Archives: Articles

Mujeristas: A Name of Our Own!!

An exploration of the emergence of mujerista theology -- which brings together elements of feminist theology, Latin American liberation theology and cultural theology.

Text:

To be able to name oneself is one of the most powerful abilities a person can have. A name is not just a word by which one is identified. A name provides the conceptual framework and the mental constructs that are used in thinking, understanding and relating to a person. For almost 15 years, Hispanic women in the U.S. who struggle against ethnic prejudice, sexism, and in many cases classism have been at a loss as to what to call ourselves. The majority of Hispanic women have simply called themselves cubanas, chicanas or puertorriquefias, and most will probably continue to do so. Some of us, feeling the need for a name that would primarily indicate the struggle against sexism that is part of our daily bread while also helping us identify one another in the trenches as we fight for our survival within different Hispanic communities and in society at large, have called ourselves feministas hispanai. But this appellation has meant giving long explanations of what such a phrase does not mean.

Feministas hispanas have been consistently marginalized in the white, Anglo feminist community because of our critique of its ethnic and racial prejudice and lack of class analysis. At the same time, when we have insisted on calling ourselves feministas, we have been rejected by many in the Hispanic community because they consider feminism a preoccupation of white, Anglo women. Yet Hispanic women widely agree with the analysis of sexism as an evil within our communities, an evil which plays into the hands of the dominant forces of society and which helps to repress and exploit us in such a way that we constitute the largest number of those at the lowest economic stratum. Likewise, Hispanic women widely agree that, though we make up the vast majority of those who participate in the work of the churches, we do not participate in deciding what work is to be done; we do the praying, but our understanding of the God to whom we pray is ignored.

Therefore Hispanic women continue to search for a name that will call us together, that will help us to understand our oppression, that will identify the specificity of our struggle without separating us from our communities. In our search we have turned to our music, part of the soul of our culture. In love songs as well as in protest songs we are simply called rnujer -- woman. " Yo soy mujer en busca de igualdad, no aguantar abuso ni maldad. Yo soy mujer y tengo dignidad, y pronto la justicia serd una realidad" ("I am a woman searching for equality; I will not put up with abuse and wickedness. I am a woman and I have dignity, and justice will soon be a reality") , proclaims a song composed by women in the South Bronx. "Mujer, tú eres mujer, porque supiste ver, la realidad de tu poder" ("Woman, you are woman, because you have known how to recognize the fact that you are powerful") , sings Rosie Sanchez. "Hoy canto al Dios del Pueblo en mi guitarra, un canto de mujer que se libera" ("Today I sing to the God of my people with my guitar, I sing a song of a woman who liberates herself’) , sings Rosa Marta Zárate. She continues, "God listened to the cry of our people, became an ally of the poor and the exploited, and frees woman from the chains imposed on her with cruelty for centuries." And the song ends by repeating time and again, "la mujer, la mujer la mujer."

Yes, we are mujeres, and those of us who make a preferential option for mujeres are mujeristas. (I am much indebted to the work of black feminists who have preceded us in this struggle to name ourselves. Their use of the term "womanist" has influenced me immensely.) As Rosa Marta’s song says so clearly, a mujerista is one who struggles to liberate herself, who is consecrated by God as proclaimer of the hope of her people. Mujerista is one who knows how to be faithful to the task of making justice and peace flourish, who opts for God’s cause and the law of love. In the mujerista God revindicates the divine image and likeness of women. The mujerista is called to gestate new women and men: a strong people. Mujeristas are anointed by God as servants, prophets and witnesses of redemption. Mujeristas will echo God’s reconciling love; their song will be a two-edged sword, and they will proclaim the gospel of liberation.

As we name ourselves mujeristas, we want to rename our theological enterprise. What we called up to now Hispanic women’s liberation theology will henceforth be mujerista theology. Mujerista theology is being formulated out of the daily voice of the mujerista, for Christianity is an intrinsic element of Hispanic culture. Mujerista theology articulates religious understandings of Hispanic women. It always uses a liberative lens, which requires placing oneself at the core of our ‘own struggling pueblo. Mujerista theology brings together elements of feminist theology, Latin American liberation theology and cultural theology, three perspectives which critique and challenge each other, giving birth to new elements, a new reality, a new whole.

Mujeristas are increasingly aware that any attempt to separate action from reflection is false and evil. The physical participation of Hispanic women in programs and action is often sought, but they are seldom asked to be involved in deciding or designing content. Hispanic women are seldom invited to reflect on the reasons and motivations for their actions. But mujeristas will always insist on the need to be actively involved, in the reflective moment of praxis. Without reflection there is no critical awareness, no conscientization, and therefore no possibility of self-definition and liberation.

One of the most pervasive themes of mujerista theology is the preferential option for the poor and oppressed. This preferential option is based on the epistemological privilege of the poor because they can see and understand what the rich and privileged cannot. It is not that the poor and oppressed are morally superior or that they can see better. Their epistemological privilege is based on the fact that, because their point of view is not distorted by power and riches, they can see differently. José Miguez Bonino explains:

The point of view of the poor, . . . pierced by suffering and attracted by hope, allows them, in their struggles, to conceive another reality. Because the poor suffer the weight of alienation, they can conceive a different project of hope and provide dynamism to a new way of organizing human life for all.

The epistemological privilege of the poor should be operative in a very special way in the theological enterprise. Mujerista theology encompasses the way grass-roots Hispanic women understand the divine and grapple with questions of ultimate meaning in their daily lives. Theological reflection cannot be separated from theological action. Therefore, mujerista theology is a praxis, which consists of two interlinked moments: action and reflection. Mujerista theology is a doing of theology that does not place reflection and articulation above action. Neither does mujerista theology see the theological enterprise as a second moment following the praxis, for all action, at the moment that it is taking place, has a reflective quality. Because mujerisra theology is a praxis, it is, therefore, the community as a whole which engages in the theological enterprise.

Liberation theologians who are academically trained are concerned about their role and title. If the community as a whole does theology, what is the task of those of us who have called ourselves theologians? I believe there is no way of averting this identity crisis once the epistemological privilege of the poor is recognized and theology is understood as a praxis. The only way for academically trained theologians to resolve their dilemma is to participate fully in a community of struggle and to do theology as members of that community. The gifts of the academically trained theologian will not be wasted. The community needs some of its members to be enablers and facilitators during the reflective moment of the praxis -- which does not happen only when one is sitting down. Those who are trained academically can enable the community to understand that its daily struggle for existence is not separate from its religious understandings, sentiments and beliefs. They can record what the community is saying so the community can benefit from it in the future, so that it may be shared with other communities of struggle, and so that one day those voices may be an intrinsic element of the societal norm.

Following the lead of Carlos Abesamis, I have proposed calling the enablers or writers of the community’s theological reflection "theological technicians." Several of my colleagues have objected to such a title. Maybe we are not ready to name ourselves. But what mujerisra theology insists on saying that theological work is done by community of struggle, not by individuals who are not intrinsic members of the community. Those of us who are academically trained and are intrinsic members of the community of struggle must do theology with our community and not as separate individuals. Our theological articulations should therefore always be birthed by the community, discussed in the community, and made understandable to the community. (I am grateful to my community of Hispanic sisters who never allowed me to rest comfortably under the name "feminist.") Because the theological articulations which we write are but a moment in the praxis of the community, such an articulation must always be open, in flux, welcoming revision.

The struggle for the liberation of Hispanic women is being carried out in many different ways by many different mujeristas all around the U.S. Mujerista theology is one of the voices of such a struggle -- a struggle that is life for us because we have learned from our grandmothers and mothers that la vida es la lucha.

Euthanasia: A Bedside View

Back in the ‘50s I wrote an article for a nursing magazine to sort out my frustrations at the way terminal patients were treated There was then no "effective management of pain" or hospice care. Frequently patients were not even told that their days were numbered. Death was seen as a failure and embarrassment to the medical profession. I received some sympathetic letters from colleagues who were also troubled by the medical profession’s failure to approach dying in a decisive and positive manner.

Then in the ‘70s Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her ideas concerning the stages through which the dying pass as they seek to reach a measure of peace and acceptance. This new openness was very liberating for medicine. Nurses no longer had to stand outside the sickroom of the dying, speaking in whispers. The hitherto forbidden subject could be faced and discussed. Predictably, however, the whole death and dying discourse began to develop into a sort of trendy psychobabble for nurses and chaplains and therapists who sat wringing their hands over someone stuck in stage three, saying things like, "If only he could move past it." A few patients even had the gall not to pass through the stages in the proper order.

Mercifully, professionals are much less likely to act and talk like that nowadays. And Kübler-Ross’s theories did lay the foundation for the hospice movement, greatly ease the mental and physical suffering of dying patients and inspire those who care for them.

In March the New England Journal of Medicine published a trailblazing article "The Physician’s Responsibility Toward Hopelessly Ill Patients." This article marked the first time that premier physicians used a prominent journal to discuss not only "pulling the plug," but whether physician-assisted suicide (performed by the patient) and euthanasia (performed by the physician) should be a part of the continuum of medical care. The article was picked up by the media, with experts from both sides presenting a preview of the debate that lies ahead. New occasions teach new duties. Thirty years ago we didn’t talk about death, 20 years ago that taboo was overturned, and now we are speaking the unspeakable. More than pulling the plug or stopping the tube feedings or writing do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders, we now have the phrase "assisted death." An older, more direct term is mercy killing.

I have been a nurse for many years. I have been at the bedside of dying people, young and old, people who died with a dramatic intensity and others who died so slowly and quietly that it was hard to tell the exact moment of death. I do not think I could ever become callous. I think I still remember every one of those occasions. Maybe not the name anymore, but something about the experience: what the relatives said, what prayers the chaplain prayed, how the room smelled, who wept and who didn’t, who helped me wash the body. I have seen the medical profession make great strides in the management of pain and suffering. But there are some terminal patients whose suffering goes beyond anything the medical profession can alleviate. The physicians who wrote the journal article are asking if there should be one final act of care -- to bring on death. As a Christian and a caregiver, I find myself saying Amen.

R. D. Laing once wrote that we are more afraid to live and love than we are to die. I think he’s wrong. I think we’re pretty frightened of all three. Malcolm Muggeridge calls death the 20th century’s dirty little secret. Maybe we could keep it a secret a little longer by having all of our bodily organs transplanted, or eating health food from the cradle on or spending two hours a day reading self-help books. But, ironically, our very health technology is forcing us to confront death. The same great strides in medical technology that are saving and prolonging lives are in some cases prolonging unspeakable anguish and suffering. That’s the way it goes with technology. The doctors who wrote the New England Journal article have brought our dirty little secret out into the open. They dare to ask: Is there a time when it is appropriate, even obligatory, to assist death? They are appealing to people of faith to think about this matter and come to terms with their proposals.

How should Christians in general -- not just Christians in the health-care field -- respond to the, notion of physician-assisted death? A wealth of memories and experiences seem to be telling me one thing, yet "thou shalt nots" and "what ifs" pull me another way. It is hard to know what is both merciful and right. I am getting older, and I have to come to terms with this issue, both professionally and personally. All I can do is to set out some of the considerations and arguments and ask God to add his blessing.

Mercy killing is certainly killing. But which word do we emphasize? The "mercy" or the "killing"? There’s no way to make it sound acceptable. Killing sounds wrong and violent. ‘4Assist death" or "stop life" sound better, but euphemisms are dishonest evasions; the issue is killing. Why is it so difficult to bring oneself to kill a person? Often it isn’t that we want a person to live longer in a state of suffering; it’s just that we don’t want to be the one to end it: Yet why do we want to keep a person alive who has no hope of recovery, who is in dreadful agony and who is begging for death?

Killing people is one of the things we do best. We kill people who get too close to our border, we kill people to take their land, we kill people whose ideologies we despise or whose skin is a different color, we kill fetuses, we kill people by not sharing our resources, we execute prisoners. We kill all kinds of people who don’t ask to die, yet the poor bugger who’s begging for death we refuse in the name of humanity.

The newspaper recently carried a neat little chart of the various chemical and germ warfare agents now at our disposal; nerve gas, vomit gas, anthrax, dengue fever. This was just a little spot of routine news. We can look at this pocket-sized guide to killing off most of the world’s population and be so desensitized that we must struggle to call up righteous outrage. Nevertheless, for many Christians mercy killing touches a raw nerve. Certainly it seems closer to home. We ourselves may one day choose to be victims if euthanasia becomes an accepted way of dying.

One argument against euthanasia is that it brutalizes society. But which is more brutal: to insist that a person spend his or her last days in agony and suffering or to help that person die a more peaceful death? Christ transformed the universe and everything in it, our lives and our deaths. We hear a lot about new life in Christ, but we’re still holding on to the old death, the one with the sting. We don’t have the faintest inkling of what St. Francis calls "the kind and gentle death." Indeed, we have a sin that we don’t think much about: we are brutalizing death. We are giving death the status of a terrorist. When one of my colleagues who works on an adjacent unit came rushing over to borrow supplies, I asked her, "What’s going on over there?" "The patient has been dead for a half hour," she replied, "they’re just playing with the body." It was the second time that evening that the emergency team had resuscitated an 84-year-old woman. We are keeping the machines on long after life has gone. We are creating black markets for livers and kidneys. Perhaps we need to think more deeply about what is brutal and what is kind.

Another argument is that euthanasia is interfering with God’s role. But where do God’s rights begin and ours end? Is taking aspirin interference? Or having an appendectomy? How about an organ transplant or genetic surgery? Releasing a person from the last agonizing days of suffering doesn’t seem to be as much interference as installing a new heart or giving a total blood transfusion. Certainly it is not tampering with destiny as much as is providing a new heart. I guess God’s rights start where our technology runs out.

Perhaps with an eye to the martyrs, some insist that since Christ suffered, it should be our privilege to suffer as he did. Christ died to spare us, among other things, the superstitious view that brute suffering is God’s will. The cross and suffering he calls us to are the kind of self-sacrifice required to feed the hungry and help the oppressed. There is no way we can imitate what Christ did on the cross. Physical suffering for its own sake has always seemed to me to be morbidly out of phase with the Good News.

Some opponents of euthanasia espouse the domino theory: if we permit euthanasia, we’ll soon be killing retarded people, then the elderly, and then people whose ears are too large. This argument is often hauled out, but I’ve never found it convincing. Life and law in a pluralistic society such as ours do not move in a rigidly logical progression. I need only look at my own tensions of conscience. In most cases I do not condone abortion, but I am pro-euthanasia. I know people who are pro-choice and are peaceniks. I know hunters who are environmentalists. The domino theory has dramatic quasi-logical power, but life does not work that way.

I deeply admire those Christians who are attempting to live the seamless garment ethic -- to be utterly consistent in their pro-life values, allowing no wrinkles or tears in that holy garment. But as I look into a face distorted with pain, I would have to question whether I was more concerned with my seamless garment than another’s suffering. There is a line in a novel by Penelope Lively that makes this point: "Tell the man on the guillotine that the action lies elsewhere." Likewise, tell the man on his bed of pain that the action is really to be found in my system of ethics or in hospital procedure manuals or in the law of the land. The dying one might think otherwise. Paul Lehmann used to say that sometimes we have to forget our principles and do the right thing.

What about mental suffering? It’s sometimes even worse than physical anguish, but it is not in itself a terminal condition. Certainly I do not propose that anyone who is suffering apply to the mercy killing board for a euthanasia permit. The physicians who wrote the journal article are proposing alternatives for hopelessly physically ill patients. The sad truth is that many unhappy people do end their lives, and many of them would have had their lives made better with psychiatric treatment. Therefore, the suicide of the mentally ill, rather than be medically facilitated, ought to be medically interdicted no matter how they may ask to die. Strangely, it is not generally the hopelessly chronic, impoverished back-ward-type patients who kill themselves. It’s people like you and me.

What about family members? If euthanasia were legal, one would hope that the family could support the dying person’s last wish. Any family is under great stress at such a time, but more so families who have never given much thought to what they believe about death or who have unresolved conflicts with the dying member. When persons are comatose and terminally ill, the family has to make these difficult decisions. Thus, 93-year-olds are resuscitated and feeding tubes are forced down, mostly for legal reasons or because families want the consolation of being able to say, We did everything we could. Some of these procedures are terrible to see, and no one who has stood at the bedside has not wondered, Is this merciful? Is this right? When an aging desperate husband rushes into a nursing home and shoots his suffering wife and then goes to jail, we know something is terribly wrong. We need to give thanks for the hospital ethics committees, composed of doctors and nurses, pastors and counselors, who are doing fine work with families facing some burdensome decisions.

In the midst of these deliberations, we ask ourselves: What gives life its quality? Is it breathing? A heartbeat? Thought? Interrelatedness? Troubling questions indeed. It seems that we can’t really say what life is. Death, too, has several definitions: brain dead, biologically dead, legally dead. But it’s the dying we’re worried about. Many terminal patients wouldn’t want euthanasia because so much has been done to make their final days as comfortable as possible. It’s the other ones we’re concerned about. What is the only argument for euthanasia? That it is merciful. We assist birth; we try to make it as safe and painless and joyful as possible. Why can’t we assist death? Just that one word -- mercy -- seems a stronger argument for than all the arguments against.

My husband and I watched Babette ‘s Feast the other night. In this beautiful movie the old people go out into the night after dining on a sublime banquet -- a foretaste of the heavenly feast. "The stars come closer every night," one says, "and the candle burns lower." Yet they join hands and sing a joyful benediction. Clearly they are prepared for the heavenly banquet, and death is no dirty little secret.

I think, Dylan Thomas to the contrary, that I would prefer to go gentle into that dark night. Only I don’t believe it’s going to be a dark night. I think it’s going to be something like Frederick Buechner once wrote:

We are going, I believe, much further than at this point we can possibly see, and in everything we do or fail to do, much more is at stake, I believe, than we dream. In this life and in whatever life awaits us, he is the way; that is our faith. And the way he is, is the way of taking time enough to love our little piece of time without forgetting that we live also beyond time.

That’s what I want to do. I want to love my little piece of time like I love the little piece of ground on which my house sits. But when my piece of time is over, when the pain gets too bad, then I’d like to have the family and the pastor and the good doctors and nurses and friends surrounding me as I say farewell. I’d like to hear "Sheep May Safely Graze" once more, and I’d like to taste the Last Supper, knowing that they have saved the best wine till last. Maybe I will discover, like St. Francis, that it is possible to praise kind and gentle death.

Buechner also writes that death is not the final end -- it is the end of an act, not the end of the drama. If we really believe that then mercy killing is, to use a strange phrase, a profound technicality. The question for me is:

Can we knock on death’s door when the storm outside is unbearable, or ought it only to be opened from the other side? I believe that in his great mercy our faithful Savior will understand our attempts to be merciful to ourselves and others. Can anyone say Amen?

A Tour Among the Evangelicals

Book Review:

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture of America. By Randall Balmer. Oxford University

Press, 256 pp., $19.95.

The sign said: "Modern American Culture Museum of the Oxford University Press: Tonight’s Feature: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture of America." Once safely under the overhang of the museum’s portico, I turned to see the rest of the tour group dashing in from their cars. The storms of modernity were blowing more fiercely than usual. In a few minutes we had all gathered on the porch. Some of us were professors of religious studies, history or sociology; some were journalists; others were leaders of evangelical organizations; and several others were simply folk interested in evangelicalism. Randall Balmer, professor at Columbia University, identified himself as our guide and as an ambassador for American evangelicalism.

Once in the museum (it was good to get into this shelter -- the rain seemed unusually acidic) , we turned to listen to Balmer. He started by defining a few terms. He began with "evangelical," naturally enough, and after a little historical background proceeded to modern-day uses of the term. Balmer said it generally denotes Christians who agree with Luther’s theological emphasis upon salvation by faith alone and who add to that certain other convictions: one must experience a spiritual rebirth during which "one acknowledges personal sinfulness and Christ’s atonement"; one must practice "a literalistic hermeneutic for understanding the Bible" based on a confidence in the inerrancy of the original texts, or "autographs," of the Bible; one must have a "proselytizing zeal" that has occasionally "erupted into large-scale revivals or spiritual awakenings"; and finally one must burn with "warmhearted piety." Balmer incidentally acknowledged that not all evangelicals share all of these characteristics. I myself wondered whether the list was complete without more attention paid to the evangelical impulse and the quest for personal holiness. But it was, after all, just an introduction.

Balmer then distinguished within evangelicalism fundamentalists, Pentecostals and charismatics. Apparently noting some foot-shuffling (although a couple of professors had started to raise their hands to question a definition or two) , he moved on to describe his project. He had grown up evangelical, he told us -- fundamentalist, actually -- but had moved out of that subculture as a student. Links with his past remained, however, and he felt a strong ambivalence: he had criticized evangelicalism while wanting to defend it against unjustified attacks by others. He had done both, therefore, in this exploration of some social manifestations of American evangelicalism encompassing as much geographical and cultural variety and balance as he could manage. He had collected stories, artifacts and impressions, and out of this had constructed displays, each representing a different institution he had visited. We might not recognize any names, he warned; he deliberately had concentrated on ordinary evangelicals, hoping to give us a true sense of mainstream evangelicalism.

The first chamber was called "California Kickback." The floor was covered in sand and the sound of surf played lightly in the background. The display showed pictures of cars parked in many rows around a large, low church building called "Calvary Chapel." Balmer pointed out the bumper-stickers, ranging from "Robertson ‘88" to "I’m into God." The focus here was a typical worship service, led by Pastor Chuck Smith.

Balmer told us that Smith, a tanned, balding, friendly man, had been ordained in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel but had gotten tired of endless denominational attendance contests and had accepted a call in 1965 to a tiny, nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. Smith and his wife welcomed his college-age daughter’s friends’ into their home, many of whom were hippies. These friends began to attend their church and then to bring others. By the early 1970s, huge baptismal services were held at the ocean – "happenings" which attracted considerable media attention and more interest in the church. Today the baptisms are held less frequently and the congregation fully spans the generations. The little church has grown into a complex of lively institutions, from private schools to a radio station. In fact, pastors told Balmer that up to 25,000 people pass through their campus every week, including thousands for the three Sunday worship services.

Why the attraction? Smith didn’t seem like such a charismatic guy. Balmer apparently had anticipated the question, and turned on a tape recorder. Testimonies from a variety of Calvary Chapel people described Smith as a genuinely spiritual, plainspoken pastor whose relaxed style matched perhaps surprisingly well with a serious desire to teach the Bible in basic, practical terms. Smith’s integrity, clarity and warmth attracted people who lived in a culture of superficial smiles and false messages.

I thought that this was a pleasant way to begin the tour, although I missed hearing some of the music that had helped put Calvary Chapel on the map. After all, its own "Maranatha Music" label had brought "Jesus music" (and its distinctive logo of a stylized Holy Spirit dove) far beyond the borders of California -- reaching even to the hinterland of northern Canada.

Balmer recognized, though, that the Dallas commitment to dispensationalism reflected a more basic commitment to a "high" view of scriptural authority and a clearcut view of biblical inspiration, so he had set out as well a few of the writings of noted "inerrancy" crusader and Dallas professor Norman Geisler. I myself recalled having heard a number of Dallas faculty members and graduates in recent years distance themselves from "hardline" dispensationalism, reducing C. I. Scofield’s highly articulated framework to virtually two principles: the literal reading of the text is to be preferred unless strong evidence indicates otherwise, and Israel and the church remain distinct in biblical chronology (and so in eschatology) to the end. Beyond these two principles, I thought, I also saw more interest in eschatology than in other traditions. Balmer’s instincts were sound here: the one class he visited was in this subject.

Balmer therefore correctly put the big Bible and pulpit in the center. Dallas’s self-proclaimed goal increasingly has been to train expositional preachers -- more than, say, pastors as counselors, social workers or ecumenical leaders. The clarity and confidence (some would say dogmatism and arrogance) typical of Dallas graduates naturally comes from "knowing" what the Bible says (through dispensationalist hermeneutics) and "knowing" that the Bible is the highest authority in all matters (through belief in its inerrancy).

Balmer noticed another part of the "Dallas man" ethos: the "man" part. The other side of his display was a videotape presentation of the class he visited. It showed a teacher, one of the seminary’s oldest and most respected, freely answering male students’ questions while deflecting with a Bible quotation a female student’s question -- to loud male laughter and her embarrassment. The tape had been edited, so I wasn’t entirely sure of the fairness of Balmer’s version, but his main point was undoubtedly sound: Dallas and its constituency are closed to the idea of women preaching. Indeed, only in 1986 were women admitted to the standard Dallas pastoral degree program, and they still are not allowed to take homiletics, since they are assumed to have no need of it.

Perhaps it was only accidental, but the temperature in this gallery seemed much lower than in the Calvary Chapel room, and Balmer’s own tone was frosty. He made a few remarks about how Dallas’s view of things reflected a general antipathy among some evangelicals toward contemporary culture, but I was still puzzled, given Balmer’s criticism, as to why anyone would find this kind of religion attractive, and I wished our guide had helped us to see that a little better.

In the next gallery we viewed some clips from the work of film director Don Thompson, who had produced some sensational, if well-produced, movies which had graphically depicted the "end times" la Hal Lindsey. Despite Balmer’s obvious ambivalence about some of the films’ content and with evangelical use of mass media in general, Thompson had impressed him as a "godly Christian."

Evangelical Neal Frisby obviously had impressed Balmer too, but not positively. His gallery was a small-scale mockup of his Capstone Cathedral in Phoenix, a pyramid-like structure in which Frisby has conducted his high-octane healing services since the early 1970s. Again, Balmer included some historical memorabilia to help us understand the tradition of faith healing in America, but clearly this example was extreme even by its extraordinary standards. Indeed, I left wondering whether this self-acclaimed "Rainbow prophet" wouldn’t be seen as actually a cult leader by most of the other people Balmer described as evangelicals.

Squarely (and I mean that) in the mainstream of evangelicalism was the "Adirondack fundamentalism" of Jack Wyrtzen’s Word of Life summer camp. The most striking part of the display was a skit Balmer had arranged of a "testimony campfire." The actors nicely captured the strong, if fleeting and often contradictory, emotions of the campers, who spoke of past failures and resolutions to serve the Lord better (while perhaps yet afraid that things really wouldn’t change). Some of us remembered, though, that powerful issues of self-esteem and sexuality often pulsed beneath all of this spiritual concern. Perhaps Balmer had been a more spiritual camper than most; he mentioned only teen love, and that only in sweet, gentle terms. Several of us, though, recalled enduring mean-spirited competition among campers to see who could be the most "spiritual" or the most "worldly" (or, mirabile dictu, to be both "Christian" and "cool"!) And others spoke of the temptations of all those shorts and bathing suits and emotional nights around the campfire and darkness so deep no one could see you hold hands or steal kisses during the prayers. Released from fundamentalist homes at last, some kids sprang in the other direction.

The next room snapped us back to the adult present: the bracing froth of the 1988 presidential campaign. In a room festooned with bunting and campaign posters, with telephones ringing in the background, Balmer nicely covered the various characteristics (naïveté, enthusiasm and more than a little self-righteousness) and concerns (from abortion to "secularist" influences upon education) of evangelicals newly involved in this arena. He also noted the irony of so many premillenialists, convinced that civilization will steadily decline until the second coming of Christ working for all the world (as it were) like postmillennialists intent on bringing in the kingdom through hard, faithful effort.

Education seemed the last thing being advanced at the annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Association. The gallery Balmer had constructed oppressed us: "Jesus junk" was everywhere, from frisbees to pocket lights with Bible verses printed on each. There were books, but they were either endless varieties of Bibles (in a bewildering range of translations, "study versions" arid covers) or fluffy self-help and romance books. Music blared from speakers -- almost all of it the homogenized, "easy listening" sound of "Christian contemporary music." The whole thing reeked of avarice and bad taste.

The contrast in the next room could hardly have been more stark. Suddenly we were in the windy silence of North Dakota, looking through some snapshots of the ministry of Father Innocent Good House, a Sioux and rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. According to Balmer, Good House was a proper evangelical who exhorted his congregation to have personal devotions and to evangelize their friends, but who also attempted to demonstrate parallels between Christianity and native culture so as to encourage his flock to enjoy the best of both worlds. Balmer clearly sympathized with this concern, although he included testimony from other evangelicals among the Native Americans who feared the resurgence of certain Native traditions as a threat to true Christianity and therefore saw Good House’s project as dangerous, if not illegitimate.

Balmer’s ambivalence about evangelicalism and his deep sympathy for those in its orbit who did not fully fit into it was evident in the next room, about a holiness camp meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida. Camp Freedom, to Balmer, seemed to offer anything but freedom. Here preachers inveighed not only against the perils of the world outside but against those within the church who attended church only on Sunday mornings (rather than also on Sunday evenings and weeknights) , who wore makeup and fashionable clothes, and who entertained themselves with dancing, movies or card games. Holiness was very much up to the individual’s own will, it seemed, and one’s eternal destiny depended upon the cultivation of holiness. "We don’t go to heaven to become saints," one preacher declared. "We become saints to go to heaven."

Meeting one "saint," however, obviously had affected Balmer deeply. He played a recording of his conversation with an elderly man who was a regular at the meeting and who could spout all the correct clichés. But then the man admitted, "I’m a homosexual," and proceeded to pour out his story of decades of attempting, not always successfully, to live in celibacy. Balmer then reflected upon the surpassing sadness of this man approaching 70 whose echoing of the camp meeting rhetoric of "blessed assurance" made it seem so superficial in the shade of his fears that he yet was not certain of his eventual standing before God. We heard the old man’s teary voice as we exited the gallery: "Sin is not worth it, because that one little sin may keep you out of heaven."

Balmer played us quite a bit of a recording he had made of conversation with Frank. I began to wonder if Balmer was a little devious here, letting Frank opine on his behalf.

"Yes," he allowed, "I did let Frank do some talking for me. What I admire about Frank is his ability to maintain a distance from all the ephemera of American evangelicalism without discarding his faith. It’s my impression, moreover, that most people reared in the evangelical subculture either embrace it altogether or abandon it altogether. Either option strikes me as disingenous, an easy way around a tradition that is at once rich in theological insights and mired in contradictions."

Balmer went on to describe evangelicalism as a tradition bound by doctrines (I would have said "beliefs and concerns") rather than one linked by ethnicity, history, liturgy or other things that unite other groups. In their shared convictions evangelicals have definitions of the world which include right and wrong, good and bad, insider and outsider. Everyone needs boundaries, Balmer affirmed, and evangelicalism provides attractively clear ones for many who fear the ambiguity and even despair of contemporary culture.

Evangelicalism is also, Balmer continued, a quintessentially American religious phenomenon in its ability to thrive in the pluralism of American religious disestablishment. The basic product, Balmer could have said had he been unkind, can be repackaged in a wide variety of ways to suit a large range of tastes. Some tastes, he did say, have been catered to quite inappropriately, and he singled out the widespread theology of prosperity and the uncritical embrace of both the technology and values of mass media as examples of the adulteration of evangelical religion.

His final main point was that each of the galleries we had visited represented a kind of socially constructed "world," an alternative to the larger culture into which evangelicals could retreat. Indeed, he said, "the entire evangelical subculture itself is a socially constructed reality. . . Evangelicals feel secure within the cocoon of this contrived universe of churches, summer camps, Bible institutes, colleges, and seminaries."

I thought this last idea was both right and wrong. Yes, these institutions did help to constitute an alternative reality, but No, I couldn’t accept the wholly pejorative way Balmer put this point. Surely Peter Berger himself would have affirmed at least some of this "huddling together" in supportive institutions as necessary for any group that wishes to withstand the collective force of the larger culture. The nature of and perhaps the attitudes within those institutions doubtless are open to criticism, but the forming of some such "countercultural" societies (e.g., congregations) seems intrinsic to the Christian faith.

I also questioned whether the evangelistic impulse, underplayed in Balmer’s original definition of "evangelicalism," really got a good look in his travels. Perhaps a visit to a training center for missionaries like Moody Bible Institute or to the head office of a mission agency would have helped balance things better.

Finally -- perhaps this was my historian’s bias -- I would have liked some attention to actual historical connections between these people, if there were any. Such an investigation might help us see if there really is an evangelical "something" out there, rather than just some "type" of religious phenomena. Are there institutions (like Wheaton College, say) or individuals (like Billy Graham) that somehow link these various bits? Or are they "united" by common affirmations yet separated by doctrinal and moral idiosyncrasies, geography, social status and so on? Answering this sort of question would perhaps have helped confirm what is central and what is peripheral in American evangelicalism. For example, if two groups affirm that they hold these "fundamental" convictions in common and yet don’t cooperate, doesn’t this imply something about what they do consider most basic?

I broke out of my reverie to hear Balmer make a few comments about how evangelicalism will probably continue to meet at least some people’s needs in the future. He concluded: "I heard the gospel at various discrete moments in my travels. . . That the evangelical gospel can still be heard at all above the din of what passes for evangelicalism in America today is miracle enough perhaps, to capture the attention of even the most jaded observers. What it all means I’m not yet sure, but I now find it less easy to dismiss the preposterous evangelical claims about a God of amazing grace who, despite our bumbling and nonsense and hoary theological schemes, saves us from ourselves." With these ambivalent words, the ambassador kindly dismissed us, and we headed into the stormy blast.

I hailed a cab right away and settled down in the backseat to muse about where Balmer’s loyalties ultimately lay. I looked down at the program damp and crumpled in my hand and noticed for the first time some small print at the very bottom dedicating the project to Balmer’s son. It seemed to reveal something of Balmer’s final allegiance: "For Christian," it read, "who in time will find his place in the patchwork quilt of American evangelicalism."

Weariness in Well-Doing (II Thess. 3:11-131)

For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies. not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work in quietness and to earn their own living. My dear people, do not be weary in well-doing (II Thess. 3:11-13).

In both cases the gap between what faith affirms about God’s judgment and the possibilities for succeeding in everyday affairs leaves room for failure. Malachi does not presume that the arrogant will be converted. In fact, God’s true worshipers seem to be in the minority. They must be encouraged by the certainty that their names are in God’s "book of remembrance." On judgment day they will be God’s special heritage as beloved children. Since the idle are still members of the church, however, Paul may hope that they will reform their lives.

The apostle’s life becomes part of the tradition that is to govern Christian behavior. Paul had worked to earn his keep while he was preaching, and he expects Christians to live in quiet self-sufficiency. I Thessalonians 4:10-12 provides the rationale for such advice. First, it expresses the gospel’s call for love among fellow Christians. Second, it earns the respect of others. Third, it frees individuals from the web of dependency and patronage. All three factors were seen as necessary to establish and maintain the young church in suspicious and hostile Thessalonica.

Where Malachi pictured the certainty of God’s judgment in order to maintain the confidence of a righteous minority, both Paul and Luke speak to other distortions of belief in divine judgment, the temptation to "hurry the program." II Thessalonians does not provide enough information for us to know what led some people to claim that the judgment had come already. The letter responds by invoking an apocalyptic scenario of what must still happen before the end. However, that very delay may contribute to the "weariness in well-doing" against which Paul warns.

Jesus’ prophecies about Jerusalem in Luke represent another way in which people are tempted to escape the gap between effort and result, and to avoid the hard lessons of patience, endurance and even suffering that go with being a servant of God. Some may proclaim that the social and political turmoil is that of the "final days." Such prophets will always gain followers. Whatever the horrors of the days before judgment, its arrival promises to clear up worldly ambiguities. When Jerusalem was on the brink of destruction in 70 AD., some people did go about proclaiming visions of God’s heavenly armies waiting to defeat the Romans besieging the city.

What is Jesus’ message to the Christian community? Avoid such prophets and readings of the "signs of the times." The Christian’s place is to witness to the gospel even in the face of persecution by one’s own family. Christians will not save their lives by joining one or another faction in a revolution. Nor are they given the key to detect when God’s judgment will come. We have no more right to suppose that our age of threatened nuclear winter or ecological destruction is closer to the end than the first-century Christians had to follow false prophets during the Jewish revolt. Christians save their lives only by faithful witness before the rulers of the world.

We are even more driven than our predecessors by the demand for visible results and achievement. We buy books that detail stages of development and achievement for our children as soon as they are born. Many of us have to fill out annual statements on our performance that document accomplishments and establish objectives for the coming year. No such reports apply to serving God. The "book of rememberance" contains the names of those beloved by God, not their annual reports. Any demand for "results" undermines the true basis of salvation -- endurance in doing good.

The Power of Sin Is the Law (I Cor. 15:56)

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law [I Cor. 15:56].

In Corinthians, celebrating salvation leads to exhortation, to a reflection on the fact that Jerusalem still lies trampled by God’s enemies. Sin, the "sting of death," dictates much of the story of our personal and national life. These readings remind us how quickly we forget the lessons of Scripture in our everyday routines. ‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law" (I Cor. 15:56) Is this merely a religious statement about freedom from the Torah? If it is, how does sin gain its power over us?

We look to the law to push away evil. How can it empower sin and death? On a TV special about the drug problem, a young ex-addict insisted that the key to helping people get off drugs was treating them with respect. Drug czar Bennett responded harshly that before those involved could be treated with respect, they would have to earn it by ceasing to act like vicious animals. Until they did so, they should expect to feel society’s anger in tough new policies.

Christians are not necessarily "soft on crime" if they choose to advocate humane laws. Laws that treat offenders as subhuman are certainly sinful. Violence sanctioned by the community begets more violence.

Isaiah and Luke depict the violence that reduces beautiful cities like Jerusalem or Beirut to rubble and invades the human heart. In Isaiah the Lord complains that when people are enslaved, God’s name is despised. It is not enough to send the exiles back to a beautiful new Jerusalem. The people must learn to recognize God again.

Luke expands the parable about a man who had entrusted money to his servants with a story of a nobleman who journeys to a distant country in order to confirm his position as king. The story would have been familiar to Luke’s readers who lived under local kings who called on Rome’s help to stay on the throne. If the ruler’s appeal to Rome was successful, the locals who opposed his ascent to power could expect death, exile or loss of property. Faithful servants, on the other hand, would receive cities that had been taken from the king’s enemies. We can easily point to similar situations in our own time. The superpowers frequently act as powerbrokers for factions in other nations despite the protests of citizens in those nations.

In Luke, the large-scale power plays by which the king establishes his rule are mirrored in the individual stories of the servants entrusted with property. There is no ambiguity about what the servants are expected to do with the small sum of money entrusted to them: the master commands them to "trade with these till I come. Though the reward is proportionate to the amount earned from the one "pound" (approximately 100 drachmas) , this is not a contest in which the winner takes all. Both servants are generously rewarded for their efforts even though they had no claim to any compensation from the master, as the third servant points out.

The king embodies what was considered "just" behavior in the Greco-Roman world. He is generous to his friends, subordinates and dependents and harsh toward his enemies. The third servant has safeguarded the "pound" he was given but has not followed orders. He justifies his disobedience by accusing the master of being a harsh man. Yet the reader has already seen that the king can be generous too. Even as the king uses his servant’s own description to render judgment against him, he points out that there was an alternative -- small-scale money-lending -- which would have satisfied his command.

The third servant attempted to play it safe in a world of power politics and master-slave relationships. Yet the only way his strategy could have succeeded would have been if the other servants had lost the money entrusted to them. Even then, one could not be sure of the king’s response. The third servant may have hoped that the nobleman would not come back as king. It is his disobedience rather than his success or failure in trading that provokes, the master’s anger. This parable is not a morality play but a sober description of how power operates in a world where the "sting of death is sin."

The Magic Kingdom (Jer. 23:5)

"Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, who shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land" Jer. 23:51.

The Scripture readings (Jer. 23:1-6, Col. 1:13-20, Luke 23:35-43) will not allow us to push Christ’s kingship off to a heavenly fantasy world. They remind us that reconciliation applies to "all things, whether on earth or in heaven" (Col. 1:20) The peace of the gospel required a violent and irrational death. Jesus, the image of God in whom the cosmos was created (Col. 1:15-16) , suffered the most degrading punishment reserved for slaves and despised criminals. Patristic commentators on the redemptive death of the Son of God emphasized the need for a sacrifice great enough to atone for the sinfulness of humanity (cf. Col. 1:14) Neither ritual animal sacrifices nor human suffering could achieve this end.

Christ rules those who have received the redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness that result from his death on a cross. We would never expect that one described as the incarnation of divine fullness (Col. 1:19) would enter into his rule by dying like a criminal. The Gospels underscore the irony of Jesus’ crucifixion by describing how he was mocked. Luke rubs the message in by repeating the mockery three times (Luke 23:35-39): the rulers of the people mock the idea of a savior who cannot save himself, the soldiers mock him as a powerless king on the point of death, and one of the criminals crucified with Jesus rails at the anointed of God who cannot save either himself or those dying with him.

We should not be too quick to condemn these mocking voices. People expected that the divinely anointed leaders of the last days would redeem them as God had once redeemed the nation from slavery in Egypt. The promise of a divinely installed shepherd and king from the Davidic line that we read about in Jeremiah 23:1-6 does not point to some other world. It promises that the Jewish exile will end. The people will dwell securely in their land under the leadership of a king whose symbolic name will be "the Lord is our righteousness" (Jer. 23:6) Such a promise undercuts other rulers’ claims to legitimacy or divine support. The rule of justice and peace will not be created by the political configurations of the present age. They have already been condemned by God for destroying what should be protected.

Jeremiah holds the earlier kings of Israel responsible for scattering the people in exile. Luke makes the rulers of the people the first to mock the crucified Jesus. The people are presented as silent witnesses to the scene. Yet their mockery has an ironic quality. When the Roman soldiers, who represent the real power in the land, mock Jesus as king of the Jews, both the people and their leaders are included in the gesture of contempt. Unlike the Jewish leaders and the criminal, the soldiers do not expect Jesus’ act of saving himself to include them. Jesus merely provides the occasion to express their disdain for a weak, conquered people. His execution demonstrates the sovereignty of Rome.

Luke’s version of the crucifixion does not permit the mockery to turn the scene into a piece of political irony. Instead, the evangelist uses a tradition about the repentant criminal to provide a dramatic example of how Jesus in fact becomes savior from the cross. During the trial scene, Pilate repeatedly states that Jesus is innocent. The second criminal also reminds us that Jesus has done nothing to deserve the death he suffers. He then goes beyond the mere recognition that Jesus is an innocent victim (hardly the first or last in human history) to acknowledge Jesus’ kingship, asking that Jesus remember him when he comes into his rule. Jesus is not a failure; he is on the way to becoming king (Acts 2:32-36) The risen Jesus must teach this lesson to his confused disciples (cf. Luke 24:26) The criminal recognizes both the justice of his own sentence and the true possibility for salvation in Jesus. His reward, even greater than the favor requested, is a place with Jesus. "Today you will be with me in Paradise." Is paradise the Magic Kingdom? Not quite. We can only enter Jesus’ kingdom if we shed the flawed, human perceptions of power and rule evident in the beginning of the story and, like the criminal, turn toward the crucified messiah.

How Do We Live with Dying? Job 19:23-27a, II Thess. 2:13-3:5, Luke 20:27-28)

"Now God is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all are alive to God" (Luke 20:381).

How do we live with dying? What hope does our Christian faith offer for the real anguish of death’? Most of us resent the thinned-out version of Christian hope, "He/she is happy in heaven." That can’t make up for the injustice of death by evildoers. It can’t make up for sudden loss, or for agonizing months of pain. And thin consolations may even eat away at the foundation of our faith. The rituals, prayers and words meant to console and renew faith and hope can weaken it.

All three of the Bible readings for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost (Job 19: 23-27a, II Thess. 2:13-3:5, Luke 20:27-38) point to ways in which God’s faithfulness reaches beyond the experience of death. In each case, the speaker is on the point of dying: Job suffers from afflictions he cannot understand, Paul is in prison for preaching the gospel, Jesus is in Jerusalem just before his passion. Just as the experience of dying is both universal and private, so each of these examples combines the universal paradox of faith in God’s living power with the speaker’s particular situation.

To whom is each speaking? Job’s audience is well-intentioned friends who hope to console him by showing him that God is "right" to let him be afflicted. The trouble is that they can only imagine solutions which make God "right" at the expense of Job’s integrity and innocence. Yet Job has another audience, the God known as the go’el, the "Redeemer," who brings people out of slavery. What is the word Job thinks should be graven in stone? That he will see his integrity vindicated -- but only after he is dead!

Paul’s words are addressed to a community of beloved Christians which he had founded and already seen through persecution. Though Paul hopes he will be delivered from his imprisonment, his anxiety is not personal. Paul’s concern is for those he leaves behind. He will not be able to admonish them to lead lives of holiness or hold fast to the truth of the gospel much longer. What will they have to live by? On the spiritual level, Paul expresses confidence in God’s power to strengthen the community. On a more human level, he stresses the importance of remembering what they have learned from him, both in person and in his letters. Paul himself is about to pass into memory, to become part of "tradition."

Jesus’ audience is hostile. Sadducees rejected the belief that God would raise up the righteous who had died; for them it was an innovation that had no basis in tradition. Appealing to the laws for Levirate marriage, they seek to show that this ‘‘new belief" led to absurd conclusions. As so often happens, Jesus challenges the questioners’ assumption. The Sadducees assume that the same relationships and realities that hold on earth will prevail in the resurrection. Levirate marriage dealt with the human need to provide an heir for the deceased in order to maintain family order and property. Anyone who has ever been the executor of an estate understands the complexity of such relationships and the attendant legal arrangements.

Jesus insists that the resurrection does not restore the social and legal configurations we know on earth. The life which the resurrected lead in God’s presence is like that of angels, who do indeed "see God" as Job hoped he might. Jesus’ secondary response to the Sadduccees’ complaint is an appeal to Scripture. Since God’s self-identification is the "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," the ancestors must be living, not dead.

None of these passages denies the painful, disorienting consequences of death. However, they challenge the human responses which block our perception of God’s redemptive power. We cannot deprive the suffering of their integrity by finding a hidden guilt that accounts for their plight. We cannot corrupt the memory of those faithful servants of God like Paul whose suffering is part of a witness to the gospel. We cannot allow laws, social arrangements and psychological adaptations designed for this age to corrupt our vision of the one who is "not God of the dead, but of the living."

God’s Gift of Righteousness (Jer. 31:32)

"But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and 1 will write it upon their hearts" [Jer. 31:32]

Luther challenged the church to show the world God’s righteousness. Works of religious and political grandeur and examples of religious piety left believers untouched by the gospel. The biblical texts for Reformation Day (Jer. 31:31-34, Rom. 3:19-28, John 8:31-36) all reflect Reformation theology’s fundamental suspicion of human nature and human institutions. Jeremiah’s vision of the new covenant which God would inscribe upon the human heart follows his bitter reflections about how little individuals or nations learn from their experience. Neither the devastating loss of northern Israel nor the attempted reforms in Jeremiah’s own day had turned the nation back to God. St. Paul’s reflections in Romans generalize Jeremiah’s experience to include all human beings: "For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

Faced with the universality of evil, what does God do? Unlike us, God exhibits patience; God does not punish those responsible for evil. Through his suffering and death Jesus offers believers the unmerited gift of righteousness, life and forgiveness (Rom. 3:24-28) This gift resolves the dilemma of sinfulness among a people covenanted with God.

God’s goodness is "on the line" in the justice and well-being of the human community. Consequently God is not "beyond" the messy world of human affairs. If God makes sinners righteous, God’s own righteousness becomes evident.

The Reformation slogan "by faith alone" poses a challenge to our own response to human evil. We accept God’s gift but we ignore God’s way of acting. Take any case of evil that grabs our public attention. What do we clamor for? Military retaliation, laws, tough sentences, mandatory programs -- and all of it as quick1y as possible! Certainly not how God responds to evil.

We may write off Luther’s critique of "works" as his rejection of a corrupt church, but we should consider the wider implications of his message. Luther insists that law and external works do not bring grace and freedom. Anything less than spiritual transformation is a physical action which can be performed by the good and the wicked alike. Suffering and other ills also know no distinction. Yet we persist in thinking that more laws, rules, regulatory agencies and watch-dog committees will defeat the evils we face. We should not ignore the message addressed to Jewish legalism in the New Testament or to Luther’s Roman church. Like them we have abundant faith in our laws, procedures and bureaucracy.

Luther observes that most preachers escape the radicalism of the gospel because they combine laws and good works with a message of faith. But any endeavor to live up to the law will end in despair or a cynicism that erodes public morality. It is OK to deceive one’s spouse, lie "a little bit," or steal from an employer -- all we have to do is be a bit less corrupt than the people we read about in the newspaper.

Luther faced the challenge that his gospel would encourage lawless behavior. Yet he insisted that the freedom a Christian enjoys follows upon transformation into a new person in Christ. Unlike the loudly proclaimed and legalistic piety of many born-again Christians, Luther counseled the newly converted to "forget the Law," to live before God as though there were no Law. Similarly, Jeremiah speaks of a covenant written upon the heart, which one person does not need to learn from another. The question, both Paul and John insist, is not whether the Law represents what is good or just, but how human beings can cease to be the slaves of sin.

God demonstrates righteousness through patience, suffering and freedom, not coercion, tough justice or rigid legalism. The American desire to demonstrate national righteousness in dramatic actions, new laws and programs and a "quick fix" for human nature can hardly stand such a message. Yet there is no other gospel. Reformation theology reminds us that the church itself is never a kingdom of the righteous but a communion of "justified sinners" and as such is always in the process of reform. According to the gospel, the way of faith is the only true hope for freedom, "so if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36)

Understanding Faith and Miracle (II Kings 17:17-24)

After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill, and his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. And she said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!" And he said to her, "Give me your son. And he took him from her bosom, and carried him UP into the upper chamber, where he lodged, and laid him upon his own bed. And he cried to the Lord, "O Lord my God, hast thou brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?" Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried to the Lord, "O Lord my God, let this child’s soul come into him again." And the Lord hearkened to the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. And Elijah took the child, and delivered him to his mother; and Elijah said, "See, your son lives." And the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth"

[I Kings 17:17-24].

Many Christians are uneasy with the miraculous stories in Scripture. Elijah’s role as the true spokesman for God is demonstrated first by the miraculous supply of food (I Kings 17: 8-16) and then by his resuscitation of the widow’s son (I Kings 17:17-24) Luke (7:1 1-17) uses the Elijah story as a skeleton to recount a similar healing by Jesus. He pairs the restoration of the widow’s son with the cure of the centurion’s servant (7:1-10) , an incident recounted in Matthew and John as well. Luke has used the episode of miraculous food from I Kings 17:8-16 in Jesus’ inaugural sermon. There is no doubt that Elijah provides the model of the "great prophet" (Luke 7:16) which the people recognize in Jesus. Jesus will soon tell the messengers of John the Baptist that "the dead are raised up" (Luke 7:22) and he will repeat this miracle by raising Jarius’s daughter. Yet Luke portrays Jesus as something more than a prophet like Elijah.

In the Elijah story, God has struck down the son of the widow with whom the prophet was lodging. Both the woman and the prophet protest the apparent meaninglessness of the boy’s death. Elijah must lie across the body and plead with the Lord three times before God restores the child’s life. The result indicates Elijah’s relationship with God.

Luke’s story is quite different. Jesus had no prior relationship with the widow. He only happened on the procession as the body was being carried out. No one demands that Jesus intervene. He acts out of compassion for the widow, whose only son has died. She is one of the helpless, poor ones of the world to whom the gospel brings news of a reversal of their fate. God comes into this life in the surprise of compassion and restored life. Any possibility that God or fate might be arbitrary or even cruel is erased. Unlike Elijah, Jesus only has to speak to the man to restore his life.

The proper response to Jesus’ deed is to recognize that he is a great prophet and the source of God’s saving power. In that sense faith springs from the miracle. But faith is not a prior condition for the miracle. Jesus intervenes with compassion because he is moved by the woman’s plight. From the opening chapters of the Gospel, Luke pictures the good news as a message of salvation for the poor, sick, sorrowful, weak, lowly and outcast. This episode dramatizes that message.

Yet stories like these do make us uneasy. We have all seen TV reports of parents whose religious convictions prevented them from seeking medical treatment for a critically ill child. In some cases, the state intervened to force the parents to get treatment for the child. In others, parents were prosecuted for causing their child’s death. Christians can hardly be blamed if they think that we would be better off with a faith not linked to such miracle stories. Viewing both stories as being about "near death experiences" could help Christians avoid expecting special exemption from sickness and death if they trust God.

The stories themselves contain their own framework for understanding faith and miracle. The widow’s words to Elijah carry all the overtones of anger mixed with self-accusation that any hospital chaplain learns to hear in the voices of the terminally ill and the bereaved. Elijah does not know an "answer" to her pain, and his first speech to Yahweh echoes her suffering. In a sense both the woman and Elijah learn about faith together. God is not vindictive or hostile to the suffering.

In approaching the widow at Nain, Jesus addresses the situation of suffering before anyone speaks to him. Until the crowd confesses its faith in Jesus after the miracle, Jesus’ voice is the only one we hear. Anticipating the miracle to come, Jesus tells the mother not to "go on weeping." Many English translations leave out the progressive sense of the Greek and read "Do not weep," as though Jesus were prohibiting her mourning. The Jesus of compassion is not a Jesus of the stiff upper lip. He is telling the woman that the weeping she now experiences will not go on. In that sense the story illustrates the beatitude of Luke 6:21, "Blessed are you who weep; now you shall laugh." The story is not a promise that faithful Christians will not experience the pain of a loved one’s death. It does not promise that widows will never find themselves left alone and impoverished by the death of their only source of support.

The story does promise that such suffering is not God’s choice for human beings. Faith recognizes a loving and compassionate order in God’s world, which seeks to transform the pain of the suffering, the poor and the outcast. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Luke makes it clear that Christians have a responsibility to show the kind of compassion that Jesus exhibits. All the widows who do not get their sons back should find "new children" and relatives in the Christian community. The Scriptures have always used the widow and orphan as symbols of society’s most vulnerable and defenseless people. Both justice and compassion require that Christian churches make the gospel a real word of good news by reaching out to such people. In that sense, the miracle is a challenge to the faith of all Christians. We must make the compassion of God visible by providing for the needs of those who are suffering.

Not Through the Law (Gal. 2:15-21)

Not Through the Law

We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we ourselves were found to be sinners, is Christ then an agent of sin? Certainly not! But if I build up again those things which I tore down, then I prove myself a transgressor. For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose [Gal. 2:15-21].

Paul’s rejection of the law as the source of righteousness before God (Gal. 2:11-21) and the story of the sinful woman in the Pharisee’s house (Luke 7:36-50) have often been taken by Christians as evidence of a Jewish legalism, which has been replaced by the superior Christian gospel of grace. Yet the same people who applaud Christianity’s break with the law may be found demanding tougher laws, more rigorous enforcement and longer prison terms to deal with the social evils of our own day. We want to clean up our society. We expect the laws, courts and law-enforcement officers to be the agents of such social purification. Are we not Pharisees at heart?

Consider the conflict between Peter and Paul reported in Galatians 2:11-15. We must remember that Paul, the narrator, is a biased party in the dispute and that he uses the event to bolster his argument against persons in Galatia who would like gentile converts to adopt such Jewish customs as circumcision, religious holidays and dietary restrictions. As far as we can tell from Galatians 2:1 - 10, Peter, James and other Jerusalem leaders had agreed that the gentile converts of Paul’s churches did not have to join the covenant of Abraham through circumcision and adoption of a Jewish lifestyle to be saved by faith in Christ. This agreement did not change the status of Jewish Christians, who presumably continued to adhere to their traditional religious practices. Nor did it address the problem of Christians in a church like that in Antioch, which included both Jewish and gentile Christians. Paul describes the agreement in terms that presuppose a separation of mission, though we cannot tell what that division meant in practice.

Paul writes that Peter, Barnabas and other Jewish Christians had been willing to break the boundaries that separated Jew and gentile and share table fellowship with gentile Christians. But the arrival of Christians associated with James, who apparently insisted that the "Jewishness" of Jewish Christians forbade such association, led these prominent men to separate from the fellowship With gentile believers. Paul calls such behavior hypocritical. His elaboration on the episode (vv. 16-21) even views it as a blasphemous denial of Christ, making Christ an agent of sin -- the sin being the breaking down of the barriers between Jew and gentile which had preserved the Jewish people from assimilation. Grace stands opposed to works of the law, which Paul’s dualistic symbolism often puts in the same group as sin and death.

Paul eventually carried the day. His view of faith, grace and salvation apart from the law has become the lens through which episodes like the story of the sinful woman and the Pharisee are read. Yet in practice many Christians might find themselves more like Peter. Peter, Barnabas and the others were evidently attempting to accommodate diversity in religious practice.

Can we tease out from these stories what the human and religious problems with the law really are? Notice Paul’s lapse in v. 15b, "We, ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners," and the Pharisee’s words, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner" (Luke 7:39). The issue is not the Jew-gentile or Jew-Christian division, but the human desire to separate oneself from the "sinner," those whose behavior threatens the norms of a social or religious group. In order to be "let in," such individuals must repent and conform to the norms of the group.

The woman who intrudes on the Pharisee’s home engages in a scandalous action. But the story reveals that the real scandal lay not in the woman’s sinfulness, in her intrusion upon the "holy" visitor, Jesus, or in the sexual overtones of unbound hair, but in the Pharisee’s narrow love and lack of hospitality. The law can protect us to some degree from the sinner and the outsider, but it cannot create hospitality, love or charity.

As with so many of the gospel stories, we are left with unfinished business. We know that the woman’s gesture brought the assurance of God’s forgiveness. Neither God nor Jesus will push her away in the name of holiness. But we are left with a question about Simon. His response to Jesus’ parable about the debtors shows that he is able to speak accurately about love and forgiveness. But like Nathan confronting the evil of David through the parable of the poorman’s lamb (II Sam. 11:26-12:6) ,the point is not in the parable but in its application to the situation.

David is convicted of violating his trust as king. Simon is convicted of failing in the obligations of hospitality. The woman’s actions are shown to supply what Simon lacked. The narrator of II Samuel resolves the tension created by Nathan’s parable and application by portraying David’s repentance and God’s judgment. Simon’s case is left open. He never speaks again in the story. We are told that others at the table wondered who Jesus is to forgive sins -- though announcing God’s forgiveness or punishment is clearly an element of the prophetic vocation, which had been tentatively ascribed to Jesus by Simon.

These readings all picture human failures which make it impossible for the law to satisfy the demands we make of it. A theology of grace does not negate the law, but it seeks to transform those aspects of human relationships which the law cannot touch and which may even make law a vehicle for hatred and sin.