seekers and their often well-meaning but uninformed allies and supporters.

Curtis’s photography is featured in displays on Native American culture and history across the U.S. and Europe. Curtis gained only fleeting respect and recognition during his lifetime; a man of extraordinary energy and talent, he died relatively unknown in 1952. The first publication of his work received mediocre reviews. In the 1970s his 20-volume work The North American Indian (1909-1930) unexpectedly re-emerged after 40 years of obscurity, riding a wave of interest in Native American life. It swiftly became the single most sought-after historical document available on the subject. A complete set sold for $73,000 in 1982, more than 24 times its original price. Anthologies about Indians, popular magazine articles and feature newspaper stories continue to publish Curtis’s now-familiar depictions of statuesque Native warriors, hunters, dancers and medicine men. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most influential of the photographer’s patrons, wrote in the preface to the original series:

"In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because he is truthful."

Marketing Indian religion or any product depends upon consumer expectation. In his insightful, fascinating work The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions, Christopher M. Lyman describes how Curtis manipulated both his subjects and his medium to create an image that reinforced cultural stereotypes of "Indianness." Although the subject of his portraits were from different tribes, says Lyman, Curtis frequently photographed them in the same costume. "The costume was probably a prop which Curtis carried with him to make his subjects look ‘Indian."’ Lyman suggests that we consider whose needs are being met by such depictions.

In a time of cultural disintegration such as ours the longing for a "golden age" or an "original people" is natural, emotionally comforting and even psychologically appropriate. But it is a problem, Lyman writes, when such collective longings serve to categorize and limit a people’s authentic religious expression.

Two personal incidents illustrate the consequences of such romantic projections. The first is a comment made to me not long ago by a tribal elder from Neah Bay, a village on the Makah Indian Reservation perched on the edge of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. It was not unusual in the peak of the summer tourist season to have visitors roam through her community peering into the windows of the homes. "Once I asked them what they were looking for," she said with bemusement. Their reply was that "they were looking for real Indians!"

The other incident involved a young Native woman from Pine Ridge who found herself fulfilling the Indian quota on several church committees. "The less I speak," she observed, "the more they think I know, the more mysterious they think I am." Extremely sensitive, gifted and dedicated, she felt tremendous pressure to "be the Indian" in a spiritual sense; this finally contributed to a emotional breakdown. Those who work in multicultural church ministries know that such incidents are far too common, especially for Native Americans.

An even more devastating illustration of the selling of Native American soul is embodied in the controversy surrounding Lynn Andrews. Five highly acclaimed books focusing on her relations of Native spiritual teachings have built a career for Andrews, a Beverly Hills actress who has taken her Workshop "Into the Crystal Dreamtime" on nationwide tours. Medicine Woman (Harper & Row, 1980) , the initial account of her experiences, won Andrews an enormous response from readers across the country. That and subsequent books were marketed as nonfiction. Her writings describe how in the mid-’70s she became an apprentice to Agnes Whistling Elk, a Native American medicine woman who Andrews claimed was a Cree shaman from Manitoba. Jaguar Woman (1985) , Star Woman (1986) and Crystal Woman (1987) , her sequels, all became New York Times best sellers.

In 1987 1 asked a Taos Pueblo Native who is also a clinical psychologist and college professor what he knew of Andrews’s reputation among tile Cree people of Manitoba. (He has worked as a consultant among the Cree.) His comments, though guarded, were unsettling. On his journeys into Manitoba and his frequent work among the Cree he had sought to verify her claims. No one had even heard of her.

In November 1988 an affidavit was filed with a lawsuit brought by David Carson, a writer and former live-in companion of Andrews, contending that "as a result of our personal relationship, she and I composed a series of literary works that includes Medicine Woman, Flight of the Seventh Moon, Jaguar Woman and Star Woman." Jonathon Adolph, a senior editor of New Age Journal, and journalist Richard Smoley began an immediate investigation. In their New Age Journal report, "Beverly Hills Shaman" (March-April 1989) , they acknowledge that in February Carson and his attorney unexpectedly indicated their intention to drop the suit, and they document that prior to that action Carson had made claims suggesting that many of Andrews ‘s experiences were the results of his own creative imagination. David Hall, a longtime acquaintance of Carson who said he watched the two work together, claims that Andrews supplied rough sketches from her experiences in Beverly Hills, and Carson wove them into a fictional narrative describing her exotic adventures with various shamans based on his own knowledge of Native American culture. Carson has claimed he is of Choctaw descent. Both Adolph and Smoley document court papers that show that even before Carson filed his suit he had been offered $15,000 by Andrews’s New York agent.

Adolph and Smoley also collected bitter criticisms of Andrews from Native American leaders contending that she had made errors regarding geography and custom, especially in her descriptions of ancient ceremonies. In an interview with New Age Journal Andrews said that "a lot of Indians are not upset, with my work." But when her publicist was asked to provide names, she produced only two: one who described herself as a Chicano and another woman who said she had a distant Native American relative.

Andrews’s own religious experience is not the issue as much as her use of Native American references and symbols out of context. For instance, in her books her teacher Agnes Whistling Elk uses Hopi and Lakota terms, even though she is supposedly a Cree. Two of the exotic ceremonies performed by Crees in Medicine Woman are unknown among the Cree people of Manitoba, according to Flora Zaharia, former director of the Native Education Branch of the Manitoba Department of Education. Adolph and Smoley quote Zaharia as saying that "Andrews is making a joke out of our spirituality and Native culture."

The popularity of Andrews’s writings reflects a great spiritual hunger. To her credit she knows, better than most, that the American dream has moved, in these last decades of the 20th century, into a desperate search for the sacred and mystical. But for Andrews or anyone else to address this need by deliberately misappropriating and misrepresenting whatever fragments of spirituality are left among indigenous peoples is unethical and spiritually misguided. Both Native and non-Native become the poorer for it.

In the midst of this dilemma the Native voice itself proves most helpful. This past June the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders, an intertribal gathering of North American spiritual and tribal leaders, met for its 12th annual conference, this time on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. It made public a seven-page ‘Communiqué" that included the following statement:

It is important to respect the fact that some ceremonial knowledge is sacred and private, meant only for the medicine societies that are responsible for those particular functions. All people are beneficiaries of these ceremonies. It is a great offence to exploit sacred knowledge. Proper performance and participation is the duty of designated traditional religious leaders. Many of these ceremonies are site-specific in their respective indigenous nations

Warnings against exploiting Native spirituality are increasingly blunt and direct. Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux, attorney and author of Custer Died for Your Sins and God ls Red, was featured in mid-August as a key speaker at the Spirit of Place Conference at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Organizers of the event had for the second consecutive year brought together architects, theologians, geomancers and community activists to explore perceptions of landscape, geography and the meaning of the sacred. Deference was appropriately shown to the Native community on this matter. But it was also apparent that many of the participants had been heavily influenced by popular images and expectations. When Deloria was asked about the popularity of Castenada’s writings, his answer was short and succinct. "Jamake Highwater, Lynn Andrews and Castenada are all of the same genre. Their writing is interesting, but it has nothing to do with Indians." He paused, took a sip of water from a glass, then continued, "It’s about what white people think Indians should be."

If Deloria’s perspective is accurate, what are we to make of the renaissance of Native religions in North America? Is it a fiction? Ask any of this summer’s 200 sun dancers from South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation or the thousands of young Native men and women participating these days in pipe ceremonies and sweatlodge rituals in prisons and in alcohol treatment programs across North America, and they will testify to the contrary. Even now initiates are preparing for their winter dancing rituals in the centuries-old secret Seyouwin societies that flourish on the western coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. What is important to understand is that Native spirituality takes specific forms among specific people, places and communities. There is no generic Indian religious experience that can be packaged and sold. Furthermore, much of the commercialization of Native religions violates basic rules governing Native Respect for the sacred: the prohibition of cameras, sketch books and tape recorders and the marketing of such knowledge for monetary gain.

As for the well-known "medicine men and women" who travel with their groupies and for-profit organizations, Ramona Soto Rank, Klamath tribal member and director for the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest, likes to remind seekers after authentic Native healers and spiritual teachers that these individuals seldom speak of themselves in such terms. Black Elk was working in a migrant worker camp in the l930s when John Neilhardt finally found him. It’s not unusual for the most noted of traditional healers in the Pacific Northwest to support themselves as seasonal fishermen and loggers.

What remains of authentic spiritual gifts should not be undervalued. Deeply experiential and personal, the rebirth of Native American religion reflects an unparalleled ecumenical openness. Those who are guests of that hospitality and openness will find it remarkable and lifegiving. It is linked, at the same time, intensely and practically, with the problems of treaty rights and land disputes that continue to ravage Native communities. This is no disembodied spiritualism that can be packaged and neatly marketed. The fusion of the spiritual life with the gritty problems of political survival, alcoholism and poverty is the real face and heart of the Native Soul. In their battle against spiritual exploitation and cultural disintegration, Indian leaders can teach those who listen the meaning of the sacred, and perhaps find hope and encouragement among conscientious new advocates and friends. Both Christian and Native religions must share the best from their respective traditions and symbols and point to a common wisdom for which the earth and our peoples so desperately cry.

Catholic Oaths and Academic Freedom

The tension has been exacerbated by the recent Vatican decision to reinstate fidelity oaths and to tighten bishops’ regulation of theological teaching at Catholic colleges and universities.

This past February the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, raised the stakes for Catholic theological faculties and, indirectly, for all theological studies by announcing that both new church officials and theologians and philosophers already on Catholic faculties had to subscribe to a revised oath of fidelity and a profession of faith. This issue reaches beyond Catholicism, however. For Protestants, the Catholic squabble represents an ecumenical challenge. For the academic world, it reawakens deep concerns over a fragile arrangement between faculty and administrations with its fatiguing but constant need to review conditions of academic governance and authority.

Behind the current conflict between episcopal authority and proponents of open theological inquiry is the legacy of the Catholic "modernist" controversy of the early 20th century. In 1907 Pope Pius X, conservative successor to Leo III, issued two documents. The first, the encyclical Pascendi gregis, condemned all reconception of dogma and doctrinal development and the rise of critical methods of inquiry. The second was a catalog of errors, Lamentabili sane exitu, condemning 65 alleged modernist mistakes about Scripture and Catholic doctrine. The effect of Pius’s action was to shut down critical Catholic scriptural and historical studies.

In 1910, an antimodernist oath, the Motu proprio sacrarum antistitum, was developed for ordinands. This became a provision in the Code of Canon Law from 1910 until its revision in 1967. In the present code, canon 833 continues to require a professio fidei but omits the explicitly antimodernist disclaimers. This revision was necessary because of the great changes in Catholic theological and scriptural studies since World War II. which were so evident at Vatican II.

A profession of faith, then, is not new for those who speak in the name of the church -- cardinals, bishops, diocesan officials and rectors of universities and seminaries. In the revised law of 1983, the provisions of canon 833 extend also to theologians and others who teach in faith and ethics "in any universities whatsoever. The profession of faith has in recent decades focused largely on subscription to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 and has not been viewed as a divisive issue by either administrators or faculty in Catholic universities. After the revisions of 1967, when the antimodernist stipulations were removed, the profession simply went beyond the creed to declare:

I firmly embrace and retain each and every thing which has been proposed by the church regarding the teaching of faith and morals, whether defined by solemn judgment or asserted and declared by the ordinary magisterium, especially those things which concern the mystery of the holy church of Christ and its sacraments and the sacrifice of the Mass and the primacy of the Roman pontiff.

That single supplementary sentence has now been replaced by three sentences which move dramatically beyond the standard creedal expectations. If enforced, the three sentences will create substantial difficulty for theologians teaching in American Catholic universities.

The first additional sentence reasserts definitive magisterial authority:

With firm faith I believe as well everything (ea omnia) contained in God’s word. written or handed down in tradition and proposed by the church -- whether in solemn judgment or in the ordinary and universal magisterium as divinely revealed and calling for faith tamquam divinitus revelata credenda).

Much will depend here, obviously, on how extensively one understands the proposals of the "ordinary and universal magisterium." The second sentence in part qualifies the first by specifying doctrinal areas of required assent rather than the authority of the church’s teaching office:

I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing (omnia et singula) that is proposed by that same church definitively (definitive) with regard to teaching concerning faith and morals.

Here, too, much will depend on the canonical definition of the specific agencies in which the church speaks "definitively." But a deeper issue looms here. What does it mean to speak of something which is definitively "proposed"? Is this a broader category than something definitively stated and, if so, is one’s acceptance of something proposed the same as one’s assent to a formal declaration of doctrine?

The third sentence is the most problematic:

What is more, I adhere (adhaereo) with religious submission of will and intellect (religioso voluntatis et intellectus obsequio) to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic magisterium even if they proclaim those teachings in an act that is not definitive.

This sentence extends theological assent to include even positions in faith and ethics that are acknowledged as less than final. This addition sharply curtails the range of dissent from the official positions of the Vatican, because it blurs the distinction between fallible and infallible.

Yet even here much depends on the interpretation of key Latin words. Some have suggested that this whole issue rests on how terms like obsequium are translated. Charles Curran, for instance, has long contended that this term is central in discussions with the Vatican and that Ratzinger is pressing an interpretation of the term that is at odds with the spirit of Vatican II. One could interpret obsequium, as "deference" or "loyalty" and still hold a dissenting position. But in its strict sense of "submission," the term would make any dissent impermissible. How such terms will be understood clearly depends on the bishops themselves.

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has not responded officially to this new Vatican initiative. It may be too early to assess any informal response of American bishops. in part because many are waiting to hear from the Congregation for Higher Education which met in Rome in April. and which is itself in the midst of revising a controversial set of guidelines regarding the relationship of the Vatican to all Catholic universities. But initial reactions and the largely conservative nature of American bishops portend a significant clash. This conflict may be offset by the critique of Catholic canonists, however. One of them, James Coriden of the Washington Theological Union, has recently raised an oblique but nonetheless significant challenge as to whether the Vatican decrees were themselves legitimately authorized.

Several Catholic bishops have already indicated strong interest in an authoritative resolution of the kind of conflicts reflected in the Curran case. One who is in a strategic position to work toward that resolution is Adam Maida, bishop of Green Bay. Maida, who has degrees in both canon and civil law and is presently a peritus for the Vatican Congregation for Higher Education, has in the past responded favorably to the kind of revisions which the Vatican has now made. He has been quoted as saying that "to be a Catholic college or university, one must reflect the teaching mission of the church and be consistent with those who are the teachers, the magisterium -- the holy father, the bishops -- who reflect the traditions of the Church." His may be the dominant view among the American Catholic hierarchy. In this view a theologian cannot take a position in faith or ethics that is contrary to the magisterial teaching "any more than you could espouse as fact in a secular university that one and one are three." Maida’s position and Curran’s treatment at Catholic University of America (Maida is also a CUA trustee) shows clearly that there are substantial limitations on intellectual and academic freedom in matters of faith and ethics. In fact, Catholic academic freedom is seriously at odds with normative academic freedom.

The second difficulty would arise within Catholic faculties of theology and religious studies, and in other departments wherever courses in faith and ethics are studied. At least three tiers would exist as a consequence of the oath and profession. Those who subscribed to 833 would be one group, officially the "Catholic theologians." A second group would be those who have not subscribed and have no license; they could teach only in those other areas where "faith and ethics" are not involved or not substantively so. This could be like asking someone to teach biology without mentioning biochemistry. A third group would be non-Catholics who by definition could not take the oath and would not be expected to adhere to Catholic teaching. Not being "Catholic theologians," they could teach with episcopal approval in several areas of theology and religious studies such as world religions and comparative and critical studies.

These distinctions and divisions create a minefield. They would bring about a curricular nightmare and would undermine disciplinary as well as professional unity. Such a three-tiered system would work only with great difficulty. In reaction, departments would probably adhere to the safety of the first tier, sliding back into an old-line "theology department" heavily involved in catechetics. In that case, the other faculty would probably move to departments of history, philosophy, sociology and area studies.

Much more significant for theologians than these practical difficulties, however, are issues of principle. It is not clear whether such an oath would be compatible with the policy on academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors and its provisions for academic tenure. The requirement would not apply to faculty appointments made before the effective date of March 1, 1989, assuming church law is not retroactive. But schools seeking to apply both the current civil standards of academic freedom and this canon to new faculty would invite litigation.

Beyond legal questions of academic tenure, however, are three problems which may be much more serious. First, the revised canon fails to understand that the church college or university must stand in both the Christian tradition and the intellectual and scientific world. No one would grant credence to a church-related institution which chose contemporaneity over fidelity to its own tradition. At the same time, a church college or university is worthless as an institution of inquiry and intellectual integrity if it seeks fidelity at the cost of contemporary scholarship. Its challenge, but also its deepest mission, is to live faithfully and to probe honestly. Catholic higher education will cease to be genuinely higher studies if it does not engage the challenges; it would become merely an extension of a parochial enterprise, confirming what some catechists have long sought and what many suspicious secularists have long believed.

The revised canon fails to understand the true nature of the Catholic college or university because it assumes an enduring conflict between faith and truth or, at least, assumes that faith seeking understanding will always operate in obedience to the institutional understanding of faith. To assent to the magisterial formulations not only now but in the future is not to give assent but to surrender -- to surrender the intellectual freedom that lies at the core of the church’s educational mission. Unconditional assent is directly opposed to scholarly integrity. Hence, such a profession of faith goes against the very purpose of Catholic higher education.

The revised canon condemns the Catholic theology and religious studies department to a second rank and will inevitably diminish faculty recruiting. With the enforcement of the oath and profession, a clear distinction will emerge between the freedom and pluralism of the non-Catholic schools and Catholic faculties. Further, the restrictions which officially apply only to theologians and certain philosophers will affect the recruitment of faculty in other disciplines, especially in small colleges. Faculty in the social and natural sciences will hesitate to apply to a small college where such a policy of oaths exists, even if only in another department.

In the preliminary discussions which have been held by academicians in Catholic institutions since the decree was announced, there has been a consensus that the oath and profession could severely damage the intellectual reputation of Catholic colleges and universities, returning them to their isolated position of the 19th century. This possibility guarantees resistance to the policy.

The revised canon also ignores the interdisciplinary and ecumenical nature of contemporary religious studies and theology. The Vatican seems oblivious of one of the most obvious and impressive facts about contemporary theology-that one cannot draw the traditional lines between Catholic theological efforts and those that spring from other parts of the Christian tradition or even from non-Christian sources. This has long been recognized in scriptural studies, but it is also commonplace in systematic theology and theological and social ethics. Just as Protestants study today with great profit the works of Rahner, Tracy, Ruether, McCormick and Ratzinger, so Catholics study the works of Pannenberg, Gustafson, Wainwright, Yoder and Pelikan. Indeed, theologians don’t think primarily in terms of confessional theology, particularly when confronting contemporary science, philosophy, secularity or social crisis.

The oath and revised profession of faith attempt to go back to an earlier confessional period in theological studies. This may create the illusion of a more orthodox Catholic faculty, but it will also isolate Catholicism from the current stream of theological studies, to its loss and to the loss of the wider church as well.

An Unapologetic Middle Ground

Book Review:

Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation, by William C. Placher. Westminster: John Knox, 178 pp., $13.95.

William C. Placher, professor of philosophy and religion at Wabash College in Indiana, offers what he modestly describes as "an extended preface to contemporary discussions about theological method." if you are wary of method or "prologomena to prologomena," put aside your fears, because Placher never loses sight of constructive theology. His is "a Christian voice in a pluralistic conversation," and he uses it to discuss not only theological method but the possibilities for dialogue between science and religion and among various religions. Placher demonstrates that a Christian voice can be eminently conversable.

As in his earlier book, A History of Christian Thought: An Introduction, and its two supplementary volumes of selections from primary sources, Placher shows himself to be an insightful, judicious and reliable interpreter of the tradition and of significant figures and issues in contemporary debates. But although it can be used in the classroom. Unapologetic Theology is not really a textbook, nor is it merely a catalog. Rather. Placher uses a cumulative argument that, in the end, makes a convincing case for his own position. It has been observed that there are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who think people are more diverse. Placher is in the latter category. Thus he is impatient with classifying theologians as either "revisionist" or "post-liberal." Revisionists are said to "think it particularly important to correlate Christian beliefs with concerns and experiences that all people share and to stand ready to defend Christian convictions according to ‘publicly acceptable’ criteria of truth." Post-liberals, on the other hand, insist that "Christian theology should focus primarily on describing the internal logic of Christian faith -- how Christian beliefs relate to each other and function within the life of a Christian community."

Kaufman, Tracy, Langdon Gilkey and James Gustafson are among the many revisionists. Lindbeck, Frei, David Kelsey and Stanley Hauerwas are members of the more recently identified post-liberal camp. Many younger theologians have allied themselves with one side or the other, but Placher recognizes the concerns and insights of both sides and seeks a via media between the two.

Nevertheless, he confesses that his greater sympathy is for postliberalism. Apparently he is a born-again post-liberal, having overcome a "religious upbringing and sensibilities" which made post-liberalism "uncongenial." Ironically, his conversion occurred when he came to the conclusion that post-liberalism "offered the best account of how to do theology, given the philosophical views I found most persuasive."

The irony here is that post-liberals. according to their critics, are supposed to be indifferent (at best) to public discourse with those in disciplines outside the theological circle. Yet Placher’s experience is not unique. It was reading sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers (including philosophers of science) that moved Lindbeck to propose a "cultural-linguistic" model for understanding religion. Frei, acknowledging intellectual debts in the preface to his groundbreaking book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, listed literary critic Erich Auerbach and analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle alongside Karl Barth. Placher performs a useful service when he corrects misconceptions and deflates rhetorical hyperbole on both sides of the revisionist-post-liberal debate.

Much of his book is devoted to discussing the philosophical perspectives that make post-liberal theology seem appropriate. Of course, to speak of a philosophical foundation would compromise post-liberal axioms. Placher avoids this paradox by insisting that his constructive theological proposals do not depend on his philosophical arguments. He is willing to risk intellectual isolation if it should come to that in order to remain faithful to a Christian vision. However, this is not likely to occur in our post-Enlightenment, pluralistic intellectual environment. As Princeton philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout has written, ‘There is no method for good argument and conversation save being conversant -- that is, being well versed on one’s own tradition and on speaking terms with others’

Placher is conversant in both senses. He engages the writings of Rawls and Haberman. which represent "the greatest contemporary efforts to rescue something like the Enlightenment dream," but finds in their liberal tolerance a "hidden intolerance" toward views embedded in particular traditions. Placher detects "two unhappy forms of relativism in Foucault and Rorty, influential critics of Enlightenment liberalism: first, "a tendency toward nihilism in which nothing can be defended as good or tine," and second, "a kind of self-satisfaction in which one retreats to the way the world looks to us, . . . an intellectual ghetto." Neither the liberals nor their arch critics are sufficiently open "to genuinely pluralistic conversation in which people from very different starting points can debate and sometimes reach conclusions."

Placher stands between these two extremes in a middle ground which allows for genuine dialogue between science and religion and among different religious traditions. Only on this basis is it possible, he insists, to avoid the dishonesty, disrespect, subtle religious imperialism or superficiality which often attend such encounters. Here he discusses the interreligious dialogue strategies of Karl Rahner, John Hick, John Cobb and Paul Knitter. In various ways each fails to acknowledge or accept the particularity of differing religious convictions and traditions and therefore resists authentic pluralism.

In addition to its call for a truce between revisionists and post-liberals, the book’s principal constructive contribution is Placher’s account of Christian truth claims. It is often alleged that post-liberals -- especially those who, like Placher, wish to employ biblical narrative within a cultural-linguistic conception or religion -- are sort on truth claims. Truth for postliberals is said to be merely intra textual -- " true to the biblical narrative" or true as "an adequate use of concepts and symbols within the Christian linguistic community." Post liberals are accused of not adequately explaining what it means to say that Christian beliefs are really true.

Understanding a religion as a cultural-linguistic framework does not in itself presuppose or require that any of the religion’s claims be true in the ontological (as opposed to categorical’) sense. Yet this view of religion in no way precludes making the strongest of truth claims, as post-liberal theologians working within it have shown. Critics’ suspicions are not entirely unfounded, however, because post-liberals have not shown how, on the basis of their assumptions, truth claims can be accounted for.

This criticism will he harder to sustain after Unapologetic Theology. Placher picks up on Stout’s observation in Ethics After Babel that it is important to distinguish claims about truth trom those about justification. Justificatory arguments for what we believe to be true are always context-dependent, but this does not diminish the sense in which the belief is claimed to be true. Placher explains that Christians discern certain "patterns": they "see the universe as the creation of a loving God"; they read the Bible, and "find in the pattern of Jesus’ life a pattern which reoccurs again and again elsewhere in the Bible, in extrabiblical history, and in their own lives"; they see in Christ’s story "the center of a larger pattern that is for them the shape of all things."

Placher’s struggle to avoid the errors of philosophical foundationalism and radical relativism and his quest to find ways to "avoid the stultifying force of tradition without refusing to listen to the voices of tradition altogether" leave him in the middle, where he risks drawing fire from all sides. But Placher has made considerable progress toward his destination, and those who accompany him through these debates -- whatever their allegiances -- will find a rich itinerary and a stimulating guide.

Confessions of a Glutton

Paradise

was very nice

for Adam and his madam,

until they filched the fruit and took the fall.

They lost their place

and fell from grace

and you can bet we can’t forget

that eating is the oldest sin of all.

-- Victor Buono, Heavy

For as long as I can remember, I have been a compulsive eater and a compulsive dieter. I learned calorie tables before learning multiplication tables. I count calories the way hesychastic monks pray: constantly and unceasingly, recalculating the tally with each new mouthful, virtually with each breath. In addition to counting calories, I have labored through the Stillman Quick Weight Loss Diet, the Stillman 14-Day Shape-Up Program, the Scarsdale Diet, the Woman Doctor’s Diet for Women, and (most recently) the 35+ Diet for Women. When I was in graduate school I enrolled in an evening class at my university titled "Lose Weight and Never Find It Again." Unfortunately, my personal lost-and-found of adiposity continued to be more efficient than the title of the course suggested.

I remember, as if it were Camelot, one period of my life when my weight stayed stable for ten months, with relatively little effort. It was my senior year in college. I was living for the first time in a coed dormitory, and I was too bashful to go into the lounge where the snack machines -- along with the pool table -- were housed. Consequently, I never ate junk food between or in place of meals. I remember, as if it were Eden, two times when I actually lost weight without trying: in Paris when I had little money for food and spent most of my time walking and sightseeing; and one January at the Ecumenical Institute in Céligny, Switzerland, when I was eating only the prepared institutional meals -- the nearest épicerie was three miles away -- and jogging for an hour or so a day through picturesque Alpine villages.

But on the other hand, I remember the times in Sheol, times when I have been so set on a binge that I have fished for food out of garbage cans. I remember being tempted to steal food from stores, not because I couldn’t afford paying for it but because I was embarrassed for the cashier to see me buying so much snack food. I remember eating food that belonged to the three other women with whom I shared a duplex and rushing to the grocery store to replace it for fear of being discovered. I remember driving miles and miles around Atlanta to go to different franchises of the same fast food establishment because I was embarrassed to buy the number of biscuits I wanted at any single Mrs. Winners restaurant. I remember eating an entire bag of Pecan Sandies at one sitting, mouthful after frantic mouthful, and feeling my heart begin to pound irregularly. I remember thinking dully: "I’m eating myself into a heart attack; I’m committing a slow form of suicide."

For the past two years, I have stayed within the range of desirable weight for my height (according to the actuarial tables and calculating myself at a medium, not even a large, frame) Still, I catch myself thinking: five fewer pounds, just five fewer, and I would be a perfectly happy woman. A gain of as little as one notch on the scales, even when I know in my gut it is the result of premenstrual fluid retention, can send my mood reeling for days, with regrettable consequences for my work and my personal relationships.

Meanwhile, the theological response to this wide-scale predicament seems sadly lacking. While theologians and ethicists may discuss the politics of food distribution in our global economy, they say little about the ethical and spiritual entailments of daily food consumption by individuals obsessed with dieting and eating. Only from the fundamentalist camp are any voices heard, and these urge a simple submission to the will of God as a means of conquering food compulsions (and, consequently, of losing not only ugly but sinful fat). Such simple answers do not suffice. Do we really consider personal diet too trivial to warrant sustained theological exploration? Might we not appropriately -- indeed, urgently -- concern ourselves with the psycho-theology of everyday life?

The sensuality of sex is an everyday issue that consumes a great deal of theological and ethical attention. The even more commonly encountered sensuality of food, however, escapes notice. Perhaps theologians and ethicists are silent on the latter issue because they view eating as relatively harmless (except in its economic ramifications). Contemporary commentators on the traditional "seven deadly sins" tend to treat gluttony with indulgence; they see it as something comic, convivial, not really all that bad.

People (especially women) with weight problems and eating disorders offer a different assessment. To them (us) , fat is not "jolly" but hideous; feeding is not a convivial celebration but a shamefully wanton act that must be undertaken in secret. Out-of-control eating seems so awful it cannot even be talked about in public; discussing masturbatory practices and sexual preferences would be easier -- and more socially acceptable -- than discussing fantasies and fetishes having to do with food. To be an out-of-control eater, to eat in the ways described by the scholastics as the five forms of gluttonous behavior (eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly and with too much attention) , carries with it a horrendous burden of guilt, self-loathing and anguish.

While theologians may not take advantage of this fund of information, dieters know, perhaps better than anyone else, the meaning of fallenness. We understand perversion of the will. We are fully aware of the difference between knowing the good and doing it; wretched women and men that we are, we understand the war that rages between the law of our mind and the law of our members. We intentionally use the rhetoric of sin to describe our eating. We speak of being led into temptation; we convince ourselves that a wedge of leftover coffee cake can summon us into the kitchen to relieve it of its lonely misery -- by eating it we enable it to join its already digesting "better half." Then we blame hidden forces for our downfall: "I don’t know what got into me," we marvel; "I can’t believe I ate the whole thing." We categorize some foods (carrots and celery, low-fat cottage cheese) as intrinsically good, our allies in the war against the law of our members; others (chocolate, cookies, ice cream, fried anything) are intrinsically wicked, our sworn foes.

In this lone instance, we find it all too easy to love our enemies. When we have been valiant and "virtuous" in the struggle (which means we have not eaten anything "sinful") , we know the gates of heaven are at hand (it only feels like hell). When we have succumbed to sugars and fats, we act as our own confessors, assigning ourselves an appropriate caloric "penance."

By the same token, we use the language of Zion to chronicle our diets. "I broke down and ate a biscuit at breakfast this morning," we confess, "but I redeemed myself by jogging an extra three miles this afternoon." Dietary schemes promise both salvation and liberation. I have actually heard one hawker of subliminal weight-loss tapes proclaim on network television: "You are in bondage to food, but you can learn how to have dominion over it; my tapes can set you free." Every diet is an act of eschatological expectancy, an act begun with the ardent hope of making oneself into a New Creature, without spot, blemish or unsightly bulges. To diet is to embark upon self-transformation; calorie counting makes Pelagians of us all.

Indeed, the conflict between grace and works shows up vividly in contemporary literature on compulsive eating and dieting. The path of works, caloric Pelagianisni, focuses on the necessity of ascetic rigor. Most diet books preach this path in one form or another: "Take control of yourself, exercise self-discipline, practice austerity, and you will be saved from the wages of excessive eating, which is ugly fat." It seems so easy, really; we need but follow the prescriptions of the diet in question (all protein/no protein; all carbohydrate/no carbohydrate -- or any magic formula in between) Vigilance is all it takes -- a dedication to dieting commensurate with the previous dedication to food.

The only problem with caloric Pelagianism is the problem with works righteousness in general: it finally does not help. It ignores the pernicious war between the law of our mind and the law of our members. Of what value is it for us to know the good food we should eat, when the evil that we should not eat is precisely what we find ourselves devouring? Diets, the path of works, simply do not work. More and more frequently, the literature on compulsive eating is admitting as much; there is even a book or two by that approximate title. Diets don’t work for the physiological fact (appalling to seasoned dieters) that an already sluggish metabolism slows down further when subjected to restricted calories. Diets also don’t work for the psychological/spiritual reason that we cannot heal an obsession by replacing it with a counter obsession. Compulsively scrutinizing what we may and may not allow ourselves to eat merely perpetuates our consuming preoccupation with food.

Counting calories (or following some other dietary regimen) can become just the opposite of a spiritual discipline. Dieting is anti-spiritual. but not because it focuses on the body rather than the spirit; such thinking perpetuates a dangerous dichotomy. Paul’s exhortation to "glorify God in [our] bodies" is profoundly wise and profoundly Christian; appropriate care for the body’s health and nourishment is responsible stewardship of creation. Rather, dieting is anti-spiritual because it focuses on a part of the created self at the expense of the whole. Counting calories (or whatever) focuses so narrowly on the size-obsessed "shoulds" of eating that it loses sight of the broader needs of the embodied human for acceptance, pleasure, nurture and fulfillment.

The path of grace does focus on these broader needs. Learning to accept, care for and love ourselves, in our bodies, must come before, not after, attempts to lose weight. If we can really, lovingly be "at one" with our bodies, we will want to feed and nurture ourselves in certain ways; if we despise and distrust our bodies, we will misfeed and malnourish ourselves. For the overweight, weight stabilization or even weight loss comes as a super-added benefit of the loving path; wild fluctuations, culminating in permanent weight gain, mark the unhappy effects of the hate and distrust.

A number of books on compulsive eating are beginning to focus on the path of acceptance, finally recognizing what Christian theology has known since Paul: that works destroy, whereas grace "giveth life." Feminists like Susie Orbach, Geneen Roth and Kim Chernin are the major spokeswomen for the latter approach. The primary message in the feminist theories and therapies is to attune oneself and surrender: if we let go of striving and get in-touch with our hungers, eating what we want when we want to until we reach the point of fullness (but not beyond), then our eating and our weight will ultimately regulate themselves.

Gluttony is a sin, then -- but not for the reasons most often suspected. If gluttony were a sin of intemperance, a careful and restrictive diet would cure it. However, we can see that dieting merely refocuses and perpetuates that problem. Rather, gluttony manifests an even deeper sin against trust. If I turn a confessional eye to my own experience as a glutton, I recognize two basic motives behind my eating compulsively beyond the point of satisfying my physical hunger. The first is that I do not trust that the same pleasure will still be available to me in the future -- that I will be able to have the food I want to eat the next time I want to eat it; therefore, I feel perversely as if I must stock up on it. The second is that I simply do not know what to do next with my time: I am terrified by the openness and loose-endedness that come when I stop eating, and I do not trust that I can figure out what to do next or that I can find something that will be as intrinsically pleasing and gratifying as eating. The root cause of gluttony thus appears to be a reluctance or refusal to live in faith: an inability to trust the future, to let go, to have confidence in the reality of grace, newness and abundance of life.

Gluttony is a sin. But this is not tantamount to saying that fatness is sinful. Gluttony and girth are two separate matters. It is possible to be quite thin and eat too eagerly or expensively; it is possible to eat quite moderately and still tend to be fat. Some studies have actually shown that overweight adolescents consume slightly less food than their higher-strung and therefore slimmer compatriots. A dubious doctrine of election would interpret the speedy metabolism of the congenitally skinny as a mark of divine favor (I confess that sometimes I do wonder about those people) The proof of the pudding of gluttony lies not in the size of the body but in the shape of the embodied soul.

To have a soul in good shape, as far as gluttony is concerned, is to be able to live with suppleness in the midst of a number of paradoxes. On the one hand, to be obsessed with eating is to be unwell in the soul; gluttony deserves its ranking not only as a sin but as a "capital"’ one, insofar as it can spawn so many other sins, such as duplicity, theft, economic injustice, hostility toward neighbors and near-suicidal hatred of self. On the other hand, to be obsessed with not eating betrays an equally troublesome misorientation of priorities. To attend to the health of our bodies is appropriate stewardship of creation; but to focus exclusively on our bodies, or to make judgments about people based on their body shape or size, manifests inappropriate worldliness. To feast is a fitting celebration of God’s bounty; yet to fast is an equally fitting act of our disciplined devotion.

Eating may be "the oldest sin of all," as Victor Buono -- along with a number of the desert fathers -- has proclaimed. Even so, the most primordial images of blessing are the table spread before us, the bread and wine of companionship, the land flowing with milk and honey. The supple soul is the one who joyously anticipates sitting down to the heavenly banquet -- and who is able to do so with exuberant unconcern for whether or not the bread is buttered or the milk is 98 percent fat-free.

The Practical Life of the Church Musician

Church musicians are all too typically regarded as those who sustain the church by providing musical services. This view has them responsible for creating fellowship and good feeling in the congregation -- dispensing services that keep everybody happy, entertain the troops and give everybody warm fuzzies.

This job description creates two intolerable tensions. First, if a congregation is even in the remotest sense Christian and not totally a reflection of the culture, its church musicians feel the gnawing sense that simply meeting people’s needs is wrong. Church musicians are not trained to be theologians so they cannot always articulate this feeling, but it is there and it can be downright painful.

The second tension comes from the pressure of trying to satisfy the desires of everybody in the congregation. It can be difficult to try to meet what are often competing demands: some people want gospel hymns, some want rock, some want Lutheran chorales, still others don’t want to sing at all and expect the choir to do it. Some want the choir to sing 16th-century motets, others want it to sing only 19th-century music. One group wants non-sexist texts when referring to humanity; others want non-sexist terms for both humanity and God; others insist one should never alter the original text. The musician is supposed to meet all those requests. The musician is not expected, however, to think, make judgments, ask questions or have a dialogue with anybody. The congregation wants the musician simply to satisfy its wants, no matter how contradictory and confusing those may be.

Defined this way, the life of a church musician is a nightmare indeed. Musicians in this situation not only sense that something is wrong at the heart of things, but that they can never do anything fight. They do not know what to plan and practice, or what demands to heed. They receive no direction except for the worst sort of consumerism. This makes them always look over their shoulders, worried that they did something wrong or that one group will be offended when another faction gets its way. Ultimately, what Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon refer to as the "voracious appetites" of demanding people can devour the musician. So, to avoid being devoured, musicians seek to manipulate tastes and needs. Some use commercial television as a model, offering cute and contrived jingles (I have heard these called "teeny hymns.") Others push for high taste or for their personal tastes. These approaches inevitably lead to frustration because they focus on power: The musician’s work gets reduced either to obvious power plays and outright war or to subtle forms of control, which are the antithesis of freedom.

I cannot begin to count the number of church musicians who have told me about the despair they have experienced in churches where they are regarded merely as need-fillers. Not all have articulated the problem in just this way, but it’s what their comments suggest. Many of these musicians have continued to struggle in spite of the problems because of their grit, determination and sense of faithfulness; many have switched churches; too many of them have left their musical posts altogether. The most tragic result is that countless young people who have sensed the despair of the musicians in their churches have never considered a career in church music even though in other respects it appeals to them.

There is an alternative to this situation, an alternative that can emerge when the church affirms some fundamental aspects of the faith. First, the church must acknowledge that it is not sustained by the services it provides or by anything it does. As the community of the baptized, the church is sustained by God’s grace. God creates the church, and God will sustain the church -- with us, without us and in spite of us. Our continual errors are eloquent enough testimony to that. If the church were supported only by human efforts, it would have disappeared long ago. So let us keep our priorities straight: the place to begin is with baptism; God’s grace drives and sustains the church and our works, not the other way around.

Second, if the church is attentive to the New Testament, Justin Martyr and Hippolytus, the Eastern church, the Western catholic tradition, the Anglican tradition, the Lutheran tradition, the Calvinist intent (and practice, if not in Geneva then in places like John Robinson’s Leiden) , the Wesleyan intent and that of the early Methodists, then its worship on every festival of the resurrection -- that is, on every Sunday -- will include both Word and Supper, not one or the other. Our Protestant heritage has gotten derailed in the last several centuries. We have legitimately objected to the medieval practice of celebrating the Supper without the Word, which is a replication of the Old Testament practice of sacrifice. But we have substituted Word without Supper, which is a replication of synagogue worship minus the joy of the resurrection. If we are serious about our worship and our responsibility as worshiping Christians, we will be faithful to Christ’s command and to on our heritage by celebrating Word and Supper every week.

While worship seems to be what we do, it is actually what God does. It looks like our praises, our prayers, our words, our bread and wine, but it is really God addressing us in our weak human words and giving us life in the messianic banquet. It looks as if God is our audience, but we are the audience and the object of God’s grace, love and care. That is true at all times and all places, of course, but in our worship it is uniquely and profoundly so.

Worship belongs to the people. It is not the sole property of the clergy, the musician or any other church leader. The Reformation taught us that worship is not the precinct of the priests. We Protestants forget that and deny it every time we shut the people out and turn worship into entertainment by clergy or musicians before silent congregations. Worship belongs to the whole people of God, not to any individual or group.

Worship is profoundly related to both the past and the present. We did not invent it. Virtually all people have worshiped. For us Christians worship is derived from Hebrew sources, radically controlled by the Christ event and edited by the church from generation to generation. Worship is also profoundly contemporary. It relates precisely to the here and now and flows into our culture in the most priestly way while at the same time bringing to bear on us the prophetic demands of justice and peace. For in worship God always calls us to a radically new and responsible life together. Worship is probably the most powerful engine for justice and peace because in it God’s call, which stands behind and before us, cannot be denied, will not let us rest and drives us into the world on behalf of the downtrodden and the oppressed.

All of this means, of course, that worship has a rhythm about it that is bigger than our individual rhythms. It relates to a story that is far larger than our individual stories, even as it encompasses those stories. To sense the big rhythm and the big story we need to be attentive to the church year and the lectionary. They protect us from being confined in our pet likes and dislikes.

What is the role, then, of church musicians? They are fundamentally responsible for the people’s song, the church’s song. That’s why the term "cantor" is so helpful in describing the church musician. Church musicians are the chief singers, the leaders of the church’s song. They are responsible for singing the congregation’s whole story. That means knowing the local stories and traditions of the particular parish they serve, and it also means relating those local stories to the catholic fullness of the whole story, and doing that with pastoral sensitivity.

This purpose might be described under five headings: Sunday morning worship, the church year, planning, practice and relationships.

The practical life of the church musician is controlled above all by Sunday morning. Each Sunday is a little Easter, the celebration of the resurrection and the time therefore for Word and Supper. The pastor, on behalf of the host who is Christ himself, serves in Christ’s stead. The musician leads the people’s song at this banquet. So, at the appropriate points -- and there are many -- the pastor relinquishes leadership to the musician. Church music has the capacity to give something of the fullness of the peoples song each Sunday because it can contextualize and pull together themes through the richness of poetic and musical imagery in a way that the spoken word cannot.

No matter how true that is, there is no way to sing the fullness of the story on any given Sunday morning. The only way to sing the fullness of the Christian story is over many Sunday mornings. Since we are all tempted to sing only our favorite parts of the story, we need some way to protect the people and to protect us from ourselves. The church year gives us that way. Over a year’s time we recount Christ’s advent, birth, epiphany, passion, death, resurrection and ascension; then we celebrate the church’s birth at Pentecost and reflect on the results of our life together and in the world. In the three-year ecumenical lectionary we get the richness of lectio continua and lectio selecta. (It is tragic that these readings do not always coincide among all denominations. That not only destroys their purpose and makes denominational and ecumenical resources less useful, it also prevents opportunities for interaction in marriages and families whose members represent different traditions and attend different churches.)

Unfortunately, church musicians often merely go through the motions of Sunday mornings and the festivals of the church year without sensing their order and relationship and without drawing on their tremendous potential. The weekly festival of the resurrection and the celebrations of the church year are the fecund soil from which the craft of the church musician grows. We need to see these festivals for what they are and for the discipline and tremendous aid and direction they provide.

Observing the church calendar requires planning and practice. Both need to be structured into the musicians’ routine because they are among the most critical things that happen in a local church. While no one formula will work in all churches, planning has to involve both pastor and musician. Otherwise the confusion that characterizes worship in so many churches is inevitable. It is possible to assign most of the planning to one person; if both agree on that arrangement, trust each other and the planner communicates instructions to the other, that approach can work. It is possible to assign responsibilities and then meet briefly, even by phone, to make sure there is coherence. That too will work if both parties agree on the system, trust each other, have a common sense of direction and know each other well.

My preference, however, is for weekly meetings at which pastor and musician plan together and for regular planning meetings held weekly, monthly or seasonally with laypeople. Since worship is communal, to plan it alone always seems to miss the mark, no matter how able one person is. The planning needs to reflect the communal nature of what is being planned. My pastor and I meet weekly and plan as far in advance as possible. At the moment a lay group has agreed to a one-year assignment. They meet once or twice for each season of the church year, review what the pastor and I have planned, change it where they want, and plan some services themselves.

There should be a discipline to this process. Nobody gets to choose his or her own few favorite hymns. Hymns have to fit the occasion. What we do has to make sense for the people of God in Chicago or New York or Springfield or wherever we are, in the late 20th century, with the themes of Pentecost VI or Advent I or whatever the occasion is, with all the resources that are available to us within the confines of our capabilities: old hymns, new hymns, music from various periods and of various styles, old translations, new translations, the same and different ways of doing things, etc.

For musicians to do their jobs, they must practice. Not to practice is to regard the people with contempt. Musicians must practice far enough ahead so things are ready when they need to be, and they must practice up to the last moment so that they will be fresh for the service.

This is difficult, particularly for those whose positions are part-time. While full-time church musicians find their hours consumed by paper work and phony administrative duties (not the legitimate ones) , part-timers have a more difficult time finding practice time because they usually also hold full-time jobs and are tired at the end of the day.

There is no single solution, but it is possible to work practice into our days. It takes some imagination and some discipline, like the organist spending a few minutes every day at a piano keyboard and reserving certain times of the week, like Saturday mornings, for practice at the church. For the choral conductor, time with the score at a desk on a lunch break is possible, along with time later at a keyboard. The singer simply has to find times and places to sing: sometimes in the car, with the windows rolled up, on the way to and from work will do nicely. If we do not practice, we render our planning useless and deny our vocation.

Underneath all this is the church musicians’ relationship with parishioners and with God. Because church musicians operate within a community of grace that is sustained by God, they do not have to try to manipulate people or their tastes. The musician is free to take risks, to "fail" and "succeed," because sustenance is not the musicians’ concern; faithfully singing the song with the people is. That means knowing the big story, knowing the people’s stories and their capacities, and then serving them with care.

Like all worthy craftspeople, church musicians have their own disciplined inner peace. But that peace is not generated simply by the craft of church music. The practical life of the church musician is the outcome of a vocation -- a calling -- that serves God and the people of God with God’s unique gift of music.

Peyote, Wine and the First Amendment

This fall the U.S. Supreme Court will consider arguments in a case that goes to the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion. The court will decide whether the state can prohibit a religious ritual, and if so, what kinds of dangers justify such an extraordinary prohibition. This litigation involves not a practice of a mainstream faith but the peyote ritual of the Native American Church.

Peyote, or mescal, is a small cactus that grows in the southwest U.S. and in northern Mexico. It produces buds or tubers, called buttons, that have hallucinogenic properties. Peyote is an illegal drug, but the federal government and 23 states permit its use in at least some religious ceremonies. Federal drug authorities issue licenses to grow and sell peyote to religious users. But the case before the court comes from Oregon, which has no such exemption.

If the Supreme Court focuses too narrowly on drugs in this case and misses the larger issue of religious ritual, it could create a devastating precedent for religious liberty. For the Native American use of peyote has substantial parallels to Christian and Jewish uses of wine. If the peyote ritual is allowed only by legislative grace and not by constitutional right, the right to participate in communion, the Passover Seder and sabbath rituals may rest on no firmer footing.

The Oregon case is an odd vehicle for addressing such an issue. It is not a criminal prosecution; questions about criminal prohibitions are involved only because the court reached out for them. Alfred Smith and Galen Black were drug- and alcohol-abuse counselors at a nonprofit agency When their supervisor learned that they had consumed peyote at a religious service, he discharged them for violating the. agency’s absolute rule against’ drug or alcohol use. The supervisor later testified that "we would have taken the same action had the claimant consumed wine at a Catholic ceremony." But he offered no evidence that anyone had actually been discharged for drinking communion wine, and he did not claim to have inquired about which of the churches his employees attended used wine and which only grape juice.

Smith and Black first complained that their employer had discriminated against them based on their religion. Without admitting the charge, the employer changed its absolute rule against religious use of drugs, and it paid Smith and Black some of their lost pay. They agreed not to insist on being reinstated to their jobs.

Smith and Black also filed claims for unemployment compensation. A long line of Supreme Court cases holds that states must pay unemployment compensation to employees who lose their jobs because of their religious beliefs. Employees who refuse to work on their sabbath have been the principal beneficiaries of this rule (in another case a worker lost his job in a brass mill because he refused to help manufacture tank turrets) The Oregon courts followed these cases and awarded unemployment compensation to Smith and Black.

The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the judgment, deciding that if Oregon could send Smith and Black to prison for chewing peyote, it could surely refuse to pay them unemployment compensation. Therefore, the court reasoned, the constitutional status of Oregon’s criminal prohibition of peyote was logically prior to the unemployment-compensation issue. It sent the case back to the state courts to ask whether Oregon would recognize a religious exception to its criminal laws against possession or consumption of peyote.

Oregon’s Supreme Court, which had already concluded that this question was irrelevant, dutifully answered that in its judgment criminal prosecution of Smith and Black would violate the federal Constitution. Their consumption of peyote was a constitutionally protected exercise of religion; therefore, Oregon could not send them to prison or refuse to pay them unemployment compensation.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case again. Presumably it intends to decide whether Smith and Black could be sent to prison, even though no one has shown the slightest interest in sending them there. If it has second thoughts about this exercise in judicial activism, it may retreat to the narrower issue and decide only whether Smith and Black are entitled to keep their unemployment compensation.

The opinions of the Oregon courts provide few details about exactly what Smith and Black did with peyote. Opinions in other cases provide more information about the peyote ritual, based on the testimony of witnesses and of anthropologists who have studied it. The peyote ritual is no modern innovation designed to evade the drug laws. Native Americans have practiced it at least since 1560, when it was first described in Spanish records. Today the ritual is practiced in substantially similar form from northern Mexico to Saskatchewan. Believers come from many Native American tribes, although it is not the major religion of any tribe. The faith has absorbed some Christian teachings as well, but peyote remains at the heart of its theology and practice.

To the believer, peyote is a sacramental substance, an object of worship and a source of divine protection. Peyote is the focus of the worship service, much as the consecrated bread and wine are the focus of mass and communion. The cases speak of prayers being directed to peyote; I suspect that the believer thinks of himself as praying to the holy spirit who is present in the peyote. •

The believer may wear peyote on his person for protection; soldiers have worn a large peyote button in a beaded pouch suspended from their necks. While there is no parallel in Christian theology, there is ample parallel in Christian folk-belief -- a consecrated communion wafer worn around the neck has been thought to be the best defense against Dracula, and crosses and medals are put to similar use against modern dangers.

Finally, and most important for the question before the court, participants in the ritual believe that peyote intoxication enables them to experience God directly. Peyote is consumed for this purpose only at a "meeting," convened and controlled by a leader. It is a sacrilege to use peyote for a nonreligious purpose. A meeting is a solemn and somewhat infrequent occasion. Participants wear their finest clothing. They pray, sing and perform ceremonies with drums, fans, eagle bones and other symbolic instruments.

The central event is the consumption of peyote in quantities sufficient to produce intoxication. At the appointed time, the leader distributes up to four buttons to each adult participant. There is an opportunity for participants to take additional buttons at a later point in the ceremony. The buttons are extremely bitter, and difficult to chew and swallow. Some groups use a tea brewed from the buttons, but chewing the buttons appears to be the norm.

The meeting lasts from sundown Saturday to sunrise Sunday. In the morning, the leader serves breakfast. By then all effects of the peyote have worn off, and the participants leave in a sober state. Smith and Black were fired for participating in a service that, apparently, went according to this generic description.

Another central function of the First Amendment is to ensure that small, unfamiliar and unpopular religions get equal treatment with larger, well-known and politically influential religions. In those compelling cases in which religious liberty must be restricted, the restrictions must be applied neutrally.

This principle of neutrality requires us to compare the peyote ritual to the rituals of mainstream faiths. Peyote is not the only mind-altering drug used in a religious ritual. Many Christians drink wine at communion. For Jews, a prayer over wine is part of the sabbath service, sabbath meals, all religious holidays and special religious events such as weddings and circumcisions.

Wine was once illegal in the U.S., just as peyote is now. But the National Prohibition Act, passed after ratification of the 18th Amendment, exempted wine "for sacramental purposes, or like religious rites." State prohibition laws, some of which survived into the 1960s, either had similar exemptions or at least were not enforced against religious users. (Contemporary local prohibition laws rarely require exemptions; they generally restrict the sale of alcohol, but permit private consumption of alcohol purchased elsewhere.)

Why is it that the religious use of wine was exempt everywhere during Prohibition, but the religious use of peyote is exempt in only half the states today? If Oregon may constitutionally punish the religious use of peyote, may it not also punish the religious use of wine? Could Oregon ban communion wine and require that all Christians use grape juice instead? The Supreme Court does not have to answer these questions formally; no case about wine is before it. But it should think hard about these questions, to make sure it is not suppressing a small and unfamiliar religion on the basis of principles it would not apply to a mainstream faith.

Oregon may respond that peyote is simply more dangerous than wine. I do not know whether that is true; I am sure that wine is more widely abused. But the court will assume that the legislature had good reason for its ban. It should inquire into dangerousness only in the narrow context of religious use. The judicial question is this: if the Constitution protects the religious use of wine when legislatures believe that wine is so dangerous it has to be banned, does the Constitution also protect religious use of peyote at a time when legislatures believe peyote must be banned? If sacramental uses of wine are protected and sacramental uses of peyote are not, it must be because of some compelling difference between the drugs or the rituals.

Each of the Christian and Jewish uses of wine is similar to the peyote ritual in some ways, and quite different in others. Communion resembles the peyote ritual in the liturgical and theological centrality of the wine in the worship service. For many Christians, there are further similarities in the reverence and even adoration for the consecrated wine and the belief that the deity is present in the wine.

However, no one gets intoxicated on communion wine. Well, hardly anyone. In traditions that believe in the real presence of Christ, the priest or pastor may get tipsy from drinking the consecrated wine that is left over at the end of the service, since the blood of Christ cannot just be poured down the drain. This consequence could perhaps be avoided by recruiting enough helpers, but in some denominations only clergy and designated assistants are permitted to help.

Not even the matter of intoxication distinguishes Purim, the celebration of the Jews’ deliverance from a genocidal plot during the Babylonian captivity. Some Jewish traditions teach a duty to celebrate Purim to the point of drunkenness. Jews drink four cups of wine at the Passover Seder, which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. Prayer over a single cup of wine is part of the sabbath service and of sabbath meals.

But one important difference is that an essential part of the peyote ritual is to experience God through the mind-altering effects of the drug; that is not part of the communion service in any Christian tradition, and it is not part of any Jewish celebrations or rituals. Purim, the most intoxicating Jewish celebration, is only a minor festival. Because Purim is far less central theologically, a decision that Oregon could ban the peyote ritual would clearly imply that it could ban the use of intoxicating amounts of wine to celebrate Purim.

In an important sense it is a greater violation of religious liberty to ban a ritual that is at the theological heart of a faith than to ban a peripheral celebration. But either act limits religious liberty. We should be uncomfortable with governmental bans on minor religious festivals, or with judges deciding which festivals are important enough to deserve full constitutional protection and which are not. A court that starts down that path might eventually convince itself that wine is not central to the sabbath or to the celebration of Passover, or that the use of wine is not central to communion. The government could acquire a de facto power to review theology and liturgy.

If the court considers communion or the Passover Seder or the sabbath, its instinct will he to regard these as constitutionally protected. If it considers only peyotism, its instinct may be to consider it a weird and dangerous practice. Comparing familiar and presumptively protected faiths to an unfamiliar one is a way of guarding against unrecognized bias. But this cautionary device will not work if the court jumps at any possible distinction to rationalize its prejudices in favor of the familiar.

Thus, the ultimate question is whether Oregon’s reasons for prohibiting the peyote ritual are compelling, and, if the. peyote ritual is to be distinguished from Christian and Jewish rituals, whether the distinctions are compelling. The only plausible distinction is that Christian and Jewish uses are generally less intoxicating -- but there are important exceptions even to that.

The distinction is further blurred by the mystical tradition in every major world religion, including Christianity and Judaism. The mystics often seek to experience God through altered states of consciousness, generally induced by trance or meditation instead of drugs. So neither the use of mind-altering drugs nor the achievement of altered consciousness distinguishes peyotism from mainstream faiths. It is only the combination of these two things that arguably distinguishes peyotism.

The most one can say without exceptions is that only in peyotism is drug-induced altered consciousness part of the central religious event. That difference is compelling only if peyote intoxication under the controlled conditions of a meeting poses a serious danger to the participants or others. To say only that Oregon disapproves of peyote intoxication is merely to restate Oregon’s disapproval of this mode of worship. Oregon’s disapproval does not provide a compelling reason to forbid a religious ritual.

The danger is hypothetical, but only in part. A variety of religious and pseudo-religious groups have claimed a right to use drugs. There is a small offshoot of the Native American Church, the Peyote Way Church of God, which split over a disagreement about the admission of non-Native American members and the authority of certain teachings from the Book of Mormon. Both the main body and the offshoot are said to teach traditional moral values, including temperance, and to be a generally positive influence on their believers. But only one of them is exempt from the federal drug laws.

The federal exemption and many of the state exemptions refer expressly to the Native American Church. No one else is exempt unless the Constitution requires an exemption. A federal district court recently upheld the narrow scope of the federal exemption and refused to exempt the Peyote Way Church of God. It is as if during Prohibition, the exemption for sacramental wine had applied only to Roman Catholics and not to Lutherans.

The Native American Church also has imitators of varying degrees of apparent sincerity. An example is the Native American Church of New York, founded by Alan Birnbaum, apparently a New Yorker but apparently not a Native American. I do not know enough about Birnbaum to determine his sincerity, but I have my doubts.

Peyote and wine are not the only mind-altering drugs used in religious rituals. A related pair of loosely organized sects that originated in Jamaica, the Rastafarians and the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, use marijuana as a sacrament. They worship Haile Selassie as a God and teach black supremacy, pacifism, a moral code, a strict set of dietary laws and some unique interpretations of Scripture. They teach an absolutist interpretation of a passage in Leviticus that forbids the shaving of beards or the cutting of hair. These groups present a much more difficult case than the peyote worshipers. because their use of marijuana is not limited to highly structured worship services. At least some of them believe they should smoke marijuana continuously.

Finally, a few ordinary drug users have claimed to have created new religions. These are usually short on doctrine, weak on ritual and utterly lacking in any teaching that might constrain or even inconvenience a believer. There is little reason to think that they are motivated by sincere religious belief. But inquiries into the sincerity of such claims are awkward and time-consuming.

If sincere religious use of mind-altering drugs is constitutionally exempt from the criminal law, then the courts must pass on all these claims to religious exemption. Enforcement will be hampered in arguable cases, and courts will make mistakes, sometimes punishing sincere but unconvincing believers while exempting more convincing fakers.

Some judges think that the difficulty of drawing lines between true and false claims of religious belief justifies a refusal to grant any exemptions. The peyote worshipers can be punished, even though we are quite sure that many of them are sincere religious believers, because we can never be certain who is sincere and who is not. These judges fear that some of the insincere will get away, and they fear that government will discriminate among the sincere, exempting some and erroneously punishing others. This they say violates the constitutional command to treat all religions equally.

The equality half of this argument has two serious defects. First, it assumes that because we will inadvertently persecute some religious minorities -- those who cannot convince us of their sincerity -- we would do better to persecute them all, including those who are both sincere and harmless. Because we will inevitably get some cases wrong, we should get them all wrong. It is an odd and unappealing sort of equality. If we are serious about the free exercise of religion, we should protect free exercise whenever we can, by protecting sincere religion in most cases even if we realize that human error will prevent us from protecting it in all cases.

Second, we know from experience that we will not enact this odd "ideal" of persecuting all religions equally. The mainstream faiths will always be exempted. So will any minority faiths that become socially accepted, or somehow get the sympathetic ear of enough legislators. When we have exempted sacramental wine, and when Congress and some states have exempted the Native American Church, the courts cannot invoke a desire for equal treatment as a reason not to exempt other religious uses of mind-altering drugs.

The danger of creating an obstacle to all drug enforcement is more serious, but manageable. Courts may have to rely on relatively objective signs of sincerity. Chewing four peyote buttons is not an easy high; the cynical evader of the drug laws can probably find an easier way to use drugs. Peyote use only in a structured service, administered by a leader who can be required to keep records, is not a likely way to satisfy an addiction or to get high whenever the mood strikes. A religion that restricts lifestyle in a variety of other ways is less likely to be a over for drug use than a religion that teaches only the duty to take drugs. A group that claims a sincere religious belief in staying high all the time will probably lose its ease, not because it is necessarily insincere but because any drug defendant could make that claim and courts have no good way to know who is telling the truth.

It may be that as a practical matter religious use of mind-altering drugs will be limited to groups that can point to some substantial tradition and that limit the use of drugs to structured worship service. Perhaps the practical difficulties of enforcing the drug laws will prevent any broader protection of religious liberty. But both familiar and unfamiliar groups can show a substantial tradition and a structured worship service. At least Christians, Jews and peyote worshipers fall into this category. Peyote worship should be constitutionally protected, and Smith and Black should be allowed to keep their unemployment compensation.

The Activism of Interpretation: Black Pastors and Public Life

The roots of black preachers’ prerogative and power are in the soils of African religion and American racism. The African reality of a wholistic as opposed to a secular and a sacred life, the place of the black church as sole as well as "soul" refuge during slavery, and the gift of oratory made the preacher the symbolic head and heart of his people.

To understand the black preachers’ lofty status among their own people and how they nurtured authentic participation with the majority on matters of public interest, one must understand how the black preacher has played the role of double agent or dual interpreter. Simply put, black preachers are socially bilingual. Their ability to communicate across racial lines and the cultural expectation that they do so has given them social and political clout disproportionate to their numbers.

One can get a sense of the black pastor’s role by surveying the activities of a black urban pastor like the late J. Pius Barbour. Barbour, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Chester, Pennsylvania, from 1933 to 1974 and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., during the latter’s Crozer Seminary years, amassed such influence over the years that it is said no decision affecting blacks in Chester was made without his input. Former congregations still speak with pride of "Doc’s" familiarity with the neighborhood people and his influence with officeholders "downtown."

During his 41 years at Calvary Baptist, Barbour served on a variety of city policy-developing committees, including the Chester Water Board and the Citizens Council on Urban Renewal. Barbour reportedly acquired his first paid political appointment by stalking into the board’s offices and reminding those in power how many votes Calvary Baptist Church had. That threat notwithstanding, the evidence points to Barbour’s having received his appointments, in large measure, due to his affinity with white concerns.

Barbour, who was the first black graduate of predominantly white Crozer Seminary, knew the white mind-set and spoke the white dialect. His knowledge of the ways and means of the majority qualified him to develop public policy and, more important, to communicate such policy to blacks on behalf of the city fathers and mothers and to help ensure a favorable response from the black community. That Barbour could be trusted is evident in his several editorials in the Chester Times on behalf of and sometimes in defense of whites:

Should we expect white preachers to get kicked out of their churches, while we enjoy ourselves?. . . I think I am behind in my NAACP dues myself. Now if I don’t even keep up with my dues I certainly don’t expect my white associate to lose his church about the matter. The white preacher is carrying the brunt of the battle and we should tell the story to America.

We are trying to keep the lines of communication open between the white power structure and the Negro community. The white community looks upon the Negro as a clown and criminal and the Negro community looks upon the white community as a community of "Wallaces and Barnetts." The responsible leaders of both groups are slowly destroying these stereotypes.

If I am supposed to vote for a black politician just because of his color, regardless of his ability, why should not the white man do the same?

What was most significant about these articles was not so much what Barbour said, but that he regularly conveyed the sentiments of the majority in Chester.

This ironic arrangement, in which the black preacher represented the white community, had its roots in the slave master’s use of slave preachers to deliver sermons espousing otherworldly realities. As time went on, the black preacher became the white man’s telephone to the black community -- in the words of Charles Hamilton in The Black Preacher in America, "the natural, most convenient tunnel."

At the same time, black preachers served as a bridge between blacks and the white world. Says Hamilton: "Blacks would, more frequently than not, turn to their ministers to intercede for them with the white establishment. He was the most sought-after person as a character witness in court for one of his parishioners." Barbour’s role as "witness" for the black community is evident in the number of jobs acquired and jail sentences ended through his direct or indirect intervention. Moreover, stories abound of Barbour’s simultaneous public conservatism and private advocacy. Calvary Baptist deacon and businessman Herman Dawson recalls: "During the ‘60s he didn’t march with us, but we knew he was with us. We’d go to his home and talk for hours about strategy. He would tell us what to expect and how to react." Dawson is the subject of an editorial in which Barbour "explains" black actions:

While we were deliberating on how to head off a bloody race riot a group of youngsters burst in on us and announced: "The State Police are shooting our people." We immediately dispatched Dr. Felder Rouse and Herman Dawson to get the information and head off any violence. While we were waiting to hear from them our "private FBI" burst into the conference with the information that a certain man of the Chester police had cracked Herman’s skull!

Barbour wished to relay the message to whites that black city leaders were not abdicating responsibility: they had made a serious though futile effort to avoid a riot. Barbour was being a priestly-prophetic press agent for the black community.

Barbour’s effectiveness in this work of interpretation was largely due to the manner in which he balanced his commitment to both the black and white communities. If there is a fault to find in his interpretive work, it is, I suspect, in the area of ultimate allegiance and ultimate truth.

There is a sense in which being available to speak for everyone taints one’s ability to speak for anyone, particularly the transcendent God of the universe. It is tempting to speak for the group that offers the best reward. Such an approach almost always leaves out the thankless task of speaking the purely prophetic word -- not because it is well received by blacks or whites but because it is the word of God.

Confusion about ultimate allegiance clouds the legacy of Barbour and his black pastoral peers. Were they little more than pawns under the control of white manipulators? Consider this indictment of black preachers by Black Muslims (recorded in C. Eric Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America) :

The black Christian preacher is the white man’s most effective tool for keeping the so-called Negroes pacified and controlled, for he tells convincing lies against nature as well as against God. The black preacher has taught his people to stand still and turn the other cheek. He urges them to fight on foreign battlefields to save the white man from his enemies; but once home again, they must patiently present themselves to be murdered by those they have saved. Thus, in an unholy and unnatural way, the "Negro clergy class is the white man’s right hand over the so-called Negroes," and the black preacher is the greatest hindrance to their progress and equality.

The question of allegiance is a pressing one for the Jesse Jacksons of the black church who must decide who they ultimately represent: the black community, a coalition of ethnic groups, the Democratic Party or a sense of moral right in the universe. More specifically, which one of these honorable constituencies is their regulating ideal?

The second sensitive spot in the black pastor’s work of interpretation is the question of truth. Shouldn’t black pastors be more than ecclesiastical messengers between minority and majority races? Howard Thurman identifies this struggle in his autobiographical treatise With Head and Heart:

My study at Haverford was a crucial experience, a watershed from which flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life. These months defined my deepest religious urges.. . . During the entire time with Rufus [Jones], issues of racial conflict never arose, for the fact of racial differences was never dealt with at the conscience level. The ethical emphasis in his interpretations of mystical religion dealt primarily with war and peace, the poverty and hunger of whole populations, and the issues arising from the conflict between nations . . . the specific issues of race with which I had been confronted all my life as a black man in America seemed strangely irrelevant. I felt that somehow he transcended race; I did so, too, temporarily.

Thurman’s ecstatic assessment suggests that historically, practically and pastorally, the activism of interpretation is always incomplete and something of an interim strategy. The spiritual mentoring task by its very nature transcends racial and cultural expectations and restrictions. Only a grasp of the transcendent "higher calling" of religious experience will make the sons and daughters of Barbour relevant interpreters and, even more important for the living of our days, inspired prophets -- transformers of public policy.

To suggest that King, Barbour’s former student minister, is a model of the preacher as transformer as well as interpreter will come as no surprise. The differences between both roles is -- to borrow a Kingism -- the difference between a thermostat and a thermometer. One sets, while the other merely gauges. Nowhere is King’s transcendence of the purely interpretive and communicative more clear than in his pre-popular indictments of the Vietnam war. Both blacks and whites were offended by this prophetic pronouncement that was unauthorized by either race. In those uncomfortable, unfavorable moments, King was more than a leader empowered by multiracial awareness and credibility; he was a messenger of God.

Missions and the Translatable Gospel

Book Review:

Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, by Lamin Sanneh. Orbis, 310 pp., $17.95 paperback.

Whether they approve or disapprove, both Christian theologians and secular historians tend to understand missions as the exporting of Western Christianity to the Third World. Lamin Sanneh, professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School, challenges that interpretation with an exciting new story of Christian mission and a provocative analysis of the role of translation in that mission. The central historical focus of Translating the Message is Christianity’s rapid spread in Africa during the past century and a half, but its distinctive interpretation has implications for all Christian mission and for a general Christian theology of culture. Moreover, this book makes a promising beginning in the comparative study of mission in Christianity and Islam.

Sanneh maintains that when first-century Christians translated their sacred texts into Greek they began a process by which the Christian message was repeatedly restated in new linguistic and cultural forms. This process both recognized the worth of each language employed and limited or relativized the significance of each cultural medium. Although particular denominations have resisted any further translation out of what for them was and is the sacred language (particularly in the case of the Bible and the central liturgy) , the impulse to translate has always reasserted itself. No matter how culturally parochial or politically imperialistic the missionary agents of the gospel have been, to the extent they have recognized and utilized the built-in Christian strategy of translation they have stood in the margins of the process and elevated the status of the culture into whose language the translation has been made.

Sanneh argues against the theory that "mission was the surrogate of Western colonialism and that . . . together these two movements combined to destroy indigenous cultures." African Christians, reading the Bible and reflecting on its message in their own languages, have tended "to question, and sometimes to renounce, the Western presuppositions of the church." Moreover, the languages and cultures into which the Christian message has been translated have been invigorated, not destroyed. The genius of the Christian movement through history is its acceptance of cultural and linguistic diversity. This process has great risks, for the diversity has repeatedly threatened the unity of the worldwide Christian community, and translation has "made Christianity vulnerable to secular influences and to the threat of polytheism."

Islam faces the opposite problem. It has succeeded in large-scale missionary expansion without sanctioning the translation out of Arabic of its Scripture or its communal prayers -- a bond of unity and a source of great strength for Islam. Forbidding the Qur’an’s translation does, however, deny sacred significance to other languages, many of which have not flourished when Islam has been dominant in a culture. Aspects of popular Islam that are expressed in the vernacular are repeatedly criticized by reform movements, which are unable on Islamic principles to appreciate vernacular expressions of Muslim piety.

Sanneh believes that both Christian and Muslim mission have a concept of sacred language, but that these concepts are diametrically opposed. Muslims consider Arabic

a revealed language . . . the medium in

which the Qur’an . . . was revealed.

. . . The author of the Qur’an who is God,

thus came to be associated with its speech,

so that the very sounds of the language are

believed to originate in heaven. . . . Consequently,

Muslims have instituted the sacred Arabic

for the canonical devotions . . . [bringing] the sacred

Arabic to the level of the ordinary believer.

In contrast, "translatability became the characteristic mode of Christian expansion through history. Christianity has no single revealed language, and historical experience traces this fact to the Pentecost event when the believers testified of God in their native tongues." But after translation into Greek, Sanneh argues, second- and third-century Christians so identified with the norms of Hellenistic culture that they turned their backs on the principle that justified "the Gentile breakthrough": "The timeless logos of the Greeks was substituted for the historical Jesus."

When missionaries among the Slavs and Germans tried to use languages other than Latin, they were opposed by who claimed "that the liturgy could be performed only in the three ancient languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, on the grounds that Pilate had used these to compose the inscription placed on the cross of Christ." In the end a compromise was reached: the Bible and the mass could be read (recited) only in Latin, but preaching and teaching was done in the vernacular.

Even this compromise was sometimes challenged (in Moravia and in England) and later the issue of vernacular translation contributed to the Reformation. In post-Reformation Roman Catholic missions, the compromise was continued (with respect to the mass it did so right up to the Second Vatican Council). In the 16th-century Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Philippines, Catholic missionaries defied the Spanish government’s order to give all religious instruction in Castilian, insisting on using the local languages. Sanneh notes other instances in which Roman Catholic missions, while retaining Latin as the language of Scripture and liturgy, have utilized local languages, cultures and artistic symbols.

Sanneh presents two alternative mission strategies: One is "mission by diffusion," making "the missionary culture the inseparable carrier of the message. . . . Religion expands from its initial cultural base and is implanted in other societies primarily as a matter of cultural identity. Islam . . . exemplifies this mode of mission." The other is "mission by translation," making "the recipient culture the true and final locus of the proclamation, so that the religion arrives without the presumption of cultural rejection. . . Conversion that takes place in mission as translation rests on the conviction that might be produced in people after conscious critical reflection." Sanneh admits that these alternative paths are not always separate or easy to untangle. "In the Jerusalem church it is obvious that most of the disciples thought at first primarily in terms of cultural diffusion."

Sanneh concedes that from the beginning, Christian history has included both mission by translation and mission by diffusion. Yet he is sure that translation is "the vintage mark of Christianity." Sanneh needs to separate this theological conclusion from the amply documented historical judgment that translation is one important medium and translatability one important principle in Christian mission. This historical judgment is crucial for Sanneh’s argument with secular historians. While "at its most self-conscious stage, mission coincided with Western colonialism," history reveals that Christianity was more than an expression of Western colonial power. Early on, Christianity in Africa began to diverge from interests of European colonial administrators. The Protestant emphasis on the primacy of the Bible, a Bible translated into the language of its local hearers and readers, took away primary authority from the missionary and gave it to an indigenous church that could be proud of its own language and culture. This is the logic of translatability, which worked against the quite conscious efforts of Western missionaries to assert their theological or moral authority or their often less conscious and more ambivalent relations to Western rulers and businesses.

The pioneer missionaries and Bible translators not only found names they considered appropriate equivalents for ho theos in the New Testament, but simultaneously concluded that "Africans had heard of God, described God most eloquently, and maintained towards God proper attitudes of reverence, Worship, and sacrifice." Moreover, many Africans concluded from "the missionary adoption of vernacular categories for the Scriptures" that the God of the ancestors could be assimilated into the God of the Bible. The jealous "God" of missionary preaching had to be spoken of with names for "God" in Africa, where "God was a hospitable deity who was approached through the mediation of lesser deities."

There is a striking irony in the situation of those missionaries who arrived quite sure that Africans had not yet heard of God. In order to translate the Scriptures or to preach a sermon they had to ask people the name for God in their language. Sanneh recounts anecdotes showing that the humor in that situation was not lost on the prospective converts. This missionary attitude, however, also elicits one of his sharpest criticisms.

Missionaries should have been pleased when they came upon evidence that God had preceded them, and that Africans possessed profound faith in the divine providence. . Instead, the missionaries appear to have been surprised, even antagonized, by examples of faithfulness, hospitality, and forgiveness. . . Faced with this bewildering situation, Africans began earnestly to inquire into the Christian Scripture, which missionaries had placed in their hands, to see where they had misunderstood the gospel. What they learned convinced them that mission as European cultural hegemony was a catastrophic departure from the Bible. . . They went on to claim the gospel, as the missionaries wished them to, but in turn insisted that missionary attitudes should continue to be scrutinized in its revealing light.

For Sanneh, translation both assumes and confirms divine preparation preceding the missionary. "Nowhere else were missionaries more anticipated than in the field of scriptural translation . . [where] we find evidence of deep and long preparation, in the tools of language as in the habits of worship and conduct, and in the venerable customs of the forebears." The truth that God is the ground of existence is one "whose sparks are entrusted to all living cultures and which the light of the gospel will rekindle into a living flame." This divine preparation for the gospel in all cultures is one theological sanction for translating the gospel into all languages. Another is confidence that the Holy Spirit will work through the translation, repeating the miracle of Pentecost, enabling all peoples to understand God’s message in their own languages.

These theological positions belong on one side of what Sanneh regards as his combination of "the theological and the historical methods to describe translatability as a religious theme." On the historical side, he devotes his final chapter to comparing Christian and Islamic mission "not primarily to judge but to elucidate their distinctive attitudes to translatability."

Sanneh’s comparison is an important step for comparative missiology, a comparison of missionary efforts in world religions, including their attitudes toward translation. Translation study is also a significant development for comparative religion, because it studies how religious communities are related in actual encounter. Third, it provides a background for Christians who are sometimes asked to give up the missionary dimension of their faith when entering into interreligious dialogue. (Even if we were willing to do so, we have no reason to assume that either Muslim or Buddhist would follow suit.)

Precisely because this comparative missiology would not make one’s "own evaluative judgments the standard of comparison," it is necessary to include in any comparison similarity as well as contrast. For Sanneh no doubt this is self-evident. His own personal journey from Islam to Christianity has not turned him against his Islamic heritage. Rather, his study of Islam after becoming a Christian includes a doctoral dissertation on the distinctive West African Islamic tradition in which he was raised, and his own statement about the "monotheist core of the gospel" that Christianity owed to its Judaic heritage has not only a rather Islamic ring, but also the explicit recognition that "both religions share this heritage with Islam."

Sanneh sometimes gives the impression, however, not only that translatability is the valid principle of Christian mission, but that cultural absolutism or cultural diffusion is both sub-Christian and inimical to cultural development. While this is a possible theological assessment, a historical comparison of Christianity and Islam needs to include the Christian instances of cultural diffusion. As Sanneh himself notes, there have been many refusals to translate in the history of Christian mission.

In a theological assessment of Christian missionary strategies, moreover, I question whether cultural diffusion and ‘translation need be antithetical. The notion of an untranslatable Scripture is connected with a conviction of divine revelation in particular persons, events and institutions. While the original language of the Scripture, of the temple cult and of much scholarly debate was Hebrew, the language of the marketplace was Aramaic. Outside Palestine many Jews used Greek in their homes and recited the Greek translation of the Hebrew sacred writings. What in modern terms would be called Jewish culture was believed to be the same, whether the Scripture was read in Hebrew or in Greek. The first gentile Christians inherited this culture of religious beliefs and practices, and it made concrete their claim to be part of God’s chosen people.

Subsequently, many Christian communities have also claimed to be God’s chosen people. Many such communities have insisted that foreigners who hear the gospel from them should accept their particular cultural version of the gospel as the embodiment of the authentic Christian tradition. is such a claim justified? At the very least, surely, the principle of translatability should serve as a powerful deterrent to the tendency of any national church to absolutize its form of Christian faith.

We can admit, however, that what each "Christian culture" tries to embody is the total inheritance of Christian tradition, and it is this tradition that its missionary representatives have sought to pass on. It is certainly true that church history often appears to be more a record of Christian unfaithfulness than a deposit of faith. But even a record of mistakes can be a salutary lesson for a new Christian community; and there also in that history a record of courageous attempts to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit.

Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians and Muslims should explore together their understandings of God’s mission to the world in a comparative inquiry that is dialogical as well as historical. Cultural diffusion is understood from inside as honoring a sacred language and customs chosen to convey God’s word and upholding a body of custom developed in obedience to the specifics of God’s word. Both approaches to mission assume that religion is expressed through culture but also transcends and transforms culture, and both approaches must wrestle with the particularity and universality of God’s saving Word.

Modern Protestant mission has, in fact, emphasized both translation and the forming of converts in a Christian culture brought in from outside, a culture stamped with a particular Western culture and often, in "higher" education, communicated through a particular Western language. A familiar controversy in 19th-century Protestant mission policy in India illustrates this fact. A generation after William Carey and the other Serampore missionaries enlisted the assistance of many Hindu scholars in translating the Bible into the major Indian languages, Alexander Duff proposed a different approach to evangelism: education in English. Not only would the Christian values embodied in English literature attract high-caste Hindus to Christ, it was claimed, but the teaching of modern science would undermine Hindus’ faith in their own religion.

As it turned out, both Carey’s approach and Duff’s "cultural diffusion" approach have had great consequences in India’s history, though neither succeeded in the common aim of "winning India to Christ." The translators helped to stimulate many Indian languages, in some cases initiating prose literature and laying the groundwork for a renaissance of regional cultures. English education became modern Indians’ distinctive mark, giving them an exceptional opening into Western culture. In most Christian missions, primary education was done in Indian languages and more advanced education in English. For many Indians, a bifurcation of culture took place, one that is quite apparent among educated Indian Christians. If British missionary societies had made the opposite decision, opting for Carey’s approach over Duff’s, Indian Christian theology might be very different from what it is today, possibly much more separated from the modern West and much closer to the idiom of regional Indian cultures.

Sanneh is one of a small number of scholars who are historians of religion and theologians at the same time. His work offers us a more accurate historical picture of Christian translation, and his theological interpretation can make Christian mission both more faithful to the truth and more respectful of other cultures.

he World Comes to Qatar

The Nation of Qatar, roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, is the world's leading producer of natural gas and has the highest per capita income of any country in the Arab world. A few decades ago it was a tribal society with an economy based largely on fishing, pearl harvesting and camel and horse breeding. In 1995 a bloodless coup in which Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa deposed his father set the stage for the modernization of the country's oil and gas industries and for stunning economic growth. Qatar's economy grew 24 percent in 2006 alone, according to the U.S. State Department, and its per capita income that year was $61,540. Qatar is on track to become the wealthiest nation (on a per capita basis) in the world.

The vast majority of Qatar's population lives in or around the capital city of Doha. Qatari citizens have benefited enormously from the economic boom, but they are a small minority in their own country, roughly 20 percent. The majority of the inhabitants are expatriates who come to Qatar to work--from other Arab nations, from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and from the West.

Qatar, which became independent from Great Britain in 1971, has long been ruled by the Al-Thani family. The emir, selected from within that family, rules in accordance with Shari'a law and in consultation with members of his and other leading families, though some moves have been made toward having elections and a more parliamentary form of government. In 1992, following the war in Kuwait, Qatar signed a defense agreement with the United States which allowed the U.S. to build in Qatar its largest military base in the Middle East and the headquarters for CENTCOM, the U.S. Central Command for the Middle East.

Sheikh Hamad, as Qatar's current emir, has introduced many changes, including a certain amount of freedom of the press and of religion. Al-Jazeera, a broadcasting company that is viewed as the freest in the Arab world, was established in 1997. Its broadcasts are often critical of other governments in the area, but not of Qatar. In March a Catholic church opened in Doha; while there were various places of Christian worship previously, this was the first building in centuries to be erected as a Christian church in the country. Significantly, it does not display the cross on any of its outer walls. Plans are being made for a Greek Orthodox church, an Anglican church, a Coptic church, and a church for Christian traditions from India, which will also include a space for nondenominational worship.

Not all Qataris are pleased with such openings to Christianity. Most of the country's citizens adhere to Islam's conservative Wahhabi movement. In the Islamic tradition, there is a hadith in which Muhammad says that Christians should not be allowed in the holy areas. Some Qatari Muslims believe that this principle should apply to the entire Arabian Peninsula, including Qatar. A vigorous debate in the local press took place over the building of the Catholic church, and worries were expressed about a possible violent protest. When Georgetown University's Qatar branch tried to import Christian Bibles for one of its theology courses, the Bibles were held up at customs for six weeks until the ministry of education was able to confirm that they were intended for educational purposes at the university.

Yet in other ways openness to the West is part of Qatar's agenda. The Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the emir, is inviting applications for membership in the Qatar Symphony Orchestra. In February, Placido Domingo came to sing with the German orchestra of Baden-Baden.

An aura of artificiality envelops many things in Doha. The shopping mall Villaggio is built as a replica of Venice, with gondoliers waiting to take shoppers for a ride along a canal that goes past the shops toward an ice skating rink. Above the mall's entrance are murals depicting Venetian architecture.

Adding to the city's artificiality is the fact that most of the expatriates have little contact with Qataris or with Islamic culture. And most of the buildings--largely constructed since the early 1990s--follow modern Western architectural styles.

Education is a realm in which Qatar has invested a great deal in opening itself to the West. Since the 1980s, the country's leaders have been concerned about the quality of the educational system and its ability to prepare students for contemporary economic and social life. It is in this rapidly changing context that the 2,500-acre Education City was founded in 1997. Its Web site offers this rationale: "Qatar Foundation understands that the future of Qatar and the region depends on well-educated citizens, actively engaged in the international marketplace of ideas, creating and finding uses for new knowledge. At Qatar Foundation, we believe that today's investments in education will make Qatar a hub of innovative education and cutting-edge research, ensuring Qatar's prosperity far into the future."

Three years ago Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., set up in Qatar a branch of its School of Foreign Service. Georgetown is one of several U.S. universities that have established a campus in the country. Virginia Commonwealth teaches communication design, fashion design and interior design; Carnegie Mellon University Qatar, business and computer science; Texas A & M University at Qatar, chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering; Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, premedical and medical studies leading to the M.D. degree. Next year Northwestern University will begin teaching journalism in the country. These are not traditional study-abroad centers for American students but rather campuses of the home university that offer full-degree programs

Students at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service-Qatar are mostly Sunni Muslims, along with some Shi'a Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Baha'is. As a Jesuit university, Georgetown requires undergraduates to take two courses in theology. I've encountered more energy in these classes than in any others I've taught. Students are eager to learn about religions other than their own, and their discussions of religious differences can move quickly into emotional disputes, with Sunni students vigorously criticizing Shi'a students, or more traditional students vehemently rejecting the views of more progressive students. I have heard anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic comments. In one class discussion, a Hindu student insisted that Hinduism is monotheistic; to demonstrate her point, she read a text of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, then translated and commented on it. In class, no other students disagreed with her, but afterward, outside of class, she was accosted and harshly criticized. To some students, Hinduism must be condemned as polytheistic.

The classroom also offers remarkable moments of interreligious exchange, as when a Hindu student queries a Muslim classmate about various aspects of the Islamic tradition, and vice versa. Muslim students are quite sensitive to the negative images of Islam that prevail in the West. Even students who are critical of other traditions appear interested in discussions of interreligious dialogue and the role of religion in peacemaking.

One student told me that in her earlier schooling she had absorbed extremely negative attitudes toward all other religions and that the Georgetown courses were her first opportunity to learn about other traditions in a more open-minded atmosphere. Some Muslims have accused her and others of being infidels because of their more benign attitudes toward other religions. A Baha'i student recalled her earlier sense of fear that people would attack her for following a different religious tradition; she appreciates the atmosphere at Georgetown, in which students can talk openly about different religions. Another student noted that learning about other religions can go two ways; it can strengthen one's faith or it can weaken it.

In my course World Religions Today, students read a book on the place of women in various religious traditions. In reference to this topic, one Qatari Muslim student noted that people in the West frequently accuse Islam of having negative attitudes toward women. She said that in reading the book she had learned that the treatment of women is a problem everywhere and that the real problem is not religion but rather the various cultures that mistreat women.

I invited a Conservative Jewish woman who is studying to be a rabbi to speak to one class. The students, most of whom were female, were amazed and delighted at the opportunity to converse with her. A number of students commented that they had no idea that a woman could study to be a rabbi in any form of Judaism. And at least in the class discussion, none of the common anti-Jewish attitudes that circulate in the Arab world surfaced.

One student said that in my course The Problem of God, she had been scared that she would be attacked if she questioned Islam. A Shi'a student acknowledged that she felt the same way around Sunni Muslims, who view her as an infidel.

A fair amount of religious intolerance circulates through Qatari primary and secondary schools. Students at Georgetown are the only ones in Qatar with the opportunity to study theology and comparative religion in the context of a university that has a major commitment to interreligious understanding. However difficult the conversations and conflicts may be at the school, our hope is to shape a hospitable atmosphere for exploring religious differences and building healthy religious communities.

An old adage of Catholic scholasticism says: whatever is received is received according to the mode of the recipient. This principle is played out weekly at Georgetown's campus in Doha, as teachers from one cultural and religious context send messages to students from very different backgrounds. Communication does take place, but always with a difference that may not be visible for some time. The project of Western education in Doha is a significant experiment whose results will be fully known only in the years and decades to come.

At the beginning of my course The Problem of God, the class studied a book about encountering God in Judaism. One day a student from Saudi Arabia approached me and said that previously he had known nothing about Jews except what he had been taught in his country--that they are all evil. He added that he did not share that view. I thanked God for this opening for more conversation.

Toward the end of the semester the class watched the movie Monsieur Ibrahim, in which an elderly Muslim gentleman in Paris (played by Omar Sharif) befriends a Jewish teenage boy. During the course of their developing friendship, the older man gives the boy his copy of the Qur'an, which contains pressed flowers. On the day we viewed the film, the Saudi student asked me if he could keep the Bible that the school had lent to him. I told him that the Bible was not mine to give, but that I would happily give him my own copy of the Bible if he came to my office the next day.

When I gave him the Bible, I thought of the movie we had seen together and wondered about the experience that this young man would have, moving beyond his upbringing to an engagement with the world's religious heritage.

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