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Back to Fundamentals

Many of you may be asking why a former politician is giving a Bible lecture to an assembly of highly qualified Christian leaders. My only credential is experience. I began teaching Bible lessons as a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, and have continued this practice for the past 62 years -- now as a deacon at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

I’ve been in a quandary about what subject to discuss. I have decided to use one of the letters of St. Paul that addresses the most serious blight that presently exists among believers in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior: divisions within the powerful river of faith that are dividing us into swirling eddies and meandering tributaries. The divisions and even animosities are a cancer that is metastasizing within the body of Christ, obsessing us with diversions from his ministry and presenting to the world a negative image of Christians.

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul shows us that, he not only deplores such disharmony but also understands its mot causes. The three churches in Galatia were established at Lystra, Iconium and Derbe on Paul’s first missionary journey. Isle was proud of these congregations, but soon learned that they had departed radically from the foundation of their faith. They had become divided because some of their leaders took the clear and adequate message of the gospel of Christ and began to add other requirements for acceptance or retention in their fellowship. This caused disagreements. arguments and acrimony.

This is an almost exact description of a plague that is threatening the unity and effectiveness of the Christian community today. Elements of fundamentalism are used to denigrate or exclude others. The healing factor that saved the early Christians was the realization that drawing nearer to Christ reduced the importance of human differences and brought the worshipers closer to one another.

After identifying himself and establishing his credentials in the first few verses, Paul lashes out in the strongest possible fashion: "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel -- not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we [apostles] or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!" (Gal. 1:6-8).

Of what crime were the Galatians guilty? Their church leaders were departing from the basic gospel of Christ by adding their own requirements for fellowship and salvation. In this case, they proposed adopting facets of Jewish law, including circumcision. Other congregations were imposing a creed concerning the eating of meat sacrificed to heathen idols, or which Sabbath day to choose. Some were arguing about who was the most authoritative apostle as spokesman for Christ.

Redefining the gospel has been a temptation for many centuries. Sometimes the message is so diluted that it is meaningless. At other times, powerful men adopt strict rules and regulations based on their own opinions and impose these creeds on others. The latter characteristics are part of a trend toward fundamentalism.

I would describe fundamentalism as, first of all, a movement led almost invariably by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and who have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers. Second, fundamentalists draw clear distinctions between themselves, the true believers, and others. They are convinced that they are right and that anyone who contradicts them is inferior and beyond the purview of God’s full blessing.

Third, fundamentalists are militant in fighting against any challenge to their beliefs, are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or even physical abuse against those who oppose the implementation of their agenda. Finally, they tend to make their self-definition increasingly narrow, to isolate themselves, to demagogue social and emotional issues and to view change, cooperation, negotiation or other efforts to resolve differences as signs of weakness.

An example of enforced belief that was promulgated and commonly accepted by Christian denominations when I was a child was the requirement that a congregation not include both black and white people. Although some elements of this racism still persist, the legal nature of the exclusion has been removed in most places.

We know that man-made issues are causing serious and debilitating schisms among Baptists, and also among Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Quakers, Catholics and others who are professed believers in the gospel message that Paul was defending. For incomprehensible reasons, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention unfortunately decided to withdraw from the Baptist World Alliance. I don’t think the general membership of the SBC agreed with that decision. No differences are important enough to prevent reconciliation. We should all hope and pray that in the not too distant future, we Baptists can be completely reunited.

I am not minimizing the importance of the controversial questions concerning abortion, homosexuality, the role of pastors, separation of church and state, the priesthood of believers, or whether the holy scriptures are to be interpreted by the words and actions of Jesus Christ or by a group of elected leaders. Paul may or may not have anticipated some of these debates, but he made it vividly clear that to add any of these issues to the good news about salvation was an abomination that could divide us one from another and dam up or fragment the great stream of evangelism for Jesus Christ.

Paul went on to remind the Galatians that the gospel is not of human origin, and that its message should not be distorted or debased by the imposition of controversial human opinions. What is the gospel message? Paul put it this way in writing to another troubled church: "When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (I Cor. 2:1-2).

There is certainly nothing wrong with believing in fundamentals, the most important of which is the gospel message: we are saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ. This should be adequate as a fundamental belief within which Christians can harmonize our evangelical effort. Does this require an additional creed or definition of who can join us in the unrestricted worship of God and the service of Jesus Christ? Certainly not.

It is inevitable that there are important issues on which many of you would disagree, both with each other and with me. And I can’t end this lesson without one example. Despite the fact that Jesus Christ was the greatest liberator of women, some male leaders of the Christian faith have continued the unwarranted practice of sexual discrimination, depriving women -- more than half the devout Christians on Earth -- of their equal rights to serve God.

There is one incontrovertible fact concerning the relationship between Jesus Christ and women: he treated them as equal to men, dramatically different from the prevailing custom of the times. Although the four Gospels were written by men, they never report an instance of Jesus condoning sexual discrimination or the implied subservience of women. Instead, he deliberately exalted women on many occasions.

The current special effort of some devout and sincere Baptist men to "keep women in their place" is based on their official assertion that "man was first in creation, and woman was first in the Edenic fall," which twists the meaning of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib and puts the blame for original sin on females. These men are also relying on a few carefully chosen selections from Paul’s letters to the early churches. If taken by themselves, some of these verses indicate that the apostle deviated from Jesus’ example and had a bias against women, and even suggested that women should be treated as second-class Christians -- submissive to their husbands, attired and coifed demurely and silent in church.

I would never claim that the scriptures are in error, but it is necessary in some cases to assess the local circumstances and to study the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew words. Most Christians ignore details of Paul’s comments that are pertinent to his own era, such as these words (1 Cor. 11:5-6): "Any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head -- it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair." (This passage makes it clear, by the way, that it is acceptable for women to pray and prophesy if their heads are covered.) Paul also forbade certain women to braid their hair or to wear rings, jewelry or expensive clothing. It is obvious in those cases that Paul is not mandating generic theological policies.

Paul’s close friend Priscilla is revered for having instructed Apollos, one of the great preachers of that day. To the church in Rome, Paul listed and thanked 28 outstanding leaders of the early churches, at least ten of whom were women. Listen to the apostle’s words (in chapter 16 of Romans): "I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae . . . greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus . . . greet Mary, who has worked very hard among you. Greet Adronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. . . greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them."

It is inconceivable to me that Paul can be quoted by modern male chauvinists as the biblical authority for excluding women from accepting God’s call to serve others in the name of Christ, when Paul himself encouraged and congratulated inspired women who were prominent -- to use his own descriptions -- as deacons, apostles, ministers and saints.

Paul’s clear theological message to the Galatians and to us is that women are to be treated exactly as equals in their right to serve God: "For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:26-28).

Our Maranatha congregation has just called a new pastor, whose wife also will be an ordained minister. I presume that our church and I will not be excluded from this fellowship. Neither should the Baptist World Alliance limit its members to groups who guarantee equal rights to women. There will be two groups in our membership: those who choose to discriminate against women and those who treat them equally with men. This accommodation is necessary, because those of us who are gathered within the sacred confines of the Baptist World Alliance must resist the fundamentalist temptations of rigidity, domination and exclusion.

Paul supplemented his advice with a few requests: "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Cor. 1:10). And my favorite Bible verse of all, to the Ephesians, "Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you" (4:32).

To summarize our lesson for today: Paul reminds us that the vast Christian world needs to rise above divisive controversies and heal our differences; to adhere to the basic and undistorted gospel message ("We are saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ"); to draw close to Christ and therefore to one another; and to follow our savior Christ, the Prince of Peace, in reaching out to the lost and alleviating the suffering of others. This is a good Bible lesson for us all.

The Burden of the Gospels

Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God’s will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred.

Having been invited to speak to a convocation of Christian seminarians, I at first felt that I should say nothing until I confessed that I do not have any such confidence. And then I understood that this would have to be my subject. I would have to speak of the meaning, as I understand it, of my lack of confidence, which I think is not at all the same as a lack of faith.

It is a fact that I have spent my life, for the most part willingly, under the influence of the Bible, particularly the Gospels, and of the Christian tradition in literature and the other arts. As a child, sometimes unwillingly, I learned many of the Bible’s stories and teachings, and was affected more than I knew by the language of the King James Version, which is the translation I still prefer. For most of my adult life I have been an urgently interested and frequently uneasy reader of the Bible, particularly of the Gospels. At the same time I have tried to be a worthy reader of Dante, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Eliot and other poets of the Christian tradition. As a result of this reading and of my experience, I am by principle and often spontaneously, as if by nature, a man of faith. But my reading of the Gospels, comforting and clarifying and instructive as they frequently are, deeply moving or exhilarating as they frequently are, has caused me to understand them also as a burden, sometimes raising the hardest of personal questions, sometimes bewildering, sometimes contradictory, sometimes apparently outrageous in their demands. This is the confession of an unconfident reader.

I will begin by dealing with the embarrassing questions that the Gospels impose, I imagine, upon any serious reader. There are two of these, and the first is this: If you bad been living in Jesus’ time and had heard him teaching, would you have been one of his followers?

To be an honest taker of this test, I think you have to try to forget that you have read the Gospels and that Jesus has been a "big name" for 2,000 years. You have to imagine instead that you are walking past the local courthouse and you come upon a crowd listening to a man named Joe Green or Green Joe, depending on judgments whispered among the listeners on the fringe. You too stop to listen, and you soon realize that Joe Green is saying something utterly scandalous, utterly unexpectable from the premises of modern society. He is saying:

"Don’t resist evil. If somebody slaps your right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too. Love your enemies. When people curse you, you must bless them. When people hate you, you must treat them kindly. When people mistrust you, you must pray for them. This is the way you must act if you want to be children of God." Well, you know how happily that would be received, not only in the White House and the Capitol, but among most of your neighbors. And then suppose this Joe Green looks at you over the heads of the crowd, calls you by name and says, I want to come to dinner at your house.

I suppose that you, like me, hope very much that you would say, "Come ahead." But I suppose also that you, like me, had better not be too sure. You will remember that in Jesus’ lifetime even his most intimate friends could hardly be described as overconfident.

The second question is this -- it comes right after the verse in which Jesus says, "If you love me, keep my commandments." Can you be sure that you would keep his commandments if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? And here I need to tell another story, this time one that actually happened.

In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a "thief-catcher." As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned. What did Dirk Willems do then?

Was the thief-catcher an enemy merely to be hated, or was he a neighbor to be loved as one loves oneself? Was he an enemy whom one must love in order to be a child of God? Was he "one of the least of these my brethren"?

What Dirk Willems did was turn back, put out his hands to his pursuer and save his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to let his rescuer go, was forced to arrest him. Dirk Willems was brought to trial, sentenced and burned to death by a "lingering fire."

I, and I suppose you, would like to be a child of God even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy? Again, I don’t think we ought to be too sure. We should remember that "Christian" generals and heads of state have routinely thanked God for the deaths of their enemies, and that the persecutors of 1569 undoubtedly thanked God for the capture and death of the "heretic" Dirk Willems.

Those are peculiar questions. I don’t think we can escape them, if we are honest. And if we are honest, I don’t think we can answer them. We humans, as we well know, have repeatedly been surprised by what we will or won’t do under pressure. A person may come to be, as many have been, heroically faithful in great adversity, but as long as that person is alive we can only say that he or she did well but remains under the requirement to do well. As long as we are alive, there is always a next time, and so the questions remain. These are questions we must live with, regarding them as unanswerable and yet profoundly influential.

The other burdening problems of the Gospels that I want to talk about are like those questions in that they are not solvable but can only be lived with as a sort of continuing education. These problems, however, are not so personal or dramatic but are merely issues of reading and making sense.

As a reader, I am unavoidably a writer. Many years of trying to write what I have perceived to be true have taught me that there are limits to what a human mind can know, and limits to what a human language can say. One may believe, as I do, in inspiration, but one must believe knowing that even the most inspired are limited in what they can tell of what they know. We humans write and read, teach and learn, at the inevitable cost of falling short. The language that reveals also obscures. And these qualifications that bear on any writing must bear of course on the Gospels.

I need to say also that, as a reader, I am first of all a literalist, as I think every reader should be. This does not mean that I don’t appreciate Jesus’ occasional irony or sarcasm ("They have their reward"), or that I am against interpretation, or that I don’t believe in "higher levels of meaning." It certainly does not mean that I think every word of the Bible is equally true, or that literalist is a synonym for fundamentalist. I mean simply that I expect any writing to make literal sense before making sense of any other kind. Interpretation should not contradict or otherwise violate the literal meaning. To read the Gospels as a literalist is, to me, the way to take them as seriously as possible.

But to take the Gospels seriously, to assume that they say what they mean and mean what they say, is the beginning of troubles. Those would-be literalists who yet argue that the Bible is unerring and unquestionable have not dealt with its contradictions, which of course it does contain, and the Gospels are not exempt. Some of Jesus’ instructions are burdensome not because they involve contradiction, but merely because they are so demanding. The proposition that love, forgiveness and peaceableness are the only neighborly relationships that are acceptable to God is difficult for us weak and violent humans, but it is plain enough for any literalist. We must either accept it as an absolute or absolutely reject it. The same for the proposition that we are not permitted to choose our neighbors ahead of time or to limit neighborhood, as is plain from the parable of the Samaritan. The same for the requirement that we must be perfect, like God, which seems as outrageous as the Buddhist vow to "save all sentient beings," and perhaps is meant to measure and instruct us in the same way. It is, to say the least, unambiguous.

But what, for example, are we to make of Luke 14:26: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own also, he cannot be my disciple." This contradicts not only the fifth commandment but Jesus’ own instruction to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It contradicts his obedience to his mother at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. It contradicts the concern he shows for the relatives of his friends and followers. But the word in the King James Version is "hate." If you go to the New English Bible or the New Revised Standard Version, looking for relief, the word still is "hate." This clearly is the sort of thing that leads to "biblical exegesis."

My own temptation is to become a literary critic, wag my head learnedly and say, "Well, this obviously is a bit of hyperbole -- the sort of exaggeration a teacher would use to shock his students awake." Maybe so, but it is not obviously so, and it comes perilously close to "He didn’t really mean it" -- always a risky assumption when reading, and especially dangerous when reading the Gospels. Another possibility, and I think a better one, is to accept our failure to understand, not as a misstatement or a textual flaw or as a problem to be solved, but as a question to live with and a burden to be borne.

We may say with some reason that such apparent difficulties might be resolved if we knew more, a further difficulty being that we don’t know more. The Gospels, like all other written works, impose on their readers the burden of their incompleteness. However partial we may be to the doctrine of the true account or "realism," we must concede at last that reality is inconceivably great and any representation of it necessarily incomplete.

St. John at the end of his Gospel, remembering perhaps the third verse of his first chapter, makes a charming acknowledgment of this necessary incompleteness: "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written everyone, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Our darkness, then, is not going to be completely lighted. Our ignorance finally is irremediable. We humans are never going to know everything, even assuming we have the capacity, because for reasons of the most insistent practicality we can’t be told everything. We need to remember here Jesus’ repeated admonitions to his disciples: You don’t know; you don’t understand; you’ve got it wrong.

The Gospels, then, stand at the opening of a mystery in which our lives are deeply, dangerously and inescapably involved. This is a mystery that the Gospels can only partially reveal, for it could be fully revealed only by more books than the world could contain. It is a mystery that we are condemned but also are highly privileged to live our way into, trusting properly that to our little knowledge greater knowledge may be revealed. It is this privilege that should make us wary of any attempt to reduce faith to a rigmarole of judgments and explanations, or to any sort of familiar talk about God. Reductive religion is just as objectionable as reductive science, and for the same reason: Reality is large, and our minds are small.

And so the issue of reality -- What is the scope of reality? What is real? -- emerges as the crisis of this discussion. Bight. at the heart of the religious impulse there seems to be a certain solicitude for reality: the fear of foreclosing it or of reducing it to some merely human estimate. Many of us are still refusing to trust Caesar, in any of his modern incarnations, with the power to define reality. Many of us are still refusing to entrust that power to science. As inhabitants of the modern world, we are religious now perhaps to the extent of our desire to crack open the coffin of materialism, and to give to reality a larger, freer definition than is allowed by the militant materialists of the corporate economy and their political servants, or by the mechanical paradigm of reductive science. Or perhaps I can make most plain what I’m trying to get at if I say that many of us are still withholding credence, just as properly and for the same reasons, from any person or institution claiming to have the definitive word on the purposes and the mind of God.

It seems to me that all the religions I know anything about emerge from an instinct to push against any merely human constraints on reality. In the Bible such constraints are conventionally attributed to "the world" in the pejorative sense of that term, which we may define as the world of the creation reduced by the purposes of any of the forms of selfishness. The contrary purpose, the purpose of freedom, is stated by Jesus in the fourth Gospel: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

This astonishing statement can be thought about and understood endlessly, for it is endlessly meaningful, but I don’t think it calls for much in the way of interpretation. It does call for a very strict and careful reading of the word life.

To talk about or to desire more abundance of anything has probably always been dangerous, but it seems particularly dangerous now. In an age of materialist science, economics, art and politics, we ought not to be much shocked by the appearance of materialist religion. We know we don’t have to look far to find people who equate more abundant life with a bigger car, a bigger house, a bigger bank account and a bigger church. They are wrong, of course. If Jesus meant only that we should have more possessions or even more "life expectancy," then John 10:10 is no more remarkable than an advertisement for any commodity whatever. Abundance, in this verse, cannot refer to an abundance of material possessions, for life does not require a material abundance; it requires only a material sufficiency. That sufficiency granted, life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance.

But even life in this generous sense of membership in creation does not protect us, as we know, from the dangers of avarice, of selfishness, of the wrong kind of abundance. Those dangers can be overcome only by the realization that in speaking of more abundant life, Jesus is not proposing to free us by making us richer; he is proposing to set life free from precisely that sort of error. He is talking about life, which is only incidentally our life, as a limitless reality.

Now that I have come out against materialism, I fear that I will be expected to say something in favor of spirituality. But if I am going to go on in the direction of what Jesus meant by "life" and "more abundantly," then I have to avoid that duality of matter and spirit at all costs.

As every reader knows, the Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practiced, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don’t need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our urge to kill one another -- that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

And where more than in the Gospels’ teaching about love do we see that famously estranged pair, matter and spirit, melt and flow together? There was a Samaritan who came upon one of his enemies, a Jew, lying wounded beside the road. And the Samaritan had compassion on the Jew and bound up his wounds and took care of him. Was this help spiritual or material? Was the Samaritan’s compassion earthly or heavenly? If those questions confuse us, that is only because we have for so long allowed ourselves to believe, as if to divide reality impartially between science and religion, that material life and spiritual life, earthly life and heavenly life, are two different things.

To get unconfused, let us go to a further and even more interesting question about the parable of the Samaritan: Why? Why did the Samaritan reach out in love to his enemy, a Jew, who happened also to be his neighbor? Why was the unbounding of this love so important to Jesus?

We might reasonably answer, remembering Genesis 1:27, that all humans, friends and enemies alike, have the same dignity, deserve the same respect, and are worthy of the same compassion because they are, all alike, made in God’s image. That is enough of a mystery, and it implies enough obligation, to waylay us awhile. It is certainly something we need to bear amdously in mind. But it is also too human-centered, too potentially egotistical, to leave alone.

I think Jesus recommended the Samaritan’s loving-kindness, what certain older writers called "holy living," simply as a matter of propriety, for the Samaritan was living in what Jesus understood to be a holy world. The foreground of the Gospels is occupied by human beings and the issues of their connection to one another and to God. But there is a background, and the background more often than not is the world in the best sense of the word, the world as made, approved, loved, sustained and finally redeemable by God. Much of the action and the talk of the Gospels takes place outdoors: on mountainsides, lakeshores, riverbanks, in fields and pastures, places populated not only by humans but by animals and plants, both domestic and wild. And these nonhuman creatures, sheep and lilies and birds, are always represented as worthy of, or as flourishing within, the love and the care of God.

To know what to make of this, we need to look back to the Old Testament, to Genesis, to the Psalms, to the preoccupation with the relation of the Israelites to their land that runs through the whole lineage of the prophets. Through all this, much is implied or taken for granted. In only two places that I remember is the always implicit relation -- the practical or working relation -- of God to the creation plainly stated. Psalm 104:30, addressing God and speaking of the creatures, says, "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created And, as if in response, Elihu says to Job (34:14-15) that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . ." I have cut Elihu’s sentence a little short so as to leave the emphasis on the phrase "all flesh."

Those also are verses that don’t require interpretation, but I want to stretch them out in paraphrase just to make as plain as possible my reason for quoting them. They are saying that not just humans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of his Spirit and breathing his breath. And so the Samaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all the customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God.

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life he means: a life that is not reducible by division, category or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.

To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, .and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. And we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don’t know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have responded with choosing the economics of extinction.

If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God’s presence in his work and in all his creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus’ teaching about love. But that answer raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?

That question calls for many answers, and we don’t know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer it will be living and working with for a long time -- if they are allowed a longtime. Meanwhile, may heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.

Implications of Just War Theory

As a high school sophomore I was told: "If you wait until you are in the back seat of a car to figure out your sexual ethic, it is probably too late." In other words, moral issues are best addressed not in the passion of the moment but as part of an ongoing formation in discipleship.

What the church knows about sex it forgets about war. Christian discourse on war rarely rises above the level of emotional appeals. At the congregational level, we often see little more than Crossfire-style debates. At the national level, we get editorial or ecclesial statements of at best a few paragraphs which present the just war tradition as a tidy checklist of criteria for evaluating a conflict.

The just war tradition was not always so superficially employed. It developed as a form of Christian practical rationality. It was not a theory to be bantered about but a rigorous ecclesial practice which arose out of the church’s day-to-day life and shaped that life.

This is to say, just war as a form of Christian discipleship is first about forming the church and only derivatively about speaking to policy makers. Accordingly, it is deeply implicated in the character of our ecclesial communities. It is sustained by the virtues inculcated through the preaching and teaching and practices of discipleship that characterize the life of the Christian community. The just war tradition makes theological sense as an expression of the character of communities concerned daily with justice and with loving our near and distant neighbors.

A church that seeks to embody and not merely argue about the just war tradition faces two immediate challenges. The first is ignorance of the tradition. In spite of the frequency with which the just war tradition is invoked and its language echoed in ecclesial speech, few Christians know about the kinds of judgments and disciplines upon which the tradition is built. Few can name the criteria, much less unpack how they might be faithfully applied.

The second challenge is presented by the emergence of "asymmetrical" or "fourth generation" warfare -- conflicts that do not involve nation states (the war on terrorism, for example, involves nonstate entities like al-Qaeda) or involve them in "low-intensity" or clandestine combat (like the U.S. involvement in guerrilla warfare in Central America in the 1980s). Many people suggest that this new context renders the just war tradition obsolete: its restraints are unsuited for the demands of combat characterized by evasion and small-scale fighting in civilian terrain.

This challenge is an intensification of the question that has been around since at least the advent of nuclear weapons, namely, "Can modern war be just?" I am persuaded by the likes of Paul Ramsey and James Turner Johnson that there is nothing inherent in the character of modern warfare that renders it intrinsically incapable of being restrained by the disciplines of the just war tradition. The difficulty is not with warfare per se, but with the (un)willingness of communities to abide by the discipline of the tradition.

Embodying the just war tradition is about much more than memorizing a list of criteria. Nevertheless, knowing the criteria is a necessary part of being formed by the tradition. Such teaching is crucial to warding off the twin errors of either neglecting our neighbors when we should come to their armed defense or giving support to armed action which falls outside the tradition and so is not rightly called just. So what are these criteria?

Legitimate authority. This criterion can be approached in terms of who may wage a war and who determines whether a particular war is just. Whereas secular accounts of the tradition locate legitimate authority in the heads of state, with some movement toward giving authority to international agencies, the Christian tradition understands legitimate authority more broadly. Authority over matters of life and death belongs to God, who has shared this authority with the governing powers (cf. Romans 13). Thus, governing authorities may wage war.

This delegation of authority, however, does not provide the ruler with carte blanche, for in the Christian tradition of just war, the determination of the justness of a war does not reside in the ruler’s hands alone. It is expected that the ruler will heed wise advisers. Moreover, it is recognized that individual soldiers should make their own determination of the justness of a conflict and act accordingly (though they are expected, when uncertain, to give leaders the benefit of the doubt). Finally, the church exercises its oversight. Historically this has taken shape in the intervention of ecclesiastical leaders as mediators in conflicts and through the practice of confession and penance in the aftermath of conflict.

This criterion presents a host of challenges to a community that would embody the tradition. To begin with, it suggests that the kind of leaders in power has everything to do with whether war is waged justly. What kinds of political leaders do we support? Do we encourage them to pursue the common good, rather than national interest, narrowly conceived? As congregational leaders, do we preach and teach that these matters are matters of faith or do we studiously avoid the appearance of meddling in politics by feigning neutrality? Do we teach the tradition to our soldiers and those who may become soldiers and do we assure them of our spiritual and material support as they abide by the tradition, whether that takes the form of refusing to fight in an unjust war, or fighting in a war but only justly? Do we lead the congregation in embracing those who have waged war justly and, just as important, do we offer returning soldiers the gift of confession and penance as needed?

Finally, this criterion raises the question of intra-ecclesial authority. For the church to exercise its proper oversight, it might be necessary for select leaders to be granted security clearances in order to be privy to information and the deliberations of state. Do we have churches that would actually trust and obey such leaders and their judgments? Do we have leaders worthy of such trust?

Just cause. The modern, secular version of the just war tradition has effectively reduced just cause to self-defense against an unjust aggressor. The Christian tradition understands just cause in a much more other-regarding manner. Christianity has consistently qualified the legitimacy of self-defense and has authorized armed action principally on behalf of the neighbor -- in the form of a government’s defense of its people or a nation’s intervention to aid an unjustly attacked neighbor.

The Christian tradition has uniformly prohibited preventative wars, arguing that the injustice must be actual and not merely speculative. However, preemptive strikes in cases where a threat is both imminent and grave have been permitted by some voices in the tradition on the grounds that such a threat constitutes an actual injustice.

Just cause as fundamentally other-regarding presents several significant challenges to the church. First and foremost, it poses the question of whether we are willing to risk our lives and the lives of our loved ones for the sake of others, even when our immediate interests are not at stake. In this regard, when we lift up before the congregation the lives of the saints who gave themselves for others and when we encourage service to those in need around us (e.g., the works of mercy) we are contributing to the formation of the kind of people on whom the just war tradition as a form of discipleship depends. After all, if we do not desire justice, if we do not care about our immediate neighbors who are unemployed, uninsured, homeless or battered, it should come as no surprise when the plight of Croatians, Sudanese, Haitians or Timorese fails to move us.

The call to risk ourselves for others challenges us to confront the pervasive sense of fear and inordinate concern for security that threatens to envelop us. This criterion reminds us of the importance of proclaiming the gospel -- that Christ has defeated sin and death, that we need not be consumed by fear, that there are worse things than dying, that we are free to live in holy insecurity, free even to die in service to our neighbor. A people who lack courage in the face of death, whether on neighborhood streets or in the hospital bed, will be hard pressed to resist the temptation to abandon the neighbor or to discard the just war discipline, say, by engaging in preventative strikes against an uncertain threat.

Right intention. This criterion is commonly reduced to a disavowal of revenge and a desire for peace. But just war as Christian discipleship involves a thicker account of intent, revolving around issues of character. First, right intent is a matter of a "just peace." As Augustine noted long ago, everyone desires peace; wars are always fought for peace -- for a peace that better suits the aggressor. It is not sufficient, then, merely to be for peace. One must intend a peace that is truly just, and not merely self-serving.

Second, right intent entails that even in warfare we love our enemy. Anger is permitted, but not hatred. Indeed, in waging war, the right intent is not to destroy the enemy but to bring the benefits of a just peace to the enemy.

Third, right intent entails what can be called "complete justice." Intentionality is not always an easy thing to discern; for this reason character and consistency are relevant to evaluating intent. Thus, evaluating intent with regard to war might entail asking: Is this a people who characteristically and consistently seek justice? Is justice only selectively enforced? Is it carried out to completion? Complete justice entails looking forward (to how justice will be implemented) and backward (bringing the past before the bar of justice). Accordingly, this criterion may involve confessing one’s own complicity in past injustice as one confronts present injustice. Likewise, intent understood in terms of complete justice provides space for consideration of "exit strategies" and how the victor deals with the defeated after the shooting stops.

The challenges and opportunities presented by this criterion to the church are manifold. In light of the demands of right intent, we might ask ourselves, how seriously do we take the gospel call to love our enemies? Do we lead our congregations regularly in prayers for our enemies, or do we only pray for our side and our own? Can we even name our enemies, or do we shy away from that because it is impolitic or impolite? Do we model and encourage within the life of the congregation (not to mention the wider world) ways of dealing with conflict, with enemies, that neither shy away from addressing problems forthrightly nor simply cut off or separate those with whom we disagree? This is to say, do we in the church model the desire for and pursuit of a just peace between enemies, or do we perpetuate a harsher politics where the winner takes all and the loser is simply silenced or encouraged to leave? Living the just war tradition may call us to reconsider the ways we pray and the processes by which we order our life together.

Right intent also presents us with the challenge of confession. Many churches have lost sight of the gift of confession, either practicing it infrequently or practicing it only in the most vague and abstract manner. If just war is premised on the intention of justice and yet we know we are not pure in our intentions for justice, examination and confession become central to the practice of just war. Only then can we avoid hypocrisy and injustice in our pursuit of justice.

Lastly, right intent amounts to a call for the patient endurance of the saints. To see justice through and not abandon either the victims or the defeated enemy requires patient endurance in the face of the hardship and costs of war and its aftermath. To this end, we might lift up the disciplines of the Christian life -- such as prayer, fasting and fidelity -- that run against the grain of an impatient and suffering-averse culture.

Last resort. This criterion legitimates the resort to arms after other feasible means of addressing the injustice in question (such as mediation, negotiation, arbitration or referral to international tribunals -- but not compromise or appeasement) have failed. Implicit in this criterion is a commitment to diplomacy in good faith, even if one’s opponent is not engaged in good-faith diplomacy.

The point at which this criterion is met is a judgment call. It requires the virtue of prudence, of sound judgment, which returns us to some of the issues of "legitimate authority" raised earlier, regarding the kinds of leaders we nurture and support. Likewise, this criterion asks of us the patience, hope and commitment to pursue other avenues short of warfare to address injustices that rise to the level of just cause. In this regard, a just war people will devote time and energy between wars to developing means of addressing injustice short of war. The criterion asks us to avoid the dual temptations of either resorting to military resources too quickly, especially when such a path may appear easier and more savory than negotiating with certain perpetrators of injustice, or of delaying indefinitely, thereby effectively abandoning the unjustly attacked neighbor.

Reasonable chance of success. This criterion entails that the goals of a war must be reasonably attainable. A just war is a limited war to address a particular, declared injustice. It is not a war to wipe out an ideology or to rid the world of evil. Such wars tend toward the unlimited and thus resemble crusades. Under this criterion, questions of proportionality are properly considered: Do the benefits outweigh the risks and harms attendant to warfare, including such potential costs as further geopolitical destabilization, increased insecurity, the sacrifice of other important values in the midst of war, the loss of life and resources? The tradition is clear in maintaining that if the costs of warfare exceed those of enduring the injustice, one may be obliged to refrain from waging war.

That a just war is a limited war calls for a people not given to overreaching, who display a certain modesty in their pursuit of the good. Such a trait might be named meekness or temperance and is opposed to a hubristic or self-righteous championing of the good. How might we ponder the formation of a people whose pursuit of the good is modest, but not to the point of appeasement or relativistic surrender of the good? Again, the practice of confession might be a good place to start. Such a practice reminds us of the limits of our pursuit of the good with regard to our enemy as well as of the persistence of injustice in our own life.

Lastly, this criterion implies that where there is not a reasonable chance of success, one cannot wage war justly. Implicit in this criterion is the moral imperative of surrender. Such a possibility points again to a people schooled in patient endurance, who are devoted to pursuing nonmilitary means of confronting injustice, and who, when all is said and done, will follow the saints and martyrs in taking up the cross rather than shed their convictions.

Noncombatant immunity/discrimination. This is the first of two criteria addressing justice in the conduct of warfare. It establishes that one cannot intentionally or directly kill noncombatants.

In a just war one has an obligation to distinguish combatants and minimize noncombatant deaths. One cannot target enemy civilians for the sake of reducing one’s own combatant deaths. Therefore, in a just war, more of our soldiers may die. This is particularly the case in the era of fourth-generation warfare insofar as such warfare is increasingly conducted in the midst of civilian populations. In other words, fighting in the midst of terrorist activity may make war even more costly to those who would fight justly.

The immediate challenge to the church is to instill in its soldiers temperance, the courage to abide by this restraint when the temptation to ignore it will be great. But the challenge extends to the whole congregation as well insofar as Christians must be willing to put the lives of their loved ones at greater risk so that enemy civilians may be at less risk. Here the other-directed character of the Christian life rises again to the fore. We must also let the governing authorities know that we are indeed willing to bear such costs for the sake of waging war justly.

Proportionality. The final criterion holds that the means used in a war’s prosecution must be proportional to the ends. Any intended destruction inflicted on the enemy must serve the stated ends of the just cause. You cannot destroy an enemy battalion simply because you have the capability to do so or because you see a postwar advantage in further weakening the enemy. In other words, this criterion prohibits "overkill," force that is disproportionate to the war’s just purpose.

Adhering to this criterion entails judgment and calls for prudence. As a matter of restraint, it calls for temperance and refraining from vengeance. The challenge for congregational leaders is to be intentional in fostering these virtues though the practices and disciplines of congregational life.

A just war people have much to do between wars, not only teaching the criteria but also nurturing the virtues commensurate with the tradition -- justice, temperance, patience, courage and so forth -- through preaching and teaching, liturgy and works of mercy.

Such labors, such discipline, however, should not strike us as particularly novel. As a Navy chaplain once reminded me, these virtues are not unique to the vocation of soldiering. Rather, they are the same virtues necessary to navigate civilian and peacetime life faithfully. Whether one is a retiree or homemaker, student or teacher, accountant or mechanic, one is called to be about the business of seeking a just peace for our neighbors. Whether one is a civilian or soldier, in wartime or peacetime, the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and courage are central to discipleship. In other words, embodying the just war tradition is not simply a matter of invoking a checklist of criteria on the eve of conflict. The tradition, if it is to be lived well, is lived as an extension of the quotidian tasks of discipleship.

The Vatican’s Quarrel with Roger Haight

In February the Jesuit theologian Roger Haight, former professor at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received notification that the Vatican had found "serious doctrinal errors" in his 1999 book Jesus: Symbol of God (Orbis) and that he was forbidden to teach as a Catholic theologian. The news did not come as a surprise. He had been involved for five years in an exchange with the Vatican and his Jesuit superior general over the contents of the book. He resigned from Weston in 2003 and has since taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

The controversy between Father Haight and the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith raises a number of difficult and challenging questions. What was Haight trying to do? What were the CDF’s objections? How was his work received by the theological community?

Haight’s book insists from the beginning that theology must be done in dialogue with the postmodern world. He argues that in a postmodern culture with its pluralistic consciousness one can no longer claim the superiority of Christianity to other religions, or Christ as the absolute center to which all other mediations of salvation are relative. This means that the dogmatic statements of faith, particularly in the area of Christology, need to be rethought and reinterpreted in a cultural and linguistic context different from the one in which they were first formulated.

Key to Haight’s method is the concept of symbol, a created person, object or event that makes known or present the transcendent reality of God, which remains always beyond our direct experience. Symbolic language is poetic, imaginative and figurative; it does not provide objective knowledge about transcendent realities, though it mediates a certain experience of God. In this way, Haight seeks to avoid a "naïve revelational positivism." His aim is to rethink christological doctrine and set it within the context of a "general theory of religion in terms of religious epistemology."

What emerges from Haight’s method is a disjuncture familiar in Protestant theology -- the difference between the approaches of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. Schleiermacher sought to situate theology within a general theology of religious consciousness, while Barth insisted on the special and particular character of Christian revelation. On the Catholic side, some see a similar difference between the work of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Schleiermacher and Rahner, like Haight, are seeking to theologize in conscious dialogue with modernity, even at the cost of cultural accommodation. Barth, with his focus on the Word of God, and von Balthasar, with his constant, contemplative gaze on the figure of the crucified and risen Jesus, take seriously the uniqueness of God’s revelation in Christ.

There is much to recommend in Haight’s approach; it could be said to be evangelical in the best sense of the word, It is an attempt to proclaim the good news of God’s salvation in Christ in language that people living in a postmodern culture can hear and understand. On the other hand, he may also have gone too far to accommodate a culture that flourishes only in the rarified atmosphere of the contemporary university. Indeed, although postmodernism is the ruling ideology of the academy, whether there are really any postmodern people is another question. In any case, theology should challenge culture as well as engage in dialogue with it, and it should be able to speak also to the church.

The CDF raised seven specific points in regard to Haight’s book. First, it had serious reservations about his theological method. While recognizing Haight’s attempt to establish a "critical correlation" between the data of faith and postmodern culture, it argued that his method actually results "in a subordination of the content of faith to its plausibility and intelligibility in postmodern culture." It also charged that in asserting that the Logos should be understood in a purely metaphorical sense, Haight denied the preexistence and incarnation of the Word as well as the divinity of Jesus.

In regard to the Trinity, the CDF rejected Haight’s view that the Logos and Spirit are symbols representing two different historical, salvific mediations of the one God, rather than referring to the differentiated inner life of God. The Vatican also argues that Haight did not affirm the salvific value of the death of Jesus and the universal salvific mission of Jesus, and it raises questions about his presentation of the resurrection.

While Haight’s book was widely acclaimed, receiving the Catholic Press Association’s award as the best book on theology in 2000, some theologians did have serious problems with the work. Without denying that there were problems, the Catholic Theological Society of America’s board of directors issued a statement protesting the CDF’s intervention as threatening "the very process of serious, systematic, internal criticism which the congregation and the bishops have long been encouraging among theologians." The directors said that Haight’s book "has done a great service in framing crucial questions that need to be addressed today," at the same time noting that the theological community has been in the process of engaging in a lively debate over the strengths and weaknesses of his speculative proposals.

In short, while many theologians continue to have serious reservations about Haight’s Christology and agree with the CDF’s critique, there is a general sense that the CDF moved too quickly on the case and did not respect the debate already taking place in the theological community.

My own sense is that Haight’s choice of a Spirit Christology, rather than the traditional Logos Christology, makes Jesus a unique mediator of the Spirit but not the incarnation of the Word. This leads in turn to a diminished doctrine of the Trinity, with a "unitarian" understanding of God. According to Haight, God is manifested in history as Father, Son and Spirit, but this language does not say anything about the divine inner life.

Some theologians, like Joseph Bracken, argue that Haight’s Christology, while radical in some senses, is not radical enough, as it fails to see that relationality -- the trinitarian communion of persons -- is at the very heart of the Christian understanding of God.

A particular strength of Haight’s book is the effort he makes to rethink the doctrine of salvation. Protestant theology, particularly evangelical theology, has canonized Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, which appears again for Catholics in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Many find Anselm’s theology inadequate for both theological and pastoral reasons, in that it suggests God’s justice can be satisfied only by the death of an only beloved Son. Eastern theology, with its doctrine of divinization, has avoided this doctrine, which seems to reduce salvation to a transaction. The patristic and indeed the biblical traditions are much richer.

I think Haight is correct in arguing for other mediators of salvation, including both non-Christian religions and secular realities -- something recognized by mainstream Catholic theology. Building on Vatican II, Pope John Paul II acknowledged in his encyclical Redemptoris missio that the Spirit can affect "society and history, peoples, cultures and religions." At the same time, few Catholic theologians would want to move so far as to suggest replacing a christocentric theology with a theocentric one. Haight’s Jesus is a teacher and exemplar but not the sole, universal savior, and Haight’s apparent inability to find any positive value in the cross seems to me a weakness in his work.

The case of Father Haight raises a number of questions faced by all churches: What is the authority of scripture, what is the relation between theology and church authority, and what is the role of academic theology in seminaries, divinity schools and undergraduate university programs?

Haight’s approach to scripture differs little from that of other mainstream theologians. He argues that the way scripture was used by the Council of Nicea (325), which presumed it to be "a source of directly representative information, like facts or objective data, about transcendent reality," is no longer acceptable. He understands biblical language as "symbolic of experience that is historically mediated."

So he warns about reading the "poetry" of the prologue in John’s Gospel in a literalist manner and sees the empty tomb and appearance narratives as not so much historical narratives as "ways of expressing and teaching the content of a faith already formed." Without denying that the resurrection was a real, eschatological act of God on Jesus, many theologians would agree with Haight on these points.

The earliest tradition, the Easter kerygma, simply proclaims that God raised Jesus and that there are witnesses. The later Easter appearance narratives are stories created precisely to help members of early Christian communities to recognize the presence of the risen Jesus in their midst, "in the breaking of the bread" of the Eucharist (Luke 24:35) or without seeing him themselves, as in the story of doubting Thomas (John 20:29).

The CDF’s insistence that "the appearances of the risen Lord and the empty tomb are the foundation of the faith of the disciples in the resurrection of Christ, and not vice versa" seems to take the appearance narratives as historical accounts. This seems difficult to reconcile with the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1993 instruction "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church," which criticizes fundamentalist interpretations for rejecting critical research, for historicizing material which never claimed to be historical, and for not taking into account the development of the gospel tradition. But while reemphasizing the importance of the historical-critical method, the instruction also insists that biblical interpretation cannot be reduced to a hypercritical analysis, but must always take place within the living tradition of the church -- its liturgical life, its contemplative reading of the sacred texts (lectio divina) and its pastoral care.

How scripture is to be interpreted remains a critical issue. With the collapse of the Reformation’s "sola Scriptura" principle in the post-Enlightenment period, Protestantism has too often been left with the alternatives of a fundamentalist literalism, with its modern doctrine of biblical inerrancy or infallibility, and theological liberalism. Many conservative Protestant churches, lacking an effective magisterium, cling to their inerrantist approach, fearful of what they see as the slippery slope toward liberalism (as I learned from my five years as a participant in conversations between Catholics and Southern Baptists). Catholic theologians affirm the role of the magisterium in safeguarding the church’s faith, as the Catholic Theological Society of America’s board of directors did in its statement on the CDF’s intervention in the case of Haight.

As Christianity becomes ever more diverse, given its incredible growth in Asia and the global south, noted by Philip Jenkins in The New Christendom, the need for a truly collegial, universal magisterium becomes ever more apparent. The alternative is a further fragmentation of the global Christian community. Tensions between newer churches and more established ones are already evident.

For example, the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in the southern hemisphere and of nontraditional African churches, variously known as African Indigenous or African Independent Churches, means that the Protestantism of the future will reflect the more participative free-church tradition. The worldwide Anglican Communion is presently experiencing tension and possible schism over the ordination of.a noncelibate gay bishop by the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, which has been strongly protested by the Anglican bishops of Africa.

The Catholic churches of Asia are showing a new maturity, with their own sense of how to address their issues. Peter Phan notes that at Bangkok in 1982 and Bandung, Indonesia, in 1990, the Federation of Asian Bishops’ conferences sought to construct an ecclesiology that makes not the church but the reign of God the center of Christian life. At the 1998 Synod of Bishops for Asia, representatives objected that the Roman-drafted outline document for the synod was too Western in its approach. Much of the controversy centered on how best to proclaim the gospel in an Asian context. The Indian bishops argued for the right of local churches to develop their own approach to evangelization. Their concern was with how Christ is proclaimed.

Many objected that the Roman emphasis on proclaiming Christ as universal savior was not a good starting point in an Asian context, viewing it as ignoring the considerable experience of their conferences and putting other religions at a disadvantage. Their own approach emphasizes a "triple dialogue" -- with other religions, with cultures and with the poor. In his exhortation "Ecclesia in Asia" Pope John Paul IL sought to incorporate some of the bishops’ concerns. But remaining tensions resulted in the 2000 declaration of the CDF, Dominus lesus, which stressed that the fullness of God’s revelation is to be found in Christ, that it is not complemented by other religions, that members of other religions are in a "gravely deficient situation," and that Christ has an absolute and universal significance.

Finally, the case of Father Haight raises with anew clarity the question of the role of academic theology. The dilemma faced by the CDF is not unique to the Catholic Church. Professional theology has both a critical and a speculative function; it probes the adequacy of the church’s language and seeks to find new, more effective ways to express its timeless truths, precisely for the sake of the church’s mission.

But the question of how theologians teaching in seminaries and undergraduate universities carry out their responsibility to bring students to an adult appreciation of the faith, both intellectually and pastorally, has not always been adequately addressed. It is not sufficient to argue that theology is different from catechesis, as many academic theologians do. Do not these theologians have an obligation to hand on the faith itself and not just the speculations of an academy too often driven by the need to publish? Do they have no responsibility for the religious development of their students?

The department in which I teach is strongly committed to the religious mission of our university and its members to the life of the church. In an age when many have called attention to the religious and theological illiteracy of many young adult Catholics, a recent comment of our students is very telling. When surveyed by a faculty committee reviewing the program for theology majors, they responded that they "had been better instructed in modern and postmodern developments and critiques of the tradition than in the tradition itself."

If the CDF’s decision to prohibit Roger Haight from teaching as a Catholic theologian is troubling, it is worth noting that he has not been silenced; he will continue to do research and to publish. His Jesus: Symbol of Cod remains a work that other theologians will have to deal with.

Mike McCurry on Church, Polities and Civil Debate

As President Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, Mike McCurry was a familiar face on the nation’s TV screens. Before serving in that post -- what he calls a "dream job" -- he was a spokesman at the Department of State and director of communications for the Democratic National Committee. He is now a partner at Public Strategies Washington, inc., a communications consulting firm, and is chairman of Grassroots Enterprise, a software provider A member of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Kensington, Maryland, where he teaches Sunday school, McCurry was a delegate from the Baltimore Washington annual conference to the United Methodists’ 2004 general conference. He also serves on the board of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

What did you learn about church politics as a delegate to the United Methodist general conference last year? How are they similar to and different from national politics?

I was a little distressed to see that some of the same "red state -- blue state" divisions that characterize national politics have seeped into the culture of the church. The United Methodist Church is so big and broad that it reflects some of the same divisions and tensions that exist in the national body politic. There was a difference, however: at the end of the day, we reminded ourselves that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. That created at least some sense of unity amidst our divisions. I think the church has a long way to go before it repairs some of the deep divisions that exist. At least in the church people try to respect those with whom they disagree. There is more listening at a church conference than at a political convention.

You have said you worry that Methodists "have lost touch with the spirit of John Wesley." How so?

There are many John Wesleys. I appreciate the Wesley who was a radical reformer and who had no problem speaking truth to the powerful. I don’t think Wesley would let Methodists sit in their comfortable pews and ignore the condition of the poor and dispossessed. There was a unity to his evangelism and witness to the poor. He also knew that a pureness of heart could overcome division. I don’t think he would tolerate those who disguise their interest in schism or in winning the contests for power in the church.

What have you learned as a Sunday school teacher and leader in a local church?

The local church is one of the few places left where you can gather under one roof with people who think entirely differently from you about issues of the day, and still feel good about who they are as people. I have good friends in my church who are way over on the other side of the political spectrum, but I never feel that those differences cloud our worship or service.

Teaching seventh- and eighth-grade Bible class is the single hardest thing I have ever done. Live television briefings with an angry press corps are a piece of cake in comparison. But when you really get a Sunday school lesson to work, the payoff is a lot more rewarding.

Has it ever seemed that your faith was in conflict with your duties as a public servant or as a consultant?

Sad to say, there have been times that I have not drawn deeply enough on my faith in responding to situations in the workplace. It’s easy to get angry or dispirited in politics or, what is worse, cynical. The language of politics is also very raw, and I catch myself slipping into vulgarity far too easily. The hardest thing in my work is to find honest, genuine ways to express faith, profess it and live it.

Did you ever struggle as a Christian during President Clinton’s personal difficulties?

Of course. Especially after he came to us and said he had misled us. It took some time and some prayer to find the right way to deal with it. I also had a struggle dealing with the real hurt that I saw Mrs. Clinton suffer.

Do you think Democrats are not aggressive enough in their criticisms of President Bush?

No. I think there is too much aggressive criticism in politics. There needs to be more inspiration. I think we Democrats won’t have much chance to win national elections until we can offer a more vibrant and compelling vision of what America can and should be. We are good at saying what we are against but less successful in defining what we are for.

What might the Kerry campaign have done differently?

We should have recognized that a vast universe of new communities was springing up in the far outskirts of suburbia and that people were coming together in those communities in new ways. We concentrated on the traditional sources of strength for the Democratic Party and missed the opportunity to engage some of these transplanted voters in their new homes. In that sense, we are not unlike the old mainline denominations that have failed to see and understand the emerging mega-churches in these very same communities.

Those fast-growing "exurb" areas now tend to be heavily Republican. As a political strategist, how do you think they can be reached?

They are Republican because the Democrats did not show up and suit up. I think many of these areas were off our radar because we did not send organizers out there to talk to community leaders and invite them in. Many of these "exurb" voters went Republican only because they didn’t know that Democrats cared about them, too.

Is there a "values gap" between the two parties?

The two parties apply their values to critical issues in different ways. I certainly would not cede "values" to the Republicans, although I would have to say that they have found a better vocabulary to express their values. We Democrats have a rich moral vocabulary of our own, and we are rediscovering it.

On what issues should Christians be taking a public stand?

What are we doing to take care of the sick, the poor, the lonely, the imprisoned? What are we doing to make peace, not war? What are we doing to help ensure that the last shall be first? I don’t remember Jesus teaching much of anything about homosexuals, but I do remember him calling us always to think about those with the least. Maybe one thing we should do is to remind one another that "Christian teaching" is much broader than the way it is being defined in some of our debates.

Given the prominence of attack ads, the erosion of privacy, the reduction of issues to sound bites, what would you say to a young person considering a career in politics?

Right now I would steer young people away from elective politics and campaigns, and toward other forms of public service. I would also work harder to develop programs that help our young people learn about politics the way it could be and should be. (I chair the board of a great nonprofit organization, the Junior Statesmen, that actually helps high school kids learn how to conduct themselves with integrity in politics.)

We can’t go on being as divided and as bitter as we are today. Things will change for the better, and I predict that will happen sooner rather than later. Then it will be safe to encourage kids to enter politics again.

Is it possible to build a religious left with anything like the muscle of the religious right?

I think it is vital that we do so. Not so that we can stare each other down from across the sanctuary, but so that we can have a good, honest debate about what faith calls us to do in the public realm. It’s been a one-sided debate in recent years, with groups like the Christian Coalition claiming to have a franchise on faith-based political truth. I think an empowered religious left can help people think harder about what God calls us to do as members of a civil community. If we have that dialogue in a genuine and gentle way, I think we will all be better off for it.

Should a religious left or even an evangelical liberal movement conduct itself differently than the religious right?

We should be more inclusive and tolerant, and we should have a better sense of humor. Our strength will be a diversity that the religious right can only dream about. But we can’t be as ponderous, and we have to have some fun along the way. I hope the religious left will never lose mischief as a tool. I think it is God’s secret weapon.

Could you comment on the "culture of life" conversation that has been much in the news of late?

Because of’ the late Pope John Paul II’s use of the term, the "culture of life" has a distinctively Catholic and theologically conservative flavor. There are many things necessary to sustain life. In the recent case of Terri Schiavo, a compassionate government that funded her care through government programs was indispensable in keeping her alive for many years. Yet many of those proclaiming a desire to fight for her life failed to fight for the programs that kept her alive, in fact were and are in favor of cutting those programs to the bone. What kind of culture is that? There are lots of things to argue about, but there are definitely two sides to the debate -- and that is what we are going to establish.

Refusing Duty in Iraq

Army sergeant Kevin Benderman, 40, faces a military trial for refusing to return to Iraq for a second tour of duty. The trial is scheduled for May 11 at an army base in Georgia. A Tennessean of Southern Baptist background, Benderman joined the army in 1987, was honorably discharged in ‘91 and re-enlisted in 2000. He has a distinguished military record, including a dozen medals. He has applied to be classified as a conscientious objector. The CENTURY asked him about his change of mind.

Didn’t you have a pretty good idea of what war is like before going to Iraq?

How can you know what anything is really like until you experience it for yourself? You can look at someone who has burns on his body and you can think that it would hurt, but you would not know how bad it hurts unless you were burned yourself.

Can’t someone have an experience and see that they were living the wrong way and try to make changes in how they were conducting themselves? If an alcoholic or a drug addict were to realize that the way he was living was very detrimental, would he not be expected to put forth the effort to change? That is what I am doing.

No doubt there are those who will say you are just trying to save your own skin and are letting down your fellow soldiers by bailing out. Others may say you are a romantic, naïve idealist who underestimates the power and extent of evil in the world and what is required to cope with it.

The people who say those things have a right to their opinion. I cannot let them stop me doing the things that I know are best for me. As far as letting down fellow soldiers, I feel that I am trying to get the very thing that kills them stopped permanently—and if they don’t see that now, then I hope they will in time.

You have said that at one point your company commander in Iraq ordered your unit to fire on small children who were throwing rocks at the troops. Would you elaborate on that incident?

Out of curiosity, the children would climb on the wall of the building that we had moved into. These kids, who were seven to nine years old, were just being kids. It must have been really exciting for them to see the equipment, and they acted like kids who have never seen that type of thing before.

We had not had the chance to secure the perimeter of the place with concertina wire, and the captain was nervous, I suppose, about the possibility of someone throwing a bomb or something. So he overreacted to the situation. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy—because there was no way that we were going to shoot those kids.

Apart from that incident, did you see other evidence of mistreatment of civilians by U.S. military personnel during your six months in Iraq?

That question is not fair to the soldiers. Soldiers are in a situation where it is very hard to tell who the "enemy" is, and so things were done to people who did not deserve it. I didn’t see torture or anything of that nature, but I did see some people who did not pose a threat to us shoved around roughly. I also saw a severely burned girl who was pleading for help, and we were told not to come to her aid because our medical supplies were limited.

But war is an extraordinary circumstance that makes people do things that are against their nature. Soldiers are in a situation that no one should ever have to be in and that will make some people behave in ways they normally wouldn’t.

Are you a selective objector, opposing only the war in Iraq, or do you now consider yourself a thoroughgoing pacifist, opposed to all war in all forms?

I was not in any other war, so this is the one that gave me firsthand knowledge of what war is. War’s only purpose is to kill.

Do you feel that you meet the military’s criteria for status as a conscientious objector? Is your objection based on "religious training and belief"?

The army’s criteria for conscientious-objector status does seem rather narrow in its scope. Who is to say what religious training is? I have read the Bible extensively since I was about 18, but I have not attended church. I think that I have training from the Creator directly as I have read the Bible, the Qur’an and many other books on the matter. I do not believe that I have to have a "middle man" between me and the Creator to know what is expected of me. Every kind of religious scripture I have read states in some way that you shall not kill.

At your trial you are likely to be asked: If it were a defensive war, would you still be opposed to it? What if the U.S. were attacked directly? Would you use coercive force to protect your own family, and if so, to what extent? How would you answer such questions?

This particular war is not any of those things. And I cannot answer a "what if" question. The U.S. was not attacked directly by Iraq. You cannot associate defending yourself from imminent personal attack with declaring war on another country -- that is comparing apples and oranges.

I have never been in another war, so the only thing that I can personally say that I experienced is this war -- and that is what has driven home to me that war is insanity. If you stop and think about them, you will know that all wars are the same. War is war, and it is designed to kill human beings. That is why I say that we need to leave it behind us.

The Church-Based University

Book Review:

Conflicting allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society. Edited by Michael L. Budde and John Wright. Brazos.

Can Hope endure? A Case Study in Christian Higher Education. By James C. Kennedy and Caroline J. Simon. Eerdmans, 249 pp.

Can a church-related college reinvigorate its Christian identity while maintaining academic quality? That question has been at the forefront of recent discussion of Christian higher education. These two books advance the discussion in different ways. Conflicting Allegiances invites us to imagine a world in which Christianity and academics are thoroughly pursued together -- and to imagine what a Christian school would then look like. Can Hope Endure? asks us to consider what is plausible in the context of one specific school, Hope College -- a context that has included conservative donors, charismatically disruptive chaplains, a professionalized faculty and the challenges of ecumenical pluralism.

Each contributor to Conflicting Allegiances was asked to comment on some aspect of an ideal-type "ecclesially based university," or EBU. John Wright opens the book with a brilliant essay that goes beyond the work of George Marsden (The Soul of the American University) and James Burtchaell (The Dying of the Light) in looking at the broad sociopolitical context of higher education. He gives a powerful analysis of what some have called the "two spheres" of American life: the state is sovereign in the public sphere but allows for "freedom" in the private sphere. As long as colleges and universities cooperate in serving the smooth operation of the political, economic and social order, they have freedom to do what they want in the private sphere. But as Clark Kerr’s downfall as president of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s demonstrated, the range of moral and religious choices remaining in that context may be very small. Indeed, religion confined to a private sphere may, by some definitions, not be religion at all.

William Cavanaugh takes on the arrogance of the American Association of University Professors in its statements (1940, 1970, 1988) about "academic freedom." To the AAUP, the presence of a department of theology in a university is a contradiction, as is a church-related college of any kind -- that is, if it still takes its religious vocations seriously. Whereas Marsden -- who has own substantial critique of the AAUP -- could be said to have argued for a place at the academic table for Christians, Cavanaugh wants to redefine the table. He claims that secular universities don’t really understand a fully orbed method of truth seeking. This argument is not new, but I have not seen it presented with such power and intensity. (Holding such views, Cavanaugh could be tenured at his own University of St. Thomas; I wonder if he’d make it at the University of Minnesota.)

Many other essays in this challenging book deserve attention. One in particular is Michael Cartwright’s on the formation and vocation of students. As someone who has taught for many years, I was delighted to learn a term to describe the role I have developed in my own style; in loco amicis should replace in loco parentis for the mentoring professor. In short, the professor who is a "wise friend" of students can be of great help in the formation of the people to whom we dedicate our lives.

Elizabeth Newman takes up a similar theme in an essay on hospitality. A Southern Baptist now back at a Baptist institution, she taught for a dozen years at a Catholic institution in the upper Midwest. She offers a moving story of being "the other" and discusses "a theology of oikos hospitality." She concludes with a reminder that the church is broken and that our academic witness is partly compromised because of that brokenness.

Keeping up the Baptist connection, Scott Moore of Baylor extends "hospitality" to the curriculum, calling for a "hermeneutic of hospitality" that brings students and professors to their tasks with texts in a way that allows faith and reason to intersect. Amy Laura Hall of Duke contributes an intriguing and well-argued chapter on the way women’s studies might help the EBU to remap its future, especially in the "unmasking of a social tapestry that cloaks false wisdom as true."

Michael Budde closes the volume by asking what these reflections amount to. To him, the EBU must have a trans-formative vision for students, faculty and society, not merely a vision that finds its place in the private sphere allotted it by a liberal democratic polity. Budde is aware that the AAUP elite and others in the academic establishment will oppose ventures in faith-based teaching and learning, sometimes adding ridicule to that opposition.

Worse still, to Budde, are those Christian leaders who think a call for an EBU is a step backward to second-class institutions. He ruefully notes that much of both Catholic and Protestant leadership has, for at least a half century, been backing away from church-relatedness, hoping to imitate elite institutions and thereby be accepted by them as "academically respectable." Budde hopes that academic and religious leaders will realize the intellectual and spiritual costs of that desire to imitate, and that they will create institutions in which the church can do its thinking and from which a called and educated laity will emerge.

Hope College in Holland, Michigan, has not received much attention in the discussion of church-related colleges. Nearly 150 years old, it is the creation of America’s oldest Protestant denomination, the Reformed Church in America (RCA). Hope perhaps suffers from underappreciation because it is within a few hours’ drive of the institutions that get most of the attention when this topic comes up: Notre Dame, Valparaiso, Wheaton and Calvin.

Can Hope Endure? is the work of two Hope College professors, philosopher Caroline Simon and historian James Kennedy. Fair disclosure requires that I mention that my wife, Barbara, was a faculty member at Hope College during some of the period described in the book and that she (by then teaching at Maryville College in Tennessee) and I were resource people at a national consultation on church-related colleges, where we talked with Simon and many others.

The first chapter is an excellent review of the discussion about the church-related college as shaped by Marsden, Burtchaell, Arthur Holmes, Jon Roberts, James Turner, Arthur Dejong, Richard Hughes, Robert Benne and Douglas Sloan.

Kennedy and Simon admit early on that their thesis -- that Hope survived by keeping to a middle way -- can be read in both positive and negative lights. On the one hand, the balancing of Reformed, evangelical and ecumenical/ progressive impulses provided the school with the strength and depth to withstand secularization. On the other hand, Hope was perhaps deluded in thinking that the center would hold, or even that there was any center at all. On the latter reading of the situation, Hope may soon have to make a faithful, even fateful, choice among the several traditions it has held loosely together over the years.

From the beginning, Hope was driven by external circumstances. It was founded in the relatively conservative Midwest -- relative, that is, to the eastern, more liberal wing of the RCA. The easterners were more numerous, and they had more money. So Hope had to work with the more conservative folks of Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin while the bills were being paid by the folks in New York and New Jersey.

Another source of pressure were the conservative elements among the new waves of Dutch immigrants who arrived in the late-l9th and early-2Oth centuries. These folks were much more confessionally minded than the RCA mainliners, and they were less willing to adapt to American culture without a fight. For example, the newcomers brought with them expectations for Christian day schools and opposition to the Masonic Lodge. Hope was again caught between two imperatives. In the end, the more confessional and ideologically argumentative elements were drawn to a breakaway denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, and to its school, Calvin College. Many pietistically conservative folks stayed with the RCA -- if their piety allowed for public schools and lodge membership, as well as for embracing the "American" character of evangelicalism, which the psalm-singers in Grand Rapids found unattractive.

Throughout Hope’s first century -- into the 1950s -- the college could plausibly adhere to the notion that Christian and American values were approximately the same. In that context Hope prospered. But as time went on it wasn’t clear why such a college should prefer a Reformed, even a Protestant or Christian, faculty if all upstanding Americans with equal academic training could contribute to an equally acceptable moral and societal end. The authors repeatedly wonder if a college always trying to mediate between two poles is deluding itself or is doing a unique thing in higher education.

A major topic in the book’s last section is the faculty hiring policy. This question has racked the Hope campus in the past half century. Should Hope faculty be what Robert Benne calls "orthodox" (which Simon and Kennedy redefine as "comprehensive") or should it be intentionally pluralistic? As all commentators on the church-related college agree, faculty hiring is vital to institutional identity. (Benne offers a typology of faculty hiring policies ranging from "orthodox," to "critical mass," to "intentionally pluralistic," to "accidentally pluralistic.")

Faculty hiring was more or less intentionally pluralistic at Hope College (though more by custom than design) until the 1960s, when a new president arrived. Calvin Vander Werf took Hope in what must be termed a secularizing direction. He clearly adopted what Sloan and others call the "two spheres" idea -- that faculty hiring should be blind to religion in order to hire the best-trained people, and that the religious character of the school would be developed in the private and nonacademic realms of chapel and personal piety. After seven eventful years, Vander Werf resigned and in 1972 Gordon Van Wylen became president. He and provost Jack Nyenhuis were determined to bring Hope back to the middle way. (An irony that Simon notes but doesn’t develop is that both men were Calvin graduates.)

While the two leaders never said so directly, many interpreted their work as a war on two fronts. They were determined that Hope would not lose its Christian identity as it pursued excellence (as happened at Oberlin, for example), and that Hope would neither join the evangelically oriented Christian College Coalition, which has some fundamentalist members, nor become confessionally focused (like Calvin, for example).

The Van Wylen presidency largely reversed the open hiring policy of the previous administration. That restrictive policy has been maintained through the succeeding administrations, though not without opposition from a considerable number of faculty and fierce opposition from some members of the history department.

The ethos of adhering to the middle was stretched to the breaking point in the 1990s. The challenge this time with the appointment of Ben Patterson as college chaplain. A self-identified evangelical, Patterson was supported by many in the faculty, but a majority thought his message and his style were too much like that of a fundamentalist. Both his supporters and his detractors agree that he may have been the most divisive figure in the history of Hope College. His tenure and departure make for a fascinating story.

With a lessening of those tensions, we can reckon what can be learned from this college’s history. First and foremost: Hope is the only church-related college I know of that welcomed secularization about the time many other colleges did, in the 1960s, but then backed away from it, in the direction of resacralization. Second, and almost as important: Hope is the only academically excellent college I know of that purposefully adopted an open hiring policy and then reversed it. On these two points Hope’s history and struggles can be instructive to other colleges that, having relinquished much of their heritage a generation ago, want to try to recover it.

Some readers may be a bit surprised by Kennedy’s and Simon’s own acceptance of a (nearly) Christians-only hiring policy as the only way this church-related college could maintain its identity and vocation. To be sure, they argue their views in the Hope way, which is to say in a middle way: they want neither a statement of faith for all faculty to sign (like Wheaton) nor a Protestants-only hiring policy (like Calvin).

The authors aimed to write a cautionary tale, a reminder that if schools like Hope do not come to a sense of Christian purpose that is at once broad and deep, then cultural forces around them -- most of them not very friendly to Christianity -- will make their choices for them.

Having allowed our vision to be raised by Budde, Wright and colleagues, and then having looked anew at a real school, we might well be grateful for such an institution as Hope College. The way it has embraced the tensions in American academic and religious life and yet (apparently) not lost the middle way could be an example to all church-related colleges that want to retain, in Robert Benne’s phrase, academic quality and soul.

A Televised Reconciliation in Northern Ireland

Desmond Tutu makes headlines, and often changes hearts and minds. In the fall of 2005, the headlines were made in Belfast, where Tutu, former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, was filming Facing the Truth, three programs for the Northern Irish BBC that aired in Britain on three consecutive days in March of this year.

The hearts and minds belong to those who suffered and to those who caused suffering during "the Troubles," the period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland beginning with the Civil rights marches in the late 1960s and continuing to the political resolution enshrined in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. More than 3,000 people were killed during the Troubles, most of them civilians. For the BEG programs the victims or families of the victims were invited to confront either the perpetrator or someone associated with the organization that had sanctioned, planned and accomplished the killing or injury.

The enterprise was a daring idea both for Tutu and the BBC. No British government of either political party has ever wanted a full-blown Truth and Reconciliation Coimmission like the South African model. That would mean opening up records that no government would allow to be opened. Similarly, Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army would never agree to a full and unfettered examination of their activities,

As a scholar familiar with the Troubles and the peace process, I believe that a TRC may not be needed in Northern Ireland. The institutions of civil society are potentially strong enough to foster some level of personal, social and cultural healing. Parachurch residential communities like Corrymeela in Ballycastle and the Christian Renewal Centre in Rostrevor can provide the safe space for dialogue and forgiveness that only a TRC could provide for a relatively institution-poor society. I’ve been a participant-observer in these communities and have witnessed the courage and grace associated with people who come to confront the past, work through it and forgive. My Catholic friends call these people "icons of grace." Yet the communities cannot reach everyone.

When Tutu agreed to try putting a TRC-type encounter on television, the BEG began recruiting people and scrupulously selecting them. The three programs were filmed at Ballywalter House, a remote country house in rural Northern Ireland, over a six-day period. Two women assisted the bishop: Donna Hicks, a Harvard specialist in conflict resolution, and Leslie Belinda, a British woman whose husband was murdered during the atrocities in Rwanda. Although Tutu was understood to be the chair of the meetings, both Hicks and Belinda were important players, and at times their interventions were crucial.

As I watched the programs, at first I was underwhelmed. While the stories were touching examples of courage and grace, they did not have the dramatic effect that I’d expected. But then, as I watched, I began to recall all the stories of pain and suffering I had heard in 30 years of writing about the Troubles. As Tutu encouraged people to tell their stories and ask their questions in Facing the Truth, a phrase or gesture would trigger in me a memory of another story of deep human loss in Ireland, and then another. Eventually I found myself weeping. As Tutu said at one such moment, "This is not something we could have contrived." One encounter involved Michael Stone, a Loyalist killer who was seen on the world’s TV screens in 1988. He had attacked an IRA funeral in West Belfast’s Milltown cemetery, the sacred burial ground of the Republican movement. Stone threw grenades and fired a pistol into the funeral party, killing three people. He was arrested, charged with those and many other crimes, convicted on multiple charges and sentenced to more that 600 years in prison. Then, to the dismay and anger of many in the Republican community, he was released in the amnesty after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

One of Stone’s convictions was for the 1987 murder of Dermot Hackett, who Stone alleged was an IRA operative. In the dramatic high point of the programs, the Hackett family confronted Stone. The family entered first, welcomed by the smiles of Tutu, Hicks and Belinda. Viewers then felt the tension rise markedly as Stone walked in, limping. The Hackett women began to sob as Stone sat down. Before Tutu could welcome them and thank them for their courage in coming, one of the women ran out of the room in tears, leaving Hackett’s widow, Sylvia, and his brother Roddy to confront Stone.

The Hacketts’ opening comments revealed their continued and largely unresolved grief about the murder, which had taken place two decades before. They are also convinced that Hackett had not been involved with any paramilitary organization. They had come to the broadcast to clear Hackett’s name, to ask the killer why he had done it and what he felt about talking an innocent man’s life and leaving his family devastated.

Stone looked menacing, but his sad eyes reflected all that he’d seen and lived in 50 years, 34 of them misspent in prison or when he was a terrorist at large. He told calmly of his upbringing in the Protestant heartland on the mean streets of working-class Belfast, and of joining the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) at 16. He was soon imprisoned on a weapons charge and spent a half year in the infamous Long Kesh prison; he calls it "the university of terrorism," because he was thoroughly politicized there and came out determined to become proficient in all the dark arts of terror.

For the next quarter century he led a double life, publicly a construction worker and family man and, in his off hours, one of the main Loyalist paramilitaries. He fooled even his wife for many years, but when she found out about his double life she left him. A somber Tutu nodded at Stone’s admission of his own vulnerability: he knows he is a marked man. For the security of his children and grandchildren he rarely sees them.

As for planning Dermot Hackett’s death, Stone described the internally rational world of the terrorist assassin. Relying on intelligence dossiers prepared meticulously by his UDR commanders, he prepared intensively, making several dry runs by following the bread delivery van in which Hackett would ultimately die; he blocked out the reality that the target might be a family man with a pregnant wife and child awaiting his return home from work; he avoided reading the papers or listening to TV reports over the next days, because the stories tend to make a real human being out of what had to be thought of only as "the target."

Bishop Tutu allowed the Hacketts to ask again about the murder. Stone stunned them all by saying, for the first time, that he was not the trigger man that day, though he had intended to be. It was actually his accomplice who had shot Hackett. Stone took responsibility for the crime because he was going to prison for life anyway -- and his taking the rap allowed another UDR man to be free to carry on the struggle. Making eye contact with Sylvia Hackett, Stone said that while he did not murder her husband, he had prepared to do so and took full responsibility for his death.

Tutu then challenged Stone in a way he had not challenged any other participant. He said that the Hacketts needed to know the truth about Dermot’s death and asked Stone to affirm that what he had just disclosed was "the gospel truth." Stone glared at Tutu and said, "I may be many things, but I am not a liar." Tutu pressed him further, saying that Stone apparently went out that night believing that a person deserved to die. Stone quickly repeated that in the dehumanized dark world of his activities, Hackett was not a person but a military target. "He was a soldier and I was a soldier."

Donna Hicks noted that Stone had come to this meeting as a human being, not as a soldier. Did he now think Hackett’s death was regrettable? Yes, it was regrettable, Stone said, but under the circumstances it was understandable.

Roddy Hackett demanded that Stone say something about the supposed evidence of Hackett’s IRA involvement and asked where the dossier was to be found. Stone was kindly toward him, saying that he had no knowledge of how the dossier was assembled or where it was now located. It was not his area of assignment.

At this impasse, Tutu asked Sylvia what she was feeling. Choking back the tears, Sylvia said to Stone, "I pray for you, I honestly do, and I forgive you. I feel sorry for your family, and for your kids who have to grow up knowing what their Dad had done." Leslie Belinda then asked Stone, "Do you see Sylvia and Roddy who lost a husband and brother, or the family of an IRA man?"

Stone paused for a long moment. He said he saw a courageous family who lost a loved one many years ago and is still grieving the loss. He saw bravery too, he said, in the family’s coming to confront him in public -- greater bravery than he could show if positions were reversed. Then, with a hint of kindness from those ominous eyes: "I appreciate Mrs, Hackett’s forgiveness for my part in the murder of her husband."

Tutu sensed that the moment for closure was at hand, and said that Sylvia had suggested she might be able to shake hands if there were an honest disclosure of facts and feelings. Tutu asked if this was that time. "It must come from yourselves. And more than from yourselves; it is God who is present at this moment, this moment we could not contrive, that there is mutual healing of all sides." Sylvia rose silently from her seat and walked to where Stone was sitting. She offered her hand, then he offered his. For a moment their eyes met. Stone said, "I’m really sorry." Then their hands unclasped, and Sylvia began to sob and ran from the room, the sound of her heels echoing down the corridor.

Roddy came over, shook hands and said he was glad for the beginning of healing. Stone responded, "I couldn’t have done what you’ve done. You’re a better man than I am. Mrs. Hackett is a better person, and a better Christian too." Tutu ended by praying that the participants might continue, by God’s grace, in their own healing and in the healing of their land. "It is only because there are people like yourselves that there is hope."

In summarizing the experience, Tutu said: "We had some extraordinary moments in the week or so that we were here where it was like something divine had intervened, and it was exhausting but eminently exhilarating."

Some journalists suggested that the three-part program was "reality TV gone mad." I disagree. I believe that Facing the Truth will reach some who still need to know what happened to their loved ones and why they were killed or maimed. It may also speak to those violent men and woman who have their stories to tell, and who need to tell those stories, at least before the hour of their death when they yearn for forgiveness.

At the same time, I share the concern of Healing Through Remembering, a highly respected group in Belfast that fears that viewers of the programs who are still dealing with personal ills from the social trauma of the Troubles will have their experiences revived with no way to find closure and release. The BBC took this concern into account by giving toll-free numbers for people to call if they wanted counseling help.

In all communities of Northern Ireland, people are only a call or link away from personal help, if needed, or from finding a safe place to tell their stories. Catholics in West Belfast know that the priests and brothers at Clonard Monastery are there for them. Protestants respect the Cornerstone Community and the Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in Belfast, while the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland exists to provide resources and staff to "enable people to contribute to conflict transformation and reconciliation."

The question for Northern Irish people, and for governments in London and Dublin, is how fully and thoroughly to confront a violent past. Perhaps the redoubtable Desmond Tutu has shown a away.

The Voices of Muslim Reformers

Books Reviewed:

Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism. Edited by Omid Safi. Oneworld, 384 pp.

American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom. By M. A. Muqtedar Khan. Amana, 208 pp.

What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West. By Feisal Abdul Rauf HarperSanFrancisco, 336 pp.

The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. By Irshad Manji. St. Martin’s Press, 240 pp.

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. By Gilles Kepel. Harvard University Press, 336 pp.

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. By Tariq Ramadan. Oxford University Press, 288 pp.

Most Muslim leaders in England responded to the terrorist bombings in London with unequivocal condemnation. Yet the Muslim community in England and elsewhere is pulled in conflicting directions. On one side are street activists preaching literal adherence to the Qur’an, shariah and hadiths, and calling for separation from, if not overthrow of, the West. On the other side are those who want to re

form Islam. Although Muslim reform may seem like an oxymoron to those who see Islam only through the lens of graphic violence, Muslim reformers have been in the sights of jihadist groups such as at Qaeda for years. Their increasingly bold public stance has made them the natural enemy of those who seek to squeeze followers of Islam into a tight-fisted sectarianism at war with the entire infidel world.

At the start of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Islamic scholars Iyad Jamaleddine (an Iraqi Shi’ite) and Hossein al-Khomeini (a grandson of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) lived under the protection of U.S. troops in a Baghdad mansion because of death threats from Muslim extremists. Their crime? They see true Islam as a flexible, non-dogmatic religion that is adaptable to the modern world with all of its plurality, and they call for the separation of mosque and state.

"We have failed as a civil society by not confronting the historical, social, and political demons within us," a Pakistani businessman wrote in a letter to the Pakistan daily the Nation. "Without a reformation in the practice of Islam which makes it move forward not backward, there is no hope for Muslims everywhere." Striking a more literary note from Egypt, poet and playwright Ali Salem wrote after 9/11 an open letter of apology to Americans: "Extremism may claim God as its redeemer, but it’s really the selfish product of lunacy. . . . These extremists are pathologically jealous. They feel like dwarfs, which is why they search for towers" to destroy.

The growing literature of the Muslim reform movement has played an especially significant role since 9/11 shifted the earth’s geopolitical axis. Western governments were bewildered about what efforts Islam itself would initiate to help prevent another 9/11 or worse from happening. The urgency of Muslim reform has become central to this concern, especially given the up-tick of democracy in the Middle East.

Use of the words Muslim reform and Islamic reform, however, arouse mixed feeling in many Muslims. In his introduction to Progressive Muslims, a collection of essays by 15 Muslim scholars and activists, Omid Safi notes the essayists’ ambivalence about using the word reform or reformation to describe what they envision. "Serious economic, social, and political issues in the Muslim world ... need urgent remedying," Safi Writes, and if "one is talking about a reformation that would address all of those levels, then I would suspect that most progressive Muslims would readily support that usage of the term." Yet the words

Islamic reformation carry baggage about "the Protestant reformation initiated by Martin Luther" which makes the essayists uneasy, according to Safi, who is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate University.

"Ours is not a project of developing a ‘Protestant’ Islam distinct from a ‘Catholic’ Islam," writes Safi.

Many of us insist that we are not looking to create a further split within the Muslim community so much as to heal it. Furthermore, embedded in the very language of "Reformation" is the notion of a significant split with the past. . . . It might be an easier task to start with a tabula rasa, but that would not be an Islamic project. Being a progressive Muslim, at least in the view of this group, mandates a difficult, onerous, critical, and uneasy engagement with the tradition.

From within what Safi prefers to call "the progressive Muslim project," voices of reform in North America and Europe are addressing constituencies and concerns relevant to their contexts. In the U.S., Muqtedar Khan emphasizes the need for Muslims to become more liberally democratic without losing their basic faith. Working out of his small, cluttered office at Adrian University, where he teaches political science, the seemingly indefatigable Khan stepped into the role of public intellectual for the U.S. Muslim community after 9/11 with incisive articles such as "Memo to Mr. Bin Laden: Go to Hell," which was picked up by more than a dozen news agencies around the world. His Web site, called "Ijtihad" (the Islamic word for "independent reasoning" or "innovative thinking"), carries his prolific writings and is a much-visited resource for the media and for Muslims seeking a philosophically oriented approach to Muslim life.

An Indian Muslim frequently on the lecture circuit, Khan believes that his flexible, liberal voice offers an alternative to those of traditionalist Islamic theologians who furnish the reasoning for conservative fatwas. Muslims must become more involved in the American political process locally, regionally and nationally, Kahn argues in American Muslims, and his use of American as an adjective before Muslims is instinctive.

"Muslims cannot be just another ethnic group [i.e., Muslim Americans] with special interests particularly in foreign policy," he writes. "We are seeking change, not only in how the U.S. deals with Muslims overseas but also how American society evolves at home. . . . We must work as hard as possible to make it morally safe and materially satisfying."

Whereas Khan stresses increasing Muslim involvement in the U.S. political process, imam Feisal Abdul Rauf believes that American Muslims must play a central role in the bigger picture of healing the rift between the U.S. and the larger Muslim world. This vigorous relationship was on the table at the second annual U.S-Islamic World Forum held in Qatar in April, sponsored by the emir of Qatar and the Brookings Institution. In his opening remarks at the conference, the emir admonished attendees from both the U.S. and Islamic countries "to arrive through dialogue at a point of transparency" where political transformation, now begun, can be completed, "so that Muslim peoples, who are the prime persons concerned with reform, can be assured" of their hopes.

Rauf has spent more than three decades in universities, mosques, synagogues and churches explaining Islam but generally resisting involvement in politics. The events of 9/11, however, pulled him from the pulpit of his mosque 12 blocks from the World Trade Center and into the media spotlight, where, he says, he has struggled to provide sound-bite political answers. What’s Right with Islam explains in depth what he could only explain in part immediately after 9/11.

Drawing on his experience in interfaith dialogue, Rauf takes Abrahamic monotheism as his starting point, insisting that it is both theologically and socially radical because it offers a "common roots" understanding for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Drawing from the Islamic imperative that "God is one" and from the Qur’an’s teaching about Adam and Eve, Rauf arrives at two essential principles: that all humans are equal "because we are born of one man and woman," and that "because we are equal . . . we have certain inalienable liberties," such as the freedom to accept or reject God, to think for ourselves (ijtihad) and to make individual choices without coercion. A "cluster of monotheism’s core ideas," which Rauf short-hands as the "Abrahamic ethic," drives the book’s thesis, showing what’s right with both Islam and the U.S. and offering suggestions about how American Muslims and the U.S. government may become forces of healing in the larger Muslim world.

Khan writes largely for academe, and Rauf, who wears his heart on his sleeve, is chiefly pastoral. Canadian journalist and television personality Irshad Manji cries like a Muslim Amos. "Islam is on very thin ice with me, she writes, then shows why in her daring book The Trouble with Islam Today (recently retitled from The Trouble with Islam). This blunt and provocative book, now a best seller, is meant to shake up what Manji calls mainstream Islam, to which she puts her honest questions about fundamentalist attitudes toward women, human rights, Jews, the U.S. and even the Qur’an. We must be self-critical, she writes, "coming clean about the nasty side of the Koran, and how it informs terrorism.

But it’s not all diatribe. Manji’s appeal for a mainstream return to ijtihad lies at the heart of her passion. Without ignoring or romanticizing Islam’s darker periods -- which is the great weakness of another, otherwise important book, Why I Am a Muslim. by Asma Gull Hasan, a somewhat conservative Muslim woman -- Manji shows the benefits that ijtihad once produced for both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, and then she asks, "When did we stop thinking?" The book suggests ways that Muslims may liberalize Islam through what she calls "operation ijtihad," an ambitious initiative that would empower more Muslim women economically, align Islamic human rights codes with those of the modern world, reform radio and television outlets, create a less militant paradigm for the relationship between mosque and state, incorporate more democracy into the Muslim world and allow for engagement in interfaith activity. This, she concludes, "would give Muslims a future to live for rather than a past to die for."

The situation in Europe, including Britain, is more nuanced than that in North America, largely because Europe’s Muslim populations have a longer and more established social and political history in nations where Muslims (of the theological left, right and center) are represented by sophisticated networks of’ mosques and political NGOs that defend the rights of Muslims and shape their participation in civic life, including the introduction of Islamic law for civil cases. Muslim reformers in Europe therefore face different challenges.

In The War for Muslim Minds, Gilles Kepel, a French Arabist and scholar of Islam, shows little patience for neoconservative U.S. foreign policy, but most of the book is taken up with criticism of the chief enemy of Muslim reform in Europe: jihadist ideology imported from Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Qutb brothers (Sayyid and Muhammad) and like-minded sources. Kepel argues that the jihadists are losing ground, but he does so by providing a political, religious and historical tour of the Middle East ("a nexus of international disorder") that could be seen as providing evidence that the jihadists aren’t losing ground. Kepel’s conclusion is that the real battleground for hearts and minds lies in the immigrant communities of European cities, where Muslims are being propagandized with "terrorist ideology and tactics." "The battle for Europe," he writes, "is a battle for self-definition. The war for Muslim minds around the world may turn on the outcome of this struggle."

And it is a struggle rooted in the concerns of daily life. Hill Gordon, a mental health nurse manager who works for Britain’s National Health Service, lives near a small neighborhood mosque in a well-integrated section of Birmingham, England. What fascinates Gordon are the daily lives of young Muslims. "They go filing into the mosque for prayers wearing traditional Muslim garb, and then later I see them around town wearing baseball caps turned backwards and all kinds of hip Western gear. Pop culture is completely inside Islamic youth culture here. It’s just that it’s all under wraps."

This neighborhood microcosm reveals the forces of religion, secularism and pluralism pulling at Europe’s growing Muslim population (estimated at least 15 million), whose heaviest concentrations are in France, Britain and Germany.

One voice in this contentious mix is that of Tariq Ramadan, a charismatic French-speaking Swiss intellectual who has a large following among Europe’s young Muslims. Arguing that Islam is universal and comprehensive in its message ("for all of life," as Christians would say about their faith), Ramadan offers European Muslims a fresh reading of Islamic sources to help them integrate faithfully into their pluralistic settings. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam takes the vision offered in To Be a European Muslim (1998) and applies it "in practical terms on the ground," suggesting "a number of concrete responses to questions asked by Western Muslims in the various areas of their daily lives."

Decades ago it dawned on many Western Christian families that, try as they might, they could no longer "keep the world out." Western Muslims has that kind of feel to it. The book carries chapters of well-thought-out commentary, written with much circumspection, on practical issues that secular pluralism in Europe forces Muslim communities to deal with. Ramadan’s advice ranges from issues of food, fashion and free time to children’s education and Islamic feminism, to social commitments, political involvement and partnerships with groups outside of Islam that share progressive Muslims’ concerns (about the environment, human rights, drug abuse and so on). His stated goal in all of this is to create an independent Western Islam, a new "Muslim personality" whose conscience can be faithful to Islamic principles while being fully integrated into Western societies.

But controversy surrounds Ramadan (see article on page 25). In The War for Muslim Minds, for instance, Kepel argues that Ramadan says one thing to Western audiences and quite another to fundamentalist Muslims and that he does this in order to expand his circle of influence. "Unless Tariq Ramadan takes responsibility for his growing internal contradictions," Kepel challenges, "they will propel him, like all shooting stars, into the dark night." Kepel’s concern highlights an enduring question for Muslim reformers that is on the minds of many Western secularists and Christians: What is their ultimate goal for the West? What do they really want?

Even the self-described liberal reformer Muqtedar Khan leaves his options open in an article titled "Who Are Moderate Muslims?" He writes: "I believe that moderate Muslims are different from militant Muslims even though both of them advocate the establishment of societies whose organizing principle is Islam." This is a very revealing statement. Does it suggest that, in urging American Muslims to get involved in local, regional and national jurisprudence, Khan ultimately wants the U.S. to become a nation shaped by Islam?

This query is indicative of basic questions remaining to be answered by progressive Muslims in dialogue with secularists and Christians. These three groups must struggle together to make the world a safer place for communities and families who see things differently from one another. Finding what the Christian wisdom tradition would call mutual-ground answers is the great task necessitated by the crisis of 9/11. To achieve this goal requires an imaginative height previously unknown to us.

Feminist Theology for a New Generation

Ten years ago Rebecca Chopp described how women’s voices and feminist practices were transforming theological education and the church. Women, she said, were "doing saving work." Doing saving work signified something more than redressing gender injustices or adding women’s stories to the church’s story. It pointed to the distinctive practices that women were undertaking, practices that offered a fresh reading of Christianity.

At a time in which the diversity of feminist theology defies tidy definitions and agreed-upon agendas, "doing saving work" suggests what’s afoot in feminist theology today -- namely, bold reinterpretations of Christianity that seek to renew the life of the church and its witness to the world. The saving work of contemporary feminists includes three features in particular.

First, feminist theologians are drawing on women’s everyday lives and especially the dynamics of God’s grace working in and through them as sources for theological reflection. Appeals to women’s experience are hardly new to feminist theology. But unlike earlier waves of feminist theology, in which appeals to women’s experience were a wakeup call about women’s marginalization, today feminist theologians turn to women’s narratives as a source of embodied knowledge. Women’s stories serve not only as the testing ground for new theological proposals, but also as material for building new theological traditions that revitalize the entire community of faith.

Second, an increasing number of feminist theologians are directing their energies toward the church’s central doctrines and practices -- justification by faith, the incarnation, baptism and the Eucharist. They are cutting new paths through these well-worn landscapes, exposing the negative effects of tradition and also its life-giving possibilities. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, many feminist theologians are "taking back" their confessional traditions, refusing to let them go until they wrestle a feminist blessing from them.

Third, many women theologians are using insights and practices from feminist theology in order to address broader social and ethical questions confronting the church, such as globalization, care of the earth, and the shifting patterns of work and family. These feminist projects aim at something more than creating a women’s-only discourse. They signal a mainstreaming of feminist discourse so that it might transform the practices of Christian communities and contribute to the flourishing of all of God’s creation.

Some examples of the kind of saving work I have in mind are Serene Jones’s Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace; Mary Grey’s Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture; Sarah Coakley’s Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender; Elisabeth Johnson’s Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints; Stephanie Paulsell’s Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice and Deanna Thompson’s Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism and the Cross.

By refracting their ecclesial traditions through the prism of feminist theories as well as the fabric of women’s lives, all of these theologians offer fresh interpretations of the Christian faith. Some of their interpretations are unsettling. In keeping with earlier generations of feminist theology, these authors pose uncomfortable questions about the church’s past and confront it with painful truths about the present. And yet these theologians’ ultimate aim is not to deconstruct the Christian faith, but to strengthen its foundations and witness. Thus the most recent wave of Christian feminist proposals is best read as edifying discourse.

We can take Jones’s and Grey’s books as two indications of the kind of sophisticated saving work under way in feminist theology. Jones unabashedly puts secular feminist theory to "church work," using it to remap the core Reformed doctrines of justification and sanctification, sin and ecclesiology. She uses feminist theory not to deconstruct Reformed faith, but to create a new road map "to help one travel the terrain [of faith] in new ways.

For Jones, doctrines are not a set of rules or propositions that mark the boundaries of orthodoxy. Rather, doctrines are "imaginative scripts" and "life-shaping dramas" that persons of faith "inhabit" and "perform" in unique ways. This does not mean that doctrines are not normative or do not make truth claims, for they surely do. But doctrines also possess a certain fluidity that allows them to stretch across diverse lives and historical contexts and be embodied in culturally specific ways.

Throughout her book, Jones tests how well the central Reformed doctrines work when performed in women’s lives. She calls together a community of women witnesses, her local church’s Tuesday-night women’s group, who try on and try out these Reformed doctrinal scripts and serve as their "contextual judge." Pairing feminist theory with women’s local wisdom, Jones exposes not only the potential pitfalls of classical doctrines, but also how, with some skillful feminist remapping, doctrines prove capacious enough for new generations of women to inhabit in grace-filled ways.

In exploring justification and sanctification, Jones first takes the reader to Luther’s courtroom and recounts his familiar drama of justification. Here the prideful sinner bent on earning his own salvation meets his undoing -- the crucifying wrath of God which reveals both the sinner’s impotence and his guilt before God. Instead of receiving his due punishment, the helpless sinner receives the unexpected and undeserved verdict of divine forgiveness. Through the proclamation of the gospel, the sinner is released from the bondage of his sin and comes to faith -- saved by grace and not by his own righteousness.

To this classic Reformed drama, Jones poses a simple question: What happens when a woman performs Luther’s dramatic script? With the help of feminist theory, she demonstrates how this drama of justification all too often "misses the mark" of women’s lives -- lives that are very often marked not by boastful arrogance but rather by an inadequate sense of personal agency. Women who already suffer from a lack of self-definition, and whose existence has already been undone by unjust relations of power, find themselves undone once again by the crucifying wrath of God. Rather than releasing a woman from her bondage to sin, Luther’s courtroom drama recapitulates the very dynamics of her oppression -- the "shattering she knows all too well."

Given the doctrine’s potentially debilitating effects, Jones proposes a deft response: Why not reverse the plot-line of the Reformed narrative, offering women the story of sanctification first, followed by that of justification? In this way, women would first be given an empowering script about divine grace that secures their personal identity, affirms the goodness of their embodiment and sends them forth into the world with renewed agency and purpose. Clothed in sanctifying grace, a woman is no longer "a dispersed and fragmented identity" determined by gender roles not of her own choosing. She is held together within "the envelope of God’s grace" and therein gains the freedom to "write new scripts of faithful living."

Once women inhabit this life-giving space of sanctification, justification returns to Jones’s salvation drama, but within a revised script. Justification is a release not primarily from the sin of one’s self-righteousness, but from the prison of gender constructions that bind women and men alike. It frees women and men from replaying inherited patterns of gender identity and social order.

At the same time, the drama of justification prevents women from blithely assuming the role of passive victims -- those who are sinned against. Jones reminds women that theirs is always an "implicated resistance" to all gender constructions, and warns about the "arrogant triumphalism" of declaring oneself innocent of projecting false identity-constructions upon others.

Jones’s most remarkable feat is her wrestling of a feminist blessing from Calvin’s doctrine of sin. As the symbolic daughters of Eve, women often bear a disproportionate burden of guilt and responsibility for sin’s presence in the world -- a guilt that can paralyze their agency and play into the hands of others’ exploitation. And yet, as Jones points out, no aspect of Christian theology has a deeper resonance with feminist analyses of oppression than the doctrine of sin. Feminist theologians are wise to call upon this doctrine to denounce the structures of domination and injustice that human beings perpetrate against one another. The doctrine of sin enables feminists to denounce gender oppression as more than a social phenomenon; it is a violation of God’s eschatological promise of the full flourishing of all human beings.

The most innovative gesture in Jones’s feminist remap-ping of sin is her linking sin to the eschatologically oriented doctrines of sanctification and justification rather than to creation, as many of her feminist predecessors have done. Following Calvin and Barth, Jones insists that sin can be seen only with the eyes of faith, that is to say, within an economy of divine grace. By taking this eschatological turn Jones sidesteps the sticky feminist problem of hypothesizing about woman’s essential nature or else about an original gender harmony from which humanity once fell. Instead, she speaks of sin from the eschatological perspective of God’s desiring the full flourishing of all persons, and of women who know themselves to be justified and sanctified in faith. In this future-oriented framework, sin becomes at once a more fluid category -- open to ongoing revision as it manifests itself in different historical and cultural circumstances. Even more, sin becomes "a grace-dependent concept," which only appears "with a simultaneous affirmation of the promised grace that contradicts it."

Once set within this grace-filled frame, feminist speech about sin (like all rightful sin-talk) is rhetorically pitched as edifying discourse. Sin-talk proves to be enabling rather than debilitating discourse; it invokes a "powerful sense of hope" that animates women’s agency in the world.

With these ground rules about sin-talk in place, Jones tests different aspects of Calvin’s doctrine of sin. What imaginative scripts does Calvin offer women about sin? Can they reveal the painful truths and deceptions about women’s lives or do they collude in women’s effacement? Once again Jones’s Tuesday-night women’s group takes center stage in her deliberations. They travel with her in the landscape of Calvin’s doctrine and assess whether his dramatic account can make sense of their specific experiences of gender oppression and also convey an empowering grace that heals their brokenness.

Three features of Calvin’s doctrine prove salutary to Jones’s feminist cartography. First, she upholds the Reformer’s root metaphor for sin as "unfaithfulness" or the opposite of "living according to God’s purposes by accepting God’s grace." This category proves flexible enough to include the diversity of women’s experiences of oppression, and yet sufficiently normative to address the theological root of women’s oppression. Beneath this overarching theological rubric, Calvin reminds us that sin is chameleon-like; it assumes ever new forms, wears multiple guises and bears different fruits in each person’s life. Jones makes use of the Reformer’s insight into the pluriform and contextual nature of sin as her license to inscribe the diverse faces of women’s oppression, from wage exploitation to bodily harm, into Calvin’s landscape of sin. At the same time she questions Calvin’s individualized notion of unfaithfulness, insisting that feminists must speak out equally against "unfaithful cultures" -- those institutional structures and cultural forces that perpetuate the gendered bondage to sin.

Second, Jones adopts Calvin’s insight into the imputed nature of original sin as a most compelling account of how men and women are born into and perform gender constructs not of their own choosing. Such gender constructs are hardly natural or "inherent" in the human condition but they become inescapable or "inherited" dimensions of our human existence. Even as we contest these false gender scripts, the scripts have a total hold over our existence, shaping our language, our values and the social structures that we all participate in.

Third and perhaps most surprising, Jones subscribes to Calvin’s account of the human condition as one of total depravity. What captures Jones’s theological imagination is Calvin’s riveting descriptions of sin’s power to assault a human being "from the outside in," co-opting the self’s resources and eventually destroying the self’s integrity. Jones creatively links Calvin’s descriptions to that of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, who speaks of "the dissolving woman," ravaged and undone by demeaning relations with others and structures of domination that surround her. Through the personal stories of those gathered in her church group, Jones gives concrete expression to sins insidious and pervasive power -- for example, the economic exploitation that destroys the material basis of women’s lives, the marginalization that aging, disabled or unemployed women experience as they lose their "use-value" to others, or else the sexual violence that dominates, violates and occupies the site of the self.

In the end, Jones offers Calvin’s doctrine of sin a warm feminist welcome, though not an uncritical one. Certain of Calvin’s tropes for sin, most notably his descriptions of the defiling and polluting power of sin, feed gender stereotypes about sexual purity that unfairly blame and shame women’s bodies as the source of sin. No strategy of reinterpretation can redeem these scripts about sin. It is best to strip them from a contemporary Reformed theology.

Similarly, Calvin’s harsh rhetoric about "the bondage of the will" and the lack of human freedom also need to be tempered in light of women’s often fragile sense of agency. Invoking Calvin’s insight that sin-talk should be "rhetorically scaled" in order to address different audiences, Jones proposes that feminist theology of sin would do well to amplify Calvin’s countervailing rhetoric of responsibility over and against that of bondage of the will so as to affirm women’s agency instead of reinforcing the dynamics of their oppression.

Roman Catholic theologian Mary Grey is less concerned with reforming a particular confessional tradition than with addressing a broader cultural crisis -- that of global capitalism. Grey’s is a profoundly spiritual quest. She first excavates the roots of our corporate heartlessness" in our culture’s disordered desires -- what she describes as our culture’s "addiction to consumerism," its "idolatry of money" and its "massive failure of compassion" for other creatures and the earth. Second, she proposes an alternative spiritual vision, a different language of desire that would return dignity to the least among us and a sense of shared responsibility for the collective flourishing of the earth and all of God’s creatures.

What makes Grey’s theological project feminist? For one, she focuses on the lot of poor women and the disproportionate burden that capitalist economic structures places on their lives. Grey exposes the gendered costs of globalization, inviting readers into the midst of the desert women of Rajasthan, one of the poorest rural areas in India, which has been hard hit by droughts in recent years.

Along with her husband, Grey has been deeply involved in a water irrigation project in this region and has gained firsthand knowledge of these women’s daily struggles for survival. Through Grey’s eyes, we accompany these women as they trudge day and night through the desert in search of water for drinking and washing. We become witnesses to the extremity of their daily suffering -- the repeated cycles of malnutrition, rampant disease due to poor hygienic conditions, and lower survival rates due to female infanticide, anemia and maternal mortality. As Grey points out, the pressures of globalization have exacerbated the marginality of these women s existence. A combination of climate change (which has significantly shortened the cycles of drought), massive migration to the cities and market pressures to grow cash crops that require huge amounts of water have depleted India’s already taxed water supply for rural areas.

Longstanding patriarchal attitudes and customs only heighten the dehumanizing effects of global capitalism on these women. The birth of a girl child in Rajasthan is perceived as "a burden from the start"; she will most likely be given less food and medical care than her brothers and has little chance of an education that could offer a way out of the cycle of rural poverty. Together globalization and patriarchal structures colonize women’s bodies through ceaseless work and crush their spirits through the loss of hope.

Grey also uses her feminist angle of vision to expose how global capitalism destroys the "economy of care" between mother and child. Globalization wreaks havoc on this primary life-giving relation, for example, by separating women from their children across enormous geographical distances as they seek to secure the welfare of their families. There is a deep irony in the "global care chains" that capitalism constructs; poor women migrate to wealthy countries in order to provide care for other people’s families, and then they send their wages home to ensure the survival of their own loved ones.

Grey’s way out of the stranglehold of global capitalism is an unusual one, especially within feminist circles. She proposes a kenotic spirituality as an antidote to "the overindulgence of consumerist society." Christianity’s witness to a self-emptying, vulnerable God confronts the ethics of self-interest and unchecked consumption that prevails in global capitalism. Such a God reeducates our disordered desires and calls our heartless society back to the spiritual practices of compassion, solidarity and justice-building with the marginalized and the humiliated in our midst.

Grey is well aware that she has high feminist hurdles to overcome in advocating a kenotic spirituality. Feminist theologians have been wary of adopting this aspect of Christian tradition because the language of self-emptying, vulnerability and suffering sacrifice has proved all too often to be pernicious for women. A spirituality of self-renunciation can be quickly distorted into a glorification of suffering for suffering’s sake. Or else the notion of kenosis can become so spiritualized that actual suffering bodies are unattended to. In either case, a kenotic spirituality can end up "crucifying again" the most vulnerable of the earth. It can cement women into situations of suffering, rather than releasing them from the bondage of social and economic oppression.

Grey is quite cognizant of these dangers. Divine kenosis, she insists, does not mean that divine power is sacrificed but rather that it is relocated in a "relational love" that brings about forgiveness and awakens an ethic of care and compassion for others. God’s power remains steadfast in its embrace of the suffering and the vulnerable. Moreover, Grey insists that a contemporary kenotic spirituality be based on a radically reconstructed notion of human personhood, in which "compassion. empathy and solidarity" become the marks of perfection for all persons.

Here she guards against any single gender being unfairly assigned the burden of care for society. Both men and women need to develop "joint models of caring and mutuality" that challenge those structures of power and religious traditions that sanction the humiliation of others. Finally, Grey warns that the call to self-emptying praxis must never become an end in itself. A person’s voluntary encounter with human suffering should always be viewed as a cry of protest and a testimony of hope against the overwhelming evil that one experiences.

Like Jones, Grey appeals to the testimony of women’s lives to support her case. For example, she recounts the story of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who was deported and eventually died in Auschwitz, to demonstrate the potency of a kenotic spirituality. In the face of the growing desperation of her Jewish community in Amsterdam, Hillesum found increasing personal freedom through such an interior spiritual journey. The vulnerability of her social circumstances drew her closer to the vulnerability at the heart of God, and paradoxically to a deepened sense of personal responsibility for contesting the hatred and despair in her midst. Awareness of God’s powerlessness awakened in Hillesum the desire and agency to become "the praying heart of the concentration camp.’ In the midst of her personal suffering, she lost neither her love for life nor her delight in "bringing divine presence into humanity’s life." Her empathy for others and her response to suffering became acts of creative resistance against a life-denying political order.

Grey’s focus on women in poverty and the prophetic possibilities of a kenotic praxis represent only half of the feminist theological agenda in her book. The other half is directed at global capitalism’s destructive attitudes toward creation. Here she draws support from ecofeminist philosophy, which has exposed the longstanding links between the exploitation of nature and that of women. Nature has been dressed up with many of the same gender assumptions that have been applied to women: it has either been romanticized as the source of endless nourishment or been declared an irrational chaos, a wilderness that needs to be subdued and ordered by civilizing humankind.

Such exploitative attitudes toward nature have worsened with the rise of global capitalism. Now nature is "packaged and commodified" for Westerners who rush to buy aromatherapy oils for relaxation, as well as CDs that bring the sounds of waterfalls and rainforests into the comfort of our living rooms. We cultivate relationships with this "pseudo-nature," while we deplete our natural environments to satisfy our consumptive lifestyles.

Grey terms this global "turn from the earth" a fall into sin. By systematically destroying our connections with nature and refusing our responsibility of care for the nonhuman aspects of creation, humans deny their status as God’s creatures. In the process we drain the world of God’s real presence, treating it instead as a resource for our greedy consumption and selfish delight.

Grey’s response to our ecocidal culture is deeply theological. We need to resacramentalize the world -- that is, to imbue nature once again with a vibrant sense of God’s intimate and loving presence. This does not mean idealizing nature as a place of romantic escape or embracing an uncritical pantheism that identifies God and nature. Rather, Grey invites us to transform our ordinary perception of nature so that we might see God’s spirit of life coursing through it. Appealing to mystics, poets and activists, she points to a different epistemology from that of modernity, a "connected knowing" that recognizes our intrinsic interconnection with all living things and awakens a reverence for life. Such empathetic knowing requires humility in accepting one’s place in the midst of creation and courage in taking on responsibility for sustaining life.

What is most striking about Grey’s feminist work is the faith she places in Christianity’s core symbols. While many other ecofeminists are deeply skeptical about the environmental fallout from the Christian economy of creation and salvation, Grey sees in that economy the prophetic challenge and the inspiration to remedy the ecological crisis. She finds in Jesus’ ministry and message support for her ecofeminist agenda. I don’t mean by this that she projects onto Jesus a modern ecological conscience -- not in the least. She does, however, invite readers to consider the intrinsic role that nature plays in Jesus’ parables. Be it the lilies of the field, the mustard seed or the vineyard, nature often provides the field of metaphors with which Jesus describes the life of discipleship and God’s providence.

Similarly, Grey emphasizes the embodied character of Jesus’ ministry. For Jesus, human healing is never spiritualized; he attends to the bodily needs of those around him through table fellowship as well as miracles.

Finally, Grey does not hesitate to anchor her ecofeminist spirituality in the mystery of cross and resurrection. She notes that nature itself was caught up in grief at the death of Christ; so, too, according to Paul, the whole of creation is filled with longing and in travail awaiting the completion of redemption. While such clues in the New Testament witness hardly amount to a full-blown ecological program, they point Christians today toward an ethics of caring for the body of Christ that should include the cosmos, in which we live, move and have our being.